trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Do You Want the Complexity in the Tools or in Their Usage?
by mxshn — 2020-12-31T10:58:38.393Z

Epistemic Status: Observation, Intuition, Not sure if there is something there

In "Living with Complexity", Donald Norman notes that complexity is inherent in a task and cannot be arbitrarily removed. In the following, I give anecdotes to show that complexity in the real-world is often shifted from a task into the tool used to achieve that task. Thus removing it from the usage/process. Borrowing from probability theory one could maybe describe it as the "Complexity Mass" being moved, where the entire complexity stays the same, but the distribution is changed.

There are tools for many tasks that are either bare bones and need a skilled user, or are simple to use, but complex. In the one case, the task complexity resides in the tool's usage and its user (muscle memory, experience, heuristics, ...), in the other case the tool itself is complex. What I mean by that is, that it contains a lot of interacting parts, and is thus difficult to repair, maintain, and reinvent.

Examples & Contrast

For example, consider traditional woodworking tools, such as chisel, saw, hammer, drill, or nail. Each one of these devices is either very simple or there exists a simple version (manual drill). A chisel needs to be sharpened to be usable, but you can sharpen metal on rocks, and you can prepare rock surfaces, just by using other rocks [1]. A saw is arguably more complex, but still only consists of one or two pieces. If using a saw-string, it is extraordinarily simple.

What is needed to render these tools usable is someone who knows how to utilize them, and who has the experience to know how to saw a particular kind of plank, where to attach the tool, what force to use, etc. Thus: tool simple, usage complex.

Contrast this to modern power tools: router, power saw, nailgun are all much easier to use. A router is much easier to use than a chisel, a power saw makes straight cuts much simpler and a nail gun is much faster than hammer and nail. And the nails are all straight. But this comes at the price of the tools themselves being very complex. Who could reinvent a nailgun? Who could even repair one? Tool complex, usage simple.

Or cooking: The traditional, simple, tools are knives, pots, cutting boards. They require you to know how to cut without endangering yourself, or how to cook rice. But they are simple to make, maintain, and clean. Complex modern tools: Food processor, rice coo...
2021 New Year Optimization Puzzles
by Scott Garrabrant — 2020-12-31T08:22:29.951Z

I was asked to host a puzzle corner for the New Year Eve's Ultra Bash, which would be a Schelling time/place for people to talk about and solve puzzles together. For the event, I decided to make three 2021 themed optimization puzzles, and I decided to also share them here. For each of these puzzles, you are trying to make a number small. Use spoiler boxes in the comments. Feel free to PM me answers, or come chat with me at the party, and I will let you know whether or not you can do better. (I won't let you know if you can do better unless you explicitly ask.) Happy New Year!

Puzzle 1

Construct a formula for 2021 using natural numbers 2 or greater, and the operations addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, unary negation, square root, and/or factorial. (You may also use parentheses.) Your score is the product of the numbers used in your expression. Operations are free. If you use a number multiple times, you have to count it multiple times. Your goal is to minimize your score.

For example, 2021=2∗103+4!−3 gives you a score of 720. You can do better.

Puzzle 2

You decide to run a donor lottery party for yourself and 2021 of your friends. You each put in $10.00 dollars, and one "lucky winner" (chosen uniformly at random) will have to decide how to spend the $20,220.00. However, your only sources of randomness are dice with prime numbers of sides. For each prime p strictly between 1 and 2021, you have a weirdly shaped fair die with p sides. You may only roll one die at a time. Your timelines are short, so you decide to choose the winner as quickly as possible (in expectation). How small can you make the expected number of die rolls needed to determine the winner?

For example, you could roll the 2017 die twice to get a number between 1 and 4068289. If the number is at most 4068264, you take the result mod 2022. If the number is in the range 4068265−4068289, reroll. This procedure takes ∼2.00001229025 rolls in expectation. You can do better.

