trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Large Gains from Small Choices
by Srdjan Miletic — 2020-12-28T19:34:51.748Z

Looking at my average day, I often think that I'm lazy and wasting most of my time. Usually I work for 8 hours, although probably only half of that time is productive. I go on a short walk, buy food and eat. After work, I mostly play videogames, do household chores and sometimes spend an hour or two talking to my girlfriend. I'm by no means a paragon of productivity. Still there are a few small things I do regularly that over a decade have compounded into substantial gains. These include:

Reading a good book a month (or trying to)

Using an RSS feed to stream high quality writing to myself daily

Subscribing to various good podcasts and listening to them as I go on walks. Usually summing up to 30 mins per day.

Going for a walk a day and doing weightlifting at least twice a week for 30 mins or so.

The more I look back, the more I think that being productive is not a matter of using every minute well or being busy all or even most of the time. Rather, I think productivity is a matter of gradually building high-impact, low-cost habits into your days. These habits don't lead to magic changes in the short term but the small differences they do make compound over the days and years. After a decade the difference between the person with good habits and the person without them is night and day.

I don't have anything more than plausible sounding arguments to prove this, but I think playing with a few numbers can help.

Let's say you commit to studying one chapter of a textbook per week. I'm currently working through [[Modern Principles of Economics 4th Edition]]. It has 38 chapters. I think that's a bit above average but let's be conservative and assume that the average textbook has 40 chapters. Let's also assume that you miss a few weeks a year. Instead of studying 52 chapters per year, you study 40. One year, one textbook. Over the course of a single decade you could get a grounding (a.k.a: know more than 95% of people) in economics, world history, criminology, law, philosophy, warfare, agriculture and four more topics of your choice. Would you be an expert in these topics? No. But the relevant comparison is not to the person who knows more than you but to the hypothetical alternate you who didn't study a chapter a day and didn't know about the green revolution in food production or that high housing prices are a result of constrained supply and increasing demand. It...
Where are the post-COVID complainers?
by knite — 2020-12-28T18:36:16.728Z

Assumption: COVID immunity lasts a long time, because that's how diseases work, and this is the case for 95+% of people who get COVID or a COVID vaccine.

20% of the United States has had COVID (13-30% per https://covid19-projections.com/) and presumed immune. Even if we conservatively take the official case count (20M) and trim off 25% to account for possible duplicates, that's 5% of the population.

Another 1-2% has already been vaccinated and will join them in a month, with more every week after that.

So on the low end, in mid-January, 7% of the country will be fine. COVID-fine, at any rate, but still subject to all local, statewide, and national restrictions.

Why aren't these people making noise about going back to their normal lives? They want to eat in restaurants and make money working in restaurants. They want to see their friends and shop. They want to do lots of things.

I notice that I am very surprised that this large and growing minority isn't insisting on partial re-openings (with immunity certificates?). I'm surprised they're not screaming for it. I'm surprised it's not a discussion all across the media. What am I missing?
I don't want to listen, because I will believe you
by George3d6 — 2020-12-28T14:58:34.952Z
Link: https://cerebralab.com/I_dont_want_to_listen,_because_I_will_believe_you

I often encounter a seemingly implicit belief that listening to someone's opinion or idea is something that can be done in exchange for merely the time spent doing so. This idea seemed so obviously true when I glanced upon it in my mind, I was almost certain it was wrong.

I - We don't learn basic things rationally

We sometimes model ourselves as rational actors, disseminating information to form beliefs and ideas. Under this model, we might think of ourselves as having some priors about facets of reality, listening to someone and evaluating the logical consistency of their ideas, then contextualizing those ideas based on our priors, looking into the supporting evidence (if any), then finally updating our priors and creating new ones.

Take as an example:

A: We should introduce a carbon tax in order to reduce our negative impact on the environment.

B: Hmh [I do have a fairly strong prior that carbon-containing gas releasing industry affects our environment for the worst. I also have a fairly strong prior that taxing a behavior disincentivizes it. But I also have a fairly strong prior that taxing industry is a very complex process, thus we need fairly solid data to have a high certainty about a given taxation strategy]. What you're saying seems reasonable, has any country experimented with such a tax?

A: Oh yes, dozens have have, including large countries with reliable data collection, such as Sweeden, Argentina, and Canada.

B: That's curious. I'll look into the data and see if and how said the carbon tax was correlated with air quality, the replacement of carbon-polluting industries with more environmentally friendly forms of industry, and government investments into air-cleaning projects. [proceeds to investigate more than alter his beliefs based on the evidence]

As far as my limited understanding of human psychology goes, I find no reason to believe the above is anywhere close to our default modus operandi.

The most closely related and scientifically measurable evidence here are a multitude of phenomena that fall under the umbrella term priming.

