trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
All is fair in love and war, on Zero-sum games in life
by Ratios — 2021-04-17T02:11:06.664Z

Crossposted from my blog: Dark Rationality

Why can’t we all just get along? Is a good question to ask, even if you won’t like the answer. Naval Ravikant posted on Twitter that people should avoid playing zero-sum games and focus on the positive-sum game of wealth creation, the irony is quite amusing considering twitter is a zero-sum-silicon-valley-engineered status game that causes many of its participants to become utterly obsessed with their follower counts. In this case, the medium is the message.

The case I’m going to be making in this post is that for humans zero-sum games are not only unavoidable but are actually very important and that these truths are being suppressed and denied because of their dire implications.

Zero-sum games in life

The most famous and clear-cut zero-sum game in life is wars, two or more sides fighting over some scarce resource, may it be oil, land, or trade routes.

The entire human history was filled with wars, in many cases wars can be considered even a negative-sum game as the aggregate loss from both sides in many cases is larger than the utility gain of the winning side. A contrarian reader would probably mention world war 2 and the positive influence it had on the development of many technologies like computation or nuclear power. But I would argue that the price we paid in economic destruction and suffering was quite high, and it’s unclear if on aggregate the result was positive. But even if it was the case this is the exception and not the norm.

But wars are not what they used to be, it seems that nuclear weapons and the MAD doctrine have made wars somewhat obsolete so an argument can be made that while wars used to be a significant problem in the past their importance in human life seems to be heavily declining.

The second big zero-sum game in life is status, here things start to become unpleasant. Because it’s quite hard to deny that status is zero-sum and while wars are becoming rare it doesn’t seem that status-wars follow suit. And if you believe the ideas of Peter Turchin about the overproduction of elites they might have even become worse with time. Judging by revealed preferences, social status is very important to people – many spend a large number of resources on Veblen goods and signaling (the broke individual who still splurges on clothes is a trope for a reason). The elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Si...
On Sleep Procrastination: Going To Bed At A Reasonable Hour
by emily.fan — 2021-04-17T02:10:59.172Z

Who Would Find This Article Most Helpful

Those who find going to bed at a reasonable hour a major bottleneck to getting enough sleep and maintaining a healthy sleep schedule

Those interested in thinking more deeply about their mindset with respect to sleep and productivity

TL;DR

Things I’ve Tried Shortened

Paying someone else $0.01 for every minute later I go to bed than my bedtime. (Perhaps next time I could use SPAR).

FocusMate while doing bedtime routine.

Posters reminding myself to sleep.

App/Website blockers.

Reading Why We Sleep.

Making rough calculations on productivity loss.

Things I am Currently Trying

App/Website blockers.

Listing out the ways I fail to go to sleep earlier and strategizing ways to combat those failure modes.

Mindset Shifts

Framing staying up late to meet deadlines as a high-interest loan.

Recognizing planning fallacy with variability in how we feel the next day while being sleep deprived.

Realizing that giving up sleep to be successful backfires.

Recommended Exercises

Reading Why We Sleep.

Making rough calculations for loss of productivity on sleep-deprived days.

Enumerating and combatting failure modes that lead to sleep procrastination.

Helpful Resources

Read this article to find them!

My Personal Sleep Procrastination

How I Procrastinate on Sleep

I procrastinate on going to sleep in a wide variety of seemingly unrelated ways:

Downloading software

Having long phone calls

Over-engineering spreadsheets

Listening to good music

Cleaning up my room

Having messaging exchanges

Reading cool articles or a good book

Finishing up homework

Making posters

Ironically, working on this article

And many more!

Things I’ve Tried

Paying someone else $0.01 for every minute later I go to bed than my bedtime. It worked in the sense that my sleep schedule became better, but I ended up losing enough money that it was painful enough for me to discontinue this. Having a sleep accountability buddy system could work better (two people paying each other, so that no one loses too much).

FocusMate nightly routine sessions. I ended up cleaning my email instead of brushing my teeth, showering, and actually going to sleep.

App & Website Blockers. I kept quitting the blockers. I am currently experimenting with a script (for Freedom on Mac) that reopens the blocker every five minutes, which seems quite effective. I do sometimes go on my Phone/iPad

...
Could degoogling be a practice run for something more important?
by Quinn — 2021-04-17T00:03:42.790Z

Andrew Critch's recent threat model ends with the following:

We humans eventually realize with collective certainty that the companies have been trading and optimizing according to objectives misaligned with preserving our long-term well-being and existence, but by then their facilities are so pervasive, well-defended, and intertwined with our basic needs that we are unable to stop them from operating. With no further need for the companies to appease humans in pursuing their production objectives, less and less of their activities end up benefiting humanity.

