trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Candy for Nets
by jefftk — 2019-09-29T11:10:01.736Z

Yesterday morning my five-year-old daughter was asking me about
mosquitos, and we got on to talking about malaria,

nets, and how

Julia and I

donate to the

AMF to keep other
kids from getting sick and potentially dying. Lily took it very
seriously, and proposed that when I retire she take my

programming job and donate in my place.

I told her that she didn't need to wait until after I retired to start
helping, and she decided she wanted to sell candy on the bike
path as a fundraiser. I told her we could do this after naps if
the weather was still nice, and the first thing she said when I got
her up from her nap was that she wanted to go make a sign.

She dictated to me, "Lily is selling candy to raise money for malaria
nets, $1" and I wrote the letters. She colored them in:

(It looks like she's posing with the sign here, but this is just how
she happened to position herself for coloring. She has short arms.)

Once Anna was up from her (longer) nap I got out the wagon and brought them over to the bike path.
Lily did all the selling; I just hung out to the side, leaning against
a tree.

She's always been good at talking to adults, and did a good job
selling the candy. She would explain that the candy was $1/each, that
the money was going to buy malaria nets, and that malaria was a very
bad disease that you got from mosquitoes. People were generous, and
several people gave without taking candy, or put in an extra dollar.
One person didn't have cash but wanted to give enough that they went
home and came back with a dollar. As someone who grew up in a part of
town with very little foot traffic, the idea that you can just walk a
short distance from your house to somewhere where several people will
pass per minute continually amazes me.

After about twenty minutes all the candy was sold and Lily had
collected $20.75. She played in the park for a while, and then when
we came home she asked how we would use the money to buy nets. I
showed her pictures of distributions on the AMF website but she wanted
to see pictures of the nets in use so we spent a while on image
search:

I explained that we weren't going to distribute the nets ourselves,
but that we would provide the money so other people could.

Initially she didn't want to donate the whole amount, but wanted to
set aside half to buy more candy so she could do this a...
Asking extremely basic questions to win arguments - Name the bias or the fallacy at play
by Boni Aditya — 2019-09-29T11:05:05.907Z

Recently I went to a product manager interview.

They asked a few questions, for which I gave the answers. But eventually one interviewer asked extremely trivial questions i.e. first year of graduation questions - How does the wifi router work? How does DNS work? How does internet work? These questions are so generic, trivial and basic but at the same time, nobody can remember everything. These questions do not require you to use your logic either. It is a simple memory based question. But since I wrote the answers to these questions over 10 years ago, it is impossible for me to remember them. I understood the bias at play here, but I could not give a name to it. There might be multiple fallacies or biases at play here. Can you please help me pin point them?
Christiano decision theory excerpt
by Rob Bensinger — 2019-09-29T02:55:35.542Z

A transcribed excerpt I found interesting from the decision theory outtake from 80,000 Hours' second interview of Paul Christiano (starting at 14:00):

Robert Wiblin: It seems like philosophers have not been terribly interested in these heterodox decision theories. They just seem to not have been persuaded, or not even to really have engaged with them a great deal. What do you think is going on there?

Paul Christiano: I think there's a few things going on. I don't think it's right to see a spectrum with CDT and then EDT and then UDT. I think it's more right to see a box, where there's the updatelessness axis and then there's the causal vs. evidential axis. And the causal vs. evidential thing I don't think is as much of a divide between geography, or between philosophers and rationalists.

CDT is the majority position in philosophy, but not an overwhelming majority; there are reasonable philosophers who defend EDT. EDT is a somewhat more common view, I think, in the world — certainly in the prisoner's dilemma with a twin case, I think most people would choose "cooperate" if you just poll people on the street. Again, not by a large majority.

And amongst the rationalists, there's also not agreement on that. Where I would say Eliezer has a view which I would describe as the causal view, not the evidential view. But he accepts updatelessness.

So on the causal vs. evidential split, I think it's not so much geographical. It's more just like everyone is fairly uncertain. Although I think it is the case maybe people in the Bay are more on evidential decision theory and philosophers are more on causal decision theory.

Then on the updatelessness thing, I think a lot of that is this semantic disagreement / this understanding of "what is the project of decision theory?" Where if you're building AI systems, the point of decision theory is to understand how we make decisions such that we can encode it into a machine.

And if you're doing that, I think there's not actually a disagreement about that question. Like, once you're really specific about what is meant. No one thinks you should make — well, I don't... Hopefully no one thinks you should make an AI that uses causal decision theory. Causal decision theorists would not recommend making such an AI, because it has bad consequences to make such an AI.

