trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why Hasn't Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?
by AppliedDivinityStudies — 2021-03-09T01:43:03.647Z

Edit: There's now a follow up post here. LW Discussion. EA Forum and r/ssc.

Here's a chart of GiveWell's annual money moved. It rose dramatically from 2014 to 2015, then more or less plateaued:

Open Philanthropy doesn't provide an equivalent chart, but they do have a grants database, so I was able to compile the data myself. It peaks in 2017, then falls a bit and plateaus:

(Note that the GiveWell and Open Philanthropy didn't formally split until 2017. GiveWell records $70.4m from Open Philanthropy in 2015, which isn't included in Open Philanthropy's own records. I've emailed them for clarification, but in the meantime, the overall story in the same: A rapid rise followed by several years of stagnation. Edit: I got a reply explaining that years are sometimes off by one, see footnote [0])

Finally, here's the Google Trends result for "Effective Altruism". It grows quickly starting in 2013, peaks in 2017, then falls back down to around 2015 levels. Broadly speaking, interest has been about flat since 2015.

If this data isn't surprising to you, it should be.

Several EA organizations work on actively growing the community, have been funding community growth for years and view it as an active priority:

80,000 Hours: The Problem Profiles page lists "Building effective altruism" as a "highest-priority area", right up there with AI and existential risk.

Open Philanthropy: Effective Altruism is one of their Focus Areas. They write "We're interested in supporting organizations that seek to introduce people to the idea of doing as much good as possible, provide them with guidance in doing so, connect them with each other, and generally grow and empower the effective altruism community."

EA Funds: One of the four funds is dedicated to Effective Altruism Infrastructure. Part of its mission reads: "Directly increase the number of people who are exposed to principles of effective altruism, or develop, refine or present such principles"

So if EA community growth is stagnating despite these efforts, it should strike you as very odd, or even somewhat troubling. Open Philanthropy decided to start funding EA community growth in 2015/2016 [1]. It's not as if this is only a very recent effort.

As long as money continues to pour into the space, we ought to understand precisely why growth has stalled so far. The question is threefold:

Why was growth initially strong?

Why did it stagnate

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D&D.Sci III Evaluation and Ruleset
by abstractapplic — 2021-03-08T23:01:36.833Z

This is a followup to the D&D.Sci post I made last week; if you haven’t already read it, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.

Here is the web interactive I built to let you test your solution; below is a complete explanation of the rules used to generate the dataset. You’ll probably want to test your answer before reading any further.

Ruleset

Mage Fights

Mages have differing levels of Power. When they fight, each of them roll two ten-sided dice, and add the result to their Power. The mage with the higher total result wins; if it’s a tie, the defender wins.

The raw Power of each mage at the time of your summoning is given below:

Mage	Power
Vitamancer A	19
Vitamancer B	22
Geomancer A	21
Geomancer B	12
Cryomancer	23
Pyromancer A	20
Pyromancer B	21
Necromancer A	22
Necromancer B	15
Necromancer C	13
Electromancer	20

Modifiers and Anomalies

Power is modified by the circumstances in which a fight occurs. The main modifiers are:

All mages get a homefield advantage of +4 when operating in their own territory.
Geomancers get +9 when defending and -9 when attacking.
Pyromancers get -9 when defending and +9 when attacking.

In addition, all the mages have something unique going on with them:

Geomancer B is the one who summoned you, and the keeper of the record provided. This explains, among other things, why all the earliest entries are fights involving him. (This fact is completely irrelevant to attempts to maximize wins or losses, but you can get unique outcomes if you make him the only winner or only loser on his side.)
Vitamancer A spent much of his youth specializing in handling Necromancer C, and gets an extra +7 whenever they fight.
Necromancer B is an ex-Vitamancer, and gets a +4 when operating in Vitamancer territory.
Geomancer A is an ex-Necromancer, and gets a +4 when operating in Necromancer territory.
The Cryomancer and Necromancer A strongly dislike fighting each other, and have made an under-the-table agreement to take turns forfeiting when their respective factions force them into conflict. The pattern is that she will ‘lose’ two fights, then he will ‘lose’ the next two, and so on ad infinitum. Necromancer A ‘lost’ the last two fights, so if you set up a fight between them the Cryomancer will take a dive.
The Electromancer is a mercenary. His prices are high enough that he’s not called in unless there is no other option; usually, when one faction’s mages are temporarily outnumbered

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Epistemological Framing for AI Alignment Research
by adamShimi — 2021-03-08T22:05:29.210Z

Introduction

You open the Alignment Forum one day, and a new post stares at you. By sheer luck you have some time, so you actually read it. And then you ask yourself the eternal question: how does this fit with the rest of the field? If you’re like me, your best guess comes from looking at the author and some keywords: this usually links the post with one of the various “schools” of AI Alignment. These tend to be affiliated with a specific researcher or lab -- there’s Paul Christiano’s kind of research, MIRI’s embedded agency, and various other approaches and agendas. Yet this is a pretty weak understanding of the place of new research.

