trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
SubOnlyStackFans
by Jacob Falkovich — 2020-11-03T02:33:00.091Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who started an OnlyFans this year, and those who started a Substack. Naturally, I first tried to do the former (

image not safe for working-from-home

). Then I learned that the percentage of straight men among OnlyFans creators is much lower than their prevailing ratio in the population, clear proof of the rampant sexism in the industry. Until the high-earning women of OnlyFans dismantle the structures of oppression and privilege they benefit from there is no room for me to join them.

What about stacking my subs like Benjamins? It’s a tempting idea — I’m writing regularly(ish) anyway, I could start charging for it. I may even benefit from the discipline imposed by a paying subscriber base.

But the truth is that I hate discipline, and I’m not desperate for money either.

Writing about my struggle to produce at my day job

worked well enough as self-therapy; I am now churning out financial software product management, whatever that is, at a sufficient rate to keep the rent paid and

the guinea pigs fed

. I’ve also been getting

enough donations

to cover the WordPress Pro subscription and bottles of microdose LSD that fuel Putanumonit, which is sweet of y’all.

I suspect that both Substack and OnlyFans may become a Girardian bubble. Everyone joins after hearing from the few people who succeed; the thousands who slink away after months of effort netted them a mere 17 subscribers usually do so quietly. There are many people whose writing and tweets I enjoy and many beautiful women I’d like to see naked, but very few I’d pay for. It’s not even just that there’s a lot of free content out there. The stuff I already pay for, including several podcasts, magazines, and

The Browser

, takes up most of the time I have to consume online content anyway.

I write Putanumonit to help make sense of things in my own head, and to

connect with people

. The number of people I meet in person is always going to be a fraction of my total readership, but even in purely financial terms the majority of the value I could get is in that small fraction.

Several readers were impressed enough by my writing, analytical skills, and domain knowledge to offer me interviews and jobs at hedge funds, startups, and one exciting Effective Altruism project. I did an internship at Jane Street on the advice of two separate blog readers befo...
Notes on Industriousness
by David Gross — 2020-11-03T01:55:28.110Z

This post examines the virtue of industry (a.k.a. “assiduity,” “enterprise,” “industriousness,” or “productivity”). It explores what others have learned about this virtue, more than my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I hope this post (and your comments on it) helps people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

“Lose no time: be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” ―Benjamin Franklin[1]

What is industry?

Industry is the virtue of habitually devoting one’s sustained effort earnestly toward worthwhile goals. It is contrasted with such things as idleness/laziness/sloth, but also with things like aimlessness, dabbling, dithering, flitting, being ironic (un-earnest), triviality, and wasting time. The self-motivating impulse behind industry is sometimes distinguished from industry itself and called by names like “drive,” “eagerness,” “enthusiasm,” or “ambition.”

“There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. …[T]here is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.” —Thomas Carlyle[2]

Cate Hall (“How to be More Agentic”) prefers the term “agency”, which she defines as “manifest determination to make things happen.”[3]

Related virtues

Some virtues in the same ballpark as industry include:

Duty (responsibility, diligence): understanding what you ought to be doing, and then devoting yourself to that in particular.
Engagement: participating earnestly in life, rather than being a mere spectator.
Focus: resisting distraction and maintaining a goal over time (though for some types of goal, being able to multi-task and rapidly shift focus is important).
Purposefulness: a belief that your endeavors matter, a sense of mission or calling.
Service: exerting oneself for the sake of something beyond oneself.

The virtue of determination / follow-through is also associated with industry, but it can sometimes be counterproductive if taken to extremes. If you are determined to push something through to the finish line no matter what, you may be exhibiting a stubbornness or bullheadedness that interferes with industry: you continue to devote yourself to an unproductive enterprise because vanity or the su...
Sleeping Julia: Empirical support for thirder argument in the Sleeping Beauty Problem
by Alex V — 2020-11-03T00:21:48.306Z

I've created an emulation of the Sleeping Beauty Problem in the Julia programming language which supports the thirder solution.

