trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why do we need a NEW philosophy of progress?
by jasoncrawford — 2022-01-25T17:28:05.313Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-a-new-philosophy-of-progress

I’ve said that we need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. But why a new philosophy? Why can’t we just return to the 19th-century attitude towards progress, which was pretty enthusiastic?

In short, the view of progress that persisted especially through the late 19th century and up until 1914 was naive. It fell apart because, in the 20th century, it met challenges it could not answer. We need to answer those challenges today.

What follows is a hypothesis that needs a lot more research and substantiation, but I’m putting it forward as my current working model of the relevant intellectual history.

The 19th-century worldview

Here are a few key elements of the Enlightenment-era worldview:

Nature was an obstacle to be conquered. Nature was imperfect; human reason could improve it—and it was fitting and proper for us to do so. Kipling wrote, “We hold all Earth to plunder / All time and space as well.” Nature was a means to our ends.
There was a deep belief in the power of human reason both to understand and to command nature. Especially by the end of the century, the accomplishments in science, technology and industry seemed to confirm this.
As a corollary of the above, there was an admiration for growth and progress: in science, in the economy, even in population.

(I’m basing this mostly on writings from the time, such as Macaulay or Alfred Russel Wallace; contemporary newspaper editorials; popular speeches given, e.g., at celebrations; poetry of the era; etc. For future research: what were the historians, philosophers, etc. of the time saying about progress? I’m familiar with some of the thought from previous centuries such as Bacon and Condorcet, but less so with that from 19th-century figures such as Mill or Comte.)

On the face of it, at least, these seem very much in sympathy with the core ideas of the progress movement as I have outlined them. So what did the 19th century get wrong?

Mistakes

Here are just some examples of things that many people believed in the late 19th century, which would later be proved quite wrong:

That technology would lead to world peace. Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet had forecast progress in morality and society just as much as in science, technology and industry. By the late 1800s, this seemed plausible. The previous century had seen monarchy and aristocracy replaced by democratic republics, and the end of slavery in th

...
Long Term Charities: Apply for SFF Funding
by Zvi — 2022-01-25T17:00:00.718Z

In the last funding round of the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF), I was one of the recommenders whose evaluations helped distribute millions of dollars in charitable grants. I wrote up my experiences here.

Now that applications for the next round are open, I want to strongly encourage more charities whose work plausibly benefits the long term future, especially charities that do not interact much with the rationalist or effective altruist ecosystems and networks, to apply for funding. SFF has no official connection with the effective altruism movement (EA), aside from sometimes recommending grants to support EA-branded charities; and, many involved are actively seeking opportunities to support projects not connected with the EA social network.

You’ll need a 501(c) charity in order to apply. If you don’t have a 501(c) but would otherwise consider applying, it’s too late for this round but there will be others, so consider getting a 501(c).

The application is not as quick and easy as it could be (I’m hoping to get that to change) but it’s not bad. Filling out such applications can be daunting, and requires much gumption. But the expected value of doing so, if you have any kind of plausible case, is very high. Your odds are remarkably good. There is a lot of money being distributed here, and a lot of money being distributed elsewhere, and a shortage of known worthy causes to which to distribute the money.

You could even get immediate gratification in the form of a speculation grant. A number of people, including myself and also Scott Aaronson, have been given $200k budgets to give out as we see fit. He’s inviting quick pitches for this. If you want to pitch me, the comments here are the place to do it, and I’ll give a quick estimate of how likely I would be to give the organization a speculation grant if they apply. My bar for saying yes if I don’t already know you will be high, but not infinitely high. Try to do this within the week.

This post is an attempt to help charities decide whether applying is worthwhile. Not every cause will be a good fit.

It also aims to tell them how, in my model, to ensure that if they should be funded, they get funded.

And most importantly, it should help you not stress so much and not spend as much time on the application, so it happens at all.

