trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Baking is Not a Ritual
by Sisi Cheng — 2020-05-25T18:08:24.836Z

I started baking about 2 years ago. Since I became a frequent supplier of baked goods in the office, a lot of people have come to me for baking advice. I’ve noticed a trend of comments about baking that all share a common root cause.

See if you can spot the common failure mode that led to these very-paraphrased comments:

“Baking is too precise for me. I want to bake without following recipes exactly, but I feel like I can’t improvise.”
“I tried making this. I left out ingredient Y because I didn’t have it and the recipe only needed a little bit of it. Why didn’t it work out?”
“I tried doing step X for exactly N minutes this time and that worked well. Oh, you’re saying that duration doesn’t matter? Well, it worked for me so I think I’ll just keep doing it just in case.”
“I always have to repeat a new recipe a bunch before I stop ruining it every other time.”

The misconception that leads to these comments is treating a baking recipe like a ritual and blindly following it, without attempting to understand the baking process at a gears-level.

Many people seem to approach baking like it is a ritual, where one follows a recipe exactly and some magic happens to produce the baked goods. Things will go mysteriously wrong if you stirred the cauldron counter-clockwise or added the water too early. In reality, baking is combining and heating up a series of ingredients so they undergo physical and chemical reactions to achieve certain texture and taste. There are underlying principles that govern the process of baking and the results.

Looking at a recipe and following the steps works fine a lot of the time, if a recipe is good and has the right details. However, if one treats the baking process as a black box ritual, without understanding the underlying mechanisms, one can run into troubles, such as:

Unable to improvise or change a recipe
Not knowing which parts of the recipe matter, i.e. have a strong effect on the end-results. Some people end up compensating for this by just trying to do everything super precisely, even when some of the steps don't make any difference.
Unable to react when something goes wrong, like a missing ingredient, or a mistake in an earlier step.

The right way to approach baking is to realize it is not a ritual. Instead, try to understand the princ...
What is a decision theory as a mathematical object?
by Erik Jenner — 2020-05-25T13:44:54.284Z

If we want a space of all decision theories, what mathematical objects does it contain? For example, if a decision theory is a function, what are its domain and codomain?

The only approach I'm familiar with is to view expected utility maximizing decision theories as ways of building counterfactuals (section 5 in the FDT paper). A decision theory could then be described as a function that takes in a state s and an action a and spits out a distribution over world states that result from counterfactually taking action a in state s.

But EDT, CDT and FDT require different amounts and kinds of structure in the description of the state s they take as input (pure probability distributions, causal models and logical models respectively), so this approach only works if there is some kind of structure that is sufficient for all decision theories we might come up with at some point.
An addendum on effective population size
by willbradshaw — 2020-05-25T12:35:52.481Z
Link: https://apomorphic.com/2019/12/31/effective-population-size

Follows from: Evolution is Sampling Error

A lot of people commenting on my previous post (mainly on Facebook) were confused about the difference between effective and census population size. I think the second response is reasonable; for non-experts, the concept of effective population size is legitimately fairly confusing. So I thought I'd follow up with a quick addendum about what effective population size is and why we use it. Since I'm not a population geneticist by training this should also be a useful reminder for me.

The field of biology that deals with the evolutionary dynamics of populations -- how mutations arise and spread, how allele frequencies shift over time through drift and selection, how alleles flow between partially-isolated populations -- is population genetics. "Popgen" differs from most of biology in that its foundations are primarily hypothetico-deductive rather than empirical: one begins by proposing some simple model of how evolution works in a population, then derives the mathematical consequences of those initial assumptions. A very large and often very beautiful edifice of theory has been constructed from these initial axioms, often yielding surprising and interesting results.

Population geneticists can therefore say a great deal about the evolution of a population, provided it meets some simplifying assumptions. Unfortunately, real populations often violate these assumptions, often dramatically so. When this happens, the population becomes dramatically harder to model productively, and the maths becomes dramatically more complicated and messy. It would therefore be very useful if we could find a way to usefully model more complex real populations using the models developed for the simple cases.

Fortunately, just such a hack exists. Many important ways in which real populations deviate from ideal assumptions cause the population to behave roughly like an idealised population of a different (typically smaller) size. This being the case, we can try to estimate the size of the idealised population that would best approximate the behaviour of the real population, then model the behaviour of that (smaller, idealised) population instead. The size of the idealised population that causes it to best approximate the behaviour of the real population is that real population's "effective" size.

