trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What's the big deal about Bayes' Theorem?
by AVoropaev — 2021-01-26T06:08:45.188Z

I guess that this kind of question gets asked (and answered) a lot. But I've tried to read a few posts here about Bayes' Theorem and they seem to talk about slightly different things than the question that is bothering me. Maybe I should've read a few more, but since I'm also interested in how people use this theorem in their everyday life, I've decided to ask the question anyway.
Bayes' Theorem is a (not very) special case of this nameless theorem:

If D, E and F are mutually-exclusive events with non-zero probabilities d, e and f respectively, then dd+e=dd+f×(d+f)d+e.

Which is true because that's how real numbers work. To translate this theorem into more familiar form, you can simply replace D with A∧B, E with ¬A∧B and F with A∧¬B and look up the definition of P(A|B), which is P(A∧B)P(A∧B)+P(¬A∧B).

You might notice that this theorem is not exactly hard to prove. It should probably be obvious to anybody who understood the definition of probability space in university. You don't need to understand probability spaces that well either -- you can boil down (losing some generality in the process) everything to this theorem:

If D, E and F are non-intersecting figures with non-zero areas d, e and f, drawn inside rectangle with area 1, then dd+e=dd+f×(d+f)d+e.

You might think of the rectangle as a target you are shooting and of D, E and F as some of the places on the target your bullet can hit.
And you can boil it down even further, losing almost all of the generality, but keeping most of the applicability to real-life scenarios.

If D, E and F are non-empty sets with d, e and f elements respectively, then dd+e=dd+f×(d+f)d+e.

Okay, so I think that Bayes' Theorem is very simple. Do I think that it is useless? Not at all -- it is used all the time. Perhaps, it is used all the time in part because it is so simple. So we have a mathematical concept that is easy to use, easy to understand (if you know a bit about probabilities) and there are many cases, when it gives counterintuitive (but correct) results. So why I am not happy with declaring it the Best Thing in the World? Well, if you put it that way, maybe I am. But there still are many other mathematical concepts that fit the bill.

For example, the Bayes' Theorem tells us something about conditional probabilities. There is a related concept of independent event...
New Empty Units
by jefftk — 2021-01-26T03:00:03.153Z

Discussing housing policy in left-wing spaces I often run into an
argument which is, essentially "building more units doesn't help with
the housing shortage because so many will be bought by speculators
with no intention of living there." This view, however, implies
there's an excellent opportunity to get a ton of housing built at the
expense of these speculators, enough to bring down the cost of housing
and transfer enormous wealth from speculators to everyone else.

Here's a recent example, Nathan
Robinson writing in Current Affairs:

There is no necessary economic reason why increasing the total number
of housing units in a city helps make housing more affordable for poor
residents. Consider the pencil towers. Let's say that in order to
build one, an early 20th century building full of lower-middle class
residents was purchased, the residents evicted, the building
flattened. There were 30 single-family units in the old building. Our
new pencil tower is 100 floors high and has 100 units. All of our
pencil tower's units are full of state-of-the-art appliances and
high-end fixtures, and cost $2,000,000 each. They are swiftly bought
up, 20 by rich people who live in the city, 30 by rich people lured to
the city by its new pencil tower, and 50 by rich people who have no
intention of living in the city but think pencil tower condos are an
asset worth owning in a swiftly-gentrifying city.

While I don't think this hypothetical is realistic, especially in its
proportions, I want to dig deeper into its implications. Let's say
we build this tower of 100 units, funded by rich people. Then we let
developers keep building, and get dozens or hundreds of towers like
this, each one with 3x the units there were before, and all at no
expense to the public. At some point, these "rich people who have no
intention of living in the city" will realize that their investment
units aren't so special after all, and the bubble will pop. Costs
will fall dramatically, since there will be far more "luxury" units
than people who can afford luxury prices.

What about the people who were living in the buildings before they
get rebuilt 3x bigger? Unfortunately, we are already losing cheap
housing quickly. Developers buy old cheap housing, gut it, and turn it
into fancy condos, all without increasing capacity. Building taller
is much more profitable, however, so if ...
Notes on Forgiveness
by David Gross — 2021-01-26T02:05:35.651Z

This post examines the virtues of forgiveness, mercy, clemency, and epieikeia. I mostly explore what other people have learned about these virtues, rather express my own opinions about them, 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. I hope it helps people who want to know more about these virtues and how to nurture them.

Forgiveness in particular has become Oprahfied as a self-help cure-all in recent years—it is not just good for your soul but “can reap huge rewards for your health, lowering the risk of heart attack; improving cholesterol levels and sleep; and reducing pain, blood pressure, and levels of anxiety, depression and stress.”[1] This trend has gone so far that a backlash began and now there is also a self-help cure-all centered on cultivating and nurturing your grudges.

