trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why the Problem of the Criterion Matters
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2021-10-30T20:44:00.143Z

I think the problem of the criterion is really, really important. So important that I'm willing to risk annoying people by bringing it up all the time. I think it matters because a failure to grok it is at the heart of why we fail to notice we're confused and struggle to become less confused. But because the problem seems removed from everyday reality when described in the abstract, I think a lot of people fail to notice when they're grappling with an instance of it. Thus I think it's worth taking some time to explore why I think the problem of the criterion matters so much by looking at some examples of how it shows up.

I'll start by reminding you what the problem of the criterion is, and then spend the remainder of the post diving into some examples of how it shows up and why it matters. The goal is to spend some time seeing the problem in action so we can learn to infer its pattern and recognize when we're running into it so that we don't wander around the world more confused than we need to be.

Recap

First, a quick recap on the problem in case you're not willing to click the link. The problem of the criterion is a problem in epistemology that initially presents with the following form:

A statement is known if it satisfies some criterion for assessing truth.
The criterion for assessing truth must be known to use it.
Thus the criterion of truth is known if the criterion of truth is known.

This creates a line of circular reasoning that generalizes to the following form:

A is B if C.
C is B.
C is B if C.

As a result, it shows up all over the place as various sorts of problems in different fields. Examples include the problem of induction, the grounding problem, and the problem of the universal prior among others. However, because the problem of the criterion is how this class of circular justification problems shows up in epistemology, it ends up underlying all the others because an ability to know lurks behind all other endeavors.

The problem of the criterion cannot be solved (see the original post for the argument of this point), yet we respond to it everyday by finding ways to function without well-grounded justification using purpose to bridge the gap. No particular purpose can be given pride of place, though—not even truth—except after having already adopted some particular purpose, thus our justifications for what we know are always contingent upon what we care ab...
Welcome to ACX/Less Wrong Budapest
by Timothy Underwood — 2021-10-30T18:19:23.577Z

Hello, we are your sort of nerds in Budapest! Come and join us.

Usually we have a discussion meetup once a month, where there is some set of articles that we read and then talk about more deeply. If there are enough people we specifically will break up into smaller groups.

Honestly I think that anyone who happened to see this page somehow on lesswrong.com is extremely likely to be the sort of person who would have fun at one of our meetings. It's like Scott always says in his posts about meetups -- even if you don't think you are the person who normally comes to these sorts of things, or who would belong, you should come anyways.
Quick general thoughts on suffering and consciousness
by Rob Bensinger — 2021-10-30T18:05:59.612Z

Below, I've collected some of my thoughts on consciousness. Topics covered (in the post and/or the comments below) include:

To what extent did subjective pain evolve as a social signal?
Why did consciousness evolve? What function(s) did it serve?
What would the evolutionary precursors of 'full' consciousness look like?
What sorts of human values are more or less likely to extend to unconscious things?
Is consciousness more like a machine (where there's a sharp cutoff between 'the machine works' or 'the machine doesn't'), or is it more like a basic physical property like mass (where there's a continuum from very small fundamental things that have small amounts of the property, all the way up to big macroscopic objects that have way more of the property)?
How should illusionism (the view that in an important sense we aren't conscious, but non-phenomenally 'appear' to be conscious) change our answers to the questions above?

1. Pain signaling

In September 2019, I wrote on my LW shortform:

Rolf Degen, summarizing part of Barbara Finlay's "The neuroscience of vision and pain":

Humans may have evolved to experience far greater pain, malaise and suffering than the rest of the animal kingdom, due to their intense sociality giving them a reasonable chance of receiving help.

From the paper:

Several years ago, we proposed the idea that pain, and sickness behaviour had become systematically increased in humans compared with our primate relatives, because human intense sociality allowed that we could ask for help and have a reasonable chance of receiving it. We called this hypothesis ‘the pain of altruism’ [68]. This idea derives from, but is a substantive extension of Wall’s account of the placebo response [43]. Starting from human childbirth as an example (but applying the idea to all kinds of trauma and illness), we hypothesized that labour pains are more painful in humans so that we might get help, an ‘obligatory midwifery’ which most other primates avoid and which improves survival in human childbirth substantially ([67]; see also [69]). Additionally, labour pains do not arise from tissue damage, but rather predict possible tissue damage and a considerable chance of death. Pain and the duration of recovery after trauma are extended, because humans may expect to be provisioned and protected during such periods. The vigour and duration of immune responses after infection, wi

...
How Much is a Sweet?
by jefftk — 2021-10-30T15:50:05.758Z

For about two years our system has been that the kids get one sweet
before dinner and one sweet after dinner. They like to divide their
allocation up ("can I have pancakes with half a sweet of
chocolate chips?"), and this has been a good opportunity for

teaching fractions. But how much is a
sweet?