General disclaimer: This is me talking, and I have zero official capacity, and tho...
Lives of the Cambridge polymath geniuses
by Owain_Evans — 2022-01-25T04:45:17.756Z

Link to full-size image

Delicious Facts

Russell

Grandfather was British prime minister
Told Virginia Woolf his devotion to serious intellectual work came to an end when “my passions got hold of me”
Met Lenin on a visit to Russia. This visit turned him against the Russian Revolution

Wittgenstein

His Austrian family was one of the richest in the world
Was at same (obscure) school at same time as Hitler
His family paid off the Nazis using their fortune to be classified as “mixed” rather than “full Jews” (and avoided the Holocaust)
Three of his four brothers died by separate acts of suicide
Tried to move to the Soviet Union to work as a laborer

Haldane

Aristocratic family, father was a prominent biologist
Introduced the primordial soup theory of the origin of life
For a period, he was a Stalinist and defended Lysenkoism on BBC radio
Moved to India late in life and renounced British citizenship

Needham

As a professor of biochemistry, at age 37 he began an improbable pivot into Sinology when he fell in love with his Chinese grad student and started learning Chinese
In China he befriended Zhou Enlai and met Mao
He was part of a commission investigating whether the US had used biological weapons in the Korean War and was fooled into believing the US had

Turing

Would occasionally run 40 miles from Bletchley to London for meetings and tried out for British Olympic team
Apparently he took fortune-telling seriously

Biographies

Russell:

Autobiography

;

Monk

Keynes:

Skidelsky

,
Wittgenstein:

Monk

Haldane:

Subramanian

Needham:

Winchester

Turing:

Hodges

Also see:

Biopic

film

on Turing from the BBC
Wittgenstein

movie

, which includes Russell and Keynes as characters:

Logicomix

: graphic novel feature Russell, Turing, and Wittgenstein (coauthored by computer scientist)

Why I found these figures interesting

They made exceptional and creative intellectual contributions (helping to found new fields). Turing’s contributions seem most important.
They had dramatic, full-bodied involvement in wars
They spent significant periods working outside academia
For their time, they had highly unconventional romantic lives and were eccentric in other ways
Russell and Haldane were self-described

rationalists

Interactions

Russell acted as Wittgenstein’s PhD supervisor but felt Wittgenstein surpassed him already as a student. Keynes invited Wittgenstein to join the Apostles and helped him get British citizenship during WW2. Turing attended ...
Quest for Holy Grail of Hedging in Retail Portfolios!

by milo — 2022-01-25T04:09:45.148Z

Please note , this post is not a solution, it is mere a discussion on the available options and risks

After reading a lot of literature on risk and hedging , I can distill the whole essence of risk management into a single sentence for Individual portfolios.

Holy Grail of hedging :

Find a strategy that performs strongly during crises yet doesn’t lose too much over a market cycle . This strategy/asset can have a material impact on portfolio performance over the long term

Objectives of a good Hedging Strategy for a Retail Portfolio :
1. Easy to Implement
2. Not based on forecasting / timing markets
3. Adding the strategy should not materially impact future returns or underperform a benchmark

Introduction:
Most active investing strategies are short volatility in one way or another. Whether you buy equities, take long positions in risky bonds or engage in spread trades, you will tend to perform better in flat to rising markets than highly volatile ones. So the first question to ask for any active strategy is to check whether it is short volatility or long volatility. For most traditional investor portfolios adding a shorty volatility strategy should be carefully measured against it’s expected risk adjusted return

Assets which can be combined in an equity heavy portfolios for Risk Management

Here I am listing various assets which can be combined with an equity portfolio to reduce portfolio risk . However on a deeper analysis none of them meet the holy grail criteria and are prone to various idiosyncratic risks which are listed here

Option 1:**Long term treasury bonds**
Risks:
* Increase in Interest Rates
* Black Swan Event where USD looses it’s monopoly as Global Reserve Currency
* Global Defacto Strategy can result in rather unintended results when it matters with rebalances occurring in all portfolios in a similar timeframe
Option 2: VIXM or VIXY
Risks
* Looses a lot during regular market cycle with drawdowns up to 90%
* Timing is important and difficult to implement as a holding strategy
* Explosive returns do not compensate of the losses during the regular market cycle which result on timing luck