Different people mean very different things by “forgiveness” so for that virtue I want to spend some time exploring why that is, what the different facets of forgiveness are, and how some people emphasize some over others.

What are these virtues?

“Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” ―Nietzsche[2]

You exercise mercy when you have the power and inclination to harm or punish someone else, and you refrain from doing so. Sometimes mercy tempers justice (I would be in my rights to have you arrested, but I won’t), but sometimes it has nothing to do with justice or can even temper injustice (kill all the men, but spare the women & children). Mercy isn’t necessarily even all that nice. For example, it might be called an act of mercy to warn people in a village to evacuate before you bombard it, even though by bombarding it you are harming it. Or, it might be called an act of mercy to give a condemned prisoner a last cigarette or to offer them a blindfold, even though you ultimately mean them harm.

Clemency typically applies only to judgement or punishment (not, in other words, to more arbitrary harm). You offer clemency to someone when you cut them slack over their wrongdoing: judging them less severely and inflicting less severe consequences, letting it slide. This term is used in a legal context to describe reduced legal punishments or the executive pardon power. Sometimes “leniency” and “indulgence” are also used in this sense. A pardon ...
Qualia Research Institute: History & 2021 Strategy
by andzuck — 2021-01-25T21:46:38.876Z

Key Points

Theoretical & empirical work on emotional valence is Qualia Research Institute’s core research focus. At a high level, Qualia Research Institute (QRI) works to formulate universal theories of valence[1], test those theories experimentally, and build non-invasive neurotechnology that reliably produces large positive valence effects.

QRI has formed partnerships to work with clinical data from psychedelic studies at King's College London, Imperial College London, and the National Institute of Mental Health of the Czech Republic.

QRI is collaborating with researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium to analyze electroencephalographic (EEG) data from jhana meditation sessions.

QRI fills an important niche in the consciousness research, psychedelic research[2], and Effective Altruist ecosystems.

On the present margin, QRI is more constrained by funding than by talent.

We’re confident that we could put $1.5M to good use over the next two years.

With further funding, QRI would pursue its research agenda and expand its team by hiring a signal processing engineer, a computational neuroscience PhD, and a software engineer.

QRI’s 2021 research agenda includes empirically exploring the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV) on high-valence data sets, developing non-invasive neurotechnology that produces large positive valence effects, building out our psychophysics toolkit and using it to collect data, publishing open-source neuroimaging software, and investigating how to generalize the Connectome-Specific Harmonic Wave (CSHW) framework into a scale-free form.

You can donate to QRI on our website or reach out to Mackenzie Dion, Director of Operations & Development, at mackenzie@qualiaresearchinstitute.org

You can keep up with our research by subscribing to our newsletter or following us on Twitter

Why Does Qualia Research Institute Exist?

Isn’t it perplexing that we’re trying to reduce the amount of suffering and increase the amount of happiness in the world, yet we don’t have a precise definition for either suffering or happiness?

As a human collective, we want to create good futures. This encompasses helping humans have happier lives, preventing intense suffering wherever it may exist, creating safe AI, and improving animals’ lives too, both in farms and in the wild.

But what is happiness? And what is suffering...
Define Your Learning Goal: Competence Or Broad Knowledge
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-01-25T20:47:50.993Z

Summary: If you're trying to learn something, get clear on whether you're

Building competence: Getting very fast and reliable on tasks that are used for a well-defined project.
Building broad knowledge: Learning just enough about a huge number of facts and theories to be able to re-master them quickly if they turn out to be handy in the future.

Immersion is the only way to build competence. Spaced repetition, using flashcards or some other system, is the only way to build general knowledge.

Some projects require a combination of competence and broad knowledge. Some projects face us with a moving target, where we need to gain temporary competence in a variety of skills, week by week or month by month. Finally, sometimes we're working on multiple projects at once, each with different but related demands, such as graduating from law school and preparing for a legal career. It might be best to optimize your learning approaches separately.

Be clear on your purposes, and use the right tool for the job.

In the comments to TurnTrout's Lesson's I've Learned From Self-Teaching, adamzerner made this important point:

I know this might go against the research on spaced repetition, but I've found that the stuff I used to study often just doesn't stick. On the other hand, there are things that I never really did spaced repetition on that have stuck remarkably well. My impression and experiences is that obtaining a deep understanding is a lot more fruitful than doing spaced repetition.

He then went on to give an example:

I'm learning functional programming right now. In functional programming, operators like + and * are just functions. Instead of 2 + 3 you can do (+) 2 3 just like you'd do add 2 3. Similarly, you could call functions using infix notations by using backticks like this 2 `add` 3 and it behaves like an operator. This really cemented for me what an operator is in such a way that I don't think SRS ever could, and it did so much faster.