Initially, we would just eyeball it, but a few months ago Julia
pointed out that my sense of how much sugar is in various foods wasn't
very reliable, and we didn't have a good sense of how much sugar they
should be having anyway.

The general recommendation is that at most 10% (pdf)
of your calories come from sugar. The kids are eating probably about
1,000 calories per day, and at four calories per gram that would be
25g sugar. Since they get two "sweets" per day, this is 12.5g/sweet.
This looks like:

12.5g table sugar (1T):

Three marshmallows:

21g Nutella (1T):

58g ice cream (~1/2C):

17g sprinkles (1.5T):

23g chocolate chips (~32 chips):

Eight chocolate-chip pancakes (no sugar in the batter, 32 chocolate
chips):

We don't count the sugar in fruit (which is generally pretty low and
comes with lots of other things we would like the kids to be eating
more of) but we would count it in juice. We also don't count the
sugar in other things that are mostly not sugar even if they do have a
bit, like breakfast cereal or peanut butter.

Comment via: facebook
We Live in a Post-Scarcity Society
by lsusr — 2021-10-30T12:05:35.267Z

Historically, a normal human population hovered on the edge of starvation.

It's hard to comprehend how important food staples used to be. In Edo Japan, wealth was measured in koku (石). One koku is (in theory) enough rice to feed one man for one year. The amount of koku a daimyo controlled was basically how many people he owned because a region's food staple production determined its carrying capacity and the human population grew until it hit carrying capacity. In other words, we bred until we were on the edge of starving to death. Most wars have ultimately been fought over land because land determines food production and food production was a matter of life and death.

―Cheap food causes cooperative ethics

Adam Smith expressed a similar sentiment in 1776. [Edit: The information contained in the below quote is of dubious veracity. See comment.]

The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. In the neighborhood of Canton, many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing-boats upon the rivers and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty, that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries. Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them. In all great towns, several are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn their subsistence.

China, however, though it may, perhaps, stand still, does not seem to go backwards. Its towns are nowhere deserted by their inhabitants. The lands which had once been cultivated, are nowhere neglected. The same, or very nearly the same, annual labour, must, therefore, continue to be performed, and the funds destined for maintaining it must not, consequently, be sensibly diminished. The lowest class of labourers, therefore, notwithstanding their scanty subsistence, must some way or other make shift to continue their race so far as to keep up their usual numbers.

But it would be

...
Tell the Truth
by lsusr — 2021-10-30T10:27:42.996Z

My favorite thing about living in the 21ˢᵗ century is that nobody can stop me from publishing whatever I want.

I mean this in the most literal sense. I can log onto a free blogging platform via Tor and no government in the world could deanonymize me. I might even do this already and there would be no way for you (or anybody else) to know.

Different countries have different levels of freedom. I have friends who live under authoritarian regimes who would literally be disappeared by the secret police if they declared their political views outright. They say "it's dangerous to express my views publicly" but they never say "I'm an independent thinker". The only people I know who claim they're scared to express independent thought live in the United States where freedom of the press is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.

People tell me they're worried of being cancelled by woke culture. I think this is just a convenient excuse for laziness and cowardice. What are you afraid of saying? That there are personality differences between men and women? Women consistently score higher than men in agreeableness and neroticism.

These findings cannot easily be attributed to self-report artifacts, as McCrae and colleagues (2005) have replicated them in observer reports of FFM traits across 50 cultures.

―Gender Differences in Five Factor Model Personality Traits in an Elderly Cohort: Extension of Robust and Surprising Findings to an Older Generation

Are you afraid to say that there are significant heritable intelligence disparities between ethnic groups? It's the obvious conclusion if you think critically about US immigration policy.

"87.2% of Indian-American adults in 2010 were foreign-born[1]." US immigration policy makes it very hard for natives of India to immigrate into the United States. It's so hard to get an H1-B visa that a young hardworking ambitious Indian data scientist who reads this blog[2] told me about how working for a US company was "unrealistic". If most Indian-American families immigrated recently and recent Indian immigrants to the United States are smarter than average Indians then one of the following statements must be true.

