trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Book Review: Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite
by PeterMcCluskey — 2021-10-09T03:31:27.711Z
Link: http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2021/10/08/why-everyone-else-is-a-hypocrite/

Book review: Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the
Modular Mind, by Robert Kurzban.

Minds are Modular

Many people explain minds by positing that they're composed of parts:

the id, ego, and super-ego

the left side and the right side of the brain

System 1 and System 2

the triune brain

Marvin Minsky's Society of
Mind

Minsky's proposal is the only one of these that resembles Kurzban's
notion of modularity enough to earn Kurzban's respect. The modules
Kurzban talks about are much more numerous, and more specialized, than
most people are willing to imagine.

Here's Kurzban's favorite Minsky
quote:

The mind is a community of "agents." Each has limited powers and can
communicate only with certain others. The powers of mind emerge from
their interactions for none of the Agents, by itself, has significant
intelligence. [...] Everyone knows what it feels like to be engaged
in a conversation with oneself. In this book, we will develop the idea
that these discussions really happen, and that the participants really
"exist." In our picture of the mind we will imagine many
"sub-persons", or "internal agents", interacting with one another.
Solving the simplest problem---seeing a picture---or remembering the
experience of seeing it---might involve a dozen or more---perhaps very
many more---of these agents playing different roles. Some of them bear
useful knowledge, some of them bear strategies for dealing with other
agents, some of them carry warnings or encouragements about how the
work of others is proceeding. And some of them are concerned with
discipline, prohibiting or "censoring" others from thinking
forbidden thoughts.

Let's take the US government as a metaphor. Instead of saying it's
composed of the legislative, executive, and judicial modules, Kurzban
would describe it as being made up of modules such as a White House
press secretary, Anthony Fauci, a Speaker of the House, more generals
than I can name, even more park rangers, etc.

In What Is It Like to Be a
Bat?,
Nagel says "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of
our experience". In contrast, Kurzban denies that we know more than a
tiny fraction of our mental activity. We don't ask "what is it like to
be an edge detector?", because there was no evolutionary pressure to
enable us to answer that question. It could be most human experience is
as mysterious to our conscious minds as ...
Booster shots from same vs different vaccines
by Aryeh Englander — 2021-10-09T02:56:29.877Z

What is the current thinking on whether it's safe and effective to get a COVID booster shot from a different vaccine than the one you originally received? For example, getting a Pfizer shot if you originally got J&J. Is it more effective than getting a booster shot of the same type you originally got? References to good papers and analyses would be appreciated.
Why Not a Natural Gas Generator?
by jefftk — 2021-10-09T01:40:04.062Z

In the comments on my

posts

about

backup power, several people
suggested looking into natural gas generators. After learning more
about them, though, and about our local infrastructure, I don't think
they make sense for us.

Unlike propane, which will stay liquid at room temperature with
reasonable pressure (~150psi), liquifying natural gas for efficient
storage requires extremely
low temperatures. This means you want to pipe it in, and
our house has a pipe to feed our furnace. This is pretty common here
in Boston, the main alternative being oil, delivered by truck.

Gas delivery is extremely reliable: I've never experienced an outage.
It has to be this reliable, because appliances have been designed with
the assumption that gas won't ever go out. Older furnaces and stoves
have pilot lights, which constantly release a small amount of gas and
burn it. If the gas went out the pilot would too, and then when the
gas came back on the house would slowly fill with gas. This means
that if there were to be an outage the utility wouldn't be able to
turn the gas back on without technicians going door to door to every
affected house.

(This dynamic, where natural gas utilities are trying very hard to
always provide sufficient flow, was a contributor to the Lawrence
explosions. In switching from an old distribution paper to a new
one they missed a sensor. As they turned down the old pipe the sensor
started to read low pressure. This triggered the system to increase
pressure in the new, unmeasured, pipe, trying to avoid an outage. As
it continued to read low pressure the system opened the valve further
and further, allowing high-pressure gas to flood the system.)

Because natural gas is so much more reliable than electricity, it is a
common choice for permanently installed standby generators. These are
typically sized to power an entire home, and do make sense in places
with frequent power outages. If you wanted a cheaper option, it is
straightforward to convert a portable generator to run on natural
gas—many companies sell conversion kits—and you could
install an external hookup, the same as you would for a natural gas
barbecue.

In thinking about whether a natural gas generator would be useful for
us, the main question is what might cause an extended outage. I think
there are roughly four causes:

Delivery: massive storm, poles are do

...
[AN #166]: Is it crazy to claim we're in the most important century?
by Rohin Shah — 2021-10-08T17:30:11.819Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

Please note that while I work at DeepMind, this newsletter represents my personal views and not those of my employer.

