trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Contra: Avoiding Sore Arms
by jefftk — 2022-04-07T01:10:04.395Z

A common issue among when dancing Lark role is sore right arms/wrists
after dancing. Why does this happen, and what can we do about it?

During the swing, the dancers need to be held together or they'll fall
over backwards. That's not because they're leaning back (stay
upright!) but because spinning gives you centrifugal force. The effort
of holding the couple together needs to be shared, but often it ends
up falling entirely to the Lark's right arm. In a typical ballroom
position swing, the Raven's left arm is behind the Lark's right
shoulder, with the other two hands joined:

standard "ballroom position" swing

It's easy to see how the Lark's right arm and wrist get overworked
here: that's the hand that's in the best position to hold the partners
together. The Raven's left hand can also help hold the couple
together, however, if they exert a gentle pressure and don't just rest
their hand on the Lark's shoulder.

Sometimes people dancing Raven who learned a different style of dance
will put their left hand on top of the Lark's right arm:

unsupportive ballroom swing

This is not a good fit for contra, because it puts all the work on the Lark.

Some dancers prefer a more supportive swing, where instead of making a
point with your free hands you place them on the arm just above the
elbow:

arm-hold ballroom swing

This allows both dancers to use both of their arms to hold the couple
together. One advantage of this position is that it is similar enough
to standard ballroom position that a Lark with a sore arm can suggest
it and switch to it pretty quickly.

If the couple is a bit more friendly or wants an even more supportive
hold, another option is to move the Raven's right hand to the Lark's
back and hold each other symmetrically:

symmetrical hold

When dancing Raven, how do I know if I'm helping enough?

Ask! Talk to a friend or anyone you happen to be dancing
with, and ask them whether they are feeling a good amount of support
from you.

Consider dancing the Lark role, if you don't already. You'll
get a better sense for what good support feels like by dancing with a
range of Ravens with different approaches.

When dancing Lark, what can I do if I'm not getting enough support?

Ask! Let them know that you could use a bit more help. If
their hand isn't in a good position to do that, consider

...
Why Take Care Of Your Health?
by MondSemmel — 2022-04-06T23:11:07.840Z

The Underspecified Normie

You’re well-aware of the benefits of a healthier lifestyle: less pain, more energy, more mobility and autonomy, a higher life expectancy, and so on and so forth ad nauseam.

Unfortunately, this knowledge doesn’t compel you to action. Your behavior mostly follows simple hyperbolic discounting - healthy actions pay off in the future, but the future is far away, and your TV / smartphone / snack is much closer.

But even if the knowledge that Health Is Good is uncompelling, maybe some other perspectives or frames might prove more fruitful for improving your health?

The Guilty Conscience

All your life you’ve been told what to do: “Go to bed already!” “Do your homework!” “Brush your teeth!”

At some point you internalized those voices: It’s 4 am. I should’ve gone to bed a long time ago. Why am I still awake? What’s wrong with me?

You’ve been thinking this way all your life. Surely this strategy will start working any day now.

If only there was an alternative...

The Investor

Investment bankers aren’t exactly known for their healthy work-life balance. You were no exception to that rule. But at some point you realized that taking care of your health is just another way of investing, namely in your own human capital.

Not all such investments pay off. But if you know where to look, you should be able to find some with outsized returns in longevity and productivity. Time to crunch some numbers!

And in the hopefully distant future, when it’s time for the final accounting, your most profitable investment might just turn out to have been - yourself.

The Decision Theorist

You are in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma with future copies of yourself. You could stay up all night to read that ratfic, but that would be defecting against tomorrow!You. And that line of thinking doesn’t end well.

So you go to bed early, and expect tomorrow!You to do the same, for the same reason.

The Competitive Gamer

The abstraction of “hitpoints” in RTS and FPS games has taught you an unfortunate lesson. People can perform at their peak ability until they reach 0 hitpoints, at which point they die. Recovery is instant as long as you get help from a medic or medkit.

Speaking of which, how do you get those in real life? After gaming for 36 consecutive hours, you aren’t feeling so well...

...

<GAME OVER.>

The Sim Gamer

You’ve just returned from the funeral of your friend Competitive Gamer. RIP. Y...
What are rationalists worst at?
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2022-04-06T23:00:08.600Z

If we want to become stronger, not just individually but as a community, it's worth checking in on what things we're worst at so we can pay attention to those things and become better at them. So, what are the things that LessWrong-style rationalists are worst at on average as of now?

Bonus points if you have concrete interventions to suggest for getting better at those things.
Control the Density of Novelty in Your Writing
by En Kepeig — 2022-04-06T21:33:44.670Z

I think the key element that determines how easy a piece of writing is to read is its density of novelty.

