trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Dietary Debates among the Fruit Gnomes
by Sherrinford — 2020-06-03T14:09:15.561Z

Somewhat experimental.

Among the Fruit Gnomes, there were two groups that were involved in an intense and annoying debate: the No-Banana-Eaters against the All-Fruiters. It was unclear who had started this kind of argument. But now it usually went as follows.

The All-Fruiters pointed out that excluding bananas from your diet was completely unnatural and obviously unhealthy. Of course, they said, some Fruit Gnomes should reduce their banana consumption. But bananas still contained many important nutrients that were hard to replace. The proponents of the banana taboo, in turn, pointed out that usually the all-fruiters were less healthy than those who did not eat bananas. And most of the all-fruiters basically ate way too many bananas. And that was bad for the Fruit-Gnome metabolism.

One day, an annoyed Vegetable Dwarf listened to the fruit gnome debate and said: "Come on people, it is not possible that each of your groups has a healthier diet than the other." So what was the problem?

With some reflection, the parties of the debate realized that they should apply two rules to their debate:

Do not compare an optimized all-fruit diet to a typical no-banana diet, except if the typical no-banana diet is an optimized no-banana diet.
Do not compare an optimized no-banana diet to a typical all-fruits diet, except if banning bananas makes the typical all-fruiter choose the optimized no-banana diet.

The first rule follows from a simple insight; if you choose a diet such that it makes you as healthy as possible, and this optimal diet contains bananas, then taking the bananas away will make you less healthy (that is, the optimized value of an objective function must decrease if you add a binding constraint). But if you want to have a fair comparison, then you should compare the resulting diet to the diet of a no-banana-eater who has also optimized her diet to be as healthy as possible, except for the bananas. Maybe the lack of bananas is not that much of a problem in the end.

The second rule is the mirror-image of the first; if you have someone who has chosen his no-banana diet in a way that makes him as healthy as possible, then comparing to a typical all-fruiter is not meaningful. The exception is for simple cases where people who must not eat bananas will, by themselves, choose the most healthy no-banana diet. (There are some reasons why this could be the case: maybe...
How can you find the best information out of all information?
by Raj Thimmiah — 2020-06-03T06:40:57.501Z

There is information out there that could completely change your life but there is no way of knowing what that information is.

Today, I stumbled upon this post and from the top comment there stumbled upon e-prime. There is no way I could stumble upon it without just having insane luck. There is plenty of other information that I would also have to depend on luck to find. I really don't like that.

My vague idea of a solution would be a recommendation network that optimizes for articles with highest life-changingness rather than when it was posted or something like that. (I wrote poorly about this idea here).

I am interested in other people's thoughts on how to solve the issue of finding the truly best information out there.

Note: for those that are also knowledge addicts and want to process vast amounts of knowledge, I think passive reading alone is useless and doesn't lead to sufficient knowledge gain for true expertise. I think many here would find incremental reading as a means of processing vast information, useful.
Inaccessible information
by paulfchristiano — 2020-06-03T05:10:02.844Z

Suppose that I have a great model for predicting “what will Alice say next?”

I can evaluate and train this model by checking its predictions against reality, but there may be many facts this model “knows” that I can’t easily access.

For example, the model might have a detailed representation of Alice’s thoughts which it uses to predict what Alice will say, without being able to directly answer “What is Alice thinking?” In this case, I can only access that knowledge indirectly, e.g. by asking about what Alice would say in under different conditions.

I’ll call information like “What is Alice thinking?” inaccessible. I think it’s very plausible that AI systems will build up important inaccessible knowledge, and that this may be a central feature of the AI alignment problem.

In this post I’m going to try to clarify what I mean by “inaccessible information” and the conditions under which it could be a problem. This is intended as clarification and framing rather than a presentation of new ideas, though sections IV, V, and VI do try to make some small steps forward.

