trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Thinking Toys
by Gary Basin — 2017-10-20T21:45:37.499Z

Original post at http://garybasin.com/thinking-toys/

My mind seems to mostly act as an emotional problem-solving machine. It's trying to find paths to get to pleasure and avoid pain. Of course, this often requires solving abstract problems, as well. Watching myself, and others, identify and solve problems suggests the existence of underlying patterns. There seem to be recurring strategies. Some simple and some compound. Some that an individual may use almost every time and others that rarely come up. There are strategies that seem obvious to one person and remain unheard of to others. Sometimes we deploy these strategies consciously but often they seem to run unconsciously.

I call these strategies Thinking Toys. Little tricks we can pick up, play with for a moment, and then throw aside as we move on. Using a toy more often seems to make it more accessible. We also learn more of its nuances -- we improve at using it. I'm trying to explicate as many of these as I can. Eventually, I want to categorize them and try to understand how they relate to each other.

See if any of these are interesting to you. Some will be familiar and obvious, whereas others may feel strange and alien. I'm writing one a week and sending them out in a newsletter, if you're interested in following along.

Bargaining

Useful and not-so-useful ways of bargaining with yourself -- between parts of you that desire different things. Bargaining as a mechanism to reduce anxiety, guilt, and distraction, freeing up the energy to focus on one strategy at a time.

Undichotomizing

Practicing the skill of identifying potential false dichotomies and generating alternatives. I find this to be one of the most common problems people run into without realizing.

Curiosity

How to build the skill of empathizing with ideas that rub you the wrong way. Being curious in order to improve our models of the world and thereby be able to act more effectively.

Action Echoes

Framing of action patterns as bundles of future actions as a way to overcome short-term urges. Based on Ainslie's work in Breakdown of Will.

Tonglen

Technique for the transformation of one mental state into another. Breathing in what you are avoiding and breathing out what you seek. Based on the Tantric meditation practice of the same name.

Focusing

Gendlin's technique for making explicit the complex implicit thoughts and feelings around

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LDL 2: Nonconvex Optimization
by magfrump — 2017-10-20T18:20:54.915Z

Edit 10/23: by request I'm going back and putting the images in. It's a pain that you can't place images in line! Also I edited the dumb probability calculation to make more sense since I may not be able to write another post today.

My favorite “party theorem” is Gauss-Bonnet. It’s the theorem that tells you why New Yorkers fold their pizza to eat it.

The statement of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem is, basically, for a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold, that the integral of Gaussian curvature over the interior plus the integral of geodesic curvature over the boundary is equal to 2 times pi times the Euler characteristic of the manifold.

The most important consequence of this is that the amount of curvature occurring on a surface is a topological constant. That is, in order to change “how curved” something is you have to tear or crease it, you can’t just stretch or bend it.

Now hopefully anyone can tell you that pizza, to begin with, is flat.

But as most people who have eaten pizza can also tell you, it doesn’t always stay flat.

(note: there aren't very many pictures of toppings falling off pizza around so I had to use one that isn't labeled for reuse--if this post starts getting lots of views please remind me to remove this image)

And this can cause all the toppings to fall off.

Is the pizza tearing or folding? No, usually it’s just bending and stretching. So if that can’t change how curved it is, why can the toppings fall off your pizza?

The answer is that Gaussian curvature, the ‘correct’ kind of curvature in the sense that it’s the kind that is topologically constant over the surface of the manifold, is basically the “curvature in both directions,” when looking at a surface.

When a pizza is flat, you can choose any direction, and it’s not curved, so 0. Then you choose the orthogonal direction, and it’s still not curved, so that’s 0 too. Then multiply those to get Gaussian curvature, and you get 0.

Conveniently, if you multiply ANYTHING by zero, you get zero. So all you need for your pizza to work out is, basically, one direction where the pizza isn’t curved, and it can curve as much as it wants in the other direction and still be “flat” since the curvature is being multiplied by zero.

But you can exploit this! If you pick a direction and purposefully curve your pizza in that direction, then in order to be “flat” in the Gaussian curvatur

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NYC Solstice and East Coast Megameetup. Interested in attending? We need your help.
by clarkey — 2017-10-20T16:49:53.619Z

Hey all, we’re currently raising funds for this year’s NYC Secular Solstice. As in previous years, this will be coinciding with the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, which will be a mass sleepover and gathering in NYC spanning an entire weekend from December 8th to 10th.

The Solstice itself is on December 9th from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm, followed by an afterparty. This year’s theme is “Generations” - the passing down of culture and knowledge from teacher to student, from master to apprentice, from parent to child. The stories we tell will investigate the methods by which this knowledge has been preserved, and how we can continue to do so for future generations.