In other fields, for example

Complexity Theory

, you don’t really need to know who wrote the paper. It usually shows a result from one of a few types (lower bound, completeness for a class, algorithm,...), and your basic training in the field armed you with mental tools to interpret results of this type. You know the big picture of the field (defining and separating complexity classes), and how types of results are linked with it. Chances are that the authors themselves called on these mental tools to justify the value of their research.

In the words of Thomas S. Kuhn, Complexity Theory is paradigmatic and AI Alignment isn’t. Paradigms, popularized in Kuhn’s

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

, capture shared assumptions on theories, interesting problems, and evaluation of solutions. They are tremendously useful to foster normal science, the puzzle-solving activity of scientists; the paradigm carves out the puzzles. Being paradigmatic also makes it easier to distinguish what’s considered valuable for the field and what isn’t, as well as how it all fits together.

This list of benefit logically pushed multiple people to argue that we should make AI Alignment paradigmatic.

I disagree. Or to be more accurate, I agree that we should have paradigms in the field, but I think that they should be part of a bigger epistemological structure. Indeed, a naive search for a paradigm either results in a natural science-like paradigm, that put too little emphasis on applications and usefulness, or in a premature constraint on the problem we’re trying to solve.

This post instead proposes a framing of AI Alignment research which has a place for paradigms, but isn’t reduced to them. I start by stating this framing, along with multiple examples in e...
What I'd change about different philosophy fields
by Rob Bensinger — 2021-03-08T18:25:30.165Z

[epistemic status: speculative conversation-starter]

My guess at the memetic shifts that would do the most to improve these philosophy fields' tendency to converge on truth:

metaphysics

1. Make reductive, 'third-person' models of the brain central to metaphysics discussion.

If you claim that humans can come to know X, then you should be able to provide a story sketch in the third person for how a physical, deterministic, evolved organism could end up learning X.

You don't have to go into exact neuroscientific detail, but it should be clear how a mechanistic cause-and-effect chain could result in a toy agent verifying the truth of X within a physical universe.

2. Care less about human intuitions and concepts. Care more about the actual subject matter of metaphysics — ultimate, objective reality. E.g., only care about the concept 'truth' insofar as we have strong reason to think an alien would arrive at the exact same concept, because it's carving nature closer to its joints.

Conduct more tests to see which concepts look more joint-carving than others.

(I think current analytic metaphysics is actually better at 'not caring about human intuitions and concepts' than most other philosophy fields. I just think this is still the field's biggest area for future improvement, partly because it's harder to do this right in metaphysics.)

decision theory

Similar to metaphysics, it should be more expected that we think of decision theories in third-person terms. Can we build toy models of a hypothetical alien or robot that actually implements this decision procedure?

In metaphysics, doing this helps us confirm that a claim is coherent and knowable. In decision theory, there's an even larger benefit: a lot of issues that are central to the field (e.g., logical uncertainty and counterlogicals) are easy to miss if you stay in fuzzy-human-intuitions land.

Much more so than in metaphysics, 'adopting a mechanistic, psychological perspective' in decision theory should often involve actual software experiments with different proposed algorithms — not because decision theory is only concerned with algorithms (it's fine for the field to care more about human decision-making than about AI decision-making), but because the algorithms are the gold standard for clarifying and testing claims.

(There have been lots of cases where decision theorists went awry because they under-specified a probl...
[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
by Vaniver — 2021-03-08T15:22:22.626Z

John Vervaeke has a lecture series on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I thought it was great, so I'm arranging a lecture club to discuss it here on Less Wrong. The format is simple: each weekday I post a comment that's a link to the next lecture and the summary (which I plan on stealing from the recap at the beginning of the next lecture), and then sometimes comment beneath it with my own thoughts. If you're coming late (even years late!) feel free to join in, and go at whatever pace works for you.

(Who is John Vervaeke? He's a lecturer in cognitive science at the University of Toronto. I hadn't heard of him before the series, which came highly recommended to me.)

I split the lecture series into three parts: the philosophical, religious, and cultural history of humankind (25 episodes) related to meaning, the cognitive science of wisdom and meaning (20 episodes), and more recent philosophy related to the meaning crisis specifically (5 episodes). Each episode is about an hour at regular speed (but I think they're understandable at 2x speed). I am not yet aware of a good text version of the lectures; I also have some suspicion that some important content is not in the text itself, and so even if I transcribed them (or paid someone to) it'd still be worth watching or listening to it.

