trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Biextensional Equivalence
by Scott Garrabrant — 2020-10-28T14:07:38.289Z

This is the third post in the Cartesian frames sequence. Read the first post here.

This post will introduce the standard equivalence relations we'll be using for Cartesian frames. Our primary interest will be in homotopy equivalence, which will allow us to classify frames according to their agents' and environments' effect on possible worlds.

1. Isomorphism

Before defining homotopy equivalence, I want to define isomorphism between Cartesian frames.

Definition: A morphism (g,h):C→D is an isomorphism if both g and h are bijective. If there is an isomorphism between C and D, we say C≅D.

Claim: ≅ is an equivalence relation.

Proof: Reflexivity is trivial because the identity is an isomorphism. For symmetry, we have that if (g,h) is an isomorphism from C to D, then (g−1,h−1) is an isomorphism from D to C. Transitivity follows from the fact that bijection is transitive. □

Claim: C≅D if and only if there is a pair of morphisms ϕ:C→D and ψ:D→C that compose to the identity morphism in both orders.

Proof: If C≅D, we have (g,h):C→D with both g and h bijective, and we can take ϕ=(g,h) and ψ=(g−1,h−1).

Conversely, if (g1,h1)∘(g0,h0) is the identity morphism on C=(A,E,⋅), then g1∘g0 is the identity on A, so g0 must be injective. Similarly, h0∘h1 is the identity on E, so h0 must be surjective. Surjectivity of g0 and injectivity of h0 follow similarly from the fact that (g0,h0)∘(g1,h1) is the identity on D. □

Isomorphism is pretty intuitive. It is basically saying that it doesn't matter what the possible agents and possible environments are, other than how they interact with the evaluation function.

We will basically always be working up to at least isomorphism. For example, in the last post ("Additive Operations on Cartesian Frames"), we noted that ⊕ and & are commutative and associative up to isomorphism.

2. Homotopy Equivalence

2.1. Homotopic Morphisms

Our initial definition of homotopy equivalence will be devoid of interpretation, but the meaning will become clear later.

We say that two morphisms from C to D are homotopic if you ca...
"Cartesian Frames" Talk #2 this Sunday at 2pm (PT)
by Rob Bensinger — 2020-10-28T13:59:20.991Z

Scott Garrabrant of MIRI is giving a second talk on Cartesian Frames this Sunday, Nov. 1 at 2pm (PT), covering the contents of his Cartesian Frames posts this week. Afterwards, there will be a Q&A and freeform discussion from 3pm to 4pm.

This talk will assume that you've either:

watched the first talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1tJdaCvcck);
or read the first two posts (Introduction to Cartesian Frames and Additive Operations on Cartesian Frames).

The talk and discussion will be on Gather.Town (i.e., not on Zoom), and take place after the Rationalist Town Hall: Pandemic Edition event.

Directions

To attend Scott's talk or the discussion:

Go to https://gather.town/app/aPVfK3G76UukgiHx/lesswrong-campus, the LW Walled Garden.
Head north and move your avatar onto the TARDIS / phone booth.
Then move your avatar onto the words "Scott G's Office" and you'll be teleported to his office.
For the talk, leave Scott's office, go up, and enter the room on the right.

The path to the TARDIS looks like this:

The path from Scott's office to the lecture hall looks like this:

Other events: Nov. 8 and Nov. 15

Scott is likely to host another talk or two on Cartesian Frames the following two Sundays at 2pm, also in Gather.Town.

Regardless, Scott will be hosting Cartesian Frames discussions on Gather.Town those Sundays (Nov. 8 and Nov. 15), 2-4pm.
Integers as Compression
by Chris_Leong — 2020-10-28T07:36:09.192Z

I would like to propose a conception of what integers are. This is something of a misnomer, I don't actually want to claim that there is a one true conception of what integers are, but nonetheless this is a convenient way of describing what this post is about. I actually believe that there's multiple starting points from which we can produce a concept of integers, nonetheless, this appears to me as a particularly beautiful approach and highlights some aspects that other conceptions may not.

