trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Studying Early Stage Science: Research Program Introduction
by habryka — 2020-01-17T22:12:03.829Z
Link: https://medium.com/@LeverageResearch/early-stage-science-research-program-introduction-cb52b7c5d6f1

(Leverage just posted the below introduction into their current research program to Medium, and I got permission to crosspost it here. I think it's quite a good read, and I more broadly think that the history of science is one of the best ways to study the art of rationality)

Introduction

Scientific progress is responsible for some of the most amazing developments in human history. It has enabled us to cure diseases, increase agricultural yields, and travel quickly and safely across the globe. As such, the opportunity to enable progress in science can be very valuable.

Having studied examples from the history of science, we at Leverage Research believe it is possible to describe how early discoveries led to the creation of impressive and sophisticated scientific disciplines. By understanding the methodologies used by the researchers at key points in the past, as well as the social and institutional contexts that enabled them to make progress, we believe it may be possible to help modern researchers make progress in new or stagnating fields.

In this paper, we outline a research program designed to investigate this hypothesis. We describe three important examples from the history of science, identify a phenomenon worth studying, state a specific formulation of our hypothesis, and describe our research methodology¹. With this paper and the work that follows it, we hope to set the stage for the study of early stage science.

You can read more about early stage science on our website.

Three Historical Cases

Galvani, Volta, and the Invention of the Battery

In 1780, an Italian physician and biologist named Luigi Galvani announced the discovery of a new electrical phenomenon, which he called “animal electricity.”

For some time, Galvani had been performing experiments using dissected frogs to investigate how electricity interacted with animal bodies. In his most famous experiment, he found that he could make dissected frog legs twitch by hanging them on iron hooks and probing them with a piece of metal. He concluded on the basis of his investigations that an electrical charge was being generated by the frog leg itself, and that this “animal electricity” was generated by an electrical fluid in the frogs (Cajavilca, Varon, and Sternbach 2009, 160).

Figure 1: Galvani experimenting on frogs

Galvani’s research attracted others to investigate animal electricity. In particular, it drew

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Fiddle Effects Tech
by jefftk — 2020-01-17T17:00:01.784Z

Imagine you're a fiddle player who primarily plays without effects,
but would occasionally like to be able to play with them. What can
you do?

One option is to put a pickup on the fiddle and run that into guitar
pedals. This will work, but pickups generally sound much worse than
clip-on mics like the ubiquitous AT
PRO-35. Since you're mostly playing uneffected, you don't want to
give that up.

Another option is to get a vocal effects processor. For example, I
have a VoiceTone
D1. These take balanced XLR from the mic, send balanced XLR to
the board, and provide phantom power, so they make a lot of sense
technically. Unfortunately, since they are designed for a vocal signal
I've found they sound pretty crummy when applied to fiddle or
mandolin.

A mixer should work here, but it seems like both overkill and a hack?
Get a small mixer with phantom power, run the output of the mixer into
a guitar pedal, run the output of the guitar pedal into another
channel on the mixer. For example, with a cheap mixer like the Behringer
Xenyx 502 you would:

run the mic into channel one, which provides phantom power

pan channel one hard right

run the right main output into the guitar pedal

run the guitar's pedal's output into channel 2 (left)

set the 2/3 balance to hard left

run the left main output (balanced) to the mixer

A slightly less cheap mixer (ex: the

Soundcraft
Notepad-5, which I have) lets you do this with a monitor channel
instead of panning, but it's still not ideal.

You're also in a funny place impedance-wise, where the guitar pedal
may be expecting a high impedance input or to be driving a high
impedance output. If you need that you could add a reamper (ex)
before the pedal and a DI (ex)
after. I'm not sure whether this is something pedals tend to care about?

All of this seems like a mess to me. It seems like maybe a bunch of
people would want a box with:

XLR input with phantom power

A good quality pre-amp with gain control

High-impedance 1/4" output to the pedal

High-impedance 1/4" input from the pedal

XLR output

Maybe a second dry-only XLR output

Does a box like this exist? Alternatively, are there pedals in the
same form factor as the vocal effects processors, but that are
designed for instruments?

Comment via: facebook
Can we always assign, and make sense of, subjective probabilities?
by MichaelA — 2020-01-17T03:05:57.077Z

Epistemic status: I wrote this post quickly, and largely to solicit feedback on the claims I make in it. This is because (a) I’m not sure about these claims (or how I’ve explained them), and (b) the question of what I should believe on this topic seems important in general and for various other posts I’m writing. (So please comment if you have any thoughts on this!)

I’ve now read a bunch on topics related to the questions covered here, but I’m not an expert, and haven’t seen or explicitly looked for a direct treatment of the questions covered here. It’s very possible this has already been thoroughly and clearly covered elsewhere; if so, please comment the link!

