trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On Changing Minds That Aren't Mine, and The Instinct to Surrender.
by Anomal3 — 2021-03-13T16:08:13.745Z

I am not a frequent poster on lesswrong. I’ve been part of the rationality community for a few years now, but I’ve fallen victim to the classic lurker mentality of looking at the most upvoted posts and believing that in comparison to them I haven’t got much to say. This post is, in part, an excuse to start posting anything at all- and in equal parts, an excuse to think about a problem that has been on my mind but not adequately articulated or considered.

I do not believe (or I at least do not behave like someone who believes) that people can change their minds- or, to me more accurate, that I can make people change their minds. This started with reasonable assessments and concessions to social realities; thoughts of the form, “While I might enjoy religious debates in the abstract, there is a very small chance that any conversation I have will convince anyone to convert to atheism. So, if I care about someone or consider them useful, it’s best not to talk about religion, because I’m unlikely to change their view but very likely to get them upset with me.” That is, I think, a sort of rational conclusion- Perhaps not one made for the right reasons, because my personality tends towards avoiding conflict anyway and this is a convenient way to do it, but it is at least defensible as an idea on its own merits.

I’ve always enjoyed arguing. I didn’t get to do it much as a kid, but the fun of debate was something that appealed to me. In college, I got on an ethics debate team that travelled across the state delving into the ethical dimensions of the issues of the day. With a few exceptions (I like to imagine they’re the sort of people who went on to become bioethicists), everyone was very friendly and polite. Due to the format of the competition, you didn’t need to disagree with your opponent; it was perfectly fine to say “Your conclusion seems right, however we’d like to refine a few points you made/examine it through another potential lens.” And many people did so! There was a feeling that the competition rounds were an exercise in trying to refine arguments and understandings into better versions of themselves by exposing them to criticism; it was all pleasantly idealistic.

When I started talking more in the rationality community (mostly in a public discord that I’ll keep unnamed due to a perhaps pointless paranoia regarding my veneer of anonymity), I loved arguing wi...
How to use hypnagogic hallucinations as biofeedback to relieve insomnia
by David Gross — 2021-03-13T15:28:51.407Z

tl;dr: If you focus, in a counterintuitively alert way, on the hypnagogic hallucinations you experience while trying to get to sleep, you can use them as a sort of biofeedback mechanism, following them as they change their characteristics in predictable ways in a direction that leads you out of insomnia into sleep.

Epistemic status:

I have allowed the typical mind fallacy to run wild and have over-confidently described something that works for me as though it will work for anyone. But perhaps my mind is typical enough for the purposes. Caveat lector.

You roll from side to back to side, you take a deep breath and try to banish the stresses of the day, maybe you even try counting sheep, but nothing helps. Each time you open your eyes in exasperation the window-shades are a little brighter and you’re closer to another day you’ll have to get through without enough sleep.

It shouldn’t have to be this way. Why can’t you just sleep like your body and mind clearly want to and need to? Why has something that was so easy for you as a child become so elusive and difficult as an adult?

Maybe you’ve tried natural-spectrum light bulbs, or changes to your diet. Maybe you’ve tried to tire yourself with exercise at bedtime. Maybe you’ve taken a chance on drug dependency by hitting the melatonin or the sedatives. Maybe you’ve tried reorienting your life around an afternoon siesta, or something exotic like “polyphasic sleep.” You’ve Googled your way through dozens of slapdash popular medicine articles that rehash the same old common sense about not drinking coffee in the evening and the like.

None of it seems to help.

This page is different. It’s going to describe a set of guideposts that you can follow that lead from insomnia to slumber, and the method you use to get reliably from each guidepost to the next.

Unlike some other techniques for dealing with insomnia, this one is not something you have to remember to do before you go to bed, or something that requires you to buy anything or to install equipment or to change your daytime routine. It’s something that is available to you wherever you happen to be and right when you need it: when you find yourself unable to fall asleep effortlessly.

