trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Founding a rationalist group at the University of Michigan
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-08-11T19:07:42.367Z

The Vision

As far as I know, there aren't any LW-style university rationalist groups. I'll be attending the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) as a graduate student starting this fall, and plan to be there for 1.5-2 years. While I'm there, I'd like to start a LW group.

There should be a mix of activities. They should let people achieve a mix of learning, creativity, socializing, and activism. Here's the sort of event that might accomplish each:

Learning: A book club, perhaps combining writings from within and outside the LW-associated community
Creativity: A research club, lightning talks, or project lab
Socializing: Careful outdoor gatherings for the foreseeable future
Activism: Focused on building, maintaining, and positively shaping the local LW community, and connecting with the small existing EA community at UM

I might call it simply the UM LessWrong Community. After Julia Galef's book Scout Mindset, I've also considered the name The Scout Society.

Here are some key subgoals:

Be sustainable. This community should develop healthy norms about when to directly support its members, when to point them to campus resources, and when to exclude people who are behaving in destructive ways. It also needs all members to contribute toward making it good, and should demand and enable personal initiative.
Be useful. We should start by trying to identify our own and each others' needs, understand why they're not being adequately met, and create events and oppotunities that address those problems.
Be proud. This means making ourselves proud, by doing our duty, achieving success/utility, and converging on the truth. It also means taking pride in ourselves, and open about who we are.
Be fast. Do things efficiently, try things out.
Be awesome. Fun, beauty, and pleasure are important. This means art, music, houseplants, food, games, and exploration.

How Can I Help?

PM me if you know people living in Ann Arbor who might be good fits and interested in participating.
Suggest reading assignments for a monthly book club that combine some literature from near the LW-sphere with something far from it. It should take maybe 5 hours. A collection of blog posts, part of a book. Be liberal with your ideas.
Describe your idea of what unique needs a university rationalist club could fulfill, as opposed to all the other student organizations and social clubs out there.
Share a story about your experience

...
Dangerous Virtual Worlds
by Davis_Kingsley — 2021-08-11T12:53:26.778Z

Once, I played a virtual reality game where robots attack you and you shoot them. This was a very fun and compelling experience despite being rather basic. In fact, it was too compelling -- the experience was so intense that I had to stop playing, as I thought that if things got significantly more intense I might have a heart attack and die!

This experience got me thinking something along the lines of: "Huh, virtual reality technology is rather primitive, but already an experience can be that intense? What will it look like once virtual reality environments have much more time, thought, and technical advancement put into them?" The prospect seemed pretty worrisome to me for the future of the technology and how it might impact society and civilization. (Of course, fears of negative ramifications of virtual reality are by no means new, but having a direct experience of it made me put more thought into the matter.)

However, I brought this up in an online conversation recently, and another user, ohAitch, made a very interesting point in reply -- many of our friends spend huge amounts of time on textual fiction, such that virtual reality might well not be a big important step!

This made me realize something -- for many people, these dangerous virtual worlds are already here. For some people it is the virtual socialization of Facebook or Twitter. For others, it might be non-VR games like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike -- there have been multiple cases of people dying at their seats after playing games for hours on end in Internet cafés. For others, it can indeed be textual fiction as ohAitch said -- webfiction, online fandoms, and the like can be very consuming.

Yes, virtual reality could certainly be immersive and dangerous in a way that some of the earlier things haven't been, could make it easier to fall down a slippery slope, and so on. I think there's a real threat there -- but there are also some threats that are already here and which it might be prudent to pay attention to. The risks of dangerous lotus-eating are real and present today, and if we only worry about what future things might bring we may miss the dangers that are already around us.

[1] I personally know people whose lives have in my view been substantially worsened by Twitter politics in particular.
Purple Lipstick
by lsusr — 2021-08-11T09:36:24.778Z

Wilfred's date had stood him up four times out of four. Wilfred opened his notebook even though he never actually got any work done. He didn't know why he kept coming back to Nostalgia Cafe.

The entry bell jingled. Susan's suit was rumpled. She seemed tense, like a tiger with poachers encroaching on its habitat. Wilfred caught her eye. She sat down opposite him, right in front of the big window.

"Can I buy you a coffee?" said Wilfred.

"I should get you one. I'm sorry for being late. Something unexpected came up at work," said Susan.

"I don't mind. This cafe always gives me a sense of wabi sabi," said Wilfred.

"Does it? Sōdesu ka?" said Susan. She narrowed her eyes. "That's a strange word to hear from a scholar of Zoroastrian fire temples."

"Sōdesu ka. It does/is. You're an archaeology afficionado? I thought you just liked me for my rugged good looks," said Wilfred.

