trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How do you build resilient personal systems?
by Raj Thimmiah — 2021-01-25T09:56:42.445Z

From new years onwards I've been on a wonderful productivity streak. I'm using the most hours of the day I ever have and it's great.

While it's still going well though, I want to figure out how to make my systems more resilient. I started reading Unsong this past Saturday and I lost a night and a day and for the first time thus far this year I failed my daily habits. I don't think it's a terrible thing but I'm nervous about failures happening again leading to downard spirals of further failures.

Does anyone have suggestions?
Tentative covid surface risk estimates
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-25T09:40:46.658Z

My household previously made some highly uncertain estimates of the covid risk from bringing random objects that other people have recently been touching into our home, for instance salads and groceries an endless stream of Amazon packages. The official guidance is very vague, e.g. “…not thought to be the main way the virus spreads”. Our bad estimates were fairly low, so we decided to basically ignore it in our covid risk accounting, except for habitually taking some reasonable precautions.

Then the covid rates here increased by a factor of ten, so we decided it would be good to look at it again.

So today I tried to estimate this from this paper (HT Ben Weinstein-Raun and Catherine Olsson) in which a group of researchers swabbed various door handles and trash cans and crosswalk buttons and the like in a small Massachusetts city and measured the covid RNA detectable on them. They also used the amounts they measured to estimate the infectiousness if someone else were to touch the surface and then touch their face.

Here I offer you a draft of an elaborate Guesstimate spreadsheet on the topic, in case you are interested in such things. Hopefully someone is, and will tell me ways that it is wrong, then later I might offer you something reliable. At present, it is probably pretty unreliable, and should only be used insofar as you would otherwise use something even more unreliable. Some non-exhaustive evidence of its unreliableness:

I haven’t actually read much of the paper

The answers in the spreadsheet have changed substantially while I have felt about as confident in them as I do now

There are numerous places where it seems dubious to me, or where I made up numbers

I try not to be the sort of person who only shares things if they are of high quality, even if the stakes are high

This calculation is ignoring the efforts everyone is making to be safe, so you might underestimate the risks if surfaces look low risk in this study because supermarket employees are actually constantly wiping them down, for instance. So it should probably be interpreted more like ‘if you take levels of caution similar to those taken with the study surfaces…’.

Interesting tentative conclusions so far, rely upon at own risk:

a person with covid touching something then you touching it then touching your face is worth extremely roughly 13 microcovids (uCov) (with 90% confidence

...
What is a VNM stable set, really?
by Nisan — 2021-01-25T05:43:59.496Z

Previously: Book report: Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann & Morgenstern)

Summary: Von Neumann and Morgenstern defined the notion of stable set in order to characterize some sort of equilibrium in cooperative games. Lucas showed that stable sets don't always exist, so they're inadequate for telling us what happens in games. I propose a generalization of stable sets that always exists, in which players can have different beliefs.

Epistemic status: This is me stretching VNM's framework and groping towards cooperative open-source game theory. The novel definitions aren't that exciting, but I think they point in the right direction. I believe the proof is solid. I've only dipped my toe into the literature, so it's likely someone has done this already.

VNM stable sets

We recall some definitions from (VNM 1944): An imputation x=(xi)i is a vector of payoffs, one for each player i. A coalition is a subset of players. A game is characterized by the maximin value v(S) for each coalition S. The function v is called the characteristic function and it satisfies v(∅)=0 and v(A)+v(B)≤v(A∪B) if A∩B=∅. Imputation x dominates imputation y, or x>y, if there's a nonempty coalition S such that xi>yi for all i∈S and ∑i∈Sxi≤v(S). A VNM stable set X is a set of imputations such that every imputation not in X is dominated by an imputation in X, and no imputation in X is dominated by an imputation in X.

VNM called stable sets "solutions", and they were supposed to represent equilibria in some unspecified dynamics of negotiation. They didn't really spell out why stable sets correspond to equilibria, but I think I figured it out.

For the dynamics, imagine that there's an "imputation under consideration" that every player can see. A coalition of unsatisfied players can form, and replace the imputation under consideration with a dominant imputation. When this process terminates, the imputation under consideration becomes the actual payoffs.

Or if you like, the players observe the actions of all players, and if a coalition of players is unsatisfied with the resulting payoffs, they take actions corresponding to a dominant imputation, thus causing a contradiction.

Beliefs

Now suppose the players are uncertain about what imputation they'll end up with. Let's represent this uncertainty with a nonempty set X of "plausible" imputations. (No probabilities.) You migh...
You can send people KN95s
by jefftk — 2021-01-24T23:40:15.806Z

At the beginning of the pandemic there was a massive mask shortage.
We still don't have enough US-spec masks, but production of
Chinese-spec (KN95) masks has ramped up enormously. These are much
better than cloth masks, and any time someone in our household goes
inside (work, medical appointments, etc) we wear one.

