trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Wanted: Foom-scared alignment research partner
by Icarus Gallagher — 2021-07-26T19:23:38.402Z

Hi, my name is Mack Gallagher, I'm 20 years old, I have ZERO familiarity with computer architecture or [math or computer science technical jargon] [although I'm OK at reasoning], I have never attended a prestigious university, and I currently live in a 15,000-person meatpacking town, where I pack meat. I am terrified of impending foom as the most likely cause of my early death, I think my brain needs regular active reinforcement from [the presence of] people who share my beliefs-and-affect-toward-them to fuel sustained positive action on my part, and I am tired of sitting around waiting to die.

Are you, like me,

Consistently apprehensive of impending foom
Allergic to high-status AI risk discussion
Currently doing something completely unrelated to AI for a day job
Tired of sitting around waiting for death

and preferably:

15-25 years old
Low-status [have never attended a prestigious university]

???

My email is magallagher00@gmail.com.

Please

email me or message me on LessWrong. Maybe we can be less useless together.
What does knowing the heritability of a trait tell me in practice?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2021-07-26T16:29:52.552Z

The concept of

heritability

gets misunderstood a lot, so there are several articles discussing what it doesn't mean. But reading through all of them leaves me confused about what it does mean in practical terms, outside the technical definition.

For example, as I myself wrote in an old comment about common misunderstandings:

Caution: heritability, as in the statistical concept, is defined in a way that has some rather counter-intuitive implications. One might think that if happiness is 50% heritable, then happiness must be 50% "hardwired". This is incorrect, and in fact the concept of heritability is theoretically incapable of making such a claim.

The definition of heritability is straightforward enough: the amount of genetic variance in a trait, divided by the overall variance in the trait. Now, nearly all humans are born with two feet, so you might expect the trait of "having two feet" to have 100% heritability. In fact, it has close to 0% heritability! This is because the vast majority of people who have lost their feet have done so because of accidents or other environmental factors, not due to a gene for one-footedness. So nearly all of the variance in the amount of feet in humans is caused by environmental factors, making the heritability zero.

Another example is that if we have a trait that is strongly affected by the environment, but we manage to make the environment more uniform, then the heritability of the trait goes up. For instance, both childhood nutrition and genetics have a strong effect on a person's height. In today's society, we have relatively good social security nets helping give most kids at least a basic level of nutrition, a basic level which may not have been available for everyone in the past. So in the past there was more environmental variance involved in determining a person's height. Therefore the trait "height" may have been less hereditary in the past than now.

The heritability of some trait is always defined in relation to some specific population in some specific environment. There's no such thing as an "overall" heritability, valid in any environment. The heritability of a trait does not tell us whether that trait can be affected by outside interventions.

Some articles that go deeper into the details and math of this include "

Heritability is a ratio, not a measure of determinism

" (dynomight.net) and "

Heritability in the genomics

...
Is there a theoretical upper limit on the R0 of Covid variants?
by CraigMichael — 2021-07-26T06:53:04.540Z

Looking at the Wikipedia article on basic reproduction number, it looks like the most contagious virus (as of right now) is measles with an R0 (high estimate) of 18. I'm wondering if there is some asymptotic limit to how contagious viruses can get, and maybe measles is close there? If there is or isn't, do we have any ideas as to what biological mechanisms are related to this?

I'm asking because it seems as the new variants emerge, it would be wise to aware of the worst case scenario. Just making a rough plot of the Covid rows in the basic reproduction article, and a rough stab on when they emerged, the wild-type, Alpha, Delta trend looks like this.

Wild-type, Alpha and Delta R0s (upper limits) and approximate dates when they emerged

From Tomas Pueyo's excellent thread, it looks like as Covid gets more transmissible it's likely to get more deadly.

In 20 months Covid has went from an R0 (again, high estimate) of 3.4 to 8. I'm not an epidemiologist, but that seems like a really big jump in context. To be fair, again, I'm using the high estimates, but the general trend is concerning and I would sleep better knowing if there was some biological reason it would plateau.