Eventually, resources critical to human survival but non-critical to machines (e.g., arable land, drinking water, atmospheric oxygen…) gradually become depleted or destroyed, until humans can no longer survive.

I occasionally see posts by people who believe that surveillance advertising is bad, and we should try to write google out of our lives. Regardless of the merit of this argument, I admire the discipline it takes to degoogle. Gmail and gdocs are really high quality, add a ton of value, which is why they've become so entrenched. I can scarcely imagine actually doing without google docs, at this point!

It occurs to me: should we be practicing the skill of doing without something that's pervasively adding a lot of value, just in case that skill helps to keep us from being enfeebled by an aligned AI system, or destroyed by a misaligned AI system? Is it also practice coordinating, which would payoff more generally than AI problems?
Superrational Agents Kelly Bet Influence!
by abramdemski — 2021-04-16T22:08:18.201Z

As a follow-up to the Walled Garden discussion about Kelly betting, Scott Garrabrant made some super-informal conjectures to me privately, involving the idea that some class of "nice" agents would "Kelly bet influence", where "influence" had something to do with anthropics and acausal trade.

I was pretty incredulous at the time. However, as soon as he left the discussion, I came up with an argument for a similar fact. (The following does not perfectly reflect what Scott had in mind, by any means. His notion of "influence" was very different, for a start.)

The meat of my argument is just Critch's negotiable RL theorem. In fact, that's practically the entirety of my argument. I'm just thinking about the consequences in a different way from how I have before.

Superrationality

Rather than articulating a real decision theory that deals with all the questions of acausal trade, bargaining, commitment races, etc, I'm just going to imagine a class of superrational agents which solve these problems somehow. These agents "handshake" with each other and negotiate (perhaps acausally) a policy which is Pareto-optimal wrt each of their preferences.

Negotiable RL

Critch's negotiable RL result studies the question of what an AI should do if it must serve multiple masters. For this post, I'll refer to the masters as "coalition members".

He shows the following:

Any policy which is Pareto-optimal with respect to the preferences of coalition members, can be understood as doing the following. Each coalition member is assigned a starting weight, with weights summing to one. At each decision, the action is selected via the weighted average of the preferences of each coalition member, according to the current weights. At each observation, the weights are updated via Bayes' Law, based on the beliefs of coalition members.

He was studying what an AI's policy should be, when serving the coalition members; however, we can apply this result to a coalition of superrational agents who are settling on their own policy, rather than constructing a robotic servant.

Critch remarks that we can imagine the weight update as the result of bets which the coalition members would make with each other. I've known about this for a long time, and it made intuitive sense to me that they'll happily bet on their beliefs; so, of course they'll gain/lose influence in the coalition based on good/bad predictions.

What I di...
Most Analogies Are Wrong
by J Bostock — 2021-04-16T19:53:41.940Z

I remember when I was taking a plant biology class at university, and our lecturer said something along the lines of "A plant needs to take in resources and spend them like a business or a bank, but this analogy isn't great, can anyone explain why?". It took a while for someone to come up with a good response but the one the lecturer was looking for was "plants take in and spend multiple 'currencies' whereas a bank only uses money". There is a better response.

It is up to the person making argument by analogy to explain why their analogy is good. It is not up to other people to explain why their analogy is bad. Analogies can often sneak in assumptions, or lose much of the incredibly deep detail present in the subject. People often end up arguing over the analogy rather than the substance.

The strongest analogies have the form [A], [A] is like [a], [a] implies [b], [b] is like [B]", therefore [B]". Many analogies run as "[A], [a] implies [b], therefore [B]", skipping over the steps which are both the most important (and often where the cracks in the argument show).

Morality as taxes goes into this a bit. Intuition pumps for philosophy are more akin to a rhetorical device than a strong argument.. If you need to use an analogy to convince someone of your point then they are not worth discussing an issue with. The need to use an analogy may mean they don't understand or want to engage with the subject matter. The other likely option is that they think you can't understand the subject matter, or even worse, they want you to accept their conclusion without engaging with the subject matter.

Instead of analogies I tend to use examples: in a discussion about AI risks, rather than saying "Imagine if gorillas decided to create humans to solve gorilla problems. No matter how much the gorillas outnumber the humans, the humans will be able to escape their cages by acting in ways which a gorilla could not have imagined." I would much rather say something like "Imagine creating an AI system which manipulates sensors and billboards in order to discourage crime in an area. If the crime is evaluated by humans watching video feeds, the most effective billboard messages will simply tell criminals where the blind spots in the camera systems are." The second one is a much stronger argument. (Here I have used two examples within an example)

Most people are aware that analogies can...
The Scout Mindset - read-along
by weft — 2021-04-16T19:43:02.554Z

I just started reading Julia Galef's new book "The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't". Here's a description:

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe—and shoot down those we don't.