HIGHLIGHTS

The "most important century" series (Holden Karnofsky) (summarized by Rohin): In some sense, it is really weird for us to claim that there is a non-trivial chance that in the near future, we might build transformative AI and either (1) go extinct or (2) exceed a growth rate of (say) 100% per year. It feels like an extraordinary claim, and thus should require extraordinary evidence. One way of cashing this out: if the claim were true, this century would be the most important century, with the most opportunity for individuals to have an impact. Given the sheer number of centuries there are, this is an extraordinary claim; it should really have extraordinary evidence. This series argues that while the claim does seem extraordinary, all views seem extraordinary -- there isn’t some default baseline view that is “ordinary” to which we should be assigning most of our probability.

Specifically, consider three possibilities for the long-run future:

1. Radical: We will have a productivity explosion by 2100, which will enable us to become technologically mature. Think of a civilization that sends spacecraft throughout the galaxy, builds permanent settlements on other planets, harvests large fractions of the energy output from stars, etc.

2. Conservative: We get to a technologically mature civilization, but it takes hundreds or thousands of years. Let’s say even 100,000 years to be ultra conservative.

3. Skeptical: We never become technologically mature for some reason. Perhaps we run into fundamental technological limits, or we choose not to expand into the galaxy, or we’re in a simulation, etc.

It’s pretty clear why the radical view is extraordinary. What about the other two?

The conservative view implies that we are currently in the most important 100,000-year period. Given that life is billions of years old, and would presumably continue for billions of years to come once we reach a stable galaxy-wide civilization, that would make this the most...
Questions about YIMBY
by Sam Enright — 2021-10-08T12:48:05.901Z

If you want to change the world, start by giving people free books. Or at least, this is the approach of the

Adam Smith Institute

, a free-market think tank in the UK. At an event of theirs, they gave me a copy of John Myers’ little book (or long paper)

YIMBY: How to end the housing crisis, boost the economy and win more votes

. Weirdly, the book starts with specific solutions to the housing crisis, and then only in the middle talks about why this is a problem you should care about.

You probably already know this story: NIMBYs (Not in My Back Yard) want to preserve the value of their homes, so they lobby the government to restrict supply through zoning laws, historic preservation rules, and widely distributed veto power. Hence, when demand goes up, prices increase. YIMBYism (Yes in My Back Yard) is a recent movement of people who want to allow more building to solve this (the author is a cofounder of

London YIMBY

).

I feel that whether you view NIMBYism as a problem of excessive government intervention or civil society is dependent on your pre-existing biases. I take a central claim of libertarianism to be that the government is overrated, and civil society is underrated. But if we had been trying to show the opposite, we could use the fact that civil society obstructs building so much to argue that the government needs to socialise more housing.

This gets at my general confusion about decentralisation arguments. There is a well-known thesis that decentralisation is good because it allows for the synthesis of information from many different sources, in a way that couldn’t plausibly be done by central authorities. The problem of NIMBYism is a problem of decentralised town councils, part of the centralised government, being lobbied by decentralised homeowners, to obstruct the ability of decentralised individuals to pay centralised developers to build new buildings. For whom is this a win – the centralisers or the decentralisers?

There’s a paper from

Hsieh and Moretti

that finds that US GDP growth between 1964 and 2009 was 50% lower as a result of restrictions on building. If we take this at face value, it’s pretty staggering. A standard result in the economics literature is that restrictions on the supply of housing cause a doubling in house prices. For London, they seem to correspond to a quadrupling in rents (these figures come from the book). Apparently, we’re not...
“Eating Dirt Benefits Kids” is Basically Made Up
by Elizabeth — 2021-10-08T08:30:09.640Z

Sometimes people imply that epistemic spot checks are a waste of time, that it’s too easy to create false beliefs with statements that are literally true but fundamentally misleading. And sometimes they’re right.

On the other hand, sometimes you spend 4 hours and discover a tenet of modern parenting is based on absolutely nothing.

Sorry, did I say 4 hours? It was more like 90 minutes, but I spent another 2.5 hours checking my work just in case. It was unnecessary.

Intro

You are probably familiar with the notion that eating dirt is good for children’s immune systems, and you probably call that Hygiene Hypothesis, although that’s technically incorrect.

Hygiene Hypothesis can refer to a few different things:

A very specific hypothesis about the balance between specific kinds of immune cells.
A broader hypothesis that exposure to nominally harmful germs provides the immune system training and challenge that ultimately reduces allergies.

One particular form of this involves exposure to macroparasites, but that seems to have fallen out of favor.

The hypothesis that exposure to things usually considered dirty helps populate a helpful microbiome (most often gut, but plausibly also skin, and occasionally eyeball), and that reduces allergies. This is more properly known as the Old Friends hypothesis, but everyone I know combines them.
Pushback on the idea that everything children touch should be super sanitized
The idea that eating dirt in particular is beneficial for children for vague allergy-related reasons.