Recently-immigrated Americans from India are smarter than average Americans.

Average Americans are smarter than average Indians.

Intelligence is more than 50% heritable. US immigration policy does not distinguish...
A Roadmap to a Post-Scarcity Economy
by lorepieri — 2021-10-30T09:04:29.479Z

Background Reading (optional for the discussion)

https://lorenzopieri.com/post_scarcity/

Summary

A post-scarcity society can be defined as a society in which all the basic needs of the population are met and provided for free. A common belief is that moving to such a desirable state, if possible at all, will require futuristic technologies to eliminate the scarcity of material resources. In this writeup I emphasise how what’s actually stopping us from being post-scarcity is not lack of resources, but the forced reliance on human labour. Given these premises, I lay out an actionable roadmap to post-scarcity and I highlight the role of automation and Universal Basic Income in the process. This analysis suggests that post-scarcity is within reach well inside the current century with current technologies, assuming a sustained progress in the field of artificial intelligence.

Discussion

Do you agree with automation being the real missing piece to post-(basic)scarcity? And what is the smoothest roadmap to such an economy, which minimise the trauma for the displaced jobs?
Start with a Title
by lsusr — 2021-10-30T08:59:08.208Z

Some writers start with a title and then write the article. Other writers start with the article and then write a title. The writers who start with a title end up with better titles. The writers who start with a title tend to write better articles too.

Good writing conveys a single point. Titles keep your writing from meandering. Sometimes these meanderings lend themselves to new titles. That's fine. Titles are allowed to change. If a digression do not lend itself to a new title that means your writing has become disjointed. A title constrains your writing in a good way.

I was once hired to help another blogger create better titles for his blog posts. He is a good writer and a knowledgable person but his articles lacked punch. They felt aimless. I invented good titles for his articles. But the titles didn't work immediately. The blogger had to remove and rewrite large chunks of the articles that weren't germane to my titles. It would have been more efficient if he had just started with a good title in the first place. Also, his articles took longer to get to the point than they would have if he had started with a title.
Unlock the Door
by lincolnquirk — 2021-10-29T23:45:43.273Z

Related: A Pattern Language

Epistemic status: Strong Anecdotal

I'm designing co-housing/co-living communities. The greatest benefit of living near your friends is that you can see each other all the time in low-stakes ways.

If you're living in the same house, this is very easy: you just hang out in the common area and say hi to everyone who goes through. If someone has time to chat then it's an easy way to get a little conversation, but it's not awkward if they are too busy.

This default doesn't really work well in a place where people don't live in the same house or share the same common space. I've spent time in communities where very close friends literally lived on the same block, but they didn't see each other more often than once a week or so, and all interactions require advance planning, because nobody is hanging out in a space where their friends cross through.

To avoid this failure mode, take the biggest or most welcoming house and make part of its common space a true community space. Unlock the door or gate, and let everyone nearby know that it's always ok to come hang out in that space, even if nobody is there. Ensure that you regularly pass through that space. Greet everyone who comes to it warmly.

Follow the intimacy gradient pattern: the unlocked space should be the most public area of that house, nearest the entrance. Try not to monopolize the entire common area of that house -- the people who live there need their own, more-private spaces when they aren't feeling as much like socializing.

You don't need to leave the door unlocked all the time. You should probably lock it while people are asleep. But I emphasize that any barrier against people coming over and hanging out whenever they feel like it will tend to make them dramatically less likely to do so -- subtle signals matter a lot here.

If you don't want to unlock it all the time, you can tell the community about the code to get in, or otherwise allow them to unlock the door on their own somehow.

This might take a while to start working. Some things you could try to go quicker:

make a very warm announcement that everyone is super welcome at any time of day or night, no really we mean it, we love you all

create a weekly hangout event, so people get used to coming over to the house regularly

create an every-day super casual coworking or happy hour: a few people agree to spend at least 1 hour a day

...
Naval Ravikant and Chris Dixon Didn't Explain Any Web3 Use Cases
by Liron — 2021-10-29T21:54:50.184Z
Link: https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/naval-ravikant-and-chris-dixon-didnt-explain-any-web3-use-cases-affc45ec3c60

This is a followup to Chris Dixon's Crypto Claims Are Logically Flimsy.

It's becoming popular for thought leaders in the investing and crypto world to make bold claims that aren't backed up by any specific examples. The latest person to prominently do this is Naval Ravikant on Tim Ferriss's podcast.

