trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Prisoner's Dilemmas : Altruism :: Battles of the Sexes : Convention
by michaelcohen — 2021-02-01T10:39:48.750Z

Game Theory

A reminder, because I always need to remind myself:

B chooses a column
A chooses a row	A's payoff, B's payoff	A's payoff, B's payoff
A's payoff, B's payoff	A's payoff, B's payoff

Prisoner's Dilemmas

It won't be news to anyone here that altruism is useful for converting a prisoner's dilemma into a non-dilemma. A situation that looks to two selfish agents like this:

2, 2	0, 3
3, 0	1, 1

could look to two perfectly selfless agents like this:

4, 4	3, 3
3, 3	2, 2

where we've just added their utility functions. Or maybe more realistically, if we add in the anger that even most selfless people would feel at being cheated:

4, 4	-1, 3
3, -1	1, 1

In any case, after a dose of altruism, prisoner's dilemmas can disappear.

Battles of the Sexes

A battle of the sexes game is of the form

11, 10	0, 0
0, 0	10, 11

The row player would like to coordinate on the top left, and the column player would like to coordinate on the bottom right.

Let's add some labels. Suppose one member of a couple wants to eat vegetarian (which involves their joint meals being vegetarian), and the other member of the couple wants to regularly eat meat (which involves many of their joint meals containing meat). Either one of them will capitulate, or they'll have to break up. And if they're honest with you, both would rather stick together and make sacrifices on their diet if need be.

Meat	No Meat
Meat	11, 10	0, 0
No meat	0, 0	10, 11

But there's another issue that arises because we want our partners to behave in certain ways in games with us. Suppose that the above is the payoff matrix "on its face". What I mean is: that's the payoff for each of the two people if some other entity (like a totalitarian state) picked both of their actions for them. Supposing that, the payoff matrix would look slightly different when they have to pick the actions themselves. Because if the row player picks "Meat", the column player would probably be thinking "I can't believe he wasn't willing to give up meat for me! I guess he likes meat more than he likes me. Do I really want to be with him?" And if the column player picks "No Meat", the row player would probably be thinking "I can't believe she's making my diet a condition of our relationship. I guess she cares more about food than me. Do I really want to be with her?" And both of them have a point. How could the other be putting a relationship at stake (worth 10 points) out of conce...
Feedback for learning
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-01T09:40:12.735Z

I wish there were better (or more known to me) quantitative tests of skills that are good for me to have. I often find learning things when there is tight feedback pretty fun. For instance, I play geography and history quizzes on Sporcle with an addictive vigor, and enjoy learning various languages on Duolingo, and various facts via Anki. I used to memorize poetry from the bathroom walls. But none of these seems that useful (in Anki I mostly learn about famous art and art movements). And meanwhile, I fail to know all manner of things that would be good to know, and forget most of what I read. (For instance, I’d like to know many more details of machine learning, how the US government works, and what happened in most of history, and I wish I remembered the details of The Precipice or The Better Angels of our Nature or even War and Peace—which I haven’t read much of, substantially because I keep losing track of what is going on or who the characters are.)

I feel like the situation was better in high school: there were contests and exams for all kinds of stuff that seemed decently useful, like math and chemistry. I guess one problem with my current situation is that because I learn things in a more distributed way, they don’t tend to come with a well matched test. A couple of times I have learned some math for instance, then looked for a suitable exam, but most exams don’t match the exact math that I learned. I suppose a solution might be to only learn things from places that also offer tests, but somehow this doesn’t sound great. Perhaps it is that the tests I found before didn’t seem that promising for rapid feedback anyway - you had to turn to a different page of a pdf or book and search through and check your own solutions. Imagine how much less fun Sporcle would be if instead of instantaneously responding to your touch, nothing happened until the end of a quiz, at which point it emailed you a pdf of the answers.

Some of this seems like it might have an easy solution that someone else knows about, at least for areas that are readily quantitatively examinable, such as math. So if I seem to be wrong, please correct me!

Do you know of well-gamified learning opportunities or tests for things that are worth studying?

I had fun practicing calibration of predictions, which seems useful, until the app idiosyncratically broke for my account in a permanent way. I also re...
Believing in things you cannot see
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-02-01T07:26:54.082Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

There is a scene at the end of the movie Tenet, in which the main character accuses the villain of solipsism:

Protagonist: “You don’t believe in a God, or a future, or in anything outside of your own experience!”

Villain: “The rest is belief, and I don’t have it.”

In the context of the film, the line seems casually written — a generic type of pseudo-philosophical, baddie-explains-his-motives type of dialogue. But it reminded me of a connection between epistemology and ethics that seems to me important, even if basic: namely, that substantial portions of ethical life, especially in a big world, are tied crucially to the ability to believe in things you cannot see.

