trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Causal Undertow: A Work of Seed Fiction
by Daniel Murfet — 2024-12-08T21:41:48.132Z

A short story, best enjoyed in-context... try exploring possible meanings of some of the unusual terms with your favourite commercially available Solomonoff inductor.

Acknowledgements. Thanks to Simon Pepin Lehalleur and Ziling Ye for feedback and suggestions.

This post is the "fun" half of a pair, for the serious version see Cognitive Work and AI Safety.

The sand was still cool under Dr. Chen's feet, the sun barely cresting the horizon. She walked the beach every morning, enjoying these quiet moments. The waves kept their ancient rhythm – a pattern born of wind and the moon's persistent pull. Simple physics, really, compared to the dynamical systems she dealt with for a living.

Her notifications pinged: urgent alert from the monitoring systems. She felt the wind picking up as she turned back toward her house, carrying the first hint of ozone that suggested rain.

In her home office, she adjusted her cogniscope's temporal resolution, watching the swirling patterns of optimisation density shift across the map. Something was off about the morning's readings. The usual dawn surge of cognitive work from the East Asian processing centers looked normal enough – the standard high-pressure system building over the financial district, sheets of optimisation rain beginning to fall across the residential zones.

But there was a strange eddy in the data, a peculiar twist in the usual laminar flow of decision-making. She tagged it for closer analysis and pulled up the overnight logs.

"Hey Reza," she called to her colleague through their video link, "are you seeing any anomalous backscatter in your quadrant? Something's causing weird refraction patterns."

Reza's response came with the slight lag of someone multitasking. "Now that you mention it, I've got an unusual belief-stability inversion forming. Thought it was just noise from the new inference farm they spun up last week."

Chen frowned, overlaying the data from the past week. There it was again – a subtle warping in the usual pattern of computational weather.

She switched to raw thermodynamic views. The energy was there, cognitive work was being absorbed, but it wasn't precipitating into the usual patterns of decisions and behaviours. Instead, it seemed to be pooling, creating some kind of standing wave in the local interpretation space.

"Running a full analysis," she announced, more to herself than Reza. The volumetri...
Misfortune and Many Worlds
by Jonah Wilberg — 2024-12-08T20:25:12.109Z

Summary: The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics can help us feel better about improbable bad events, since the things we value remain unaffected in most other worlds.

I’ve previously

suggested

that when we think about the ethical implications of the

many-worlds interpretation (MWI)

of quantum mechanics, the kinds of implications we should expect are ones about how to feel in certain situations, and what kinds of character traits or ‘virtues’ we should try to develop.

And I’ve also explored what those implications are in the case of mutually exclusive life choices.

I’m now going to consider the implications of MWI for how we should think and feel about a different range of scenarios, namely improbable, bad events in one’s life, or world history.

Lightning strikes

Being struck by lightning is a classic example of an improbable event with harsh consequences.

It’s also plausibly an example of a quantum event.

As David Deutsch points out, even a single cosmic-ray particle, travelling towards earth from deep space, may have a quantum wave function with a spatial spread larger than earth’s diameter.

Consequently its interaction with the atoms of the earth’s atmosphere constitutes a ‘natural quantum measurement’ of its location, and therefore a source of multiple decoherent histories or ‘worlds’.

Deutsch writes[1]:

In each such history there is an autonomous instance of the cosmic-ray particle, which will dissipate its energy in creating a ‘cosmic-ray shower’ of electrically charged particles. Thus in different histories, such a shower will occur at different locations. In some, that shower will provide a conducting path down which a lightning bolt will travel. Every atom on the surface of the Earth will be struck by such lightning in some history.

The detailed mechanisms of lightning formation are still not well understood, but let’s suppose Deutsch is right.

If you were struck by lightning today[2] and were seriously injured but not killed, what implications would MWI have for how you should think and feel about that event?

There are of course some thoughts and feelings you would have whether or not MWI is true. You would be in severe physical pain, and probably emotional distress too as you consider the ramifications for your future plans. And you may also rightly feel some sense of unfairness in being subject to such an improbab...
Luck Based Medicine: No Good Very Bad Winter Cured My Hypothyroidism
by Elizabeth — 2024-12-08T20:10:02.651Z

I’ve previously written about Luck Based Medicine: the idea that, having exhausted all the reasonable cures for some issue, you are better off just trying shit rather than trying to reason more cures into existence. I share LBM success stories primarily as propaganda for the concept: the chance any one cure works for anyone else is <10% (sometimes much less), but a culture where people try things and share their results.

I’ve also previously written about my Very Unlucky Winter. My mattress developed mold, and in the course of three months I had four distinct respiratory infections, to devastating effect. A year later I am still working my way through side effects like asthma and foot pain.