There are various ways in which deviations from the i

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Why Rationalists Shouldn't be Interested in Topos Theory
by jollybard — 2020-05-25T05:35:03.193Z

I spent a lot of the last two years getting really into categorical logic (as in, using category theory to study logic), because I'm really into logic, and category theory seemed to be able to provide cool alternate foundations of mathematics.

Turns out it doesn't really.

Don't get me wrong, I still think it's interesting and useful, and it did provide me with a very cosmopolitan view of logical systems (more on that later). But category theory is not suitable for foundations or even meant to be foundational. Most category theorists use an extended version of set theory as foundations!

In fact, its purpose is best seen as exactly dual to that of foundations: while set theory allows you to build things from the ground up, category theory allows you to organize things from high above. A category by itself is not so interesting; one often studies a category in terms of how it maps from and into other categories (including itself!), with functors, and, most usefully, adjunctions.

Ahem. This wasn't even on topic.

I want to talk about a particular subject in categorical logic, perhaps the most well-studied one, which is topos theory, and why I believe it be to useless for rationality, so that others may avoid retreading my path. The thesis of this post is that probabilities aren't (intuitionistic) truth values.

Topoï and toposes

A topos is perhaps best seen not even as category, but as an alternate mathematical universe. They are, essentially, "weird set theories". Case in point: Set itself is a topos, and other toposes are often constructed as categories of functors F:C→Set, for C an arbitrary category.

(Functors assemble into categories if you take natural transformations between them. That basically means that you have maps F(c)→G(c), such that if you compare the images of a path under F and G, all the little squares commute.)

Consider that natural numbers, with their usual ordering like 4≤5, can form a category if you take instead 4→5. So one simple example is to consider the category of all functors N→Set, which are really just sequences of sets, like

X1→X2→X3→⋯

where the arrows are regular set theoretic functions. You can do practically any kind of mathematical reasoning using sequences of sets! (as long as it is constructive) For example, you have

an "

... ,,
What are the best tools for recording predictions?
by Raemon — 2020-05-24T19:15:24.033Z

Preferably, follow rules from "Best Textbooks in any Subject." I'm interested in people who have tried 2-3 prediction-recording tools, and can argue why one is better than the others.

I've decided I finally want to get gud at calibration.

I'm personally just interested in tracking my own predictions, often about private things. I'd prefer something very low-friction where I can record my own predictions, mark them as true/false later on using my own judgment, and automatically see a graph of how calibrated I am.
[Meta] Finding free energy in karma
by  — 2020-05-24T14:47:15.115Z

As I've been posting here on LessWrong for a few months now, I wanted to share two things I've noticed about the karma system. These are ad-hoc observations, not rigorous empirical results, and while they might feel like ways to "cheat" the system, I hope by making them public and known, it serves to make the "market" for karma more efficient instead.

1. [Fairly confident] Posts appear on the front page unevenly throughout the week. As best I can tell there's a lull on Sunday and a spike on Monday/Tuesday. I'm not sure if this is due to unevenness in when people write, or unevenness in when mods promote posts to the front page. Regardless, since your post's karma depends in part on how long it remains on the front page (which provides more eyeballs), and that depends in part on what other posts it's competing against, there is opportunity here. Consider delaying publishing your post to a less busy time of the week.

2. [Less confident] Automatic cross-posting is a self-fulfilling karma signal. Having automatic cross-posting set up requires both sufficient author interest and sufficient moderator trust, since it's still a fairly manual process. This means that auto-x-posting is a fairly significant indicator of status/karma in the community, and such posts tend to do better in part as a self-fulfilling prophecy (of course they often do better because they're unusually good too - the karma system isn't broken, just slightly unbalanced). There's no way to replicate the automatic-x-post indicator in a manual post, but even just putting "[Cross-posted from MyBlog]" at the top of the text seems to provide a small boost.
Plague in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
by Zvi — 2020-05-24T12:00:00.904Z

Spoiler Alert: Contains minor spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has become my quaratine game. A gorgeous tour of ancient Greece is a great antidote to never going outside.

One noteworthy thing in the game is how it deals with plague. You encounter it twice.

On the game’s introductory island of Kefalonia, you can run into a side quest called The Blood Fevor. There is a plague, and priests are attempting to contain it… by killing off the families of the infected.

You can either allow this, or you can forcibly prevent it, in which case you have to kill the priests.

If you do not prevent the excutions, you are called a muderer. You try to ‘reassure’ your friend that this was necessary. Later in the game, the Oracle of Delphi tells you that you’re a bad person, because you let yourself be bossed around by an unknown plague.

If you prevent the executions, you are called a hero. Later in the game, you are informed a plauge has spread throughout Kefalonia. No one makes the connection or blames you.