I. The zone

I sometimes think of everyday life as involving a kind of loosely-defined “zone,” the contents of which one is acquainted with in a fairly direct way, and which are consequently easy to treat as “real.” The size of this “zone” varies depending on person and context. In some contexts, someone might treat their experience at this particular moment as the full extent of the zone; in others, it might be their past, present and future experiences; in still others, it might include people and communities that they’re close to, or that they interact with directly, especially in actual physical spaces; and in still others, it might be much broader.

The place beyond the zone is not “present”; it’s not a part of your lived world. You might hear news about it, and get evidence about it; but you don’t “see it for yourself.” And hence, absent imaginative effort, the land beyond the zone can feel abstract, colorless, and hard to attend to.

The land in the zone, by contrast, requires very little imagination: it’s there, and naturally experienced as some combination of concrete, vivid, tactile, and colorful. At present, for example, my house’s kitchen feels like it’s inside one salient type of “zone.” It’s not that I’m always in the kitchen. But I’m often in very direct contact with it. There’s a particular feeling of what it’s like to be there; it has a particular refrigerator handle that I grab, a particular set of drawers that slide open in a particular way. And when some action has consequences that affect the kitchen — for example, the dishwasher breaks, or a wine glass shatters on the floor — these consequences really show up in my world.

One can be wrong/uncertain abou...
The 10,000-Hour Rule is a myth
by lynettebye — 2021-02-01T04:47:03.868Z

This post appeared first on the EA Coaching blog.

The 10,000-Hour Rule for expertise popularized by Malcolm Gladwell is a funny case of citation telephone. Basically, the rule claims that anyone can become an expert if they spend ten thousand hours practicing. In other words, ten thousand hours of practice is necessary and sufficient to become an expert. It’s attributed to research by Anders Ericsson, the psychologist who pioneered the study of deliberate practice.

An interpretation which Ericsson published a three-page paper refuting. (You can read the whole thing here.)

The best violinists averaged ten thousand hours of practice, compared to their less accomplished counterparts who “only” averaged five thousand. (Keep in mind that Ericsson studies expert performance – he wants to know what makes people excel, so he’s not studying average populations.)

According to Ericsson, Gladwell claimed that 10,000 hours was the “magic number for true expertise” based on Ericsson’s work. This misrepresentation won popular appeal and spread. In internet mythos, the average is now misrepresented as a threshold after which people magically become experts. (I pity the poor stats professors weeping into their pillow at people abusing averages.)

This is another example of why you should take pop sci stuff with a grain of salt. The 10,000-Hour Rule was coined and popularized based on a game of citation telephone tracing back to a misunderstanding of a statistic. The guy it’s attributed to denies that he ever said or intended to convey that message. That should be enough to warrant a dollop of skepticism for the next bright claim to come along.

Still, if the 10,000-Hour Rule is an urban myth, is there still anything to learn here? I think so.

1.

Becoming world class takes a heck of a lot of time. Ten thousand hours is twenty hours of practice a week for ten years. That’s how much the best violinists averaged by the time they were twenty, and it’s not like they stopped there. They probably continued that rate of practice during their actual career. In another example, winners of international piano competitions had around twenty-five thousand hours of practice under their belts.

Even assuming significant heterogeneity, it will probably take a lot of time to compete at the highest levels in a standardized field such as sports or music. If you can find ...
2019 Review: Voting Results!
by Raemon — 2021-02-01T03:10:19.284Z

You can see the full voting results here: 1000+ karma voters (All voters)

The 2019 Review votes are in!

This year, 88 voters participated, evaluating 116 posts. (Of those voters, 61 had 1000+ karma, and will be weighted more highly in the moderation team's decision of what to include in the Best of 2019 Books)

The LessWrong Moderation team will be reflecting on these results and using them as a major input into "what to include in the 2019 books."

Top Results

The top 15 results from the 1000+ karma users are:

What failure looks like by Paul Christiano
Risks from Learned Optimization: Introduction, by evhub, Chris van Merwijk, vlad_m, Joar Skalse and Scott Garrabrant
The Parable of Predict-O-Matic, by Abram Demski
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success, by Scott Alexander
Being the (Pareto) Best in the World, by Johnswentworth
Rule Thinkers In, Not Out, by Scott Alexander
Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain, by Kaj Sotala
Asymmetric Justice, by Zvi Mowshowitz
Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists, by Zack Davis
1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled, by Scott Alexander
Selection vs Control, by Abram Demski
You Have About Five Words, by Raymond Arnold
The Schelling Choice is "Rabbit", not "Stag", by Raymond Arnold
Noticing Frame Differences, by Raymond Arnold
"Yes Requires the Possibility of No", by Scott Garrabrant

Top Reviewers

Meanwhile, we also had a lot of great reviews. One of the most valuable things I found about the review process was that it looks at lots of great posts at once, which led me to find connections between them I had previously missed. We'll be doing a more in-depth review of the best reviews later on, but for now, I wanted to shoutout to the people who did a bunch of great review work.