I. Defining inaccessible information

I’ll start by informally defining what it means for information to be accessible, based on two mechanisms:

Mechanism 1: checking directly

If I can check X myself, given other accessible information, then I’ll define X to be accessible.

For example, I can check a claim about what Alice will do, but I can’t check a claim about what Alice is thinking.

If I can run randomized experiments, I can probabilistically check a claim about what Alice would do. But I can’t check a counterfactual claim for conditions that I can’t create in an experiment.

In reality this is a graded notion — some things are easier or harder to check. For the purpose of this post, we can just talk about whether something can be tested even a single time over the course of my training process.

Mechanism 2: transfer

The simplest model that provides some accessible information X may also provide some other information Y. After all, it’s unlikely that the simplest model that outputs X doesn’t output anything else. In this case, we’ll define Y to be accessible.

For example, if I train a model to predict what happens over the next minute, hour, or day, it may generalize to predicting what will happen in a month or year. For example, if the simplest model to predict the next day was a fully-accurate physical simulation...
The Law of Cultural Proximity
by  — 2020-06-03T02:18:40.523Z

[Not my area of expertise, but I would be surprised if the core thesis was wrong in a significant way. Probably not as original as I think it is. Based on a previous blog post of mine that went in a very different/weird direction. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Crazy.]

Introduction

Currently, different human cultures have different behavioural norms around all sorts of things. These norms cover all kinds of personal and interpersonal conduct, and extend into different legal systems in countries around the globe. In politics, this is often talked about in the form of the Overton window, which is the set of political positions that are sufficiently “mainstream” in a given culture to be considered electable. Unsurprisingly, different cultures have different Overton windows. For example, Norway and the United States currently have Overton windows that tend to overlap on some policies (the punishment of theft) but perhaps not on others (social welfare).

Shared norms and a stable, well-defined Overton window are important for the stable functioning of society, since they provide the implicit contract and social fabric on which everything else operates. But what exactly is the scope of a “society” for which that is true? We just talked about the differences between Norway and the U.S., but in a very real sense, Norway and the U.S. share “western culture” when placed in comparison with Iran or North Korea. In the other direction, there are many distinct cultures entirely within the U.S. with different norms around things like gun control. The categories were made for man, not man for the categories.

However blurry these lines are, it might be tempting to assume that they get drawn roughly according to geography; it's certainly reflected in our language (note my use of "western culture" already in this post). But this isn't quite right: the key factor is actually interactional proximity; it's just that in a historical setting geographical and interactional proximity were the same thing. Time for an example.

Ooms and Looms

Back in the neolithic era, the tribe of Oom and the tribe of Loom occupied opposite banks of their local river. These two tribes were closely linked in every aspect: geographically, linguistically, economically, and of course, culturally. Because the Ooms and the Looms were forced into ...
A revolution in philosophy: the rise of conceptual engineering
by Suspended Reason — 2020-06-02T18:30:30.495Z

Almost a decade ago, Luke Muehlhauser ran a series "Rationality and Philosophy" on LessWrong 1.0. It gives a good introductory account, but recently, still dissatisfied with the treatment of the two groups' relationship, I've started a larger "Meta-Sequence" project, so to speak, treating the subject in depth.

As part of that larger project, I want to introduce a frame that, to my knowledge, hasn't yet been discussed to any meaningful extent on this board: conceptual engineering, and its role as a solution to the problems of "counterexample philosophy" and "conceptual analysis"—the mistaken if implicit belief that concepts have "necessary and sufficient" conditions—in other words, Platonic essences. As Yudkowsky has argued extensively in "Human's Guide to Words," this is not how concepts work. But he's far from alone in advancing this argument, which has in recent decades become a rallying cry for a meaningful corner of philosophy.

