trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A lost 80s/90s metaphor: playing the demo
by CraigMichael — 2021-09-02T08:45:41.019Z

I'm an old. By which I mean a somewhat recent quadragenarian. Folks used to call people like me Xennials, but that was seven years ago when we still had a spark of life left. Now that we're all just waiting to die, we're geriatric millennials.

Anyway, as an old, there are times I feel the need to lecture the younger generation about how things were in the old-timey days of the 1980s and the 1990s. So, kids, if you're reading this, I know you don't like lectures. But I think this is an interesting framing of a concept, and worth your time. If you read the whole thing, I'll mail you some Werther's Originals from between my sofa cushions.

(I'm not sure what the average LessWrong reader age is, but my gut tells me it's twenty-something. Apologies if I'm way off and most of you are my age or older).

So, check this out. The arcades of the 1980s were a lot like the arcade bars of the 2020s, but instead of ordering a $15 IPA you would order a 50¢ Pepsi, so you didn't need a fake ID. If you were in high school, knew CP/M, had a 1200 baud modem, and were friends with Ally Sheedy, she might know to find you in the arcade. If you were lucky, one day she just might whisk through the door and ask you to commit a felony for her! (To be fair, you offered as much earlier.)

Of course, you being you, you anticipated this and already committed the aforementioned felony. So, good job, you?

(Protip: Please don't actually commit cyber crime felonies, especially not as foundations for romantic relationships).

Get to the point, grandpa!

Okay, okay... So arcade games have what people now call attract modes. That's what they do when they're on and no one is playing them. The job of what's displayed during the attract mode is to get your attention, make the game look worth playing, and get people to insert coins and play.

While people call this 'attract mode' now, I promise you zero kids in the 80s and 90s used that term. We just called it "the demo," or less commonly "the intro." The demos were either very simple AIs or small scripts to move the game characters punctuated with title screens, some other information about the game, etc. The Street Fighter II one looked like this.

"Playing" the demo

When we were real young and ran out of quarters, we all at one point had the idea that maybe somehow we could keep playing for free. What if we could influence the demo an...
Blind Spots in Science and Culture
by rogersbacon — 2021-09-02T00:02:02.826Z

What are we blind to?

(Originally posted at Secretum Secretorum)

I am writing a paper with a psychology professor friend of mine on why we should get amateurs (like myself) more involved in the “knowledge work” of psychological research (gathering observational data, designing and implementing experiments, generating hypotheses, data analysis, etc.) and how we can do so. There are a few pieces to the puzzle, but the simple answer of why we should get amateurs involved in psychology research is that by virtue of being outsiders to academia, amateurs (by which we mean basically any smart person who is not directly getting paid to do psychological research or isn’t in training to be a paid researcher like graduate students), are subject to very different constraints and incentives than the vast majority of professional researchers and thus can think and work in ways that they might not be able to. It is precisely in these areas, which we refer to as “blind spots” (as in academia is systematically biased away from seeing/exploring these areas), where amateurs should work in order to advance psychology. In the remainder of this essay, I will share a few sections from the draft where we propose different blind spots in academic psychology along with some additional commentary, but before I do that I want to flesh out this concept of a blind spot a little more and provide some examples.

Toward a Theory of Blind Spots

Imagine a landscape of all possible ideas…

(Did you actually try to imagine it or did you just read the words?)

(Do you even know how to use your imagination anymore?)

(In the landscape of ideas, we may think of peaks as areas of good ideas (rational, useful, interesting, etc.) and valleys as bad ideas. Our challenge then - as individuals and as a species - is to optimize our exploration of the landscape. One thing that “landscape thinking” makes clear is the problem of being trapped on a local optima; the best strategy is not 100% hill-climbing - sometimes you need to go through a valley of bad ideas to find a new peak. See

Exploring the Landscape of Scientific Minds

for another perspective on landscape thinking.)

Blind spots are the regions in this landscape which are systematically unexplored or underexplored because of some constraint (either biological, psychological, social, political, economic) or incentive. Importantly, we can also think of...
Intelligence, Fast and Slow
by Mateusz Mazurkiewicz — 2021-09-01T19:52:54.756Z

(Cross-posted from my personal blog, Dialectics of Nature)

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, whose study of human biases laid the foundation for modern behavioral economics, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow outlines a dichotomy: human thinking is performed in two different ways. Fast and instinctive thinking of "System 1" and slower, deliberate thinking of "System 2."