Suppose we have the following sequences:

aaaa aaaa

bbbcc bbbcc

abcd abcd

If sequences of this form are fairly common, then the number 2 will be useful for compressing information about these sequences. In particular, we can imagine writing the first sequences as 2{aaaa} instead.

Next let's imagine taking the sequence 2{aaaa} and appending 3{aaaa}. This would give us the sequence 5{aaaa} and leads to a natural notion of addition. 4{2{aaaa}} = 8{aaaa} and so now we have arithmetic as well.

We aren't limited to exact matches either. Consider:

aab aac aax

If the last character is irrelevant, we could write this as 3{aa_}. This is useful for producing a conceptualisation of objects as objects are almost never exactly the same. If we have a photograph, we can imagine utilising a form of lossy compression to represent the data present. For example, we might only care about the fact that there are three people in the photo and not about any of the details. This can further be extended into video and streams of experience. Alternatively, instead of compressing streams of experience, we could imagine compressing some kind of mental model.

One major advantage of talking about compression and sequences instead of objects is that to talk about objects you need to be able to set up a significant amount of metaphysical infrastructure. In contrast, sequences are fairly simple objects. We don't need these sequences to exist in an abstract sense, but only as objects in our mind. We could try defining numbers using abstract objects instead, but these don't naturally provide a notion of addition without something like a notion of space. Sets can provide a useful conception of numbers as well, but the abstract sets in our head are difficult to relate to the concrete sets in the world, while the compression conception links back fairly naturally. But beyond this, I don't believe that we need a unique co...
Why indoor lighting is hard to get right and how to fix it
by Richard Korzekwa  — 2020-10-28T04:46:22.672Z

The days are getting shorter in the northern hemisphere, and with the ongoing pandemic, most of us expect to be spending more time in our homes than normal. Creating a healthy home environment is more important than usual, and the light inside your home is an often underappreciated part of this.

There has already been some explicit discussion[1] about the importance of lighting for health and productivity, as well as many mentions of it in other places. Nonetheless, based on discussions I've had recently within the community, I get the impression that it is helpful for me to write up the results and tinkering that have done over the past few years.

First, I will cover some of the research on how our bodies respond to light, and which particular characteristics of natural light we want to mimic. Then I will explain solving this problem is hard and my overall strategy for solving it. Finally, I will give some specific advice on what to buy and how to arrange things.

I give quite a lot of background before offering any specific advice. Although I think the background information might help you make good decisions, you should feel free to skip the next section if you're in a hurry or if it seems uninteresting.

Background

Note: My background is in optics, not physiology or psychology and I began researching and writing this document almost four years ago. My original draft, as well as many of my sources, have been lost in the intervening years, so what you're seeing here is based on a combination of my notes that survived, my recollection of the research, and a partial duplication of the research. To make matters worse, it does seem that new research has come along since I began this project, so this is likely out of date. My guess is that most or all of the practical conclusions still stand, but I am only moderately confident of this. As much as I would like to take the time to update the research, past experience suggests that I will never actually publish it if I try to put too much more work into it. I welcome corrections, and if there is sufficient enthusiasm around this topic, I may try to write an updated version.

Your body uses light to synchronize its internal clock and to modulate your mood and alertness[2]. While the particulars of the lighting in your environment are important, your only perceptual access to information about lighting in the moment comes ...
Desperation hamster wheels
by Nicole Ross — 2020-10-28T02:32:27.000Z

In my first few jobs, I felt desperate to have an impact. I was often filled with anxiety that I might not be able to. My soul ached. Fear propelled me to action. I remember sitting in a coffee shop one Saturday trying to read a book that I thought would help me learn about biosafety, an impactful career path I wanted to explore. While I found the book interesting, I had to force myself to read each page because I was worn out. Yet I kept chugging along because I thought it was my lifeline, even though I was making extremely little progress. I thought: If I don’t do this excellently, I’ll be a failure.

