trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets - Part 7
by lsusr — 2020-12-11T05:54:52.510Z

They were in the hospital wing.

"Who are you?" Harry Potter said to Luna.

"You-Know-Who. Hiss hiss hiss," Luna said. She held fingers down from her mouth and swayed like a snake.

"This is Loony—" Hermione said, "Luna Lovegood. She created the BOY-WHO-LIVED GETS DRACO MALFOY PREGNANT headline the summer before last. She believes there exists an unobservable Platform Nine and One-Half concealed by powerful magics. She claims you and she adventured together without me."

"Do you have any evidence I trusted you before I lost my memory?" Harry asked.

Luna glanced at Hermione.

"All my secrets are hers as well," Harry said.

"I know your real name, that you're a Parselmouth and that you've operated the Mirror of Atlantis," said Luna.

"My real name isn't something I'd tell you so you must have worked it out yourself and therefore does not constitute evidence of my trusting you in the past. There are at least three people who know I'm a Parselmouth so it's not surprising the information leaked out. These are the same people who know I've operated the Mirror so the Mirror adds no bits of information. An enemy would be at least as likely as an ally to possess this information," said Harry, "Did we discover an ancient artifact or something?"

"We found the Lost Diadem of Ravenclaw together," Luna showed it to him.

"This crown proves little since you could easily retcon a story around it. On the other hand, there is information I would tell someone I trusted if I wanted to guarantee recognition in case of obliviation," said Harry, "Do you have the recognition code?"

Luna recognized the logic of someone whose priors outweighed the available evidence. She fled the room.

The Marauder's Map showed Luna how to climb on top of the Great Hall. She hugged a stone gargoyle at the edge. It guided her tears down into the Hogwarts courtyard.

"Not now, Wanda," Luna said, "I need to feel this."

Luna detected quiet behind her. She continued staring at the students mingling below.

"I do not intend to jump," Luna said.

"I do not intend to stop you," Lady Yue said.

They listened to the wind. They smelled the gentle scent of trees.

"How does one make friends?" Luna asked.

"That is Professor Lockhart's field of expertise," Lady Yue said.

"Do you have a spell for loneliness?" Luna asked.

"今夜鄜州月，" Lady Yue sang from her teenage youth, "閨中只独看。遥憐小児女，未解憶長安。香霧雲鬟湿，清輝玉臂寒。何時倚虚幌，双照涙痕乾？"

《月夜》 Moon Night by Du Fu 杜甫

今夜鄜州月，

...
Epistemic Warfare
by Gentzel — 2020-12-11T03:50:01.497Z

Lying and censorship are both adversarial games: they are applied by some for an advantage over others.
All else being equal, one is harmful because it spreads disinformation, the other is harmful because it suppresses the spread of accurate information. When someone or a group justifies using either, it is normally in the context of achieving a greater benefit, or responding reciprocally to another. This mirrors war, in that war is inherently destructive as well, but can sometimes be used to accomplish good things and to punish or deter bad things.
Treating lying and censorship as war though highlights not just that civil discourse is in a constant state of war, but a constant state of war crime. Lying to the masses is a form of indiscriminate attack, while censorship operates like a blockade and locks away potential benefits from everyone. Lies and censorship have collateral damage, and should only be considered legitimate when considerations of proportionality and mitigating collateral damage are applied. It should not be tolerated when friends and political allies lie to you about political opponents to boost support, because they are treating you as an adversary or a useful idiot. The more acceptable it is to lie and censor for effect, unpaired from any consideration of proportionality or collateral damage, the more societal trust is destroyed and the harder it is to initiate mutually beneficial cooperation. When insincere and unserious discourse and analysis is accepted (from one’s own side), b.s. proliferates and simultaneously provides stronger justification for the powerful to censor arbitrarily and in a biased manner to favor themselves. To get to a state with less lying and censorship, I wonder if the history of the decline of war provides any lessons on a path to “epistemic peace.”
You can’t easily get to a cooperative equilibrium when there are many actors that can independently chose to cheat and defect for their own advantage. To negotiate with trust that something good will happen, you need fewer actors. While it was easy for societies and states to monopolize the use of force, prohibit murder, and set rules of war with each other, it is much more arbitrary to prohibit “lying” or to get large groups to agree on what is unacceptable beyond extremely legible and circumscribed instances such as fraud. In broader epistemic conflict over what is true...
Heel-and-toe drumming
by jefftk — 2020-12-11T02:20:02.784Z

In foot percussion (clogging, tap, podorythmie) people traditionally
use both their heel and their toe. A heel strike and toe strike make
different noises, and you can play faster by using them both. When I
started looking at electronic foot percussion (

2013) I assumed I would use
my heel and toe, and that was how my first versions worked (

youtube). I
had serious trouble with vibration isolation, however, especially when
playing live, and after a few gigs I switched to only playing with my
heels.

