trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The slopes to common sense
by George3d6 — 2021-02-22T19:22:03.931Z
Link: https://cerebralab.com/The_slopes_to_common_sense

The slopes to common sense

Usually, I try to outline the thing I'm talking about first. But in this case, it's best to start with an example.

i - Why we sleep

In 2017 the book "Why We Sleep" was published. This book was essentially trying to muster a very strong scientific argument for why one should sleep 8 (self-reported) hours a night. In that, it argued the health and cognitive benefits of sleep are so great that sleeping less than 8 (self-reported) hours a night is insane from a cost-benefit analysis perspective.

Two years later, Alexey Guzey stumbled upon the book and wrote a pretty stark rebuttal of the first chapters, essentially showing that the epidemiological evidence does not exactly support the author's conclusion and some of the smaller claims that reinforce it. It should be noted that in some cases "Why We Sleep" doesn't only ignore the evidence on the subject, but outright engages in data manipulation.

To me this seems like a fairly clear case of "chunk the book in the junk science bin, try to tell people not to read it and move on". So was that the internet's reaction? Well, that's hard to say, the top discussion threads around the article as shown by Google are:

Hacker News
/r/ssc
/r/sleep
/r/sleephackers

I find it very interesting that in all 4 discussion threads it seems like the consensus opinion is something like "yeah, but the book is still pretty good" plus a bunch of people upvoting comments that criticize the rebuttal without having read it (i.e. the answer to their criticism is found in the rebuttal itself).

It should be noted here that /r/sleephackers and /r/sleep are supposed to be specialized communities, i.e. the kind that would care about even minor factual errors regarding this topic. And /r/ssc, as well as HN, should boast an audience that's educated enough not to confuse science with a new global religion.

So why is everyone still agreeing with the core thesis of the book?

I don't know, but I can speculate it stems from a line of thought that goes something like this:

Yeah, ok, maybe it's not proven that 8-hours of self-reported sleep is the ideal. Maybe there are +/-3 hr variations depending on the individual and environmental factors. Maybe short sleep is not correlated with that many negative things, or not that strongly. Still, the general point that it's cautious to try and sleep as much as you feel you need to, and not set an alarm

...
How can I protect my bank account from large, surprise withdrawals?
by Maxwell Peterson — 2021-02-22T18:57:46.784Z

Today's Money Stuff describes large charges for electricity auto-withdrawn from customer's accounts:

Last week there was a brief surprising spike in the spot price of electricity in Texas... Prices went from something like $20 per megawatt-hour in early February to something like $9,000 last week...
[A customer of an electric company] and her husband, Doug Robinson, 42, used less energy in February than they did the prior month. Still, their bill, typically around $100 a month, was more than $6,500 in 17 days. Because Griddy is connected to customers’ credit or debit cards to make automatic withdrawals, her credit card bill is now more than $2,500 — which she cannot afford to pay. She canceled her card before she could face more charges.

I called my bank (US Bank) to see if they could put in a rule to protect my account for this kind of thing, for example, allow no auto-withdrawals over $1,000 dollars. The guy on the phone said no - they could set up after-the-fact alerts about large withdrawals, but nothing for before the horse is out of the barn.
My question: what are some ways to defend myself against this kind of large surprise withdrawal? I like the convenience of auto-paying, and would like to keep as much of that convenience as possible, but it looks like I will have to sacrifice some of it. I would have never guessed, if I lived in Texas, that I might be at the kind of financial risk described above, so I am looking for a method that doesn't require me to know a lot about what specific thing might be about to incur a large charge.
Calculating Kelly
by abramdemski — 2021-02-22T17:32:38.601Z

Jacob Falcovich tells us that we should Kelly bet on everything. I discuss whether we should Kelly bet when we'd normally make small-money bets on disagreements. Lsusr reminds us that we aren't very good at intuitively grasping what the Kelly formula actually will say.

Due to Lsusr's post, I took another look at how I actually calculate Kelly. I'll describe the improved formulation I came up with. I'm curious to hear everyone else's thoughts on the quickest ways, or what formula you prefer, or how you intuitively estimate. If you already have opinions, take a moment to think what they are before reading further.

In the comments to my post on Kelly, Daniel Filan mentioned:

FWIW the version that I think I'll manage to remember is that the optional fraction of your bankroll to bet is the expected net winnings divided by the net winnings if you win.

I've found that I remember this formulation, but the difference between "net winnings" and "gross winnings" is enough to make me want to double-check things, and in the few months since writing the original post, I haven't actually used this to calculate Kelly.

"expected net winnings divided by net winnings if you win" is easy enough to remember, but is it easy enough to calculate? When I try to calculate it, I think of it this way:

[probability of success] × [payoff of success] + [probability of failure] × [payoff of failure] all divided by [payoff of success].

