trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Book review: The Complacent Class
by Richard_Ngo — 2018-10-13T19:20:05.823Z
Link: http://thinkingcomplete.blogspot.com/2018/08/book-review-complacent-class.html

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity."

--W. B. Yeats

The idea that things aren't going great these days is pretty widespread; there's a glut of books pointing out various problems. Cowen's achievement in this one is in weaving together disparate strands of evidence to identify the zeitgeist which summarises the overall trend - in a word, complacency. There are at least two ways in which people can be complacent. Either they're living pretty good lives, and want to solidify their positions as much as possible. Or they're unsatisfied with their lives, but unwilling to mobilise or take the risks which could improve their situations. (People in the middle of the economic spectrum showcase aspects of both). What's the opposite of complacency? Dynamism and risk-taking - traits which have always been associated with immigrants, and with America, the land of immigrants. Such traits aren't always expressed in positive ways, of course. Says Cowen: "Our current decade can be understood by comparing it to the 1960s and early 1970s. The Watts riots of 1965 put 4,000 people in jail and led to thirty-four killed and hundreds injured; during an eighteen-month period in 1971–1972, there were more than 2,500 domestic bombings reported, averaging out to more than five a day. I’m not advocating these tactics, of course. My point is that, today, there is an entirely different mentality, a far more complacent one, and one that finds it hard to grasp that change might proceed on such a basis. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s, not only did riots and bombings happen, but large numbers of influential intellectuals endorsed them, defended them, and maybe led them to some degree." In comparison to this, even people who are passionate about social change lack anywhere near the same sense of urgency today.

Cowen identifies many metrics which support the narrative of increasing complacency. Over the last few decades, interstate migration has gone down, job mobility has gone down, startup formation has gone down, and business churn and turnover have gone down. What's gone up? Market concentration and "matching": our ability to tailor our lives so that we're only exposed to things we're already comfortable with, whether that be music and movies similar to those we've seen be...
On Hollywood Heroism
by dragohole — 2018-10-12T21:35:01.035Z

WARNING: This is a very personal essay that includes potentially triggering, childish views of an arrogant past!me, a lot of narrative, long literary tangents, and incredibly brash use of the Oxford comma. If you wish to cut straight to the useful parts, scroll down to Big Letter Headings.

For a long time I felt like my life suspiciously lacked any meaning. I looked at the people around me and shuddered with disgust: they were doing regular people things, like going to work, buying groceries, hanging out with their friends, and binging shows on Netflix.

This didn’t mesh well with my idea of what a meaningful-and-thus-enjoyable life looked like: a Sacred Pursuit of your Ideals, not settling for anything less than Perfection, giving it all to the One True Cause, Howard Roark style. My model of Purpose predicted other people to be unhappy, and at first this, indeed, was my assumption.

“God,” I thought, “these people must hate themselves, feeling empty and shallow like the dead husks of human beings they are.”

In hindsight, this was a blatant case of typical-minding, since, of course, my life was also a perfect fit for my description of their existence.

I have been waging a perpetual war with akrasia for many years now, drowning my consciousness in a never-ending stream… of… Twitch streams, reaching Diamond V in League of Legends on numerous occasions, masturbating a dozen times a day, and, yes, hating every second of it. That is, whenever I actually had the rare moments of awareness to notice what the everloving fuck was happening to my life, which usually devolved into a mildly depressed state coupled with idle suicidal ideation, until the sloppy swamp of distraction swallowed me back inside.

The people, of course, were happy anyways. Because people don’t care what other people think shouldn’t be so.

I remember one of the moments when I noticed the feeling of aliveness. Here’s a note from my Google Keep that I scribbled back then, right on the spot.

25/05/17 12:10 AM

I feel at peace. The storm clouds fill up almost every corner of the sky up above, leaving only a few blue spots out. The storm is in the air, too. The surrounding buildings, trees, cars are painted in muted, warm colors. All kinds of different feelings mix inside me, but there is one overarching theme. "This is life". The thought is reassuring, like the hand of somebody dear to you on your sho...
Coordination Problems in Evolution: Eigen's Paradox
by Martin Sustrik — 2018-10-12T12:40:10.675Z

Introduction

Lately I've written couple of posts that discuss coordination problems. Not the idealized, game-theoretical stuff but rather the real, messy coordination problems encountered by real people in the real world. Here, I will explore very different territory. I will look at coordination problems between between molecules, chromosomes, cells and individuals as they occurred and as they were solved in the course of biological evolution.

This article is based on the book "The Major Transitions in Evolution" by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry.

Before proceeding I would like to say few words about why I chose that particular book, although it was published in 1995 and thus misses a lot of recent research.