But, uh, I also appear to have cured my hypothyroidism, and the best hypothesis as to why is all the povidone iodine I gargled for all those respiratory infections illnesses.

Usually when I discuss fringe medicine I like to say “anything with a real effect can hurt you”, because it’s a nice catchall for potential danger. In this case, I can be more direct: anything that cures hypothyroidism has a risk of causing hyperthyroidism. The symptoms for this start with “very annoying” and end at “permanent disability or death”, so if you’re going to try iodine, it absolutely needs to be under medical supervision with regular testing.

All that said…

I was first diagnosed with hypothyroidism 15 years ago, and 10 years ago tried titrating off medication but was forced back on. My thyroid numbers were in the range where mainstream MDs would think about treating and every ND, NP, or integrative MD would treat immediately.

Low iodine can contribute to hypothyroidism, and my serum iodine tested at low normal for years, so we had of course tried supplementing iodine via pills, repeatedly, to no result. No change in thyroid and no change in serum iodine levels.

In January of the Very Unlucky Winter, I caught covid. I take covid hard under the best of circumstances and was still suffering aftereffects from RSV the previous month, so I was quite scared. Reddit suggested gargling povidone iodine and after irresponsibly little research, I tried it. My irresponsibility paid off in that the covid case was short and didn’t reach my lungs. I stopped taking iodine when I recovered but between all the illnesses, potential illnesses, and prophylactic use I ened up using it for quite a ...
Densing Law of LLMs
by Bogdan Ionut Cirstea — 2024-12-08T19:35:09.244Z
Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04315

Authors: Chaojun Xiao, Jie Cai, Weilin Zhao, Guoyang Zeng, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun.

Abstract (bolding mine):

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a milestone in artificial intelligence, and their performance can improve as the model size increases. However, this scaling brings great challenges to training and inference efficiency, particularly for deploying LLMs in resource-constrained environments, and the scaling trend is becoming increasingly unsustainable. This paper introduces the concept of ``\textit{capacity density}'' as a new metric to evaluate the quality of the LLMs across different scales and describes the trend of LLMs in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. To calculate the capacity density of a given target LLM, we first introduce a set of reference models and develop a scaling law to predict the downstream performance of these reference models based on their parameter sizes. We then define the effective parameter size of the target LLM as the parameter size required by a reference model to achieve equivalent performance, and formalize the capacity density as the ratio of the effective parameter size to the actual parameter size of the target LLM. Capacity density provides a unified framework for assessing both model effectiveness and efficiency. Our further analysis of recent open-source base LLMs reveals an empirical law (the densing law) that the capacity density of LLMs grows exponentially over time. More specifically, using some widely used benchmarks for evaluation, the capacity density of LLMs doubles approximately every three months. The law provides new perspectives to guide future LLM development, emphasizing the importance of improving capacity density to achieve optimal results with minimal computational overhead.

Seems like bad news when it comes to proliferation, but good news with respect to weak-forward-passes and (especially latent) scheming.
Are there ways to artificially fix laziness?
by Aidar — 2024-12-08T18:26:26.433Z

Recently, I have been doing a particularly challenging task. It felt quite painful because I had to continuously fight the urge to stop doing whatever I was doing and watch some brainrot content. After finishing that task, I thought to myself: Why am I feeling lazy?

My best guess for that question right now is the idea that humans are adapted to conserve calories as much as possible. Humans are evolved to be savannah hunter-gatherers who had very limited amount of food, so laziness probably was a good adaptation to them. The particularly hard-working ancient humans probably were more likely to die from starvation. Therefore, it made sense for them to evolve mental circuits which are adapted to conserve energy and have a high discount value.

The thing is, I live in a postindustrial society with basically unbounded access to food. I do not need these energy saving, procrastination inducing mental circuits anymore. They are just making it harder to achieve goals that I want to achieve. So I just want to turn them off. I want to fix laziness. I want infinite willpower.

So far, I could not find any academic literature that focused on turning off the parts of the brain which are responsible for causing laziness. Any help with providing the academic literature that is relevant for my question is highly appreciated.
Fred the Heretic, a GPT for poetry
by Bill Benzon — 2024-12-08T16:52:07.660Z

Paul Fishwick at U of Texas at Dallas has created a poetry-generating GPT based on the poetry of Frederic Turner. I've played around with it a bit:

Fred the Heretic goes to New Orleans and appropriates some culture [Shine on Titanic]

Fred the Heretic, GPT, does poetry, channeling Augustine, Burton, and Hollander
Rethink Wellbeing’s Year 2 Update: Foster Sustainable High Performance for Ambitious Altruists 
by Inga G. — 2024-12-08T14:32:39.902Z

In a period of increasing existential risks and growing political instability, it can be hard to stay focused and passionate about working toward humanity’s flourishing. Many members of this community have told us they feel worried, hopeless, and burnt out. At

Rethink Wellbeing

, we have made it our mission to empower those doing the most good, by giving them tools to improve their mental health and well-being, and thereby their executive functioning and productivity, to increase their positive impact on the world.