This technique requires a little practice to get it right, but once you’ve got it, it’s like riding a bicycle and you can use it whenever you need it.

How I came to write this

For many years I was p...
Exploiting Crypto Prediction Markets for Fun and Profit
by Srdjan Miletic — 2021-03-13T02:31:30.493Z

I believe that exploiting inefficiencies in crypto prediction markets is an easy way to make market beating returns. This guide is a step by step walkthrough of how to make bets on these markets. I think this is useful because the process is somewhat complicated and there are a few non-obvious mistakes which can wipe out your returns.

The payoff per trade is in the region of 3% with a roughly 30 - 60 day turnaround time. Because of various costs, it's probably not economical to trade on less than 5k USD as the fixed costs will eat up your margin.

This is not financial advice. I may be wrong. The steps may be wrong. The specifics will become outdated over time. This is not zero-risk.

1: What are crypto prediction markets

Prediction markets are markets where people predict things, then the thing happens and then people either make or loose money based on whether their predictions were correct. The "market" in prediction market comes from the fact that rather than having a single agent set the odds and offer people bets, as is the case with a bookie, instead there is a supply of options representing outcomes which people bid on and freely exchange. The tokens are distributed in an initial auction. People can trade their tokens between the auction and the market resolving. Once the market resolves, those options can be redeemed for a fixed amount if they represent the correct outcome. Tokens representing the incorrect outcome are worthless.

There are various kinds of markets and formats but the simplest is a binary yes no question which resolves on a specific date. A few examples are:

"Will 100 million people have received a dose of an approved COVID-19 vaccine in the US by April 1, 2021?"

"Will ETH be above $2000 on April 1st, 2021?"

The tokens for these markets typically resolve for 1$ if they're correct or 0$ if incorrect, meaning the token price is bounded between 0$ - 1$ and converts neatly to a percentage.

2: Why should we believe we can beat the market?

On the object level because these markets are often obviously insane. At the date of writing there is an active prediction market asking if Trump will be president of the USA on the 31st of May, 2021. The odds are 0.95/0.05. Vitaliks post describing how he made money from the US election is another good example. On a more meta level, because prediction markets are far less optimized than other financial mar...
[Video] Intelligence and Stupidity: The Orthogonality Thesis
by plex — 2021-03-13T00:32:21.227Z
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo

Can highly intelligent agents have stupid goals?
A look at The Orthogonality Thesis and the nature of stupidity.

A good popular introduction to the Orthogonality Thesis from Robert Miles.
Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
by Scott Alexander — 2021-03-12T20:02:28.639Z

Crossposted from Astral Codex Ten

Introduction and review

Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al’s work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases.

To review: the brain combines raw experience (eg sensations, memories) with context (eg priors, expectations, other related sensations and memories) to produce perceptions. You don’t notice this process; you are only able to consciously register the final perception, which feels exactly like raw experience.

A typical optical illusion. The top chess set and the bottom chess set are the same color (grayish). But the top appears white and the bottom black because of the context (darker vs. lighter background). You perceive not the raw experience (grayish color) but the final perception modulated by context; to your conscious mind, it just seems like a brute fact that the top is white and the bottom black, and it is hard to convince yourself otherwise.

Or: maybe you feel like you are using a particular context independent channel (eg hearing). Unbeknownst to you, the information in that channel is being context-modulated by the inputs of a different channel (eg vision). You don’t feel like “this is what I’m hearing, but my vision tells me differently, so I’ll compromise”. You feel like “this is exactly what I heard, with my ears, in a way vision didn’t affect at all”.

This is called the McGurk Effect. The man is saying the same syllable each time, but depending on what picture of his mouth moving you see, you hear it differently. Your vision is context-modulating your hearing, but it just sounds like hearing something.

