trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How Much is Your Time Worth?
by lynettebye — 2019-09-02T06:19:28.511Z

“I didn’t get much done last week because it was so hot.”

It wasn’t the first time a client said this to me, and I was curious. “Have you considered getting an air conditioner if it’s that bad?”

“No” He replied (let’s call him Philip), “An open window is usually enough. It’s just that the heatwave this week was particularly bad.” When we discussed it a bit more, Philip said it didn’t seem worth the hassle since the AC only really felt necessary for a few weeks during the summer.

So, was Philip right? Is it worth buying an AC as a productivity hack?

How much is your time worth?

Most people don’t think about air conditioners when evaluating their productivity, because it’s not within the normal scope of time management. But if you frame productivity as the careful use of your resources - including time, effort, and money - to accomplish your goals, then an AC is fair game as a productivity hack. The question becomes “is the cost of buying the AC a good deal for the productive time it saves you?”

If you don’t already have an estimate of how much you will spend to save an hour, try estimating it with the tools below. A dollar value is a handy tool when deciding which time savers are a bargain.

This Clearer Thinking tool is convenient for calculating the value of a marginal hour of your time. (A normal work hour may be worth more or less to you, depending on whether you care more about output from focused work hours or work/life balance. The marginal output of an additional hour worked decreases, probably starting somewhere after three to six hours per day. On the other hand, the marginal value of an hour of free time to you starts increasing the more you’ve worked.)

Another way to calculate the value of a marginal hour of work time is to look at what you could earn in a marginal hour as a baseline for how much your time is worth, e.g. tutoring on Wyzant. These estimate how much you would be willing to pay for an hour of your time. If your income is particularly unstable or you have less than 6 months runway, you may want to be more cautious about spending money.

You could also try directly estimating the value you produce in an hour. Since this seems difficult to do for most people, a plausible proxy is how much existing met...
What are the biggest "moonshots" currently in progress?
by Liron — 2019-09-01T19:41:22.556Z

You know, "moonshot" projects like:

SpaceX's plan to colonize Mars
SpaceX's plan to give the whole world fast satellite internet
Tesla's plan to transition the world to sustainable energy
Boom making commercial supersonic flight a thing again

Let's make a list!

E.g. does anyone know if China has some huge construction projects that could qualify for this?
Probability as Minimal Map
by johnswentworth — 2019-09-01T19:19:56.696Z

What’s the difference between a map and the raw data used to generate that map?

Suppose, for example, that google sends a bunch of cars out driving around New York City, snapping photos every few feet, then uses the photos to reconstruct a streetmap. In an informational sense, what’s the difference between the giant database full of photos and the streetmap?

Obvious answer: the map throws away a huge amount of information which we don’t care about, at least for the map’s use-case.

Let’s try to formalize this intuition a little. We want the ability to run queries against the map - e.g. things like “How far apart are Times Square and the Met?” or questions about street network topology. Let’s call the whole class of queries we want to support Q. We also have some input data X - e.g. the database full of images from the streets of NYC. The goal of the map-synthesizing process is to throw out as much information as possible from X, while still keeping any and all information relevant to queries in Q.

Natural next question: given the query class Q and some data-generating process, can we characterize “optimal” map-making processes which maximize the amount of information “thrown out” (measured in an information-theoretic sense) while still keeping all information relevant to Q?

For the very simplest query classes, we can answer this question quite neatly.

Suppose that our query class contains only a single query q, and the query is a true/false question. For instance, maybe the only query we care about at all is q = “Is the distance between Times Square and the Met greater than one mile?”, and we want to throw out as much information as possible without losing any info relevant to the query.

Claim: any solution to this problem is isomorphic to the probability P[q|X]. In other words, P[q|X] is itself a minimal “lossless” map (where by “lossless” we mean it does not throw out any info from X relevant to the query, not that it perfectly predicts q), and any other minimal “lossless” map is a reversible transformation of P[q|X].

Let’s prove it.

