trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Stop pressing the Try Harder button
by Neel Nanda — 2020-09-05T09:10:05.964Z
Link: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/mini-blog-post-6-stop-pressing-the-try-harder-button

(This is a post from a daily blogging experiment I did at neelnanda.io, which I thought might also fit the tastes of LessWrong. This is very much in the spirit of Trying to Try)

I recently had a productivity coaching session, and at the end we agreed on a few actions points that I’d do by the next session. But, come the next session, these had completely slipped my mind. These suggestions were good ideas, and I had no issue with implementing them, the problem was just that they completely slipped my mind! (We then spent the second session debugging my ability to actually follow action points, and this was pretty successful!)

I think the error I made there is a really common one when planning, and one I observe often in myself and others. Often I’ll hear a cool book recommendation, offer to meet up with someone some time, hear about a new productivity technique, notice an example sheet deadline looming. But I consistently fail to action upon this. So this post is about what exactly went wrong, and the main solution I’ve found to this problem!

Planning, as I define it, is about ensuring that the future goes the way I currently want it to. And the error I made was that, implicitly, I was trying to make the future go the way I currently wanted it to. That by committing to do things, and wanting to them, and just applying effort, things would happen. And the end result of this was that I totally forgot about it. Or sometimes, that I vaguely remembered the commitment or idea, and felt some guilt about it, but it never felt urgent or my highest priority. And every time I thought about the task, I resolved to Try Harder, and felt a stronger sense of motivation, but this never translated into action. I call this error Pressing the Try Harder button, and it’s characterised by feelings of guilt, obligation, motivation and optimism.

This is a classic case of failing to Be Deliberate. It feels good to try hard at something, it feels important and virtuous, and it’s easy to think that trying hard is what matters. But ultimately, trying hard is just a means to an end - my goal is to ensure that the task happens. If I can get it done in half the effort, or get somebody else to do it, that’s awesome! Because my true goal is the result. And pressing the Try Harder button is not an effective way of achieving the goal - you can tell, bec...
Li and Vitanyi's bad scholarship
by alanf — 2020-09-05T08:07:02.851Z

In An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications 4th edition Li and Vitanyi claim that Solomonoff Induction solves the problem of induction. In Section 5.1.4 they write:

The philosopher D. Hume (1711–1776) argued that true induction is impossible because we can reach conclusions only by using known data and methods. Therefore, the conclusion is logically already contained in the start configuration. Consequently, the only form of induction possible is deduction. Philosophers have tried to find a way out of this deterministic conundrum by appealing to probabilistic reasoning such as using Bayes’s rule. One problem with this is where the prior probability one uses has to come from. Unsatisfactory solutions have been proposed by philosophers such as R. Carnap (1891–1970) and K.R. Popper.

What Hume actually wrote about induction was (Section IV, Part II, pp. 16-17):

Should it be said that, from a number of uniform experiments, we infer a connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; this, I must confess, seems the same difficulty, couched in different terms. The question still recurs, on what process of argument this inference is founded? Where is the medium, the interposing ideas, which join propositions so very wide of each other? It is confessed that the colour, consistence, and other sensible qualities of bread appear not, of themselves, to have any connexion with the secret powers of nourishment and support. For otherwise we could infer these secret powers from the first appearance of these sensible qualities, without the aid of experience; contrary to the sentiment of all philosophers, and contrary to plain matter of fact. Here, then, is our natural state of ignorance with regard to the powers and influence of all objects. How is this remedied by experience? It only shows us a number of uniform effects, resulting from certain objects, and teaches us that those particular objects, at that particular time, were endowed with such powers and forces. When a new object, endowed with similar sensible qualities, is produced, we expect similar powers and forces, and look for a like effect. From a body of like colour and consistence with bread we expect like nourishment and support. But this surely is a step or progress of the mind, which wants to be explained. When a man says, I have found, in all past instances,

...
Conflict, the Rules of Engagement, and Professionalism
by habryka — 2020-09-05T05:04:16.081Z

(Talk given at an event on Sunday 16th of August. habryka is responsible for the talk, Justis Mills edited the transcript.

If you're a curated author and interested in giving a 5-min talk, which will then be transcribed and edited, sign up here.)

(This was all very off-the-cuff about stuff that I am very confused about, so take all of this with a grain of salt. There are at least a few things in here I disagree with myself, that I wouldn't have put into written form directly.)

habryka: I’m going to talk about three frames I have involving relationships and sociology. I’ll present the frames, some short justifications for why I believe them, and discuss how they connect to each other.

