trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
ESC Process Notes: Detail-Focused Books
by Elizabeth — 2019-12-31T22:00:01.194Z

When I started doing epistemic spot checks, I would pick focal claims and work to verify them. That meant finding other sources and skimming them as quickly as possible to get their judgement on the particular claim. This was not great for my overall learning, but it’s not even really good for claim evaluation: it flattens complexity and focuses me on claims with obvious binary answers that can be evaluated without context. It also privileges the hypothesis by focusing on “is this claim right?” rather than “what is the truth?”.

So I moved towards reading all of my sources deeply, even if my selection was inspired by a particular book’s particular claim. But this has its own problems.

In both The Oxford Handbook of Children and Childhood Education in the Ancient World and Children and Childhood in Roman Italy, my notes sometimes degenerate into “and then a bunch of specifics”. “Specifics” might mean a bunch of individual art pieces, or a list of books that subtly changed a field’s framing. This happens because I’m not sure what’s important and get overwhelmed.

Knowledge of importance comes from having a model I’m trying to test. The model can be external to the focal book (either from me, or another book), or from it. E.g. I didn’t have a a particular frame on the evolution of states before starting Against the Grain, but James C. Scott is very clear on what he believes, so I can assess how relevant various facts he presents are to evaluating that claim.

[I’m not perfect at this- e.g., in The Unbound Prometheus, the author claims that Europeans were more rational than Asians, and that their lower birth rate was evidence of this. I went along with that at the time because of the frame I was in, but looking back, I think that even assuming Europe did have a lower birth rate, it wouldn’t have proved Europeans were more rational or scientifically minded. This is a post in itself.]

If I’d come into The Oxford Handbook of Children and Childhood Education in the Ancient World or Children and Childhood in Roman Italy with a hypothesis to test, it would have been obvious information was relevant and what wasn’t. But I didn’t, so it wasn’t, and that was very tiring.

The obvious answer is “just write down everything”, and I think that would work with certain books. In particular, it would work with books that could be rewritten in Workflowy: those with crisp points that can ...
Conversational Cultures: Combat vs Nurture (V2)
by Ruby — 2019-12-31T20:23:53.772Z

You are viewing Version 2 of this post: a major revision written for the LessWrong 2018 Review. The original version published on 9th November 2018 can be viewed here.

See my change notes for major updates between V1 and V2.

Combat Culture

I went to an orthodox Jewish high school in Australia. For most of my early teenage years, I spent one to three hours each morning debating the true meaning of abstruse phrases of Talmudic Aramaic. The majority of class time was spent sitting opposite your chavrusa (study partner, but linguistically the term has the same root as the word “friend”) arguing vehemently for your interpretation of the arcane words. I didn’t think in terms of probabilities back then, but if I had, I think at any point I should have given roughly even odds to my view vs my chavrusa’s view on most occasions. Yet that didn’t really matter. Whatever your credence, you argued as hard as you could for the view that made sense in your mind, explaining why your adversary/partner/friend’s view was utterly inconsistent with reality. That was the process. Eventually, you’d reach agreement or agree to disagree (which was perfectly legitimate), and then move onto the next passage to decipher.

Later, I studied mainstream analytic philosophy at university. There wasn’t the chavrusa, pair-study format, but the culture of debate felt the same to me. Different philosophers would write long papers explaining why philosophers holding opposite views were utterly confused and mistaken for reasons one through fifty. They’d go back and forth, each arguing for their own correctness and the others’ mistakeness with great rigor. I’m still impressed with the rigor and thoroughness of especially good analytic philosophers.

I’ll describe this style as combative, or Combat Culture. You have your view, they have their view, and you each work to prove your rightness by defending your view and attacking theirs. Occasionally one side will update, but more commonly you develop or modify your view to meet the criticisms. Overall, the pool of arguments and views develops and as a group you feel like you’ve made progress.

While it’s true that you’ll often shake your head at the folly of those who disagree with you, the fact that you’re bothering to discuss with them at all implies a certain minimum of respect and recognition. You don’t write lengthy papers or books to respond to people who...
100 Ways To Live Better
by Jacob Falkovich — 2019-12-31T20:23:12.039Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

A couple of weeks ago Venkatesh challenged his followers to brainstorm at least 100 tweets on a topic via live responses. Since I’m not an expert on anything in particular, I decided to simply see if I can come up with 100 discrete pieces of life advice in a day.

