trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Quadratic, not logarithmic
by Valentin2026 — 2021-02-08T03:42:34.781Z

I recently realized a very simple, almost obvious bias, that I had because I never thought more about it. Moreover, quite a lot of people have this bias too.

What is worse in time of pandemic - to increase the number of your contacts from 0 to 1 or from 99 to 100? Intuitively, since we perceive many quantities on a logarithmic scale, the first thing is much worse. I heard multiple times something like: "I am already doing this and this and that because I have to, so it does not make sense for me to decrease my shopping", or "My roommate (spouse, child...) does not care about this at all, so it does not make sense for me either".

However, this is simply not true. If I care solely about myself, increasing the number of contacts increases the probability to get sick linearly - no logarithmic scale. But if I also care about other people (my contacts, yes), then we have linear growth of probability to become a spreader, and linear growth of the group to whom I can spread, thus leading to quadratic growth of the total expected damage to society.

So, if I have quite a lot of contacts already, I should be much more cautious about adding more than if I have almost none. It sounds so trivial right now - yet so many times I have heard the opposite advice.
Singularity&phase transition-2. A priori probability and ways to check.
by Valentin2026 — 2021-02-08T02:21:27.825Z

In my previous post, I discussed a conjecture that certain quantities near singularity should demonstrate power-law behavior, and based on this we can potentially predict when the singularity is supposed to happen. In this post (you can read it independently if you haven't read the first one), I explain why I think that a priori probability of this statement holding true is high enough to make the efforts to check it worthwhile, and I discuss how can we validate (or invalidate) it.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the Earth population was growing almost all its history till 1960th as 1tc–t, a hyperbolical growth. Later I found an excellent post by Scott Alexander, that I highly recommend on this topic. In a nutshell, the reason for the growth is the following. In the ideal situation with unlimited resources and no scientific progress, the speed of the population growth dNdt would be simply proportional to the number of people N that is already here, making the growth exponential. However, there is scientific progress S in real life, that can be estimated as roughly proportional to the number of researchers, which in turn is also proportional to the number of people N. The speed of population growth can be estimated (in the simplest model) as proportional to the current level of scientific progress. This gives us the equations, leading to the hyperbolic growth:

dNdt=C1NS

dSdt=C2SN

There can be different reasons for the termination of this growth. First, at some point, rapid population growth becomes physiologically impossible (for example, doubling the population every day is impossible for humans). Second, we can invent a super AI, and reach the singularity. In the first scenario, the termination occurs when1NdNdt reaches a threshold value, and in the second, when S reaches a threshold value. Notice that these two events are not connected in this model – namely, they do not have to coincide at all. There is no inner reason for it.

In our world, the hyperbolic growth terminated far before the physiological limit, because of the demographic transition – people just started to have fewer children. “Aha” – one could say – “ here you go! The model stops working, the speed of population growth is not simply linear on science, but has more complicated non-linear dependence. We need non-l...
Metric selection bias: why Moore's law is less important than you think
by Aaron Bergman — 2021-02-08T00:21:20.494Z
Link: https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/metric-selection-bias

1. Intro

Before vaccine-induced-neo-techno-optimism was all the rage, it was fashionable and popular (in some circles) to bemoan our era as one of disturbing technological stagnation. Almost a decade ago, economists like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers started lamenting the secular stagnation in economic growth. More recently, a small cohort have argued pretty convincingly that technological progress - the fundamental driver of growth and improved standard of living - is slowing down.

A few sourced from the first link above:

Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find, a 54 page paper published in American Economic Review, co-authored by two Stanford Professors, an MIT professor and a Stanford PhD student.
Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck, an Atlantic article co-authored by Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen.
Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood’s 41 page monograph, filled with original data analysis, detailing the slowing of science across numerous fields.
And of course, The Great Stagnation itself, a book length treatment of the question.

Just a few days ago, Jason Crawford wrote a nice summary of the evidence. Less rigorous but perhaps more impactful have been the bounty of pithy aphorisms from technologists like Peter Thiel:

They promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters.
You could say that all these gadgets and devices, they dazzle us but they also distract us from the ways in which our larger surroundings are strangely old. So we run cell phones while we’re riding in a 19th-century subway system in New York. San Francisco, the housing stock looks like it’s from the 50s and 60s, it’s mostly quite decrepit and incredibly hard to change these sort of things. So you have bits making progress, atoms are strangely very stuck.

2. The Problem

My purpose here isn’t to debunk the claims that technological progress is slower than it used to be, than it ought to be, or than many think it is. After writing a paper on the topic, I tend to agree with Cowen and Thiel. One thing, though, rubs me the wrong way. Quite often, techno-pessimist papers and articles point to things like a slowdown in Moore’s Law as evidence for technological stagnation.

