trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Failed Vegan Choux Experiments
by jefftk — 2021-02-20T20:10:05.990Z

Many kinds of pastry can be made vegan quite easily. Puff pastry,
which is thin layers of dough and fat, works very well with various
plant-based fats and pre-made puff sheets are very often vegan.
Lately, however, I've been excited about choux pastry.

Choux pastry is what makes eclairs, cream puffs, and profiteroles.
It's traditionally made from flour, butter, water, salt, and
eggs. Using vegan butter in place of butter is not a problem, but the
eggs are fundamental to the recipe. They not only provide leavening by
releasing their water as steam, but they bind the dough together.

Looking online, I found various recipes that attempts to make vegan
Choux pastry, but reading through them many are essentially making an
enriched bread. Some go a bit farther, trying to figure out the role
of eggs in choux and substitute for them, but none work very well.

I was interested in potentially using aquafaba to substitute for the
eggs, but while I could make things that went into the oven very
puffy, they didn't set.

More flour helped some:

I also tried xanthan gum. Here are four, with different levels (puffier ones have more):

Here's the inside:

Unfortunately, amounts of xanthan gum that were sufficient to get
approximately the right shape were ridiculously high, and tasted very
strongly of xanthan gum. Not tasty. If you're curious:

1/4 C (4T) water

2T salted veg butter

1/4 C (4T) flour

1/8t baking soda

2t xanthan gum

4T aquafaba

1/4t cream of tartar

Melt the butter in the water, and bring to a boil. Add the flour all
at once, remove from the heat, and mix well. Add the baking soda and
xanthan gum, mix more, and let it sit and cool.

Whip the aquafaba and cream of tartar, and mix gradually into the
cooled dough, bit by bit. You'll loose most of the foam from the
first bits, but it should be pretty puffy by the end. Put it on a
greased baking sheet, shaping or piping. Bake at 450F until the
outside is firm (??) and then cool down to 325 to bake until done
through.

I wrote most of this post in the summer, describing what I tried, and
I kept thinking I was going to come back and experiment more. At this
point, it doesn't look like I'm going to be experimenting more, so I
just wanted to publish what I had.

Comment via: facebook
How my school gamed the stats
by Srdjan Miletic — 2021-02-20T19:23:25.202Z

I was reading the Slate Star Codex review of The Cult of Smart. Part of it discusses charter vs state schools and the allegations of fraud of various kinds undermining charter schools record of better achievement. Reading it, I realized that I took for granted that public schools engage in systematic fraud in a variety of ways. I don't think this is something everyone understands, hence this post.

I went to a state school in the UK. State schools are rated on a 1 - 4 scale from unsatisfactory to outstanding. My school was rated good, meaning a 3. A few memories which stand out. During my first week I saw one of the boys in my class who was 11 at the time held up against the wall in a corridor while a 16 year old put a shiv to his throat and robbed him. He handed over his wallet and keys. A year or two later and I remember seeing a small boy who struggled with depression held up by the throat against a locker and slapped in the face by a troublemaker from the same class in front of everyone just before we went in to the classroom. I remember classes which were filled start to finish with people shouting and talking. Neither of the first two events were common but they also weren't uncommon. No one was surprised to witness them. It's worth emphasizing again that my school was above average, in fact quite far above average, and in a middle class area. It's also worth noting that I was mostly in top ability streamed classes, meaning my classroom experience was likely far better than average.

There were many ways in which the school and teachers gamed the system to boost their measured performance. One way was to do exams for students. I was on a bottom set language class for French. After two years I literally couldn't speak a single sentence in french and maybe knew 20 words in total. I still passed my exams. How? We did the tests in class. Often the teacher would go through them with us. Literally giving us the test and then going through each question on the whiteboard and telling us what to write. A different year and a different teacher, this time the teacher would sit next to us and write the answers down. Why sit next to us? It was the bottom set so people often wouldn't even bother to write down the answer if they were told it. This kind of thing was normal, so much so that I, and I think most people there, didn't realize anything unusual was happening.

Ano...
What are the most powerful lotuses?
by ForensicOceanography — 2021-02-20T19:05:59.899Z

Bryan Caplan writes an argument against Universal Basic Income: https://www.econlib.org/from-ubi-to-anomia/.

To sum up, the majority of the people not in the labor force spend most of their time on screens, and this is bad for their health and their wellness. If more people were to exit the labor force, many of them would presumably behave the same way, therefore UBI is a bad idea.

I am not sure of the validity of the object-level argument (the causal link could be in the other way: maybe people who spend their entire day scrolling their Facebook feed are more likely to become NEET, and not the reverse).

