trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Design policy to be testable
by Yair Halberstadt — 2022-01-31T06:04:53.887Z

My father in law is an expert on legislation. He's travelled around the world advising countries on how to craft laws and constitutions.

One of the projects he's working on at the moment is advising on a bill to promote integrated education of different cultural and religious groups in Northern Ireland.

He was discussing the policy with me the other day, and was saying that he thinks it will be highly effective: "It's impossible for a preacher to stand up and say that all catholics/protestants are evil, when you've grown up in the same class as them and simply know they're not."

I agreed the reasoning made sense, but was somewhat skeptical it would necessarily have the desired effect. I can easily think of just so stories where the opposite happens.

For example, kids naturally form cliques. And protestant kids are more likely to form cliques with other protestant kids, and catholic kids with catholic kids. So they might both grow up 'knowing' that the other group were very cliquey and not at all interested in being friends.

So I asked, how do they plan to test whether it worked?

He looked at me for a few seconds, and then said that he supposed you could look at statistics such as rates of conscription to the IRA.

"Wait a minute, " I replied, "do you mean to say that they haven't designed up front criteria for how to measure how effective this policy is? Then how on earth will they know if it's successful?"

Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, the idea of crafting policy in such a way that it can be easily testable just doesn't seem to exist!

I know that we're probably never going to have futarchies, or even deregulate healthcare. But I think the idea of designing policy to be testable is something that should be pretty uncontroversial (at least if you're not a politician).

I would love to live in a world where any bill required the following 5 items:

A description of how they're going to measure the impact of the bill.

A prediction distribution for the impact of the bill.

A level at which they'd consider the bill a success, and a level at which they'd consider it a failure.

A description of how they're going to measure how bad things would be conditional on the bill not passing.

A prediction distribution for this value.

I'm not even asking for these values to be used explicitly in any way, (e.g. I'm not suggesting we automatically fire lawmakers who propose bills...
Reflections on six months of fatherhood
by jasoncrawford — 2022-01-31T05:28:09.154Z
Link: https://jasoncrawford.org/reflections-on-six-months-of-fatherhood

To be fed from a spoon requires three distinct skills. First, you must open your mouth when the spoon approaches. Second, you must close your mouth around the spoon once it has fully entered the mouth (and not before). Third, you must swallow the food that remains in your mouth after the spoon is withdrawn, rather than spitting it out.

I know this because my daughter, who is six months old, did not possess these skills two months ago. She learned rapidly—ah, to possess the neuroplasticity of the young—but there was a brief period when she literally did not know how to be spoon-fed. (Note that I have not begun to describe the skills required to feed oneself with a spoon, in part because she has not yet acquired them.)

The first lesson I have received from fatherhood is that everything must be learned, or very nearly everything. Babies are born with a very small number of reflexes and instincts: to suck on whatever enters their mouth, to “root” around on mother’s chest to find the nipple, to cry when they are uncomfortable. Everything else is a mental step in a long, upward climb.

In the first weeks, both the parents and the child are focused on digestion. The infant is essentially an alimentary canal with arms and legs. (The limbs are superfluous and indeed get in the way more than they help; if children were properly engineered, they would be born limbless, and the arms and legs would grow in as they were needed.) The infant is learning to nurse, to sleep, and to poop, and that’s about all they do for a little while. Yes, they even need to learn how to poop, or at least that’s how the nurse in the maternity ward explained her grunting sounds and puzzled expression.

All capabilities come in the tiniest increments. At first she did not know what her hands were for, and was more likely to scratch her own face than to do anything useful with them. After a few months she started to realize that hands could grasp things, but not how to do so. She would pinch and grip randomly when something was under them. Just feeling. She started to hold the bottle when I fed her, but she made every conceivable mistake in doing so. She would put her hands on top of the bottle, rather than on the bottom or sides. (Gravity has to be learned.) She would try to balance it on her knuckles, to comic effect. She would get a grip on the bottle, then move her hands and lose her grip while dr...
How do I find Likelihoods and Prior probabilities for Complete blood count (CBC) values for cats?
by ATheCoder — 2022-01-31T05:11:58.440Z

I'm in the midst of reading Eliezer's sequences and I have learned Bayes' Theorem because of it. I wanted to apply it to my friend's current uncertain situation. Her cat was diagnosed with a disease called FIP and she has treated her cat with remdesivir. However, there is a chance of about 10% according to studies that her cat might relapse after finishing the treatment. So she has been taking blood tests ever since to know whether her cat has relapsed or not. So I wanted to apply Bayes Rule to the blood cell counts and Biochemistry to update the prior probability of 10% each time she gets a new lab result.

