trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Benign Boundary Violations
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2022-05-26T06:48:35.585Z

Recently, my friend Eric asked me what sorts of things I wanted to have happen at my bachelor party.

I said (among other things) that I'd really enjoy some benign boundary violations.

Eric went ????

Subsequently: an essay.

We use the word "boundary" to mean at least two things, when we're discussing people's personal boundaries.

The first is their actual self-defined boundary—the line that they would draw, if they had perfect introspective access, which marks the transition point from "this is okay" to "this is no longer okay."

Different people have different boundaries:

There are all sorts of different domains in which we have those different boundaries. If the above were a representation of people's feelings about personal space, then the person on the left would probably be big into hugs and slaps-on-the-shoulder, while the one on the right might not be comfortable sharing an elevator with more than one other person (if that).

If the above were a representation of, say, people's openness to criticism, then the person on the left probably wouldn't mind if you told them their presentation sucked, in front of an audience of their friends, colleagues, and potential romantic partners. Meanwhile, the person on the right would probably prefer that you send a private message checking to see whether they were even interested in critical feedback at this time.

Obviously, a diagram like the one above leaves out a lot of important nuance. For instance, a given person often has different boundaries within the same domain, depending on context—you may be very comfortable with intimate touch with your spouse and three closest friends, but very uncomfortable receiving hugs from strangers. And you may be quite comfortable receiving touches on the shoulder from just about anyone, but very uncomfortable receiving touches on the thigh.

The above also doesn't do a great job of showing uncertainty in one's boundaries, which is often substantial. The "grey area" between okay and not okay might be quite small, in some cases (you have a clear, unambiguous "line" that you do not want crossed) and quite wide in others where you're not sure how you feel, and you might not know exactly where that gradient begins and ends.

But for any given domain, and any given context, most people could at least a little bit describe where their boundaries lie. They're okay with the a-w...
Here's a List of Some of My Ideas for Blog Posts
by lsusr — 2022-05-26T05:35:28.236Z

I will never run out of ideas for blog posts because blogging generates ideas faster than I can blog. The number of ideas for blog posts I have massively outnumbers the number of blog posts I have written. To illustrate my point, here are some of the ideas I have for blog posts.

The list is written in reverse order. Newer ideas are at the top.

List of Blog Ideas

Writing is anti-inductive

Farming long-tailed upside

Re: Misinformation About Misinformation

Modern straps

Re: "Instead of competing with everyone else for the attention of the median person, it's often worthwhile to make something just for smart people. They may be a small fraction of the population, but there are still a lot of them in total."

Book Review of MCTB

Study notes from Molecular Biology of the Cell

Finish translating The Art of War and the other 6 military classics

"Material Construction", a series of posts about science that starts by explaining how atoms work and then builds everything out of that

The Virtue of Trolling

How Modern Art Works

Aluminum fuel cells

Evaporative Cooling in AI Alignment

Predictive Processing and Placebos

Japanese stuff in Star Wars

Biting Fingernails

Geoarbitrage

Dilute your Kool Aid with more Kool Aid

Re: PG's How to Lose Time and Money

managing client expectations

Wave harmonics and brain synchronization

Rationality is someone who cares more about being right than feeling right

Against the intrinsic value of money

What would fractional reserve banking look to a predictive processor?

Meeting writers IRL

Learning the Others' language よろしくお願いします

Advice for Smart People with Autism

How to get an internship

Re: this comment by Razied about meditation

Re: Mandatory Secret Identities

Re: Going from California with an Aching in My Heart.

Star Wars and Marvel doing same thing with expanded universe

Trump symbiosis

Interview with Bryan Caplan

Everyone should be like us

Russia showing torrents in theaters

Adult Responsibility

Collective Guilt

Re: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

Money is commoditized coercion

Proper Repro Steps

Absolute reference points. Talking about what people are talking about is a trap.

a series on Rationality

Minimum Viable Skynet

Unbelievable stories go into fiction

Busywork

Paperclip Maximizer Minimizers

Pedagogical techniques from different domains

...
View and bet in Manifold prediction markets on Lesswrong
by Sinclair Chen — 2022-05-26T02:41:02.599Z

(Crossposted from EA Forum)
Links to prediction markets on Manifold Markets now show a preview of the market on hover.

You can also embed markets directly in posts:

This lets you bet on yes/no questions without leaving Lesswrong! You do need to be logged into Manifold, otherwise when you try to bet it will first bring you to a screen to log in via your google account.

How to embed a market

Just go the market (or create one), copy the link, and paste it in the editor. It will automatically turn into an embed like the one above.