I basically accept a Bayesian interpretation of probability, "in which, instead of frequency or propensity of some phenomenon, probability is interpreted as reasonable expectation representing a state of knowledge or as quantification of a personal belief" (Wikipedia). Relatedly, I think I accept the idea that we can always assign probabilities to propositions (or at least use something like an uninformative prior), and "make sense of" these probabilities, even if sometimes we have incredibly little basis for making those probability estimates.

This idea seems to be disputed fairly often, and this seems related to the concept of a distinction between "risk" and "uncertainty" (which I think is a confused concept). I think the arguments against this idea are flawed. But I want to test my beliefs and properly engage with those arguments. So in this post, I first discuss how I believe we can arrive at, and make sense of, probability estimates in what are sometimes put forward as "challenging cases", before discussing what I think is probably the most challenging type of case: what I call "supernatural-type" claims.

Weak examples of "Knightian uncertainty"

Sometimes people propose what seem to me to be very weak examples of cases in which, they propose, we simply cannot arrive at probability estimates. (This may be simply a result of them having a frequentist interpretation of probability, but this often doesn't seem to be made explicit or defended.) Here's one example:

there are situations with so many unique features that they can hardly be grouped with similar cases, such as the danger resulting from a new type of virus, or the consequences of military intervention in conflict areas. These represent cases

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Against Rationalization II: Sequence Recap
by dspeyer — 2020-01-16T22:51:20.308Z

Previously: Eliezer's "Against Rationalization" sequence

I've run out of things to say about rationalization for the moment. Hopefully there'll be an Against Rationalization III a few years from now, but ideally some third author will write it.

For now, a quick recap to double as a table of contents:

Why a New Rationalization Sequence? -- What is rationalization and why is it worth fighting?
Red Flags for Rationalization -- When you see these signs, you should worry. And do something. Even though sometimes you'll conclude everything is fine.
Avoiding Rationalization -- If a chain of logic is endangered by rationalization, the best thing to do is not need that chain of logic.
Testing for Rationalization -- If you can't avoid needing the logic, try using these tools to check if it's dangerously tainted by rationalization.
Using Expert Disagreement -- In the particular case that you're worried because you disagree with the experts, try these tools
Using Expert Disagreement
by dspeyer — 2020-01-16T22:42:14.980Z

Previously: Testing for Rationalization

One of the red flags was "disagreeing with experts". While all the preceding tools apply here, there's a suite of special options for examining this particular scenario.

The "World is Mad" Dialectic

Back in 2015, Ozymandias wrote:

I think a formative moment for any rationalist– our “Uncle Ben shot by the mugger” moment, if you will– is the moment you go “holy shit, everyone in the world is fucking insane.”

First, you can say “holy shit, everyone in the world is fucking insane. Therefore, if I adopt the radical new policy of not being fucking insane, I can pick up these giant piles of utility everyone is leaving on the ground, and then I win.”

Second, you can say “holy shit, everyone in the world is fucking insane. However, none of them seem to realize that they’re insane. By extension, I am probably insane. I should take careful steps to minimize the damage I do.”

I want to emphasize that these are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re a dialectic (…okay, look, this hammer I found is really neat and I want to find some place to use it).

(I would define a "dialectic" as two superficially opposite statements, both of which are true, in such a way that resolving the apparent paradox forces you to build a usefully richer world-model. I have not run this definition past Ozy, much less Hegel.)

To which Eliezer replied in 2017:

But, speaking first to the basic dichotomy that’s being proposed, the whole point of becoming sane is that your beliefs shouldn’t reflect what sort of person you are. To the extent you’re succeeding, at least, your beliefs should just reflect how the world is.

Good News, Everyone!

I did an empirical test and found no sign of a general factor of trusting your own reasoning.

But I did find lots of disagreement. What are people deciding based on?

Types of Disagreement

Explicit

The expert actually said the opposite of your conclusion.

This is the simplest form of disagreement. The expert could still be wrong, or lying, or communicating unclearly and not actually saying what you think they said. But at least there's no complications from the form of disagreement itself.

The "communicating unclearly" hypothesis should always be high in your p...
Bay Solstice 2019 Retrospective
by mingyuan — 2020-01-16T17:15:03.840Z

I was the Creative Director for last year’s Winter Solstice in the Bay Area. I worked with Nat Kozak and Chelsea Voss, who were both focused more on logistics. Chelsea was also the official leader who oversaw both me and Nat and had final say on disputes. (However, I was granted dictatorial control over the Solstice arc and had final say in that arena.) I legit have no idea how any one of us would have pulled this off without the others; love to both of them and also massive respect to Cody Wild, who somehow ran the entire thing herself in 2018.

