trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Math: Textbooks and the DTP pipeline
by Andrew Quinn — 2018-07-09T15:09:56.817Z

Epistemic status: Half-certain, half-skeptical. This mental model feels a bit too compressed to me to be maximally useful.

I've spent a surprising (=non-zero) number of hours studying mathematics during my summer break, and noticed an interesting pattern in undergraduate textbooks.

With a certain amount of remarks, exercises, and concrete examples thrown in and seasoned to taste, most traditional mathematics textbooks will start out with some rigorous definitions, then state some theorems that use those definitions, and finally prove those theorems. Then the process starts all over again - the "Definition → Theorem → Proof" pipeline, as it's often called by pure mathematicians.*

I think this lens is very obvious when pointed out, but I've also found it useful to structure my thinking around my newfound hobby. Let's see if it pays out.

First, how do we most effectively deal with each step of the core pipeline? Here are some things I've found useful, although YMMV:

Definitions are usually the easiest step, but it's easy to get windshield-wiper eyes when reading a technical work (=reading, understanding it in the moment, but not retaining it once the book closes), so I recommend constructing simple examples of whatever is being defined. Of special value is trying to construct objects that break one and only one interesting parameter of the definition if it has multiple different conditions.

What counts as an interesting parameter is a matter of your own taste. For example, the set-theoretic definition of a topological space (X,T) had 4 important parameters for me to tweak before I felt like I had a handle on it.

Ditto for theorems. Usually, a good theorem shows me something at least a little surprising, so I'm more motivated to find an example (and to try to find a counter example) than definitions. More useful than that, however, is to take a minute and try to strategize about how you might prove it for a minute or two. Actually writing a proof out for a new theorem is likely more trouble than it's worth, not least because your plan is often not going to pan out perfectly, but doing this gets your brain into the right gear for the next part of the pipeline.
Proofs are where you spend the bulk of your mental energy when doing higher mathematics. Proofs are hardcore applications of definitions and theorems in service of

...
The Fermi Paradox: What did Sandberg, Drexler and Ord Really Dissolve?
by Shmi — 2018-07-08T21:18:20.358Z

(Cross-posted from my blog)

So this paper by the trio from the FHI, Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord (SDO for short) has been talked about quite a bit, on LessWrong, on SSC and on Reddit. It is about how their Monte-Carlo calculations based on probability distributions rather than on the usual point estimates of the Drake equation apparently dissolves the question of why we are seemingly alone in the Universe that is supposed to be teeming with intelligent life, if one takes the Copernican idea "we are not special" seriously. One grim suggestion is that there is a Great Filter that is still in front of us and is almost guaranteed to kill us off before the human civilization reaches the technological levels observable by other civilizations like ours.

There are plenty of other ideas, most addressing various factors in the Drake equation, but the one advanced in SDO is quite different from the mainstream: they say that estimating these factors is a wrong way to go, because the uncertainty in these very small probabilities is so large, the point estimates are all but meaningless. Instead they suggest that the correct approach is something along the following lines: First, assume a reasonable probability distribution for each factor, then draw a value for each factor based on their probability distributions, calculate the resulting expected value of the number of currently detectable civilizations, then repeat this process many times to create a synthetic probability distribution of the number of this civilizations, and finally extract the odds of us being alone in the universe from this distribution. And that is what they did, and concluded that the odds of us being alone in the Milky Way are something like 1:3. Thus, according to SDO, there is no paradox, an average universe is naturally a desolate place.

Their to the Fermi paradox solution is basically

Due to random chance, some of the parameters in the Drake equation, we do not know which, we do not know why, are many orders of magnitude smaller in our universe than previously estimated.

I have an issue with calling it "dissolving the paradox", since it doesn't answer any of the practical questions about the universe we live in. Fermi's question, "Where is everybody?" remains open.

But I may have misunderstood the paper. So, what follows is an attempt to understan...
An Exercise in Applied Rationality: A New Apartment
by Sable — 2018-07-08T21:18:04.518Z

I just moved into a new apartment, and I'm finding my life to be something of a blank slate. I still work at the same job and have the same car, but all of my habits and routines have been reset.

I'd appreciate some advice from the community about what to do; there are so many possibilities I'm experiencing decision paralysis.

Any topic is up for discussion, any piece of advice useful.

Some questions to get started:
Should I decorate my apartment all at once or over time? It's a 14 month lease.
How much energy should I invest into getting to know the people who live in near me, versus attempting other avenues of socialization?
I'm on the ground floor. Aside from flooding/crime, are there other advantages or disadvantages I should be aware of?
Should I meditate daily? For how long? When?
Any tricks to forming/keeping a successful reading habit?
Any tips for food/diet? I'm thinking I'd like to aim for nutritarian and see where it takes me.