This is a combination of five numbers (one being a repeat). We have to calculate probability of failure from the probability of success (ie, 1-p). Then we perform two multiplications, one addition, and one division -- five steps of mental arithmetic.

But the formula is really a function of two numbers (see Lsusr's graph for a vivid illustration). Can we formulate the calculation in a way that feels like just a function of two numbers?

Normally the formula is stated in terms of b, the net winnings if you win. I prefer to state it in terms of r=b+1. If there's an opportunity to "double" your money, r=2 while b=1; so I think r is more how people intuitively think about things.

In these terms, the break-even point is just p=1r. This is easy to reconstruct with mental checks: if you stand to double your money, you'd better believe your chances of winning are at least 50%; if you stand to quadruple your money, chanc...
Could first doses first be better for the vaccine hesitant?
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-02-22T16:24:55.847Z

One argument against proposing “first doses first” in major news media is that it might make vaccine hesitant communities feel like one COVID vaccine dose is enough.

But it still seems to me like this might be a much better health outcome even for them than a two-dose regimen. It’s possible that getting the R0 down and establishing herd immunity faster would protect the vaccine hesitant more than getting them to go from one shot to two.

Of course, this doesn’t entirely overcome the objection that it would still be better to not debate the topic in major news media, to preserve willingness to get the second shot. But then again, if the “first shots first” plan is better not just in general, but for the vaccine hesitant, then that argument loses much of its force.

To be cynical, perhaps the people arguing to keep “first doses first” off the front page of the newspaper actually want a FDF regime, but also want a “second-dose positive” regime in which the vaccine hesitant are more willing to get that second dose. So they want to quietly install a de facto FDF regime with no public debate or announcement, while still pretending like all experts agree we should do second doses first?

If so, pulling the wool over the eyes of the vaccine hesitant does not seem like the way to build long-term trust. So it seems like it violates their right to informed consent on a community level? And hence for all the rhetoric about protecting these communities from themselves, it seems to me like the very open and straightforward FDF proponents are doing better by these communities both on a health and an ethics level than the “no public discussion group.”

But there are a LOT of “ifs” in this question, so what I really want to know is whether this particular line of thinking represented anywhere in the expert debate?
Overcoming Helplessness
by Neel Nanda — 2021-02-22T15:03:45.869Z
Link: https://neelnanda.io/blog/41-helplessness

Introduction

A concept that I find extremely useful for understanding my life and failure modes is the notion of helplessness. Helplessness is when I have a problem in my life that I don’t even try to solve. The problem feels big and overwhelming, and I have no idea where to start. It feels like a background fact of my existence, rather than something that I have agency in and can make progress on.

This is an important concept, because it often surrounds the biggest problems in my life - problems of motivation, life goals, career plans, health, romance, fulfilment, etc. I am aware there are problems, I maybe vaguely intend to do something one day, but I don’t actually do anything about it. And this is insane! I am much more able to fix a small, inconsequential problem in my life than I am to fix the largest, and most consequential. Larger problems are, naturally, harder to solve. But the times when I have managed to overcome helplessness, I’ve always been able to make some progress - helplessness causes me to massively misallocate effort for improving my life. This is a key example of

upside risk

- the returns of making progress on my biggest problems is massive, and is almost always worth a shot.

Helplessness is a particularly insidious problem because it often passes unnoticed. When I am helpless about a problem it doesn’t feel like I am carefully evaluating the possible options, probability of success, and expected value of pursuing an option. Rather, the idea of solving the problem feels unthinkable. I flinch away from the idea before I can even begin to evaluate the pros and cons, and have a systematic blind spot around working through my helplessness.

Accordingly, I find it valuable to reframe the issue away from solving the problem to making progress on the problem. If a problem is large enough, making incremental progress is still extremely useful to me. And this makes it feel far less overwhelming - redefining the problem so that the idea of doing anything is thinkable is the first step towards a solution, and it is far easier to imagine making progress than solving a major problem outright. Often, one of the sources of helplessness is a fear of trying to solve the problem and failing - reframing it to be about making progress makes failure a much less visceral possibility

To be clear, I think that sometimes helplessness is ju...
Best way to write a bicolor article on Less Wrong?
by Viliam — 2021-02-22T14:46:31.681Z

I am planning to write an article that would use two colors to distinguish between "map" and "territory", kinda like in The Neverending Story. In other words, instead of:

The sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white.

I want to write something like:

Snow is white if and only if snow is white.

In general, the quote marks have the advantage of unlimited nesting, but I don't need it now; my article will have exactly two levels, not more. On the other hand, I feel that the bicolor version may be easier to perceive instinctively; the words referring to the map and the territory are not only surrounded by marks, they look differently by themselves. Also, quote marks are generally used for various purposes (quoting, irony, etc.), so authors emphasise the "this refers to map, as opposed to the territory" usage by not saying merely "X", but "the sentence X", "the words X", "the text X", etc. By removing such words, even my example here is shorter.

