trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Theory Of Change As A Hypothesis: Choosing A High-Impact Path When You’re Uncertain
by lynettebye — 2020-11-28T04:38:19.981Z

This post appeared first on the EA Coaching blog.

Some life paths are well mapped out. If you want to be a doctor, there is a straightforward path through undergrad, med school, and residency (at least in the US). These goals may require a lot of work, but it’s relatively easy to figure out what your next step is.

However, many cause areas that effective altruists focus on don’t have clear paths to success. You need to figure out what to do for yourself if you’re doing global priorities research, or working on pandemic preparedness, or founding a new charity. Similarly, if you don’t yet know what you want to work on, you have to figure out what on earth you’re going to do (or off earth, if that’s your jam).

Really excelling means needing to figure out your own path to success. If it was easy, then many people would follow that path. With that much competition, you would be hard pressed to be one of the best. Hence, you’re more likely to have an impact in neglected career paths because it’s less likely that someone else would have done whatever you did. Similarly, within careers where the steps are fairly straightforward, it often takes doing something

unusual

to have a large impact.

This creates a catch 22. If you know exactly what needs to be done to have an impact, then so do most other people with similar or higher levels of experience. So someone else is more likely to already be doing it. And your counterfactual impact is lower, particularly if you’re fairly junior in your field.

If you don’t know what needs to be done to accomplish some high-level goal, then counterfactually other people are also less likely to, but you’re guessing in the dark about what you should be doing.

So what can you do?

The first step is to form a hypothesis about what is valuable for you to do. What is your best guess about how to cause the change you want to see in the world? I call this hypothesis your theory of change. It is your best guess about what you should do to actually

try

moving directly towards your

goal

. You can see examples of theories of change

here

and

here

.

You don’t need to get your theory of change perfect right away (and you probably won’t). In fact, it’s best to lightly hold several hypotheses when you’re highly uncertain. You can start with your best guess and then get more information to improve these hypotheses.

For exa...
Overcoming Paradox of Choice Through Random Selection
by vernamcipher — 2020-11-28T04:27:55.657Z

Epistemic Status: Personal anecdote with reasonable sounding theory.

Background

I love to read. There is no activity I like more than it, or one I want to do as often. I’ve been blessed with an intensely vivid imagination, and twenty minutes spent reading a well-written short story can elevate my mood through the whole rest of a day. For that reason, you would think I would try to make sure my reading was as high-quality as possible.

At the beginning of 2020 I set out to find out just how much of my reading was high-quality. I started a spreadsheet to make a record of everything I read during the year. Excluding only news articles (which I began the year with a plan to avoid as much as possible – HA!), I recorded every fiction and non-fiction book, graphic novel, pen and paper RPG rulebook/supplement, and essay I finished, noting the author, title, and date of completion. From the data I hoped to be able to determine roughly much time I was spending reading worthwhile things, and conversely just roughly how much time I was wasting on things that were not worthwhile – on the fair assumption that if I was reading X at time T, I could have substituted reading Y at time T.

I should say a little about what I mean by ‘worthwhile reading’. When I say a piece of writing is worthwhile, I mean that it possesses at least one of the following traits:

(a)	It is intrinsically enjoyable to read (every short story, full-length book whether fiction or non-fiction, and graphic novel met this criterion, as I would not have finished it otherwise), or

(b)	I learned a new concept or mental model from reading it (for example, the fourth essay I read about an emergency room struggling through the spring surge of Covid-19 cases was not worthwhile on this metric, nor the fifth article about how the U.S. government’s pandemic response was dysfunctional, but Tomas Pueyo’s “Coronavirus, The Hammer and the Dance” or The Zvi’s “Immoral Mazes” sequence was)

Trait (b) is a bit vague, but like (a) I think it is one of those “you know it when you feel it” things. Anyway, my goal was to ensure as much of my reading during the year matched at least one of the two traits.

I collected some preliminary results on November 1st and was a disappointed. During that span I read 15 non-fiction books, 15 novels, 33 short stories, 42 graphic novels, 1 gamebook, and 617 essay and articles. I wasn’t so much disap...
The Mutant Game - Rounds 31 to 90
by lsusr — 2020-11-27T21:05:19.787Z

Rounds 31-50

Silly 2 Bot dies in round 31.
AbstractSpyTreeBot dies in round 37.
"Winner against low constant bots" dies in round 46.