For those unfamiliar with the problem, I recommend this explanation by Julia Galef: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL52lG6aNIY

In this explanation, I'll briefly explain the current situation with regard to this problem's status in academia, how the emulation works, and how we can formalize the intuitions gleaned from this experiment. Let's start with the code.

Originally I wrote this in Julia (hence the name), and that code can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/seisvelas/SleepingJulia/blob/main/sleeping.jl.ipynb

Here I'll do the same thing, but in Python, as that language is likely grokked by a broader audience of LessWrong readers. First, I create a class to run the experiment and track the state of various sleeping beauty experiments:

import random

class SleepingBeautyExperiment:
def __init__(self):
self.wakeups = 0
self.bets = {
'heads' : { 'win' : 0, 'loss' : 0},
'tails' : { 'win' : 0, 'loss' : 0},
}

def run(self, bet):
coin = ('heads', 'tails')
coin_toss = random.choice(coin)
win_or_loss = 'win' if coin_toss == bet else 'loss'
self.bets[bet][win_or_loss] += 1

# Tuesday, in case of tails
if coin_toss == 'tails':
self.bets[bet][win_or_loss] += 1

def repeat(self, bet, times):
for i in range(times):
self.run(bet)

def reset(self):
self.__init__()

I apologize for the lack of code highlighting. I tried to write code that self-documents as much as possible, but if I failed, just leave a comment and I'll clarify to the best of my ability. The key observation is that in the case of tails, we wake SB twice. Ie, for every 100 experiments, there will be 150 wakeups. We don't care how many whole experiments SB summarily wins (if we did, though, the halfer interpretation would be the correct one!).

Let's see the code in action:

>>> heads_wins = Sb.bets['heads']['win']
>>> heads_losses = Sb.bets['heads']['loss']
>>> heads_wins / (heads_wins + heads_losses)
0.33378682085242317
>>> # As percent rounded to two decimal places:
>>> int(heads_wins / (heads_wins + heads_losses) * 10000) / 100
33.37

There ya go, a nice right dose of thirderism. In the lay rationality community the SB problem is often treated as an open deb...
Subagents of Cartesian Frames
by Scott Garrabrant — 2020-11-02T22:02:52.605Z

Here, we introduce and discuss the concept of a subagent in the Cartesian Frames paradigm.

Note that in this post, as in much of the sequence, we are generally working up to biextensional equivalence. In the discussion, when we informally say that a frame has some property or is some object, what we'll generally mean is that this is true of its biextensional equivalence class.

1. Definitions of Subagent

1.1. Categorical Definition

Definition: Let C and D be Cartesian frames over W. We say that C's agent is a subagent of D's agent, written C◃D, if for every morphism ϕ:C→⊥ there exists a pair of morphisms ϕ0:C→D and ϕ1:D→⊥ such that ϕ=ϕ1∘ϕ0.

Colloquially, we say that every morphism from C to ⊥ factors through D. As a shorthand for "C's agent is a subagent of D's agent," we will just say "C is a subagent of D."

At a glance, it probably isn't clear what this definition has to do with subagents. We'll first talk philosophically about what we mean by "subagent", and then give an alternate definition that will make the connection more clear.

When I say "subagent," I am actually generalizing over two different relationships that may not immediately seem like they belong together.

First, there is the relationship between the component and the whole. One football player is a subagent of the entire football team.

Second, there is the relationship between an agent before and after making a precommitment or a choice. When I precommit not to take a certain action, I am effectively replacing myself with a weaker agent that has fewer options. The new agent with the commitment is a subagent of the original agent.

These are the two notions I am trying to capture with the word "subagent". I am making the philosophical claim that we should think of them primarily as one concept, and am partially backing up this claim by pointing to the simplicity of the above definition. In a future post, we will discuss the formal differences between these two kinds of subagent, but I think it is best to view them as two special cases of the one simple concept.

