trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Book Review: Albion’s Seed
by Scott Alexander — 2016-04-27T08:40:44.000Z

I.

Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does.

In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as “Englishmen”, a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer’s thesis is the opposite. Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its own somewhere in the Eastern US.

I used to play Alpha Centauri, a computer game about the colonization of its namesake star system. One of the dynamics that made it so interesting was its backstory, where a Puerto Rican survivalist, an African plutocrat, and other colorful characters organized their own colonial expeditions and competed to seize territory and resources. You got to explore not only the settlement of a new world, but the settlement of a new world by societies dominated by extreme founder effects. What kind of weird pathologies and wonderful innovations do you get when a group of overly romantic Scottish environmentalists is allowed to develop on its own trajectory free of all non-overly-romantic-Scottish-environmentalist influences? Albion’s Seed argues that this is basically the process that formed several early US states.

Fischer describes four of these migrations: the Puritans to New England in the 1620s, the Cavaliers to Virginia in the 1640s, the Quakers to Pennsylvania in the 1670s, and the Borderers to Appalachia in the 1700s.

II.

A: The Puritans

I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England just northeast of London. They came to America partly because they felt persecuted, but...
Exercise in rationality: popular quotes, revisited
by  — 2016-04-25T23:35:42.838Z

A friend recently shared an image of Lincoln with the quote, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt."

Correcting that idea, I replied with the following: "Speak! Reveal your foolishness, and open yourself so that others may enlighten you and you can learn. Fear the false mantle of silence-as-wisdom; better to briefly be the vocal fool than forever the silent fool."

The experience led me to thinking that it might be fun, cathartic, andor a good mental exercise/reminder to translate our culture's more irrational memes into a more presentable package.

Post your own examples if you like, and if I think of/see more I'll post here.
Sphere packing and logical uncertainty
by sanxiyn — 2016-04-25T06:02:57.685Z

Trying posting here since I don't see how to post to https://agentfoundations.org/.

Recently sphere packing was solved in dimension 24, and I read about it on Quanta Magazine. I found the following part of the article (paraphrased) fascinating.

Cohn and Kumar found that the best possible sphere packings in dimensions 24 could be at most 0.0000000000000000000000000001 percent denser than the Leech lattice. Given this ridiculously close estimate, it seemed clear that the Leech lattice must be the best sphere packings in dimension 24.

This is clearly a kind of reasoning under logical uncertainty, and seems very reasonable. Most humans probably would reason similarly, even when they have no idea what the Leech lattice is.

Is this kind of reasoning covered by already known desiderata for logical uncertainty?
Open Thread April 25 - May 1, 2016
by Elo — 2016-04-25T06:02:04.897Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
[Link] Mutual fund fees
by James_Miller — 2016-04-23T22:09:39.949Z

An easy win for rationalists is to avoid actively managed mutual funds. As a NYT article points out:

"High fees, often hidden from view, are still enriching many advisers and financial services companies at the expense of ordinary people who are struggling to salt away savings....even for retirement accounts that are to be covered by the rules, many advisers are not required to act in their clients’ best interests. This means that they are legally entitled to look out for themselves first and recommend investments with higher fees, to the detriment of those who have asked for help....even when fund managers succeed in outperforming their peers in one year, they cannot easily repeat the feat in successive years, as many studies have shown. That’s why low-cost index funds, which merely mirror the performance of the market and don’t try to beat it, make a great deal of sense as a core investment....With fees included, the average actively managed fund in each of 29 asset categories — from those that invest in various sizes and styles of stocks to those that hold fixed-income instruments like government or municipal bonds — underperformed its benchmark over the decade through December. In other words, index funds outperformed the average actively managed fund in every single category....Investors who believe they have found honest and skillful advisers may still want to understand all of this. Not everyone truly has your best interest at heart."
My Custom Spelling Dictionary
by Gram_Stone — 2016-04-23T21:56:23.183Z

I looked at my custom spelling dictionary in Google Chrome, and thought custom spelling dictionaries in general might be a good place for you to look if you wonder what kinds of terms you'll have to explain to people to help them understand what you mean. If something's on your list, then you would probably have to provide an explanation of its usage to a given random individual from the world population.