First, it was written by widely recognized experts in the field. That may not have been that important if I was writing about a different topic, but evolutionary biology is notoriously tricky, subtle and prone to misunderstanding. Sometimes it generates crackpot ideas, which, nonetheless, sometimes turn out to be true. A layman, or even a popular science writer, is likely to get lost.

John Maynard Smith is one of the big names of evolutionary biology of 20th century. He owe to him the introduction of game theory into evolutionary biology. He's the author of the central idea in the field, so called evolutionarily stable strategy, which is, to put it shortly, an application of the concept of Nash equilibria to biological, evolving systems.

Eörs Szathmáry is less known, but he did a lot of work on the topic of origin of life.

Second, the book is concerned with the big changes in the evolutionary history. It doesn't spend much time on evolution-as-usual, on how a specific bone or organ evolved. Rather, it discusses the events which significantly changed the nature of evolution itself: How did the life began? How we've got the first self-replicating molecules? How did the cell originated? How did the multicellular organisms?

One would expect a book on such a grand subject to be a least a bit hand-wavy. Surprisingly though, it's not. Instead, the authors dive deep into the details of each individual topic, they discuss chemical details of the reactions in questions, their yield and speed, how would they survive in the competition of other reactions going on nearby and so on. They discuss the game-theoretic considerations of forming an eukaryotic cell or an ins

...
Nyoom
by Alicorn — 2018-10-12T02:34:38.353Z

Let me tell you about my scooter.

I have a foldable electric trike scooter slightly heavier than my toddler. It has no pedal option, just footrests.

It can't reverse. It corners badly. It has a little nubbin that's supposed to keep it from unfolding till I deliberately unfold it, but that usually doesn't work. It has a top speed of "brisk jog". If I ride it on a poorly maintained sidewalk it will punch me in the crotch with its bicycle seat till I'm numb. It can go roughly five or six miles on one full battery and doesn't have a swappable battery pack. It has little enough torque that I sometimes have to kick it forward, even though it's not designed for that, in order to get from a curbcut up onto a road if the road is arched highly enough and I don't start with momentum; there are street-legal slopes it cannot climb. My cargo capacity is limited to what I can wear on my torso and fit in a small bike basket in front.

I love it to pieces and you're going to see them popping up everywhere in the next couple of years.

See, I'm bad at walking. Not like, you know, really disabled. I can do two blocks without complaining, five if I have a reason, I could walk a mile if I had a great reason. It'd make me miserable and exhausted and my feet and ankles would hate me for the rest of the day and I might need to stop and rest four times in the second half, but, you know, I could. I'd spit fire if someone told me it was three blocks to where we were going and it was really seven whoops, but I'd get there, and I'd get home after, too, too tired to play with my child and in too much pain to stand up long enough to cook dinner, but hey! I wasn't disabled or anything!

Factor in the fact that I cannot drive, standing is worse for my feet than walking, and I cannot maneuver in traffic, and you will understand why I am not solving this problem with a car, conventional scooter, or bicycle. Sometimes I took the bus, if I felt like standing in the sun for ten to fifteen minutes. But that was fine! I wasn't disabled or anything!

I am the primary caretaker of a toddler. This toddler loves to go to the playground. It's two blocks and change from home. I can walk that, but bringing a munchkin along I also have to stand for about as long as I walk so he can look at everything - unless I want to carry...
Additional arguments for NIMBY
by Zvi — 2018-10-11T20:40:05.547Z

The following post was written in July of 2017 in response to a post by Julia Galef, but I decided not to post/finish it. I figured I’d piled on San Francisco enough. With the recent post on the subject by Scott Alexander, I figured I would dust it off, give it an editing pass to reflect new points, flesh out the unwritten parts, and let it fly free. Enjoy!

Epistemic Status: I never borrowed your pot, I gave it back to you in perfect condition, and when I borrowed it there was already a hole in it. Also, citation needed.

Originally a response to: Should We Build More Housing in San Francisco?

Yes. Also, yes. And in conclusion, yes.

Wait. We’re not done.

In her post, Julia presents what she sees as the three major disagreements between advocates of building more housing (YIMBYs) and critics of building more housing (NIBMYs). She views these as: Would adding new housing noticeably effect prices? Does new housing help poor tenants? Are NIMBY objections (that incumbents deserve extra consideration, and existing character is worth preserving) legitimate?

My mission, should I choose to accept it (and I do) is to come up with as many reasons as possible why building new housing in San Francisco would be a bad idea, because upon reading Julia’s list, I realized that my steelman arguments against housing construction mostly weren’t covered, and I wouldn’t group them in this way at all. Many of them seem to never be covered at all.