The most basic illusion I know of is the Wine Illusion; dye a white wine red, and lots of people will say it tastes like red wine. The raw experience - the taste of the wine itself - is that of a white wine. But the context is that you're drinking a red liquid. Result: it tastes like a red wine.

The placebo effect is almost equally simple. You're in pain, so your doctor gives you a “painkiller” (unbeknownst to you, it’s really a sugar pill). The raw experience is the nerve sending out just as many pain impulses as before....
Covid 3/12: New CDC Guidelines Available
by Zvi — 2021-03-12T17:20:01.392Z

This post is a day late although not all that short, as I warned it might be. This is because I have spent the last week visiting the best place on Earth, my true home, which is New York City. I will return again soon, and soon after that I will once again be able to live there. A great moment. I hope to write about the trip, but I need to get this post out quickly, so that won’t make it in this week.

This week had three (other) big discrete things happen. The CDC issued unexpectedly sane guidelines for vaccinated people, and thanks to the day of delay, we also have Biden announcing a date that everyone will be eligible for the vaccine. Finally, on March 7 the Covid Tracking Project stopped collecting data, requiring another phase transition in much of the data and leaving me without a source for detailed positive test rate data that I’m happy about.

We also had a bunch of opening up around the country, despite what is obviously about to happen.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Last week: 4.2% positive test rate and an average of 1,827 deaths after subtracting the California bump, using Covid Tracking Project’s final week of data.

Last week’s prediction: No prediction due to some combination of ‘somehow I forgot to do this’ and the expected lack of data collection making it difficult to fairly evaluate the prediction. We’ll start again fresh now.

(My (highly unreliable guess you should not trust to match what I would have said) would likely have been to see small declines, to something like 3.9% positive rate and 1,650 deaths, which absolutely does not count for anything as a prediction but does give a sense of vaguely where expectations were a week ago.)

This is the testing trends chart from Johns Hopkins, a plausible new data source.

I hate when I want charts and all I get are graphs, and also note that phase jump up and down, and also when you highlight a day it doesn’t tell you what date that is so unless you can work backwards from the final day (and this doesn’t make it that easy to know what the final day is, if it might or might not have updated yet) everything is super fuzzy.

The phase jump here appears in their data in some states and not in others. It’s clearly not ‘real.’ For now, I’m going to presume that the new 4.0% rate at the end is now calibrated however the old numbers were calibrated at the Covid Tracking ...
"Beliefs" vs. "Notions"
by David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet) — 2021-03-12T16:04:31.194Z

The term "belief" is used very differently in Bayesian ML and everyday life.

1) In Bayesian ML, is refers to a distribution over entire world models.
2) In everyday life, it refers to something more like a single proposition.

I propose the term "notion" for technical use to describe something like (2).
Rigorous political science?
by abramdemski — 2021-03-12T15:30:53.837Z

Voting theory seems pretty easy to Google, find interesting reference material on, etc. But I'm currently interested in going a bit beyond voting theory, to broader questions of governance. For example, what are the real advantages of parliamentary systems vs presidential systems? What elements of constitutions lead to actual good governance?
Questions like these are less clear-cut and more highly politicized, so I expect it to be much more difficult to filter out BS. Wikipedia is full of good historical information, but articles on specific government styles tend to only contain vague statements of advantages and disadvantages, rather than rigorous assessment.

Are there good subfields of political science that would offer powerful predictive models, or at least mathematically rigorous analysis?

Are there terms I should Google? Areas with good textbooks? Other book recommendations? Specific papers?
Can a Vegan Diet Be Healthy? A Literature Review
by Erich_Grunewald — 2021-03-12T12:47:50.590Z
Link: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/can-a-vegan-diet-be-healthy-a-literature-review/

Addendum 2023-07-02: Although this post concludes -- rightly, I think -- that a vegan diet can likely be healthy if you make sure to get all the nutrients that you need, I want to emphasise up front that you really do need to make sure that you get all the nutrients you need, and this does not happen by default. As the post points out, for example, many vegans are deficient in vitamin D and/or vitamin B12; fortunately those are easy to supplement, but you need to actually do that. For more information on how to do a vegan diet, see for example Vegan Health.

