trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Arguing from a Gap of Perspective
by ideenrun — 2021-05-01T22:42:11.263Z

TL;DR

This post gives a name to a concept that I've encountered in many discussions recently: The Gap of Perspective. The concept is very similar to Inferential Distance in that there is a difficulty conveying your point with appropriate strength because of a huge difference in knowledge or experience. On top of that, the Gap of Perspective is based on an irrational distribution of opinion that runs inverse to the arguments, mostly because of tradition. The term Gap of Perspective is supposed to highlight that the other person does not update her opinion according to what the arguments suggest, instead staying closely to her original opinion. The reason for this is that she can't see the arguments or evidence from your point of view.
Thus, despite of overwhelming arguments for this sane perspective, people update their belief only minor steps away from the socially established perspective. I elaborate on this using some controversial examples that I need to hold my tongue back about in everyday life, because what I consider sane is considered radical by many of the people I interact with. Like with Inferential Distance, I feel it is important to notice the Gap of Perspective in conversations in order to understand the frustration of certain discussions and better cope with it.

Disclaimer

Let me state first, that this is probably not a novel concept, because once seen, it feels obvious in a lot of cases. However, I don't recall having seen it stated this way on LW. I feel like Tim Urban came pretty close with his elaboration of the Idea Spectrum which does avoid the possibility of one opinion being way saner than the other, which is perfectly fine for his line of thought.

This article contains quite some of my personal opinion in the examples, which is backed by many arguments that I will not repeat here. I mainly use the most obvious arguments, while hoping to avoid strawmanning. In the end, the Gap of Perspective is exactly that: A huge difference in perception of a topic caused by a huge difference in knowledge or experience, plus the failure to update the beliefs appropriately.

This is not a post of what people should belief. It's about how it is sometimes necessary to look at a topic from a different perspective in order to get a reasonable consensus and notice when conversations turn (hopelessly) toxic. Also this post is a way to structure my thoughts

...
Follow-up to Julia Wise on "Don’t Shoot The Dog"
by Alex Flint — 2021-05-01T19:07:45.468Z

Julia Wise recently wrote up notes from "Don’t Shoot The Dog", a book by Karen Pryor about behavioral training methods:

The book applies behavioral psychology to training animals and people. The author started off as a dolphin trainer at an aquarium park in the 1960s and moved on to horses, dogs, and her own children. There are a lot of anecdotes about how to train animals (apparently polar bears like raisins). At the time, training animals without violence was considered novel and maybe impossible.

Julia’s notes are wonderful. She skilfully picks interesting anecdotes and key points from the text, adding her own beautiful and concise connections to the practical experience of raising children. It’s a real treat to read.

Julia begins by addressing the perception that systematic training might be in some way unethical:

I can understand not wanting to use behavioral methods on children; the idea can sound overly harsh or reductive. The thing is, we already reinforce behavior all the time, including bad behavior, often without meaning to. So you might as well notice what you’re doing.

What is it about systematic training that seems harsh and reductive? Because it does seem, at least on the surface, potentially harsh and reductive. It may be that this is a mistaken perception, or it may be that it is a fact that we have to live with, but where does this perception come from in the first place?

Togetherness

When I interact with friends, family, lovers, colleagues, children, and even animals, I long for a boundaryless togetherness in which no private plan or intention is held back on either side. But for practical reasons it is very difficult to reach this state of affairs in any connection for any length of time. For example, Julia offers this lovely anecdote:

[...] our four-year-old was eager to go home from the park, and left without us towards the house. I caught up with her and told her not to leave without us. We were halfway to the house, but If I’d continued home with her from there, she would still have achieved what she wanted: getting home sooner. So I took her back to the park and we redid the whole situation: she said "I want to go home" and I walked home with her. Running off on her own didn’t pay, and she hasn’t repeated it.

It would not have been very practical for Julia to operate from a place of "boundaryless togetherness" in this scenario. Wh...
Death by Red Tape
by abramdemski — 2021-05-01T18:03:34.780Z

Contains spoilers for the worldbuilding of Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" universe.

Based on Eliezer's vision of the present from 1900.

In the Zones of Thought universe, there is a cycle of civilization: civilizations rise from stone-age technology, gradually accumulating more technology, until they reach the peak of technological possibility. At that point, the only way they can improve society is by over-optimizing it for typical cases, removing slack. Once society has removed its slack, it's just a matter of time until unforeseen events force the system slightly outside of its safe parameters. This sets off a chain reaction: like dominoes falling, the failure of one subsystem causes the failure of another and another. This catastrophe either kills everyone on the planet, or sets things so far back that society has to start from scratch.