While I worked with a bunch of other people on Solstice, all opinions expressed here are my own.

Process

Beginnings & research phase

Chelsea, Nat, and I spent just about a full year preparing for Solstice. Our first meeting as a group was on January 20th, and we received official confirmation that we’d be in charge about a month later. In the following month, the three of us had roughly weekly planning meetings via video chat. In the first meeting, we set goals for what we wanted to have done by the first of April, and after that we checked in regularly for a while.

My goal by the first of April was to have a rough outline of the entire arc and a plan for how to make the tone be coherent. I also wanted to get a better handle on the task, and to that end I had conversations with several previous Solstice organizers and also read as much as I could. This included Ray’s sequence on ritual, most of the writing on the Secular Solstice website (both the

blog

and the

resources

section were useful), discussions on the Rational Ritual Facebook group, and whatever else I could find.

I also spent a full day listening to every single song that had ever been recommended for Solstice (see below) and making notes on them in a spreadsheet. When I ran out of songs in that reference class, I sorted my iTunes library by most listens and started going through to see if any of those songs might fit. This was quite surprisingly fruitful - I actually ended up using three of the songs that were originally put on my list in this way.

Another thing I did was go around and ask people what they wanted out of Solstice. I got responses that were actually fairly useful, like “I lose interest during long speeches” and “there should be more singalongs” and “I like singalongs but a lot of the songs have really complicated tunes and I can’t h

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Reality-Revealing and Reality-Masking Puzzles
by AnnaSalamon — 2020-01-16T16:15:34.650Z

Tl;dr: I’ll try here to show how CFAR’s “art of rationality” has evolved over time, and what has driven that evolution.

In the course of this, I’ll introduce the distinction between what I’ll call “reality-revealing puzzles” and “reality-masking puzzles”—a distinction that I think is almost necessary for anyone attempting to develop a psychological art in ways that will help rather than harm. (And one I wish I’d had explicitly back when the Center for Applied Rationality was founded.)

I’ll also be trying to elaborate, here, on the notion we at CFAR have recently been tossing around about CFAR being an attempt to bridge between common sense and Singularity scenarios—an attempt to figure out how people can stay grounded in common sense and ordinary decency and humane values and so on, while also taking in (and planning actions within) the kind of universe we may actually be living in.

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Arts grow from puzzles. I like to look at mathematics, or music, or ungodly things like marketing, and ask: What puzzles were its creators tinkering with that led them to leave behind these structures? (Structures now being used by other people, for other reasons.)

I picture arts like coral reefs. Coral polyps build shell-bits for their own reasons, but over time there accumulates a reef usable by others. Math built up like this—and math is now a powerful structure for building from. [Sales and Freud and modern marketing/self-help/sales etc. built up some patterns too—and our basic way of seeing each other and ourselves is now built partly in and from all these structures, for better and for worse.]

So let’s ask: What sort of reef is CFAR living within, and adding to? From what puzzles (what patterns of tinkering) has our “rationality” accumulated?

Two kinds of puzzles: “reality-revealing” and “reality-masking”

First, some background. Some puzzles invite a kind of tinkering that lets the world in and leaves you smarter. A kid whittling with a pocket knife is entangling her mind with bits of reality. So is a driver who notices something small about how pedestrians dart into streets, and adjusts accordingly. So also is the mathematician at her daily work. And so on.

Other puzzles (or other contexts) invite a kind of tinkering that has the opposite effect. They invite a tinkering that gradually figures out how to mask parts of the world from your vision. For example, some months into my

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How to Escape From Immoral Mazes
by Zvi — 2020-01-16T13:10:00.787Z

Previously in sequence and most on point: What is Success in an Immoral Maze?, How to Identify an Immoral Maze

This post deals with the goal of avoiding or escaping being trapped in an immoral maze, accepting that for now we are trapped in a society that contains powerful mazes.

We will not discuss methods of improving conditions (or preventing the worsening of conditions) within a maze, beyond a brief note on what a CEO might do. For a middle manager anything beyond not making the problem worse is exceedingly difficult. Even for the CEO this is an extraordinarily difficult task.

To rescue society as a whole requires collectively fighting back. We will consider such options in later posts.

For now, the problem statement is hard enough.

To reiterate the main personal-level takeaway

Being in a maze is not worth it. They couldn’t pay you enough. Even if they could, they definitely don’t. If you end up CEO, you still lose. These lives are not worth it. Do not be a middle manager at a major corporation or other organization that works like this. Do not sell your soul.

Problem statement

Increasingly, avoiding mazes is easier said than done.

First, one must identify them, for which the previous post offers a guide.

