trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
App and book recommendations for people who want to be happier and more productive
by KatWoods — 2021-11-06T17:40:40.592Z

If somebody asks you the same question more than ten times, that’s probably a sign it’s time to write a blog post about it. So after being asked by far more than ten people about what books and resources I recommend, both for EAs more broadly and for people interested in charity entrepreneurship more specifically, here it is! After spending roughly the last 15 years optimizing nearly constantly, these are the systems and products I recommend.

If you know better versions of what I recommend, please share it in the comments! While I recommend the apps I use, I’m sure there’s ones out there that do the same thing but in a better way and I just haven’t had the time or energy to pay the switching costs yet.

Apps and Extensions

Game-changers. Everybody should be using these.

Video Speed Controller.

This allows you to hot key change the speed of videos anywhere on Chrome. It also doesn’t limit you to 2x, which so many apps do for some reason. You'll never (involuntarily) watch things on 1x again.
Clipboard history with

CopyQ

(Mac) or

here

for Windows. Absolute game changer. It remembers everything you've copy-pasted and you can click it from a list or use shortcut keys to paste them again in the future. Saves you so much time and hassle. It's hard to describe how much this changes how you use your computer.

Switch between your two most recent tabs

. Use the shortcut Alt + Q to switch between your two most recently used tabs. It's like alt-tab but for tabs instead of windows. I can't imagine navigating a computer without this. It feels crippling. I know that there are better ones that allow you cycle through multiple tabs, not just your most recent. If you know of one, recommend it in the comments! I just haven't had the spare time to optimize this more.

Google docs quick create

. Shortcut key or single click to automatically create a new google document or spreadsheet. Saves a ton of time.

​Very good. Will be extremely useful for a lot of, but not all, people

Quickcompose.

You know how easy it is to get distracted by your inbox when you need to send an email? Quick compose makes it so that you can open up a window that’s just a compose window so you can’t get distracted by new emails.

I don't care about cookies.

Makes it so that Chrome automatically accepts cookies, so you never have to click "I accept cookies" ever again.

StayFocusd.

Limits

...
Chu are you?
by Adele Lopez — 2021-11-06T17:39:45.332Z
Link: http://adelelopez.com/chu-are-you

Maybe you've heard about something called a Chu space around here. But what the heck is a Chu space? And whatever it is, does it really belong with all the rich mathematical structures we know and love?

Say you have some stuff. What can you do with it?

Maybe it's made of little pieces, and you can do a different thing with each little piece.

But maybe the pieces are structured in a certain way, and you aren't allowed to do anything that would break this structure.

A Chu space is a versatile way of formalizing anything like that!

To represent something in a Chu space, we'll put the names of our pieces on the left. How about the rules? For a Chu space, the rules are about allowed ways to color our pieces. To represent these rules, we can simply make columns showing all the allowed ways we can color our pieces (just get rid of any columns that break the rules). Here's what a basic 3-element set (pictured on the left) looks like as a Chu space:

It doesn't have any sort of structure, so we show that by allowing all the possible colorings (with two colors). Chu spaces that don't have any rules (i.e. all colorings are allowed) are equivalent to sets.

What about the one with the arrows from above? How can we make an arrow into a coloring rule? One way we could do it is by stipulating that if there's an arrow x→y, we'll make a rule that if x is colored black, then y has to be colored black too, where x and y can stand in for any of the pieces. Here's what that Chu space looks like:

Spend a minute looking at the picture until you're convinced that our coloring rule is obeyed for every arrow on the left side of the picture. Any Chu space that has this kind of arrow rule has the structure of a poset.

There and back again

If we have two Chu spaces, say A and B, what sort of maps should we be able to make between them?

We'd like to be able to map the pieces of A to the pieces of B. So this part of our map will just be a normal function between sets:

f:Apieces→Bpieces

But we also want our maps to respect the rules of A as it maps to B. How can we check this?

Let's think through how we would be able to tell if a potential map did break the rules. The map will take pieces of A to pieces of B, so let's look at the pieces of B that got mapped onto, i.e. f(Apieces). It will help if we have a concrete example in mind, so let's consider a potential map that we think should break the rule...
Substack Ho?
by Zvi — 2021-11-06T16:50:01.012Z

For a while now, I’ve been unhappy with WordPress. Their new editor is effectively unusable, and I’ve been using first Google Docs and recently LessWrong’s editor to compose new posts.

