trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Let's Stop Pretending to Be Original Thinkers
by vernamcipher — 2022-01-08T20:14:15.942Z

Cross-posted from my Substack, A Flood of Ideas: https://mflood.substack.com/p/lets-stop-pretending-we-are-original

Why Be Original?

Our society values and promotes original thinking and novelty. Or at least it pretends to. The result is a lot of pretended originality, a kind of Emperor’s New Clothes where everyone is the Emperor. Consider:

Academics, though they are primarily paid for their teaching of undergraduates and graduate students, are expected to undertake (what is perceived to be) original research if they are ever to land the vanishingly rare, endangered, and on the way to extinction tenured positions.
Artists need to be perceived as “daring,” “bold,” or “original,” if they are to achieve fame and success. It’s almost unthinkable to read a profile of a rising artist that describes them as “highly traditional,” or “strongly influenced by the Old Masters.”
In business, entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, unless they are under criminal investigation, are described as bold visionaries, original thinkers, and people who “think outside the box.” Whether they follow sound business practices, make wise long-term decisions, or are honest dealers seems to be not worth mentioning (not until the indictments are opened, anyway).
Speaking of business, during the mid-1990s to early 2000s, a second-tier computer manufacturer made the most of its outsider position by associating its products and whole brand with the phrase “Think Different.”(1)
Psychologists and self-help/motivational gurus claim they have analyzed what makes people original thinkers and promise - through their articles, books, and public talks - to make us original thinkers as well. Their titles should give you cause to doubt whether their promises are honest (e.g. “Five Things That Original Thinkers Do Every Day Before Breakfast”). Also, the people who claim to teach original thinking don't seem to do much of it themselves.
Job advertisements in a wide range of industries ask for original thinking and innovative problem solving skills, even in areas where innovation mostly generates fraud (Enron exercised highly original thinking in their accounting, for example). In job interviews, candidates are often expected to describe ways in which they solved problems with ‘outside the box’ thinking. As I wrote, innovative problem solving is even now being asked of vinyl siding i

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The best curriculum for every goal
by Randomized, Controlled — 2022-01-08T18:47:31.006Z

In the fine tradition of Best Textbook, Best Software and Best Visualization:

For our purposes a curriculum is one or more discrete resources (website, book, article, tutorial, whatevs) plus one or more goal-states, such as acquiring or practicing a new skill, learning about a subject, or similar. Type signature is:

curriculum is (List<resource>, List<goal-state>)

Submission Rules:

One nomination per comment

Please include an explanation of why you nominated it

If you can compare your nomination to other curricula, that's excellent but not required

(NB: "comparing to other curricula" could be comparison of resources OR goal-states OR both; I think a certain amount of comparison between goal-states could be really interesting, but my hope is that this thread has significant attention devoted to discussing resources.)

This was motivated by looking at one of Gwern's self-experimentation posts and realizing that I wanted to be able to do that kind of [self-]experimental design + data analysis + visualization. This is my attempt to manifest that curriculum [plus many others] into being.
Two ominous charts on the financial markets 
by arunto — 2022-01-08T14:07:30.897Z

The following two charts have been on my mind quite intensively for some time and have had a relatively strong influence on my thinking about dangers for the future development of the financial markets in recent months:

1. Shiller CAPE

An interesting measure of stock market valuation from my perspective is Shiller's CAPE (Cyclically Adjusted PE Ratio). Basically, it is just a price-earnings ratio, but using adjusted earnings over the last 10 years to smooth out the normal cyclical fluctuations.

Source: multpl.com

Admittedly, it is not yet possible to tell from it that valuations and thus share prices will soon be heading downward. But the risk of a crash seems evident to me.

The only time valuations were even higher was in the dot-com bubble around 2000. There is another interesting parallel here. If you look at the statistics on speculation on credit (margin), you see a significant increase in margin positions (FINRA) for some time. At the linked site, you can also find historical data on margin positions, and if you look at 1998-2000, the trend is similar.

2. Historical interest rate trends

I found the following chart in the book "The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival" by C. Goodhart and M. Pradhan (The book is very interesting in that it derives a forecast of rising inflation not from monetary developments, but from global demographic developments. I found it well worth reading). While I had read the underlying facts (the ongoing interest rate cuts of the past decades cannot continue) before, it was not until I saw this graphic that I actually became fully aware of the problem.

Source: SUERF

From the graph (UK long term bond yield; it could be drawn analogously for many other countries), I draw some rather uncomfortable conclusions:

(a) The interest rate cuts that have characterized the last 40 years in financial markets can no longer continue. In this respect, we are facing a fundamental change in the development of interest rates (transition from falling interest rates to more or less stable interest rates or to rising interest rates).

b) All my implicit knowledge about the financial markets that I gained as a teenager and an adult was formed in an interest rate environment (falling interest rates) that will soon be a thing of the past. So I can no longer rely on my implicit knowledge.

c) The practical experie...
Goal-directedness: my baseline beliefs
by Morgan_Rogers — 2022-01-08T13:09:06.888Z

In a short time I will be starting a project (funded by LTFF) under the supervision of Adam Shimi with the goal of deconfusing goal-directedness. I have decided to record the progress on this project on a biweekly basis here on LW, to test whether this helps to keep me accountable for making progress on my project, and to record the process.

Before the project begins, I want to record my baseline beliefs about goal-directedness. I'm doing this partly to see how by beliefs change through the research process and partly just to get my thoughts in order.

Existing ideas on goal-directedness

Adam Shimi has thought a lot about this topic. His literature review with Michele Campolo and Joe Collman assembles ideas and intuitions about goal-directedness, some criteria which any proposed definition of goal-directedness can be compared against, and finally an assembly of proposed definitions from various sources. The definitions cut down my initial workload significantly, especially Vanessa Kosoy's definition of goal-directed intelligence, since it gives me a formal criterion in terms of numerical values which might be feasible to actually implement and compute in toy examples.

