trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Occam's Razor: In need of sharpening?
by Jimdrix_Hendri — 2019-08-01T13:36:09.780Z

In the first half of the 14th century, the Franciscan friar and logician, William of Occam proposed a heuristic for deciding between alternative explanations of physical observables. As William put it: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity". Or, as Einstein reformulated it 600 years later: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".

Occam's Razor, as it became known, was enthusiastically adopted by the scientific community and remains the unquestioned criterion for deciding between alternative hypotheses to this day. In my opinion, its success is traceable to two characteristics:

o Utility: OR is not a logical deduction. Neither is it a statement about which hypothesis is most likely. Instead, it is a procedure for selecting a theory which makes further work as easy is possible. And by facilitating work, we can usually advance further and faster.

o Combinability. OR is fully compatible with each the epistemological stances which have been adopted within science from time to time (empiricism, rationalism, positivism, falsifiability, etc.)

It is remarkable that such a widely applied principle is exercised with so little thought to its interpretation. I thought of this recently upon reading an article claiming that the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is appealing because it is so simple. Really?? The multiverse explanation proposes the creation of an infinitude of new universes at every instant. To me, that makes it an egregiously complex hypothesis. But if someone decides that it is simple, I have no basis for refutation, since the notion of what it means for a theory to be simple has never been specified.

What do we mean when we call something simple? My naive notion is to begin by counting parts and features. A milling device made up of two stones, one stationary one mobile, fitted with a stick for rotation by hand becomes more complex when we add devices to capture and transmit water power for setting the stone in motion. And my mobile phone becomes more complex each time I add a new app. But these notions don't serve to answer the question whether Lagrange's formulation of classical mechanics, based on action, is simpler than the equivalent formulation by Newton, based on his three laws of forces.

Isn't remarkable that scientists, so renown for their exactitude, hav...
Mistake Versus Conflict Theory of Against Billionaire Philanthropy
by Zvi — 2019-08-01T13:10:01.408Z

Response To (SlateStarCodex): Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

I agree with all the central points in Scott Alexander’s Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy. I find his statements accurate and his arguments convincing. I have quibbles with specific details and criticisms of particular actions.

He and I disagree on much regarding the right ways to be effective, whether or not it is as an altruist. None of that has any bearing on his central points.

We violently agree that it is highly praiseworthy and net good for the world to use one’s resources in attempts to improve the world. And that if we criticize rather than praise such actions, we will get less of them.

We also violently agree that one should direct those resources towards where one believes they would do the most good, to the best one of one’s ability. One should not first giving those resources to an outside organization one does not control and which mostly does not use resources wisely or aim to make the world better, in the hopes that it can be convinced to use those resources wisely and aim to make the world better.

We again violently agree that privately directed efforts of wealthy individuals often do massive amounts of obvious good, on average are much more effective, and have some of the most epic wins of history to their names. Scott cites only the altruistic wins and effectiveness here, which I’d normally object to, but which in context I’ll allow.

And so on.

Where we disagree is why anyone is opposing billionaire philanthropy.

We disagree that Scott’s post is a useful thing to write. I agree with everything he says, but expect it to convince less than zero people to support his position.

Scott laid out our disagreement in his post Conflict vs. Mistake.

Scott is a mistake theorist. That’s not our disagreement here.

Our disagreement is that he’s failing to model that his opponents here are all pure conflict theorists.

Because, come on. Read their quotes. Consider their arguments.

Remember Scott’s test from Conflict vs. Mistake (the Jacobite piece in question is about how communists ignore problems of public choice):

What would the conflict theorist argument against the Jacobite piece look like? Take a second to actually think about this. Is it similar to what I’m writing right now – an explanation of conflict vs. mistake theory, and a defense of how conflict theory actually describes the w

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Do you use twitter for intellectual engagement? Do you like it?
by Hazard — 2019-08-01T12:35:57.359Z

By happenstance I never started using social media much, and when I stumbled onto the Deep Work mindset I began intentionally avoiding it.

One thing I'd like in my life is an intellectual community, where I can routinely go to find people's thoughts that I'm interested, routinely produce thoughts people are interested in, and engage and be engaged with on those ideas. A few things I've seen recently have slightly updated me that twitter might be useful for this.

I've already seen Zvi and others talk against facebook, but I haven't heard many people talk about twitter.