Of course, my problem is with finding P(B|A) and P(B|~A) (A: is the probability that the cat has been cured). I have found a study that shows blood cell counts for cats that are infected with FIP. Their mean and Range and Median is also available. I know I can use a normal distribution to calculate P(B|~A). However I could not find a study that shows these values for Healthy cats so I can get the P(B|A). I don't exactly know what to search for really...

Healthy cat Complete blood counts or biochemistry didn't yield anything in Google Scholar.

I also know that this must be available somewhere because all blood tests come with a reference range.
What do we mean when we say the brain computes?
by Adam Shai — 2022-01-31T03:33:48.978Z

A sequence of posts on frameworks for brain computation

I plan on making a sequence of posts that discusses current frameworks for how brains compute. What do I mean by computation here? Roughtly speaking I want to answer how the activity of neurons implements cognitive function. You might say: well that's not an issue, neurons fire, they cause other neurons to fire, those knock down some other neural dominoes, and then eventually they cause a motor neuron to fire and you say "Eureka, I have cognated!" This doesn't seem like a great explanation to me, and I believe there are multiple frameworks that are starting to come together in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, dynamical systems theory, etc. etc. that provide an alternative to the standard point of view for how brains compute, hereafter called The Standard View. Hopefully some others will find this interesting. In this first post I'm going to talk about The Standard View and handwave about its shortcomings[1]. Ultimately I believe the shortcomings are most clearly understood while being directly compared to alternative frameworks.

Everyone seems to think that the brain computes

Neuroscientists often say that "the brain computes." This strikes most as such an obvious statement that follow-up questions like "what does compute mean in that phrase, exactly?" are met with a sigh that speaks quite clearly --- "Please keep the philosophy aside, we are trying to do actual science here." But my day job has been in experimental neuroscience for longer than a decade now, and I've never been able to shake the feeling that a lot of our understanding of the brain really hinges on figuring out what we mean by compute when we say the brain computes. That's what I'm going to discuss here.

What I'm not interested in is if the brain is a Turing Machine or some other formal definition of computer, instead I want to take the intuitive notion that the brain computes as a given, and try to figure out what a typical neuroscientist might mean by that, and what are the possible ways we can understand natural systems computing more generally.

Single Neuron Computation is a straighforward case of the brain computing

A popular textbook in neuroscience called The Biophysics of Computation by Christof Koch famously starts with the phrase in question. It's maybe no surprise that the book focuses mostly on the bi...
Career Day: A Short Story
by vernamcipher — 2022-01-30T22:22:03.029Z
Link: https://mflood.substack.com/p/career-day

(~5000 words, estimated reading time 35-40 minutes)

Career Day

By M. Flood

“Total destruction will come to those who laughed at me and failed to heed my warnings.”

“What was that sweetheart?” Maggie said, trying to hear her husband over the bubbling of the coffee percolator and the hissing of the eggs on the pan. She didn’t like how strong his German accent had become.

“The world will quake in fear when I unveil my engine of destruction,” Victor said blankly, sitting at the table staring at the newspaper. Perhaps he was having some trouble waking up. The coffee would help with that.

“In a minute, Victor,” she said. Grabbing the wooden handle of the frying pan gingerly, being careful not to splinter it, she efficiently scraped the three eggs off onto the plates. Carefully picking up the broom, she thumped on the ceiling, holding herself back so she didn’t drive another hole through the drywall.

Thankfully, she heard the answering thump of Callie’s feet as the ten-year old rolled herself out of bed and started down the stairs. Ready to scold her again, Maggie was stopped short by Callie’s jumping down the stairs and running into the kitchen fully dressed for school. She even had her bookbag over her shoulder.

“Good morning, Mom!” Callie shouted, not stopping as she jumped onto the black-and-white checked linoleum and slid in her socked feet over to the breakfast table. With a practiced motion she scooped up the egg and dropped it onto the peanut butter and raspberry jam toast, slapping the second slice on top of the first, then dashed over to give her father a kiss on the cheek.

Callie’s kiss seemed to bring him out of his reveries of vengeance and destruction. “Have a good day at school, meine Mäuschen,” he said, putting an arm around her and kissing her forehead. “I am sorry I cannot come.” Again, the German accent. He was so good at suppressing it most of the time.

Still disappointed, Callie nodded.

“Aren’t you going to sit for breakfast?” Maggie asked, wiping crumbs off on her apron.