A scary, but I'm not sure how likely, scenario would be if another 20 months out (March 2023 or so), assuming there's large enough sections of the world where Covid is still spreading (either because vaccines haven't gotten there, or new vaccines are required for breakthroughs, or vaccines/infection immunity declines too quickly, etc), is there any reason to think it wouldn't jump another ~4.6 to ~12 or higher? Could it go above 18?

I'm just surprised I'm not seeing more discussion about this. Maybe I've missed it?
When writing triggers memory reconsolidation
by Adam Zerner — 2021-07-25T22:10:26.517Z

Last night I read the post Working With Monsters. My response? "Holy shit. This post is amazing and I needed to hear it."

The idea in the post is that you have to be able to work with people who you find morally abhorent. You can't just start a war every time someone believes in a god you don't like. Oh wait... I guess you can.

But you shouldn't! And even before reading the post, I had that stance. If you asked me, I'd have said "of course". So why is it that I found Working With Monsters to be influential?

Well, even though I believed it before, I still felt something "snap into place" after reading the post.

Think of it like this. My mind is composed of subagents. And so is yours.

It's like there are different people living inside your head. In the above image from Wait But Why, the author identifieds the Higher Mind and the Primitive Mind. In reality there are many more "people"/subagents than that living in your head, but let's go with this for now.

When I felt it "snap into place", I think what happened was that my Primitive Mind finally "got it". Higher Mind already understood it, but Primitive Mind did not.

What do I mean by "got it"? I have memory reconsolidation in mind. Here's a hand wavvy description of how that works.

When you initially form a memory/belief, like "you're a terrible person if you work with monsters", it "solidifies". It becomes "locked in". It consolidates.

If you want to update it, you have to first "unlock it". You do this by really zeroing in on it. Making it extremely salient. "Re-living it", if you will.

Once the memory is unlocked, it is available to be updated. In order to update it, you have to basically convince the subagent, eg. Primitive Mind, that the initial memory is false and instead something else is true. Picture a lawyer making an argument to a judge.

After the memory is updated, it becomes "locked in" again. It reconsolidates. Now if you wanted to update it a second time, you'd have unlock it again.

Let's get back to the blog post Working With Monsters. I think that what happened to me last night is that the blog post successfully performed steps two and three on my Primitive Mind subagent. For step two, it painted a picture that made things salient enough for me. For step three, despite being fictional, I felt like it still implicitly was making an argument, and I found that argument to be highly convincing.

More gen...
Can I teach myself scientific creativity?
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-07-25T20:15:09.385Z

Textbooks and classes are more than just curated collections of established knowledge. They also suggest what your goal should be:

Read the textbook and go to lecture
Take notes, ask questions when you feel confused, and try to understand everything
Solve the assigned problems for which the material equips you
Do practical projects and labs for hands-on experience

These are all instrumental goals, pointed at the terminal goal of becoming familiar with the material.

In real-world scientific research, scholarship has a different terminal goal, which is to let you design and carry out useful experiments. Familiarity with the material is just an instrumental goal that is supposed to contribute to that end.

Since useful research is about carrying out novel experiments to chip away at unsolved problems, it's generally going to be harder to say which specific bits of knowledge are going to be most useful to help you become a better experimenter. Perhaps you'll hit on a great idea for an experiment, or have a novel theoretical insight, and be able to trace back which bits of prior knowledge were necessary and sufficient to achieve this illumination.

Unfortunately, now that you've had your eureka moment, the connection between that prior knowledge and your creative insight is no longer very useful. The causal connection between your prior knowledge and your eureka moment is a form of knowledge. Unfortunately, it's a form of knowledge that becomes obsolete as soon as it is created.

All you can do with it is bring others to the same eureka moment you just had, which is what a classroom education is for. You can't use the prior knowledge->eureka moment connection to teach other people how to crank out their own novel insights.