Option 3: Gold
Risks
* Does loose during raising interest rates
* Experiences material drawdowns if not timed with a Trend .
* Does not provide explosive returns in crisis

Option 4: Low Hanging Fruit: Com...
Wireless Outlet Switching
by jefftk — 2022-01-25T02:50:06.131Z

We have lamps in our bedroom, and we were thinking it might be nice to
wire up some switchable outlets. Ideally with a three-way switch, one
at the doorway and one at our bed. Dimming would be nice too, though
not a dealbreaker. This would be quite a lot of work, though, running
new wires. And what if we wanted to move our bed at some point?

The modern solution would be Internet of
Things smart outlets, as part of a smart home system. While it
would be nice to be able to turn the lights on and off vocally, I
don't want to deal with Wi-Fi issues and integration hiccups: I just want light switches.

It turns out this product also exists: switches that talk wirelessly
with a box you put between your lamp and the wall. The switches can
be battery powered, and the batteries last a long time because you
aren't doing that much switching. I got two of these GE
"mySelectSmart" ones (~$25/each). I was a little bit worried
about whether I would be control both sockets with both switches, but
I followed the pairing process for each pair and it all works.

They do what they're supposed to, and I don't have to think about
them!

One downside of this setup is that the socket is always going to draw
a little bit of power, even when off, because it needs to be listening
for the wireless signal it tells it to turn on. But how big of an
issue is this? I measured, and it draws 0.3W when off. Over a year
that's ~2.6 kWh, or $0.55. One
of these would have to last ~45 years before the electricity cost
caught up with the $25 initial purchase price. And installing
hardwired switchable outlets wouldn't pay for itself, even if we kept
the configuration static for a century.

Comment via: facebook
Iterating fast: voice dictation as a form of babble
by Gytis Daujotas — 2022-01-25T00:21:42.383Z

Voice input has dramatically increased my writing output as well as the quality of my ideas. But I think that it's not as easy as turning on voice dictation and writing an essay from start to finish. There is a particular way or method of doing voice input that I have found to be far more effective, which is what I will describe in this post.

The pitfalls of dictation

When you think of voice input, you might think of dictation. It's a form of transcription: an attempt to accurately piece together the words being said and faithfully reconstruct them into text.

Courts and legal depositions benefit from accurate transcription. And in the past, if you were exceptionally rich and exceptionally busy, you might dictate your letter to a scribe who would jot it down for you. These are the use cases that voice dictation has been designed to replace.

A key feature of this mode is that dictation is a one-way process where the goal is accuracy. Do-overs and backtracking aren't really possible: the over-arching goal is faithfulness to what was said. This is suited for letters and messages, but I think this is not all that voice input can do.

Consider sketching on a page, where various ideas or points are connected by drawing arrows or shapes or groupings. When sketching, you aren't quite sure how to structure your thoughts before you start. And sketching is, in some way, the act of figuring this out. There is something highly nonlinear about this process where your thoughts backtrack to previous ideas and test the strength of old conclusions.

Good conversations can be something like this, with both participants in more of a 'dance' than a single-pointed journey towards a predetermined conclusion. And I think that voice dictation can, with some effort and learning, become something like this too.

An alternate use of voice input: babble

The primary thing to know about speaking is that we can speak very fast, and in comparison we type rather slow. This might seem like no big deal: it's always tempting to think that a sped-up version of a process is a qualitative, not quantitative, difference. But, as it has been said, quantity has a quality all of its own. Fast input can yield surprisingly large rewards.

