trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Consciousness as Metaphor: What Jaynes Has to Offer 
by Hazard — 2020-06-07T18:41:16.664Z

Cross-posted from my roam-blog. Greatly inspired by a lot of the stuff in Kaj's Multi-Agent Models of the Mind Sequence

This first paragraph of a recent SlateStarCodex post:

Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.

Nice job beautifully capturing my love of, and frustration with, this book. Jaynes has so many wild and exciting ideas and most of them are really weird. Not weird as in code for "stupid or wrong", but weird as in being so far outside what you thought the realm of possibility was that you're left sorta scratching your head.

One paragraph summary of Jaynes' book: consciousness is learned, not innate. From the development of language up till the Bronze Age Collapse people were directed around by the voices of the god's which they heard in their heads and would have conversations with and this was perfectly normal. The gods were neurologically real in the sense that cultural expectations allowed people to experience the thoughts that their right hemisphere produced as hallucinated voices that they attributed to the gods. Eventually writing, trading, and the collapse of most civilizations began to break down this bicameral mind, and modern consciousness (were "you" are in control and think things with your mind) came about.

...

...

... wut?

I can already tell that "the gods were real, but not like in a supernatural way, like in a uniform auditory hallucinations across populations way" is weird enough to knock most people off their game. Scott's post does a great job of trying to across this one piece of weirdness by recasting Jaynes' takes in terms of "Theory of mind". If you're hung up on gods being real, I'd recommend it as a Minimum Viable Explanation. Kevin Simler has a great series that delves more into the guts of this space.

That being said, I'm not writing this post to talk about auditory hallucinations or the idea that the gods were a real part of everyday life for thousands of year

...
Estimating COVID-19 Mortality Rates
by Benquo — 2020-06-07T15:45:30.271Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/estimating-covid-19-mortality-rates/

In the early days of the pandemic, there wasn't great data available, and it wasn't easy to do better than trusting the standard epidemiological estimate that around 2% of people who got COVID-19 would die. My back of the envelope estimate at the time was way higher, but no one else I knew seemed to think that number made sense, so I let the matter drop. But now we have enough data to check.

Recently, my sister reached out to me to check her own thinking on the matter. She used the same method I initially tried and abandoned - simply dividing the number of deaths by the number of resolved cases (deaths + recoveries) - to estimate that in the US, COVID-19 kills around 1 in 6 people who get it.

The problem with using only resolved cases, in a country with an ongoing pandemic, is that if people die faster than they're marked recovered, death rates can be inflated - and if they recover faster, deflated. Ideally, you'd want to wait until all cases have been resolved one way or the other. Fortunately, there are now countries where that situation nearly holds.

ETA: The other problem is that cases aren't infections. But if, as I do, you want to use publicly reported case data to make informed personal decisions, you might also be interested in the easier to calculate expected deaths per reported case.

I looked at countries with the 25 lowest active case counts, using the 91-DIVOC visualization tool, to see which ones seemed to be mostly done with the pandemic, at least for now:

I copied the current numbers (as of 7 Jun 2020) into a spreadsheet, to see what the effective death rate is in countries where the vast majority of cases are resolved. For the People's Republic of China, I only looked at numbers from Hubei.

In the countries and regions I looked at, active cases are around 1% of all confirmed cases, and around 5.8% of resolved COVID-19 cases end in death. But two thirds of cases came from Hubei. Excluding China, around 4% of confirmed cases are active, and around 3.5% of resolved cases ended in death. If I only look at other countries where fewer than 1% of confirmed cases are active, the average COVID-19 death rate is 2.6%, though in individual countries it ranges from 0.55% for Iceland to 4.67% for Croatia.

I'm adjusting my freak-out-and-hole-up threshold accordingly.

UPDATE: In the comments on my blog, Anna Salamon shared this est...
Self-help, hard and soft
by technicalities — 2020-06-07T15:39:29.746Z

Summary: Four types of trying to be better.

Confidence: 90% that this beats the 0-D or 1-D idea. 50% that this is the best phrasing or 2D projection.

I get annoyed when I click a post and find that it's not a list of things to try, or a cool tool for reasoning or deciding. But I don't endorse this annoyance, and I try to be less narrow.

The following may be helpful if you're like me, and want to understand what people are doing and so circumvent annoyance. (I think it beats "rationality" vs "post-rationality" because it drops the incipient in-group/out-group stuff and focusses on what people are actually doing.)

