trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Key Power of the President is to Coordinate the Execution of Existing Concrete Plans
by Ben Pace — 2019-07-16T05:06:50.397Z

I listened to the 80,000 Hours podcast with Tom Kalil, who spent 16 years as Deputy Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Kalil seems skilled at evaluating concrete scientific plans to offer the president and finding the path of least resistance through government to effect those plans, though he is not himself someone with deep technical understanding of any single domain.

One key idea I took from the podcast was that his main use of the executive branch of government is as a coordination mechanism. I moved away from thinking of the President as an expert who makes decisions like a CEO, and much more as an individual with immense coordination power trying his best to take any concrete plans given to him and coordinate the country around executing on them. That is, not someone who comes up with plans, not someone who executes on the plans, but someone who coordinates people to execute the concrete plans that are waiting to be picked up and run with.

Below are relevant and very interesting quotes, followed by a few more updates I made listening to the podcast.

Key Quotes

Robert Wiblin: So, do you think people under-appreciate how much the executive branch can just do autonomously?

Tom Kalil: Yes. Yeah. Not only what it can do, but the President’s ability to convene.

[...]

Tom Kalil: One thing that I used to ask people is to imagine that you have a 15 minute meeting with the President in the Oval Office and he says, “Rob, if you give me a good idea for”, pick your cause, “reducing existential risk, then I will call anyone on the planet. It can be a conference call so there can be more than one person on the line. If it’s someone from inside the government, that I can direct them to something because I’m their boss, and if it’s someone outside the government then I can challenge them to do something. So, you not only have to tell me, what is your idea, but in order to make your idea happen, who would I call and what would I ask them to do?”

Tom Kalil: There are several reasons for this thought experiment. One is that if you work for the President you have the ability to send the President a decision memo and have him check the box that says yes. Over time that give you a sense of what psychologists call agency, a sense that many things that you see in the w

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How Can Rationalists Join Other Communities Interested in Truth-Seeking?
by Evan_Gaensbauer — 2019-07-16T03:29:02.830Z

Last week, Davis Kingsley wrote about reasons one might want to diversify one's "friendship portfolio." I commented that if this, being on LessWrong, was aimed at a rationalist audience, it's my experience many rationalists are introverted or shy enough, some have difficulty joining new groups of friends outside the rationality community as well (though of course there were several comments on Davis' posts about the benefits of having just a small, consistent group of friends in a single community, worth considering). However, Ruby commented with an even greater reason why some rationalists who might want friends beyond the rationality community nonetheless primarily stick to the rationality community:

I suspect there are challenges for rationalists in joining new communities beyond introversion. I've found it jarring to be getting along with some new folk and then people start saying ridiculous things, but worse, having no real interest in determining whether the things they say are actually true. Or even when they try, being terrible at discussion. I don't need to nitpick everything or correct every "wrong" thing I hear, but it is hard to feel like beliefs aren't real to people - they're just things you say. A performance.

There are people outside the rationality community who are fine at the above, but being used to rationalists does introduce some novel challenges. It'd be nice if we ever accumulated communal knowledge on how to bridge such cultural gaps.

So, I thought I would ask.
Interview With Diana Fleischman and Geoffrey Miller
by Jacob Falkovich — 2019-07-16T01:34:26.156Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Diana Fleischman and Geoffrey Miller at the NYC Rationality meetup. Diana and Geoffrey are professors of evolutionary psychology, Effective Altruists, thoughtful polyamorists, and fearless thinkers. We talked about everything that’s important in life: gems, sex, morality, kids, shit-testing, jealousy, and why women are smart.

If you missed it, here’s the wide-ranging interview I did with Geoffrey alone a year ago. I will also publish the audience Q&A from the meetup later this month.

Congratulations on your engagement! Geoffrey designed a special moissanite engagement ring for Diana, and moissanite is something my wife and I believe in very much as well. Can you tell everyone about moissanite so that no one here buys a diamond ever again?

Geoffrey: In my book Spent I did a multi-page critique of the DeBeers diamond cartel and diamonds as costly signals of commitment. And maybe it’s fine to spend a lot of money on a signal, money that goes to a cartel.

Diana: But cocaine is more fun!

Geoffrey: Yes, or get a college degree — that’s a cartel too. But there are better and cheaper stones, like moissanite which is a silicon carbide gem and costs 1/10 to 1/50 of a diamond depending on the carat. But I think it’s a better stone, it has superior ‘fire’ and ‘brilliance’, as they say. Of course, once moissanite was invented and it became colorless and clear enough, the diamond cartel dissed it by saying “these are just disco balls”. Basically – it’s too flashy, and no self-respecting person who cares about the subtlety of a diamond will buy a moissy. Whereas for the previous 100 years, diamonds were sold as the flashiest, highest brilliance, and highest fire gemstone. So: hypocrites.