1. I think most relationships go better if you lean into conflict.

2. Most conflicts are hierarchically embedded within different rules, and maintaining the integrity of those rules is quite important.

3. Professionalism is really interesting. I like thinking about it, and I've gotten a bunch of value from thinking about it, because I didn't realize how much of my life has been shaped by professionalism.

Leaning into conflict

One of the things that has been pretty useful for me in life, is a general heuristic of realizing that conflict in relationships is usually net positive. (It depends a bit on the exact type of conflict, but works as a very rough heuristic.) I find it pretty valuable too, if I'm in a relationship, whether it's a working relationship, a romantic relationship, or a friendship, to pay a good amount of attention to where conflicts could happen in that relationship. And generally, I choose to steer towards those conflicts, to talk about them and seize them as substantial opportunities.

I think there are two reasons for this.

First, if startups should

fail fast

, so should relationships. The number of people you could have relationships with is much greater than the number of people that you will have relationships with. So there is a selection problem here, and in order to get as much data as you want, I think going through relationships quickly and figuring out whether they will break or not is quite valuable.

Second, I've found that having past successful conflicts in a relationship is a very strong predictor for that relationship going well more generally, and for my ability to commit to the relationship and get things done within it. In fact, I fi...
Multivariate estimation & the Squiggly language
by ozziegooen — 2020-09-05T04:35:01.206Z

(Talk given at an event on Sunday 16th of August. Ozzie Gooen is responsible for the talk, Justis Mills edited the transcript.

If you're a curated author and interested in giving a 5-min talk, which will then be transcribed and edited, sign up here.)

Ozzie: This image is my

TLDR

on probability distributions:

Basically, distributions are kind of old school. People are used to estimating and predicting them. We don't want that. We want functions that return distributions -- those are way cooler. The future is functions, not distributions.

What do I mean by this?

For an example, let's look at some of the existing COVID models. This is one of them, from the IHME:

You can see that it made projections for total deaths, daily deaths, and a bunch of other variables. And for each indicator, you could choose a country or a location, and it gives you a forecast of what that indicator may look like.

So basically there's some function that for any parameter, which could be deaths or daily deaths or time or whatever, outputs a probability density. That's the core thing that's happening.

So if you were able to parameterize the model in that way, and format it in these terms, you could basically wrap the function in some encoding. And then do the same forecast, but now using a centralized encoding.

So right now, basically for people to make something like the COVID dashboard from before, they have to use this intense output and write some custom GUI. It's a whole custom process. Moreover, it's very difficult to write your own function that calls their underlying model.

But, hypothetically, if we had an encoding layer between the model and the output, these forecasters could basically write the results of their model into one function, or into one big file. Then that file could be interpreted and run on demand. That would be a much nicer format.

Let’s take a look at Metaculus, which is about the best forecasting platform we have right now.

On Metaculus, everything is a point estimate, which is limiting. In general, it's great that we have good point estimates, but most people don't want to look at this. They’d rather look at the pretty dashboard from before, right?

So we need to figure out ways of getting our predictors to work together to make things that look more like the pretty graphs. And one of those questions is: how do we get predic...
When should I be concerned about my Oura measurements indicating COVID-19?
by ChristianKl — 2020-09-04T22:15:54.577Z

The Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute seems to have developed an app that can detect COVID-19 3 days before symptoms based on Oura data but the app isn't publically available. How should a user that doesn't have access to the app interpret his Oura measurements to know when they should self-isolate or get tested?
Hello ordinary folks, I'm the Chosen One
by dadadarren — 2020-09-04T19:59:10.799Z

This is an informal argument against the fine-tuned universe. The complete argument can be found on my website. The purpose is to show the importance of perspectives in reasoning, especially in anthropic topics. See my previous post for a summary.

Why I am the Chosen One

I know this sounds ridiculous. But bear with me for a minute. I will prove it to you. The clue is in the history.

I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and 8 great-grandparents. This number keeps multiplying. 50 generations back, the theoretical upper bound for the number of my ancestors is about 10^15, way above the total number of humans ever lived. Of course, there would be significant overlaps in this mega family tree. At this scale, calling it a family web would no longer be a joke. Nonetheless, even with overlapping, it still means going back far enough, say around 1000AD, my direct ancestors would cover a significant portion of the world population.

