trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
LW Update 2019-01-03 – New All-Posts Page, Author hover-previews and new post-item
by habryka — 2019-03-02T04:09:41.029Z

Daily page replaced with new "All-posts" page

The old /daily page (accessible via clicking "Daily" on the frontpage, or clicking on "All Posts" in the hamburger menu in the top-left) has been replaced with a new /allPosts page that is showcasing a bunch of new designs that we are planning to roll out across the site over the next few weeks.

Note in particular the changes to the post-preview, which is now reduced to one line and puts all the key information into easily skimmable columns. We also got rid of our beloved little title-column things on the left side, and moved everything into a central column in preparation for some upcoming changes to the overall site structure.

By default the page will function just like the old /daily page, but with optional additional functionality in the form of new filters and sorting options (this now also finally allows you to easily sort by "total karma" again).

Author hover-preview

If you hover over the author names of comments and posts, you can now see a small preview of their bio, the time they signed up and the number of posts and comments that they've written. The goal is to make it easier to figure out whether an author has written other content you might want to read, and whether the user you are looking at is new, which helps you set expectations and hopefully encourages people to help new users get onboarded.

Karma notifications

Jim talked a bit more about karma notifications over in another meta post. I think this is a pretty important feature, and am interested in people's thoughts on the new notifications.
Karma-Change Notifications
by jimrandomh — 2019-03-02T02:52:58.291Z

Starting this weekend, LessWrong will be displaying karma notifications in the top-right corner, telling you about when you've been upvoted or downvoted. You can click the star icon to see which of your posts and comments have been voted on, and how much their score has changed.

This works a little differently from how most web sites do it. I've noticed a tendency, in myself and others, to sometimes obsessively refresh pages hoping to have gotten Likes. The rest of the LessWrong team has noticed this too. That's why on LessWrong, by default, this won't work; karma-change notifications are grouped into daily batches, so after you've checked it, you won't be notified of any additional votes until the next day.

While I hope that this prevents people from using LessWrong in ways that they don't endorse, daily batching might not be a strong enough safeguard for everyone. If you find yourself tempted to check LessWrong more often than you think is ideal, you can change the karma-notifier batches to weekly, or disable them entirely. On the other hand, if checking and posting on LessWrong is something you'd rather do more of (because you'd otherwise do something less valuable), you can set it to real-time.

As a nonprofit with no advertising, LessWrong is under a different set of incentives than most websites. We worry a lot about the trade-off between engagement and addictiveness. I want people to use the site in ways they reflectively endorse, even if that means using it less. I think LessWrong should leave that under user control, as much as feasible.

(As a reminder: Voting on LessWrong is a way of saying "I want to see more/less things like this". Upvotes are a way to tell people that their post or comment was worth their time to write, and worth your time to read. It does not necessarily indicate agreement; sometimes a good write-up of an ultimately incorrect idea is what a conversation needs. Conversely, downvotes do not necessarily indicate disagreement; sometimes a correct points is written in a way that's confusing, inflammatory or otherwise detracts from the conversation.)

As always, bug reports are welcome here, via the Intercom widget, or on the GitHub issue tracker.
We’ve Been Thinking About Measurement All Wrong
by Ian David Moss — 2019-03-01T15:59:43.000Z

Doug Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything offers social sector professionals a step-by-step guide to counting what counts.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Measurement is not a simple act of observation disconnected from any larger plan. Instead, it’s an optimization strategy for reducing uncertainty about decisions we need to make. That’s the central argument of Douglas Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business, which remains one of the most important books on decision-making I’ve read since first encountering it more than seven years ago.

How to Measure Anything’s reframing of measurement’s purpose is nothing short of revolutionary, none more so than for workers in what I call the “knowledge industries” — evaluation, research, data science, policy analysis, forecasting, etc. Among other ramifications, it establishes that measurement has value only insofar as it can reduce uncertainty in the context of a decision that matters. This emphasis on specific decisions — in other words, starting with the decision and seeking out additional information only as needed to gain confidence in making it — suggests a hyper-applied approach to evaluation and research that would represent a radical departure from the way these functions operate at most organizations.

