trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On (Not) Reading Papers
by Jan — 2021-12-21T09:57:19.416Z
Link: https://universalprior.substack.com/p/on-not-reading-papers

The emperor's new paper.

In a recent

lunch conversation

, a colleague of mine explained her system for reading scientific papers. She calls the system tongue-in-cheek "not reading the paper". It goes as follows:

Read the title and predict what the abstract will say. If you are correct, stop reading the paper.
Otherwise, read the abstract and predict what the main results will be. If you are correct, stop reading the paper.
Read the last paragraph of the introduction or the first paragraph of the discussion and predict the details of the results. If you are correct, stop reading the paper.
etc.

I love this system, mostly because of the flippant name, but also because it points out that "

the emperor is naked

". It is a bit of an

open

secret

that "not reading the paper" is the only feasible strategy for staying on top of the

ever-increasing mountain of academic literature

. But while everybody knows this, not

everybody knows that everybody knows this

. On discussion boards, some researchers claim with a straight face to be reading

100 papers per month

. Skimming 100 papers per month might be possible, but reading them is not.

So why is this not common knowledge? A likely cause is the stinging horror that overcomes me every time I think about how science really shouldn't work. Our institutions are stuck in

inadequate equilibria

, the scientific method

is too weak

, statistical hypothesis testing is

broken

,

nothing

replicates

, there is

rampant fraud

,... and now scientists don't even read academic papers? That's just what we needed.

And yet it moves

.

For some reason

, we still get some new insight out of this mess that calls itself science. Even though scientists don't read papers, the entire edifice does not collapse. How is that? In this post, I will go through some obvious and less obvious problems that come from "not reading the paper", and how those turn out to not be that bad. In the end, I tee up a better system that I will expand on in part two of this post.

And yet it moves.

Argyle: Okay, level with me here. How can you just not read the paper? How do you know what's written in it?

Belka: Well, when I was new at this, I did read a lot of papers very carefully. I got stuck a lot, redid a lot of the calculations, double-checked the methodology, asked my colleagues...

Argyle: But you don't anymore?

Belka: Sometimes I do! That's what journal clubs and coffee breaks are good for.

...
Quick Poll: Booster Reactions
by Elizabeth — 2021-12-21T07:40:07.347Z

Lots of people are getting covid boosters now. To help myself and others plan I did an extremely informal poll on Twitter and Facebook about how people’s booster side effects compared to their second dose. Take home message: boosters are typically easier than second shots, but they’re bad often enough you should have a plan for that.

The poll was a mess for a number of reasons, including:

I didn’t describe the options very well, so it’s 2/3 freeform responses I collapsed into a few categories.
There was a tremendous variation in what combination of shots people got.
It’s self-reported. I have unusually data-minded friends which minimizes the typical problem of extreme responses getting disproportionate attention, but it doesn’t eliminate it, and self-report data has other issues.
I only sampled people who follow me on social media, who are predominantly <45 years old, reasonably healthy, reasonably high income, and mostly working desk jobs.
I specified mRNA but not the manufacturer; Moderna but not Pfizer boosters are smaller than the original dose.

Nonetheless, the trend was pretty clear.

Of people who received three mRNA shots from the same manufacturer, comparing their second shot to their third:

12 had no major symptoms either time (where major is defined as “affected what you could do in your day.” It specifically does not include arm soreness, including soreness that limited range of motion)
2 had no major symptoms for their second shot but had major for their third

Not included in data: one person who got pregnant between their second and third shot

23 had major symptoms for their second shot, and the third was easier

This includes at least one case where the third was still extremely bad and 2-3 “still pretty bad, just not as bad as the second”
Three cases fell short of “major symptoms” for the second, but had an even easier third shot

11 people had similar major symptoms both times
2 had major symptoms for second shot, and third was worse

Of people who mix and matched doses

2 had no major symptoms either time
4 had no major symptoms for their second shot but had major symptoms for their third

Not included: 1 reported no symptoms for the first two and mild symptoms for the third

4 had major symptoms for their second shot, and their third was easier
2 people had major symptoms both times
1 had major symptoms for their second shot, and their third wa

...
Book Launch: The Engines of Cognition
by Ben Pace — 2021-12-21T07:24:45.170Z

The Engines of Cognition is a newly published collection of essays by the LessWrong Community. They're currently available with Prime at Amazon US, where they'll arrive in time for Christmas, and you can read on to learn more about them.

