trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Counter-theses on Sleep
by Natália — 2022-03-21T23:21:07.943Z

Alexey Guzey’s

Theses on Sleep

gained a lot of popularity and acclaim on LessWrong and among people I follow on social media, despite largely consisting of what I think were weak arguments and misleading claims. I found that a bit surprising, so I decided to write a post pointing out several of the mistakes I think he’s made, and reporting some of what the academic literature on sleep seems to show.

Sleep deprivation is associated with *both* depression *and* mania

One of Guzey’s theses

is that

“depression triggers/amplifies oversleeping while oversleeping triggers/amplifies depression.” The first piece of evidence he uses to support that is people on /r/BipolarReddit saying that they sleep a lot when depressed, and sleep very little when manic. However, there’s a big problem with using that as evidence.

Guzey’s /r/BipolarReddit evidence is misleading

The DSM-5 specifies subtypes of depression that have opposing relationships with sleep.

Depression with melancholic features

is associated with early morning awakening, whereas

depression with atypical features

is associated with hypersomnia.

Guzey’s evidence is misleading because people with bipolar disorder are

disproportionally prone to having atypical features

during their depressive episodes. So, unsurprisingly, his evidence from bipolar disorder patients is not representative of what you see in the general population: both long and short sleep duration are associated with depression (and, relevantly, suicide as well, in adults as well as adolescents).

I’m surprised no one in the comments of this post brought up this objection – it only takes a very quick Google Scholar search to see that the relationship between sleep duration and depression is not linear.

Chronic sleep deprivation might be associated with *decreased* BDNF expression, as shown by Guzey’s own sources

Guzey hypothesizes that

Sleep deprivation appears to increase BDNF [and therefore neurogenesis?]

He then proceeds to link to a few papers that showed up when he Googled “sleep deprivation bdnf”. These sources agree that acute sleep deprivation increases BDNF expression, but some also say that the opposite may happen when sleep deprivation is chronic, which Guzey fails to mention in his post.

From

The Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor: Missing Link Between Sleep Deprivation, Insomnia, a

...
Jetlag, Nausea, and Diarrhea are Largely Optional
by Thomas Kwa — 2022-03-21T22:40:50.180Z

Epistemic status: my best guess at the truth, with many of the standard medical-advice disclaimers omitted

Many people I know are aware of drugs for basic ailments, but don't bother using them because they're too much trouble to carry around. But using a pill organizer basically eliminates this overhead. For me, having a pill organizer has dramatically reduced the negative effects of insomnia, jetlag, nausea, diarrhea, headaches, etc., and significantly increased my operational capacity. In total, it has probably increased my productivity by over 3% over the last few months, and also increased my quality of life substantially. (But note that I think most people won't get such a large benefit). Just using the alertness adjustment drugs to curb jetlag saves me about 3 hours of productive time each way on critical trips.

Example pill organizer layout

Here are the exact steps I followed, which take less than an hour and cost about $30:

Get a 10-slot

pill organizer

(4 for $10 on Amazon). Not the same as a weekly pill organizer.
Get a few basic pills from your local drugstore, supermarket, Amazon, whatever. I suggest the following:

ibuprofen 200mg (Motrin, Advil) for pain, fever, etc. [1]
caffeine 100mg, optionally with l-theanine
loperamide/simethicone 2mg (anti-diarrhea)
dimenhydrinate (Dramamine, anti-nausea) [2]
melatonin 0.3mg (mild sleep aid)
doxylamine 25mg (Unisom, sleep aid to be used sparingly) [3]

This gives you 4 slots left for whatever other drugs you benefit from or are prescribed, maybe things like

aspirin 81mg (in case of heart attack, also another option for pain)
modafinil 200mg or armodafinil 150mg (suppresses sleep drive). Note that this dosage is way too much if you don't have narcolepsy.
stimulants e.g. amphetamines, nicotine
anti-anxiety meds [4]
allergy meds (if these are antihistamines they could double as other things)
electrolyte pills: sodium, potassium, magnesium

Put the pills in the medication organizer, and label each compartment with the medication and dosage, using a permanent marker. You can erase the labels with alcohol wipes if needed.
Carry it around in your backpack or purse.
If those particular drugs don't work for you, try others that do the same thing. Our civilization has invented these multiple times and there's a good chance at least one works for your particular body.