Hubbard also argues that if something matters, it must have observable consequences or leave some kind of observable trace. Therefore, everything that matters is measurable, even seemingly “intangible” phenomena that most would consider to be beyond the realm of quantification. If something does not seem amenable to measurement, it’s a sign that either it doesn’t actually matter or it’s not sufficiently well defined.

— @iandavidmoss

How to Measure Anything presents a panoply of methods for defining measurement problems more clearly and training stakeholders in solving them, including Fermi estimation, calibrated probability assessment, Monte Carlo simulation, various sampling techniques, Bayesian statistics, and methods to aggregate expert judgments. Many of these fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces into an overarching methodology Hubbard has developed for analyzing and making any decision, which he calls Applied Information Economics. The basic steps of AIE are as follows:

Define a decision problem and relevant uncertainties
Determine what you know now
Compute the value of additional i

...
Motivation: You Have to Win in the Moment

by Ruby — 2019-03-01T00:26:07.323Z

Epistemic status: Confidence that the models expressed are true to reality: 80%; Confidence that the inferred advice isn’t bad advice: 80%; Confidence that the models presented are complete: less than 50%. I'd bet I'm still missing an important piece or two from the picture.

If often seems that if only we could get our motivation in order, we could work wonders. Wouldn’t it be good if we always had the motivation to do what we really wanted or ought to do? Our homework, our taxes, our jobs, our diets and exercise, our artistic and creative hobbies, our study plans, on and on. There are so many things we feel like we theoretically could do and yet we don’t. There are so many things we do, but only by fighting ourselves each step of the way [1].

Wrestling with a few novel motivational challenges of my own, I’ve been revisiting my models and skills. It feels like a number of pieces have clicked into place recently and I have some insights worth sharing. Hopefully, you will benefit from this post and/or tell me how it is wrong or incomplete.

Your Motivation System

We can reasonably believe that your brain has a motivation system (or an overall motivation system comprised of a great many motivation subsystems). One reason to believe this is the

extensive scientific literature

captured in tens of thousands of papers and built from probably at least as many researcher-years. Compared to that, the models described in this post are the crudest simplification. However, the models in this post have the advantage that they’re much quicker to read and much easier to apply to your life.

The second reason to believe that your brain has a motivation system is a mix of your first-person experience and first-principles reasoning. Consider that you have only one body and that in any given moment you can execute approximately only a single activity. You are eating or you are sleeping, but not both. Something in you must make a decision at every given moment about which activity you will execute.

Now, you might think that is you who makes the decision about what to do. “It is me, I think with my free will and weigh my options and then decide what to do!” Ignoring for the moment that we so often struggle to do what we “decide” to do, I will assert that there far, far too many considerations when deciding what to do for your conscience explicit mind to handle it all on its own. You’d...
What would a zetetic explanation be for the rationality community?
by hamnox — 2019-02-28T20:05:18.787Z

Zetetic explanations as described by benquo (blogpost, lw linkpost).

Interdisciplinary

covers a mixture of social and natural factors leading up to the isolation of the thing
historical in the original, investigative sense of the term "history."
risks being wrong

Empowering

integrates concrete and model-based thinking that is checkable on multiple levels
affirms basic competence of humans to explore our world
centers process of discovery rather than a finished product

The rationality sequences created a community with shared language for talking about mind and optimization space. If we have that history understood on a technical level, I think we'll be better at seeing through founder effects to recognize ally and sister movements forming in other contexts.
Have a camel!
by Mary Chernyshenko — 2019-02-28T19:25:05.476Z

1.

