trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Other utopias or searching the reference class for the rationality hub project
by gogishvilli — 2021-02-15T15:38:02.435Z

Let's find the reference class for the new rational hub project, come up with some parameters to assess them, and quarter-bake a model to constrain our migration expectations.

I arbitrarily selected Free Town Project and Rajneeshpuram. If after the discussion the model will seem worthy - we can google other examples and get a rough feel for its predictive power.

This post started from a message to my friend:

“FSP- weak pull, zero requirements- moved 2k. Rajneeshpuram - very strong pull, cult level requirements - 7k, Rationalists - mid pull, few hard requirements- assuming linear importance of both - should it be more successful other things being equal?”

This post is an attempt to expand on it. I'm ignorant of details of both and the US reality as well, but I'll try to extract relevant parameters and not to assess the specifics, so I'll just ignore the details and gaps and model something in the right direction. The parameters, ordered by obscurity ascending:

Pull - what brings people together

Alternatively - how hard it is to live outside the community if you believe X?

FSP - there's a lot of libertarians, the ideology is vague and abstract - one can live okay in most of the US.

Rajneeshpuram - a cult of personality, very specific ideology - it's very hard to follow it outside of the community in the USA, maybe better in India, but few people choose to live there.

Rationality hub - one can live with normies, but it's quite dull, a lot of people have already moved to the nearest hub. Somebody who's finished the Sequences seems quite dedicated to me.

Requirements/Demands - how hard it is to live in the community?

FSP - no demands, nothing positive bring together, no constructive program - totally no constraints of expectations - no person who's not miserable and values what they have will move. My guess is that anarchists would have more pull

Rajneeshpuram - cult. If you like everything but this sexist thing, you'll be peer pressured AF. Looks like only people who agree with the ideology 100% wouldn't be miserable there, although the first two episodes of Wild Wild Country suggest otherwise.

Rationality hub - demands to understand the craft and have similar values. Most of us have quite specific expectations, won't be pressed to observe any rituals, if we agree with the values but think that 60% of the sequences are overkill or that most of the...
Semaglutide is cool, but no one wants to talk about b. animalis ssp. lactis?
by CraigMichael — 2021-02-15T09:50:30.979Z

[Epistemic status: I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but there are two RCTs supporting this. Also I talk about poop.]

Like many others, I've been excitedly reading about semaglutide over the last few days. For someone like Stephan Guyenet, author or The Hungry Brain, it seems like a vindication of the weight regulation model via the brain and signaling hormones (what he calls the lipostat) and he seems excited about it.

But let me tell you a quick story. I got a stomach bug, probably something like traveler's diarrhea, a few months ago. I tried several things to help fix it, and at one point was at Whole Foods starring down the wall of probiotics.

I Googled "probiotics by level of evidence" and one of the first page results was the Clinical Guide to Probiotic Products Available in USA. No one else was in the aisle, so I took some time to skim it. It has a table of probiotic supplements showing the level of evidence for each (the familiar Level I, Level II and Level III) related to what they're intended to treat and the strains of probiotics in the supplement.

That whole list was surprising and worth reading in terms of evidence for probiotics to support mood and affect, lower LDL-C, etc. But looking specifically at weight management, all of the probiotics for it contain some form of B. animalis ssp. lactis in the dose around 10 billion per capsule per day or higher. There's two Level I (RCT-level studies) showing it's effectiveness for that purpose. It's also in Activia yoghurt but the dose is much smaller.

Someone on Wikipedia thinks this is Bifidobacterium animalis from Activia.

I was and remain skeptical, but nothing sets off my evidence evaluation alarm bells. The first of the two, a 2016 study, was published in EBioMedicine and is in the 89th percentile in General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology. The second is from 2020 and is in Scientific Reports which is in the 93rd percentile under the category Multidisciplinary. Neither of them are on Beall's List. The results aren't as spectacular as semaglutide where people saw a 17.4% reduction in weight over 68 weeks. But they are pretty good. In the 2016 study here was a 4.5% reduction over 6 months (in the best case where it was given with additional dietary fiber).

From the 2020 study.

2020 study showing changes in body weight, BMI and waist circumference

In the 20...
Contact with reality
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-02-15T04:53:39.739Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

In thought experiments descended from Nozick’s classic “experience machine,” you consider how being plugged into a machine that generates the experience of a certain kind of life (generally, a very pleasant one) compares with some alternative. Such comparisons are meant to tease apart the purely experiential aspect of life from other factors — in particular, factors related to what we might call “contact with reality.”