Puzzle 3

You decide to run another donor lottery party. The person who won the last donor lottery party is still deciding how to spend the money and will not participate, so you have 2021 people total. This time, you plan ahead, and decide to buy some weighted...
And You Take Me the Way I Am
by Zack_M_Davis — 2020-12-31T05:45:24.952Z
Link: http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2020/12/and-you-take-me-the-way-i-am/

Mark Twain wrote that honesty means you don't have to remember anything. But it also means you don't have to worry about making mistakes.

If you said something terrible that made everyone decide that you're stupid and evil, there's no sense in futilely protesting that "that's not what you meant", or agonizing that you should have thought more carefully and said something else in order to avoid the outcome of everyone thinking that you're stupid and evil.

Strategy is deception. You said what you said in the situation you were in, and everyone else used the information in that signal as evidence for a Bayesian update about your intelligence and moral character. As they should. So what's the problem? You wouldn't want people to have false beliefs, would you!?
One Year of Pomodoros
by Alex_Altair — 2020-12-31T04:42:31.274Z

In December of 2019, I started recording how many pomodoros I did each day. I had no expectation that this would last a long time, but it's now been over a year! I've kept a spreadsheet of my daily pomodoros since then, and here's the graph. I did 2171 pomodoros between 2019-12-01 and 2020-12-29, for an average of 5.5 per day.

My pomodoros per day over the last 13 months. The line is a moving 6-day average. To see the full size, right-click and open image in a new tab.

This post is a retrospective. As such, there's not much of a narrative, just a lot of little details. Hopefully it will be useful to someone.

Definition

In case you're unfamiliar, pomodoros (sometimes abbreviated to pomos or poms) are an extremely simple work technique. You set a timer, usually for 25 minutes. You do focused work during that time. When the timer goes off, you take a break, usually for 5 minutes. You repeat this however much you want.

This almost sounds too simple to take seriously, but LessWrong is no stranger to using literal timers to solve problems. The purpose of doing pomodoros is to increase productivity by controlling your focus. Some people are naturally bad at taking breaks, and some people (like me) are bad at focusing on work. The former can lead to mental fatigue or general attentional inefficiency; the breaks force a person to rest their mind. For the latter, setting a timer makes it easier to "stick with it" for that duration. There are a more specific ideas and recommendations from the official inventor of the technique, but honestly it's so simple that you're better off just experimenting with it for a few days, and picking the parameters that work best for you.

For the purpose of my own data recording, I defined a pomodoro as a 20-50 minute period, where I actually set a timer, and worked on an endorsed productive activity. If I zoned out for too much of the time, I didn't count it.

Disclaimers about the data

The graph definitely encodes some broad trends, but there is quite a bit of interpretation to be wary of. There were many times when I did work, but didn't time it. This could be because I forgot, or didn't realize I was going to do a block of work until I was halfway through it, or because I was collaborating with someone else and our dynamic didn't need the structure, or because I was doing some physical work where I didn't really take breaks and having a timer...
Seeing the edge of the world
by KatjaGrace — 2020-12-31T03:40:15.928Z

A nice thing about looking at the ocean that I noticed today is that it is unusually easy to interpret the view as a close up of the edge of a giant wet ball of rock in space, and thus to more compellingly visualize the fact that I live on one of those, and some of all that that entails.

The Pacific Ocean where I am got dark, so here’s the Norwegian Sea 2.5 years ago to illustrate:
How would you govern Mars?
by Bernhard — 2020-12-31T02:32:02.447Z

Summary: Good government is hard. Given the chance, how would you improve it? Below you will find one idea I like, to hopefully get a fruitful discussion started.

I started writing this in February, just as the Pandemic appeared on the horizon, and titled it "How would you govern Mars", hoping to get your attention (Of course Elon Musk beat me to it, but he is good at building hype after all). So now that I have your attention, here goes:

Government sucks. Demonstrably so, just watch the news. There may be some countries that are doing better than others, but most of them are either very rich (Switzerland, Norway, Singapore), and/or very small.