Don’t take my word for it. From Cowen and Southewood’s paper:

Still, the exact same data used to illustrate Moore’s Law now suggest that Moore’s Law definitely is slowing down. And that is evidence for a scientific s

...
Killing the ants
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-02-07T23:17:01.938Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

I. The ants

Recently, my housemates and I started seeing a lot of ants in the house. They marched in long lines along the edges of the basement and the bathrooms. A few showed up in the drawers. My girlfriend put out some red pepper, which was supposed to deter them from one of their routes, but they cut a line straight through.

We thought maybe they were sheltering from the rain, which had become more frequent. We had had ants before; we’d talked, then, about whether to do something about it; but we hadn’t, and eventually they disappeared. We thought maybe this would happen again.

It didn’t. Over weeks, the problem got worse. There were hundreds of ants in the upstairs bathroom. They started to show up much more in the kitchen. We threw out various things, sealed various things. They showed up in beds. Kitchen drawers were now ant territory.

We talked about what to do. We were reluctant to kill them, which was part of why we had waited. But a number of people in the house felt that the situation was getting out of hand, and that we were on track for something much harder to control. I thought of a house I had stayed at, where the ants swarmed over the coffee maker every morning, and efforts (I’m not sure how extreme) to get rid of them had failed.

The most effective killing method is to poison the colony as a whole. The ants are lured into a sugary liquid that also contains borax, which is poisonous for ants, but relatively safe for humans. They then track the poison back to the colony. We talked about how bad this would be for the ants — and in particular, the fact that the poison is slow-acting. Crushing them directly, we thought, might be more humane; though it would also be more time-consuming, and less likely to solve the problem.

Eventually, though without resolving all disagreements amongst housemates, we put out the poison baits (my girlfriend also tried cloves, coffee grounds, and lemon juice around that time, as well as luring the ants to some peanut butter and honey outside, away from the house). The ants in the kitchen disappeared. There are still a few in the upstairs bathroom; and inside the clear plastic baits, you can see ant bodies, in the syrup.

II. Owning it

At one point, on the topic of the ants, I said, in passing, something like: “may we be forgiven.” My girlfriend responded seriously, saying something like:...
Making Expertise Legible: Being right should make you respected, not the other way around
by ejacob — 2021-02-07T23:15:08.122Z
Link: https://eidan.substack.com/p/making-expertise-legible

I will be hopping on a long train of thought largely already fleshed out by

Scott Alexander

and

Zvi

. The problem they are talking about is complicated, and so I recommend reading those linked articles, but for those with little time or poor memory I will briefly summarize.

Political appointments and government bureaucracies are selective systems; behaviors that reinforce the power of people above and around you usually get rewarded with promotions and more power. (This is Zvi’s concept of

Immoral Mazes

). The CDC is such a system. SA argues that this is one reason why the rationalist blogosphere has recognized that information from folks like Zvi about the Coronavirus is generally more accurate and useful than information from authoritative figures like Dr. Fauci. According to Scott Alexander, Zvi can optimize for “being right,” but:

When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she's trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.

Zvi’s response proposed that the situation is actually worse than this; he thinks that there’s not even any attempt at optimizing some combination of being right and keeping power, the desire to do good for good’s sake being trained out of such people long ago. Instead, people in high-level positions act out of a learned instinct to preserve their position.

Scott Alexander added a

bonus post

indicating that part of the problem of why “real” expertise doesn’t reach the policy level is that journalists can’t find insider sources willing to be contrarian, and that outsider sources simply don’t met the standard to be cited in serious articles. In addition, many experts don’t trust the journalists to faithfully reproduce their real opinions instead of writing hatchet jobs. I’d like to focus on these two problems. If we can improve either of them, and get more contrarian opinions taken seriously (when they’re right, ideally), that can only help put pressure on institutions to improve.

I. A Journalism-Side Solution

It would be good if journalists could find and honestly portray contrarian opinions, and if contrarians could trust they won’t be misrepresented.

No newspaper or onl...
Timeline of AI safety
by riceissa — 2021-02-07T22:29:00.811Z
Link: https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_AI_safety

Here is a timeline of AI safety that I originally wrote in 2017. The timeline has been updated several times since then, mostly by Vipul Naik.