We’ll formalize our claim in terms of mutual information I. We have two pieces:

P[q|X] throws away no information relevant to q: I(q;X)=I(q;P[q|X])
For any function g(X), if g throws away no information relevant to&

...
Tiddlywiki for organizing notes and research
by eukaryote — 2019-09-01T18:44:57.742Z
Link: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2019/09/01/tiddlywiki-for-organizing-notes-and-research/

Happy new school year to my fellow students! With my first year of grad school under my belt, and my sword and shield out for Round 2, I wanted to share a tool that’s helped me on my journey.

Two years ago, my go-to system for organizing my research and writing “citations in 3 different programs” + “pile everything into a haphazard series of google docs and hope for the best”. I figured this wasn’t great. After doing some reading and trying several alternatives, I discovered Tiddlywiki.

Tiddlywiki is an ancient open-source wiki application in the form of an html file. It has all the tools you need to make a wiki in the form of “tiddlers”, self-contained chunks of info that you can tag and link to each other. When you save the wiki, the program and your text all get wrapped up together into the same .html file – it both stores your info and is the program for running the wiki. It works on any web browser, as well as special programs.

I stuck with it and here’s why:

Wiki format: Wikis seem really compatible with the way my brain works. If I take notes on a book or article, that source gets its own tiddler on the wiki. They can then get interwoven, crosslinked, expanded upon, etc.

Elegant: Does most things I want it to. Easy to link to tiddlers and drag them or other files in from other wikis/folders. The structure is transparent and customizable.

Robust: Tiddlywikis from a decade ago are still perfectly functional today. The entire program and dataset lives in one small html file that runs on anything with a web browser.

Meta-aesthetics: Feeding all my data to Google is a little worrying. Tiddlywiki, meanwhile, is open-source and runs from your computer. The fact that the program is a quine is really neat.

Encryption: Tiddlywikis have an encryption function baked in. I don’t know if it’s very good. Consider using Veracrypt for better security. But if you don’t want to do that, here you go. This also means you can upload your wikis and backups to cloud services while keeping them encrypted. (Go to “Tools” in the sidebar, then click on the “set password” button. After you set a password, you can look at the .html file text to be sure that, yes, everything is encrypted into nonsense characters.)

Customizable: Easily change the color scheme, any text or formatting, the layout, etc. It’s extremely adaptable. You can also install a variety of plugins, though I haven’

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Welcome to Philadelphia SSC Meetup [Edit With Your Details]
by Majuscule — 2019-09-01T18:43:31.408Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
The Five Main Muscles for a Full Range of Natural Movement, Dynamic Alignment & Balance.
by leggi — 2019-09-01T03:22:38.247Z

Epistemic status. Full confidence. The anatomy is easily verifiable. Working towards fully utilising these muscles has changed my life. My story here.

For a less wordy introduction to the anatomy try here: The 5 Main Muscles Made Easy.

Introduction

Following an introduction to our midline anatomy and the median plane as the references for alignment and balance of the human body, think about how you move.

Do you move well?

Our System For Movement.

The main components of our 'system for movement' are:

Muscles

(The movers - tissue of action - background notes on muscles.)
Bones (Solid frame, attachment points for muscles.)
Brain (HQ. Receiving and processing sensory information and sending commands to body.)

Mind

(Observer and controller.)
Nerves (Communication network.)
Connective tissues (Just about everything else). We are physically interconnected from head to fingers to toes by the body-wide web of connective tissues (various forms of fibrous tissue) .

Do you have a full range of natural movement?

A Full Range of Natural Movement.

A full range of natural movement is what your body

should

be able to do. Your full potential. Not what you are currently able to do.

When the body is balanced, movement can flow through all potential positions. The head, arms and legs can all be moved independently, through their full range of motion, in a smooth and controlled manner, without effort or strain.

Examples of some of the body's capabilities.

