trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Heuristics for textbook selection
by John_Maxwell — 2017-09-06T04:17:01.783Z

Back in 2011, lukeprog posted a textbook recommendation thread. It's a nice thread, but not every topic has a textbook recommendation. What are some other heuristics for selecting textbooks besides looking in that thread?

Amazon star rating is the obvious heuristic, but it occurred to me that Amazon sales rank might actually be more valuable: It's an indicator that profs are selecting the textbook for their classes. And it's an indicator that the textbook has achieved mindshare, meaning you're more likely to learn the same terminology that others use. (But there are also disadvantages of having the same set of mental models that everyone else is using.) BTW, my dad claims Goodreads star ratings can have a more informative spread than Amazon ones.

Somewhere I read that Elements of Statistical Learning was becoming the standard machine learning text partially because it's available for free online. That creates a wrinkle in the sales rank heuristic, because people are less likely to buy a book if they can get it online for free. (Though Elements of Statistical Learning appears to be a #1 bestseller on Amazon, in bioinformatics.)

Another heuristic is to read the biographies of the textbook authors and figure out who has the most credible claim to expertise, or who seems to be the most rigorous thinker (e.g. How Brands Grow is much more data-driven than a typical marketing book). Or try to figure out what text the most expert professors are choosing for their classes. (Oftentimes you can find the syllabi of their classes online. I guess the naive path would probably look something like: go to US News to see what the top ranked universities are for the subject you're interested in. Look at the university's course catalog until you find the course that covers the topic you want to learn. Do site:youruniversity.edu course_id on Google in order to find the syllabus for the most recent time that course was taught.)
Expanding Premium Mediocrity
by Zvi — 2017-09-05T23:01:24.000Z

Epistemic Status: Skippable. This is (much of) what I think Rao is trying to say in the second section of his post, the part about Maya but before Molly and Max, translated into DWATV-speak. Proceed if and only if you want that.

Continuation From (at least see the 2x2s): Exploring Premium Mediocrity

Long Ago: In a world… of venture capital, The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing

Original Post (Ribbonfarm): The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millenial

The last thing I would do is embrace premium mediocrity. I wrote a guide to avoiding premium mediocrity months ago.

Rao and I agree that Maya Millennial is not fooled, and is consuming her premium mediocrity with her eyes open.

Why would anyone knowingly embrace premium mediocrity?

I: The Parents

The first story is ‘do it for the parents.’

This does not make logistical sense.

Maya Millennial might buy her parents a premium mediocre dinner. They can’t tell the difference. It might convince them she can afford it. They’d have an Actually Good time.

I can almost respect that.

If Maya got a job that made her parents happy, or dated someone that made her parents happy, that too would make sense.

But most of the time her parents aren’t there. Keeping parents happy can explain having life goals like jobs, relationships or even kids. What keeping them happy can’t explain is a day in and day out premium mediocre life.

II: The Strivers

A variation on the parents story is ‘do it for the strivers.’

The Randian strivers will continue putting in their 100-hour weeks figuring out obscure crypotography and machine learning problems and 3d printed tiny houses so our premium-mediocre free-riding gets just a little bit more sustainable every year.

You just have to laugh while you eat your salad alone. Except you’re not alone. You’re being watched by people who sincerely want you to enjoy your salad so their work feels more meaningful. The emotional labor serves a psychological purpose.

Smile, you’re on millionaire Instagram.

This took me a while to understand because on the surface, all the illusion-crafting and believing goes the other way. Steve Jobs hypnotized you, not the other way round, didn’t he? Actually the hypnotism has always been duplex.