About

In The Engines of Cognition, the writers set out to understand key elements of the art of rationality. Starting with the simple epistemic question of when and how to trust different sources of information, the essays in this collection move through understanding the lens of incentives, an exploration of when and why complex systems become modular, and finally into a discussions of failure, both personal and civilizational.

This book set is for people who want to read the most interesting ideas LessWrong has recently explored. It's for the people who read best away from screens, away from distractions. It's for people who do not check the site regularly, but would still like to get the ideas within. For such people, this is intended to be the ideal way to read LessWrong.

Essays in this book set take a variety of forms, from thought experiments to literature reviews, as well as book reviews, interviews, personal stories, microeconomic arguments, mathematical explanations, research advice, philosophical musings, published papers, disagreements-with-Robin-Hanson, forecasts for the future, survey data, cartoons, and more.

Authors featured include Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowshowitz, and over 30 more LessWrong writers. The essays were originally published to LessWrong in 2019, and for the first time are available with editing and illustration in print form. In addition, given recent advances in machine learning art, each essay has a unique piece of ML-generated art based on the essay title, some of which are shown below.

Order now on Amazon Prime US ($30) and it will arrive in time for Christmas.

Book Spreads

Table of Contents

Trust

Rule Thinkers In, Not Out	Scott Alexander
Gears vs Behavior	John S. Wentworth
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success	Scott Alexander
Reason isn't magic	Ben Hoffman
"Other people are wrong" vs "I am right"	Buck Shlegeris
In My Culture	Duncan Sabien
Chris Olah's views on AGI safety	Evan Hubinger
Understanding "Deep Double Descent"	Evan Hubinger
How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions)	Hazard
Paper-Reading for Gears	John S.

...
Researcher incentives cause smoother progress on benchmarks 
by ryan_greenblatt — 2021-12-21T04:13:48.758Z

(Epistemic status: likely. That said, this post isn't thorough; I wanted to write quickly.)

Let's look at the state of the art in ImageNet.[1]
The curve looks pretty smooth especially for the last 7 years.
However, there don't seem to be that many advances which actually improve
current results.

Here's a list which should include most of the important factors:

Batch norm

Better LR schedules

Residual connections

MBConv

NAS

ReLU

Attention

Augmentation schemes

Some other tweaks to the training process

Moar compute

Part of the smoothness comes from compute scaling, but I think another important
factor is the control system of researchers trying to achieve SOTA (compare to
does reality drive straight lines on graphs, or do straight lines on graphs
drive reality?).

For instance, consider the batch norm paper. Despite batch norm being
a relatively large advancement (removing it would greatly harm performance with
current models even after retuning), the improvement in top 5 SOTA error from this paper is
only from 4.94% to 4.82%. This is likely because the researchers only
bothered to improve performance until the SOTA threshold was reached.
When surpassing SOTA by a large amount is easy, this situation likely differs,
but that seems uncommon (it does seem to have been the case for resnet).

This presents a reason to be wary of generalizing smooth progress on benchmarks
to smooth AI progress in future high investment scenarios where research
incentives could differ greatly.

(I'm also planning on writing a post on gears level models of where smooth AI
progress could come from, but I wanted to write this first as a standalone
post. Edit: here is the post)

Yes, ImageNet SOTA is mostly meaningless garbage. This post is actually
trying to increase the rate at which the fully automatic nail gun is
shooting at that particular dead horse containing coffin. ↩︎
Omicron Post #8
by Zvi — 2021-12-20T23:10:01.630Z

I have fallen mildly ill, as have my wife and son. So far we don’t have a positive Covid-19 test, and everyone is maximally vaccinated, but given the timing the obvious conclusions do seem likely. Wish me well, and hopefully Christmas will not be cancelled and I can keep the posts mostly going. I do have winter break to help me out.

