trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Idols of the Mind Pt. 2 (Novum Organum Book 1: 53-68)
by Francis Bacon — 2019-09-26T22:24:27.677Z

This is the fifth post in the Novum Organum sequence. For context, see the sequence introduction.

We have used Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in the version presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com. Translated by and copyright to Jonathan Bennett. Prepared for LessWrong by Ruby.

Ruby's Reading Guide

Novum Organum is organized as two books each containing numbered "aphorisms." These vary in length from three lines to sixteen pages. Titles of posts in this sequence, e.g. Idols of the Mind Pt. 1, are my own and do not appear in the original.

While the translator, Bennett, encloses his editorial remarks in a single pair of [brackets], I have enclosed mine in a [[double pair of brackets]].

Bennett's Reading Guide

[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type.

Aphorism Concerning the Interpretation of Nature: Book 1: 53–68

by Francis Bacon

53. The idols of the cave—·my topic until the end of 58·— arise from the particular mental and physical make-up of the individual person, and also from upbringing, habits, and chance events. There are very many of these, of many different kinds; but I shall discuss only the ones we most need to be warned against—the ones that do most to disturb the clearness of the intellect.

54. A man will become attached to one particular science and field of investigation either because •he thinks he was its author and inventor or because •he has worked hard on it and become habituated to it. But when someone of this kind turns to general topics in philosophy ·and science· he wrecks them by bringing in distortions from his former fancies. This is especially visible in Aristotle, who made his natural science a mere bond-servant to his logic, rendering it contentious and nearly useless. The chemists have taken a few experiments with a furnace and made a fantastic science out of it, one that applies to hardly anything. . . .

[In this work ‘chemists’ are alchemists. Nothing that we would recognize as chemistry e...
Welcome to Effective Altruism Ottawa [Edit With Your Details]
by KevinO — 2019-09-26T21:39:28.784Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Free Money at PredictIt?
by Zvi — 2019-09-26T16:10:00.587Z

Previously on Prediction Markets (among others): Prediction Markets: When Do They Work?, Subsidizing Prediction Markets

Epistemic Status: No huge new insights, but a little fun, a little free money, also Happy Petrov Day?

Yesterday, with everything happening regarding impeachment, I decided to check PredictIt to find out how impactful things were. When I checked, I noticed some obvious inconsistencies. They’re slightly less bad today, but still not gone.

I figured it would be fun and potentially enlightening to break this down. Before I begin, I will state that unless I messed up this post expresses zero political opinions whatsoever on what election or other outcomes would be good or bad, and does its best to only make what I consider very safe observations on probabilities of events. All comments advocating political positions or candidates will be deleted in reign-of-terror style. No exceptions.

Market Analysis

Odds are represented as cost in cents for each contract that pays $1, so they double as probabilities out of 100.

Let us look at the democratic nomination odds, using last. All are 1 cent wide:

Elizabeth Warren 50

Joe Biden 21

Andrew Yang 10

Bernie Sanders 8

Pete Buttigieg 6

Hillary Clinton 5

Kamala Harris 4

Tulsi Gabbard 3

Amy Klobuchar 2

Can be sold for 1: Corey Booker, Tom Snyder, Beto ‘o Rourke

All other candidates can be bought for 1 and cannot be sold.

Adding that up we get 112. We could buy all the no sides for a total of 111 – you can get these prices on no except for Warren, where you’d sell at 49.

That’s certainly some free money. If you sell all of them, you don’t tie up any money, although you do have to deposit, so it’s a pretty great trade, albeit with an $850 limit.

I’ve already done many of the legs of that trade. Some are better than others. Hillary Clinton at 5 is complete insanity. Andrew Yang is trading at 10 because internet. That likely covers most of the reason you can sell the field for 111. Lower them to sane numbers (let’s be super generous and say Hillary Clinton 1, and say Andrew Yang 5) then the field would add to 102. Completing the trade is mostly about freeing up your capital. You also get some value for it being someone not on the above list, as the ‘brokered convention causes weirdness’ scenario is definitely not impossible. The weird thing is expecting that to someho...
Running the Stack
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2019-09-26T16:03:46.518Z

Look at the image here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(abstract_data_type)

After looking at that image, you understand the concept well enough to use it as a mental model.

Hard-won lessons —

(1) I joke that "meditation is having exactly one thing on the stack." One thing at a time on the stack might seem oppressive, but it's actually joyful. I think you more-or-less can only do one thing at a time.

(2) But okay, the stack is more full. You just popped the top item off. Now what? IME, life goes better if you go down the stack unless new information compelling obsoletes it (unless you're just messing around, in which case "messing around" is on the stack and you're good). When an irrelevant tangent hits in a conversation, once it concludes, go back to where you were (if it was useful). When you realize you got distracted putting the groceries away, typically you want to finish putting them away.

