trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Spoiler-Free Review: Roguebook
by Zvi — 2021-07-05T11:30:01.050Z

If someone asks me what one game they should play, my answer is Slay the Spire. It’s an amazing game, and with it now out for every platform including mobile phones, the only reason not to play is concern that you won’t know when to stop.

I’ve also played a lot of other rogue deckbuilders. In my rank order, there’s Monster Train (Tier 2), Dream Quest (Tier 3), Monster Slayers (Tier 4) and Dicey Dungeons (Tier 4). Even when they’re not the best, especially in staying power, they’re almost always great fun to explore. I can’t objectively recommend Monster Slayers or Dicey Dungeons, but did I have fun for a bunch of hours and get my money’s worth? Absolutely.

Thus, when I learned on its release day about Roguebook, a rogue deckbuilder from a team including Richard Garfield that was clearly at least a spiritual successor, it was clear what I would be doing with my free time that weekend. I was super excited to see what Richard could do, and hope he’d take his usual big swings.

Review takes place in 3 stages: Pure (1 bit of info), Almost Pure (3 bits of info) and then Overview (analysis of big picture stuff).

Pure Spoiler-Free Review (e.g. the 1 bit you actually need, whether this is at least Tier 3)

Yes.

Almost Pure Spoiler-Free Review (e.g. 3 bits of information, what tier this is)

2. It’s very good, and better than I initially gave it credit for. If you loved Slay the Spire and/or liked Monster Train, and want more, this is your game. If you weren’t impressed by Slay the Spire, unless your issue was the art style, this is unlikely to change your mind, and this isn’t as good as its predecessor, but it’s a worthy addition to the genre. Roguebook has a 79 on Metacritic, and while initially I thought that was about right, on reflection I’d have it up around 90. Whereas Slay the Spire has an 89 and I’d flip that to 98.

Overview (Spoilers minimized)

Roguebook is fun. Its big drawback is that it doesn’t swing for the fences enough. Instead, it specializes in giving you the experience of powering up, doing ludicrous things and breaking the game in half.

The game is good at giving you the ‘good stuff’ feeling of finding powerful things and doing powerful things, and there are several powerful things that can get you where you need to go. It felt to me as if there were a number of things the game was trying to make happen that were never going t...
You are allowed to edit Wikipedia
by ChristianKl — 2021-07-05T09:56:13.253Z

I frequently hear complains from people about individual Wikipedia pages but most of the people who complain only complain outside of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is inherently democratic. If you read a Wikipedia article and think it's very problematic, take five minutes and write about why it's problematic on the talk page of the article.

Wikipedia is an important part of the commons. If you think from an EA perspective those five minutes (or even more if it takes you time to search for sources) have a good chance of being time spent with a good EA return.

While recruiting people outside of Wikipedia to individual pages to engage in discussion goes against Wikipedia's rules, simply engaging on Wikipedia and voicing your opinion is helpful. It makes it more likely that consensus on the article shifts in the right direction.
Resources On Mental Health And Finding A Therapist
by lynettebye — 2021-07-05T07:54:35.514Z

This is an earlier post from my blog, which I'm crossposting here as a resource.

While the oft-cited statistic is that 20% of adults have a mental illness, I estimate the true number who would benefit from therapy or mental health self-help resources at some point in their life is closer to two thirds (see footnote)

I personally benefit enormously from taking an antidepressant and understand myself better from having seen four therapists over the past decade, yet somehow it never occurred to me that I should try either until friends shared their personal stories. There’s probably a whole post’s worth of words on how it’s hard to match our internal experiences to labels.

But I’m not writing that post, so I’ll just say this: Maybe it helps to think of mental health as understanding and being able to manage what your brain does, instead of a diagnosis wielded by doctors about a specific disease. So when I’m putting time into mental health, I’m investing in training my brain.

I’m not saying mental illnesses aren’t real illnesses - instead I’m pointing at the broad spectrum of internal experiences between “diagnosable major depression” and “I feel and think things that I don’t like and don’t know how to deal with.” Mental health resources can help with both of those places.

So here are the best resources I have for investing in your brain. I’ve bolded the most useful ones, so focus on those if you’re short on time.

Self-Help

If you’re severely depressed enough that you don’t have the energy to wade through answers or you are currently suicidal, call a

helpline

or schedule an appointment with your doctor.

Otherwise, start with the Slate Star Codex posts

Things that sometimes work if you have anxiety

and

Things that sometimes help if you have depression

. Scott Alexander put together great summaries of the lifestyle, professional, pharmaceutical, and last resort interventions you can try.

