trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
People Will Listen
by sapphire — 2021-04-11T16:51:10.467Z

I have been thinking a lot about the crypto autopsy Scott posted in 2018. In retrospect, there was still an enormous amount of money to be made 'buying the dip' in BTC/ETH. And there was even more money to be made buying altcoins. Scott also links to this thread from 2015 strongly advising people to buy bitcoin at around $230 (so approximately 250x gains on the percent you held). The earlier bitcoin discussion on lesswrong might have represented an even more lucrative opportunity but this is some of the best completely explicit advice ever posted on the forum:

LessWrong is where I learned about Bitcoin, several years ago, and my greatest regret is that I did not investigate it more as soon as possible, that people here did not yell at me louder that it was important, and to go take a look at it. In that spirit, I will do so now.

...

This is a time to be good rationalists, and investigate a possible opportunity, comparing the present situation to historical examples, and making an informed decision. Either Bitcoin has begun the process of dying, and this decline will continue in stages until it hits zero (or some incredibly low value that is essentially the same for our purposes), or it will live. Based on the new all time high being hit in number of transactions, and ways to spend Bitcoin, I think there is at least a reasonable chance it will live. Enough of a chance that it is worth taking some money that you can 100% afford to lose, and making a bet. A rational gamble that there is a decent probability that it will survive, at a time when a large number of others are betting that it will fail.

And then once you do that, try your hardest to mentally write it off as a complete loss, like you had blown the money on a vacation or a consumer good, and now it is gone, and then wait a long time.

As I am writing the thread itself has four upvotes. Conversely, the following comment has twenty-six (this thread long predates variable weight votes though we can still vote on it going forward)

I used to believe that bitcoin is under-priced before, but there are so many agents involved in it now (including Wall Street), that I can't really convince myself that I know better than them - the market is too efficient for me.

Additionally, I'd be especially wary about buying based on arguments regarding the future price based on such obvious metr

...
Ben Goertzel's "Kinds of Minds"
by JoshuaFox — 2021-04-11T12:41:16.550Z

I'd like to recommend Ben Goertzel's book from 2006 Hidden Pattern, and particularly Chapter 2 "Kinds of Minds". (The book is also available at the author's site, but that may trigger SSL certificate warnings.)

We've come to understand that a future AGI may have non-anthropomorphic implementation and behavior, but this chapter situates possible minds in a variety of types of implementation and embodiment that I have not seen described elsewhere.

Specifically, p.17 compares

High-resource minds (like AIXI) or modest-resource

and among modest-resource minds

Embodied versus non, and within the "embodied" category: singly versus multiply versus flexibly embodied, and tool-dependent versus non
Mindplexes versus fully unified minds
Socially-dependent versus non

If there is other literature that enumerates and compares these and other kinds of minds, I'll be glad to know.
Specializing in Problems We Don't Understand
by johnswentworth — 2021-04-10T22:40:40.690Z

Most problems can be separated pretty cleanly into two categories: things we basically understand, and things we basically don’t understand. Some things we basically understand: building bridges and skyscrapers, treating and preventing infections, satellites and GPS, cars and ships, oil wells and gas pipelines and power plants, cell networks and databases and websites. Some things we basically don’t understand: building fusion power plants, treating and preventing cancer, high-temperature superconductors, programmable contracts, genetic engineering, fluctuations in the value of money, biological and artificial neural networks. Problems we basically understand may have lots of moving parts, require many people with many specialties, but they’re generally problems which can be reliably solved by throwing resources at it. There usually isn’t much uncertainty about whether the problem will be solved at all, or a high risk of unknown unknowns, or a need for foundational research in order to move forward. Problems we basically don’t understand are the opposite: they are research problems, problems which likely require a whole new paradigm.

In agency terms: problems we basically understand are typically solved via

adaptation-execution rather than goal-optimization

. Problems we basically don’t understand are exactly those for which existing adaptations fail.

Main claim underlying this post: it is possible to specialize in problems-we-basically-don’t-understand, as a category in its own right, in a way which generalizes across fields. Problems we do understand mainly require relatively-specialized knowledge and techniques adapted to solving particular problems. But problems we don’t understand mainly require general-purpose skills of empiricism, noticing patterns and bottlenecks, model-building, and design principles. Existing specialized knowledge and techniques don’t suffice - after all, if the existing specialized knowledge and techniques were sufficient to reliably solve the problem, then it wouldn’t be a problem-we-basically-don’t-understand in the first place.

So… how would one go about specializing in problems we basically don’t understand? This post will mostly talk about how to choose what to formally study, and how to study it, in order to specialize in problems we don’t understand.