Omicron continues to take over. Official reactions have been relatively mild, with only the Netherlands entering a lockdown that I have seen. Private reaction has been more robust, which is the best way to do it, and there are some early signs it could be having a substantial effect in the UK, although I’m guessing that is probably a mirage. As usual, we’ll know one way or another in a few days, only to have a new set of mysteries on our hands.

The big argument in the last few days was over severity. A new study on infectiousness in the UK was essentially misappropriated, and its 24 (!) hospitalized Omicron patients (0.15% of all cases, versus 0.7% of other cases, before controlling for things, then when controlling for things they mostly evened out) were cited as strong evidence that Omicron is not less severe than Delta. Whereas what the study actually said on the topic was mostly nothing, because there wasn’t enough data yet.

Thus the big row over the idea of there being ‘no evidence’ for things, and how that turns into those things being known to be wrong (or right!) at the whim of those who control the narrative, Scott Alexander writing how The Phrase ‘No Evidence’ Is a Red Flag for Bad Science Communication, and me writing up my previous harsher but fairer proposal for the Law of No Evidence that the claim that there is ‘no evidence’ for something is evidence of bullshit.

As usual, we’ll look at South Africa, the UK, Denmark and select other places, then survey other aspects, then update our probabilities.

South Africa

Here’s a news dashboard with good charts for South Africa. Looks like things may have somehow peaked there, at least in the most hard-hit areas, and that there will be far fewer ventilated patients than in previous waves.

This is one of the many ways we have more data. That doesn’t mean we’re closer to understanding it.

This new wave is milder per case but we already knew that. That’s not the question. Ventilator use or deaths seem better than hospitalizations since hospitalizations are partly...
Good complete views on motivation
by Valdes — 2021-12-20T22:10:38.357Z

I intend in the coming weeks to spend some time on the topic of motivation and time management. I do not wish to get a good and generic theoretical view (though I wouldn't mind). Instead I am mostly aiming at the following gains :

Increase the time I spend reading, thinking, and working.

A better control on my choices of pleasant activities (choosing to read fiction I will enjoy rather than more immediately rewarding youtube videos, for example).

A better control of my time schedule.

To do so, I have decided to use a process that first collects "complete views" on the topic. This means books, blogposts series, videos, or other forms of media detailing a paradigm on the topic. Complete with usable advice. These are called "views" bellow.

I intend to collect between 5 and 10 such views. It is my intuition that some of the relevant scientific background can be vulgarized in a few hours and be helpful. If that is correct, one of the first views should also present it.
In a second phase, I intend to make my own synthesis of the whole and make changes to my life. The idea is to judge the changes after a few months and think back on the topic periodically.

I welcome remarks on the process I have planned but that is not why I am writing a lesswrong question. Instead, I would like you to give me suggestions of authors to consider. I am mainly interested in views that :

Come from authors who are high achievers themselves.

Come from authors who are specialists in psychology, sophrology, or other relevant fields.

Have had a documented positive impact on people before, ideally on male computer scientists (though with this last bit I am probably starting to be too picky).

Any combination of these is good, the more the better.

I promise that if I go through with the process using at lest one view recommended here I will write an account of my synthesis on lesswrong.

Edit : I am still collecting views and will therefore delay the project, probably by a couple months. I am not cancelling anything, just delaying.
Prizes for last year's 2019 Review
by Raemon — 2021-12-20T21:58:25.036Z

About a year ago, LessWrong held its second annual review, where we looked over the best posts from 2019. The LessWrong team offered $2000 in prizes for the top post authors, and (up to) $2000 in prizes for the best reviews of those posts.