I'll begin with a history of concepts and conceptual analysis, which I hope will present a productively new frame, for many here, through which to view the history of philosophy. (Why it was, indeed, a "diseased discipline"—and how it's healing itself.) Then I'll walk through a recent talk by Dave Chalmers (paper if you prefer reading) on conceptual engineering, using it as a pretense for exploring a cluster of pertinent ideas. Let me suggest an alternative title for Dave's talk in advance: "How to reintroduce all the bad habits we were trying to purge in the first place." As you'll see, I pick on Dave pretty heavily, partly because I think the way he uses words (e.g. in his work with Andy Clark on embodiment) is reckless and irresponsible, partly because he occupies such a prominent place in the field.

Conceptual engineering is a crucial moment of development for philosophy—a paradigm shift after 2500 years of bad praxis, reification fallacies, magical thinking, religious "essences," and linguistic misunderstandings. (Blame the early Christians, whose ideological leanings lead to a triumph of Platonism over the Sophists.) Bad linguistic foundations give rise to compounded confusion, so it's important to get this right from the start. Raised in the old guard, Chalmers doesn't understand why conceptual engineering (CE) is needed, or the bigger disciplinary shift CE might represent.

How did we get here? A history of concepts

I'll kick th...
What proportion of US companies would agree to this gross pay deduction / direct donation if asked by an employee?
by Bobby Shen — 2020-06-02T18:27:00.173Z

This is not the most eloquent title, and it is not even that precise. Here is some more context. Find the words "main question " for my main question. I figured I would say that to avoid berrying the lead.
Consider a salaried employee making N1 = $ 100000 in the US in year 2020. Let's estimate their taxes with assumptions and round numbers.
Calculation 1.
1. No investment taxable stuff. Taxed as Single
2. Payroll taxes of about 7650 total. (SS 6.2, Medicare 1.45)
3. They take the standard deduction for an individual, 12200. No extra tax credits.
4. Their federal income tax is against a taxable income of about 87800. (Yes, I believe that it's 100000 - 12200, not 100000 - 7650. The payroll taxes do not lower the amount 87800). The federal income tax is about 15000.
5. Their state income tax is also against 87800 for about 4000. (would be about 5700 in California)
6. 100000 - 7650 - 15000 - 4000 = 73350
Calculation 2: They make the same salary and donate 10000 to nonprofits that year. (Or to a deferred fund which counts the deduction in 2020, ....)
2. Same payroll taxes 7650. As far as I'm aware, donating normally cannot lower this
3. Let's estimate their itemized deduction as 16000 instead of 12200.
4. Their federal income tax is against a taxable income of about 84000, not 87800. At a marginal rate of around 23%, (I think it's in between tax brackets. I don't want to worry about absolute details!) the federal income tax decreases by 0.23 * 3800 = 874
5. Their state income is against 84000. At a marginal rate of around 7%, the state income tax is about 266 less.
6. Their income after donation is about 73350 - 10000 + 874 + 266 equals 8860 less (not 10000 less).
Calculation 3: Let's suppose that their itemized deduction would have been exactly 12200 without donation and is thus 22200. Skipping steps, their income after donation is about 73350 - 10000 + 2300 + 700 = 7000 less. Generally, by donating 10000 around these tax brackets, the most you can hope to get back by the standard tax code is 3000.
Calculation 4: Let's suppose that this employee is about to agree with their employer on a salary of 10000, and the employer donates 10000, to any choice of most 501c3 nonprofits registered in US (that is A LOT) at the employee's choice.
2. Their payroll tax is about 765 less.
3. They take the standard deduction for an individual...
Open & Welcome Thread - June 2020
by habryka — 2020-06-02T18:19:36.166Z

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it. (You can also make a shortform post)

And, if you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are welcome.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ.

