trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Data Analysis of LW: Activity Levels + Age Distribution of User Accounts
by Ruby — 2019-05-14T23:53:54.332Z

Epistemic: I rarely trust other people’s data analysis, I only half trust my own. Right now, analytics is only getting a slice of my attention and this work is not as thorough as I’d like, but I think the broad strokes picture is correct. I have probably failed to include enough clarifications and disclaimers on where we should expect the data to be inaccurate. Feedback on my approach welcome.

I’ve been doing some analytics work for the LessWrong 2.0 team since September last year (since March I’ve been doing other work too, but that’s not relevant here). This post will hopefully be the first a series which will eliminate the backlog of analytics results I’ve been wanting to share.

This post is probably not the ideal starting point - that would be probably be a big picture general overview of LessWrong usage since the beginning - but it is some of my most recent work and therefore is easiest to share. Still, it does show things about the bigger picture.

Warning: The graphs are repetitive even though they’re showing different things. I’ve included them all for completeness, but you can just read my summary/interpretations while looking at only some of them.

Distribution of User Account Age

Question: LW2 seems to be doing well, but is that just because we’re retaining/re-engaging a devoted base of older users despite not signing up new users?

Answer: Activity on LW2 is coming from both new and old users across all activity types (posts, comments, votes, and views). The project is succeeding at getting new people to create accounts and engage.

In fact, there have consistently been more new users voting and viewing each month since LW2 launched than throughout LW’s past. The number of new users posting each month is roughly the same as historical levels. The number of new users who are commenting has declined (though the percentage new users is roughly the same), however this is consistent with the trend that comment volume on LW2 has not recovered from The Great Decline of 2015-2017 the way other metrics have.

Meaning of the Graphs

I plotted graphs for each activity type (posts, comments, votes, and views) and the corresponding population of users which engages in those activities. For each user engaging in each activity type, I calculated the “age” of that account since it first engaged in that activity type, i.e. in the graph for users who post, the age of the user ...
Boo votes, Yay NPS
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2019-05-14T19:07:52.432Z

TL;DR

Many votes on LW are "boos" and "yays", and consequently they aren't very useful for determining what is worth reading. A modified version of a Net Promoter Score (NPS) on each post may provide a better metric for determining read worthiness.

Motivation

It's come up a couple time in my recent comments that I've expressed a theory that votes on LW, AF, and EAF are "boos" and "yays". I have an idea about how we could do better assuming the purpose of votes is not to jeer and cheer but to provide information about the post, specifically how much the post is worth reading, so I'm finally writing it up so others can, yes, boo or applaud my effort, but more importantly so we might discuss ways to improve the system. If you don't like my proposal and agree we could do better than votes, I encourage you to write up your ideas and share them.

So, there are many things votes could be for, but I view votes as a solution to a problem, so what's the problem votes are trying to solve? The number one question I want answered about every post is some version of "should I read this?". There's subtly different ways to phrase this question: "is this worth engaging with?", "should I read this carefully or just skim it?", "is this worth my time and energy?", etc.

I want a solution to this problem because when I come to LW/AF/EAF every day I want a reliable signal about what it's worth me spending my energy engaging with (I generally don't want to just read, but also comment, discuss, understand, grow). Right now votes don't provide this to me, as I'll explain below, but they do provide other things. So keep in mind that my goal in this proposal is primarily to solve the particular problem of "should I read this?" and not the many other problems votes might be solutions to like "how to deliver simple positive/negative feedback?", "how can I express my pleasure or displeasure with a post?", "how do we determine status within the forum?", or "how do we increase platform engagement?". I don't ignore these other purposes, but I take them as secondary—and maybe there's other purposes I forgot to list and so forgot to take into account! The point being I want it to be clear I'm making a proposal that's trying to solve a particular problem, and if you complain "but wait, it doesn't solve this other problem" my response will be "yep, sure doesn't", so any discussion of this sort should ...
Eight Books To Read
by Samo Burja — 2019-05-14T17:40:00.867Z

This article was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can

access the original here.

A few years ago, I was asked by a friend what news sources they should follow to understand the Syrian Civil War. I replied they shouldn’t follow any news at all. My recommendation instead was a six month break from Syrian news, supplemented by leisurely reading through six books on Syrian politics, economics, and culture. I pointed out they could read them on their phone just as conveniently as they could read tweets or articles. My friend was taken aback but followed the advice.