This off-the-cuff game turned into perhaps the most successful creative project I’ve ever done. The thread was viewed by tens of thousands of people, received thousands of likes, and gained me hundreds of Twitter followers. I didn’t know there was such thirst for random life-advice, nor that I would be the one to tap the kegs. And now my blog readers get the expanded, edited, and organized collection.

The good life is a frequent subject on Putanumonit. I aimed for this thread to be an inspiration to myself as well, writing down many things that I think I should do but haven’t gotten around to yet. I tried to steer a middle course between over-generalized Navalisms and too-specific tips on the particular brand of chapstick that will change your life. May these inspire you to live your best life or to mock me in funny ways in the comments.

Meta

1

Any life advice that isn’t given to you personally is not designed to be followed to the letter. Try to resonate with the philosophy that generates it instead. Remember that directional advice (e.g., “be more …”) may need to be reversed before consumption.

2

Collect feedback from everybody. Play games with close friends where you have to give each other constructive criticism and ways to improve. Collect anonymous feedback from internet strangers on Admonymous.

3

Stop lurking; write that comment. You know the saying about letting people suspect you’re dumb rather than opening your mouth and removing all doubt? Fuck that. We know you’re dumb. You get less dumb by saying things and getting feedback.

4

Learn some improv, at least to get the basic gist of it. Take a class or read Impro. Improv mindset is a great way to approach many social situations including most interactions on the internet. A good comment/reply often starts with “yes, and”.

5

Don’t nitpick, that’s the opposite of good improv. You think that the categories in this post are arbitrary? A piece of advice doesn’t apply to your special situation? You’re probab...
BIDA Musician Booking
by jefftk — 2019-12-31T20:10:01.639Z

I'm going to be booking musicians for BIDA, at least through the end
of the season (July), and I wanted to write up a bit about how I'm
thinking about it.

I see two main goals in our booking:

Book performers where the dancers are going to have a great
time.

Book performers who are going to gain a lot from the experience.

There are dozens of contra dances in our area, and BIDA was founded
partly as a stepping stone. The big Scout House dances had high standards
and didn't want to book people unless they were confident they'd be
great, but it could be hard for people to make that jump. One of the
goals with BIDA is to be a dance that is willing to take some chances.

When I was booking callers, this cashed out as a set of priorities.
The highest priority was people who were just at the point where they
were ready to call our dance, though since these evenings sometimes
were a little rough I wouldn't want these to be too close together or
too high a fraction of overall evenings. The next priority was people
who were clearly able to call our dance, and were calling other
dances, but were still new enough that getting to call BIDA would help
them learn and grow. Then for the remaining spots I'd book the best
callers I could find, much like any other dance that was optimizing
for the immediate experience of the dancers.

For musician booking the same principles cash out pretty differently
because bands are (basically always) multiple musicians. There are
still groups where it's everyone's first band, in which case it's a
lot like the situation with caller booking, but these groups are only
a small portion of people playing dances. Groups with a range of
experience levels change things a lot. Musicians who have played
contra dances for a long time can hold a group's sound together and
support musicians newer to contra, while the newer musicians are
learning a lot from working with the more experienced ones.
Additionally, it's helpful for musicians that have recently started
working together to have places that are willing to book them even
though they don't have much of a joint track record yet.

For example, this Sunday we have Jaige
Trudel, Alex
Cumming, and Adam Broome.
Jaige and Adam have been playing contra dances for decades, with Crowfoot and then Maivish. Alex has been playing music
for a long time, but is newer to contra ...
AI Alignment, Constraints, Control, Incentives or Partnership?
by jmh — 2019-12-31T13:42:56.471Z

A quick search on AI benevolence did not really return much and I've not waded into the depths of the whole area. However I am wondering to what extent the current approach here is about constraining and controlling (call that bucket 1) versus that of incenting and partnership (Bucket 2) as a solution to the general fears of AGI.

If one were to toss the approaches into one of the buckets what percentage would be in each of the buckets? I get the impression most of what I've seen seems more bucket 1 type solutions.
Does Big Business Hate Your Family?
by Zvi — 2019-12-31T12:50:00.827Z

Previously in Sequence: Moloch Hasn’t Won, Perfect Competition, Imperfect Competition

The book Moral Mazes describes the world of managers in several large American corporations.

They are placed in severely toxic situations. To succeed, they transform their entire selves into maximizers of what get you ahead in middle corporate management.

This includes active hostility to all morality and to all other considerations not being actively maximized. Those considerations compete for attention and resources.