What has your experience been with using twitter to find, engage with, and share interesting ideas?
The Importance of Those Who Aren't Here
by Davis_Kingsley — 2019-07-31T23:33:59.877Z

One concept that people often miss when structuring groups, organizations, or social spaces is the importance of those who aren't here. People who aren't actively present can be just as important for the medium- and long-term future of your project as those who happen to be around right now (sometimes more so!) -- and if you overfit your planning to the people who happen to be around right now, you may end up damaging your long-term prospects.

Here are some examples of what this can look like:

1) A king falls into decadence and surrounds himself with flattering courtiers. Whenever he wonders whether things are going in the right direction, the courtiers assure him everything is grand and maneuver to prevent him from learning about any negative developments.

2) An online community is meant to represent a wide range of viewpoints and perspectives, but biases in moderation begin to creep in that drive some away. Since the people who don't agree with the current approach have mostly left, polling active users no longer accurately samples the broader community that the space was meant to draw on, but rather the people who happen to agree with the current approach.

3) An employer begins to remove people who don't agree with his strategy and hire those who do. Now, everyone in the organization is on the same page with respect to the strategy -- but when that strategy has flaws there are few internal voices that are able to point that out.

4) A person who recently moved is having some social difficulties fitting in to a new community she's joined and asks her old friends for advice; because they are already her friends and enjoy her current manner, their advice is not very useful for helping her adapt to a new context!

5) A company developing new technology overfixates on their current market and falls prey to Galápagos syndrome; their products become overspecialized with features for their existing group and are no longer competitive in the broader market.

Focusing too much on those who are currently present can be insidious because it can be self-reinforcing; once one is focused on an inappropriately small group of users, confidants, or advisers, it can grow increasingly difficult to bring in information from outside this perspective. Further, one who relies too heavily on a certain perspective can ultimately alter their plans in a direction tha...
Gathering thoughts on Distillation
by Raemon — 2019-07-31T19:48:34.378Z

I think one of the biggest outstanding issues facing LessWrong is good infrastructure for distilling lengthy conversations.

Wei_Dai notes in the comments of Forum Participation as Research Strategy:

There's nothing that explicitly prevents people from distilling such discussions into subsequent posts or papers. If people aren't doing that, or are doing that less than they should, that could potentially be solved as a problem that's separate from "should more people be doing FP or traditional research?"

Also, it's not clear to me that traditional research produces more clear distillations of how disagreements get resolved. It seems like most such discussions don't make for publishable papers and therefore most disagreements between "traditional researchers" just don't get resolved in a way that leaves a public record (or at all).

The LessWrong team has discussed this on and off for about 9 months. While we haven't done any development work on it yet (mostly working on Open Questions instead), habryka and I at least had some sense that this might be one of the most important things LessWrong is missing.

I have some vague thoughts on what would be needed here, but am interested in others opinions.

The rough thing that seems missing to me is a pipeline that goes something like:

1. Somebody notices that there was either a post that was way longer than it needed to be (or a bit confusing, or something). Or a meandering comment conversation that was could use to be distilled down into a post. They flag that collection of posts and comments into a databse object that says "hey, this cluster of posts and/or comments could use distillation"

2. Someone (sometimes that same person, sometimes a totally different person), writes up a distillation of that cluster of posts and/or comments

3. It might be that different people write up different distillations of the same content, because they had different takeaways. Or maybe two people both agreed that a post was long, but they both found different central metaphors useful.

4. The people who wrote the original post or comments can mark distillations as "good representation of my views" or not.

In theory there's nothing preventing this from happening with the current site technology. But, a year ago, there was nothing stopping people from making question p...
Contest: $1,000 for good questions to ask to an Oracle AI
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2019-07-31T18:48:59.406Z

Edit: contest closed now, will start assessing the entries.

The contest

I'm offering $1,000 for good questions to ask of AI Oracles. Good questions are those that are safe and useful: that allows us to get information out of the Oracle without increasing risk.

To enter, put your suggestion in the comments below. The contest ends at the end[1] of the 31st of August, 2019.

Oracles

A perennial suggestion for a safe AI design is the Oracle AI: an AI confined to a sandbox of some sort, that interacts with the world only by answering questions.

This is, of course, not safe in general; an Oracle AI can influence the world through the contents of its answers, allowing it to potentially escape the sandbox.

Two of the safest designs seem to be the counterfactual Oracle, and the low bandwidth Oracle. These are detailed here, here, and here, but in short:

A counterfactual Oracle is one whose objective function (or reward, or loss function) is only non-trivial in worlds where its answer is not seen by humans. Hence it has no motivation to manipulate humans through its answer.

A low bandwidth Oracle is one that must select its answers off a relatively small list. Though this answer is a self-confirming prediction, the negative effects and potential for manipulation is restricted because there are only a few possible answers available.