So I think once we're talking about "How do you make an AI?", if you're saying, "I...
Kohli episode discussion in 80K's Christiano interview
by Rob Bensinger — 2019-09-29T01:40:33.852Z
Link: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-christiano-a-message-for-the-future/

From the 80,000 Hours Podcast (1:10:38):

Robert Wiblin: A few weeks ago, we published

our conversation with Pushmeet Kohli

, who’s an AI robustness and reliability researcher at DeepMind over in London. To heavily summarize Pushmeet’s views, I think he might have made a couple of key claims.

One was that alignment and robustness issues, in his view, appear everywhere throughout the development of machine learning systems, so they require some degree of attention from everyone who’s working in the field. According to Pushmeet, this makes the distinction between safety research and non-safety research somewhat vague and blurry, and he thinks people who are working on capabilities are kind of also helping with safety, and improving reliability also improves capabilities, because you can then actually design algorithms that do what you want.

Secondly, I think he thought that an important part of reliability and robustness is going to be trying to faithfully communicate our desires to machine learning algorithms, and that this is kind of analogous to – although a harder instance of – the challenge of just communicating with other people, getting them to really understand what we mean. Although of course it’s easier to do that with other humans than with animals or machine learning algorithms.

A third point was, I guess, just a general sense of optimism: that DeepMind is working on this issue quite a lot and are keen to hire more people to work on these problems, and I guess a sense that probably we’re going to be able to gradually fix these problems with AI alignment as we go along and machine learning algorithms get more influential.

I know you haven’t had a chance to listen to the whole interview, but you skimmed over the transcript. Firstly, where do you think Pushmeet is getting things right? Where do you agree?

Paul Christiano: So I certainly agree that there’s this tight linkage between getting AI systems to do what you want and making them more capable. I agree with the basic optimism that people will need to address the “getting AI systems to do what we want” problem. I think it is more likely than not that people will have a good solution to that problem.

Maybe there’s this interesting intervention of, “Should longtermists be thinking about that problem in order to increase the probability?” I think even absent the actions of the longtermists, there’s a reasonab...
Is Specificity a Mental Model?
by Liron — 2019-09-28T22:53:56.886Z

This is Part IX of the Specificity Sequence

I've recently noticed a lot of smart people publishing lists of mental models. They're apparently having a moment:

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions by Shane Parrish
Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful and Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Mental Models: Learn How to Think Better and Gain a Mental Edge by James Clear
Mental Models by Julian Shapiro
A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom, a 1994 talk by Charlie Munger about how he and Warren Buffet use a “latticework of models” to understand the world and make good investments. A couple decades early to the current party, but still.

There are hundreds of useful mental models to learn, such as “leverage”, “social proof”, “seizing the middle”, and of course, “mental model”. I want to help you be the very best, searching far and wide, teaching your brain to understand the power that’s inside.

Gotta Catch ’Em All

We’ve been focusing nonstop on one (super)powerful mental model called the “ladder of abstraction”, and seen it prove useful in a surprising variety of unrelated domains. The best mental models are the ones that have the largest number of applicability domains while also being the simplest and most compact. 😎

But despite all its usefulness, the ladder of abstraction doesn’t appear in any list of mental models I’ve seen to date. The closest it’s gotten is probably this entry from Farnam Street’s list in the "Military & War" section:

Seeing the Front
One of the most valuable military tactics is the habit of “personally seeing the front” before making decisions — not always relying on advisors, maps, and reports, all of which can be either faulty or biased.

Yes, advisors and maps and reports that tell you the reality on the ground may be “faulty or biased”, but there’s an even more fundamental problem: Their whole job is to slide the ground truth up the ladder of abstraction.

A report tells you that your enemy’s troops on the battlefield outnumber yours 2-to-1. Sounds like you should retreat, right? Not so fast. Let’s slide that down the ladder of abstraction by filling in more detail.

Rain clouds are gathering in the sky? The report might have neglected to mention that detail. When you realize it’s going to rain, you might think of a clever strategy that uses the rain to your advantage.

“Seeing...
Axis-49 to Jammer MIDI Mapper
by jefftk — 2019-09-28T11:20:02.044Z

One of the risks with

new
instruments is that you might put a lot of work learning how to
play something that then is discontinued. In the case of the

jammer, things are worse because it was
discontinued five years before I even got into the instrument. As I
see used Axis-49s come up on resale sites I've been making lowball
offers, as politely as I can, trying to collect a few spares, and at
this point I have three and a half. [1] While my main goal with these
is insurance against a future where mine breaks and I can't fix it,
they don't need to stay on my shelf: I've been lending them out to
people who want to play with the layout.