If you also let them keep their money, you are told the plauge has spread throughout Greece. So being superficially generous makes things much, much worse.

This all feels right and seems to explain a lot. It is clear what must be done, but the incentives are all wrong. Even when you are right you still get punished for allowing others to take action. If you prevent others from taking action, even with disasterous consequences, you are considered a hero.

Later, you are given a quest to warn about The Plague of Athens. The plauge is historical, so it can’t be prevented. Warning about it has no effect. Again, this feels right.

When the Plague of Athens does hit, you are given the task to burn some of the bodies to prevent further spread, as Hippokrates (yes, that one, these games are like that) has figured out this will help prevent further infection. The Followers of Ares try to stop you for religious reasons, and you have to kill them. Once again, society primarily moves to violently prevent action.

Then Pericles breaks quarantine and goes outside when everyone tells him not to, and gets himself killed for it. That part is not historical. It felt right in context.

Experiencing the game helped me process why we’ve reacted to today’s plauge the way we did.
Why We Age, Part 1: What ageing is and is not
by willbradshaw — 2020-05-24T09:06:08.897Z
Link: https://apomorphic.com/2019/09/09/why-we-age-1-intro

At the LessWrong European Community Weekend 2018, I gave a talk explaining the intuition behind non-adaptive theories of the evolution of ageing. This blog post and its followup are adapted from that presentation.

When people find out that I did my PhD in the biology of ageing, they tend to ask one of two questions. First, they ask what they can do to live longer. Second, they ask why people age in the first place. My answer to the first question is unfortunately fairly boring at present -- don't smoke, eat well, get enough exercise, get enough sleep, et cetera -- but when it comes to the second I think I have more of interest to say. So let's dive into the important and fractious question of why we age.

What is ageing?

It is a curious thing that there is no word in the English language that stands for the mere increase of years; that is, for ageing without its connotations of increasing deterioration and decay.

—Peter Medawar, "An Unsolved Problem in Biology"

When people talk about "ageing", there are broadly speaking three different things they might mean[1]. Firstly, there is the simple process of getting older -- of the amount of time since you were born inexorably increasing. Let's call this process "temporal ageing". Ageing in this way has a lot of benefits: more memories, more experience, and with luck more self-knowledge and more wisdom.

Unfortunately, the benefits conferred by temporal ageing are currently inextricably tied to the physical changes denoted by the second meaning of "ageing": a generalised physiological deterioration, characterised by a wide range of unfortunate symptoms affecting almost every system of the body. As a result of this second kind of ageing, we become slower, more fragile, more prone to disease, and generally more likely to experience impaired health and wellbeing as we get older, eventually leading to death. As we as a civilisation have gradually eliminated more and more extrinsic forms of suffering and death, the depredations of ageing have gradually become the primary cause of ill health and death in developed countries by an overwhelming margin. This is the kind of ageing people mean when they worry about getting cancer or dementia, buy "anti-ageing" skin cream, or invest in real anti-ageing research; it's the province of doctors, physiologists, and molecular biologists. Let's call it "physiological ageing".

Finally, th

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LessWrong v2.0 Anti-Kibitzer (hides comment authors and vote counts)
by Marcello — 2020-05-23T23:44:15.457Z

About 10 years ago, I wrote the original LessWrong 1.0 anti-kibitzer. The original rationale for creating it was as a de-biasing tool to aid in judging ideas by their contents, rather than their author or popularity. The original post goes into the rationale for its creation in more depth so I won't repeat myself here.

As such, I went back and updated it for the modern site. Follow the link to find the UserScript, some screenshots of it in action, and installation instructions. I have also added an additional feature which replaces the usernames with colorful bars of different lengths and colors. This makes threaded conversations easier to follow, as it enables one to tell when two comments are written by the same individual.

Let me know in the comments if you find any bugs or have any feature requests.
Opposing a hierarchy does not imply egalitarianism
by Viliam — 2020-05-23T20:51:10.024Z

Epistemic status: just thinking aloud...

Trigger warning: bullying (without details)

I have repeatedly seen the claim that people are egalitarian in nature. It goes roughly like this:

Before invention of agriculture, people didn't have hierarchies. Of course, some people were always stronger or more skilled than others. But when we observe the behavior of hunter-gatherer tribes today, we see that they have strong social norms against bragging. For example, a superior hunter always downplays his success, and attributes it to luck rather than his own skills. (And the rest of the tribe often plays along, ritualistically mocking the hunter and his catch.) A hunter violating this social norm would antagonize everyone, and he knows he cannot afford it. This shows that people naturally oppose hierarchies.