(My early drafts of the "Embedded Agency" sequence used the word "subagent" in the title for both the Subsystem Alignment and Robust Delegation sections.)

1.2. Currying Definition

Definition: Let C and&nb...
Confucianism in AI Alignment
by johnswentworth — 2020-11-02T21:16:45.599Z

I hear there’s a thing where people write a lot in November, so I’m going to try writing a blog post every day. Disclaimer: this post is less polished than my median. And my median post isn’t very polished to begin with.

Imagine a large corporation - we’ll call it BigCo. BigCo knows that quality management is high-value, so they have a special program to choose new managers. They run the candidates through a program involving lots of management exercises, simulations, and tests, and select those who perform best.

Of course, the exercises and simulations and tests are not a perfect proxy for the would-be managers’ real skills and habits. The rules can be gamed. Within a few years of starting the program, BigCo notices a drastic disconnect between performance in the program and performance in practice. The candidates who perform best in the program are those who game the rules, not those who manage well, so of course many candidates devote all their effort to gaming the rules.

How should this problem be solved?

Ancient Chinese scholars had a few competing schools of thought on this question, most notably the Confucianists and the Legalists. The (stylized) Confucianists’ answer was: the candidates should be virtuous and not abuse the rules. BigCo should demonstrate virtue and benevolence in general, and in return their workers should show loyalty and obedience. I’m not an expert, but as far as I can tell this is not a straw man - though stylized and adapted to a modern context, it accurately captures the spirit of Confucian thought.

The (stylized) Legalists instead took the position obvious to any student of modern economics: this is an incentive design problem, and BigCo leadership should design less abusable incentives.

If you have decent intuition for economics, it probably seems like the Legalist position is basically right and the Confucian position is Just Wrong. I don't want to discourage this intuition, but I expect that many people who have this intuition cannot fully spell out why the Confucian answer is Just Wrong, other than “it has no hope of working in practice”. After all, the whole thing is worded as a moral assertion - what people should do, how the problem should be solved. Surely the Confucian ideal of everyone working together in harmony is not wrong as an ideal? It may not be possible in practice, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to bring t...
Location Discussion Takeaways
by mingyuan — 2020-11-02T21:14:24.604Z

It's been a month and a half since I posted

The rationalist community's location problem

, and there's been a ton of good discussion both in the comments and elsewhere. In this post I hope to summarize the discussion so far, provide additional data, and give my take on what I think we should do.

It's worth noting that there are two related discussions going on in parallel. The first is this one: rationalists as a whole have become less tied down geographically during the pandemic, and it seemed like a good time to reassess whether the Berkeley hub was the optimal setup. The second is internal to MIRI (though it's been posted about publicly a bit) – like everyone else, MIRI has had to experiment with new and nonstandard working setups in 2020, and that's also put them in a place of wanting to reassess whether being in Berkeley is optimal.

Note: I work for MIRI, but these are entirely my own opinions and not MIRI's – I've been thinking about this problem since long before I joined MIRI and don't necessarily see eye-to-eye with most people there on this question.

The discussion so far + data

People have shown the most serious interest in college towns (e.g. Austin, Ann Arbor, Oxford) and several European cities (e.g. Berlin, Tallinn, Prague, London). Options in New Zealand and Australia have been floated but appear to not be under very serious consideration. MIRI's main options under consideration are (1) the Toronto area, or (2) rural New Hampshire, within a couple hours' drive of Boston.

After looking at all the comments I thought, "Wow, there sure are a lot of places people are interested in and a lot of different things they care about. This seems like a great time to use a spreadsheet!" So

here it is

. You will quickly notice that it is not all the way filled out; this is because it has nearly 1500 cells and I was doing it alone. It is publicly editable, so please contribute a bit of your time to fill out a column or two if you think it's valuable to have this data!

