trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Large Effects Can't Prove Small Causes
by Bucky — 2020-10-06T17:34:24.153Z

Fast evidence assessment

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how to assess evidence quickly. We usually don't have time to do a deep dive into everything we hear but there are quick intuitions which can be applied to get an idea of how much a piece of evidence should change our mind. I’ve written about this previously in the context of scientific papers but I think the rules are more generalizable than that.

So this is an attempt to get as much out of a piece of evidence with as little effort as possible and with knowing as little statistics as possible.

Below is one intuition I find useful. I have a few others I could write up and will judge reaction to this one as to whether they're worth writing.

Large Effects Can't Prove Small Causes

(Note: When I say "small cause" I mean a cause which would be expected to create a small effect.)

Say you have some evidence of a very large effect and a proposed cause. The first thing to ask yourself is not whether you believe the cause could create some effect, but whether the proposed cause could possibly cause an effect that big.

Does it seem to contradict anything else which you think you know about the world?

If it were true then what other evidence would you expect to see?

If there is no corresponding evidence then the original evidence was probably caused by something else.

You don't even need to know what the other cause might be (although it helps if you can). So long as you can confidently assess that the proposed cause isn't anywhere near sufficient to cause such a large effect, the evidence provides negligible confirmation that the proposed cause is creating any of the effect. Any effect that the proposed cause is having is being drowned out by noise created from other causes.

I don’t think there’s anything massively new here and I think people have a sense that this is true (Putanumonit has also discussed something similar in the context of scientific papers). However I think it’s easy to forget to apply it, especially to informal evidence.

I’ve had cause to use this rule at least 3 times in the last few months on COVID related data which hopefully illustrate the point.

COVID cell phones

A friend mentioned to me that there had been a 21 million drop in the number of Chinese cell phone contracts between November 2019 and February 2020. They presented this as evidence that the Chinese government was cover...
Conversations from inside early singularity
by faint reminder — 2020-10-06T16:46:44.738Z

Everything is getting better all the time:

Prelude

JB:Later, Garfunkel's father bought him a wire recorder and from then on, Garfunkel spent his afternoons singing, recording, and playing it back, so he could listen for flaws and learn how to improve.

heh

R:This appears to be one of the patterns for all the skills

DA:hmm

should that entire conversation about 'everyone getting better at everything all at once' be a blog post

JB:the primordial skill is noticing

DA:or posted to lesswrong actually

R:A blog post, at least

DA:it feels like it was a useful product of the chat channel and should be saved

JB:do you feel like writing it

or would you just copypaste the convo

DA:maybe, will anyone read it?

JB:i think so

Everything is getting better all the time:

Opening

[link one: osteen...]

DA:damn

are the replay analysis queens of esports

actually uh

better at learning and self-development than baseline humanity

and getting better at any skill is the same ur-skill, which could be developed better for literally everyone, including men of the fine cut

does western society have an underdeveloped understanding of the state of the art of theory of learning?

[link deux: there was a moment in sports...]

[link three: most surgery is done in your head...]

DA: maybe, idk

if the cost of masterful action is humility, it might be too expensive

JC:@DA Nice find. This isn't news to me - I've seen similar about coaching in surgery before. Yes. Society is systematically underdeveloped in the theory of of learning. It's not an accidental failure. Before you try to change it, you need to understand why.

DA: i mean, i have to have an explanation for why useful new information hasn't spread to saturation yet

the answers are normally going ot be 'communication hard' 'emotions hard' or 'pricing / extracting value hard' from my general expectations about efficiency

but sometimes it's just because 'nobody has put the work into spreading the idea yet'

those would be the 'ideas' to try to build a business or school of philosophy off of

e.g. i am very confident that the lakoffian theory of language as metaphor just never spread yet, and has low-hanging fruit everywhere if i push it on enough people or try to develop it

R: It's also a benefit to know it and not spread it, if you try to spread it and no one's willing to listen, might as well just use it for yourself...
Not Even Evidence
by Dach — 2020-10-06T01:20:25.028Z

Introduction.

I've been thinking about Anthropic Arguments recently, and noticed a disturbing lack of hard hitting (as in, can be shown to be true or false given our knowledge of physics and such) thought experiments on the topic.

The self sampling assumption is as follows:

All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all actually existent observers (past, present and future) in their reference class.

In this post, I'm using the reference class of "Algorithms identical to you, but perhaps in different times and places"- that seems the least objectionable. This includes exact simulated copies of you and exact physical duplicates of you.