Moissies are getting better and better, and they just went off-patent four years ago so there are multiple manufacturers making them now and prices are dropping. So I’d rather put the effort into the design and personalization. I’m using a CAD system for the design and manufacture, you can now design it in collaboration with a jeweler who will cast it and make it.

Diana: It’s about a 9 mm stone. How much would a diamond that size cost?

Geoffrey: It’s a 3-carat moissy so it costs about $2,000, and an equivalent diamond would cost $120,000.

My wife’s moissanite sparkling in the beerlight.

Geoffrey wrote the book Mate with Tucker Max...
Why artificial optimism?
by jessicata — 2019-07-15T21:41:24.223Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2019/07/15/why-artificial-optimism/

Optimism bias is well-known. Here are some examples.

It's conventional to answer the question "How are you doing?" with "well", regardless of how you're actually doing. Why?

People often believe that it's inherently good to be happy, rather than thinking that their happiness level should track the actual state of affairs (and thus be a useful tool for emotional processing and communication). Why?

People often think their project has an unrealistically high chance of succeeding. Why?

People often avoid looking at horrible things clearly. Why?

People often want to suppress criticism but less often want to suppress praise; in general, they hold criticism to a higher standard than praise. Why?

The parable of the gullible king

Imagine a kingdom ruled by a gullible king. The king gets reports from different regions of the kingdom (managed by different vassals). These reports detail how things are going in these different regions, including particular events, and an overall summary of how well things are going. He is quite gullible, so he usually believes these reports, although not if they're too outlandish.

When he thinks things are going well in some region of the kingdom, he gives the vassal more resources, expands the region controlled by the vassal, encourages others to copy the practices of that region, and so on. When he thinks things are going poorly in some region of the kingdom (in a long-term way, not as a temporary crisis), he gives the vassal fewer resources, contracts the region controlled by the vassal, encourages others not to copy the practices of that region, possibly replaces the vassal, and so on. This behavior makes sense if he's assuming he's getting reliable information: it's better for practices that result in better outcomes to get copied, and for places with higher economic growth rates to get more resources.

Initially, this works well, and good practices are adopted throughout the kingdom. But, some vassals get the idea of exaggerating how well things are going in their own region, while denigrating other regions. This results in their own region getting more territory and resources, and their practices being adopted elsewhere.

Soon, these distortions become ubiquitous, as the king (unwittingly) encourages everyone to adopt them, due to the apparent success of the regions distorting information this way. At this point, the vassals face a

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Offering public comment in the Federal rulemaking process
by ryan_b — 2019-07-15T20:31:39.182Z

This is a short linkdump of useful resources in the event you are planning to make a public comment on the AI standards. In the main these recommendations are intuitive: it helps to be an expert; identify exactly what document you are referring to; speak directly to your concern; use citations; etc.

How to comment on a rule, from the Center for Effective Government: https://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/4059

How public comment works, from the Public Comment Project:

https://publiccommentproject.org/how-it-works

Tips for submitting effective comments, from Regulations.gov:

https://www.regulations.gov/docs/Tips_For_Submitting_Effective_Comments.pdf

How to effectively comment on regulations, from the Brookings Institute:

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ES_20180809_RegComments.pdf

Examples of public comments, from the Public Comment Project:

https://publiccommentproject.org/comment-examples-index#examples-aqcons
Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality
by habryka — 2019-07-15T20:22:58.599Z

Epistemic Status: Pointing at early stage concepts, but with high confidence that something real is here. Hopefully not the final version of this post.

When I started studying rationality and philosophy, I had the perspective that people who were in positions of power and influence should primarily focus on how to make good decisions in general and that we should generally give power to people who have demonstrated a good track record of general rationality. I also thought of power as this mostly unconstrained resource, similar to having money in your bank account, and that we should make sure to primarily allocate power to the people who are good at thinking and making decisions.