What I am interested in is how one would have to design a robust system that governs the day to day interactions between people, and that is able to evolve and adapt, and thus capable of serving the people now and in the future.

I'm not so much interested in any particular detail, and more in a method of how to identify and overcome newly arising issues (Not so much an updated reissue of the Ten Commandments, and more a system that generates useful commandments on demand). I'm, also not necessarily limiting this to "laws", and instead want to include "unwritten norms" and "culture" as well.

The system should be applicable to any (large, >>150) group of people, that wants to bootstrap a community. Possible examples would be the mentioned colony on Mars, or the Moon; an independent seastead floating somewhere in the Pacific; or maybe an existing country overcoming its former government (e.g. "The Capitalist Republic of North Korea", or "The Anarchic Free State of Portland").

By way of example, I'll start with listing a few high-level, long-standing issues that I think should be solved sooner rather than later. I'll also outline one idea that may address some of them. Then I would like to hear your opinions on what the important problems are, and how you would do it.

Problems:

Inequality: More unequal societies just do worse in general (I am not going to give an example/reference for this one. Instead I kindly suggest that you travel to new places once in a while)

Winner takes all: A special case of inequality. Exists on many levels (Country, state, corporation, personal)

Rules-as-written versus Rules-as-intended: Sometimes people do "bad" (e.g. negative-sum) things, without violating any laws (e.g. Martin Shkreli raising pr...
A Model of Ontological Development
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2020-12-31T01:55:58.654Z

Introduction

In this post I present a model of human psychological development based on increases in the structural complexity of ontology. Or more simply, it's a model about how human minds grow in terms of how complex their models of the world are. It breaks down development into 8 stages that build on each other, and spans from birth to what, for lack of a better term, we might call enlightenment. I think you'll find it useful if you're interested in better understanding how human thinking changes and grows throughout a lifetime, in developing yourself, or if you notice some confusion that humans seem to change in meaningful ways as they age but don't already have a strong gears-level model of how that works.

The model rests on several claims about the world:

Humans engage in psychological development throughout their lives.
This psychological development is marked by phases that are different from each other in kind (a difference in "type signature") along certain key dimensions.
This difference in kind is due to increasing structural complexity of one's models (ontology) in reference to the reality (the ontic) being modeled.
One can progress towards greater complexity.
This greater complexity confers the disposition to live a better life, contingent on integration of the insights this complexity offers.

For this post I assume you already agree with Claim 1 as it's not very controversial. For evidence of Claim 2 and Claim 4 I defer to both content linked in the Background section and the writing of David Chapman. For Claim 3 I defer to my previous post, "Phenomenological Complexity Classes". And for Claim 5 I present myself (you can see some of my personal story around this in the "Phenomenological Complexity Classes" post) and basically everyone else who has improved their lives through self-help, positive psychology, and Buddhist practices leading to awakening.

With these claims in mind, I then present my current best general model of what this psychological development looks like. If you're familiar with the "Phenomenological Complexity Classes" post (just "PCC" hereon), this is basically version 2 of that.

Background

Presenting the model in full detail with everything justified within the text to the best of my ability would require giving a lot of background, probably something book length. I'm definitely not going to do that, so with my apologies here are a b...
What do you think should be included in a series about conceptual media?
by Polytopos — 2020-12-31T01:40:31.353Z

For a while now I've been planning to do a series of posts about conceptual media.
A conceptual medium is a an expressive medium that primarily serves to express abstract thoughts and ideas. It is analogous to the concept of an artistic medium (e.g., painting, poetry, violin, etc), but pertains to the expression of conceptual thought rather than artistic expression.
Examples of such media would be speech, written prose text, programming languages, mathematical symbolic notation, geometrical diagrams, explanatory comics, conceptual network diagrams (a.k.a., mindmaps), interactive simulations, data visualizations, markup languages, and semantic web technologies.
To be clear, I'm speaking about media in which thoughts are articulated/expressed, not media which encodes and transmits information. So for this perspective, an article in a print journal or an ejournal would be considered the same media (namely prose text with citations) although the latter is encoded and transmitted digitally. Similarly, a TED talk viewed on YouTube is not essentially different from an in-person oral presentation from a conceptual media perspective, although clearly it has much wider reach, ease of viewing etc.
I'd like to connect these ideas with various key thinkers on the topic. My present list of thinkers includes: Leibniz, Lev Vygotsky, Vannevar Bush, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Douglas Engelbart, Andy Clark, Michael Bostock, and Nick Sousanis.

