trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Praise of some popular LW articles
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-07-20T00:32:35.849Z

My composition teacher in college told me that in some pottery schools, the teacher holds up your pot, examines it, comments on it, and then smashes it on the floor. They do this for your first 100 pots.

In that spirit, this post's epistemic status is SMASH THIS POT.

In line with my previous experiment in reading LW articles with a critical attitude, focusing on the weakest passages, I decided to try the opposite. I picked two popular LW articles suggested at the top of my feed, selected the passages I thought were strongest, and tried to express my agreement and build on them.

Strongest Passage in "Reason Isn't Magic"

by Benquo

Quote 1

[Manioc transplantation to Africa] is offered as a cautionary tale against innovating through reason, since there's a lot of information embedded in your culture (via hundreds of years of selection), even if people can't explain why...

First of all, it's not clear things got worse on net, just that a tradeoff was made. How many person-days per year were freed up by less labor-intensive manioc handling? Has anyone bothered to count the hours lost to laborious traditional manioc-processing, to compare them with the burden of consuming too much cyanide?

The concept of "cultural selection" implies that the survival of weird, costly traditions indicates that they must make a culture more fit, so breaking them is likely to make a culture worse off. Benquo is rightly skeptical of this little-tested idea.

What about slack, the idea that net negative traits might survive because competition isn't fierce enough to wipe them out?

What about the idea that weird, costly rules might improve group cohesion enough to have a net positive effect on cultural fitness, even though their direct effect is negative?

What if fitness tradeoffs differ in different environments, time periods, or cultural contexts? Maybe simpler preparation produced higher cultural fitness in Africa, while the avoidance of cyanide poisoning produced higher cultural fitness in South America.

What if "reason" is being used inappropriately here to lump together any change made based on individual thought? Didn't cultures throughout history and around the world develop traditions for how to employ reason to produce good results?

Quote 2

Third, the actually existing Portuguese and Africans involved in this experiment weren't committed rationalists - they were just p

...
Types Of Online Meetups
by Dan B — 2020-07-19T23:51:27.048Z

Yesterday I joined Raemon's videoconference-meetup-about-videoconference-meetups, but then I had to leave due to a scheduling conflict.

The thing I wanted to get out of that meetup was ideas for online things I can do with my friends.

I thought I'd post a list of things I've done online with my friends, in the hope that others would respond with things they've done online, and we could have an information exchange.

Here are some kinds of meetups you can have online:

* Jackbox: you can download Jackbox on Steam, and share your screen to a videoconference, and up to eight people can play. Mostly we played Fibbage. Getting the audio to work was surprisingly tricky, because you have to share the Jackbox audio, but if you share the videoconference audio then you get bad audio feedback. The solution I reached was to have a dedicated computer for this, and to manually turn off the specific thread of audio that was coming from Chrome.

We did this and it was fun, and then I tried to schedule it again and people didn't seem interested, so possibly it didn't work as well as I thought.

* Letter Jam: there are lots of board games you can play with friends online, but this one is cooperative in a way that works pretty well over videoconference. In this game, you can't see your own letter but you can see everyone else's letter; you can spell words using other people's letters, which hopefully will let them figure out what their letters are. We use http://lettergame.nfshost.com/ and a videoconference for audio. Two games in one sitting seems right; three games can cause burnout.

I'm hoping to do this as a weekly activity.

* Puzzle Night: on the second Tuesday of the month, http://www.puzzledpint.com/ publishes new puzzles, and we get a little team together to solve them over videoconference. Generally we use a separate Google Draw for each puzzle, though some puzzles will need a spreadsheet instead.

July's puzzles won't work for this, because they published two puzzles which both have to be printed out on paper to solve. Past months' puzzles will work. I used to have weekly puzzle parties where we'd choose a date from the archives and solve that month's puzzles and compare our times to the solve times in the spreadsheet.

* RPGs: best practice is to use a shared Google Drive to store documents. A ...
Musical Outgroups
by  — 2020-07-19T22:55:12.007Z

[Content warning: Politics. Something I will regret writing. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Empty.]