I went into this research project very sold on the Hygiene Hypothesis (broad sense), and figured this would be a quick due diligence to demonstrate it and get some numbers. And it’s true, the backing for Hygiene and Old Friends Hypothesis seems reasonably good, although I didn’t dig into it because even if they’re true, the whole eating dirt thing doesn’t follow automatically. When I dug into that, what I found was spurious at best, and what gains there were had better explanations than dirt consumption.

This post is not exhaustive. Proving a negative is very tiring, and I felt like I did my due diligence checking the major books and articles making the claim, none of which had a leg to stand on. Counterevidence is welcome.

Evidence

Being born via c-section instead of vaginally impoverishes a newborn’s microbiome, and applying vaginal fluid post-

...
Glen Weyl: "Why I Was Wrong to Demonize Rationalism"
by Zack_M_Davis — 2021-10-08T05:36:08.691Z
Link: https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/why-i-was-wrong-to-demonize-rationalism/

Glen Weyl reflects on his previous disparagement of the social scene surrounding this website, and expresses regret at having been too hostile: while he stands by many of his specific criticisms, he now thinks "rationalists" should be seen as more similar to other intellectual communities (which can be allied on some issues if not others), rather than a uniquely nefarious threat. (October 2021, 1300 words)
Noragami
by lsusr — 2021-10-08T05:11:29.212Z

Noragami is a 12-episode anime that aired in 2014. The first 11 episodes are fine. I liked them but I didn't understand why until the 12ᵗʰ episode. The 12ᵗʰ episode blew me away.

Japan today has many layers of foreign influence. The most recent is the American occupation. Before that was the Meiji Restoration. Before that was Chinese Confucianism. Before that was Chinese Daoism. Japanese Shinto goes back to before history itself. It's the oldest indigenous religion of Japan.

In indigenous Japanese religion, anything can have its own spirit or god. The distinction isn't important to polytheists. They're all just 神 (pronunciation here). Mountains have 神. Rivers have 神. The thing doesn't have to be big or ancient or natural or even important. Swords can have 神. Computers can have 神. Ideas can have 神.

The universe of Noragami operates on the principle that praying to a 神 gives it power. A 神 without anyone praying to it will stop existing. Many 神 have temples built to them. A 神 with its own temple can rely on a steady stream of prayers. You pay it a 5¥ ($0.05 USD) coin and pray for something like doing well on your exams.

Hiyori Iki is a normal middle school student living in the modern material world of 2014 Japan. She has an accident which causes her soul to slip out of her body and she discovers the spirit world where the 神 live and she meets Yato.

"Noragami" means "Stray God". Yato is a 神 without a shrine. He has no followers. He cleans bathrooms for 5¥ and calls it a prayer. It's not clear to Hiyori Iki what Yato is a the god of. Yato has a mysterious past he won't talk about. Hiyori Iki tries to ask the other 神 but none of them give a straight answer either.

The first 12 episodes are Hiyori and Yato going on adventures together. Yato tries lots of different ways to be useful so he can get someone―anyone―to pray to him.

Spoilers Ahead

Japan had a warrior culture for nearly a thousand years, if not more. Japan began modernizing in 1868 when it turned itself into a Western-style empire. The warrior class was eliminated but the culture of war was repurposed to serve the empire.

Then came the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo. Upon their ashes, Japan was rebuilt into a nation-state so nonaggressive the Japanese military is literally called the "Japanese Self-Defense Force" (自衛隊). This isn't a euphemism like the United States' "Depar...
How much slower is remote work?
by jsteinhardt — 2021-10-08T02:00:17.857Z

I'm a bit of a productivity nerd, and I like to keep track of how long tasks take. Sometimes this involves actually tracking everything I do all day, although most of the time I just keep rough mental track.

Given that lockdowns forced everything remote for about a year, and that some people are still remote, I was pretty interested in how much remote vs. in-person work affects productivity. I have some pretty direct comparisons, because I can observe meetings with the exact same set of people on the exact same project, both before and after it switched from zoom to in-person. I also have some harder-to-compare anecdotes on long-term effects.

My bottom line is that remote work is sometimes significantly less efficient (by factors of 2x-5x), but that this effect is felt most for people who are new to an organization or who are switching fields or roles. In particular, many senior employees won't experience a productivity hit, so the relevant decision-makers might systematically underestimate the costs of remote work.

For context, I'm a professor at Berkeley, so my data is from managing students and post-docs, but I think the trends probably generalize. Overall, I think you will take the largest hit from remote work if you:

Are a junior employee, or are switching to a role that requires different skills or organizational knowledge.