My existence is the result of all those people’s reproductive success. That means any historical event that affected the lives of a moderate number of people must have unfolded exactly the way it did for the creation of me. If Alexsander lost the battle of Gaugamela, or Genghis Khan failed to unite the Mongol tribes, or Columbus did not reach the New World in 1492, I would not be here.

Why stop there? It can go even further and be more disturbing. For my existence, it is not enough that all my ancestors successfully produced offsprings, they had to produce the exact offsprings. Meaning in each case the exact sperm had to fertilize the exact egg. Couple this with the exponential growth of my family tree the chance of my existence is unfathomably small. Yet, here I am.

This is either a statistical miracle or, an unknown force has guided every aspect of the past to ensure my existence. The odd is too obvious. The history must be fine-tuned for me.

The Fine-Tuned Universe

I can imagine how people would react if I tell them the above. They will say I am unbelievably egocentric and narcissistic. Why would history care if you are produced or not? Something could very well happen differently causing you not to be born. Big deal? More importantly, if the past is fine-tuned for you, am I just a by-product of that fine-tuning? I can use the same argument from my perspective and say history is fine-tuned for me instead of you. Safe to say it is not going to b...
Why would code/English or low-abstraction/high-abstraction simplicity or brevity correspond?
by curi — 2020-09-04T19:46:29.174Z

Solomonoff Induction (SI) focuses on short code. What’s short in English is not necessarily short in code, and vice versa. Most of our intuition in favor of short, simple explanations is from our experience with English, not code. Is there literature arguing that code and English brevity usually or always correspond to each other? If not, then most of our reasons for accepting Occam’s Razor wouldn’t apply to SI.

Another way to think of the issue may be that coding is a low level or reductionist way to deal with an issue, while English is a high level approach that uses high level tools like explanations. Ideas can be represented in many ways, including at different levels of abstraction. It’s unclear that length or simplicity is consistent for the same idea across different levels of abstraction. That is, if you have two ideas X and Y, and X is simpler and shorter when you compare both ideas at a one level of abstraction, it may be unsafe to assume that X will also be simpler and shorter than Y when you compare them at a different level of abstraction. Is there any literature which addresses this?
Open & Welcome Thread - September 2020
by habryka — 2020-09-04T18:14:17.056Z

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it. (You can also make a shortform post)

And, if you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are welcome.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here.
Estimating the ROI of Insulation
by jefftk — 2020-09-03T20:30:08.886Z

A few months ago I wrote about

trying to decide what to do with our
shed. It turns out that not only is our property too small for a
tiny house ("backyard cottage"), the only reason we're able to have
the shed where it is it's because it is grandfathered in. The shed
turned out to have solid footings, so we decided to have it repaired.

I hired a mason to redo the cinderblock and a carpenter to replace the
roof. The mason has finished, and I'm waiting for the carpenter to
start:

When the carpenter is done, we'll have a weathertight structure, but
we still need to figure out what we want to do with the inside. One
thing I'm trying to figure out is how much insulation makes sense. As
a detached building with electricity, we would probably use resistive
heat, which is relatively expensive (~$0.21/kWh).

The structure is:

Walls
335 sqft

Roof
145 sqft

Floor
145 sqft

Door
18 sqft

Side windows
12 sqft

End window
8 sqft

Most of the structure is exposed to air, which is generally much
colder than the ground, so I'm going to ignore the floor.

Heat loss is proportional to area and temperature difference, and also
varies by material. This per-material factor is called the U-factor
(heat / area-degree). When dealing with conductive heat loss, which
is the main kind of loss I expect us to see here, people generally use
its reciprocal, the R-value. Attempts at estimating the R-values of
the shell components, in F*sqft*hr/BTU:

Walls
8" cinderblock
1.11

Roof
3/4 plywood sheathing, asphault shingles
0.94 + 0.44

Door
solid wood
2.17

Side windows
single pane
0.91

End windows
double pane
3.4

This gives me:

335 sqft / 1.11 F*sqft*hr/BTU +
145 sqft / 1.38 F*sqft*hr/BTU +
18 sqft / 2.17 F*sqft*hr/BTU +
12 sqft / 0.91 F*sqft*hr/BTU +
8 sqft / 3.4 F*sqft*hr/BTU
= 430 BTU / F*hr

How many heating degree hours (F*h) should we count? If it is 50F
outside for one hour and I want it to be 70F inside, that's 20F*h.
What is it over the course of a year?

