trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
“PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.
by AnnaSalamon — 2021-02-14T03:32:24.985Z

This is in some sense a small detail, but one important enough to be worth write-up and critique: AFAICT, “PR” is a corrupt concept, in the sense that if you try to “navigate PR concerns” about yourself / your organization / your cause area / etc., the concept will guide you toward harmful and confused actions. In contrast, if you try to safeguard your “reputation”, your “brand”, or your “honor,” I predict this will basically go fine, and will not lead you to leave a weird confused residue in yourself or others.

To explain the difference:

If I am safeguarding my “honor” (or my “reputation”, “brand”, or “good name”), there are some fixed standards that I try to be known as adhering to. For example, in Game of Thrones, the Lannisters are safeguarding their “honor” by adhering to the principle “A Lannister always pays his debts.” They take pains to adhere to a certain standard, and to be known to adhere to that standard. Many examples are more complicated than this; a gentleman of 1800 who took up a duel to defend his “honor” was usually not defending his known adherence to a single simple principle a la the Lannisters. But it was still about his visible adherence to a fixed (though not explicit) societal standard.

In contrast, if I am “managing PR concerns,” there is no fixed standards of good conduct, or of my-brand-like conduct, that I am trying to adhere to. Instead, I am trying to do a more complicated operation:

Model which words or actions may cause “people” (especially media, or self-reinforcing miasma) to get upset with me;

Try to speak in such a way as to not set that off.

It’s a weirder or loopier process. One that’s more prone to self-reinforcing fears of shadows, and one that somehow (I think?) tends to pull a person away from communicating anything at all. Reminiscent of “Politics and the English Language.” Not reminiscent of Strunk and White.

One way you can see the difference, is that when people think about “PR” they imagine a weird outside expertise, such that you need to have a “PR consultant” or a “media consultant” who you should nervously heed advice from. When people think about their “honor," it's more a thing they can know or choose directly, and so it is more a thing that leaves them free to communicate something.

So: simple suggestion. If, at any point, you find yourself trying to “navigate PR”, or to help some person or org...
Bucket Brigade Updates
by jefftk — 2021-02-14T03:30:05.919Z

I've continued working on

Bucket
Brigade, and wanted to write up a summary of the changes since my

last update in early January.
While there are still

features
I'd like to add, at this point it is sufficiently complete and
self-explanatory that people I don't know are using it with good
success.

Backing track, lyrics, and image uploads. When singing or
playing with a group of people, it can be useful to have something to
coordinate on. When someone leads a song, before they start singing
they have the option to upload an mp3, text, or image to share.

An
mp3 will be treated as being in a bucket before the very first bucket,
while text and images will show on everyone's screens.

All of these
are ephemeral.

Three mute states. With larger groups you typically want to
have a setting like "muted during the conversational parts, unmuted
during songs", so this is now an option.

When you've chosen it you
can either click a button to turn your mic on, or you can hold down
spacebar to talk. If you join a call with a lot of people in it, it
will default to the setting, and it gives you a little pop-up to let
you know you're starting muted.

Explanatory text. Historically, I or someone else would need to
do a lot of talking to explain how all of it worked. At this point,
I've put in enough in-line help text that if you're willing to read the
instructions you should be good on your own.

Network quality meter. There are little green boxes at the
bottom of the page that tell you how well your network is doing. If
you're having trouble keeping all the boxes lit, you probably want to
try to move closer to your wifi router.

Technically, what the boxes
are measuring is how much time it's been since the local audio buffer
ran dry.

More robust mixing console. The previous iteration of the
console was built to be just good enough to support the mixing I
needed to do during solstice,
but now it no longer breaks horribly if multiple people try to use it
at the same time. You can also now monitor multiple people. I've
promoted it from the "Debug" tab to the "Advanced" tab.

[beta] Presentation mode. If you want to run a concert or
virtual contradance and bucket brigade, I think you probably want to
stream its output to Zoom or something instead of having all of the
attendees join. I'm not entirely sure how you would handle of

...
This is my 100ᵗʰ post on Less Wrong
by lsusr — 2021-02-14T03:11:44.055Z

I started blogging one and a half years ago. Blogging has helped my life in many ways. I have met interesting people online I would never have encountered in meatspace. I have received educated feedback on esoteric topics. I have shared fun projects like Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets and the 2020 Less Wrong Darwin Game with strangers around the globe.

But the most important thing about Less Wrong is it has made me a more positive person, in multiple senses of the word.

Speaking in affirmative statements.

Being nice to people. Looking at the bright side of things.

Most ideas come in the form of "x is true" or "¬x is false". In mathematics "x is true" and "¬x is false" contain exactly the same information. In real life they don't. Most real life questions have n competing answers, one of which is true. If you say "answer an is true" then you answer the question. If n is large and you say "answer an′ is false" then you have conveyed almost zero information.