The East is rich and her tales abundant, and here is but one of them.*
Once upon a time, a man lost his camel and went about looking for it. He met three boys whom he asked if they had seen the animal.
"Is your camel pregnant?" asked the first boy.
"Why, so she is!" said the owner, surprised.
"Does she have only one eye?" asked the second boy then.
"Indeed she does!" said the owner, now hopeful.
"And does she have a sore on her back?" asked the third boy at last.
"A big one!" cried the owner happily. "Where has she gone?"
"Sorry," said the children. "But we haven't seen her."
To make an Eastern story short... er, let us turn to the end where the man demanded from a third party to make the boys tell him where to find the camel.
This is how it went:

Boy 1: "[O ... emir,] I saw the camel's tracks and where it urinated, and so knew it was pregnant."
Boy 2: "[O ... emir,] I saw that the camel only ate grass from one side of the road, and so knew it was one-eyed."
Boy 3: "[O ... emir,] I saw some of the grass that the camel had rubbed against and knew there was a sore on its back."
Emir: "Thanks everybody, you may go. And you may keep looking for your animal."
2.
Compare this to the infamous tale of blind men groping an elephant.
The observers had a single common object to describe. They did not exactly see it. Every one of them had a single piece of intelligence to add to the pile, inferred from a single kind of study apiece. Their answers did not depend on the order or completeness of other reports, even when it could be done.
Yet in case of the elephant, which was known to be the one and only thing to study from the outset till the end, there was much dissent and no synthesis.
In case of the camel, which was only confirmed to be the same animal by the outsider who had lost it, the researchers never argued.
So why do some people lose elephants when other people only lose camels?
Policy-Based vs Willpower-Based Intentions
by Unreal — 2019-02-28T05:17:55.302Z

Been thinking about what it means to set an intention lately. I think I’ve found a distinction between policy-based intentions and willpower-based intentions.

Policy-based intention

Policy-based intention-setting is a lot like writing a computer script and running it.
For example, I have a policy around tipping Lyft drivers. It is made up of a bunch of if-then statements.

If I’m making income above X, then tip Lyft drivers $1.
If I’m making income below X, then tip Lyft drivers $0.
Add +$1 if they help me with my luggage.
If for any reason I want to tip a different amount (because they were particularly bad or good), tip that amount instead.

It might not be the perfect policy for every situation, but it’s better for me to spend the processing power once, rather than every time.

It basically costs no willpower to implement the policy. I’m not having to nudge myself, “Now remember I decided I’d do X in these situations.” I’m not having to consciously hold the intention in my mind. It’s more like I changed the underlying code—the old, default behavior—and now it just runs the new script automatically.

I call it an intention because it is me manifesting a change in my behavior using a decision point. I created a branch in my history, and I chose left instead of right. And now my future self is going to choose left instead of right in a bunch of future branches.

Willpower-based intention

This seems more like what is classically meant by intention.

Willpower-based intention involves an active, conscious, mindful holding in the mind. To me, it viscerally feels like my brain is gripping an object inside my head. If I grip too hard, I can get a headache. I can also hold it lightly / gently (such as during mindfulness meditation).

The holding doesn’t always have to be continuous. It can work more like “reminders” where I find myself naturally inclined to do X, and then I remind myself I intended to do Y instead.

Here’s a few examples:

You’re meditating on your breath; you hold the intention in your mind to return your attention to the breath when you notice your attention has drifted; while you meditate, this intention is ‘online’, and when you stop meditating, the intention goes ‘offline’.
You have a contest to see who can stare at each other without blinking the longest. Your first impulse is to blink, but you divert that initial impulse, and instead do something other th

...
The Tale of Alice Almost: Strategies for Dealing With Pretty Good People
by sarahconstantin — 2019-02-27T19:34:03.906Z

Suppose you value some virtue V and you want to encourage people to be better at it. Suppose also you are something of a “thought leader” or “public intellectual” — you have some ability to influence the culture around you through speech or writing.

Suppose Alice Almost is much more V-virtuous than the average person — say, she’s in the top one percent of the population at the practice of V. But she’s still exhibited some clear-cut failures of V. She’s almost V-virtuous, but not quite.

