trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Site Feature] Link Previews
by Raemon — 2019-09-17T23:03:12.818Z

Links in posts and comments now display a hover-preview when linking to LessWrong content.

For instance, this link to an old post by Scott Alexander will display the title, first couple paragraphs, and other meta-data.

For comments, it will display the post-name and the comment-in-question, such as on this shortform comment by Buck about effective tutoring.

We're considering ways to effectively do hover previews for particular common external links (such as wikipedia and arxiv), but for the immediate future, all external links just provide a simple "url" hoveover.
False Dilemmas w/ exercises
by Logan Riggs — 2019-09-17T22:35:33.882Z

This is the third post in the Arguing Well sequence, but it can be understood on its own. This post is influenced by

False Dilemma

,

The Third alternative

.

A false dilemma is of the form “It’s either this, or that. Pick one!” It tries to make you choose from a limited set of options, when, in reality, more options are available. With that in mind, what’s wrong with the following examples?

Ex. 1: You either love the guy or hate him

Counterargument 1: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!”

Counterargument 2: I can feel neutral towards the guy

Ex. 2: You can only add and subtract in mathematics.

Uh, division and multiplication, right?

Ex. 3: Either you get me that new car, or you don’t love me!

I can care about your well-being and happiness and not get you that specific car. I could buy a used car, so you wouldn’t freak out if it got damaged or [3 different examples based on what the (father?) thinks is best].

Ex. 4: You didn’t donate to the food drive, so you don’t care about starving children!

I do care about starving children, but my family and I are just barely scraping by and I value feeding them first.

Generalization

How would you generalize the above examples? Of course it presents a certain set of options as the only available options (I said this in the intro!), but what’s the relationship between those options? Are there different types of options that are similar/different between the examples?

One way to frame it is to separate options into two types: values and actions

With that frame, false dilemmas can be categorized into 4 varieties:

1. Only these values are compatible with an agent

2. Only these actions are compatible with a system/environment

3. Only these actions are compatible with this value

4. Only these values are compatible with this action

These 4 varieties correspond to each of their respective examples above (this is not a coincidence). Note: you could have answered Ex.3 as (4) and Ex.4 as (3), it really just depends on the truth of the situation. I’ll leave the details as an exercise for the reader.

[Also, I’m sticking my neck out here and claiming that these are the only 4 categories a false dilemma can ever fit. Prove me wrong in the comments and I’ll update the post]

So how about trying this new frame out on the following:

Ex. 5: You can either get up and wo...
PRINCIPLES OF PERCEPTION
by Jason Ken — 2019-09-17T20:20:03.439Z

It is relevant that one should pay attention in the tiniest bits of the location they find themselves in. From this bit of habit, a lot of things will cease to confound the mind. How much we can predict circumstances by relying on previous data depends on how much we have programmed our minds to divide the world into tiny clues, and compose it in the right way. A lot of Sherlock Holmes readers fail to see the conclusion of the crime, even when all the facts are laid out before them. When the conclusion does come, you then make connections to the strings you’ve been provided with. Mostly with human psychology, we get the answer and then go back to connect the strings we’ve had in the very beginning. In this exercise, we are learning to condition ourselves to use the strings of incidences to theorize the ending, not use the ending to connect the incidences.

I’ve actually met a person that can always predict the ending of the movie just five minutes into the movie. And then another that claims that if he had the name of the movie, the starring actors or their faces, that he could pick up the clues and possibly predict the ending. The second claim may seem farfetched, but it is within the bounds of logical reasoning. For most people, this attribute has been so innate in them, it becomes a conditioned reflex.

Let’s say you climb a set of stairs every day for the past ten years. Have you really taken the time to know the number of stairs in the staircase? Can you identify the parts that are more worn than the others?

Okay, here’s another one. If you had a neighbor for two years, can you rightfully recall what colors the neighbor favors to wear on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the fact that he usually leaves by this time and gets back by another time? Can you guess his behavioral patterns? And let’s say he suddenly goes missing, and the police questions you and asks if there were odd manners that he was exhibiting prior to his disappearance, would you be able to recall that he always wears a brown tie on Tuesdays, and the last Tuesday you saw him, he wasn’t wearing one? That is conditioned observation.

