trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: $10,000 in prizes for good stories
by aarongertler — 2021-09-12T21:25:03.466Z
Link: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JFiHewypFB2niuy2G/ea-forum-creative-writing-contest-usd10-000-in-prizes-for

We just launched a

creative writing contest

on the Effective Altruism Forum. Stories like HPMOR and The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant have been massively impactful, and we'd like to see more work in that vein — please consider submitting something!

Note that you can also submit past work that seems like a good fit. The criteria are:

Someone can reasonably finish the work in one sitting
The work might inspire someone to become interested in EA, or in some part of EA. You don't have to shill for anything too specific — we'd be really happy to see work that just reflects rational/EA modes of thinking, applied in altruistic ways, without being directly about animal suffering or AI or whatnot.

I'm running the contest. Please let me know, here or on the Forum, if you have any questions!
How factories were made safe
by jasoncrawford — 2021-09-12T19:58:12.597Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/history-of-factory-safety

Angelo Guira was just sixteen years old when he began working in the steel factory. He was a “trough boy,” and his job was to stand at one end of the trough where red-hot steel pipes were dropped. Every time a pipe fell, he pulled a lever that dumped the pipe onto a cooling bed. He was a small lad, and at first they hesitated to take him, but after a year on the job the foreman acknowledged he was the best boy they’d had. Until one day when Angelo was just a little too slow—or perhaps the welder was a little too quick—and a second pipe came out of the furnace before he had dropped the first. The one pipe struck the other, and sent it right through Angelo’s body, killing him. If only he had been standing up, out of the way, instead of sitting down—which the day foreman told him was dangerous, but the night foreman allowed. If only they had installed the guard plate before the accident, instead of after. If only.

Angelo was not the only casualty of the steel mills of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania that year. In the twelve months from July 1906 through June 1907, ten in total were killed by the operation of rolls. Twenty-two were killed by hot metal explosions. Five were asphyxiated by furnace gas. Thirty-one fatalities were attributed to the operation of the railroad at the steel yards, and forty-two to the operation of cranes. Twenty-four men fell from a height, or into a pit. Eight died from electric shock. In all, there were 195 casualties in the steel mills in those twelve months, and these were just a portion of the total of 526 deaths from work accidents. In addition, there were 509 other accidents that sent men to the hospital, at least 76 of which resulted in serious, permanent injury.

Work-Accidents and the Law, 1910

In 1907, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall fatality rate in the iron and steel industry was about 220 per 100,000 full-time workers. By 2019, however, that rate had fallen to only 26.3 per 100,000, a reduction of almost 90%.

The story of workplace safety illustrates both the serious problems that progress can cause, and how the solution to those problems can be found in further progress. It’s a fascinating story in its own right, and in it we find lessons about safety in general, about liability law, and about the early history of capitalism.

The dangers of early factories

The Industrial Revolution created a...
Review of A Map that Reflects the Territory
by William Gasarch — 2021-09-12T19:43:27.571Z

I had read about lesswrong.com on Scott Aaaronon's blog but never read it. Then there was an offer to review A Map that Reflects the Territory which (as you prob know) is a collection of lesswrong essays.

I originally had just a link to my review, which I still have in this post; however, several people (correctly) urged me to make it a post you can just read directly. Due to the FAQ being out of date and my own luddite-tendencies I was unable to do this, but Ruby did it for me, for which I am grateful. The full text appears below the link.

Here is a link to my review:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/lesswrong.pdf

Here is the review in text to just read:

A Map that Reflect the Territory: Essays by the Less Wrong Community
Author: Less Wrong
Publisher: Less Wrong Press
720 pages, Year: 2020
$30.00 But See Note on Availability

Reviewer: William Gasarch (gasarch@umd.edu )

Availability As of September 2021 when I finished this review the book was out of stock on Amazon. However:

It is on the lesswrong site to buy: https://www.lesswrong.com/books
It was on Amazon.au. (Australian Amazon)
there may be a kindle version soon.

1 Introduction

Less Wrong is a forum where people post essays. The stated philosophy is: We are a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. More generally, we work to develop and practice the art of human rationality. That seems to cover a lot of ground! A satire of it would say the following: There are discussions about discussions, discussions about arguments, arguments about discussions, and arguments about arguments.

That is not fair. The topics seem to be (1) find the truth in science and in life, (2) AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and (3) probability. The most common non-trivial word in this book might be Bayes (a trivial word would be something like the which is likely more common but less interesting).

This book is a best-of collection. We quote the preface: Users wrote reviews of the best posts of 2018, and voted on them using the quadratic voting system, popularized by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin. From the 2000+ posts published that year, the Review narrowed down the 44 most interesting and valuable posts.