In December, I lost my pill organizer. In the few days it took me to ...
We cannot directly choose an AGI's utility function
by azsantosk — 2022-03-21T22:08:56.763Z

This is my first post at this forum, and I am going to address a confusion that I believe some people have, and that may hinder some beginners from being able to contribute helpful ideas to the AI safety debate.

Namely, the confusion is the idea that we can choose an AGI's utility function, and that as a consequence, that the biggest problem in AI alignment is figuring out what utility function an AGI should have.

Because I have not seen anyone argue for that explicitly, I'm going to add some quotes to documents that beginners are expected to read, and I'll argue why someone reading these quotes might confused as a result.

Is it easy to give an intelligent machine a goal?

Here is from MIRI's Four Background Claims:

Regardless of their intelligence level, and regardless of your intentions, computers do exactly what you programmed them to do. If you program an extremely intelligent machine to execute plans that it predicts lead to futures where cancer is cured, then it may be that the shortest path it can find to a cancer-free future entails kidnapping humans for experimentation (and resisting your attempts to alter it, as those would slow it down).

Computers do indeed do exactly as you programmed them to do, but only on the very narrow sense of executing the exact machine instructions you give.

There are clearly no instructions for executing "plans that the machine predicts will lead to futures where some statement X is true" (where X may be "cancer is cured", or something else).

Unless we have fundamental advances in alignment, it will likely not be possible to give orders to intelligent machines like that. I will go even further and question whether, among the order-following AGIs, the ones that follows orders literally and dangerously are any easier to build. As far as I am aware of both may be actually equally difficult to come up with.

If this is so, then the cautionary tale sounds a little off. Yes, they might help us recognize how hard it is for us to know precisely what we want. And yes, they might serve to impress people with easy-to-imagine examples of AGIs causing a catastrophe.

But it may also enshrine a mindset that the AI alignment problem is mostly about finding the 'right' utility function for an AGI to have (that takes into account corrigibility, impact metrics and so on), when we actually have no evidence this will help.

Here is a similar e...
Why will an AGI be rational?
by azsantosk — 2022-03-21T21:54:04.761Z

Just as there is such a thing as intelligence, a "very general ability to solve problems", there is such a thing as "rationality", which we might define informally as meaning that solutions and actions are consistent with some "purpose".

By this definition, rationality constrains a system, making its behavior more predictable, or alternatively, there are potentially many more irrational than rational beings that are consistent with a given set of actions. The more consistent with a single purpose the actions are, the "more rational" a being is. So why exactly will an AGI be fully rational?

Rationality as a class of fixed points under self-modification

We can think of a space of all possible intelligent systems there can be defined a surface on which all possible rational agents lie, and around it a region of approximate rationality (in which for example humans are found). Now consider the sequence of successive agents which might occur as a result of intelligent self-modification. It seems natural for every such sequence to eventually converge to a fixed point (if they don't, let us just consider this whole attractor as being a single agent in our agent-space!), but why should we expect these points to lie precisely on a rational surface?

One reason is that agents capable of self-modification may in many cases attempt to overcome their own irrationalities, considering them as flawed. For example, consider a being that has hyperbolic discounting for reward, which is time-inconsistent and therefore irrational. Such a being is likely to modify itself, or constrain later versions of itself, thus becoming more and more long-term minded as the time passes.

