trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Healthy News Diet II
by mpr — 2021-01-07T22:13:29.917Z
Link: https://matthewroll.com/2021/01/05/a-healthy-news.html

In the previous post I described what I thought a healthy news diet might look like. I wanted to lay out a framework that would allow me to stay informed in ways I care about, but would also keep me from using news as a way to pass time and indulge in an addiction to the feed. I came up with the following criteria for a healthy news diet:

Specific things you want to get out of reading news
A plan for how to get those things out of reading news
A list of non-news activities you want to use to pass time
Slots during your week that you will use to read news

In this post I'm going to fill in each of those items for myself. Once I've filled out that plan, I'll start to follow it. And I will keep track of how closely I follow it. In my paper journal I've added two sections to track

how many times I use the predetermined slots to read the news
how many times outside of the predetermined slots I read news

The combination of those statistics should be a good measurement of how closely I'm sticking to my new "healthy news diet."

That's just the quantitative side. After a month I'll do a write up of how I feel it's going.

Specific things you want to get out of reading news

I have a hunch keeping this list short is important. Maybe a rule of thumb would be to keep it under five. I care to keep up-to-date on

The health of the US economy
Virus outbreaks
New tech around cloud-based app development

As far as this section is concerned, I think that's really all you need. A list of bullets. They can be super high level, because you will have time to think more carefully and drill down on each of them in the next section.

A plan for how to get those things out of reading news

This section is for coming up with what information you are going to look for and what sources you are going to look at for each of the items in the previous section.

The health of the US economy

There are lots of statistics that people use to measure the health of the economy. I looked at a bunch of them and decided I care about knowing the current state and trends over time of the following:

Weekly unemployment claims
Percent change in the price of the SP 500 over the past week, month, and quarter.
Consumer spending
Corporate debt levels
Government debt levels
Rate of inflation
Treasury Yield Curve

Now, the US economy is a massive beast ($20tn!) and the statistics listed above are not likely to change much week to week. So I'm th...
Change My View: Incumbent religions still get too much leeway
by mike_hawke — 2021-01-07T19:44:45.208Z

In the past few years I've gone from being almost entirely dismissive of religion to being much more uncertain and equivocal. In particular, I've become much warier of implicitly judging The Old Ways against modern conditions and assumptions. These changes happened partly because I heard Jordan Peterson manage to give Sam Harris a couple of decent counterarguments, and partly due to various other things in the air such as The Secret of Our Success and Doesn't Matter, Warm Fuzzies. I think this arc of beliefs is familiar to many of you.

But I feel that we're now missing something else.

Sure, incumbent religions deserve a lot of credit for helping people survive millennia of scarcity in untamed environments. And Jordan Peterson might be right when he says it’s too easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But those same religions are also clearly contributing to This Failing Earth: reliable methods of reasoning are still niche, faith is held up as a virtue even in advanced countries, bioethicists promote death, and very few people even know about cryonics or Fun Theory.

Even among educated people, feelings of awe and wonder are often more closely associated with Iron-age myths than with science. This is absurd and it bothers me greatly. Read the Bible, watch Sagan's Cosmos, and then tell me that their relative statures are anywhere near appropriate. "Merely" real phenomena like decoherence and the arrow of time and evolution by natural selection are obviously æsthetically richer (for better and for worse) than "a god did it" or other formerly useful fictions. Stories about humanoid gods have their place, and that place is in anthropology exhibits alongside rain dances and augury.

Here's possibly my most important crux: Respect for incumbent religions comes at the cost of more modern philosophies. Rocket launch rituals, Wisdom Day[1], vitrification ceremonies or so on would be embraced more quickly if people didn’t repress their disdain for things like circumcision ceremonies or theories of immaterial souls. (I claim that you can and should respect the function something serves while also disdaining the weak or outdated aspects.)
I ask you: Doesn’t standard Mormonism pose an obstacle to Mormon Transhumanism? And isn't that bad?