I am not an anthropologist, and I could only guess how our ancestors really behaved. This article is not meant as a positive statement about the actual behavior of our ancestors, but rather as a criticism of the argument, which I will shorten to: "I have seen people oppose a hierarchy, which means that they are egalitarians."

Allow me to illustrate what I mean, using a simple model:

Imagine a completely fictional social environment; let's call it "high school". As a simplification, imagine that it contains three kinds of people. First group, let's call them "normies", is average at everything. Second group, let's call them "jocks", is superior at physical skills, and inferior at mental skills. Third group, let's call them "nerds", is superior at mental skills, and inferior at physical skills. The typical behavior observed at the schoolyard is "jocks" bullying "nerds".

An external observer, focusing on a subset of facts, could easily conclude that the high school is an exemplar of egalitarian society, and describe it thusly:

Before becoming adults, children do not have hierarchies. Of course, some children are stronger or smarter than others. But when we observe the behavior at schools today, we see that they have strong social norms against bragging. For example, a student superior at math will try to hide his or her skills in the classroom, to avoid antagonizing classmates. Otherwise, he or she would likely be bullied. This shows that children naturally oppose hierarchies.

And w...
What is your internet search methodology ?
by George3d6 — 2020-05-23T20:33:53.668Z

I feel like the heuristics we use to search random tat on the internet are an incredibly larger part of our lives.

I wouldn't make a claim as extended as "googling skills are on the largest determinants of success in life", but I wouldn't look very suspiciously at someone that tried to make it either.

So I'm rather curios what the "search methodology" of people here is.

Let me try to give an example by detailing mine, it's non-ideal since I apply it mainly subconsciously, but that's why I'm looking to improve it, also I'm probably missing some things ,but again, this is just an example not a claim that it's in any way "good.

a) Find a phrasing that is < 5-6 word long and type it into google

b) If a certain key word isn't showing up quote it

c) If am looking for a specific type of discussing type the name of a form together with it (e.g. LessWrong: Fobar falacy, SSC: edgy political thing, Reddit: Corporate sponsored product review, StackOverflow: copy paste of a tiny part of the debug log which I hope is unique enough for my problem)

d) If what I'm looking for seem high-falutin to be considered "scientific" consider google scholar instead

+ ublock origin with strict settings, disable 3rd party cookies, container addons for e.g. google and fb in order to somewhat limit amount of ads

+ sci-hub now for quicker paper reading (basically you just click it, it tires to find the doi of the abstract you are looking at and opens it in a scihub tag)

For me, at least, thinking of this requires trying to observe myself and query my subconscious, rather than thinking about it the same way I think about explicit actions/choices.

I'd wager it's the same for many people and thus a lot of critical components might be missing... but, there's not much that can be done about that.
Mazes Sequence Summary
by Zvi — 2020-05-23T16:40:01.401Z

This post attempts to summarize the key points of the Immoral Mazes Sequence, which begins here, so they can be referenced without asking readers to get through an entire book first.

Due to the change in format, the posts will be summarized slightly out of order.

Note that this summary, and especially the summary of the summary, represent a not only an abridged and simplified but also sanitized version of the central points. Brains do their best to continuously round down and not fully see these concepts.

Core Ideas (Summary of the Summary)

The book Moral Mazes, by Robert Jackall, is a detailed exploration of middle manager hell. Managers must abandon all other goals and values, in favor of spending all their time and resources on manipulations of the system. They must learn to view such actions as intrinsically good and worthy of reward. Only those who let this process entirely consume them can survive.

The Immoral Mazes sequence is an exploration of what causes that hell, and how and why it has spread so widely in our society. Its thesis is that this is the result of a vicious cycle arising from competitive pressures among those competing for their own organizational advancement. Over time, those who focus more on and more value such competitions win them, gain power and further spread their values, unless they are actively and continuously opposed.

Once things get bad in an organization they tend to only get worse, but things in general get better because such organizations then decay and are replaced by new ones. Unfortunately, our society now slows or prevents that process, with these same organizations and their values increasingly running the show.

Investment and flexibility become impossible. Even appearing to care about anything except the competition itself costs you your allies. Thus things inevitably decay and then collapse, flexibility returns, cycle repeats.

Involvement with such patterns is far more destructive to humans than is commonly known. Employment or other involvement with such patterns should be avoided or ended, even at seemingly high cost in money and superficial status. If one wishes to accomplish something other than competition for advancement, one must be vigilant to punish maze-promoting behaviors, and to keep out or cast out those whose values align with mazes.

This is a special case of the principle that

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