The Open Thread sequence is here.
GPT-3: A Summary
by leogao — 2020-06-02T18:14:54.380Z
Link: https://leogao.dev/2020/05/29/GPT-3-A-Brief-Summary/

With massive size comes massive generalization ability: GPT-3 is competitive in many benchmarks without even tuning on the target task. [...] Perhaps the most impressive part, though, is that even at such a massive scale, the model still scales smoothly in performance instead of plateauing, implying that still-larger models would perform even better.
Air Conditioning
by jefftk — 2020-06-02T17:20:02.901Z

Growing up, I thought of air conditioning as extravagant. And AC for a
large house, especially if it's poorly insulated or you only use a
small part of the house, can get costly. On the other hand, AC for a
single room is just pennies per hour, and if it lets you sleep
well on a hot night or makes you more productive during a hot day,
it's probably well worth it.

To take an example, this small
window unit is rated at 5,000 BTU with an Energy Efficiency Ratio
of 11.0. This means we should expect it to draw 454W (5,000 / 11) on
a hot day (95F, 50% humidity) when running on high. Living in MA we
have some of the most expensive electricity in the country, and at our
$0.21/kWh 454W is 9.5¢/hr.
At temperatures below that 95F it will be more efficient because it
will draw less (I measured 332W testing this weekend) and you won't
need to run it constantly to keep a good temperature. This brings it
down to about the power consumption of a PC, and maybe between
1¢/h and 5¢/h. A workday's worth is then ~$0.09 to ~$0.45.
It doesn't have to make you much more productive or comfortable to be
worth it!

But maybe climate change means I should be avoiding AC for altruistic
reasons? The dirtiest fuel still used is coal, at 2.21lb
CO2e per kWh. At $10/T for carbon offsets that's 1.1¢/kWh.
Not zero, but it's very low. If you're worried about longer-term
sustainability when we run out of things to offset, at that point
we're not going to be using coal (since if someone is still burning
coal you could pay them to stop) and demand for AC lines up well with
the production curve for solar.

You could even make an AC unit directly connected to a solar panel,
without the efficiency losses of converting to alternating current or
charging a battery. You should be able to make a ~4,000 BTU window
unit that runs off a standard 65x29 panel and runs the compressor at
whatever speed the incoming voltage will support. Probably not worth
it, though, unless you need cooling year-round whenever the sun is
shining, since otherwise the panel is wasted the rest of the time.

Fan pre-cooling is still a good
fit for large houses, days that don't get that hot, and weather where
it cools down a lot overnight. Working from home, with my 'office'
being the corner of our third-floor bedroom with South-facing windows,
however, this room is a much better fit for AC than pre-cooling....
0oo.li: Financial Think Tank
by Mindey — 2020-06-02T16:03:16.779Z

First posted on Everything-List on June 2, 2020.

Hi Everyone,
while bright scientists and imaginative geeks continue to discuss advanced concepts at elusive locations of the Internet -- the remains of UseNet, and esoteric websites, the ideas shared there as plain text, no matter how bright, generally don't make it into any funding platforms to be tried out. The modern instant-gratification and flashy platforms usually require a prototype of an attractive product, a good ARR, or a well traded coin to convince investors. But few innovators are willing to spend resources and months of uncertainty to build prototypes, or spend on marketing to promote a coin, and so, the bright, potentially life-saving ideas continue to die.
The 0oo.li today, is an on-line problem solving, innovation, work and investment forum, to organize discussion from suggesting questions, ideas, to starting projects, and sharing work results in public, that enables anyone to take a look at the risk, ROI, logic, and structure, and having fun discussing, and funding projects, not because of flashy prototypes, but because of verified public works. The project was inspired 15 years ago, by Halfbakery, if anyone knows that site, this may look a bit familiar.
Feel free to come by. Introductory video is at 0oo.li/usage. Your feedback is very welcome!
Mindey
Building brain-inspired AGI is infinitely easier than understanding the brain
by Steven Byrnes — 2020-06-02T14:13:32.105Z

Epistemic status: Trying to explain why I have certain intuitions. Not sure whether people will find this obvious vs controversial.