The

Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9)

asks a few questions that let you check how likely it is that you’re depressed. If you score above 10, you should probably think about seeing a doctor. If you score 5-9, you may still benefit from medication (which would require seeing a doctor) or self-help. Additionally, you can actually get a pretty low score even if you're thinking about suicide all the time, as long as you don't have other sy...
We Still Don't Know If Masks Work
by Mike Harris — 2021-07-05T04:52:54.435Z

Introduction:

Recently a paper was published which got attention by estimating that 100% mask wearing in the population would cause a 25% reduction in the effective transmission number (shortened to transmissiblity throughout).

This study was observational and so inferring causality is always difficult. Thanks to the excellent data availability I was able to replicate and attempt to validate the model.

Based on my analysis, this study does not provide good evidence for such a causal link, and there is evidence to believe that the observed correlation is spurious.

Model Details:

The paper uses a fairly simple model in combination with MCMC sampling to arrive at their estimates of the effectiveness of various interventions. This simple model allows them to combine multiple disparate data sources together to get an estimate combining multiple possible effects.

In order to arrive at its estimate of transmissibility the model considers the following parameters.

Various NPIs such as school closing or restrictions on gathering at a regional level.

Regional Mobility (based on Google Mobility Reports)

Self Reported Mask Wearing (based on Facebook surveys)

A custom regional factor.

Random variation in transmissibility over time.

It then computes the most likely distribution of weights for each of these factors based on the likelihood of matching the observed cases and deaths.

Observational Window:

One common criticism of this paper has been that the window was chosen specifically to make masks look better. If the analysis was extended to include the winter spike, masks would come out looking worse.

This was the critique I initially started out to analyze, but it does not appear to be true. When I extended the analysis window to December, masks still appeared to be effective. In fact the claimed effectiveness increased to 40% over that interval. The data on NPIs in the model is not as high quality for the full interval, but the effect being observed seems robust to a wider time range.

Regional Effects:

If mask wearing causes a drop in transmissibility, then regions with higher levels of mask wearing should observe lower growth rates. This figure from the paper makes the implication clear. In fact the model does not actually make that prediction. Instead (holding NPIs and mobility constant) regions with higher mask wearing are predicted to have higher growth.

This occurs b...
Anthropic Effects in Estimating Evolution Difficulty
by Mark Xu — 2021-07-05T04:02:18.242Z

Thanks to Linchuan Zhang, Jack Ryan and Carl Shulman for helpful comments and suggestions. Remaining mistakes are my own.

Epistemic status: “There is something fascinating about [anthropics]. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi)

Attempts to predict the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) sometimes use biological evolution to upper bound the amount of computation needed to produce human level intelligence, e.g. in Ajeya’s use of biological anchors. Such attempts have mostly ignored observation selection effects. Shulman and Bostrom’s 2012 paper How Hard is Artificial Intelligence? analyzes how evolutionary arguments interact with various ways of reasoning about observation selection effects, drawing evidence from timings of evolutionary milestones and instances of convergent evolution. This post is a summary of key arguments advanced by the paper; see the original paper for citations.

More concretely, suppose evolutionary processes produce human-level intelligence on 1/10 or 1/10^1000 planets that develop life. Call the former case “easy” and the latter case “hard.” The paper attempts to determine whether the facts about evolution on Earth can distinguish between evolving intelligence being easy or hard.

Recall two common forms of anthropic reasoning:[1]

Self-Sampling Assumption (SSA): Observers should reason as if they were a random sample from all actually existent observers in their reference class. Observers should reason as if they have an equal probability of being in any world with observers, regardless of the number of observers in that world. Worlds where a higher fraction of observers are “like you” are more probable.

Self-Indication Assumption (SIA): Observers should reason as if they were a random sample from all possible observers. Observers should reason as if they have a probability of being in a world proportional with the number of observers it contains. Worlds where a higher number of observers are “like you” are more probable.

For more discussion, see Katja's Anthropic Principles or Bostrom’s Anthropic Bias.

Key takeaways:

Universes where evolution is easy have vastly more intelligent observers than universes in which intelligence is hard. Since SIA a priori favors universes with many observers over universes with few, SIA assigns almos

...
Can group identity be a force for good?
by Eric Neyman — 2021-07-04T17:16:32.761Z
Link: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2021/07/04/can-tribalism-be-a-force-for-good/

Many in the rationalist sphere look down on tribalism and group identity. Paul Graham writes that identity interferes with people’s ability to have a productive discussion. Julia Galef seconds this view (though with exceptions), devoting a chapter of Scout Mindset to the ways that identity interferes with clear thinking. Eliezer Yudkowsky makes a similar point in the context of political identity.