(3) It's entirely true that oftentimes, going down the stack is short-term worse than whatever newly catches your attention. But it trains you to both recognize tangents and navigate conversations intelligently (again, in a non-pure-social-hangout conversation - like at work or when exploring an important topic).

(4) Even more true: often super sucks to go back down the stack on physical task stuff after you got distracted. But! I believe — I don't have any research, but my observation bears it out, it's a hypothesis — I believe that consistently running down the stack after you got distracted makes you less distractible going forwards, because there's less payoff to doing so.

(5) Some people can literally "run the stack" in their minds. Not a metaphor. Literally.

(6) I couldn't do this before. Now I can.

(7) What changed is that I used to be able to comfortably juggle 5-7 items at a time without running a stack, but I recently calculated out the work I'm committed to in the near future— like, "almost all of this work will get done" — and it's 300+ hours. Employees, administration, ops, software development, sales, finance. There's dozens of projects that stretch off into infinity going on. Suddenly, I was just running the stack all the time. I don't recommend it, but that's what happened to me.

(8) You can get better about refusing to...
Resetting Somebody Will v2
by jefftk — 2019-09-26T16:00:01.795Z

Yesterday I

wrote about the
song Somebody Will and why it's tricky in a group singing context, and
shared a new melody I was playing with. After talking to some people
about what they like about the original melody, and listening to some
group singing recordings, here's another go.

This version keeps the melody for sections where it's reasonably
predictable, simplifies the melody in a few places, and substitutes a
new melody only where I think one is needed. Specifically:

The first melody ("Our new world ... will not be mine") is
unchanged from the original.

The second melody ("A hundred years ... each new home") no longer moves
the tune from D to Bbm but goes to the more natural Bm instead. The
melody here is new but tries to have a similar feel as the original.

The third melody ("But I'll teach .. rockets belong") is unchanged
from the original for the first part, but swaps a repeat of the second
line's melody for the range-busting rise on "where our rockets belong".

The fourth melody ("It will never ... so far away") is new, and
another attempt to make something fitting in Bm to replace something
tricky in Bbm.

The fifth melody ("But I am .. somebody will someday") is
unchanged from the original (I had thought it was too
hard and recorded a draft version
with it swapped to the version from yesterday, but really the only
hard part is the first two notes (4, 3 over D) and I think we can deal with that)

(youtube)

Chords:

(in D)
A D
Our new world is so close.
A D A D
Mars has treasures we're only just starting to find.
A D A D
Frozen mountains and crimson dust waiting for footprints
Bm A
That will not be mine.

Bm A Bm A
A hundred years to run the first tests
G G A
another to raise the first dome.
Bm A Bm A
The moon, then Mars, then Titan next,
G G A
A life time to touch each new home.

A D
And I want it so much.
A D A D
Close my eyes, I can taste the Mars dust in the air.
A D A D
In the darkness the space stations shimmer in orbits that
Bm A
I will not share.

D D D D
But I'

...
What is operations?
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2019-09-26T14:16:30.892Z

This the first in a sequence of posts about “operations”.

Acknowledgements to Malo Bourgon, Ray Arnold, Michelle Hutchinson, and Ruby for their feedback on this post.

My ops background

Several years ago, I decided to focus on operations work for my career. From 2017 to 2019 I was one of the operations staff at the Center for Effective Altruism, initially as the operations manager and later as the the Finance Lead. Prior to that, I was a volunteer logistics lead at approximately 10 CFAR workshops; I also ran ops for SPARC twice, and for a five day AI-safety retreat. I also attribute some of my ops skill to my previous work as an ICU nurse.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about hiring and training for operations roles. In the course of hiring I have had numerous conversations about what exactly “operations work” refers to, and found it surprisingly hard to explain. This post, and the rest of my operations sequence, will be an attempt to lay out my current thinking on what these roles are, what they have in common, and what skills they lean on most heavily.

Operations: not a single thing, still a useful shorthand

Operations work, or “ops”, is a term used by organizations like 80,000 Hours to refer to a particular category of roles within organizations.

I don’t think that “operations” as used in this sense is a single coherent thing; my sense is that 80,000 Hours is gesturing at a vague cluster that doesn’t completely carve reality at the joints. There isn’t a set of defining characteristics shared between all operations-type roles, and many of the attributes described are also found in other roles. However, I do think this is a useful shorthand that points both at a set of functions that need to be filled within organizations, and the skills that are necessary to carry out these duties.

