trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Above the Narrative
by Jacob Falkovich — 2021-02-25T04:37:21.587Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.com

Sometimes you write about a thing and that thing… happens.

I spent all of February working on a post about the mainstream narrative of American society: who gets to tell it, what happens when that narrative is challenged, and how Rationality relates to it. I finished a 5,000-word draft on Friday night and went to sleep intending to make a few final edits on Saturday. I woke up to the New York Times

story about SlateStarCodex

and the ensuing shitstorm, an illustration of everything I was writing about. Then Claire Lehmann invited me to write about the matter for Quillette, so I spent the long weekend furiously condensing 5,000 words down to 1,800 and tying it to the NYT piece.

The result is

The Narrative and Its Discontents

. Please go ahead and read it! I’m quite happy with how it turned out, and the lively discussion on the Quillette forum. This post is a follow up on The Narrative’s manufacturers and its discontents.

Journalist

Hot take: Calling Cade Metz a piece of shit on Twitter or sharing his address is, like, totally cringe. Going through his writing or personal correspondence hoping to find something problematic is even worse. That’s just handing your soul to the devil — the

same devil

that employs Metz.

Metz’s article is a hit piece in the sense of causing unnecessary harm to its subject, but it certainly wasn’t a knockout. The word “racist” had to appear in the article — that’s just in the Times’ style guide now — but at least

they didn’t force it in the title

. The fact that Metz spent eight months on the story and produced no more damning evidence than Scott having once agreed with Charles Murray on a non race-related topic reflect positively on Scott for anyone who pays attention and didn’t have their mind already made up. The article was so anemic I thought it would be funny to claim that

Metz actually wrote it to protect Rationalists

. But it became hard to say that with a straight face after Scott himself accused the NYT of publishing “something as negative as possible” as vengeance.

Something similar played out back in June. Out of respect for Scott’s wishes for anonymity, I wrote Metz and his editors asking them to withhold his full name by

appealing to their journalistic integrity and desire for consistency

. Maybe my approach was doomed regardless, but the “torrent of online abuse” Metz says he received certainly di...
Mentorship, Management, and Mysterious Old Wizards
by Raemon — 2021-02-24T22:00:15.889Z
Link: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JJuEKwRm3oDC3qce7/mentorship-management-and-mysterious-old-wizards

Followup to Dealing with Network Constraints

Epistemic Status: I spent some time trying to check if Mysterious Old Wizards were important, and reality did not clearly tell me one way or another. But, I still believe it and frequently reference it and figured I should lay out the belief.

Three bottlenecks that the EA community faces – easily mistaken for each other, but with important differences:

Mentorship – People who help you learn skills, design your career, and gain important context about the EA landscape that help you figure out how to apply those skills.

Management – Within a given org or existing hierarchy, someone who figures out what needs doing and who should do it. This can involve mentorship of employees who are either new, or need to train in new skills.

Finally, what I call Mysterious Old Wizards – Those who help awaken people's ambition and agency.

I mention all three concepts to avoid jargon confusion. Mysterious Old Wizards are slightly fungible with mentors and management, but they are not the same thing. But first, let's go over the first two.

Mentorship and Management Bottlenecks

Mentorship and Management are (hopefully) well understood. Right now, my guess is that management is the biggest bottleneck for EA (with mentorship a close second). But this doesn't mean there's any obvious changes to make to our collective strategy.

The people I know of who are best at mentorship are quite busy. As far as I can tell, they are already putting effort into mentoring and managing people. Mentorship and management also both directly trade off against other high value work they could be doing.

There are people with more free time, but those people are also less obviously qualified to mentor people. You can (and probably should) have people across the EA landscape mentoring each other. But, you need to be realistic about how valuable this is, and how much it enables EA to scale.

A top-tier mentor with lots of skills and context can help ensure someone thinks through lots of relevant considerations, or direct them in the most useful ways. A medium-tier mentor is more likely to be misguided about some things, or missing some context.

A newcomer to the field who's just read the obvious blogposts might be able to help a newer-comer learn what to read, but there's going to be a lot of stuff they don't know.

A lot of EA content is subtle and detailed, and eas...
Suffering-Focused Ethics in the Infinite Universe. How can we redeem ourselves if Multiverse Immortality is real and subjective death is impossible. 

by Szymon Kucharski — 2021-02-24T21:02:08.080Z

The work is only a skeleton of a more complete concept and in some places a loose collection of unprofessional thoughts. It is a translation from the original language, which is probably why there could be mistakes in it. I apologize for the underdeveloped elements of the concept, for many reasons in many places the current state is very far from perfect, I hope it will be improved in the future. Nevertheless, I felt that it would be experimentally good to publish it here temporarily.

