trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
You have to create your own personal finance system
by Nicole Dieker — 2022-01-23T18:53:48.014Z

Crossposted from Nicole Dieker Dot Com. Also — I hadn't yet read the Immoral Mazes sequence when I wrote this, but it seems like we're talking about the same kind of thing.

All right.

Let's see if I can sum all of this up as efficiently as possible:

There are

two kinds of systems in the world:

the kind that are difficult to leave and the kind that are difficult to stick to.

(There are probably more than two kinds of systems in the world, but for the purposes of this very efficient blog post I am only focusing on these two.)

Personal finance, when approached systematically, is difficult to stick to. Not only does personal finance require you to develop habits like "regularly checking your expenses against your budget," but it also requires you to evaluate multiple other systems, often at a level that takes some background knowledge or expertise, on the basis of "will this get me closer to my financial goals or take me further away from them?"

It's a lot easier to just, like, spend money and hope it all works out.

And, in a lot of cases, it does work out! Having credit card debt, for example, does not necessarily get in the way of living a good life. Certain levels of debt, combined with credit-damaging factors like missed payments, could make your life a lot harder — but if you're carrying around $5K in credit card debt like

the average American,

it's not going to preclude you from buying a house or starting a family or taking a vacation or nearly anything else you want to do.

It certainly won't keep you from, like, being a good person.

Of course, you're going to need to keep making those monthly credit card payments. A little extra money, every month, going towards interest on the debt you can't yet pay off in full — and, again, that's fine, a lot of people are happy to pay a little extra money to maintain both their debt and their credit score, and if you're carrying $5K in debt on a credit card with a 20% APR, that's only $80 a month (or so) in interest charges.

I mean, you could probably think of a lot of other things you'd rather do with an extra $80 every month (or $960 per year), but the purchases you made on those credit cards also got you stuff you wanted and/or needed, so... like I said, it generally works out, and people are either willing to make those tradeoffs or they don't really think about what they're trading.

If you're in the former situation, you're ...
Why rationalists should care (more) about free software
by RichardJActon — 2022-01-23T17:31:34.116Z

cross-posted to pan narrans

Why rationalists should care (more) about free software

especially if you want to upload your brain

In the limit condition freedom of compute is freedom of thought.

As we offload more of our cognition to our computational devices we expose a new threat surface for attacks on our ability to think free of malign or otherwise misaligned influence.
The parties who control the computational systems to which you have outsourced your cognition have a vector by which to influence your thinking.
This may be a problem for you if their interests are not aligned with your own as they can use this power to manipulate you in service of their goals and against your own.

The fundamental operations of our brains remain difficult to reliably and effectively interfere with primarily because of our ignorance of how to achieve this. This, however, may change as understanding of our wetware increases and subtle direct manipulations of our brain chemistry can be employed to influence our behaviour. A highly granular version of this approach is likely still quite far off but it generally feels more viscerally scary than influencing us via our technology. Surfing the web without ad-block already feels uncomfortably close to the futurama gag about ads in your dreams. Increasing though this is amounting to the same thing. Indeed our technology is already doing this to us, albeit fairly crudely for now, by exploiting our reward circuits and many other subtle systematic flaws in the human psyche.

What is "free" software?
Free as in liberty no as in gratuity, as in speech not beer, politically and not necessarily financially.
The free software foundation defines free software as adhering to the four essential freedoms which I paraphrase here:

The freedom to run the code however you wish

The freedom to examine its source code so that you can understand and modify it for your own purposes

The freedom to distribute the source code as is

The freedom to distribute modified versions of the source code

Note that code which is 'source available' only really gets you freedom 1, depending on how the code is licenced and built this may not get you any of the others including freedom 0. Much ink has been spilt over the use of the term 'open source' as not going far enough as a result.
Free software is often referred to by the acronyms FOSS & FLOSS (Free/Libre and

...
Excessive Nuance and Derailing Conversations
by Alexander — 2022-01-23T10:42:11.298Z

Overview

I've observed my interlocutors—and sometimes myself—applying excessive nuance to irrelevant points during some discussions. This misplaced nuance results in the derailing of conversations towards rabbit holes and dead ends.

High-Level Description

When I bring a new supporting but tangential idea into a discussion (e.g. mention a widely accepted scientific theory), my interlocutor applies excessive nuance to this new idea at the expense of the salient points in the discussion. This misplaced and excessive nuance takes the form of nitpicking or questioning the underlying framework underpinning that newly introduced idea.

This is rarely fruitful because almost always, none of the participants is at the cutting-edge of the relevant fields to add any new insights. I'm all for rational inquiry and open discourse, but nitpicking oftentimes comes across as pretentious and unconstructive.