The self sampling assumption claims that our experiences are probabilistic evidence about the observations of people in the reference class we're in. If H1 predicts that observers like us exist and a rather large proportion of observers, and H2 predicts that observers like us exist but are a very small proportion of observers, ceteris paribus we can choose H1 over H2. Our experiences provide meaningful evidence in this pretty unobjectionable and intuitive way.

There are real world consequences of accepting this sort of reasoning, some of which punish us with physics verified irrationality- we will act in ways that we can verify in advance and in retrospect cannot be based on any communicated information, and with more contrived examples can verifiably make us incorrectly update based on specific information more often than we correctly update, even if we know all the relevant information.

This allows us to glimpse at the underlying problems with our intuitions about some sorts of anthropic reasoning.

Consider the following hypothetical:

There are a million exactly perfect copies of you (including you, of course) throughout the universe, all of which are non-local to one another- their futures do not intersect.

Now, consider the following two hypotheses to which we've each assigned probability exactly .5 for simplicity:

Scenario 1: All of your copies (including you) are exactly identical and will always be exactly identical. Their entire observable universe has been and always will be precisely the same, and they will not see a bright pink pop-up on their screen roughly a second after they read the sentence below these two hypotheses.
Scenario 2:

...
Fermi Challenge: Trains and Air Cargo
by Ben Pace — 2020-10-05T21:51:45.281Z

Jacob (Jacob) and I are giving each other Fermi estimates to complete.

From Ben: How many miles of train tracks exist in the world?
From Jacob: How many metric tons of air freight cargo shipped globally in 2009, and in 2019 (either by commercial airlines or specialized freight companies)? (Final score will be average of those scores.

Whoever is the furthest from the truth (in log space) loses.

The deadline is Monday 12th October. You are welcome to participate.

If you submit a Fermi estimate as an answer (not comment) to this post, it will be scored. If you submit for both and would like them both to be scored, your scores will be averaged.

This thread has the following rules which you must obey or else your answers/comments will be edited/deleted.

Rules for this thread

All analysis of the question must be in spoiler tags (

how do I do that?

)
You're only allowed to use numbers you don't need to Google.
No object level analysis is allowed outside spoilered text.
If your comment contains the answer, or if you know the true answer, make sure to mention this outside the spoilered text.

If you'd like an example of what that looks like in practise, see

this

and

this

thread. The first thread is especially good, where only whitelisted things are allowed outside of the spoiler text.

This is what spoilered text looks like! Your comment should mostly look like this, except for some metadata at the start so people can make an informed choice about whether to read your comment.

Why do this?

Last week Jacob ran the babble challenge. More than 20 users joined to practice their creativity by coming up with 50 ways of sending something to the moon.

This challenge continues in the same spirit. We want to build a culture of practice on LessWrong. A place where you users can come together, push the limits of their abilities, and grow stronger as rationalists. This is an experiment in that direction.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: A summary
by jasoncrawford — 2020-10-05T21:41:08.447Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/summary-the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth

The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert J. Gordon, is like a murder mystery in which the murderer is never caught. Indeed there is no investigation, and perhaps no detective.

The thesis of Gordon’s book is that high rates of economic growth in America were a one-time event between roughly 1870–1970, which he calls the “special century”. Since then, growth has slowed, and we have no reason to expect it to return anytime soon, if ever.

The argument of the book can be summarized as follows:

Life and work in the US were utterly transformed for the better between 1870 and 1940, across the board, with improvements continuing at a slower pace until 1970.
Since 1970, information and communication technology has been similarly transformed, but other areas of life (such as housing, food, and transportation) have not been.
We can see these differences reflected in economic metrics, which grew significantly faster especially during 1920–70 than before or since.
All of the trends that led to high growth in that period are played out already, and there are none on the horizon to replace them.
Therefore, high growth is a thing of the past, and low growth will be the norm for the future.

The bulk of the book’s 700+ pages are dedicated to the first three points above: a qualitative and quantitative survey of how the American standard of living has changed since 1870.

In the several decades after 1870, every aspect of American life was transformed:

Food: In 1870 Americans were well-fed, but with a monotonous diet high in pork and cornmeal, foods that could easily be preserved without refrigerators. Over the coming decades diets became more varied, and food got easier to prepare, thanks to the introduction of home refrigerators, prepared foods, and supermarkets. But major innovation here was over by 1940.

Clothing: In 1870 most Americans owned only a few outfits. Most clothing was made in the home, by women, although some men’s clothing might be purchased. By 1940 clothing was made in factories and purchased through department stores and other retail outlets.