You can get the link from:

The address bar
The copy link button below a market you created

Or the three dot menu above the chart

Much thanks to Ben West for reviewing the code for this, which was heavily based on the previous integrations for Our World in Data, Metaculus, and Elicit.
Testing Air Purifiers
by jefftk — 2022-05-25T23:50:02.275Z

If you're considering buying an air purifier for reducing covid risk,
the

EPA
recommends comparing them based on their Clean Air Delivery Rate
(CADR) for smoke. But what if you want to evaluate a purifier
yourself? Perhaps you don't trust the manufacturer, want to evaluate
an off-brand filter replacement, have built a

filter
cube, or put together

something weirder? How can we
measure purifier performance?

What we would like to calculate is the device's smoke CADR: when given
smoke-polluted air, how quickly can it clear the smoke? This is
something we can test:

Make smoke.

Wait for the smoke to distribute.

Turn on the air purifier.

Track results on air quality monitor.

Burning matches is a good way to create smoke, but you get a lot of
variation in exactly how much. Here are twenty four trials where I burned
seven matches and measured the peak amount of 2.5µm smoke "pm2.5"
with an M2000:

Even if you exclude the one trial where I got unusually small amount
and the three where I got an unusually large amount, the middle
twenty still varied over a range of 121-233 µg/m³, almost 2x.

While creating a consistent amount of smoke is difficult, I think it
also isn't needed. A filter removes a consistent proportion of its
input for each size of particle. If you put very smoky or nearly
clean air through a MERV-13 filter, out the other side you should get
air that has, for example, 85% fewer 1-3µm particles. Purifiers,
then, should reduce particle concentrations exponentially and we
should see measured pm2.5 levels decrease by a constant fraction each
minute.

Do we? Let's check!

I used a Coway AP-1512HH Mighty (the
Wirecutter's top pick) and ran it on 'high' five times, tracking
p2.5 levels:

Eyeballing these, the initial decrease from the peak is lower than
you'd expect from the rest of the curve. I think this is partially a
measurement artifact: the meter is recording once a minute, and it
isn't able to identify the true peak. The highest reading we get is
going to be from a minute that included some amount of increase in
smoke and also some amount of decrease. Additionally, at the
beginning the smoke and cleaned air are still evening out around the
room. Let's skip the very beginning of each curve and normalize by
counting the highest included measurement as 100%:

How close is this to exponential deca...
Glass Puppet
by lsusr — 2022-05-25T23:01:15.473Z

The worst part of being an actor is that all work is temporary. That's what Alia told herself. In actuality, Alia's "acting" career amounted to two spots as an extra in commercials for enterprise software.

To make ends meet, Alia worked as a social engineer. That's what Alia told herself. In actuality, Alia's "social engineering" career amounted to bluffing her way into an AI Alignment bootcamp for the free room and board.

That's what had brought Alia to the entryway to the headquarters of Overton Cybernetics, a giant skyscraper of steel and glass. Apparently they needed an actor with AI Alignment experience. Alia took a deep breath. She was an actor. She had already faked her way through an AI Alignment bootcamp. Surely she could social engineer her way through an actual AI Alignment gig too, right?

An older woman in a pencil skirt greeted Alia at the door.

"You're going to be meeting with Dominic Hamilton," said the woman, "so make a good impression."

Dominic Hamilton.

The 27-year-old founder of Overton Cybernetics.

Alia played it cool. She smiled as if she met billionaire geniuses all the time. Surely that's how a real AI Alignment actor would react, right?

Dominic Hamilton's assistant led Alia to an elevator. They took it halfway up the building, transferred to a second elevator and took the second elevator the rest of the way to the top. Alia deliberately avoided paying attention to her surroundings. She was an actor specializing in AI Alignment. She met billionaire geniuses all the time. Today was an ordinary day for her.

Dominic Hamilton's office was sparse. One desk. One laptop. One door opposite one giant floor-to-ceiling window instead of a wall. Dominic Hamilton's throne chair faced away from the window towards the door. Surely Dominic Hamilton didn't actually work here. It must be a greeting room to intimidate visitors. Alia decided not to be intimidated.

Alia sat in the seat opposite the throne. Dominic Hamilton's assistant quietly stood in a corner of the room by the door.

"It's nice to meet you Mr. Dominic Hamilton," said Alia. She held out her hand to shake. It was ignored.

"Just 'Dominic', please. But not yet," said Dominic. He motioned to a pair of smartglasses on the desk. "Put them on."

Alia examined the smartglasses. They were bulkier than commercial smartglass. It was a prototype. Dominic Hamilton twiddled his thumbs until Alia put on the glasses.

"W...
How to get people to produce more great exposition? Some strategies and their assumptions
by riceissa — 2022-05-25T22:30:32.448Z

Some of the recent posts in the distillation & pedagogy tag here on LessWrong, such as "Call For Distillers" and the AI Safety Distillation Contest, have been bugging me, and this post is my attempt to introspect about why.