Sounds great. How can I help?

In previous years, Solstice has been mostly underwritten by a few generous individuals; we’re trying to produce a more sustainable base of donations for this year’s event. Right now, our sustainable ticket price is about $30, which we’ve found seems steep to newcomers. Our long-term path to sustainability at a lower price point involves getting more yearly attendance, so we want to continue to provide discounted access for the general public and people with tight finances. So. Our hope is for you to donate this year the amount that you'd be happy to donate each year, to ensure the NYC Solstice continues to thrive.

$15 - Newcomer / Affordable option: If you're new, or you're not sure how much Solstice is worth to you, or finances are tight, you're welcome to come with a donation of $15.

$35 - Sponsorship option: You attend Solstice, and you contribute a bit towards subsidizing others using the newcomer/affordable option.

$25 Volunteering Option - If you're willing to put in roughly 3 hours of work (enough to do a shopping-spree for the afterparty, or show up early to set up, or help run the ticketstand, help clean up, etc)

$50 and higher - Higher levels of sponsorship for those who are able.

Donate at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1939801081/nyc-secular-solstice-2017-generations

Wait, I’m new to this. What is Secular Solstice?

Secular Solstice is a rationalist tradition, and one of the few public facing rationalist held events. It’s what it says on the tin: a nonreligious winter solstice holiday. We sing, we tell stories about scientific progress and humanist values, we light candles. Usually, we get about 150 people in NYC. For more info, or if you’r

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NYC Solstice and East Coast Megameetup. Interested in attending? We need your help.
by Rachel Shu — 2017-10-20T16:32:37.906Z

Hey all, we’re currently raising funds for this year’s NYC Secular Solstice. As in previous years, this will be coinciding with the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, which will be a mass sleepover and gathering in NYC spanning an entire weekend from December 8th to 10th.

The Solstice itself is on December 9th from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm, followed by an afterparty. This year’s theme is “Generations” - the passing down of culture and knowledge from teacher to student, from master to apprentice, from parent to child. The stories we tell will investigate the methods by which this knowledge has been preserved, and how we can continue to do so for future generations.

Sounds great. How can I help?

In previous years, Solstice has been mostly underwritten by a few generous individuals; we’re trying to produce a more sustainable base of donations for this year’s event. Right now, our sustainable ticket price is about $30, which we’ve found seems steep to newcomers. Our long-term path to sustainability at a lower price point involves getting more yearly attendance, so we want to continue to provide discounted access for the general public and people with tight finances. So. Our hope is for you to donate this year the amount that you'd be happy to donate each year, to ensure the NYC Solstice continues to thrive.

$15 - Newcomer / Affordable option: If you're new, or you're not sure how much Solstice is worth to you, or finances are tight, you're welcome to come with a donation of $15.

$35 - Sponsorship option: You attend Solstice, and you contribute a bit towards subsidizing others using the newcomer/affordable option.

$25 Volunteering Option - If you're willing to put in roughly 3 hours of work (enough to do a shopping-spree for the afterparty, or show up early to set up, or help run the ticketstand, help clean up, etc)

$50 and higher - Higher levels of sponsorship for those who are able.

Donate at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1939801081/nyc-secular-solstice-2017-generations

Wait, I’m new to this. What is Secular Solstice?

Secular Solstice is a rationalist tradition, and one of the few public facing rationalist held events. It’s what it says on the tin: a nonreligious winter solstice holiday. We sing, we tell stories about scientific progress and humanist values, we light candles. Usually, we...
10/20/17 Development Update: HTML pasting, the return of the bullets and bugfixes
by habryka — 2017-10-20T08:31:25.396Z

Quick summary of the changes I just pushed:

You can now finally paste HTML and Rich Text content into our editor! This means copy-pasting content from Google Docs or Wordpress or whatever other tools you use for writing now preserves formatting such as italics, bold and links. We only import the formatting that we support, so you won't be able to copy tables or images or other similar things.

Bullet lists work again in the editor

Meta posts no longer have the personal blog background

I renamed the frontpage sections. "Recent Frontpage Posts" now just says "Frontpage Posts" (since the "recent" implied that they were sorted by time, which they weren't) and "Featured Posts" now just says "Featured".

A bunch of smaller bugfixes

Let me know if you notice anything broken. We should be pushing another large chunk of performance improvements in the next few days, and also fix the thing where you don't immediately see that you upvoted your own comments.
The Four States: action, cognitive, emotional, relational
by squidious — 2017-10-20T07:00:00.000Z

During a discussion on how to make the rationalist community more "Hufflepuff", the idea was brought up to define what "more Hufflepuff" even means. Words like cooperation, loyalty, diligence, and empathy were written down. As the list grew longer, I realized they all fit one or two of three categories: relational, emotional, and action. These are the three states that Hufflepuffs are most valued for. Loyalty is a relational state, while diligence is an action state. Meanwhile, cooperation is a blend of action and relational, and empathy is a blend of emotional and relational.