Work on more "abstract" or "conceptual" topics where it is useful to draw on a board and have shared visual context with collaborators.

Conversely, you will not notice much drawback from remote work if you:

Are an experienced employee

Are mostly doing "execution-oriented" work (writing code or papers)

Managers are a special case here because they are senior and mostly execution-oriented, but some management (such as giving difficult feedback or propagating social norms) is much easier in person. As a manager, I also found myself spending more effort on monitoring and improving people's mental health, although that might have been because of Covid-19 and not remote work itself.

Some Data

Here's some actual data to back this up. For more math-oriented projects, when we switched from meeting over zoom to meeting in person, I found that our previous 60-minute meeting finished at the 40-minute mark, because we had discussed everything we wanted to. The speed-up was a combination of:

Fewer conversational pauses / interruptions, because

...
Perceptual dexterity: a case study
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2021-10-07T22:25:36.856Z

My partner Logan Brienne Strohl has been doing original rationality development off and on for the past ten years (and "on" for at least the past three).

A week or so ago, I received a long email from them, which they summarized as follows:

Duncan and I recently moved out into the country, where it took us almost a month to get moderately functional internet. I was psychologically prepared for a lack of internet, but Duncan was not. Rather than being understanding and supportive of his struggles, I found myself acting irritated, dismissive, and even disgusted. Shortly after an alarming-to-me discussion that addressed the internet issue directly, I sat down to figure out what on earth was happening in my head. This is my log of that introspective session, which I shared with Duncan, and which I'm happy for him to share with you.

The reason I asked Logan for permission to publish the email is that it leapt out to me as a sort of motivating example for the kind of work that they've been doing. Their primary focus these days is in phenomenology and preconceptual immediacy, much of it headlined by their concept of "naturalism," some of which has been published on LW.

The email isn't any of that, exactly. It isn't naturalism, and it isn't about naturalism, and you can't pinpoint naturalism just by reading it. But it was excellent in a way I had a hard time describing, and clear evidence that there's something going on in Logan's head that is outside of the boundaries of my own competence. I found myself thinking thoughts like "so this is the mind that is discovering-slash-developing naturalism" and "so this is what a mind that's been steeping in naturalism-etc, and practicing it relentlessly, looks like in motion."

In particular, the email was chock-full of what Logan refers to as perceptual dexterity, and which I now hope they write about at length in the near future.

(Or rather, not perceptual dexterity precisely, but something like recursive perceptual dexterity? Phenomenological perceptual dexterity? Perceptual dexterity turned on itself and applied to Logan's own thoughts and moment-to-moment conscious experience.)

It seemed worth publishing, along with some annotations, as a case study.

The email

(It's about 2000 words, maybe 4000 with all of the annotations. I recommend reading now if you're going to, and leaving the below f...
(Book Review) The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Xylitol — 2021-10-07T22:21:13.170Z

Consider this: Your child is struggling in school. What might be going on? Perhaps home life is chaotic and stressful. Perhaps the school itself lacks resources. Maybe other kids bully them because of their kinky hair or strange accent or their hand-me-down clothing. But Kathryn Paige Harden, in her book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, argues that we’re still missing something important—your kid’s genes.

Her book, and much of her research, focuses on how genes affect educational attainment, and for good reason—education and well-being are connected, especially in America. For example, the adult life expectancy of Black Americans with a bachelor’s degree is now closer to white Americans with a degree than to Black Americans without a degree. This gap in how education affects life expectancy is widening, even as the corresponding racial and gender gaps in life expectancy are narrowing. So if you’re concerned about social inequalities, you should be concerned with education.

According to Harden, genes predict educational attainment just about as well as family income does. Which is to say, a good bit! And because genes are just as unearned as other benefits of one’s birth, Harden wants to use genetic knowledge to improve social policy and create a more egalitarian, anti-eugenic future:

Like being born to a rich or poor family, being born with a certain set of genetic variants is the outcome of a lottery of birth. You didn't get to pick your parents, and that applies just as much to what they bequeathed you genetically as what they bequeathed you environmentally. And, like social class, the outcome of the genetic lottery is a systemic force that matters for who gets more, and who gets less, of nearly everything we care about in society.

Her Argument

If you’ll remember, the book’s subtitle is Why DNA Matters for Social Equality. So, why does it? Harden’s central argument is quite simple:

Once you know some scientific basics—experimental design, causation, counterfactuals, control groups—it’s clear that genetics is a confounding variable in social policy research and intervention.

But we haven’t treated it as a confounder. Instead, we’ve just ignored it because it feels dangerous. (This is what she calls the genome-blind position.)

Because we’ve ignored it, our social policy is more costly and less effective than it could be.

Her argume...