1. Suffering-Focused Ethics: Negative Consequentialism, Efilism, Promortalism, and Antinatalism as worldviews whose goal is to reduce suffering.

The life of every sentient being contains the inherent elements of suffering. They are, at the broadest spectrum, all the negative aspects of life that can be subjectively experienced by anything with that subjectivity. As a rule, it is assumed that the more complicated the nervous system in which negative states are felt, the greater the being's ability to feel them, the complexity of the "mind" grows along with the advancement of the brain itself, which may and very likely involve an increase in the amount of negative (and relatively "positive") states that can be experienced. Perhaps as the mental capacity of a given creature increases, so does the intensity of the suffering that can be felt.

We currently don't know as much as we would like to about suffering. Here are some links to possibly helpful articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates

Probably the most advanced species among the minds of the earth is man. From the time of the emergence of our distant ancestors, at least a dozen species very similar to us, within the same genus Homo and more broadly, the Hominini tribe lived and died out over millions of years, until only us and chimpanzees remained of the entire tribe. Homo sapiens is the last representative of the genus Homo, extinct outside of...
Are there good negotiation classes?
by shenkev — 2021-02-24T19:24:03.466Z

In HPMOR there is the notion of Malfoy's "negotiation tutors". Are there good classes or private lessons irl that are analogous to that (either online or in-person post covid)?

I'm a shyish programmer thinking about going into a managerial role. Wanted to get a leg-up by training myself to be more social and better at negotiation. I read Cialdini's Influences but theory is no replacement for practice. I'm not sure where to find such classes since a lot of classes online seems scammy/low-quality.
[AN #139]: How the simplicity of reality explains the success of neural nets
by Rohin Shah — 2021-02-24T18:30:04.038Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

Please note that while I work at DeepMind, this newsletter represents my personal views and not those of my employer.

HIGHLIGHTS

Why does deep and cheap learning work so well? (Henry W. Lin et al) (summarized by Rohin): We know that the success of neural networks must be at least in part due to some inductive bias (presumably towards “simplicity”), based on the following empirical observations:

1. Neural networks with mere millions of parameters work well with high-dimensional inputs such as images, despite the fact that, speaking loosely, there are exponentially more functions from images to classifications than there are functions expressible by million-parameter neural networks.

2. Neural networks learn solutions that generalize well even in the overparameterized regime, where statistical learning theory would predict that they overfit.

3. Relatedly, neural networks learn solutions that generalize well, despite the fact that they can memorize a randomly labeled training dataset of the same size.

Can we say more about this inductive bias towards simplicity? This paper tackles this question from the perspective of the first empirical observation: what is it about neural networks and/or reality such that relatively small neural networks can still learn the “correct” function? We can’t appeal to the fact that neural networks are universal function approximators, because that theorem doesn’t put a bound on the size of the neural network. The core idea of this paper is that any function that we care to model with neural networks in practice tends to be quite simple: in particular, it can often be expressed as a polynomial plus a few extra things.

Typically, we’re interested in modeling the relationship between some latent class y and some detailed observations or data x. For example, y might be a concept like “cat” or image labels more broadly, while x might be specific natural images. In this case the causal structure in reality looks like y → x. In our example, there is ...
A No-Nonsense Guide to Early Retirement
by tryactions — 2021-02-24T16:37:38.585Z

(Edited 2024-07-18: Looking at this 3.5 years later, there's a few changes I would make.
First, I avoided being too opinionated about asset allocation -- but I now think it's pretty important to have a high % of investments in stock index funds. I would not drop below 80%, except perhaps briefly during the early stages of retirement. I am currently 100% invested in stocks.
Second, I recommended establishing an emergency fund in cash, then paying off all debt above 3-4% interest rate. Interest rates have since increased across the board, and you can earn 5% just sitting money in a high-yield savings account, so this no longer makes sense. I also think it can make sense to save money in investments even while holding some high-interest debt -- you might lose net worth, but you gain financial stability by having additional assets you can call on in case of job loss/etc. This is especially true if the debt is large, such as a mortgage.

Third, I recommended a flat 6-12 months of expenses kept in cash. If you have sufficient amounts in stocks that you'll be financially safe even given a large market downturn, this is unnecessary. I keep ~2 months of expenses in cash (a money market fund) and the rest in stocks.

Fourth, I think Fidelity is ergonomically better than Vanguard, and ETFs are ergonomically better than mutual funds. I also don't mention expense ratios. Nowadays, my default recommendation would be "Fidelity + buy VTI" instead of "Vanguard + buy VFIFX".)

(Edited 2021-02-28: Added a section on how retirement is risky, and changed a few other sections to provide more context or clarify various trade-offs pointed out in the comments.)