So, how to do this technically?

If I understand it correctly, Markdown doesn't support colors, but you can replace Markdown editor with Rich text editor in user settings, and the Rich text editor supports colors. Am I right?
Alternatively, instead of colors, I could use italics or bold font, just like I did in the example here. Not only is this simple in Markdown editor, but as an advantage, if some blind people read this, their software would probably pronounce those words in a different voice, making the article more accessible. (Is this true? Can anyone confirm?) The minor disadvantage is that I will not be able to use the italics or bold font in the usual way in the article, but I think I can live with that. Though, as you see, I love using italics, so I would probably use bold font for the map-words.
(For the sake of completeness, using CAPITAL LETTERS would also be an option, but it is an ugly option I would rather avoid.)
And maybe more of the above could be combined, e.g. the words referring to the map could be written using italics and different color. That would make them even more stand out of the remaining text. Is it worth the extra effort?

Is there another option I missed here?

Which option would you prefer? I care about everyone's opinion, but the perspectives of colorblind or blind readers are especially valuable, because using a wrong option might completely ruin the article for them.
Science Fiction
by lsusr — 2021-02-22T09:35:16.361Z

This morning (Amman time) I taught a class to a middle school in Jordan. It was the opening to a big daylong event where the parents were invited and the superintendant said some formal words.

Ostensibly, my lecture was about design in the COVID-19 world. That was the pretext from which I obtained the opportunity. Actually, I turned it into a Q&A where I answered questions about what it's like to invent things.

Some of the questions were technical like "How do you advertise your products?" and "What programming language(s) do you use?" When a nerd asked about Arduinos I was happy to answer that we used a few in the prototyping stage.

Technical stuff consists of things you can learn in school…eventually…in theory. The more interesting questions (from my perspective) concerned open-ended topics like "What did you learn?" How am I supposed to explain to middle schoolers what it's like to carry on when all hope seems lost?

Another interesting question was "Where do you get inspiration?" It was asked more than once. I was surprised by how quickly, precisely and consistently I answered the same three words each time. "Read science fiction." These are middle schoolers and they're living in science fiction's golden age.

I am getting better at interfacing with schools. The first time I guest lectured to middle schoolers I gave the teacher nightmares. The students loved my blunt honesty. The teacher did too; he was worried the parents would complain. None did, but I learned my lesson. It is more efficient—and produces less collateral damage—if I can point children to George Orwell and Paul Graham rather than attempting to foment mischief directly.

For me, the golden age of science fiction was 9 to 17, with a peak from 12 to 14. Following that, I have studied science and faced the real world instead. When I returned to science fiction the magic was gone. I would read a story and think to myself "I know, from personal experience, that's not how things work."

I am a technical entrepreneur. My job is to build the future. To build the future you must balance conviction against skepticism. Rationalism is full of advice on cultivating skepticism. Science is an unrivaled tool for cultivating conviction within its domain. However, the vanguard of progress is beyond the reach of science. Peer review is not a fountain of inspiration. I cannot afford to lack imagination.

If you want,...
What's your best alternate history utopia?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2021-02-22T08:17:23.774Z

Rules:

Same level of technology as today

Basic human psychology is the same

But you are allowed to change prevalent institutions, cultural assumptions etc.

So e.g. if you think that the modern school system is oppressive and traumatizing, you can describe a world that has something else instead. But you should describe the alternative at least a bit - what kids do with their time instead and how they learn skills and are selected into jobs. Don't just say "no school", give us a positive alternative vision.

Within those constraints, you're allowed to change as much as you like and can think of.

What's your utopia like?
Two types of deference
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-02-22T03:32:53.561Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

This post distinguishes between two different ways of deferring to future humans who understand a lot more about the world than we do.

I. Some futuristic minds

Consider a futuristic version of human civilization, in which human-like capacities for cognition and understanding have dramatically improved. Let’s say, in particular, that humans have figured out how to scan their brains, replicate the cognitively-relevant causal structure on computers, and then to gradually but radically scale up the size, speed, memory capacity, etc of the resulting digital minds (it’s not important, to the thought experiment, that this process be identity-preserving). Each such mind, let’s say, occupies an entire 50-floor, warehouse-like building, filled with futuristic computers running near physical limits on storage, communication speed, and processing power (see Sandberg (1999) for some discussion). These minds can interact with the world via various sophisticated sensors and robots, and they can communicate extensively with each other via various high-bandwidth channels.