The message that these masks are available and reasonably cheap (ex: 50 at $1.50/each,
shipped) seems to be spreading slowly and unevenly through society.
If someone vulnerable you care about is still wearing cloth masks to
go into buildings, you might consider sending them a box. For
example, Julia and I both sent boxes to our parents: we checked in
with them about what they had been wearing, told them about how it was
now possible to get higher quality masks, and asked if it would be ok
if we sent some.

You can spread a message by talking, but that's not the only way.

Comment via: facebook
On clinging
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-01-24T23:25:36.412Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

I often find myself wanting to refer to a certain dimension of emotional experience, which I’ll call “clinging.” This post tries to point at it. I also suggest that understanding this dimension can resolve a common confusion about Buddhist philosophy and other types of spiritual/therapeutic advice — namely, how “non-attachment” or “letting go” can be compatible with deep passion and care. I further suggest that clinging can help us think more clearly about patterns of concern that register, intuitively, as non-virtuous.

I. Pointing at clinging

Clinging, as I think about it, is a certain mental flavor or cluster of related flavors. It feels contracted, tight, clenched, and narrow. It has a kind of hardness, a “not OK-ness,” and a (sometimes subtle) kind of desperation. It sees scarcity. It grabs. It sees threat. It pushes away. It carries seeds of resentments and complaints. Jealousy, entitlement, pettiness, and bitterness all have a lot of clinging in them, as do greed, desire for status, and anxiety.

I’m not just listing emotions and traits often thought bad. Self-absorption, for example, need not be clingy; it can just be blind, wrapped up in its own world. Same with arrogance and disrespect, for related reasons. Emotions in the vicinity of depression, boredom, laziness, and malaise also seem non-clingy, at least at the surface. Contempt does not obviously connote clinginess, to me; nor does Voldemort’s cruelty, or the Joker’s indifference to the burning of the world.

Often, in my experience, clinging seems to hijack attention and agency. It makes it harder to think, weigh considerations, and respond. You are more likely to flail, or stumble around, or to “find yourself” doing something rather than choosing to do it. And you’re more likely, as well, to become pre-occupied by certain decisions — especially if both options involve things you’re clinging in relation to — or events. Indeed, clinging sometimes seems like it treats certain outcomes as “infinitely bad,” or at least bad enough that avoiding them is something like a hard constraint. This can cause consequent problems with reasoning about what costs to pay to avoid what risks.

Clinging is also, centrally, unpleasant. But it’s a particular type of unpleasant, which feels more like it grabs and restricts and distorts who you are than e.g. a headache.

Conversely, a s...
FC final: Can Factored Cognition schemes scale?
by Rafael Harth — 2021-01-24T22:18:55.892Z

(Apologies for the long delay.)

Scaling of Regular Thought

The punchline of the previous post was that there is only one mode of thinking: your brain can solve various tasks in a single step (from the perspective of awareness), and we've called those tasks your cognitive primitives. All primitives are intuition-like in that we can't inspect how they're being done, and we may or may not have an explanation for the result after the fact.

We're now interested in how this process scales. We don't tend to solve hard problems by staring at their description and waiting for a primitive to solve them in one step, so some kind of reasoning backward is going on. However, there is no module for this in the brain, so our ability to 'reason backward' also has to be implemented by primitives.

The easiest way to observe how this works is to take a problem that is just barely too hard to solve with a single primitive. My pick for this is multiplying two 2-digit numbers. Thus, I invite you to do the following

EXERCISE: There is a simple (two 2-digit numbers) multiplication problem in the spoiler below. Make sure you have something to write; it can be a piece of paper or a digital notepad. Look at the exercise, solve it in your head, and write down every verbal thought that pops into your mind until you have the solution. Write only to document your thoughts; don't do a written calculation.

12⋅17

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Below is what my transcript looks like. You may have had more or fewer intermediate steps, repetitions, or unrelated thoughts in between. That's all fine.

The coloring is something I've added after the fact. The black thoughts (minus the problem itself) are the outputs of primitives that actually solve math problems. Those are all simple; it's 10⋅17 and 2⋅17 and 170+34. On the other hand, 14⋅17 itself is outside the set of exercises that can be handled by a single primitive (at least for me). And thus, my brain has performed a feat of utter genius: instead of a primitive that sees the exercise and outputs a solution, it found a primitive which saw the exercise and output another exercise! (Namely, 10⋅17.) Subsequently, that exercise was taking as the input to a different primitive, which was then able to solve it in one step.

(It may be that some of the 'subproblem outputs' like 10⋅17 did not appear as verbal thoughts for you. In general, not all outputs of primitives make it int...
Policy restrictions and Secret keeping AI
by Donald Hobson — 2021-01-24T20:59:14.342Z

Status: outlining a reasonably interesting idea I haven't seen discussed here before. Just come up with it so might not be fully thought out. May be a repeat of something. Rough draft quality, grammar may be lacking.