“No time, Mom, might miss the bus,” Callie said, walking over to give Maggie a hug. Maggie gently stroked her daughter’s blonde hair – so like her father’s – and gave her a kiss on the top of the head. For my sins, she thought, she’d never be able to have any touch in any way that didn’t have to be controlled, measured, precise, like a jeweller or a su...
Can we grow cars instead of building them?
by pchvykov — 2022-01-30T21:05:02.351Z

Well that sounds like an exciting idea — imagine a car tree that grows on its own, and we need not do anything other than pick the ready-made cars off it. Perhaps we can breed faster models, or cross-breed to make new ones — in all seems like a lot less effort than having hundreds of engineers and designers spend hours planning out every detail. Ok, but what exactly do we mean when we think of growing cars, and how is it different from how they are currently built at manufacturing plants? (I f**ing love that “plant” is already the word we use for factories!!! I think there is some deep insight there)

To dig a bit more into the distinction here, imagine this scenario: some aliens come to Earth that are so different from us that they cannot even identify humans as clearly distinct from the matter of our environment. Imagine that they don’t see us as distinct living organisms, let alone as individuals with unique personalities and interests, or anything like “consciousness.” They merely see lots of biochemical processes that lead to more biochemical processes, all intertwined, interacting, and producing some plastics. Some of these plastics combine with bits of metal into cars, as catalyzed by some more biochemical processes (which we call humans, but they don’t). From this perspective, a manufacturing plant will look to them precisely like a tree that grows cars, all on its own! Furthermore, if they tried to control what sort of cars it produces, they wouldn’t think to talk to workers and change design plans — instead they might try to cross-pollinate: bring two different manufacturing plants close together and see if they learn to produce some hybrid model of the cars.

Ok, I can see a few holes you can poke in this line of reasoning — please do so in the comments! Even so, I think the overall point holds: we can construct a reasonable “outside perspective” from which manufacturing plants will fit all the criteria above for “growing cars.” Do you buy this? What other distinctions do you see between “building” and “growing” cars that I missed in the above table? Finally, if we still want to invent a way to “grow cars” (from our perspective) what would be the main way we would know that we succeeded (our KPI)?
I’ll continue this discussion next week, with some brainstorming (read: BS) of how we might actually achieve this in the future ;P
Infant Talk boxes?
by jefftk — 2022-01-30T18:20:05.780Z

I often play music with Nora (7M) sitting on my lap, and she loves to
play with my

talk
box tube:

(youtube)

This is just something we do for fun, but it makes me wonder: could
this sort of play help babies learn to talk sooner?

A talk box is a speaker with a tube that pipes its sound into your
mouth. You use your mouth to filter the incoming audio, emphasizing
some frequencies relative to others, and then you and others hear the
modified sound. In music this can be used to make an instrument appear to
talk/sing, or it can be used a bit like a wah-wah, to
dynamically adjust the tone.

Now, this is very speculative and probably wrong, but here's my idea
for how it might help a baby practice talking. What if most of the
time in learning how to talk is learning how to shape the sounds with
your mouth? Babies babble a lot, limited by some combination of vocal
cord stamina and interest, but having some talk box time could let
them get in additional practice?

Comment via: facebook
Retrospective forecasting
by Ege Erdil — 2022-01-30T16:38:17.723Z

Suppose you had to answer the following question: what were the chances of the Confederate States winning the American Civil War in the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863?

At first glance, it's not terribly clear what this question means. It's vaguely posed: we haven't made it clear what it means for the Confederacy to "win" the war. We could make this more precise, but it's the comparatively less serious problem with the question. More serious is that we don't know what we're talking about when we ask about the probability of an event taking place when said event happened.

We could, for example, interpret the question as being about the extent to which macroscopic events in the world are influenced by the fact that fundamental physics is not deterministic. For example, it's sensible to ask what the probability of an atom of uranium-235 decaying in a given year was, even if we know that it did decay - in fact, in the ideal setting, this knowledge wouldn't affect our assessment of the chances at all, due to Fermi's rule. It's an age old question how much this microscopic lack of determinism cascades upwards to a similar lack of determinism on macroscopic scales, but while this question is interesting I also don't have anything novel to say about it.

What I can say is that even if Einstein had been right that God doesn't play dice with the universe, it would still make sense to ask questions such as the one above about the Civil War. The way to make sense of the question in this context is to imagine it as a question conditional only on what we know about the world prior to the Battle of Gettysburg - we exclude any information obtained after the battle. While in a deterministic world Laplace's demon could know the outcome of the Civil War with certainty starting from perfect knowledge of an initial state, we don't actually have perfect knowledge about the state of the world in June 1863. We also can't simply condition on the outcome of the war and know it with certainty, since the outcome is something that was only revealed past the deadline to which we restrict ourselves. This puts us in a similar epistemic situation to the paragraph above; except now the question is about the impact of anything we don't know on the question we care about rather than only the impact of "irreducible" nondeterminism.

It's important that while we condition only on facts about t...
I Am a Dimensional Traveller from a World of Highly Sensitive Rationalists
by LightStar — 2022-01-30T13:00:25.655Z

I'm not actually a dimensional traveller. This is a writing exercise.

"Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is a temperamental or personality trait involving 'an increased sensitivity of the central nervous system and a deeper cognitive processing of physical, social and emotional stimuli'", according to Wikipedia.

So what is my world like? Mostly I want to talk about how people communicate.

Communication is telepathy. You are not just saying words, you are putting thoughts and images into someone's head. With people being more sensitive, and processing what you say deeper/more-intensely, the rules of communication are more restrictive. Saying certain kind of things may require consent, rather than being assumed to be allowed by default.

There is a notion of being in-harmony while conversing which is what to you would look like a regular conversation. It requires sufficient-level-of-mutual-understanding.
When there is sufficient level of lack-of-mutual-understanding, the conversation will fall back on a more robust algorithm, where one person will take the role of listener and another of sender.
The listener's task is to form an accurate understanding of what the sender wants to express, as verified by the sender.
The listener is not allowed to express opinions or ask questions (without asking for consent for that first). The listener is allowed to say "here is my understanding of what you said <....>, is this correct?".
This continues until the sender is satisfied with the listener's level of understanding.
At which point the listener and sender may switch roles, or continue in the same roles, or agree that they are in-harmony and return to an unstructed kind of conversation.

Why do it like this?
Because understanding and expressing your mental-model in words is a delicate task. Someone with a high sensitivity would experience in as painful if someone interrupted them by injecting a conflicting mental model into their mind while they were trying to do that (which is what expressing a disagreement is).
I suppose it might be harder to understand why being asked a question would interfere with a person's mental processes this way. Can I just say "different neural architecture" and leave it at that?
Communication requires consent and you do not express your own opinions or disagreements unless the other person has consented to hearing them. You do not ask questi...
Knowledge Localization: Tentatively Positive Results on OCR
by J Bostock — 2022-01-30T11:57:19.151Z

Epistemic Status: Original research, see previous post for more information

The Plan

Hard-code a simple ML system in Python (yikes!) so I can see all of the moving parts and understand it better.
Give the ML system something to learn (in this case OCR based on the MNIST dataset, because it's easy to get hold of and basically a solved problem in terms of actually classifying characters)
Actually test my hypothesis:

Methods

The neural network used is simple, 784 neurons on the input layer, 100 hidden neurons, 2 output. The activation function used is log(exp(x)+1)). All weights and biases were initialized with He initialization. For compatibility reasons the data label is either [1,0] or [0,1]. The input values are normalized to be between 1/256 and 1 rather than 0 and 255.

The learning process involves backpropagating on a single datapoint (one labelled character) at a time. Overall loss appears to reach a minimum early within the first training epoch. For this reason the first 1200 of 60,000 datapoints were used for phase 1. This refers to training a single neural network on a dataset consisting of all of the 6s and 8s; and 1s and 7s, from the first 12000 datapoints (keeping roughly equal numbers of the two types of data helps to keep the biases and weights towards the last layer from having large changes in any one direction).

During the second half of phase 1, the absolute value of the change of each parameter is added to one of two running tallies, one for 1s/7s and one for 6s/8s. Then the total updating done to each parameter by each class of datapoint can be found. This amounts to summing the absolute value of the update sizes from each datapoint. The "relative updating due to 1s/7s" variable for each parameter is then a/(a+b) where a is the sum of the updates due to 1s and 7s, and b is the sum of the updates due to 6s and 8s. (The correlation still holds whether we look at all of phase 1 or just the second half, but I've found it to be slightly stronger for the second half of training.

Then four copies of the network are made. Both are trained on the remainder of the MNIST dataset, one on 1s and 6s/8s, one on 7s and 6s/8s; then one on 1s/7s and 6s, and one on 1s/7s and 8s. The difference in the final parameter values between these two pairs of networks is then found. We then ta...
How would you learn absolute pitch?
by Thomas Sepulchre — 2022-01-29T23:26:42.368Z

Absolute pitch is the ability to correctly identify any musical note. It is close to another ability, relative pitch, which is the ability to identify any interval correctly, although relative pitch is usually described as the ability to correctly identify any note, once the subject has been given a "reference tone". An important fact here is that relative pitch is not as rare as absolute pitch, which may hint that absolute pitch is harder to acquire/train.

What kind of learning procedure would you design to learn absolute pitch?

In particular, I have two strategies in mind, and I don't think either would work. The first one is simple: a computer produces a note, the user identifies the note, the computer corrects the user. This is flawed because the first note in pair with the correct answer given by the computer provides a reference tone, therefore, after the first note, the user only trains his/her relative pitch. The second strategy would be to not correct the user immediately, but instead wait for example 10 notes before correcting. This seems flawed too, because of how crucial a quick feedback is to learning. Note that, with either strategies, it is not possible to make long learning sessions anyway, because it soon becomes a relative pitch training strategy.

Any clever idea?