I will also cover the standard reasons, to see where they fit into my ordering of potential arguments, and because some of them have a point.

Added 10/11/2018: Scott’s reasons, in his recent article, are that San Francisco is uniquely bad at building houses, more housing might not lower rents, YIMBYs act like human garbage and show total disrespect for people’s lives and preferences and call anyone opposed to them names up to and including racist, that people moving to San Francisco is bad for them and that people moving to San Francisco is bad for their communities. I don’t address the completely true argument that YIMBYs are often obnoxious, and don’t consider ‘we won’t be able to do X’ a very good argument for ‘lets ban doing X’ but do address the others. Scott’s final preference is for coordination to move valued communities to better locations, a solution I endorse, and even tried to start multiple times without success.

Reason #1:

People shou

...
Public Positions and Private Guts
by Vaniver — 2018-10-11T19:38:25.567Z

In this post I lay out a model of beliefs and communication that identify two types of things we might think of as ‘beliefs,’ how they are communicated between people, how they are communicated within people, and what this might imply about intellectual progress in some important fields. As background, Terence Tao has a blog post describing three stages of mathematics: pre-rigorous, rigorous, and post-rigorous. It’s only about two pages; the rest of this post will assume you’ve read it. Ben Pace has a blog post describing how to discuss the models generating an output, rather than the output itself, which is also short and is related, but has important distinctions from the model outlined here.

[Note: the concept for this post comes from a talk given by Anna Salamon, and I sometimes instruct for CFAR, but the presentation in this post should be taken to only represent my views.]

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties. -- Francis Bacon

FORMAL COMMUNICATION

Probably the dominant model of conversations among philosophers today is Robert Stalnaker’s. (Here’s an introduction.) A conversation has a defined set of interlocutors, and some shared context, and speech acts add statements to the context, typically by asserting a new fact.

I’m not an expert in contemporary philosophy, and so from here on out this is my extension of this view that I’ll refer to as ‘formal.’ Perhaps this extension is entirely precedented, or perhaps it’s controversial. My view focuses on situations where logical omniscience is not assumed, and thus simply pointing out the conclusion that arises from combining facts can count as such an assertion. Proper speech considers this and takes inferential distance into account; my speech acts should be derivable from our shared context or an unsurprising jump from them. Both new logical facts and environmental facts count as adding information to the shared context. That I am currently wearing brown socks while writing this part of the post is not something you could derive from our shared context, but is nevertheless ‘unsurprising.’

It’s easy to see how a mathematical proof might fit into this framework. We begin with some axioms and suppositions, and then ...
Bay Area: vibes
by KatjaGrace — 2018-10-11T19:00:18.694Z

Paul Graham says that cities send subtle messages about what your ambitions should be—different ones tell you to be richer, or be smarter, or to live better. I have lately been feeling like the same is true of people, and groups of people, and TV shows, and songs, and workplaces, and Twitter, and places you sit down to get a quick drink.

Obviously people (and all these other things) explicitly tell you to do different things sometimes. But I think there are subtler suggestions, both about what is valuable, and about what the world is like.

Some examples, mostly from people I know, anonymized:

Alice says to be more careful with your minutes. Also maybe your seconds

Bob says to find things to laugh about

Celia says to find flaws to smirk about

Doris says to have more novel insights

Erica says to feel more, and better

Francis tells you that just your being there is amazing, but that doing something would also be a fittingly wonderful manifestation of that

Gerald says to be more reasonable

Harriet says that everything is fundamentally ok

Ira says to know more stories

Jared says to know more facts

I had thought in the abstract that people around influence a person, but lately I more viscerally anticipate it, and shy away from some of the influences.

It’s dinner time, so I won’t elaborate further. Does this fit your experience?
Why don’t we treat geniuses like professional athletes?
by ryan_b — 2018-10-11T15:37:33.688Z

I mean in the work-environment sense, rather than the celebrity-and-endorsement-deals sense.

A professional sports team gets a lot of benefits that are designed to keep physically talented people performing at their peak. They have support for things like recovery, sleep, nutrition, physical fitness, and of course the specific skills they use to play the game. This support takes the form of specialized personnel who are also employed by the team, whose job it is to work with the athletes for those purposes. The whole environment is geared towards performance maintenance.

The basics of sleep, diet and exercise are required for optimal performance across all domains; being in an environment that optimizes for them is an advantage.

Sports teams balance practice and games. Practice still makes sense for knowledge work; games analogize to projects/development/etc.