If I were to ask you the number of trees in your street, the highest number of same colored homes in your district, or the number of people who have black cars around your area, might you be able to answer accurately, might your guess even get as close to the real figur...
The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer
by Samo Burja — 2019-09-17T20:10:01.046Z

This article was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can

access the original here.

Growing up as an aspiring javelin thrower in Kenya, the young Julius Yego was unable to find a coach: in a country where runners command the most prestige, mentorship was practically nonexistent. Determined to succeed, he instead watched YouTube recordings of Norwegian Olympic javelin thrower Andreas Thorkildsen, taking detailed notes and attempting to imitate the fine details of his movements. Yego went on to win gold in the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, silver in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and holds the 3rd-longest javelin throw on world record. He acquired a coach only six months before he competed in the 2012 London Olympics — over a decade after he started practicing.

Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit knowledge transmission which is historically unprecedented, facilitating the preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery.

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an obstacle to centralization, as i...
Jane Street Inteview Guide (Notes on Probability, Markets, etc.)
by  — 2019-09-17T05:28:23.058Z
Link: https://www.janestreet.com/static/pdfs/trading-interview.pdf?utm_source=web&utm_medium=pdf&utm_campaign=probability_markets_guide

Context: I'm currently prepping for a Jane Street trader intern interview. They sent me this guide to look over and, while there's not a lot that's new to me or LW, it's got a lot of concepts that are popular here on LW (expected value, conditional probability, priors, adverse selection).

Figured I'd share it here if anyone was curious. I would not endorse it as a good introductory guide, though.
Meetups as Institutions for Intellectual Progress
by mingyuan — 2019-09-17T05:23:08.004Z

Epistemic status: Not a historian of science, but I have thought fairly extensively about meetups. Kind of making this up as I go along, almost certainly missing important points.

Other meta: Written all in one sitting, to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. No one proofread it, so hopefully there aren't sentences that just cut off in the middle. Also, forgive my excessive use of scare quotes.

tl;dr: The difference between historical salons and LW meetups is that meetups do not feel like the place where progress is made. They’re not doing research or publishing anything. If they wrote up the results of their discussions and posted them on LW, that would help conversations be less siloed.

This post is a confluence of two major topics I’ve been mulling over for a while now.

Number one is rationality meetups. I’ve been working on global meetup coordination on-and-off and more-or-less formally for over two years now, and it is just... not an easy problem. It was about two years ago that I wrote What Are Meetups Actually Trying to Accomplish?, and I honestly haven’t made a ton of progress since then (due to meetups being like my sixth or lower priority at any given time). However, I have changed my outlook somewhat - that post was very much trying to be descriptive, but I’m now much more inclined towards prescriptivism (more on that in the appendix).

Number two, Habryka has gotten me hooked on books about the history of science, and on thinking about how intellectual progress is made more generally. I’ve recently read The Innovators, The Age of Innovation, and the biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and I’m in the process of reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Science in the 20th Century, and a biography of Benjamin Franklin. I also majored in physics, which de facto included a fair amount of history of science.

Turns out, most modern histories of science and innovation (at least the ones that I’ve read, but like, selection bias) focus pretty heavily on the first half of the 20th century, and specifically, the people during that time who roughly thought of themselves as physicists.

Physics at the time was a small community. If the books I’ve been reading are to be believed, all the big-name scientists read each others' papers, many of them were close friends who regularly exchan...
Modes of Petrov Day
by Raemon — 2019-09-17T02:47:31.469Z

Last updated Sept 16, 2019

September 26 is Petrov Day.

In 1983, the story of humanity nearly ended. We’re gathered here to remember that moment, and others like it.

But to experience the magnitude of those events, we need to visit them in their proper context. Let us begin the story of human history...

— Jim Babcock's Petrov Day ceremony

Petrov Day on Easy Mode: Hang out. Share a meme.

Petrov Day on Normal Mode: Have a quiet, dignified ceremony.

Petrov Day on Hardcore Mode A: During said ceremony, unveil a large red button. If anybody presses the button, the ceremony is over. Go home. Do not speak.

Petrov Day on Hardestcore Mode: If anyone presses the button, you may never celebrate Petrov Day again.

