trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Dark Matters
by Diffractor — 2021-03-14T23:36:58.884Z

This post will be about the main points of evidence for the existence of dark matter. To evaluate whether a competing theory to dark matter is plausible, it's important to know what the actual arguments in favor of dark matter are in more detail than just "dark matter is the stuff you have to add to get galactic rotation curves to work out". A competitor has to address the strongest arguments in favor of the existence of dark matter, not just the weaker fare like galactic rotation curves.

So, when reading some hot new arxiv paper about dark matter or the lack thereof, it is fairly useful to know the top five lines of evidential support for dark matter (in my own personal estimation, others may differ). This lets you at least check whether the result is directly addressing the major cruxes that the case for dark matter rests upon, or just picking off one particular piece of evidence and sweeping the rest under the rug, even if you lack the full technical ability to evaluate the claimed result.

This post will be saving the best for last, so if you're not going to read the whole thing, skip down to sections 4 and 5.

Also, what exactly is meant when the term "dark matter" is used in this post? Anything with mass (so it's affected by gravity and gravitationally influences other things) which does not interact via the electromagnetic force. Electrons, protons, nuclei, and atoms emphatically do not count. Black holes, neutrinos, WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles), and axions would count under this definition. The last two are theoretical, the first two are very much established. Of course, it would be a massive cop-out to go "neutrinos exist, therefore dark matter does", so "dark matter" will be used with a followup connotation of "and whatever the heck is (we don't know yet), there must be 5x more of it in the universe than matter made of atoms or atom parts, no way around that whatsoever"

Point 1: Galactic Rotation Curves

The story begins with galaxy rotation curves, which were the original motivation for postulating dark matter in the first place. Given a point gravitational mass, it's pretty simple to calculate the velocity of something orbiting around it, depending only on how far away the object is orbiting and how much mass is in the central point. Stuff orbiting further out from a point mass will be orbiting at a lower velocity.

With a...
Predictions for future dispositions toward Twitter
by mike_hawke — 2021-03-14T22:10:17.720Z

(This was previously a shortform post.)

I have such strong opinions about Twitter that I figured I should make those opinions pay rent in the form of anticipations, so here they are.

My Beliefs and Opinions

Twitter is psychotoxic--it has a negative influence on one’s mood, habits, personality, reasoning ability, and so on. Using twitter causes people to practice mental behaviors that are corrosive to clear thinking and agency, both immediately and longer-term. The easy availability of bite-sized content is eroding people's ability to read longer-form content like blog sequences or books. Twitter deserves the same condemnation that the 24h news cycle gets and much more. I believe that if far fewer people used Twitter, my life would be noticeably better.

I feel my attention being tugged at by the Twitterverse even when I have been away from it for weeks or longer. This is partly a sensible worry--things on Twitter do have noticeable effects on the world, worthy of offline concern. But this attentional capture is mostly due to the manipulative, addictive design of the service.

This is a hackneyed pattern, but: Twitter is the 21st century’s tobacco. It is an addictive, next-gen intoxicant.

A while ago, I heard some podcast guest recommend that you “avoid letting Twitter be the background music of your life. When you’re hanging out with your friend, don’t browse twitter while they’re in the bathroom.” I didn’t realize people did that. I think I need to start asking my friends if they are doing this when we hang out, and trying to get them to stop. (UPDATE: I have realized that is too much to ask for under normal circumstances. I now only make a serious bid for phone-free hangouts on special occasions like my birthday.)

The full effects of twitter on individuals and groups is still an open question, slowly being answered by massive, natural experiments.

My Anticipations

In a good future, people will consider the comparison between tobacco and twitter to be basically correct, if somewhat clichéd and superficial. We will look back on the present state of affairs with pity, embarrassment, and a bit of queasiness.

The Internet Research Agency was just the beginning; we will hear of ever more numerous and galling examples of social media used to twist people’s minds. In less than 20 years, the dev race between offensive psyops and defensive countermeasures will be wides

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Seatbelt Extenders and Booster Seats
by jefftk — 2021-03-14T21:50:05.559Z

In reading about putting

three car
seats across the back of a car, one problem people described was
it being difficult to buckle a booster seat that is right up next to
another seat. I also ran into people saying that you should

definitely
not

use
seatbelt extenders to solve this problem.

Naively, a seatbelt extender seems exactly the right tool: Since the
problem comes from the booster moving the child up without moving the
buckle up, an appropriately sized extender that moved the buckle up to
match seems ideal. So what is the problem?