Here are four strategies for achieving the goal of creating more great expository pieces:[1]

Encourage people to produce more expository pieces and let people know that producing explanations is a valid path. In my interpretation, the "Call For Distillers" post mainly uses this strategy.
Give people money in exchange for producing explanations. The AI Safety Distillation Contest is maybe half about this strategy and half about the previous strategy.
Get people who are already good at producing explanations to mentor other people. I think the Distill Research Journal is mainly using this strategy.
Treat exposition as a scientific field of inquiry: try to open up the black box of what makes an explanation good and come up with techniques or "building blocks" of good explanations. Tim Gowers is the best example I know of, with his blog posts, YouTube videos, and the Tricki.

Each of these strategies comes with a set of assumptions that makes it the best strategy for achieving the goal:

Encouragement is a good strategy if the main problem is that people don't know that exposition is a thing they can do. But if used as the main strategy, it also has the assumption that many people already have the skill of producing great exposition, or that they will be able to learn it on their own.
Throwing money at the problem is a good strategy if people lack the time or resources to spend on creating explanations. As with the encouragement strategy, if this is the main strategy one employs then there is an assumption that many people are already good at producing exposition or can learn on their own. Alternatively, even if few people are great at exposition, throwing money can still look good as long as the funders can identify the few great expositors.
Mentorship is a good strategy if most people don't know how to produce great explanations and it is difficult to learn how to do this on one's own, but many people want to and have the capacity to learn the skill given help.
"Exposition as science" is a good strategy if no one really knows how to produce great explanations. The less people know about how to produce great explanations, or the fewer the number of

...
Request for small textbook recommendations
by Alex_Altair — 2022-05-25T22:19:56.549Z

I'd love recommendations for good textbooks that are short.

I like books to be physically smaller so that they're easier to hold and carry around, and I'd also like to be able to at least plausibly believe that I might read the whole thing. I was a math and physics major, so I can pick up most undergrad or graduate textbooks and at least have a chance at understanding what's going on.

I'm mostly thinking about math & physics but am very happy to get recommendations for any field! I'd love to acquire more of a sense of what various fields are about at the professional level. I'm also happy with books that straddle the genres of textbook and popular non-fiction. Highly-readable academic papers are also very welcome! (This post is great, but doesn't have anything to do with size.)

I'll post some examples as answers.
Science-informed normativity
by Richard_Ngo — 2022-05-25T18:30:03.572Z

The debate over moral realism is often framed in terms of a binary question: are there ever objective facts about what’s moral to do in a given situation? The broader question of normative realism is also framed in a similar way: are there ever objective facts about what’s rational to do in a given situation? But I think we can understand these topics better by reframing them in terms of the question: how much do normative beliefs converge or diverge as ontologies improve? In other words: let’s stop thinking about whether we can derive normativity from nothing, and start thinking about how much normativity we can derive from how little, given that we continue to improve our understanding of the world. The core intuition behind this approach is that, even if a better understand of science and mathematics can’t directly tell us what we should value, it can heavily influence how our values develop over time.

Values under ontology improvements

By “ontology” I mean the set of concepts which we use to understand the world. Human ontologies are primarily formulated in terms of objects which persist over time, and which have certain properties and relationships. The details have changed greatly throughout history, though. To explain fire and disease, we used to appeal to spirits and curses; over time we removed them and added entities like phlogiston and miasmas; now we’ve removed those in turn and replaced them with oxidation and bacteria. In other cases, we still use old concepts, but with an understanding that they’re only approximations to more sophisticated ones - like absolute versus relative space and time. In other cases, we’ve added novel entities - like dark matter, or complex numbers - in order to explain novel phenomena.

I’d classify all of these changes as “improvements” to our ontologies. What specifically counts as an improvement (if anything) is an ongoing debate in the philosophy of science. For now, though, I’ll assume that readers share roughly common-sense intuitions about ontology improvement - e.g. the intuition that science has dramatically improved our ontologies over the last few centuries. Now imagine that our ontologies continue to dramatically improve as we come to better understand the world; and that we try to reformulate moral values from our old ontologies in terms of our new ontologies in a reasonable way. What might happen?

Here are two...
Reflections on a year of college
by unoptimal — 2022-05-25T16:26:56.792Z

Crossposted from my blog. Considering collaborating on a version of this that's tailored specifically towards undergrads in the LW or EA communities.

I just completed my first year of college (US university). I’ve written up some personal reflections and curated some useful thoughts from others.

Caveat: people are different. My perspective is one of millions; treat it accordingly.

Understand the game

For some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, they don’t tell you the cynical (realistic? red-pill? based?) perspective of college during admissions. That’s for yourself to figure out, which seems…a little unfair.

