trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Becoming a Staff Engineer
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2022-04-03T02:30:12.951Z

I'm trying to think of things to write that would be both easy to hammer out and valuable enough to garner upvotes during these few days when upvotes are extra valuable. So how about a topic I know a lot about: my job!

I'm a senior staff software engineer. What does that mean?

There's a couple ways to describe it.

Nominally it's a software engineering job equivalent to being a director, which is common big-org management speak for a manager who manages other managers (but not generally someone who manages directors—that's a VP). I often tell people I'm in "engineering middle management", which is a funny way of saying that I'm expected to be highly autonomous, mostly identify my own projects and drive them to success, and operate over multiple teams (if my projects aren't impacting multiple teams or groups of teams then that's too small a project and I should delegate it to a staff or senior engineer if I think it's important).

There's different ways to do the job, but most of the time it means I don't write code. Not because it's beneath me but because spending time writing code is almost never high leverage enough for it to be the right choice (there's almost always some other engineer who needs the growth opportunity of writing the code that I would be stealing from them if I wrote the code). This might be somewhat unique to me though because I seem to have higher comparative advantage in a few other skills: decision making (being accountable for making the right technical choices for the team and company), alignment building (getting everyone to agree on what we're doing), project management (making sure everyone knows what to do and when they need to do it by), and mentorship and teaching (helping others learn skills that will help them grow or at least achieve what they want). I have to find more than zero time to write code to stay connected to the ground truth of the work, but it tends to be restricted to side quests that don't have hard deadlines, hackathons, and Advent of Code.

Unfortunately, there's no good easy way to describe the job. I didn't understand it until I was already doing it, and I probably still don't understand it. This seems to be an inherent challenge for both managers and staff engineers: fundamentally your job is to decide what needs to get done and then get it done, and you do whatever it is that you can best do to make that happen....
Problem of Induction: What if Instants Were Independent
by Epirito — 2022-04-03T00:54:50.177Z

What if each instant were independent from the last?

At first sight, this situation, which from now on I will call BLEAK, might seem hopelessly bleak in an epistemological sense. For example: in the real world, a stock quote is probably going to be just a little higher or lower than its previous value, but if BLEAK were true, it would be no more probable that Gamestop remains less valuable than Tesla at the next instant than the contrary. In fact, both companies might not even exist in the next instant. If anyone truly believed that we have no reason to think that BLEAK is false, that one moment affects the next one, he should be paralyzed by uncertainty. But no one is. Therefore, radical sceptics don't even believe what they preach.

And yet, they probably think they do. They wouldn't all be lying, right? Well, I think they are probably just confused.

However, I intend to show that BLEAK might not be quite as epistemologically bleak as it seems:

Suppose that you throw some dice a huge number of times. You'll notice that they all fall with some number between 1 and 6 face up. Actually that's not a very good example because if you wanted to see what numbers you could get, you would just look around each face of the die. So let's use a black box random number generator instead. Literally just a black box with a screen and a button. When you press the button, a random number between 1 and 6 shows up. So Bob comes across this box and doesn't know what it's for. He messes with it for a bit and notices that a number shows up in the screen every time he presses the button. He becomes obsessed with it and spends whole days and nights pressing it numerous times for the rest of his life. He will soon become used to seeing the same numbers on it. By the end of his life, a seven or an eight will (rightly) seem very unlikely to appear on it.

Now, if BLEAK were true, we could model our experience as this box. Our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, (and this is crucial) our memories are what is shown on the screen. So, given that each instant is independent from the next (remember: we are pretending for a second that BLEAK is true), how did we never notice it? Is my whole life just a (very) lucky streak of random feelings and thoughts and perceptions, like seeing the whole Bee Movie appear in the TV static by sheer coincidence?

It could be, but it's very unlikely.

It's...
How to openly maintain a single identity while keeping it private?
by identity.key — 2022-04-03T00:53:47.096Z

Whenever I need to create an account on some platform I've not used before, I'm almost always[1] faced with a dilemma regarding my public username. I can simply use one that I already use elsewhere or I can come up with a new, unique one.

Both, in my view, have advantages and disadvantages:

It's easy and quick to use an existing username[2], but it immediately links my activity in the platforms. This often happens in a permanent way—in many cases it's not possible to change the username afterwards.
Sometimes though, it may be tricky to determine which of the existing usernames to use (which I have due to facing this dilemma and sometimes creating new usernames)—do I associate this new account with these accounts and interests, or with these other ones, etc.