Novelty can be thought of as the writing equivilant of information. Anything the reader already knows doesn't have to be fully processed, it can just be recalled. Known words, idioms, and structures don't have to be relearned every time they appear. So only new information (novelty) has to be decoded by the reader.

The higher the density of novelty, the harder a piece of writing is to read.

Shakespeare vs Ordinary Speech

Shakespeare is relatively difficult for modern readers because there are lots of unfamiliar words, linguistic structures, and styles of expression. The reader has to process novel elements like blank verse, Elizabethan English, and poetic creativity.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Macbeth Act 2, Scene 2, 54–60

This was a little easier for people in Shakespeare’s time to follow, because they were more familiar with contemporary linguistic and artistic tropes.

Contrast that with the effortlessness of parsing ordinary conversation:

Hello, how are you?
Fine, thanks. And you?
I’m doing well.

Ordinary conversation barely registers as information to our minds because it's so familiar.

Readable writing falls somewhere between these two extremes, maintaining a comfortable density of novelty for the reader. I’ll give several examples of writing with a high density of novelty (hard to read), and writing with a low density of novelty (easy to read). In general, it's better to have a lower density of novelty if you want to communicate clearly.

High Density of Novelty (Hard)

The sub-relations and sur-relations of quads span partonomic hierarchies, where each element can be defined by its parts. This is different from a taxonomic (“is-a”) hierarchy, where the elements are categories made up of sub-categories.

- Joscha Bach’s PhD Thesis “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence

Admittedly, this quote is taken out of context from a long PhD thesis, and Joscha Bach is actually a very clear communicator. But on its own, without the proper background knowledge, this passage is unreadable (to me) because there are too many unfamiliar terms, and not enough context to infer their meaning.

Low Density of Novelty (Easy)

“A lot of the commentators say Moloch

...
Elasticity of Wheat Supply?
by johnswentworth — 2022-04-06T20:20:59.439Z

I've been hearing concerns about famine stemming from the war in Ukraine. When thinking about how bad that situation is likely to be, the most important thing I don't know is the price elasticity of wheat: how much more wheat do farmers plant, given some increase in price? This is the sort of thing which I expect economists have already measured pretty well. Does anyone know of a good source?
The Debtors' Revolt
by Benquo — 2022-04-06T19:40:28.292Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-debtors-revolt/

Dear Evan,

You asked whether I had anything in writing to point you to about the history of the great international debtors' revolt of the 20th century, more commonly called the World Wars. I didn't, and I have had some trouble figuring out what the best approach is, in part because it's not clear who my audience is or which feedback if any is trying to learn something new rather than condition me to say more familiar things. Without an idea of someone who might understand me, there is no such thing as an attempt to communicate. The epistolary format has worked well for me recently, so I am going to try to explain what I know to you, personally, and publish at least my original email, and any back-and-forth you're willing to share.

I want to start by explaining the importance of this history. If I tell you that the old world has been overthrown by a class of debtor-aristocrats, and society converted en masse into a debtor aristocracy, you might think of exemplary cavaliers such as Thomas Jefferson and get the wrong idea. Instead, I'll start with an anecdote about the sort of person I mean, so you can see the relationship between membership in a debtor class, shame, class privilege (including "racial" privilege), and opposition to language. Next I will talk a little bit about the mechanism by which the debtor aristocracy propagates itself. Then I'll go into the chronology of the Money Wars. Along the way I will try to clearly signpost standard search terms, related bodies of recorded knowledge, and particular books or essays that might be relevant, but there are a lot, and I will try to write this in a way that at least potentially stands alone - please do err on the side of asking me questions (or trying to restate things in your own words to check whether you understand) rather than assuming you should do your own research first, because that will help me create a canonical summary I can point others to, and I expect that you are better informed than the typical person I need to explain this to.

The New Regime

Ann: A Case Study in Debtor Privilege

Near the beginning of the pandemic my friends and I arranged a small distribution of masks into prisons. After some signal-boosting by Madonna and Oprah, Jack Dorsey donated $10M, enough to solve the problem nationally. We tried to follow up with distributions of vitamin D and nHales. In both cases we were blocked, and...
How to Interpret Vitamin D Dosage Using Numbers
by Benquo — 2022-04-06T19:36:07.466Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/how-to-interpret-vitamin-d-dosage-using-numbers/

I am sick of people rejecting good evidence about vitamin D because they are confused about the bad evidence and can't be bothered to investigate, so I am going to explain it.

Let's look at this like a 19th century physician who woke up from a coma this morning to trawl the public internet for info (I helped), knowing about evolution and bodies and counting and skepticism but not about "metastudies" or "scientific consensus" or "USDA guidelines." How much vitamin D do we need?

