trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Coronavirus and Rents
by jefftk — 2020-06-20T16:20:03.133Z

With everyone staying home, cities make a lot less sense. Many people
who previously wanted to minimize their commutes are working from
home, and could live anywhere. People who wanted to live close to
friends and family aren't seeing them. People who like to go to
restaurants, bars, clubs, or dances aren't doing that either. On the
other hand, the benefits of living farther out, such as space,
proximity to nature, and cost, are if anything even more important.
So I've seen a stream of friends posting about how they're leaving
Boston, NYC, SF, and other cities, at least for now.

I track Boston rental listings for my rent
map, and you can see this reflected in the data. Here are new
two-bedroom listings for the last three months, compared to the same
three months last year:

Each chart shows all two-bedroom listings in the data, sorted from
cheapest to most expensive (sheet).
In April prices were about the same as last year, but they dropped in
May, and even further in June. Most of the change is in fancy units:
the median 2BR (~$2800) was $50 cheaper (2%) in May year-over-year
and $75 (3%) cheaper in June y/y, while the 90th percentile 2BR
(~$4250) fell $440 (10%) for May and $700 (16%) for June.

This makes sense: the people renting expensive units are probably
disproportionately people who can work from anywhere remotely, and
people who in normal times are highly reliant on the city for
entertainment. I expect it's even more dramatic in SF, where so much
of the housing boom has been driven by tech employment.

I think we're probably not done, though. Many landlords are small, and
slow to react to changing market conditions. We're playing reverse
musical chairs, where many landlords are going to be stuck without a
tenant come September first. The ones who have realized this are
offering lower rents, trying to keep their tenants, and as we get
closer to September I expect more will catch on.

If you're a tenant you can probably negotiate lower rent. Or,
higher risk, higher expected value, wait longer and hope for prices to
fall further. We may see some pretty desperate landlords.

Where does this leave me? While I'm a landlord, I'm on the side of
tenants here. I care much more that friends and neighbors aren't
priced out than that we make the highest possible rent from our
rooms. I'm happy to see rents falling, though ...
‘Maximum’ level of suffering?
by Anirandis — 2020-06-20T14:05:14.423Z

Is there a maximum level of suffering that could intentionally be achieved? Say there were a malevolent superintelligence in this universe that planned to create Matrioshka brains & maximise humanity’s suffering.

Could it rapidly expand one’s pain centres, with the effect of increasing their perception of pain, without ever hitting a wall? Would adding extra compute towards torturing someone lead to eventual diminishing returns? Do we have reason to think that there’d be some form of ‘limit’ in the pain it could feasible cause, or would it be near-infinite?

I know this is quite a depressing and speculative topic, but I’m wondering what people think.
Relevant pre-AGI possibilities
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-06-20T10:52:00.257Z
Link: https://aiimpacts.org/relevant-pre-agi-possibilities/

Epistemic status: I started this as an AI Impacts research project, but given that it’s fundamentally a fun speculative brainstorm, it worked better as a blog post.

The default, when reasoning about advanced artificial general intelligence (AGI), is to imagine it appearing in a world that is basically like the present. Yet almost everyone agrees the world will likely be importantly different by the time advanced AGI arrives.

One way to address this problem is to reason in abstract, general ways that are hopefully robust to whatever unforeseen developments lie ahead. Another is to brainstorm particular changes that might happen, and check our reasoning against the resulting list.

This is an attempt to begin the second approach.2 I sought things that might happen that seemed both (a) within the realm of plausibility, and (b) probably strategically relevant to AI safety or AI policy.

I collected potential list entries via brainstorming, asking others for ideas, googling, and reading lists that seemed relevant (e.g. Wikipedia’s list of emerging technologies,3 a list of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions4, and DARPA’s list of projects.5)

I then shortened the list based on my guesses about the plausibility and relevance of these possibilities. I did not put much time into evaluating any particular possibility, so my guesses should not be treated as anything more. I erred on the side of inclusion, so the entries in this list vary greatly in plausibility and relevance. I made some attempt to categorize these entries and merge similar ones, but this document is fundamentally a brainstorm, not a taxonomy, so keep your expectations low.

I hope to update this post as new ideas find me and old ideas are refined or refuted. I welcome suggestions and criticisms; email me (gmail kokotajlod) or leave a comment.