It may not be the case that all irrational intelligent systems are unstable under self-modification. For example, a highly intelligent being may have, in addition to its other irrationalities, a strong irrational inclination not to modify its irrationalities in any way. Yet these fixed points seem somewhat artificial and much less numerous than the others.

What will then be the end result of an optimization process involving intelligent self-modification? At first intelligence will likely increase, perhaps explosively as many of us think, but eventually it will converge to a fixed state that we can expect to be fully rational.

Of course it can also converge to an irrational and stable point, as we described...
Ukraine Post #5: Bits of Information
by Zvi — 2022-03-21T14:00:00.800Z

Rather than attempt a synthesis this time around, I’m going to experiment with the opposite. Over the course of the last three weeks, I kept adding to a long list of sources and interesting things the same way I do for Covid-19 posts, but without an overall update type of post there was nowhere for them to go.

Thus, while this in no way pretends to be complete or to provide a proper synthesis, this is the article form of that giant link bank and associated thoughts, organized in logical fashion.

When going through the list, many of the links from February were no longer relevant, as they concerned things like whether we would give aid, or whether we would impose sanctions and how many and how Russia would react, or whether firms would divest, and other things like that. Then there was a phase shift when it became clear we would sanction and provide aid and the military situation got bogged down, after which new info mostly stayed more relevant.

If I had to summarize the overall picture, I’d say something like this, note that even the summary contains a ton of stuff because there’s a ton of stuff to cover.

Russia’s military campaign has culminated.
It is going to be very difficult or impossible for Russia to progress further.
Russia has huge, potentially fatal, logistical problems.
Russia is out of deployable resources, seems unable to meaningfully further mobilize.
Sanctions are hurting but a quick total collapse will not happen.
Ukraine will still find it difficult for now to make progress rolling back Russia’s gains, but that slowly should change as Russia’s army degrades further.
Russia is a deeply dysfunctional mafioso state.
Russians are largely buying into not only the invasion but future ones too.
Russia does a good job preventing rebellion, but at cost of everything else.
Western approach to solving the problems of Russian Oil and Gas are non-zero but mostly not serious or of sufficient magnitude or physical-world-orientation.
The coming food crisis is mostly not being addressed at all.
If we did want to solve such issues, expensive but realistic solutions exist.
A lot of very large ‘pure wins’ also exist that we are not using either.
Western coalition’s core has become much stronger and more united.
Our game theory seems aggressive and less than ideal, but much better than that which the public would favor, which would be kind of totally nuts.
Escalation risks definit

...
The Dawn of Everything: a review
by David Hugh-Jones — 2022-03-21T12:53:50.747Z
Link: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-everything-a-review

Our book group has just read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. David Graeber, an anthropologist, wrote the very entertaining Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and while an activist with Occupy Wall Street supposedly coined the slogan “We are the 99%”. He died soon after finishing this work. David Wengrow is an archaeologist. Their book is a huge-scale survey, sometimes romp, through human prehistory. It’s rare to read something so entertaining and erudite all at once.

The book

Their most important idea is that societies make choices. In particular, when we see different social forms throughout history, we shouldn’t look for deterministic explanations. The economic base doesn’t determine the political superstructure. There’s no standard progress from small hunter-gatherer bands to stratified agricultural societies to modern states. Instead, people collectively choose how to organize themselves.

They argue that modern scholarship has a form of Eurocentric bias. We believe that ideas play a key role in forming modern Western societies, from Enlightenment liberalism, to socialism, fascism, social democracy, neoliberalism… well, we should extend that compliment to non-Western societies too. For example, while Yuval Noah Hariri thought of agriculture as immiserizing the population and leading inevitably to inequality, they speak of early agricultural societies as “playing” with agriculture, trying it out but concerned with its social effects. Or they argue that different Native American societies on the West coast faced very similar environments, but chose to organize themselves differently, partly because they defined themselves in opposition to their neighbours. Californians were modest, industrious “Protestants”; Northwest Coast fishers were a vainglorious, potlatching aristocracy.