Petrov Day on Multiplayer Hard[est]core Mode: As Hard[est]core Mode, except instead of an inert button, you use a website connected to another house where people are also celebrating Petrov Day. If anyone in one house presses the button, the other house receives a launch alarm. They have 60 seconds to respond. At the end of 60 seconds, their party is over, and they must go home silently. The website has some chance of giving you a false alarm.

Habryka made a website last year that allows houses to choose each other as nuclear targets, and then potentially launch missiles at each other. You can log in, create a "house" account, and then communicate with another house about the rules and conditions of your Petrov Day celebration.

(Note that the website is a bit janky, and that anyone who can guess the name of your house could potentially target it with nuclear missiles)
Bioinfohazards
by Spiracular — 2019-09-17T02:41:30.175Z

Authors: Megan Crawford, Finan Adamson, Jeffrey Ladish

Special Thanks to Georgia Ray for Editing

Biorisk

Most in the effective altruism community are aware of a possible existential threat from biological technology but not much beyond that. The form biological threats could take is unclear. Is the primary threat from state bioweapon programs? Or superorganisms accidentally released from synthetic biology labs? Or something else entirely?

If you’re not already an expert, you’re encouraged to stay away from this topic. You’re told that speculating about powerful biological weapons might inspire terrorists or rogue states, and simply articulating these threats won’t make us any safer. The cry of “Info hazard!” shuts down discussion by fiat, and the reasons cannot be explained since these might also be info hazards. If concerned, intelligent people cannot articulate their reasons for censorship, cannot coordinate around principles of information management, then that itself is a cause for concern. Discussions may simply move to unregulated forums, and dangerous ideas will propagate through well intentioned ignorance.

We believe that well reasoned principles and heuristics can help solve this coordination problem. The goal of this post is to carve up the information landscape into areas of relative danger and safety; to illuminate some of the islands in the mire that contain more treasures than traps, and to help you judge where you’re likely to find discussion more destructive than constructive.

Useful things to know already if you’re reading this post:

Bostrom’s paper on Information Hazards, and the more general categorization schema from this LessWrong overview.

It would also be useful to refresh yourself on the meaning of the Unilateralist’s Curse.

Much of the material in this also overlaps with Gregory Lewis’ Information Hazards in Biotechnology article, which we recommend.

Risks of Information Sharing

We’ve divided this paper into two broad categories: risks from information sharing, and risks from secrecy. First we will go over the ways in which sharing information can cause harm, and then how keeping information secret can cause harm.

We believe considering both is important for determining whether or not to share a particular thought or paper. To keep things relatively targeted and concrete, we provide illustrative toy examples, or sometimes even real exampl...
The Quantity/Quality of Researchers Has Drastically Increased Over the Centuries
by Grue_Slinky — 2019-09-17T00:28:45.203Z

For just about any academic field F and number X greater than ~100, there are a lot more F researchers than there were X years ago, and this remains true if you restrict to researchers above a given level of quality/competence Q.

This observation seems pretty straightforward/uncontroversial to me, and yet it has quite a few consequences that seem quite nontrivial. Before getting to those, allow me to explain the claim in more detail.

The Claim

For concreteness, let's let F be "maths" and let X be "519".

Well, the world population is about 15 times what it was in the year 1500, therefore there's 15 times as many researchers (at any given level of quality). Right?

Of course not. Let's go through what's wrong with that.

Most notably, pretty much all the mathematicians who were doing cutting-edge research in 1500 lived in Europe. Today, they almost all live in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and some other small developed countries. Every now and then a prodigy like Ramanujan comes along, but by and large, the developing world does not have the economic/pedagogical/cultural means to raise many of these, or even "discover" them when they do come along, so I will round these off.

The point is, we should be comparing the population of Europe in 1500 to the combined current population of all those regions that have the infrastructure to reliably pump out mathematicians today.

Population of Europe in 1500: 88,000,000

Population of Europe, US, CA, AU, JP in 1998: 1,280,000,000

...which gives us a quotient of 1280/91 ~= 14.54. I will round this up to account for the "other small developed countries" and also the fact that talented 3rd world prodigies occasionally make their way in academia in a way that wasn't possible in 1500. So by our reasoning so far, the talent pool of researchers has grown by a factor of 15 in that time. But a few more corrections are still in order.