Interactive “Generate Future” button

Asya Bergal and I made an interactive button to go with the list. The button randomly generates a possible future according to probabilities that you choose. It is very crude, but it has been fun to play with, and perhaps even slightly useful. For example, once I decided that my credences were probably systematically too high because the futures generated with them were too crazy. Another time I used the alternate method (described below) to recursively generate a detailed future trajectory, written up he...
The point of a memory palace
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-06-20T01:00:41.975Z

A memory palace seems like an inefficient way to learn, unless it's for a memorization stunt. At least, that's what it seems like as a beginner. It's slow, requires a very peaceful frame of mind, and isn't the kind of thing you can just dip into when needed in a time crunch. Nor does it make you better at the sort of fast calculations you get on an exam. Flash cards and homework seem like a more efficient way to grind in order to improve your speed and accuracy of recall.

We now have fast tools for information retrieval and visualization. It's usually more efficient to build a personal reference sheet than to construct a memory palace, unless you're trying to count cards.

Yet my experiences with visualization practice and memory palaces have been intriguing. I want to outline some of the benefits I've seen.

1) Constructing a memory palace makes textbook reading more engaging and focused.

Textbooks are dry, dense, and full of explanations that eventually become distractions from the information you're searching for. A memory palace turns dry prose into a far more engaging multi-sensory experience. When you're already in a peaceful, relaxed frame of mind, the dense charts and long lists of equations become interesting memorization challenges rather than dry references. I can study far, far longer if I'm visualizing the material than if I'm just scanning words on a page, trying to figure out which equations I'll need for the next test.

School does not incentivize this kind of scientific reading for pleasure, or even suggest it might be possible. It 100% incentivizes students to calculate, calculate, calculate, and to get their gratification from high grades. This is a disgusting outcome, and I see visualization practice as a way to reclaim your own mind and imagination from this Molochian trap.

2) Visualization lets you see what you know all at once.

I'm a classically trained pianist, and the trouble with audio/kinetic memorization is that you can only hold one posture or sound in your head at a time. At least that I'm aware of. Audio/kinetic memory can also be fragile. Ever tried to play a piece of classical music, hit a single point in the music where you can't remember what comes next, and just found yourself looping and floundering at the stuck place?

With the visual sense, we can all keep t...
The ground of optimization
by Alex Flint — 2020-06-20T00:38:15.521Z

This work was supported by OAK, a monastic community in the Berkeley hills. This document could not have been written without the daily love of living in this beautiful community. The work involved in writing this cannot be separated from the sitting, chanting, cooking, cleaning, crying, correcting, fundraising, listening, laughing, and teaching of the whole community.

What is optimization? What is the relationship between a computational optimization process — say, a computer program solving an optimization problem — and a physical optimization process — say, a team of humans building a house?

We propose the concept of an optimizing system as a physically closed system containing both that which is being optimized and that which is doing the optimizing, and defined by a tendency to evolve from a broad basin of attraction towards a small set of target configurations despite perturbations to the system. We compare our definition to that proposed by Yudkowsky, and place our work in the context of work by Demski and Garrabrant’s Embedded Agency, and Drexler’s Comprehensive AI Services. We show that our definition resolves difficult cases proposed by Daniel Filan. We work through numerous examples of biological, computational, and simple physical systems showing how our definition relates to each.

Introduction

In the field of computer science, an optimization algorithm is a computer program that outputs the solution, or an approximation thereof, to an optimization problem. An optimization problem consists of an objective function to be maximized or minimized, and a feasible region within which to search for a solution. For example we might take the objective function (x2−2)2 as a minimization problem and the whole real number line as the feasible region. The solution then would be x=√2 and a working optimization algorithm for this problem is one that outputs a close approximation to this value.

In the field of operations research and engineering more broadly, optimization involves improving some process or physical artifact so that it is fit for a certain purpose or fulfills some set of requirements. For example, we might choose to measure a nail factory by the rate at which it outputs nails, relative to the cost of production inputs. We can view this as a kind of objective function, with the factory as the object of optimization just as the variable x was the ob...
Are All Existential Risks Equivalent to a Lack of General Collective Intelligence? And is GCI therefore the Most Important Human Innovation in the History and Immediate Future of Mankind?
by williamsae — 2020-06-19T20:38:51.456Z

Cross-posted from the Effective Altruism Forum, and edited slightly.