Hunter-gatherers in the environment where most of our evolution happened might have been outside all day shirtless. On average the sun's halfway from peak, so that might be equivalent to 8 hours of peak sunlight at the equator. If you're Fitzpatrick Type III like me, your skin adapted to absorb sunlight somewhat more efficiently since your ancestors were exposed to less over an evolutionarily relevant period, so let's cut that in half and say your body evolved for the equivalent of 4 hours of peak sunlight a day. An experimental study says:

Peak ultraviolet B irradiation for vitamin D synthesis occurs around 12 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST). In Boston, MA, from April to October at 12 pm EST an individual with type III skin, with 25.5% of the body surface area exposed, would need to spend 3 to 8 minutes in the sun to synthesize 400 IU of vitamin D. It is difficult to synthesize vitamin D during the winter in Boston, MA. For all study months in Miami, FL, an individual with type III skin would need to spend 3 to 6 minutes at 12 pm EST to synthesize 400 IU. Vitamin D synthesis occurs faster in individuals with lighter Fitzpatrick skin types.

There's another one that's paywalled if someone wants to pay or steal and check.

400 IU per 5 minutes is 8000 IU per hour is 32,000 IU (800 micrograms) per day by this estimate.

When deciding how much is actually appropriate to supplement, we need to take into account diminishing returns; eventually the sunlight starts producing other secondary metabolites which are also good for us, so a 16,000 IU supplement is lower-quality than sunlight but similar in the effective dosage of the most important chemical our evolutionary ancestors' bodies would have made from sunlight; in practice I wouldn't take more than that.

If someone wants to pay some people to have their blood drawn and analyzed before and after a full sunny day at the beach, great, but I can't be b...
Notes on the Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Benquo — 2022-04-06T19:34:36.093Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/notes-on-the-autobiography-of-malcolm-x-2/

The Autobiography of Malcolm X isn't just an important historical document, but skillful storytelling about the investigation of a mystery: why are white people like that?

In his description of his early life, he seems to clearly show that “imitating white privilege folkways” is an orientation white upbringing & schooling cultivates by hooking into attachment-seeking, but keeps it ambiguous whether he’s noticed this is what happened to whites too. He shows that privileged whites fetishize natural/bad/sexual/embodied blackness as their shadow, while blacks fetishize whites as status symbols. Again, unclear whether he’s noticed that whites also fetishize whites as status symbols.

Dancing

He’s clear that white people are taught to dance through internalized authoritarian rule-following, and that black people are natural dancers if they throw off that conditioning, unclear whether he’s being coy or actually hasn’t generalized to whites.

He describes his own learning to dance as a process of learning to spontaneously move to music, combined with some amount of imitation of showoff moves others were doing. I "learned" to "Lindy hop" from white people teaching steps explicitly (consistent with how he thinks white people dance), and this bears no resemblance to the process of learning to dance the Lindy hop that Malcolm X describes. It's just a totally different way of relating to one's body. I've only very recently started to regularly be able to dance simply by wanting to move to music. I had to stop fighting myself first.

Jews

Got to the part where he discovers Nation of Islam ideology (he implies he no longer believes the chronology involving the scientist Yakub deliberately breeding white people on the island of Patmos through a policy of dysgenics). When told that all white people without exception are wicked, the concrete counterexample he comes up with from his own life is Jewish. On top of that, the one European philosopher he approves of is Spinoza! (Even Nation of Islam claims that Allah sent Moses to civilize the Jews first among whites.) But he still doesn't connect the dots, at least not yet, that whiteness is unevenly distributed.

A lot of disapproval my father expressed about self-despising Jews aspiring to white gentile beauty standards (straight hair, fair skin) is nearly word for word something Malcolm X might have written about black people.

The gene...
Understanding Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem
by Rafael Harth — 2022-04-06T19:31:19.711Z

EDIT 2023/07: I recommend reading part one of this book review instead (or at least before) this post; it does a better job explaining formal systems.

This is a post I wrote back in September of 2020 and am now publishing due to the changed incentives. The idea was something like "create a short document that everyone who knows math but has never studied meta logic can read to obtain a complete understanding of what Gödel's (first) Incompleteness Theorem means". I thought this was worthwhile because said theorem may just be the most criminally misunderstood result in all of mathematics. (And also because writing tutorials like this is a great way to make sure you get it yourself!) I gave up on it at the time because it was getting too long. I've now taken out the part where we prove the theorem, and the post still needs 5000+ words, just for explaining what the heck the theorem even says.

... so I don't really expect many people to be interested, but hey, it's still easier than reading a textbook, so if for some reason you always wanted to know what the incompleteness theorem really means, or you already do know but want to test/refresh your understanding, perhaps this post is for you?