That picture has changed a lot over the years. While I think there is still a lot of value in the idea of "philosopher kings", I've made a variety of updates that significantly changed my relationship to allocating power in this way:

I have come to believe that people's ability to come to correct opinions about important questions is in large part a result of whether their social and monetary incentives reward them when they have accurate models in a specific domain. This means a person can have extremely good opinions in one domain of reality, because they are subject to good incentives, while having highly inaccurate models in a large variety of other domains in which their incentives are not well optimized.
People's rationality is much more defined by their ability to maneuver themselves into environments in which their external incentives align with their goals, than by their ability to have correct opinions while being subject to incentives they don't endorse. This is a tractable intervention and so the best people will be able to have vastly more accurate beliefs than the average person, but it means that "having accurate beliefs in one domain" doesn't straightforwardly generalize to "will have accurate beliefs in other domains".
One is strongly predictive of the other, and that’s in part due to general thinking skills and broad cognitive ability. But another major piece of the puzzle is the person's ability to build and seek out environments with good incentive structures.
Everyone is highly irrational in their beliefs about at least some aspects of reality, and positions of power in particular tend to encourage strong i
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Jeff Hawkins on neuromorphic AGI within 20 years
by Steven Byrnes — 2019-07-15T19:16:27.294Z

I just listened to AI podcast: Jeff Hawkins on the Thousand Brain Theory of Intelligence, and read some of the related papers. Jeff Hawkins is a theoretical neuroscientist; you may have heard of his 2004 book On Intelligence. Earlier, he had an illustrious career in EECS, including inventing the Palm Pilot. He now runs the company Numenta, which is dedicated to understanding how the human brain works (especially the neocortex), and using that knowledge to develop bio-inspired AI algorithms.

In no particular order, here are some highlights and commentary from the podcast and associated papers.

Every part of the neocortex is running the same algorithm

The neocortex is the outermost and most evolutionarily-recent layer of the mammalian brain. In humans, it is about the size and shape of a dinner napkin (maybe 1500cm²×3mm), and constitutes 75% of the entire brain. Jeff wants us to think of it like 150,000 side-by-side "cortical columns", each of which is a little 1mm²×3mm tube, although I don't think we're supposed to the "column" thing too literally (there's no sharp demarcation between neighboring columns).

When you look at a diagram of the brain, the neocortex has loads of different parts that do different things—motor, sensory, visual, language, cognition, planning, and more. But Jeff says that all 150,000 of these cortical columns are virtually identical! Not only do they each have the same types of neurons, but they're laid out into the same configuration and wiring and larger-scale structures. In other words, there seems to be "general-purpose neocortical tissue", and if you dump visual information into it, it does visual processing, and if you connect it to motor control pathways, it does motor control, etc. He said that this theory originated with Vernon Mountcastle in the 1970s, and is now widely (but not universally) accepted in neuroscience. The theory is supported both by examining different parts of the brain under the microscope, and also by experiments, e.g. the fact that congenitally blind people can use their visual cortex for non-visual things, and conversely he mentioned in passing some old experiment where a scientist attached the optic nerve of a lemur to a different part of the cortex and it was able to see (or something like that).

Anyway, if you accept that premise, then there is one type of computation that the neocortex does, and if we ca

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Commentary On "The Abolition of Man"
by Vaniver — 2019-07-15T18:56:27.295Z

C.S. Lewis wrote a short book attacking moral subjectivism in education; it's available online here as a pdf, here as raw text, and here as a series of videos [1 2 3], and I think probably worth reading in full (at 50 pages or ~100 minutes of video at 1x speed). This post is mostly me rambling about what I saw as the central point, especially connected to individual development and community health, by quoting sections and then reacting to them.

The book begins with a reaction to a grammar textbook (written in 1939) euphemistically called The Green Book whose lessons are also philosophical; Lewis doesn't object to the bait-and-switch (outside of one paragraph) so much as the content and quality of the philosophy. (One suspects Lewis wouldn't object to the Copybook Headings referenced by Kipling, even tho that mixes writing lessons and philosophy.)

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it--believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.

First, let's get the obvious objections out of the way: the claim of universality is probably false. Even supposing it were true, then the underlying change seems worth investigating. Naive belief that one's map is objective reality disintegrates on contact with different maps and after noticing surprising divergences between one's predictions and observations; one can imagine this happening in the moral realm as well as the physical one. But presumably we should just ignore this as standard "the contemporary world is fallen and bad" framing instead of an actual historical claim.

The more interesting claim here is the question of whether or not there can or should be a question of merit, distinct from a question of flavor or fact. A previous taxonomy I've liked a lot (that I was mostly introduced to by Sapiens) is the split between objective (determined by reality), subjective (determined by the person in question), and intersubjective (determined by some group process); the rules of a game are not just 'my personal whims' and are also not 'scientific' in the sense that any outside observer would be able to determine it themselves. Without access...
Overcoming Akrasia/Procrastination - Volunteers Wanted
by Matt Goldenberg — 2019-07-15T18:29:40.888Z

Edit: Cohorts are basically full for now, will let people know if spaces open up.

