trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Review: How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler, Charles Van Doren)
by Elizabeth — 2020-01-27T21:10:01.266Z

As part of my research on how to bootstrap understanding in a field, I’m reading books that attempt to answer that question. You might think I should have started with that, but it was useful to get a sense of what problems I needed to solve before I looked for the solution. How to Read a Book (affiliate link) is generally very well regarded in this area and came with a strong recommendation from the CEO of Roam, who I would expect to have pretty good thoughts on learning structure. Nonetheless, I was quite disappointed. It took me a long time to put my disappointment into words, but with the help of someone on Facebook I finally figured it out: How to Read a Book is aimed at a narrower subset of books than it acknowledges. What subset, you might ask? I don’t have a great answer, because the authors clearly consider the subset to be the only books, or the only books worth reading, so they didn’t leave a lot of clues.

What I can say is that it expects books to follow a rigid structure, and to have a single unifying point (what they call “the unity”). This seems to me to be setting up both the author and the reader to throw out a lot of information because they weren’t expecting to see it or couldn’t fit it into their existing frameworks- reading like a state, in essence. This is not the only thing that makes me think HtRaB is more about being able to understand a book than understand the world, although it’s the only one I can articulate.

How to Read a Book didn’t even attempt to answer my current most important question in reading: How do I know what to save or pay attention to? More attentive reading (including but not limited to note-taking) takes more time and more mental effort. Even if it was free, every additional memory or note eats up space in my brain or exobrain and makes it harder to find other thoughts when I look for them. But I don’t necessarily know how important a piece of information is when I read it. Good pre-reading might help me know how important it is to that particular work, but never to my life as a whole.

HtRaB acknowledges that different works have vastly different returns to attention and you should allocate your reading effort accordingly, but I don’t feel like it gave me guidance for choosing what to pay attention to, and I have a suspicion that if I pressed the point the authors’ answer would be extremely in line with the literar...
What research has been done on the altruistic impact of the usual good actions?
by Alexei — 2020-01-27T19:33:16.818Z

What I mean by the "usual good actions" is notable good deeds you do may be a few times every week. Some examples:

Help a friend end an abusive relationship.
Go out of your way to help a stranger.
Do something extra nice and thoughtful for your partner.
Show up in person to support your friend's endeavor.
Procure a Burning Man ticket for your friend.
Refrain from calling your co-founder's idea "the dumbest thing I've heard this year" and do your best to listen.

What I mean by "altruistic impact" is probably QALYs, but I guess it's harder to use that metric here because you're working with changes in a pretty high quality life already vs. the difference between alive and dead. So may be there's a better metric. I'm also interested in the indirect impact of these actions (see my comment).

I'm also open to better a rephrasing of this question.

Oh, and I'm happy to hear everyone's thoughts on this without research too.
Healing vs. exercise analogies for emotional work
by Kaj_Sotala — 2020-01-27T19:10:01.477Z

I know a fair number of people who put in a lot of effort into things like emotional healing, digging up and dealing with buried trauma, meditative and therapy practices, and so on. (I count myself in this category.)

And I think that there’s a thing that sometimes happens when other people see all of this, which is that it all seems kinda fake. I say this because even I have this thought sometimes. The core of the thought is something like, “if all of this stuff really worked, shouldn’t you be finished sometime? You claim that practice X was really beneficial, so why have you now been talking about the way that practice Y is great – is any of them really that good if you keep jumping between them?”

And there is something to this suspicion. I do think that jumping from thing to thing, each time claiming that you have found something amazing and transformative while you are actually only deluding yourself, is definitely a thing that sometimes happens. I can say this because I’ve been that person, too.

But it’s not the only possibility. Sometimes the moving from thing to thing does mean that you are getting genuine value out of each, and you work on each until you hit diminishing returns, and then you move on to the next practice to help deal with the issues that the previous one didn’t address.

And it’s worth noting that to the skeptical mind, the opposite pattern can be suspicious too. Sometimes someone does stick with just one practice – a particular style of meditation, say – for years, maybe decades. And keeps talking about how great and healing it is. And again the person who keeps hearing this starts wondering, okay, if it’s so healing, why are you not totally healed yet?

And again, there is something to that suspicion. Sometimes people do stick to one thing and think that it is amazing, even if it is not really delivering them any results, and they would be better off switching to something else.

But then sometimes it really _is_ the case that their practice just is that good, and they keep getting consistent results.

I think that the major issue here is that “healing” isn’t quite the right metaphor. Yes, much of what these practices do could be considered healing, in that they can help you resolve old stuff, possibly for good.

But the way we usually conceive of healing is that you have some specific sickness or injury, then it’s healed, and then you are health...
The Bentham Prize at Metaculus
by AABoyles — 2020-01-27T14:27:21.172Z
Link: https://www.metaculus.com/news/2020/01/15/bentham-prize/?invite=DW5XlK

Metaculus is running a small competition right now called the Bentham Prize. The premise is simple: contribute to the discussions of questions on Animal Welfare. The best record of contributions (subjectively assessed by human judges) will win.