I think the subject matter is 1) very convergent with the sort of rationality people are interested in on LW, and 2) relevant to AI alignment, especially thinking about embedded agency.

Discussion:

Introduction
Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution
Conscious Cosmos and Modern Grammar
Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom
Plato and the Cave
Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution
Aristotle's World View and Erich Fromm
The Buddha and "Mindfulness"
Insight
Consciousness
Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1
Higher States of Consciousness, Part 2
Buddhism and Parasitic Processing
Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics
Marcus Aurelius and Jesus
Christianity and Agape
Gnosis and Existential Inertia
Plotinus and Neoplatonism
Augustine and Aquinas
Death of the Universe
Martin Luther and Descartes
Descartes vs. Hobbes
Romanticism
Hegel
The Clash
Cognitive Science
Problem Formulation
Convergence to Relevance Realization
Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization
Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory
Embodied-Embedded RR as Dynamical-Developmental GI
RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness
The Spirit

...
If you've learned from the best, you're doing it wrong
by George3d6 — 2021-03-08T13:14:13.038Z
Link: https://cerebralab.com/If_you've_learned_from_the_best,_you're_doing_it_wrong

i - Working out

Say you've read up on the studies about exercise and you've decided to dedicate 30 to 90 minute of every day purely to improve your body. You like the CV benefits, but also, you agree that strength, stability, postural awareness and whatnot play an important role in optimal functioning, even if that function is sitting at a computer writing code.

How do you proceed?

Well, there are many ways, but the worst possible way would be to look for someone that looks to be very physically fit, is scoring amazingly well in sporting competitions and is known to perform feats of strength, endurance and agility.

Why?

Envision a few examples of this type of person. I'm envisioning Lance Armstrong, the guy who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones, and Royce Gracie, the guy that won the first UFC (the one that was actually fun to watch).

I've no idea how they would act as coaches, but their path to success certainly involved training for 6 to 14 hours a day, every day of the week, for more than a dozen years. It presumably involved a lot of weird meal plans and sleep plans and investments into a bunch of expensive devices. It certainly focused on minimizing accidents, but in the now, not in the 50 years from now. On top of that, it probably included a mix of exogenous HGH, IGF, Testosterone, EPO and many other compounds I wouldn't be able to name.

None of those things are bad if your goal is along the line of:

I want to become the strongest/fastest/powerfulest/sportiest/bestest

But they are horrible ideas if your goal is exercising as a health-enhancing addition to a lifestyle focused on other things.

ii - On Nobel laureates being mediocre teachers

There's a classic problem that you've heard of before along the lines of:

Yeah, he's an amazing researcher, but a horrible teacher. Go figure, it's probably the very mental quirks that make him so smart that give him a hard time with explaining the field to anyone else.

While the thing I'm trying to expand upon here is correlated with this, it's not the problem I'm trying to get at.

Say you've got someone very good at material science and physics in general. She's highly cited, coordinated a bunch of experiments at CERN, appears in the author list of a bunch of major papers, has various patents, is paid to advise major manufacturers, the bunch.

If you take this person and tell her to teach physics 101 she might indeed perform ...
Simple Tricks to Improve KN95 Masks
by dawangy — 2021-03-08T08:59:46.155Z

There have already been a couple of posts on this topic, including this one which promotes a mask brace:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CrikcGiaWK9CSSzrJ/i-made-an-n95-level-mask-at-home-and-you-can-too

Since then, there have been changes to the way we mask. Nowadays, I often see people wearing KN95 masks outside, whereas in April/May almost everyone stuck to plain surgical masks. In my opinion, KN95 masks are a great compromise between surgical and N95 cup or duckbill style masks; they offer pretty good comfort, good filtration, but unfortunately most of them do not offer good fit.

One of the reasons for this is that KN95 masks are more commonly found in earloop form rather than headband. I haven't tried the headband KN95 masks myself, but the earloop masks fit loosely around the ears and don't seal the outer rims of the mask to your face. Another major reason for leakage in KN95 masks is that the bendy bit around the nosebridge isn't really firm enough, and so these masks, (at least when I use them straight out of the box), leak a bunch of air through the top. This is most noticeable if you wear glasses or goggles; they start fogging up.

The main solution that people use for the glass fogging issue is tape around the top of the mask. I dislike this approach for a few reasons. First of all, tape on your face feels bad. Secondly, every time I tape the top of the mask to my face, the tape loses stickiness and I have to tear it off to replace it with new tape. This visibly damages my masks, which I reuse at least several times.