The spreadsheet is informative, but it doesn't make the decision for us. In order for it to be useful, we have to figure out what we value.

My take

The rationalist community is many things, but fundamentally, it exists to carry out the project of rationality, broadly defined. As such, our goal in choosing a location should be to preserve (or improve) the ability of individuals in the co...
Kelly Bet or Update?
by abramdemski — 2020-11-02T20:26:01.185Z

I suggest augmenting the classic "bet or update" with "Kelly bet or update".

Epistemic status: feels like maybe going too far, but worth considering?

On the one hand, we have a line of thinking in rationalist discourse which says probability is willingness to bet. This line of thinking suggests that many bad thinking patterns and misapplications of probability theory can broadly be discouraged by a culture of betting.

On the other hand, there's the longstanding discussion of Aumann Agreement and modest epistemology. According to this line of thinking, beliefs should be contagious among honest and rational folk, so long as they believe each other to be honest and rational. One should never agree to disagree; where two disagree, at least one is wrong (irrationally wrong -- or dishonest). This line of thinking has been developed extensively by Robin Hanson and others, and criticized heavily in Eliezer's Inadequate Equilibria, as well as some earlier essays.

These two perspectives are reconciled in the creedo bet or update, which has been proposed as a norm for rationalists: in any significant disagreement, you should either come to an agreement (at least of the Aumann sort, where you may not understand each other's exact reasons, but assign enough outside-view credibility to each other that your final probabilities align), or, failing that, you should bet. The Hansons of the world can take the outside view and update to agree with each other, while the Yudkowskys of the world put their money where their mouth is.

But how much should you bet?

Risk Aversion

A common norm in the rationalist circles I've frequented is to bet small amounts. I think there are some arguments in favor of this:

This makes winning feel good and losing hurt, without putting too much on the line. We want opportunities to learn, we want some useful social pressure against overconfidence and other biases, but we're not out to bankrupt anyone.
Often, bets have to do with things we have control over, such as placing a bet about when you'll finish an important project. Bets which are small in relationship to the project's importance help guarantee that no one gains a perverse financial incentive to delay or sabotage an important project. (On the other hand, people usually avoid perverse bets anyway; and, sometimes it is useful to use bets in the opposite way -- setting up extra incentives in virtuous di

...
What Belongs in my Glossary?
by Zvi — 2020-11-02T19:52:58.009Z

I've been working on a Glossary that will give short descriptions of concepts I've introduced, so people don't have to seek out entire posts to grok what they mean in context and then decide later if they'd like to know more. So far I've got Asymmetric Justice, The Delenda Est Club, Doom Patrol, Everything is Trying to Kill You, Easy Mode, Hard Mode, Perfect/Superperfect/Imperfect Competition, Immoral Maze, Maze Behaviors, Maze Levels, Slack, Out to Get You, Simulacra Levels, Sacrifice to the Gods, Very Serious People.

What other things should I make sure to include? (Post has been edited as I add things, answers below that suggest things that are in likely were helpful, thank you)

(Also any cool elegant/short definitions for the above or other Zvi-concepts are welcome, including Devil's Dictionary style versions)
Generalize Kelly to Account for # Iterations?
by abramdemski — 2020-11-02T16:36:25.699Z

On my post weird things about money, Bunthut made the following comment:

I think the interesting question is what to do when you expect many more, but only finitely many rounds. It seems like Kelly should somehow gradually transition, until it recommends normal utility maximization in the case of only a single round happening ever. Log utility doesn't do this. I'm not sure I have anything that does though, so maybe it's unfair to ask it from you, but still it seems like a core part of the idea, that the Kelly strategy comes from the compounding, is lost.

Kelly betting seems somehow less justified when we're not doing it a bunch of times. If I were making bets left and right, I would feel more inclined to use Kelly; I could visualize the growth-maximizing behavior, and know that if I trusted my own probability assessments, I'd see that growth curve with high probability.