Critiques of news media are much more in vogue now than they were in 2015. People bemoan the poor factual accuracy or manifest political bias of today’s media, whether that means established newspapers like The New York Times or social networks like Facebook. But there is a more fundamental problem with news: it can provide information, but isn’t structured to educate you into someone who could understand this cherry-picked information. Formal education often fails to provide this vital foundation.

After six months, my friend thanked me. They said they now barely follow any news on Syria, but when they do it has gone from perplexing to understandable. The fragments of information no longer landed only as emotional bursts of excitement or anxiety, but rather helped contribute to a solid picture of the region. They asked me a more difficult question: what books should they read to understand not just Syria, but global society as a whole?

Books are incomplete instruments for instruction. They don’t respond to the reader and cannot directly answer questions, and they require a strange and systematic process of study that goes beyond mere reading. In physics education, for example, one will pair up the mastery of theories with tests of solving mathematical puzzles as well as a course of practical experiments that tie those to one’s senses. For the study of society, there would have to be analogues.

Further, true autodidacticism is a rare gift. To maintain motivation over a few months, learning has to be its own reward. This reward of learning must somehow be tied to understanding the world as it is, rather than pursuing theories for the sake of entertainment.

Much has happened throughout human history, and much is happening right now. Too much to ever fully...
Flashcards for AI Safety?
by Søren Elverlin — 2019-05-14T14:37:59.417Z

I sometimes struggle to remember the contents of all the articles I've read on AI Safety. Spaced repetition might be helpful, but this requires someone to write flashcards. For Anki, I've found 2 decks, titled "Superintelligence" and "AI Policy".

Do more AI Safety relevant decks exist?

What would be a good strategy for generating useful flashcards?
Integrating disagreeing subagents
by Kaj_Sotala — 2019-05-14T14:06:55.632Z

In my previous post

, I suggested that akrasia involves subagent disagreement - or in other words, different parts of the brain having differing ideas on what the best course of action is. The existence of such conflicts raises the question, how does one resolve them?

In this post I will discuss various techniques which could be interpreted as ways of resolving subagents disagreements, as well as some of the reasons for why this doesn’t always happen.

A word on interpreting “subagents”

The frame that I’ve had so far is that of the brain being composed of different subagents with conflicting beliefs. On the other hand, one could argue that the subagent interpretation isn’t strictly necessary for many of the examples that I bring up in this post. One could just as well view my examples as talking about a single agent with conflicting beliefs.

The distinction between these two frames isn’t always entirely clear. In “

Complex Behavior from Simple (Sub)Agents

”, mordinamael presents a toy model where an agent has different goals. Moving to different locations will satisfy the different goals to a varying extent. The agent will generate a list of possible moves and picks the move which will bring some goal the closest to being satisfied.

Is this a unified agent, or one made up of several subagents?

One could argue for either interpretation. On the other hand, mordinamael's post frames the goals as subagents, and they are in a sense competing with each other. On the other hand, the subagents arguably don’t make the final decision themselves: they just report expected outcomes, and then a central mechanism picks a move based on their reports.

This resembles the neuroscience model I discussed in my last post, where different subsystems in the brain submit various action “bids” to the basal ganglia. Various mechanisms then pick a winning bid based on various criteria - such as how relevant the subsystem’s concerns are for the current situation, and how accurate the different subsystems have historically been in their predictions.

Likewise, in extending the

model from Consciousness and the Brain

for my

toy version of the Internal Family Systems model

, I postulated a system where various subagents vote for different objects to become the content of consciousness. In that model, the winner was determined by a system which adjusted the vote weights of the different subagents ...
How to improve at critical thinking on science/medical literature?
by hereisonehand — 2019-05-14T11:58:34.613Z

I'm a medical student, and I will often read articles that are critical of scientific literature (Scott Alexander on Pharmacogenomics; EMCrit on thrombolysis in ischemic stroke, etc.) with some awe at the authors' ability to evaluate evidence.

I'm sure that part of this is practice. If I spend more time critically reading scientific literature, and less time taking experts at face value, I will likely become better able to think independently.

However, part of it strikes me as a lack of technical skills. I'm often unsure how to critique study designs when I don't understand the statistical methods being used.

Any recommendations for how I might get the skills I need to think independently about scientific/medical literature?