I want to consider how different conceptual media shape our process of discovery, invention, mutual understanding, and epistemic justification. Can we augment our intelligence by designing new media for thinking? If so, what is the best way to approach this task? What seems to make it so difficult?
Questions:
What is I missing from what I wrote above?
Are their key examples of conceptual media that I'm leaving out?
What important thinkers on this topic that I should consider adding to the series?
What conceptual media (past, present, or imagined in the future) should I be sure to talk about?
To get into the weeds a bit, I'd be curious if anybody knows of good academic work on the neurological and cognitive changes associated with the switch from a pre-literate language users to literate ones. I also think there may have been prior work done on the cognitive impact of various kinds of computer interfaces, for example t...
SpaceX will have massive impact in the next decade
by ChristianKl — 2020-12-31T01:04:03.127Z

Epistemic status: Speculative thinking with a bunch of links to facts I found during my research.

Elon Musk SpaceX already provides launch capabilities for larger satellites that are cheaper then the competition. While it costs $165–220M to buy a launch with the Ariane 5 which can bring 20,000 kg to low-earth orbit, it only costs $62 million to buy a Falcon 9 launch which can carry 22,800 kg to low-earth orbit. That's the quoted price without reuse and rumor goes that SpaceX manages to make 40% profits on each launch.

With Starship Elon Musk is now building a system that's planned to provide another strong improvement in price. $2 million per mission into low-earth orbit. He plans to be able to mass produce Starship at 5 million$ per ship.

Tourism

A Starship is projected to be able to carry a volume of 1,000 m³ with 100,000kg of weight. In contrast a Boeing 737-800 NG which can carry 184 m³ with a weight of 24 000 kg with 189 seats. While it's possible that a Starship can't pack it's passengers as tightly as a Boeing 737-800 NG this still suggests 5,000$ tickets to low-earth orbits that would allow a space tourism industry whose journeys could be afforded by the 1% and not just by people earning millions per year.

Asteroid Mining

When it costs 20$ to transport a kg to low-earth orbit we might find a way to to mine palladium that can be sold for $34,115 per kg on earth or gold that can be sold for $60,882 per kg. While it's unclear how to effectively mine asteroids the transport costs won't hold back businesses anymore from trying to mine asteroids.

Given that the total mining output in the US alone was 692 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 I would be surprised if we don't see a few billions flow per year into the prospect of making asteroid mining viable once Starship is ready.

Tungsten Rods

When Tungsten rods are dropped from space onto earth they manage to store a lot of kinetic energy because they have a very high boiling point. Dropping tungsten rods from space can release as much energy as nuclear weapons without the nuclear fallout.

Starship transport costs will make Tungsten rod cost effective weapons and they should be on the radar of anyone who currently focuses on nuclear containment because they provide similar risks.

EarthNow satellite coverage

EarthNow is a company that plans deliver video that shows Earth from orbit in real time:

Each roughly

...
[Linkpost] Drug-Approval Denationalization
by ChristianKl — 2020-12-30T22:09:56.347Z

Linkpost for Drug-Approval Denationalization:

In a recent article, I quoted 35 economists who favor liberalization of pre-market approval.

[...]

One idea is to recognize the drug approvals of, say, 15 other governments. That is, we reform the U.S. system so that if the drug-approval agency of even one of those 15 countries approves a drug for that country, then the drug is automatically approved in the United States.
Stock market hints for 2021 from past crashes
by bfinn — 2020-12-30T20:05:44.578Z

What might past crashes tell us about what stocks will do in 2021?