I can give another example from my own life. My bachelor's degree is in music, and I spent years studying music theory. My composition teacher asked us to memorize the music we were studying. It's very hard to memorize this by reading the score, but much easier if you just spend a lot of time playing it on the piano:

And this isn't even the hard part. Good luck putting that on Anki.

Whether we're learning about programming or piano performanc...
A perspective on covariate adjustment and confounding in randomized experiments.
by Darren — 2021-01-25T20:22:44.117Z

Randomized experiments (including clinical trials) are widely recognized as useful tools for trying to understand cause and effect. They are also criticized, both fairly and unfairly. Some of the more common misconceptions around randomization follow from the idea that randomization is useful because it "balances confounders", but this is not correct..not exactly anyway. The linked essay tries to explain why it's not correct, why it matters, and the implications this misconception has for the design of clinical trials.

https://statsepi.substack.com/p/out-of-balance
State, Art, Identity
by musq — 2021-01-25T20:22:37.082Z

What is art? What makes a good artist?

State

A snapshot of the current environment is called state. Fundamentally, it is composed of atoms arranged in an ordered/disordered fashion at a given space-time. Each passing moment gives rise to a new state.

What are you thinking right now?

Whatever you’re thinking as of this moment corresponds to a state of your brain. So you are basically, the cumulative state of your brain since your birth. This can (almost) never be identical to another person, because we all have unique experiences in a given space-time. So, each one of us is unique. That is our identity.

Some states are extraordinary, most are not. For example, following incidents created an extraordinary state:

17,000 years ago, a Neanderthal saw a bull
Buddha being born in Lumbini in 5th century BC
Napoleon leading his army to cross the Alps in 1800

Connecting the dots of past extraordinary events helps us understand history and extrapolate more state. But how do we find out about extraordinary events?

Art

Art is the channel through which transfer of state takes place from one person to another.

How do we know about the aforementioned extraordinary events? We know them because of:

Cave paintings (source) - Tells us the state of relationship between Neanderthal and bulls
Edicts of Ashoka (source) - Tells us the state of when and where Buddha was born
Jacques-Louis David’s paintings (source) - Tells us the state of what Napolean looked like, and his clothes

All forms of art, be it music, dance, painting, sculpture, poem, drama, design, folklore, or even a simple conversation are a method to communicate state. This communication can happen over space and across time.

By this classification, all humans are artists (since all of us communicate).

So what makes a good artist?

A good artist is one, who for given a state, knows the most effective way to transfer it. So, he must be able to

precisely identify his audience,
determine the best channel (music, poem, sketch, etc.), and
put the least amount of effort to transfer that state

e.g. If I’m unable to communicate my understanding of this topic (state) to you in the least amount of words (channel), then I’m not a good artist. This applies, given that I believe I know the kind of people who will read this article (audience).

A good artist must first identify the audience. Only then will he be able to figure out the best channel. One channe...
When Hope Fails
by resurgam — 2021-01-25T20:22:24.304Z

This post is mostly personal; it may annoy or dismay some readers. I’m leaving it on LessWrong because it does touch on issues relevant to the community, and also because I have nowhere else to go.

content warning: death, grief, and not-so-rational coping mechanisms

_____________________________________________________

My grandfather died in December.

He had a stroke several months ago. The weather was getting chilly, so he and my grandmother visited their countryside cottage to prepare the garden for winter. As they were ready to drive back home, grandpa suddenly staggered and fell over. He was brought to hospital quickly, and the surgery was successful, and all the circumstances seemed so favorable, and I was dumb enough to expect a full recovery. And then he got infected with coronavirus while he was still in the hospital ward.

The last time I saw him was before the pandemic. I was going to tell and ask him so many things “when this is all over”, and now I never will. Everything he was and everything he could be, with all his knowledge and memory, is lost irretrievably. "When an elder dies, a library is burnt to the ground", as the proverb says. Except it wasn't just some stupid library, it was my grandpa who used to play chess with me (he always called the queen "dame") and proudly tell everyone who’d listen how well his granddaughter was doing with her studies. I wanted him to live forever, and instead the universe, in its blind indifference, destroyed him, like it had destroyed billions of others before him.

I can’t remember what his body looked like; the thing that lay in the coffin was incomprehensible. It had nothing in common with my grandfather — a joyous, energetic, kind-hearted man who had survived a bomb exploding in his hands when he was a boy and fought two cancers into remission when he grew old. The morticians had done an exceptional job, and the thing was a perfectly executed imitation of an elderly stranger. The hairline was recognizable; otherwise, I could see nothing but a wax figure that was, for some reason, dressed in my grandfather’s suit. So I remained calm, as I knew grandpa wasn’t really in that coffin — or anywhere else.