Let’s say that together, some very large number of such minds (10 million? eventually there are space limitations) set out on a coordinated project of improving their collective understanding of the world, at all levels of abstraction. This is not a narrowly “scientific” enterprise, but rather one that encompasses all truth-oriented aspirations involved in human art, literature, philosophy, economics, and so forth — as well as in many other practices, which our present civilization does not engage in. These minds aren’t just looking for the most fundamental laws of physics, or the true theorems; they’re looking for everything that any human trying to understand any aspect of the world has been looking for (though they’ll presumably need some ways of prioritizing). They can use their robots and computing resources etc to gather all the empirical data they want. Let’s say that they spend roughly 1,000 objective years on this project.

To be clear: I’m not trying to give a realistic picture of what futuristic human inquiry will be like, or what versions would be desirable. Mostly, I want to evoke with some concreteness the possibility of extreme differences in scale, intensity, and quality of inquiry — as well as in the cognitive capacity of the inquirers — relative to present-da...
Exponential growth is the baseline
by jasoncrawford — 2021-02-22T02:08:16.704Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/exponential-growth-is-the-baseline

When we consider the question of “stagnation,” we are assuming an implicit answer to an underlying question: relative to what? What should we expect?

I have a simple answer: Our baseline expectation should be no less than exponential growth.

I will give both historical and theoretical reasons for this. Then, I will address concerns about the inputs to exponential growth: whether those too need to grow exponentially, and what problems that poses.

Exponentials in practice

My first reason for an exponential baseline is that we have plenty of historical examples of exponential growth sustained over long periods.

One of the most famous is Moore’s Law, the exponential growth in the number of transistors fitting in an integrated circuit:

Our World in Data

In a previous post, I discussed J. Storrs Hall’s concept of the Henry Adams Curve, an exponential increase in per-capita energy usage, sustained for a couple of centuries until it flatlined around 1970:

J. Storrs Hall, Where is My Flying Car?

Here are some more charts of technological progress, many of which show exponential improvement curves, including in speed of transportation, energy density of batteries, and accuracy of clocks.

Each individual technology, over a long enough period of time, tends to follow not an exponential but an S-curve. It’s just the first part that looks exponential. But when we add up all the S-curves across the economy, we can get an exponential growth curve for the economy as a whole:

Our World in Data

(And that’s only for advanced countries since the Industrial Revolution; if you look at trajectories that span both before and after industrialization, you get super-exponential curves. But what causes those and whether we should “expect” them is beyond the scope of this essay.)

This is why we talk about the rate of growth, and why it’s meaningful to compare the growth rate of the economy over a period of many years: the growth rate, expressed as a percentage, is constant for an exponential curve. It’s actually more meaningful to talk about “a 1% increase in GDP” than “a $200 billion increase”.

Exponentials in theory

My second reason for believing in exponentials is that there is a simple generative model to explain them.

Things that are growing exponentially are growing in proportion to their size. One way this can happen is if the thing—whether an economy, a business, or an organism—invests a constan...
Chaotic era: avoid or survive?
by Valentin2026 — 2021-02-22T01:34:41.317Z

In the world of the “Three-body problem” novel by Liu Cixin, stable eras, when the planet is rotating just around one sun, and everything is quite predictable, are changing to chaotic eras, when all three suns are involved, and nothing is possible to predict. In our history, we have relatively stable periods (when you are quite certain that your job or savings are not going to disappear tomorrow, for example). The levels of stability can be different, of course. The first few months of the pandemic were really less stable than life before the pandemic, but certainly more stable than life during WWII (at least in Europe). The question that I want to discuss here is how likely that we will get into a very chaotic era again, and what should we do with it. Notice, that by chaotic I don’t mean necessary “troublesome”. I mean only “hard to predict”.

Hard to predict for whom? We have many agents with different levels of expertise and different level of responsibility. If experts make a correct prediction, but many non-experts made a crucial mistake that strongly hurt them (loss of income or savings, for example), these non-experts can start acting based on emotions making the situation even less predictable, thus leading to the “domino effect”. Peculiar conspiracy theories spread among them can make the situation even worse. Another option is an irrational decision of a person with a huge level of responsibility, such as a dictator of a country with nuclear weapons, for example.

I can name a few scenarios that may increase the level of chaos in the system – just what came to my mind. Of course, there are more, most likely – those are just illustrations

-Due to AI, a lot of people may lose their jobs, and there may be no other job they have skills to do, so we get a huge amount unemployed and likely angry people, that can unpredictably vote or protest.

-The world financial system may transit to cryptoeconomics, which, in the process of transition, may lead to huge instabilities on the market, inflation, and people losing almost all their savings (again, a lot of angry people)

-Technological progress may lead to asymmetry in the opportunities of countries with nuclear weapons (like the system that would destroy all opponent’s missiles, for example). The threat of such an event may result in the dangerous behavior of the opponent without such...