Here's a strong claim you might be able to change my view on: However much humble respect you have for some Abrahamic religion like Ju...
How to Write Like Kaj Sotala
by Matt Goldenberg — 2021-01-07T19:33:35.260Z

Since I started quarantine in late February, I've been trying to learn the skill of modelling implicit skills and knowledge. Over that time, I've interviewed nearly 20 people and learned one specific implict theory or skill that they use. Many of those people in the rationality and post-rationality communities.

Kaj Sotala is one of my favorite writers on Lesswrong. He writes clearly, deliberately, and precisely. His writing is deliberate, interesting, and approachable.

After nearly 4 hours of interviewing him, this is my model of how he writes. Note that while it is inspired by Kaj, it is not necessarily fully endorsed by him. There is always a translation process from his brain to his mouth to my brain to refining to putting it to the page.

That being said, my ability to help correct misunderstandings and bridge perspectives in text has profited massively from internalizing the model here.

Beliefs and Motivation

Primary Motivator

Let's first talk about beliefs and motivations. What's his primary motivation to start this process? For him, it's a process of seeing people disagree, and feeling a visceral sense of frustration at people talking past each other.

For him, it's almost a proprioceptive sense of two different shapes. One person is saying circle, and the other is hearing square. It's really important to make these shapes match up!

Underlying Motivator

There are two underlying values here. The less salient one is wanting a sense of admiration from others. It's really nice to get praise for creating good explanations that unify two viewpoints.

The more salient value is a sense of Harmony and Beauty. If you can create a beautiful explanation, people can understand each other. The universe is just a bit more harmonious if you can take two perspectives and integrate them!

Necessary Conditions

In terms of what initially motivates him and lets him see the opportunity for this sense of Harmony and Beauty is when he sees people talking past each other, and feels like he sees where the disconnect is. Or he has a sense of what could be said instead.

Writing Strategy

So those are some of his underlying beliefs and motivations. But how does he actually craft these beautiful explanations? What is his strategy?

Tests

First, there's a few background processes he is running when he's writing. Tests to make sure that what he's writing will lead to that beauty and har...
Covid 1/7: The Fire of a Thousand Suns
by Zvi — 2021-01-07T17:00:01.843Z

I’ll summarize everything up front.

Might as well get on with it.

Let’s do the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction last week: 14.3% positive rate on 9.7 million tests, and an average of 2,500 deaths, again with wide error bars.

Results: 16.4% positive rate on 9.3 million tests, and an average of 2,657 deaths.

The phase shift on 12/30, in the wake of Christmas, seems to have been real, giving us the clear holiday bump we did not see from previous holidays.

That was both the very bad outcome for infections I was worried about, and also not high on my list of things to be concerned or furious about this week.

For deaths, my estimate was lower than it should have been and I should have assumed a full reversion, so on reflection it’s my mistake rather than especially bad news.

The new strain is not yet prevalent enough to be noticeably impacting the numbers.

Prediction: 17.0% positive rate on 9.5 million tests, and an average of 2,800 deaths. The holidays are over, there will be some fallout, with things getting slightly worse, but with the main boost in deaths from Christmas mostly coming later.

Deaths

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST
Oct 29-Nov 4	956	1977	2309	613
Nov 5-Nov 11	1089	2712	2535	870
Nov 12-Nov 18	1255	2934	2818	1127
Nov 19-Nov 25	1761	4169	3396	1714
Nov 26-Dec 2	1628	3814	2742	1939
Dec 3-Dec 9	2437	5508	4286	2744
Dec 10-Dec 16	3278	5324	4376	3541
Dec 17-Dec 23	3826	5158	5131	3772
Dec 24-Dec 30	3363	3668	4171	3640
Dec 31-Jan 6	5320	5036	6072	4986

This is the one place it’s not as bad as it looks. The data source for these numbers is Wikipedia, which shows a relatively large amount of shifting of deaths from last week into this week.

If we assume that a lot of this week’s deaths were actually last week, that explains much of the increase. It’s not good news or anything, it’s definitely bad news, but it is not full on terrifying like it would be if we didn’t know about Christmas.