I never tried suggesting cryonics when I still could. All of my relatives are, to some extent, religious or spiritual, and my grandfather was no exception. I predicted tha...
How likely is it that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory?
by CTVKenney — 2021-01-25T20:22:16.105Z

I read this article in NY magazine, on the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis. I found it fairly convincing, so I think the chance that SARS-CoV-2 passed through some human laboratory before spreading to people is better than not. But when I tried following up by reading other sources, I found myself falling into the trap of trying to just confirm my existing belief. How might we estimate a probability that SARS-CoV-2 passed through a human laboratory at some point before spreading to humans?
Is Immortality Ethical?
by harsimony — 2021-01-25T16:55:04.941Z
Link: https://harsimony.wordpress.com/2020/11/27/is-immortality-ethical/

Summary: At a steady state of population, extended lifespan means taking resources away from other potential people. Technology for extended life may not be ethical in this case. Because we are not in steady state, this does not argue against working on life extension technology today.

Many people research radical life extension, dreaming of a day when we might live forever. But I fear that advocates of life extension have overlooked an important concern about immortality: is it ethical?

The argument here is simple, in a world where the population has reached a steady state, another year of life for me reduces the resources available to everyone else. This not only means less resources for existing humans, it also means there would be less resources to support a larger population. In this circumstance, choosing to live another year means preventing someone else from living another year. No one would argue against a 25-year-old choosing to live another year, but what if they are 1000 years old? In steady state population, if they chose to continue for another 1000 years, they are essentially preventing 10 normal human lifetimes within that span. If you were to treat potential or future humans as moral agents in their own right, it might make sense to ask the 1000-year-old to let someone new take their place.

The above argument makes two important assumptions. The most important is that population is in steady state. If population is growing, the above argument becomes much weaker since there are no major resource constraints on creating new life. The second assumption involves taking future generations and potential lives into account. If you don’t care about future people then it doesn’t matter if you are taking resources from them! Similarly, if you do not believe in taking into account your impact on potential human lives, it doesn’t matter that you could give your resources to them.

The first assumption seems like it could be reasonable in the far future (though it may be possible for humanity to continue expanding into space forever). The second assumption is a deep philosophical issue which I will not get into here, but it seems reasonable to me. Taking both of these assumptions as a given, I want to develop some intuition for this problem and suggest some solutions.

At it’s core, immortality is a problem of inequality. In a world of immortals, some people c...
[Link] Philosophers’ Non-Profit Offers Free Online Critical Thinking Course
by David Gross — 2021-01-25T15:16:14.529Z

https://dailynous.com/2021/01/25/philosophers-non-profit-offers-free-online-critical-thinking-course/

“A Boston-area non-profit organization has created a free, online, critical thinking course for students and teachers—a ‘boot camp for arguments’—based on a pedagogical technique that has some empirical research behind it.…”
Revelation and mathematics
by George3d6 — 2021-01-25T12:26:14.056Z
Link: https://cerebralab.com/Revelation_and_mathematics

The mind of the enlightenment era mathematician might have been the ultimate tool ever devised for creating pointless and convoluted connections between pi and everything else.

i - Secret based religion

There are certain Buddhist traditions, e.g. Dzogchen, in which "enlightenment" or some other desired state or status is predicated upon knowing some hidden knowledge. This is most popular in Buddhist faiths but by no means confined to them, some gnostic traditions are also fund of secret knowledge.

This begs a question for the would-be believer:

Why not readily give out this knowledge?

If all I have to do to /reach enlightenment/attain nirvana/understand the nature of God/ is to read a few sentences, why not readily give them to everyone?

The answer to this has something to do with "mind preparedness", one is not ready to understand until they have some prerequisite baggage. But still, why not give them to everyone first, then tell them to go get the prerequisite knowledge. After all, the prerequisites might be different for everyone, this way, as soon as they have them, things will instantly click, and they won't have to /meditate/chant/pray/ for longer than necessary.

To which the crazier believers answer something like:

Because God will blindeth the unworthy who lookedth uponith thy sacredest texts.

But the saner ones say something like:

Look, this is the most profound knowledge on Earth, but if we give it to you before you are prepared, you won't see that. You will get used to it and thus it will forever lose importance, it will become a banality in your mind. Only reading with fresh eyes makes it have the power it does, and you can only do that once, so I'd better be after you learnt enough to grasp its value".

Sound like a load of rubbish? Ok, I agree, but the methodology these sects invented for causing a feeling of revelation might be quite generic and ingenious. Let me give a brief summary of how this goes:

Have some hidden knowledge, vaguely tell the student about it, but don't focus on it. The hidden knowledge is usually simple, somewhat circular and somewhat abstract: "Evil is a construct of man, to understand God is to understand that even under great pain, the default condition of the mind is happiness", "If the nature of the world is perfect emptiness that also implies perfect connectedness", "There is no centre to experience in your /hear/head/body/"... e

...