The fourth state (cognitive) is more or less what the community was founded on, so it makes sense that the other three are where the community is lacking. People and communities often pick a state to prioritize, letting others fall by the wayside. My experience with other communities show that the cognitive state is often deprioritized, which is why it makes sense that there would be demand for a community that bases itself in such a state. A person coming from a socio-emotionally heavy subculture may find rationality refreshing in its focus on truth-seeking as opposed to what "feels good", and an imbalance in other communities may cause rationalists to lean too heavily on the cognitive, ignoring other states altogether.

Regardless of whether or not you consider yourself a rationalist, there is probably a state where you see yourself or your community lacking. As with many theories in personality psychology, there is an implication here that balance is best. I don't want to assume that this is true in all cases, but running a few mental experiments could shed light on the tradeoffs. If a cognitive-heavy community focused on action a little more, what would that look like? If a friend who spends a lot of time in the relational state started setting aside time for emotional processing, what would they lose and gain? On a community-wide level, balance between the states makes the community more open to different kinds of people. A cognitive community with more relational focus would feel more welcoming, and more focus on the emotional state might help it feel more comfortable and safe. But for those who want the kind of community with a high barrier to entry, this may not be particularly wanted. Instead, they may prefer focusing on the cognitive even more

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Recent updates to gwern.net (2016-2017)
by gwern — 2017-10-20T02:11:07.808Z

Previously: 2011; 2012-2013; 2013-2014; 2014-2015; 2015-2016

“Every season hath its pleasures; / Spring may boast her flowery prime, / Yet the vineyard’s ruby treasures / Brighten Autumn’s sob’rer time.”

Another year of my completed writings, sorted by topic:

AI:

Why Tool AIs Want To Be Agent AIs

The Kelly Coin-Flipping Problem: Exact Solutions via Decision Trees, Approximations, and Generalizations

Genetics:

Genetic Correlation Wikipedia article (Writing this article set a personal record for 'most excessive number of references'.)

compiled modern genetics bibliography

Biology:

frequency of catnip response in cats: a meta-analysis

“How Would You Prove You Are a Time-traveler From the Past?”

Statistics:

Efficiently calculating the average maximum sample from a sample of Gaussians

“Proportion of Important Thinkers by Global Region Over Time in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment: bootstrap & Bayesian time-series approaches”

blind mineral water taste test using Bayesian best-arm bandits

WiFi bandwidth benchmarking & optimizing

Misc:

“Ted Chiang’s ‘Story Of Your Life’ Is Not A Time-Travel Story”

compiled my quips & bad jokes

why aren’t there powerful general languages?

laptop data loss postmortem

gwern.net has undergone some wide-ranging changes, primarily an addition of a new metadata field “importance” (benefiting from my resorter too, incidentally), switch to HTTPS, complete revision of the URL scheme to from trouble-prone spaces to hyphens, renaming hundreds of hosted files, removal of Google AdSense (due to an A/B test indicating serious damage to traffic), and defining thousands of redirects for moves & broken links & typos, as well as additional minor visual tweaks to the CSS, layout, and logo. I continue to use Patreon which is more successful than ever (thanks!) and send out my newsletters.
Yudkowsky on AGI ethics
by Rob Bensinger — 2017-10-19T23:13:59.829Z

A Cornell computer scientist recently wrote on social media:

[...] I think the general sense in AI is that we don't know what will play out, but some of these possibilities are bad, and we need to start thinking about it. We are plagued by highly visible people ranging from Musk to Ng painting pictures ranging from imminent risk to highly premature needless fear, but that doesn't depict the center of gravity, which has noticeably shifted to thinking about the potential bad outcomes and what we might do about it. (Turning close to home to provide an example of how mainstream this is becoming, at Cornell two AI professors, Joe Halpern and Bart Selman, ran a seminar and course last semester on societal and ethical challenges for AI, and only just a few weeks ago we had a labor economist speak in our CS colloquium series about policy ideas targeting possible future directions for CS and AI, to an extremely large and enthusiastic audience.)

To which Eliezer Yudkowsky replied:

My forecast of the net effects of "ethical" discussion is negative; I expect it to be a cheap, easy, attention-grabbing distraction from technical issues and technical thoughts that actually determine okay outcomes. [...]

