trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Short Note on My Value Notion
by aysajan — 2021-12-20T14:35:24.100Z

Value of something

When I have $100 to spend, I can buy ~50 cups of coffee, ~10 regular meals, or a 1-night stay at a hotel, etc. Accordingly it feels like the value of $100 should be ~50 cups of coffee, or ~10 meals, or a one-night stay at a hotel. If I can’t put this $100 into any usage, it is worthless. For instance, if the coffee shop, or the restaurant, or the hotel or any business in general refuses to accept fiat money, the value of that $100 will be zero.

Intuitively, the value of a fiat money can be represented by the units of consumables one can purchase using that money. On the other hand, the exact answer to the question of “what IS the value of $100 fiat money” is not yet obvious (at least to me). One can argue that when 10 meals can be purchased using $100, the value of that 10 meals can be hugely different for different people in the different parts of the world. But this argument feels like trying to argue the value of 10 meals rather than the value of $100.

My current understanding is that, in general, the value of something can be represented/quantifiable by the units of some other things that can be directly obtained by putting that thing into usage. If it stays idle without doing anything, the value is essentially zero.

Let’s look at some more examples:

Value of a cup of coffee. When I drink a cup of regular coffee (not decaf), I can finish 5 tasks on average instead of two in a day; or I can finish a task on average in 1 hour instead of 2 hours. In this case, the value of the coffee can be represented by 5 tasks/day or 1 hour/task. If the coffee sits on the table without anyone drinking it, the value of that coffee will be zero.
Value of a car. With my car, I can commute 100-mile distance in, let's say, two hours. In this particular case the value of my car can be represented by 2 hours/100 miles. If the car stays idle in the garage with no one driving it, the value is essentially zero.
Value of a business. Let’s say I am considering buying an Amazon online retail business. First I ask myself: How much am I willing to pay for this business? The answer to this question can be the value of that business. If I am willing to pay $10 million for the store, the value of that business is $10 million to me. If no one is willing to pay anything, the value of the business is essentially zero.

What’s wrong with this model?

Frankly , I am n...
Parenting: "Try harder next time" is bad advice for kids too
by Steven Byrnes — 2021-12-20T14:18:00.834Z

A post from last year that really stuck with me is Neel Nanda's "Stop pressing the Try Harder button". Key excerpt:

And every time I thought about the task, I resolved to Try Harder, and felt a stronger sense of motivation, but this never translated into action. I call this error Pressing the Try Harder button, and it’s characterised by feelings of guilt, obligation, motivation and optimism.

This is a classic case of failing to Be Deliberate. It feels good to try hard at something, it feels important and virtuous, and it’s easy to think that trying hard is what matters. But ultimately, trying hard is just a means to an end - my goal is to ensure that the task happens. If I can get it done in half the effort, or get somebody else to do it, that’s awesome! Because my true goal is the result. And pressing the Try Harder button is not an effective way of achieving the goal - you can tell, because it so often fails!

If I'm repeatedly failing to do something I want to do, then that's strong evidence that "resolving to try harder next time" was not an effective plan for accomplishing this particular goal. (That's not to say it never works.) Well, if that plan is ineffective, I need to find a different plan. Maybe I should set a reminder alarm, or change my routine, or outsource the task, or make a checklist, or whatever. (See Neel's post or your favorite productivity book for more ideas.)

I don't consider this advice to be particularly novel, but Neel's post is a nice framing because the phrase "try harder" jogs my memory. It has become the "trigger" of a trigger-action-plan: When I say to myself "I'll try harder next time", it makes me think of Neel's post, and then that makes me pause and try to think of a better way.

…And then, what do you know, I also started noticing myself telling my kid to "try harder next time".

Well, let me tell you. If "try harder next time" is a frequently-ineffective way for me to solve a problem, then wouldn't you know it, it's a frequently-ineffective way for my kid to solve a problem too.

So now if my kid is trying to solve a problem—or if they're not even trying—and I catch myself telling them to "try harder next time", that reminds me to pause, and put on my problem-solving hat instead, and encourage my kid to put on their problem-solving hat too. Maybe we'll even brainstorm together. (If tensions are high, I might set a reminder to ...
Law of No Evidence
by Zvi — 2021-12-20T13:50:01.189Z

This is a reference post for the Law of No Evidence.

Scott Alexander did us all a public service this week with his post The Phrase “No Evidence” Is a Red Flag for Bad Science Communication. If you have not yet read it I recommend doing so, and it is an excellent link to have handy going forward, and especially to have handy when going through studies about the severity of Omicron.

