trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Improving rationality / scout mindset on a debate group
by Aryeh Englander — 2021-09-04T17:02:24.557Z

(Cross-posted from my Facebook wall.)

I help run a decent-sized debate group on Facebook focused on arguments for / against religion in general and Orthodox Judaism in particular (I grew up Orthodox but stopped believing around 7 years ago). I think my fellow moderators and I have done a relatively decent job of ensuring that the discussion stays (mostly, usually) respectful. But beyond respectful dialogue, I'd like to also encourage members to use better epistemic standards. Especially, I would love to get people from both sides to do adversarial collaborations, try to more often play "devil's advocate", steelman the other side's position, attempt to pass Ideological Turing Tests, etc. - basically, to try to adopt more of a "scout mindset" rather than a "soldier mindset".

I've tried directly asking people to try practicing these techniques more frequently, but with very limited success. I suppose it doesn't help that the group is explicitly a debate group - but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that's part of what attracts people to the group in the first place so I'm reluctant to change it. It also doesn't help that many people in the group (on all sides) really don't think that the people they're arguing against have anything going for their positions. We do at least have a few people in the group who really are great at scout mindset though. Better than I am, in fact - I will admit that I myself often have a lot of difficulty applying these techniques.

What are some ideas or suggestions for how I might be able to encourage better epistemic standards in this kind of group?

Group audience, if it's relevant (although probably some members of the group will disagree with these characterizations):

Most members are at least interested in reasonable, respectful intellectual discussion.
I think most but not all members are at least somewhat interested in improving their own rational thinking. Some are very interested, but even for those people I often have a hard time encouraging more of a scout mindset.
Many members are quite knowledgeable about philosophy, rational thinking, science, history, etc.; others are much less knowledgeable in many or all of those areas. (Part of this is because many members come from relatively insular Orthodox Jewish communities that strongly discourage going to college and often provide sub-par education in lower grades.)
Kids Roaming
by jefftk — 2021-09-04T14:20:02.558Z

Over the last hundred years here, there's been a clear trend down in
how far kids can wander at a given age. I think a lot of this comes
from the

demographic
transition: with fewer kids and lower child mortality, previously
acceptable risks become less so. On the other hand, I think it's
really good for kids to

learn how to
be independent, and going where you want is an important
component.

Let's say we started allowing our two older kids (7y and 5y) to wander
farther from the house: what are the risks?

I think the biggest risk is cars. When my kids were learning to walk
I taught them to stay out of the
street, and more recently we've been practicing crossing. They're
now to the point where I can tell them "cross when you think it's safe",
and almost all the time they do it correctly. Unfortunately, "almost"
isn't good enough here: they need to have the skill completely solid
before I'm happy for them to do it unsupervised.

In cases where they don't have to cross any streets alone, like walking to school or walking around
the block, as long as I know they're going it's fine. But let's say
that in a few months, perhaps around when they're 8y and 6y, they're
ready to cross our neighborhood streets together. They could
potentially walk to the playground, linear
park, and various friends houses, all within a few blocks. What
are the risks then?

Potentially they could:

Get lost.

Get hurt to where they need help.

Get kidnapped.

Get stopped by the police or others, who might think they're too
young to be out on their own.

I don't think any of these are very likely: they're generally cautious
and have good judgement, and if something did go wrong they'd only be
about 1/8mi from the house.

I do wonder whether technology might mean we could give them more
freedom for a given level of safety, however, with a cell phone or GPS
watch? Something where they could contact us if they needed help, and
we could see where they were. Has anyone tried anything like this?
Nonspecific discomfort
by cousin_it — 2021-09-04T14:15:22.636Z

I think people can often be unhappy not because they have major problems (like an illness or a divorce), but due to "nonspecific discomfort", which arises from many small reasons. Most of the time it stays below the radar, but there's one particular way it can lead to large harm: you feel a gradual realization, over the course of days or weeks, that your life is missing some important specific thing, and set out to obtain it. In fact the thing is unrelated to the reasons you're unhappy, you just latched onto it randomly; and more often not, it ends up harming you instead of helping.

Here's some examples that made this idea clear in my mind:

Musicians often talk about "gear acquisition syndrome". Basically you see a shiny new guitar in a storefront, and it starts to occupy your thoughts, giving you an illusion that it will bring you joy. Then you buy it, and no joy results. The truth is you had some other discomfort going on, unrelated to the amount of gear you own, and it coalesced around a random idea: "I want this thing".