To give some an idea of what the body is capable, consider the number of moving joints of the body (I'm not happy to provide a figure but various suggestions appear here on Quora.) and the range of motion of those joints (not an exhaustive list e.g. there's no data for the spinal column). The slightest movement in any joint - flexion, extension, adduction, abduction, rotation depending on the joint's capabilities - creates a novel pose. The body has innumerable positions - our posture/positioning/movement is a flow.

A full range of natural movement is possible when the body is functioning at optimal, dynamically balanced and aligned. (baselinehealing.com what does alignment mean?)

Anatomy of alignment and balance (recap):

The linea alba and nuchal & supraspinous ligaments are our main anatomical guides for body alignment.

Midline anatomy of the linea alba and nuchal and supraspino

...
Arguing Absolute Velocities
by Closed Limelike Curves — 2019-09-01T02:11:16.756Z

CW: Analogies

You and a friend are arguing over a physics question: "You're on a train speeding seventy miles per hour east, while you run 5 miles per hour west. How fast are you moving?"

That's obvious, you think to yourself. The question says I'm running 5 miles per hour west, so I must be moving 5 miles per hour west. The extra stuff about the train is just there to confuse me.

Your friend is just as convinced: If the train's moving 70 miles per hour east, and I'm running 5 miles per hour west, then my speed must be 65 miles per hour east, he reasons. I guess this guy must just be one of the slower kids at school. The next five minutes are spent in argument because you're telepathic and can hear your friend's mocking thoughts.

Then, because this was actually one of those dreams where you're back in high school and don't know any of the answers on the test, Galileo materializes in front of you.

"Forsake these notions of absolute velocity!" he booms. "Woe unto you, who have so quickly forgotten my doctrine of Galilean relativity! You are traveling 5 miles per hour west relative to the train, and 65 miles per hour east relative to the train tracks. You’re also going like a bajillion miles per hour around the sun."

You are both deeply embarrassed, and have learned your lesson. You will never again forget that a measurement devoid of context is meaningless. What matters is the relationship between measurements. To talk about velocities, you need a reference point to compare to.

Galileo smiles at you both as he fades away into the abstract concept of experimentation.

It’s temptingly easy to argue absolute velocities.

Take Scott’s SSC post, "How Bad Are Things?"

This is also why I am wary whenever people start boasting about how much better we’re doing than back in the bad old days. That precise statement seems to in fact be true. [… But] I don’t think we have any idea how many people do or don’t have it pretty good.

Now, this is, strictly speaking, true. Just because the world's improved, that doesn't mean the average person's life is good right now, because the question is wrong. Good or bad by what standard? How many people have it "Pretty good" depends almost entirely on what bar you pick, and not at all on how good people's lives actually are.

Even if you think the right bar is obvious, it isn't. You could put the bar for "a life worth living" at bare subsistence. Aft...
Bay Area Winter Solstice Volunteering
by Chelsea Voss — 2019-09-01T02:05:00.365Z

This year's Bay Area Winter Solstice will be held on Sunday, December 15 in the Chabot Planetarium. The Solstice is an annual gathering where we come together to celebrate humanity and the things that matter to us.

We're now soliciting volunteers from the Rationalist and Effective Altruist communities for the various volunteering roles that the Solstice will require! Consider giving a speech, leading a singalong, or joining the Bay Area Bayesian Choir for its autumn rehearsals. We're also looking for intrepid volunteers who might like to be in charge of A/V, food, programs, and other aspects of event logistics.

Apply here: https://tinyurl.com/wintersolstice2019contributors

New this year, we will also be having an unconference the Saturday immediately before Solstice, in the style and flavor of New York's Megameetup. Tickets will be sold separately. Stay tuned for details.

Cheers,
Nat, Claire, & Chelsea
Welcome to Twin Cities SSC Meetup [Edit With Your Details]
by Closed Limelike Curves — 2019-09-01T00:06:08.457Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Logical Counterfactuals and Proposition graphs, Part 2
by Donald Hobson — 2019-08-31T20:58:12.851Z

If you haven't read part 1, read it here.

In this post we extend the notion of propositional graphs to cover any first order theory.