Those who refuse or fail to self-modify in this way fail to climb the corporate ladder. Those who ‘succeed’ at this task sometimes rise to higher corporate positions, but there are not enough positions to go around, so many still fail.

Reminder: Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value

This is a default characteristic of all sufficiently strong optimizers. Recall that when we optimize for X but are indifferent to Y, we by default actively optimize against Y, for all Y that would make any claims to resources. See The Hidden Complexity of Wishes.

Perfect competition destroys all value by being a sufficiently powerful optimizer.

The competition for success as a middle manager described in Moral Mazes destroys the managers (among many other things it destroys) the same way, by putting them and the company’s own culture and norms under sufficiently powerful optimization pressure towards a narrow target.

Does Big Business Hate Your Family?

Consider this comment, elevated to a post at Marginal Revolution, responding to Tyler Cowen’s noting that the National Conservatism Conference had a talk called “Big Business Hates Your Family”:

What would it mean if big business did hate your family?

Would it mean adopting a working culture that made it ever harder to rise to power within it while also having said family? Would it require those with career ambitions to geographically abandon extended family and to live in areas notoriously difficult for raising families? Would it mean requiring long delays on family formation while you got credentialed, worked with little remuneration while getting your foot in the door, and then place huge amounts of time and effort on career growth rather than investing in your family? Does corporate culture act like it hates your family?

Would it mean selling products which have s

...
Voting Phase UI: Aggregating common comments?
by Raemon — 2019-12-31T03:48:41.024Z

Or: UI musings for the Voting Phase of the 2018 Review. This post outlines the current plans, and asks a couple concrete questions at the end.

Range Voting, which is converted into Quadratic Voting

The current plan for the Voting Phase, after some discussion on this thread, is for most people to start with a range-voting system, which is converted* into a set of quadratic votes that people can then fine tune.

* the precise conversion method is still up in the air. More comments and suggestions appreciated.

The range-voting part will basically be a "-1 to 3" scale, with the points corresponding to english-labels of "No", "Neutral", "Decent", "Important", and "Crucial".

(This is a bit asymmetric between downvotes and upvotes, but you can add stronger downvotes in the quadratic step. Our experience testing voting systems was that only a small number of posts were things we expected anyone to downvote much. So it didn't seem useful to heavily emphasize downvotes in the first-pass-phase)

If you want to skip the range voting and go right to the quadratic voting, you can do that.

What common comments do you expect people to make?

You're also encouraged to leave comments on each post, if there's anything you haven't yet said about it in the Nomination or Review Phases. The comments can be marked private (if so, only LW team members will see them).

But there are a couple types of comments I thought might be common enough to warrant some kind of... standardizing.

For the most part, I expect "how useful is this post?" and "how epistemically sound is this post" to blur together (for good or for ill – this may just be halo effect, but I think it's hard to avoid it). But I at least wanted people to have the opportunity to say "I rate this post overall a 2-out-of-3 stars, but it had particularly good, or bad, epistemics, compared to other posts I gave 2-stars." Or something like that.

I was thinking of including a few checkboxes for "common, default comments" that people could leave, so that certain types of feedback could be more easily aggregated.

If you have time, it'd be helpful if you looked over the posts on the /reviews page and think about what sort of short, simple comments you might have wanted to leave on them (either positive or negative ones), especially if you think others might want to leave similar comments.

(Ideally post each one as a top-level commen

...
Folding Couch Monitor
by jefftk — 2019-12-31T03:40:01.567Z

I find working on a laptop to be pretty rough ergonomically. The only
way for my wrists to be comfortable is if the laptop is flat on my
lap, and keeping my wrists happy is

very
important to me. This means my neck is angled down at the screen,
though, and I can't do this for very long without it getting painful.

When I'm home I usually sit on the couch to use my laptop, and I was
thinking about how I might be able to do that with a screen at a
pleasant height. I've read about various
approaches that usually involve elevating the laptop screen and
using an external keyboard, but I really like being able to use my
laptop's touchpad. I decided to set up an external monitor that folds
out over the couch when I want to use it, and folds away against the
wall when I don't:

I started by making some diagrams:

I cut a section of cabinet-grade plywood to a bit bigger than the
monitor, and mounted the monitor in the middle. I was able to re-use
some of the mounting hardware from the stand to make something where
the monitor would be easily removable. Once I got the monitor on,
however, it wouldn't come off again, so something went wrong there.