As useful as it is, he is being too kind. Not only is this ‘bad science communication’ it is also ‘not how this works, not how any of this works’ where ‘this’ is knowledge or actual science (as opposed to the brand the scientism of Science(TM)) and most importantly it is also evidence of bullshit, as per my proposed Law of No Evidence:

Law of No Evidence: Any claim that there is “no evidence” of something is evidence of bullshit.

No evidence should be fully up there with “government denial” or “I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way they can prove anything.” If there was indeed no evidence, there’d be no need to claim there was no evidence, and this is usually a move to categorize the evidence as illegitimate and irrelevant because it doesn’t fit today’s preferred form of scientism.

The context that led to the law’s formulation was people saying there was “no evidence” that the suspension of the J&J vaccine led to increased vaccine hesitancy, which was over-the-top levels of obvious nonsense, as I was constantly dealing with people’s concerns about that, and there was a huge dip on the vaccination chart at exactly the right time.

The context now is that there have been a lot of assessments that there is ‘no evidence’ that Omicron is less severe than Delta, often based on a particular data point not providing such evidence, which is then often flipped around to be a claim that Omicron definitely isn’t less severe than Delta, and that everyone speculating otherwise is irresponsible. Which is obvious nonsense, we clearly have plenty of evidence in lots of different directions and the whole thing is complicated and difficult and it will be a while before we can draw definite conclusions either way.

Saying there is ‘no evidence’ of something isn’t not lazy or bad science reporting (or other talk). It is definitely both of those, but that is not what it centrally is. No evidence is a magic phrase used to intentionally manipulate understanding by using a motte and b...
Buckets & Bayes
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2021-12-20T05:54:37.450Z

Author's note: this essay was originally published pseudonymously in 2017. It's now being permanently rehosted at this link. I'll be rehosting a small number of other upper-quintile essays from that era over the coming weeks.

I once had a conversation with a couple of the cofounders of the Center for Applied Rationality (Anna Salamon and Val Smith) in which they told me that early attempts to create useful, sticky CFAR classes almost always failed when they were centered around a single concept or technique.

However, the instructors quickly learned that combining two or more classes—even if both of them were falling flat on their own—often produced results that were surprising and memorable. For instance, both the “inner simulator” class (which tried to draw people’s attention to the fact that they had an implicit world simulator that was constantly aggregating data, and which they could query for useful information) and the “professions versus anticipations” class (that was meant to distinguish between S2 predictions and S1 predictions) were falling flat until they were combined into the “Murphyjitsu” technique, which is popular enough that the first six Google results are all CFAR alumni explaining and recommending it.

This rhymes with a Paul Graham insight that LessWrong user jacobjacob left as a comment on a post:

“He claims that the most valuable insights are both general and surprising, but that those insights are very hard to find. So instead one is often better off searching for surprising takes on established general ideas [such as drawing a link between Thing A and Very Different Thing B].”

I buy what I see as the combined claim pretty hard. It matches with my experience of analogy and metaphor being among the most powerful teaching tools, and with the idea of cross-domain renaissance nature being something that emerges from generalizing and translating specific skill into broad competence. So today, I’m going to try to act on that claim, and do my best to synthesize the highly-useful-but-often-unsticky concept of

Bayesian updating

with Anna Salamon’s highly-sticky-but-often-hard-to-operationalize concept of

bucket errors

.

(The rest of this post will assume zero familiarity with either concept and be very 101, so if you’re likely to find that boring, please skim or skip. Also, it’s going to be formatted as a ~30min tutorial, which means that you shouldn’...
Business Writing Example #2
by lsusr — 2021-12-20T05:06:55.603Z

After Business Writing Example #1, the customer sent an inquiry to my friend.

Please check possibilities to my inquiry form attachment. Please confirm prices and lead time too. Please also pay attention on weight of batteries.

We don't have any storage space at the moment. There is a rollover and more than 40 containers arrive almost at once.

My friend wrote the following response.

Many thanks for your reply.

We fully understand your warehouse pressure. You can confirm the order this week, because the lead time might be 45 days, which it will arrive you around or after the Spring Festival. This timeline will not occupy your storage space. How do you think please?

Look forward to having your feedback, thank you.

My friend's English is adequate. Her tone is fine. She is perfectly friendly. The problem with my friend's message this time is it fails to answer the customer's questions.

The customer asked for the following information:

Prices

Lead time

Weight

When replying to a business email you should answer every question as completely as you can. My friend didn't answer the questions about price and weight. A customer should never have to ask you for information twice.

