trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Too right to write
by Solenoid_Entity — 2022-01-20T13:21:48.499Z

When I want to inflate my CV I'll often claim I'm experienced as a 'professional writer.' Truth is, I worked for a couple of years at a tiny marketing agency in remote northern England, where I ended up handling many of the copywriting tasks and all the proofreading, because I go pretty alright at it.

This launched me (a pedantic over-thinker) on a collision course with our clients (reasonably intelligent people with average writing abilities) over questions of grammar and style.

The resulting fights yielded some observations about spelling and grammar as signalling dilemmas that I think generalise quite nicely to domains beyond writing. I thought I'd write a few LW posts to get these thoughts out of my head.

you sure were staying in faze with our readers?

Our agency's own brand-new shiny redesigned website was finally complete, and it was my job to proofread the copy. On our Managing Director's very own bio page:

"It takes a lot to phase me."

Wince. Correct it instantly. Look again at the word. F A Z E. That is right, isn't it? Google and check. Yep. Look at it again. Feels weird man.

It's just... even though it's right, you have to admit it's a mistake that's become so widespread the correct spelling feels like a mistake. Hell, the correct spelling just feels inherently idiotic. F. Z. Idiot letters.

I start to consider, for the first time in my short career, leaving a mistake in place.

It felt dirty. But 95% of our customers would appreciate it – even at the cost of the 5% of customers I wanted the most.

bigbears

You Americans often pronounce 'phenomena' and 'phenomenon' almost exactly the same way! The last two letters are just a flat mute sound.

But it's not just that. If you haven't already noticed, you will from now on: these two are often used the wrong way around. Phenomena for singular and phenomenon for plural! And this isn't just random people. I've seen this in legal text, I've seen it in tweets from public intellectuals.

It's really just a pointless bugbear – it merely reveals the person doesn't actively notice Greek/Latin grammar patterns for plurals, or else they'd instantly see the problem. To be fair, though, that certainly would imply things about their education and about how observant they are.

Because we really do constantly judge each other based on these little bugbears. And those judgements inform our choices of friends, romantic ...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Psychomagic | Chapter 3: Intelligence Explosions
by Henry Prowbell — 2022-01-20T13:11:58.598Z

This is a Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fiction which contains spoilers. If you haven't, you should read or listen to Eliezer Yudkowsky's original work before reading this.

<< Chapter 2

Delicate coils of patchouli incense wafted through Professor Trelawney’s classroom, spiralling up through streamers of Tibetan prayer flags and coalescing in a thick cloud around the various dream catchers and crystals which lined the ceiling. It was only ten minutes into Mrs Trelawney’s Divination class and Harry's mind was already wandering.

“Today we will be practicing the ancient art of clairvoyance. That is, the detection of magical objects using our powers of extra-sensory perception.”

Harry and Hermione sat at the very back of the class on low, uncomfortable meditation cushions. Back here, they could at least talk without being noticed.

Harry had explained that discovering the fundamental equations of magic was still the ultimate goal, but that they should start by investigating intelligence enhancing magic first. If they could crack that, everything else would be easier. And any initial progress would make subsequent progress easier, in what Harry had described as an intelligence explosion.

Hermione, it seemed, was just happy to move on to something that involved metaphorical rather than literal explosions.

But for all the excitement, it wasn’t obvious where to start. Harry’s reflex when faced with a confusing problem was to set a 5 minute timer on his wristwatch and to write down as many open questions as he could. At the top of his parchment he wrote the following prompt

What questions, if I knew their answers, would make this problem easy to solve?

It was a way of cataloguing unknowns, noticing areas of confusion and spotting holes in your mental model – which could then be investigated one by one. Often all you needed was a single thread to pull on to get you going.

This time, though, it took 4 minutes to realise he wasn’t clear on even the most basic question of all.

“Hermione, what does the word intelligence mean?”

“It’s your ability to think and solve problems, isn’t it? Humans have it more than dogs. Dogs have it more than slugs. And there are IQ tests which are supposed to measure it.”

“Right, and IQ tests are about how well you can solve certain kinds of standardized reasoning problems,” Harry added.

He thought of IQ tests as measuring someth...
Speed Pasta Bake
by jefftk — 2022-01-20T02:50:04.832Z

Lily loves pasta bake: pasta, tomato sauce, and cheese baked until the
cheese at the top is a bit crispy. Unfortunately, this needs about
45min in the oven. But, just like

with
quesadillas, you can make it much faster by doing most of the
heating in the microwave:

Combine leftover pasta, jarred tomato sauce, and grated cheese
in a dish and that is safe for both the microwave and the oven. Put
additional grated cheese on top.

Microwave until piping hot.

Broil for about two minutes, or until the cheese is browned and
crispy. This goes very fast, and the window between "just right" and
"burnt" is small.