Here's my list:

anthropogenic

attentional

attentionally

automaticity

beisutsukai

bulletpoint

ceteris

combinatorially

commentariat

credences

curation

disanalogies

Eliezer

epistemic

evolutionarily

formidability

fortiori

gedanken

Gwern

hierarch

impactful

indexical

interpretable

Kahneman

LW

LWers

maladaptive

metacognition

metacognitive

metamemory

MIRI

Newcomblike

normatively

paribus

percepts

prefrontal

pseudonymity

pseudonymously

relatable

situational

superintelligence

underconfidence

underconfident

unobservable

unsimplified

updateless

whistleblow

Share yours, too, if you'd like. Maybe something interesting or useful will come out of it. Maybe there will be patterns.
What is up with carbon dioxide and cognition? An offer
by paulfchristiano — 2016-04-23T17:47:43.494Z

One or two research groups have published work on carbon dioxide and cognition. The state of the published literature is confusing.

Here is one paper on the topic. The authors investigate a proprietary cognitive benchmark, and experimentally manipulate carbon dioxide levels (without affecting other measures of air quality). They find implausibly large effects from increased carbon dioxide concentrations.

If the reported effects are real and the suggested interpretation is correct, I think it would be a big deal. To put this in perspective, carbon dioxide concentrations in my room vary between 500 and 1500 ppm depending on whether I open the windows. The experiment reports on cognitive effects for moving from 600 and 1000 ppm, and finds significant effects compared to interindividual differences.

I haven't spent much time looking into this (maybe 30 minutes, and another 30 minutes to write this post). I expect that if we spent some time looking into indoor CO2 we could have a much better sense of what was going on, by some combination of better literature review, discussion with experts, looking into the benchmark they used, and just generally thinking about it.

So, here's a proposal:

If someone looks into this and writes a post that improves our collective understanding of the issue, I will be willing to buy part of an associated certificate of impact, at a price of around $100*N, where N is my own totally made up estimate of how many hours of my own time it would take to produce a similarly useful writeup. I'd buy up to 50% of the certificate at that price.
Whether or not they want to sell me some of the certificate, on May 1 I'll give a $500 prize to the author of the best publicly-available analysis of the issue. If the best analysis draws heavily on someone else's work, I'll use my discretion: I may split the prize arbitrarily, and may give it to the earlier post even if it is not quite as excellent.

Some clarifications:

The metric for quality is "how useful it is to Paul." I hope that's a useful proxy for how useful it is in general, but no guarantees. I am generally a pretty skeptical person. I would care a lot about even a modest but well-established effect on performance.
These don't need to be new analyses, either for the prize or the purchase.
I reserve the right to resolve all ambiguities arbitrarily, and i

...
The Validity of the Anthropic Principle
by casebash — 2016-04-23T09:12:33.606Z

In my last post, I wrote about how the anthropic principle was often misapplied, that it could not be used within a single model, but only for comparing two or more models. This post will explain why I think that the anthropic principle is valid in every case where we aren't making those mistakes.

There have been many probability problems discussed on this site and one popular viewpoint is that probabilities cannot be discussed as existing by themselves, but only as existing in relation to a series of bets. Imagine that there are two worlds: World A has 10 people and World B has 100. Both worlds have a prior probability of 50% of being correct. Is it the case that World B should instead be given a 10:1 odds due to there being ten times the number of people and the anthropic principle? This sounds surprising, but I would say yes as you’d have to be paid 10 times as much from each person in World A who is correct in order for you to be indifferent between the two worlds. What this means is that if there is a bet that gains or loses you money according to whether you are in world A or world B, you should bet as though the probability of you being in world B is 10 times as much. That doesn’t quite show that the probability is 10:1, but it is rather close. I can’t actually remember the exact process/theorem in order to determine probabilities from betting odds. Can anyone link it to me?

Another way to show that the anthropic principle is probably correct is to note that if world A had 0 people instead, then there would be 100% of observing world B rather than world A. This doesn’t prove much, but it does prove that anthropic effects exist on some level.