This post examines the idea of “contact with reality.” In particular, I try to evoke and defend the possibility (though not the obligation) of caring about contact with reality, regardless of its impact on your own pleasure, or on the lives of others.

I. Experience machines

As a tool for thinking about the value of “contact with reality,” cases involving experience machines are often left importantly underspecified: the question of what sort of “contact with reality” one has is not settled by the fact that one is plugged into a machine. In particular, the following four questions seem important:

Are you alone in your simulated world? E.g., are there other conscious people in this world, or not?
How wrong are you about the simulated world?
How wrong are you about the real world?
Do you know that you’re in the machine, once you’re in it? (The usual assumption is no).

(We can also ask questions about things like autonomy, but I’m going not going to focus on these.)

Questions about the non-machine alternative matter a lot, too. For example, the duties, relationships, and opportunities to do good one has or would have in the non-machine alternative are clearly relevant (though note that these matter in certain simulated worlds, too). And more generally, an informed comparison requires knowing what sorts of experiences, and what types of contact with reality, the non-machine alternative offers.

Finally, various specific questions about the choice set-up matter. Do you start out in the real world, or the machine world? Are you allowed to try out each alternative, to see what it’s like? Can you change you mind later? Can you split your time? How long is one committed to one vs. the other at a stretch? How much psychological continuity (including continuity of memory) is there as you switch? And so forth.

II. Being alone

The versions of the machine world that seem to me most informative involve being (a) alone, and (b) wro...
What didn’t happen
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-15T04:30:12.132Z

I have a secret fiction blog, which I intermittently mean to publish things on, but apparently haven’t now in over ten years, which seems like a reasonable point at which to make it less secret. Here is the start. It’s not very long.

Here is an excerpt inspired by events leading to my first kiss (names changed, coincidence with name of my later partner coincidental):

The main argument for believing other people are conscious is that in all other respects they resemble you. Carrie stared tiredly into the crowd of blurs surrounding her and found this argument uncompelling. She couldn’t actually imagine thinking any of the things that had recently been shouted near her, which strengthened the hypothesis that nobody else was thinking them either. Which pressed the question of why someone was simulating this particular reality for her, and what the significance was of a tall man screeching ‘It’s beer pong o clock!’.

She had the same unease with movies often. Did that scene of the couple driving in their car add something to the plot? Either half the movie was revealing information entirely invisible to her, or film producers went to great expense to make films a certain length despite the fact that no story required it. She liked to think that if she spent years studying this it would all make sense, as she regularly insisted to other people that everything did if you studied it enough. Part of her was terrified that this wasn’t true. When it got too insistent a bigger, more heavily armed part of her would menacingly point out, ‘that doesn’t make sense and you have zero reason to believe it’ and the other part would whimper ‘what if that doesn’t matter?’ and go off to wring its hands in a less conscious corner. A short handsome boy sat down unusually close to Carrie, and she turned to make funny noises at him.

“Paul. How do you do?”

“Uh..I..do..am.. Carrie..fine, actually.. not.. sorry, never mind”, Carrie smiled reassuringly.

“You’re cute. What do you do?” He pretended to be pushed closer to her by someone else sitting on his other side.

When she was younger Carrie had had a reasonably high prior on her having a male partner, or several, in her lifetime. By the time she was eighteen and still didn’t have a single close friend, let alone a male one, ‘kiss someone, ever” was well down her list of unrealistically optimistic goals, between ‘stop global warming’...
Not Yet the Dawn
by Slimepriestess — 2021-02-15T04:00:12.103Z

How many is too many?

How much is too much?

How do we live with the numbers? These damned numbers.

R0, R1, the case fatality rate, the hospitalization rate, the rate of ICU overcrowding, the number of infected, the number of dead, the number of bodies piling up in morgues, when does it all stop really meaning anything and just become this exercise in abstraction?

And is that what we need to do to cope with it?

How do we get up and go to work every morning in a world where

the state of California had to relax it’s clean air laws so they could burn a backlog of bodies?

How do we talk about The Mandalorian and the latest celebrity gossip and act like everything’s fine while the equivelant of 9/11 is happening every day?

How do we manage to eat breakfast, put on our shoes and masks, and live our lives like we aren’t in the midst of what will hopefully be the largest and most traumatic event of our lives?

How do we live with it as a people? How do we live with it as people?

How are we going to deal with the fact that society values its utility more than the lives of a significant portion of the people living in it?

Will we eschew the values of liberal humanism or will we double down on them and if those two positions come into a conflict, who wins?

What will become of us after this?

After. There are so many things which will come after, because of this. But we aren’t living in After, not yet anyway.

The long night is not over, and this is not yet the dawn.