I know a few people who've had plastic surgeries that didn't go well; it gets so bad that their new look literally makes me want to leave the room. But they themselves never seem to notice the problem. It feels like their nonspecific discomfort randomly coalesced around a different idea: "if I change my looks in this way, that will make my life better".

Copycat suicides. For most people, hearing about a suicide on the news isn't reason enough to push them over the edge. But in society there's always a certain percentage of people whose nonspecific discomfort is so high, that they can latch onto even this idea and imagine it's a solution to some or other imaginary problem.

Mass movements, and savior complex. Hoffer's book is the best source on this and basically agrees with my experiences: the people joining mass movements often do that because they're unhappy with themselves, and use the movement as a substitute for the things missing from their life.

Now, it's true that my idea is a bit like phlogiston theory: "there's this nebulous thing and it's the reason behind all of life's problems". But I'm not actually proposing to explain all problems, only some. And the easiest way to judge the idea is to try it for yourself, make a measurement of your own "nonspecific discomfort", and recognize which more specific problems and solutions your ...
Hope and False Hope
by TekhneMakre — 2021-09-04T09:46:23.513Z

I'm trying to figure out why people don't want to really consider cryonics as an option. E.g., maybe they never really consider anything; maybe life sucks for them and they don't want to live; maybe they are afraid of future justice; maybe they are afraid of social punishment for doing weird stuff (woo-oo-oooh, Walt Disney's severed head, woo-oo-oo-ooh); maybe they don't have the money; maybe they judge that to even reconsider whether it's actually a scam is to be scammed; maybe they don't think humanity will last long enough; maybe they don't think it'll ever be feasible to reconstitute a person via superintelligent nanotechnology from frozen brain tissue (what a ridiculous opinion, lol). Stated reasons often include death being good, appropriate, comprehensible, poetic, expected, natural, etc., but I don't feel like I can yet make any empathetic or logical sense out of that response, and it always strikes me as a cover for something else, though I don't know.
Another hypothesis I hadn't crystallized before, as a sort of generalization of the fear of scams: maybe they are afraid of taking on False Hope. Some terms:
- Having a Wish (that X) or Wishing (for X) is stance of being ready to take whatever opportunities are given to make the world be a certain way (be X). A Wish is ambiguously either the Wishing stance, or X itself (so you could reach a Wish).
- A person's Life-force is their energy, attention, effort, care, thought, problem-solving, optimization, interest, planning, consideration, orientation, etc.
- A Hope is a way of comporting yourself that's well-suited for pursuing a Wish that you believe you can reach. Someone with Hope in a Wish for X will invest their Life-force towards bringing about X. Footnotes: [1] [2]. Hope also ambiguously refers to elements of a strategy generated by Hope, which can also be a source of Hope (e.g. "This treaty is our last hope for peace."). [3]
- A False Hope is a Hope that won't actually bring about the Wish. [4] [5] False Hope is terrifying because Hope is powerful: if you'd go past the edges of the Earth to save a loved one, you might burn up all your Life-force for nothing on a False Hope, or worse, put your Life-force towards ends that are worse than nothing.
Some people exploit and create False Hope. Hope for money attracts pyramid schemers, Hope for growth in production via capital attracts predatory lenders, Hope ...
Is LessWrong dead without Cox’s theorem?
by  — 2021-09-04T05:45:32.781Z

Cox’s theorem seems to be pretty important to you guys but it’s looking kind of weak right now with Halpern’s counter-example so I was wondering: what implications does Cox’s theorem not being true have for LessWrong? There seem to be very few discussions in LessWrong about alternative formulations for fixing probability theory as extended logic in light of Halpern’s paper. I find this quite surprising given how much you all talk about Jaynes-Cox probability theory. I asked a question about it myself, but to no avail: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x7NyhgenYe4zAQ4Kc/has-van-horn-fixed-cox-s-theorem

Thanks!
[Review] Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
by lsusr — 2021-09-03T22:24:03.396Z

This post contains spoilers for Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and All You Need is Kill (2004).

Spoiler-Free tl;dr

Watch Edge of Tomorrow up until the scene at the dam. Skip the rest of the film and read All You Need is Kill instead.

Spoilerific Review

Edge of tomorrow is Groundhog Day (1993) except instead of taking place in a small town in the 90s it takes places on the Invasion of Normandy in a future war against aliens.

Act 1

In the first scene, Tom Cruise goes through his day normally. He dies and comes back to life. He relives the same day over and over until he gets used to how the time loop works. At the end of Act 1, Tom Cruise discovers that war heroine Emily Blunt used to have the time travel power too and they team up.

Act 2

Emily Blunt trains Tom Cruise to fight. They fight the aliens over and over again, getting a little better each time.

