trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How Lesswrong helped me make $25K: A rational pricing strategy
by kareemabukhadra — 2020-12-21T20:20:18.485Z

3 months ago, I started a company that helps people land jobs in exchange for a cut of their income once they land a job.

Since then, I've closed 5 customers worth about ~$25K. I strongly attribute my ability to close deals to how I price. I strongly attribute how I price to ideas I've developed reading Lesswrong (especially concepts from Economics like Shut up and Multiply).

Word for word, here's how I walk customers through pricing on sales calls:

There are 52 weeks in a year.
Each week makes up about 2% of a year.
That means the opportunity cost of you not working is 2% of your potential post tax salary per week
Does that make sense?
Remind, me, what role are you trying to get?
Great, x make about $YK per year (.75% to get post tax) which is $ZK per year post tax so on a weekly basis you're losing $XK.
On a monthly basis, that's about $XK.
Does that make sense?
Base case: The average job seeker spends 5 months or about 22 weeks in unemployment & that's during non-covid times.
I can help you get a job in less than half that time, 2.5 months or the equivalent of 10 weeks. I just did it for my first customer in 6 weeks.
That’s 12 more weeks of you working or a little over 23% of a years’ worth of income.
So to be clear, in this case, working with me would help you save 23% of a years' worth of income or potentially x$K dollars.
Do you understand how I got to that number?
Great, so the way I go about this is I split that value of 23% halfway. In other words, I give half the savings to you, and then take the other half for myself, leaving us both with 11.5%.
Does that make sense?
Naturally, you may be thinking, "what happens if we're not successful?" Here's a few possible scenarios:

If you land a role in the 22nd week (which is the average amount a job seeker looks for a job) or any point after, I don't get any cut.
If you land a role after the 10 week mark, the percentage cut I get drops incrementally each following week, up until the average case of 22 weeks. For example, if you start a role on the 16th week which is 6 weeks quicker than you would have originally gotten it assuming the average case, then we would be splitting (6 / 52) or 11.4% of the value.
As a final point, if you have not landed 10 or more interviews by the 10 week mark, you reserve the right to end our contract. This means you will not pay anything for my service. This decision to end our cont

...
Welcome to EA Torino [Edit With Your Details]
by stasya.fedorova@gmail.com — 2020-12-21T20:19:13.355Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Welcome to EA Milano [Edit With Your Details]
by stasya.fedorova@gmail.com — 2020-12-21T20:19:13.278Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
parenting rules
by Dave Orr — 2020-12-21T19:48:42.365Z

(crossposted from my nascent substack)

Way back in 2012 I wrote up on livejournal (I told you this was a long time ago) a few parenting rules we lived by. This is the one livejournal post I regularly reshare, so here it is on a more modern platform. Our kids are older now (11 and 13) but with one exception I think these really hold up.

That one exception is praise, where the research on praise seemed clear in 2012 and has since largely failed to replicate and certainly doesn’t have the effect size that everyone thought, so that one I no longer stand by.

Here they are:

Try never to lie. If kids ask a question and they aren't ready to hear the answer, just tell them that. This doesn't mean you have to go into every gruesome detail, it's fine to couch your answer at the level you think they'll understand and that you have time for, but they're smarter than you probably think.
This does extend to things like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. We've told them those stories with the attempt to treat them just like any other fictional story. When Jackson point blank asked if Santa was real, I told him, "No, but it's a fun story and fun to pretend."
There's a common pattern with kids to tell them things that are untrue but scary as a joke, like "Be careful not to slip down the drain!" Don't do that. Kids have trouble distinguishing fake warnings from real ones.
However, saying untrue things as a joke is fine in the right context. "Elephant toes" is a fine answer to a question about what's for dinner. (As long as it's not true.) People say untrue things all the time, and taking the time to evaluate whether an adult is telling the truth is a useful skill. But until the kids are good at it, the untruths should be completely implausible, then can get more plausible as they get more on to you. Fun game, actually.
The most difficult time for this one is when they want something that you don't want to give them. Like if mommy is downstairs and I'm doing bedtime, it's very tempting to claim that Katy is busy doing sometime important that can't be interrupted rather than just admitting she needs a break, or it's my turn to answer the late night call.
Remember that every interaction is a repeated game, and your goal is not to win this one iteration, but to win the series. So if a child is crying because she wants something, even though it feels like a win to give in now (she stops cryi

...
Notes on Fitness
by David Gross — 2020-12-21T16:51:17.623Z

This post examines the virtue of fitness. I mean to explore what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than to express 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, but as someone who wants to learn more. I hope it helps people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

Why is fitness a virtue?

This is a good time to restate what is meant by a virtue, in the classic, Aristotelian sense: A virtue is a person’s characteristic habit that tends to promote or exhibit that person’s human flourishing.