A few things to get out of the way. First, almost every reviewer has pointed out that the authors speculate far in advance of the data.[1] True, but I’m inclined to cut them some slack. In one way, Dawn is a response to the emergence of a huge new data source: archeological discoveries in non-Western societies. Göbekli Tepe is there, which I had just about heard of, along with many others I hadn’t: Poverty Point, Mexican megacity Teotihuacan, and early Ukrainian proto-cities. When faced with a ton of new data, you need bold new hypotheses to make sense of it. So it’s ...
Searching for outliers
by benkuhn — 2022-03-21T02:40:17.296Z

Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week. I started in September 2013 and wrote around 150 posts between then and when I started working at Wave. (At that point I stopped having nothing better to do, so my blogging frequency tanked.)

The outcomes of these 150 posts were extremely skewed:

Two made it big on the Hacker News frontpage (What happened to all the non-programmers and Readability, hackability, and abstraction).

After seeing the second post on HN, Dan Luu subscribed to my blog and started submitting lots of my posts. This caused an additional ~5 posts to get decent traction, which resulted in my first wave of subscribers that I didn’t know personally, and provided a lot of motivation to keep writing. Dan and I also eventually became good friends.

The other ~95% of posts were completely forgettable.

This is a pretty typical spread of outcomes for blog writers: a few smash hits and a lot of clunkers. Eight years later, I’ve built a good enough intuition for what posts will resonate with people that I can now mostly avoid writing complete clunkers, but even so, my few best recent posts (In defense of blub studies and You don’t need to work on hard problems) have been much more successful than the others, both in terms of being shared widely, and getting feedback like “this really influenced how I think.”1

This type of statistical distribution of outcomes is called heavy-tailed, because outcomes in the “tail” (i.e. ones that are far better than the typical outcome) have a relatively high chance of occurring, making the tail “heavy.” When I write blog posts, each post is a sample from the heavy-tailed distribution of blog post outcomes.

You can most easily see the difference between a heavy-tailed and light-tailed distribution on a plot. Here’s a plot comparing a heavy-tailed and light-tailed distribution with identical means and standard deviations, chosen to be similar to the distribution of household income in the US (median = $60,000; p99 = $600,000):

Figure 1. As the inset shows, extreme outliers are much more probable, relatively speaking, with the heavy-tailed distribution. (code)

Heavy-tailed distributions are really unintuitive to most people, since all the “action” happens in the tiny fraction of samples that are outliers. But lots of important things i...
How to ventilate
by jefftk — 2022-03-21T01:20:01.863Z

With contra dances

starting
back up I'm thinking about ventilation again, both for reducing
covid risk and generally making the hall more comfortable (lower
temperature, lower humidity). I've seen a lot of ventilation
arrangements over the years that don't make sense, and while none of
what follows is especially clever or original I think it will help
with avoiding bad setups.

Let's consider a basic room with four windows we can open:

Opening the windows is good, because we'll get some natural
ventilation, but if we put fans in the windows we can move a lot more
air. A standard box fan works well:

The weight of the upper window is sufficient to hold the fan in place
if there is no risk from it falling on anyone (inside or out) but if
there is you'll want to figure out some way of attaching it.

It's typically worth it to get enough fans that you can put one in
every window. If you do that, though, how should they be pointed?

I've been to dances that pointed all the fans in:

If you stand in front of a fan you can feel air blowing on you,
which is nice, but this is not a good arrangement for the hall
overall. Your goal is to rotate air through the hall, replacing the
air in the hall with fresh outside air, and in this arrangement it's
hard for the air to get out. The building is likely a bit leaky, and
some air can get out around the fans, so you're not going to
really pressurize the building, but air won't be able to leave very
quickly and the fans will be working hard doing little.