Introduction

I wanted to be able to link people to a guide on early retirement that succinctly covered everything I thought was important, but I couldn't find one that I was satisfied with. So I made this.

There are tons of communities and resources out there for anyone who wants to read more about retirement, investing, financial independence, etc -- many of which I'm cribbing from. You might start here: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/wiki/faq.

This is an opinionated guide, which means a lot of it is kind of made up -- but I think it's ~95% in line with what you'll find in financial independence communities across the internet. Even if som...
Are multiple shorter exposures less likely to reduce in infections of COVID-19 then one larger exposure?
by ChristianKl — 2021-02-24T13:14:53.751Z

At 15 separate days Alice spends 1 minute in close proximity of Carol, who is infected with COVID-19. Bob on the other hand spends 15 minutes on one day with Carol, who is infected with COVID-19. Assuming the infectiousness of Carol is the same on every day and everything else about the risk factors is constant, is Bob more likely to get infected then Alice? If so, by how much?

(StackExchange crosspost; Quora crosspost)
Reading recommendations on social technology: looking for the third way between technocracy and populism
by Quinn — 2021-02-24T11:48:06.451Z

I broadly see the situation as follows

populism is the failure mode that I can characterize as the two wolves and a sheep problem (voting on what's for dinner), adversarial dynamics between majorities and minorities are exacerbated.

technocracy is the failure mode where you get a bunch of wonks together to look for positive-sum solutions, maximize on behalf of the aggregate, etc., but you're fighting a losing battle to compress information for them (i.e. in the hayekian criticism of economic planning sense).

I guess they fall on opposite sides of a spectrum and I view actually-existing democracies as a constant push-pull, negotiating a sweet spot on the spectrum. I'm wondering if we can dissolve the problem with some truly galaxy-brained social technology.

What can I read to beef up my thinking about this?
Coincidences are Improbable
by Mark Xu — 2021-02-24T09:14:11.918Z
Link: https://markxu.com/coincidences

Ada Palmer:

events which are improbable and proximal are likely to have a causal link

I usually feel fine after eating food. One day, I decided to try a new dish at a restaurant. Afterward, my stomach is upset. I suspect that the new dish caused my stomachache. How justified is this suspicion?

Suppose events A and B both have a probability 0.01 of occurring, and you observe both. This event favors various hypotheses over each other to the extent that they sharply predicted A∧B. A hypothesis that has P(B∣A)=c∗0.01 assigns c times more probability mass to A∧B than hypotheses that suppose A and B are independent.

More concretely, a hypothesis that postulates a strong causal link between A and B might have P(B∣A)=0.9. This hypothesis is favored 90:1 over a hypothesis that has P(B∣A)=P(B)=0.01. More generally, if you observe two improbable things, this is evidence that the presence of one observation makes the other more likely, with the evidence getting stronger as the connection between the two events strengthens.

Coincidences happen, but they are improbable. If you get a dog and your couch starts getting damaged, your dog is probably doing it. If your skin gets irritated and you recently switched lotion brands, you're probably allergic to the new brand. If my friend and I both saw someone six feet tall with red hair, we probably saw the same person. If your friend introduces you to someone that is both vegan and plays Magic the Gathering, you probably forget that your friend is also vegan and plays Magic the Gathering.

There are four ways events can be causally linked, only two of which are direct:

A causes B; your dog caused the couch damage.

B causes A; your skin irritation is caused by the new lotion brand.

Some event C causes both; the same 6-foot person causes both you and your friend to see them.

Some event D caused by both has been conditioned upon; new introductions have improbable attribute combinations because your friend seeks those combinations out.

When enough coincidences happen, start looking for a causal link.
The Grandest Vision for Humanity (Light)
by Ruby — 2021-02-24T07:15:10.049Z
Link: https://hackernoon.com/the-grandest-vision-for-humanity-7e54eb3a4369

This is the third speech in the wedding ceremony of Ruby & Miranda. See the Sequence introduction for more info. The speech was given by Riva-Melissa Tez.

Tara descends from podium.

Brienne: We hope to banish the darkness. But our ambition is far greater than that. We intend to create a future glorious beyond imagining. I call upon Riva to speak of the Light we might attain.

Riva ascends podium.

IMAGE 2 PROJECTED ON PLANETARIUM

Messier 16 (M16), also known as the Eagle Nebula.

Riva commences speech.

The universe is complex and beautiful. To think of the themes we have listened to today, of love, humanity, life and death, should leave us humbled by the histories of all those who have lived before, of all those who will live after us, the vast unimportance of ourselves in the sequence of the eternal everything. Forever impressed by the genuine role of human anonymity, the world doesn't and won't ever really know who we are, merely just one of many dots in the vast space-time spectrum that we should protect. But how many of us daydream about the goal of humanity in the universe? What does it look like?

