trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekend Review Bash: Guided review writing, Forecasting and co-working, in EU and US times
by Bird Concept — 2021-01-08T21:04:12.332Z

This is the final weekend of the review phase of the LessWrong 2019 Review. There's been more than 100 reviews written; but more than 60 posts are still unreviewed. Let's go out with a bang before we start voting!

To help you to join the review effort, we have a few virtual sessions lined up this weekend:

Guided review writing

You pick an essay. You get some time to read it. Then I'll walk you through a set of guided prompts and exercises to help you form an opinion about it. Finally you'll get some time to write-up your thoughts and, if you're happy with them, post them on the site.

Review Forecasting

Before the session I have turned 10-20 claims from review posts into forecasting questions or binary polls. In the session we'll discuss and put probabilities on them together.

A rapid-fire way of getting lots of data about review claims (as opposed to the traditional, more in-depth reviews).

Review co-working

Do pomodoros together with other reviewers. Discuss any things that come up in the breaks.

Great if you already know what you want to get done, but would like some company or social accountability while doing it.

(Please note this is not an ordinary co-working session, where you can work on anything you like. It's only for contributing to the LessWrong 2019 Review.)

Location

LessWrong Walled Garden, main cabin.

Join here.

Schedule

SATURDAY

11am PST / 20:00 CET : (1h) Review Forecasting

12pm PST / 21:00 CET : (2h) Guided review writing & Review co-working

6pm-8pm PST: (2h) Review co-working

SUNDAY

11am PST / 20:00 CET : (1h) Review Forecasting

12pm PST / 21:00 CET : (2h) Guided review writing & Review co-working

6pm-8pm PST: (2h) Review co-working

RSVP

Link to Facebook Event.

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/mOjqegne-)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/DwIGCb9SV)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/QxkRzZm5A)
Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception
by Zack_M_Davis — 2021-01-08T20:54:57.979Z

Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundaries?

There is an important difference between having a utility function defined over a statistical model's performance against specific real-world data (even if another mind with different values would be interested in different data), and having a utility function defined over features of the model itself.

Arbitrariness in the map doesn't correspond to arbitrariness in the territory. Whatever criterion your brain is using to decide which word you want, is your non-arbitrary reason ...

So the one comes back to you and says:

That seems wrong—why wouldn't I care about the utility of having a particular model? I agree that categories derive much of their usefulness from "carving reality at the joints"—that's one very important kind of consequence of choosing to draw category boundaries in a particular way. But other consequences might matter too, if we have some moral reason to value drawing our categories a particular way. I don't see why I shouldn't be willing to trade off one unit of categorizational nonawkwardness for X units of morality, even if trading off a million units of categorizational nonawkwardness for the same X units of morality would be bad.

I once read about an analogy between category boundaries and national borders. Imagine a diplomat trying to come up with a proposal for a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. There's no such thing as the "correct" border between Israel and Palestine, but there are consequences of choosing one border or another. For example, awarding territory to one side risks angering the other. For another, if the West Bank and Gaza Strip are to be part of Palestine, but Tel-Aviv and the southern city of Eilat are to be part of Israel, then topology forces you to decide which of Israel and Palestine gets to be continuous, and which will be split into two parts, because a "land bridge" between Gaza and the West Bank would separate Tel Aviv and Eilat, and vice versa. Since borders can't be "true" or "false", the diplomat's task is and can only be to weigh these kinds of trade-offs.

Analogously, I think of language, following Eliezer Yudkowsky's "A Human's Guide to Words", as being a human-made project intended to help people understand each other. It draws on the structure of reality, but has many free variables, so that the structure of reality doesn't constrain it compl

...
Are UFOs just drones?
by Kenny — 2021-01-08T20:51:26.068Z

From Conversations with Tyler 2020 Retrospective (Ep. 112) | by Mercatus Center | Conversations with Tyler | Dec, 2020 | Medium [emphasis mine]:

HOLMES: One of the crazy things about 2020 has been this under-discussed acceptance of what you just described, that it has become more — mainstream is the wrong word — but more accepted among smart people that we may be seeing actual signs of alien life. It may not be likely, but it’s becoming the most likely explanation.

COWEN: Even if it is, which I give 5 percent . . . I’ve been saying it’s almost certainly drones, not that the proverbial little green men are inside. But it should be a big, big thing, and it isn’t. That to me is so startling. Brennan can say what he said. It won’t be on the front page of the New York Times. Some number of people will talk about it.