The top reviewers (aggregating the total karma of their review-comments) were:

Some things I particularly appreciated were:

johnswentworth, Zvi and others providing fairly comprehensive reviews of many different posts, taking stock of how some posts fit together.
Jacobjacob and magfrump who stuck out in my mind for doing particularly "epistemic spot check" type reviews, which are often more effortful.

Complete Results (1000+ Karma)

You can see the full voting results here: 1000+ karma voters (All voters)

To help users see the spread of the vote data, we've included swarmplot visu...
Smuggled frames
by Artyom Kazak — 2021-02-01T01:22:19.798Z

Cross-posted from my blog.

Status: I think the described concept would be more useful if I applied it more often — or at least noticed when I do apply it. Right now it's thinking out loud + "I wonder what will happen if I post on LW".

Intro

I think that "critical thinking" is way too often taken to mean roughly "checking the facts and logical inferences you are presented with".

In addition to focusing on facts — "what people claim to be true" — it seems useful to focus on a certain cluster of claims that are very often left implicit. These claims are related to the process of how humans make decisions in the wild, which involves mushy categories like "legitimacy" and "importance". I will call them "frames".

Those claims can be categorized as:

existence claims — by mentioning a thing or a category (e.g. "Supreme Court's liberal wing"), you are claiming that it exists and makes sense and can be used productively for thinking; How An Algorithm Feels From Inside is a post-length exploration of that for categories specifically;
importance claims — by mentioning a thing, you are claiming that it should be taken into consideration;
legitimacy claims — building on a premise that a certain authority is legitimate in some domain (thus automatically making it more legitimate);
and likely more.

For example, whenever somebody start talking about "the best way to solve a problem X", you might disagree with their solutions — alright! — but you will update slightly towards "problem X exists" and perhaps "problem X is important". These might be very contentious claims, but they get smuggled in without an argument.

(Unless you have a strong emotional reaction, in which case they might rejected wholesale. Think of anything from the domain of politics, for instance.)

Example: Merriam-Webster

A lot of people believe that a) that it's important for the category of "correct spelling" to exist, and, simultaneously, b) that objective rules of spelling don't exist, i.e. grammar (and language in general) is defined by social consensus.

This has a lot of consequences. For instance, people get genuinely upset that Merriam-Webster lists "irregardless" as a word. They also spend a ton of time arguing about spelling, the logic of it, precedents, and so on.

Of course, there are many other reasons to care about spelling, such as "learning to spell, and learning to argue about spelling well, is a somewhat c...
Self-Criticism Can Be Wrong And Harmful
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-02-01T01:07:33.737Z

Preface

I am an advocate for constructive discourse.

This essay is going to point out that some forms of self-criticism are harmful, both to the self-critic and to others. It will also assert that motives for self-criticism are sometimes problematic.

However, to offer criticism to a person who's already criticizing themselves inaccurately or excessively could just add fuel to the fire.

The reason I'm publishing it is that I think it's true and necessary.

The reason I have not gone out of my way to write it in an overtly "kind" tone is because I think it is fairly common for people who are engaged in an act of self-criticism to receive, and discount, kindness as "mere kindness for the sake of being kind."

Other times, as I will assert, self-criticism can have self-serving ends. In such cases, an extra helping of "kindness" may not be called for.

Yet this risks creating a loop of despair for some people who have a low threshold for self-criticism. They may suspect their own motives in the first place. That might also make them more prone to map the idea that self-criticism can be self-serving onto themselves. I do not wish to provoke that reaction.

So I hope that readers will treat this short essay with an extra helping of caution, both intellectual and emotional.

Some people are especially virtuous. They devote their lives to making the world a better place. They do so in a considerate and effective manner to the greatest extent that any reasonable person can. They do so with a humble attitude. All together, they are excellent human beings. It helps our society when their work is appreciated. They are role models for others.

Self-critique can be a necessary and valuable part of shaping oneself into such an exemplar. It helps you identify your own biases and seek to correct them. It helps you to hold yourself accountable for your failings and do better in the future.

Clearly, some people are not exemplars. Some are even downright villains. Examples come readily to mind. They might be public figures. They might be the perpetrators of small but potent injustices who we have to deal with in our personal lives.