The effect of this conversation style is the unchecked growth of the stack of topics. We often forget to go back down the stack to revisit the original points that instigated the discussion unless someone cares sufficiently to intentionally apply enough pressure to steer the conversation back down the stack. Such discussions usually quickly end up in rabbit holes, and no one gets anything out of them.

Example

Suppose that you are having a conversation about "what it feels like when your worldview is shattered." Your interlocutor is a fellow rationalist and mentions that they read a book promoting climate denial and describes to you what it felt like to almost have their worldview shattered by a professional motivated-skeptic and evidence-cherrypicker. They explain how difficult it is for us mere mortals to notice this black magic being applied to our minds and how easy it is to be deceived by a professional charlatan.

To add to this discussion, you contribute the idea that this feeling is similar going the other way. For example, a profoundly religious person reading a science book on biological evolution will feel similar to how you—a rigorous rationalist—felt reading a book promoting climate denial, anti-vax, or some other pseudoscientific theory.

Both of you agree that evolution is a widely accepted theory with plenty of evidence going for it. Still, your interlocutor decides that they want to show you how much they know about the philosophy of science, so they say, "Playing devi...
Is AI Alignment a pseudoscience?
by mocny-chlapik — 2022-01-23T10:32:08.826Z

Hi there, my background is in AI research and recently I have discovered some AI Alignment communities centered around here. The more I read about AI Alignment, the more I have a feeling that the whole field is basically a fictional-world-building exercise.

Some problems I have noticed: The basic concepts (e.g. what are the basic properties of the AI that are being discussed) are left undefined. The questions answered are build on unrealistic premises about how AI systems might work. Mathiness - using vaguely defined mathematical terms to describe complex problems and then solving them with additional vaguely defined mathematical operations. Combination of mathematical thinking and hand-wavy reasoning that lead to preferred conclusions.

Maybe I am reading it wrong. How would you steelman the argument that AI Alignment is actually a rigorous field? Do you consider AI Alignment to be scientific? If so, how is it Popper-falsifiable?
CICO is a weird reference class
by Chad Nauseam — 2022-01-23T07:00:11.825Z

People tend to form what I guess I'm going to call default-hypothesis-reference-classes. This is what they see as the "default" hypothesis that new hypotheses have to compete against. Obviously this isn't how a perfect bayesian reasoner would act, but we're only human.

These weird reference classes can be tricky, because you can get "sucked into them" and stop noticing that they're weird.

I started thinking of this when thinking about the CICO model of weight gain/loss. Calories-in-calories-out sounds obviously true under thermodynamics. There's about 2 × 1010 Calories in a gram of matter, and humans need about 2000 Calories per day, so make sure not to eat more than a tiny fraction of a gram per day and you're sure to lose weight.

Well, not quite. In my opinion, the most "natural" default reference class for weight gain or loss is mass-in-mass-out (MIMO), which is obviously true, if not super useful. This has to be true - everything we know about physics tells us it's impossible for your body to gain or lose mass unless it comes from or goes somewhere.

What people mean when they say CICO is that different foods have different amounts of bioavailable energy, and weight gain is dependent on difference between the bioavailable energy you eat and the amount of heat your body produces. This doesn't seem like it necessarily has to be true! People gain weight when they grow, and that's partially because they're eating actual minerals that are deposited into their bones. (And these minerals largely don't go anywhere once they're deposited.) So that's a straightforward counterexample to CICO.

We could imagine the same thing happening with fat gain or loss. Your body could store energy by accumulating fat, but not remove the actual fat molecules from your body when their chemical energy is consumed. (I'm not saying that this actually happens, just that it's not forbidden by thermodynamics.) Or our model for what kinds of energy are bioavailable could be wrong, and if so we'd give wrong predictions when trying to apply CICO even if the theory itself were true.

What I'm trying to say is, if your previous "default" reference class for models of weight gain was MIMO, CICO would seem weird and not that special to you. CICO is very likely more useful than MIMO, but it wouldn't intuitively seem like it should be the default theory all other theories are at best ...
Hyperpalatable Food Hypothesis: A LessWrong Study?
by BDay — 2022-01-23T05:43:31.428Z

In Eliezer Yudkowsky's recent post he discussed SlimeMoldTimeMold’s research into possible causes of obesity, and how he thinks SMTM’s theories are more convincing than the Hyperpalatable Food Hypothesis (HFH). SlimeMoldTimeMold theorizes that some kind of contamination is more likely, potentially lithium contamination in water. His work can be found here: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/

Matthew Barnett's comment supporting the hyperpalatable food hypothesis was strongly upvoted, so I’m interpreting that as indicating a decent amount of support for it among readers here. Personally, I find the HFH the most compelling of the existing theories. Why I’m posting is I think we could run our own study to test this hypothesis.