Lastly, I'm sure there are questions I don't even know enough to ask, given that this is my first apartment. What do you wish someone had told you before you moved into your first apartment?

Thanks.
Estimating the consequences of device detection tech
by Jsevillamol — 2018-07-08T18:25:15.277Z

Today I have been asked to join a European project in collaboration with the police, developing two sorts of tech:

Device identification; that is, inferring from the filters applied to an image or video, pixel defects and other information hidden in raw pixel data the device with which it was taken (which is useful when for example a criminal modifies the metadata of a picture to try to blame their crimes on somebody else)
Detection of fake media; that is, determining if a certain video has been tampered with

To be honest, I do not fully grasp the consequences this tech could have in society, so I have resolved to write this post to illustrate my informal reasoning about it.

My process of reasoning will be as follows. I will first estimate the potential impact of legitimate use cases of such a device (such as stopping human trafficking), and then estimate the potential impact of illegitimate use cases (such as stopping whistleblowers or detaining dissenters of totalitarian regimes). Then I will compare one result against the other weighted by the applicability of this tech to each case.

Let us start.

Device identification

It is not difficult to imagine how this kind of tech can be misused, but we also need to take into account legitimate uses.

In Europe, we still have a fair dose of

human trafficking

, in which such a tool could potentially be used to great effect (identifying who took pictures of abused people, perhaps).

According to the link above, there were about 11k identified victims of human trafficking in the EU in 2012. If the tech in question was developed and successful, we could expect it to be implemented in other parts of the first world. Let’s suppose that the volume of dealt with trafficking in the first world (roughly EU + North America + Eastern Asia + Australia) is about 3-~10 times what it is in the EU, and that the number of victims identified roughly corresponds to the number of victims saved from trafficking. That means that about 30k-~100k people are saved from trafficking every year.

Are there other areas of similar importance where this tech could be used?

Recorded police data in Europe

points towards about 3k homicides per year in EU, 400k assaults (excluding sexual violence and homicides), 100k cases of sexual violence, 5M thefts (I estimated the sum of the numbers by hand, take it with a grain of salt).

All of these have not the same weight, ...
Putting Logarithmic-Quality Scales On Time
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2018-07-08T15:00:37.568Z

From my journal. Originally posted on my personal blog. Status: quite speculative, but there's something here.

***

Hmm.

We could probably put a -5 to +5 scale of behavior together that was logarithmic about the enduring good/bad impact of various activities.

Something totally neutral — say, neutral leisure that’s not particularly recharging nor distracting — that might be 0.

Activities or time that were +1 would be very slight gains without much enduring impact, like slightly-recharging leisure. +2 might be things with slightly more impact, like doing chores or cleaning.

The thing about logarithmic scales is that they get big, fast. +3 might be good one-off business-building activities, +4 might be establishing an ongoing revenue channel that keeps outputting gains, and +5 might be an absolute game-changing type thing like getting workable protocols on a vastly untapped marketing channel like Google Adwords in its very early days (with the potential for hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars in profit if done right) or recruiting an absolute superstar employee or some such.

On the negative side, -1 would be lost time without much repercussion (maybe a slow start to the day kind of staring off into space), -2 would be slight ongoing negative consequences like starting the day surfing the internet, -3 would be starting to take multi-day damage with bad decisions, -4 would be doing seriously dumb stuff with very long-term implications — for instance, stubbornly training through an injury and turning it into multi-months of physical therapy required, and -5 would be multi-year damage events like a serious alcoholic or heroin addict relapsing onto booze or heroin respectively.

Logarithmic scales are notoriously hard for people to get their mind around, but actually map well to reality in some instances.

For instance, if you spent a half-hour at “-1” quality time (-30 total) and then two hours at “-2” quality time (-1200 total), but then 90 minutes on a good one-off revenue generating campaign at +3 (+9000), then you come out considerably ahead. Staring off into space or surfing the internet is of course wasteful, but a solidly inspired 90 minutes of revenue-generating is much better than that. It’s possible to get a lot of gains in 90 focused minutes.

-5: -10,000 points per minute
-4: -1,000 points per minute
-3: -100 points per minute
-2: -10 points per minute
-1: ...
Automatic for the people
by technicalities — 2018-07-08T14:23:08.787Z

Summary: Things we could do about technological unemployment, if there was technological unemployment. (Novel bit is a top-down macroeconomic calculation.)

Confidence: 90% that the solutions I call 'vicious' would be. 60% that the ones I call 'nonvicious' would be. Worth emphasising up here that there is little evidence for tech' unemployment right now.

Crossposted from

gleech.org

.

Autonomous trucks are now in use and are already safer and more fuel-efficient than human driven ones. (Truck drivers are ~2% of the entire American workforce.)