A question one would employ type 1 thinking to find a solution to is "what is 6x3?" A question suited for type 2 thinking is "what is 6x33?" The mechanism used by the human brain to arrive at those is fundamentally, substantially different. When asked about an explanation, the asked person would produce similar step-by-step arithmetical solutions to both. However, in the type 1 thinking, the process explained did not occur. No math-savvy person adds three sixes when faced with such a simple calculation. This, or any other valid breakdown, will be made up after-the-fact, as opposed to "6x33" question, where the person asked how they concluded on the result would likely answer truthfully, giving an account of arithmetics actually performed in their heads.

A person prompted with "6x3" does not add three numbers so fast that they don't even notice it. They do not make the calculation at all, even unconsciously. The operation of producing the answer is certainly more similar to information retrieval than calculation. But rather than accessing some storage space for results of trivial arithmetic, the answer is encoded within neural connections. It is connectionist and behavioral, rather than symbolic and cognitive. By benefit of constant reuse (behavioral aspect), this knowledge is programmed into weights of the biological neural network: the human brain (connectionist aspect). The only thing that happens in the brain confronted with "2x2" is neurons firing in a sequence producing 4. Weights are sub-symbolic, and there is no explicit mathematical representation, any recognizable intermediate steps.

In type 2 thinking, one uses one's brain to emulate symbolic information-processing, just as one emulates a virtual machine on one's desktop. One creates algorithms, plans, and puts effort into imagining numbers, patterns, and structures. An imaginary canvas for equations appears; it is an act of conjuring the symbolic representation. In the posthumanism of Stiegler's Technics and Time, the 'faculty of symboliz...
D&D.Sci Pathfinder: Return of the Gray Swan
by aphyer — 2021-09-01T17:43:38.128Z

This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.

Edited to add: Consensus is that this scenario is too complicated. It probably shouldn't be the first D&D.Sci scenario you play - try the original Voyages of the Gray Swan or The Sorcerer's Personal Shopper first, if you haven't played them yet.

Story

You had thought that the Admiralty was done with you after last time. After their response to your initial suggestions was to assign you to a series of dangerous voyages and hope that killed you, you were quite glad to set foot back ashore and not hear from them again. You've still been receiving a modest stipend for your past service for the last ten years or so, and that plus occasional odd-jobs for local wizards has left you a fairly comfortable life in the capital of Eastmarch.

So you are perhaps a bit concerned when you receive a summons to attend at once an audience with the Third Lord of the Admiralty. Your only consolation is that the summons arrives via a courier knocking on your door rather than a squadron of marines kicking it down and dragging you off.

You were not expecting what actually happened, though. When you were called into the Lord Admiral's office, there was only one person it it, and you recognized him.

"Captain O'Neill?" It's been a while since you saw him. He's still got the beard and the lively eyes, but he was wearing less braid back then, and a less...fancy...hat...

He chuckles. "It's Admiral now, actually. I'm sorry to call you here on such short notice, but a problem has arisen that I could use some help with."

It seems that Captain O'Neill (you absent-mindedly call him 'Captain' rather than 'Admiral' another three times during your conversation, but he doesn't seem offended) has risen through the ranks quite dramatically since you sailed with him on the Gray Swan. It also seems that he still remembers, and appreciates, your efforts to keep him and his crew alive ten years ago (even if your main motive was to keep yourself alive with them).

He explains that the Admiralty has an extremely important mission. Sometime later this week, ships need to reach certain locations on this MAP. He points out two locations.

You stare at the...
Forecasting Newsletter: August 2021
by NunoSempere — 2021-09-01T17:01:23.170Z

Highlights

Despite forecaster consensus to the contrary, Kabul has fallen
CSET-Foretell attempts to make inroads into US decision-making mechanisms
The US’ CDC to launch a new outbreak analysis and forecast center

Index

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms
Blog Posts
Long Content
In The News

Sign up here or browse past newsletters here.

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms

Metaculus

SimonM (a) kindly curated the top comments from Metaculus this past August (a). They are:

johnnycaffeine (a) asks if the community prediction is a good indicator that people didn't forsee the rapidity of the Taliban takeover
j.m. (a) did the (now moot) impeachment math for Cuomo: there would probably have been enough votes for an impeachment to go through.
Jgalt (a) flags up a rather poorly aged forecast by Biden.
alexrjl (a) points out a design flaw in Rootclaim's Challenge (a): "I find it ironic in the extreme that Rootclaim makes repeated reference to the overconfidence of experts, but that their challenge requires you to "win a debate", meaning that if you think they are overconfident but not directionally wrong (e.g. assigning 90% to something which you think should be assigned a 60% probability) there is no way for you to win the bet."
j.m. (a) points out the internet was adopted slower than one might otherwise think.

Metaculus begins the next round of the Keep Virginia Safe Tournament (a), which has a $1,000 prize pool. They have also pushed a redesign of their frontpage (a).