How should you engage with Alice in discourse, and how should you talk about Alice, if your goal is to get people to be more V-virtuous?

Well, it depends on what your specific goal is.

Raising the Global Median

If your goal is to raise the general population’s median V–level, for instance, if V is “understanding of how vaccines work” and your goal is to increase the proportion of people who vaccinate their children, you want to support Alice straightforwardly.

Alice is way above the median V level. It would be great if people became more like Alice. If Alice is a popular communicator, signal-boosting Alice will be more likely to help rather than harm your cause.

For instance, suppose Alice makes a post telling parents to vaccinate their kids, but she gets a minor fact wrong along the way. It’s still OK to quote or excerpt the true part of her post approvingly, or to praise her for coming out in favor of vaccines.

Even spreading the post with the incorrect statement included, while it’s definitely suboptimal for the cause of increasing the average person’s understanding of vaccines, is probably net positive, rather than net negative.

Raising the Median Among The Virtuous

What if, instead, you’re trying to promote V among a small sub-community who excel at it? Say, the top 1% of the population in terms of V-virtue?

You might do this if your goal only requires a small number of people to practice exceptional virtue. For instance, to have an effective volunteer military doesn’t require all Americans to exhibit the virtues of a good soldier, just the ones who sign up for military service.

Now, within the community you’re trying to influence, Alice Almost isn’t way above average any more. Alice is average.

That means, you want to push people, including Alice, to be bette...
Unconscious Economics
by Bird Concept — 2019-02-27T12:58:50.320Z

Here’s an insight I had about how incentives work in practice, that I’ve not seen explained in an econ textbook/course.

There are at least three ways in which incentives affect behaviour: 1) via consciously motivating agents, 2) via unconsciously reinforcing certain behaviour, and 3) via selection effects. I think perhaps 2) and probably 3) are more important, but much less talked about.

Examples of 1) are the following:

When content creators get paid for the number of views their videos have... they will deliberately try to maximise view-count, for example by crafting vague, clickbaity titles that many people will click on.
When salespeople get paid a commision based on how many sales they do, but do not lose any salary due to poor customer reviews... they will selectively boast and exaggerate the good aspects of a product and downplay or sneakily circumvent discussion of the downsides.
When college admissions are partly based on grades, students will work really hard to find the teacher’s password and get good grades, instead of doing things like being independently curious, exploratory and trying to deeply understand the subject

One objection you might have to this is something like:

Look at those people without integrity, just trying so hard to optimise whatever their incentives tell them to! I myself, and indeed most people, wouldn’t behave that way.

On the one hand, I would make videos I think are good, and honestly sell products the way I would sell something to a friend, and make sure I understand my textbook instead of just memorising things. I’m not some kind of microeconomic robot!

And on the other hand, even if things were not like this… it’s just really hard to creatively find ways of maximising a target. I don’t know what appeals to ‘the kids’ on YouTube, and I don’t know how to find out except by paying for some huge survey or something... human brains aren’t really designed for doing maximising like that. I couldn’t optimise in all these clever ways even if I wanted to.

One response to this is:

Without engaging with your particular arguments, we know empirically that the conclusion is false. There’s a wealth of econometrics and micro papers showing how demand shifts in response to price changes. I could dig out plenty of references for you… but heck, just look around.

There’s a $10.000/year daycare close to where I live, and when the moms there t

...
So You Want to Colonize The Universe Part 5: The Actual Design
by Diffractor — 2019-02-27T10:23:28.424Z

Alright, here's the actual design for an intergalactic mission to the Virgo Supercluster.

(1, 2, 3, 4)

Phase 1: Acceleration

To begin with, you use really big lightsails and exawatt dyson-swarm-powered laser arrays to get your fleet of 30 or so ships (really just a cylinder of some fancy graphite-based dust-impact-resistant material that weighs about 1/5 of the Titanic, and has about a 20 meter radius) up to cruising speed of 0.9 c for their 200-million-light-year voyage across the intergalactic void to the Virgo Supercluster, or at least where it's projected to be in the future by cosmic evolution simulations.