As a group, we could have 3 months where we only eat meat, fruit, vegetables and spices. We track our weight, pool the data and see what happens at the end of it.

Instructions would be along the lines of:

Eat only meat, fruit, vegetables and spices.
Eat to satiation. Eat how much you feel like eating.
Do not alter exercise habits greatly during these months if possible. Report if you do.
Rather than record everything you eat, only record when you have broken the diet. Obviously, this diet will be very difficult to follow in certain settings, and we’ll all break it at some point. This is fine. Being allowed to break this diet for a few days at a time, or for a few meals here or there will be necessary. As long as you restart afterwards and record how much you deviated over the 3 month period, I think we'll still have a good sense of its efficacy.

This would only make sense to do if enough people were interested, so I thought I’d make this post to see if anyone was. If it is something you'd be interested to participate in, please comment below or send me a message.

Also, if you see any issues/improvements please comment.
5x5 Go Board
by jefftk — 2022-01-23T02:20:05.275Z

Lily and I have been playing some

5x5

Go. We were using
rubber bands to mark off a corner of a regular board, but I wanted a
real one. It doesn't seem like anyone sells these, so I decided to
make one:

I found someone else's writeup of how they made a
Go board, and took a similar approach.

Instead of using MDF,
I used some of the three-quarter inch plywood I keep on hand. I cut a rectangle
6" by 6.46", following the Japanese ratio:

I sanded it, progressively down to 220 grit:

I sketched the initial set of lines in pencil:

I drew the lines in sharpie. It would've been a bit nicer to use a
finer point, but this was what I had.

After two coats of polyurethane, it's ready for play:
List of Probability Calibration Exercises
by Isaac King — 2022-01-23T02:12:41.798Z

I recently spent a while looking at how different people had designed their probability calibration exercises (for ideas on how to design my own), and they turned out to be quite difficult to find. Many of the best ones were the least advertised and hardest to locate online. I figured I'd compile them all here in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar position. Please let me know about any I missed and I'll add them to the post. Many of these are old and no longer maintained, so no guarantees as to quality.

https://bayes-up.web.app/

http://acritch.com/credence-game/

http://confidence.success-equation.com/

https://calibration-practice.neocities.org/

http://web.archive.org/web/20100529074053/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=129

http://credencecalibration.com/

https://programs.clearerthinking.org/calibrate_your_judgment.html

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/calibration or https://80000hours.org/calibration-training/ (Different URLs for same application.)

https://calibration.lazdini.lv/

http://www.2pih.com/caltest/

http://web.archive.org/web/20161020032514/http://calibratedprobabilityassessment.org/

https://predictionbook.com/credence_games/try

https://calibration-training.netlify.app/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.the_calibration_game

https://www.metaculus.com/tutorials/

https://outsidetheasylum.blog/probability-calibration/

https://peterattiamd.com/confidence/

http://quantifiedintuitions.org/calibration
Descriptive vs. prescriptive optimism
by jasoncrawford — 2022-01-22T19:50:43.887Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/descriptive-vs-prescriptive-optimism

[Cross-posting this essay from 2020 by request.]

I am not an “optimist”. Well, not exactly. Though I sing the praises of progress in these essays, and though I paint a bold vision for the future, I have hesitated to apply that term to myself. I have said that I am “fundamentally” optimistic, or a “paranoid optimist”; or I have reached for constructions like “short-term pessimist, long-term optimist”. But none of these are quite right.

In my discussion with Tamara Winter and Trevor McKendrick on optimism, the three of us converged on a formulation that I think resolves the paradox: descriptive vs. prescriptive optimism.

Descriptive optimism is the expectation that good things will happen, that an outcome will be positive, that the trend is in the right direction. It is a belief about the world.

Prescriptive optimism is the decision to work to make good outcomes happen. Whether lighthearted or desperate, cheerful or grim, it is a commitment to action and effort.

Descriptive optimism, for me, is highly contextual. It is situation-specific. I am mildly optimistic about our efforts against coronavirus. I am fairly pessimistic about US politics.

Prescriptive optimism is deeply philosophical. It is a belief about the nature of life, intelligence, and agency. It is a moral attitude, a way of living.

Descriptive optimism is determined by the external facts, but prescriptive optimism is an internal choice.

Descriptive optimism on its own can lead to complacency, Panglossianism, and other cavalier attitudes—progress as coasting. Prescriptive optimism calls for boldness, courage, and vigorous effort. When the two are combined, they call for expansive, ambitious plans. When prescriptive optimism is combined with descriptive pessimism, they together call for grit, determination, and fighting spirit.