A lot of this extends from Scott Alexander’s I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, but if you don’t want to read the whole thing I’ll quote a few key definitions up front. Specifically:

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

And then the kicker:

And my hypothesis, stated plainly, is that if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists – it’s the Red Tribe.

Scott’s post was written in 2017, which now feels like a very different time. I’m not good at fancy metaphors and stories like Scott, so instead of gently guiding you to my point I’m just going to say it: I don’t think the definitions of these tribes...
Forum Assisted Discussion
by Dan B — 2020-07-19T22:38:10.727Z

This post is a record of a meetup I hosted for the NYC rationalist group a few months ago. Its name changed a few times -- for a while it was called "Askhole For Internet Points", and then I decided that was weird, and by increments it changed to "Forum Assisted Discussion".

Here's the philosophy behind this event: I wanted to hold a discussion, but I've noticed in the past that large-group discussions aren't really fun. My experience of the problem is that I'll be part of a large discussion, and I'll have a thing that I want to say, but five other people will also have things that they want to say. The worst case is that we wait for someone to finish and then we all interrupt each other to try to be the next speaker. A better case is that there's a moderator who tells us what order we'll speak in -- but then I have to wait for five other people to say their thing before I can say my thing, and "waiting for you to finish talking so I can talk" isn't the right mindset to enjoy a discussion.

Here's the idea for this event: we all got in a Zoom chatroom, and we all got in a forum. I'd post a discussion question on the forum, and everyone would answer it by posting a top-level comment on the post.

(There was a rule: you must always post a top-level comment. If you don't know, post a top-level comment saying you don't know, and talking about how we should go about finding out. If you don't care, post a comment explaining why the question doesn't matter.)

Then, we'd spend a few minutes reading everyone's top-level comments and posting second-level comments.

(We had another rule: upvote any comment that gives you new insights or information about the topic. Never downvote anything unless it's actually trolling. The "never downvote" rule was necessary for the "you must post a top-level comment" rule to work.)

The game was intended to last one-and-a-half hours; due to poor planning on my part it ran two hours and change. We had nine people posting comments at the start of the event, and six people at the end. I felt it was a moderate success.

The Zoom was used purely for meta-discussion, eg, "okay, the second discussion question is up now!"

Here are my notes for things to do differently next time:

Reddit turned out to not

...
Pulse and Glide Cycling
by jefftk — 2020-07-19T19:02:24.070Z

About 10 years ago I stopped bicycling very much, because my

knees hurt. Since then I've mostly
gotten around by walking, running, and public transport. With COVID,
however, I've

started bicycling
more, and initially my nees were hurting again a bit. A couple
weeks ago I bicycled about half an hour to get somewhere, and by the
end my knees were hurting a lot. On the way back, I decided to try a

technique

from

hypermiling:

pulse and
glide.

I put the bike in mid gear, stood up, leaned over the handlebars,
and pushed hard through about three rotations of the pedals. Then I
sat down and coasted for about 30s. I repeated this all the way home,
except for one hill that was too steep for any coasting, which I
walked up. When I got home, my knees felt decent.

I tried this again on Thursday (40min round trip), and then again
yesterday (1hr round trip). My knees feel totally fine!

I initially expected that this would be significantly slower, but, for
me, I think it's actually faster! Normally I bike slowly, trying to
keep things easy on my knees, so this is a bit of a low bar. Looking
at my most recent trip, I biked 5.0mi in 29min, and Google Maps
predicts 31min. I'm usually more like 30% slower than Maps predicts.

Two guesses about why this might feel better:

In regular bicycling, I'm making a lot of rotations. I usually use a
low gear, move my feet quickly, and don't use a lot of force. This is
a lot more movement in my knees than I get in the rest of my life,
while when pulsing it's probably closer to normal.

My bicycle has a traditional upright riding position, and when
I pulse I'm out of the saddle. I think it's likely that my pedaling
position when pulsing is a lot more ergonomic. At the very least it's
much easier to put out a lot of power.

pulsing: standing up, accelerating quickly

gliding: sitting down, resting, decelerating slowly

One thing I like about pulsing is that it works really well with
traffic lights. I can choose when to pulse and went to coast, and
generally get to lights when they're green. I am willing to go through
red lights on a bike after looking around carefully to make sure that
I have sufficient visibility and there's no one coming, but it's still
much faster when green since you can stay at full speed.