Priming our brains for specific patterns of thought seldom implicates what we'd call "reason" or even conscious thinking. Bring someone to a part where everyone speaks Spanish and they'll be primed to understand Spanish; they will still "understand" other languages, of course, but the context switching required to communicate ...
Choosing the right ask for a context
by ChristianKl — 2020-12-28T14:58:10.770Z

There are multiple ways of asking another person to engage in an action. Many people don't reflect about the different kinds of asks, use the asks that their cultural conditioning dictates and don't get what they want. They might stay silent because they don't want to inconvenience the other person with a strong ask. Other times they express a strong ask and inconvenience the other person more than they desire.

Invitations, requests, demands and commands

This post explores the differences between invitations, requests, demands and commands. While sometimes people say "I request you to take out the trash" when they mean "I demand that you take out the trash" it's still useful to mentally distinguish the different kinds of asks.

An invitation is about giving another person an option to do something. If I'm holding a party and have a guest list, an invitation is a requirement to attend the party but I'm completely okay with people who would be welcome at the party not arriving. If the other person thinks they have a better option then the option that my invitation gives them, I'm not expecting them to follow my invitation.

A step above an invitation is a request. When I'm sitting in a room with high CO2 I might request that another person opens the window. If the person follows my request they are doing me a favor that I appreciate. If they however don't open the window that's also fine with me.

A step above a request is a demand. If I want to read a book that I lend a friend again, I might demand that my friend give me back the book the next time we meet. If the other person doesn't bring the book the next time we meet and doesn't have a good reason, I'm going to be a bit angry at them not fulfilling my demand.

A step above a demand is a command. If I'm in court the judge gives me a command to tell the truth. The command implies that there's a punishment when I violate it, even if I can present a reason for why I don't think it was a good idea to tell the truth.

Cultures

In the

Ask and Guess culture

distinction there's the idea that a culture either does their asks with invitations and requests or does the asks with demands and commands. In practice, people who are in a guess culture environment will often interpret the invitations and requests as demands. It requires cultural norms that allow invitation and requests to be made without being interpreted as demands.

On ...
Would the Real Economy Please Stand Up
by  — 2020-12-28T14:05:55.402Z

More-or-less an exegesis of The Manual Economy. Warning: I am not an economist; this is speculative. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Empty.

I.

What does “the economy” mean to you? What do those words point to in the world? If I say instead “the banana”, that’s a pretty well-defined concrete object. If I say “the marriage”, that’s way less concrete but still has pretty well-defined boundaries in a lot of ways. But when I say “the economy”… well. Isn’t everything kinda part of the economy? It starts to involve a lot of hand-waving and ambiguity.

Just as the idea of “marriage” is made up of roughly three distinct pieces in reality (a legal piece, a social piece, and a now-optional religious piece), I like to think of the “economy” as really made up of a few fairly distinct pieces. Like two kids in a trench-coat, every economy is really two economies trying to sneak into a movie theatre together: a concrete economy made of goods and services, and a virtual economic coordination mechanism. These two economies usually stay approximately isomorphic to each other; when I buy a banana there are two parallel exchanges, one in money and one in bananas. Think of it like double-entry bookkeeping.

To draw out this distinction, imagine two alternative worlds. Imagine first the world vaguely hinted at in The Manual Economy, the world where money and all other coordination mechanisms have completely disappeared, but life carries on completely normally. In this world people still work, and receive goods. There are still “rich” and “poor” lifestyles, and poverty traps, and all the rest. It’s just that there’s no terrestrial coordination mechanism anymore; the economy stays coordinated because some twisted god wills it to be so. In this world you don’t go buy a banana. You go take a banana from the store without giving anything in return. The twisted god controlling us all merely wills it so that poor people don’t go take all the bananas.

For our second imaginary world, take the mirror image of the first. In this world money, and banks, and mortgages and all the rest still exist. People get paycheques, and try to make their rent each month, and get punished when they’re late paying their bills. But also it’s basically The Matrix; everybody eats and sleeps and lives in a permanent tube with no actual goods or services being exchanged. In our first imaginary world, we had a concrete...
Infinite possibilities
by KatjaGrace — 2020-12-28T10:10:16.027Z

Naively, for instance from the perspective of me as a child, it seems like a person has vastly many possible options at each moment, leading out in every direction, where many of them surely lead to amazing things, and thus it should be very easy to have an incredibly great life and make a huge positive difference to the world.

The problem with this is that having the ability to do incredible things, and wanting to do those incredible things, is not enough. If you can also do a bazillion other non-incredible things, then you also have to be able to pick out the incredible path from among the rest, and even if you do, a moment later it hits another incomprehensibly complicated intersection of unmarked paths, and you have to do it again.