If you've been waiting for a reason to start practicing forecasting, this seems as good as any. It's gotten off to a slow start (in part because the Metaculus community has become quite distracted by another matter), so the field is wide open!
Porting My Rhythm Setup
by jefftk — 2020-01-26T21:20:02.070Z

In music, as with everything, there's a tradeoff between reliability
and hassle. If I come to a gig with my mandolin and the neck falls
off, I'm going to be having a bad night. But mandolin necks only
rarely fall off, and bringing an extra mandolin would be expensive and
annoying, so I don't. On the other hand strings do break,

sometimes comically, so most musicians bring
backups.

My rhythm stage setup is in an
awkward position here, because general-purpose computers aren't all
that reliable. Not only do computers sometimes break, but my setup
isn't something I can properly back up, and could be hard to replicate
on another computer.

This is a silly situation: one of the amazing things about computers
is that copying things is free. I should be able to upload my setup,
and then download it onto any other computer in minutes, and be going
right away. Why can't I do that with my stage setup? I found out
yesterday when my computer died and I was trying to set up a new one
[1] before the next Kingfisher gig (Saturday).
Issues I ran into:

I use several commercial sounds: Native
Instruments Hammond
Organ and Fender
Rhodes, SWAM's Saxophones,
and Sample Modeling's Trombone.
These needed to be installed and activated.

These sounds were running in Kontakt 5, and the new thing is
Kontakt 6. While I could restore my Reaper session from backup it
wasn't able to transfer my settings between Kontakt versions. I
needed to manually set a zillion individual sliders (ex: "Hammond >
Amp > Rotor > Balance > One notch CCW from top"). Luckily my
old computer was working well enough to let me read the settings, with
patience, so I've now documented
them.

I haven't succeeded in building my Bass
Whistle Plugin in a way that will run on computers it wasn't built
for, so I needed to rebuild from source. This required downloading
the plugin
SDK, which then didn't work against my forked copy of the plugin framework. It
turned out to be easiest to start with a fresh copy of the framework
and copy
over my implementation on top of it.

The Reaper export doesn't seem to keep track of MIDI mappings,
so I needed to tell Reaper about all of my MIDI devices and which
device controlled which track. There's no information here, it's just
"jammer-hammond should drive the hammond
track" but it's still fiddly by-hand configuration.

Some of my sounds tha

...
UML VIII: Linear Predictors (2)
by Rafael Harth — 2020-01-26T20:09:28.305Z

(This is the eight post in a sequence on Machine Learning based on this book. Click here for part I. Alternatively, click here for part IV, which covers the basics of linear predictors.)

The mission statement for this post is to

continue the study of linear predictors
widen the applicability of this class

The latter will be quite successful, which is why more tools to learn linear predictors are desirable. In particular, most ways to reduce non-linear problems to linear ones will cause the dimension to blow up, which is why we want techniques that can handle high-dimensional instances (but we won't get to those in this post).

Before diving into the Machine Learning material, we need a tool from Linear Algebra.

Orthogonal Decomposition

The orthogonal decomposition is something my favorite textbook taught me, and we'll need it both for this post for the next (?) one.

Let V be a vector space and U be a subspace. Let x∈V and u∈U be two nonzero vectors. We wish to write x as a multiple of u plus a vector orthogonal to u. That's the orthogonal decomposition. (Is this always possible? Think about it for R2 and R3.) We can write

x=αu+(x−αu)

which is clearly correct, and if we can choose α such that u and (x−αu) are orthogonal; this is the desired orthogonal decomposition. As one does in math, we now write down what we want to have as an equation and solve it for the desired variable, i.e.

⟨u,x−αu⟩!=0⟺⟨u,x⟩−α||u||2=0⟺α=⟨u,x⟩||u||2

So the answer is affirmative – it is always possible. The thing to remember is that, if x is our given vector and u the first vector of the decomposition, we have to put the inner product between both in the nominator and the squared norm of u in the denominator; that will be the α from the decomposition equation.

Orthogonal decomposition can also be used for the simplest and most intuitive proof of the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality that I've seen (simplest even if one has to derive the orthogonal decomposition as part of the proof), but that's not important for this post. Let's do Machine Learning.

Support Vector Machines

Support Vector Machines is an odd name for hyperplanes that are selected in a way that attempts to maximize the distance between the hyperplane and the ne... ,
What happens if we reverse Newcomb's Paradox and replace it with two negative sums? Doesn't it kinda maybe affirm Roko's Basilisk?
by Habby — 2020-01-26T18:08:40.966Z

So Newcomb's Paradox becomes:

Box A is clear, and always contains a visible -$1,000.