I had an idea last night for how one could make a bicycle that was
even bet...
Math. proof of the superiority of independent guesses?
by Milton — 2020-07-19T02:38:39.725Z

Alice, Bob, Chris, Dana and Erica have set out to guess the number of candies in a glas jar just by looking at it. How do I mathematically show that the average guess will come closer to the real number if they guess independently, i.e without Bob hearing Alice's guess, Chris hearing Alice's and Bob's guess and so on?

And finally, I'm pretty confident I've read about this on LessWrong before, but I can't seem to find the specific post. Can anyone help me recollect?
Criticism of some popular LW articles
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-07-19T01:16:50.230Z

My composition teacher in college told me that in some pottery schools, the teacher holds up your pot, examines it, comments on it, and then smashes it on the floor. They do this for your first 100 pots.

In that spirit, this post's epistemic status is SMASH THIS POT.

As an experiment, I'm choosing three popular LW posts that happen to be at the top of my feed. I'm looking for the quotes I most disagree with, and digging into that disagreement. This is because I notice I have a tendency to just consume curated LW content passively. I'd instead like to approach it with a more assertively skeptical mindset.

Thought I believe in the principle of charity, I think that a comparative advantage of LW compared with other online spaces is as a space where frank and public object-level disagreement is permitted, as long as we avoid ad hominems or trolling.

Furthermore, I'm focusing here on what I took away from these posts, rather than what these authors intended, or what they learned by writing them. Insofar as the author was specifically trying to convince me to take these statements seriously, they failed. Insofar as they had some other purpose in mind, I have absolutely no opinion on the matter.

So with personal apologies to the three excellent writers I happened to select for this exercise, here I go.

1. The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist

Quote I disagree with:

So although it's correct to say that the skeptics' emotions overwhelmed their rationality, they wouldn't have those emotions unless they thought on some level that ghosts were worth getting scared about.

No. They had those emotions because they thought on some level that dark, unfamiliar environments that their community says are scary might be unsafe. Hence, reword "This looks suspiciously like I'm making an expected utility calculation. Probability of being killed by ghost something dangerous living in the house * value of my life, compared to a million dollars."

Impact on conclusion:

But if that's true, we're now up to three different levels of belief. The one I profess to my friends, the one that controls my anticipation, and the one that influences my emotions.

There are no ghosts, profess skepticism.
There are no ghosts, take the bet.
There are ghosts, run for your life!

Instead of three levels of belief, we have three levels of storytelling. The story my friends and I share, the story that controls my anticip...
Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know (I.)
by Martin Sustrik — 2020-07-19T01:11:54.756Z

Swiss political system may be best known for its extensive use of referenda. However, others may argue that its most striking feature is the ability to avoid political polarization. In this respect it may be unique among the western nations.

That being said, it is hard to learn much about how it works. First, a big part of the system is informal and thus only discoverable by observing it personally or by asking the locals. Second, it's strongly decentralized. Different rules apply in different cantons and municipalities which makes the topic confusing to study. Third, Swiss aren't especially interested in promoting their own system abroad. A lot of the resources therefore exist only in local languages.

In this article I'll try to put together what I've learned by living in the country, speaking to local people, following local press and studying the resources.

Still, a disclaimer is due: I am not Swiss. I have lived here only for five years. Neither am I a political scientists or a sociologist. If you are Swiss, or simply know better than me, let me know about any inaccuracies in the article.

On the more technical side of things: There's a lot of material to cover, and the result may be rather overwhelming. It would be a small book rather than a long article. Therefore, I am going to split this essay into three or four installments which I will publish one at a time.

Semi-direct Democracy

When modern Switzerland was established in 1848, it was a pretty standard representative democracy, mostly based on the American model.

It's a federal state. Federal elections are held every four years. People are represented by political parties. There are two chambers of the parliament. Parliament elects members of the government, who then together run the country. The thriving ecosystem of various voluntary associations resembles the America that Alexis de Toqueville has written about.

However, Switzerland is special in that various elements of direct democracy were introduced in the course of history.