One consideration is whether, due to better nutrition, schooling, economic conditions, etc., the average person in the developed world today is actually smarter than the average European in 1500. The Flynn effect is the observation that average IQ scores have risen substantially (over 10 points) in the past century, but it is controversial whether this represents a real gain in intelligence or test-taking familiarity (or, of course, a combination of these). If the former, our factor of 14 goes into th...
Is there an existing label for the category of fallacies exemplified by "paradox of tolerance"?
by slikts — 2019-09-16T20:33:16.126Z

The "paradox of tolerance" is a continually hot topic, but I've not seen it framed as a member in a category of fallacies where a principle is conceptualized as either absolute or hypocritical and the absolute conception then rejected as self-contradictory or incoherent. Other examples of commonly absolutized principles are pacifism, pluralism, humility, openness, specific kinds of freedoms, etc.
I've been provisionally calling it the 'false self-contradiction fallacy', meaning a specialized case of black-and-white fallacy as applied to ethical, moral or practical principles by presuming a false dichotomy between the principle being either absolute or hypocritical. The presumption is based on a shallow conception of the principle that excludes the deeper grounding principles that would allow integrating restrictions on the principle. The fallacy banks on the popular intuitions of justice needing to be blind and the universality of human rights and presumes limits to a principle to be arbitrary or unjustified.
Deeper conceptions of principles are able to integrate critical rejection; for example, in the case of tolerance, it can integrate the self-preservation of the principle by conditioning it on reciprocity. Tolerance in this case is not valuable in itself but as a higher-order expression of avoiding conflict escalation, achieving intellectual plurality, etc.
Absolute pacifism may be the most clear example of the fallacy, since most people understand that, to be coherent, pacifism must assign a high negative value to violence as a conflict-solving approach and positive value to alternative approaches, but that violence is still kept as the last resort, since the other approaches can't always work.
I find 'false self-contradictions' especially pernicious in their rhetorical persuasiveness and their consequent wide application in promoting moral relativism and getting around inconvenient principles. I'm really interested in finding existing discourse that would take a similar angle, and generally in mainstreaming awareness of this specific kind of fallacious argumentation.
Effective Altruism and Everyday Decisions
by jefftk — 2019-09-16T19:00:01.780Z

Ask for your drink without a straw.

Unplug your microwave when not in use.

Bring a water bottle to events.

Stop using air conditioning.

Choose products that minimize packaging.

I've recently heard people advocate for all of these, generally in the
form of "here are small things you can be doing to help the planet."
In the EA Facebook group someone

asked
why we haven't tried to make estimates so we can prioritize among
these. Is it more important to reuse containers, or to buy locally
made soap?

I think the main reason we haven't put a lot of work into quantifying
the impacts of these everyday choices is that they're minor compared
to questions like "what should I work on?", "if I'm donating where
should the money go?", "how can we figure out the impact of our
choices at all reliably?" etc. Quantification, even at a very rough
level, is really hard and so we should focus on the most important
questions first.

A second reason, however, is that these sorts of activities are often
shockingly poor tradeoffs. Perhaps you give up AC to save
electricity, but then you get less done during the day, sleep poorly
at night, and only save $3/day in electricity and ~$0.75/day in CO2
[1] Or you buy zero-waste
laundry paste which you dilute at home, putting money and effort
into avoiding a very small amount of plastic packaging. Or you take
cold showers and enjoy them dramatically less while slightly reducing
your use of heating fuel. Advocacy often explicitly or implicitly
treats actions as free, while a full evaluation needs to also consider
the cost to yourself.

I'm not saying our personal choices don't matter and that we should
give up, but a small number of our choices matter far more than
others, and we should put our efforts there.

(Previously: 2015,
2013, 2012.)

[1] This is figuring 600W average usage for a window unit, which is
14.4kWh/day. Our marginal cost for power is $0.21/kWh, on the high
side nationally, so $3/day. Figuring 1T CO2 per kWh, this is ~0.007T
CO2/day. Using the same 95th percentile EPA social cost estimate I
used in this post, $105/T,
that's $0.76/day. These are very rough numbers, but they're enough to
see that the costs are low.