I've got some new material I'm working on a related to overcoming procrastination and akrasia. It breaks down the skill of focus/willpower into seven "mental habits" that when stacked, are what you need to overcome procrastination. I wrote a bit more about what the habits are on my Shortform Feed.

I'd love to test teaching the material with a few cohorts before I finalize it into a course. The commitment would be 30 minutes a day for 7 days, free for the first few cohorts. The sessions are about 1/3 teaching, 2/3 practice of the skills. If anyone here is interested let me know.
Let's Read:
Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker
by Yuxi_Liu — 2019-07-14T06:22:19.609Z

On July 11, a new poker AI is published in Science. Called Pluribus, it plays 6-player No-limit Texas Hold'em at superhuman level.

In this post, we read through the paper. The level of exposition is between the paper (too serious) and the popular press (too entertaining).

Basics of Texas Hold'em

If you don't know what it even is, like me, then playing a tutorial would be best. I used Learn Poker on my phone.

Now that you know how to play it, it's time to deal with some of the terminologies.

Big blind: the minimal money/poker chips that every player must bet in order to play. For example, $0.1 would be a reasonable amount in casual play.

No-limit: you can bet as much as you want. Okay, not really. You can't bet a billion dollars. In practical playing, it's usually limited to something "reasonable" like 100 times of the big blind.

Heads-up: 2-player.

Limping: betting the minimal amount that you have to bet, in order to keep yourself in the game. This is generally considered bad: if you feel confident, you should raise the bet, and if you feel diffident, you should quit.

Donk betting: some kind of uncommon play that's usually considered dumb (like a donkey). I didn't figure out what it actually means.

The authors

The authors are Noam Brown and Tuomas Sandholm. Previously, they made the news by writing Libratus, a poker AI that beat human champions in 2-player no-limit Texas Hold'em, in 2017.

Pluribus contains a lot of the code from Libratus and its siblings:

The authors have ownership interest in Strategic Machine, Inc. and Strategy Robot, Inc. which have exclusively licensed prior game-solving code from Prof. Sandholm’s Carnegie Mellon University laboratory, which constitutes the bulk of the code in Pluribus.

Scroll to the bottom for more on the two companies.

Highlights from the paper

Is Nash equilibrium even worthwhile?

In multiplayer games, Nash equilibriums are not easy to compute, and might not even matter. Consider the Lemonade Stand Game:

It is summer on Lemonade Island, and you need to make some cash. You decide to set up a lemonade stand on the beach (which goes all around the island), as do two others. There are twelve places to set up around the island like the numbers on a clock. Your price is fixed, and all people go to the nearest lemonade stand. The game is repeated. Every night, everyone moves under cover of darkness (simultaneously). There i

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Insights from Linear Algebra Done Right
by Rafael Harth — 2019-07-13T18:24:50.753Z

This book has previously been discussed by Nate Soares and TurnTrout. In this... review? report? detailed journal entry? ... I will focus on the things which stood out to me. (Definitely not meant to be understandable for anyone unfamiliar with the field.) The book has ten chapters; I did most of the exercises in chapters 6 to 10. I got through that half of the book in about 3 weeks, which was nice since the previous (harder and longer) textbook on topology I worked through took me about a year.

I've previously taken two introductory courses to liner algebra and came out thinking of the field as large and very unstructured, with lots of concepts and theorems floating around disconnectedly. What is a normal matrix? I might or might not have remembered the definition, but I certainly had no idea what it is good for. Three weeks of intense study with this book has improved my understanding dramatically. Now, the field seems structured and pretty intuitive (and I certainly won't forget what a normal operator is). It is truly hard to overstate how good of a job this book does teaching the subject, compared to what I've seen before. It's probably the best textbook on anything I've read so far.

Chapter 1 introduces complex numbers and vectors spaces.

Chapter 2 introduces finite-dimensional vector spaces. What stands out is just how nicely behaved they are. Every finite-dimensional real or complex vector space is isomorphic to either Rn or Cn. Take any k linearly independent vectors, and they span a subspace of dimension k. If they're not linearly independent, then one vector is in the span of the previous vectors. Any list of n linearly independent vectors make up a basis for the entire space. Basically every result one would want to hold when looking back onto the material does actually hold.

Like most fields in math, Linear Algebra ultimately cares about studying functions, and once again it only cares about a tiny subset of all possible functions. In this case it is linear maps, which are the focus of Chapter 3. These are functions T:V→W such that T(x+y)=T(x)+T(y) and T(αx)=αT(x) for all x,y∈V and α∈F, where V and W are vector spaces over some field F (in this book, always R or C).

Brief comparison to topology: The word "continuity" is only mentioned in the final chapter of this book, bu...