trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Vim
by lsusr — 2021-04-07T06:35:59.268Z

Vim is a terminal-based editor optimized for speed. Keys are hotkeys by default. Vim does not even use Ctrl for most of them. Maneuvering via hotkeys is so efficient mouse input is often disabled by default.

This guide focuses on the features I use most frequently. It has nothing about with native Vim windows because I use i3 or Spacemacs instead. If you feel I left out a valuable feature then please let me know about it in the comments.

Movement

The simplest way to move is via the hjkl keys.

key
action

h
moves the cursor one character left

j
moves the cursor one line down

k
moves the cursor one line up

l
moves the cursor one character right

The hl keys operate within a single line. Pressing h at the start of a line does nothing. Pressing l at the end of a line does nothing. By line I mean a string of characters ending with a carriage return. The fact that a long paragraph appears to wrap around on your screen is irrelevant.

The jk keys move the cursor down and up a single line. If the cursor is in the 3rd column of the 6th line then pressing j moves the cursor to the 3th column of the 7th line.

Most commands can be prefixed with a number. 4h moves the cursor left 4 characters. 101j moves the cursor down 101 lines.

A sequence of nonempty lines is called a paragraph. The {} keys move the cursor forward and back by paragraphs.

key
action

}
moves the curser forward one paragraph

{
moves the curser backward one paragraph

There are two kinds of "words" in Vim. A word is a sequence of alphanumeric characters. A Word is a sequence of non-whitespace characters. The wbe keys move the cursor around words. The WBE keys move the cursor around Words.

key
action

w
moves the cursor forward to the next start of a word

e
moves the cursor forward to the next end of a word

b
moves the cursor backward to the next start of a word

W
moves the cursor forward to the next start of a Word

E
moves the cursor forward to the next end of a Word

B
moves the cursor backward to the next start of a Word

The #* keys move the cursor forward and backward to the next "idenfitier". If the cursor hovers over the word "marmot" then pressing * will move the cursor forward to the next instance of the word "marmot" and pressing # will move the cursor backward to the previous instance of the word "marmot".

key
action

#
moves the cursor backward to the

...
Curious Inquiry and Rigorous Training
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-04-06T22:38:41.125Z

Epistemic status: personal opinion and theorizing, based on recent conversations and explorations of Anki and the use cases of flashcards for autodidacticism in STEM. Mainly of use to continue directing my own Curious Inquiry, and hoping others find it a valuable framework as well.

Textbooks are jam-packed with facts. Students get tested on these facts shortly after reading about them for the first time. Often, they don't use good learning strategies to meet this challenge. This makes classroom education stressful and time-consuming. They're judged not on their enthusiasm, but on their homework and test scores. Many students either tune out or identify learning with achieving a grade.

This aspect of classroom education is practice for the sort of high-pressure, short-term ability knowledge workers need to cultivate for new projects and workflows. I call it Rigorous Training. To be able to put new, detailed information into your head, and use it to satisfy someone else's requirements, is a valuable skill. It's best to be efficient at it. What's the minimum time, effort, and strain you can use to excel on a test or project?

Curious Inquiry is different from Rigorous Training. There is no test. That's very important. But it is a concrete skill, with a procedure by which you carry it out. Curious Inquiry works a little like this:

Find a new concept and take in some basic facts about it. For example, you might hear about the poly(A) tail in mRNA, and read the facts stated in the introduction to the Wikipedia article on polyadenlyation.
Build an understanding of those basic facts by generating something new.

Ask questions about things you don't understand or are curious about. Proteins cleave the 3' end and synthesize the poly(A) tail, but which proteins, and how do they work together?
Make up gears-level models and propose hypotheses. Since the poly(A) tail determines how long the mRNA lasts, proteins might modify it in response to dynamic cellular needs for the proteins it generates.
Find a metaphor and explain it in your own words. The poly(A) tail is like a molecular "clock" or "fuse."

Based on what you generate, find a new set of basic facts and repeat. Notice when your level of curiosity is decreasing, and switch to something else.

With Curious Inquiry, you're not trying to retain the facts you learn or the understandings you generate for the long term. You're just wa...
Testing The Natural Abstraction Hypothesis: Project Intro
by johnswentworth — 2021-04-06T21:24:43.135Z

The

natural abstraction hypothesis

says that

Our physical world abstracts well: for most systems, the information relevant “far away” from the system (in various senses) is much lower-dimensional than the system itself. These low-dimensional summaries are exactly the high-level abstract objects/concepts typically used by humans.
These abstractions are “natural”: a wide variety of cognitive architectures will learn to use approximately the same high-level abstract objects/concepts to reason about the world.