I think this view is correct, but I want to give three personal examples of my own identity motivating me do good things. These examples have a common theme, and I believe there are lessons to be drawn from them.

I. Effective altruism

I first ran into EA in 11th grade, when my English teacher assigned an essay by Peter Singer and asked us to argue against it. I completed the assignment and got a pretty good grade (though, having reread my essay, it was pretty bad!). But I noticed that Singer’s argument was much stronger than most arguments I’d encountered. Over the next couple years I became a utilitarian and was fully on board with EA (at least in broad strokes) my freshman year of college.

By “fully on board”, I mean that I agreed that the EA approach to improving the world was a really good one. On the other hand, I didn’t change any of my personal behaviors to reflect this. I didn’t start donating to or working on effective causes.

Unlike (I think) most EAs, I’m not intrinsically motivated to do good. Making someone happy feels good if I’m close to them, but knowing that I’ve saved the expected lives of 1.2 strangers — frankly it doesn’t. If I could change that I probably would, but as far as I can tell this is just how my brain works.

But last year I donated a few percent of my income to effective charities, and I plan to work my way up toward 10% over the next few years. What changed?

For me, it was the fact that I wanted to feel like a real EA. I wanted to feel like I could honestly identify as an EA, be part of the EA tribe. I joined Columbia EA in my first year of grad school, felt really at home in that community, and grew closer to the EA movement as a whole. Now I consider myself an effective altruist. Introspecting about why I’m donating, and why I’m thinking about ways to make my academic research on forecasting more relevant to EA causes, well — it’s because it’s the EA thing to do.

So my journey has been (1) I learned about and agreed with EA pr...
An Apprentice Experiment in Python Programming
by konstell — 2021-07-04T03:29:13.251Z

A couple weeks ago Zvi made an apprentice thread. I have always wanted to be someone's apprentice, but it didn't occur to me that I could just ...ask to do that. Mainly I was concerned about this being too big of an ask. I saw gilch's comment offering to mentor Python programming. I want to level up my Python skills, so I took gilch up on the offer. In a separate comment, gilch posed some questions about what mentors and/or the community get in return. I proposed that I, as the mentee, document what I have learned and share it publicly.

Yesterday we had our first session.

Background

I had identified that I wanted to fill gaps in my Python knowledge, two of which being package management and decorators.

Map and Territory

Gilch started by saying that "even senior developers typically have noticeable gaps," but building an accurate map of the territory of programming would enable one to ask the right questions. They then listed three things to help with that:

Documentation on the Python standard library. "You should at least know what's in there, even if you don't know how to use all of it. Skimming the documentation is probably the fastest way to learn that. You should know what all the operators and builtin functions do."

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for computer science foundation. There are some variants of the book in Python, if one does not want to use Scheme.

CODE as "more of a pop book" on the backgrounds.

In my case, I minored in CS, but did not take operating systems or compilers. I currently work as a junior Python developer, so reading the Python standard library seems to be the lowest hanging fruit here, with SICP on the side, CODE on the back burner.

Decorators

The rest of the conversation consisted of gilch teaching me about decorators.

Gilch: Decorators are syntactic sugar.

@foo
def bar():
...

means the same thing as

def bar():
...
bar = foo(bar)

Decorators also work on classes.

@foo
class Bar:
...

is the same as

class Bar:
...
Bar = foo(Bar)

An Example from pytest

At this point I asked if decorators were more than that. I had seen decorators in pytest:

@pytest.fixture
def foo():
...

def test_bar(foo): # foo automatically gets evaluated inside the test
...

Does this mean that, when foo is passed in test_bar as a variable, what gets passed in is actually something like pytes...
Should VS Would and Newcomb's Paradox
by dadadarren — 2021-07-03T23:45:29.655Z

What One Should Do VS What One Would Do

When talking about how a decision is made, there are two approaches. Perhaps the more typical one is to reason as the decision-maker. From this first-person perspective, we consider all possible actions, imagine their respective outcomes, then choose the one deemed optimal according to some objective. This seems to fit what usually meant by decision-making: what one should do.

Alternatively, we can take an outsider perspective (or a God's eye view if you prefer) and analyze the decision-maker itself by reductionism. For example, this can be done by physically studying the decision-maker's brain and build a model to deduce its outcome. In contrast to the first type of analysis, this is about what one would do

Conflicting Approaches

My position is that perspective is a primitive reasoning starting point. Therefore the two approaches above, each basing on a different perspective, must not mix. As that is also the cause for anthropic paradoxes. However, even if you do not agree with that, it is still very reasonable to question the compatibility of the two approaches.

For starters, they are based on very different premises. The first-person approach considers the decision-maker as the agent, the outsider approach considers the decision-maker part of the environment, one regards it as the analyzer while the other regards it as the analyzed.