It ends up almost identical to the oven-only version, with slightly more
active time and far less wall time.

I wonder why I don't see more recipes like this, which use the
microwave for the "get things hot" phase before switching
to a pan or oven for browning?

I forgot to take a picture before serving, but here's what it looks
like after Lily had two helpings:
Action: Help expand funding for AI Safety by coordinating on NSF response
by Evan R. Murphy — 2022-01-19T22:47:11.888Z

Thanks to Frances Lorenz and Shiri for their feedback on a draft of this post.

tl;dr: Please fill out this short form if you might be willing to take a few small, simple actions in the next ~5 weeks that have the chance to dramatically increase funding for AI Safety through the NSF.

What is this?

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has put out a Request for Information relating to topics they will be funding in 2023 as part of their NSF Convergence Accelerator program. A group of us are working on coordinating responses to maximize chances that they'll choose AI Safety as one of their topics. This has the potential to add millions of dollars to the available grant pool for AI Safety in 2023.

Shiri Dori-Hacohen originally posted about this on the 80,000 Hours AI Safety email list. Here's an excerpt from her email which explains the situation well (some emphasis hers, some mine):

To make a long story short(ish), the responses they get to this RfI now (by Feb 28) will influence the call for proposals they put out in this program in 2023.

This RfI is really quite easy to respond to, and it could be a potentially very influential thing to propose AI Safety as a topic. It's the kind of thing that could have a disproportionate impact on the field by influencing downstream funding, which would then have a ripple effect on additional researchers learning more about AI safety and possibly shifting their work to it. This impact would last over and above any kind of research results funded by this specific call, and I sincerely believe this is one of the highest-impact actions we can take right now.

In my experience, it would be incredibly powerful to mount an orchestrated / coordinated response to this call, i.e. having multiple folks replying with distinct but related proposals. For example, I know that a large group of [redacted] grantees had mounted such a coordinated response a couple of years ago in response to this exact RfI, and that was what led the NSF to pick disinformation as one of the two topics for the 2021 Convergence call, leading to $9M in federal funding (including my own research!) -- and many many additional funding opportunities downstream for the NSF grantees.

Even if there was a relatively small probability of success for this particular call, the outsized impact of success would make the expecte

...
NFTs Are Probably Not Beanie Babies
by parrhesia — 2022-01-19T22:14:24.173Z

I'm new enough to the world of NFTs -- and that world is shifting so rapidly -- that I'm certain my authority over the subject is woefully inadequate. But as the consumer-facing nature of the blockchain is also only recently beginning to bloom, I'd say it doesn't take much yet to get a reasonable education. With that in mind, the following is my take on why NFTs may represent a more fundamental economic shift than what I had originally imagined them to be.

NFTs: Beanie Babies of the Future

Or, at least, that's where I started. At first blush and through the nuance-crushing filter of typical media reporting, the idea seems like nothing more than digital ownership of an "asset" with no marginal cost of replication. And that sounds insane. Pictures of apes are trading for tens of thousands of dollars, and the most charitable notion I could come up with was that this is a phenomenon likely to appeal only to the intersection of "collectors" and "technophile early-adopters."

And anecdotally, that bit still seems to be true. That friend of yours who spends too much money on speculative nonsense obviously bought a Topps baseball highlight NFT for thousands of dollars because, like, they're gaining so much value! And somewhere in the back of your mind, some recollection of Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs are throwing off warning signs.

Why do you need your baseball card on the blockchain? And why would you want to "own" something digital like a sports highlight? I mean, I can see it online just as easily as you can.

The Stock Market for Everything

Then again, though, there are some fundamental mechanisms at play here that, regardless of this particular implementation, may actually become pretty ground-breaking. NFTs are just another implementation of the distributed ledger system, but rather than tracking ownership of "currency" like Bitcoin or Ethereum (which can be used to buy things, at least in theory), NFTs track ownership of something more abstract: anything at all.

As it turns out, "fractional ownership" akin to the stock market is maybe a better analogy than digital Beanie Babies. Combined with smart contracts to, say, pay out dividends according to ownership, NFTs may replicate (and multiply) the individualized access to the stock market that Robinhood's arrival on the scene had. But in this case, we're securitizing not companies but ... well, just kind of anything a...
Omicron Post #15
by Zvi — 2022-01-19T14:40:01.190Z

Omicron has fully taken over, and our uncertainty about it has mostly been resolved. The Omicron pandemic is now the Covid-19 pandemic, and we’re back in a kind of ‘normal mode’ albeit at the top of the Omicron wave.

A few weeks ago, the majority of the information and week’s discussion were in the Omicron posts. This week, the vast majority are in the normal weekly post, there’s only one pure Omicron post (although the Polymarket post was closely related) and it’s relatively short.