Flourishing is affected by lots of other things, including the actions of other people and the luck of the draw. But as far as characteristic habits go, those that typically tend to promote one’s human flourishing are the virtues; those that typically degrade one’s human flourishing are vices.

To the extent that you are sick, debilitated, or disabled, your human flourishing is that much less. This does not in itself say anything about your moral worth or virtuousness: being sick, debilitated, or disabled is not in itself blameworthy.

But, if you have characteristic habits that have a tendency to make you sick, debilitated, or disabled, those characteristic habits may be vices (assuming they don’t have offsetting benefits in terms of human flourishing) and you would be wise to replace them with corresponding virtues: characteristic habits that promote wellness, strength, and capability.

Fitness as a virtue is not so much measured by how healthy you are so much as how healthy your habits are. Your health may be in large part a matter of what cards you were dealt, but you can play those cards well or poorly, and that’s where the virtue of fitness comes in.

Related virtues

Some closely-related or synonymous names for this virtue are strength, vigor, hardiness, vitality, health, fettle, shape, well-being, and robustness.

In the context of endurance, fitness goes by names like resilience, grit, toughness, and fortitude.

When fitness is reflected in action, it may be called energy, liveliness, or tirelessness.

Fitness comes to the aid of other virtues by giving you more strength, energy, and capacity to carry them out, while distracting you less with aches & pains & worries. It helps the intellectual virtues by keeping the mind sh...
Babble Challenge: Not-So-Future Coordination Tech
by abramdemski — 2020-12-21T16:48:20.515Z

In contrast to John's question, I'm looking for things which could easily happen if only we had the idea, facilitated by technology today, or (even better) with nothing but pen and paper, raising hands, etc.

Think about the difference between small group coordination without the idea of taking a vote, vs with. That's the sort of difference I'm after.

Or driving with/without the idea of staying on the right side of the road.

Or a world with/out kickstarter.

If you want a numerical mark, come up with 20. Ideas can obviously be super vague (EG "like kickstarter, but for Effective Altruism"), since I'm not expecting you to EG actually come up with a better voting system or a way to make futarchic governance practical for small groups, etc.

Feel free/encouraged to list "obvious" ideas, including ideas already mentioned by other people, to keep the creative juices flowing.
How Hard Would It Be To Make A COVID Vaccine For Oneself?
by johnswentworth — 2020-12-21T16:19:10.415Z

I always assumed, without investigating, that vaccine-making was the sort of thing which required highly specialized experts and equipment. But I've been hearing that the Moderna vaccine was designed in two days, which strongly suggests that it's simple. So I'm at least asking the question: how hard would it be to make such a vaccine?

The main question is what's involved in designing and synthesizing a vaccine. Subquestions:

What information is needed for design, and is any non-public?
What skills are needed for design (other than general bio/bioinformatics know-how), and how does one design a vaccine?
What equipment and supplies are needed for synthesis?
Does the equipment require any unusual skills (other than typical wetlab stuff, e.g. how to use a pipette or prevent contamination)?
Perhaps most important for a non-professional effort: what quality assurance steps are typically used? How can one verify that the thing one intended to produce was actually produced?

These are the main things I'd like to know about.

There's also a cluster of secondary questions around exactly what one could do with such a vaccine, beyond using it oneself. Presumably the FDA would shut down any effort to sell it to others as a vaccine, but which part of that is the problematic part? If someone gives away a homebrew vaccine for free, is that ok? If it's advertised as not-a-vaccine (but with a technical explanation of exactly what it is), or even as "not for human use" (since of course humans never use things not fit for human use), is that ok? To what extent can barriers be circumvented by loading all the equipment in an RV and taking a weekend trip to Canada/Mexico/whatever the equivalent is for Europe? I'm imagining e.g. a small group in Berkeley decides to put in the effort to learn how to make vaccines, buys $10k of equipment and supplies, then gives away vaccine to most of the Berkeley rationalist hub (with a clear "not approved by FDA, not fit for human consumption" warning accompanied by an implicit wink). Where does the FDA draw the line between "a group of friends doing stuff they shouldn't be doing" vs something which needs to be shut down?

I expect any viable plan would take quite a lot of effort, but there's an awful lot of value to be had here - even just immunizing oneself and a handful of friends could plausibly be valuable enough to justify the effort and expenditure. Al...
2020 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison
by Larks — 2020-12-21T15:27:19.303Z

cross-posted to the EA forum here.

Introduction

As in

2016

,

2017

,

2018

, and

2019

, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments.

My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2020 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2020 budgets to get a sense of urgency.

I’d like to apologize in advance to everyone doing useful AI Safety work whose contributions I have overlooked or misconstrued. As ever I am painfully aware of the various corners I have had to cut due to time constraints from my job, as well as being distracted by 1) other projects, 2) the miracle of life and 3) computer games.