Vernor Vinge was writing before Nassim Taleb, but if not for that, this could well be interpreted as a reference to Taleb's ideas. Taleb mocks the big players on the stock market for betting on the typical case, and taking huge losses when "black swans" (unexpected/unanticipatable events) occur. (Taleb makes money on the stock market by taking the opposite side of these bets, betting on the unknown unknowns.)

Taleb ridicules Bayesians for their tendency to rely on oversimplified models which assume the future will look like the past. Instead he favors Popperian epistemology and ergodicity economics.

Indeed, naive Bayesians do run the risk of over-optimizing, eliminating slack, and overly assuming that the future will be like the past. On a whole-society level, it makes sense that this kind of thinking could eventually lead to catastrophe (and plausibly already has, in the form of the 2008 housing crash).

However, human nature and modern experience leads me to think that the opposite failure mode might be more common.

Taleb advises us to design "antifragile" systems which, like him, bet on the atypical and get stronger through failure. This means designing systems with lots of slack, modularity, redundancy, and multiple layers (think of a laptop, which has a hard chassis to protect and support the vital electronics, & then often has a moderately hard plastic protective case, and then is transported in a soft outer case of some kind). It means responding to black swans by building new systems which mitigate, or (even better)...
Forecasting Newsletter: April 2021
by NunoSempere — 2021-05-01T16:07:22.689Z

Highlights

Polymarket is being attacked by “sandwiching” bots
Metaculus launches “

Forecasting Causes

”
In

Reflective Bayesianism

, Abram Demski outlines questionable and implicit assumptions which Bayesians make.

Index

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms
In The News
Blog Posts
Long Content
Hard To Categorize

Sign up

here

or browse past newsletters

here

.

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms

Polymarket

After the demonstrable success of Polymarket (and, to a lesser extent, Augur) in attracting volume to their platforms, many imitators have popped up on the crypto scene. None of them are functional yet, but I thought I'd mention them, in order from least to most scammy:

PolkaMarkets

is aiming for an August release date, and has recently begun

testing its MVP

.

Hedgehog Markets

's schtick is to be implemented in an up-and-coming blockchain, Solana. The functioning markets on their webpage are currently using test money.

Totem

has an interesting scheme where predictions are non-punitive. That is, people who predict incorrectly won't lose money, they will merely win less. However, after reading

their whitepaper

, it is not exactly clear where the money for rewards will come from. It is being built on top of the Binance chain,

a centralised exchange with a centralized coin

, which I find unappealing.

Polars

and

PredictX

are also built on top of the Binance chain. I would characterize them as money grabs. That is, they are attempting to raise money to do something like Polymarket without a clear plan for how they would be superior.

While Totem feels scammy, there are interesting possibilities related to its core idea. For example, external actors could subsidize the market. Another alternative could be to stake the bet amounts on a financial instrument which provides returns, like Uniswap, while waiting for resolution. In other words, one could bet the interest, not the principal.

While imitator projects go through the design and test stages, Polymarket has been dealing with a new real world problem: “sandwiching". Here is how it works on a high level: a bot detects transactions before miners process them, and profits from that information at the expense of the user.

To understand it on a more detailed level, it is first necessary to explain several details about Polymarket's architecture. Polymarket uses an Automated Market Maker design (as opposed to an order book). Thi...
April 2021 Deep Dive: Transformers and GPT-3
by adamShimi — 2021-05-01T11:18:08.584Z

Introduction

I know very little about a staggering number of topics that would be incredibly useful for my research and/or navigating the field. Part of the problem is the sheer number of choices -- I can't make myself study one thing very long because I always feel like I need to learn 20 other things.

To solve this problem, I started to implement monthly deep dives into a topic. A month is short enough that even I can stay relatively on track for that long, while still being enough time to actually learn something. The goal is not to master the topic completely (which would be impossible); it's to get a finer map of the territory, and to be able to discuss relevant ideas on this topic.

This first month was dedicated to transformers and the GPT-3 model, a topic I felt like I had to do, but which actually kind of grew on me.

Note that this post is a very quickly written summary of what I did and how it went (a bit like TurnTrout's sequence, with probably less insights). This is not a distillation post, and if you read it, you will not learn that much about the subject. That being said, it might prove useful if you want to go learn it by yourself.

Thanks to Jérémy, Flora, Connor, Kyle and Laria for great discussions that helped me understand this topic further.

The Plan

I based myself quite loosely on the structure advocated in Scott Young's Ultralearning. Which only means that I made a planning week by week, checked what resources were recommended beforehand, and tried to focus on the direct applications I wanted to make of my learning, which is explaining it to people and having interesting discussions on the subject.