After that, there are still many hard problems to solve.

How do we avoid moral mazes? How do we justify that choice to others? What alternative choices do we have? What if we’re already in a maze? What if we’ve already self-modified in ways that make it hard to extract ourselves? What if our human or social capital only pays off inside them?

What about if you are doing object-level work without anyone who reports to you, but you have a maze above you?

And for those who think this way, do I have a moral obligation to suffer and do this anyway, in order to maximize my charitable giving, or to otherwise do good?

How do we avoid immoral mazes?

Truly understand how painful it will be to interact with a maze even if you’re not an employee. Know the signs, as discussed in the previous post. Keep a close eye out for mazes. Realize that you have other options. Choose other paths.

This isn’t an ‘all things being equal’ choose other paths. This is making what look like major sacrifices and different life choices and profession choices, or taking big risks (that may or may not include starting a business or doing work ...
Testing for Rationalization
by dspeyer — 2020-01-16T08:12:56.444Z

Previously: Avoiding Rationalization

So you've seen reason to suspect you might be rationalizing, and you can't avoid the situation, what now?

Here are some tests you can apply to see whether you were rationalizing.

Reverse the Consequences

Let's explain this one via example:

Some Abstinence Educators like to use the "scotch tape" model of human sexuality. In it, sex causes people to attach to each other emotionally, but decreasingly with successive partners, just like tape is sticky, but less sticky when reused. Therefore, they say, you should avoid premarital sex because it will make you less attached to your eventual spouse.

Do you think this is a reasonable summary of human sexuality? Are people basically scotch tape?

Suppose the postscript had been: therefore you should have lots of premarital sex, so that you're not irrationally attached to someone. That way, when you believe you are in love and ready to commit, you really are.

Does this change your views on the scotch tape model? For many people, it does.

If so, then your views on the model are not driven by your analysis of its own merits, but by either your desire to have premarital sex, or your reluctance to admit Abstinence Educators could ever be right about anything.

(Or, possibly, your emotional revulsion at premarital sex or your affiliation to Abstinence Educators. The point of this section is unaffected.)

The point here is to break the argument into the piece to be evaluated, and the consequence of that piece which logically shouldn't effect the first part's validity but somehow does.

If the consequences seem hard to spin backwards, put on your Complete Monster Hat for a quick role-play. Suppose you think third-world charity is breaking the economies it goes to, and therefore you should keep your money for yourself, but this could be a rationalization from an unendorsed value (greed). Imagine yourself as a Dick Dastardly, a mustache-twirling villain who's trying to maximize suffering. Does Mr. Dastardly give generously to charity? Probably not.

I don't want to get into an analysis of economic aid here. If contemplating Mr Dastardly gives you a more complex result like "I should stop treating all third-world economic aid as equivalent" and not a simple "I should give", then the intuition pump is working as intended. Because...
The Alignment-Competence Trade-Off,  Part 1: Coalition Size and Signaling Costs
by Gentzel — 2020-01-15T23:10:01.055Z

This is part 1 of a series of posts I initially planned to organize as a massive post last summer on principal-agent problems. As that task quickly became overwhelming, I decided to break it down into smaller posts that ensure I cover each of the cases and mechanisms that I intended to.

Overall, I think the trade-off between the alignment of agents and the competence of agents can explain a lot of problems to which people often think there are simple answers. The less capable an agent is (whether the agent is a person, a bureaucracy, or an algorithm) the easier it is for a principal to assess the agent, and ensure the agent is working toward the principal’s goals. As agents become more competent, they become both more capable of actually accomplishing the principal’s goals and of merely appearing to accomplish the principal’s goals while pursuing their own. In debating policy changes, I often find one sided arguments that neglect this trade-off, and in general I think efforts to improve policies or the bureaucratic structures of companies, non-profits, and governments should be informed by it.

Part 1:

Virtue signaling and moralistic anger are both forces that have been useful for holding people accountable, and powerful mechanisms of cultural evolution: spreading some norms more successfully than others, and resulting in many societies holding similar norms.

However, the larger a group becomes, the less members of the group know on average about other individual member’s behavior or the consequences of it: making it harder to evaluate complex actions. This in turn gives an advantage to more clear forms of signaling that are more inefficient and costly than those that could be sustainable in smaller groups.

Examples:

While it would be efficient for a politician to accept money from competing special interest groups and to keep their behavior consistent with their constituents regardless, it is simpler for politicians to convince allies they aren’t corrupt by not accepting money from political opponents at all.
With more complex tax codes, governments can implement more economically efficient pigouvian taxes which increase economic growth by concentrating more and more of the tax burden on actions which produce negative externalities for others. However, the power to assess and tax negative externalities gives those that influence t

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