This perhaps sounds obvious, but I think we do often still talk as if what happens is determined by people’s goals and their capabilities, and ignore the issue of computing which exercise of capabilities will bring about which goals, or leaving it as hopefully irrelevant noise in the model. My tentative guess is that this is a real impediment to thinking about the world and strategizing about life well.

I don’t know if anyone has a better model, or has thought about how bad this is. My tentative guess is that it is bad. It seems like something economists would think about, but I’m not sure what it would be called.
Uninformed Elevation of Trust
by Shmi — 2020-12-28T08:18:07.357Z

I don't know if there is a standard name for this phenomenon (other than the related Gell-Mann amnesia effect, e.g. "The Sequences are great, except in my area of expertise, where they are terrible.").

Here is the gist: we trust the data as much as we trust the source, regardless of how much the source trusts the data.

This sounds unobjectionable on the surface. We tend to equate the reliability of the data with the subjectively perceived trustworthiness of the source of data whenever we have no independent means of checking the veracity of the data. What is lost in this near-automatic logic is one small piece: the credence the source itself assigns to the data.

The (faulty) Bayesian math here is pretty straightforward and is left as an exercise to the reader.

A few examples:

An investment tip from an insider is perceived as reliable even if the insider themselves would consider it a speculation at best.
Life on Venus!
US election fraud!
A tupperware party.
A potential hire introduced by a trusted friend or a coworker.
A CFAR workshop. Just kidding, those are super trustworthy.

I think the titular description, Uninformed Elevation of Trust, tends to capture the essence of what happens, quickly and naturally, whenever we forget or neglect to engage our critical reasoning full on. It's an elevation of trust, not just adjustment of it, because the scenario where we skip the critical evaluation happens more the more we trust the source of data. We just naturally assume that whatever they tell us is as trustworthy as they themselves are, even though it's obvious that it should be discounted by the factor equal to the source's degree of belief in what they tell us.

Please feel free to offer your own examples and counter examples.
Review: LessWrong Best of 2018 – Epistemology
by Jacob Falkovich — 2020-12-28T04:32:50.070Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit. Some of this post is relevant mostly to readers of my blog who aren't LessWrongers, but you may still be interested in my general thoughts about the essays, the book as an artifact, and the state of the community.

Is there a better way to bid goodbye to 2020 than with

a book set of the best Rationalist writing of 2018

? I wouldn’t know — Ben Pace, who compiled and edited the set, sent me a review copy and so I spent Christmas day reading the Epistemology entry. So this post is a review, and of more than just the books.

A great thing you’ll notice right away about the books is that they smell exactly like

Wiz

, the Israeli video game magazine from the 90s that was the joy of my middle school years. A not-so-great thing about the books is that they’re small. The essays are printed in a very small font and the quotes within each essay are printed, for some reason, in an even smaller font. There are rumors that inside the quotes the secrets of the universe are rendered in the tiniest font of all, but I lack the visual acuity to discern if that is the case.

The book set looks almost comical next to the

hardcover SlateStarCodex collection

on my shelf:

Ironically, this juxtaposition describes the state of the Rationality community when I discovered it in early 2014. That year was Scott Alexander’s unassailable annus mirabilis. In the span of 12 months he taught us about

outgroups and the gray tribe

,

Moloch

,

fashions, layer

s and

countersignaling

,

words and categories

,

toxoplasma

,

the psychology of EA

and of

social justice

,

drugs

,

other drugs

,

better drugs

,

scientific validity

, and

whale cancer

.

The same period for LessWrong is described by Ben Pace in the introduction to the book set as “a dark age from 2014-2017, with contributions declining and the community dispersing”. This led to the LessWrong 2.0 team forming in 2018, and, as the book set can attest, ushering in a true renaissance of rationality writing and intellectual progress.

The Epistemology tome contains the following ten essays, which I’ll refer to by the bolded part:

A

Sketch of Good

Communication

by Ben Pace (significantly edited from the online version)

Babble

by Xiaoyu He (aka alkjash)

Local Validity

as a Key to Sanity and Civilization

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

The

Loudest Alarm

Is Probably False

by Patrick LaVictoire (aka orthonormal)

Varieties

of Argumentative Experience

by Scott Alex

...
Reviews as "How should this be improved to meet the bar?"
by Raemon — 2020-12-28T02:55:11.078Z

The LessWrong Review is a pretty big experiment, and I am still very much uncertain what the best form of reviewing is. We were pretty vague on how to review, listing these bullet points on topics a review should consider:

How has this post been useful?
How does it connect to the broader intellectual landscape?
Is this post epistemically sound?
How could it be improved?
What further work would you like to see on top of the ideas proposed in this post?

I'm interested in seeing more of the last two. I'd like a key piece of the Review to be "authors rewriting posts if they can be improved", and "people writing followup posts that either attempt a better explanation of whatever the post was about, or do followup work exploring more of the post's ideas."