Consider some arbitrary first order theory. For example a theory of integers.

We can consider the program to deal with two basic types. B={⊤,⊥} and N={0,1,2,...}. All the functions and transformation rules in the previous post apply to B. For example, ⊤ is of type B. ∧ is a function from B2→B.

3 and 7 are of type N, and < is a function from N2→B. So 3<7 is a valid Boolean that can be treated just like p with respect to the propositional transformations. ie (3<7)∧p≡p∧(3<7).

We can also add S:N→N the successor function. Here are some more equivalence rules you might want.

Sα<Sβ≡α<β

α<0≡⊥

0<Sα≡⊤

¬(α<β)≡β<Sα

In general, there is a finite list of types. Call them X1,X2,...Xn

All functions have a fixed number of inputs, each with a fixed type, and output something of a fixed type. In our parse tree from before, this means that our edges have one of finitely many different colours, and that each symbol node has a fixed pattern of colors for its inputs and outputs. + is a node of type N and both its children are of type N. < is a node of type B, and both its children are of type N. ¬ is of type B and has one child of type B. Where the output type is not clear, it may be indicated by a subscript. <B(3N,5N)

Before we can get to predicate logic, we will introduce a set of implicit variable symbols VX for each type X in use. V=∪nx=1VX is the set of all implicit variables. An implicit variable is an abstract symbol like ⊥ or 3. Specific implicit variables will be represented by capital roman letters (ABC). Substitution rules can also contain references to arbitrary members of some VX. Eg

Sub(ΓN,δN,+N(αN,βN))≡+N(Sub(ΓN,δN,αN),Sub(ΓN,δN,βN))

Sub(ΓN,δN,ΓN)≡δN

Here Sub is the substitution function, the αN,βN,δN represent any expression that has a real type. The ΓN represents any single symbol from the set VN.

Applying these equivalences tells us that

Sub(X,5,+(3,X))≡+(Sub(X,5,3),Sub(X,5,X))≡+(Sub(X,5,3),5)

If 3 is a shorthand for S(S(S(0))) then the rules Sub(ΓN,δN,S(αN))≡S(Sub(ΓN,δN,αN)) and Sub(ΓN,δN,0N)≡0N allow deduction all the way to +(Sub(X,5,3),5)≡8

A general first order theory makes use of = and ∀ as well as [/] for substitution. These do not need any special properties, and can be defined by the nor...
Peter Thiel/Eric Weinstein Transcript on Growth, Violence, and Stories
by Ben Pace — 2019-08-31T02:44:16.833Z

I’ve recently been through a spate of listening to podcasts. When I listened to the first ninety minutes of a three-hour conversation between Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel, I was surprised to hear echoed a lot of ideas we've discussed on LessWrong about stagnation in academia and scientific discourse more generally (e.g. here and here). I realised there was no good online transcript for people to read, discuss, and link to, so in my off-work hours as a hopefully useful public service, I thought I’d try my hand at making one, and used a format inspired by other podcasts who do the same (in this case, the often brilliant 80,000 Hours Podcast).

I've split it into five posts for readability. (Further notes on editing are in this comment.) I'll post them every couple of days for the next week or so. The posts are: this introduction, Stories About Academia, Stories About Education, Political Violence and Distraction Theories, and Stories About Progress.

I've finished listening to the podcast, and found it to contain a very interesting alternative worldview, that I've since come back to many times in conversation.

So without further ado.

Some of the topics discussed

What stories institutions tell when growth has stopped.
The argument that the physics community is the most important community on Earth.
Why we’re losing polymaths.
Why it can be bad to train too many people.
The relationship between automation and redistribution.
The theory that a great deal of political discourse is a distraction from not having solutions to the lack of innovation/growth.
How the theories of Rene Girard are an antidote to strong libertarian impulses.
The importance of a society not disillusioned about growth, but excited about growth.
Whether scientific progress can be a motivating story for society.