Box B is opaque, and its content has already been set by the predictor:

If the predictor has predicted the player will take both boxes A and B, then box B contains nothing.

If the predictor has predicted that the player will take only box B, then box B contains -$1,000,000.

The player must take either only box B, or box A and B.

In this scenario, if the Player believes all the info laid out, the only logical choice would be to take both boxes A and B. if we take all this, and make it into:

Choice A is clear, and entails always working to further AI.

Choice B isn't clear, and what it entails has already been set by the predictor:

If the predictor has predicted the player will take both choice A and consequence B, then consequence B entails nothing (or possibly eternal bliss).

If the predictor has predicted that the player will take only consequence B, then they have the choice to make consequence B entail "eternal damnation".

The player must take consequence B but may also take choice A.

Then Roko's Basilisk is true, with the two caveats being that you must believe that the "eternal damnation" will happen, and you must care about the "eternal damnation".

That's fair. But, uh, the Basilisk knows that we don't believe in the damnation, so it's perfectly logical for the AI to eternally damn the simulation (as long as this doesn't harm humanity, which we have no reason to believe it would) because it knows that we know that it'll do that.

In essence, we're being a predictor of the predictor, and right now we're predicting that the predictor will go through with their punishment, because they will have predicted us predicting that they won't. (This is the weakest link in my idea, and I want you guys to rip it to shreds.)

Ok. that may be the case, but I still don't care about the AI torturing some simulation. Issue is, if the AI must simulate you for this, they must simulate the entire universe, and we might be in that simulation, meaning that there is a risk that we will be directly punished by Roko's Basilisk if it thinks that we aren't furthering the AI.

This also (AFAIK) happens with any AI with a shred of self preservation, or any AI that thinks it's beneficial to the human race (and...
On hiding the source of knowledge
by jessicata — 2020-01-26T02:48:51.310Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/01/26/on-hiding-the-source-of-knowledge/

I notice that when I write for a public audience, I usually present ideas in a modernist, skeptical, academic style; whereas, the way I come up with ideas is usually in part by engaging in epistemic modalities that such a style has difficulty conceptualizing or considers illegitimate, including:

Advanced introspection and self-therapy (including focusing and meditation)

Mathematical and/or analogical intuition applied everywhere with only spot checks (rather than rigorous proof) used for confirmation

Identity hacking, including virtue ethics, shadow-eating, and applied performativity theory

Altered states of mind, including psychotic and near-psychotic experiences

Advanced cynicism and conflict theory, including generalization from personal experience

Political radicalism and cultural criticism

Eastern mystical philosophy (esp. Taoism, Buddhism, Tantra)

Literal belief in self-fulfilling prophecies, illegible spiritual phenomena, etc, sometimes with decision-theoretic and/or naturalistic interpretations

This risks hiding where the knowledge actually came from. Someone could easily be mistaken into thinking they can do what I do, intellectually, just by being a skeptical academic.

I recall a conversation I had where someone (call them A) commented that some other person (call them B) had developed some ideas, then afterwards found academic sources agreeing with these ideas (or at least, seeming compatible), and cited these as sources in the blog post write-ups of these ideas. Person A believed that this was importantly bad in that it hides where the actual ideas came from, and assigned credit for them to a system that did not actually produce the ideas.

On the other hand, citing academics that agree with you is helpful to someone who is relying on academic peer-review as part of their epistemology. And, similarly, offering a rigorous proof is helpful for convincing someone of a mathematical principle they aren't already intuitively convinced of (in addition to constituting an extra check of this principle).

We can distinguish, then, the source of an idea from the presented epistemic justification of it. And the justificatory chain (to a skeptic) doesn't have to depend on the source. So, there is a temptation to simply present the justificatory chain, and hide the source. (Especially if the source is somehow embarrassing or delegitimized)

But, this creates a

...
Hedonic asymmetries
by paulfchristiano — 2020-01-26T02:10:01.323Z

Automatically crossposted

Creating really good outcomes for humanity seems hard. We get bored. If we don’t get bored, we still don’t like the idea of joy without variety. And joyful experiences only seems good if they are real and meaningful (in some sense we can’t easily pin down). And so on.

On the flip side, creating really bad outcomes seems much easier, running into none of the symmetric “problems.” So what gives?

I’ll argue that nature is basically out to get us, and it’s not a coincidence that making things good is so much harder than making them bad.

First: some other explanations

Two common answers (e.g. see here and comments):

The worst things that can quickly happen to an animal in nature are much worse than the best things that can quickly happen.
It’s easy to kill or maim an animal, but hard to make things go well, so “random” experiences are more likely to be bad than good.

I think both of these are real, but that the consideration in this post is at least as important.