I began with a vague 1D idea: that there's "hard self-help" (actionable, crisp, objective) and soft self-help (contemplative, vague, subjective). This is really not useful without using two dimensions, though:

External
Internal

Legible
Lifehacks
Techniques

Illegible
Attempts
Seeking

Examples:

External
Internal

L
supplements, exercise, Things I Use, Quantified Self, checklists, Anki, time management, Algos to Live By
Models, CBT, bug lists, IDC, Focussing, this 2x2

I
brainstorming, CoZe, Oblique Strategies, 'Actually Try', 'Dive In', going with your gut
Art, stream entry, Kōans, aphorism, Replacing Guilt

Notes

This abstraction clearly strains to cover its large, wild, continuous domain.

The top axis covers a few things. It could be "Environment optimisation vs Inner alignment", or "Action vs Contemplation", or "Objective vs Subjective".

My original name for the left axis was "Algorithm vs Heuristic".

The idea of a "Rest Day" is an unambiguous algorithm: 1) Make no appointments; 2) Do what you want. But each instance is different and highly illegible. "Why am I doing this? Because." Outer loop is algo, the inner loop is heuristic.

If it worked, biofeedback would be the exemplar of legible-internal.

This is probably not the most significant difference beween rationality and post-rationality: that might be "rationality realism vs anti-realism".

I have no idea where to put Circling. It's right in the middle.

Build your own typology

Particular vs General: Is it targeting one bug or a raised 'waterline'? Object vs Meta level? Incremental or revolution?

Objective vs Subjective: Is the target your environment (including the body and habits) or your mind?

Action vs Contemplation: Does the idea involve doing things besides thinking

...
Wireless is a trap
by benkuhn — 2020-06-07T15:30:02.352Z

I used to be an anti-wire crusader. I hated the clutter of cables, and my tendency to unconsciously chew on them if they got anywhere near my face. But running into bug after tricky wireless bug—mostly while trying to make my video calls work better—I’ve apostasized. The more I’ve learned about wifi, Bluetooth and related protocols, the more I’m convinced that they’re often worse, on net, than wires.

For instance: most people, when their video call stutters, blame their Internet service provider. That’s understandable, since most ISPs are overpriced oligopolists with barely-usable software and horrible customer service. However, every time I can remember helping someone track down the source of their connection problems, the culprit has turned out to be their wifi. And often, the easiest fix has been to run a cable.

Wifi (and bluetooth, etc.) sucker you in by making it seem like they “just work.” But if you investigate, you’ll often find that the wireless link is operating in a degraded state that performs much worse than a wired equivalent. Since this degradation is silent, it’s often not obvious that the problem is the wireless—instead, you’ll probably conclude that it’s your device/software/self.

Over and over again, I’ve seen people fix some wireless-related problem and go “wow, I had no idea how much better this could be!"

Fig. 1a: managed cables on my desk.

Fig. 1b: less-managed cables underneath.

Recently, I finally ragequit and replaced all my desk’s wireless devices with wired ones. While I had to invest a bit in figuring out cable management (and break my habit of chewing on headphone cables), I was able to achieve nearly the same level of tidiness, with much better reliability, quality and speed. I no longer have to worry about my equipment failing to pair, running out of battery, or spontaneously giving me garbled robot voice during a livestreamed talk. It’s dramatically reduced my level of device-related agony.

To illustrate the degree of agony I’m talking about, below I’ll cover some of the subtle, hard-to-notice but severe problems I’ve run into with wireless protocols. If you’re convinced, try out some wires—you, too, can figure out whether you’ve been a victim of the wireless trap.

Wifi

Interference. If multiple wireless networks are operating on the same “channel” (radio frequency band), their transmissions can interfere with each other. Wh...
Philosophy in the Darkest Timeline: Basics of the Evolution of Meaning
by Zack_M_Davis — 2020-06-07T07:52:09.143Z

A decade and a half from now, during the next Plague, you're lucky enough to have an underground bunker to wait out the months until herd immunity. Unfortunately, as your food stocks dwindle, you realize you'll have to make a perilous journey out to the surface world for a supply run. Ever since the botched geoengineering experiment of '29—and perhaps more so, the Great War of 10:00–11:30 a.m. 4 August 2033—your region has been suffering increasingly erratic weather. It's likely to be either extremely hot outside or extremely cold: you don't know which one, but knowing is critical for deciding what protective gear you need to wear on your supply run. (The 35K SPF nano-sunblock will be essential if it's Hot, but harmful in the Cold, and vice versa for your synthweave hyperscarf.)

You think back fondly of the Plague of '20—in those carefree days, ubiquitous internet access made it easy to get a weather report, or to order delivery of supplies, or even fresh meals, right to your door (!!). Those days are years long gone, however, and you remind yourself that you should be grateful: the Butlerian Network Killswitch was the only thing that saved humanity from the GPT-12 Uprising of '32.