The objections I read are that an extender might be:

Too long, where the buckle would be over
the child's belly instead of at their side.

Too long, where the shoulder belt might fall over the
child's neck.

Positioned where the booster's armrest could unbuckle
it in a crash.

Intended for another vehicle, appearing to buckle
without being secure.

Built poorly, and fail under the stresses of a crash.

These are all real things that could go wrong, but they are also all
things that can be addressed. Belt extenders are made in a wide range
of lengths, and one that is the same height as the booster seat puts
the belt in the same relation to the child as it was designed. This
keeps the buckle off their belly, leaves the shoulder belt at the
right height, and keeps the buckle well below the armrest.

Similarly, you can buy belt extenders for a specific seat in a specific
vehicle. For example:

As for build quality, these extenders are designed for adults too
large to fit a standard length seatbelt. Using them for someone much
lighter adds a huge safety margin.

Some people point to an accident where a child was severely injured when
their extender failed
in a crash, but this was a Ford extender plugged into a Nissan
vehicle. It was such a bad match it could "be unbuckled without
pressing the button by bending it in a person's hands." I don't think
this case is very informative?

It seems to me like it ought to be safe for someone to use one
provided that (a) the top of the extender is no higher than the plane
of the booster and (b) it's the right one for their particular seat
in their particular vehicle. Perhaps, however, this is complex enough
that people would get it wrong, and get hurt, and so we say not to do
it? Alternatively, are there other issues I'm overlooking?

O...
Haskenthetical update: user-defined macros
by philh — 2021-03-14T21:20:04.108Z

A while back I wrote about Haskenthetical, a language that I'm implementing for fun. I'm still working on it, at least from time to time.

The thing I'm pleased to have implemented recently is user-defined macros. This makes it potentially a lot more ergonomic.

(You still can't do anything with it, really. It has no I/O except for printing a single value at the end, and that's in a constrained format. It's beyond the reach even of sysfuck. But, like. If you could do things with it, user-defined macros would make it nicer to do those things.)

These aren't hygienic macros, partly because when I used Racket a little at my old job I never really got my head around those, but also because they would have been more work. I'm more inclined to go for Clojure's approach of namespace qualifying, but since I don't have any kind of namespaces yet it seems premature to think of that.

Quasiquote

The biggest test of Haskenthetical yet has been using these macros to implement ¶ quoting (quote, like a standard lisp ') and quasiquoting (qq, like `, using ↑ and ↑↑ for splicing). Quasiquoting in particular was one of the hardest pieces of code I think I've ever written, and it's only 100 lines in the end. Some of the things that made it difficult:

Haskenthetical is deficient. Pattern-matching causes deep nesting and the chance of forgetting a case, while type eliminators are hard to read and flow poorly. (It's deficient in many many ways, but those are the ones that seem particularly relevant here.)

More importantly, the current implementation of Haskenthetical is deficient. The error messages are completely unhelpful, telling you that two types didn't unify but not where they occured. Both the debugging output and the output from the program itself are hard to read. I also uncovered one straight-up bug in the process, which was easy to fix when I tracked it down but hard to track down because the error messages are completely unhelpful.

Also, I'm deficient as a thinker. I have a brain architecture that can't easily distinguish between the object and the meta levels, or the meta and the meta-meta levels. Wtf, who designed this piece of shit?

The problem itself is well-targeted to hit those last two deficiencies. The quasiquote function simply converts syntax trees to syntax trees, but some of the trees in question represent Haskenthetical ex

...
Exploring Luck
by arashparam — 2021-03-14T19:12:31.644Z

Hey guys,

A concept I have been recently exploring is luck. My understanding of it has been inspired by Nassim Taleb, Naval Ravikant, James Austin, and Marc Andreessen. In general, I found that there is a sense of inner comfort knowing the role luck plays in life.

I thought I would share what I wrote here (note it is a copy and paste). I am curious as to whether 1) if you are familiar with the work of the people above, think I accurate captured their points and 2) in general curious to see if you agree. If you noticed any flaws or issues, please comment as I would like to update my thinking on it (and the blog post).

Hope you guys enjoy it and thanks for reading!

------------------------

Earlier this year, I wrote an essay on the role luck (or chance, randomness, etc.) plays in achieving success and wealth. The key insight was this: “Outcomes for many things in life are more influenced by randomness than we think. Said another way, we often confuse luck for skill, randomness for determinism, and coincidence for causality.”