"Don't change the subject. What makes you interested in the atashkada?" said Susan.

"Eternal fires are expensive, even in the best of times, which antiquity was not. Legends say the early fire temples were gigantic bonfires. I want to know why," said Wilfred.

"Tradition," said Susan.

"A tradition has to start somewhere," said Wilfred.

"With the Scythians, obviously," said Susan.

"I always thought of the Zoroastrians as having exterminated the Scythians," said Wilfred.

"History is never that simple," said Susan.

"Then what do you think happened?" said Wilfred.

"I'm going to get a coffee. Do you want a coffee?" said Susan.

"Let me get you one," said Wilfred.

"Nonsense. Sit tight and try to figure out what happened to the Scythians," said Susan. She got up.

Wilfred forced himself to look out the window instead of following Susan. The Scythians didn't burn eternal fires—at least not with the seriousness of the early Zoroastrians. Wilfred could understand the purpose of burning ritual fires. The question is, why would you have to burn one forever?

"Speaking of which, one of the fire temples went out a couple weeks ago," said Wilfred.

"Sōdesu ka?" said Susan.

"Sōdesu," said Wilfred, "Tuesday, actually."

"I'm sorry about that," said Susan.

Wilfred knew she means "I'm sorry for missing our date," but his brain pieced together something else entirely.

"What did you say you did for a living again?" said Wilfred.

"I didn't," said Susan. She carefully drew a purple lipstick across her lips, "I'm a federal agent."

"No you're not," sai...
Halpern’s paper - A refutation of Cox’s theorem?
by  — 2021-08-11T09:25:32.330Z

What implications does the paper “A Counter Example to Theorems of Cox and Fine” by J. Y. Halpern have for Cox’s theorem and probability theory as extended logic? This is the description of the paper:

“Cox's well-known theorem justifying the use of probability is shown not to hold in finite domains. The counterexample also suggests that Cox's assumptions are insufficient to prove the result even in infinite domains. The same counterexample is used to disprove a result of Fine on comparative conditional probability.”

Edit: You can access the paper here - https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5450

A similar question seems have been posted (but not answered) here:

https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/190187/297721

https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/190184/297721

https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/189757/297721

Why is Cox’s theorem being disputed? Are there any non-sequiturs in the proof that Professor Jaynes give for it in his book? If not, then how can it be disputed?
What is the name of this fallacy?
by mukashi — 2021-08-11T02:10:43.894Z

I failed to identify whether this is a well-known fallacy, I would appreciate it if someone tells me what this is called.

The fallacy normally goes like this:

I see you are very happy to criticize the government! Now go back to your place using the road that the government built for you!

So you say capitalism is horrible and must be destroyed - on the iPhone made by a corporation.

You are being an hypocrete criticizing public education because you went to a public school and did your studies thanks to the State, that financed your education

In all cases, the fallacy is assuming that if no public entity had created the environment allowing an individual to do something (or benefit from some advantage), no one else would have.

If there is no name for this fallacy I would suggest calling it the Christian bridge fallacy. I heard this example from Sam Harris. I don't remember his literal words but it goes like this;

Some historians argue that we must thank the Church for the bridges built in Europe during the Middle Ages. However, this is wrong: the Church built those bridges basically because they were the only ones around with power; if they hadn't done it, someone else would have done it.

In my examples, the same thing applies. I might have been able to study in a public school thanks to the government, but if that weren't the case, I would have probably studied anyway, only in a different way.

Please notice one important thing too: There might be some cases where this sort of argument is not a fallacy but a real objection.
Interest in Biostasis: Much More Than You Wanted to Know. (Results from the ACX 2021 Biostasis/Cryonics Survey)
by Synaptic — 2021-08-11T00:43:18.860Z
Link: https://synopticz.github.io/acx_2021_survey

Motivation

My motivation for doing this survey is simple: I’m continuously surprised that I’m one of the few people in the world who is obsessed with the problem of how to preserve people with the goal of reviving them in the future. It’s a potential solution to one of humanity’s oldest and most vexing problems and, yet, so few people seem to care. My goal with this survey is to better understand why people are hesitant towards or even against biostasis.

Note: Biostasis is a generalization of the term cryonics to include preservation technologies that don’t necessarily use cold temperatures. It’s also semantics; a bit of rebranding for a term with some unfortunate connotations. I use the terms biostasis and cryonics interchangeably.

