trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
It's Not About The Nail
by  — 2020-04-26T23:50:55.973Z

[This is hardly original; I’m documenting for my own sake since it took so long for me to understand. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Crazy.]

There’s an old saw, that when a women complains she wants sympathy, but when a man hears a complaint, he tries to solve the problem. This viral YouTube video captures it perfectly.

Of course it’s not strictly limited by gender, that’s just the stereotype. And the underlying psychological details are fairly meaty; this article captures a lot of it pretty well for me.

I’ve known about all this for a long time now, and it’s always made sense at a sort of descriptive level of how people behave and what people need. But despite reading that article (and a good reddit thread) I’ve never really understood the “why”. What is the actual value of listening and “emotional support” in these kind of scenarios? Why do people need that? Well I finally had it happen to me recently when I was aware enough to notice the meta, and thus write this post.

I now find it easiest to think about in terms of the second-order psychological effects of bad things happening. When a bad thing happens to you, that has direct, obvious bad effects on you. But it also has secondary effects on your model of the world. Your mind (consciously or subconsciously) now has new information that the world is slightly less safe or slightly less predictable than it thought before. And of course the direct, obvious bad effects make you vulnerable (not just “feel” vulnerable, although normally that too – they make you actually vulnerable because you’ve just taken damage, so further damage becomes increasingly dangerous).

Obviously sometimes, and depending on the scenario, the first-order effect dominates and you really should just solve that problem directly. This is what makes the video so absurd – having a nail in your head is hard to beat in terms of the first-order effects dominating. But in real versions of these cases, sometimes the second-order effects are more significant, or more urgent, or at the least more easily addressable. In these cases it’s natural to want to address the second-order effects first. And the best way to do that is talking about it.

Talking about a problem to somebody you have a close relationship with addresses these second...
Training Regime Day 22: Murphyjitsu 2
by Mark Xu — 2020-04-26T20:18:50.505Z

Introduction

Society has many pieces of wisdom floating around that are epistemically false, but instrumentally useful.

Individuals are told to "invest, then don't touch the money until you retire". "Invest, then don't touch it" is false because sometimes, some individuals will be able to beat the market; however, if you tell people "Invest, then don't touch it unless you can beat the market", people will be overconfident and move around their money way to much, resulting in them losing money. Instrumentally, you then tell people to never touch their money, because that results in better behavior.

College students are told to "go to class no matter what". As a factual question, there exist students that would benefit from not going to class. However, telling everyone "go to class, unless you think you would benefit from not going" results in many people that would benefit from going to class pleading their own exceptionalism. Instrumentally, you tell people to always go to class, because that results in better behavior.

On a meta level, the pattern I'm trying to describe is common wisdom of the sort "always do X" being factually incorrect but existing to provide pushback against a tendency that the truth would fail to solve. A similar pattern is someone saying "I believe X strongly" when they believe X weakly because they think it'll cause you to update to believing X weakly, which is more correct from their perspective. There's some "truth", but you can't say the truth because the end result is not acting/believing "truth", so you exaggerate to shift the end result closer to "truth".

Remember, the real rules have no exceptions.

On the object level, society has internalized:

No plan survives contact with reality.

On a factual level, this is nonsense. Many plans get executed without hiccups (many run so smoothly we don't even consider them plans). However, people tend to get too attached to their plans, so the corrective wisdom is "all plans fail" so they detach themselves at the proper speed.

The point of an applied rationality training regime is to get good enough at planning that your plans survive contact with reality.

Combative Murphyjitsu

Bog-standard murphyjitsu is an explicit process. Explicit processes are bad be...
Post/meta-skepticism I
by Ouroborus — 2020-04-26T00:18:26.123Z
Link: https://ouroborusdotblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/26/post-meta-skepticism-i/

Less Wrong has been significantly influenced by the skeptic movement. This has general been good for the epistemic health of our community, but at the same time we should also worry about whether everything we have inherited is true and beneficial. In other words, we need to apply skepticism to skepticism itself.

It's often good to start with the strengths of a movement and consider how these can also become weaknesses if taken too extremes, so this is what we'll do in this post instead of taking them at face value. The fundamental promise of skepticism is that it will prevent you from being mislead by weak evidence, poor reasoning, social pressure or those who would manipulate you.

The opposite of foolishing accepting weak evidence is being excessively dogmatic in the standards of evidence you require, even when circumstances require you to decide based on inconclusive evidence. A famous spoof article jokes that we don't know parachutes are reliable because we don't have a randomised controlled trial.