If true, the natural abstraction hypothesis would dramatically simplify AI and AI alignment in particular. It would mean that a wide variety of cognitive architectures will reliably learn approximately-the-same concepts as humans use, and that these concepts can be precisely and unambiguously specified.

Ultimately, the natural abstraction hypothesis is an empirical claim, and will need to be tested empirically. At this point, however, we lack even the tools required to test it. This post is an intro to a project to build those tools and, ultimately, test the natural abstraction hypothesis in the real world.

Background & Motivation

One of the major conceptual challenges of designing human-aligned AI is the fact that

human values are a function of humans’ latent variables

: humans care about abstract objects/concepts like trees, cars, or other humans, not about low-level quantum world-states directly. This leads to conceptual problems of defining “what we want” in physical, reductive terms. More generally, it leads to conceptual problems in

translating

between human concepts and concepts learned by other systems - e.g. ML systems or biological systems.

If true, the natural abstraction hypothesis provides a framework for translating between high-level human concepts, low-level physical systems, and high-level concepts used by non-human systems.

The foundations of the framework have been sketched out in previous posts.

What is Abstraction?

introduces the mathematical formulation of the framework and provides several examples. Briefly: the high-dimensional internal details of far-apart subsystems are independent given their low-dimensional “abstract” summaries. For instance, the

Lumped Circuit Abstraction

abstracts away all the details of molecule positions or wire shapes in an electronic circuit, and represents the circuit as components each summarized by some low-d...
AI oracles on blockchain
by Caravaggio — 2021-04-06T20:13:29.567Z

Epistemic status: Speculation on one path of AI development, but it has been on my mind for a while

Note: I haven't found this idea developed anywhere, but possible it has already been discussed

Blockchain's locked-in syndrome

Blockchains today suffer from a locked-in syndrome. There is a vibrant activity and innovation within the ecosystem, however most of it is self referential. DeFi protocols allow users to trade, lease and stake DeFi tokens that themselves support the governance of those protocols. Painstaking efforts are extended to link, in a decentralized way, some of the tokens to the external world. Example of complex protocol designed to achieve a decentralized link to external information is the USD-linked Dai stablecoin.

Blockchain is locked-in because of the well known Oracle Problem- when external data is entered into the blockchain there is no easy way to ascertain the trustworthiness of the information. External data input invalidates the whole concept of a trustless system, as it requires trust in the provider of the data, known as the blockchain oracle.

Several projects attempt to design incentive structures that generate trustworthy human-based oracles. So far, none of them are widely used and successful. However, for blockchain to fulfill its promise it will need to interact with the external world. Immediate use cases of external information on blockchain include tokenization of financial assets, development of insurance smart contracts, and adjudication of prediction markets.

AI as a solution to the oracle problem

AI oracles seem to be a potential solution for the oracle problem. A decentralized narrow AI program's could be ported onto the blockchain and employed to provide immutable decisions for smart contracts based on interpretation of external information streams. A GPT-3 style program could scan the internet and decide the outcome of a prediction market contract on, say, election outcome. Decentralized image recognition could be used to verify insurance claims.

By being based on blockchain, the AI oracle will be decentralized, its code and decisions transparent and its decisions immutable. When combined with higher scalability, the AI oracles will be superior to incentive-based, human-verified oracles. Currently, AI is not widely used for oracles on blockchain due to low computational bandwidth of blockchain. This will change as ...
Reflective Bayesianism
by abramdemski — 2021-04-06T19:48:43.917Z

I've argued in several places that traditional Bayesian reasoning is unable to properly handle embeddedness, logical uncertainty, and related issues.

However, in the light of hindsight, it's possible to imagine a Bayesian pondering these things, and "escaping the trap". This is because the trap was largely made out of assumptions we didn't usually explicitly recognize we were making.

Therefore, in order to aid moving beyond the traditional view, I think it's instructive to paint a detailed picture of what a traditional Bayesian might believe. This can be seen as a partner to my post Radical Probabilism, which explained in considerable detail how to move beyond the traditional Bayesian view.

Simple Belief vs Reflective Belief

There is an important distinction between the explicit dogmas of a view (ie, what adherents explicitly endorse) vs what one would need to believe in order to agree with them. One can become familiar with this distinction by studying logic, especially Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Tarski's undefinability theorem. In particular:

Axiomatic systems such as set theory cannot proclaim themselves self-consistent (unless they are, indeed, inconsistent). However, adherents believe the system to be consistent. If they seriously doubted this, they would not use the system.
Such axiomatic systems cannot discuss their own semantics (their map-territory correspondence). However, adherents regularly discuss this.