I'm sure I've run across that idea before – that UFOs are drones – but encountering it just now (again?), and thinking about it (again?) ...

I'm relatively convinced – UFOs are 'just' 'drones'.

They're 'just' drones – it wasn't 'obvious' before and, if a significant number of historical UFOs were drones, the drones are impressive tech!

Possibly the drones were much more than even contemporary drones known to the public – so not just (regular) drones.

(And it's still of course possible that some of the drones were extraterrestrial – and maybe much more likely than UFOs being sentient-human-plus-intelligence-in-the-flesh piloted or occupied.)
Why not? potato chips in a box edition
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-08T20:10:16.882Z

In reviewing my year I came across these photos of a box of potato chips I took in January on a plane. I took them because it seemed so much better to me than chips in a bag:

The corners of the box opened out, so that it was like a bowl.

As usual, I wonder, is it actually better or does it just seem so to me? If it is better, why aren’t most chips sold this way?

Ways it seems better to me:

you don’t get oil from the bag all over your hand

you can see what you are picking up, which is somehow pleasing

and which also allows more delicate grasping, rather than just thrusting your hand into the food, which seems better for sharing

it has a natural surface to sit on, which is more pleasing than a bag that sits on its side

it would fit neatly in a drawer, instead of taking up a large shapeless space (this is getting minor, but I do imagine it affecting what I would in fact want to buy)

Further evidence that this is good is that people often pour chips into bowls.

A downside is that it seems to involve more packaging, though I’m not sure how much the environmental impacts of cardboard and normal chip packaging compare. Other foods regularly involve cardboard boxes, along with numerous layers of other packign material, so it would be surprising if that was prohibitively costly. I think the foil-like layer is needed to avoid air getting in and making the chips stale (chips are actually packaged with nitrogen to keep fresh, apparently).

There could easily be costs I don’t know about. For instance, apparently normal chip packaging involves carefully chosen layers of polymer for things like repelling moisture and avoiding package breakage. And some materials will change the taste of ingredients. I also wonder if you could do a similar thing with creative use of entirely normal chip packaging, though there is less of an existence proof there. I’m imagining something like this:
Science in a High-Dimensional World
by johnswentworth — 2021-01-08T17:52:02.261Z

Claim: the usual explanation of the Scientific Method is missing some key pieces about how to make science work well in a high-dimensional world (e.g. our world). Updating our picture of science to account for the challenges of dimensionality gives a different model for how to do science and how to recognize high-value research. This post will sketch out that model, and explain what problems it solves.

The Dimensionality Problem

Imagine that we are early scientists, investigating the mechanics of a sled sliding down a slope. What determines how fast the sled goes? Any number of factors could conceivably matter: angle of the hill, weight and shape and material of the sled, blessings or curses laid upon the sled or the hill, the weather, wetness, phase of the moon, latitude and/or longitude and/or altitude, etc. For all the early scientists know, there may be some deep mathematical structure to the world which links the sled’s speed to the astrological motions of stars and planets, or the flaps of the wings of butterflies across the ocean, or vibrations from the feet of foxes running through the woods.

Takeaway: there are literally billions of variables which could influence the speed of a sled on a hill, as far as an early scientist knows.

So, the early scientists try to control as much as they can. They use a standardized sled, with standardized weights, on a flat smooth piece of wood treated in a standardized manner, at a standardized angle. Playing around, they find that they need to carefully control a dozen different variables to get reproducible results. With those dozen pieces carefully kept the same every time… the sled consistently reaches the same speed (within reasonable precision).

At first glance, this does not sound very useful. They had to exercise unrealistic levels of standardization and control over a dozen different variables. Presumably their results will not generalize to real sleds on real hills in the wild.

But stop for a moment to consider the implications of the result. A consistent sled-speed can be achieved while controlling only a dozen variables. Out of literally billions. Planetary motions? Irrelevant, after controlling for those dozen variables. Flaps of butterfly wings on the other side of the ocean? Irrelevant, after controlling for those dozen variables. Vibrations from foxes’ feet? Irrelevant, after controlling for those dozen var...
Why the outside view suggests that longevity escape velocity is a long time away and cryonics is a much more feasible option for those alive today: signal-boosting a comment by Calm-Meet9916 on Reddit
by Synaptic — 2021-01-08T17:20:32.460Z

Disclaimer: I strongly support anti-aging research. It's obviously a great idea. And, like a lot of other cryonicists, I think that longevity escape velocity is unlikely to come about anytime soon and that cryonics is much more likely to work for me, my loved ones, and other people alive today.