As an entry test, see if you can look at the statement below and understand why it is true, regardless of what K1 and L1 and I1 mean. If you can, you probably know enough math to proceed. (If not, you most likely don't, alas.)

(∀x(K1(x)⟹L1(x))∧∀x(L1(x)⟹I1(x)))⟹∀x(K1(x)⟹I1(x))

1. Languages and Interpretations

The most important step to approach any of this Metalogic stuff is to understand that there are two fundamentally different things: languages and interpretations.

1.1 Languages

The language world is where formulas like the one above are living. Formally, one starts with a set of symbols and defines specific rules that determine which combinations of symbols constitute proper formulas.[1] The following symbols (plus arbitrarily many variable names) are always present:[2]

{∨,∧,⟹⟸,∀,∃,=,(,),¬}

(The post assumes you know what they all mean.)

These are enough for some formulas like ∀x∃y(x=y), but there are also richer formulas such as the following:

∀x∃y((s1(0)<2x)⟹(x+2y)<2(x⋅2y))

This formula will be our running example, so we call it F. It clearly contains things that are not in our list of symbols above. We call these new things constants, predicates, and function symbols.

C

...
The Zombie Argument for Empiricists
by JonathanErhardt — 2022-04-06T19:10:29.033Z

(Target audience: Empiricists/Rationalists rejecting conceivability arguments (such as the zombie argument), no background in philosophy necessary. Goes into some philosophy of language stuff, but doesn't get technical.)

The zombie argument against physicalism about consciousness is scorned by empiricists. And – on the face of it – for good reasons: How could a priori reasoning show us anything substantive about the world? How could our cognition have evolved to reliably assess such arguments? And its premisses are assessed using intuitions – but intuitions seem epistemically dubious at best.

I think empiricists are wrong in rejecting conceivability arguments such as the zombie argument. This is my attempt to convince them that conceivability arguments 1) are compatible with and indeed necessary for empiricists philosophy, 2) don’t ever show us anything substantive about the world, and 3) are supported by evolutionary psychology and linguistics.

I will first look at a (hopefully uncontroversial) case study and then argue for 1) - 3).

The case study: Empiricists like to compare consciousness to the phenomenon of life, where initially there was reluctance to reduce the phenomenon to physical processes but eventually views shifted and now it’s the received view that we don’t have to posit a fundamental life force to explain the various observables associated with life. How did this shift happen? 2 things were required: First, scientific progress had to show how microscopic phenomena could account for a variety of macroscopic phenomena in the domain of biology. Second, we needed to realize that these macroscopic phenomena were related to life in the right way. Roughly: Microphysics explains *something* and the thing it explains must fall under the concept we’re interested in, namely “life”. The first step has to do with the world, the second with language.

How does the second step work? We never had a precise definition of “life”, and we still don’t. How then can we know whether the various macroscopic biological phenomena we’ve reductively explained are collectively equivalent to life? It turns out that although people are notoriously bad at defining their terms, they are very good at pointing out the extension of terms in various actual and hypothetical situations. This should not come as a surprise, since pointing at things and classifying them is roughly how chil...
What Twitter fixes should we advocate, now that Elon is on the board?
by Jackson Wagner — 2022-04-06T16:54:43.790Z

(Cross-posted from the EA Forum out of the Goodness of my Heart, and since the same post will often spark radically different discussions on EAF vs LessWrong.)

This week, Elon Musk revealed that he has purchased a 9% stake in Twitter, and has joined the company's board of directors. Media coverage has focused on Musk's pro-free-speech views, which will probably shape how he tries to influence Twitter. But there are also many other ways that we might hope to tweak Twitter for the long-term benefit of humanity!

Purchasing a prestigious, tastemaking institution (like a social media site, newspaper, university, or scientific journal), has repeatedly been proposed as an "EA megaproject". The common theme is:
1. We could buy influence over the "commanding heights of culture", then use that influence to either:
2a. Directly promote a rationalist worldview, like by publishing EA-flavored newspaper editorials.
2b. Generally reform and improve the rationality/functioning of those institutions, like by improving the practices of a scientific journal. (As a neutral public platform, Twitter seems best suited for this approach, rather than direct EA promotion.)

Elon Musk seems sympathetic to effective altruism, so with him on Twitter's board, we could consider Step 1 of a Twitter Megaproject partially accomplished, and get started on brainstorming specific potential reforms that Twitter could make. Personally, I think it would be cool for Twitter to add features that familiarize people with decisionmaking mechanisms like prediction markets and approval voting. But I'm sure there are other great ideas out there -- I know there have been several rationalist efforts (including this very forum!) to design social media sites that promote especially thoughtful, productive discussion. What's your take on what Twitter could do for the long-term betterment of civilization?