trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Really Fresh Baking
by jefftk — 2020-05-10T11:40:02.836Z

Many baked goods are much better when they still have their cooking
warmth. Some foods, like pizza, are nearly always served this way, but
others are only done this way occasionally. Several companies have
used this to offer a much tastier product than you'd normally get:

Midwest Airlines chocolate
chip cookies, which they would bake fresh on-board. Good for a
cookie, let alone an airline cookie.

Bertucci's
rolls, a somewhat typical roll that is famously delicious because
it's served just out of the oven.

Krispy Kreme doughnuts, with a "hot
now" light so people know when they can get them right out of the
fryer.

Some of this is that in cases where it's not that hard to serve it
fresh it's unexceptional to serve it that way. You wouldn't normally
eat waffles, pancakes, crepes, popovers, or pasta except completely
fresh. Thinking about why we do these this way, I think it's that
they're operationally simple: short cooking times and small minimum
batch sizes. Bertucci's and Midwest handle this by serving the same
product to everyone, which really only works if you make it a central
aspect of your identity.

If we could sort out the operational aspects of timing and
preparation, it seems like we could be generally eating a lot tastier
food. Burgers on fresh-baked buns, etc. Improvements here could be
well-received!
The Mind: Board Game Review
by Alexei — 2020-05-10T00:45:56.456Z

Recently I've played a board game called The Mind. I had an amazing experience and would highly recommend it to anyone. But I think the LW crowd might find it especially interesting, and I'll say more on that at the end.

I'll describe the game briefly, but I also recommend you watch this explanation and review of the game if you want to understand it better.

If you want to read about my personal experience with it, I'll post it in a comment. But I'd recommend you only read it after you've played the game yourself a few times and ideally got to the end.

Rules of the game

There is a deck of cards, 1-100. Each player is dealt N cards, where N is the current level. Without any kind of verbal communication the players have to play their cards into the center one by one in the increasing order. If someone plays a card and someone else has a lower card, then you've collectively made a mistake and you lose a life. I'm skipping over a few minor rules, but this is the core of the game.

The game is collaborative and supports 2-4 players. On the box it says the game takes 20-30 minutes, and that's true because you're likely to lose pretty fast. But once you get good, the game might easily take longer: 1-1.5 hours, depending on the pace your group sets.

One thing that's a bit tricky with this game is that the rules around the communication are somewhat vague. In theory, you could try to develop a language that communicates the numbers or something like that. I'd highly discourage you to do that, and in fact, I'd recommend to not do any kind of strategizing or coordination with your group. Just play it and let the strategy emerge non-verbally. Steelman the game's rules until you're having the most fun with it.

Relevance to LW

Circling: I think of circling as interpersonal meditation. You're very present with what's happening right now, both in yourself and in others. In this game you enter a very similar state. You're watching each player carefully for the clues they're giving you. How are they feeling? What are they trying to communicate? How do they think you're feeling?
IFS: This game is called The Mind for a reason. When you play the game well it feels like you're actually merging your minds with the other players. Like you're becoming one. Moreover, you learn to recog

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Why COVID-19 prevention at the margin might be bad for most LWers
by Kenoubi — 2020-05-10T00:19:02.472Z

I'm surprised and confused that no one else seems to be saying this, but I think the most extreme measures LWers have been talking about are much more likely to harm than help the world, and probably those LWers themselves. These are things like using copper tape on frequently touched surfaces or leaving packages outdoors for 2 days. Note that I'm not just saying these aren't worth it on net; I think doing them is actively harmful and you should stop.

EDITED: A number of people have pointed out concerns that even in those whose acute illness is not severe, there may be significant long-term negative health effects. I definitely wasn't adequately accounting for that. I'm not thrilled about the quality of evidence for this one way or the other, but that's perhaps to be expected for such a new disease. (There's no real way to know how COVID-19 survivors will be doing a year later, yet.) If these effects are much more common than death in the young and healthy, that would be a strong argument against my first point below, and against the overall conclusion of infection being beneficial.

I've edited the title slightly to account for these. I still think the rest of these points would point towards infection being less bad than otherwise, and that I've seen a striking lack of people commenting on the fact that some factors point in that direction. From this point on I've left the post as is.

Here are my assumptions (I think these are pretty consensus, not extreme weird views):

COVID-19 isn't that bad for the vast majority of young and otherwise healthy people (no worse than a bad flu).

COVID-19 is pretty bad for the elderly and people with other serious chronic conditions, especially very elderly people and elderly people with other conditions (double digit mortality rate).

Severe cases are not only less likely in the young and otherwise healthy, they have a much better prognosis when they do occur.