You can't use it without a MIDI mapper, though, because while I've
rearranged the physical keys, that doesn't make it send different MIDI
signals. I was trying to help someone get set up with one, and it
turns out that the state of MIDI mappers for non-programmers isn't
that great. Plus, with 98 keys, that's a lot of data entry. So I've
made a stand-alone version for Mac: source
code, executable
program.

It's a quick cut-down version of the code behind my rhythm stage setup that looks for
an Axis-49 and presents a virtual MIDI device (jammer) that produces
the mapped notes. There are two binaries, one for holding the device
with (non-functional) transpose keys up, the other with transpose keys
down.

If you sometimes play with sharp-key instruments and other times play
with flat key ones, you can turn the device over and use the other
binary, with a transposition MIDI mapper. This lets you have a range
from F to
B (F, C, G, D, A, E, B) in one orientation, centered on the key of
D, and Db to G (Db, Ab, Eb, Bb, F, C, G) in the other, centered on the
key of Bb, in the other.

[1] Three good ones, and one that's too old to go into "selfless"
mode and so is effectively only half a keyboard.
Follow-Up to Petrov Day, 2019
by Ben Pace — 2019-09-27T23:47:15.738Z

Hurrah! Success! I didn't know what to expect, and am pleasantly surprised to find the Frontpage is still intact. My thanks to everyone who took part, to everyone who commented on yesterday's post, and to everyone who didn't unilaterally blow up the site.

Launch Attempts Results

I said I would share usernames and codes of all attempts to launch the codes. Others on the team told me this seemed like a bad idea in many ways, and on reflection I agree - I think many people were not aware they were signing up for being publicly named and shamed, and I think it's good that people aren't surprised by their actions becoming public. Though if someone had successfully nuked the site I would have named them.

Nonetheless, I’ll share a bunch of info. First of all, the button was in a pretty central place, and it turns out you can hit it accidentally. Ray built the button so that you could only hit it once - it was forever after pressed.

The number of logged-in users who pressed the button was 102.

(Ruby made a sheet of times when people pressed the button, redacting most of the info.)

I have no number for logged-out users, for them pressing it brought up a window asking them to log-in. (Er, I'm not certain that's the best selection process for new users).
The number of users who actually submitted launch codes is 18.

11 of those accounts had zero karma, 7 accounts had positive karma. None of the users were people who had been given real codes.

Several users submitted launch codes before clicking through to find out what the button even did - I hope this initiative serves them well in life.
A few accounts were made on-the-day presumably for this purpose, I'm happy to name these. They include users like "bomb_presser", "The Last Harbinger", and "halosaga", whose codes were "00000000", "NL73njLH58et1Ec0" and "diediedie" respectively.

LW user ciphergoth (Paul Crowley) shared his launch codes on Facebook (indeed I had sent him real launch codes), and two users copied and entered them. However, he had actually shared fake codes. "The Last Harbinger" entered them.

A second user entered them, who had positive karma, and was not someone to whom I had sent real codes. However, they failed to properly copy it, missing the final character. To them, I can only say what I had prepared to say to anyone who mis-entered what they believed were correct launch codes. "First, you thought you were...
Partial Agency
by abramdemski — 2019-09-27T22:04:46.754Z

Epistemic status: very rough intuitions here.

I think there's something interesting going on with Evan's notion of myopia.

Evan has been calling this thing "myopia". Scott has been calling it "stop-gradients". In my own mind, I've been calling the phenomenon "directionality". Each of these words gives a different set of intuitions about how the cluster could eventually be formalized.

Stop-Gradients

Nash equilibria are, abstractly, modeling agents via an equation like a∗=argmaxaf(a,a∗). In words: a∗ is the agent's mixed strategy. The payoff f(.,.) is a function of the mixed strategy in two ways: the first argument is the causal channel, where actions directly have effects; the second argument represents the "acausal" channel, IE, the fact that the other players know the agent's mixed strategy and this influences their actions. The agent is maximizing across the first channel, but "ignoring" the second channel; that is why we have to solve for a fixed point to find Nash equilibria. This motivates the notion of "stop gradient": if we think in terms of neural-network type learning, we're sending the gradient through the first argument but not the second. (It's a kind of mathematically weird thing to do!)