Specialize in Things Which Generalize

Suppose existing models and techniques for...
Recently I bought a new laptop
by Tetraspace — 2021-04-10T20:29:45.685Z

128 GB of hard drive space, I found, was not enough to contain both the build tools for every random programming language I might want to try out and every main series Paradox grand strategy game. So I decided to get a new laptop. Also the bottom half of my screen was completely obscured by screen problems upon booting up the laptop, so it took a few minutes to "warm up" and be usable. Also I came close to accidentally my old laptop trying to install Linux. Also the casing seemed to be coming a bit loose, but that was probably fine, it just does that.

One problem, a big problem, that might have put the whole project into disarray, is that there are 410 results in the laptop category on Curry's. Deciding between two alternatives is hard enough. Deciding between 410? It boggles the imagination.

So first narrow this down with some easy filters. My old laptop had a 15.6" screen, so only include those in the search (I have another laptop with a 13 inch screen, which is noticeably worse). I'm a stodgy nerd rather than a dynamic young creative, so only include Windows laptops in the search. I need to, at some point, possibly use the laptop I buy, so only include ones that can be delivered to my location in the search. This reduced the number of laptops down to 33, a much more manageable number.

At that point, the next step was to make a spreadsheet. Simple linear models are unreasonably effective, so I took the four things I was looking at for laptops (hard drive space, RAM, processor speed, cheapness) and put them in a spreadsheet, and added them together. Because computer performance is logarithmically distributed in powers of 2, it made sense to use the logarithm of these stats. Since I'd want a doubling of the cost of a laptop to lead to a doubling of the RAM, processor speed, and hard drive space (one way to achieve this is to buy two laptops), cost was weighted three times more than the other three. I calculated the score of my current laptop (actually one available on the market which approximates my current laptop), set that to be zero, and offset all the values.

This gave me a list of LaptopScores™, the top one of which was a LENOVO IdeaPad 3 15.6" with 1.91 laptop points. Anyway, I bought it, that's the one I'm using now.

LaptopScores are biased towards cheap laptops because a laptop that is twice as good is usually a little more than twice as expe...
A Brief Review of Current and Near-Future Methods of Genetic Engineering
by GeneSmith — 2021-04-10T19:16:01.169Z

Part 1: The Case for Human Genetic Engineering

Part 2: The Case for Increasing Intelligence

My Purpose in Writing This Post

I've spent the last 6 months or so looking into the possibility of pursuing human genetic engineering as a means of improving human lives and increasing the probability of a desirable future. If you'd like more details about why I think improving health and intelligence is desirable, read my previous two posts.

In this post I'm going to summarize my understanding of the research on how genetic engineering will likely be done, the limitations of current techniques, and how they might be improved in the near future.

One last thing before I get started: the genetic engineering I am interested in, and which I think holds the most potential for increasing the likelihood of a good future does not incorporate any type of selective breeding or eugenics programs. Though one could theoretically increase intelligence or any other trait by banning those with undesirable traits from having children and encouraging those with desirable traits people to have more children, I think this is a bad approach for reasons I have summarized in another post.. This post examines methods that do not require coercion to work.

A Summary of Current Techniques

Step 1: Make a yardstick

All non-coercive efforts to genetically engineer humans have one essential prerequisite task: finding which genes contribute to the expression of different traits. In the modern world of genetics, this is done with a test called a Genome Wide Association Study, or GWAS. These are truly massive studies: a typical GWAS done today usually has hundreds of thousands of participants. Genetic material is collected from all participants, often with a blood draw or cheek swab, and their genome is analyzed with a machine like Illumina's MiSeq analyzer.

For cost reasons, nearly all studies today sequence only a small portion of the genome using a device called an SNP microarray. SNP stands for Single Nucleotide Polymorphism, and is the term geneticists use to refer to a base pair that differs between two individuals. Also, because it's technically possible for any base pair to differ between humans, geneticists usually use this term to refer to base pairs for which at least 1% of study participants have a different base pair at that location. An SNP microarray is an amazing device that can sequence a...
A DIY cryptocurrency hardware wallet for free
by jorges — 2021-04-10T17:36:53.123Z

When holding cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, many people suggest doing it on hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor. However, there is a very simple and safe solution, using only two regular pen / flash drives, connected via USB.

tl;dr: Boot from a Debian live, run AtomicWallet (or any other with an .AppImage distribution) and let its config be saved (and later read) on/from a second pen drive.