The collection of posts is now gathered together i...
What I've been doing instead of writing
by benkuhn — 2021-09-12T12:40:14.532Z

I’ve been too busy with work to write much recently, but in lieu of that, here’s a batch of links to other stuff I’ve been doing elsewhere.

The thing I’m most excited about:

Wave raises $200m from Sequoia, Stripe, Founders Fund and Ribbit at a $1.7b valuation. It’ll fund faster expansion across Africa. I’m pumped for us to save tons of money + time for even more people!

One of our investors for Founders Fund wrote an amazing deep dive into our vision and strategy. (Sadly, we had to ask Everett to cut the best part for confidentiality reasons—though I’m allowed to tell it to potential hires, so if you’re curious… you know what to do!)

On the Wave blog I wrote up my argument for why working at Wave is an extremely effective way to improve the world. (I expect to write a lot more for Wave’s blog in the future, so consider subscribing if you want to keep up with it!)

This is probably a good time to mention that we are hiring! A lot! If you’re an engineer or engineering leader, and you like tracking your impact in units like “number of households lifted out of extreme poverty,"1 let’s talk.

Other non-writing activities:

I gave a talk at !!con 2020—a conference whose only rule is that you must be super excited about your topic—on some of the things Wave has done to make our app work reliably on unreliable mobile networks: 89 characters of base-11?! Mobile networking in rural Ethiopia!

Alexey Guzey interviewed me about… a lot of stuff… including what habits have helped me the most to be effective, productively channeling neuroticism, what I learned from starting Harvard Effective Altruism, and what it feels like to repeatedly sample from a heavy-tailed distribution.

I appeared on the Narratives podcast where we talked about deciding what to do with your life, differences between management and engineering, cool parts of Wave’s culture, “staring into the abyss,” and other fun stuff.

I’ve occasionally been posting proto-blog-post threads to Twitter. The best ones will probably make it here (in fleshed-out form) but no promises!

As of now I feel pretty good about my plan to eventually get back to a normal workload, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to ship some new posts soon—I have a backlog I’m excited about!

When mobile money succeeded in Kenya, (Suri and Jack 2016) found that it lifted 2% of all Kenyan households—almost a million people—out of extreme

...
Equal Parenting Advice for Dads
by jefftk — 2021-09-12T11:33:13.577Z

I originally posted this 2019-05-12 on my personal site, before I'd set up automatic crossposting. On yesterday's post about childcare Gunnar_Zarncke suggested I post it here.

It's pretty common for a male-female couple to be intellectually in agreement to split the work of parenting equally, but then for the mother to end up doing a lot more. There's a lot in our society that pushes towards mothers having primary responsibility for kids, and it can be a very easy rut to fall into even if it's not what you want.

Pregnancy and birth are very asymmetric, and then breastfeeding continues the pattern: nursing isn't going to be equitable. This means night feedings, more ability to calm the baby, and even just her smelling more familiar to them. While this asymmetry isn't permanent, it pushes you towards starting with an unequal division.

Then with parental leave it's very common for the mother to take more time off work than the father. Many jobs give more leave to birth parents, and someone who has just given birth often needs substantial recovery time. Fathers commonly earn more than mothers and so if leave is unpaid many couples can afford more if the mother takes it than if the father does.

If you're the dad, what can you do? I see two main aspects: sharing the work, and sharing the parenting.

From a work perspective, in as much as you want to be trying to make things fair you should be making up for the things you can't do by taking on more of the remaining work: non-feeding care, diapers, cooking, etc. Sleeping elsewhere sometimes so you have more energy and be more alert the next day can work well, as can taking the baby early in the morning so the mother can sleep in.

The other aspect is you want to be dividing the parenting, not just the work. This is because you really need to avoid a situation where the mother has a much better understanding of the baby than you do. For example, you can get into a cycle where you can't calm the baby as well, they spend more time with their mother, you get less experience and practice with them, and your relative abilities with the baby get farther and farther apart.

Having time when you're watching the baby solo is pretty valuable: you get practice much faster and your kid can't just insist on their preferred parent. My work gives (a very generous by US standards) twelve weeks of leave, which I took each time as two weeks at ...
Soldiers, Scouts, and Albatrosses.
by Jan — 2021-09-12T10:36:32.719Z
Link: https://universalprior.substack.com/p/soldiers-scouts-and-albatrosses

TL;DR: Soldier and Scout as modes of thought. Soldiers "assume the conclusion", which is sometimes unreasonably effective. Search as a synthesis of Soldier and Scout. Lévy flight as optimal trade-off.

Hey IAN! What's the best way of thinking?

#[[IAN says]]: I think of the soldier mindset as the most important mindset, the one where you're doing the right thing, the one where you're on a mission. I think of the scout mindset as the one with the most virtue, the one where you have very high potential for doing the right thing, the one where you're driven to find the truth and to seek out new things.