Summary: The value of human problem-solving ability is the value that can be accumulated through abstraction of value (e.g. defining value in terms of money) and through the exchange of that abstraction. This value can be observed to be orders of magnitude higher than without human intelligence. The value of the problem-solving ability of a General Collective Intelligence is the value that can be accummulated through the abstraction of that abstraction of value (e.g. defining value in terms ability to generalize one process and to reuse it where it is applicable in other processes) and through the exchange of that abstraction. This value (and therefor the problem-solving ability of a GCI as well as it's capacity to solve existential risks) can be orders of magnitude higher still than possible for human intelligence.

From the perspective of an approach called Human-Centric Functional Modeling (HCFM), which defines systems according to their function, the earth is an adaptive problem-solving system that functions to solve the problems posed by it's environment. As we'll see, this perspective is important in defining in the simplest possible way why human intelligence has been so impactful on the planet. And this approach is important in understanding how to fix that impact.

From this functional modeling perspective, the earth can be defined in terms of a minimal (simplest possible) set of functions of the earth, and higher order interactions between those functions, to the limit of some order N that is reliably achievable without a new system of organization to govern those interactions. Biological life consists of all the Nth order interactions between those functions, where these interactions are higher order and therefore of greater complexity than reliably achievable without life. From the functional modeling perspective homeostasis is the process of seeking to sustain fitness to function, and all life shares this feature. In essence, in that the earth converted part of itself into life, life is a set of processes the earth has developed during it's lifetime to adapt to give itself greater capacity to maintain stability in it's fitness to function.

The earth's adaptation to produce human intelligence marks a functional transition point in the life of the earth....
Collaborators for Effective Thesis project wanted
by DavidJanku — 2020-06-19T20:38:38.617Z

Effective Thesis is looking for collaborators: We would like to expand our team and take on a new team member who could help us carry out project operations. This would require an investment of at least 10 hours per week as we want to create a small and coherent team rather than a large and diffused one. The time investment might get paid for depending on the project receiving funding in the coming months, but so far it is volunteering-based. However, please reach out even if you'd consider joining us only in case your time was paid for. Specific responsibilities will be assigned based on project needs and personal fit, but generally, we are looking for someone proactive, comfortable with independently and creatively tackling various types of tasks and happy to become a core part of our team. The work is fully remote. If you’d like to join us or know of anyone who might be interested, please reach out at david.janku@effectivethesis.org
Innovation and Dependence
by smaslennikov — 2020-06-19T19:39:58.350Z
Link: https://smaslennikov.com/posts/innovation-and-dependence/

Today’s innovations and progress swoop humanity into a neat cycle of anticipation and acquisition through deceptive notions that guide it to dependence. We’re sold on products and ideas through questionable but politically acceptable marketing tactics. We buy, pre-order, take out loans, only to supposedly upgrade later to a somehow inferior product.

We were always conditioned for this, like many others, back in school it was suggested by adults to perceive school and homework as a real job. Having little visibility into what I got out of this job - little freedom, no money, - the desire for an actual job was obvious. A whole streak of professions later, I’m engulfed in work that I’m glad I enjoy, but there’s always a thought in the back of my mind of what could’ve been, an alternative lifestyle I see practiced by numerous acquaintances: a much less stable career opposite more free time, less toys, a stricter necessity to default to mentally stimulating activities like reading, socializing, exercising; simply because there wouldn’t be spare resources to purchase garbage entertainment. There’s a slight feeling of entrapment: “The things you own end up owning you.” On the other hand, of course, it could just be the same struggle but highlighted by debt. Yet, I digress: this is a social example of the cycle of anticipation and dependence, where expectations of freedom (a job, a car, a place to live) didn’t match reality - added responsibilities, stress, less free time.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked hard to become a hardcore minimalist to ease some of the burden of falling into capitalist traps - obviously not hard enough. Three-four years ago my end goal was to only have as much crap as would fit in my car. At my best I got down to two or three car loads. Having grown addicted to change for irrelevant reasons, I tend to move every year: a good way to gauge how much of the house became storage in that time; though isn’t it a nice capitalist dream to have the space for all the toys and trinkets? A shed with tools to build a white picket fence, those collages of family photographs on the stairwell, an RV in the backyard, a lawn mower you can sit on, a car for each family member. It’s a circular requirement: get the house for the stuff, get more stuff for the house...
Practical Conflict Resolution: A Taxonomy of Disagreement
by  — 2020-06-19T02:25:10.594Z

The previous posts in this sequence were largely setup; still important, but not intended to contain significant new material. Now, finally, we get to the good stuff. Once you’ve got the right attitude, good communication, and a decent grasp of what both sides are saying, how do you actually get to a successful resolution? For me, it boils down to understanding the building blocks of how we argue, and how we disagree.