Going forward, after this week, my default plan is to incorporate the Omicron news and the Omicron-related predictions into the mainline weekly posts, and supplement with issue-specific posts rather than general Omicron updates.

If things continue to go well, I hope to use the resulting bandwidth to start doing less speed premium writing, and more longer term analysis, both on Covid and otherwise. There’s a lot I simply haven’t had the time to think about let alone write out properly.

Remember, this is a happy moment. We are no longer in (as much of) an emergency.

Severity

Thread updating what we know about severity of Omicron. Less severe in adults, less loss of taste and smell, mostly this is confirmation of the usual good news.

The issue of severity in children is less clear because Covid-19 is so non-severe in children it’s hard to tell the relative change.

All we know is there’s a lot more cases, and a lot more cases means a lot more child cases, and a lot more ‘with Covid’ cases means proportionally more child cases, and none of that is particular reason to doubt that the severity effect in children is different from that in adults, but we don’t know for sure because we lack the data, which results in for example the UK’s report saying about severity in children we have ‘low confidence.’ I agree that we are less confident here, but our baseline should mostly be that it roughly matches the adult changes, rather than a baseline of no change from Delta. But even if there is no change from Delta, that’s still not high risk.

Spread

BA.2 is the other sub-variant of Omicron, whereas BA.1 is the one that shows up on S-gene deletion tests and it most common in the USA and UK. This thread discusses whether we should worry about BA.2, and offers this chart, you can get more at this website.

If we take this at face value, it was 10% of Omicron cases on 21 D...
You Can Get Fluvoxamine
by AppliedDivinityStudies — 2022-01-18T23:48:43.773Z

[TLDR: I paid $95 for a 10 minute video consultation with a doctor, told them I was depressed and wanted fluvoxamine, and got my prescription immediately.]

I'm not a doctor, and this isn't medical advice. If you want information on the status of fluvoxamine as a Covid treatment, you can see the evidence base in the appendix, but interpreting those results isn't my business.

I'm just here to tell you that if you want fluvoxamine, you can get it.

Years ago, some of my friends were into downloading apps that would get you a 10 minute consultation with a doctor in order to quickly acquire a prescription for medical marajuana. Today, similar apps exist for a wide range of medications, and with a bit of Googling, you can find one that will prescribe you fluvoxamine.

What's required on your end? In my case, $95, 10 minutes of my time, and some white lies about my mental health. Fluvoxamine is only prescribed right now for depression and anxiety, so if you want it, my advice is to say that:

You have an ongoing history of moderate depression and anxiety

You have taken Fluvoxamine in the past, and it's helped

And that's basically it. Because there are many other treatments for depression, you do specifically have to ask for Fluvoxamine by name. If they try to give you something else, say that you've tried it before and didn't like the side effects (weight gain, insomnia, headaches, whatever).

One more note, and this is critical: unless you are actually suicidal, do not tell your doctor that you have plans to commit suicide, to hurt yourself or others, or do anything that sounds like an immediate threat. This puts you at risk of being put involuntarily in an inpatient program, and you don't want that.

Finally, you might ask: isn't this super unethical? Aren't you not supposed to lie to doctors to get drugs? Maybe, I don't know, this isn't medical advice, and it's not really ethical advice either. I think the only real potential harms here are we consume so much fluvoxamine that there isn't enough for depressed people, or that doctors start taking actual depressed patients who want fluvoxamine less seriously. As far as I can tell, there isn't currently a shortage, as to the latter concern, I couldn't really say.

Appendix

Again, this isn't medical advice. You shouldn't take any of these results or pieces of news coverage as evidence that fluvoxamine works and that the benefi...
How do you reason about how many COVID test kits to keep on hand?
by nim — 2022-01-18T18:09:07.954Z

With the release of 4 free test kits per residential address in the US (https://special.usps.com/testkits), I'm trying to think through how many tests it's appropriate and useful for me to keep on hand.

Normally a "don't take too many from a limited supply" heuristic would cap my purchases, but I found a small local pharmacy with excellent stock. I questioned a friendly employee there about whether there were explicit or implicit limits on how many kits (2 tests per kit) I could get, and she expressed that I could buy as many as I want by saying "you could get 10 if you want them!", in a context and tone implying that 10 was more than anybody would want.

I also can't really rely on my budget to dictate how many to purchase, as I'm fortunate enough to have a well funded HSA and few requirements of it. I invest the max allowed amount of those HSA savings, but there's still enough left over to cover more tests than I've bought so far.

I don't currently engage in any activities that require a negative test to do them, and when I want to know whether I might have covid, I use PCR testing from a local testing site. I've seen like 2 other cars there ever in the 2 times I've wanted a test, so not concerned about my use of it taking away capacity that someone else might need.