Good Judgment & Good Judgment Open

Here are the top few best comments from Good Judgment Open (a), as curated by myself:

rjfmgy (a) compares and contrasts the current situation in Afghanistan with the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria in 2015, on which he also forecasted at the time.
Anneinak (a) meets with the Dutch Ambassador to forecast "When will a new Dutch government be sworn in after the 2021 general election?"
RyanBeck (a) reads Merck's Q2 earnings call document, and concludes that molnupiravir will most likely not be approved by the US FDA for use to treat COVID-19 before 1 October 2021. He also shares this report (a) by the US's Office of the Director of National Intelligence on the origins of COVID-19.
keith-huggins (a) gives the lowdown on the power grab by the President of Tunisia.

In addition, Good Judgment Open introduced the Sky News Challenge (a). Questions are very UK-centric. But on th...
Tasker actions which save me time and sanity
by just_browsing — 2021-09-01T14:49:31.105Z

Tasker is a general purpose automation app for Android. It costs a few dollars and takes a bit of time to learn, but once you learn the basics it is quite useful. In this post, I briefly describe how Tasker works, then list simple things I've implemented in Tasker, and lastly describe what things in general Tasker can be useful for.

Tasker basics

The core functionality of the app is a trigger-action principle. Tasker lets you select from a wide variety of triggers (Tasker uses the word "profile") -- for example, connecting to a specific bluetooth device or it being a certain time of day. And it lets you execute a wide variety of actions -- for example, changing device volume, brightness, or more complicated things like launching apps. Then you can tell Tasker to execute one or more actions when a trigger starts/stops happening.

Two additional features which give this trigger-action paradigm more functionality are Tasker's GUI builder (Tasker uses the word "scene") and variables. The GUI builder allows you to make custom graphics appear on your phone -- for example, you can create custom buttons or dashboards. Variables are useful for storing data -- for example, you can store the SSID of your current internet connection. Tasker also lets you store lists of variables ("arrays").

Tasker can also do things beyond the reach of your phone. For example, with some effort, you can configure Tasker to push any data you want to a google sheet.

Simple tasks I use Tasker for

Here is a list of very simple things I've implemented in Tasker, and how they help me.

If my phone connects to my bluetooth headphones: open Spotify and set the volume to a good value. The "open Spotify" part is useful on the go. The "setting the volume to a good value" helps me avoid damaging my ears if the volume was accidentally left on high.
If my phone is flipped over, mute the media volume. If it's flipped again, restore the previous volume. I've been using this to avoid watching and listening to YouTube ads. If I click a video and an ad starts playing, I simply flip my phone, wait a while, then flip it back. So much nicer than fiddling with the volume slider to try to mute the ad.
Set phone brightness to high in the morning. Set it to low in the evening. Good for not blinding myself in the night / not being able to see my screen in the morning.
Turn off haptic feedback at night. Useful for

...
US Military Global Information Dominance Experiments
by NunoSempere — 2021-09-01T13:34:39.169Z
Link: https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2711594/northcom-commander-gen-glen-d-vanherck-conducts-press-briefing-on-north-america/

Recently, the US military gave a briefing on what I take to be the current state of the art capabilities for using ML for intelligence gathering. Some quotes worth highlighting follow, with some notes and impressions at the bottom.

The Global Information Dominance Experiment that we're going to talk about, and more specifically, the recent Global Information Dominance Experiment 3 was a cross-command event seeking to leap forward our ability to maintain domain awareness, achieve information dominance and provide decision superiority in competition and crisis.

So the experiment—we won't name nations but let's just say it was focused on a peer competitor. This time in GIDE 3 we focused a lot on contested logistics, to give us a scenario where maybe a line of communication such as the Panama Canal may be challenged. It enabled us to rapidly collaborate amongst all 11 combatant commands and across the department to see that data and information. We're taking sensors from around the globe, not only military sensors but commercially available information, and utilizing that for domain awareness.

Specific to your question about artificial intelligence and what I call information dominance, we would take artificial intelligence and use machine learning to take a look and assess, for example, the average number of cars in a parking lot that may be there in a specific location to a competitor or a threat. And we monitor that over a period of time.

The machine learning and the artificial intelligence can detect changes in that and we can set parameters where it will trip an alert to give you the awareness to go take another sensor such as GEOINT on-satellite capability to take a closer look at what might be ongoing in a specific location.

What we've seen is the ability to get way further what I call left, left of being reactive to actually being proactive. And I'm talking not minutes and hours, I'm talking days.

The ability to see days in advance creates decision space. Decision space for me as an operational commander to potentially posture forces to create deterrence options to provide that to the secretary or even the president. To use messaging, the information space to create deterrence options and messaging and if required to get further ahead and posture ourselves for defeat.