The NPCs are dead. Chaos Army is dead. It's a clone world now.

Rounds 51-90

Two CloneBots die in their game of rock, paper scissors.

Karmabot dies on round 56, before deploying its payload.
CloneBot dies on round 79, before deploying its payload.

This CloneBot's change in population growth around round 75 is suspicious.

It could be emergent behavior from the competition between the clones or it could be indicative of something deeper going on. I glanced through the source code in this particular CloneBot's payload. One comment jumped out at me.

# Neo: I know Kung Fu.

I will take a closer look at A Very Social Bot's source code next week.

Everything so far

Today's Obituary

Bot	Team	Summary	Round
Silly 2 Bot	NPCs	Always returns 2.	31
AbstractSpyTreeBot	Chaos Army	Open source simulator.	37
Winner against low constant bots	Chaos Army	Starts with 2. Then always returns 5 - opponent_previous_move.	46
Karma Bot	Clone Army	bot genus: CloneBot ¶ bot species: KarmaBot ¶ Karmabot plays a forgiving style of "tit-for-tat", but tracks the opponent's Karma level ¶ each defect move (opponent plays something that triggers a 0 payout) costs them a Karma point ¶ (we only start counting karma after symmetry has been broken between the 2 players) ¶ karmabot retaliates immediately against defection, but will relent a few turns later to break defect-defect cycles ¶ however, this forgiving attitude is only maintained if the opponent's karma score is above zero ¶ if the opponent has defected too many times, and its karma is negative, KarmaBot simply plays tit-for-tat ¶ this puts a fairly small bound on the amount by which the opposing bot can do better than KarmaBot	56
CloneBot	Clone Army	CloneBot's payload contains a hand-coded decision tree with 11 terminal nodes.	79

The next installment of this series will be posted on November 30, 2020.
Notes on Good Temper
by David Gross — 2020-11-27T16:21:15.159Z

This post examines the virtue of good temper. It is meant mostly as an exploration of what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing 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 on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is good temper?

“To bear trials with a calm mind
robs misfortune of its strength and burden.”
—Seneca[1]

Good temper is the proper regulation of anger in particular. It may be best described by contrasting it with its opposite, which goes under names like “volatility,” “fury,” “wrath,” “hot-headedness,” “seething,” “flying off the handle,” and such. If you suffer from any of that, then even if you are generally level-headed, when you are provoked to anger you no longer make wise and sensible decisions but instead act rashly in ways that you would otherwise avoid.

If you have good temper, you keep your wits about you even when you are angry or have cause to be angry, and the quality of your decisions does not suffer as a result.

(Something about on-line interactions seems to easily provoke “flame wars” and other counterproductive displays of anger. Internet trolls play social media like a video game in which they score points by provoking other people into pointless displays of rage. So we would be wise to be especially on our guard about letting our anger interfere with the wisdom of how we behave on-line.)

Related virtues

Good temper is related to poise, in the sense of being unflappable. Someone with good temper is well-composed, stays cool, rolls with the punches, and doesn’t get thrown off their game.

Sometimes good temper is subsumed under temperance and self control—in such a scheme the temperate person is not prone to extremes of anger, and the person with self control does not let anger run away with them even if it does rise to extremes.

Zac Cogley calls the virtue concerned with anger “patience.”[2] (My own page on the virtue of patience gives it a wider subject matter, including for example boredom, wait, or pain.)

Good temper is in tension with righteous indignation (or it may be that ultimately they resolve to the same thing: being angry in the right amount, toward the...
Final Version Perfected: An Underused Execution Algorithm
by willbradshaw — 2020-11-27T10:43:02.796Z

TLDR

Final Version Perfected

(FVP) is a highly effective algorithm for deciding which tasks from your To-Do lists to do in what order.
The design of the algorithm makes it far more efficient than exhaustive ranking, while (in my experience) far more effective than just reading through the tasks and picking one out.
FVP is most useful when you have a large number of tasks to choose from, don’t have time to do all of them, and are initially unsure about which is best.
I find FVP very effective at overcoming psychological issues like indecision, procrastination, or

psychological aversion to particular tasks

.
Currently there are limited online tools available, and I mostly use FVP with paper lists. Ideas (or tools) for better online execution of FVP would be very valuable to me.