Note that both of these Oracles are designed to be episodic (they are run for single episodes, get their rewards by the end of that episode, aren't asked further questions before the episode ends, and are only motivated to best perform on that one episode), to avoid incentives to longer term manipulation.

Getting useful answers

The counterfactual and low bandwidth Oracles are safer than unrestricted Oracles, but this safety comes at a price. The price is that we can no longer "ask" the Oracle any question we feel like, and we certainly can't have long discussions to clarify terms and so on. For the counterfactual Oracle, the answer might not even mean anything real to us - it's about another world, that we don't inhabit.

Despite this, its possible to get a surprising amount of good work out of these designs. To give one example, suppose we want to fund various one of a million projects on AI safety, but are unsure which one would perform better. We can't directly ask either Oracle, but there are indirect ways of getting advice:

We could ask t

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Another case of "common sense" not being common?
by jmh — 2019-07-31T17:15:40.674Z

Okay, that is probably not that good a characterization. However, I do like when someone figures out a simple way of looking at problems that have gone unsolved and so thought to be very difficult, so therefore must be really complicated.

If you didn't see this:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-solves-computer-science-conjecture-in-two-pages-20190725/
Walkthrough: The Transformer Architecture [Part 2/2]
by Matthew Barnett — 2019-07-31T13:54:44.805Z

If you are already sort of familiar with the Transformer, this post can serve as a standalone technical explanation of the architecture. Otherwise, I recommend reading part one to get the gist of what the network is doing.

Yesterday, I left us with two images of the Transformer architecture. These images show us the general flow of data through the network. The first image shows the stack of encoders and decoders in their bubbles, which is the basic outline of the Transformer. The second image shows us the sublayers of the encoder and decoder.

Now, with the picture of how the data moves through the architecture, I will fully explain a forward pass with an example. Keep the general structure in mind as we go through the details, which can be a bit mind-numbing at parts.

The task

The Transformer is well suited for translating sentences between languages. Since I don't speak any language other than English, I have decided to translate between sarcastic sentences and their intended meaning. In the example, I am translating the phrase "Yeah right" to "That's not true." This way all those robots who only understand the literal interpretation of English can simply incorporate a Transformer into their brain and be good to go.

The embedding

Before the sentence "Yeah right" can be fed into the architecture, it needs to take a form that is understood by the network. In order to have the architecture read words, we therefore need embed each word into a vector.

We could just take the size of the vocabulary of the document we are working with, and then one-hot encode each word into a fantastically sparse and long vector. But this approach has two problems:

1. The high dimension that these vectors are in makes them harder to work with.

2. There's no natural interpretation of proximity in this vector space.

Ideally, we want words that are similar to be related in some way when they are embedded into a vector format. For instance, we might want all the fruits {apple, orange, pear} to be close to each other in some cluster, and far enough away from the vehicle cluster {car, motorcycle, truck} to form distinct groups.

To be brief, the way that we do this is to use some word embedding neural network that has already been trained on English sentences.

Positional encoding

After we have obtained a set of word-embedded vectors for each word in our sentence, we still must do some further pre...
How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions)
by Hazard — 2019-07-31T13:34:16.506Z

(cross posted from my personal blog)

Since middle school I've generally thought that I'm pretty good at dealing with my emotions, and a handful of close friends and family have made similar comments. Now I can see that though I was particularly good at never flipping out, I was decidedly not good "healthy emotional processing". I'll explain later what I think "healthy emotional processing" is, right now I'm using quotes to indicate "the thing that's good to do with emotions". Here it goes...

Relevant context

When I was a kid I adopted a strong, "Fix it or stop complaining about it" mentality. This applied to stress and worry as well. "Either address the problem you're worried about or quit worrying about it!" Also being a kid, I had a limited capacity to actually fix anything, and as such I was often exercising the "stop worrying about it" option.

Another thing about me, I was a massive book worm and loved to collect "obvious mistakes" that heroes and villains would make. My theory was, "Know all the traps, and then just don't fall for them". That plus the sort of books I read meant that I "knew" it was a big no-no to ignore or repress your emotions. Luckily, since I knew you shouldn't repress your emotions, I "just didn't" and have lived happily ever after

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yeah nopes.

Wiggling ears

It can be really hard to teach someone to move in a way that is completely new to them. I teach parkour, and sometimes I want to say,

Me: "Do the shock absorbing thing with your legs!" Student: "What's the shock absorbing thing?" Me: "... uh, you know... the thing were your legs... absorb shock?"