Prerequisites

A computer with two USB slots (or any other option to have them connected at the same time)

2 USB flash drives:

1 called LinuxDrive, with >4GB storage space

1 called CoinDrive

Create the wallet

Install a Debian live, for example the XFCE image on LinuxDrive. On OSX, this can be done with balenaEtcher.

Boot the machine from LinuxDrive.

Having booted and Debian running, insert CoinDrive and mount it (click on its icon on the desktop).

Open the Terminal and execute

ls /media/user/ – this will show the name that CoinDrive was formatted with. Let's assume it is CoinDrive

mkdir /media/user/CoinDrive/atomic/ – creates a directory where the wallet's data will be stored

ln -s /media/user/CoinDrive/atomic/ ~/.config/atomic – creates a symbolic link from the home directory to CoinDrive

In a browser, download the AppImage of AtomicWallet: Click on Downloads and then pick Ubuntu (not Debian).

Again in the Terminal, execute

chmod u+x Downloads/atomicwallet.Appimage – to make the file executable

Downloads/atomicwallet.Appimage --no-sandbox – to run the wallet

In Atomic wallet, create the wallet: set a password, remember the paper seed and the public addresses of the coins you want to use. (You might scan their QR codes with a phone.)

Shutdown / reboot.

Fill the wallet

To send money to the wallet, you of course only need its public addresses. No need to touch LinuxDrive or CoinDrive.

Spend from the wallet

Boot Debian from LinuxDrive.

Download again the AppImage of AtomicWallet

In the Terminal, execute again:

ln -s /media/user/CoinDrive/atomic ~/.config/atomic

chmod u+x Downloads/atomicwallet.Appimage

Downloads/atomicwallet.Appimage --no-sandbox

Send money from the open wallet.

Backup the wallet

Atomic Wallet has stored your wallet data in a directory atomic/ on the pen drive, encrypted with a passphrase. Therefore, to back it up, you might copy that folder anywhere else as a backup.

Compared to a commercial hardware wallet

Convenience

A hardware walle...
[Recruiting for a Discord Server] AI Forecasting & Threat Modeling Workshop
by Quinn — 2021-04-10T16:15:07.420Z
Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdB-uW_d0Nc_EKSwemIugq5jQASrNV8kLwmNnwPBXScalreRA/viewform?usp=sf_link

Hi! We're interested in beefing up our forecasting and threat modeling skills so that we understand the problems of TAI and AI existential safety better.

We're pretty much of a technical background, but occasionally discuss governance and policy matters.

We are committed 1-2 hours per week, 1 hour on a call and occasionally prepping with a short reading.

Exercises we've done

estimates on https://forecast.elicit.org/

fermi modeling scenarios (e.g. how to fermi model)

writing scenarios (vague scifi)

responding to papers or blog posts

Post we've produced

Directions we're thinking of taking the group in:

formal prediction tracking, like on elicit but more about your personal journey rethinking and updating on an individual question

concrete goals like production of high quality posts

We are on a discord server, and we're looking to grow to around 20 people.

We think that having a space where no ideas are stupid is critical for self-development, and we see this group as a bridge between casual conversation and larger communities like lesswrong and the alignment forum.

Please reach out if you'd like to join!
Forcing Yourself is Self Harm, or Don't Goodhart Yourself
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2021-04-10T15:19:42.130Z

I recently wrote about how forcing yourself to keep your identity small harms you in the same way suppressing emotions is self harm. I got two kinds of criticism on the piece. One was that people seemed to read "actively working to keep your identity small is bad" as "keeping your identity small is bad" and disliked what they perceived as a contrary position on advice they like. This was at least partially my fault because the original title of the post didn't make this very clear. The other criticism was that I had made a general argument that "forcing yourself to do X is self harm" but had used it only to address keeping your identity small.

So, here is a better titled and generalized version of that post.

There are any number of virtuous things we might strive for. Here's a small list of the kinds of things I have in mind:

productivity
being nice
eating healthy
exercising regularly
getting enough sleep
keeping your identity small
meditating
learning something you considers important, like a foreign language or math
writing more
keeping the house clean

A tempting strategy to achieve these things is some variant of forcing, striving, trying real hard, or otherwise just actively and directly pushing yourself to achieve the goal. This typically looks a few ways:

punishing yourself when you fail
creating rewards for yourself when you succeed
beating yourself up for not being better
creating incentives to "trick" yourself
exerting self control or willpower

The problem is that these methods all have a common fatal flaw: they require optimizing towards a measured target and so are subject to Goodhart effects.