However, on a more abstract level, this hit me as an uncommonly Puritan argument. If people did not have the need to work, many of them would end up living a miserable life, pursuing short-term petty pleasures. This rings true to me, it somewhat resonates with my "high-level generators of disagreement". So my brain is trying to find ways to defend this argument.

Is it reasonable to think that, if relieved from the necessity to work, the majority of people would just procastinate all day? But I guess it is possible to conceive a model in which lotuses tend to trap men, and if you decrease the incentive to getting things done (in the example of this article, if you decrease the reward from green circles), more people will spend more times eating lotuses. There are many social incentives to work, which would not disappear if we remove the economic incentive to work; but it is also true that social rewards are often easy to pursue on social network.

So we should expect an increase the mean time that the population spends on activities that we might judge as "lotuses". But on what lotuses in particular? Is procastinating on the Internet the most brain-gripping short-term reward of this age, or there are other competing lotuses?
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
by Kaj_Sotala — 2021-02-20T13:54:05.162Z
Link: https://iep.utm.edu/ethic-ai/

Table of contents:

The Relevance of AI for Ethics

What is AI?

Its Ethical Relevance

Main Debates

Machine Ethics

Bottom-up Approaches: Casuistry

Top-down Approaches: The MoralDM Approach

Mixed Approaches: The Hybrid Approach

Autonomous Systems

Machine Bias

The Problem of Opacity

Machine Consciousness

The Moral Status of Artificial Intelligent Machines

The Autonomy Approach

The Indirect Duties Approach

The Relational Approach

The Upshot

Singularity and Value Alignment

Other Debates

AI as a form of Moral Enhancement or a Moral Advisor

AI and the Future of Work

AI and the Future of Personal Relationships

AI and the Concern About Human ‘Enfeeblement’

Anthropomorphism

Ethical Guidelines for AI

Conclusion

References and Further Reading

Its entry on "Singularity and Value Alignment" is shorter than Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on superintelligence:

Some of the theories of the potential moral status of artificial intelligent agents discussed in section 2.f. have struck some authors as belonging to science fiction. The same can be said about the next topic to be considered: singularity. The underlying argument regarding technological singularity was introduced by statistician I. J. Good in ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’ (1965):

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus, the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The idea of an intelligence explosion involving self-replicating, super-intelligent AI machines seems inconceivable to many; some commentators dismiss such claims as a myth about the future development of AI (for example, Floridi 2016). However, prominent voices both inside and outside academia are taking this idea very seriously—in fact, so seriously that they fear the possible consequence of the so-called ‘existential risks’ such as the risk of human extinction. Among those voicing such fears are philosophers like Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, but also prominent figures like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking.

Authors discussing the idea of technological singular

...
On the Nature of Reputation
by Martin Sustrik — 2021-02-20T12:50:30.128Z

Abstract: Reputation tokens (e.g. brands, but lot of other things as well) are vessels to store reputation. They are free to create but expensive to fill with trust. Consumers use them to deal with information overload. Producers use them to manipulate common knowledge. Also, a certain kind of supply-demand-style equilibrium exists.

Trademarks

Speaking about reputation, one risks getting all hand-wavy and disconnected from the real world.

To keep the discussion down-to-earth, let's start with the trademark law. The trademark law was, after all, created specifically to deal with reputation. And being a law, it is not a theoretical model but a living organism evolved to solve actual real-world problems.

You may have a vague idea that a trademark is something like an Internet domain name. You can buy a name and then it's yours. It's your property and everyone else should get off your lawn.

But the trademark law is not like that at all.

First of all, you don't create a trademark by buying it. Trademark is rather created as a by-product of using a name. You establish a company. You start producing stuff. Maybe you do a little advertising. People start to recognize your brand. Et voilà, you own a legally recognized trademark. No explicit action on your part is needed.

Similarly, if you stop using the name, your claim to it gradually dissipates. If you claim a trademark and your opponent is able to prove that you haven't used it for decades, the court will rule against you.

There is also the concept of "trademark goodwill" which loosely translates to "reputation". Interestingly, the notion of trademark goodwill tends to be phrased in economic terms. Namely, it is the part of the value of the company that is gained through owning the trademark.

Another common misconception about trademarks is that the names are, similarly to the Internet domain names, global.

In reality, the scope of a trademark is limited to the area of one's activity. Apple, the grocery store doesn't infringe on the trademark of Apple, the consumer electronics manufacturer. Similarly, Apple, a grocery store in Manchester, England may not infringe on the trademark of Apple, a grocery store in Brisbane, Australia. The rule of the thumb is that there's an infringement only when the two trademarks can be easily mistaken for each another by the customers.

Reputation Tokens

Alice is a commercial programmer. She...
Google’s Ethical AI team and AI Safety
by magfrump — 2021-02-20T09:42:20.260Z

cross-posted from my blog

Background on the events

I have been thinking about this since the firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru, and yet still no one has actually written about it beyond my own tweets, so I guess it falls to me.