Creating a new username, on the other hand, allows me to avoid any immediate linking. Often I could later link the accounts by just mentioning them in a bio/about field of my profiles, if I'd like to.
However, I find making a new identifier for myself quite challenging: it may take hours to settle on something I am comfortable with. I almost always start thinking of using a string of random characters, but it seems not nice to people who'd want to read it[3], especially seeing many simple, "normal" usernames around. So I begin brainstorming simple word(s) that would look cool[4], but this inevitably leads into thinking about the meaning of these words and then trying to still make them somehow relate to my identity... which is opposite of the goal I started with.

The issue stems from the fact that I would like both "maintaining a single identity" of the first approach and "staying anonymous" / "keeping the identity private" of the second approach. Using the bio/about field as I mentioned above seems like the solution, but I feel like it hurts discoverability—something that I would like to have as part of "maintaining a single identity".

The reason I want to have both is that, while I appreciate being anonymous, thus being able to say more things in an open way, I would like to remain discoverable by other people who share similar interests as me, and not necessarily just one interest. I would like them to be able to look at my username on one platform, and be able to associate it with my activity on another, without them having to do much digging around my profiles to see the connection. I sometimes d...
High schoolers can apply to the Atlas Fellowship: $50k scholarship + summer program
by sydney — 2022-04-03T00:53:05.397Z

Summary

Jonas Vollmer, Ashley Lin, and I are starting the

Atlas Fellowshi

p, a $50,000 scholarship + all-expenses-paid summer program for ~100 talented high school students from across the world, funded by Open Philanthropy and the FTX Future Fund.
If you’re in high school or age 14–19 anywhere in the world, you can apply here by April 10th!
If you

encourage a student to apply

and we accept them into the program, you get $500.
You can see templates to share the program and more details on nominations in our

outreach guide

.
We’re hiring (including internships, remote roles, and part-time roles). Learn more

here

!

About the program

If you read LessWrong, you probably have some sense of what it means to pursue a goal, to

actually try

to

win

. We want to help you do that (especially, but not exclusively, if your goal improves the world). We want to give you the chance to not worry about money or deadlines or sending prestigious signals to others and to just do something badass that actually matters.

In particular, if you're the kind of exceptionally talented individual we're looking for, we want to give you:

$50,000 for education + professional development
Our outlines of an understanding of rationality and how the world works, and all the prerequisites needed for this (ex: Fermi estimates, big history, inside views)
Sessions, tutoring, and other resources to help you build object-level technical skills (including AI alignment, economics, probability theory, type theory, statistics, proofs, linear algebra, machine learning, genomics and more)
College admissions support (or help with your own projects)
Connections to other exceptional people interested in improving the world
A fun summer experience

If this sounds interesting,

apply here

by April 10th!

Why we’re doing this

The world is full of problems that are bottlenecked on talent. But much of the world’s talent is stuck in high school spending their free time rowing to get into Harvard or otherwise trying to send costly signals of academic ability. We think our program will give high school students the intellectual environment, courage, and resources to start working on things that matter instead.

Why high school?

Less competition, fewer other good opportunities: while bright college students or adults have many exciting opportunities available to them (including opportunities from others in

...
Entering At the 11th Hour (Babble & Anaylsis)
by EdricBroadhurst — 2022-04-03T00:52:57.115Z

Background

It isn’t obvious what contributing to The Good Future from a non-standard background looks like.

Especially on a short timeline.

I am a first time poster with a background in the arts. I became aware of AI safety as a cause area relatively recently, and despite it possibly being the 11th hour, I want to contribute. I would consider myself a baby rationalist - there is years worth of content to digest still. This feels like relevant information to this post because I expect the results of my Babble session and reflection to be very different than (what I perceive to be) the average less wrong poster.

Why even try?

Because humans are worth it, and if I can tip the scale even a little bit then I should.

I am motivated to post now for the first time because of the Good Hearts experiment. One of the desirable outcomes seems to be pulling us lurkers out of woodwork to see what the results of the week look like, and as someone who fits that description I feel that I can contribute to the experiment. Normally I feel like I should not participate in posting because of the very high standard of discourse, but this experiment feels like permission to post and try for that high standard anyway (while being okay with being corrected on wrongness).