The perspective I’m talking about involves some mix of:

College is mostly signaling
Social sciences bad ha ha
Colleges just want money
Many classes are useless (the caveat being technical subjects or skills)
The main value adds of college comes from outside of the classroom
Did I mention there’s a lot of dunking on the social sciences?

These ideas may feel a little uncomfortable. Some of them are overemphasized to make a stronger point. But in my experience (and through conversations with peers I highly regard), they seem mostly right.

Even if you’re skeptical, I think it’s important to at least be aware of these sentiments. It might save you a lot of time and effort.

Related:

Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off. We test the strength of his case.

“If you want to get the best education in the world for free, you can just move to Princeton and start attending classes unofficially. There’s almost no effort made to stop you. You just won’t get a diploma, which makes it near pointless, because college is more about impressing people than learning useful info.”

College advice for people who are exactly like me

“Coming in, you will probably think that your college experience has been carefully designed to provide you the best possible education. (HA HA HA.)”
“Actually, your college experience has been carefully designed to provide you with a piece of paper signalling to potential employers that you are intelligent and work hard, while in the process transferring as much money as possible from your family to administrators and construction firms. Also there are some people who will try to teach you stuff. The silver lining is that most of the brightest people in the world also want the same piece of paper

...
The "Measuring Stick of Utility" Problem
by johnswentworth — 2022-05-25T16:17:22.958Z

Let’s start with the simplest coherence theorem: suppose I’ll pay to upgrade pepperoni pizza to mushroom, pay to upgrade mushroom to anchovy, and pay to upgrade anchovy to pepperoni. This does not bode well for my bank account balance. And the only way to avoid having such circular preferences is if there exists some “consistent preference ordering” of the three toppings - i.e. some ordering such that I will only pay to upgrade to a topping later in the order, never earlier. That ordering can then be specified as a utility function: a function which takes in a topping, and gives the topping’s position in the preference order, so that I will only pay to upgrade to a topping with higher utility.

More advanced coherence theorems remove a lot of implicit assumptions (e.g. I could learn over time, and I might just face various implicit tradeoffs in the world rather than explicit offers to trade), and add more machinery (e.g. we can incorporate uncertainty and derive expected utility maximization and Bayesian updates). But they all require something-which-works-like-money.

Money has two key properties in this argument:

Money is additive across decisions. If I pay $1 to upgrade anchovy to pepperoni, and another $1 to upgrade pepperoni to mushroom, then I have spent $1 + $1 = $2.
All else equal, more money is good. If I spend $3 trading anchovy -> pepperoni -> mushroom -> anchovy, then I could have just stuck with anchovy from the start and had strictly more money, which would be better.

These are the conditions which make money a “measuring stick of utility”: more money is better (all else equal), and money adds. (Indeed, these are also the key properties of a literal measuring stick: distances measured by the stick along a straight line add, and bigger numbers indicate more distance.)

Why does this matter?

There’s a common misconception that every system can be interpreted as a utility maximizer, so coherence theorems don’t say anything interesting. After all, we can always just pick some “utility function” which is maximized by whatever the system actually does. It’s the measuring stick of utility which makes coherence theorems nontrivial: if I spend $3 trading anchovy -> pepperoni -> mushroom -> anchovy, then it implies that either (1) I don’t have a utility function over toppings (though I could still have a utility function ...
What's The Best Place to Look When You Have A Question About x?
by Chloe Thompson — 2022-05-25T13:51:14.384Z

Stackoverflow for programming
Perhaps UpToDate for medical stuff (but I'm not a doctor so I'm not sure)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for accessible but rigorous summaries of the philosophical literature on a given topic (though again I'm not an expert on this)
Even something most people here might take for granted but a lot of people in general wouldn't-- for questions that academics would research, going to Google Scholar and searching "x meta-analysis"

It seems like one big difference between someone totally unfamiliar with a given field/skill and someone familiar with it is just that the person familiar with it knows a really good (/the best) place (website, forum, potentially even a reference book etc) to look for answers about it.

It seems like simply learning where to look for answers about a given thing gives an instant boost, so I thought I'd ask people to share what the equivalents are for fields/topics that they have inside knowledge of. Doesn't have to be just academic fields, and sources don't have to be websites, it could be "call your local x, they'll have that info right on hand and are actually happy to take calls from the public".
This is obviously in the spirit of the classic The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, but where that aims to answer what you should read when you want to start learning all about a given field in general, here I'm asking where you should go when you have a more specific one-off thing you want answers on.

(I don't remember seeing a post like this before and didn't see one in a quick search, but if someone's aware of one and I'm doubling up let me know!)

In your answer say what topic/field/skill it's about, what 'place to look' you're suggesting, and what your suggestion is based on (e.g. "I've been a GP for 5 years and this is what all the GPs I know use when they have a medical question", or "I'm not an expert but I've personally found this useful").