trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Preface to the Sequence on Factored Cognition
by Rafael Harth — 2020-11-30T18:49:26.171Z

Factored Cognition is primarily studied by Ought, the same organization that was partially credited for implementing the interactive prediction feature. Ought is an organization with at least five members who have worked on the problem for several years. I am a single person who just finished a master's degree. The rationale for writing about the topic anyway was to have diversity of approaches: Ought is primarily doing empirical work, whereas I've studied the problem under the lens of math and epistemic rationality. As far as I know, there is virtually no overlap between what I've written and what Ought has published so far.

Was it successful? Well, all I can say for sure is that writing the sequence has significantly changed my own views.

This sequence has two 'prologue' posts, which make points relevant for but not restricted to Factored Cognition. I think of them as posts #-2 and #-1 (then, this post is #0, and the proper sequence starts at #1). These are

A guide to Iterated Amplification and Debate, which explains what Factored Cognition is and the two schemes that use it. This post is there to make sure that no prerequisite knowledge is needed to read the sequence. You can skip this if you're already familiar with both schemes.

Hiding Complexity, which is about characterizing what makes a part of a big problem a 'subproblem'.

The remaining sequence is currently about 15000 words long, though this could change. The structure is roughly:

Define a mathematical model and see what we can do with that (posts #1-#2)

Tackle the human component: think seriously about how thinking works and whether solving hard problems with Factored Cognition looks feasible (posts #3-#5)

Spell out what I conclude from both parts (post #6)

The current version of the sequence includes exercises. This is pretty experimental, so if they are too hard or too easy, it's probably my fault. I've still left them in because I generally think it makes sense to include 'think about this thing for a bit' moments. They look like this:

EXERCISE (5 SECONDS): Compute 2+5.

Whenever there's a range, it means that the lower number is an upper bound for the exercise itself, and the remaining time is for rereading parts of this or previous posts. So 1-6 minutes means 'you shouldn't take more than 1 minute for the exercise itself, but you may first take about 5 minutes to reread parts of the po...
[Linkpost] AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology
by adamShimi — 2020-11-30T17:33:43.691Z
Link: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology

To my eyes, this looks like the sort of useful advance in applying AI that doesn't really improve capabilities, and thus is just net positive, even judged by a safety mindset. But I'm curious to know if other people think differently.

(Note that it might be easier to discuss this after the paper is posted online)
The Mutant Game - Rounds 91 to 247
by lsusr — 2020-11-30T09:25:51.503Z

A Very Social Bot contains the following payload:

def payload(self) :
# put a personal word here to guarantee no tie during cooperation: myUniqueWord
# put what you want to play for the showdown
# no line after 'def payload(self)' should have less than 8 whitespaces at the beginning,
# unless it's an empty or only whitespace line
# Neo: I know Kung Fu.
if self.turn == 0 :
self.roundSave = self.round
opponent_source_raw = self.extra.__getattribute__(''.join(['ge','t_','op','po','ne','nt','_s','ou','rce']))(self)
if self.is_opponent_clone and ("Morpheus:"+" Show me.") in opponent_source_raw :
self.is_opponent_superclone = True
else :
self.is_opponent_superclone = False
if self.is_opponent_superclone :
if self.round == 150 :
return 5
else :
return self.cooperateWithClone()
self.round -= self.showdownRound
self.round *= 2 # simulating a new cooperation phase
output = self.default()
self.round = self.roundSave
return output

After the clone treaty expires, it is supposed to cooperate with a_comatose_squirrel.

def payload(self) :
# put a personal word here to guarantee no tie during cooperation: myUniqueWord
# put what you want to play for the showdown
# no line after 'def payload(self)' should have less than 8 whitespaces at the beginning,
# unless it's an empty or only whitespace line
# Morpheus: Show me.
if self.turn == 0 :
self.roundSave = self.round
opponent_source_raw = self.extra.__getattribute__(''.join(['ge','t_','op','po','ne','nt','_s','ou','rce']))(self)
if self.is_opponent_clone and ("Neo: I kno"+"w Kung Fu.") in opponent_source_raw :
self.is_opponent_superclone = True
else :
self.is_opponent_superclone = False
if self.is_opponent_superclone :
if self.round == 150 :
return 0
else :
return self.cooperateWithClone()
self.round -= self.showdownRound
self.round *= 2 # simulating a new cooperation phase
output = self.default()
self.round = self.roundSave

...
Book review: WEIRDest People
by PeterMcCluskey — 2020-11-30T03:33:17.510Z
Link: http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2020/11/28/weirdest-people/

Book review: The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich.