Similarly, if you look at a standard drum kit, a foot only does one
thing at once. Traditionally, one foot is on the bass pedal and one
is on the hi-hat pedal, and perhaps you might move your foot to a
different pedal sometimes, but you don't have one pedal for your toe
and one for your heel.

This is not a limitation of acoustic playing: Drum-tec makes a bass
drum double pedal with heel-toe operation:

(DP-921FB)

With electronic drums, this should be even more practical, but I still
don't see anyone doing this. Well, almost no one:

(youtube)

Mezerg plays his kick drum with his left foot and snare with his left
heel, by putting his foot diagonally across the two pedals.
Similarly, sometimes he plays two different pedals with his right foot
as well. Each, individually:

Kick on the downbeat, left toe: @t=17:31

Hi-hat on the upbeat: right heel: @t=5:08

Snare on two and four: left heel@t=20:21

Something with the right toe: @t=4:27

He's playing electronic dance music, and he's playing a live version
of a drum machine. He has each of these elements, and he brings them
in and out over time. Here's what it sounds like with everything in:

@t=21:36.

Very occasionally he plays other things (@t=9:51) but it seems
like that is mostly not his style?

I've been trying heel-and-toe drumming, and while I'm not very good at
it yet, I do like it. I've been using my left heel for the kick and
left toe for the snare, right toe for the hi-hat and right heel for a
crash or another hi-hat. I've only been doing this for a few days, so
these examples are not very good yet, but I think they illustrate what
is possible:

(youtube)

(youtube)

(youtube)
The impact of you is determined by them.
by Munkh-Ochir Soyol-Erdene — 2020-12-10T22:01:54.796Z

The title is partially not true because how you act will definitely show your image and people will judge it with common sense, but the other part is only up to them to decide the impact of your actions which makes it already terrifying in a way of not knowing what something really is. World is a scary place with full of unknown threats and uncertain futures and when even your actions are uncertain it is really depressing for me.

Do me a favor and please imagine this. What do you think you would value more? A help in a troubling days or a help in a easy times? Of course you would choose the first one. And what if the effort of those helps are equally challenging for the helper's side? Still the first one is more valuable to you simply because you need it.

So the impact of my effort can differ greatly on your conditions. And those conditions could be anything. It could be because they were feeling little bit silly at the time or something was just annoying them for a while. Those conditions create a crack in the facade we put up front in order to hide our vulnerability. And since the conditions can be anything it is really hard to predict when or where these cracks would appear.

Sometimes people don't have a lot of cracks but only few deep ones, some people may have a lot, it really is out of your control.

Everyone gets into hard situations eventually mentally if not physically or materially then you will help them as a friend and then they will truly appreciate your company, your persistence and recognize your value. But isn't that just same as waiting for the crack to appear? or do you not want you to be valued higher?

Antidote: is you don't want to be wanting to be valued higher. Because everything is random and if it were not like this then things would be very boring. If everyone's effort was valued in a fair and standard way then you would start to take it as an obligation. People are not a objects or a reward for your effort that you grind. So just keep going and take the treatments you get with appreciation.
Mental Blinders from Working Within Systems
by abramdemski — 2020-12-10T19:09:50.720Z

In make an extraordinary effort (and in other posts), Eliezer talks about how uncommon goals require uncommon means. He also notes that people seem incredibly unwilling to consider these unusual routes:

Even so, I think that we could do with more appreciation of the virtue "make an extraordinary effort". I've lost count of how many people have said to me something like: "It's futile to work on Friendly AI, because the first AIs will be built by powerful corporations and they will only care about maximizing profits." "It's futile to work on Friendly AI, the first AIs will be built by the military as weapons." And I'm standing there thinking: Does it even occur to them that this might be a time to try for something other than the default outcome? They and I have different basic assumptions about how this whole AI thing works, to be sure; but if I believed what they believed, I wouldn't be shrugging and going on my way.

I once talked to someone from China, who said that starting an organization like MIRI would be inconceivable there, because of the immense pressure to achieve traditional success. It's possible (this person continued) to start a charity, or to become a researcher, or to do other things which on the surface appear to be going after something other than money/status/power. But in some very solid way, these are just different ways to go about getting money/status/power (in a way that's not true in the West). If everyone around you is so hooked into the system, it's hard to really have thoughts that go in any other direction. Your peers and your parents will be on your case to justify your career moves.

I note that starting an organization like MIRI seems pretty inconceivable in America, too, and really what it takes is for a committed group of people to make an effort. But I think the point stands -- there's probably a degree of difference between America and China in this respect. For one thing, America has a start-up culture which is not present in a lot of other places. And from what I've heard, Chinese parents exert a lot more pressure on their children's life choices (career, spouse, etc) than American parents, which would have the claimed effect.