Wittgenstein wanted to argue that language is nonsense insofar as it failed to paint a picture or possible pictures of the world (in a particular technical sense). The only trouble was that this claim itself didn't paint a picture of the world. The logical positivists belived that beliefs were defined in terms of the experimental predictions they made, however it is almost entirely false that just now a chocolate cake spontaneously formed at the center of the sun then dissolve and it isn't clear how to define this claim itself experimentally or in terms of mathematics. Behaviourism argued that it was unscientific to ascribe emotions, beliefs or thoughts to humans as we can't directly observe these, which resulted in a greatly crippled psychology field.

Similarly, the opposite of foolishing accepting poor reasoning is being excessively dogmatic in the preciseness of arguments that you need. When talking about ethics, Aristotle argues that, "We must not expect more precision than the subject-matter exists". Some subjects are inherently hard to talk about and expecting too much precision can prevent us talking about it at all. One example is when people dismiss philosophy as too vague to be useful and then end up effectively adopting a philosophical theory anyway, but without any deep thought or evaluation.

Similarly Kieran...
Training Regime Day 21: Executing Intentions
by Mark Xu — 2020-04-25T22:16:04.761Z

Introduction

It is written about the first of the Twelve Virtues:

Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer.

The main flaw of the Twelve Virtues is that they are epistemic in nature.

It is written about the first of the applied virtues:

Intentions seek to annihilate themselves; there is no intention that does not want to be executed.

The Technique

This is the simple, yet awesome technique to end all techniques:

1. Have an intention

2. Execute it

Exercise

Spend 15 minutes to 2 hours executing intentions.

I had many intentions

They were all executed

What were their crimes?
What are your favorite examples of distillation?
by  — 2020-04-25T17:06:51.393Z

I'm a big fan of the Distill machine learning journal and the ideas of Research Debt and distillation. I consider Distill and LessWrong great repositories for distillations of ML / AI and some math topics. However, I've recently been hankering for distillations from other fields with which I'm somewhat familiar -- biology, algorithms, economics-- or even not that familiar. (John Wentworth's recent series of posts on aging and constraints are good examples of one form posts like this could take.)

So, I figured I'd ask here: what are your favorite examples of distillation in different fields? I'm open to more ML / AI related posts but am especially excited about responses in the fields I mentioned above or other different fields (I would include math here too). Ideal answers would be posts that optimally trade off:

Describing a non-trivial topic.

Not "dumbing it down".

Being accessible to non-experts.
On New York’s Antibody Tests
by Zvi — 2020-04-25T15:20:01.173Z

Previously: My Covid-19 Thinking: 4/23 pre-Cuomo Data which has links to other previous stuff at the top.

We’re all working from the same information, mostly from Cuomo’s slides. Let’s reproduce them here, give the rest of the information, then go from there.

What We Know

Also in 2 other slides:

52% female sample with 12% positive, 48% male with 15.9% positive.

Asian 8.8% of total with 11.7% positive, black 14.3% with 22.1% positive, Latino 17.6% of total with 22.5% positive, and white 57.1% of total with 9.1% positive. Cuomo says this is mostly because most non-whites in the state live in New York City.

Samples were taken at grocery stores. From the comment that this ‘missed essential workers’ I presume it happened during work hours. People were given their results if they wanted to know, and participation was voluntary.

So many questions. Still, very good data. Many thanks for providing it. What does it all mean?

Mostly people seemed surprised the numbers were so high, and a lot of people objected the infection rate couldn’t possibly be so high, and thus started looking for evidence it wasn’t so. As opposed to my reaction, which was that the rate seemed too low so there were probably things I needed to adjust for. My pre-study best guess was as follows, as posted yesterday:

That would make the infection rate in New York State overall about 19% now and 29% when things are finished. We’d have identified 13.3% of positive cases as of right now, with vastly inadequate testing.

This would also imply New York City was roughly 30% infected, which is on the extreme low end of my previous prior guess range.

That now seems fully compatible with the results of the antibody tests. Alas, part of the problem with that compatibility is that there’s a wide range of potential ways the results could be biased.

Nate Silver had a good twitter thread outlining the three big problems with the numbers. The numbers lag, there was a biased sample (we just don’t know in what direction or how big a bias) and not knowing the specificity/sensitivity of the test.

By contrast, there have been lots of links from people who should know better to a pretty bad Twitter thread by Anish Jha, who was quick and has reasonable credentials and claim to authority and made noises that sounded like being “responsible” – he speculates about what would happen if sensitivity was only 93% in a test...
Fast Takeoff in Biological Intelligence
by  — 2020-04-25T12:21:23.603Z

[Speculative and not my area of expertise; probably wrong. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Crazy.]

One of the possible risks of artificial intelligence is the idea of “fast” (exponential) takeoff – that once an AI becomes even just a tiny bit smarter than humans, it will be able to recursively self-improve along an exponential curve and we’ll never be able to catch up with it, making it effectively a god in comparison to us poor humans. While human intelligence is improving over time (via natural selection and perhaps whatever causes the Flynn effect) it does so much, much more slowly and in a way that doesn’t seem to be accelerating exponentially.