Suppose now that world A has 1 person and world B has 1 million people. Maybe you aren’t convinced that you are more likely to observe world B. Let’s consider an equivalent formulation where world A has 1 person who is extremely unobservant and only has a 1 in a million chance of noticing the giant floating A in world A and the other world has a single person, but this time with a 100% chance of noticing the giant floating B in their world. I think it is clear that it is more likely for you to notice a giant floating B than an A.

One more formulation is to have world A have 10 humans and 90 cyborgs and world B to have 100 humans. We can then ask about the probability of be...
Sleepwalk bias, self-defeating predictions and existential risk
by Stefan_Schubert — 2016-04-22T18:31:32.480Z

Connected to: The Argument from Crisis and Pessimism Bias

When we predict the future, we often seem to underestimate the degree to which people will act to avoid adverse outcomes. Examples include Marx's prediction that the ruling classes would fail to act to avert a bloody revolution, predictions of environmental disasters and resource constraints, y2K, etc. In most or all of these cases, there could have been a catastrophe, if people had not acted with determination and ingenuity to prevent it. But when pressed, people often do that, and it seems that we often fail to take that into account when making predictions. In other words: too often we postulate that people will sleepwalk into a disaster. Call this sleepwalk bias.

What are the causes of sleepwalk bias? I think there are two primary causes:

Cognitive constraints. It is easier to just extrapolate existing trends than to engage in complicated reasoning about how people will act to prevent those trends from continuing.

Predictions as warnings. We often fail to distinguish between predictions in the pure sense (what I would bet will happen) and what we may term warnings (what we think will happen, unless appropriate action is taken). Some of these predictions could perhaps be interpreted as warnings - in which case, they were not as bad as they seemed.

However, you could also argue that they were actual predictions, and that they were more effective because they were predictions, rather than warnings. For, more often than not, there will of course be lots of work to reduce the risk of disaster, which will reduce the risk. This means that a warning saying that "if no action is taken, there will be a disaster" is not necessarily very effective as a way to change behaviour - since we know for a fact that action will be taken. A prediction that there is a high probability of a disaster all things considered is much more effective. Indeed, the fact that predictions are more effective than warnings might be the reason why people predict disasters, rather than warn about them. Such predictions are self-defeating - which you may argue is why people make them.

In practice, I think people often fail to distinguish between pure predictions and warnings. They slide between these interpretations. In any case, the effect of all this is for these "prediction-warnings" to seem too pessimistic qua pure predictions.

&nb...
One weird trick to turn maximisers into minimisers
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-04-22T16:47:46.014Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

A simple and easy design for a u-maximising agent that turns into a u-minimising one.

Let X be some boolean random variable outside the agent's control, that will be determined at some future time t (based on a cosmic event, maybe?). Set it up so that P(X=1)=ε, and for a given utility u, consider the utility:

u# = (2/ε)Xu - u.

Before t, the expected value of (2/ε)X is 2, so u# = u. Hence the agent is a u-maximiser. After t, the most likely option is X=0, hence a little bit of evidence to that effect is enough to make u# into a u-minimiser.

This isn't perfect corrigibility - the agent would be willing to sacrifice a bit of u-value (before t) in order to maintain its flexibility after t. To combat this effect, we could instead use:

u# = Ω(2/ε)Xu - u.

If Ω is large, then the agent is willing to pay very little u-value to maintain flexibility. However, the amount of evidence of X=0 that it needs to become a u-minimiser is equally proportional to Ω, so X better be a clear and convincing event.
One weird trick to turn maximisers into minimisers
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-04-22T16:45:02.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

A simple and easy design for a u-maximising agent that turns into a u-minimising one.

Let X be some boolean random variable outside the agent's control, that will be determined at some future time t (based on a cosmic event, maybe?). Set it up so that P(X=1)=ϵ, and for a given utility u consider the utility:

u#=(2/ϵ)Xu−u.

Before t, the expected value of (2/ϵ)X is 2, so u#=u. Hence the agent is a u-maximiser. After t, the most likely option is X=0, hence a little bit of evidence to that effect is enough to make u# into a u-minimiser.

