trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
No, Newspeak Won’t Make You Stupid
by MikkW — 2020-12-18T00:56:02.654Z

In George Orwell's book 1984, he describes a totalitarian society that, among other initiatives to suppress the population, implements "Newspeak", a heavily simplified version of the English language, designed with the stated intent of limiting the citizens' capacity to think for themselves; everybody knows that when you have a thinking people, keeping a peoplegroup still and not angry is unpossible.

In short, the ethos of newspeak can be summarized as: "Minimize vocabulary to minimize range of thought and expression". There’s no way such a simple idea could mean different things to different people, right? Well… there are two different, closely related, ideas, both of which the book implies, that are worth separating here.

The first (which I think is to some extent reasonable) is that by removing certain words from the language, which serve as effective handles for pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, pro-market concepts, the regime makes it harder to communicate and verbally think about such ideas… Although, if that was the only thing done by Orwell’s Oceania, it would work about as well as taking a sharp knife away from a toddler, while still leaving on the ground next to them a fully-loaded AK-47; people are adept at making themselves understood, even in the face of constraints to communication

The second idea, which I worry is an incorrect takeaway people may get from 1984, is that by shortening the dictionary of vocabulary that people are encouraged to use (absent any particular bias towards removing handles for subversive ideas), one will reduce the intellectual capacity of people using that variant of the language. However, since that idea is false, that definitely, 100% clearly makes it perfectly okay for a government to force Newspeak on its people, and that totally wouldn’t be a creepy overstepping of its power (I know, Poe’s Law says that it is utterly impossible for me to be sarcastic on the internet without somebody thinking that I actually believe it).

Cadence of Information is Constant

If you listen to a native Chinese speaker, then compare the sound of their speech to a native Hawaiian speaker, there are many apparent differences in the sound of the two languages. Chinese has a rich phonological inventory containing 19 consonants, 5 vowels, and quite famously, 4 different tones (pitch patterns) which are used for each syllable, for a total of 5400 (...
Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets - Part 8
by lsusr — 2020-12-17T22:29:47.788Z

Luna had too many Calls to Adventure. If there was an author writing Luna's life, Luna would file a complaint. Luna had three magical artifacts of incredible power and at least two of them were maps. What kind of author gives her hero two magical maps? It's redundant.

"Are you a map of 10th century Wessex?" Luna asked the Diadem of Ravenclaw.

A princess's cute animal companion is supposed to be visible.

"Maybe you'll turn into a prince for me," she said to Wanda. Luna tried kissing Wanda but the Wrackspurt dodged and went for her ear instead, "Oh well."

Luna needed a mysterious old wizard to help guide her narrative.

Gilderoy Lockhart's office hours were always packed.

"How did you get past all the security to assassinate the Dark Lord of Berzerkistan?" a sixth-year girl asked.

"I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have ever set foot in Berzerkistan," Lockhart winked, "If, as rumored, I am indeed responsible for the Dark Lord of Berzerkistan's untimely demise then my methods must remain a state secret."

"Tell me how you got rid of the Bandon Banshee," a first-year girl said.

"It is all in my book," Lockhart said.

"How did you kill the Dementor sent to Hogwarts last year?" a third-year girl asked.

"I promised not to tell," Lockhart said.

Lockhart loved his little fans even though none of them cared how he had won Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile Award. Lockhart patiently parried their questions until one last first-year remained. She had waited to ask him something in private.

"Umm. It's okay if you say no. But. Well. Canyouteachmetobepopular?" Luna asked.

Lockhart brandished his award-winning smile. Then his face fell.

"Such personal attention to a student might appear unseemly," Lockhart said genuinely.

"It's an interview for The Quibbler," Luna said.

Luna tried out for the Quidditch team. She crashed her broom into the stands. Luna tried out for the Gobstones team. She passed out from the fumes. Luna attempted to try out for Smite Club, a rumored underground continuation of Quirrel's battles. Luna could not find where Smite Club held its meetings. Smite Club may have only ever existed in her imagination.

A month flew by. Luna was exhausted. She sleepwalked.

99% of other people never notice the things you fail at. 1% have forgotten by tomorrow morning.

―Lovegood, Luna. "Secrets of Gilderoy Lockhart." The Quibbler.

Luna started a Welters team. No other students sho...
Ideal Chess - drop chess perfected
by MikkW — 2020-12-17T20:03:19.329Z

Chess is fairly well known, but there's also an entire world of chess variants, games that take the core ideas of chess and change either a few details or completely reimagine the game, either to improve the game, or just change the flavour of the game. There's even an entire website dedicated to documenting different variants of chess.

Today I want to tell you about some classic chess variants: Crazyhouse chess, Grand chess, and Shogi (Japanese chess), and posit a combination of the first two that I suspect may become my favorite chess when I have a chance to try it.