Yet I do believe that creativity can be taught.

I worked as a piano teacher for a decade before my turn into scientific research. Although I was classically trained, I looked for ways to teach improvisation and songwriting to interested students. Occasionally, I would find two types of mechanical methods for developing their creativity:

Processes for improvising that force students to make creative decisions, even when they don't have any clear ideas.
Tools that let students generate clear ideas, even when they're not ready to make any creative decisions.

For example, when I taught songwriting, I created a songwriting process (verse/chorus structure, figurin...
When Arguing Definitions is Arguing Decisions
by Hazard — 2021-07-25T16:45:40.575Z

(epistemic status: experimental new format! Optimized for memetic power. Fun and useful refactorings of classic ideas about language.)

(note: this post was originally made as a slide deck and lives as a pdf here. Color coding of ideas was inspired by abramdemski and turntroat. Since this is a bunch of images, the links don't work, and I've collected them all at the bottom of the post)

"Love that energy Jaynes!"
Necessary and Sufficient
Family Resemblance
Words as Hidden Inferences
How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside
A Human's Guide to Words
View from nowhere
"Al Capone has a point"
Reality tunnels
Blind Men and the elephant
Formal Logic
Implication
Proof trees
Rwandan Genocide
Radio address given on April 30th, 1994
Ghosts of Rwanda
Machete Season
"I didn’t succeed in tracking down the original docs, but

this

interview has a lot of context and quotes that lay out a pretty solid case."
"

From the Genocide Convention of 1948

, there are several more articles specifying things like how international courts are supposed to work, and what “punishment” entails."

General Romeo Dallaire

, on the ground in Rwanda.
"Just a year earlier the U.S had been badly burned with an

attempted intervention in a Somalian civil war

."
Conflict Is Not Abuse
Come Build Affordable Housing!
by jefftk — 2021-07-25T14:10:02.649Z

With the new Affordable Housing Overlay District (

ordinance
2020-27) here in Somerville, affordable housing construction can
be very profitable. For example, below I estimate someone could spend
~$220/sqft and sell for ~$550/sqft, all while helping fix the housing
crisis. So: come build!

The new affordable housing rules, which went into effect in December,
allow higher density construction on the condition that the housing be
permanently affordable. This is solid politics: affordable
housing is very popular here. Below, I'm going to try to estimate how
much you could make if you invested in creating additional housing as
efficiently as possible.

The first question is how much you would be able to earn from creating
additional units. The ordinance defines "affordable dwelling unit"
(ADU) as a "dwelling unit sold, leased, or rented at a
price affordable to a specific household income specified by this
Ordinance or other Federal, State, or local affordable housing
program." (2.1)
For expediency I'm just going to look at the definition of "affordable
to a specific household income" in Somerville zoning, and not also dig
into Federal/State regulations. This means there's potentially an
option for less restrictive pricing that I'm not getting into.

Section 12.1
sets caps on rents and purchase prices defined by three tiers of affordability:

There are normally requirements for how many of each tier you are
required to build, if you're building ADUs as part of a market rate
development, but 8.1.3.e
says "development subject to this section is exempt from Section 12.1
Affordable Housing". If you're trying to
maximize return, you build units entirely targeted at the highest tier.

The next step is to convert these multipliers into a maximum
monthly payment. The Median Family Income for
Boston-Cambridge-Quincy is $120,800 for 2021, so this gives us:

studio

1br

2br

3br

4br

5br

6br

7br

8br

Rental

$1422

$1739

$2041

$2343

$2645

$2947

$3249

$3551

$3853

Sale

$1805

$2190

$2556

$2923

$3289

$3656

$4022

$4389

$4755

Since it looks like the sale numbers are a bit more favorable, let's
assume the units will be sold. The maximum
sale price is 103% of the size of the mortgage you could get with
the maximum monthly payment. Since the current rate is 2....
Academic Rationality Research
by ChristianKl — 2021-07-25T13:59:02.848Z

There are now at least two academic research groups on rationality, in the sense we use the word in here, in Germany that seem to be little known in the US rationality community. The point of this post is telling you they exist if you didn't already know.