This isn't perfect corrigibility --- the agent would be willing to sacrifice a bit of u-value (before t) in order to maintain its flexibility after t. To combat this effect, we could instead use:

u#=Ω(2/ϵ)Xu−u.

If Ω is large, then the agent is willing to pay very little u-value to maintain flexibility. However, the amount of evidence of X=0 that it needs to become a u-minimiser is equally proportional to Ω, so X better be a clear and convincing event.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-04-22T15:58:04.608Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on April 22nd. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Nairobi mini-Meetup #1: Double Crux: 30 April 2016 03:34PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Baltimore / UMBC Weekly Meetup: How To Actually Change Your Mind (part 2): 24 April 2016 03:00PM
European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
San Antonio Meetup: 24 April 2016 02:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks: 25 April 2016 06:15PM
San Jose Meetup: Park Day (II): 24 April 2016 03:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

[Moscow] Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow: 23 April 2016 03:00AM
Moscow: paranoid calibaration, EA criticism, deliberate practice dojo: 24 April 2016 02:00PM
[Moscow] Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game: 27 April 2016 07:40PM
New Hampshire Meetup: 26 April 2016 07:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - May: 01 May 2016 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 23 April 2016 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 24 April 2016 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are m...
[link] Simplifying the environment: a new convergent instrumental goal
by Kaj_Sotala — 2016-04-22T06:48:33.718Z

http://kajsotala.fi/2016/04/simplifying-the-environment-a-new-convergent-instrumental-goal/

Convergent instrumental goals (also basic AI drives) are goals that are useful for pursuing almost any other goal, and are thus likely to be pursued by any agent that is intelligent enough to understand why they’re useful. They are interesting because they may allow us to roughly predict the behavior of even AI systems that are much more intelligent than we are.

Instrumental goals are also a strong argument for why sufficiently advanced AI systems that were indifferent towards human values could be dangerous towards humans, even if they weren’t actively malicious: because the AI having instrumental goals such as self-preservation or resource acquisition could come to conflict with human well-being. “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”

I’ve thought of a candidate for a new convergent instrumental drive: simplifying the environment to make it more predictable in a way that aligns with your goals.
The Web Browser is Not Your Client (But You Don't Need To Know That)
by Error — 2016-04-22T00:12:25.410Z

(Part of a sequence on discussion technology and NNTP. As last time, I should probably emphasize that I am a crank on this subject and do not actually expect anything I recommend to be implemented. Add whatever salt you feel is necessary)1

If there is one thing I hope readers get out of this sequence, it is this: The Web Browser is Not Your Client.

It looks like you have three or four viable clients -- IE, Firefox, Chrome, et al. You don't. You have one. It has a subforum listing with two items at the top of the display; some widgets on the right hand side for user details, RSS feed, meetups; the top-level post display; and below that, replies nested in the usual way.

Changing your browser has the exact same effect on your Less Wrong experience as changing your operating system, i.e. next to none.

For comparison, consider the Less Wrong IRC, where you can tune your experience with a wide range of different software. If you don't like your UX, there are other clients that give a different UX to the same content and community.

That is how the mechanism of discussion used to work, and does not now. Today, your user experience (UX) in a given community is dictated mostly by the admins of that community, and software development is often neither their forte nor something they have time for. I'll often find myself snarkily responding to feature requests with "you know, someone wrote something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it."

Semantic Collapse

What defines a client? More specifically, what defines a discussion client, a Less Wrong client?

The toolchain by which you read LW probably looks something like this; anyone who's read the source please correct me if I'm off:

Browser -> HTTP server -> LW UI application -> Reddit API -> Backend database.

The database stores all the information about users, posts, etc. The API presents subsets of that information in a way that's convenient for a web application to consume (probably JSON objects, though I haven't checked). The UI layer generates a web page layout and content using that information, which is then presented -- in the form of (mostly) HTML -- by the HTTP server layer to your browser. Your browser figures out what color pixels go where.

All of this is a gross oversimplification, obviously.

In some sense, the browser is self-evidently a client: It talks to an http server, receives hypertext, r...