I.

Shogi is the version of chess that is native to Japan, and it is wildly different from western chess - both western chess and shogi have evolved continuously from the original chaturanga as the game spread out from India. The core difference between shogi and the familiar western chess is that once a piece has been captured, the capturing player may later place the piece back on the board as his own piece. But if that was the only difference, it would make for a very crazy game, since the pieces in western chess are so powerful while the king is so weak, that the game would be filled with precarious situations that would require the players to always have their guard up for an unexpected piece drop, and checkmate is never more than a few moves away unless both players are paying close attention.

In fact, this version is precisely crazyhouse chess, and this property is both what makes crazyhouse chess so beloved and fun, but also what stands in its way of being taken as seriously as orthodox chess. There are two ways that this barrier could be overcome - either the king can be buffed, giving him more mobility to better dodge the insanity that the drops create, or the pieces can be nerfed, making them much less powerful, and particularly to have less influence at a long range. Shogi chooses the route of nerfing the pieces, replacing the long-ranged and very influential pieces used in orthodox chess with a set of pieces that have much more limited mobility, such as the lance, which moves like a rook, but can only move straight forward (thereby limiting its position to a single track), the uma (horse), which moves like a knight, but can only move in the two forwards most positions, or the gold and silver generals, who can only move in a subset of the directions that a king can move in. Since each pi...
How long till Inverse AlphaFold?
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-12-17T19:56:14.474Z

AlphaFold 2 takes an amino acid sequence as input, and outputs a 3D structure which represents the protein that that sequence forms. It would be cool if we could do it in reverse, i.e. the user inputs a 3D model (e.g. a gear, an axle, a wall with a hole in it of a certain shape...) and then the system outputs an amino acid sequence that would form a protein with that structure.

I don't have a good sense of whether this is a very difficult problem that we are nowhere near solving, or an obvious next step after AlphaFold2.

My current median is that it's 4 years away, but I'm very uncertain about that.

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/AQcP9K-DH)
Notes on Dignity
by David Gross — 2020-12-17T15:46:15.933Z

This post examines the virtue of dignity. It is meant mostly as an exploration of what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is dignity?

The word “dignity” is commonly used in a few ways, only one of which describes a virtue.[1]

One way is in phrases like “human dignity.”[2] This is something that is supposed to reside in all people and that makes them worthy of respect. If you mistreat someone in certain ways, you might be said to be “violating their dignity.” In such a case, it’s not that you were mistaken about whether or not this particular person had exceptional dignity worthy of respect, but that you were failing to acknowledge a sort of inalienable baseline dignity that belongs to everyone and the possession of which sets certain boundaries to how you ought to behave toward them. Discussions of dignity in contexts like human rights and medical ethics are usually discussions of this sort of dignity. (Dignity in this sense has a suspicious resemblance to phlogiston: a hypothesized substance that serves as a placeholder for a more complex explanation — less generously, a mere applause light, or “nonsense on stilts.”[3])

Occasionally “dignity” is used as a sort of honorific, bestowed on somebody as a way of raising them above the common crowd. A “dignitary” for example, is someone who has been officially granted dignity of a sort. Someone with exceptional poise and gravitas might be said to thereby appear “dignified.”

If you succeed in elevating something (an art form, a profession, a group of people) into a position of higher respectability, you might be said to have “brought dignity” to it. (For example, “Zora Neale Hurston brought dignity to African American folk tales by revealing them to be a sophisticated literature.”)

Finally, another use of “dignity” is in phrases like “that would be beneath my dignity” or “to bear trials with dignity.” This form of dignity you don’t just have by default; some people have it and some people don’t. But on the other hand, it is not something that is bestowed o...
Covid 12/17: The First Dose
by Zvi — 2020-12-17T14:20:01.106Z

The Pfizer vaccine is being deployed to health care workers and long-term care facility residents. The Moderna vaccine is close behind, with the full FDA report already out. There were some small extra delays thrown in for good measure, on the order of a few days, that doubtless killed a few people but shouldn’t delay the overall path of events. We are now in the vaccination stage of the pandemic. If the trial results are to be believed in detail, by the end of next week those getting the first dose will largely already be immune, and the population immunity effects can begin to compound and help turn the tide. They will start out small, but soon start growing faster, and every little bit helps.

There even seems to be a good chance that overall new infections would have already peaked if not for worries about Christmas and New Year’s coming up soon. Positive test percentages seem to be starting to even out or slowly decline as we get clear of Thanksgiving, and death rates are not rising as much as they would be rising in the scenario where data snags and testing issues were the only reason we didn’t notice things getting even worse than they are. If anything, death rates suggest a better picture than the positive test counts.