Once again, some things came up and we got pretty sidetracked in actually getting around to awarding those prizes. Apologies to authors and reviewers. (I'm setting in motion some processes so that this year's prizes are given out in a much more timely fashion)

Prizes for Posts

The $2000 in prizes for posts this year are awarded to:

$200 to Paul Christiano, for What Failure Looks Like
$600 (divided evenly) among Evan Hubinger, Chris van Merwijk, vlad_m, Joar Skalse and Scott Garrabrant, for Risks from Learned Optimization
$200 to Abram Demski, for Parable of the Predict-o-matic and Selection vs Control
$200 to John Wentworth, for Being on the Pareto Frontier
$200 to Scott Alexander, for Book Review: Secret of our Success and Rule Thinkers in, not Out
$200 to Kaj Sotala, for Unlocking Emotional Brain
$200 to Zvi Mowshowitz, for Asymmetric Justice
$200 to Zack Davis, for Heads I Win, Tails I Never Heard of Her

The above authors are chosen primarily by the outcome of the vote (on which they all scored very highly). I'm also making a moderator call to award $100 to Benquo for Reason Isn't Magic, essentially coming out of our review-prize-budget. I thought it was a good review of the Secrets of Our Success post, which I think warranted special attention (see below).

Prizes for Reviews

Reviewing generally seems unglamorous compared to authoring posts. To compensate,I awarded more prize money here per unit-of-effort than I did for posts.

I particularly went out of my way to reward reviews that attempted a factual epistemic spot check – not because I think those are most important overall, but because they seem undersupplied to me, and more effortful. (AFAICT we only had 2-3?)

That said, much of LessWrong's content is in the domain of philosophy or theory, where epistemic spot checks aren't quite the right frame.

Secrets of Our Success

Book Review: Secrets of Our Success was an interesting case that stood out to me when reflecting on last year's process. Fiddler's review basically argues "This post mostly quotes cherry picked anecdotes, without distinguishing which of those anecdotes Scott endorses, and some of those cherry p...
Omicron Paths
by jefftk — 2021-12-20T18:30:04.651Z

While there is still a lot we don't know about Omicron, things are
starting to come together. We know it is able to infect people who've
previously had covid or been vaccinated, and that it spreads extremely
quickly. Combine this with the US having very limited tracking of
variants, and what should we expect to see?

Here's what cases look like in London:

London cases from coronavirus.data.gov.uk split by SGTF percentages from the Omicron daily overview. Inspired by Theo Sanderson's chart.

Now imagine that instead of seeing nice colored lines, you just saw a single line representing overall cases:

Instead of the rise in cases being apparent in the data from
~2021-12-01, it's not until ~2021-12-12 that we see it.

This is what the statistics will look like in places that don't know
which cases are Omicron. It will look relatively flat, a small uptick
which might be noise, and then a huge spike. And due to reporting
delays, we won't see the spike until cases are much higher.

The biggest question in my mind is how we are going to react. Are we,
as a society, going to seriously attempt to limit spread?

One potential path is that we don't. Vaccinated adults are in good
shape, unvaccinated adults less so. Unvaccinated children
were at a similar risk to vaccinated adults pre-Omicron. We don't
shut things down and it burns through quickly. Hospitals probably get
overloaded leading to additional deaths, especially of unvaccinated
people.

Another potential path is that we really try: we go back to early 2020
policies, but at least this time we know to focus on air and not
surfaces. Omicron is so infectious that I don't see how we contain
it, and everyone still gets it eventually, but we have more time. This
is the standard flattened curve, with fewer deaths due to the
hospitals being less burdened, and the added potential benefit of
Paxlovid approval (incredibly frustrating that it's still not even
approved for emergency use) and scale up.

There are also paths in the middle, some of which makes sense. Every
activity has some level of risk and some level of benefit, and the
more we are able to move away from the ones with a bad ratio. The more
we can gain time without giving up too much. In practice, however, I'm
quite skeptical of this: our prioritization so far has been quite poor
(indoor dining + remote elementary school...
Is there a term / better way of phrasing the general case where an intervention helps certain individuals do better at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any external value?
by freedomandutility — 2021-12-20T17:35:08.099Z

Eg - Some people think that education / the cosmetics industry benefit some individuals but hurt other individuals at the same time because job markets / dating markets involve zero-sum games, so education / the cosmetic industry don’t provide any benefit to society overall. In other words, they change who succeeds but don’t cause more success.