If a stranger says something wrong then you should ignore them. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life. Before I began blogging, if I read a post with 100 claims and 1 of them was wrong then I would focus on the 1 wrong claim. Now I focus on the 99 true claims.

I used to think about the world as a conflict between right and wrong. Now I think about it as a conflict between action and inaction. The problem isn't that the Bad Guys are promoting Bad Ideas. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of people aren't promoting anything at all. Thinking for yourself doesn't equal consuming the right media. It equals 𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 media.

I used to think of writers as important people who should be held to lofty standards. Now I think of writers as ordinary people on an adventure of discovery. I want to encourage them. After all, when people write nice comments on my posts it makes me really happy. I usually read them several times.

There are a many of people who contribute to this community, but my favorite people to notice are the ones who write nice comments. Thank you Ben Pace for being such a positive force in this community. You always have such nice things to say to people.
Five examples
by Adam Zerner — 2021-02-14T02:47:07.317Z

I often find it difficult to think about things without concrete, realistic examples to latch on to. Here are five examples of this.

1) Your Cheerful Price

Imagine that you need a simple portfolio website for your photography business. Your friend Alice is a web developer. You can ask her what her normal price is and offer to pay her that price to build you the website. But that might be awkward. Maybe she isn't looking for work right now, but says yes anyway out of some sort of social obligation. You don't want that to happen.
What could you do to avoid this? Find her cheerful price, perhaps. Maybe her normal price is $100/hr and she's not really feeling up for that, but if you paid her $200/hr she'd be excited about the work.
Is this useful? I can't really tell. In this particular example it seems like it'd just make more sense to have a back and forth conversation about what her normal price is, how she's feeling, how you're feeling, etc., and try to figure out if there's a price that you each would feel good about. Cheerful/excited/"hell yeah" certainly establishes an upper bound for one side, but I can't really tell how useful that is.

2) If you’re not feeling “hell yeah!” then say no

This seems like one of those things that sounds wise and smart in theory, but probably not actually good advice in practice.
For example, I have a SAAS app that hasn't really gone anywhere and I've put it on the back burner. Someone just came to me with a revenue share offer. I'd be giving up a larger share than I think is fair. And the total amount I'd make per month is maybe $100-200, so I'm not sure whether it'd be worth the back and forth + any customizations they'd want from me. I don't feel "hell yeah" about it, but it is still probably worth it.
In reality, I'm sure that there are some situations where it's great advice, some situations where it's terrible advice, and some situations where it could go either way. I think the question is whether it's usually useful. It doesn't have to be useful in every single possible situation. That would be setting the bar too high. If it identifies a common failure mode and helps push you away from that failure mode and closer to the point on the spectrum where you should be, then I call that good advice.

If I were to try to figure out whether "hell yeah or no" does this, the way I'd go about it would be to come up with a wide variety of ...
The ecology of conviction
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-14T01:30:13.068Z

Supposing that sincerity has declined, why?

It feels natural to me that sincere enthusiasms should be rare relative to criticism and half-heartedness. But I would have thought this was born of fairly basic features of the situation, and so wouldn’t change over time.

It seems clearly easier and less socially risky to be critical of things, or non-committal, than to stand for a positive vision. It is easier to produce a valid criticism than an idea immune to valid criticism (and easier again to say, ‘this is very simplistic - the situation is subtle’). And if an idea is criticized, the critic gets to seem sophisticated, while the holder of the idea gets to seem naïve. A criticism is smaller than a positive vision, so a critic is usually not staking their reputation on their criticism as much, or claiming that it is good, in the way that the enthusiast is.

But there are also rewards for positive visions and for sincere enthusiasm that aren’t had by critics and routine doubters. So for things to change over time, you really just need the scale of these incentives to change, whether in a basic way or because the situation is changing.

One way this could have happened is that the internet (or even earlier change in the information economy) somehow changed the ecology of enthusiasts and doubters, pushing the incentives away from enthusiasm. e.g. The ease, convenience and anonymity of criticizing and doubting on the internet puts a given positive vision in contact with many more critics, making it basically impossible for an idea to emerge not substantially marred by doubt and teeming with uncertainties and summarizable as ‘maybe X, but I don’t know, it’s complicated’. This makes presenting positive visions less appealing, reducing the population of positive vision havers, and making them either less confident or more the kinds of people whose confidence isn’t affected by the volume of doubt other people might have about what they are saying. Which all make them even easier targets for criticism, and make confident enthusiasm for an idea increasingly correlated with being some kind of arrogant fool. Which decreases the basic respect offered by society for someone seeming to have a positive vision.

This is a very speculative story, but something like these kinds of dynamics seems plausible.