Context: A recent LW post suggested that pursuing anti-aging was more feasible than cryonics (as somewhat of an aside of an interesting, in-depth article about anti-aging interventions). It was cross-posted on Reddit

here

.

u/Calm-Meet9916

had a great response based on reference class forecasting, known on LW as the "Outside View", that I wanted to signal-boost here because I think it is important to present the counter case about the relative feasibility of cryonics vs LEV.

Quote from

First Comment

: "There is no basis for claiming that anti-aging is more feasible than cryonics or more feasible than cryonics for people under 50. Looking at the last 20-30 years, predictions for anti-aging were that we'll have robust mouse rejuvenation by now. We don't and we aren't even close. The little progress that has been made has not been translated to humans and there is no reason to believe that it will (as with dementia and Alzheimers disease which has consistently failed over the last 30+ years). By the time anything of significance gets translated to humans, people who are today under 50 will be in quite bad shape."

Quote from

Second Comment

: "In his

first TED talk in 2005

Aubrey's message was that we have 90% chance for robust mouse rejuvenation in 10 years if $100 million per year would be invested philanthropically. We're now in 2021, 16 years from his talk, funding overall is much greater than $100 million per year, although it's not just philanthropic. And what are the results? We can increase mouse lifespan on average by 25% with senolytics. That's it. We're very far from RMR and I'd say that his prediction (or his message, or whatever you want to call it) has been overoptimistic by at least 3-4 decades, possibly more.

On one hand I understand that it's hard to get public excited by saying "you will not benefit, two generations from now will", but on the other, it's detrimental to cryonics if people think "we'll have human rejuvenation in 20 years, don't bother". It prevents people from considering cryonics, as is the case right now for the vast majority of anti-aging...
Condition-directedness
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-08T10:30:21.311Z

In chess, you can’t play by picking a desired end of the game and backward chaining to the first move, because there are vastly more possible chains of moves than your brain can deal with, and the good ones are few. Instead, chess players steer by heuristic senses of the worth of situations. I assume they still back-chain a few moves (‘if I go there, she’ll have to move her rook, freeing my queen’) but just leading from a heuristically worse to a heuristically better situation a short hop away.

In life, it is often taken for granted that one should pursue goals, not just very locally, but over scales of decades. The alternative is taken to be being unambitious and directionless.

But there should also be an alternative that is equivalent to the chess one: heuristically improving the situation, without setting your eye on a particular pathway to a particular end-state.

Which seems like actually what people do a lot of the time. For instance, making your living room nice without a particular plan for it, or reading to be ‘well read’, or exercising to be ‘fit’ (at least insofar as having a nice living space and being fit and well-read are taken as generally promising situations rather than stepping stones immediately prior to some envisaged meeting, say). Even at a much higher level, spending a whole working life upholding the law or reporting on events or teaching the young because these put society in a better situation overall, not because they will lead to some very specific outcome.

In spite of its commonness, I’m not sure that I have heard of this type of action labeled as distinct from goal-directedness and undirectedness. I’ll call it condition-directedness for now. When people are asked for their five year plans, they become uncomfortable if they don’t have one, rather than proudly stating that they don’t currently subscribe to goal-oriented strategy at that scale. Maybe it’s just that I hang out in this strange Effective Altruist community, where all things are meant to be judged by their final measure on the goal, which perhaps encourages evaluating them explicitly with reference to an envisaged path to the goal, especially if it is otherwise hard to distinguish the valuable actions from doing whatever you feel like.

It seems like one could be condition-directed and yet very ambitious and not directionless. (Though your ambition would be non-specific, and ...
Conversation, event loops, and error handling
by Adam Zerner — 2021-01-08T08:05:49.224Z

My previous post Debugging the student got me thinking about conversations. Particularly conversations where one person is trying to explain things to the other person. In that post I talked about some ways I see this go south. In this post I want to expand on these ideas with some analogies from programming.