So, my concerns are:

Does test availability seem likely to remain high, or likely to drop due to supply chain issues during the time frame in which tests are relevant and useful? (I assume substantial chance of supply chain issues? not sure what data to consider in assessing this)

For how long do testing requirements seem likely to remain in place, regardless of what the disease actually does? I remember flying pre-2001 clearly enough to have little faith in our society's ability to remove "safety" requirements even when faced with evidence that they aren't working as intended.

How likely does it seem that testing requirements will spread to activities which don't currently have them, such as flights to locations one could drive to? (I assume lowish? not sure what data to consider in improving this guess)

How likely does it seem that whatever variant comes after omicron will be detectable by current tests in a way that's useful? I fear that "useful" may bifurcate, as Zvi has begun pointing out by differentiating nose vs throat swab results: There's "useful" like taking off your belt is useful to le

...
Thought Experiments Provide a Third Anchor
by jsteinhardt — 2022-01-18T16:00:20.795Z

Previously, I argued that we should expect future ML systems to often exhibit "emergent" behavior, where they acquire new capabilities that were not explicitly designed or intended, simply as a result of scaling. This was a special case of a general phenomenon in the physical sciences called More Is Different.

I care about this because I think AI will have a huge impact on society, and I want to forecast what future systems will be like so that I can steer things to be better. To that end, I find More Is Different to be troubling and disorienting. I’m inclined to forecast the future by looking at existing trends and asking what will happen if they continue, but we should instead expect new qualitative behaviors to arise all the time that are not an extrapolation of previous trends.

Given this, how can we predict what future systems will look like? For this, I find it helpful to think in terms of "anchors"---reference classes that are broadly analogous to future ML systems, which we can then use to make predictions.

The most obvious reference class for future ML systems is current ML systems---I'll call this the current ML anchor. I think this is indeed a pretty good starting point, but we’ve already seen that it fails to account for emergent capabilities.

What other anchors can we use? One intuitive approach would be to look for things that humans are good at but that current ML systems are bad at. This would include:

Mastery of external tools (e.g. calculators, search engines, software, programming)

Very efficient learning (e.g. reading a textbook once to learn a new subject)

Long-term planning (e.g. being able to successfully achieve goals over months)

Models sufficiently far in the future will presumably have these sorts of capabilities. While this still leaves unknowns---for instance, we don't know how rapidly these capabilities will appear---it's still a useful complement to the current ML anchor. I'll call this the human anchor.

A problem with the human anchor is that it risks anthropomorphising ML by over-analogizing with human behavior. Anthropomorphic reasoning correctly gets a bad rap in ML, because it's very intuitively persuasive but has a mixed at best track record. This isn't a reason to abandon the human anchor, but it means we shouldn't be entirely satisfied with it.

This brings us to a third anchor, the optimization anchor, which I associate wit...
Positly covid survey: long covid
by KatjaGrace — 2022-01-18T10:40:18.665Z

Here are some more careful results from a survey I ran the other day on Positly, to test whether it’s trivial to find people who have had their lives seriously impacted by long covid, and to get a better sense of the distribution of what people mean by things like ‘brain fog’, in bigger, vaguer, research efforts.

Respondents are from the US, aged 20-40, and decided to take the survey—entitled ‘Lifestyle 2022’ with a longer description mentioning the pandemic—when offered good compensation for doing so, a couple of days ago.

Most basic results

228 responses

56 people thought they have had covid; seven or eight of them on multiple occasions

12 had ongoing health problems or symptoms after recovering from acute illness (21% of those infected)

This was the basic long covid question:

Do you seem to have ongoing health problems or symptoms after recovering from acute covid illness?

In retrospect, it seems misinterpretable, but looking at other responses (see very bottom for all questions, or section ‘How bad are these long covid cases’ for more details on most of them), I don’t think they misinterpreted it much.

Long covid from cases over two months ago, by vaccination status

The most basic results are not so telling, because maybe all of those people with ongoing problems are among the masses recovering in recent weeks, and will recover from everything before long. So here we’ll just look at people who were infected more than two months ago.

Also, let’s divide up rates by vaccination status at the time of infection.

Minor details:

These results are about cases rather than people, i.e. people with two cases are registered twice below (I asked about the date, vaccination status and health consequences for each, so e.g. one person says they got long covid from the second case, so the first is counted under ‘no LC’).

‘Vaccinated’ = at least a full one or two shot course for two weeks

Results:

All
Vac
No vac
(Vac N/A)

All
39
6
31
2

LC
9
2
7
0

no LC
30
4
24
2

P(LC)
0.23
0.33
0.23

In sum, in this (small) group:

Around quarter of cases of covid >2 months ago were reported to precede some kind of ongoing health

...