Suppose you have some set of worlds W and some set of actions A . A policy is a function P:W→ΔA from worlds to probability distributions over actions. (worlds to actions is good too, but probability distributions are helpful for Secret keeping AI in particular)

You also have a prior probability distribution over worlds and a utility function U:(W×A)→R . This gives a function from policies to reals. Given reasonable assumptions, we can pick the best policy from any set of allowable policies.

Now some of these policies are physically impossible, they require you to act differently based on information you don't yet know, or will never find out. Throw these policies out.

Let Π be any set of policies formed by taking the intersection of the physically possible policies, with those that pass some other test. (I will show later a simple other test that yields meaningful and potentially useful behaviour) Our AI then takes the highest expected utility policy in Π .

Note that all sorts of real world phenomena can be described in terms of physics constraints on policies. From communication and memory restrictions between different parts of the AI, to the AI running on a reversible or quantum computer that must implement a bijective or unitary function.

Assuming bounded utility functions, these agents have a nice property, they don't care much about worlds of small probability measure. If the agent hasn't seen extremely improbable input data, then extremely unlikely worlds won't influence the choice of actions, unless that choice was basically a tie anyway. (conjecture: If perturbing all the utilities by any perturbation of magnitude at most epsilon doesn't change the action on most worlds, then perturbing the utilities on a small measure of worlds doesn't change the action on most worlds)

Suppose that some section of the world can be selected with s:W→S , where S is the set of options. (For example a computer password)

A secret keeping AI is one that only allows policies P st for all t∈S

EW(U(w,P(w))|s(w)=t) is constant.

In other words, there is no ...
Reasons against anti-aging
by Mark Miro — 2021-01-24T20:33:09.832Z

I agree with Peter Thiel on many things, but not when it come to his belief that anti-aging will be beneficial. It could be that my concerns are wrong. Or maybe anti-aging is inherently interesting to some people who want to live to see flying cars and no rational critique would dissuade them.

Impossible tree pruning:

Getting older involves building up a world view that allows you to exploit gaps in the world and use them as a way to make money. In order to do this you build a mental model (a tree) of skills based on where you think there's demand for skills like your own. Each layer takes time to develop. Everyone else is also building up this tree for themselves. What happens over your career is that everyone in the world changes the world in some way that creates new gaps that may not fit into the tree you've imagined. Further, the gaps in the world that used to exist become filled. In short, the best approach would be to rebuild your tree from scratch. This is why having kids is more efficient than just having more time on earth.

Population growth:

Even if birth rates went down to replacement rate tomorrow, improvements in longevity would result in more people being on the planet at any given time. This would be because the window of possibly alive people would expand to include older and older people. For the people worried about population growth it may not be as big a concern as growth caused by families having 4 kids. It might still be worth mentioning.

Downstream problems:

Arguably, one of reasons young people are frustrated with modern politics is that boomers are still very much in the driver's seat. I think large demographic shifts are likely to create instability. An increase in productive years could lead to an increase in a more drawn out decline. If so, we'll need more senior care. This may become a costly burden on future generations. We may also have to consider assisted suicide for people who would be dead if it weren't for technology. Should we keep them alive because we can?

Ultimately:

My point is not that people should stop doing this type of research, it's just that I personally don't find the benefits to outweigh potential costs. I believe a better understanding of human biology would inherently aid in anti-aging anyways while also increasing our chances of sustaining more human life on the planet, or even suppo...
Confirmation Bias in Action
by Jacob Falkovich — 2021-01-24T17:38:08.873Z

Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit.

The heart of Rationality is learning

how to actually change your mind

, and the biggest obstacle to changing your mind is confirmation bias. Half the biases on

the laundry list

are either special cases of confirmation bias or generally helpful heuristics that become delusional when combined with confirmation bias.

And yet, neither the

popular

nor the

Rationalist

literature does a good job of explicating it. It’s defined as “the tendency to

search

for,

interpret

,

favor

, and

recall

information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values”. The definition is a good start, but it doesn’t explain why this tendency arises or even why the four underlined verbs go together. Academic papers are more often

operationalizing pieces of confirmation bias

in strange ways to eke out their p-values than offering a compelling theory of the phenomenon.

My goal with this post is to reconceptualize confirmation bias using the paradigm of

predictive processing

, with particular focus on the centrality of action. This focuses CB as a phenomenon of

human

epistemology

, with our brains designed to

manage our bodies

and move them to manipulate the world. This view of CB wouldn’t apply to, for example, a lonely

oracle AI

passively monitoring the world and making predictions. But it applies to us.