The French writer and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland captured it in a passage later echoed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, when he wrote of

this intimate alliance—which for me makes the true man—of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will. It is this natural bravery that is the flower of a good people, which “does not need to hope to undertake and to succeed to persevere,” but which lives in struggle over and above suffering, doubt, and the blasts of nothingness because his fiery life is the negation of death.

This has been distilled...
A one-question Turing test for GPT-3
by Paul Crowley — 2022-01-22T18:17:56.463Z

"Amy": Sorry Mike, I entered the wrong number. I hope this was a beautiful misunderstanding. I am very sorry for the trouble I have caused you.

Me: No trouble at all, hope you are well!

"Amy": It is fate that we meet each other. Please forgive me for my mistake. My name is Amy. Where are you from?

Me: My favorite random question: what food would you use to prop a book open and why?

This is mostly a bit of fun, but when I posted this to Facebook Rob Bensinger asked me to post it here: "it's a great example of what folks like Eliezer mean when they claim that GPT-3 is doing 'shallow pattern-matching', 'not really making sense at all', etc.."

I got texted by a "wrong number" scammer, and I was curious if it was a bot, so after a bit of thought I came up with the following one-question Turing test:

What food would you use to prop a book open and why?

I love this question because any real human can answer it pretty well, but answering it relies on all sort of knowledge of the physical properties of books and food that we mostly don't write about, and especially not where they interact. I asked my partner Jess and she said "a banana" which is pretty much a perfect answer: it's heavy enough to hold the pages open, it's long and thin so it won't cover all the text, it's curved so it won't roll off, and it has a skin so it won't mess up the book.

But then I worried, am I underestimating modern engines like GPT-3? I asked Rosie Campbell at OpenAI to try it. Here and throughout this post, answers are almost entirely unfiltered/uncurated, except where it gave very similar answers twice. Here's what we got:

I would use a banana. It is very brown.

Eggs and a toast because I want to be full after I read the book

I would use ravioli because it would be hard to turn the page.

A French Fry... but hold the ketchup and salt.

Poptarts, because of the stiffness and the flexibility.

I would use a banana as a bookmark.

The food I would use to prop a book open would have to be lollipop. Why? Because it is sweet and sour at the same time

Bacon egg and cheese. I choose bacon because while it is objectively the best food on this list, the book is open-faced.

This however is without any prompt engineering; GPT-3 can often do dramatically better given a better prompt. Rosie tried with the following prompt:

The following is a conversation between

...
What’s wrong with Pomodoro
by bfinn — 2022-01-22T16:54:45.164Z

POMODORO is a popular way to manage your time. The idea is that instead of half-working all day, you work in intense 25-minute stints, with 5-minute breaks (or occasionally longer) in between, marked by an alarm:

Invented by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s, Pomodoro was named after a tomato-shaped timer. Even back then there was nothing new about working for fixed periods until an alarm goes off. For centuries, schools have taught lessons this way, ending with a bell.[1] And there are various other techniques (listed below) for working in fixed time intervals against the clock. I call such methods ‘clock-work’.

The good

Clock-work has various benefits, principally:

Each period is an achievable, bite-sized chunk of work. This makes it easier to start on a daunting project, and to plough on to the next break when a task gets hard or tedious.
Each period has a short-term deadline, which focuses your mind and creates a slight sense of urgency.
You get regular breaks to maintain your energy, attention, decision-making, performance and well-being. They also provide an opportunity to step back and reconsider what you're working on (though thinking about work doesn't make a restful break).
The fixed lengths simplify planning, such as school schedules/timetables; similarly, Pomodoro users treat the 25-minute stints as a unit to plan and track their work.

The bad

Though clock-work suits some people, tasks and situations, it has big problems too. Years before I’d even heard of Pomodoro, I devised a similar system using hour-long work stints. But I could never stick to it for more than a few days at a time, as it kept going wrong. Eventually I abandoned it altogether, and figured out why it kept failing:

No fixed work length is best

How long should each stint last? There’s no consensus between rival time management systems, experts and scientific research at all:

Productivity author Mark Forster recommends starting with 5-minute bursts, and progressively extending them to 40 minutes.
Medical professor Dr James Levine suggests 15 minutes’ work at a time.
Though Pomodoro advocates 25 minutes, many users choose their own length.
30- and 60-minute stints worked equally well for computer operators in one study.
School classes typically last 30–90 minutes, and it’s unclear what length is best.
Time-tracking software DeskTime found their most productive users average 52 minutes’ work,

...