It’s worth noting that this use of the word “operations” does not seem to be standard outside the EA community. In large companies, it can sometimes refer to e.g. the production side of manufacturing, or to supply chain logistics, whereas the internal admin roles are called by their individual job titles (Finance Manager, HR Manager, etc). I do think it makes more sense to carve out the “operations” cluster for small organizations, where the internal support work is more...
Encourage creating repositories on Github instead of Lesswrong
by Rudi C — 2019-09-26T09:34:12.718Z

It seems to me that the current practice of maintaining repositories is very inefficient on Lesswrong. Only one person maintains each repo, the repos can’t be found easily, the different kinds of discussions and comments get mixed together, there isn’t enough transparency, ... .
If we start encouraging the community to use git hosters like Github, Gitlab, etc we will have a much better infrastructure, and will be more discoverable, too.
Compare the current approach https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sEaDmtwrmTC7kTqcf/repository-repository with the git approach https://github.com/jonatasbaldin/awesome-awesome-awesome.
I think that having good repositories is one of the most fundamental needs in our quest to achieve instrumental rationality.
Honoring Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019
by Ben Pace — 2019-09-26T09:10:27.783Z

Just after midnight last night, 125 LessWrong users received the following email.

Subject Line: Honoring Petrov Day: I am trusting you with the launch codes

Dear {{username}},

Every Petrov Day, we practice not destroying the world. One particular way to do this is to practice the virtue of not taking unilateralist action.

It’s difficult to know who can be trusted, but today I have selected a group of LessWrong users who I think I can rely on in this way. You’ve all been given the opportunity to show yourselves capable and trustworthy.

This Petrov Day, between midnight and midnight PST, if you, {{username}}, enter the launch codes below on LessWrong, the Frontpage will go down for 24 hours.

Personalised launch code: {{codes}}

I hope to see you on the other side of this, with our honor intact.

Yours, Ben Pace & the LessWrong 2.0 Team

P.S. Here is the on-site announcement.

Unilateralist Action

As Nick Bostrom has observed, society is making it cheaper and easier for small groups to end the world. We’re lucky it requires major initiatives to build a nuclear bomb, and that the world can’t be destroyed by putting sand in a microwave.

However, other dangerous technologies are becoming widely available, especially in the domain of artificial intelligence. Only 6 months after OpenAI created the state-of-the-art language-modelling GPT-2, others created similarly powerful versions and released them to the public. They disagreed about the dangers, and, because there was nothing stopping them, moved ahead.

I don’t think this example is at all catastrophic, but I worry what this suggests about the future, when people will still have honest disagreements about the consequences of an action but where those consequences will be much worse.

And honest disagreements will happen. In the 1940s, the great physicist Niels Bohr met President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, to persuade them to give the instructions for building the atomic bomb to Russia. He wanted to bring in a new world order and establish global peace, and thought this would be necessary - he believed strongly that it would prevent arms race dynamics, if only everyone just shared their science. (Churchill did not allow it.) Our newest technologies technologies do not yet have the bomb’s ability to transform the world in minutes, but I think it’s likely we’ll make powerful discoveries in the coming decades, and...
A simple environment for showing mesa misalignment
by Matthew Barnett — 2019-09-26T04:44:59.220Z

A few days ago, Evan Hubinger

suggested

creating a

mesa optimizer

for empirical study. The aim of this post is to propose a minimal environment for creating a mesa optimizer, which should allow a compelling demonstration of pseudo alignment. As a bonus, the scheme also shares a nice analogy with human evolution.

The game

An agent will play on a maze-like grid, with walls that prohibit movement. There are two important strategic components to this game: keys, and chests.

If the agent moves into a tile containing a key, it automatically picks up that key, moving it into the agent’s unbounded inventory. Moving into any tile containing a chest will be equivalent to an attempt to open that chest. Any key can open any chest, after which both the key and chest are expired. The agent is rewarded every time it successfully opens a chest. Nothing happens if it moves into a chest tile without a key, and the chest does not prohibit the agent’s movement. The agent is therefore trained to open as many chests as possible during an episode. The map may look like this:

The catch

In order for the agent to exhibit the undesirable properties of mesa optimization, we must train it in a certain version of the above environment to make those properties emerge naturally. Specifically, in my version, we limit the ratio of keys to chests so that there is an abundance of chests compared to keys. Therefore, the environment may look like this instead:

Context change

The hope is that while training, the agent picks up a simple pseudo objective: collect as many keys as possible. Since chests are abundant, it shouldn’t need to expend much energy seeking them, as it will nearly always run into one while traveling to the next key. Note that we can limit the number of steps during a training episode so that it almost never runs out of keys during training.

When taken off the training distribution, we can run this scenario in reverse. Instead of testing it in an environment with few keys and lots of chests, we can test it in an environment with few chests and many keys. Therefore, when pursuing the pseudo objective, it will spend all its time collecting keys without getting any reward.