But maybe gene editing changes that.

Gene editing seems about as close as a biological organism can get to recursively editing its own source code, and with recent advances (CRISPR, etc) we are plausibly much closer to functional genetic manipulation than we are to human-level AI. If this is true, humans could reach fast takeoff in our own biological intelligence well before we build an AI capable of the same thing. In this world we’re probably safe from existential AI risk; if we’re both on the same curve, it only matters who gets started first.

There are a bunch of obvious objections and weaknesses in this analogy which are worth talking through at a high level:

The difference between hardware and software seems relevant here. Gene editing seems more like a hardware-level capability, whereas most arguments about fast takeoff in AI talk about recursive improvement of software. It seems easy for a strong AI to recompile itself with a better algorithm, where-as it seems plausibly more difficulty for it to design and then manufacture better hardware.
This seems like a reasonable objection, though I do have two counterpoints. The first is that, in humans at least, intelligence seems pretty closely linked to hardware. Software also seems important, but hardware puts strong upper bounds on what is possible. The second counterpoint is that our inability to effectively edit our software source code is, in some sense, a hardware problem; if we could genetically build a better human, capable of more direct meta-cognitive editing… I don’t even know what that would look like.
Another consideration is generation length. Even talking about hardware replacement, a recurs

...
Why is my (our?) reasoning process noisy?
by emanuele ascani — 2020-04-25T12:19:44.972Z

I especially notice this is a problem after a written exam. Even if I am 100% prepared and if I check the answers multiple times, I end up making mistakes that are the stuff of dreams. This can make a huge difference for me, because these mistakes are not isolated, they are often in many exercises or questions and they are often macroscopic.

They can range from changing a number to another number (not due to bad calligraphy, I have perfectly intelligible calligraphy. I'm inclined to think that somewhere in my neuronal processes that number literally turned into another one), or completely botching the correct process for solving the problem even if I have solved similar problems with the correct process tens of times before.

This can mean the difference between (translating to American grades) an A and a C. Or a C and botching the exam. It makes a big difference.

One time, I had botched the screen-off test of an exam due to this kind of mistakes. The screen-off test consisted in a multiple choice questions sheet that the professor used to screen-off what tests to spend time correcting in full and what tests not bother correcting. The real test consisted in the open questions and exercises after the screen-off. I managed to convince the professor to correct the rest of the exam even if I botched the screen-off, and I got an A.

I'm pretty sure this problem doesn't happen because of

Anxiety: I'm perfectly calm.
Calligraphy: It is good and very intelligible.
Distraction: I don't get distracted... I remain concentrated on the exercise.

I don't think it happens because I'm in a hurry either. I often have tight time limits, but I do the exercises at the speed I usually maintain. Even if I was in a hurry I still wouldn't understand how I could make such incredible mistakes, given that I already had done the exercises tens of times before.

I'm using the example of exams because this is the area where this problem shows up the most. It also shows up when programming, but that's not as impactful, because I can correct the mistakes. I am wondering if there are other areas of life where this is a problem but I am not noticing. If it is a phenomenon isolated to tests or not. It is entirely possible that it is something affecting my usual thought processes in a bad way, but which I'm not aware of, because I can't check ...
The Chilling Effect of Confiscation
by jefftk — 2020-04-25T02:50:03.564Z

The federal government has been seizing mask imports:

Three million, on arrival at the Port of New York and New Jersey on 2020-03-18 (Boston Globe)

Four hundred thousand, on arrival at JFK airport; 100k on 2020-04-06 and 300k on 2020-04-16 (USA Today, NY Daily News)

One million, while in transit to South Florida firefighters last week (The Miami Times, 2020-04-24)

Some states have responded by importing masks and other personal
protective equipment (PPE) outside of standard channels:

Massachusetts asked the owners of the New England Patriots to
import masks on the team plane (Wall
Street Journal, Time,
2020-04-02)

Illinois chartered multiple FedEx flights (Chicago
Sun-Times 2020-04-14, 2020-04-19)

And there's an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about
a hospital administrator working to line up a shipment and narrowly
avoiding confiscation.

Much more impactful than what these seizures are pushing people to do,
however, is what they're pushing people not to do. A hospital
administrator or governor who could be prioritizing sourcing PPE has
many other things they could focus on, and if the PPE they import has
a large chance of getting seized they're going to prioritize those other
things on the margin. Independent importers likewise can't risk
having their goods seized without payment, as Indutex reported ("Let's
not forget I paid $4 million for this product on March 18. I don't
have any money and I don't have any product and there's people that
are asking for it.") Making deals with factories and prepaying so
they can ramp up production is super valuable, and we'll see less of it
the more risk there is of having your goods taken.