Sometimes I think about humanity in the same way I regard a painting by Georges Seurat. The use of pointillism- which is the artistic technique of painting a collection of thousands of microdots on the canvas that contrast and compliment each other in a multitude of colours. From up close these dots seem nonsensical, even plain wrong- a blue dot next to a yellow dot that from further away appears white. From a distant viewpoint these individual dots combine to make a beautifully intricate scene. An analogy of all the beings in the universe. Each life, idea, love simply a tiny colourful dot,complimenting and contrasting, but from further way these blend to contribute to a bigger picture, a bigger goal.

How big is this overall picture? Well, it’s huge. The distance of the known universe is 900 billion light years in diameter, where each light year is 5.87 Trillion miles. The full scale is unfathomable to us. And it’s old too. 13.75 billion years old. Our human-like ancestors have only inhabited this universe, this exact planet on which we stand, for around 6 million years, a ridiculously short time-slice when compared to the true scale of the context. The fact that we are here, right now, with all the possibilities and options that could have made things tur...
Avoid Contentious Terms
by jefftk — 2021-02-24T03:10:05.216Z

A succinct term for a concept is great, but only if everyone involved
views it similarly. If you're trying to write something persuasive,
controversial terms are traps that can derail discussion and make
finding common ground harder. Consider limiting yourself to well
understood terms to avoid distracting from your core argument.

One of my favorite comments I've received
was "you're really good at talking about the patriarchy without
talking about the patriarchy," on a post about dividing tasks in marriage. I didn't use
terms like "emotional labor", "sexism", or, as noted, "patriarchy".
This typically involves slightly longer phrasing, but it's not too
bad; that post has "not everyone wants to be or will be in a
male-female couple" instead of bringing in "heteronormative".
Similarly, a version of the post I wrote about tickling kids that used "consent" or "rape
culture" would have been worse.

There are two main ways people bounce off terms:

Affiliation. A piece mentioning "emotional labor" will lead
readers to one set of inferences about the author; one mentioning
"traditional marriage" will bring different inferences to mind. This
can be useful if you are trying to strengthen the views of people who
already agree with you, but not if you're trying to bring in new
people.

Confusion. Your audience may not know what your terms mean, or,
worse, may think they mean something different than you do. In
discussions with your friends a broad understanding of "racist" may be
implicit, but if you use the term to describe credit scoring many
readers will take it as a claim that the system was maliciously and
intentionally designed to disadvantage people on the basis of their
race, and perhaps that credit scores explicitly consider an
applicant's race.

There are some downsides to this approach: it can make it harder to
find your piece through searching and it can feel somewhat detached
from the broader conversation on the issue. It's probably not for
everyone, but it's a pragmatic approach I've found works well.

Comment via: facebook
Yes, words can cause harm
by kithpendragon — 2021-02-24T00:18:56.790Z

[ETA] I've made a few clarifying edits in response to early feedback, discussing some of my writing mishakes. All are clearly marked, and all of the original text is still present. Thanks to those who told me they had read something other than what I intended to write.

[ETA] I've been convinced to make a list of abstracted examples. See Appendix I in the comments section.

⚠️ Content Warning: The territory pointed to in this post can be extremely challenging to navigate skillfully.

Quoted below in full is the About This Document section of a short essay I wrote some time ago about the ways words can cause harm to people.

On more than one occasion, I've been asked to explain why I suggested that my interlocutor should be more careful with their words. «Words are just wiggly air or patterns of light and dark; I can't produce any string of words that can hurt you without your consent,» goes the argument.

I've given a short answers that stuck very closely to the context of the conversations. On one recent occasion, I began compiling a "So, you still don't buy it" list. This would consist of examples of words and phrases that might cause harm, since examples are often the fastest and easiest way to show things to people.

Two minutes later, I noticed the obvious information hazard and deleted the list in horror.

After about an hour's frantic thought, I tried again. This time, I planned to produce a lightly structured document with categories and explanations. There would be only a single example for each category, carefully selected to exemplify a certain kind of harm, but applicable only to a very narrow range of circumstances.

I deleted that list before it even finished taking shape. Likewise the list that followed with examples selected from popular fiction.

Nevertheless, I still felt that if the question of how words could cause harm was being asked, it was important to be able to discuss the answer. And the short statement, "words and symbols are causal mental objects capable of producing or promoting harm to any number of entity classes in a wide variety of contexts," seemed unlikely to convey the full scope and gravity of the problem, or even to be particularly convincing on its own. So I wrestled with how to present the whole thing ethically. I wrote a draft of this document and held off on posting it for a week to see if I still felt OK publishing it after that t

...