So, for negative reviews, if a post's central concept seems important but the post itself feels inadequate, I'd be interested in seeing more "how could this post be improved, such that it makes sense to include in a 'Best Of', or otherwise enter into Lesswrong's longterm memory.*"

*a concern I have about the current Review process is it focuses primarily on the best-of book, but not all important works make sense to include in a public facing artifact. Examples of this might include a) dry, technical posts, b) posts that are important but somehow controversial, c) posts that are doing a lot of "schlep" work (such as replications), where you don't necessarily care that everyone reads them, but you care that they exist and you can refer to them when doing later meta-analyses or whatnot)

I'm not sure about the best solution for this and this is still the subject of some debate on the LessWrong team, but I'd personally prefer if reviewers somewhat distinguished between "whether it makes sense for a post to be in the Best Of Book" and "whether the post is somehow important to the LessWrong intellectual project."
The Twins
by Prometheus — 2020-12-28T01:26:23.447Z

Someone is pregnant with twins. At birth, the twins are taken blindfolded to separate rooms. Both rooms are identical on the interior; outside, there is a ‘1’ printed on one of the doors and a ‘2’ printed on the other. Once inside, the blindfolds are removed, and the twins are left alone in their separate rooms. The twins do not leave their respective rooms during the course of their childhood. The rooms contain machines to take care of them during infant development, and there is a bathroom/shower in each for when they get older. Rather than encountering other humans, they are both raised by the exact same computer programs. These programs give them their education. Slots in the walls give them food and water. Any meal that is distributed to one twin is also given in exact same type and quantity to the other.

The computers are programmed to be interactive, allowing the child to still develop social abilities. Now, imagine if the program asks them a question. The question could be anything, such as “what’s your favorite color?” or “what do you want to do when you leave this room?”. What matters is how the children respond. Would they be exactly the same? The determinist answer would be yes. They have received the exact same sensory perception, possess the same DNA, and the same environmental conditions and diet. One who supports the idea of quantum randomness in cognition might disagree, believing these slight variations could eventually result in observable changes in behavior. Those who understand Chaos Theory would probably also point out small variations, that could not be fully controlled by any test, could also result in differences in behavior. Another problem would be the mutations in their genes that could also affect behavior. While twin DNA might begin by being close to identical, all genes are still subject to mutations over the course of a person’s life.

But what if all small variations could be controlled? And what if quantum variations did not play a role in cognitive differences? What if even their mutations in genes were either controlled, or else also identical? Each child would then truly be identical. They would answer questions the same way, in the same tone. They would get up at the same time, go to the bathroom at the same time. They would think the same, and have the same dreams.

Now imagine if they were both allowed ou...
Agency Volume of "A Map That Reflects the Territory" Set - My Personal Commentary
by hamnox — 2020-12-27T23:35:25.765Z

previously, in this series

Noticing the taste of Lotus

This has really lovely prose.

Friend said he resented the premise that life is more than just a series of lotuses to eat. the writing made it sound so easy not to fall into them, and did not acknowledge let alone offer any concrete solutions to help with its very real difficulty. I think my friend has a point.

Takeaways

Just look. notice when something grabs your wanting.
Notice especially when someone else built the want-grabber.
Be at ease and let yourself get grabbed if you want to, just pay attention to what happens as a result.

The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life

The intuitive geometric explanation works for a level of math knowledge that groks point graphs and what a normal distribution looks like. Reasonable for lesswrong. I still want to see a version with a lower barrier to entry than that. Admittedly, that's well outside the scope of this post.

Not in this essay explained: Mediocristan, Quine, Blegg/Rube network illustration, ethical naturalist

Lots of references made in this essay feel at risk of nulling out

The most merciful thing in the world is how so far we have managed to stay in the area where the human mind can correlate its contents

Ended on a note of horror. Scott has ensured I will never forget this essay, sure hope that's what he was going for.

Meta-Honesty: Firming up Honesty Around its Edge-Cases

The Basics

To always be honest requires:

quick clever thinking with words
surrounding self with people who can handle you saying things off-script
courage or stubbornness to risk rejection based on what you believe

Why did E feel the need to drop in the term Glomarization. He could have actually explained the concept.

Truth-telling rules - good candidate for #jestercourt clarification

I'd like to try a conversation in which everyone must speak only things that are literally false, but the lies have to stay on topic and consistent. there'd be a timeout signal for when you catch someone's story not adding up and need to talk out of character. It'll be great.

We purport "Do not kill" to be absolute and exceptionless because that's what it takes to get people to even hesitate… and I think this relates to Ziz's thing about being ready to perform extreme violence at any moment. She's gone the opposite direction and tried having actual models of when to use violence.

I am left aimless.

The Details

ow my head hurt...