My theory is speculative and incomplete, and I don’t have a mountain of experimental data or neuroimaging to back it up. But if you’re somewhat familiar with both predictive processing (as you will be by the end) and confirmation bias, I think you’ll find that it point in the right direction.

Criminal rioter or heroic protester? Image credit: Lam Yik Fei — Getty Images

Inadequate Explanations

Wikipedia offers

four explanations of confirmation bias

. All are somewhat plausible, but all are also lacking in important ways and don’t offer a comprehensive picture even when combined.

1. Cognitive vs. motivational

Our brain has limited capacity to hold and compare multiple alternatives simultaneously and seeks lazy shortcuts. For example, it’s easier to answer “does this new data obviously contradict my held beliefs and force me to change them?” than to do the hard work of inferring to what extent the new data supports or opposes various hypotheses and updating incrementally. We’re also motivated to believe things that make us happy.

Our bra...
Li’l pots
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-24T12:40:42.259Z

As a pandemic-era purchaser of foods for a large household of time-thirsty researchers, I can tell you an interesting thing about the demand for cheese in this context:

If you spend a lot of money on a nice cheese, wrapped up in some fancy foreign label, there is a good chance that it will languish sadly in the back of the fridge for months until someone notices that it is moldy and throws it away, or makes a last-ditch attempt to cut up the whole thing and compel the group to eat it. Maybe on the way there, someone will take a single slice of it once, and move it in a zip-loc bag, where it will remain until the end.

If you spend a few dollars on a six-pack of generic single-serve cheese-cubes with nuts, they will fly from the fridge and you will be acknowledged for this triumph of shopping, and more such cheese will be needed by the next grocery order.

It was initially hypothesized by a housemate that this was due to error. The cheese cubes are more expensive per unit of cheese, while also consisting of worse cheese. Which is fairly suggestive of overall worseness. One could further note that they involve substantially more packaging, and take up more space per cheese. So a natural theory is that the cheese-cube eating housemates are erring, due to some kind of short-sighted non-endorsed laziness.

I’m with the cheese-cube eaters, except at least ten times more passionately (for instance, I am writing an essay in favor of the position). It’s not about the quality-adjusted cheese per dollar. Getting out a pre-opened hunk of cheese, examining the color and consistency of its moist edges, awkwardly undressing it further from its tight, torn, damp plastic casing, finding a knife and something to cut it on, cutting some, wrapping the rest again, fitting it back in the fridge, and cleaning up the knife and counter, is an experience. And it’s not a good one. It has all kinds of wetness and ineffectual muscular exertions and tenuous balancing and making hard decisions about risk under uncertainty and washing things. Whereas reaching out your hand for a cheese-cube pack then de-lidding it into the trash—while not an amazing experience—is I’d say overall positive, being substantially comprised of the initial sighting of your desired cheese-cube-pack and then the immediate having of it. At worst it is a very short experience. And it makes perfect...
Dissolving Sleeping Beauty
by Chris_Leong — 2021-01-24T08:10:44.088Z

The first thing I recommend to people interested in anthropics and the Sleeping Beauty Problem is, If a tree falls on Sleeping Beauty by ata. The whole article is excellent, I recommend reading in full, but the basic argument is simple:

There are different bets we can make regarding the coin. For example, we can pay out Sleeping Beauty each time they are woken up or only once.
If we pay them out each time they are woken up and then convert this betting structure into an equivalent probability, we obtain the thirder solution, whilst if we only pay them out once, we obtain the halver solution.
Therefore, the problem is underspecified. In order to be able to solve the problem, we need to explain which bet structure we are using.
Asking "Which is the tree bet structure?" is the same kind of confusion as asking, "If a tree fell in a forest, would it make a sound?". Well, what exactly do you mean by "sound"? Answer that, and you'll have the answer to your question.

I found this extremely insightful, but at the same time, I can understand why some people might find it unsatisfactory.

After all, when we ask, "What is the probably of the coin landing heads?", we don't have a particular bet structure in mind. And, I don't just mean that we didn't have an explicit bet structure in mind, even when asked to clarify I don't think many people will immediately say, "Oh, I meant that bet structure!".

What we have in the back of our minds isn't some bet structure, but a whole lot of associations about what we mean and even though we can look for the bet structure that best matches these intuitions, the explanation given in "If a Tree Fell on Sleeping Beauty" won't be satisfactory unless we bring these into the story. In this case, I suspect that there's actually a single intution that does most of the work, so I'll just focus on that.

The "Objective" Perspective

I suspect that most halvers have a strong intution that we're trying to measure something objective about the coin. If we say, "Well, the probability of a coin landing on heads isn't something intrinsic to it, but depends on the environment we put it in", they'll still try to make it as objective as possible by specifying the environment as precisely as they can and insisting on the most reliable-seeming way of measuring it.

In particular, to the extent that a particular observer affects the observation, something has gon...