These thoughts were inspired by a conversation I had with Nick Beckstead.
The Economics of Media
by lsusr — 2021-02-13T23:11:48.727Z

When I was a kid I thought the news came from "investigative reporters" like Clark Kent were who were paid to research stories. Since then, I have gotten my startup on national television, placed a press release into the world news, discussed biological warfare as a podcast guest, written a blog which has been reposted to Hacker News, written fanfiction which has been linked to on Reddit and read a lot of books. My understanding of the media ecosystem has become more nuanced.

Media Economics

Small fry like Lyle McDonald, the McKays and Bruce Schneier can scrape by by selling books, branded paraphernalia and other niche merchandise. Niche merchandise doesn't scale. Large megacorp news outlets generally rely on subscriptions and advertising for their core revenue.

Subscriptions and advertising scale linearly with the number of viewers. But the cost of distributing Internet[1] media is negligible. An article costs the same to write whether one person reads it or one million. The market equilibrium is one where the great masses of people get our information from a tiny number of sources.

What people do with the information doesn't much affect a media outlet's bottom line. Whether the information makes people angry or happy doesn't matter except to the extent anger and happiness affect readership. Whether the information promotes good policy doesn't matter at all—unless that policy directly affects the news industry.

Content is fungible. Financially, what matters is how many people consume it.

Minimizing Costs

I learned a lot about Twitter when I hosted the 2020 Less Wrong Darwin Game. I wrote a sequence 11,475 words. It dwarfed anything else I had ever written until then because…I barely had to write anything. The story was created Vanilla_cabs and other competitors. Reporters report on Twitter tweets for the same reason: because content is fungible and because rehashing tweets is a cheap way to mass produce news.

But there's an even easier way to generate content: Let someone else do it for you.

Media businesses convert content into money. Media businesses don't care about the content's secondary effects. The cheaper media businesses can acquire content the more money they can earn. Non-media business with products to sell want media attention. Non-media businesses profit only off of contents' secondary effects. These are the perfect conditions for symbiosis. If a n...
Recruiting for esports experiment
by asdfrty6 — 2021-02-13T17:46:37.384Z

I am interested in conducting an experiment involving learning & teaching gaming. I am recruiting either 6 or 12 participants to attempt to learn a video game intensively for around 2 weeks. This is not paid either way (I am not paying for volunteers, and you are not paying for coaching) and far from a professional academic thing; more of a bet between friends. It's getting published to Twitter, not published to a journal. We'll be learning Overwatch because that's my personal area of expertise.

Conventional wisdom is that gamers take months or years of practise to get good - and that unchangeable factors like in-built 'reaction times', 'natural talent' or 'instincts' are extremely important. This would suggest that, if I took 6-12 people who haven't previously played much FPS games and tried to teach them Overwatch for a couple of weeks, they wouldn't be able to reach a very high level. Perhaps at best they might be average at best by the end of it. My hypothesis is that a team built by a good coach could scrim 3500+ SR within a couple of weeks. (SR or Skill Rating is an ELO system.) For context, average is around 2500+, I currently work with players around 4300-4500, and pro players will typically peak around 4600+. I agree that this is very ambitious and a sort of daring hypothesis, which is why I should test it and lose Bayes points (and also coaching points) if I'm wrong. On the other hand, if I'm right, I totally deserve more Twitch followers.

(For the people going "video gamers have coaches???" - yes, the good ones do, and for team games there is a lot of theory and concepts to learn. Talking shop with high-level coaches and analysts involves just as much jargon and verbal chess as arguing with smart scientists.)

Some beliefs that are influencing my hypothesis here:

I think recruiting smart people, and importantly people who know how to learn and have lots of techniques for thinking better, will make a huge difference. I notice that with my 3800 players I currently spend a lot of time repeating the same lessons before the players implement them, whereas with 4300 players I rarely have to do this. Is that because the 4300 player, having practised and studied more, is now able to understand concepts more easily and implement them faster? Or are people who implement concepts quickly just more likely to reach 4300 in the first place? This is the thinking

...
How Should We Respond to Cade Metz?
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-02-13T16:11:45.355Z

The Cade Metz article on Slate Star Codex is out.

It seems valuable for us to have a discussion about our reactions to it. Also what we want to do about it. Here are my questions:

The article pulls quotes out of context, looking for the problematizing angle, distorting the implications of word choice. It's also large. And the context is deep, because Scott's a deep thinker. Having a post explaining these problems that I could send to friends and family members for context, and for my own sanity, would be really nice. Edit: Scott wrote one.
Is the article a fair and much-needed outside piece of criticism that we should take seriously? We talk a bigger game about accepting and integrating outside criticism than many communities. Maybe this is our chance to really put that into practice?
Scott was told that the way to get ahead of damaging journalism is to reveal everything they might want to find out. For those of us writing under a pseudonym, should we all just be revealing our real names, and letting friends, family members, and colleagues (where appropriate) know about our connection with SSC and this community?