First of all, all 11 combatant commands are using the exactly same environ

...
Guide to Warwick, New York
by Zvi — 2021-09-01T13:30:00.803Z

On March 22, 2020, I moved my family forty miles northwest from New York City to Warwick, New York, into half of a house. On September 3, 2021, we will return to the city. During that time, we’ve spent the vast majority of days in this city, with only a handful of bus trips into Manhattan, the occasional day trip to the in-laws twenty minutes away, and a few vacations and other trips.

I’ve come to be rather fond of this town. I would categorize Warwick as ‘best of breed.’ It’s a nice place with nice people, it’s mostly walkable, and there’s a great playground, a post office, a CVS and a solid supermarket, with a variety of surprisingly good places to eat relative to the relevant baselines. There’s no train access, but you can take a bus directly to or from the city.

It seems worthwhile, before I go, to write down the specifics of what’s here and which things are good and how to best take advantage of them, in case it is helpful to others, and so I can look back upon it in the future. If that isn’t interesting to you, by all means skip this – this post is straightforwardly exactly what it says on the tin, and nothing more.

I’ll start with the overall structure and then get down to detailed infodumping about what’s here.

Overall Structure of Town

Warwick has a main street upon which are the bulk of the things, which mostly runs north and south, and on the south end swings to go west, at which point there aren’t any more side streets. We lived on Grant Street, one block west of the main street, which is a bunch of houses plus a maternity hospital directly across from us. If you go east or west of main street, you get some useful things one block in either direction, but the pickings get slim farther out than that.

The main street looks like this, which faces south just before it turns to head west:

The only important thing more than one block away from main is the playground, which is about three blocks due east. A few other things are several blocks from main but they never seemed useful. This is not a large town.

It is somewhat of a tourist trap, in the sense that the area runs largely on agricultural tourism and Warwick is where people in the area go to find nice things.

Transportation

The transportation situation isn’t the worst, but it’s definitely not great either.

If you want public transportation, you can board a bus here and it ...
Open & Welcome Thread September 2021
by Horatio Von Becker — 2021-09-01T08:58:29.501Z

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.
Long Covid Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem
by Elizabeth — 2021-09-01T07:20:05.374Z

At this point, people I know are not that worried about dying from covid. We’re all vaccinated, we’re mostly young and healthy(ish), and it turns out the odds were always low for us. We’re also not that worried about hospitalization: it’s much more likely than death, but maintaining covid precautions indefinitely is very costly so by and large we’re willing to risk it.

The big unknown here has been long covid. Losing a few weeks to being extremely sick might be worth the risk, but a lifetime of fatigue and reduced cognition is a very big deal. With that in mind, I set out to do some math on what risks we were running. Unfortunately baseline covid has barely been around long enough to have data on long covid, most of it is still terrible, and the vaccine and Delta variant have not been widespread long enough to have much data at all.

In the end, the conclusion I came to was that for vaccinated people under 40 with <=1 comorbidiy, the cognitive risks of long covid are lost in the noise of other risks they commonly take. Coming to this conclusion involved reading a number of papers, but also a lot of emotional processing around risk and health. I’ve included that processing under a “personal stuff” section, which you can skip if you just want the info but I encourage you to read if you feel yourself starting to yell that I’m not taking small risks of great suffering seriously. I do encourage you to read the caveats section before deciding how much weight to put on my conclusions.

Personal Stuff

This post took a long time to write, much longer than I wanted, because this is not an abstract topic to me. I have chronic pain from nerve damage in my jaw caused by medical incompetence, and my attempts to seek treatment for this continually run into the brick wall of a medical system that doesn’t consider my pain important (tangent: if you have a pain specialist you trust, anywhere in the US, please e-mail me (elizabeth@acesounderglass.com)). I empathize very much with the long covid sufferers who are being told their suffering doesn’t exist because it’s too hard to measure and we can’t prove what caused it.

Additionally, I’m still suffering from side effects from my covid vaccine in April. It’s very minor, chest congestion that doesn’t seem to affect my lung capacity (but I don’t have a clear before picture, so hard to say for sure). But it’s getting worse and...
Petition To Make Inarticulate Downvoting More Difficult
by Horatio Von Becker — 2021-09-01T06:23:19.640Z

I feel a strong affinity with this community, but that's hard to remember when my own locally-weird ideas get downvoted and/or reverted to draft without giving me a clear route to explain myself.

Even just splitting the Karma mechanism into "doesn't seem benevolent" and "doesn't seem accurate" would be much more comforting. None of us have the working memory to keep that straight all the time.

Or, since nonbenevolence is a stronger claim, it could be the Strong Downvote? It should absolutely be labeled as such, though.