Here's an illustrative story of what can happen:

You want to be more productive, so you start measuring how productive you are. The metric used isn't that important for this example, so let's say it's something like words written per hour. Using a spreadsheet and a simple word counting program, you capture this information and find that you can write about 500 words of useable content per hour at your most productive. Great, now you can start holding yourself accountable and expecting, let's say, at least 400 words per hour.

Uh oh, it's a Tuesday, you look at the clock, and you realize you've only written 100 words in the last hour. Well, that's okay, you'll do better next hour. But another hour passes and you only wrote 100 more words. This is looking bad. The day goes on like t

...
Rediscovery, the Mind's Curare
by Erich_Grunewald — 2021-04-10T07:42:11.348Z
Link: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/rediscovery-the-minds-curare/

I'm often apprehensive about writing things that may already have been written, of sharing ideas that may already have been thought of, of saying things that may be cliché or dull or commonplace. I think I can trace this to a fear of being seen as ignorant or uneducated, which itself can be traced to my valuing knowledge & education.[1]

I remember once when I was young & thinking, as one does, about free will. I thought, Well, probably humans are like those stones that roll down the slope of a mountain: the places they end up are precisely determined by their shape & density, the arrangement of the mountain slope & the permanent laws of mechanics. So we too always do the thing that we were always going to do, as determined by the arrangement of our sensory inputs & the particular configuration of neurons & synapses in our brain. But that is not what we humans mean when we talk about free will. Because though it is determined how we will act – so I reasoned to myself – no one actually knows what has been preordained. So as far as we're concerned our actions & those of other humans can still take countless possible shapes, no fewer than the ways a stone can roll down a mountain slope. Thus thought the teenage me. But months or perhaps years later, happening upon an article on free will, I learned that views very similar to these were called determinism & compatibilism & had been known & discussed in philosophy for decades if not centuries.

I don't mean to suggest that everything has been done before. That is obviously not true, even in a weaker sense. I just mean that it's damned difficult to come up with unique ideas, ideas no one has ever expressed, & that those who do are a damned rare species. Whatever topic you choose to write on is most likely the mere playground of a scholar who has spent years foraging it. I'm sure the very ideas that I am expressing here have been thought & expressed by other people, too.[2]

On the one hand, this apprehension probably has some good sides. It means I'm more likely to research things before writing them. It means I'm more likely to leave unpublished some writings that would produce a deserved negative response. It means I'm more likely to be original & have original thoughts. Maybe ...

But it also seems irrational. Where's the harm in writing about something that's already...
Sometimes, it can take a while to notice confusion
by masasin — 2021-04-10T03:24:43.623Z

Epistemic status: Anecdote.

tl;dr: I had multiple opportunities to notice my confusion, but failed every time until I actually thought about it. Ended up testing positive for COVID, despite expectations.

Background

I started preparing for the pandemic in January 2020. At the time, I was living alone. In January, my visa lapsed, and I moved in with someone else while waiting for a new visa to finish processing. Among all the people I know around the world, I think I was the single most cautious. Nobody had seen my face directly for almost a year, I was always masked (and, since October, double masked), I washed fastidiously, and never spent too long near others.

With the move, though, I was exposed to far more risk, which was the other person's activities. She's an immunologist, and wears a mask when she goes out (e.g., to work). She also got vaccinated a while ago, along with all her friends.

Symptoms begin

On Wednesday 31 March, I woke up with a dry throat. I had forgotten the window open, and I sleep with my mouth open when I'm tired, so I wasn't very concerned. This had happened before.

The next day, the window had been closed, but the dryness hadn't gone away yet, which I found strange, but ignored. (Mistake 1.) I did a work meeting, then went to rent a car for the long weekend, which was supposed to be my first vacation since before pandemic. The AirBnB was also booked. And so we went. (Mistake 2.)

That night, when my roommate and I arrived at our destination (a basement apartment; no interaction with the host), it was very cold, and I started coughing. I thought it might just be a cold. (Mistake 3.) The coughing persisted until the next morning. My SO asked me to take it easy that day, and to do a PCR test when I could. I tried to assuage her fears, and brushed it off as nothing serious. (Mistake 4.) However, partially because she was worried, and partially because the cough was not nothing, I did curtail our plans for the first day.

Symptoms subside

By the next morning, the cough had mostly subsided, but my SO heard it as well, and again asked me to take a break, and asked me to take a PCR test ASAP. I partially agreed this time around, because it was unusual for a cough to last this long (at least for my body). We took the day off, I bought a thermometer, and we stayed within a couple of kilometres of the AirBnB.

Even when the call ended, I was still aga...