My friend did a minimal job of addressing the lead time question. She should include multiple lead time estimates, depending on when the customer confirms the order. This provides more information to the customer (which is good for the customer) and applies external closing pressure on the customer (which is good for my friend).

The reference to Spring Festival only works if the customer is Chinese or is intimately familiar with Chinese culture. The customer is not Chinese. Either the reference to Spring Festival should be removed or my friend should provide cultural context like "lead times increase around Spring Festival".

The customer's warehouse pressure is a potential bargaining chip. My friend should use it to try to upsell the customer.

Here is my version of the message.

Thank you for getting back to us so quickly. We understand what it's like to have a limited warehouse space.

If you confirm an order this week, we estimate a lead time of 45 days (plus <number> days for shipping). If you confirm an order four weeks from now (late December) we estimate a lead time closer to <bigger number> days.

As for pricing, <pricing information>.

We are not (ourselves) super limited by wa

...
Business Writing Example #1
by lsusr — 2021-12-20T05:02:22.800Z

One of my friends is a saleswoman in Shenzhen who sells lead-acid batteries. She sends out lots of emails and gets few responses. When she does get a response, she often hands it off to someone else in her company who is better at closing sales.

Here is a letter my friend sent to a customer.

Dear Sir

Good day.

May I know, do you have a new order this week?

The Chinese Lunar New Year is approaching, the lead time will be longer, what's more, the shipping cost will be more and more expensive, we suggest that you can confirm the order this week.

Await your reply soon, thank you very much.

Experienced import companies don't care if you write with a Chinese accent. My friend's English is perfectly comprehensible. Her weakness is sales. Let's improve her email.

But first, a little background. Lunar New Year is China's Christmas. (Christmas is Christianity's Saturnalia.) It's a winter holiday where you go home to your family and exchange gifts. Most workers' hometowns are in the countryside. The country's industrial production shuts down for weeks.

That's why Earth's global supply chain of electronics depends on the phase of the moon.

Being a good salesperson means communicating to the customer that you're capable of satisfying the customer's desires and eager to do so (at the fair market price). "Capable" and "fair" tend to be binary values. Either you sell lead-acid batteries or you don't. Either you are willing to accept the fair market price or you aren't.

"Eager" matters because salespeople are middleman. A customer can always get lower prices by routing around you. They buy from you because it is simpler. Your job is to make buying things easy. You create convenience. An eager salesperson makes buying effortless.

My friend wants her customer to buy her company's products. She is leveraging Lunar New Year to pressure her customer into committing to an order. It's an excuse to pester her customer. Getting pestered is annoying. It makes the customer's life harder.

My friend's email is not a pleasant email to receive. It starts with a question. Questions make the receiver feel obligated to respond. Social obligation feels bad. The ending "Await your reply soon" worsens the unpleasant feeling of obligation.

My friend should draw attention to how eager she is to help out her customer. Here is my version of the email.

Dear <customer name>,

Do you have a new order this w

...
The Tree of Worlds (Solstice speech)
by jchan — 2021-12-20T04:39:39.313Z

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum

How faithfully you blossom

Through summer's heat and winter's chill

Your leaves are green and blooming still

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum

How faithfully you blossom...

I like this song because it's perfectly traditional and also perfectly secular. "O Christmas Tree" is a mistranslation of the line; Tannenbaum really just means "fir tree." The song admires the evergreen for its constancy, its living needles giving hope amidst the blanketing snow, reminding us through the depths of winter that all is not lost.

Of course, this message falls flat on us here in Austin. Almost all of the trees around town are still green, as always, and there's not a flake of snow to be seen (not yet, anyway). There's nothing special about greenery in December. Indeed, we might rather sing:

O cedar tree, O cedar tree

How noxious is your pollen

Your powder blowing far and wide

That leaves us red- and bleary-eyed

O cedar tree, O cedar tree

How noxious is your pollen...

But is there another tree that deserves our praise?

Let me pivot for a moment and quote from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Here, the titular prophet lies dying, and his companion animals, the talking eagle and snake, supply for him his last words:

Now I die and disappear [...] and at once I am nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the tangle of causes into which I am woven returns—it will create me once again! I myself am part of the causes of the eternal return. I come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this snake—not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life: I come again forever to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things—to speak again the word of the great noontide of earth and man, to teach again to man the Overman. [Ch. 57]

Now, what is Nietzsche trying to say here? Did he actually believe that time is one big circle, that the universe will repeat itself again and again forever, down to the last and smallest detail?