TL;DR

This post is about:

Highlights, & learnings from 2024
Our goals & plans for 2025
Ways you can join our mission

In 2024, we successfully delivered and evaluated 3 guided mental health programs teaching evidence-based psychotherapeutic techniques, tailored to the EA and adjacent communities (N~150). We also searched for and tested some potential fundraising options: focusing on writing federal grant applications and building our EA supporter and donor community.

In 2025, we aim to deliver our most cost-effective and proven flagship program, the iterated “CBT Lab Peer Support” to 150 to 200 ambitious altruists in 3 cohorts. We’d also like to develop and pilot at least one of two potentially impactful programs:

An LLM-guided version of the CBT Lab to test whether similar results can be achieved with lower costs of human guidance.
The Social Lab Peer Group Support, which teaches social skills to connect, support, manage conflicts, form meaningful social roles, assert oneself, and build relationships. This program aims to serve those ~30% of program applicants who we were unable to invite to the CBT Lab due to too low social scores, which have been shown to be a risk factor for mental health treatments not working.

Three key ways to support our mission:

1. Follow us (

LinkedIn

,

EA Forum

,

newsletter

), AND recommend our program to a friend, or share our

donation campaign

with 1-3 potential supporters.

2. Donate to our campaign this season if you're able to. Even if just a little (every dollar counts!), or more if you feel as confident in our program outcomes as we do after our successful replication this year. Every $350 supports 1 ambitious altruist, saves ~2 WELLBYs, and ~2 months FTE of productive hours.

3. Contact us about supporting our research, i.e., publ...
Alternatives to Masks for Infectious Aerosols
by jefftk — 2024-12-08T14:00:01.670Z

This is a personal post: I'm not speaking for SecureBio or
BIDA.

I help organize a contra
dance that requires high filtration masks (N95
etc) at half of our dances. When we restarted
in 2022 we required masks at all our dances, before switching
to half in 2023. We just ran
a survey of our dancers, and while there are people who would like
to not have to wear masks there are also a lot of people who are only
willing to come if they know all the dancers will be masked. [1]

Last week I attended a conference for work with a lot of people
thinking about biosecurity, which has me wondering about ways we could
have a hall as safe as one where the dancers are all wearing N95s but
without the ways N95s make it harder to dance.

We're using N95 for two purposes:

Source control: reducing the amount of droplets and aerosols that
are breathed out which go on to enter the air of the room.

Respiratory protection: reducing the amount of droplets and
aerosols in the room air that end up inside people.

Since the overall goal is to have a space where people can come and
dance at a lower risk of respiratory infection, let's assume that
regardless of how we change policy the people who are trying to
protect themselves will continue to wear N95s for their own
respiratory protection. Is there something we could do to equal
the source control benefits of N95s but that's more pleasant for
dancing?

If we moved our dancing outside (we can't), or managed to get
equivalent ventilation to being outside (really not practical) we
could potentially stop with source control entirely. With so
much ventilation the aerosols would disperse extremely quickly,
giving air that's much cleaner than the N95-filtered air we currently
have. While the benefits for droplets aren't going to be as high, I
think that's outweighed by the effects of the former.

Since that's not on the table, though, I think we'd need to stick with
at least surgical masks for source control. These do a good job with
droplets, but not much with aerosols. What would our options be for
aerosols?

The first question is, how much clean air do we need? Ventilation is
usually given in CFM/person: cubic feet of clean air, per minute, per
person. This isn't perfect, since all else equal a larger room is
safer, but it's pretty good. ASHRAE Standard 241-2023 ("Control of
Infectious Aerosols") re...
Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
by Mati_Roy — 2024-12-08T06:57:45.783Z

Story from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt (my thoughts follow):

For those of us who understand that the obvious is not
always the solution, and that the facts, no matter how implausible,
are still the facts ...

A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

"This is the second time I have written you, and I don't blame you
for not answering me, because I kind of sounded crazy, but it is a
fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert
after dinner each night. But the kind of ice cream varies so, every
night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice
cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's
also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my
trips to the store have created a problem. You see, every time I buy
vanilla ice cream, when I start back from the store my car won't
start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just
fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter
how silly it sounds: 'What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not
start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get
any other kind?'"