This reminds me of a quote from Zvi's summary of Moral Mazes:

[T]his is the result of a vicious cycle arising from competitive pressures among those competing for their

...
What technologies could cause world GDP doubling times to be <8 years?
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-12-10T15:34:14.214Z

Some people think GDP is a good metric for AI timelines and takeoff speeds, and that the world economy will double in 4 years before the start of the first 1-year doubling period, and that AGI will happen after the economy is already growing much faster than it is today.

Other than AGI, what technologies could significantly accelerate world GDP growth? (Say, to a doubling period of <8 years, meaning the whole world economy grows 9%+ per year, significantly faster than the fastest-growing countries today.)

I find myself struggling to think of plausible answers to this question. Here are some ideas:

--Cheap energy, e.g. from solar panels or fusion

--Cheap resources, e.g. from asteroid mining, undersea mining, automated mines...

--Robots and self-driving cars make transportation and manufacturing cheaper

--3D printing? Idk.

--Narrow AI? Seems like the most plausible answer, but narrow AI doing what, exactly? Driving cars? Manufacturing things? Already discussed that. Inventing new products? OK, but in that case won't they also invent AGI?

My problem is that while all of these things seem like they could be a big deal by ordinary standards, they don't seem like that big a deal. Looking back over US economic history, it seems to my quick glance that growth rates haven't changed much in 200 years. (!!!) But over that time energy, resources, etc. have gotten lots cheaper in the USA, and all sorts of new tech has been developed. Worldwide, it looks like the last time annual GWP growth was less than half of what it is now (excluding the Great Depression) was... 1875! (At least according to my data, would love to see a more thorough investigation of this). The world looked hella different in 1875 than it does now in 2020; doubling world GDP growth rates again seems like a pretty tall order. I believe that AGI could do it, but what else could?
Countering Self-Deception: When Decoupling, When Decontextualizing?
by a gently pricked vein — 2020-12-10T15:28:24.302Z

What's the difference, conceptually, between these three noticings, if any?

"I'm only enjoying that wine because of what it signals"

"I'm only enjoying that food because I know it's organic"

"I'm only enjoying that movie scene because I know what happened before it"

It might be helpful for me to figure out whether I'm "actually" enjoying the wine, or if it's a sort of a crony belief: disentangling those is useful to make better decisions for myself, in say, deciding to go to a wine-tasting if status-boost among those people isn't relevant to me.

Perhaps similarly, I'm better off knowing if my knowledge of whether this food item is organic is interfering with my taste experience.

But then in the movie example, no one would dispute the knowledge is relevant to the experience! Going back to our earlier ones, maybe just the knowledge there was relevant, and "genuinely" making it a better experience?

Maybe my degree of liking a food item is a function of both "knowledge of organic origin" and "chemical interactions with tongue receptors" just like my degree of liking of a movie is a function of both "contextual buildup from the narrative" and "the currently unfolding scene"?

Some questions to think about:

Do some of these point legitimately or illegitimately at self-deception?
Are some of these a confusion of levels and others less so?
Are some of these instances of working wishful thinking?
Are some of these better seen as actions rather than rationalizations?

Other examples to meditate on simultaneously, with helpful variance in their sense of how solved each feels:

"I only upvoted that because of who wrote it"

"I only care about my son because of how it makes me feel"

"I only had a moving experience because of the alcohol and hormones in my bloodstream"

"I only moved my hand because I moved my fingers"

"I'm only exhibiting courage because I've convinced myself I'll scare away my opponent"

"I only look pretty because of my cosmetics/surgery"

PS. I do think we've learnt that there are more ways words can be wrong than just being disguised queries. In any case, the "real question" I'm trying to ask is: what are some criteria for determining when it is appropriate to decouple, even if only internally? Are there cases where you might overcorrect for fallacies of compression? Is there possibly a compact set of criteria that we could workshop? I have an inkling there might.

Note: this qu...
Covid 12/10: Vaccine Approval Day in America
by Zvi — 2020-12-10T14:20:02.012Z

Today, the FDA is meeting to discuss Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. By the time many of you read this, they will have hopefully given the vaccine, and perhaps Moderna’s as well, emergency use authorization. If that happens, distributions to the states can begin, and some people will be vaccinated as early as tomorrow.

That is excellent news. Alas, supplies remain highly limited and the vaccine takes a month to work. States are getting smaller allocations of the vaccine than they expected. The situation for the holiday season remains unchanged, and most of us will likely not become immune until some time around May.

Two weeks ago, I noted data was about to get weird. A week ago I observed that the data was weird. What I didn’t note was that the Covid Tracking Project had written a post about exactly in what ways they expected it to be weird, which were different in places from the ways I expected. Lots of good observations in there. The post makes a convincing case that I was underestimating expected delays and bottlenecks.