I made a spacer for the hinge-side, and used a pair of door hinges.
Unfortunately, after Julia had painted everything I realized the
spacer wasn't thick enough, so for now there's an ugly unpainted
wooden shim. It's built like a door, and feels very sturdy.

The monitor can swing out all the way, enough to be used as a TV from
a second couch on the far wall:

You can also have it partly open, if multiple people want to hang out
on the closer couch and look at something:

To keep it in position when I'm using it as a computer monitor, I have
a short length of string between a pair of cup hooks:

I do look a little silly using it:

I built this today and have only just started using it, but so far I'm
very happy and my neck feels great!
human psycholinguists: a critical appraisal
by nostalgebraist — 2019-12-31T00:20:01.330Z

(The title of this post is a joking homage to one of Gary Marcus’ papers.)

I’ve discussed GPT-2 and BERT and other instances of the Transformer architecture a lot on this blog. As you can probably tell, I find them very interesting and exciting. But not everyone has the reaction I do, including some people who I think ought to have that reaction.

Whatever else GPT-2 and friends may or may not be, I think they are clearly a source of fascinating and novel scientific evidence about language and the mind. That much, I think, should be uncontroversial. But it isn’t.

(i.)

When I was a teenager, I went through a period where I was very interested in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. I first got interested via Steven Pinker’s popular books – this was back when Pinker was mostly famous for writing about psychology rather than history and culture – and proceeded to read other, more academic books by authors like Gary Marcus, Jerry Fodor, and John Anderson.

At this time (roughly 2002-6), there was nothing out there that remotely resembled GPT-2. Although there were apparently quite mature and complete formal theories of morphology and syntax, which could accurately answer questions like “is this a well-formed English sentence?”, no one really knew how these could or should be implemented in a physical system meant to understand or produce language.

This was true in two ways. For one thing, no one knew how the human brain implemented this stuff, although apparently it did. But the difficulty was more severe than that: even if you forgot about the brain, and just tried to write a computer program (any computer program) that understood or produced language, the results would be dismal.

At the time, such programs were either specialized academic models of one specific phenomenon – for example, a program that could form the past tense of a verb, but couldn’t do anything else – or they were ostensibly general-purpose but incredibly brittle and error-prone, little more than amusing toys. The latter category included some programs intended as mere amusements or provocations, like the various chatterbots (still about as good/bad as ELIZA after four decades), but also more serious efforts whose reach exceeded their grasp. SYSTRAN spent decades manually curating millions o

...
Looking for non-AI people to work on AGI risks
by otto.barten — 2019-12-30T20:41:43.625Z

I'm worried about AGI safety, and I'm looking for non-AI people to worry with. Let me explain.
A lecture by futurist Anders Sandberg, online reading, and real-life discussions with my local Effective Altruist group, gave me as a non-AI person (33-yo physicist, engineer, climate activist and startup founder) the convictions that:
- AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, Superintelligence, or the Singularity) is a realistic possibility in the next decades, say between 2030 and 2050
- AGI could well become orders of magnitude smarter than humans, fast
- If unaligned, AGI could well lead to human extinction
- If aligned ('safe'), AGI could still possibly lead to human extinction, for example because someone's goals turned out to be faulty, or because someone removed the safety from the code
I'm active for two climate NGOs, where a lot of people are worrying about human extinction because of the climate crisis. I'm also worrying about this, but at the same time, I think the chance of human extincion due to AGI is much larger. Although the chance is much larger, I don't believe it to be 100%: we could still stop AGI development, for example (I think that makes more sense than fleeing to Mars or working on a human-machine interface). Stopping development is a novel angle for many safe AI researchers, futurists, startup founders, and the like. However, many non-AI people think this is a very sensible solution, at least if all else fails. I agree with them. It is not going to be an easy goal to achieve and I see the penalty, but I think it makes the most sense from the options we have.
Therefore, I'm looking for non-AI people, who are interested to work with me on common sense solutions for existential risks posed by AGI.
Does anyone know where to find them?
Austin LW: Survey for far-traveling attendees Jan-Feb 2020
by jchan — 2019-12-30T15:40:22.442Z

We at the Austin LW meetup have reason to believe that there are many people in the surrounding area who would like to travel to Austin to attend a meetup, if they could be assured that other fellow far-comers will also be there. To that end, we're running a survey to coordinate on a date to designate as the "far-comers meetup." If you may be interested in attending such a meetup, please fill out the following survey by Tuesday, January 7, 2020: https://forms.gle/DnY8rwJUE322nt45A