Process

My intention is to write in the ballpark of 50 items of ways I can contribute to obtaining The Good Future without auto-pruning, especially on my instincts of “reasonableness” and “feasibility.” I will then go through and analyze my thinking by categorizing the items with the intention of learning what pathways are under-represented in my thoughts, or that I may be completely blind to. I may find other ways to evaluate the Babble that aren’t obvious to me beforehand.

I also hope to find something actionable.

Babble

50 Ways To Contribute

Optimize our household so that it is the most productive research environment possible for my researcher partner
Host a local meetup
Commit to spending the time to obtain the necessary background knowledge to become an expert
Provide low-skill task completion services for researchers to free up their time
Connect researchers who need some-skill level tasks done with those who can do so to free up their time
Create art using AI as some sort of awareness project - use opportunities for discourse to talk about cause areas
Optimize my income earning in a no

...
Monthly Linkspost 3/2022
by Keller — 2022-04-02T23:57:29.228Z

This is a linkspost for https://keller.substack.com/p/monthly-shorts-322

Offense and Defense

So, we talk about ransomware as this serious and emerging problem. But it’s interesting to see that part of why ransomware is hard to solve is that it’s incredibly easy. Here are the top criminal groups by ransomware revenue.

The top one, Conti, is a clear market leader

How much does Conti pay their staff? New people make $1-2k. Monthly. These can’t be the best people in the world: Google has a Moscow office, to pick but one example. And Conti is protected by the Russian government! They don’t have to worry (much) about being arrested! “Just don’t work for people doing bad things” is actually really enough for most people. The issue is that the imbalance between offense and defense in cyber is really severe.

This Vanity Fair article matches my current state of mind on lab leak vs natural origin: the biological evidence seems to point mildly towards natural origin, and the political observation is that the Chinese central government, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and a number of US scientists have frantically worked to cover it up. Which, of course, leaves the obvious implication that they’re guilty: how likely would this behavior be if they knew that it was natural origin? Oh, and also, whether or not SARS-CoV-2 was a lab-escape, we should still stop gain of function research with our existing, inadequately secure, labs.

If you want to do something about Russian censorship (which directly contributes to the viability of the war), I can recommend Snowflake, which makes being a place that Tor traffic comes from much easier. It makes Tor safer for those who use it, it makes your own traffic marginally more anonymous (because anything could plausibly be Tor traffic instead), and is very simple to run: you literally just keep the tab open.

You may have read about the Modern System, as Brett Deveraux calls it following Biddle, where young officers are given a clear understanding of the “commander’s intent”, something that you can reasonably call a goal, and an order to get the job done. It relies on flexibility, leadership, and competence in your officer corp. The US is very good at it. One of the reasons many other countries don’t like it is that it tends to produce good revolutionary leaders.

Modern authoritarian ‘coup-proofing’ makes it practically impossible to actually imp

...
Hallelujah
by Pablo Repetto — 2022-04-02T23:34:47.457Z
Link: https://pabloernesto.github.io/2022/04/02/hallelujah.html

Randall is great and objectively hilarious. But. “Shift” and “left” do not rhyme. They’re suppossed to. And this bothered me (hypothetically I might have tried to sing this). So I kind of… rewrote most of the thing? Without really meaning to? Yay?

I'd not normally share this, but in the spirit of LW's current campaign to reward content I thought I'd throw out it into the world.
20 Modern Heresies
by rogersbacon — 2022-04-02T22:46:37.536Z
Link: https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/20-modern-heresies?s=w

Burning of Jan Hus, Spiezer Chronicle, 1485

You may have heard about

Hereticon

, an exclusive invite-only “conference for thoughtcrime” that recently happened in Miami. While I’m sure there were some true heretics in attendance, the cynical part of me feels like it was basically just an excuse for rich, self-styled contrarians to hobnob and pat themselves on the back for being such radical thinkers. Looking at

the list of presentations

, I’m left a little cold—topics included eugenics, geoengineering, UFOs, transhumanism, psychedelics, ESP, and polyamory. Perhaps this just speaks to what a radical thinker I am (oh wait, now I’m doing it), but I don’t find any of these topics to be all that heretical, at least not in any serious or deep way.

All of this of course begs the question: what exactly is a heresy?

In my estimation, a heresy is a view that questions something which everyone seems to take for granted, something that we have forgotten can even be questioned in the first place. In the best instance, it is a view that no one has truly expressed before, and not just because it is obviously false or uninteresting. It might be wrong or impractical, in fact it probably is, but it’s also not impossible to imagine a world in which this belief becomes mainstream.