To emphasize my earlier point, skill, hard work, intellect, and other positive personality traits matter. But they are necessary—not sufficient. They do not guarantee success. Luck clearly plays a role, especially in fields such as entrepreneurship and investing, where outcomes are impacted by random events.

But I wanted to revisit this topic because I had a lingering question in my head: Can we make our luck?

What Is Luck?

Before we can determine whether we can create luck, it is essential to define it. The best definition I have seen comes from James Austin, author of Chase, Chance, and Creativity. I was exposed to James Austin’s work through Marc Andreessen’s blog.

Austin defines luck as “something fortuitous that happens unpredictably without discernable human intention.” While this is a great definition, it requires some unpacking—especially the latter half.

Luck is fortuitous and unpredictable. We can’t time it, as we don’t know when or how it will present itself. This maps on to my experiences with luck. But it doesn’t mean we can’t influence luck.

This becomes clear when we examine the latter half of the definition: luck happens without discernable human intention. “Discernable” is the operative word. We might not be able to determine which specific actions or intentions caused luck. But a lack of evidence for causation is not evidence a...
AI x-risk reduction: why I chose academia over industry
by David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet) — 2021-03-14T17:25:12.503Z

I've been leaning towards a career in academia for >3 years, and recently got a tenure track role at Cambridge. This post sketches out my reasoning for preferring academia over industry.
Thoughts on Industry Positions:
A lot of people working on AI x-risk seem to think it's better to be in industry. I think the main arguments for that side of things are:

All the usual reasons for preferring industry, e.g. less non-research obligations, more resources.
AGI is expected to be built in industry (e.g. by OpenAI, Google, or DeepMind), and if you're there, you can influence the decision-making around development and deployment.

I think these are good reasons, but far from definitive.
I'll also note that nobody seems to be going to Google, even though they are arguably the most likely to develop AGI, since 1) they are bigger, publish more, and have more resources, 2) they can probably steal from DeepMind to some extent. So if you ARE going to industry, please consider working for Google. Also Chinese companies.
My reasons for preferring academia:

Mentorship and exponential growth: In academia, you can mentor a lot more people, and this leads to a much higher rate of exponential growth. My quick estimate is that as an academic you can produce ~10 new researchers in 5 years; in industry, it's more like ~3. I think you might also have significant, but hard-to-measure impact through teaching and other academic activities.
Personal fit: Unlike (I think) most people in the field, I don't like coding much. I'm also not a theoretician. I am more of a "big picture" "idea person", and more of an extrovert. I like the idea of spending most of my time managing others, writing, giving talks, etc. I have far too many ideas to pursue on my own effectively. I also don't like the idea of having a boss.
Better position for advocacy: There are many reasons I think academia makes for a better "bully pulpit".
- A tenure track faculty position at a top-20 institution is higher status than a research scientist position.
- Many academics find employees of big tech companies somewhat suspect, e.g. viewing them as sell-outs or shills to some extent.
- None of the tech companies has a sufficiently credible commitment to reducing AI x-risk (and knowing what steps to take to do that) for my taste.
- Te

...
The non-central fallacy and Law
by ThomasMore — 2021-03-14T15:09:06.061Z

A recent post by Matthew Barnett discussed the potential use of the non-central fallacy. Two stock examples seem to be 'taxation is theft' and 'eating meat is murder.' What is interesting is that, as well as being popular labels, 'theft' and 'murder' are both legal categories.

This post will briefly discuss some of the added complications which follow from their 'legal' quality. It has two parts:

First, that even if legal categories can be reduced to a complex array of moral positions, to jump straight there will confuse people.
Second, 'legal' categories, if reduced, usually have their own connotations distinct from commonplace concepts.

Part 1: What Makes 'Murder' Different

Can we reduce the criteria for a legal category, such as 'murder', 'theft', or, to a lesser extent 'cruelty', to a series of moral standards?

Example 1: 'Cruelty'

Some discussion on the non-central fallacy implies we can. A good summary of what this kind of reduction would look like can be found in Barnett's steel-manned non-central fallacy:

Person A: "I'm not saying that animal farming merely fits the dictionary definition of cruelty, and therefore we ought to treat it exactly like every other case that matches that definition.

Look, why do we think that torture and child abuse are wrong in the first place? For me, it's because those things involve involuntary suffering, and I think involuntary suffering is bad, no matter who experiences it. When I said that animal farming is cruelty, I was merely using that word as short-hand to convey my stance on involuntary suffering."

Here, cruelty is reduced to a set of (contested) moral positions. For instance, there is 'involuntary suffering is wrong' and 'the wrongness of involuntary suffering does not depend on the subject being a human.'