We help them believe the new economy is emerging faster than it is, they help us believe we are contributing more to it than we are, rather

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Online discussion is better than pre-publication peer review
by Wei Dai — 2017-09-05T13:25:15.331Z

Related: Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum, Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation

During a recent discussion about (in part) academic peer review, some people defended peer review as necessary in academia, despite its flaws, for time management. Without it, they said, researchers would be overwhelmed by "cranks and incompetents and time-card-punchers" and "semi-serious people post ideas that have already been addressed or refuted in papers already". I replied that on online discussion forums, "it doesn't take a lot of effort to detect cranks and previously addressed ideas". I was prompted by Michael Arc and Stuart Armstrong to elaborate. Here's what I wrote in response:

My experience is with systems like LW. If an article is in my own specialty then I can judge it easily and make comments if it’s interesting, otherwise I look at its votes and other people’s comments to figure out whether it’s something I should pay more attention to. One advantage over peer review is that each specialist can see all the unfiltered work in their own field, and it only takes one person from all the specialists in a field to recognize that a work may be promising, then comment on it and draw others’ attentions. Another advantage is that nobody can make ill-considered comments without suffering personal consequences since everything is public. This seem like an obvious improvement over standard pre-publication peer review, for the purpose of filtering out bad work and focusing attention on promising work, and in practice works reasonably well on LW.

Apparently some people in academia have come to similar conclusions about how peer review is currently done and are trying to reform it in various ways, including switching to post-publication peer review (which seems very similar to what we do on forums like LW). However it's troubling (in a "civilizational inadequacy" sense) that academia is moving so slowly in that direction, despite the necessary enabling technology having been invented a decade or more ago.
Open thread, September 4 - September 10, 2017
by Thomas — 2017-09-04T07:41:03.866Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, 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 start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting
If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics
by Scott Alexander — 2017-09-03T20:56:25.373Z

I do not believe that the utility weights I worked on last week – the ones that say living in North Korea is 37% as good as living in the First World – are objectively correct or correspond to any sort of natural category. So why do I find them so interesting?

A few weeks ago I got to go to a free CFAR tutorial (you can hear about these kinds of things by signing up for their newsletter). During this particular tutorial, Julia tried to explain Bayes’ Theorem to some, er, rationality virgins. I record a heavily-edited-to-avoid-recognizable-details memory of the conversation below:

Julia: So let’s try an example. Suppose there’s a five percent chance per month your computer breaks down. In that case…

Student: Whoa. Hold on here. That’s not the chance my computer will break down.

Julia: No? Well, what do you think the chance is?

Student: Who knows? It might happen, or it might not.

Julia: Right, but can you turn that into a number?

Student: No. I have no idea whether my computer will break. I’d be making the number up.

Julia: Well, in a sense, yes. But you’d be communicating some information. A 1% chance your computer will break down is very different from a 99% chance.

Student: I don’t know the future. Why do you want to me to pretend I do?

Julia: (who is heroically nice and patient) Okay, let’s back up. Suppose you buy a sandwich. Is the sandwich probably poisoned, or probably not poisoned?

Student: Exactly which sandwich are we talking about here?

In the context of a lesson on probability, this is a problem I think most people would be able to avoid. But the student’s attitude, the one that rejects hokey quantification of things we don’t actually know how to quantify, is a pretty common one. And it informs a lot of the objections to utilitarianism – the problem of quantifying exactly how bad North Korea shares some of the pitfalls of quantifying exactly how likely your computer is to break (for example, “we are kind of making this number up” is a pitfall).

The explanation that Julia and I tried to give the other student was that imperfect information still beats zero information. Even if the number “five percent” was made up (suppose that this is a new kind of computer being used in a new way that cannot be easily compared to longevity data for previous co...
Intellectual Progress Inside and Outside Academia
by Ben Pace — 2017-09-02T23:08:46.690Z

This post is taken from a recent facebook conversation that included Wei Dai, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Vladimir Slepnev, Stuart Armstrong, Maxim Kesin, Qiaochu Yuan and Robby Bensinger, about the ability of academia to do the key intellectual progress required in AI alignment.

[The above people all gave permission to have their comments copied here. Some commenters requested their replies not be made public, and their comment threads were not copied over.]

Initial Thread

Wei Dai:

Eliezer, can you give us your take on this discussion between me, Vladimir Slepnev, and Stuart Armstrong? I'm especially interested to know if you have any thoughts on what is preventing academia from taking or even recognizing certain steps in intellectual progress (e.g., inventing anything resembling Bitcoin or TDT/UDT) that non-academics are capable of. What is going on there and what do we need do to avoid possibly suffering the same fate? See this and this.