This becomes especially interesting when we're studying rationality (rather than, say, mathematics), because a theory of rationality is supposed to characterize normatively correct thinking. Yet, due to the above facts, philosophers will typically end up in a strange position where they endorse principles very different from the ones they themselves are using. For example, a philosopher arguing that set theory is the ultimate foundation of rational thought would find themselves in the strange position of utilizing "irrational" tools (tools which go beyond set theory) to come to its defense, EG in discussing the semantics of set theory or arguing for its consistency.1

I'll use the term simple belief to indicate accepting the explicit dogmas, and reflective belief to indicate accepting the meta-dogmas which justify the dogmas.2,3 (These are not terms intended to stand the test of time; I'm not sure about the best terminology, and probably won...
Don't Sell Your Soul
by Jacob Falkovich — 2021-04-06T19:02:55.391Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

You know the lockdown has dragged on for too long when people are selling their souls on Twitter.

Normally the soul-selling is of the NDA-for-a-six-figure-job kind, which is par for the course. But this time it went way beyond that. A self-described

desert witch

on Twitter

offered people $10

in return for their signature on a

stringent 54-point contract

giving up possession of their souls, whatever that may mean.

Twelve people

took the deal.

Since I’m a Rationalist, and this happened in my corner of Twitter, and no-one knows how to define this corner except through vague associations with Rationality, and since everyone knows that Rationalists are atheists who don’t believe in souls,

a common reaction

was that the Rationalists are at it again.

But the actual Rationalists who chimed in seemed unanimous that selling your soul to a desert witch on Twitter is a really dumb thing to do. Even if in the grand scheme of things this is all just online silliness, I think it’s a useful case study of the difference between the popular conception of “rationalists” and someone who actually spent years in the community contemplating Rationalist questions of knowledge, confidence, and decision theory.

And so I would posit that Rationality is knowing better than to sign a contract selling your soul for $10, regardless of whether you believe in souls.

I don’t speak authoritatively for all “Rationalists”, of course. No one can really do that. I’m using the term because before I knew about Rationality the most I would’ve been able to say about selling your soul is that I have a hunch that it’s dumb. Rationality introduced me to many frameworks that can explicate why exactly is dumb. Since frameworks make for better blog posts than hunches, below are the Rationalist

physical materialist

reasons not to sell your soul.

Advocatus Diaboli

Let’s start with the devil’s case. Why may it be a good idea to sell your soul for $10?

One possible reason: it’s just a performance, art for art’s sake. I certainly believe that art deserves its sake! But it’s important to note that in this case Liminal Warmth, the soul proprietor, is the artist. She came up with the idea, she drew up the contract, she decides what to do with the souls. The seller is hardly a co-creator in this, they’re more of a prop. This is somewhat akin to letting a tattoo artist you don’t know ink whatev...
Monastery and Throne
by Jacob Falkovich — 2021-04-06T19:00:52.623Z

Thinking about the impact of Rationalist writing after a small blog post made a big difference. Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

Changing British Minds

Even a year after the fact, it’s difficult to compile an accurate timeline of the UK Government’s thinking on COVID and how it changed in spring 2020.

The first COVID case in the UK was confirmed on January 31. Spread continued throughout February, and the British government published its first

Coronavirus action plan

on March 3. It focused on the tracing and isolation of known cases while saying that it “will aim to minimise the social and economic impact” and that “it may be that widespread exposure in the UK is inevitable”.

The decisions ultimately came down to PM Boris Johnson and his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. At the beginning of March, according to the

Sunday Times

, Cummings leaned towards a strategy of herd immunity: having the majority of the UK’s population catch the virus throughout the summer months to protect the economy and put Britain in the clear by winter.

The PM’s office denied

this claim and alleged that the quotes attributed to Cummings by the Sunday Times were fabricated. In any case there were clearly heated debates within Johnson’s inner circle on the costs and benefits of mitigation.

Whatever the stance was in the first two weeks of March, by March 12 things began to shift. The strategic advisory group of experts warned that the UK would suffer 500,000 deaths if the virus was left unmitigated, and Cummings himself

began pushing vigorously for a shut down

. The UK Government began implementing mitigation measures on March 13, and on March 23

announced a full lockdown

of the entire nation. The UK spring COVID wave peaked at 70 daily cases per million, significantly below the US and many European nations.

Oh,

there’s one other thing

that may have changed the mind of Dominic Cummings and the fate of Britain in early March.

Post Impact

The four hours I spent writing

Seeing the Smoke

on a whim were

more impactful

than projects I spent months of my life on. I calculated that if just 1% of the 20,000 people who read that post the week it came out avoided catching COVID and infecting others during a period when the curve was steepening, the post probably saved several lives. To learn that my post impacted policy for 67 million Britons is a whole other level of bonkers.