I’d also like to find a term / nicer way of phrasing how individuals involved are incentivised to invest more resources to these things as others do the same, leading to a vicious cycle and increasing amounts of resources being dedicated to something that does not benefit society.
Bayesian Dharani, Great Dharani for Conserving Evidence
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2021-12-20T16:32:34.606Z

I like combining the two big forces in my life, Rationality and Zen. For some time, I've had the notion that it'd be nice to have a rationalist dharani, perhaps for chanting during Solstice.

The basic idea of a dharani is that it's a chant made up of sounds that are supposed to have some effect, like a magic spell. Although originally written in Sanskrit or Pali, they've been translated and modified over the centuries such that many of them (or at least the ones I know via Zen) no longer have literal meanings, and are instead just sounds meant to convey a particular mood or desire.

It seems very extremely unlikely to me that dharani's are actually magic spells, but they do have an effect on the world via the people who chant them. In particular, when chants are done not just by a priest but by everyone in the congregation, they create a shared experience. There's some opening up of the closed, individual sense of self as we all lift (our voices) together to express a shared intention. That intention is carried on by we who chanted in the background of our minds, slowly working change on us.

This morning inspiration struck, and at last I have penned a rationalist dharani. If I can arrange it, a recording will be forthcoming, though I'll probably be too busy to get to it for a while.

Notes: (o) small bell (O) big bell (^) stifle (gatz) big bell, (X) mokugyo, (*) last time only
To be accompanied by mokugyo on each syllable

(chant leader only) Bayesian Dharani, Great Dharani for Conserving Evidence (X) (O)

(everyone 3 times) (O) pee of ay given bee equal pee of bee given ay time pee of ay over pee of bee (O*) or pee of ay given bee equal pee of bee given ay time pee of ay over pee of bee given ay time pee of ay plus pee of bee given not ay time pee of not ay (O*) or pee of bee equal (o*) sum for jay of pee of bee (o*) given ay sub jay time pee of ay sub jay (^*) (ritard)
Are "non-computable functions" always hard to solve in practice?
by Morpheus — 2021-12-20T16:32:25.118Z

I am trying to get a better understanding of the philosophical implications of non-computable functions, and this is some fix idea I had to which I don't know the answer:
For a Problem Π: Π undecidable => Π infeasible to calculate even when making the domain of all the variables finite? (Clarification below)

One well known result in CS-Theory is that there is a large class of problems that are "undecidable" meaning there does not exist a Turing machine that can determine the answer to your problem for all natural numbers.
One example would be the "busy beaver game" where you try to find the Turing machine with n different states that produces the largest amount of 1s on the tape. What is impressive about the busy beaver function, is that it explodes really quickly, and I believe the values are only known for values up to n=5. It is relatively easy to show that determining whether a Turing machine is a busy beaver is undecidable for an arbitrary n.

It recently realized though that the whole non-computability thing and the Church Turing Thesis for that matter is kinda cheap since we humans are actually not always interested in an algorithm that works for all natural numbers, and something that works for all n up to tree(3) or similar would be good enough.
By the Myhill Nerode Theorem, every finite language is regular and thus decidable => any busy beaver that you could run on a finite Turing machine with tree(3) available memory slots (which would be equivalent to a finite state automaton) is decidable (I am not 100% percent sure this dodges something like rices theorem for regular Turing machines, which might imply that these automatons would be hard to find). In general, this suggests to me that for any problem where you actually have the hardware to solve it, there also exists the requisite "algorithm".

In principle, I would not see a concern to adding the assumption "and n < tree(4)" to your inductive hypothesis in your inductive proof that your algorithm is correct.

In practice, of course, it seems hard to leverage this assumption for anything other than brute force, and that what you end up with could be something other than a table of the correct solutions.