[Edit: Changed formatting of links after a comment]
Thinking Fast and Hard
by Jacob Falkovich — 2019-05-13T19:58:34.089Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

Note: Yes, I know about Worm. No, I haven't read past the first quarter or so.

A cool superpower to have would be the ability to slow subjective time and get a lot of thinking done.

In every superhero movie, no matter how fast the protagonists fly or how hard they punch, they always end up within one step of disaster because their planning skills are dogshit. The villain loses not because he can’t punch as hard, but because of steadfast refusal to think things through. Outside of some genre fiction, it’s very rare to see a villain that deserves the epithet scheming.

Also, the hero wins because he’s handsome. When everyone is flying by intuition, lookism wins the day.

The scariest comic supervillain would be named Murphyjitsu. Her superpower would be the ability to go through the following checklist:

Do I have a plan?
Imagine that my plan failed. Am I utterly shocked?
If not, what is the most likely failure mode? How do I prevent it?
If I’ve iterated enough that the plan seems very likely to work, remember to notice any confusing and unexpected evidence that might cause me to rethink it.

Murphyjitsu would spend her formative years on the harsh streets of Distopolis, building a burning resentment for humanity and practicing calibration by tracking the success rate of all her predictions and plots.

Sarah Constantin notes that deliberate and effortful thinking (aka System 2) is as mysterious as it is powerful. We underestimate its power only because of how rarely it is used. We underestimate its mysteriousness only because it takes deliberate effort to notice how little we understand it.

System 2 is a scarce resource, a sort of superpower of the human mind that it only breaks out in emergencies. The Global Workspace model of consciousness posits that the brain contains a multitude of modules each doing its own processing while competing for the spotlight of conscious attention. My hypothesis is that a main function of consciousness is to allocate System 2 resources to subprocesses that need it.

Unexpected stimuli grab your attention, to check whether dealing with them requires any thinking. For example, we are perfectly capable of handling any number of strangers with unconscious System 1 processing, as can be demonstrated by a stroll through a busy city. But when a stranger walks into a room we perk up – even though we determined many th...
Physical linguistics
by Yuxi_Liu — 2019-05-13T19:30:28.263Z

This is really my attempt at approaching eliminative materialism, and probably reading Paul Churchland or Daniel Dennett's papers would be better for you to get the point. I'm just writing to organize my thoughts.

Background

There are three big problems in science: universe, life, and consciousness. There is a good theory of the universe on the macro and micro scale, and the problem of its origin. They are not the final word, but we have a good sense of any future updated theories would be like: mechanistic, mathematical, probably using real, complex, and discrete numbers.

A theory of life is still in the works, though there are encouraging attempts. The physical construction of life and the descriptive theory of life is now complete except in the details. We know that it would be something made of evolution, thermodynamics, chemistry, and of course, mathematics. The engineering theory of life is still greatly missing. We do not know how to create life, at most we can fork the genetic code and do little modifications and mixings. We don't even know if a robot is alive.

A theory of consciousness is in an even earlier stage. There are some basic studies of the description of consciousness, and there are dozens of hazy philosophical theories that needs to be made quantitative using future data.

Consciousness-free

One problem with consciousness is its paradoxical qualities, creating questions that seem to both be compelling and deformed:

"Why am I me instead of someone else?"

"If Pinkie is copied, which one is the real Pinkie?"

"Is the feeling of blue same for everyone?"

"How does one freely choose?"

Now compare them with analogous questions from universe and life:

"Why is this rock this rock instead of that rock?"

"If this book is copied, which one is the real book?"

"Is this website the same website on every computer?"

"How does a slime mold decide which way to go?"

The analogous questions lose their mystery and becomes mundane, confused, or fascinating but also scientifically analyzable.

Possibly the problem is with the understanding of conscious itself, which is too confused. I propose to remove consciousness from explanations of life behavior (human or not) as much as possible. If it can be fully removed, then the problem of consciousness is solved. If it can't be fully removed, then it concentrates the effort for solution.

A sketch

As a sketch of how such

...
In support of the inside view and a counter to modest epistemology 
by solomon alon — 2019-05-13T15:21:57.624Z

This might have already been said in inadequate equilibria however it was definitely not clear enough for me to understand it from their so it's not plagiarism. The outside asks, what evidence do you have that you are right and the other person is wrong. The fact that you think your right does not constitute evidence because he also thinks he's right.