My idea was that in order to understand GPT-3, I needed first to understand the Transformer architecture, then the GPT family, then play with GPT-3 directly. Since I started this deep dive on the 8th of April, the planning was broadly:

Week of the 8th: Study transformers. Here are the resources I had in mind

Original paper (Attention is all you need)
Annotated version of original paper
Stack Overflow explanation of an apparently difficult point (Queries, keys and values)
Explanatory blog post 1
Explanatory blog post 2
Blog post on the historical significance of transformers (nostalgebraist)
Survey of attention mechanisms
Survey of transformer family

Week of the 15th: Study the GPT family of models. Resources once again

Original papers

GPT
GPT-2
GPT-3

History

https://

...
Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think
by StyleOfDog — 2021-05-01T05:16:09.821Z

Epistemic status: highly suggestive.

[EDIT: Added more info on research methods. Addressed some common criticism. Added titles for video links and a few new vids. Prevented revolution with a military coup d'état]

A combination of surveys and bayesian estimates[1] leads me to believe this community is interested in autism, cats, cognition, philosophy, and moral valence of animals. What I’m going to show you checks every box, so it boggles my mind that I don't see anyone talk about it. It has been bothering me so much that I decided to create an account and write this article.

I have two theories.

The community will ignore fascinating insight just because its normie coded. Cute tiktok-famous poodle doesn't pattern match to "this contains real insight into animal cognition".

Nobody tried to sell this well enough.

I personally believe in the second one[2] and I'll try to sell it to you.

Stella

There’s an intervention to help non-verbal autistic kids communicate using “communication boards” (not to be confused with facilitated communication which has a bad reputation). It can be a paper board with pictures or it can be a board with buttons that say a word when pressed. In 2018 Christina Hunger (hungerforwords.com) - a speech pathologist working with autistic children using such boards - started to wonder if her dog was in fact autistic. Just kidding, she saw similarities in patterns of behavior between young kids she was working with ("learner" seems to be the term of art) and her dog. So she gave it a button that says “Outside” and expanded from there.

Now teaching a dog to press a button that says “outside” is not impressive or interesting to me. But then she kept adding buttons and her dog started to display capabilities for rudimentary syntax.

Stella the talking dog compilation - Stella answers whether she wants to play or eat, asks for help when one of her buttons breaks, alerts owner to possible "danger" outside.

Stella tells us she is all done with her bed!

Stella the Talking Dog says "Help Good Want Eat"

(most of the good videos are on her Instagram @hunger4words, not much is on YouTube)

Reaction from serious animal language researchers and animal cognition hobbyists was muted to non-existent, but dog moms ate this stuff up. One of them was Alexis.

Bunny

Most useful research is impractical to do within academia

The Importance of Methodology and Practical Ma

...
[ACX Linkpost] A Modest Proposal for Republicans
by mike_hawke — 2021-04-30T18:43:17.252Z
Link: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans

I like reading through LW comments more than Substack comments, hence linkpost.

Politics is indeed the mindkiller and/or hard mode, but this post is the most novel and thought-provoking political writing I've seen all year and I can't stop thinking about it.
Review of "Why AI is Harder Than We Think"
by electroswing — 2021-04-30T18:14:34.855Z

"Why AI is Harder Than We Think" is a recent (April 26, 2021) arXiv preprint by Melanie Mitchell. While the author is a tenured professor with technical publications, they also have published multiple layman-level essays and articles which tend to be skeptical and pessimistic of AI progress. Why AI is Harder Than We Think falls somewhere in between the two extremes—it's written in the style of an academic paper, but the arguments appeal to a layman audience.

Reddit's /r/machinelearning was pretty harsh on the paper—click here for the full discussion. While I agree it has flaws, I still found it an interesting and valuable read because I enjoyed the process of figuring out where my opinions diverged from the author's.

In this post, I will briefly summarize the paper and state my opinions. The most interesting part (= where I disagree the most) is Fallacy 4, so skip to that if you don't want to read the whole blog post.

Introduction: AI Springs and Winters

Self-driving cars were predicted to be available for purchase by 2020, but they aren't. The author also gives a more in depth historical account of the various AI "springs" (periods of growth and optimism due to advances in AI research) and "winters" (periods of stagnation and pessimism when said advances aren't powerful 'enough') which have occurred since the 1950s.