Update:

I've learned a lot about media today just by reading comment threads in SCC-associated communities. My intuitive takeaway is that it's time for a reckoning, and I need to build a model of how this stuff works on a systemic level.

I understand why some people criticized this post (and a longer article that I moved to drafts), for giving prominence. Personally, I agree with Dentin that it's best to shrug it off as crappy journalism and ignore it. I'd delete this post, except that I don't want to delete his and a few other comments along with it.
some random parenting ideas
by mike_hawke — 2021-02-13T15:53:43.855Z

These have been bouncing around in my head for years. I finally wrote them down and showed them to a friend and he said I should post it.

Disclaimers:

Written from a WEIRD cultural background, plus my own idiosyncratic tastes, biased toward STEM stuff, probably outright wrong in some places, etc.
Mostly for ages 5-10. You're on your own with the adolescents...and basically all the complicated, uncomfortable stuff.
Soon to be obsolete if the 21st century is even half as transformative as I expect it to be (regardless of AI).
I'm child-free, and I look forward to keeping it that way indefinitely! As such, I will have little or no occasion to practice what I preach.

Talk is cheap, grain of salt, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Ideas:

(In random order)

Accept that you will have to be a tyrant. Keep in mind that not all tyrants are the same. If you got to pick which person was going to tyrannize you, you would not just pick at random.
Accept that your performance as a parent will probably be mediocre at best. Take an antifragile approach. Given base rates, you are pretty much guaranteed to cause some irreparable harm a few times. Accept this with equanimity and use the calm therefrom to avoid unnecessary further harm.
Your parenting style will probably mostly be derived from that of your own parents
Do what the mr. money mustache did: He only made a kid only after accumulating $1,000,000 (working as a software engineer and living frugally) and retiring (at ~30 years old). He then ran a part-time construction company for fun, and used the extra free time and emotional slack to raise his kid. If nothing else this is an existence proof and an ideal to strive for.
Study and practice better methods of communication before you make the kid. Reach the point where you can look back and think, “I used to be so bad at expressing myself....Good thing I didn’t try to raise a kid back then!”
Train them to express their emotions articulately. (If you are not already good at communication, you may want to consider not making a new person.)
Train them in effective emotional coping and processing. This one is hard and I’m still not good at it, so I leave the details up to you, sorry.
Get them in the habit of privately journaling.

At least once a year, prompt them to write down what they think would be a good parenting strategy. If/when they have their own kid, compare notes. (Can you imagine growing up

...
Apply to Effective Altruism Funds now
by Jonas V — 2021-02-13T13:36:39.977Z
Link: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NfkdSooNiHcdCBSJs/apply-to-ea-funds-now-1

I expect EA Funds – and the Long-Term Future Fund in particular – to be of interest to people on LessWrong, so I'm crossposting my EA Forum post with the excerpts that seem most relevant:

Summary

The Animal Welfare Fund, the Long-Term Future Fund, and the EA Infrastructure Fund (formerly the EA Meta Fund) are calling for applications.
Applying is fast and easy – it typically takes less than a few hours. If you are unsure whether to apply, simply give it a try.
The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now support anonymized grants: if you prefer not having your name listed in the public payout report, we are still interested in funding you.
If you have a project you think will improve the world, and it seems like a good fit for one of our funds, we encourage you to apply by 7 March (11:59pm PST). Apply here. We’d be excited to hear from you!

Recent updates

The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund now officially support anonymized grants. To be transparent towards donors and the effective altruism community, we generally prefer to publish a report about your grant, with your name attached to it. But if you prefer we do not disclose any of your personal information, you can now choose one of the following options: 1) Requesting that the public grant report be anonymized. In this case, we will consider your request, but in some cases, we may end up asking you to choose between a public grant or none at all. 2) Requesting we do not publish a public grant report of any kind. In this case, if we think the grant is above our threshold for funding, we will refer it to private funders.

(…)

Long-Term Future Fund

The

Long-Term Future Fund

aims to positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilization, primarily via making grants that contribute to the mitigation of global catastrophic risks. Historically, we’ve funded a variety of longtermist projects, including:

Scholarships, academic teaching buy-outs, and additional funding for academics to free up their time
Funding to make existing researchers more effective
Direct work in AI, biosecurity, forecasting, and philanthropic timing
Up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work
Seed money for new organizations
Movement-building programs

See our previous grants

here

. Most of our grants are reported publicly, but we also give applicants the option to receive an anonymous grant, or to be referred to a priv...