Myopia

Thinking in terms of iterated games, we can also justify the label "myopia". Thinking in terms of "gradients" suggests that we're doing some kind of training involving repeatedly playing the game. But we're training an agent to play as if it's a single-shot game: the gradient is rewarding behavior which gets more reward within the single round even if it compromises long-run reward. This is a weird thing to do: why implement a training regime to produce strategies like that, if we believe the nash-equilibrium model, IE we think the other players will know our mixed strategy and react to it? We can, for example, win chicken by going straight more often than is myopically rational. Generally speaking, we expect to get better rewards in the rounds after training if we optimized for non-myopic strategies during training.

Directionality

To justify my term "directionality" for these phenomena, we have to look at a different example: the idea that "when beliefs and reality don't match, we change our be...
Long-term Donation Bunching?
by jefftk — 2019-09-27T12:40:01.661Z

Let's say you're a relatively well-off American with an income of
$100k and have taken the

Giving What We Can pledge
to donate 10% of your money to the most effective charities you can
find. The standard deduction in the US is currently $12k, which means
if you were to donate $10k/year it effectively wouldn't be tax
deductible. [1]

The standard EA suggestion here is Donation Bunching: instead
of donating $10k every year donate $20k half the years and $0 the
other half. In the years where you donate you itemize your
deductions, in the others you take the standard deduction. Considered
over two years, $8k of the $20k (40%) is deductible.

But we could do better than that! You can deduct up to 60% of your
income if you're donating cash, so you could have five years of
donating $0 and one year of donating $60k. Considered over six years,
$48k of the $60k (80%) is deductible. [2]

This sounds great, right? Money donated to effective charities does
much more good than money collected by the government, and with a bit
of planning you can effectively move 80% of your donations to being
pre-tax. But I don't think it's a good idea!

Over time people change, and a very common way people change as they
get older is to turn inward. You start out as a bright-eyed idealist,
enthusiastic about making the world a better place and willing to make
sacrifices for what you believe in. Then you burn out working too
many hours doing something that doesn't feel as effective as you
thought it would be, or you start feeling a pull to have kids and
focus your efforts there, or you just stop feeling so motivated by
altruism, or dozens of other things, and after a few years the idea of
giving your money to people who need it more still sounds nice but
isn't a priority anymore.

While we don't have good data on the rate at which this happens, in a
small
sample about half of people in the effective altruism movement in
2013 were no longer involved five years later. If you think your
current self is correct to be altruistic and don't want to leave
donations up to a likely less-generous future person then bunching
donations over several years is harmful: the substantial possibility
that you don't actually donate outweighs the tax savings. [3]

(Thanks to someone I talked to at the SSC
Boston Meetup for asking me the question that got me thinking
about this.)

[...
Happy Petrov Day!
by Martin Sustrik — 2019-09-27T02:10:00.739Z

I don't care much about feast days or memorial days. Assumption of Mary? Meh. Slovak Constitution Day? Shrug. Labour Day? Real socialism had sucked all the joy out of that one.

The only one that I do observe is Petrov Day. Not that I do anything special. I don't even take a day off from work. I just take few minutes to contemplate.

But now I am thinking that maybe, on this festive occasion, I should do a little bit more, maybe something that's public, something that has at least a slight feeling of a ceremony.

And given that while browsing the newspapers today I haven't found a single mention of the event, no op-eds, no commemorative articles, no historical analysis, I decided to write a witness report of my own, no matter how petty and unimportant it may be.

On September 26th, 1983 I was ten years old. I was attending 4th grade of the Czech school by Czechoslovak embassy in London. The authorities didn't want socialist kids to mingle with capitalist kids, so we weren't allowed to attend local schools. (There were sporadic, unsuccessfull, attempts to mix the kids from different socialist countries though.) The school resided in a family house in Hampstead and there were approximately forty kids attending. I don't remember that particular day, but given that it was in autumn and that it was in London, I assume it was raining. It was Monday. We used to live close to the school, several Czechoslovak families close to each other and so, same as every morning, one of the mothers walked us to the school. Kids that lived further away were driven in by a minibus. There were four grades in the school, two teachers and two classrooms. Kindergarten was in a separate room near the entrance. Me and my friend, we once did a puppet show for the kindergarteners. We had only one puppet (a chicken) and so I have no idea what the other one of us was doing. The memories have faded in the meantime. There was a narrow room with no windows in the basement that served as a library. My favourite book was about cars: A hand-illustrated compendium of models from the very beginning of automobilism up to the seventies. One of the cars was called Zaporozhets which was a bit puzzling and mysterious because it sounded like it should have horns. The room was also used for more nefarious purposes, when the boys were all too interested in what's under girls' skirts and the girls were not unwi...