Speaking allows words to be put down cheaply, almost at the speed of thought. In that way, voice dictation allows written text to become even closer to pure "thought-stuff", somethin...
Time until graduation as a proxy for picking between (German) universities
by Morpheus — 2022-01-24T18:27:32.984Z

If you are in high school and struggle with decision-making, please don't take this too seriously. If you're into EA maybe apply for 1-1 advice here?

Choosing a university without knowing what metrics to base this decision on is hard. When I did this one year ago, I was mostly comparing German universities as it was my country of residence (I debated going abroad, but covid and other things made this option unattractive for me). Since most universities here are free and rankings not really popular, there isn't as much of a prestige difference between universities to cut down the possibilities. So in the end, I based my decision mostly on cost of living and location/city.

I didn't expect the differences in universities to be large enough to be worth looking further into it. I've changed my mind about that, mostly based on the fact that I could share what I've learned with other aspiring undergraduates.

Data

I looked into which metrics were used for ranking universities by the CHE-Ranking which is the most popular (which ranks universities for every metric and every degree separately and refuses to aggregate them to give universities an overall rank. The idea is "make your personal ranking according to your priorities". It's like they actively refuse to play the prestige game). Most of their metrics are either subjective ratings by a few students (how useful are these ratings if these students have never been to a different university to compare it to?), or things like money per researcher, which seem rather useless for finding the best place to study as an undergraduate. The only thing that stood out to me was "% of graduations in appropriate time".
Unfortunately, universities in Germany have only recently (2017)[1] started to collect this data in a central place, so I rely on the summary statistics from the CHE-Ranking-Site and hope that they did a good job.

As you can see in the plot below, there are lots of universities where you would be above average (median) if you finished your degree in your eighth semester. It turns out, the difference how many students (in Computer Science [most popular on lesswrong]) graduate after their eighth[2] semester [3] is pretty large.

Some of this may be due to random variation in student ability or curriculum, but even excluding universities with less than 1000-students (so at least (1000/4) * (around 50% passing rate) ...
Nuanced and Extreme Countersignaling
by DirectedEvolution — 2022-01-24T06:47:49.410Z

Nuanced Countersignaling

Scott Alexander described countersignaling as following a barber-pole pattern. Or, as he says in Friendship is Countersignaling:

... you can mistake someone at level n for level n-1, but never for level n-2 – so pretending to be level n-2 and getting away with it is a sure sign that you are in fact level n and not level n-1.

I think of this as a subtype of countersignaling - nuanced countersignaling. The primary goal here to distinguish an actual level n from a similar-but-worse level n-1. This is done by sending an n-2 signal while you're at level n.

Note that under this theory, sending an n-3 signal is "dangerous" for the purpose of countersignaling as level n. After all, n-3 would be how an n-1 countersignals. Countersignaling at level n-2 is the only way to unambiguously countersignal level n status.

Extreme Countersignaling

By contrast, with extreme countersignaling, the idea is to send the most extreme possible countersignal. If signals are on a spectrum from 10 to -10, extreme countersignaling is when a person at level 10 illustrates this by sending a -10 signal. A person at level 9 can only get away with sending a -9 signal.

I think this is what's going on in Scott's dialog in the post about friendship.

Becca: What are you doing here? I figured they’d have locked you away in the psych ward for good by now.
Scott: Nope. And what are you doing here? You haven’t killed off all your patients yet?
Becca: Only person in this hospital I might kill is standing right in front of me.
Scott: Be careful, I’m armed and dangerous *picks up a central line placement practice set menacingly*

Let's say that friendship is on the scale of solid friends > budding friendship > acquaintances > strangers > enemies. If Scott and Becca are solid friends, nuanced countersignaling would call for a dialog where they pretended to be acquaintances.

Becca: How's it going... Scott? Right?

Scott: It's actually Thomas, but no worries, Sarah. Good to see you again.

Becca: I'm going to go catch a movie after work, any chance you want to come?

Scott: Uh, maybe let's get coffee first and get to know each other better?