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

It's a deep issue. But stating the obvious is often a good idea, so to state the obvious parts, we're looking at a lot of principal-agent problems, Goodhart's Law, bad systemic incentives, hypercompetition crowding out voluntary contributions of real work, the blind leading the blind and second-generation illiteracy, etcetera. There just isn't very much in the academic system that does promote any kind of real work getting done, and a lot of other rewards and incentives instead. If you wanted to get productive work done inside academia, you'd have to ignore all the incentives pointing elsewhere, and then you'd (a) be leading a horrible unrewarded life and (b) you would fall off the hypercompetitive frontier of the major journals and (c) nobody else would be particularly incentivized to pay attention to you except under unusual circumstances. Academia isn't about knowledge. To put it another way, although there are deep things to say about the way in which bad incentives arise, the skills that are lost, the particular fallacies that arise, and so on, it doesn't feel to me like the *obvious* bad incentives are inadequate to explain the observations you're pointing to. Unless there's some kind of psychological block preventing people from seeing all the obvious systemic problems, it doesn't feel like the end result ought to be surprising.

Of course, a lot of peo

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September 2017 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2017-09-02T21:17:56.947Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Simplified Anthropic Doomsday
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-09-02T20:37:48.290Z

Here is a simplified version of the Doomsday argument in Anthropic decision theory, to get easier intuitions.

Assume a single agent A exists, an average utilitarian, with utility linear in money. Their species survives with 50% probability; denote this event by S. If the species survives, there will be 100 people total; otherwise the average utilitarian is the only one of its kind. An independent coin lands heads with 50% probability; denote this event by H.

Agent A must price a coupon CS that pays out €1 on S, and a coupon CH that pays out €1 on H. The coupon CS pays out only on S, thus the reward only exists in a world where there are a hundred people, thus if S happens, the coupon CS is worth (€1)/100. Hence its expected worth is (€1)/200=(€2)/400.

But H is independent of S, so (H,S) and (H,¬S) both have probability 25%. In (H,S), there are a hundred people, so CH is worth (€1)/100. In (H,¬S), there is one person, so CH is worth (€1)/1=€1. Thus the expected value of CH is (€1)/4+(€1)/400 = (€101)/400. This is more than 50 times the value of CS.

Note that C¬S, the coupon that pays out on doom, has an even higher expected value of (€1)/2=(€200)/400.

So, H and S have identical probability, but A assigns CS and CH different expected utilities, with a higher value to CH, simply because S is correlated with survival and H is independent of it (and A assigns an ever higher value to C¬S, which is anti-correlated with survival). This is a phrasing of the Doomsday Argument in ADT.
Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
by Scott Alexander — 2017-09-02T19:50:00.365Z

I.

From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:

"There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn’t step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient had claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox Heraclitus had bought, on the grounds that since the animal had changed, it wasn’t the same one he had bought and so was up for grabs. Heraclitus would have quickly come up with some ersatz, watered-down version of identity of practical value for dealing with property rights, oxen, lyres, vineyards, and the like. And then he might have wondered if that watered-down vulgar sense of identity might be a considerably more valuable concept than a pure and philosophical sort of identity that nothing has.

Okay, but I can think of something worse than that.

Imagine Heraclitus as a cattle rustler in the Old West. Every time a rancher catches him at his nefarious business, he patiently explains to them that identity doesn’t exist, and therefore the same argument against private property as made above. Flummoxed, they’re unable to think of a response before he rides off into the sunset.

But then when Heraclitus himself needs the concept of stable personal identity for something – maybe he wants to deposit his ill-gotten gains in the bank with certainty that the banker will give it back to him next time he shows up to withdraw it, or maybe he wants to bribe the sheriff to ignore his activities for the next while – all of a sudden Heraclitus is willing to tolerate the watered-down vulgar sense of identity like everyone else.

(actually, I can think of something even worse than that, which is a TV western based on this premise, where a roving band of pre-Socratic desperadoes terrorizes Texas. The climax is no doubt when the hero strides onto Main Street, revolver in hand, saying “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And Parmenides gruffly responds “No, I’m pretty sure that’s impossible.”)