Last week, I was approached by a representative from Substack who pitched me on moving my blog from WordPress to Substack. This is my attempt to break down the pros and cons and decide whether to do it.

The advantages of Substack are:

The ability to sell subscriptions. It’s right there on the site, and many people who would subscribe have already entered their information subscribing to another Substack. Right now, if you want to support my writing (which to be very clear I absolutely do not need in any way, and if you are constrained by money please do not do this, but which is appreciated and motivating), you have to do so on Patreon. If I was bringing in more, I would be able to use some of that to improve quality (buy more subscriptions to other things, potentially hire editors or researchers to help, or simply justify devoting more time). At the extreme, there are worlds where this becomes my job, although no reasonable estimates have me close to that even if my other obligations were to wind down cleanly.
Email newsletter as a form of distribution, and a way to collect contact information. WordPress lets you subscribe to posts so you can get notified, but that’s one step removed and I don’t get those people’s contact information. This would likely get more people reading and give me a method of contacting people if it ever seemed worthwhile. You also get open rates and clickthrough rates on the emails, which is good data.
Actual human support to help their writers seems to be available, at least at the level I’m currently on, which is nice.
Their default comments formatting is superior to what I currently have on WordPress, except for the baseline ability to like comments, which I hate, but which I would be able to (and would) remove.
Some amount of extra discoverability via leader boards and via a link to my Twitter account. Some people are still subscribing to my mostly defunct Aikido Sports Substack that way. Some potential for additional promotion in the future, or other synergies with other Substack writers, although not now.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that Substack was more likely to improve over time relative to a default WordPress setup I’d get if I do

...
CFAR, responsibility and bureaucracy
by ChristianKl — 2021-11-06T14:53:28.290Z

Status: I wrote the draft for this article a few months before the more recent discussions. While I'm not sure that I get everything right, I believe that simply publishing my post is better then to keep it in my drawer.

Introduction

CFAR was founded in the spirit of being a place where we learn to make better decisions through thinking better about the involved issues. As founders left it drifted into an organization that tries to solve issues by bureaucracy instead of trying to solve them through thinking better.

I will focus this post on the underlying ideas and not the people involved. I do value the involved people that I know and think they are generally great people.

CFAR handling of Brent

One episode that CFAR itself sees as a

mistake

was how they dealt with Brent. Instead of investigating the ideas and reasoning processes that lead to the mistake, CFAR considered the solution to be that they need more bureaucracy. The bureaucratic solutions are solutions that any other organization might have come up with. While CFAR was founded to be a place for new ideas they just copied bureaucratic ideas from elsewhere.

Where do reasoning errors come from? They come from what people believe. The document states in a shallow way that I could have read anywhere else:

As event organizers, we have a responsibility to help keep our attendees safe.

One staff member left CFAR over making the mistake regarding Brent. The staff member currently has their own personal development program. While explaining how the program works the staff member said about responsibility:

Everyone's learning and growth is their own responsibility. I'm responsible for myself and I'm here to learn and grow and you are responsible for yourself, your learning and your growth.

One person who is in the program told me about it and took it as a great message of individual empowerment. The core issue here is that believing it's the role of the event organizers to keep everybody safe is at odds with the idea that everybody is responsible for themselves. The decision to invite a person to a workshop is and considering it the responsibility of the person to ensure their safety is at odds with the idea that it's the teachers job to keep people safe.

I learned a lot from that staff member, I think he's a great person.

Where does the other idea come from?

If this value difference surprises you, you might ask yo...
Speaking of Stag Hunts
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2021-11-06T08:20:34.967Z

This is an essay about the current state of the LessWrong community, and the broader EA/rationalist/longtermist communities that it overlaps and bridges, inspired mostly by the dynamics around these three posts. The concepts and claims laid out in Concentration of Force, which was originally written as part one of this essay, are important context for the thoughts below.

Summary/thesis, mostly cribbed from user anon03's comment below: In many high-importance and high-emotion discussions on LessWrong, the comments and vote distribution seem very soldier-mindset instead of scout-mindset, and the overall soundness and carefulness of reasoning and discourse seems to me to be much lower than baseline, which already felt a smidge too low. This seems to indicate a failure of the LW community further up the chain (i.e. is a result of a problem, not the problem itself) and I think we should put forth real effort to fix it, and I think the most likely target is something like a more-consistent embrace and enforcement of some very basic rationality discourse norms.