Why engage in heretical thinking? Is it just a convenient excuse to write a bunch of controversial shit (yes…) or is there some broader goal that is served by attempting to come up with a list of blasphemous views? Naturally, Paul Graham has already written eloquently on heresies, how to find them, and why we should try to find them in his essay, “

What You Can’t Say

”.

“Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist…

Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand

...
Approach to Screen Time
by jefftk — 2022-04-02T22:20:04.729Z

Screens can be really engrossing, and learning moderation is pretty
hard. This is one of a small number of places (along with staying up
as late as they want and

eating as
many sweets as they'd like) where an approach of letting our kids
play with them as much as they want doesn't seem like it would be
something that they were happy with in retrospect. The main issue I
see here is in crowding out other things: when not on screens the kids
do a lot of social, physical, and/or imaginative things that I think
are pretty good for them. Not all screen time is equal from my
perspective, either. If they're, say, getting better at reading I'm
happy for them to do a lot more of that than if they're playing a
video game fun alone.

I don't feel like we have the perfect approach here, and we've gone
through a few different systems, but this is what we're currently
using:

Podcasts and
audio books: unlimited. I have a bunch of story tapes that my
grandmother recorded for us, and Lily especially enjoys them. Let me
know if you want a link.

Messaging, blogging: unlimited, though they
don't do these very much.

Learning games: unrestricted before breakfast on weekends and
between dinner and bedtime snack. If they think
something (a program or a portion of a program) should count as a
learning game they need to bring it to us and demonstrate that it
is. Once a quarter all precedents are cleared and they need to bring
games back to us, because otherwise you have "learning games" where
they have mastered all of the learning portions and are just playing
the games. This is primarily games like ABC Mouse and CodeSpark, though Lily recently
proposed that karaoke count (which I said it was fine as long as she
wasn't doing songs she knew all the lyrics to).

TV and movies: movie day once a week (usually on a day with bad
weather) with our nanny for about an
hour and a half; occasional movies together as a family.

Anything else: fifteen minutes a day; unlimited during long car
trips and airplane rides. If they are playing a game together (End it
isn't just one of them watching the other one play) then they can pool
their time and play for a half an hour.

I asked the kids what they thought of the rules:

Anna: they're good.

Lily: they're ok.

I asked what they'd do if they were a parent:

Lily: If I was a parent I would change the fifteen minutes

...
Uncontrollable Super-Powerful Explosives
by Sammy Martin — 2022-04-02T20:13:13.431Z

In the late 19th century, two researchers meet to discuss their differing views on the existential risk posed by future Uncontrollable Super-Powerful Explosives.

Catastrophist: I predict that one day, not too far in the future, we will find a way to unlock a qualitatively new kind of explosive power. This explosive will represent a fundamental break with what has come before. It will be so much more powerful than any other explosive that whoever gets to this technology first might be in a position to gain a DSA over any opposition. Also, the governance and military strategies that we were using to prevent wars or win them will be fundamentally unable to control this new technology, so we'll have to reinvent everything on the fly or die in an extinction-level war. There's no way we'd be competent enough to handle something of that power without killing ourselves almost immediately.
Gradualist: I’m also concerned about the prospect of explosives one day becoming far more destructive than they are now, with possibly catastrophic consequences if we aren't prepared. I'm not so sure that we’d instantly go extinct if you were right, though I agree that if anything like what you're describing is real, we’re in a great deal of danger. But we'll leave questions of Governance for another time. In the meantime, I want to push back against the idea that this will all happen so suddenly. What does that word 'DSA' mean?
C: Decisive strategic advantage. Anyone who has that technology would be able to render any military opposition irrelevant. Probably, they'd be able to wipe out entire cities with one bomb and force their opponents to surrender almost immediately.
G: That seems like a weirdly specific prediction to make. Why assume something so unlikely? Have you got any evidence such a thing is even possible?
C: I have my reasons, but first let me deal with what you just said, because I can't let that slip. Zero-to-one discontinuities are actually pretty common in the history of technology. Someone had to invent guns or steam engines for the first time. Why wouldn't there be a zero-to-one transition for explosive power someday?
G: Because zero-to-one discontinuities happen when you do something for the first time.
C: Yes, that's what I'm suggesting.
G: No you aren't: we've already had our zero-to-one discontinuity! We've invented black powder, then dynamite and

...