In other great news, Over the counter $30 Covid-19 test approved by FDA. It’s official. Woo-hoo! Three million over the counter tests this month, then they ramp up production. We could have done this a long time ago and solved the whole pandemic, and instead it’s going to be a drop in the bucket that shows up late to the party, but every little bit helps.

Alas, as always, none of that changes the short term situation much. There’s lots of Covid-19 out there, and if anything there are even more reasons to play it safe right now. Large Christmas gatherings or New Year’s parties are a profoundly bad idea.

In many ways, it seemed like this week was mostly ‘cut to one week later’ with few if any surprises, except for the approval of the first at-home Covid-19 test.

Let’s do the numbers.

As a bonus, here is someone else running their version of the numbers on a state level. He does this monthly, and they’re useful graphs with solid commentary. It’s a generally good newsletter.

(Technical note: Brief uncredited screenshots whose source isn’t obvious are from CNBC live update page or CNN live update page. I’m experimenting with this ...
Some things I’m looking forward to in 2021: probable post-pandemic edition
by KatjaGrace — 2020-12-17T08:20:14.424Z

Fewer deaths all around

A giant party at my house

A portion of the research I feel bad about not doing just becoming irrelevant (e.g. what’s the evidence about surfaces now? Are we badly underestimating the harms of long covid?)

Leaving my house in an unprepared fashion and seeing where it takes me

Whatever it was that I used to do in places other than my house, that I actually can’t seem to remember or explicitly pinpoint and plan from a distance, but which I vaguely miss (possibly this is basically just 4)

Seeing friends who live in faraway places such as Berkeley

Going on a cross-country train and embracing the general lack of hygiene and space

Seeing non-household friends without inadvertently spending a fraction of my attention on air dynamics and mask stability

The stakes of everyday personal choices being lowered enough that people being thoughtless or foolish isn’t a critical threat to friendliness, harmony or anyone’s life

Helping the economy of restaurants and cafes recover

Casual minor encounters and non-encounters with strangers in shops, streets and cafes (and these being more of the meeting places of the world, and internet comments being less, for more people)

Meeting new people regularly

More distinct places and place-vibes to conveniently be in

One fewer area to worry that I should be doing something better

Listening to an audiobook on crowded public transit on the way to my downtown office, and then being at my office

Reading and writing in notebooks in cafes

The world feeling so big that you can go to other places and find people thinking about entirely different things

Being dirty

Crowded, dimly lit places with atmosphere and mild uncertainty

Resolution of this episode

Watching everyone else enjoy things coming back
It turns out that group meetings are mostly a terrible way to make decisions
by Ian David Moss — 2020-12-17T03:30:09.529Z

Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash

Over the course of nearly two decades in the workplace, I’ve seen the inside of dozens of organizations and teams as an employee, consultant, or friendly collaborator. With rare exceptions, it seems, important decisions get made one of two ways. If an organization is particularly hierarchical or founder-driven, the leader makes the decision and then communicates it to whoever needs to know about it. Otherwise, the decision gets made, usually by group consensus, in a meeting.

All too often, those meetings are decision-making disasters.

Or at any rate, that’s what the research says. It might not be apparent right away — one of the sneaky aspects of group deliberation is that it reliably increases confidence in the final decision, whether that decision was a good one or not! And yet most group deliberations don’t do much to combat the many cognitive biases we carry into those groups as individuals. In fact, meetings tend to make many of those biases even worse.

Studies show that several biases that are especially relevant in group settings are among those exacerbated by the group decision-making process:

planning fallacy (thinking things will get done sooner or cost less than turns out to be the case)
framing effects (seeing a situation differently depending on how it’s presented)
egocentric bias (assuming that other people are more like you than they are)
the representativeness heuristic (relying too much on stereotypes)
unrealistic optimism
overconfidence
sunk cost fallacy (doubling down on a losing strategy)

Groups do perform slightly better than individuals when it comes to availability heuristic, anchoring, and hindsight bias, but the errors are still there.

All of this is chronicled in an essential (if not exactly riveting) book called Wiser: Moving Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie. The duo set out to have Wiser do for group decision-making what Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow did for individual decision-making — lay out, in comprehensive fashion, what cognitive science says about group decision-making biases and how those biases can be overcome. Though Wiser is a small fraction of the length of Kahneman’s grand opus, it makes a convincing case that decision-making in groups is a distinct enough phenomenon that it merits distinct analysis. For the purposes of improving decision-ma...
Hard work is irritating
by Oldmanrahul — 2020-12-17T01:04:29.025Z
Link: https://oldmanrahul.com/2020/12/13/hard-work-is-irritating/

My understanding of getting into a flow state (or “being in the zone”) was completely wrong.

Authors like Steve Kotler and Csíkszentmihályi describe achieving flow as a structural problem. To achieve flow we must match our skills to the challenges in front of us, they write. If the challenges are too easy, we’ll get bored, if too difficult, we’ll quit from frustration.