What does it mean to care about each other when the scope of each other becomes too large to comprehend?

Words are easy, wearing a mask is easy enough, but beyond that? To stare into the vast abstraction of intensive care units and overworked doctors and nurses, to understand that every death is a human with a name and face and story and do something with that knowledge other than sink into despair?

Laugh nervously and change the topic. Did you buy any stock in Gamestop? Check out this meme I found. Did you hear who got cancelled last week?

What’s happening to us? What is this doing to us as a culture? What’s it doing to us as people?

How do we handle the severe case of collective PTSD we’re all going to be left with?

How do we handle the gaslighting that governments and corporations are going to inflict on us to try and make us believe that they did the best they could and that they really do care for us?

When...
The Median is Less than the Average
by lsusr — 2021-02-15T02:28:39.788Z

In The Economics of Media I discussed how news is written by large organizations including businesses, governments and major political parties.

The same was true in the age of paper media except with the addition of more powerful local monopolies. Much of the United States (and likely the rest of the world) had one (or few) major newspaper(s). Chaos favors the underdog. When a single company controls an industry, it is incentivized to promote stability. It is more important for a monopoly newspaper to censor offensive news than to create interesting content.

We often think of "censorship" as suppression of politically sensitive topics. Actually, most censorship pertains to merely offensive topics. In the forewords and afterwords to Gary Larson's The Far Side collections you'll find incident after incident of his work (which is far less titillating than xkcd) getting suppressed by puritan surburban readers—usually for reasons unrelated to politics. Paper newspapers maintained their monopolies by regurgitating bland moderation.

Centralized anything is a single point of failure. Is is easy to suppress a centralized operation like Bing, Facebook, YouTube, WeChat, a school or The Seattle Times. It is impossible to censor the entire Internet. Before the Internet, the only opinions you could conveniently access were those which passed all the filters built into the centralized paper publishers. Now you can access all the opinions.

Increased information makes smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you are smart then increased access to information is unequivocably a good thing. You can master basically any technical subject just from the books available on two websites. If you are stupid then increased information makes the world a confusing place because it's harder to just conform to the party line. Increased information means there is more media specifically designed to dupe stupid people. The Internet increases the variance of human intelligence.

Human intelligence is asymmetrically distributed. Intelligence is capped on the bottom but it is long-tailed at the top. It is more like a Poisson distribution than a Gaussian distribution. The median is less than the average. As variance increases, the difference gap between average and median widens. Increased variance in intelligence is a pressure behind increasing income inequality. It makes the world less e...
How is rationalism different from utilitarianism?
by Wang Street Journal — 2021-02-15T02:04:25.102Z

Would appreciate either theoretical explanations or illustration using examples. I am new to the forum, and it appears to me that both rationalists and utilitarianists would use "utility maximization" as the key decision criterion. Maybe for rationalists, "utility" is defined narrower because certain values are upheld or preferred over others (e.g. uphold Truth and the scientific process).

Take an example from daily life, say your friend bought you a jacket as a gift. You find the jacket hideous. Your friend asks you how you like the jacket. Should you tell the truth (e.g., doesn't think it suits you) or should you tell a white lie (e.g., you love it)? Would the decision-making calculus of a rationalist differ from that of a utilitarianist?
The Future of Nuclear Arms Control?
by Gentzel — 2021-02-15T01:50:01.757Z

In the early Cold War, weapons were not very accurate and intelligence collection often wasn’t very good or up to date. If you were a war planner, the advent of the hydrogen bomb solved a lot of problems for you: even if you didn’t know exactly where a target was, and even if your weapon could miss by hundreds of meters, with a large enough nuclear yield, you could still guarantee the destruction of whatever targets you hoped to hit.
But with giant yield weapons, comes massive collateral damage, likely far beyond what is required to deter decision makers. The difference between a TSAR bomb (or its modern equivalent) and the lowest settings of a mini-nuke is still an order of magnitude larger than the difference between the conventional “mother of all bombs” and a hand grenade. The Beirut explosion last year was the size of the hand grenade blast in this analogy… but if you feel the need to visualize the differences more precisely, you can use NUKEMAP.
Massive yield weapons aren’t just big explosions: they produce more radioactive nuclear fallout that can spread over thousand miles and kill people for years, larger (though less efficient) electromagnetic pulses that can disable electronic grids and large electronic devices over millions of square miles, and mushroom clouds that can reach the stratosphere, contributing to nuclear winter.
With the proliferation of sensors, precision weapons, and fusion of information by narrow artificial intelligence, giant weapon yields may no longer necessary to assure deterrence. In my view, this presents the opportunity the reduce the risk of nuclear winter, but how would you achieve that?
In “Winter-Safe Deterrence” Seth Baum argues that limiting the global nuclear arsenals to ~50 weapons may be a path that allows a degree of deterrence while not threatening enough cities to threaten the global climate. To dig in to more detail and slightly contest the paper: it is not a limit of 50 weapons per say that assures the climate, but rather how large the weapons are and what they are aimed at. Since large yield weapons can loft dust straight to the stratosphere, they don’t even have to produce firestorms to start contributing to nuclear winter: once you get particles that block sunlight to an altitude that heating by the sun can keep them lofted, you’ll block sunlight a very long time and start harming crop yields. To get soot hi...
Remembering people's name with Anki
by Arthur Milchior — 2021-02-14T16:34:02.274Z