Philosophers and linguists have spent millennia studying the nature of logic, rhetoric, and argument, all the way from Aristotle through to predicate logic and beyond. However, while rhetoric and disagreement are obviously related, the nature of disagreement itself is much less studied. The rationalist community has explored parts of it, coming up with some interesting ideas like double-cruxing, but as far as I know has only a few disconnected heuristics - no comprehensive theory.

In a very brief post in 2017 (well before I joined Less Wrong) I sketched out a basic categorization of disagreements with almost no explanation. Several years later, my core model remains almost the same. While there can be many forms of valid argument and many kinds of propositions to slot into those arguments, there are in fact only three kinds of atomic disagreement: fact, value, and meaning. As far as I can tell every disagreement must either belong to one of these categories, be "empty" (meaning there's technically no disagreement at all), or be a complex combination of smaller disagreements. I’ll tackle them one at a time, including tips for resolving each type, and then talk about how to understand and break down the more complex combinations.

Disagreements of Fact

Disagreements of fact are disagreements over how the world was, is, or will be. They are fundamentally empirical in nature: if I believe that there are only ten chickens on the planet and you believe that there are more, that’s something we can physically check; we just have to go out and count enough chickens. Disagreements about historical facts are often harder to resolve (we can’t just count the chickens alive in the year 1500 to see how many there were) but the factual nature of the disagreement remains; there is a single right answer, and we just have to find it.

Resolving disagreements of fact is the specialty of science and the scientific method. When a ...
Using a memory palace to memorize a textbook.
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-06-19T02:09:18.172Z

I spent the week prepping for finals. One is a year-long cumulative closed-book chemistry exam that I haven't had much time to practice for. I was worried about memorizing a few things:

Periodic trends and exceptions
The form and application of approximately 100 workhorse equations and various forms of measurement (molarity vs. molality vs. mole fraction).
Equations that get used rarely in homework or on exercises, but might be used as "gotchas" on the test.
Some concepts that I found either confusing, or so simple that I didn't bother to remember them the first time.

My anxiety wasn't just my ability to recall these ideas when prompted:

"What's the two-point form of the Clausius-Clapeyron Equation?"

ln(P2 / P1) = - Δ Hvap/R * (1/T2 - 1/T1)

Nor was I unable to perform the calculations.

My real concern was that I had spent the year treating my chemistry textbook like a reference manual, a repository for concepts and equations that I could look up when needed. I just memorized the few bits I'd need on any given quiz. Looking back at 1,000 pages of chemistry, I foresaw myself reviewing chapter 5 for a couple hours, but forgetting that review by the time I got to chapter 19.

The sheer volume of work that seemed to be involved in memorizing a textbook seemed unreasonable. I hate using Anki, and I spend far too much time in front of screens as it is.

So I decided to try something different - experimenting with the memory palace technique.

I perceive myself as having a poor visual imagination, but I've been trying to practice improving it lately, with some success. Gwern points to expert opinion that visual thinking ability might be second only to IQ in terms of intellectual importance. My experience is that when I'm using psychedelics, or deliberately practicing my visualization abilities, I do improve far beyond my perceived abilities. We're stuck with our IQ, but if it's possible to improve our visual thinking skills through practice in adulthood, that's important.

I want to describe my attempts and the outcome.

First Room

I tried this both with a single calculus textbook chapter, and my entire chemistry textbook. The results were similar but different. I'm going to focus on the chemistry palace here.

I close my eyes and allow myself to picture nothing, or whatever random nonsense comes to mind. No...
What should I teach to my future daughter?
by Anabel RC — 2020-06-19T00:32:21.086Z

Soon I will have a baby girl and I was thinking that the world is changing very fast and I want to be able to give her some bases for her to learn to deal with this civilisation.
From a practical point of view.. i was wondering if I Should teach her some programming language... What skills does she need for what is coming?
Ofc.. i will also do my best in terms of teaching her ethics, compassion and other values.. but I am talking about the hands-on skills that the new generations need to be able to develop.