I find, and I imagine many people in the rat-sphere agree, the idea of talking about energy consumption and climate change to be low on my list of ethical priorities surrounding AI. But I find that uncompelling because I think that (a) this cost can be weighed against the benefits AI can create and (b) this cost can be literally offset by potential current and future carbon capture technologies. I think this is well established in the EA community, with recent possible exceptions taking shape.

But these ideas rely on current assumptions about how much power is being used for what purposes. If AI continues to scale by adding compute, as is generally expected, this could create conflicts of interest in the AI space. That would be bad for a number of reasons, chief among them that it would mean that only actors who are willing to impose substantial costs on the commons would be able to implement their visions. This is my central point, so I will return to it later.

For now, just keep in mind that the low priority of climate change among EAs is an empirical question of how easy it is to influence certain changes. I don’t think any of the specific work by Dr. Gebru makes a convincing case to me that the question has a different answer. But I haven’t heard literally any other single person say that!

Instead, she was fired, and today the other co-lead of her team was also fired. The justification for firing Gebru was “she quit.” No public statement has been made, even internally to the team both managed, about why Margaret Mitchell was fired, unless you count “it’s part of a re-org.” For reference, my team at Google has been re-org’d at least four times, and I have never seen anyone fired or even moved out of their management position in that time. Usually I don’t even notice.

(Because of timing there has been some conflation of this incident with the firing of a recruiter who worked mostly with historically Black colleges and universities. Maybe this is evidence that racism played a part in the decision, but I intend to regard “bad decision-making” on the part of Alphabet as a bit of a black box because harming AI safety prospects is very bad regardless ...
The Kelly Criterion in 3D
by lsusr — 2021-02-20T08:21:09.577Z

The Kelly Criterion is a gambling strategy which maximizes the logarithm of your expected wealth. The Kelly Criterion tells you what fraction f∗ of your bankroll to wager. It is a function of the net fractional odds[1] received b>0 and the probability of a win p∈(0,1).

f∗=p(b+1)−1b

Some properties are intuitively easy to understand.

The Kelly wager is positive iff the expected value bp−(1−p) is positive. The Kelly wager is zero otherwise.

The Kelly wager is 1 for all p=1. (Ignore b=0.)

The Kelly wager is 0 for all b=0. (Ignore p=1.)

What surprised me is that if you fix b and restrain p to the region of positive f∗ then f∗ is a linear function of p. This was not intuitive to me.

I expected asymptotic behavior with the greatest df∗dp in a neighborhood of p=1. In other words, I expected the fractional wager to increase slowly at first and then increase faster as p approached 1. Actually, p is linear.

Kelly wagers tend to be more aggressive then human intuitions. I knew this and I still underestimated the Kelly wager. I didn't mess this up in a high stakes situation where fear throws off my calculations. I didn't even mess this up in a real-world situation where uncertainty complicates things. I underestimated the Kelly wager on a purely conceptual level.

I have written before about the utility of my fear heuristic. My fear heuristic might be helping to compensate for my Kelly miscalibration.

Recalibrating

I'm good at tolerating risk when it comes the small number of gigantic risky bets guiding my professional career. I'm also good at tolerating risk in the domain of painlessly small bets. (Not that there is much risk to tolerate in this latter case.) Judging by this post's analysis, I am awful at calibrating my risk tolerance for wagers between 0.05% and 1% of my net worth. Specifically, I am insufficiently risk tolerant.

What makes this worse is that the region of 0.05% to 1% of my net worth is full of long tails. The wagers I'm skipping could easily repay themselves a thousandfold. If I take a wager like this every day for 2 years and just a single one of them repays itself a thousandfold then I win bigtime.

I need to gamble more.

Optional Practice

I used these problems is to help develop my intuitive grasp of the Kelly criterion.

Q1: If p=0.01 and b=1000 then what is the corresponding f∗?

0.9%

The above number is way higher than what my intuition tells me i...
Coffee trucks: a brilliant idea that someone should do?
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-20T07:50:12.401Z

I sometimes wonder if the world should have coffee trucks, like ice cream trucks, roaming the street. Especially when half the population is working from home.

Coffee seems ideal for this because:

you can probably prepare it fresh in a briefly stopping vehicle,

you don’t need much variety,

people are often flexible about when they get it,

they often like to get it as a short break from work in which they bump into other people,

more than half of the US population consumes it at least once every day, so potential demand is radically higher than for most foodstuffs!

most people don’t have the means to make cafe-quality coffee in their home,

it doesn’t go bad easily

There are clearly stationary coffee trucks, like food trucks. I think moving trucks may also exist or have existed ever, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, and it’s hard to find mention of them. Here are some people who had the same idea, but since nobody was expecting a moving coffee bus, they got more traffic sitting still like a cafe. But surely people expecting your product to exist is an obstacle not unique to circulating coffee trucks. Here is someone with the same idea, and someone who says there was one in a holiday park once, and some others who think they exist in Australia and Buffalo, but it sounds like they might be thinking of stationary coffee trucks.