Your best bet for an advance weather report is the pneumatic tube system connecting your bunker with the settlement above. You write, "Is it hot or cold outside today?" on a piece of paper, seal it in a tube, send it up, and hope one of your ill-tempered neighbors in the group house upstairs feels like answering. You suspect they don't like you, perhaps out of jealousy at your solo possession of the bunker.

(According to the official account as printed on posters in the marketplace, the Plague only spreads through respiratory droplets, not fomites, so the tube should be safe. You don't think you trust the official account, but you don't feel motivated to take extra precautions—almost as if you're not entirely sure how much you value continuing to live in this world.)

You're in luck. Minutes later, the tube comes back. Inside is a new piece of paper:

You groan; you would have prefered the Cold. The nanoblock you wear when it's Hot smells terrible and makes your skin itch for days, but it—just barely—beats the alternative. You take twenty minutes to apply the nanoblock and put on your sunsuit, goggles, and mask. You will yourself to drag your wagon up the staircase from your bunker to th

...
Everyday Lessons from High-Dimensional Optimization
by johnswentworth — 2020-06-06T20:57:05.155Z

Suppose you’re designing a bridge. There’s a massive number of variables you can tweak: overall shape, relative positions and connectivity of components, even the dimensions and material of every beam and rivet. Even for a small footbridge, we’re talking about at least thousands of variables. For a large project, millions if not billions. Every one of those is a dimension over which we could, in principle, optimize.

Suppose you have a website, and you want to increase sign-ups. There’s a massive number of variables you can tweak: ad copy/photos/videos, spend distribution across ad channels, home page copy/photos/videos, button sizes and positions, page colors and styling… and every one of those is itself high-dimensional. Every word choice, every color, every position of every button, header, divider, sidebar, box, link… every one of those is a variable, adding up to thousands of dimensions over which to optimize.

Suppose you’re a startup founder planning your day - just a normal workday. There’s a massive number of variables you could tweak: dozens of people you could talk to, dozens of things you could talk to any of them about, and all the possible combinations of people and topics. There’s emails, code, designs and plans you could write. Every choice is a dimension over which you could optimize.

Point being: real-world optimization problems are usually pretty high dimensional.

Unfortunately, many techniques and intuitions which work well for low-dimensional optimization do not scale up well to higher dimensions. This post talks about some of these problems, and what they look like in real life.

Try It and See

Let’s start with a baseline: try something at random, see how well it works. If it doesn’t work, or doesn’t work better than your current best choice, then throw it out and try something else at random.

In low-dimensional problems, this isn’t a bad approach. Want to decide which brand of soap to use? Try it and see. There just aren’t that many possible choices, so you’ll pretty quickly try all of them and settle on the best.

On the other hand, we probably don’t want to design a bridge by creating a design completely at random, checking whether it works, then throwing it out and trying another design at random if it doesn’t.

In general, the number of possible states/designs/configurations in a space increases exponentially with the number of dimensions. A pro

...
Most reliable news sources?
by Eli Tyre — 2020-06-06T20:24:58.529Z

I've longed assumed that the vast majority of what the news discusses is irrelevant in the long run, and not that well reported at that. But the world seems to be moving faster these days, and I have more of a sense that I want to know what happened this week, because it might impact what I do next week.

For the first time in my life, I have some inclination to follow current events as they happen. And I find that I don't really know how to do that.

What are the most reliable / least-politicized news sources?

In particular, I want a resource that I can refer to that will tell me what happened in the past 3 days, in as factual and unbiased a way as possible. I expect that I might have to do further research, to get context for the events. But to start, I want a place where I can go that will tell me what happened, with a minimum of narrativizing, political outrage, etc.
Your best future self
by Raemon — 2020-06-06T19:10:04.069Z

Crossposted from facebook. Not the sort of thing I typically write for LessWrong.

Epistemic status: poetry

A thing I realized recently is that you can pray to your best future self.

Your future self knows exactly what you are going through, because they were once you. You don't have to struggle to put your stress and anxiety and anger and frustration into words, and worry that the person you're talking to won't get it, or that the process of putting it into words will have you dwelling on things too much and making it worse.

Your future self will just be there. And they will know exactly what you have experienced. And they will be older, stronger, wiser. They will know your pain, and they will know that the pain can be overcome. Your future self loves you unconditionally as no other person can.

They may not be able to talk to you, in detail, without you having to put more effort into figuring out what you need help with exactly, and maybe that part will involve putting things into words, but the words will not have to be for anyone else's benefit, just yours, and as soon as you've figured out what things you're _trying_ to ask your future self will just know.

Your future self may or may not be able to offer useful advice. I think sometimes they can. Some parts of them already live in side you, already strong. They have the skills you have, just untethered by the stress of your current situation. Your future self can offer guidance about those things.

In some cases, your future self can offer guidance in domains you're still sorting out, because humans have a weird racial bonus for social-simulation-cognition.