Act 3

In Act 3 Tom Cruise loses his time travel power. Together, he and Emily Blunt have only one shot to kill the boss alien.

Act 1 and Act 2 make sense. They're structurally identical to Groundhog Day. But Act 3 is awful. This is a time travel movie. In Act 3 there's no time travelling! It turns into a generic action flick.

What happened?

All You Need is Kill

Edge of Tomorrow was originally based on the Japanese light novel All You Need is Kill. Act 1 and Act 2 are the same. I hypothesize Act 3 was modified for American audiences.

In All You Need is Kill, Emily Blunt never loses her time travelling power. She fights alongside Tom Cruise as an equal. They kill the boss alien together.

But the story doesn't end there.

In All You Need is Kill there is a detailed explanation about how the time travel works. To escape each time loop our heroes need to kill the alien loopers, leaving only themselves. But since both Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt are both loopers, only one of them can escape the final time loop. One of them has to die.

So at the end of the story there's a big epic duel to the death between our two heroes who love each other and have spent the entire story training and fighting alongside each other.

That is how you end a time travel samurai epic.
Why has the replication crisis affected RCT-studies but not observational studies?
by dynomight — 2021-09-03T21:43:36.593Z

Everyone here is probably familiar with the reproducibility crisis in psychology and various other fields. I've recently been thinking there's something very odd about all this. Namely, the reproducibility crisis seems to be almost entirely based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In terms of statistical design, these are the absolute gold-standard! Yet, my impression is that the majority of results in the social sciences are based on observational studies, not RCTs. While there's usually at least some attempt to control for confounders, I feel like all the problems that contribute to the reproducibility crisis so far are 10x worse here: there's so many more degrees of freedom in how you could set up the analysis.

Is my perception that the reproducibility crisis hasn't really gotten to observational studies yet correct? If so, why not? And am I right to think that if/when these start getting checked, they are likely to be found even more unreliable?

I find it so puzzling that these seem to have mostly escaped scrutiny so far, and wonder if there's a whole movement somewhere that I just haven't encountered.
The Most Important Century: Sequence Introduction
by HoldenKarnofsky — 2021-09-03T20:19:27.917Z

[Moderators' note: with permission, I am crossposting Holden Karnofsky's Most Important Century series, originally published on his blog. In my (Ruby's) opinion, this may be the most compelling extant write-up that argues we are living in an exceptionally important time.

Posts in the series will be published every 4th day until we are caught up, then will be posted here as they are published. Links in this roadmap will be updated as posts are published to LessWrong. Eager readers are encouraged to "read ahead" in the original.]

This is a roadmap/"extended table of contents" for a series of posts arguing for a good chance that we're in the most important century of all time.

I think we have good reason to believe that the 21st century could be the most important century ever for humanity. I think the most likely way this would happen would be via the development of advanced AI systems that lead to explosive growth and scientific advancement, getting us more quickly than most people imagine to a deeply unfamiliar future.

A bit more specifically,

1

I think there is a good chance that:

During the century we're in right now, we will develop technologies that cause us to transition to a state in which humans as we know them are no longer the main force in world events. This is our last chance to shape how that transition happens.
Whatever the main force in world events is (perhaps digital people, misaligned AI, or something else) will create highly stable civilizations that populate our entire galaxy for billions of years to come. The transition taking place this century could shape all of that.

I think it's very unclear whether this would be a good or bad thing. What matters is that it could go a lot of different ways, and we have a chance to affect that.

I believe the above possibility doesn't get enough attention, discussion, or investment, particularly from people whose goal is to make the world better. By writing about it, I'd like to either help change that, or gain more opportunities to get criticized and change my mind.

This post serves as a summary/roadmap for an 11-post series arguing these points (and the posts themselves are often effectively summaries of longer analyses by others). I will add links as I put out posts in the series.

Roadmap

Our wildly

2

important era

All possible views about humanity's long-term future are wild

argues that two simple observations - ...
All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild
by HoldenKarnofsky — 2021-09-03T20:19:06.453Z

This is the first post in the Most Important Century sequence. For more info and a roadmap for the series, see the sequence introduction.

Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"

Summary

In a series of posts starting with this one, I'm going to argue that the 21st century could see our civilization develop technologies allowing rapid expansion throughout our currently-empty galaxy. And thus, that this century could determine the entire future of the galaxy for tens of billions of years, or more.
This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time. I illustrate this with a timeline of the galaxy. (On a personal level, this "wildness" is probably the single biggest reason I was skeptical for many years of the arguments presented in this series. Such claims about the significance of the times we live in seem "wild" enough to be suspicious.)
But I don't think it's really possible to hold a non-"wild" view on this topic. I discuss alternatives to my view: a "conservative" view that thinks the technologies I'm describing are possible, but will take much longer than I think, and a "skeptical" view that thinks galaxy-scale expansion will never happen. Each of these views seems "wild" in its own way.
Ultimately, as hinted at by the

Fermi paradox

, it seems that our species is simply in a wild situation.

Before I continue, I should say that I don't think humanity (or some digital descendant of humanity) expanding throughout the galaxy would necessarily be a good thing - especially if this prevents other life forms from ever emerging. I think it's quite hard to have a confident view on whether this would be good or bad. I'd like to keep the focus on the idea that our situation is "wild." I am not advocating excitement or glee at the prospect of expanding throughout the galaxy. I am advocating seriousness about the enormous potential stakes.

My view

This is the first in a series of pieces about the hypothesis that we live in the most important century for humanity.

In this series, I'm going to argue that there's a good chance of a productivity explosion by 2100, which could quickly lead to what one might call a "technologically mature"

1

civilization. That would mean that:

We'd be able to start sending spacecraft throughout the galaxy and beyond.
These spacecraft could mi

...
Book review: Shut Out
by PeterMcCluskey — 2021-09-03T19:07:31.446Z
Link: http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2021/09/02/shut-out/

Book review: Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession
and Crippled Our Economy, by Kevin
Erdmann.

Why did the US have an unusually bad recession in
2008, followed by years
of disappointing growth?

Many influential people attribute it to the 2004-2006 housing bubble,
and the ensuing subprime mortgage
crisis, with an
implication that people bought too many houses. Erdmann says: no, the
main problems were due to obstacles which prevented the building and
buying of houses.

He mainly argues against two competing narratives that are popular among
economists:

increased availability of credit fueled a buying binge among people
who had trouble affording homes.

there was a general and unusual increase in the demand for homes.

Reframing the Housing Bubble

There was a homebuilding boom, somewhat catering to those who wanted
lower-than-average priced houses.

There was also an important surge in prices for houses, which was mildly
concentrated on houses priced below average.

Many pundits put those two together, to conclude that the boom was
caused by loose credit, which fueled purchases by people who couldn't
quite afford a house.

Erdmann shows that those two patterns were mostly happening in very
different places, and the pundits are confused because they're not
separating out data for those places.

Four Categories of Regions

We are bidding up little condos and bungalows in the metropolitan
enclaves of privilege, where high incomes are available but only to a
limited number of families. ... Homes haven't become trophies.
They've become toll gates barring the way to employment.

The biggest surge in prices was in cheaper-than-average houses in a few
big cities. It was caused by massive demand from workers who could earn
unusual incomes there, because that's where unusually productive
industries became concentrated.

New housing was largely outlawed there. So prices rose because housing
became more valuable there. That generated an important refugee crisis,
as rents rose faster than many renters' income, and as homeowners
cashed in on windfall gains. (I don't quite endorse Erdmann's use of
the word crisis here, but I'll use it for lack of a better term.)

Erdmann calls these locations closed access
cities
(CACs). Soaring prices in these cities coincided with a population
decrease, which strongly points to a housing shortage as a leading cause
of those prices.

Er...
Why the technological singularity by AGI may never happen
by hippke — 2021-09-03T14:19:54.350Z

Artificial general intelligence is often assumed to improve exponentially through recursive self-improvement, resulting in a technological singularity. There are hidden assumptions in this model which should be made explicit so that their probability can be assessed.

Let us assume that:

The Landauer limit holds, meaning that:

Reversible computations are impractical
Minimum switching energy is of order 10−21 J per operation
Thus, energy cost at kT of order 1 EUR per 1022 FLOPs (details)

General intelligence scales sublinear with compute:

Making a machine calculate the same result in half the time costs more than twice the energy:

Parallelization is never perfect (Amdahl's law)
Increasing frequency results in a quadratic power increase (P∝fV2)

Similarly, cloning entire agents does not speed up most tasks linearly with the number of agents ("You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.")
Improving algorithms will have a limit at some point

My prior on (1) is 90% and on (2) about 80%.

Taken together, training ever larger models may become prohibitively expensive (or financially unattractive) for marginal gains. As an example, take an AGI with an intelligence level of 200 points, consuming 1 kW of power. Increasing its intelligence by a few points may come at 10x the power requirement. Mock visualization:

If these assumptions hold, then the exponential increase in capabilities would likely break down before a singularity is reached.