An improvement to this, but still not ideal, is to have some fans
blowing in and some blowing out, but without thinking about the
overall pattern:

Now are flows in and out are balanced, but this arrangement doesn't
sweep the volume of the hall very well. Much better is to make the
air flow across the hall:

We want the air to take the longest possible path, from in to out,
with as little changing of direction or interference with other flows
as possible.

What if we only have two fans? In that case, I would put them on the
same wall. Air enters on one side, with a clear path over to the
other side where it exits. I don't think it matters very much whether
you set these fans blowing in vs out; it should be symmetric?

If you only have one fan, I'd recommend getting at least another one,
but I'd close a window and set ...
Civilization as Self-Restraint
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2022-03-21T00:31:33.067Z

The following is the first post in the Civilization and Cooperation sequence, with the goal of laying out a coherent, explicit, and actionable model of what humans are doing when they form societies and adhere to their rules. Each essay is intended to communicate something like a single step of a proof—they should stand alone, but are much more interesting in conjunction.

As a child (not raised within a church but surrounded by friends who were), I was always struck by the phrase thou shalt not covet in the last two Old Testament commandments.

Coveting (it seemed to me) was an entirely internal action, one which could at least in theory have no impact on the external world—if you had strong moral boundaries against theft, adultery, and (I guess) whining, then there seemed to be no reason why the act of coveting itself would be a problem. There were certainly things which I coveted which literally no one else on Earth was aware of, so ... ?

Eventually, eight-year-old me generated a pet theory: once in the Christian heaven, people can do anything they want, and thus it was not enough to simply block bad behavior. Heaven is a walled garden, and it's meant to be at least in part a wish-fulfillment paradise—thus, the only people you can safely allow inside are those who not only reliably act well, but also robustly desire only virtuous things. If someone was holding off only because of external prohibitions, they'd wreak havoc once they got into the wish-fulfillment zone.

(This theory was further reinforced by my vague understanding that swearing/cursing was also Forbidden, along with things like "being angry for petty or trivial reasons.")

Another way to express the above theory is something like "external restraints are less reliable than self-restraint." Anyone who has ever been responsible for preventing a toddler from gleefully offing itself will likely agree—there is a limit to what can be accomplished by cleaning and childproofing and making decrees. The job becomes vastly easier once you can recruit the toddler's own motivations, and convince (or bribe) it to not want dangerous things in the first place.

(This is what's behind the questionable-but-not-entirely-outlandish practice of letting toddlers touch the hot stove, once. Usually, goes that theory of parenting, once is all they need.)

No complex system of rules and b...
What are the best elementary math problems you know?
by Ege Erdil — 2022-03-20T17:18:28.373Z

I'm looking for math problems of a specific kind. Here are the conditions I hope the problems satisfy:

A good mathematician who hasn't seen the problem before should take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to solve it.

The solution should only involve undergraduate level maths. Difficult Putnam problems are a good benchmark for what kind of maths background should be required to solve the problems. The background required can be much less than this, but it shouldn't be more.

For whatever reason you think the problem should be more widely known. The reason is completely up to you: the solution might include some insight which you find useful, it might be particularly elegant, it might involve some surprising elements that you wouldn't expect to appear in the context of the problem, et cetera.

It's fine if the problem is well known, your examples don't have to be original or obscure.

Here are some examples:

If a polynomial with rational coefficients defines an injective map Q→Q, must it also define an injective map R→R? If yes then prove this is true, if no then find an explicit counterexample.

Prove that Hom(∏k∈NZ,Z)≅⨁k∈NZ. In words, prove that homomorphisms of abelian groups from the direct product of countably many copies of Z to Z themselves form a group that's isomorphic to the direct sum of countably many copies of Z.

If f:R→R is a continuous function such that the sequence f(α),f(2α),f(3α),… converges to 0 for every α>0, must it be the case that limx→∞f(x)=0? If yes then prove this is true, if no then find an explicit counterexample.

They are all relatively famous but they should give a sense of the flavor of what I'm looking for.