This article focuses on AI risk work. If you think other causes are important too, your priorities might differ. This particularly affects GCRI, FHI and CSER, who both do a lot of work on other issues which I attempt to cover but only very cursorily.

How to read this document

This document is fairly extensive, and some parts (particularly the methodology section) are largely the same as last year, so I don’t recommend reading from start to finish. Instead, I recommend navigating to the sections of most interest to you.

If you are interested in a specific research organisation, you can use the table of contents to navigate to the appropriate section. You might then also want to Ctrl+F for the organisation acronym in case they are mentioned elsewhere as well. Papers listed as ‘X researchers contributed to the following research lead by other organisations’ are included in the section corresponding to their first author and you can Cntrl+F to find them.

If you are interested in a specific topic, I have added a tag to each paper, so you can Ctrl+F for a tag to find associated work. The tags were chosen somewhat informally so you might want to search more than one, especially as a piece might seem to fit in multiple categories.

Here are the un-scientifically-chosen hashtags:

AgentFoundations
Amplification
Capabilities
Corrigibility
DecisionThe

...
Confidence Intervals seen as pixel stripes
by qbolec — 2020-12-21T11:00:56.900Z

[epistemic status: I am not a statistician, thus I've probably made errors in this post. I welcome any corrections to the merits of the post. I'm even open to removing it if proven the whole idea is stupid. However, I'd like to preserve the visual form of the post, as the sole reason to write this article in the first place, was that I couldn't find this visual analogy anywhere, and personally find it very helpful]

In this article I'd like to verbalize and more importantly - visualize - some intuitions about what a Confidence Interval really means when a Frequentist or a Bayesian use the term, and how come it can have more than one meaning.

Let me start with a toy example, which is hopefully simple enough, that even if Frequentists and Bayesians disagree about what "probability" really is, they can at least agree that it looks like there are two random events involved in following two steps:

We first roll a 6-sided dice to generate the number N (1,2,3,4,5 or 6).
We then flip N coins and count number of heads, H.

Now, suppose that we only know H, but are interested in guessing what was the value of N. Hopefully, you can see how this is a very oversimplified variant of a real world situation, where you try to deduce the value of some real world parameter given just a noisy observation - here H plays a role of the noisy observation of the real world parameter N/2.

This example is simple enough, that we can count on fingers, how often each possible combination of N and H "should" occur in an ideal world: for a given N, number of ways to choose H coins is by definition (NH), and there are 2N possible sequences of heads and tails of length N, so the said probability is 16(NH)/2N, which can be presented as a grid:

N=6	0.3%	1.6%	3.9%	5.2%	3.9%	1.6%	0.3%
N=5	0.5%	2.6%	5.2%	5.2%	2.6%	0.5%
N=4	1.0%	4.2%	6.3%	4.2%	1.0%
N=3	2.1%	6.3%	6.3%	2.1%
N=2	4.2%	8.3%	4.2%
N=1	8.3%	8.3%
H=0	H=1	H=2	H=3	H=4	H=5	H=6

Above, each row corresponds to a particular result of the dice roll in the first step of the process, and thus numbers in each row sum to 1/6=16.6% of the total number of trials. In an "ideal" ("fair") world, repeating the experiment 6×64 times, we'd expect each particular N to occur exactly 64 times, and a specific combination of N and H to occur 64(NH)/2N=(NH)26−H tim...
Fusion and Equivocation in Korzybski's General Semantics
by abramdemski — 2020-12-21T05:44:41.064Z

I recently tried to figure out Korzybski's General Semantics again. I think I gained some insight into what Korzybski and followers were so excited about, and thought I'd try to write a brief note about it.

My "aha" moment came from reading the wikipedia entry on General Semantics, which includes the following:

General semantics postulates that most people "identify," or fail to differentiate the serial stages or "levels" within their own neuro-evaluative processing. "Most people," Korzybski wrote, "identify in value levels I, II, III, and IV and react as if our verbalizations about the first three levels were 'it.' Whatever we may say something 'is' obviously is not the 'something' on the silent levels."[11]

[...]

Although producing saliva constitutes an appropriate response when lemon juice drips onto the tongue, a person has inappropriately identified when an imagined lemon or the word "l–e–m–o–n" triggers a salivation response.

This seems like a very Buddhist use of "identification". It reminds me very much of Kaj's explanation of insight meditation. Korzybski is trying to get us to "respond appropriately" by differentiating rather than identifying. He writes that differentiating "introduces a most beneficial delay" between stimulus and response. Identification and differentiation seems like exactly what Kaj is talking about with "fusion" and "defusion".