We still should expect further increases in the next few weeks before the tide likely temporarily turns.

Positive Test Percentages

Percentages	Northeast	Midwest	South	West
11/5 to 11/11	5.56%	17.51%	9.89%	8.31%
11/12 to 11/18	6.99%	18.90%	11.64%	10.66%
11/19 to 11/25	7.00%	16.62%	10.41%	11.75%
11/26 to 12/2	8.38%	17.90%	12.45%	12.79%
12/3 to 12/9	10.47%	17.94%	13.70%	12.76%
12/10 to 12/16	10.15%	15.63%	15.91%	13.65%
12/17 to 12/23	9.88%	14.65%	15.78%	13.82%
12/24 to 12/30	10.65%	14.54%	17.07%	12.90%
12/31 to 1/6	12.18%	17.03%	19.69%	15.94%

No way to sugar coat th...
Eight claims about multi-agent AGI safety
by Richard_Ngo — 2021-01-07T13:34:55.041Z

There are quite a few arguments about how interactions between multiple AGIs affect risks from AGI development. I’ve identified at least eight distinct but closely-related claims which it seems worthwhile to disambiguate. I’ve split them up into four claims about the process of training AGIs, and four claims about the process of deploying AGIs; after listing them, I go on to explain each in more detail. Note that while I believe that all of these ideas are interesting enough to warrant further investigation, I don’t currently believe that all of them are true as stated. In particular, I think that so far there's been little compelling explanation of why interactions between many aligned AIs might have castastrophic effects on the world (as is discussed in point 7).

Claims about training

1. Multi-agent training is one of the most likely ways we might build AGI.

2. Multi-agent training is one of the most dangerous ways we might build AGI.

3. Multi-agent training is a regime in which standard safety techniques won’t work.

4. Multi-agent training allows us to implement important new safety techniques.

Claims about deployment

5. We should expect the first AGIs to be deployed in a world which already contains many nearly-as-good AIs.

6. We should expect AGIs to be deployed as multi-agent collectives.

7. Lack of coordination between multiple deployed AGIs is a major source of existential risk.

8. Conflict between multiple deployed AGIs risks causing large-scale suffering.

Details and arguments

1. Multi-agent training is one of the most likely ways we might build AGI.

The core argument for this thesis is that multi-agent interaction was a key feature of the evolution of human intelligence, by promoting both competition and cooperation. Competition between humans provides a series of challenges which are always at roughly the right level of difficulty;

Liebo et al. (2019)

call this an autocurriculum. Autocurricula were crucial for training sophisticated reinforcement learning agents like AlphaGo and OpenAI Five; it seems plausible that they will also play an important role in training AGIs. Meanwhile, the usefulness of cooperation led to the development of language, which plays a core role in human cognition; and the benefits of cooperatively sharing ideas allowed the accumulation of human cultural skills and knowledge more generally.

2. Multi-agent training is one of the most dan...
Evening drawing
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-07T11:00:22.556Z

This evening I became tempted by a YouTube video of an artist painting a portrait, which led me to be tempted by another such video, and then more of them, and then by one of these artists’ websites, and then by my own pencils and paper. (I did not become tempted by YouTube videos advertising breaking news of some sort of crazy Trump riot, since I decided not to ‘check the internet’ until bed time).

Some observations on drawing:

In my world, art supplies are a kind of archetype of a thing that is viscerally exciting vastly beyond its likelihood of being used (and even further beyond its likelihood of being used well). Like, look at this paper I got! (I did, extensively.) Think of the potential it holds! But actually, for now, it’s sitting under my bed.

It is sometimes very hard to draw without poking my tongue out. Not in the sense that that without my tongue out, drawing is hard—I mean, while drawing, it seems infeasible to keep my tongue in my mouth. This feels natural and unsurprising, like how if you stand on one leg it is hard to not fall over, not like an epileptic seizure overcoming my tongue. But stated explicitly, it is pretty weird.