But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a "scout" mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true.

In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world—which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.

This seems like a good book to do a read-along to, since there are probably a decent number of people reading it at the same time.
If possible put your comments under the correct chapter parent comment as you go. If you get further ahead than me, feel free to create a new chapter parent comment.
Why has nuclear power been a flop?
by jasoncrawford — 2021-04-16T16:49:15.789Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

To fully understand progress, we must contrast it with non-progress. Of particular interest are the technologies that have failed to live up to the promise they seemed to have decades ago. And few technologies have failed more to live up to a greater promise than nuclear power.

In the 1950s, nuclear was the energy of the future. Two generations later, it provides only about 10% of world electricity, and reactor design hasn‘t fundamentally changed in decades. (Even “advanced reactor designs” are based on concepts first tested in the 1960s.)

So as soon as I came across it, I knew I had to read a book just published last year by Jack Devanney: Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop.

What follows is my summary of the book—Devanney‘s arguments and conclusions, whether or not I fully agree with them. I‘ll give my own thoughts at the end.

The Gordian knot

There is a great conflict between two of the most pressing problems of our time: poverty and climate change. To avoid global warming, the world needs to massively reduce CO2 emissions. But to end poverty, the world needs massive amounts of energy. In developing economies, every kWh of energy consumed is worth roughly $5 of GDP.

How much energy do we need? Just to give everyone in the world the per-capita energy consumption of Europe (which is only half that of the US), we would need to more than triple world energy production, increasing our current 2.3 TW by over 5 additional TW:

Devanney Fig 1.3: Regional distribution of electricity consumption

If we account for population growth, and for the decarbonization of the entire economy (building heating, industrial processes, electric vehicles, synthetic fuels, etc.), we need more like 25 TW:

Devanney Fig 1.4: Electricity consumption in a decarbonized world

This is the Gordian knot. Nuclear power is the sword that can cut it: a scalable source of dispatchable (i.e., on-demand), virtually emissions-free energy. It takes up very little land, consumes very little fuel, and produces very little waste. It‘s the technology the world needs to solve both energy poverty and climate change.

So why isn‘t it much bigger? Why hasn‘t it solved the problem already? Why has it been “such a tragic flop?”

Nuclear is expensive but should be cheap

The proximal cause of nuclear‘s flop is that it is expensive. In most places, it can‘t compete with fossil fuels. Natural gas can provide electricity at 7–8 cen...
Prophetic Hazard
by onur — 2021-04-16T10:09:14.745Z

Some beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies. These involve causal sequences of the form

(1) X believes that ‘X is p.’

(2) X therefore does b.

(3) Because of (2), X becomes p.

SFPs can be desirable or undesirable to the believer, depending on how they affect them. For example, "I am confident" might be desirable, whereas "I have social anxiety" might be undesirable.

A prophetic hazard is created when someone proposes an idea that can become an undesirable self-fulfilling prophecy, or affirms an existing one. Below are some examples of prophetic hazards at a personal level:

Telling a pessimistic person "You are such a pessimist".

Telling someone who is suffering depression "You are so depressed".

Reminding an old person that they are old.

Reminding a terminally ill patient that they don't have much to live, thereby distressing them and hastening the process.

Telling a child that they are stupid after they make a mistake.

Prophetic hazards can also exist at a societal level:

The following belief is a common feature of right-wing ideologies: "Social inequality is a natural feature of societies, and is therefore inevitable."

Bernaysian approach to democracy: "Masses of working people are like a herd of sheep that are unfit to rule themselves."

Prophetic hazards are dangerous because they reflect a certain reality, or rather, a possibility of becoming real. They push people towards slippery slopes where they can lose control. They pave paths of least resistance to catastrophes which can otherwise be avoided through effort.
Does anyone know this webpage about Machine Learning?
by mukashi — 2021-04-16T01:03:43.804Z

I have been trying to find this webpage for a few weeks with no success, maybe someone knows what I am referring to and can point me out to it, I would really appreciate it.

I remember that a few years ago (it could be about 5 years ago or more) I found this brilliant resource about Machine Learning and Bayesian statistics.

They had a big graph with all the important concepts in Machine Learning: You could click in every node (a concept, e.g. Maximum Likelihood) and see what things you need to understand first (e.g. basic probability) and to what things that specific point was a prerequisite itself (e.g. Expectation-Maximization). There weren't extensive explanations inside of every concept, but a long list of recommended resources, such as courses, videos or papers. There was also an option where you could just mark some of the nodes as "mastered" and then you could clearly see where you could go with the things that you knew, and what were the missing things you needed to master first to go study more complex stuff.