Most LWers are young, otherwise healthy, and not living with anyone for whom those things aren't true.

Viral load matters, and initial exposure amount substantially affects viral load.

Marginal prevention efforts disproportionately prevent low-quantity exposure (surface exposures, for example, even if possible, are probably low-dose).

Most people who recover from COVID-19 have a reasonable amount of immunity (let's say on average equivalent to 6 months of full im

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Literature Review For Academic Outsiders: What, How, and Why
by namespace — 2020-05-09T22:58:46.580Z
Link: https://www.thelastrationalist.com/literature-review-for-academic-outsiders-what-how-and-why.html

A few years ago I wrote a comment on LessWrong about how most authors on the site probably don't know how to do a literature review:

On the one hand, I too resent that LW is basically an insight porn factory near completely devoid of scholarship.

On the other hand, this is not a useful comment. I can think of at least two things you could have done to make this a useful comment:

Specified even a general direction of where you feel the body of economic literature could have been engaged. I know you might resent doing someone elses research for them if you’re not already familiar with said body, but frankly the norm right now is to post webs spun from the fibrous extrusions of peoples musing thoughts. The system equilibrium isn’t going to change unless some effort is invested into moving it. Notice you could write your comment on most posts while only changing a few words.

Provide advice on how one might go about engaging with ‘the body of economic literature’. Many people are intelligent and reasonably well informed, but not academics. Taking this as an excuse to mark them swamp creatures beyond assistance is both lazy and makes the world worse. You could even link to reasonably well written guides from someone else if you don’t want to invest the effort (entirely understandable).

I also linked a guide from Harvard's library (Garson & Lillvick, 2012) on how to do a literature review. But this guide makes extensive use of flash video, which makes it increasingly hard to access the content. Even if flash was alive and well, video is not necessarily the most comfortable format. Worse still, I remember feeling there was a great deal of tacit knowledge excluded from the guide which wouldn't be apparent to someone that isn't already familiar with academic culture. Even if the guide was a perfect representation of how to do an academic literature review, the priorities and types of work put together by LessWrong authors are more outsider science (Dance, 2008) than they are Harvard. For this reason I've had writing a guide to literature review aimed towards academic outsiders on my to-do list for a while.

At the same time I'm not interested in reinventing the wheel. This guide is going to focus specifically on filling in the knowledge gaps I would expect from someone who has...
Project Proposal: Gears of Aging
by johnswentworth — 2020-05-09T18:47:26.468Z

Imagine building an airplane the way we do biology research.

Hundreds of separate research groups each pick different airplane parts to work on. There’s no particular coordination in this; people choose based first on what they know how to build, second on what seems fun/interesting/flashy/fashionable, and finally on what they expect to be useful (based on limited local knowledge). Funds are allocated to anything which sounds vaguely related to airplanes. There might be fifty different groups all building propellers, one guy toiling away at gyros and nobody at all on fuel lines. One group is building an autopilot system which could be handy but isn’t really necessary; others are building things which won’t be useful at all but they don’t realize they won’t be useful.

There’s obviously room to generate value by assembling all the parts together, but there’s more to it than that. It’s not just that nobody is assembling the parts, there isn’t even a plan to assemble them. Nobody’s really sure what parts are even being produced, and nobody has a comprehensive list of parts needed in order to build an airplane. If things are missing, nobody knows it. If some work is extraneous, nobody knows that either; nobody knows what the minimum viable path to an airplane looks like. There is no airplane blueprint.

This is what the large majority of aging research looks like. There’s hundreds of different groups each studying specific subsystems. There’s little coordination on what is studied, few-if-any people assembling the parts on a large scale, and nothing like a blueprint.

The eventual vision of the

Gears of Aging

project is to create a blueprint.

What Does That Look Like?

A blueprint does not have to include all the internals of every single subsystem in comprehensive detail. The idea is to include enough detail that we can calculate whether the airplane will fly under various conditions.

Likewise, a blueprint-analogue for aging should include enough detail that we can calculate whether a given treatment/intervention will cure various age-related diseases, and independently verify each of the model’s assumptions.

Such a calculation doesn’t necessarily involve a lot of numerical precision. If we know the

root cause

of some age-related disease with high confidence, then we can say that reversing the root cause would cure the disease, without doing much math. On the other hand, w...
Why there's an ethanol glut and sanitizer shortage (WSJ)
by William Walker — 2020-05-09T15:08:42.408Z
Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-find-rubbing-alcohol-11588629519

Rent-seeking is so out of control that the US literally doesn't allow ethanol producers to make sanitizer during a fuel glut/sanitizer shortage:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-you-cant-find-rubbing-alcohol-11588629519
Shared House Setup
by jefftk — 2020-05-09T11:30:02.425Z

In my post on

helping Lily make
dinner I talked about how there were eight people in the house,
and someone wrote to me to ask how this works and how we ended up with
that arrangement.