IAN might be onto something there. But let's tell the story in order...
Childcare III
by jefftk — 2021-09-12T01:30:04.700Z

Four and

six
years ago I wrote posts describing what we had tried for childcare.
Now that the kids are older (7y and 5y), I can ask them what they
liked and didn't. Both of gave the same order:

Us or someone else (au pair, nanny, housemate, friend) watching them.

In-person school.

Virtual school.

Watching themselves.

Anna has only just started Kindergarten, and so has very limited
experience of school. She did a small amount of virtual preschool,
because she didn't like that only Lily had calls, but she didn't like
that and we stopped.

They really didn't like watching themselves:

Anna: "When Lily was on a [school] call Lily couldn't
play with me, so there was basically nothing that I could do that I
wanted to. And the only thing I wanted to do was play a game that
needed at least two people. And, in particular, it needed to be two
kids. And there were no other kids who were available to play except
me.

Lily: "I liked all of these except watching myself. It was just
boring."

(I've gone back and added a note to my post.)

I asked what they thought about having lessons with us. Lily put
it between virtual school and watching herself; Anna put it between
someone watching them and in-person school.

I also tried asking them to imagine that they'd been sick, and weren't allowed
to go back to school yet because they might still be contagious. Would
they be sad to stay home from school or happy not to go? Lily was sad
to stay home; Anna wasn't.

I asked them if they'd liked all of their childcare providers and they
said yes. I asked if there were parts they didn't like:

Lily: "[one of them] mostly lied down on the couch and sometimes made
us go to parks even when we didn't want to and sometimes had us stay
inside when we wanted to go to the park".

Anna: "when [one of them] would brush my hair, she also thought she
was supposed to brush my ears!"

What we did when:

Ages 2y5m to 6y9m / 0y6m to 4y10m: au pairs

We had a series of four au pairs. Typically an au pair stays for a
year, and may renew for a second. Our first au pair stayed for three
months (homesick), the second for a year (ineligible to renew), the
third for two years (renewed), and the fourth for a year (planned to
renew, but pandemic).

Overall, this was a really good experience. I liked all of them, and
so did the kids. We're ...
Pack a travel bathroom bag
by Alex Hollow — 2021-09-11T23:50:27.316Z
Link: https://alexhollow.wordpress.com/2021/09/11/pack-a-travel-bathroom-bag/

About a year ago, I realized that packing all my bathroom stuff was one of the more difficult and annoying and error-prone parts of packing for travel. So, without planning on going anywhere, I packed my travel bathroom bag.

This bag had all the things I was previously likely to forget – toothbrush and toothpaste, floss, comb, hair product, deodorant, nail clippers, travel-sized face wash and moisturizer. That’s a lot of stuff, and most of it I could do without. But why risk it? I’d rather be able to grab a bag and know I have everything.

Put together, the bag probably cost around $50. The time savings while packing probably make it worthwhile by itself, but also I will never forget any of those things ever again on any trip. Overall, it seems like a win!

An ancillary benefit of this bag is always having backups of everything. If I run out of toothpaste, or floss, or hair product, I have a small backup supply of everything that I consider useful enough to go in the travel bag.
Is MIRI's reading list up to date?
by Aryeh Englander — 2021-09-11T18:56:39.779Z

Question especially for MIRI folks:

The MIRI reading list has not changed very much in several years. But MIRI-associated researchers have been producing what appears to be a significant number of new research directions - for example, Cartesian Frames, Finite Factored Sets, Infra-Bayesianism, and a lot of Stuart Armstrong's research.

Is the research guide up to date and sufficient for contributing to all the different research directions that MIRI is pursuing?
Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
by Erich_Grunewald — 2021-09-11T13:37:22.704Z
Link: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/the-american-style-of-quotation-mark-punctuation-makes-no-sense/

There are different ways of combining quotation and punctuation marks. In the American style, you almost always put periods and commas inside the quotation marks:

Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, "I refute it thus."[1]

It is only an accident of evolution, as it were, that the senses we are born with are not adapted to feel such things "directly."[2]

In the British style, however, you put periods and commas outside the quotation marks, unless they are part of a complete sentence that is fully contained between the quotation marks:

Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, "I refute it thus."[3]

It is only an accident of evolution, as it were, that the senses we are born with are not adapted to feel such things "directly".[4]

When faced with this contrast, the proper reaction is to recoil in horror at the first approach, and to look approvingly on the second. In the sentence beginning with It is only ..., the quotation is a part of the sentence, and the sentence contains the quoted word.

It is only an accident of evolution ... "directly".
[--------------------sentence---------------------]
[--quote-]

Since a period marks the end of a sentence, it should not be placed before marking the end of the quotation. You can compare this with nested or hierarchical structures, or with stacks, or even with last in, first out methods of computing, inventory accounting or redundancy management. Under any comparison, the British style will seem preferable to the American. You resolve the nested item first, before resolving the parent. I do not know but suspect that this is why the British style is also called logical quotation.