Start-up founders will speak of passion as the gateway to flow. If you’re passionate, you’ll dance into the office ready to get back to it. If you’re feeling resistance … well, maybe you’re not passionate or earnest enough.

My personal day-to-day experiences are a stark disconnect from the popular descriptions of flow. I reliably find it irritating to sit down and start working. My mind wanders, opening up HackerNews, Reddit, and Youtube tabs to stave off the negative feelings.

What I learned and want to share with you, dear reader, is the wisdom that irritation is a necessary starter to getting down to work. It’s completely normal to “not be into it” regardless of how passionate you are or how well the challenges are structured. The initial resistance is part of the process, not a sign of a defected process or defected you.

Why oh why?

TL;DR Noradrenaline

Noradrenaline is one of the major brain chemicals that builds the initial resistance to getting things done. It’s the “alertness” neurotransmitter (fancy word for “chemical messenger”) that tells different systems in the brain to be at attention when we’re ready to do focused, hard work. The problem: it’s the same messenger that yells across our system when we’re triggering our fight or flight response.

Evolutionarily speaking, fight or flight is effective because we want to escape the feeling of irritation. Racing heart rate, shortness of breath, paranoid alertness–the state of fight or flight is painful. Us humans, as pleasure-seeking monkeys, would like to avoid pain as often as we can.

This very blog post is a month too late. I have it dated as November 11th but it’s December 15th today. One month later and I’m still writing this damn thing. I have excuses, believe me. Job interviews, interview prep, life, etc., but that’s all they are: excuses. What was most important to me was daily writing. But writing is hard and noradrenaline-fueled resistance makes it harder.

Noradrenaline, to repeat, performs double duty for both “getting down to work” and ...
Are there any systematic ways to choose evaluation criteria?
by Aman Patel — 2020-12-17T01:03:41.663Z

Although I’ve read many posts, this is my first contribution to LessWrong, so here goes:

I’m working on a personal project to develop a system to evaluate different AI policy proposals, but I realized that I didn’t know how to choose which criteria to use--so I’m looking for a systematic way to go about this. In other words, I’m looking for “meta-criteria” that I could use to pick good criteria. (I realize that this could go into an infinite regress, but I think it could be useful to go at least a few layers deeper, just to be a bit more confident in our choices.)

Are there any existing resources or papers that might be helpful?

I haven’t found exactly what I’m looking for so far, but I’m sure there’s something out there, since this question is relevant to many fields. I know that there’s been a lot of research done on picking optimization criteria (for AI safety, etc.), and I know that other scientific fields have developed methods to find good ways to measure things (like validity and reliability tests). Is there any literature that tries to attack these problems in a more abstract way?

In lieu of developed research, does anyone have ideas about how to approach selecting proper criteria?

Any insights would help!
Two Explorations
by alkjash — 2020-12-16T21:27:42.790Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2020/12/16/two-explorations/

Much has been written about the fundamental opposition between explore and exploit, chaos and order, yin and yang. In this post I make two observations about the psychology of this opposition.

In the first part, I challenge the metaphor of the comfort zone: a slowly-changing region in activity-space where everything inside is comfortable and everything outside induces anxiety. The point is that anxiety depends not only on the spookiness of the activity itself, but on one's proximity to safety. I am afraid because it is dark; I am terrified because the light switch is all the way down the hall. In particular, it is possible to reduce anxiety by bringing your comfort zone with you in the form of a safety behavior or a trusted companion. This serves as an alternative to Comfort Zone Expansion.

In the second part, I note that explore and exploit are often embodied in the human personality as two competing subagents. In almost everyone I've met, one of these subagents dominates the other. I tell four typical stories of this imbalance, and then suggest that something better is possible. This is perhaps the central example of integrating disagreeing subagents.

Part 1: Distance to Safety

1. Mother and Child

(The following is my retelling of an old story, dating back probably to at least Jean Piaget. I first encountered a variant of this story in The Monkey Wars, where identical behavior was observed in primates.)

A mother brings her child, a girl of perhaps three or four years of age, to an empty playground at the park. Autumn has progressed to the stage where leaves fall in twos and threes. The girl peeks out of the folds of her mother's coat, staring now at the swing set, now at the neon tube slide. With a nudge, the mother pushes her daughter onto the mulch and gives her an encouraging nod. After glancing back to her mother several times, the girl slowly approaches the playground and begins to play.

Soon, she is clambering about, but periodically looks back at the bench where her mother is sitting. Each time their eyes meet, the girl waves, pig-tails dancing, and the mother waves back. The girl then returns to free play.

At some point, the mother briefly leaves her post to chat with an acquaintance. The girl, pepping herself up to go down the slide for the first time, looks back, finds her mother gone, and panics. She curls up into a ball at the top of the playground and...