There were three critical factors that, taken together, formed a “desperation hamster wheel,” a cycle of desperation, inadequacy, and burn out that got me nowhere:

Self-worth -- I often acted and felt as if my self-worth was defined wholly by my impact, even though I would give lip service to self-worth being more than that.
Insecurity/inadequacy -- I constantly felt not skilled or talented enough to have an impact in the ways I thought were most valuable.
Black and white thinking -- I thought of things in binary. E.g. I was either good enough or not, I was smart or not, I would have an impact or not.

Together, these factors manifested as a deep, powerful, clawing desire for impact. They drove me to work as hard as possible, and fight with all I had. It backfired.

This “desperation hamster wheel” led me to think too narrowly about what opportunities were available for impact and what skills I had or could learn. For example, I only thought about having an impact via the organization I was currently working at, instead of looking more broadly. I only considered the roles most lauded in my community at the time, instead of thinking outside the box about the best fit for me.

I would have been much happier and much more impactful had I taken a more open, relaxed, and creative approach.

Instead, I kept fighting against my weaknesses -- against reality -- rather than leaning into my strengths.(1) It led me to worse work habits and worse performance, creating a vicious cycle, as negative feedback and lack of success fueled my desperation. For example, I kept trying to do research because I thought that that work was especially valuable. But, I hadn’t yet developed the skills necessary to do it well, and my desperation made the inherent vulnerability and failure involved in l...
Notes on Honesty
by David Gross — 2020-10-28T00:54:50.839Z

This post examines the virtue of honesty (a.k.a. “truthfulness,” “veracity”).[1] As with my other posts in this sequence, I’m less interested in breaking new ground and more in synthesizing whatever wisdom I could find on the subject. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I hope it will help people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

The topic is complex and it was hard for me to find the sweet spot between being too wordy and too superficial. People have written dense books to try to explain things I cheekily tried to summarize in a sentence or two.

Honesty and rationality

Much of LessWrong concerns how we can better approach knowing the truth. Honesty concerns an aspect of how we communicate truth. So I think of it as a social virtue rather than an intellectual virtue. Sometimes, however, expressions like “being honest with yourself” describe intellectual virtues.

Honesty requires at least a minimum exercise of intellectual virtues. If you do not exercise epistemological due diligence before you communicate your understanding of the world, you may tell the truth as you see it, but you fail to respect the virtue of honesty by not taking enough care to distinguish the false from the true.

For example, an acquaintance of mine is very woo. When she tells me of woo things that she thinks are important for me to learn about, I don’t think she’s lying to me, exactly, but she exercises such poor judgement about what to believe that I tend to think of her as being as much a dishonest person as a foolish one.

On the other hand, Scott Alexander warns against “lie inflation”[2] in which we accuse people of lying when they are merely honestly representing the poor results of their sloppy thinking. (His argument is something like this: if we expand our definition of dishonesty to cover mistaken sloppy thinking then we risk losing the ability to talk more precisely about deliberately deceptive dishonesty, and this lowers our defenses against just such liars.)[3]

Related virtues

Some other virtues are closely-related to honesty:

If you have cultivated a reputation for honesty, you are “reputable” or “trustworthy”.
Being honest about your commitments to future action is “accountability”, “reliability”, “dependability”, or “conscientiousness”.
If you are not merely honest, but also proactive about seeking out and express

...
How can I reconcile these COVID test false-negative numbers?
by Optimization Process — 2020-10-27T23:56:44.544Z

[effort level: thinking out loud, plus a couple hours' googling]

There's been a lot of press lately around Costco selling an “AZOVA” at-home COVID test...

...with a sensitivity of 98% (meaning 98% of positive tests are correct) and a specificity of 99% (meaning 99% of negative tests are correct).