There are obligatory referenda: Any change in constitution, adjustment of taxes or joining any international organization must be approved by the people and the cantons. There are legislative referenda: Any law enacted by the parliament may be challenged and rejected in a referendum. Finally, there are so called "popular initiatives" which can propose a referendum on any topic. I...
Why is pseudo-alignment "worse" than other ways ML can fail to generalize?
by nostalgebraist — 2020-07-18T22:54:50.957Z

I have only just read the mesa optimizers paper, and I don't understand what it adds to the pre-existing picture that "ML can fail to generalize outside the train distribution and this is bad."

The discussion in the paper generally assumes a background distinction between "training" and "deployment" (or an equivalent distinction), and discuss models which succeed on the base objective during "training" but not during "deployment."

In the sections about "deception," this happens in a special way quite unlike the ordinary failures to generalize that we see in ML today (and arises under correspondingly exotic conditions). But, in cases other than "deception," the paper describes dynamics and outcomes that seem identical to the ordinary generalization problem in ML:

Training find a model that scores well on the base objective, assessed over the training distribution
But, this model may not score well on the base objective, assessed over other distributions

For example, the following is just a textbook generalization failure, which can happen with or without a mesa-optimizer:

For a toy example of what pseudo-alignment might look like, consider an RL agent trained on a maze navigation task where all the doors during training happen to be red. Let the base objective (reward function) be Obase = (1 if reached a door, 0 otherwise). On the training distribution, this objective is equivalent to Oalt = (1 if reached something red, 0 otherwise). Consider what would happen if an agent, trained to high performance on Obase on this task, were put in an environment where the doors are instead blue, and with some red objects that are not doors. It might generalize on Obase, reliably navigating to the blue door in each maze (robust alignment). But it might also generalize on Oalt instead of Obase, reliably navigating each maze to reach red objects (pseudo-alignment).

Additionally, when the paper makes remarks that seem to be addressing my question, I find these remarks confused (or perhaps just confusing).

For instance, in this remark

The possibility of mesa-optimizers has important implications for the safety of advanced machine learning systems. When a base optimizer generates a mesa-optimizer, safety properties of the base optimizer may not transfer to the mesa-optimizer.

I don't understand what "...
Against Reopening Ottawa
by  — 2020-07-18T20:08:07.151Z

[COVID-related. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Empty. Sorry I couldn't make the graph embed work here, you can see the original at a readable size on my blog.]

I.

This is not the COVID post I thought I would be writing a few weeks ago. I honestly didn’t think I’d be writing a COVID post at all.

A few weeks ago, most of Canada seemed to be under control. There were a few hot spots left in e.g. Southern Ontario, but almost any other graph you looked at showed a nice, clean downward trend. How quickly things change. I live in Ottawa, so I’m going to focus there. This data comes directly from Ottawa Public Health (though the graph is mine):

You can see things getting consistently better in May, staying quite steady throughout June, and then starting to creep back up around the beginning of July.

This is a huge problem.

It may seem like I’m exaggerating slightly – after all, Ottawa (a city of 1 million people) went from roughly 4 new cases a day, to roughly 8 new cases a day, over the span of two weeks. That hardly seems comparable to the huge surges being seen in the southern United States or other problem areas. Ottawa’s health care system and hospitals have plenty of capacity. Our testing turn-around time remains under 48h, and our testing throughput remains high. We have a mandatory mask bylaw in place. There seem to be a lot of things going right.

In point of fact there are a lot of things going right – I’d still rather be in Ottawa than in any part of the US. But just because some things are going well, doesn’t mean we’re not still in trouble. Going from 4 to 8 new cases a day is an increase, and any increase is really bad news.

II.

At the risk of rehashing a topic everybody is sick of at this point: virus spread is modelled exponentially (this exponent is the “R0” everybody keeps talking about). R0 isn’t a magical fixed value; when something changes (e.g. people start wearing masks) then R0 for the virus changes too. When R0 is less than one, the virus gradually fades out of the population, as was happening in Ottawa in May. When R0 is exactly one, then the number of new cases stays flat, as was happening in June. When R0 is greater than one, the virus starts picking up steam and spreading again.

R0 in Ottawa is, clearly, greater than one at this point, and has been si...