The standard approach is to look up heating degree days for your
location. This is a standard number computed for many places, and
assumes you heat your building to 65F. Per NationalGrid,
over the last 30 years Boston has averaged 6,521 heating degree-days.
We're not planning to live in the shed, though, and instead we would
prob...
Using GPT-N to Solve Interpretability of Neural Networks: A Research Agenda
by Logan Riggs — 2020-09-03T18:27:05.860Z

Tl;dr We are attempting to make neural networks (NN) modular, have GPT-N interpret each module for us, in order to catch mesa-alignment and inner-alignment failures.

Completed Project

Train a neural net with an added loss term that enforces the sort of modularity that we see in well-designed software projects. To use this paper's informal definition of modularity

a network is modular to the extent that it can be partitioned into sets of neurons where each set is strongly internally connected, but only weakly connected to other sets.

Example of a “Modular” GPT. Each module should be densely connected w/ relatively larger weights. Interfaces between modules should be sparsely connected w/ relatively smaller weights.

Once we have a Modular NN (for example, a GPT), we will use a normal GPT to map each module into a natural language description. Notice that there are two different GPT’s at work here.

GPT-N reads in each “Module” of the “Modular GPT”, outputting a natural language description for each module.

If successful, we could use GPT-N to interpret any modular NN in natural language. Not only should this help our understanding of what the model is doing, but it should also catch mesa-alignment and inner-alignment failures.

Cruxes

There are a few intuitions we have that go counter to other’s intuitions. Below is an elaboration of our thoughts and why we think this project could work.

Finding a Loss function that Induces Modularity

We currently think a Gomory-Hu Tree (GH Tree) captures the relevant information. We will initially convert a NN to a GH Tree to calculate the new loss function. This conversion will be computationally costly, though more progress can be made to calculate the loss function directly from the NN. See Appendix A for more details

Small NN’s are Human Interpretable

We’re assuming humans can interpret small NN’s, given enough time. A “Modular” NN is just a collection of small NN’s connected by sparse weights. If humans could interpret each module in theory, then GPT-N could too. If humans can interpret the interfaces between each, then GPT-N could too.

Examples from

NN Playground

are readily interpretable (such as the above example).

GPT-3 can already turn comments into code. We don't expect the reverse case to be fundamentally harder, and ne...
Emotional valence vs RL reward: a video game analogy
by Steven Byrnes — 2020-09-03T15:28:08.013Z

(Update Sept 2021: I no longer believe that we make decisions that maximize the expected sum of future rewards—see discussion of TD learning here. It's more like "maximizing expected reward next step" (but "next step" can entail making a long-term plan). So this post isn't quite right in some of its specifics. That said, I don't think it's wildly wrong and I think it would just need a couple tweaks. Anyway, it's just a brainstorming post, don't take it too literally.)

I recently read a book about emotions and neuroscience (brief review here) that talked about "valence and arousal" as two key ingredients of our interoception. Of these, arousal seems pretty comprehensible—the brain senses the body's cortisol level, heart rate, etc. But the valence of an emotion—what is that? What does it correspond to in the brain and body? My brief literature search didn't turn up anything that made sense to me, but after thinking about it a bit, here is what I came up with (with the usual caveat that it may be wrong or obvious). But first,

Definition of "the valence of an emotional state" (at least as I'm using the term)

Here's how I want to define the valence of an emotional state:

When I'm proud, that's a nice feeling, I like having that feeling, and I want that feeling to continue. That's positive valence.
When I have a feeling of guilt and dread, that's a bad feeling, I don't like having that feeling, and I want that feeling to end as soon as possible. That's negative valence.

There's a chance that I'm misusing the term; the psychological literature itself seems all over the place. For example, some people say anger is negative valence, but when I feel righteous anger, I like having that feeling, and I want that feeling to continue. (I don't want to want that feeling to continue, but I do want that feeling to continue!) So by my definition, righteous anger is positive valence!

There are some seemingly-paradoxical aspects of how valence does or doesn't drive behavior:

Sometimes I have an urge to snack, or to procrastinate, but doing so doesn't make me happy or put me in a positive-valence state; it makes my mood worse, and I know it's going to make my mood worse, but I do it anyway.
Conversely, sometimes it occurs to me that I should go meditate, and I know it will make me happy, but I feel an irresistible urge not to, and I don't.
...and yet these are exceptions. I do tend to usua

...