Crap journalism (that is, 80% of (UK) journalism) is now fully automatable. Automatic art is quite good and improving fast. Consider also the cocktail bartender. And so on: maybe half of all jobs are at risk of being automated, assuming the rate of AI progress just stays constant (“over an unspecified period, perhaps a decade or two”).

Automation is maybe the main way that technology improves most people’s lives: aside from status exceptions like Apple products, big reductions in manufacturing cost usually mean big reduction in the end cost of goods. Obviously, replacing labour costs with lower-marginal-cost machines benefits rich machine-owners most, but automation also allows giant price cuts in all kinds of things; over the last two centuries these cuts have transformed society, increasing equality enormously by making things affordable for the first time.

Besides the obvious example - that we now produce a volume of food far beyond the needs of the entire world population (2940kcal per person per day, though with terrible distributive failures) - consider that a single ordinary shirt takes 508 hours of labour to produce on a spinning wheel and hand-loom - so you would expect to pay something above $3600 at current minimum wage (still $900 at 1400CE wage levels).

Getting costs as near to zero as possible is the way we will solve the easy problem of human existence, scarcity of basic goods and leisure. (The hard problem of human life is boredom and dignity and meaning and all that.)

Types of automation

I couldn't find a rigorous list of the types of automation, so here's my attempt:

First-wave: Mechanical control. machines which perform one task automatically because of the exact shape of their components. e.g. a) Cams, linked wheels machined to create fixed sequences of linear motion

...
Stories of Summer Solstice 
by Raemon — 2018-07-08T07:16:10.473Z

[Epistemic Status: talking in the language of metaphorical soul and mysticism.]

Previously:

Visions of Summer Solstice
Obligatory link to The Value and Danger of Ritual for people just tuning in.

June 23rd, the Bay community journeyed out to the edge of the world to celebrate the longest day of the year.

Photo Credit to Shaked Koplewitz

This came on the heels of EA Global, which had a strong focus on action, networking, planning projects and thinking about the future. Much of rationality is about thinking and doing. But once a year, it's nice to be.

We scoped out several possible locations, and ultimately settled on the Marin Headlands – a surreal, remote world of hidden beaches, spooky ruins and epic cliffs. Approximately 100 people came, some in 15-seat caravan vans, some individual carpools.

At solar noon, when the shadows are shortest, we opened with a speech by Malcolm Ocean. "The biggest thing you'll want to be wary of here is fear of missing out. There's going to be a lot of stuff going on today. It is not possible to see it all – just like life. Rather than trying desperately to optimize your time, I recommend just... going with the flow of the moment."

During the day, we had a few major activities:

Circling
Capture the Flag with water guns, war paint and a literal fort (although we ended up having to find a second fort because the one we meant to use got sniped by a wedding)
Group singing
Exploration in small groups of the various nooks, crannies and cliffscapes of the Headlands.

We didn't end up building a solar-temple, due to various logistical issues (and I think largely because there were lots of competing things to do). But a) I'm fairly confident about getting that done next year, and b) meanwhile... the drum circle at sunset felt deeply good.

On the event feedback survey I sent out, the overall ratio of meh/good/great/ecstatic for was 2/10/13/3, which has me pretty confident that we got the general shape of the event right.

This post is a scattershot of takeaways.

Drum Circles and Mary's Room

I've observed drum circles. I've participated in drum circles with strangers who were not really "my people." I've done circle-singing, which is sort of like a drum circle except with voices instead of drums. I have some theoretical background in music, and in ritual. I know what a drum circle is suppos...
Book review: Pearl's Book of Why
by PeterMcCluskey — 2018-07-07T17:30:30.994Z
Link: http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2018/07/06/pearls-book-of-why/

Book review: The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie.

This book aims to turn the ideas from Pearl's seminal
Causality) into
something that's readable by a fairly wide audience.

It is somewhat successful. Most of the book is pretty readable, but
parts of it still read like they were written for mathematicians.

History of science

A fair amount of the book covers the era (most of the 20th century) when
statisticians and scientists mostly rejected causality as an appropriate
subject for science. They mostly observed correlations, and carefully
repeated the mantra "correlation does not imply causation".

Scientists kept wanting to at least hint at causal implications of their
research, but statisticians rejected most attempts to make rigorous
claims about causes.

The one exception was for randomized controlled trials (RCTs).
Statisticians figured out early on that a good RCT can demonstrate that
correlation does imply causation. So RCTs became increasingly
important
over much of the 20th century[1].

That created a weird tension, where the use of RCTs made it clear that
scientists valued the concept of causality, but in most other contexts
they tried to talk as if causality wasn't real. Not quite as definitely
unreal as phlogiston. A bit closer to how
behaviorists often tabooed the
ideas that we had internal experiences and consciousness, or how
linguists once banned debates on the origin of
language, namely,
that it was dangerous to think science could touch those topics. Or
maybe a bit like heaven and hell - concepts which, even if they are
useful, seem to be forever beyond the reach of science?