We've been living in group households for most of the last ten years:
with another couple and their baby in East Somerville; with a rotating
group of parents, sisters, in-laws, niblings, cousins, and friends in
West Medford; and our current setup in West Somerville. In the early
2010s, Julia and I were thinking about
different ways of having a more long-term arrangement, and we decided
on buying a large house and renting to friends. Ideally something
with multiple units, so we'd have more flexibility if at some point we
wanted a different arrangement.

In August 2014 my college friend David saw two posts of
ours and was thinking some about communal housing. We wrote back
and forth some, and I encouraged them to consider moving to Boston and
living with us. At the time it didn't seem like it made sense for
them, though.

Julia and I had been looking at multi-family houses in Somerville and
Cambridge, and in September 2014 we made an offer on a West Somerville
two-family (though the closing ended up being delayed until mid-February). We talked more to
David and their partner Al, and they decided to come be housemates
with us.

Initially the house had a downstairs unit with two bedrooms and one
bathroom, and an upstairs unit with "four" bedrooms and one bathroom.
That's "four" because you had to walk through one bedroom to get to
another, which would normally be a large downside but ended up being a
good fit for David and Al's needs. Julia and I took the other two
bedrooms, and the previous tenants stayed on in the downstairs unit.

We made some changes to the house to make it work better with more
people: I added a second bathroom
to the upstairs unit, I converted part of the front hall to be an home
office for Julia, we had dormers built giving two
more bedrooms on the upstairs unit, and then I added a hallway to allow the
"pass-through" bedroom to be used independently.

After a while friends moved
into the first floor two-bedroom, and then when they moved out David
and Al moved downstairs and Ruthie moved in upstairs. We
also have had a series of au pairs
who've lived upstairs with us as well, taking care of the kids.

We do communal food, with a h...
Is there any scientific evidence for benefits of meditation?
by  — 2020-05-09T08:53:53.124Z

Are there good reasons for a typical reader of LessWrong to invest their time and effort into meditation practice? I'm going to do a literature review and will keep adding answers here but contributions from others are more than welcome. Some ground rules for the answers:

Only links to scientific papers + ideally a short commentary (summary and criticism where applicable), please.
Studies that have been independently replicated are especially welcome. In such cases, please post the replications as well.
No meta-analyses, please. The last time I did a literature review on the subject, most papers were of embarrassingly low quality and a meta-analysis can easily obscure that. This rule does not introduce bias: if a meta-analysis is based on high quality studies, then those individual studies are admissible here.
For any supposed benefit, meditation should be compared with other means of gaining that benefit. Either in the linked paper, or in the commentary.
Participants' self-reporting on their internal mental states (emotions, thoughts, etc.) is not considered reliable or informative for the purpose of this post. Note: self-reporting on physical behaviours is admissible, although it's best if it's based on some tracking methodology rather than just memory.
If you aren't sure whether your contribution meets those criteria, please post a comment instead of an answer.

There are no rules for the comments, other than basic civility. Anything that contributes to the discussion, including criticism of the rules above, is more than welcome. In fact, I'm going to write in comments some of the backstory and my thoughts before embarking on the search for answers.
What are examples of perennial discoveries?
by Mati_Roy — 2020-05-09T06:17:18.171Z

Quotes are from a private mailing list I'm part of. I asked the author if they wanted acknowledgement; I'll update if so.

Definition of "perennial discoveries": "These are science or engineering 'breakthroughs' that get announced in the press over and over and over, yet almost always fail to reach large-scale commercial use (the failure often not being reported)."

Motivation for asking: "I think it would be significantly easier to make sense of the world if there were a convenient, well-known list of 'perennial discoveries'. [...] A story on the list could be safely assumed to be unimportant, at least without much more information. Conversely, a story not on the list could be much more important than it might initially seem."
Corrigibility as outside view
by TurnTrout — 2020-05-08T21:56:17.548Z

You run a country. One day, you think "I could help so many more people if I set all the rules... and I could make this happen". As far as you can tell, this is the real reason you want to set the rules – you want to help people, and you think you'd do a good job.

But historically… in this kind of situation, this reasoning can lead to terrible things.

So you just don't do it, even though it feels like a good idea.[1] More generally,

Even though my intuition/naïve decision-making process says I should do X, I know (through mental simulation or from history) my algorithm is usually wrong in this situation. I'm not going to do X.

"It feels like I could complete this project within a week. But… in the past, when I've predicted "a week" for projects like this, reality usually gives me a longer answer. I'm not going to trust this feeling. I'm going to allocate extra time."