It is also frequently very hard to draw without tilting my head from side to side. I first noticed this in high school art class, where I sat drawing and listening to the other students talk. One of them pointed out to another that looking around the room, students were tilting their heads to and fro all over the place. I also overheard an eye-opening discussion of how awesome it was that we were going to war in Iraq imminently, since that might clear space in the ranks of military helicopter pilots, allowing the excited student to fill it. Drawing and overhearing seem like good complementary activities.

It’s hard to really get behind my attempts to draw well, because it doesn’t feel like they are leading anywhere. I would be more into it if it was part of a compelling plan to save the world. Perhaps I don’t really believe in leisure enough to wholeheartedly do it, and don’t disbelieve in it enough to work all of the time. Alas.

Even without the world perhaps needing saving, drawing feels a bit pointless, since we have photography. But this doesn’t make sense: if you want to create an image of a scene, much better to draw it than to have to create it in real life then photograph it. For instance, most of the

...
Grading my 2020 predictions
by Eric Neyman — 2021-01-07T00:33:38.566Z
Link: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/grading-my-2020-predictions/

[Edit: when I copy-pasted from my blog, the colors didn't show up, and I'm not sure how to make them show up; sorry!]

In December 2019, I made 132 probabilistic predictions for 2020. As promised, I’ve come back to evaluate them on three criteria: calibration, personal optimism/pessimism, and performance relative to PredictIt (and an anonymous friend who sent me their predictions for some of the events).

I’ll get to all of those, but first, here are my predictions, color-coded by whether or not the events transpired (green = happened, red = didn’t happen).

Predictions

I. US Politics

A. Primary elections

1. Biden wins Iowa caucus popular vote (EDIT 1/30/2020: I meant after those who caucused for candidates with less than 15% support realign): 25%
2. Sanders wins Iowa caucus popular vote: 21% (lost on delegates but won popular vote)
3. Warren wins Iowa caucus popular vote: 10%
4. Buttigieg wins Iowa caucus popular vote: 27%
5. Klobuchar wins Iowa caucus popular vote: 13%
6. Biden wins New Hampshire primary popular vote: 21%
7. Sanders wins New Hampshire primary popular vote: 26%
8. Warren wins New Hampshire primary popular vote: 20%
9. Buttigieg wins New Hampshire primary popular vote: 21%
10. Klobuchar wins New Hampshire primary popular vote: 6%
11. Biden wins Nevada caucus popular vote: 37%
12. Sanders wins Nevada caucus popular vote: 33%
13. Warren wins Nevada caucus popular vote: 9%
14. Buttigieg wins Nevada caucus popular vote: 10%
15. Klobuchar wins Nevada caucus popular vote: 5%
16. Biden wins South Carolina primary popular vote: 67%
17. Sanders wins South Carolina primary popular vote: 15%
18. Warren wins South Carolina primary popular vote: 7%
19. Buttigieg wins South Carolina primary popular vote: 5%
20. Klobuchar wins South Carolina primary popular vote: 2%
21. Biden wins the most Super Tuesday delegates (not counting superdelegates): 43%
22. Sanders wins the most Super Tuesday delegates (not counting superdelegates): 18%
23. Warren wins the most Super Tuesday delegates (not counting superdelegates): 14%
24. Buttigieg wins the most Super Tuesday delegates (not counting superdelegates): 15%
25. Klobuchar wins the most Super Tuesday delegates (not counting superdelegates): 6%
26. Biden wins the Democratic nomination: 38%
27. Sanders wins the Democratic nomination: 16%
28. Warren wins the Democratic nomination: 17%
29. Buttigieg wins the Democratic nomination: 19%
30. Klobuchar win...
A dozen habits that work for me
by mike_hawke — 2021-01-06T22:52:37.776Z

I'm just proud and I want to share. I've read Do Life Hacks Ever Reach Fixation and Other Optimizing, but maybe a couple of these will end up helping someone.