Naval Ravikant is the founder of AngelList and writes very interesting books and blogs. He and Chris Dixon (a partner at Andreessen Horowitz) are now deploying many $millions of capital into crypto projects, and encouraging others to do so.

I think it's worthwhile to document how far people can go without having their abstract claims tested with a request for specificity. But it feels a bit surreal observing that my industry's top investors and thought leaders seem to be making decisions on mental models full of holes that they aren't flagging as holes.
[TL;DR] "Training for the New Alpinism" by Steve House and Scott Johnston 

by lsusr — 2021-10-29T21:20:00.451Z

TL;DR

If you're an ultraendurance athlete then you should spend three quarters of your time just below your Aerobic Threshold and most of the rest just below your Anaerobic Threshold. Everyone benefits from a little strength training.

What it Takes to Climb a Mountain

There are three components to climbing a mountain. You need the right skills, the right equipment and the right body. Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete by Steve House and Scott Johnston is about how to build the optimal body for alpine mountaineering.

Training for the New Alpinism is among my favorite books on athletic training. It has great information on subjects from altitude acclimation to "whether Peanut M&M's are in fact nature's most perfect food", but my favorite chapters are endurance conditioning[1] and physiology[2].

Training for the New Alpinism is concerned with an athlete's ability to exert force. In this context, physical conditioning has four components.

Muscular strength is the peak force you can exert with your muscles.

Muscular endurance is how much force you can exert from your muscles for a medium length of time.

Aerobic endurance is how much power you can sustain for a long period of time.

Speed is how fast you can operate your muscles.

Peak Speed Doesn't Matter

[S]peed is not only very genetic, it’s very very hard to train. It takes constant, relentless work to get small improvements (consider that a track sprinter may train for a year to take a tenth [of a second] or less off their best time).

―All You Need to Know About Training by Lyle McDonald

Speed is measured in fractions of a second. Mountain climbs are measured in days.

Muscles are Heavy

Increasing your strength has two phases. At first, your body will increase muscle recruitment. This is a neurological adaptation. It adds no weight. Muscle recruitment strictly adds to your endurance because it spreads your exercise load across more muscle fibers who take turns contracting which increases how long it takes to exhaust each individual muscle fiber.

A minimum muscular strength is necessary to climb a particular mountain. If you have good muscle recruitment then additional strength gains are counterproductive to mountain climbing because increasing strength (beyond muscle recruitment) increases your weight. Carrying extra weight makes it hard to climb mountains. A specialized moun...
True Stories of Algorithmic Improvement
by johnswentworth — 2021-10-29T20:57:13.638Z

In May 2020, OpenAI released

a report

on algorithmic efficiency improvements in deep learning. Main headline:

Compared to 2012, it now takes 44 times less compute to train a neural network to the level of AlexNet (by contrast, Moore’s Law would yield an 11x cost improvement over this period). Our results suggest that for AI tasks with high levels of recent investment, algorithmic progress has yielded more gains than classical hardware efficiency.

A lot people were

surprised

by this; there’s a common narrative in which AI progress has come mostly from throwing more and more compute at relatively-dumb algorithms. (This is a common interpretation of

The Bitter Lesson

, though I would argue it is largely a misinterpretation.)

I’ve had various experiences over the years which made the result not-that-surprising. Algorithms beating compute is the sort of thing I expect by default, on a gut level. The point of this post is to tell a few of the stories which underlie that intuition, aimed especially toward people who don’t have much first-hand experience with software engineering, ML, or simulation. (There will still be some jargon, though.)

Disclaimer: this does not mean that you should put tons of confidence on this view. The goal is just to provide a possible lens through which “algorithmic progress has yielded more gains than classical hardware efficiency” makes sense; I want to

raise that hypothesis from entropy

. I’m not going to provide the sort of evidence which would justify very high confidence, I’m just going to point it out as a hypothesis to keep in the back of your mind, and update on when results like OpenAI’s come along.

Rewrite In C

Back in college, I spent a summer simulating an unusual type of biochemical oscillator, officially under the aegis of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.

The algorithm

was conceptually simple: every time a reaction occurs between two molecules, update the counts of each molecule, then randomly sample to figure out when the next reaction happens. (In a single cell, molecule counts are often small enough that we can simulate each individual reaction like this, at least for a particular reaction-type.) Early in the summer, I spent a few days studying the algorithm and coding up a simulation in python. In order to get decent statistics, we needed to run it a lot, so the professor overseeing the work recommended that I book some ...