Several prediction markets have recently offered a bet at around 62¢ which superforecasters assign around 85% probability. This resulted in a rare temptation for me to Kelly bet. Calculating the Kelly formula, I found that I was supposed to put 60% of my bankroll on this.

Now, 60% of my savings seems like a lot. But am I really more risk-averse than Kelly? It struck me that if I were to do this sort of thing all the time, I would feel more strongly justified using Kelly.

Bunthut is suggesting a generalization of Kelly which accounts for the number of times we expect to iterate investment. In Bunthut's suggestion, we would get less risk-averse as number of iterations dropped, approaching expectation maximization. This would reflect the idea that the Kelly criterion arises because of long-term performance over many iterations, and normal expectation maximization is the right thing to do in single-shot scenarios.

But I sort of suspect this "origin of Kelly" story is wrong. So I'm also interested in number-iteration formulas which reach different conclusions.

The obvious route is to modulate Kelly by the probability that the result will be close to the median case. With arbitrarily many iterations, we are virtually certain that the fraction of bets which pay out approaches their probabilities of paying out, which is the classic argument in favor of Kelly. But with less iterations, we are less sure. So, how might one use that to modulate betting behavior?

I suggest explicitly stepping outside of an ...
Waffle Crepes
by jefftk — 2020-11-02T15:30:02.843Z

For years now I've been making eggy

crepes or

waffles for the kids' breakfast as a way to
get them eating more protein. One thing I discovered recently, is
that if you cook the crepes on both sides at the same time it's faster
and they come out slightly fluffy.

We have a combination waffle maker/griddle with reversible plates (an
older model of this
one) and when I made crepes on it I would normally open it fully
flat. I found a closing it, however, offers another way to cook them:

It's still thin like a crepe:

Don't cook it too long, or it gets hard. Cooked just enough and it
rolls nicely:

I find these are tastier than what I was making before, you don't have
to flip them, and they cook really quickly.
Non Polemic: How do you personally deal with "irrational" people?
by Emiya — 2020-11-02T13:44:24.841Z

I'm finally managing to finish my "basic" training in rationality, which is to mean finish studying "Rationality: A-Z" (I had studied the first half years ago, but I foolishly stopped when I got to the part about reductionism, which was unbelievably stupid of me even with all the reasons the led to me doing so). I plan to continue studying even more material once I'm done with it, to train myself in instrumental rationality and everything else I can find to make myself as smart as I could possibly be. I'm very satisfied with my progresses, the first half of the sequences helped me improve tremendously years ago, and now I can see myself improving again.

But, even while I am still at what I think is just the beginning of my improvement, I'm noticing more and more a rather serious problem.

To put it politely, I hate how people think, now.

I know it's really unfair because I didn't know any better mere weeks ago, and years ago I was a good textbook example of an intelligent person who'd keep mainly using his intelligence to rationalise whatever questionable decisions he made, but I just can't help it.

I notice logic leaps, cognitive missteps and dumb conclusions of people who are considered smart, deep and expert on stuff while they talk on the radio or on other medias and I get angry.

I notice idiotic ideas, as well as practices of thoughts that are the cognitive equivalent of shooting yourself in both knees, spreading inside ideologies I deeply care about, because the evils they fight are very real and demonstrated by science, but now I can see how all the truth is hopelessly getting mixed up with stuff that's just stupid or wrong, and that the intelligent people that once introduced me to these ideologies are absolutely incapable of judging and criticising any bad idea that's coming from their own side, and I get livid.

Half the time I hear someone talking I have to choose between politely tearing apart the majority of what he said, growing more and more annoyed, or just shutting off my attention and think about something else while pretending to listen to them.

And all this is just when I have to deal with intelligent people.

I can't comprehend how a stupid person thinks unless I just stop thinking of him as an actual human being, switch off my empathy completely and just model him as a badly designed computer program with a bunch of floatin...