(And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.)

I claim that something has gone a little bit wrong.

And as readers of many of my/other/essays/know, I claim that things going a little bit wrong is often actually quite a big problem.

I am not alone in thinking that the small scale matters. Tiny mental flinches, itty bitty little incentives, things thrown ever so slightly off course (and then never brought back). That small things often have outsized or cumulative effects is a popular view, either explicitly stated or discernible as an underlying assumption in the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, Logan Brienne Strohl, Scott Alexander, Anna Salamon, and Andrew Critch, just to name a few.

Yet I nevertheless feel that I encounter resistance of various forms when attempting to point at small things as if they are important. Resistance rather than cooperative disagreement—impatience, dismissal, often condescension or sneering, sometimes projection and strawmanning.

This is absolutely at leas...
Concentration of Force
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2021-11-06T08:20:18.991Z

This essay began as part one of a longer piece. Part one is standalone and "timeless." Part two is focused on the local dynamics of the EA/rationality/longtermist communities and LessWrong in November of 2021. Following wise advice from Zack_M_Davis, I've split them into two separate posts. Nevertheless, I recommend that people intending to read both seriously consider reading them back-to-back, so that the content of this one is fresh in the mind. It's both something of a prerequisite and also relevantly context-setting.

Introduction

Concentration of force is a military concept (sometimes referred to as "mass"). It used to be concentration of forces, until innovations like machine guns and cruise missiles made gathering all of your actual personnel together into more of a liability.

The idea is simple. Essentially, there is a difference between relevant moments and irrelevant moments. Battles and non-battles, moments of engagement and moments between engagements.

At each relevant moment, you want to project locally superior or overwhelming force. Perhaps this means having the most soldiers/guns/tanks/planes actually present, or perhaps this just means having the right missiles pointed in the right directions.

If you are good at coordination and maneuver, you can concentrate force in most or every engagement, and consistently win even against an overall larger or more powerful opponent. This is how guerrilla warfare works—you choose the time and place of conflict in order to ensure that you outnumber the enemy in each specific encounter, and you fade into the mists before their reinforcements arrive.

Red wins each of the depicted engagements handily.

I claim that the Grey Tribe generally, and rationalists/longtermists/EAs more specifically, and LessWrong the website and community even more specifically, are systematically and spectacularly failing at concentration of force. That none of those groups puts anything like sufficient strategic energy into ensuring that critical mass coheres at crucial moments, and that each would benefit from optimizing their ability to do so quickly, reliably, and effectively, and from thinking in terms of concentration of force as a matter of habit.

I anticipate a (reasonable) objection along the lines of "mistake theory rather than conflict theory!" or "generous tit-for-tat rather ...
Study Guide
by johnswentworth — 2021-11-06T01:23:09.552Z

This post is for students who hope to eventually work on technical

problems we don’t understand

, especially agency and AI alignment, and want to know what to study or practice.

Guiding Principles

Current alignment researchers have wildly different recommendations on paths into the field, usually correlated with the wildly different paths these researchers have themselves taken into the field. This also correlates with different kinds of work on alignment. This guide largely reflects my own path, and I think it is useful if you want to do the sort of research I do. That means fairly theoretical work (for now), very technical, drawing on models and math from a lot of different areas to understand real-world agents.

Specializing in Problems We Don’t Understand

lays out a general framework which guides many of the recommendations here. I’ll also briefly go over some guiding principles more specific to choosing what (and how much) to study:

Breadth over depth
Practice generalizing concepts
Be able to model anything
High volume of knowledge

Breadth Over Depth

In general, study in any particular topic has decreasing marginal returns. The first exposure or two gives you the basic frames, tells you what kinds of questions to ask and what kinds of tools are available, etc. You may not remember everything, but you can at least remember what things to look up later if you need them - which is a pretty huge improvement over not even knowing that X is a thing you can look up at all!

Another way to frame this: problems-we-don’t-understand rely heavily on bringing in frames and tools from other fields. (If the frames and tools of this field were already sufficient, it wouldn’t be a problem-we-don’t-understand in the first place.) So, you want to have a very large library of frames and tools to apply. On the other hand, you don’t necessarily need very much depth in each frame or tool - just enough to recognize problems where it might apply and maybe try it out in a quick-and-dirty way.