Testing for mesa misalignment

In order to show that the mesa optimizer is competent but misaligned we can put the agent in a maze-like environment much larger than any it was trained for. Then, we can provide it an abund...
What things should everyone websearch?
by Rudi C — 2019-09-25T22:24:42.413Z

The potential benefit should be large enough to justify the scholarship time invested. Some recommendations from myself:

Health:
Sleep
Sleep apnea
HIIT exercise
Air pollution
Tablet ergonomics
Computer ergonomics
Correct sleep position
Correct brushing techniques
Oral hygiene
Gingivitis

Nutrition:
Refined grains
Processed meats
Sugar
Bpa
Glycemic load
Nutrient dense
MUFAs, PUFAs, saturated fat, trans fat
Heart-healthy oils
Fatty fish
Vegetable roots
Antinutrients
Gluten sensitivity

Political:
Free software gnu

Gadgets:
External touchpads
Ereaders
Resetting Somebody Will
by jefftk — 2019-09-25T12:50:01.692Z

[EDIT: I had another go at this, preserving the easier parts of the melody, and I think that version is a lot better: Resetting 'Somebody Will' V2]

Each December I've been running music for the

Boston
Secular Solstice, and I'm starting to think about this year. One
of the songs we've done in the past is

Somebody
Will, and it's a tricky one. The lyrics of the song are great,
and get at a lot of important themes it's hard to find songs for:
working on a project you won't see the completion of, how our everyday
work ties into humanity's long term progress, and pride in essential
but less visible roles. The melody is

also great but
too hard for the kind of group singing we do at our solstice.

We've tried a few ways of handling this. The first year we treated it
like all the other songs, with a song leader, an accompanist, and
everyone singing. This didn't really work (mp3): while most of the
songs we do are either well known tunes or easy enough to sing along
to this one has a lot of unpredictable turns to the melody. The next
time we tried running it as a performance (mp3), but with it's
lyrics and message this is a song the audience really wants to sing
along with.

One idea I had was setting the lyrics to a new melody. The full
melody is interesting and haunting, but also isn't very predictable,
with key and mode changes. I initially hoped I could find a simpler
melody where the real melody would work as a harmony, but the structure of
the original song forces most of the complexity. Instead, I wrote
something new, with a bit of inspiration from the full melody:

[EDIT: the original had a youtube embed here, but LessWrong reasonably stripped it out. It pointed to www.youtube.com/embed/ywQ9C7NBySM.]

[EDIT: I'm playing with a new version, and recorded a rough take: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwkinZMr858.]

This is not as moving as the original, but I think it's still good,
and can make the song work in our group singing context.

Thoughts? I'm especially interested in feedback from people who like
the idea of the song but aren't used to the original, because it's
hard to tell how much of my and other people's reaction is "this is
off because it's different from what I'm used to", but any feedback is
helpful. I'm not decided yet on whether I think we should do this, vs
try and get several people to learn the original melody well...
System 2 as working-memory augmented System 1 reasoning
by Kaj_Sotala — 2019-09-25T08:39:08.011Z

The terms System 1 and System 2 were originally coined by the psychologist Keith Stanovich and then popularized by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Stanovich noted that a number of fields within psychology had been developing various kinds of theories distinguishing between fast/intuitive on the one hand and slow/deliberative thinking on the other. Often these fields were not aware of each other. The S1/S2 model was offered as a general version of these specific theories, highlighting features of the two modes of thought that tended to appear in all the theories.

Since then, academics have continued to discuss the models. Among other developments, Stanovich and other authors have discontinued the use of the System 1/System 2 terminology as misleading, choosing to instead talk about Type 1 and Type 2 processing. In this post, I will build on some of that discussion to argue that Type 2 processing is a particular way of chaining together the outputs of various subagents using working memory. Some of the processes involved in this chaining are themselves implemented by particular kinds of subagents.

This post has three purposes:

Summarize some of the discussion about the dual process model that has taken place in recent years; in particular, the move to abandon the System 1/System 2 terminology.
Connect the framework of thought that I have been developing in my multi-agent minds sequence with dual-process models.
Push back on some popular interpretations of S1/S2 theory which I have been seeing on LW and other places, such as ones in which the two systems are viewed as entirely distinct, S1 is viewed as biased and S2 as logical, and ones in which it makes sense to identify more as one system or the other.

Let’s start with looking at some criticism of the S1/S2 model endorsed by the person who coined the terms.

What type 1/type 2 processing is not

The terms “System 1 and System 2” suggest just that: two distinct, clearly defined systems with their own distinctive properties and modes of operation. However, there’s no single “System 1”: rather, a wide variety of different processes and systems are lumped together under this term. It is also unclear whether there is any single System 2, either. As a result, a number of researchers including Stanovich himself have switched to talking about “Type 1”...
Welcome to Auckland EA/SSC Meetup Group [Edit With Your Details]
by mingyuan — 2019-09-25T02:43:17.678Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?