The skins crawled, and the meat that was stuck on the spits bellowed,

both roast and raw, and the noise was like the lowing of cattle.[1]

– Homer

The first question is: healthy compared to what? To a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet? or to a standard Western diet? or to the mean world diet, if that is even a coherent concept? The papers I will cover in this post don't all answer the same question, so I'll try to be clear in pointing out what they are comparing to. They also differ in which non-carnivorous diets they are looking at. There are many varieties of vegetarian[2] & even vegan diets. Since there aren't that many studies on vegan diets specifically, I'll also be looking at studies of vegetarian diets. Why? Because I think it's likely (though not guaranteed) that any positive or negative effects in vegetarian diets are also present in vegan diets (though there might be positive or negative effects from vegan diets that aren't produced by vegetarian diets). I'll make these distinctions, too, where relevant.

The other thing I'll note before we get underway is that vegans & vegetarians are strongly self-selected groups that differ significantly from the general population. That means there are a lot of possible confounds here. If we find that vegans are on average healthier than non-vegans, we can't infer that it is the vegan diet that makes them healthier, because correlation is not causation. It could just be that vegans exercise more or smoke less, for example, & that it is the exercise or the lack of smoking, not the diet, that makes them healthier. What that means is that we must look at observational studies with a critical eye.[3] Instead, wherever possible, I will be citing randomised controlled trials (RCTs), where the variable being studied (in this case, a particular diet) is isolated...
How I come up with ideas
by lsusr — 2021-03-12T09:01:31.916Z

I desire many things. I invent ideas to satisfy my desires. Whenever I learn something new, I compare the new fact against my database of desires. If my new fact could be used to satisfy a desire then I get an idea.

Some desires are universal among humans.

I want to be rich without putting in much effort.

I want lots of people to think I'm attractive.

I want a space station.

I want an electric car that costs $100.

I want a time machine, an invisibility cloak and a magic wand.

I want to live for a long time in good health.

I want to make my friends happy.

I want an ethical source of tasty protein.

I want to save and/or destroy the world.

Common desires are hard to satisfy creatively because too many people are competing to satisfy them. The possibility space of solution tends to have been picked clean. Either common desires are already satisfied or common desires are irreducibly hard to satisfy.

Cultivating Weird Desires

The trick to coming up ideas is to cultivate weird desires. Weird desires often arise from caring too much about things that don't matter (yet).

I want my keyboard inputs to be as efficient as humanly possible. (Solutions: Vim, Spacemacs.)

I want to learn foreign languages as efficiently as humanly possible. Anki isn't good enough. (Solution: write my own ML-powered flashcard software.)

I run LineageOS to evade adware, bloat and root protections on my Android phone.

Another way to cultivate weird desires is to be stingy with your money.

I write meta-ML software to automate architecture search because I need machine learning software but I do not want to hire lots of data scientists.

I lived in a hallway for two years to save money in college. I lived in a kitchen cupboard to save money in China. I like capsule hotels.

I use use AWS Lambda to avoid paying for more expensive EC2 instances. I use S3 to avoid the minimum price of a traditional RDS.

Weird desires motivate weird behaviors in a self-sustaining chain reaction.

I wrote a bash script that uses xrandr to adjust my screen resolution to the resolution of my drawing tablet because my drawing tablet's drivers for Linux did not map correctly to i3.

I do data science in Hy because my meta-ML software requires custom macros for its UI.

I am reading Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese because I want to better understand the poetry of Zen Master Ryokan.