Practice Generalizing Concepts

Bringing in frames and tools from other fields requires the ability to recognize and adapt those frames and tools for problems very different from the field in which we first learned them. So, practice generalizing concepts from one area to another is particularly important.

Unfortunately, this is not a focus in most courses. There are exceptions - applied math classes often ...
Nightclubs in Heaven?
by J Bostock — 2021-11-05T23:28:19.461Z

I worry primarily about whether there are nightclubs in Heaven.

-Tom Waits

Nightclubs are a strange thing. Loud music, people crammed in amongst one another, they are usually physically uncomfortable. Spending the night in one involves a loss of sleep (and usually loss of one's senses via alcohol or similar substances). They are an experience remarkably unique to young folk.

I suspect the rationalist community aren't the biggest fans of them. But I think experiences like it are an interesting part of the human experience. There seem to be many things which are exclusively done by certain age demographics. What are the reasons?

Physiological? As we get older, people get less able to handle exhaustion and hangovers.
Cultural? Being over 35 in a nightclub is weird, and older people have more responsibilities.
Psychological? Something about the experience just stops resonating with older people.

As someone who's just past the "nightclub-heavy" portion of my life, it's genuinely quite spooky how quickly my preferences have changed.

Eternal Life and Eudaimonia

One of the cases I make for living forever, or at least a few billion years (to other young people, everyone I speak to over 35 seems to be onboard with it) is this: you imagine a world where everyone is old, but with immortality, everyone is young; in fact everyone is younger than the youngest people now, because they have more years left. But I'm not 100% sure about this.

Years left and years spent are confounded in our current existence. Old people and young people differ due to a mixture of both. But what happens when both are centuries?

(This might be a moot point. With AGI we might have enormous control over our psychology, but on the other hand I suspect meddling with our psychology is one of the riskiest things we can do as a species.)

One of the differences is that old people have made more mistakes than young people. This is one of the most noticeable differences between me2021 and me2016. Some of these aren't worth repeating, but a great many mistakes people make in their youths are basically harmless and very entertaining (and I am no exception).

Eudaimonia is a word which comes up a lot with regards to this sort of discussion. There is a potential failure mode of humanity which slowly dissolves into boredom.

Biology and Society

I do have hope here. This is not one of my biggest worries abo...
Comments on OpenPhil's Interpretability RFP
by paulfchristiano — 2021-11-05T22:36:04.733Z

I'm very excited about research that tries to deeply understand how neural networks are thinking, and especially to understand tiny parts of neural networks without too much concern for scalability, as described in OpenPhil's recent RFP or the Circuits thread on Distill.

I want to give some detail on the kind of research I'm most excited about and why.

(Disclaimer: These are off-the-cuff thoughts. I'm not at all an expert in this area, just someone who cares a lot about alignment and has opinions.)

Why I'm excited about interpretability

I'm very scared of powerful AI doing something deliberately destructive that no one wanted it to do. If we had a reasonably complete story about how a neural network was thinking, then I doubt this failure mode would take us by surprise---we'd be able to see that the model was only behaving well on the training distribution because we were watching, and understand that the model was capable and inclined to cause harm when deployed. I think that even a partial understanding could provide a huge amount of clarity on open disputes about how models will generalize and when they may pose risks.

So the simplest positive case for interpretability is that it gives us a much clearer warning about an impending problem. That may or may not be enough for us to get our act together and fix the problem, but it's at least a start.

Beyond that, interpretability plays a central role in many proposals for training safe AI. For example, we might use interpretability to help identify cases where the model would behave badly, to help ensure that the model never develops deceptive intent, or to help understand what the model knows about the world so that we can better evaluate its outputs. We don't really know which of these approaches will pan out, but the fact that interpretability keeps coming up makes it seem important beyond just a warning shot.

Some of these approaches would put more "strain" on an interpretability method. If we optimize models so that they don't appear to think certain kinds of thoughts, then gradient descent will find a way to hide those thoughts. I don't know if interpretability techniques would ever be strong enough to stand up to this kind of optimization pressure, but I think interpretability is incredibly useful anyway---it still gives you a key warning shot, and many of the potential applications in the training...