Highlights

Peter Thiel: The direct scientific questions, I think, are very hard to get a handle on. And the reason for this is that in late modernity, which we are living in, there's simply too much knowledge for any individual human to understand all of it. And so in this world of extreme hyper specialization, where it's narrower and narrower subsets of experts policing themselves and talking about how great they are, the string theorists talking about how great string theory is, the cancer researchers talking about how they're just about to cure cancer, the quantum computer researchers are just abo

...
What does social psychology tell us about getting consistent evaluations out of groups?
by Elizabeth — 2019-08-31T01:11:27.433Z

Suppose we have different groups repeatedly making the same kind of decision (ex: awards in a civil lawsuit). We would like their decisions to be consistent and predictable, and are even willing to trade some accuracy to do so.

Social psychology has a lot of predictions about things that will influence a groups answer, and thus could affect consistency (ex: a confident person speaking first will sway the group enormously) (assuming that survived the replication crisis, which I haven't checked). What other problems and solutions does post-crisis social psychology suggest when trying to get consistent evaluations out of groups?
How good a proxy for accuracy is precision?
by Elizabeth — 2019-08-31T01:01:57.330Z

Accuracy = averaging to the right answer.

Precision = having a low standard deviation.

It's easy to get a precise but inaccurate answer- just guess 0 every time. But for situations where people aren't goodharting, are a cluster of answers that are more similar to each other more likely to average to the correct answer than a cluster of answers that aren't? And how does that change based on how the answers were generated (e.g. same individual giving multiple answers over time vs. multiple individuals answering vs. multiple groups answering)? In what ways do accuracy and precision directly trade off against each other?
Can this model grade a test without knowing the answers?
by Elizabeth — 2019-08-31T00:53:42.538Z

In the 2012 paper "How To Grade a Test Without Knowing the Answers — A Bayesian Graphical Model for Adaptive Crowdsourcing and Aptitude Testing" (PDF), Bachrach et al describe a mathematical model for starting with

a set of questions without answers
a set of answerers (participants) of unknown quality

and ending up with assessments of:

correct answers for the questions
assessed difficulty for the questions
evaluations of the participants, including overall reliability and areas of expertise

Can the model actually do this? Is it the best model for doing this? What kind of problems does it handle well and poorly?
Look at the Shape of Your Utility Distribution
by zulupineapple — 2019-08-30T23:27:16.326Z

If we can talk about "expected utility", then "utility" has to be a random variable sampled form some distribution. You can then ask questions like "what is the probability that U is less than 10?" or, in other words, "how many outcomes have U<10, and how likely are they?". With those questions we can draw a probability density function for our utility distribution.

Here is a sketch of one such distribution. I'm going to assume that it is normal or common and then compare others to it. X-axis is utility ("bad" on the left, "good" on the right) and Y-axis is probability (the bottom line is 0). The peak in the middle says that some values of U are common for many outcomes. The tails on ether side say that the outcomes with very large of very low values of U are unlikely.

Here is another sketch. The left tail is heavy, meaning that "bad" outcomes are more likely than in the common distribution. An agent with this U distribution would exhibit caution or inaction, because the risk/reward ratio of most actions would be awful. The agent would say "what if I fail?". However, if precautions are taken, this agent would exhibit much more normal reward-seeking behavior. This state seems similar to human fear or anxiety.

Here is a similar distribution, but now the right tail is very thin, meaning that "good" outcomes are near-impossible. This agent would exhibit caution and inaction, just like the previous one. However this one would rather say "what's the point?". If nothing good is going to happen, then its best option is to stop wasting resources. At best the agent could try to prepare in case some misfortune may randomly befall it. This state seems similar to human depression.

Finally, a distribution with a thicker right tail, meaning that "good" outcomes are likely. This agent should be very active, since many actions will have great risk/reward. This could make the agent take unnecessary risks and waste resources. However, if the agent has well calibrated beliefs, this can lead to great productivity. In humans, similar states range from optimism to mania.

I believe that there is a direct relation between human emotions or mental states and the functions U and P. For example, it's hard to separate "I'm afraid" from "I believe...