I keep an open bag of baby carrots on my kitchen counter. I snack on them constantly throughout the day without even trying. After a couple of days, it’ll be down to the last 10 or so, and they’re all dried out, so I throw them away. My snacking impulse is strong and I hope to overcome it one day, but in the meantime I’m going through at least half a pound of raw carrots per day. Fiber.
It isn't the Dark Ages anymore so I use a toilet stool and those wet, flushable buttwipes. (I like Cottonelle™ but I'm still trying out different brands.)
I minimize media exposure. The wall of TVs at the gym sure is enticing...all those news headlines and talking heads and flashy advertisements and other attention bait... But it's just so very costly in subtle and pernicious ways. And I regard Twitter the way Odysseus regards the Sirens--willpower is not enough, I have to maintain distance and/or mastbinding. I could say a lot more, but this stuff deserves its own post.
I maintain a list of ways I disagree with the public thinkers I follow. I also write down my most controversial beliefs on paper and then burn the paper. I find that this makes me moderately better at thinking for myself.
I try to buy deserts that have built-in delays of gratification. Mostly this means frozen pastries and cookie dough (I never developed the taste for raw cookie dough). Also, I only bake 2 or 3 at a time. If I really want more than that, I can bake a couple more.
I go out for walks a lot. It's just good.
I try to think verbally about something for a few minutes every day, and for 30+ minutes at least once per week. Sometimes this is journaling, but usually it’s thinking out loud (especially when out for a walk). I’ll do Leverage-style belief reporting, or just a stream of consciousness monologue. Indispensable for relieving mental constipation.
I keep chewing gum on hand and I chew it after eating something sugary.
I set a really low bar for my meditation practice.
If I don't think I'll need my phone for something, I don't bring it with me. This has backfired a couple of times, but so far the freedom feels worthwhile overall (especially when out for a walk).
I was persuaded by The Checklist Manifesto. I consult a checklist every time I do laundry,

...
COVID-19: home stretch and fourth wave Q&A
by habryka — 2021-01-06T22:44:29.382Z

Robby Bensinger wrote this post and shared it in a private Facebook group, but it seemed good to also have it on LessWrong. Note that I have substantial disagreements with the current content of this document, since it currently seems to advise far too risk-averse of a strategy and makes claims of the type "if you don't fully lockdown you are basically giving up on not getting COVID" which strike me as very wrong. See thread on this comment for details.

Disclaimer: This document was made by non-experts. You may want to spot-check the cited sources to decide for yourself whether you think the reasoning makes sense. This document was created January 6, 2021, and may be out of date on some points.

Q: What's up with the new COVID-19 strain from southern England?

The strain, called VOC-202012/01 (or B.1.1.7 in

cov-lineages.org

nomenclature, 20B/501Y.V1 in

nextstrain.org

nomenclature), appears to be much more infectious than other COVID-19 strains. As of Dec. 31, Zvi Mowshowitz thought it was 80% likely the new strain is >50% more transmissible; as of Dec. 27, superforecaster Juan Gambeiro thought this was 65% likely. As of Dec. 31, infectious disease expert Trevor Bedford expected the new strain to be about 50% more transmissible. I expect we'll get increasingly good estimates over the next few weeks.

The new strain doesn't appear to cause worse symptoms (update Jan. 22: it

may indeed cause worse systems

), but as Zvi Mowshowitz noted on Dec. 24, if transmissibility is as high as it looks and vaccine rollout doesn't speed up dramatically, we should expect a massive fourth wave of infections in the US "likely cresting between March and May, that could be sufficiently powerful to substantially overshoot herd immunity".

"Overshooting herd immunity" means we achieve herd immunity in the space of a few weeks, with perhaps 60+% of all Americans getting sick; and then (because the total number of infectious people is so high) a large portion of the rest of the population gets infected too even though the virus's effective reproduction number R is much lower now.

Daniel Speyer’s description of overshooting herd immunity in a short period of time:

"More people are infected than it would take to drive r<1. More than 2/3 of the population, using the uniform r=3 model. This still leaves individuals the opportunity to go full-lockdown until vaccinated and avoi

...