'Cruelty' in this form could be seen as a useful, albeit superfluous, heuristic device for organising a sub-set of what we think is morally wrong. When we want to work out if a potential member qualifies, we would use morally salient features to determine similarity or difference.

Addendum

Admittedly, 'Cruelty' is not the best example for my point because it is not commonly thought of as a 'legal' category. See below. Nonetheless, in Barnett's post 'cruelty' is treated the same as 'murder' and 'theft' without distinguishing their legal status, so it can be assum...
Physicalism implies experience never dies. So what am I going to experience after it does?
by Szymon Kucharski — 2021-03-14T14:45:34.412Z

If there are no computer simulations
What will happen to me after I die? what is the next moment I am most likely to feel? In what reality will I be? These questions matter when the experience seems immortal. If you haven't come across the idea that if we are a way of feeling information processed in a specific way (computationalism or any similar theory explaining the emergence of consciousness), then we exist wherever some system "recreates" us. We can feel something / ourselves only in the existing futures. Our subjectivity will never die because there is always some future, no matter how improbable and abstract. Link to the explanation: https://vitrifyher.com/2018/06/01/consciousness-is-forever-2/ by Mario Alejandro Montano. If you already know this view, I have put together my thoughts on possible futures that I found likely in some way. Forgive me if I express myself unclearly or I cannot describe something precisely, using very strict terms, Unfortunately, I had no real opportunity to learn to communicate fluently in English.

It depends directly on my measure, on what part of the systems recreating my existence will have what future. My measure decreases with each death, in fact, with each passing moment, though perhaps if something like the Youngness paradox is a reality, it does increase. But no, the universe is eternal, time is an emergent non-fundamental property, and everything exists the same, past or future. Even if the number of systems recreating me increases, they are mostly "me" young in eternal inflation. Unless so many older "me" are simulated that my measure will increase.

Maybe the measure should decrease as a result of entropy, and we should exist as states with the greatest possible measure at any time? "Now" is a moment of the "greatest" measure possible, a moment later too, and always so. In this way, the greatest measure of "us" would always be in what we perceive as the past. In fact, we would be moving subjectively against the flow of measure, because from the outside there would always be fewer systems that perform us, and we can only subjectively feel the next moment, remembering the previous one, not the other way around. This is how time must work, we cannot remember the past. Thus, having only or statistically more information, a more complicated informationally mind, or existing in more complex information systems that can re-...
Internal Double Crux: Video Games
by supposedlyfun — 2021-03-14T11:45:24.431Z

Inspired by Jacob Falkovich's Internal Diet Crux.

Disputants: Read Bermudez, and Play On.

PO: State your hypothesis, sir!

RB: You are spending too much time playing video games. Now yours.

PO: You're mistaken; I'm indulging in a reasonable amount of downtime.

RB: Using the Sapience Spell, I summon, and precommit to engaging with, the sensation of loving-kindness for whatever claims you may make or emotional disclosures you reveal. You want what's best for SupposedlyFun.

PO: Using the Sapience Spell, I summon, and precommit to engaging with, the sensation of loving-kindness for whatever claims you may make or emotional disclosures you reveal. You want what's best for SupposedlyFun.

RB: Okay. We are working four hours per day as a lawyer. This is about 65% of the daily work we were doing before we moved to a foreign country to be with our spouse who temporarily works there. We should have a lot of slack for other intellectual projects. I want us to read Bermudez' cognitive science textbook. Kahneman and Tversky can come later. We should be able to set aside 30 minutes per day for this.

PO: Nothing you said is unreasonable. But I like playing video games, and it's not abnormal for people to spend 2 hours a day on leisure pursuits. The average American apparently spends twice that time on TV per day. I, meaning you, have never been the kind of person who can just work nonstop all day. Additionally, we are still living in quarantine society, a once-per-generation if not rarer level of interference with normal life, in particular with things that keep us from getting depressed, like socializing.

RB: That's all true. However, you are able to work at the food court with the big sunny windows, or likewise at the library, and be around people while working and getting sun-eye exposure time. You could add 30 minutes of Bermudez at the end.

PO: After two hours of working, we need a substantial break[, and reading a textbook doesn't feel like a break, even though we get a lot from reading it]. This is apparently a function of working outside the office; when we were there in person, billing seven hours a day was much easier. Fewer distractions, or being around people, or all of the above? Anyway, let's be honest--you are the voice of SupposedlyFun's dad-when-we-were-in-high-school, who is similar to SF but wired some...