So much of this crisis has been poorly handled that any
individual bit I pick to look at seems like it's not worth focusing
on, but this policy is not just foolish, it's foolish in a way that
you might have thought conservatives might have avoided? Like,
conservatives saying we should avoid lockdowns and let people decide
risk for themselves is the sort of policy disagreement I'd expect to
have, but using the federal government to grab things, discouraging
private initiative and investment, really?
What makes counterfactuals comparable?
by Chris_Leong — 2020-04-24T22:47:38.365Z

l was attempting to write a reference post on the concept of comparability in decision theory problems, but I realised that I don't yet have a strong enough grasp on the various positions that one could adopt to write a post worthy of being a reference. I'll quote my draft quite liberally below:

In the context of decision theory, comparability is about whether or not it is fair to compare counterfactuals when evaluating decisions, a decision algorithm or decision theory. Perhaps the best way to illustrate is with the example of a medical trial. Let's suppose we're trying to see if aspirin reduces the amount of pain experienced. So if we create two groups, give aspirin to one and then observe that group as having experienced less pain, that is evidence that it does what we want. However, if the aspirin group was healthy and most of other group had cancer, then this wouldn't be a fair test. We would be treating two groups as comparable when they differed in an attribute relevant the to outcome we cared about.

Given a decision problem, we normally apply a decision theory to construct counterfactuals, then calculate the utility for each and finally make a decision. Prima facie, it appears that these counterfactuals must be comparable in order for a decision theory to count as being reasonable. Otherwise, we would open ourselves to the critique of being the same as a naive researcher in the aspirin example.

We can clarify this with an example. Casual decision theorists recommend 2-boxing for Newcomb's Problem. They admit that a 1-boxer will receive an extra $1 million, but they would likely argue that this isn't a fair comparison since the opaque box contains $1 million for the 1-boxer, but not for the 2-boxer. This is essentially a dispute over whether these counterfactuals are comparable.

Why is this important?

Well, as far as I can tell attempts to understand counterfactuals have taken us to logical counterfactuals at which point we've become stuck. Asking an easier question could help us to become unstuck. And determining if counterfactuals are comparable seems easier than saying what counterfactuals are. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if we don't know what we mean by comparability then we don't fully even know what we are looking for.

Given this, I find it strange that this notion hasn't been discussed to any significant degree at all on Less Wrong as fa...
What are the relative speeds of AI capabilities and AI safety?
by NunoSempere — 2020-04-24T18:21:58.528Z

If you want to solve AI safety before AI capabilities become too great, then it seems that AI safety must have some of the following:

More researchers

Better researchers

Less necessary insights

Easier necessary insights

Ability to steal insights from AI capability research more than the reverse.

...

Is this likely to be the case? Why? Another way to ask this question is: Under which scenarios doesn't aligning add time?
Training Regime Day 20: OODA Loop
by Mark Xu — 2020-04-24T18:11:30.506Z

Introduction

The OODA loop is the cycle of observe -> orient -> decide -> act. This was developed by Colonel John Boyd as an abstraction of the rapid decision-making that occurs during combat. The loop contains four stages:

Observe: Take in information from the environment.

Orient: Determine the set of possible actions.

Decide: Choose which action is the best action.

Act: Do that action.

Examples

(feel free to skip if the general concept seems to make sense to you)

These examples are going to be in rather artificial environments. In the real world, it is not so clear which stage of OODA you're in at any given moment. Nonetheless, I claim that it's a useful abstraction:

1. [Note: I suck at chess] In chess, you observe by looking at the chessboard. A naive way to orient is to consider all legal chess moves. However, if you consider too many moves, then deciding which move is best becomes intractable. An experienced chess player will thus orient strategically by only considering a small set of moves. To decide which move is best, chess players will typically run some sort of tree search. Acting in chess is trivial. In typical chess, players are not extremely constrained on time, so the OODA loop is slow.

2. In Magic: the Gathering, you observe by looking at the board state and the cards in your hand. Similarly to chess, you cannot consider all possible moves, so you must strategically orient based upon a set of moves that experience tells you are likely to be good. You decide by a set of heuristics honed by long hours of playing, possibly by conducting a small amount of search or doing explicit probability calculations. Action in Magic: the Gathering is also trivial. Magic: the Gathering is more constrained on time than chess, but the OODA loop is still relatively slow.

3. [Note: I haven't played Starcraft in many years] In Starcraft, you observe by looking at the screen/minimap/other status indicators. You consider a select set of moves governed by your knowledge of strategy, what your opponent is doing, etc. You decide what to do based almost entirely on well trained heuristics/intuition. Acting is sometimes constrained by your ability to click properly, but generally you won't even consider actions that you know that you can't execute properly. Starcraft is played in real time - the rapidity at which you can execute your OODA loop mat...