Links: Main survey page, Demographic questions, Biostasis/cryonics questions

Previous surveys: Kaiser and colleagues 2014, LW 2016 Survey, Reddit 2019 survey, Melanie Swan’s 2019 survey, Gillett and colleagues 2021

Highlights

Replication of well-known associations of increased interest in biostasis: younger people; non-religious people; non-spiritual people; transgender women and cisgender men; and people in computer-related professions.
People who are actually signed up for biostasis have higher average scores on knowledge questions about cryobiology than people who are not signed up.
People with libertarian and liberal politics are the most consistently interested in and supportive of biostasis. People with conservative and alt-right politics are the most consistently uninterested and unsupportive of biostasis.
People with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and autism are more interested in biostasis, while those with a diagnosis of depression are less interested.
There is a cluster of pro-biostasis and related beliefs all positively correlated with one another: being more likely to be signed up or interested in it, being more able to imagine it, assigning a higher probability it will work, assigning a higher probability of longevity escape velocity, et cetera. One could think of this as a type of “mood affiliation.”
Of people’s biggest concern about biostasis, religious reasons or selfishness are correlated with the least interest; people most concerned about lack of scientific validation or the possibility of unfavorable revival conditions are slightly more interested; and people most concerned with cost, logistic problems, social ostracis

...
For God's sake, Google it.
by Aaron Bergman — 2021-08-10T23:52:24.408Z
Link: https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/for-gods-sake-google-it

Anti-disclaimer: this is not an ad for Google. Feel free to use

DuckDuckGo

or whatever floats your boat.

Intro

I’ve noticed a peculiar pattern in my blog posts: the more original I consider a post, the less interesting it seems to everyone else—at least as measured by page views and Reddit comments. Scroll to the bottom of my

“top posts” list

, and you’ll find a bunch of posts explaining insights that I—and I alone, apparently—thought were super interesting and important. The winner in this regard is “

Clearer Thinking on Collective Action

,” with a grand total of 26 page views—about 3% that of “

Some things I’ve learned in college

.”

With this in mind, let me present perhaps my most banal and utterly unoriginal idea to date.

Google it.

If anyone is the type of person to use Google, it’s me. I’m pretty technologically literate, use the internet often, and enjoy learning new skills and information. I’m also not exactly a social butterfly who will go out of his way to ask something of another human. Despite all this, I find myself regularly spinning my wheels, wasting precious time and energy trying to find the answer to a question like it was 1921 instead of 2021. That is, by trial, error, and intuition-guided exploration.

Eventually, upon exhausting my intrinsic motivation to find out “on my own,” I mope over to the next tab on my browser like a sheepish schoolchild to ask Google what to do. Lo and behold, virtually all of the time, an answer on the first page of search results is well beyond satisfactory.

The internet is amazing

In my progress studies/econ nerd/techologist information ecosystem, there are a bunch of highbrow takes about how the internet is either bad or not as good as it should be. “

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,

” said Peter Thiel. Despite near-universal access to unprecedented amounts of information, economic growth since the rise of the internet has been lackluster at best, a phenomenon known as “

secular stagnation

.” Social media companies attract our best and brightest students away from socially-productive endeavors with the promise of comfortable salaries and free nitro cold brew in an ultra-aesthetic office—students who go on to design attention-monetization algorithms that erode our cognitive and emotional wellbeing.

These points are all true (I wrote them, after all), but let’s not forget one basic fact: the internet is inc...
Free course review — Reliable and Interpretable Artificial Intelligence (ETH Zurich)
by Jan Czechowski — 2021-08-10T16:36:39.737Z

Crossposted from my medium

Recently, I became interested in the topic of Explainable Artificial Intelligence. I was mostly inspired by the Machine Learning Street Talk episode with Christoph Molnar. I decided I need to learn the basics of the field and I found this 13 lectures course available for free on YouTube: Reliable and Interpretable Artificial Intelligence originally held in Autumn Semester 2020 at ETH Zurich by Martin Vechev

In this review I will try to answer the question:

Is this course for you?

What math/machine learning background knowledge do you need to understand the contents?

What are the contents of the course? What lectures can be skipped?

General impressions

I really enjoyed the course and consider it a good investment in my situation (working full time but wanting to transition to AI research with a focus on AI safety). Each lecture was insightful, and every point was very thoroughly explained with multiple rephrasings and examples. I was able to watch some parts of it in increased playback speed, occasionally slowing down when I felt I’m losing the thread. I logged in total 15h for watching the course content and around 3h for Anki cards creation and review in my personal time tracking app.

Background knowledge required

I expected operations like propagating generalized convex polyhedra through multiple layers of a neural net to require quite sophisticated mathematics — turns out, basic linear algebra was enough to understand the concept.

Although the course assumes the basic ML concepts are known to the student when the given concept is needed usually a quick recap is provided; for example for RELU activation, CNN architecture, etc.