I previously wrote about the short-term aftermaths of crashes, which - despite wild variation - average out like a normal year. This is consistent with the weak-form Efficient Market Hypothesis: the fact prices have fallen should tell you nothing about which way they will continue afterwards.

But let’s see what happens longer-term. Here are how UK and US stocks performed for five years after every crash* in history:

While each crash was very different, on average stocks rose in the first half of each graph (see black lines). To examine this more closely, let's average together all 15 US & UK crashes of the past century**, and consider the first three years of aftermath:

This suggests three stages:

As previously discussed, a slight rise on average for a year after the crash, like a normal year (with 5% real return)
Then a strong recovery for more than a year (averaging 15% return p.a.)
Then back to normal trendless behaviour (averaging 3% p.a. to five years after the crash).

And each stage has a plausible explanation:

After the initial shock, efficient markets incorporate expectations accurately, so on average prices are flattish.
While some crashes do their worst in weeks, and others take many months, the damage is mostly done and remedial measures are started within a year, so stocks then rise quickly. (With exceptions, e.g. the 1929 Wall Street crash.)
When the situation returns to normal (or a new normal), usual random walk behaviour resumes.

Whether 1 and 2 are distinct stages, or just segments of an upward curve (which depends partly on where you draw the red lines) is moot, but the general upward trend seems likely to be real – that is, to suggest similar behaviour in future crashes.

Stage 1 and 3 seem a bit different from each other, though both are close enough to normal growth rates. The fact stage 1's average rise is fairly steady whereas stage 3 looks more random may well just be chance, due to the small sample size.

Implications for 2021

How does all this relate to where we are now? Since the March 2020 crash, stocks have performed much better than average (as with the 1970 crash), though this is compatible with the wide variation in past aftermaths. The seeds of stage 2 are being sown in the form of vaccines and stimulus measures, and interest rates are low, making stocks attractive; so it ...
"I Don't Know" (2020 Solstice Speech)
by Raemon — 2020-12-30T18:30:31.250Z

This was my primary speech at this year's Solstice. I have meta-commentary on it I will share in a bit.

The virtue of darkness is to face reality at its harshest, without looking away.

There are many forms of metaphorical darkness. But perhaps the most primal is to Not Know Things. Humans crave certainty. Is there a lion lurking in the darkness, or not? Will your family reject you, or not? Will your parents or government or god somehow make sure that ultimately, everything will be okay?

Sometimes the answer is "No, you're on your own." And that’s awful. But at the least you know where you stand.

Sometimes, though, the answer is just "I don't know." You have to make a decision and take action without knowing. You might have to make tradeoffs, or sacrifices. And you will not find out, tomorrow, or maybe even a year from now, whether your decision was correct.

This year, there were a lot of things I didn't know. Some of them were pretty concrete and easy to think about:

How easily does covid spread?

How likely am I to die or suffer longterm debilitating effects?

Do masks work?

What distance can we safely see each other outdoors?

Back in April, the answer to these was "we don't know". And we had to make calls about what to do, regardless. Nine months later, some of the answers still aren't quite as clear as I'd like.

But those were the *straightforward* questions. Some questions got a bit murkier – questions about what other people believe. Questions about moral uncertainty and game theory and how to handle scarcity. I didn’t know the answers, and didn’t know what other people thought the answers were.

How dangerous do other people think covid is? What norms do they think there should be in the pandemic? How do they think we should enforce those norms?

I don’t know.

Which crumbling pillars of my life do I NEED to survive? Which pillars do my loved ones need?

If my spouse or housemate or friends or coworkers DISAGREE about how to coordinate... what happens?

I don't know.

How do I feel about that?

I’m not sure.

...

If I say "Screw it, I'm sick of living in fear", and decide to just live my life normally, how likely am I to give covid to someone else?

If I decide "Screw it, I'm sick of negotiating with everyone. I'm running away to the woods", what pieces of infrastructure will crumble a little without me? Which friends needed me? How many other people will run ...