Retail: The general store of 1870 gradually gave way to the urban department store, with better selection and lower prices, and rural areas were served by mail order catalogs, which took advantage of the postal service and the railways. Later, when cars became common, people had more shopping options because they could drive ...
Come to the Boulder rationality reading group!
by Kerry McKean — 2020-10-05T20:54:45.941Z

Drop-ins, visitors, old hands, and the curious all welcome.

We meet 1st & 3rd Mondays for ~2 hours to have a good time talking about ideas. Readings serve as focus for discussion--content varies but SSC is popular. Format, attendance, and expectations are very casual and friendly: Nobody will judge you for not doing the reading, or for not being familiar with some concept.

Regular attendees skew "rationalist-adjacent" and aren't very plugged into The Rationality Community, though most have read the sequences. Curious and non-rationalist visitors from the university or local community are common, as are visiting rationalists from out of town. Typical attendance is 4-8 people, and typical meetings last about 2 hours.

Readings are posted on the meetup.com event page (group page here: https://www.meetup.com/Boulder-Applied-Rationality-Meetup/ ), usually the morning of or the day before because I'm not very organized. I usually respond to emails, though it may take a few days.
Domains of truth
by mxln — 2020-10-05T19:46:28.843Z

Every text about truth must begin noticing that truth is the most written-about topic in philosophy, which is due to the importance of the notion of truth.

You may or may not find the above sentence to be true. Perhaps you find some parts of the sentence to be true, but not others. Perhaps you feel incredibly bored by yet another text about truth. Why discuss the matter any further?

I will argue that the term of truth has a different meaning in different domains, that this can cause serious issues in any discourse, and that it can help explain the seeminly incredible irrational types of discourse we witness today. Is there a (metaphysical) property common to all usages of truth? That is for philosophers to decide. However, I find it fundamental to any rational debate to reflect on the usage of central ideas, such as the idea of truth. In an age which sees both amazing scientific progress and Flat Earthers, such reflections could even help understanding these kinds of nonsynchronisms.

The philosopher Michael P. Lynch argues in favor of a pluralistic theory of truth. Together with Jeremy Wyatt he states that the concept of truth must be separated from truth properties, and that depending on the domain, different things can play the role of truth bearer. In the scientific and political discourse, a number of important domains exist. In each domain, I believe the matter of an objective truth as well as our ability to recognize it, should it exist, varies to a great extent.

Regarding the number and types of domains, a pragmatic approach is best. Defining such a taxonomy of domains is effectively a model. As the adage goes, models are always wrong, but more or less useful. The basis for the domains are properties of the world which appear to be uniquely important, and not easily reducible. These properties are:

empirical: time and space
ontological/categorical: which kind of things exist, and of which kind a specific thing is
axiomatic/symbolic: defined, self-contained sets of symbols and rules
causal: Without the thing A, the thing B would not exist, or at least it would be different.

Of course, other categories might be introduced. For example, I would subsume moral propositions under the axiomatic category, but its practical importance could motivate creating a separate category for such propositions.

Disclaimer: The table below is my own work, so I cannot provide ...
COVID Strategy 101
by Mike Harris — 2020-10-05T19:30:43.529Z

Introduction:

Over the past six months of the COVID epidemic a sharp divide has emerged.

In one camp, most public health experts believe that the lockdowns in place are keeping us from unmitigated disaster and millions of deaths. In the other camp, a disparate group of scientists have argued that the lockdowns are unnecessary and causing far more damage than what would be caused by COVID if life was allowed to return mostly to normal.

Most people are aware of these two camps, and may have read some of the articles arguing in one direction or the other.
However most articles are either at a very high level, and don't explain the specifics of the strategy and beliefs; Or they are at a very technical level, and are too bogged down with mathematics and terminology to be comprehensible.

In this article I want to blaze a middle path, providing enough detail to understand the beliefs and arguments of both the camps, while not being so technical. To aid in this goal I have developed interactive tools to visualize the implications of the various theories proposed. These tools are obviously vast simplifications so the precise numbers produced are less important than the overall dynamics.

The disagreements between these two camps span a wide range of topics:

Strategic: What is the right approach for dealing with COVID.

Moral: How do you balance the loss of life from the epidemic with the loss of liberty from lockdown measures.

Tactical: What actions are most effective, for instance how well do masks work?

This article is aimed at explaining the strategic disagreements. Science and data cannot decide these moral tradeoffs, only tell you what the tradeoffs are likely to be. The tactical decisions are also inherently technical in nature, depending on the precise numbers rather than the broad strokes.