Here are some highlights by year from the timeline since 2013:

Year	Highlights
2013	Research and outreach focused on forecasting and timelines continue. Connections with the nascent effective altruism movement strengthen. The Center for the Study of Existential Risk and the Foundational Research Institute launch.
2014	Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom is published. The Future of Life Institute is founded and AI Impacts launches. AI safety gets more mainstream attention, including from Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and the fictional portrayal Ex Machina. While forecasting and timelines remain a focus of AI safety efforts, the effort shifts toward the technical AI safety agenda, with the launch of the Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum.
2015	AI safety continues to get more mainstream, with the founding of OpenAI (supported by Elon Musk and Sam Altman) and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, the Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence, the Puerto Rico conference, and coverage on Wait But Why. This also appears to be the last year that Peter Thiel donates in the area.
2016	Open Philanthropy makes AI safety a focus area; it would ramp up giving in the area considerably starting around this time. The landmark paper "Concrete Problems in AI Safety" is published, and OpenAI's safety work picks up pace. The Center for Human-Compatible AI launches. The annual tradition of LessWrong posts providing an AI alignment literature review and charity comparison for the year begins. AI safety continues to get more mainstream, with the Partnership on AI and the Obama administration's efforts to understand the subject.
2017	This is a great year for cryptocurrency prices, causing a number of donations to MIRI from people who got rich through cryptocurrency. The AI safety funding and support landscape changes somewhat with the launch of the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) (and funding of its grants program by Jaan Tallinn) and the Effective Altruism Funds, specifically the Long-Term Future Fund. Open Philanthropy makes several grants in AI safety, including a $30 million grant to OpenAI and a $3.75 million grant to MIRI. AI safety attracts dismissive commentary from Mark Zuckerberg, while Elon Musk

...
History of the Public Suffix List
by jefftk — 2021-02-07T22:20:06.229Z

Are

forums.example.com and

mail.example.com
the same site? I'd say yes, since they're probably run by the same
people. What about

example-a.github.io and

example-b.github.io? I'd say no, since GitHub

allows anyone to register pages
like

username.github.io. I can make my judgments
as a human, but what should the browser do? Should

www.example.com be able to set a cookie that will be sent
to

mail.example.com?

It is a bit of a hack, but the way browsers deal with this is a big
list: the Public Suffix List.
The PSL contains, for example, com and
github.io, which tell us that example.com
and example.github.io are independent sites. On the
other hand, any subdomains are not separate sites:
forums.example.com and mail.example.com.
Have a look, it's pretty hairy: public_suffix_list.dat

Browsers are somewhat ashamed of the hackiness of site,
and nervous about the security risk of omissions, and so have
generally used a much stricter concept of origin when
introducing functionality. For example,
https://a.example.com cannot write to
localStorage in a way visible to
https://b.example.com. As browsers work to prevent
cross-site tracking, however, with privacy changes such as cache partitioning, the
origin model is too strict. These mitigations generally
use the PSL, and I wanted to look back at its origins.

HTTP was originally completely stateless. This poses challenges if
you want to implement per-user functionality, like a shopping cart.
Netscape's solution, which the world adopted, was cookies. If you
read the
original
specification, it has some discussion of how to prevent someone
setting a cookie on all of .com:

Only hosts within the specified domain can set a cookie for a domain
and domains must have at least two (2) or three (3) periods in them to
prevent domains of the form: ".com", ".edu", and "va.us". Any domain
that fails within one of the seven special top level domains listed
below only require two periods. Any other domain requires at least
three. The seven special top level domains are: "COM", "EDU", "NET",
"ORG", "GOV", "MIL", and "INT".

This simple heuristic worked reasonably well at the time: it
understands that

example.com and

example.co.uk are independent sites, separate from other

.com or

.co.uk sites.

Perhaps because this special-cased domain names, it was not included
in the first two ...
Book review: Sleight of Mind (Matt Cook)
by Bob Baker — 2021-02-07T21:44:13.784Z

This book covers a range of science and mathematics topics by focusing on paradoxes — surprising results, or seeming contradictions. This is an effective way to quickly give a taste, and a few deeper results, across a range of areas. (Chapter list included below.)

Such a range of topics in a single book often means that some are fumbled, sometimes badly. Keeping each to a single chapter obviously mandates omissions and simplifications but, pleasingly, I didn't notice any screw-ups. (Although perhaps that's the bliss of ignorance since I'm not an expert in any of the subjects.)

(At the end one learns that the chapters on physics were written by other authors, who are experts in those areas. That's probably a wise choice and it explained some stylistic discontinuities.)