Why does this keep happening? The author's thesis:

In this chapter I explore the reasons for the repeating cycle of overconfidence followed by disappointment in expectations about AI. I argue that over-optimism among the public, the media, and even experts can arise from several fallacies in how we talk about AI and in our intuitions about the nature of intelligence.

Specifically, they discuss four fallacies, which I'll address individually in the coming sections.

Sidenote: I really enjoyed pages 2–3 (the section on AI Springs and Winters). Whether or not you buy the thesis of this paper, that section is a well written historical account and you should check it out if you're interested.

Fallacy 1: Narrow intelligence is on a continuum with general intelligence

The claim here is, when we make progress in AI by beating top humans at chess, we've solved a problem which is much more narrow than we think. Similar claims apply to seemingly general systems such as IBM's Watson and OpenAI's GPT-3.

My opinion

Issue 1: Narrow tasks are s...
Mindfulness as debugging
by pchvykov — 2021-04-30T16:59:12.834Z

Are mindfulness practices just attempts to reverse-engineer our brain’s compression algorithms?

I was recently thinking about one cool way we could conceptualize various mindfulness practices from a cognitive science and information theory perspective. Here I am referring to mindfulness practices in the broadest sense. So

Tai Chi

(or other martial arts of even dance practices) can be seen as mindfulness of physical movement: rather than just making a step, I look into what muscles I need to contract and where to shift my weight in order to make that step. “

Consent Culture

” could be another one: rather than just initiating physical contact with a partner, I first ask myself what precise contact I would really enjoy, and then explicitly ask them if it aligns with their desires. Similarly we can view practices like “

Nonviolent Communication

” — as mindfulness of emotions and needs behind the things I say; or “

Street Epistemology

” — as mindfulness of the beliefs I hold and the evidence that led me to them. And, of course, meditation — as mindfulness of the processes that turn my raw sensations into the qualia of my experiences.

The emerging pattern may thus be that all mindfulness practices are about unpacking and examining our habitual patterns of experiencing the world. To be more precise, by “habitual patterns” I am here referring to the amazing ways that our brain learns to make sense of the vast amounts of data constantly streaming in through our various senses. This complex task of compressing sensory information by finding patterns and forming concepts is crucial for our survival and adequate existence in our world (see my

last post

about this). From the day we are born, our brain is hard at work looking for the most accurate and efficient compression algorithms. Even cultural heritage may be seen as especially effective compression heuristics that are being passed down through generations.

Nonetheless, any compression algorithm is necessarily inaccurate in some ways — and may thus mislead us in atypical, delicate, or complex situations. In order to have some way to “debug” these algorithms when that happens, we need to have some sense of how they function — and this is where mindfulness comes in! In these practices, we pick one particular habitual compression pattern (e.g., for Tai Chi, this would be physical movement), we setup a safe practice container (e....
Moral Privilege
by ACrackedPot — 2021-04-30T14:54:38.434Z

Imagine, for a moment, living in a society in which toddlers routinely stab infants with knives, and adults routinely smash toddlers with rocks. You, naturally, are horrified by this state of affairs, and are thus flabbergasted when everybody suddenly notices that toddlers stabbing infants with knives is a bad thing - and pushes for a solution of increasing the rate at which toddlers are smashed with rocks.

You, having come from moral sensibilities that arose in an entirely different place in time in which stabbing infants and smashing toddlers are both considered horrifying, are naturally going to feel pretty conflicted about this. Yeah, it's great that they've decided that it's a bad thing that toddlers stab infants with knives, but also their solution actually kind of makes everything worse. They've progressed to a morality more similar to your own, but the increased similarity has, in a sense, made everything worse.

Your friend in this society, whose views you find abhorrent, is puzzled by your reaction. Why are you so upset? Sure, you didn't get everything you wanted, but society has progressed, hasn't it? Shouldn't you support this new initiative, which is, after all, a step in the right direction, the direction you want everything to progress in? Why are you so insistent that knives be taken away from toddlers, as access to knives is part of every human's natural rights, when there's a much more moral solution that leaves everybody better off and doesn't harm anyone's rights, which is to say, smashing the toddler's heads in with rocks?

Setting aside how contrived this scenario is, I think it basically describes a routine state of affairs in the world: From any given moral perspective, progress in one moral dimension will basically always amount to regression in another, even if it's only the inverse moral position. We frequently find ourselves biting repugnant bullets, and it's difficult not to be at least a little bit cynical about the state of affairs.

It's hard not to get annoyed at those who never have to make these trade-offs, particularly in situations where they get upset about having to make a trade-off, or acknowledge a moral perspective they don't really care about. Because the privilege referenced in the title of the post relates to the idea that a majoritarian moral perspective may find its...