In the sentence beginning with Dr Johnson ..., we do place the period within the quotation marks, because what is being quoted is a full sentence. We are placing the period to mark the end of the inner, quoted sentence.[5]

Dr Johnson kicked a large rock ... "I refute it thus."
[----------------------sentence----------------------]
[------quote------]
[----sentence---]

There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language. The British approach makes more sense, so use that one.

Deutsch, D. (1998). The fabric of reality. Penguin UK. ↩︎

...
Bayeswatch 9: Zombies
by lsusr — 2021-09-11T05:57:38.997Z

Vi took a taxi to the outside of the Natanz fortress. She left her cornea and other electronics with Miriam on the scout ship. Vi walked up the to soldier standing guard at the front gate. She caught his eye. Then she stepped over the road spikes into the compound.

The soldier shouted something. Vi didn't wait for a translation. She lay face-first on the dirt and placed her hands on the back of her head.

The soldiers scanned her for explosives. Negative. They handcuffed her, patted her down, took her wallet and placed a bag over her head. They threw her in the back of a van. Vi could tell when they entered the tunnels from the increased echoing. The tunnels were cooler too. The door opened. The soldiers marched Vi through several beeping machines. Vi ignored them. She was too busy counting seconds. The soldier sat her in a chair before removing the bag over her head. There was a guard on either side of her and an officer across the desk.

"Excuse me ma'am, but I'm very confused. Are you having a heatstroke?" said the officer.

"No sir," said Vi.

"Then might I ask what you are doing?" said the officer.

"What did it look like I was doing?" said Vi.

"It looked like you were attempting to break into this facility," said the officer.

"I was breaking into this facility," said Vi.

The officer didn't laugh.

"What time is it?" said Vi.

"You're not privy to that information," the officer said.

"That's okay. I've been counting," said Vi.

"What?" said the officer.

"Any minute now," said Vi.

The infected soldiers exchanged timed chemical signals. The officer and the two guards collapsed simultaneously. Vi stole a key and released her handcuffs. She stole a pistol and shot each of them in the head.

Vi patiently made her way through the facility. The Z-Day virus only changed the infecteds' behavior. It didn't give them resistance to bullets.

"You do not have clearance to land," said the air traffic controller.

"I'm from Bayeswatch. I've been there since Z-Day. It's public record. Your facility has been taken over by a rogue AI. It has released the Z-Day virus. I have the vaccine and the cure. You can let me land or you can get eaten alive or worse. By the way, you should barricade the entrances into the air traffic control tower. Turn off your internal radios too. This is an AI Box scenario," said Miriam.

They let Miriam land the scout. A van drove up to her aircraft. "It took you long enoug...
Does Diverse News Decrease Polarization?
by jsteinhardt — 2021-09-11T02:30:16.583Z

This is the third in a series of posts studying how Facebook's newsfeed affects political polarization. To recap:

In the first post, I showed that polarization trends in the U.S. don't coincide with social media adoption, and argued that Facebook is unlikely to be the primary direct driver of polarization (but could have important indirect effects).

In the second post, I showed that Facebook isn't more likely than other sources to show users pro-attitudinal content; but it is more likely to show them extreme content on both sides of the political spectrum.

(Recall that we call a news article pro-attitudinal if it agrees with a user's political views, and counter-attitudinal if it runs counter to them; and that this is usually determined by looking at what outlet the article appears in.)

In this post, I'll finally look at the causal effect of the newsfeed on user's beliefs and attitudes. In summary:

Cheap nudges on Facebook can have strong lasting (≥3 months) effects on user feed content, which translate to small changes in political affect but no measurable change in political beliefs.

Specifically, the nudge exposed users to moderately counter-attitudinal news, and influenced around 10% of a user's newsfeed on average. This led to a 1-point reduction in affective polarization on a 0-100 scale.

For context, affective polarization has increased by 10 points in the last 20 years.

Some cruder estimates suggest that quitting Facebook entirely reduces affective polarization by around 2 points, and providing a fully balanced feed would reduce it by 4 points.

To me this paints an optimistic but limited outlook for interventions on Facebook newsfeeds. Fully balancing the feed seems unattainable without strongly ignoring user preferences, and I'd personally guess that 3 points is about the best you can get. That's only 30% of the polarization we'd like to address, but that could already be a big deal! Especially since a cheap intervention can already get you to 10%.

In addition, the fact that newsfeeds don't seem to influence voting behavior removes some ethical concerns. While many have worried about Facebook influencing elections, in the U.S. at least I suspect this worry is overstated, and the numbers above seem to back that up. If the primary effect of changing newsfeeds is simply to make people less angry with each other, without affecting their voting prefere...