In traditional argumentation terms, this mistake is "equivocation" -- treating two things as the same when they are importantly different. Equivocating between two things forces us to respond in the same way to both. For example, if no firm distinction is made between "liberal immigration policy" and "democratic values", then one must accept or reject both at once.

The grecio-roman (ie "western") rhetorical tradition focuses on explicit reasoning, and treats equivocation as an error in explicit reasoning. It is countered by precision in language, including taking care about explicitly defining terms, and careful analysis of the logic of arguments.
The Buddhist tradition focuses instead on the internal, subjective, phenomenological version. "Identification" here has to do with insufficiently fine-grained perception. It is remedied by introspection and training the senses. This allows one to see more clearly by focused attention, which allows one to differentiate (de-identify) subtly different mental phenomenon, s

...
Using spaced repetition to make the most out of blog posts and books
by tchauvin — 2020-12-21T02:47:16.888Z

Cross-posted from timot.cool

Spaced repetition (SR) is still an early field of collective experimentation. People have been coming up with many ideas on what to use SR for: trivia like the capitals of the world, foreign vocabulary, their domain of expertise... What I almost never see discussed is the use of SR for content like blog posts and non-fiction books. We're reading them to induce long-term change in our behavior or thinking capabilities, yet these sources of knowledge seemingly don't trigger the SR reflex as much or at all.

Why? Because blog posts and books are mostly not about raw facts, which are the easiest way to get started with SR. Yet I've personally found a lot of value in using SR for the ideas, arguments and concepts I find in my readings. A few (overlapping) subcategories with examples from my collection:

1. Concepts (examples). Some writings give a crystal-clear name to some idea that was complex or vague, and the idea now becomes a tool in a cognitive toolkit. These concepts are essential for thinking. You'll think better if you have chunked vague ideas into things with names, and these names are even more essential if you want to discuss things with others, or share these vague ideas. In section 9 of his Nonfiction Writing Advice, Scott Alexander writes that some of the more important things a blog can do is to put names on such vague ideas. Scott called these "concept handles", after previously calling them "crystallized patterns". He says:

If you figure out something interesting and very briefly cram it into somebody else’s head, don’t waste that! Give it a nice concept-handle so that they’ll remember it and be able to use it to solve other problems!

And I say: don't waste that! Put the concept-handle into your SR collection to avoid the risk of forgetting about it forever, and so you can easily share it with friends or refer back to the original post later on!

These concepts may come with examples (or you may make up your own), which are often also worth remembering.

2. Arguments, ideas (examples). After all, why should we forget them?

3. Summaries (examples). I like these a lot, and they're often appropriate for blog posts. This is the kind of SR card whose formulation (writing a personal summary) requires putting in some effort, but is very valuable.

A few thoughts on the above usage of SR:

people vary wildly in their experience with

...
Secular Solstice 2020
by jefftk — 2020-12-20T23:20:03.863Z

Last night, about 225 people gathered for songs and stories. In the
spirit of putting in a ridiculous amount of effort to keep doing
normal things in abnormal times, a group of friends built a platform
where we could listen together, and sing together, as we do every
year. This was the biggest gathering

Bucket Brigade has handled, and
with the vaccines being distributed now it may be the largest it ever
handles.

If you missed it, Rachel made a recording of most of the service:

(youtube)

And here are the recordings Bucket Brigade made:

Bitter
Wind Blown

Chasing
Patterns In The Sky

Hard Times
Come Again No More

Sounds
of Silence

Whose
Woods Are These, Blowin' in the Wind

Bold Orion

Hymn
to Breaking Strain, Bitter Wind Blown

Five
Hundred
Million, Brighter Than Today

Here
Comes the Sun

Beautiful
Tomorrow

Uplift

Five
Million Years

Since the majority of people were in the final bucket for each song,
these recordings have many more voices than you would have been able
to hear live. They don't include anyone who failed calibration,
clicked "don't let anyone hear me", or muted themself.

Each song was a pre-recorded backing video, with the audience singing along
live (example backing
video).

While Glenn and I had been working on Bucket Brigade since early
July, we only got to something that could plausibly have handled
this crowd in mid-November.
Even then, we had a disastrous first live stress test where the server
fell over at ~38 people because of differences between are simulated
testing and real users. We made our automated stress testing more
realistic, but last night Bucket Brigade was handling 10 times more real
users than it had before.

I ran sound during the event, adjusting all of the different volumes.
(I want to give a special thanks to Elizabeth: over the past month
she has been my hands
when working on bucket brigade, and the mixing console would not have
been possible without her.) What took most of my time was listening
to people who had chosen to sing early in the brigade and making sure
they were singing accurately enough that they weren't going to confuse
the people who came later. In a normal group people are able to listen
to each other and self correct, but in a chain like this the first few
users need to be right together or else everyone later will not know
who to match.

Looking at the logs from th...