Anki changed my life in a lot of way. But the most obvious one is that, thanks to Anki, I do finally recall people's name ! You can find my example, with my name and picture, on my website.

How I know that anki really works

I'm really bad at remembering faces and names[1]. With anki, it did change a lot. I started a new job in September 2017 as a post-doc. A month before starting, I went on the website of the laboratory I was joining, and I red the list of my future colleagues. I then created a card with their picture, first-name, last name. If the picture were not on their professional webpage, I did try to find them on the web and in social media. In September, when I started my job, I already knew their name[2].

I was able to easily see the effect of Anki, because I realized that, while I knew the name of the colleague who have an Anki card, I still had trouble recalling the name of the few colleague who had no Anki cards. I.e. if a problem had no picture of themselves on the web, I wasn't able to recall their name. In particular, it was hard for me to learn the name of the administrative staff, because their name and pictures do not appear on our website. .

Using Anki to learn name has a strange side-effect. When I see the face of a colleague, I need to recall to which picture of Anki he looks like, and then I can recall his[3] name. So, it's still a costly process in my head, since using Anki created an unusual indirection.

Of course, I could ask anyone without picture on the web whether I could take a picture to add in my database. Bit I believe it would have sound strange.

Remaining problems

One problem with the Anki method is that it only works when I made cards. However, most of the time, I don't think about taking time to make the cards. I should certainly remember the name of people I meet in conferences, they could be future colleagues, they could lead to job opportunities or to scientific collaborations. Recalling their name and where we meet is thus important. But I don't necessarily think about doing it while in the conference. And once I leave the conference, I never do the card.

Similarly, I've got a life outside of my work. For example, when I meet friend of friend, I may want to recall them. But I can't necessarily ask to take a picture of them. And if I met them at a queer event, a polyamory event, or a BDSM event, I think adding this infor...
Notes on Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" (2020)
by MichaelA — 2021-02-14T08:40:49.243Z

Cross-posted to the Effective Altruism Forum (but with a brand new and improved structure)

I recently finished reading Henrich's 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. I would highly recommend it, along with Henrich's 2015 book The Secret of Our Success; I've roughly ranked them the 8th and 9th most useful-to-me of the 47 effective-altruism-related books I've read since learning about effective altruism (EA).

In this post, I'll:

Summarise my "four main updates" from this book
Share the Anki cards I made for myself when reading the book[1]

I intend this as a lower-effort alternative to writing notes specifically for public consumption or writing a proper book review
If you want to download the cards themselves to import them into your own deck, follow this link.

My hope is that this will be a low-effort way for me to help some people to quickly:

Gain some key insights from the book
Work out whether reading/listening to the book is worth their time

(See also Should pretty much all content that's EA-relevant and/or created by EAs be (link)posted to the Forum?)

You may find it also/more useful to read

This review of the book on LessWrong (which I haven't read myself)
The Wikipedia page on the book
The Slate Star Codex review of Secret of Our Success

My four main updates

I wrote this quickly and only after finishing the book; take it all with a grain of salt.

Here are what I think are the four main ways in which WEIRDest People shifted my beliefs on relatively high-level points that seem potentially decision-relevant, as distinct from specific facts I learned:

The book made me a bit less concerned about unrecoverable collapse and unrecoverable dystopia (i.e., the two types of existential catastrophe other than extinction, in Toby Ord's breakdown)

This is because a big part of my concern was based on the idea that the current state and trend for things like values, institutions, and political systems seems unusually good by historical standards, and we don't fully understand how that state and trend came about, so we should worry that any "major disruption" could somehow throw us off course and that we wouldn't be able to get back on course (see Beckstead, 2015).

E.g., perhaps a major war could knock us from a stable equilibrium with many liberal democracies to a stable equilibrium with many authorit

...