Here are some of the ways I modify my KN95 masks to maximize comfort, fit, and reusability. You will need:

Glue
Scissors
Metal strips for face mask (just search for this on Ebay or something, here's 10 thick ones for $9: Ebay Link
Tissue/toilet paper

Other than the metal strips, you probably have all of these lying around already! Here's a self explanatory picture with additional explanation below:

A few things to notice. First of all, the earloops have been tied and then snipped to be smaller. This makes the mask fit tightly around your face. You may have to experiment with how much you want to tighten it, since not all faces are the same size. Once you have tied the knots, just take your scissors and snip off the dangly loops.

An additional metal strip was added to the upper part of the front of the mask. Make sure to bend this to the shape...
Care and demandingness
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-03-08T07:03:42.755Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

People sometimes object to moral claims on the grounds that their implications would be too demanding. But analogous objections make little sense in empirical and prudential contexts. I find this contrast instructive. Some ways of understanding moral obligation suggest relevant differences from empiricism and prudence. But the more we see moral life as continuous with caring about stuff in general, the less it makes sense to expect “can’t-be-too-demanding” guarantees.

I. Demandingness objections

I’ll understand a “demandingness objection” as an objection of the following form:

The fact that p would imply that one should engage in intuitively “demanding” behavior is evidence against p.

I’ll construe “demanding,” here, as something like “very costly.” More precise definitions might shed more light.

I’m most familiar with demandingness objections in the context of various moral claims. For example, demandingness is often offered as an objection to utilitarianism — a view which implies, naively, that you’re obligated to devote all of your time and resources to helping others, up the point where you are improving the lives of others less than you are reducing the quality of your own life (I think that various non-consequentialist views actually have similar implications). But it comes up in other contexts as well. For example, people sometimes argue that we should discount the moral importance of what happens to future generations of humans, because not doing so implies, naively, that we should sacrifice a lot now in order to make the future better.

Below, I discuss a few ways of making sense of these objections: I think they often draw on important heuristics, and should be taken seriously in various ways. And I think they may make sense on some conceptions of moral obligation. But I also worry that they can obscure the basic contingency of how what matters to us can be arranged in the world.

II. Applying the objection to empirical and prudential claims

Considered abstractly, demandingness objections of the form listed above seem quite strange. Consider, for example, how such objections sound in the context of empirical claims:

“If there was a big storm heading this way, that would mean we should cancel our canoe trip, which we’ve been planning for months. This is evidence against an oncoming big storm.”
“If this start-up idea would be

...
Irrational arguments or valuable heuristics?
by Hauntology Ph.D. — 2021-03-08T05:34:52.108Z

I. Dreams of Vaccines

The other day, I was speaking with someone I'll call Steve. I will generously describe Steve as skeptical of mRNA vaccines, believing them to be dangerous and possibly part of a grand conspiracy to profit from the deaths of millions. I ask why he believes this and he cites a widely circulated video with someone talking about how dangerous new mRNA technology may be. I haven't heard of this person before but a quick search reveals that, unsurprisingly, they aren't an immunologist: they practice something I've never heard of called "osteopathy." A few more searches reveal this to be a practice that is, at best, a form of alternative medicine whose benefits largely remain empirically undemonstrated and, at worst, complete woo. Furthermore, this person has been a vocal proponent of a certain debunked claim regarding autism and vaccines.

At this point, I am sufficiently convinced that no medical claims this person makes should be taken seriously. I tell Steve as much and show him what I found. He accuses me of ad hominem and that it is my intellectual responsibility to engage with the speaker's argument seriously, to refute the speaker's points.

While the nature of Steve's claim is correct, I think this may be a teachable moment for practical epistemic rationality. I think ad hominem, bulverism, argument from authority, and similar invalid species of argument have a tight grip on ordinary thinking because, though not valid by any means, they are decent heuristics for distinguishing possibly-maybe-true things from complete horseshit.

II. The Demonic Ratio

Suppose I'm riding on the bus when a demon apparates next to me and presses an unsettling, tentacled contraption to my forehead. He wants information regarding the nature of the ratio circumferencediameter for an arbitrary circle, assuring me that a wrong answer will result in unspeakable agony for all eternity.

If I knew anything about math before, I certainly don't right now, so I frantically consult the people sitting nearby and get three competing assertions:

Alice is a research mathematician and she asserts that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is always the irrational number π, which is slightly bigger than 3.
Bob is a programmer and he asserts that this ratio is always 3.14.
Charles is the local tie dye enthusiast and he asserts

...