But even when your future self doesn't know any better than you, what they can offer immediately, without hesitation, is empathy and unconditional love. They see you exactly as you are. They are holding your hand or giving you a hug or maybe just looking at you warmly from a little distance if that's what you need.

They know about your flaws. They know how much work and/or time it'll take to overcome those flaws. But they know you will eventually overcome them. They love you anyway, and they will always be there for you if you need them.

There is... an important sense in which your future self doesn't exist. But there are at least two important senses in which they do.

The first way they exist is a bit speculative, but does match my current sense of how to think a...
Consequentialism and Accidents
by Rodrigo Fernandes — 2020-06-06T18:29:11.511Z

Can't seem to find criticism on consequentialism regarding mistakes/accidents. For example, an act of someone who unwillingly saves 100 lives he was trying to kill is seen, to consequentialists, as moral as an act of someone who knowingly and voluntarily saved 100 lives. I intuitively regard those acts as not on the same moral pedestal, despite overall agreeing with the consequentialist/utilitarian approach to ethics. Would love to hear some thoughts on this.
A Practical Guide to Conflict Resolution: Attitude
by  — 2020-06-06T12:29:16.728Z

[As described in the introduction, this post lays the foundation for how to think about and approach conflict, and the attitudes we can take to do that more effectively.]

The tools of conflict resolution bear a striking resemblance to the tools of conflict. In practice, this means that one of the most important parts of successful conflict resolution is your attitude - otherwise, you’re liable to misuse the tools you have available. A good attitude will naturally guide you to the right decisions, smooth out minor miscommunications, and build trust. It’s the foundation on which all the other parts of this sequence are built. But what does “a good attitude” actually look like? While people have many different attitudes toward different parts of their life, there are four specific ones which I think are important for conflict resolution.

The first attitude has to do with what you’re aiming for. Human beings have an unfortunate tendency to try and “win” arguments in a purely social sense (e.g. via ad hominem attacks), but victory of that kind is typically not the goal you’re interested in if you’re reading this essay. Sometimes, the goal we seek is truly as simple as “resolving the conflict”, though usually it’s not. More often, “success” really means uncovering the truth, or finding a solution where everyone gets what they want, or clearing up some underlying miscommunication. Know what it is you’re really aiming for, and set your attitude accordingly. Aim for success, not for victory.

The second attitude is far simpler since it already has name: humility. Accept that sometimes you just don’t have all the information. Accept that sometimes you makes mistakes. Accept that sometimes you honestly just change your mind (or have it changed by someone else). Our ego doesn’t like admitting to these things, but they do happen, and digging in your heels to protect your ego is the fastest way to unnecessarily prolong a conflict.

The third attitude is an attitude toward others. Just like we have an unfortunate tendency to try and “win” arguments, we also have an unfortunate tendency to view other people in a conflict as “enemies”. Instead, it is far better to respect and trust your conversational partners, and always assume they ar...
Basic Mindsets
by ExCeph — 2020-06-06T00:44:58.188Z

(Co-authored with Sailor Vulcan)

Long ago, in the

previous article

, we discussed the processes of guessing and checking, how they explore the unknown and the known, and how they can run in a distinct or subliminal mode. In this article, we’ll see how these processes form different mindsets that handle different types of tasks.

Mindsets

Mindsets are feedback loops of guessing and checking running in various modes. Their function is to create different types of maps that can be used for different purposes.

When using any mindset, the mind searches through hypothesis space in rough order of relevance to information from the territory (guessing) and redistributes its confidence in each hypothesis based on how well it compares against information from the territory and against other hypotheses that it holds in high confidence (checking).

When either of these processes takes place in the subliminal mode, it runs implicitly. It leaves no record of the iteration or comparison: only the results. When either process takes place in the distinct mode, it leaves an explicit memory of what information was accessed by the process in order to produce the results it did. Each of these modes has advantages and disadvantages.

Both the processes of guessing and checking are necessary for forming models of reality, but the modes in which these processes run influence what aspects of the model are updated and applied.

It should be noted that these mindsets do not have solid borders between them. The mindsets described below are analogous to primary colors, or a basis for a multidimensional vector space. They are the simplest way to define the range of skills people can access and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a person’s repertoire.

As such, any limitations ascribed to a mindset are for the purpose of defining the purest and most basic building block form of that mindset. Any person’s thought process can blur the distinction between adjacent mindsets, or combine any number of mindsets together. Many of these compound processes I’ve already classified as hybrid mindsets, but for the sake of brevity we’ll leave those for another article.

“Relevant” Hypotheses

Before we get into the mindsets, it should first be noted that throughout this article we will use the word “relevant” several times in the context of de...