Introduction

Execution is the

Last Mile Problem

of productivity infrastructure. You can put as much effort as you like into organising your goals, organising your To-Do lists, organising your calendar, but sooner or later you will be presented with more than one thing you could reasonably be doing with your time. When that happens, you will need some sort of method for choosing what that thing will be, and actually getting started.

Most people, I think, face this problem by either just doing the thing that is top-of-mind or looking through their To-Do list and picking something out. This works fine when the next thing to do is obvious, and you have no problems getting started on it. But when you have many potential things to do and aren’t sure which is best, or when you kind of know what the best next thing is but are avoiding it for one reason or another, you need a better system.

That system needs to be quick to execute, easy to remember, and effective at actually having you do the best next task. It needs to be robust to your psychological weaknesses, minimising procrastination, indecision, and ugh fields. It needs to be efficient, requiring as little work as possible to identify the most valuable task.

Enter

Final Version Perfected

.

The FVP Algorithm

The algorithm for executing tasks under FVP is pretty simple. You can find a description of it by the designer

here

, but here’s my version:

Put all the tasks you have to choose from into one big unsorted list.
Mark the first item on the list. Don’t do it yet.
For each subsequent item on the list, ask yourself, "Do I want to do this task more than the l

...
[AN #126]: Avoiding wireheading by decoupling action feedback from action effects
by Rohin Shah — 2020-11-26T23:20:05.290Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

Please note that while I work at DeepMind, this newsletter represents my personal views and not those of my employer.

HIGHLIGHTS

Avoiding Tampering Incentives in Deep RL via Decoupled Approval (Ramana Kumar, Jonathan Uesato et al) (summarized by Rohin): Current-RF optimization (AN #71) shows that to avoid tampering with the reward, we can have an agent that evaluates plans it makes according to the current reward function, rather than the reward after tampering, and this is sufficient to remove any incentive for tampering. However, that work required the ability to evaluate actions and/or plans using the "current reward". How might we implement this in deep RL algorithms in practice?

Let's take a simple example: suppose for an autonomous personal assistant, every once in a while we query the user for their satisfaction, write it to a file, and then use that file to train the assistant. Then with normal RL the assistant is incentivized to "tamper" by rewriting the contents of the file to show maximal satisfaction. In this context, current-RF optimization would say that before rewriting the contents, the agent should ask the user whether that's a good idea. However, we can't ask the user about every action, and our agent does need to take some actions in order to explore the environment.

The authors formalize this as a Corrupted Feedback MDP, in which the feedback which the agent gets is corrupted in some states. They assume that the human gives approval feedback, which they formalize as the advantage function. (The advantage is the long-term value of the queried action relative to the average action for the current state.) This ensures that the agent only needs to myopically select the action with highest approval, which means we can run any old deep RL algorithm with the discount set to zero. However, this doesn't solve the problem, because with deep RL the feedback is given after the action is executed, at which point it has already been corrupted (in our example, the file already claims the user is max...
Nash Score for Voting Techniques
by abramdemski — 2020-11-26T19:29:31.187Z

This is a follow-up to my thoughts on voting methods. As I discussed there, I worry that a utilitarian score for voting techniques, called VSE, doesn't capture everything important. In particular, I worry that it doesn't sufficiently push toward compromise solutions. I also raised several other concerns, but that's the concern I'll be discussing here.

The basic idea here will be to use the Nash bargaining solution to define "equitable" outcomes. I mentioned in my previous post that there were two conflicting ways of pointing out what's wrong with VSE: (a) it doesn't push toward equitable outcomes, (b) it doesn't push against transfers of wealth. An equitabillity-first solution would push toward wealth redistribution to reduce inequality. An anti-transfer solution would instead seek to uphold property rights more, decrease taxes, etc. Interestingly, the current proposal ends up somewhere between the two.

As I've described before, the Nash bargaining solution first shifts utilities so that each person's zero point is their best alternative to negotiating an agreement (called the BATNA point). Then, all utilities are multiplied together. This has the advantage of being invariant to meaningless transformations of people's utility functions, unlike just summing up utilities. (It also has a number of other advantages which Nash outlined.)

We can think of the BATNA point as the utility of "vote of no confidence" -- some electoral reformists propose that "no confidence" should be added to all ballots, representing the possibility of rejecting all candidates and putting together a new election.