There's the Rationality Enhancement Group lead by Falk Lieder in the Max-Plank Insititute in Tübingen and there's a group on Adaptive Rationality in the Max-Plank Insititute in Berlin.

When Falk Lieder was in at our European community weekend he repeatidly said that he's interested in collaborating with the wider rationality community. There's a list of publications of his group and also a Youtube channel that presents a few ideas.

The adaptive rationality group has decided to speak of rationality techniques we would likely call applied rationality techniques as "boosting decision-making" in contrast to the academic literature on nudging. I think it's worth exploring whether we should also apply their term for the cluster of techniques like Double Crux.
The biological intelligence explosion
by Rob Lucas — 2021-07-25T13:08:27.588Z

Summary: Human genetic engineering could lead to intelligence enhancement that leads to genetic engineers who are better at genetic engineering (and research on pathways to improving intelligence). Which leads to a continuing process of greater and greater intelligence. This iterative process would be a human intelligence explosion.

There’s a view that AI will hit a point where it begins an intelligence explosion: an AI system will be designed that is better at designing AI systems than its designers were. As such, it will be able modify its own design such that it, or a second generation version of it, will be created that is superior to it. And this next version will thus be sufficiently advanced that it can create a more advanced version. Etc. You end up with an iterative process whose next generation progress is based on its current state, and as such an exponential growth, at least until some limiting factor is reached. Hence, intelligence explosion.

This seems like a possible outcome, though the absolute rate of change isn’t clear.

But aside from computer intelligence, there’s another pathway to intelligences improving their own design: humans. With current genome reading technology we are identifying a myriad of genes related to intelligence. While each individual gene gives only a small effect, the interplay of many (hundreds) of such genes can be shown to have very large effects on IQ.

While gene-therapy is in it’s early stages, it’s a current emerging technology that’s undergoing rapid progress. It is currently difficult to modify even individual genes in adult organisms: there are off target effects to worry about, it’s not possible to deliver the genes to every cell, the immune system will attack the viruses used for gene delivery, etc. But there is already progress in solving all of these problems. It’s not crazy to think that within a couple of decades we may be able to safely alter dozens or hundreds of genes in adult humans, and if not 100% of cells, a high enough percentage for effective therapy.

If we imagine such a world, we can see researches making use of such treatments to improve their own intelligence. This then, can lead to clearer thinking, and more creativity, and both more and better ideas. Which then could lead to the next wave of breakthoughs, perhaps...
My Productivity Tips and Systems
by Jack R — 2021-07-25T12:52:34.932Z

[Read bolded words to skim]

Below are a bunch of tips, systems, and devices for improving productivity. I don't mean to claim I know a lot about productivity—I think there is likely a lot of useful advice I am missing. If you are new to thinking about productivity, a lot of this stuff might be useful, though it is probably better to instead aim for the mindset that can generate these tips and habits for yourself. For this, I recommend attending a Center for Applied Rationality workshop, reading the CFAR handbook, checking out Neel Nanda's blog, and/or reading Rationality: A to Z (podcast form here).

My recommendations are in very rough order of how much I recommend them, based on how excited I am/would expect someone else to be to know about the tip (my top recommendation being Things 3 + Apple Watch). Though I didn't try that hard to order things in this way.