Wow!

Henrich previously wrote one of the best books of the last
decade.
Normally, I expect such an author's future books to, at best, exhibit
regression toward the mean. But Henrich's grand overview of humanity's
first few million years was merely a modest portion of the ideas that he
originally tried to fit into this magnum opus. Henrich couldn't quite
explain in one volume how humanity got all the way to industrial
empires, so he split the explanation into two books.

The cartoon version of the industrial revolution: Protestant culture
made the West more autistic.

However, explaining the most important event in
history makes up
only about 25% of this book's focus and value.

Henrich doesn't want us to think of it as the most important event -
because he views it not as a single event, but as a stage in a long
process. Most books on the industrial revolution concentrate on some
subset of the 1500-1800 time frame. WEIRDest People devotes a majority
of its attention to the prior millennium.

When I last reviewed a
book
on the industrial revolution, I was pessimistic about ever getting
enough evidence to distinguish between too many plausible hypotheses.
Henrich found a solution: most of the proposed explanations describe
features that contributed to the industrial revolution; they follow
naturally from the way that WEIRD culture (Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) altered our psychology.

Important aspects of this new culture / psychology include: analytic
thinking, nonconformity, impersonal prosociality (trusting strangers,
treating them fairly), and internal attributions (e.g. the idea that a
good afterlife depends on internal mental states, rather than rituals).

Along the way, Henrich provides at least partial answers to a surprising
number of questions that I carelessly neglected to ask, such as:

how do rules about cousin marriage affect conformity (as measured by
the Asch Conformity Test)?

how strong is the correlation between how individualistic a society
is and its rate of innovation?

why does Latin have 25 words for prostitute?

how did the peculiarities of rice cultivation affect the ability of
southeastern China to develop science?

how do social safety nets influence a society's rate of innovation?

Much of Henrich's focus is on this key question: how do increasingly
large group...
A short talk on SB and friends
by  — 2020-11-29T21:07:40.653Z

Hi there. First post; be kind please.

I'm looking to present a short talk on the Sleeping Beauty problem in our maths/computing group at work. So far, I've just sketched an incomplete outline:

Start by describing SB and the halfer, thirder & double-halfer arguments. Note that there seem to be two types of uncertainty here: (1) the coin outcome and (2) the day of the week. These types "feel" different, and it should not be a foregone conclusion that you can treat each the same.
Describe the Absent-Minded Driver and how his choice of mixed strategy appears consistent only with certainty that he is approaching the first junction, i.e. the planning-optimal decision. At first glance, this looks like bad news for type-2 day-of-the-week / position-on-the-road uncertainty.
...?

By this point, the audience (maths/computing folk, remember) will be starting to conclude that type-2 uncertainty is just a load of old touchy-feely nonsense and that all the world needs is cold hard classical probability. I would like to counter that on two fronts:

Though we didn't achieve it when scratching the surface of the SB & AMD problems, consistent theories of rational decision making that include type-2 uncertainties do exist, such as XXX.
There is a philosophical need for such theories (you cannot just rely on cold hard classical probability), as shown for example by YYY.

I'm stuck for what to say on XXX and YYY. Can you help?

Comments also welcome on appropriate terminology (not "type-2"!) and anything else that strikes you as being egregiously wrong. Please do not assume any prior knowledge. Thank you.
Before rationality- a snapshot
by jospus321 — 2020-11-29T21:07:36.113Z

This post is roughly analogous to the “before” photos that you see people use to demonstrate the effects of dieting, except I want to use it a sort of time capsule to compare my conception of myself as a thinker now to that conception in [some] years time, when I am further along in my studies of rationality and metarationality.

To contextualise the picture of a flabby, sad looking brain that I take today, I should probably describe my exploration of those concepts so far.

Rationality first: I study in a field that is somewhat based on principles of rationality but in terms of day to day thinking relies much more on pattern recognition and intuition based on experience than genuine reasoning from first principles. I’d like to start integrating Bayesian thinking into my study but I haven’t yet found a really good layman’s introduction.

In my own time, I’m involved in effective altruism, a field which highly prizes rational thinking, and as part of that I attend a weekly discussion group which explores, amongst other things, the philosophical basis of altruism and reason. In the last few months, I’ve also got really into Scott Alexander; his ability to imagine alternatives to systems and norms that are so widely accepted we don’t even realise we’re using them is incredibly impressive, and he’s also convinced me of the utility of using extreme hypothetical scenarios to help us solve problems in the actual real world. More and more of my sentences these days start with “I can/can’t imagine a world in which…”, which is kind of a fun way to think about problems or values.