To summarize the previous post, imagine someone trying to explain differential equations to a random person on off the street. Silly, right? A random person off the street won't be able to follow. But I think something analogous happens all of the time. The "teacher" starts babbling about something to the student when the student doesn't have nearly enough background information or context to keep up.

In that post one of the commenters proposed that the issue is teachers assuming too much of their students. My response:

That was a hypothesis of mine too, but it seems to only scratches the surface. If teacher stops to reflect, they'll usually realize that it was silly to try to teach differential equations to someone off the street. It's not that they "actually" think there's a short inferential distance, it's that they didn't ask themself the question of what the inferential distance is in the first place.

Event loops

There is something called an event loop in web browsers. If you're interested, this video explains it and is one of my favorite videos:

And if you're not interested, well, I guess I'm going to explain it anyway.

A web browser executes code. But while it's busy executing its code, when you click something, you need it to execute other code for you. "Hey, could you stop what you're doing and check the most recent score of the basketball game please?" You're interrupting!

As an analogy, imagine your accountant sitting at his desk doing taxes. There's a three inch stack of papers on his desk that he's working on. And now you walk in and just have a measly two papers you need him to fill out for you. You interrupt and see if he would mind stopping what he's doing to help you.

Nope! Not gonna happen! That shit on his desk, he's in the zone working his way through it and nothing's gonna get in the way of that!

But if you want, there's another desk in the back with a good 20 inches of papers he also needs to get to. You could put your stuff on bottom of that, and he'll get to it when he's ready. First come first serve. You're last.

The three inch stack ...
Information on time-complexity prior?
by Garrett Baker — 2021-01-08T06:09:03.462Z

On a recent episode of The Bayesian Conspiracy, the time-complexity prior was mentioned as a plausible alternative to Solomnoff induction. And reading Abram Demski's explanation of logical induction in Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation, a prior over time-complexity seems like a natural consequence of the formulation.

Can anyone provide sources for more information on this, assuming such sources exist?
Thoughts on personal identity
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-01-08T04:19:19.637Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

Recently, in an effort to clarify my views about personal identity, I looked back at the discussion of the topic in Part III of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. This post is an attempt to grok Parfit’s view more fully than I have in the past.

Parfit’s analysis is an inspiring example of analytic philosophy as a force not just for clarifying concepts or justifying intuitions, but for radically revising how we see the world. Here’s my description of the basic view that Parfit wants to revise (this isn’t the precise version Parfit gives; rather, it’s an attempt to articulate the view as I find it in myself). We have certain ways of relating to the future that seem centrally connected with what will happen to us. If I learn, for example, that someone in the future is going to hit on the head with a hammer, my relationship to this fact differs depending on whether the person in question is me vs., say, Angela Merkel. The difference need not be about the amount of concern: I might well be more concerned about Angela’s future head injuries than about my own. But some other dimension intuitively differs.

In particular, it seems, whether the future hammer-blow victim will be me vs. Angela makes a difference to whether it makes sense for me to anticipate being hit on the head — to expect, as it were, to be there for the inner experiences involved in the blow. Intuitively, of the vast ocean of experience that will take place in the future, I will only be there for a very small subset; just as, of the vast majority ocean of experiences in the past, I was only there for a tiny subset. Before I was born, I wasn’t there for any experiences; and after I die, I won’t be there for any more experiences, ever again.

This seems like a deep difference: the difference between nothingness, blankness, the void, and the bright joy of consciousness, the lushness, energy and intensity of being something, of being alive, awake, here. It’s the infinitely thin line we disappear into when we die; the line with no other side; the direction we travel as we faint and fade — away from home, music, loves, friends, sights unseen, beauties undiscovered; away from everything; nowhere.

Here’s an example of consciousness of this difference, from All Quiet on the Western Front. I include it in an effort to make vivid the stakes of what can seem like fanciful metaphy...
What's up with the Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial?
by ChristianKl — 2021-01-07T23:31:07.619Z

It seems that the official website of the trial suggest that they are sill seeking donations to start the trial. On the other hand, it's reported in 2019 that they raised the necessary 75$ million to start the trial:

After closing the final $40m of its required $75m budget with a donation from a private source, the first drug trial directly targeting aging is set to begin at the end of this year, lead researcher Dr Nir Barzilai has revealed in an exclusive interview with Longevity.Technology.

I can't find any trial registration that the trial is started. What's up here? Did someone disappear with the money?