I’m not sure that it’s good for any kind of truck to exist if it makes noise all the time as it travels through neighborhoods, delighting some, but surely disrupting others. But I think that can be entirely resolved digitally: instead of the truck playing music, the service could have an app that plays music when truck is approaching, if you signed up for that. Then you touch the notification to turn off the music and at the same time report whether you want a coffee.

Am I missing something?
Societal Self-control
by Aaron Bergman — 2021-02-20T03:05:21.271Z
Link: https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/societal-self-control

Intro

At the individual level, we humans often intentionally reduce our freedom so that our future selves will make some particular decision. Want to eat healthier? Much easier to forego buying chips and candy at the supermarket than it is to leave them in the bag at home. Want to stay focused on work? Much easier to

block your favorite websites

than it is to actively resist the siren’s call of Reddit.

Most of the time, these “prospective self control devices,” or PSCDs, as I’ll call them, don’t entirely remove your future freedom; you can always drive to the store for a candy bar or manually disable the Chrome extension. Still, if done right, the temptations won’t be strong enough to warrant this degree of effort. The mere existence of the barrier also serves as a reminder of your higher-level goal.

Here, I want to explore whether PSCDs are underused at the societal level and, if so, how we might use them to improve collective decision-making.

They’re already here

Unsurprisingly, there are already plenty of institutions/norms/rules/practices that seem to count as societal PSCDs. Literally any law is one banal example; “we” (in a very broad sense) decide to make certain activities difficult to do. This is true both in a physical sense (if you try to rob a bank, someone with a gun will physically come and stop you) and a psychological sense (it is often unpleasant to do something illegal due to fear of punishment and general social stigma).

Just like the individual examples, laws don’t entirely remove our freedom to break them. In some cases, as with murder, this is mostly because our society lacks the capability to physically prevent people from doing so. Often, though, we affirmatively want to be able to break the law in extraordinary circumstances. Most of the time, doing 120 in a 55 is very bad and wrong, but if your dad is having a heart attack in the passenger seat and the hospital is 5 minutes away, the ability to physically break the law (and possibly incur the consequences) is a good thing to have.

However, it seems to me that most of these societal PSCDs are “selfish,” at least in a very loose sense. I hesitate to use the word because of its moral connotation, but I’m using it solely to indicate something that promotes our individual well-being, even if it imposes no cost on others. Both speed limits and a social media website blocker are selfish in this w...
Experientialist Theories of Well-Being
by andzuck — 2021-02-19T22:04:24.183Z

This piece was written by Aidan Mackenzie and originally posted on QRI's website.

Aidan is a recent graduate of Cornell University with a BA in philosophy and is a visiting research fellow at QRI. His current interests focus on global priorities research as well as the intersections between meta-ethics and philosophy of mind.

TLDR

This post discusses and explores the philosophy of well-being, a subtopic in moral philosophy. I focus on outlining what I call “experientialist” views — the class of views which argue that experience is necessary for well-being. I aim to illustrate why these views, and the discussion around them, can more thoroughly frame hedonism and other theories which attempt to explain value in terms of phenomenology[1]. I also offer recommendations of relevant academic philosophy research for further reading. Motivated by Olah & Carter’s “Research Debt”, this piece distills the existing academic discussion of hedonism into an easy-to-understand map.

Introduction

In moral philosophy, well-being is defined as what is non-instrumentally good for an individual. For example, catching the bus after work is good because it leads to other good things such as being punctual and having more time to spend with family and friends, but feeling happy is good in and of itself. Well-being is the good that is good in and of itself for an individual.

There are many philosophical questions surrounding well-being. We might wonder whether being altruistic leads to more well-being than succeeding in one’s career, or we might debate how we can measure the subjective elements of happiness for the purposes of calculation (as is often important in economic debates).

However, this post focuses on the more fundamental question of well-being: what fundamentally makes something count as wellbeing? Another way to phrase this question is to ask why is it that certain states of mind count as positive well-being while others do not? In philosophy, answers to this question typically fall into three broad camps: (1) Hedonism, (2) Desire-based theories, and (3) Objective List theories (Crisp, “Well-Being”). My project in this post is to consider the first of these camps and to argue that we ought to reconceptualize this camp as the “experientialist camp” where the theory of hedonism is a specific version of a wider classification. My hope is that by detailing the wider space a...