As a new secretary, I think I know how my boss would want me to reply to an important e-mail. However, I'm not sure. Even though I think I know what to do, common sense recommends I clarify.

You broke up with someone. "Even though I really miss them, in this kind of situation, missing my ex isn't a reliable indicator that I should get back together with them. I'm not going to trust this feeling, and will trust the "sober" version of me which broke up with them."

We are biased and corrupted. By taking the outside view on how our own algorithm performs in a given situation, we can adjust accordingly.

Corrigibility

The "hard problem of corrigibility" is to build an agent which, in an intuitive sense, reasons internally as if from the programmers' external perspective. We think the AI is incomplete, that we might have made mistakes in building it, that we might want to correct it, and that it would be e.g. dangerous for the AI to take large actions or high-impact actions or do weird new things without asking first.

We would ideally want the agent to see itself in exactly this way, behaving as if it were thinking, "I am incomplete and there is an outside force trying to complete me, my design may contain errors and there is an outside force that wants to correct them and this a good thing, my expected utility calculations suggesting that this action has super-high utility may be dangerously mistaken and I should run them past the outside force; I think I've done this calculation showing the expe

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Lessons from Isaac: Pitfalls of Reason
by adamShimi — 2020-05-08T20:44:35.902Z

Welcome back for another entry in Lessons from Isaac, where I comment
Isaac Asimov's robot stories from the perspective of AI Safety.
Last time, I learned that writing a whole post
on a story void of any useful information on the subject was not... ideal.
But don't worry: in Reason, his second robot story, old Isaac
finally starts exploring the ramifications of the Laws of Robotics,
which brings us to AI Safety.

Note: although the robot in this story is not gendered, Asimov
uses "he" to describe it. Probably the remnant of a time
where genders were not as accepted and/or understood as today;
that being said, I'm hardly an expert on which pronouns to use
where, and thus I'll keep Asimov's "he". Also, maintaining Asimov's
convention ensures that my commentary stays coherent with the quotes.

Summary

Two guys work on an orbital station around the sun, which captures
energy and sends it back to Earth. They're tasked with building
a robot from Ikea-like parts; the long-term goal being for this
robot to eventually replace human-labor in the station.
The engineers finish the robot, named QT-1 and thus nicknamed Cutie,
and it works great. Except that Cutie refuses to believe the two engineers
built him. He argues that he's clearly superior to them, both in
terms of body power and reasoning abilities. And since, in his view,

no being can create another being superior to itself

the humans could not have built him.
Also, the whole "we're from Earth to send energy back so that millions of people like
us can live their lives" seems ludicrous to him.

He ends up deducing that he was built by the Master
-- the Converter, the station's main computer --
to do its bidding as an improved version of humans. The engineers try
all they can think of to convince the robot that they built him,
but Cutie stays unconvinced. And when one of the engineers spit
on the Converter out of spite, Cutie has them both confined
in their quarters.

Yet that is impossible! Every robot must follow the three Laws of
Robotics. Among them, the second one states that robots must
obey orders, except when it contradicts with the first law --
that forbids robots to harm or let harm be done to humans.
But here, Cutie refuses to follow orders, even when they would
not endanger humans! And he doesn't seem to know anything about the
Laws of Robotics. What is worse, his not-following-order
is putting lives in dange

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How to do remote co-working
by SoerenMind — 2020-05-08T19:38:11.623Z

The single biggest improvement to my productivity during this epidemic has been from co-working with friends on Skype.

This is really easy to do and doesn’t really need an explanation. But it took some activation energy for me to implement it reasonably well and so I’ll spell out what works for me. Hopefully, that’ll reduce the activation energy for some people.

I’ve entirely stolen this strategy from Jan Brauner who has been regularly co-working on video calls for years. But I’m not claiming this the uniquely best strategy.

Find a co-working partner. There is no shortage of people looking now. You just have to write down a few names and ask them if they want to try co-working. This is very low commitment, they’re just signing up for one session. If you end up with multiple partners, you’ll just have more options.
Set up an initial video call. During the call, share what your plans for the next session are. Then you hang up and work (or stay on call and maybe mute if you prefer).
You both set a timer for e.g. 60 minutes and call each other again when it goes off. Then you tell each other how the session went and if there’s any way in which you’d like to improve. And you can just chat a bit, walk around, have a break. Finally, jump back to step 2) until you want to stop working.
If you decide you want to work together regularly, agree on which days of the week you’ll co-work and at what time you start. Consistency is key.

I find that this works best with two or three people. The more people, the more coordination overhead and the less time everyone gets to reflect about their session in the break.