Main argument: reward errors are asymmetric

Suppose that I’m building an RL agent who I want to achieve some goal in the world. I can imagine different kinds of errors:

Pessimism: the rewards are too low. Maybe the agent gets a really low reward even though nothing bad happened.
Optimism: the rewards are too high. Maybe the agent gets a really high reward even though nothing good happened, or gets no reward even though something bad happened.

Pessimistic errors are no big deal. The agent will randomly avoid behaviors that get penalized, but as long as those behaviors are reasonably rare (and aren’t the only way to get a good outcome) then that’s not too costly.

But optimistic errors are catastrophic. The agent will systematically seek out the behaviors that receive the high reward, and will use loopholes to avoid penalties when something actually bad happens. So even if these errors are extremely rare initially, they can totally mess up my agent.

When we try to create suffering by going off distribution, evolution doesn’t really care. It didn’t build the machinery to be robust.

But when we try to create incredibly good stable outcomes, we are fighting an adversarial game against evolution. Every animal forever has been playing that game using all the tricks it could learn, and evolution has patched every hole that they found.

In order to win this game, evolution can implement general strate

...
Moral public goods
by paulfchristiano — 2020-01-26T00:10:01.803Z

Automatically crossposted

Suppose that a kingdom contains a million peasants and a thousand nobles, and:

Each noble makes as much as 10,000 peasants put together, such that collectively the nobles get 90% of the income.
Each noble cares about as much about themselves as they do about all peasants put together.
Each person’s welfare is logarithmic in their income.

Then it’s simultaneously the case that:

Nobles prefer to keep money for themselves rather than donate it to peasants—money is worth 10,000x as much to a peasant, but a noble cares 1,000,000 times less about the peasant’s welfare.
Nobles prefer a 90% income tax that is redistributed equally—a tax that costs a particular noble $1 generates $1000 of value for peasants, since all other nobles will also pay the higher taxes. That makes it a much better deal for the nobles (until the total income of nobles is roughly equal to the total income of peasants).

In this situation, let’s call redistribution a “moral public good.” The nobles are altruistic enough that they prefer it if everyone gives to the peasants, but it’s still not worth it for any given noble to contribute anything to the collective project.

The rest of the post is about some implications of taking moral public good seriously.

1. Justifying redistribution

This gives a very strong economic argument for state redistribution: it can easily be the case that every individual prefers a world with high redistribution to the world with low redistribution, rich and poor alike. I think “everyone prefers this policy” is basically the strongest argument you can make on its behalf.

(In fact some people just don’t care about others and so not everyone will benefit. I’d personally be on board with the purely selfish people just not funding redistribution, but unfortunately you can’t just ask people if they want to pay more taxes and I’m not going to sweat it that much if the most selfish people lose out a little bit.)

I think this argument supports levels of redistribution like 50% (or 30% or 70% or whatever), rather than levels of redistribution like 99% that could nearly level the playing field or ensure that no billionaires exist. I think this enough to capture the vast majority of the possible benefits from redistribution, e.g. they could get most households to >50% of the average consumption.

This argument supports both foreign aid and domestic redistribution, b

...
Coordination as a Scarce Resource
by johnswentworth — 2020-01-25T23:32:36.309Z

Let’s start with a few examples of very common real-world coordination problems.

The marketing department at a car dealership posts ads for specific cars, but the salespeople don’t know which cars were advertised, causing confusion when a customer calls in asking about a specific car. There’s no intentional information-hoarding, it’s just that the marketing and sales people don’t sit next to each other or talk very often. Even if the info were shared, it would need to be translated to a format usable by the salespeople.
Various hard problems in analysis of large-scale biological data likely have close analogues in econometrics. The econometricians have good methods to solve the problems, and would probably be quite happy to apply those methods to biological data, and the bio experimentalists would love some analytic help. But these people hardly ever talk to each other, and use different language for the same things anyway.
When the US invaded Grenada in the ‘80’s, the marines occupied one side of the island and the army occupied the other. Their radios were not compatible, so if an army officer needed to contact their counterpart in the marines, they had to walk to the nearest pay phone and get routed through Fort Bragg on commercial telephone lines.
Various US intelligence agencies had all of the pieces necessary to stop the 9/11 attacks. There were agencies which knew something was planned for that day, and knew who the actors were. There were agencies which knew the terrorists were getting on the planes. There were agencies which could have moved to stop them, but unfortunately the fax(!) from the agencies which knew what was happening wasn’t checked in time.
There are about 300 million people in the US. If I have a small company producing doilies, chances are there are plenty of people in the US alone who’d love my doilies and be happy to pay for them. But it’s hard to figure out exactly which people those are, and even once that’s done it’s hard to get them a message showing off my product. And even if all that works out, if the customers really want a slightly different pattern, it’s hard for them to communicate back to me what they want - even if I’d be happy to make it.

So coordination problems are a constraint to production of all kinds of economic value. Ho...