(IIUC, they're getting their terms wrong here: "sensitivity" means "P(positive test | sick)", not "P(sick | positive test)" as their parenthetical claims. Same flip for "specificity." I'd guess that they mean "P(positive test | sick)", and that some copywriter mis-translated, but not sure.)

That is, they claim a false negative rate of 2%.

Compare that to this study of RT-PCR COVID test false negative rates:

Over the 4 days of infection before the typical time of symptom onset (day 5), the probability of a false-negative result in an infected person decreases from

100% (95% CI, 100% to 100%) on day 1 to

67% (CI, 27% to 94%) on day 4.On the day of symptom onset, the median false-negative rate was

38% (CI, 18% to 65%). This decreased to

20% (CI, 12% to 30%) on day 8 (3 days after symptom onset) then began to increase again, from

21% (CI, 13% to 31%) on day 9 to

66% (CI, 54% to 77%) on day 21.

That is, they claim false negative rates ten times higher than AZOVA's, even if you nail the timing.

How can these false negative rates be so different?

Hypothesis 1: the study with the >20% false negative rates was from April-May, and the state of the art has moved on since then.

(Counterpoint: in five months, we reduced false negatives by a factor of ten? Seems unlikely.)

Hypothesis 2: AZOVA doesn't actually mean "sensitivity" i.e. "P(positive test | sick)", they truly mean "P(sick | positive test) = 98%" -- which might bw achievable through some clever definition of base rates.

(Counterpoint: I think this would have to drive their "P(healthy | negative test)" numbers into the toilet.)

Hypothesis 3: AZOVA's "98%" and "99%" are just benchmarked against some other test -- so "P(positive test | sick)" should actually read "P(positive AZOVA test | positive gold standard test)" -- which just means that their test is about as good as the gold standard.

(Counterpoint: in the "Contrived Clinical Study" section of their Emergency Use Authorization summary, they build "known positive" / "known negative" samples by spiking negative samples with viral RNA, and their test gets ev

...
Babble challenge: 50 ways to stop torture
by seed — 2020-10-27T19:38:22.141Z

Content warning: torture.
Torture is deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on someone with the purpose of punishment, extracting a confession, or getting information out of them. Even though torture is illegal under international law, many governments continue to use it.

Today I'm borrowing jacobjacob's delightful format to pose a challenge of my own:
Tell me 50 ways to (help) protect people from torture.

Bonus points for solutions making use of math/programming/machine learning. Boring solutions that only make a small dent in the problem are fine. Outlandish solutions are also fine. Please stay within the realm of physical possibility, though. If you are unsure if the idea is physically possible, it's also fine.

Rules

50 answers. Shoot for 1 hour.

To beat the challenge, you need to come up with 50 ideas.

However, the 1 hour limit is a stretch goal. It’s fine if it takes longer to get to 50.

If you had some great ideas but didn't make it to 50, you didn't beat the challenge, but I still want to know the ideas!

Post your answers inside of spoiler tags. (

How do I do that?

)
Celebrate other’s answers.

This is really important. Sharing babble in public is a scary experience. I don’t want people to leave this having back-chained the experience “If I am creative, people will look down on me”. So be generous with those upvotes.

If you comment on someone else’s post, focus on making exciting, novel ideas work -- instead of tearing apart worse ideas.

Reward people for babbling -- don’t punish them for not pruning.

I might remove comments that break this rule.

Not all your ideas have to work.

It may be hard to predict the effect an intervention will have on society. Did you know that Richard Gatling, inventor of the machine gun, thought his invention would decrease the number of war deaths? So, I just want anything that sounds plausible. It is OK if the solution only works in some scenarios, or helps indirectly. You can ask yourself, what are people already doing about the problem? How can they be helped? On the other hand, what was never tried before?

My main tip: when you’re stuck, say something stupid.