My counter is that their are different levels of sureness about being correct. I can be pretty sure or absolutely certain. And the more sure I am of something the more likely it is to be true. So if I knew that I was more sure than the other person I know that it is more likely that I am right and he is wrong. However how do I know that I'm more sure than he is on this topic. The answer is simple, you don't. However you don't need to know that. Let's say that if you are more sure than you are 100 percent correct however if your exactly as sure than you are 5o percent likely to be correct. And you are 50 percent certain that you are more sure than he is. Then it is 75 percent likely that you are correct.

Even if you are both the same sure about it you can look at how often are you this sure and how often is he that sure. Let's say your this sure 1 out of 50 times and he is this sure 1 out of 30 times then its more likely that you are correct because you being sure constitutes more evidence than his being sure.

This argument is at its most powerful when you conserve it for those few times that you're absolutely sure. Where your at the most possible clarity about a thing. Because when that happens you are way more likely to be correct since you are the most possibly sure and its really unlikely he is as sure as you or even if he is its really unlikely that he is rarely as sure as this so its way more likely that you are correct

I'm my experience this feeling of absolute correctness rarely manifests but when it does i've always been correct ( I had these arguments before I learned anything about logic or philosophy and after I learned a little I found out that I had mainstream views so that's my correct metric). Its a feeling of absolute clarity, in the moment you understand it perfectly and you feel the confusion and lack of understanding of your opponent.

From here I usually find things that I set in stone are and if you disagree with them I lower you in my outsi...
Ed Boyden on the State of Science
by Ben Pace — 2019-05-13T01:54:37.835Z

I just listened to Tyler Cowen's interview with Ed Boyden (link and transcript). The second half contained a lot of questions about current scientific infrastructure, and Boyden had a lot of interesting comments, so I've reproduced a few particular quotes here and added headings.

(Things I've not quoted that LWers might be interested in: Boyden said that whole brain emulations probably work in principle, that he meditates every day and has used an internal family systems meditation for 10 years.)

The Surprisingly Poor State of Funding

COWEN: How should we improve the funding of science in this country?

BOYDEN: I like to look at the history of science to learn about its future, and one thing I’ve learned a lot over the last couple years — and it’s even happened to me — is that it’s really hard to fund pioneering ideas.

Brian Kobilka, who recently won the Nobel Prize for solving the structure of the G-protein-coupled receptor — and for context, one-third of all drugs target this class of molecules, so it’s a very, very important class of drugs — he lost his funding because he wasn’t making progress fast enough. If I recall, he had to moonlight as an emergency room physician to keep going on his research.

Doug Prasher, who cloned the gene for green fluorescent protein, which has been used in something like a million biology studies, ballpark — he lost his funding and eventually left science, ended up driving a shuttle bus for, I believe, a rental car facility or something.

Anyway, there’s so many stories. For me, it became personal because when we proposed this expansion microscopy technology, where we blow up brain specimens and other specimens a hundred times in volume to map them, people thought it was nonsense. People were skeptical. People hated it. Nine out of my first ten grants that I wrote on it were rejected.

If it weren’t for the Open Philanthropy Project that heard about our struggles to get this project funded — through, again, a set of links that were, as far as I can tell, largely luck driven — maybe our group would have been out of business. But they came through and gave us a major gift, and that kept us going.

Boyden also said this sentence in passing, which seemed striking to me about the insularity at the highest echelons of science.

BOYDEN: I read a statistic that 40 percent of the professors at MIT trained at one point in their career at Stanford, H...
What are some "Communities and Cultures Different From Our Own?"
by Raemon — 2019-05-12T22:03:42.590Z

"Legal Systems Different From Our Own" is a fantastic work that explores how many different cultures approached legality. The diversity of ideas there has given me both concrete ideas of how to incentivize people, and helped shake me out of some default frames I was holding.

I'd be interested in other works that do the same thing, but for different aspects of community building (including but not limited how to help people find connection, how to help them gain skills, how to ensure the community has a good mixture of growth and stability, etc).

Three useful answers to this question would include:

1) if there literally is a book that is an overview of different communities or cultures and interesting elements of how they work, that'd be useful

2) if you have read a book that deals with one particular community or type of community, writing up a summary of that book

3) writing up experiences from a given community, especially if there were particular social tools that the community used that have neat implications.