The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter,
but sent an engineer to check it out anyway. The latter was surprised
to be greeted by a successful, obviously well-educated man in a fine
neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time,
so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It
was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came
back to the car, it wouldn't start.

The engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, the
man got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got
strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla.
The car failed to start.

Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this
man's car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore,
to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the
problem. And toward this end he began to take notes: he jotted down
all sorts of data, time of day, type of gas used, time to drive back
and forth, etc.

In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy
vanilla than any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout of
the store.

Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at
the front of the

...
A good way to build many air filters on the cheap
by winstonBosan — 2024-12-08T01:47:58.236Z

TLDR: ↓

With access to a 3D printer and some lack of regard for aesthetics, you can build a Levoit 300 (a popular air filter) clone for roughly 25% of the price.

And against the cheapest possible competition, it is roughly price per volume of air competitive/better but much quieter + modular + not soft vendor locked to their filters.

Why not just buy n many X filters?

If there is one thing I associate the LW community with, that would be the undying love for Eliezer Yudkowsky and his role as the rightful caliph[1] Lumenators and Air Filters.

Ever since my allergy diagnosis, I've thought of various schemes to cover my house with the latter. The obvious decision is to acquire as many as IKEA/Levoit/CheapInc. filters as fast and as cheaply per CFM (cubic feet per minute) as possible. Then proceed to plant them around the place and call it a done deal.

Sadly, a quick proof of concept somewhat shattered my dream. After listening to how loud some of these fans are in person, I realized the advertised CFM all correspond to the highest fan setting - and they are very noisy (effectively in the 50~60 db range). And I didn't want to spend hundreds on what are essentially glorified pressure optimized fans on a box.

Also, I am not the biggest fan of having IoT devices sprinkled in my living quarters - too many of these filters have smart features I don't want. If I didn't write the firmware, I certainly don't want anything with more compute and IO than a Raspberry PI pico controlling my fans and light bulbs.

Somewhere, somehow, someone must have had this problem and wrote something about it?

There is an obvious solution

Between "A box taped together with filter as sides and a box fan on top" and "custom designed fan enclosure to win some obscure competition by 0,3% margin", there is a great solution proposed by the BigClive - a fan mounted on a cylindrical filter.

BigClive's solution is elegant. By combining pressure optimized off-the shelf parts (computer fans) with the bare minimal of essentials (the filter itself as the filter and structure, and a PSU), you can just get a air filter without any of the bells and whistles. And, to free yourself from filter shape vendor lock, if you have access to a 3D printer, you can just print the right sized cone to mount your filter on.

Now, BigClive's solution is not perfect, at least in this specific implementati...
Historical Net Worth
by jefftk — 2024-12-07T23:10:01.519Z

Julia recently posted about how we're

still
donating 50%, which included this chart of monthly spending from
our

2024
spending update:

While each year before 2024 we'd been saving some, 2024 was the first
year in which we were drawing from savings to make donations.
Noticing this prompted David Denkenberger to ask:

If you don't mind me asking, how does the return on your investments
factor in? E.g., is the negative savings offset by return such that
your net worth is not falling?

This is a good question! Our net worth hasn't been something I've
been regularly calculating, but this seemed like a good opportunity to
figure out how it's changed over time.

Things I counted:

Liquid: cash in our bank account, stocks we own in a standard
investment account.

Retirement: 401k, HSA

House: value of the house according to Zillow, less loan
balance

Things I didn't count:

Credit card balances (we pay these off in full each month)

The value of our other stuff, which has been going up a bit
over time. The biggest single possession is probably our half of the
shared car (~$2.9k), followed
by my mandolin
(~$2k). A full accounting here would be a ton of work.

The value of my 7,049 options for Wave and 56 shares of Zepz, from when I
was laid off from
Wave. I have no idea how much these are worth.

Human and social capital.

While I would have liked to go back to ~2008 when we had essentially
zero net worth, since I haven't been tracking this I was reliant on
the records various providers keep, which seem to go back ten years.
I took values as of June 1st each year when possible, because right
around the end of the year there's a lot of variability due to when
donation related transactions hit our bank account. In cases where I
could only get January 1st numbers I interpolated to get a June 1st
number. I adjusted for inflation using the CPIAUCSL, so I
could do this in constant 2024-06-01 dollars.

Here's the chart:

The biggest factor is appreciation on our house (which is bad),
followed by the stock market doing well (which is good).

To answer David's question, it looks like our net worth hasn't been
going down as we draw from savings. This seems like more reason to
continue donating half, and not to respond to our now-lower
income by donating a smaller fraction.

(I continue to be quite unsure
how t...