At its best, philosophy is a revolutionary pursuit that dissolves our common-sense intuitions and exposes the possibility of much deeper structures behind them. One can respond by becoming a saint or madman, or by becoming a pragmatist who is willing to continue to participate in human society while also und

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The Case Of The Suffocating Woman
by Scott Alexander — 2017-09-02T19:42:31.833Z

[Content warning: panic, suffocation]

I.

I recently presented this case at a conference and I figured you guys might want to hear it too. Various details have been obfuscated or changed around to protect confidentiality of the people involved.

A 20-something year old woman comes into the emergency room complaining that she can’t breathe. The emergency doctors note that she’s breathing perfectly normally. She says okay, fine, she’s breathing normally now, but she’s certain she’s about to suffocate. She’s having constant panic attacks, gasping for breath, feels like she can’t get any air into her lungs, been awake 96 hours straight because she’s afraid she’ll stop breathing in her sleep. She accepts voluntary admission to the psychiatric unit with a diagnosis of panic disorder.

We take a full history in the psych ward and there’s not much of interest. She’s never had any psychiatric conditions in the past. She’s never used any psychiatric medication. She’s never had any serious diseases. One month ago, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl, and she’s been very busy with all the new baby-related issues, but she doesn’t think it’s stressed her out unreasonably much.

We start her on an SSRI with (as usual) little immediate effect. On the ward, she continues to have panic attacks, which look like her gasping for breath and being utterly convinced that she is about to die; these last from a few minutes to a few hours. In between these she’s reasonable and cooperative but still very worried about her breathing. There are no other psychiatric symptoms. She isn’t delusional – when we tell her that our tests show her breathing is fine, she’s willing to admit we’re probably right – she just feels on a gut level like she can’t breathe. I’m still not really sure what’s going on.

So at this point, I do what any good psychiatrist would: I Google “how do you treat a patient who thinks she’s suffocating?” And I stumble onto one of the first convincing explanations I’ve ever seen of the pathophysiology of a psychiatric disorder.

II.

Panic disorder is a DSM-approved psychiatric condition affecting about 3% of the population. It’s marked by “panic attacks”, short (minutes to hours) episodes where p...
Exploring Premium Mediocrity
by Zvi — 2017-09-02T19:20:21.000Z

Epistemic Status: Mediocre Premium

Response To (Rao / Ribbonfarm) : The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millenial

Builds Upon (not required): Play in Easy Mode, Play in Hard Mode

Leads To: Expanding Premium Mediocrity

Good Other Commentary (Jacob / Put a Num On It): Escaping the Premium Mediocre

I

A few days ago I read this very good sentence by Venkatesh Rao:

Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden.

Exactly, my brain thought. Say no more! Long have I waited for a name to put to this concept! Somewhere Plato was smiling.

Then Rao continued, and I wondered if he was pondering something different than what I was pondering:

Premium mediocre is cupcakes and froyo. Premium mediocre is “truffle” oil on anything (no actual truffles are harmed in the making of “truffle” oil), and extra-leg-room seats in Economy. Premium mediocre is cruise ships, artisan pizza, Game of Thrones, and The Bellagio.

As Elanor of The Good Place observed when given a list of supposedly sexy things, well, some of those are right. In particular, froyo, “truffle” oil, extra-leg-room seats in Economy and cruise ships are clearly right. Artisan pizza at first struck me as wrong but now strikes me as right, because the ones that are wrong don’t call themselves ‘artisan.’ Cupcakes are Actually Good, but kind of by coincidence, which is a strange gray area. Then there were two clear errors: The Bellagio is a terrible example given the casino options, and Game of Thrones, which is both Actually Good and outside the pattern entirely (or rather, it wasn’t until some point in the past two seasons, which is a clue).

Something was amiss.

Then he came back with a sentence that, while not quite as high Quality as the first, sums it all up perfectly:

Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.

More examples follow:

Premium mediocre is Starbucks’ Italian names for drink sizes, and its original pumpkin spice lattes featuring a staggering absence of pumpkin in the preparation. Actually all the coffee at Starbucks is premium mediocre. I like it anyway.

Premium mediocre is Cost Plus World Market, one of my favorite stores, purveyor of fine imported potato chips in weird flavors and interesting cheap candy from convenience stores around the world.

The best banana, any piece of dragon fruit, fancy lettuce, David Brooks’ idea of a gourmet sandwich.

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