Just as score voting would maximize VSE best if voters were entirely honest, we can design a voting method which would maximize Nash Score if voters were perfectly honest. The ballot is exactly like score voting plus a score for "no confidence":

Fill in one bubble in each row.	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Alice	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O
Bob	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O
Carol	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O
No Confidence	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O	O

However, instead of adding up all the scores to find the winner, we proceed as follows:

Subtract the "no confidence" score from the rest of the scores, on each ballot.
Eliminate any candidates who, on any ballot, score below zero. If all candidates are eliminated in this way, "no confidence" wins.
Score the remaining candidates by multiplying together all their scores on individual ballots.

This voting method is, of course, patently ...
Notes on Endurance
by David Gross — 2020-11-26T18:44:48.997Z

This post examines the virtue of endurance. It is meant mostly as an exploration of what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing 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 on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is endurance?

Endurance is the virtue exhibited by someone who characteristically puts up with adversity, pain, discomfort, hardship, or suffering in a way that allows them to maintain their poise. To be endurance-as-a-virtue, you must be enduring because you have the confidence that you can endure; in other words, you aren’t just hopelessly enduring because you have no choice but to endure.

Related virtues

There are several other virtues that are closely related to endurance or that are dependent on it:

A near-synonym for endurance is fortitude.
When you both endure and do not let whatever it is you are enduring distract you from your worthy projects, you exhibit persistence, perseverance, steadfastness, or tenacity. It’s also trendy these days to use the words grit or sisu to describe this.
Being resistant to the negative effects of adversity (to the extent where maybe you do not even feel you have to endure anything) is hardiness or toughness.
The ability to recover well from adversity is resilience.
When you both endure and don’t get bent about whatever it is you’re enduring, you’re also exhibiting forbearance or patience.
In the context of physical exertion, endurance is sometimes called stamina (sometimes this term is also used analogously in terms like “mental stamina”).
To endure something it helps to have hope/optimism that it can be endured.

Aristotle pointed out parallels between endurance and self control: Self-control is resisting the temptation of things that seem immediately appealing (“I can do without that”); endurance is resisting the discouragement of things that seem immediately uncomfortable (“I can put up with that”). It can be difficult to distinguish them in some cases: is the regretful alcoholic reaching for the bottle because they cannot resist the temptation of a pleasing drink, or because they cannot endure the discomfort of withdrawal?

What good is it?

“The Roma

...
Small Habits Shape Identity: How I became someone who exercises
by adamShimi — 2020-11-26T14:55:57.622Z

This morning, I lingered in my bed until late. Despite that, I went for a run. It started okay, but upgraded to great after a few minutes. Running felt good, natural, what I should be doing right now. I even went for a longer path than initially planned, just because I wanted to.

This feeling of adequacy, of doing something natural, when exercising of all things, would have baffled the Me from a year ago. Not that I stay inside all the time; walking around is one of my favorite things to do. But exercise is different. Exercise is hard, and intentional, and sweaty, and it makes you feel like shit. I was not someone who exercised.

I am now. I exercise 6 days a week, every day but Monday. Sometimes I miss, but I go back to it soon after. And this happened thanks to my habits.

The Power of Habits

Atomic Habits by James Clear is my go-to book about habits. It's every thing I like for a productivity book: well-written and straight to the point, with clear actionable advice and warning that it doesn't apply to everything. If you're interested in habits, read it.

But two ideas struck with me long after finishing the book: habits make identity, and even small habits count.

Identity and Habits

James Clear has a great one-liner (out of many) about this:

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

Voting theory issues aside (what's the VSE of my internal voting system?), this idea gives a clear way to influence your identity: do what the person you want to be would do. Want to be a writer? Writer writes. So write. Want to be someone who exercises? Then exercise. Clear calls these identity-based habits. Another way to put it is that you're changing your baseline. If you're writing a bit every day, then what feels weird is if you don't write. Same for playing the piano or exercising.

Once identity is changed, it becomes easier to put productivity and improvement systems in place -- you stop getting in your own way. Such systems then deliver outcomes. So instead of focusing on outcomes, one should shape her identity, and then her systems. Outcomes will follow

This worked tremendously well for me. After starting my exercising habit last year, I felt a real shift in my identity, from someone who doesn't exercise to someone who does. In turn, this helped me to build a system for improving my physical shape, and I'm feeling the outcomes one year later...