The first-person approach assumes the decision-maker could select different choices. There are alternative actions I can take that will lead to different outcomes. In comparison, the outsider approach regards the decision-maker as nothing more but a complex machine. There is no sense in talking about alternatives as the decision is simply an output of the said machine.

Mixing the two would lead to some troubling problems. For example, the first-person approach makes decisions by evaluating the respective outcomes of all choices. We can use the outsider approach to reductively analyze the decision-maker to deduce its output. So the choices other than the one being ultimately taken are simply never happening. Using this result in the first-person analysis would produce a contradiction: what is the outcome of an action if that action is not taken? It bumps into the principle of explosion, making the evaluation impossible. (See action-counterfactuals for a related discussion.)

However, we neve...
Notes on Kindness
by David Gross — 2021-07-03T21:47:45.972Z

This post examines the virtue of kindness. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn more about kindness and how to become better at it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is kindness?

“It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” ―Aldous Huxley[1]

I had more difficulty than I expected coming up with a good definition of kindness. I painted myself into a corner by doing previous write-ups on compassion, respect for others, care, benevolence, and courtesy. Those cover a lot of the same territory, and seemed to leave kindness with little ground of its own. But I think there is some distinct kernel to kindness that makes it different from these things, and this may also suggest different ways of improving it in ourselves.

For example, there’s the concept of “random acts of kindness.” It’s harder to imagine “random acts of care” or “random acts of compassion”: those virtues seem to require more intimacy with the recipient and their needs than “random” acts would be appropriate for.

Courtesy and respect for others may just discourage you from being unkind, without also prompting you to kindness.

And there’s the trope of the benevolent person who loves humanity, but can’t seem to get along with anybody in particular and treats individual people condescendingly or brusquely. Kindness seems an especially important skill for an aspiring benevolent to cultivate. As one wise person put it: “Try to always be kind because you never know when you’re incompetent.”

[B]ecause being wrong feels exactly like being right, you’re almost always better off being nice. Kindness covers a multitude of incompetences, including incompetence you didn’t even realise you had.[2]

My attempt to define kindness

I think you are being kind if you are doing something with the motive of making some other creature’s life better for them and you do so skillfully enough that you are likely to succeed in this. To unpack this:

Kindness involves doing something (a kind word might be enough, but thoughts-and-prayers probably aren’t). It is an activity, not a sentiment.
It is prompted by a kind motive—a desire to be helpful: to make some creature’s life better (or prevent it from getting worse).
This motive is to make that c

...
Mauhn Releases AI Safety Documentation
by Berg Severens — 2021-07-03T21:23:00.555Z

Mauhn is a company doing research in AGI with a capped profit structure and an ethics board (represented by people from outside the company). Whereas there is a significant amount of AI/AGI safety research, there is still a gap of how to put this into practice for organizations doing research in AGI. We want to help closing this gap, with the following blogpost (written for an audience not familiar with AI Safety) and associated links to relevant documents:

Mauhn AI Safety Vision
This summarizes the most important points Mauhn will commit to towards building safe (proto-)AGI systems

Ethics section of Mauhn’s statutes
The statutes of Mauhn define the legal structure of the ethics board

Declaration of Ethical Commitment
Every founder, investor and employee sign the declaration of ethical commitment before starting a collaboration with Mauhn

We hope that other organizations will adopt similar principles or derivatives thereof. We were a bit short on bandwidth for this first version, but we want to include more feedback from the AI safety community for future versions of these documents. Please drop me an e-mail (berg@mauhn.com), if you'd like to contribute to next versions of this work. Probably we'll update the documentation once per year.
Open and Welcome Thread – July 2021
by habryka — 2021-07-03T19:53:07.048Z

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.
How would you run the statistics on whether Ivermectin helped India reduce COVID-19 cases?
by ChristianKl — 2021-07-03T16:09:17.991Z

I frequently read the claim that India reduced their COVID-19 cases a lot via Ivermectin but it's very unclear to me whether the relevant data to make that claim is cheripicked.

India has 34 region and each of those region has their own policy on Ivermectin. While we don't have exact data about Ivermectin usage, Google Trend data provides a proxy for usage of Ivermectin and does provide data that's fine-grained enough to separate individual region. John Hopkins provides data for COVID-19 cases by Indian region as well. 34 regions sounds to me like it's plausible to find statistically significant results if Ivermectin had an effect that's as great as proponent of Ivermectin claim

Given p-hacking concerns, it makes sense to first decide on how to analyse the data and then run the statistics. Does anyone have suggestion for how the data should be analysed?