But scientists kept wanting to influence the world, rather than just
predict it. So they often got impatient, when they couldn't afford to
wait for RCTs, to act as if correlations told them something about
causation.

The most conspicuous example is smoking. Scientists saw many hints that
smoking caused cancer, but without an RCT[2], their
standards and vocabulary made it hard to say more than that smoking is
associated with cancer.

This eventually prompted experts to articulate
criteria that
seemed somewhat useful at establishing causality. But even in ideal
circumstances, those criteria weren't convincing enough to produce a
consensus. Authoritative claims about smoking and cancer were delayed
for years by scientists' discomfort with talking about
causality[...
obvious epiphanies

by nBrown — 2018-07-07T03:05:23.271Z

In her post Closer to Fine, Sarah Constantin points at a something I’m calling an obvious epiphany.

You can be intellectually aware that a thing is true, and still have strong negative feelings that contradict it … There’s a big difference between “please tell me I’m okay, for the umpteenth time” and just believing “yeah, I’m okay, that’s a fact about reality.” Getting over this last hump, for me, was mostly a matter of insights, deeply internalized.

Epiphanies are weird, because what happens in practice is that you have a lot of them, and they all sound really obvious if you say them out loud. I believe this is normal. Single epiphanies don’t change you for life, mostly, but an aggregate of many epiphanies on the same theme add up.

Things like “I can trust myself more”, “I deserve happiness”, “I am actually successful by my own standards”, “I have strong convictions and admire heroism and that is a good thing”, “I care about truth and science a lot”, “I care about peace and freedom a lot,” “I deserve to give myself credit”, “I deserve to live”, and so on, sound like mundane platitudes, but there’s an experience of grokking them deeply, recognizing that they’re not just nice things to say but in a certain sense literally true in real life, that is essential and can’t be replaced.

Here are three examples I’ve discovered: I am good at giving massages, other people don’t understand audio at 3x speed and people enjoy my company

I was giving a someone a massage and she said “You’re really good at massages”. I don’t get that many massages so I took this as: Thanks for giving me a massage, massages are great. Instead of brushing it off I asked her “really?” She replied “No seriously I’ve had massages from three other people and they’re all worse”.

I’ve taken to watch youtube videos at faster speeds. It doesn’t ruin the experience and you can get more goodness in less time. My brother remarked “How can you understand that?” It’s more taxing to watch videos at high speeds, so I took this to as: hey aren’t you tired from watching a whole lecture at that speed. Turns out speech at 2.5x-3x speed up is totally unintelligible to someone who hasn’t gradually ramped up the speed.

I was unable to make a family event and my sister remarked “We’ll miss your company” I took this as: the habitual -it's good to see you-/I'm obligated to say I want you there. Halfway through th...
Towards dissolving the mystery of consciousness
by GeometryOfTheShadows — 2018-07-06T21:36:54.439Z

1

Let us consider a world where it is well known that light is a wave, characterized by wavelength. The white color is known to be a mix of many different waves as shown by a prism separating sunlight into a rainbow. Physicists measure and catalog the wavelengths of different colors such as red [620–750 nm], green [495–570 nm] and yellow [570–590 nm].

Across the street from the physicists is a painters' guild. They also deal a lot in colors and know well that mixing red and green yields yellow. They even demonstrated it to physicists, with a system of two prisms, baffles and mirrors. And yet the theory explaining how mixing two pure waves, one of 700nm and one of 500nm, results in a wave of 580nm remains elusive. Many different non-linear effects were hypothesized, but none was confirmed.

2

To us, this mystery is of course completely transparent. We now know well that a sensation of color is determined not by the frequency, but by a ratio of activation of 3 different types of photoreceptor cone cells in the eye retina [0]. Each of those cell types is sensitive to large overlapping swaths of frequencies. So a pure yellow and combination of pure red and green just happen to produce identical activation patterns.

To reach this understanding we had to look away from light itself and into the mechanism, we used to observe the light - our eyes and brains.

3

It seems to me that something similar happens with attempting to explain consciousness. We have some strong intuitions about what is and what isn't conscious and there are attempts to model those intuitions [1] [2]. I feel that there can't be a theory of consciousness without a good look at the mechanism that generates those intuitions - our brain.

4

Humans evolved as a social organism and the ability to function in a group was critical for survival. An "agent detector" that can distinguish a fellow human from inanimate objects and animals can be an extremely usable adaptation. (This detector can further usefully distinguish friend from foe, aka ingroup/outgroup, but this is beyond the scope of current text). And the intuition that someone or something is conscious is merely this object detector being activated in our brain. And the study of consciousness (like the study of color) should mostly produce answers about our detectors than about the conscious object themselves.

In a world with a wide ...