Announcement

Justin Ith and I wil...
Impact of delaying vaccinations on the total number of deaths
by qbolec — 2021-03-11T23:49:37.278Z

When I've heard, that because of a single death, which might be attributed to something perhaps related to the vaccine, someone has decided to pause vaccinations in a whole country for two weeks, and then several other countries followed the suite, my first question was:

"But, how many more people will die because of delaying vaccinations for 14 days?!"

Because, on the one side we have "perhaps 1 per B*100 000 000" (guesstimate based on this) and on the other we have something like "at least A*100", and without knowing A and B, how can I do any cost-benefit calculation and form opinion on this?

I'm skeptical in cases like this, because politicians obviously care more about signaling their care about safety, then they actually care about safety. For example "pausing vaccinations because they might have side effects" clearly helps to achieve the first goal, regardless of whether or not it indeed increases public safety. And it can be even worse, if the signaling is aimed not at the citizens, but at someone else.

I've realized, that I don't know how many excess deaths are caused by delaying vaccination for two weeks.

My first intuition was that it's roughly 14*number of deaths per day attributed to COVID. But this isn't the correct way to count this for various reasons.

My second intuition was: hey, surely someone has already thought this through, and made a simulator - year ago there were plenty of Javascript pandemic simulators - let's just see what will happen if I pause vaccinations for two weeks, and I'm done! Alas, none of them has even the concept of vaccinations implemented - apparently back then developers were more pessimistic.

So, I thought that my last resort is to create such a simulation myself, which borders with insanity given how difficult statistics are and how easily one can shoot themselves in foot. But, since nobody else seems to have created such a simulation for me (or my google skills don't match their SEO skills), I'm forced to try. So here it is:

Impact of delaying vaccination in a simple epidemic model

Obviously it is very simplified, as I am not an epidemiologists (nor a statistician) and moreover, even if I had added more parameters to the model, I would have no idea how to set them to plausible values, and all I wanted to achieve is to build some mental model of how pausing vaccinations impacts total deaths - not compute the exa...
I want to die in an infinite universe. How philosophy led me to the deepest heights of indifferent despair.
by Szymon Kucharski — 2021-03-11T23:16:13.696Z

{warning: a translation} Here there should be a quote related to the subject, showing our littleness, because that's what the quote implies, and our tickling ego, because someone wise said something with which we agree. I don't see the need to define wisdom, so I don't see the sense in that either. I'd like to erase this unnecessary term, like a million others, from people's http://www.edarcipelago.com/freebooks/CioranHeightsofDespair.pdf

Why rationality and logic work at all, and why, even if they don't work, it is pointless and impossible not to assume them in order to achieve any goal.

Is there any goal we should want to achieve? I don't know, I don't know what it means we should, I'm not interested in it. Do I have a goal that I would like to achieve? I do not know. I act so that it seems to me that there is such a purpose in me. The simplest coherent candidate for such a goal is complete fulfillment, the state of lack of further desires and needs, which I treat as unnecessary in a life assessed as tragically useless. I want and I can't stop wanting. In the depths of something I WANT and I want to fulfill the conditions that will make me stop WANTING, fulfilling this permanent omni-wanting, or stop feeling it. I have no need to look for any depth in it and seek to understand such a state for any purpose other than ending this wish. I don't know how to reason outside of logic, so I use it absolutely. I assume I am, since I could infer it, so p-> p, if so, then all logic. The third assumption is the assumption of the existence of some form of external world, I assume, available to experimental cognition. On these 4 assumptions, I try to build my vision of the world. The simpler something is in the dimension of axioms, if it is consistent with itself and with observations, the more it tempts me.

I am not going to write about goals, meanings, and meanings, or any other metaphysical aspects, because I don't see the need to use them in any absolute sense or in any absolutely objective way. Defined in this way do not exist for me, unlike the feelings we call sensations of meaning, value, and meaning.

I have a need to fill the gaps in ignorance with philosophy. From the coherent visions, I choose the simplest, requiring the least assumptions and mechanisms. I don't care if I should or if it makes sense, however expressed, the only important thin...