Despite that, we saw a big jump in positive test percentage on Tuesday, December 2, exactly when I’d expected one. That could mostly be a coincidence. Perhaps that was more of a shift in timing of reporting, with the real surge from Thanksgiving coming later. I certainly buy the augment that such super-spreader events infect people in multiple waves, as those infected take the virus home, and we should expect an unusually high effective R0 in the week after Thanksgiving.

That will not give us much time to recover before Christmas and New Year’s Eve give their one-two punch. It seems unlikely we will turn the corner until after those get to play out. Despite previous holidays not showing up much in the data, these big three seem like a huge deal to me, especially now. People are sick of it all.

People are also sick, period. Death rates are up. Positive test rates are up. Cases are up.

This week’s post attempts to limit Twitter links. In cases where the link is serving as a source but is otherwise inessential, I’m going to link it explicitly and purely as a source, so there’s no need to click unless you want to verify it. Any other Twitter links didn’t have a good substitute I could find easily.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Last week’s prediction: My unconfident prediction is a 14.8% positive rate on 10 million tes...
Containment Thread on the Motivation and Political Context for My Philosophy of Language Agenda
by Zack_M_Davis — 2020-12-10T08:30:19.126Z

So, if you've been reading my Less Wrong posts over the last twenty-one months, you'll notice that I've been doing a lot of philosophy-of-language blogging lately! Those posts are:

"Where to Draw the Boundaries?"

"Schelling Concepts, and Simple Membership Tests"

"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist"

"Algorithms of Deception!"

"Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"

"Philosophy in the Darkest Timeline: Basics of the Evolution of Meaning"

"Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!"

"Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" (forthcoming)

But, if you didn't know, the reason I've been doing so much philosophy-of-language blogging lately is because I was frustrated because I thought a lot of people were motivatedly getting the philosophy of language wrong for political convenience, specifically around transgender issues. (I think assertions like "trans women are women" and similar need to be argued for on the empirical merits; you can't just define them to be true.)

In particular, "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" was intended as a "stealth reply" (quoting/paraphrasing without attribution in order to reply to the philosophical substance while eliding the political context) to:

Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories"

(note that Alexander added a clarifying edit to the bottom in December 2019)

a November 2018 Twitter thread by Eliezer Yudkowsky (archived)

(note that Yudkowsky would later clarify his position in a September 2020 Facebook post)

I also write a blog about gender issues under a differential-visibility-but-not-actually-Secret pen name. The posts from that blog that are most relevant to my philosophical writing on Less Wrong are:

"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions" (a non-stealth reply to Alexander's "... Not Man for the Categories")

"Reply to The Unit of Caring on Adult Human Females"

"Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"

"More Schelling"

"Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender"

To allay concerns about premature abstraction of political issues, I'm putting up this non-Frontpageable post in case anyone wants to comment on or ask questions about my object-level motivations without cluttering up our philosophy discussions.
Unexplored modes of language
by KatjaGrace — 2020-12-10T07:00:09.960Z

English can be communicated via 2D symbols that can be drawn on paper using a hand and seen with eyes, or via sounds that can be made with a mouth and heard by ears.

These two forms are the same language because the mouth sounds and drawn symbols correspond at the level of words (and usually as far as sounds and letters, at least substantially). That is, if I write ‘ambition’, there is a specific mouth sound that you would use if converting it to spoken English, whereas if you were converting it to spoken French, there might not be a natural equivalent.

As far as I know, most popular languages are like this: they have a mouth-sound version and a hand-drawn (or hand-typed) version. They often have a braille version, with symbols that can be felt by touch instead of vision. An exception is sign languages (which are generally not just alternate versions of spoken languages), which use 4-D symbols gestured by hands over time, and received by eyes.

I wonder whether there are more modes of languages that it would be good to have. Would we have them, if there were? It’s not clear from a brief perusal of Wikipedia that Europe had sophisticated sign languages prior to about five hundred years ago. Communication methods generally have strong network effects—it’s not worth communicating by some method that nobody can understand, just like it’s not worth joining an empty dating site—and new physical modes of English are much more expensive than for instance new messaging platforms, and have nobody to promote them.

Uncommon modes of language that seem potentially good (an uninformed brainstorm):

symbols drawn with hands on receiver’s skin, received by touch, I’ve heard of blind and deaf people such as Helen Keller using this, but it seems useful for instance when it is loud, or when you don’t want to be overheard or to annoy people nearby, or for covert communication under the table at a larger event, or for when you are wearing a giant face mask.
symbols gestured with whole body like interpretive dance, but with objective interpretation. Good from a distance, when loud, etc. Perhaps conducive to different sorts of expressiveness, like how verbal communication makes singing with lyrics possible, and there is complementarity between the words and the music.
symbols gestured with whole body, interpreted by computer, received as written text What if keyboards were like a Kin

...