Phase 2: Coasting

By time dilation, this is dropped to 100 million years of waiting in an absolutely black void between the galaxies, where nothing of note happens except for occasional nanobot repairs, and keeping the antimatter at 0.1 K. And most of the fleet dies because they got hit by a grain of sand that's out in the galactic void for some improbable reason, but over those sorts of distances, even very improbable sand grains will show up at some point. However, several of them probably make it through, with the front looking pretty moth-eaten.

Phase 3: Target Selection and the Steering Burn

At a few tens or hundreds of thousands of lightyears out, the next phase can begin. Telescopic monitoring of the incoming galaxy, to build up a map of where the stars will be upon arrival, and the interstellar density distribution, and pick a good-looking one. Sticking a telescope out in front leads to the sensors getting destroyed by the proton flux, so they'll probably be shielded at the bottom of a tube of solid-but-transparent material.

Steering to the appropriate star location is done by a dusty-plasma-fission rocket firing sideways, which provides 200 newtons of thrust (equivalent to a model rocket engine), and emits 3.5 gigawatts of waste heat. For thrust that low with that much energy, the exhaust must be going really fast, and by the rocket equation, it gets the 0.1% of c change in velocity with only about 5% of the starship mass devoted to propellant, ie fissile uranium (or plutonium, bred from ordinary uranium by an onboard nuclear reactor, which is much more common and less prone to decaying over these time intervals and easier to store). So that's another 7,200 tons of uranium. An antimatter beam core rocket would have much less radiation damage, but i...
So You Want to Colonize The Universe Part 4: Velocity Changes and Energy
by Diffractor — 2019-02-27T10:22:46.371Z

(1, 2, 3, 5)

Part 4a: Speeding Up

Ok, so how do you get up to 0.9 c in the first place?

The common answer is "antimatter", but antimatter actually isn't that good for missions that are extremely relativistic. This is because of the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation, which applies anytime you're carrying your energy source and propellant onboard. Fortunately, it's very simple. ΔV=Ve∗ln(mfullmempty) . ΔV is your change in velocity. Ve is your exhaust velocity. And mfull is the mass of the rocket full of propellant, with mempty being the mass of the rocket without propellant.

Eyeballing this, we see that the exhaust velocity gives you a decent approximation to how much you can change your velocity by, if you've got about 2 parts propellant to 1 part mass. Getting more velocity change requires an exponential rise in your mass ratio, and very rapidly gets to not be worth it, as pretty much no rocket has a mass ratio greater than about 20. Also, for stuff going really fast, the energy delivered is high, but the momentum isn't nearly as high, so high-specific-impulse rockets that whip their exhaust up to relativistic speeds emit an awful lot of energy, but have the sort of thrust typically associated with a fleet of asthmatic hummingbirds because they're very fuel-efficient and have a low mass-loss rate.

There are relativistic adjustments, of course, but the same basic behavior applies. Also antimatter annihilation has the problem of spending about 40% of its energy as gamma rays which just go in all directions and can't be used for thrust as a result, so you have to adjust the equation to account for that inefficiency.

So, even for a beam-core antimatter rocket, it's a bit more disappointing than you'd think. The classic example of this is the Frisbee Antimatter Starship, a hilariously ambitious starship design that is about 700 km long, has about 160,000 tons of antimatter aboard, blasts out 100 terawatts of power, and achieves a measly 0.25 c. There have been notable improvements in beam-core engine design since then, but it's still too much for too little speed. And eyeballing it, the dust shield looks pretty puny, because it's sized for erosion from relativistic protons and small dust grains, not the cruise-missile-level dust grains I'm worried about.

Certainly insufficient for an intergalactic mission at high-relativistic velocities.

Edit: Found another beam-core antimatt...