To sum up, the course is perfectly approachable for a machine learning enthusiast, still working on a good overview of the basics.

Course contents

The course covers the popular topics of adversarial examples, robustness, and also smoothing classifiers and visualization techniques for computer vision systems.

I think certification methods based on various convex relaxation techniques might be overrepresented in the curriculum. Possibly because this is the particular area of research interest of the lecturer Martin Vechev. If your goal is to get a good overview of machine learning interpretability in a time-effective manner, you might want to consider skipping lectures 5–7.

However, the important topic...
Dopamine-supervised learning in mammals & fruit flies
by Steven Byrnes — 2021-08-10T16:13:43.878Z

(Last revised: December 2024. See changelog at the bottom.)

The backstory: Dopamine-supervised learning in mammals

According to a well-known theory from the 1990s, dopamine signals in mammal brains can serve as Reward Prediction Error signals that drive reinforcement learning, i.e. finding good actions within a high-dimensional space of possible actions.

I for one strongly agree that this is one of the things that dopamine does.

But meanwhile I've been advocating that dopamine also plays a different role in other parts of the mammal brain: a dopamine signal can provide the supervisory signal for supervised learning in a one-dimensional action space.

(Or 47 dopamine signals can supervise learning in a 47-dimensional action space, etc. etc.)

The main (though not exclusive) part of the brain where I think dopamine-supervised learning is happening is the “extended striatum” (caudate, putamen, nucleus accumbens, part of the amygdala, and a couple other areas). I think these parts of the brain house many copies of basically the same supervised learning algorithm (which I call a short-term predictor), each sending its output down to the hypothalamus & brainstem, and each in turn receiving an appropriate supervisory dopamine signal coming back up from the brainstem.

For example, one of the supervised learning circuits might have an output line to the hypothalamus & brainstem whose signals mean: “We need to salivate now!” The brainstem then has a dopamine supervisory signal going back up to that circuit, which it uses to correct those suggestions with the benefit of hindsight. Thus, if I suddenly find myself with a mouth chock-full of salt, then in hindsight, I should have been salivating in advance. The brainstem knows that I should have been salivating—the brainstem has a direct input from the taste buds—and thus the brainstem can put that information into the dopamine supervisory signal.

Here I’ll zoom out a bit so that we can see both kinds of dopamine signals, the reinforcement learning dopamine, and the supervised learning dopamine:

See my post Big picture of motivation, decision-making, and RL for details and terminology. I think all the arrows shown as coming up from the bottom box involve dopamine.

The right side is the array of dopamine-supervised learning algorithms—the downward arrows are the learning algorithm outputs, and the upward arrows are the su...
The two-headed bacterium
by Malmesbury — 2021-08-10T15:28:50.660Z

Cross-posted from substack.

I like to see categories as fish nets we use to capture ideas. We classify things into categories like individuals, nation or species, and of course it is all arbitrary and doesn’t correspond to anything in the real world. But categories still form useful chunks we can use to make sense of the world. Furthermore, here is a fun exercise: introduce arbitrary changes in the categories, and see what the world looks like through this new lens. As I will argue, there are plenty of things to be discovered this way. Use the standard fish nets, and you get a standard understanding of the world. Try to use slightly larger or smaller nets, and maybe you will discover things you had never noticed before.

Take the individual, for example. One bacterial cell contains exactly one genome and all the necessary equipment to replicate it. Using our human-derived intuition of what makes an individual, it makes sense to see bacteria as unicellular organisms, meaning that one cell = one individual. If you visit the wiki page on prokaryotes (the larger group that encompasses bacteria and archaea) the first thing you hear is that they are unicellular, as if it were the most important thing about them. However, bacteria are so weird, so different from us, that it makes little sense to describe them using the categories we invented while observing humans.

Let’s explore the strange and surprising processes that are uncovered when you change your definition of the individual to make it either wider, or narrower. First, I will start with a hot take: each bacterial lineage is one big multicellular individual. Then I will move on to the super-hot-magma-take: each bacterial cell is actually made of two distinct individuals fused together, facing in opposite directions.

Bacteria as multicellular organisms

First, let’s make our definition of the individual arbitrarily broader, and consider that the whole bacterial culture, descending from a single ancestral cell, is one individual. Is there anything interesting to see here? For starters, some behaviors of bacterial cells don’t really make sense as individuals. For example, bacterial cells regularly perform what could only be described as bacterial sacrifice.

The Kelly criterion in prokaryotes

Content warning: bacterial sacrifice

Antibiotics were already in the environment long before humans started using them, usually sec...