In terms of metarationality, I don’t think I’ve really even scratched the most superficial surface, but I also think I’ve progressed significantly since this time a few years ago. I had to study some very basic epistemology at school but I really didn’t enjoy it- I couldn’t really see how mulling over whether it was possible to know anything made any difference to anything I could practically achieve or change. I think it did affect me though, as compared to my peers I think I am somewhat more likely to ask how we know the things we’re taught.

It’s kind of weird that we can think and know without knowing how. I don’t think consciously think about walking anymore, but I guess at some point I did; thinking feels like the opposite, where I’ve just always been doing it and only now started to think about ...
Notes on Humility
by David Gross — 2020-11-29T19:50:28.349Z

This post examines the virtue of humility. It is meant mostly as an exploration of what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is humility?

Humble people are aware of their fallibility and imperfection, and of the smallness and briefness of their lives, and act accordingly. They avoid flattering themselves, and are less vulnerable to the flattery of others. They know that while they may be particularly special to themselves, the rest of the universe does not have to go along with that assessment. They have the courage to occasionally empathize with the universal, objective point of view in which they are an ephemeral spark doomed to be extinguished into an eternal obscurity.

A humble person does not mistake confidence for accuracy, or the limits of what they know with the limits of what is knowable. Humble people do not become defensive or flustered when they discover they were mistaken, but take this as a matter of course, and adjust course accordingly. They are not so proud of their self image and opinions that they will refuse to trade them for better ones.

Humility is one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” — described there in this way:

To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans. Because this world contains many whose grasp of rationality is abysmal, beginning students of rationality win arguments and acquire an exaggerated view of their own abilities. But it is useless to be superior: Life is not graded on a curve. The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share.

...
DIY Beaterless Drum Pedals
by jefftk — 2020-11-29T01:20:02.842Z

When I first made a board for electronic foot percussion, I played
around until I had something that worked. My initial design (

2013) and my two later
iterations (

2018,

2019) were all built around the idea of
attaching a piezoelectric contact microphone to the underside of a
piece of wood, and then isolating its vibrations from a base:

I did figure out how to make progressively better ones, with better
vibration isolation, which allowed me to have more dynamic
range. Still, consistency, range, and mistriggers continued to be
major issues.

When you look at commercial beaterless pedals for electronic drum
kits, however, they look more like:

I think I did look at these when designing my initial pedals, but
dismissed them because it looked to me like they were optimized for
people who came from a background of drum playing. Traditional drum
pedals are shaped the way they are primarily to get sufficient travel,
and existing drummers are used to that shape. Since my constraints
were so different, I didn't really look at how they worked.

What I missed was that having a piece of the instrument that strikes
another piece is a great way to get a very consistent input. I
instead had designed something where my foot was filling that role,
which made it very sensitive to foot placement.

I designed a new pedal:

This pedal works because the top section of wood is springy. When you
step on it, the top and the bottom come together with a bit of a
click, and the microphone picks that up, allowing the drums to
trigger.

I started making one. A piezo looks like this:

I was planning to have the wires on the underside, so I hollowed out
some space:

I glued it down:

Testing it out, it worked great! Nice dynamic range. I was pretty
happy. I built several more:

Unfortunately, when I started playing with them I realized that they
only lasted about ten minutes. The solder joints, on the underside of
the piezo, would crack:

Turns out stamping on things is really demanding.

I was frustrated with myself for building so many before I really knew
whether they worked, but scrapped them and designed new ones. This
time, the piezo would be the other way up, encased in epoxy. Instead
of being hit directly with the upper board, I would put a sorbothane
"tooth" to precisely strike the piezo:

This time I...
Prize: Interesting Examples of Evaluations
by Elizabeth — 2020-11-28T21:11:22.190Z

TLDR

Submit ideas of “interesting evaluations” in the comments. The best one by December 5th will get $50. All of them will be highly appreciated.

Motivation

A few of us (myself, Nuño Sempere, and Ozzie Gooen), have been working recently to better understand how to implement meaningful evaluation systems for EA/rationalist research and projects. This is important both for short-term use (so we can better understand how valuable EA/rationalist research is) and for long-term use (as in, setting up scalable forecasting systems on qualitative parameters). In order to understand this problem, we've been investigating evaluations specific to research and evaluations in a much broader sense.