This article is aimed at an American audience and uses data or numbers for the United States unless otherwise specified. However none of the ideas are unique to America.

The Basic Infection Model:

Almost every model for the spread of COVID has as its basis the SIR model.
In this model every sick person will infect, on average, the same number of other people before recovering. This number is known as "R0".
If we look at R0=2 it is easy to see how the infection can grow out of control very quickly; After 10 rounds of transmission 1 person will cause 1000 infections and after 20 t...
The Felt Sense: What, Why and How
by Kaj_Sotala — 2020-10-05T15:57:50.545Z

While LW has seen previous discussion of Focusing, I feel like there has been relatively limited discussion of the felt sense - that is, the thing that Focusing is actually accessing.

Everyone accesses felt senses all the time, but most people don't know that they are doing it. I think that being able to make the skill more explicit is really valuable, and in this post I'm going to give lots of examples of why that is and what you can do with it.

Hopefully, after I'm done, you will not only know what a felt sense is (if you didn't already), but also will have difficulty understanding how you ever got by without this concept.

Examples of felt senses

The term "felt sense" was originally coined by the psychologist Eugene Gendlin, as a name for something that he found his clients to be accessing in their therapy sessions. Here are some examples of felt senses:

Think of some person you know, maybe imagining what it feels to be like in the same room as them. You probably have some “sense” of that person, of what it is that they feel like.
Likewise if you think of some fictional universe, it has something of its own feel. Harry Potter feels different from Star Wars feels different from Game of Thrones feels different from James Bond.
Sometimes you will have a word “right on the tip of your tongue”; it’s as if the word is almost there, but you can’t quite reach it. When you do, you just know that it's the right word - because the "shape" of the word matches the one you were reaching for before.

The felt senses of pictures

Here are are a few pictures that I recently collected from the Facebook group "Steampunk Tendencies":

How do you feel when you look at these pictures? What's the general vibe that unites all of these pictures?

Likely you can find quite a few. If I put aside the words "steampunk" and "Victorian", next I get the word "mechanical". "Dark" also feels fitting.

Whatever the vibe that you get, it's probably something different than the one you get from this collection of images:

Look at the first set of images, then the second. How does it feel when you switch looking from one to the other? What kinds of changes are there in your mind and your body?

I like both sets, but looking from one to the other, I notice that the forest images make me feel like my mind is opening up, whereas the steampunk ones make it close a little. Comparing the two, I feel li...
Universal Eudaimonia
by hg00 — 2020-10-05T13:45:19.609Z

The AI is here. And it's Friendly. But due to moral uncertainty, its value function prohibits any major intervention in existing human societies.

The AI's nanobots get to work. They replace the South Pacific garbage patch with a new continent--Eudaimonia, a rat park for humans. All basic needs are met, but if you want more money, you can gamble at a positive-expected-value casino or run through a bonus area where $100 bills flutter down from the sky. Immortality drugs are under development. The AI nanoprints RollerCoaster Tycoon save files on demand. Cherries are bred to be free of pits. Spaceships full of tourists depart regularly for a new floating city on Venus. And many ignore all this in favor of immersive virtual environments which are far more wondrous.

The AI is concerned. Eudaimonia seems to satisfy many human terminal values. But other terminal values appear to be in conflict. Indeed, some people have a terminal value that others should not be allowed to achieve their terminal values! That doesn't sound like a rat park! It's impossible to please everyone, and although the AI could modify peoples' preferences to change this, it is far too corrigible for that nonsense.

The AI comes up with a compromise. Once a month, you're given the opportunity to video call someone you have a deep disagreement with. At the end of the call, each of you gets to make a choice regarding whether the other should be allowed in Eudaimonia. But there's a twist: Whatever choice you made for the other person is the choice the AI makes for you.

The plan seems to be working splendidly at first. Legions of forgiving and agreeable people flood into the new continent and enjoy a life of constant bliss. The average resident makes three new deep friendships per month while tripping on psychedelic drugs. What used to be existential conflicts are now ironic sports team rivalries.

But a problem emerges: As the forgiving and agreeable people leave, it is the unforgiving and disagreeable people who are left behind--people who are especially difficult to forgive. The world outside Eudaimonia keeps getting uglier and uglier.

The AI decides it isn't fair to hold later applicants to a higher standard. Instead of doing a call with another person outside Eudaimonia, the AI sets you up with a Eudaimonia resident who disagreed with you in a past life. The AI offers them loyalty points at their favori...