Personally I was familiar with probably half of the paradoxes covered, which did make some of the chapters a little skippable. But I found that the unfamiliar ones were useful enough to justify hunting down. The chapter that left the strongest impression on me was actually the first one, on infinities. I think I've actually come across all of the paradoxes in that chapter — Hilbert's hotel is pretty famous — but having them all laid out in series left me wondering whether infinity wasn't a mistake:

Mathematics could have left the question of "how many natural numbers are there?" as undefined, like dividing by zero. There are as many as you want, but it's not an expressible quantity. Instead we gave it a name and explored what followed from it. That's not a bad idea in general: giving sqrt(-1) a name and seeing where that led turned out really well! But, as far as I know, the structure behind infinity is bereft, useless, and full of nonsense. Having the paradoxes written out, one after another, drove that home. Although perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps there's a rich and useful study of infinities that I'm not aware of, but that chapter left me wondering that maybe we shouldn't have bothered.

The chapter on voting (“Social Choice”) was the topic that I was least-well versed in, and was the one chapter that I went back and read again once finished. But voting systems are within the bailiwick of LessWrong so I'm not suggesting that most readers here would find it valuable. But, perhaps, it's worth reading the chapters that one is very familiar with as an exploration of how paradoxes might work for explainin...
How do you optimize productivity with respect to your menstrual cycle? 
by just_browsing — 2021-02-07T21:39:55.917Z

As the question asks, I am looking for productivity advice directly or indirectly related to one's menstrual cycle.

Motivation: This may seem like a gross or weirdly personal question but I think it's actually quite important. For example, for the first four hours of my period, I am unable to do anything besides lie down, be in pain, and (sometimes) vomit for about 4 hours. Not accounting for all of the other ways my period negatively affects me, this is already 4 hours * 12 = 48 hours = 2 full days lost per year. That being said, there can be menstruation related hormonal fluctuations which positively influence productivity. During ovulation, I can sometimes reach almost manic levels of mental and social energy and (I'm less sure about this) I require a bit less sleep to function.

What the question is asking: This is a very open-ended and personal question so I am expecting similarly open-ended and personal answers. For example, stuff I'm interested in:

Generally speaking, how does your menstrual cycle affect your productivity?
What effects has the pill had? Which kind of pill?
Have you experimented with varying your cycle length? (I had a 3 month cycle some number of years ago, and enjoyed the decreased frequency and intensity of my periods.)
Have you noticed fluctuations in energy level caused by your menstrual cycle? Any way to make the high energy phases longer and the low energy phases shorter? Do phases of high energy correspond to a certain hormone which I could get through the pill?
Are there dietary changes that mitigate the bad effects of menstruation / enhance the good effects? (For example, is it "helpful" to give in to cravings?)
Are there sleep schedule choices that can be made which synergize with your menstrual cycle?
Are there points in your cycle where you are best at detail-oriented work / creative work / socializing / writing / anything else relevant?

It's possible that your answers to many of these questions are "my menstrual cycle is irrelevant here because other inputs have way stronger effects". Insofar as your menstrual cycle has a sizeable effect on any of these points (or other points I haven't mentioned), I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts.
Why I Am Not in Charge
by Zvi — 2021-02-07T18:20:01.333Z

Epistemic Status: Long piece written because the speed premium was too high to write a short one. Figured I should get my take on this out quickly.

(Note: This has been edited to reflect that I originally mixed up UpToDate with WebMD (since it’s been years since I’ve used either and was writing quickly) and gave the impression that WebMD was a useful product and that my wife liked it or used it. I apologize for the mix-up, and affirm that WebMD is mostly useless, but UpToDate is awesome.)

Scott Alexander has a very high opinion of my ability to figure things out.. It’s quite the endorsement to be called the person that first comes to mind as likely things right. Scott even thinks it would hypothetically be great if I was the benevolent dictator or secretary of health, as my decisions would do a lot of good.

In turn, I have a very high opinion of Scott Alexander. If you get to read one person on the internet going either forwards or backwards, I’d go with Scott. Even as others are often in awe of my level (and sometimes quality) of output, I have always been in awe of his level and quality of output.

His core explanation in one paragraph: I have a much easier task than those in charge. All I have to do is get the right answer, without worrying (anything like as much) about liability or politics or leadership, or being legible, or any number of other things those with power and responsibility have to worry about lest they lose that power and responsibility and/or get sued into oblivion. Those with power have to optimize for seeking power and play the game of Moloch, and we need to pick a selection process that makes this the least destructive we can and thus can only rely on legible expertise, and we actually kind of do a decent job of it.

In that spirit, I’d like to welcome everyone coming here from Astral Codex Ten, flesh out and make more explicit my model of the dynamics involved, and point out some of the ways in which I think Scott’s model of the situation is wrong or incomplete. Which in turn will be partly wrong, and only be some of the ways in which it is wrong or incomplete, as my model is also doubtless wrong and incomplete.

The core disagreement between my model and Scott’s model is that Scott’s model implicitly assumes people with power have goals and are maximizing for success given those goals. I do not believe this.

More broadly, Sco...