Most people are somewhere in between. It can be valuable for an exemplar to assume they're about average, with lots of room to grow. However, perhaps by definition, there is less to criticize about the behavior of exemplary people than of villains. And criticisms, incl...
How to Absorb a Shared Success Script (while also thinking you're living without one)
by Hazard — 2021-01-31T20:17:10.433Z

(Cross-posted from my roam-blog)

Productivity Origin Story

Growing up, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was super powers. It wasn't until the middle of 6th grade that I finally gave up on trying to nurture my not quite nascent telekinetic abilities and turned to (slightly) more practical avenues. Taking a cue from all the Kid's Science and Physics books that surrounded me, I decided I was going to make cool things and be an inventor. To me, "inventing stuff" served the same psychological slot that super powers had. Maybe I'd never be Spider-Man, but I could be Batman!

The only problem with that plan was... I sucked at making things. My PVC pipe air cannons leaked. My potassium nitrate smoke grenades shot out more flames than smoke. My microwave magnetron Tesla Coil plugged in and did nothing. And I never came up with a remotely plausible idea for an invisibility cloak.

As I made my way through high school, two things began to change. I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and I started getting into magic. Outliers told me, among other things, that if I could just dedicate 10,000 hours of practice, I could be a world class expert - and as anyone who's ever read a YA novel knows, the hero is often the best in the world at a certain skill. Meanwhile, magic was giving me a visceral experience of the previously abstract truth that I Can Make Progress Via Practice. Every sleight of hand move was difficult at the beginning. Then I'd practice it. Then it would become easy.

This was the first time I began to be convinced that I could become better at something, as opposed to simply being good at something from the start. It was exhilarating! As high school turned into a gap year which turned into university, Outliers was joined by books like The Talent Code (expanding on the deliberate practice formula) and DeepWork (cut distraction, focus is everything), hours of podcasts with Tim Ferriss (meta-learning and sneakiness) and Jordan Harbinger (a bajillion guests who wrote self-help books), and a deluge of blog posts from the like of Scott Young (meta-learning and focus) and others. The sorts of people who love to hustle but hate to identify as hustlers.

Many of the themes (focus, commitment, deliberately working towards a goal) had a trad ring to them, reminiscent of the sort of advice I'd been getting from my parents my whole life. Now the advice felt like...
Oceans of snails
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-31T11:20:10.545Z

Somehow while knowing that a) ‘sea snail’ was a concept, and b) beaches were strewn with sea shells, which involve various snail-reminiscent spirals, I failed to reach the stunning conclusion that the oceans are substantially inhabited by these kinds of characters:

But its true. And it seems that not only are the spiral-looking shells from snails, but various flat and non-spiral ones are too.

Little Mountain 5, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Alexandre Laporte, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Image: Malcolm Storey, BioImages - the Virtual Fieldguide (UK) through the Encyclopedia of Life and the creative commons CC BY-NC-SA license.

NOAA (Photo Collection of Dr. James P. McVey, NOAA Sea Grant Program), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This is a meaningful update because snails are a particular kind of thing I’m familiar with, and furthermore I like them.
Clarifications on tech stagnation
by jasoncrawford — 2021-01-31T00:59:42.219Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/clarifications-on-stagnation

Five points of clarification regarding the “technology stagnation” hypothesis:

It posits a slowdown relative to peak growth rates of ~100 years ago. It doesn’t mean growth has gone to zero, and it doesn’t even mean that growth has slowed to where it was before the Industrial Revolution. (I said this in the original post but it bears repeating.)

It is about the technological frontier and economic development in advanced countries. It’s not about global development, which has not, as far as I know, been stagnating. The last fifty years have been fantastic for India and China, for example.

It is about technology and economics, not science. Or at least, scientific stagnation is a separate question, and one that I have a much less informed opinion about, and have not weighed in on. There is widespread discussion about physics being “stuck”, but biology seems to be making progress from what I can tell.

It is descriptive and backwards-looking. It is a hypothesis about the past, not a prediction for the future. And it is unrelated to optimism or pessimism. It is compatible with believing that slow growth is:

inevitable and permanent (Gordon)
a phase we’re muddling through, and will soon get out of (which is how I interpret Cowen and others)
a failing on the part of our culture that we need to correct (which is the impression I get from Thiel)

It does not posit a cause, and certainly not a single, central, grand cause. It’s just descriptive: has progress slowed? There could be multiple causes. I tend to think it is a combination of the centralization and bureaucratization of research funding, over-regulation, and cultural attitudes turning against progress (not that these are unrelated).