Decomposing practices is where the interesting bits might be. In athletics, there is almost always a ready-made set of drills for any particular skillset, which can be prioritized by a coach working with an athlete. There is already a notion of managing the workload: athletes have overtraining and thinkers have burnout.

In The Power of the Context Alan Kay describes funding people over projects and orienting them with a vision in lieu of specific goals. This sounds suspiciously like persuading geniuses to act as though they were on a team. Alan makes the comparison himself:

“Our game is more like art and sports than accounting, in that high percentages of failure are quite OK as long as enough larger processes succeed."

I am tempted to go further and say that in the context of things like science or math research failures are still a positive contribution insofar as they establish that something doesn’t work, which makes future attempts more likely. This isn’t much of a thing in sports, which are entirely built around repeatable object-level activities; striking out does not make the next batter more likely to hit.

It seems like the object vs meta level distinction also highlights where the analogy breaks down. In a game like football, each player has a specialized role which contributes to moving the ball down the field. They can spend time mastering a set of moves which they adapt on the fly and can be relied on consistently. There is not a clear place for that in service of the PARC vision of “interact...
Thinkerly: Grammarly for writing good thoughts
by ryan_b — 2018-10-11T14:57:04.571Z

There is no product here, I am just putting down some ideas about what how such a thing might work.

You may have noticed all the annoying Grammarly adds bouncing around, which is a browser-based spelling/grammar/syntax checker. I wondered about how easily we could detect indications of known-bad-thinking with the same kind of analysis. This website is all through written communication, and the community is a solid proponent of note-taking; what if there were a tool that could catch obvious signs of bad or sloppy thinking as you wrote the thought down?

It does seem like it would be difficult to point to any kind of general grammar pattern that indicates a bad argument. However, it would be pretty straightforward to collect a large pile of bad argument examples, and then try pattern matching against those. It should also be simple enough to flag claims which should require evidence or a citation - something like if it detects numbers it searches the rest of the text for something resembling a source or citation.

Speaking of, is there some kind of bibliography or citation software that we could mimic or hijack for this purpose?

While I mostly envision this as a tool to help maintain clear thinking by catching errors in my notes, the thought of applying it to a blog post or editorial from the browser tickles me immensely. Click the button and the page turns red, go ahead and browse elsewhere.
Two Kinds of Technology Change
by johnswentworth — 2018-10-11T04:54:50.121Z

Many of the examples in this post are drawn from Volume I of Fernand Braudel’s “Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century”, which I strongly recommend for anyone interested in a quantitative approach to history.

You may have heard that Gutenberg revolutionized the intellectual world with his invention of moving type in the mid-1400’s.

Here’s the thing, though: Gutenberg was not the first to try movable type. The Chinese were using basic printing presses in the ninth century; Pi Cheng introduced movable characters between 1040 and 1050. So why didn’t it catch on then? And even setting that aside, surely some tired monk must have thought of the idea sooner.

Turns out, prior to the 14th century, books were primarily printed on parchment — created from sheep skins. A single 150-page book required the skins of 12 sheep to make the parchment. That much parchment wasn’t cheap — the parchment on which a book was written cost far more than the actual writing. With that much cost sunk in the materials, it’s no wonder that book-buyers wanted beautiful, handwritten script — it added relatively little to the cost.

It was paper which changed all that. European paper production didn’t get properly underway until the 1300’s. Once it did, book prices plummeted, writing became the primary expense of book production, and printing presses with movable type followed a century later.

The printing press offers a clear example of a technology change whose arrival was limited, not by the genius of the inventor, but by economic viability. The limiting factor wasn’t insight, it was prices.

Once you go looking for it, there’s a lot of technology shifts like this. Newcomen’s steam engine (and Heron’s, long before). Schwenteer’s telegraph. Bushnell’s submarine. Babbage and Lovelace had all the key ideas for the modern computer in the 1820’s, but it wasn’t until the 1890 census that somebody wanted to pay for such a thing. And of course, Moore’s Law led to all sorts of ideas going from unprofitable to ubiquitous in the span of a decade or two.

In all these cases, the pattern is the same: the idea for an invention long predates the price shifts which make it marketable.

On the other hand, this isn’t the case for all technological progress. There are some technologies for which demand preceded capability. After some insight or breakthrough made the technology possible, adoption followed rapidl...
Less to Greater, Bookmarklet Edition
by Three-Monkey Mind — 2018-10-11T04:21:39.672Z
Link: https://www.threemonkeymind.com/l2g/

Lesser2Greater is a Chrome extension that redirects from lesswrong.com to greaterwrong.com. I’d like to use it, but I’m not a Chrome user. I do, however, use bookmarklets, so I made one to replicate Lesser2Greater’s functionality.