It's hard to know how to give cues that will lead to someone making the right mental/muscle connection. Learning new motor movements is somewhat of a process of flailing around in the dark, until some feedback mechanism tells you you did it right (a coach, it's visually obvious, the jump doesn't hurt anymore, etc). Wiggling your ears is a nice concrete version of a) movement most people's bodies are capable of and b) one that most people feel like is impossible.

Claim: learning mental and emotional skills has a similar "flailing around in the dark" aspect. There are the mental and ...
Drive-By Low-Effort Criticism
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2019-07-31T11:51:37.844Z

I'd like to point out a phenomenon that has predictable consequences, that people are seemingly unaware of:

The Drive-By Low-Effort Criticism.

To illustrate, we'll use:

The Relationship Between the Village and the Mission

That was a recent post by Raemon on here that, as far as I can tell, (1) took an incredible amount of work to make, (2) was incredibly pro-social, (3) was incredibly well-intentioned, and (4) is the class of thing that has massively high-upside if it works. It might not work, but it's the type of thing that should be encouraged.

To further break this down, the post was:

-> 5,444 words (!)

-> Deep-linked/cited 26 other posts (!)

-> Had analysis, context, tradeoffs, anticipation of likely questions or objections, actionable ideas, etc

-> Was nicely formatted for readability with headlines, appropriate bold and italics, etc etc.

-> Offered to do real-world things at author's time and expense to improve the real-world rationality community (!!!)

-> It even contained a motherfuckin' Venn diagram (!!!)

In any event, I think we can clearly say it was a high effort post. How many hours did it take? Jeez. More than 2 hours, for sure. More than 5 hours, very likely. More than 10 hours, probably. More than 20 hours? 30? Probably under a hundred hours, but heck, maybe not if you consider all the time thinking about the concepts.

Regardless — hours. Not minutes. High effort.

And this is clearly someone who cares immensely about what he's doing. And it's clearly well-intentioned. And it's humble. And it's... it's just great. Hats off to Raemon.

Now, it might not work. It might be unfeasible. But he's certainly putting in a big effort to see if something good is possible.

What is his top comment? Here's how the first one starts —

[ comment copied from Facebook / I didn't read the full article before making this comment ]

i am somewhat anti-"Mission-centered Village."

Wait, you didn't read the full article before making a drive-by low-effort criticism of the concept?

Okay. Deep breath. What's the second top-level comment?

Here is my brain dump: I have mostly given up on the Berkeley rationality community as a possible village. I think the people who showed up here were mostly selected for being bad at villaging, and that the awful shit that's been happening around here

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Will autonomous cars be more economical/efficient as shared urban transit than busses or trains, and by how much? What's some good research on this?
by mako yass — 2019-07-31T00:16:59.415Z

There's reason to think they would be. When people get into a shared public transit vehicle, usually, they're not all going to the same place. The vehicle has to take an indirect route, it has to start and stop many times along the way to let people on and off. A person will often have to transfer between multiple lines along the way and that will often involve a bit of waiting. There are usually many routes that have very low utilisation rates- carriages will be mostly empty most of the time, in part due to the fact that you can't deploy half of a bus for low-use routes, in part due to the rigidity of the route scheduling.

Small self-driving vehicles, instead, can take a person straight where they need to go. The vehicle can then pick up someone else nearby and take them straight where they need to go, and so on, all day. They'll also benefit from economy of scale of production, if more units are produced, the cheaper they individually become, smaller units, then, can be cheaper.

That's the vision I have in my head, anyway.

The main potential issue that I can see is commuting patterns. If a lot of people are going in the same direction at the same time, batching their trips together with larger densely packed shared vehicles might make sense.

But I'm not sure that's a legitimate way for cities to be. With affordable inner-city housing, mixed-use planning, this commuting pattern wouldn't pop up - people would be taking short trips in all different directions even during peak commuting times.

(Although I cannot personally understand why) A lot of people seem to like living in suburbs, and conventionally planned cities have land pricing issues that make living in them prohibitively expensive for most ordinary people who work in them (I will discuss a potential solution to this in a later post). These ideal mixed use cities that I am mentally situated in, might not exist, and might not come to exist before autonomous vehicles start to compete with existing public transit.

So I'd like to know what relationship suburb size has to the commuting pattern problem - how large can the suburbs get before fixed-route busses become more efficient? (and also, are they really better, even with large suburbs? Is there that much route agreement in any city?)

Visions of self-driving cars currently look like variants of the cars we have, im...