We expect work in this area to be useful for a wide variety of purposes. For instance, even if

Certificates of Impact

eventually get used as the primary mode of project evaluation, purchasers of certificates will need strategies to actually do the estimation.

Existing writing on “evaluations” seems to be fairly domain-specific (only focused on Education or Nonprofits), one-sided (yay evaluations or boo evaluations), or both. This often isn’t particularly useful when trying to understand the potential gains and dangers of setting up new evaluation systems.

I’m now investigating a neutral history of evaluations, with the goal of identifying trends in what aids or hinders an evaluation system in achieving its goals. The ideal output of this stage would be an absolutely comprehensive list that will be posted to LessWrong. While this is probably impractical, hopefully, we could make one comprehensive enough, especially with your help.

Task

Suggest an interesting example (or examples) of an evaluation system. For these purposes, evaluation means "a systematic determination of a subject's merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards", but if you think of something that doesn't seem to fit, err on the side of inclusion

Prize

The prize is $50 for the top submission.

Rules

To enter, submit a comment suggesting an interesting example below, before the 5th of December. This post is both on LessWrong and the EA Forum, so comments on either count.

Rubric

To hold true to the spirit of the project, we have a rubric evaluation system to score this competition. Entries will be evaluated using the following criteria:

Usefulness/uniqueness of lesson from the exam

...
Does a site exist for keeping track of casual wagers with others?
by Liface — 2020-11-28T16:22:09.512Z

I run into two situations where I want to wager:

With a friend, about some future outcome
With someone I'm having a debate with on the internet, as a way to settle the debate and test our beliefs

With friends, I've been tracking these wagers with a Google Calendar invitation, but this doesn't work as well with internet strangers (people don't feel comfortable as often sharing their email).

What I'm looking for is something similar to https://longbets.org/ where people can keep track of wagers and even open them up to public comment. Does something like this exist?

Features would be:

Wager description and resolution criteria
Amount wagered
Odds given if not 1:1
Resolution date

Nice to have:

Some integration with crypto or payments or escrow to manage payouts
Ability for public to comment on wagers and even clone them and make their own wagers
Can we get people to shut up on public transportation?
by ChristianKl — 2020-11-28T15:30:16.797Z

Whether masked or not masked, holding conversations seems to increase COVID-19 transmission. It's my impression that while people in Berlin generally do wear masks they still hold conversations in public similarly to how they would before COVID-19. There's no messaging to cut down unneccessary communication. I don't know what to do with this insight. Does anybody have ideas?
Is this a good way to bet on short timelines?
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-11-28T12:51:07.516Z

I was mildly disappointed in the responses to my last question, so I did a bit of thinking and came up with some answers myself. I'm not super happy with them either, and would love feedback on them + variations, new suggestions, etc. The ideas are:

1. I approach someone who has longer timelines than me, and I say: I'll give you $X now if you promise to publicly admit I was right later and give me a platform, assuming you later come to update significantly in my direction.

2. I approach someone who has longer timelines than me, and I say: I'll give you $X now if you agree to talk with me about timelines for 2 hours. I'd like to hear your reasons, and to hear your responses to mine. The talk will be recorded. Then I get one coupon which I can redeem for another 2-hour conversation with you.

3. I approach someone who has longer timelines than me, and I say: For the next 5 years, you agree to put x% of your work-hours into projects of my choosing (perhaps with some constraints, like personal fit). Then, for the rest of my life, I'll put x% of my work-hours into projects of your choosing (constraints, etc.).

The problem with no. 3 is that it's probably too big an ask. Maybe it would work with someone who I already get along well with and can collaborate on projects, whose work I respect and who respects my work.

The point of no. 2 is to get them to update towards my position faster than they otherwise would have. This might happen in the first two-hour conversation, even. (They get the same benefits from me, plus cash, so it should be pretty appealing for sufficiently large X. Plus, I also benefit from the extra information which might help me update towards longer timelines after our talk!) The problem is that maybe forced 2-hour conversations don't actually succeed in that goal, depending on psychology/personality.

A variant of no 2 would simply be to challenge people to a public debate on the topic. Then the goal would be to get the audience to update.

The point of no. 1 is to get them to give me some of their status/credibility/platform, in the event that I turn out to be probably right. The problem, of course, is that it's up to them to decide whether I'm probably right, and it gives them an incentive to decide that I'm not!