I’m struggling a bit to make sen...
There Is No Control System For COVID
by Mike Harris — 2021-04-06T17:16:04.171Z

Introduction:

The standard model for explaining COVID transmission has a serious problem with the data. In the United States, despite seemingly large differences in policy and behavior, the difference in infection rates has been relatively small.

In this article I will explain why this convergence is so surprising for the standard model and how a relatively small modification can give much more sensible results. I will also discuss some of the other suggested approaches and why they are not able to adequately solve this problem.

The Problem:

If we look at the infection data as of November 2021, before California and New York had their winter surge, we see widely varying COVID infection rates. Vermont, the least infected state, had less than 3% of its population infected. The most infected state (excluding ones with major outbreaks before lockdown) was North Dakota with almost 28% of its population infected.

These large differences were attributed to different levels of restrictions and seriousness among the residents in fighting COVID. California was not the least infected state, and Florida not the most infected, but as large states with deviating policy responses and corresponding differences in infection rates they came to epitomize the two sides.

Florida, with its loose policies had people spend ~20% more time outside the house than California did, and by November 1st 20% of the population had been infected compared to California's 12%.

The implication then is that if Florida were to reduce its transmission by the 20% necessary to match California it would reduce its infection rate to 12%. However if we try to fit the daily transmission rate to the observed data in Florida, we see that reducing it by 20% would mean that only 0.75% would have been infected. In order to match California's infection rate Florida would have needed to reduce its transmission rate by just 3%

Using similar simulations we can see that the difference needed for Florida to match the best state, Vermont, is just 10% while an increase of 10% would have doubled the number of infections, and made it by far the highest in the country.

When you combine these points together you get the following problems for the standard model:

Despite seemingly wide variations in behavior and lockdown strictness all states had nearly the same amount of transmission.

The duration of the epidemic is highly un

...
The Accord
by Timothy Underwood — 2021-04-06T15:44:28.797Z

In the middle of last year, I wrote a transhumanist sci fi novella inspired by (among other things) SSC's post about the Archipelago. It was quite intentionally written as a sci fi story drawing on Less Wrong discussions of AI, and it uses an idea I got from something EY wrote about AI merging their value functions to create the government of the system. It also draws ideas from Isaac Arthur's futurism youtube channel (which I also think a lot of people here might like).

Also, it isn't really a traditional novel or story, rather it is basically one of those books written by a fake historian that the quotes at the start of each chapter in a sci fi or fantasy novel come from. That and excerpts from the comment section after each chapter. I try looking at the archipelago as an example of one way to distribute resources in a post human labor society. But it definitely not a post scarcity world, since you can't get that if while you have physical limits to the total amount of energy and stuff you can use. So I'm also exploring the ways that malthusian limits might manifest in the context of an AGI that grabs all of the resources available and makse them available for humans to use, but which also fully respects human autonomy

So I've posted the whole thing for free, so go read it if any of that sounds cool, :)

The Accord
Preventing overcharging by prosecutors
by ChristianKl — 2021-04-06T11:13:50.893Z

In criminal cases in the United States prosecutors often add a lot of charges for a defendant to have ammunition for coercing the defendant into a plea deal. This is toxic because the defendant doesn't know which of those charges are likely to hold up in court if the case would be decided by a jury. Given that there's little cost to the prosecutor for adding additional charges, defendants are often overcharged.

I propose that whenever a prosecutor files a charge for a defendant, the prosecutor should state the likelihood that in the absence of a deal the court will find the defendant guilty of the charge. The ability of the prosecutor to accurately access the likelihood can be measured via the Briers score or a Log score.

The current score should be publicly accessible on the website of the court. This allows the defendant to know whether they can trust the likelihood values the prosecutor gives. The score should also be printed on ballots when the prosecutor seeks reelection to create much higher incentives for the prosecutor to give the correct likelihood then convicting a lot of people.

After the prosecutor provides the likelihood for the charges it's much easier for a defendant to make a good decision about whether taken a given plea deal is in their interest. Prosecutors with a good Briers score will be able to make more plea deals to reduce their overall workload because it's easier for the defendant to know that a deal is in their interest.

While this reform wouldn't fix all problems with plea deals, as some plea deals are due to the defendant being given charges that would actually hold up in court given the existing criminal code, the reform will provide defendants with fairer plea deals. Defendants getting fair plea deals is good for the system given that it keeps overall legal costs down.

I would expect that many juries will automatically throw out a 10% or 20% charges because there will be people on the jury who would argue that the prosecutor thinking that there's only a 20% chance that a charge holds means that there's reasonable doubt against the charge.

This reform is both in the interests of citizens who care about law and order and citizens who care about reducing sentencing overall as everybody should be interested in prosecutors providing fair plea deals.