The ethics of bridge-building is to not have your bridge fall down and kill people and there is a frame of mind in which this obviousness is obvious enough. How not to have the bridge fall down is hard.

This is possibly surprising coming from the person who came up with coherent extrapolated volition, co-wrote the Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence article on "The Ethics of AI," etc. The relevant background comes from Eliezer's writing on the minimality principle:

[W]hen we are building the first sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence, we are operating in an extremely dangerous context in which building a marginally more powerful AI is marginally more dangerous. The first AGI ever built should therefore execute the least dangerous plan for preventing immediately following AGIs from destroying the world six months later. Furthermore, the least dangerous plan is not the plan that seems to contain the fewest material actions that seem risky in a conventional sense, but rather the plan that requires the least dangerous cognition from the AGI executing it. Similarly, inside the AGI itself, if a class of thought seems dangerous bu

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Regress Thyself to the Mean
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-10-19T22:42:08.925Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/regress-thyself-to-the-mean-932d5fd9789d

I don’t usually write about well understood things: others are better explainers than I am, and I have more fun working at the edge. But a few weeks ago I was commenting on a Facebook post and the exchange went something like this:

Them: I think [subculture] is fading out because it’s being softened by the surrounding culture of the city.

Me: Actually, that seems insufficiently parsimonious to me. I think a simpler explanation is that people in [subculture] are aging.

Someone else: You don’t even need to suppose it’s aging related. It’s probably just regression to the mean.

Me:

So to atone for my sin of neglecting the most likely reason anything ever happens, I present to you my penance — an introduction to regression to the mean.

Regressive Statistics

Suppose you are sitting on a park bench, watching people walk by. You notice the height of each person that passes you and develop a sense for how the height of people at the park is distributed. After some time a friend joins you on the bench and, hearing about what you’ve been doing, ask you if the next person to walk by is likely to be taller or shorter than the last person who did.

Regression to the mean tells you how to answer this. Whatever the distribution of the heights of the park goers, each person who walks by, lacking any other information to inform your decision, is likely to be in the direction of the mean within the height distribution relative to the previous person. So if a short person walks by, you tell your friend the next person is likely to be taller and vice versa, and most of the time you will be right!

There are several ways to understand why this works, but I think the most straightforward is to think in terms of sampling from a distribution. You know the heights of the people you’ve seen in the park, so if you charted a histogram of their height measurements you’d get a picture that looked approximately like this:

Then if you observe someone of any particular height, you can divide the histogram into two sections: those shorter than the observed height and those taller. Because of the way the data is distributed, though, the side with the mean will always have more of the probability density than the other side, so it is always more likely than not that the next sample will be in the direction where the mean is locate...
Learning Deep Learning:
Joining data science research as a mathematician
by magfrump — 2017-10-19T19:14:01.823Z

About two years ago I finished my PhD in mathematics on an obscure technical topic in number theory. I left academic math because I wanted to do something that had a bigger (i.e. any) impact on the world around me. I also wanted to get out of the extremely perverse academic job market.

Since then, I’ve designed taught courses on machine learning and am now working as a data scientist for a large company you’ve heard of (but not that one). In some respects I feel like my background in math better prepared me for this job than I can imagine a data science program doing—I think my desire for a higher burden of proof than p=.05 is one of the most important things I’ve brought to the table in all the projects I’ve touched. I’ve also gotten a lot out of my background on LessWrong, mostly because it’s the only place I’ve ever really studied statistics. You’d think you couldn’t get a math PhD without doing at least a little stats, but you’d be wrong.

Anyway there is one aspect of data science that I’m definitely behind the curve on, and that’s the software engineering side. In particular, as a mathematician I’m very read to grab a hold of a lot of abstraction and then tuck it into a black box and then reopen it whenever it doesn’t work exactly how I expect. But in the modern data science community, there are a ton of abstractions and they’ve only been boxed up inconsistently.

I read a lot about deep learning research, both on LessWrong and for work, and there are a ton of interesting experiments that I would like to replicate and a handful of original research ideas I’d like to try out, just in brief prototypes to see if they are even worth exploring or thinking about. To do this, what I want is something like the ability to write the following code:

model = pre_trained_alexnet()
GAN = generative_adversarial_network()
model.transfer(new_task())
GAN.aggrieve(model,new_task())

While it may be possible to do things like this, especially with libraries like keras, this isn’t where most introductions to deep learning start.

Frustratingly for me, they almost all start with a huge series of videos on how to implement backpropagation where they insist that it’s not really that bad if you don’t understand all the calculus. To me this feels like doing absolutely nothing—these parts of the process have already been well established and optimized beyond my ability to contribute

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