We could imagine some abstruse physical model in which this is literally true, but I don't think that's what Nietzsche is getting at. Rather, the metaphor of "eternal return" is meant to challenge us: If there is no afterlife, no karma, no divine reckoning of good and evil deeds, then what do we live for? Is this life, here and now, the one yo...
SGD Understood through Probability Current
by J Bostock — 2021-12-19T23:26:23.455Z

My previous post about SGD was an intro to this model. That post concerned a model of a loss landscape on two "datapoints". In this post I attempt to build a new model of SGD and validate it, with mixed success, but it is sort of interesting.

Gradient Variance

We could model this another way. The expected change of W on each step is −TdWdL, but we will also expect variance. W will evolve over time through probability space. There are two competing "forces" here, the "spreading force" created by variance in in dWdlj over all datapoints in the model, and the "descent force" being exerted by gradient descent pushing W back into the centre of a given local minimum.

I think it makes sense to introduce some new notation here.

gj(W)=dljdW

G(W)=dLdW=average(all j)(gj(W))

S2(W)=variance(all j)(gj(W))

S(W)=+√S2(W)

The S2 notation should be thought of like the cos2(x) notation.

Plotting these for our current system:

Places where G is zero and the gradient of G is positive are the stable equilibrium points with regards to gradient descent on L (at ~1 and 2). If G and S2 are both zero at the same place, then this is an equilibrium point with regards to SGD on L (only at 2). The zero points for G and S2 around the pit at 1 are not quite in the same pace.

It is possible to consider probability mass of W "moving" according to the following rule:

A "point" (dirac δ distribution) of probability at W, between t and t+1, changes to a distribution centred at W−TG(W) with a variance of T2S2(W).

Now we have abstracted away T from the actual process of discontinuous updates, we can try and factor out the discontinuity entirely. This will make the maths more manageable when it comes to generalizing to larger models. T will likely be much smaller for larger models but as long as S(W) grows larger with the number of datapoints used, this will compensate.

(Point of notation, I will be using d rather than ∂, even though the latter is arguably more correct. As we will never be "mixing" Wand t it won't make a difference to our results)

Instead of probability distribution moving, we might now consider it flowing. This can...
Beware using words off the probability distribution that generated them.
by Donald Hobson — 2021-12-19T16:52:37.908Z

Suppose Alice is thinking about some feature of the real world. To make the graphs easier to draw, this example is a continuous 1d variable. Alice has a probability distribution that looks like this.

A 2 humped probability distribution.

In order to help talk about this distribution, Alice labels the 2 peaks.

So now Alice can describe the situation as a foo or a bar. Of course, such description looses some information. In particular, it is bad at describing outcomes that are far from either peak, but Alice doesn't think this is a problem as she thinks such outcomes are very unlikely.

Now Bob comes along. Bob's probability distribution looks like this. (The green peaks that are slightly taller and to the right are bob's distribution. Alice's distribution is shown for comparison.)

Now Alice thinks P(Foo)=0.3 and bob thinks P(Foo)=0.4

They can have a productive discussion just using the words Foo and Bar to talk about the possibilities, without ever really mentioning the underlying distribution explicitly.

Now comes Carl. Here is his probability distribution.

Now the Foo and Bar approximation is really starting to break down. Most of Carl's probability mass lies in regions that aren't clear examples of either.

What is the probability that god exists? What is the probability covid leaked from a lab? Surely you can assign a probability to any statement? No.

For the god question, possibilities involving timetraveling humans playing at being Jesus using advanced tech to create "miracles", or pranking aliens, or simulators etc is orders of magnitude higher than the probability I assign to the fully stereotypical Judaeo-Christian god. Its edge cases. Its all edge cases. On one extreme, if someone defined god as the space-less timeless creator of all life, you might point out that evolution technically fits the bill. The space of hypothesis is very high dimensional. The stereotypical religious persons probability distribution focusses in on a tiny volume in that space. Mine doesn't. So if they try to define a region that contains their blob of probability, then most of my probability mass in that region is what they consider to be a weird edge case.

The probability I put on god existing varies by orders of magnitude depending on precisely how "god" is defined.

On the other hand, the probability covid is a lab leak, I put it around 80%. If you had an a...
Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?
by ChristianKl — 2021-12-19T11:58:10.431Z
Link: https://www.wholezero.org/stack/quis-cancellat-ipsos-cancellores

This post was linked in Occupational Infohazards. I don't know to what extent its claims are true or false, but it's worth having a place on LessWrong to discuss the claims that doesn't mix with all the other claims from jessicata's post.