Creating a similar graph with the important concepts in LW would be great by the way.
Place-Based Programming - Part 2 - Functions
by lsusr — 2021-04-16T00:25:27.515Z

In Part 1, we defined a place-of macro and a value-of function. The code from Part 1, as originally written, was not an importable module. I have modified the code from Part 1 to be portable.

;; Module from Part 1
;; Save this code into a file called part1.hy and then use it with:
;; (import [part1 [value-of]])
;; (require [part1 [place-of]])

(setv +place-dir+ ".places/")

(defmacro/g! place-of [code]
`(do
(import [hashlib [md5]] os pickle)
(setv ~g!type-dir (os.path.join ~+place-dir+ (str (type '~code))))
(if-not (os.path.exists ~g!type-dir)
(os.mkdir ~g!type-dir))
(setv ~g!place
(os.path.join
~g!type-dir
(+ (.hexdigest (md5 (.encode (str '~code))))
".pickle")))
(if-not (os.path.exists ~g!place)
(with [f (open ~g!place "wb")]
(pickle.dump (eval '~code) f)))
~g!place))

(defn value-of [place]
(import os pickle)
(assert (= (type place) str)
(+ (str place) " is not a place"))
(if-not os.path.exists
(raise (FileNotFoundError (+ "Could not find place " place))))
(with [f (open place "rb")]
(pickle.load f)))

The value-of function works fine. The place-of macro has no way to accept parameters. We will define a macro for constructing place-based functions, which can accept parameters.

defnp

Hy's built-in function declaration macro is defn. We will call our place-based function declaration macro defnp. Our place-based function will hash its own code as before. We also need a unique identifier for its parameters. In data science, the values of our parameters are often gigantic. It takes a long time to hash a big data structure. Hashing big data structures takes many computations. The whole purpose of a persistent memoization system is to reduce how many computations we have to perform. Passing values to our place-based function is a wastes compute. Instead we pass places, which are always easy to hash. A place-based function takes places as parameters and then returns another place.

(import [part1 [value-of]])
(require [part1 [place-of]])

(import os [part1 [+place-dir+]])
(setv +funcall-dir+ (os.path.join +place-dir+ "funcall"))

(defmacro/g! defnp [symbol params &rest body]
`(do
(import [hashlib [md5]] os pickle)
(defn ~symbol ~params
(setv ~g!funcall-place
(os.path.join

...
The National Dashboard and Human Progress
by maxa — 2021-04-15T19:21:59.879Z
Link: https://max2c.com/national-dashboard-and-human-progress/

In this post, I would like to consider a hypothetical national dashboard comprising essential metrics that measure the economy, human well-being, and long-term progress. It is hypothetical because, although all these metrics are measured today, not all of them receive equal attention in the government and the media.

In This Post

Show Me the Numbers
Can We Measure Progress?
A National Dashboard
Upstream Drivers of Long-Term Progress
A Possible Set of 11 Metrics
More Options
Global Focus

Show Me the Numbers

As someone who has studied economics and business and spent over a decade working in the private sector, I’ve been long dismayed by how little focus there is on numbers in government and media reporting. To the extent politicians focus on numbers, they typically pick the ones that support their narrative and seem relevant to this week’s news cycle.¹

I wonder if there’s a better way. What if we reversed the order? What if we came together as a society and determined (1) what areas we would most like to improve, (2) the best way to measure the progress, and (3) the best way to report on it and future plans? What if we then used this framework to guide public conversation, media reporting, and perhaps even some White House press briefings?

The idea is not new, of course. And many people have already tried to popularize it. Recently, Andrew Young got many people excited when he proposed the idea of the American scorecard and — taking the idea to the extreme — suggested that the president use PowerPoint to report on progress.

So what’s the problem?

The problem isn’t as much that we aren’t measuring things.² The problem is threefold:

There is little national and global public consensus regarding which indicators matter most.
There is limited accountability when it comes to improving these numbers and publicly reporting on them in a structured way and with a regular cadence.
Media focus can sometimes be misplaced, haphazard, pessimistically biased, localist, and short-term focused.

Can We Measure Progress?

First, we might want to agree on what human progress is. And since this conversation can get rather complicated and heated quickly, it might make sense to focus on things things that people universally value. Here is a relevant quote from Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now:

“What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be fo

...
Old post/writing on optimization daemons?
by jbkjr — 2021-04-15T18:00:17.923Z

I'm having trouble locating an old post about optimization daemons that I know I read at one point. I believe it was written by Eliezer. It featured a lot of visual imagery of the daemon steering the path of the model through parameter-space by e.g. forcing it through narrow paths towards low loss surrounded by walls of high loss. Does anyone know which post I'm remembering?