Table of Contents

TODO List: Things 3 + Apple Watch
Computer Restrictions: Cold Turkey
Sleep: Tips
Exercise: Tips
Phone Restrictions: ScreenTime or Freedom
Reading list: Instapaper
Device: Computer Monitor
Internet speed: Ethernet cable and good internet service
Device: Mouse
Miscellaneous tips
Tracking device usage: RescueTime or Toggl or Forest
Useful programs/apps/sites
Useful browser extensions
Device: MacBook (borrow first)
Password Manager: Dashlane (free for Stanford) or NordPass (free?)
Other products

TODO List: Things 3 + Apple Watch

Things 3 (ETA: Mac required, making me recommend a Mac more than I would otherwise)

Can add todos, blog post ideas, projects ideas, any other useful notes from my apple watch with my voice very easily through my watch (takes two watch screen taps)
On the computer, can add stuff to your todo list with a keyboard shortcut from any app

E.g. when reading an email, I can press ctrl + space, and this pops up in the middle of my screen. There is even a hyperlink to the email in the description of the todo

Move TODOs to specific dates in the future such that they appear in your inbox on that date

I use this at least once per week, surprisingly useful
Useful for things like things you want to apply to but the application doesn't open for months, people you want to reach out to when traveling to a new place, bumping an important email after a week if there is no reply, etc

Have lists for things other than todos

Mistakes or bugs
Blog post ideas
Project ideas
People to talk to
Things to learn
"Someday"

...
What are some triggers that prompt you to do a Fermi estimate, or to pull up a spreadsheet and make a simple/rough quantitative model?
by Eli Tyre — 2021-07-25T06:47:56.249Z

I'm currently viscerally feeling the power of rough quantitative modeling, after trying it on a personal problem to get an order of magnitude estimate and finding that having a concrete estimate was surprisingly helpful. I'd like to make drawing up drop-dead simple quantitative models more of a habit, a tool that I reach for regularly.

But...despite feeling how useful this can be, I don't yet have a good handle on in which moments, exactly, I should be reaching for that tool. I'm hoping that asking others will give me ideas for what TAPs to experiment with.

What triggers, either in your environment or your thought process, incline you to start jotting down numbers on paper on in a spreadsheet?

Or as an alternative prompt: When was the last time you made a new spreadsheet, and what was the proximal cause?
Failing safely is the anomaly
by Andrew Vlahos — 2021-07-25T04:56:27.002Z

It's hard to view the Flat Earth Society as a civilizational success. I can't understand how their minds can believe this in a world where telephones can cross time zones. But compare it to Boko Haram. They believe that the world is flat and that water doesn't evaporate (Allah creates the rain each time). Also, their popularity and death counts exceed that of ISIS (since 2015).

This isn't just because they're Muslim. If a group of Sunni Muslims murders lots of other Sunni Muslims, "religion" isn't a sufficient explanation. There are over three million Muslims in the US, this has been true since before 9/11, and they aren't constantly murdering people.

This kind of self-destructive insanity happens for secular reasons too. The Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda are so similar that people need to look at government-issued identification to find out which group someone belongs to, if they don't say themselves. This racial categorization was arbitrary from the beginning; Belgian colonizers measured nose shape and a couple other physical features, and assigned groups based on that. The sane thing would have been to reject the colonizer's absurd tool to keep them divided. Instead, the people in Rwanda internalized the division, eventually murdering each other until about a tenth of the population was killed (about a million). This was in 1994.

Sometimes the insane factions get political power. Lysenkoism is a theory of biology that in many points directly contradicts farmers' observations. It taught, for example, that seeds of the same type must be planted as close together as possible since members of the same class never compete, and that fertilizer is bad for plants. Enforcing Lysenko's methods wasn't the only reason that 30 million in Stalin's Soviet Union and another 30 million during China's Great Leap Forward died of starvation (these are estimates, the exact number is not known), but it was a major cause.

These were all as insane as the Flat Earth belief is today, and happened during the past century. Before the enlightenment this was even more common; I don't have statistics on how many people were martyred or massacred because people thought that their perfect and powerful god needed humans to murder it's mistakes for it, or something else, but it sure happened a lot.

Eliezer talked about how some pseudoscience has appeared where people think personality or diet ...