Note that this imaginary dialog doesn't come off as particularly funny or friendly, which might be because my writing sucks, but is also predicted by extreme countersignaling. They need to go all the way to pretending to be enemies to illustrate jus...
Words are Imprecise Telepathy
by LightStar — 2022-01-24T01:45:58.996Z

Words are mental paintbrush handles. Saying "triangular lightbulb" paints a picture with words.

The point of communication is to transmit a message. But the message is not the words. The message is the picture, the mental model inside your head.
So the message is reduced to words, which are then used by the recipient to construct a new mental model, with possible errors.

Interpreting words is a complex task. Words do not always have literal, well-defined meanings (if they did, machine translation would be a much easier problem to solve).
Words and words clusters activate patterns in our brain, some patterns subtler than others.

So the actual meaning of a word, a sentence, a communique could be considered to be how it is interpreted by the recipient's brain, what kind of mental model or mental image is created.

Communication is imprecise. We might want to know how imprecise.
The words, the sentences you use are only an approximation to the mental image in your head. But some approximations are better then others.

Pi could be approximated as 3, 3.14, 3.1415, etc, depending on what task you are doing.
The shape of Earth could be approximated as a sphere, an oblate spheroid or a topographical map.

If you are doing calculations by hand, it's probably a waste of time to use a value of pi with 15 decimals.
If you want a satellite to stay in low orbit around the Moon, you'll want to know the precise nature of the lunar gravitational field including any anomalies, not just an approximation which assumes the field is uniform.

Use appropriate precision for the task at hand. Use higher precision to lower errors. Use lower precision to save time and resources.

In order to communicate in higher precision, it helps to pay attention to the what information is transmitted beside the literal meaning of the words.
This is less important for "precise" topics such as math and science, and more important for "sensitive" topics such as emotions, conflict resolution, politics and gender equality.

Pay attention to the "tone" of the conversation.
Not just what someone is saying, but what does expressing it the way they do imply?
What patterns are activated in my brain when processing this information?
The more precise your perception is, the subtler patterns you notice in yourself when processing information.
The more precisely you communicate, the more accurately you control what patterns are activate...
NFTs, Coin Collecting, and Expensive Paintings
by leogao — 2022-01-24T01:01:48.117Z

I‘ve tried to make this post fairly nuanced and with a lot of steelmanning, in contrast to much of the material on this subject. My opinions on crypto as a whole are more complex and deserve a separate, more in depth post. None of this is financial advice, I am not a financial advisor, etc.

When it comes to paintings, people care a lot about having the “original” painting. There can only be one original, “real” Mona Lisa, despite all the hi-res scans you can get. Even if you could make a copy so good that nobody could visually tell it apart from the original painting without painstaking chemical analysis, the original is still going to be worth many orders of magnitude more than the copy. While some people argue that the impossibility of making an exact copy of a physical object is the reason why the original is distinct from the copies (and therefore the crux of why this doesn’t generalize into the digital world), and that therefore the small difference in chemical composition or whatever makes up for those orders of magnitude, I think that this view is pretty silly. A visually indistinguishable painting has the same aesthetic value, and conveys the same historical value to the viewer, and even if you argue that there is some premium to having the original, it seems pretty absurd to suggest that the minor visual differences and chemical composition are worth, within a rounding error, $870 million of the $870 million the Mona Lisa is valued at, and that the actual content of art itself modulo some small errors is worth basically nothing in comparison.

I think it’s pretty clear that people don’t actually care about the chemical composition of their paintings or whatever. Rather, I hypothesize that the reason people care about the original is because this enforces artificial scarcity. You can always make more replicas, but there is only one “original”. By ensuring that more supply cannot ever be added, you ensure an effective monopoly on the painting until you decide to sell it.

This then brings up the question: Why care about the original and not the 15th copy? One might argue that since physical objects cannot (for all practical purposes) be copied exactly, every painting is unique, so if we only cared about uniqueness, we shouldn’t expect to favor the original. I think there are two main reasons behind this: first, the original is a far more natura...