Part 1: Brains probably do some useful things in utterly inscrutable ways

I'm not so much interested in arguing the strong claim that the brain does some useful things in infinitely inscrutable ways—i.e., that understanding them is fundamentally impossible. I merely want to make the weaker claim that the brain probably does some useful things in ways that are for all intents and purposes inscrutable.

Where did I get this intuition? A few places:

Evolved FPGA circuits - see the awesome blog post On the Origin of Circuits focusing on the classic 1996 paper by Adrian Thompson. An evolved circuit of just 37 logic gates managed to perform a function which kinda seems impossible with those components. It turned out that the components were used in weird ways—the circuit ran differently on nominally-identical FPGAs, the transistors were not all used as on/off switches, there was some electromagnetic coupling or power-line coupling going on, etc. Can we understand how this circuit works? In the paper, they didn't try. I imagine that a good physicist, given enough time and experimental data, could get at least a vague idea of the most important aspects. But there might be subtleties that can't really be explained better than a simulation, or maybe some component has 17 unrelated functions that occur at different parts of the cycle, or maybe you need to account for a microscopic bump in some wire, or whatever. If it were 370 components instead of 37, and there were limits on what you can measure experimentally, it would be that much harder.
The Busy Beaver Function Σ(n) is unknown for as low as n=5. So we have a bunch of really simple computer programs, and no one knows whether they run forever or halt. When you get to larger n it gets even worse: For n≥1919 (and perhaps much smaller n too), Σ(n) is formally undecidable. While that's not exactly the same as saying that we will never understand these programs, I kinda expect that there are in fact programs whose asymptotic behavior really is "infinitely inscrutable", i.e. programs which don't halt, but where there is fundamentally no way to understand why they don't halt, short of actually running them forever, and that's true even if you have a brain the size of Jupiter. (I could be wrong, and

...
Spoiler-Free Review: Monster Train
by Zvi — 2020-06-02T13:40:00.868Z

Epistemic Status: Covenant Rank 8 (meaning I’ve won 8 runs, one each on each of levels 0-7) after about 20 games played.

As is my template, a spoiler-free review seeks to answer the question “should I play this game?” without giving away any unnecessary information.

A strategy discussion may happen in another post in the future. Find the game here.

Should I Play This Game?

Short Answer

In this case, my answer to that is that you should play it if you are a fan of the game’s genre.

If you are a huge fan of such games, stop reading now and go play the game.

If you are a fan of such games but not a huge fan, read on to see if the game appeals.

If you are actively not a fan of such games, this game isn’t for you.

If you’ve never played a game of this type, play Slay the Spire first. Then consider DreamQuest, which I consider a tier 2 game, and/or Monster Train.

In my tier system, Slay the Spire is a Tier 1 game. It is a Must Play.

DreamQuest and Monster Train are Tier 2 games. They are Worth It, for those who can get into them.

Dicey Dungeons is a Tier 4 game in the genre. It’s Playable. For true genre lovers only. I enjoyed watching it do its thing but have no desire to explore it in depth.

I am always happy to play Tier 3 (Good) or better games in genres I like, if there are no known fresh Must Play or Worth It games available that scratch the same itch. Tier 2 or higher games are worth playing, to me, in most genres, provided they agree with you.

Core Mechanics

Monster Train is a deckbuilding roguelike in the style of games like Slay the Spire and DreamQuest.

You start out with a deck of mostly basic cards that are mostly quite bad. Between battles, you get to do things that improve that deck. You get good cards that fit your strategy. You get rid of bad cards that don’t fit your strategy. You improve and duplicate your cards. You get artifacts that give you static advantages, similar to relics in Slay the Spire.

Each battle, you face several waves of monsters. They mostly but not always start at the bottom train level.

Each turn, you draw a hand of cards then spend our local version of energy/mana/fire to play them. Your fire replenishes each turn. You can play monsters to fight on each of three levels, provided there is space for them, and you can also play spells. Monsters that get deployed don’t go back in your deck, whereas spells stick around. When you run out of ca...