If you spend 5 min agonising over not having anything to say, you’re doing it wrong. You’re being too critical. Just lower your standards and say something, anything. Soon enough you’ll be back on track....
Spoiler-Free Review and then Semi-Walkthrough: Star Traders: Frontiers
by Zvi — 2020-10-27T18:50:01.179Z

Star Traders: Frontiers is a Tier 2 open-world game in which you have a starship and you go where you want and do what you want. You can be any or all of: A merchant who takes spices from one port and moves them to another port, an explorer of wilderness planets, a pirate who preys on shipping, a bounty hunter with a licence to kill, a scavenger, a spy, a warrior and more. You can take part in blood feuds or politics or steer clear of them as the eras fly by. There’s tons of room to have the experiences you want to have, rather than the ones the game wants you to have. And if you want a real challenge, there are difficulty levels and achievements for that, too.

Star Traders: Frontiers is available on your phone. You can play it that way if you’d like, but it suffers with the screen that small, so I recommend playing on a computer or at least a tablet.

The reason this isn’t a Tier 1 game is that there’s a lot of information to take in and manage, and a lot of necessary attention to detail. A serious mistake on one of many fronts can cause oversize harm and effectively ruin a playthrough even on lower difficulties where you don’t have permadeath. That makes the game easy to bounce off of and makes the game super long. I’ve only done one playthrough to the end of the main storyline, which was as a merchant. It took a crazy number of hours of playing time despite not maximizing for a lot of it in order to get to the end.

This is a game where you make your own house rules. You choose your difficulty level, and can customize it. You decide who you want your captain to be. You choose which parts of the system to ruthlessly exploit and which not to, and how many spreadsheets and maps you want to create. Then when you play another captain on Impossible, maybe you throw all those rules out the window and say everything is fair game.

This is also a game where you choose the balance between ‘look it up in the Wiki and see how this works’ against ‘do stuff and see what happens and learn that way.’ While also balancing ‘make stellar charts of every quadrant with detailed notes and spreadsheets of what you are doing with every crew member and every contact’ against the desire to get on with it and not get too obsessed. It’s important not to be afraid to make mistakes, and also not to be afraid to look things up or carefully plan them, and figure out how to maximize y...
Memory reconsolidation for self-affection
by Kaj_Sotala — 2020-10-27T10:10:04.884Z

Last Thursday, I realized that none of the people who ever hurt me did it because there was anything fundamentally wrong with me.

I don’t mean that as in “realized intellectually”, I mean as in “realized emotionally so that in any shame-tinged memory that I could think of, the other person decomposed to their inner pain and what they did to me in reaction to that pain and then it became apparent that it wasn’t really about me”.

The way this happened, I had been doing a lot of meditation / parts work and came to an early experience where I thought someone didn’t care about how he made me feel. Then that got juxtaposed with later memories of how he obviously did care and OH at that moment he just didn’t realize how I felt.

Then later I ended up at the memory an unrelated incident where a close friend said something that hurt and then I realized that wait, her words had nothing to do with anything that I’d said in the first place, she was obviously just projecting an unrelated trauma on me.

And then when I saw see her inner pain and words come apart, something clicked and suddenly I could see everyone’s inner pain and words come apart and then that generalized to everything and all kinds of memories started coming up to get reinterpreted.

The process was significantly aided by seeing Nick Cammarata post the following on Twitter:

… unconditional self love is about editing every single memory you have one by one going as far back as you remember to have affection as the principal component. Once you’ve done this, integrating affection into every moment of life going forward becomes effortless. After all, your brain thinks it’s already been doing that for every moment of its life. Why stop now?

It feels like being able to project compassion towards the me in the memories is an important part of the process: first I remember a shameful memory, then I project compassion at the me in the memory, then that kind of shifts into a third-person perspective where it becomes apparent what happened and I can kind of see people’s motivations in my mind’s eye.

And for that, having spent time with children seems to help. There’s a memory that comes up of me as a child or young adult, where it feels like I’m fundamentally bad. And then I kind of ask myself, if this was [some kid that I know and have spent time playing with], would I think of them as fundamentally bad for having screwed ...