The aim of my project is not simply to pit these definitions against one another in examples, though: I want to do some serious stress-testing of the concept itself, and maybe eventually bring some serious maths to bear on these definitions. Some questions include:

How do (different formalizations of) goal-directedness vary as different aspects of the agent's behaviour and environment change? Expectation: a notion of goal-directedness which is too sensitive to small changes will not be useful, so this may be a criterion for refining definitions of goal-directedness (see next section). Generally speaking, I expect goal-directed behaviour to become increasingly rare and therefore more identifiable as the complexity of the environment and behaviour grow.
What happens in extreme cases? Expectation: extreme simplicity is the easiest to think about, and here goal-directedness collapses. For a very simple system, many explanations adequately account for behaviour: it's roughly as simple to say that a ball falls because it "wants" to accelerate towards the ground as to simply describe the falling motion. Generally speaking, I expect goal-directedness to be the extreme end of a spectrum which grows as complexi

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Training Rationality through Deckbuilders
by vitaliya — 2022-01-08T06:00:45.829Z

Deckbuilding games are a great way to train rationality. They're usually composed of high-dimensional cost/benefit analyses under uncertainty: you don't know precisely what future enemies you might encounter, or the particular hand you'll be dealt. All you can do is shift probabilities by adding or removing cards, tweaking complex systems and synergies with emergent characteristics. One of the high points in such games is uncovering the truly broken combination, where through meticulous planning and arrangement you can heal or deal arbitrary amounts of damage.

Video games of this genre which I'd recommend include:

Slay the Spire, which arguably started the newer wave of such games;
Griftlands, which has three reasonably engaging campaign narratives of 6 hours or so each, and an interesting duality between physical and mental combat mechanics which use separate decks;
Gordian Quest, which includes additional mechanics around unit positioning and has a more traditional video-gamey campaign in a fantasy setting;
Nowhere Prophet, like the above but a post-apocalyptic bent;
Inscryption, a meta-narrative that topped several Game of the Year lists in 2021, with a deep emphasis on tone and discovery, as well as lane-based positioning mechanics and varied resource pool types;
Dicey Dungeons, a game where the elements of randomisation are front-and-centre, and more limited to the result of a six-sided die roll, making cost/benefit calculations easier.

There are, of course, tabletop deckbuilding games - but these usually operate much slower than their video game counterparts, as the players try to remember the rules and manually execute the consequences of their actions. Similarly, there are trading card games like Magic: The Gathering, though preconstructed decks have less uncertainty associated with future card acquisition. Draft versions of Magic, where players build their decks from random boosters, address operating under uncertainty slightly better, though become expensive quite quickly. They also require friends you can meet in person, who are mutually willing to learn the game, with an open schedule, and a similar skill level. Automating enemy gameplay eliminates these problems.

I think it's more useful to play a variety of such games rather than play the same game on a very deep level: top-tier experts in a specific game might have a deep understanding of the specific ...
Omicron variolation?
by Randomized, Controlled — 2022-01-08T03:12:16.987Z

Given that the balance of evidence is looking more and more like O is mild, should healthy folks below some age (60 years?) seek to expose themselves? Cost/benefit will obviously vary with vaccination status, but this is looking like an opportunity for a low-risk inoculation against whatever variants descend from Omicron. Any strong arguments against this?
Reductionism is not the ultimate tool for causal inference
by tailcalled — 2022-01-07T21:51:22.837Z

This is a link post for a Substack post I made.

Sometimes, when doing causal inference, people strongly wish to see a mechanism. For instance, for the claim that some trait is genetically heritable, they want to see the genes through which inheritance passes, and the mechanisms through which the genes act. That is, they want a reductionistic model, where the overall causal effect is broken down into mechanisms that are causally linked together.

Certainly this can be valuable at times! But we shouldn’t think of it as being the only valid method for understanding causality. Here are some reasons why.

Circularity

You want to know the mechanism in order to know the causal effects. But a mechanism is itself dependent on causal claims; it requires picking out a set of variables, making claims about the causal relations between those variables, and adding up the causal effects to an overall mechanism.

If you have two variables X and Z, and there is a claim that X influences Z, then you might ask about what the mechanism is, i.e. through which mediators Y it is that X works its influence on Z. But rather than solving the causal inference problem, this increases the causal inference problem, because it requires figuring out the effects of X on Y, and figuring out the effects of Y on Z. In the worst case, this could lead to infinite regress, as you jump all the way down to quantum field theory in chase of mechanisms. At some point you’ve got to resort to a mechanism-less causal theory.

That is, it’s nice that we today know that the reason objects can push each other upon contact is due to the electrons in the atoms of the objects repelling each other. But we had a good understanding of the fact that contact allows objects to cause a force on each other far before we had a reductionistic understanding of how.

Multiple causes and multiple mediation

Having more educated parents is an advantage for students when doing homework, because parents can help their children with that homework.

But there are an enormous number of different homework tasks, and a fairly high number of different education types and levels your parents could have. In order to understand the effect of parental education or intelligence on helping with homework in a reductionistic manner, you would have to take every single piece of homework, figure out how much more educated parents help, and add it up to a to...
Omicron Post #13: Outlook
by Zvi — 2022-01-07T21:20:01.328Z

Omicron is now the dominant strain, so much of what would otherwise have gone into this Omicron post ended up in the latest weekly post instead, and I’m considering the right way to merge the two streams together.

In addition to some amount of the usual business, the focus of this post will be an explicit attempt to look at what’s likely to happen from here, and give my baseline scenario.

I recently had reason to chart out what I expected that baseline scenario to be around the world, so it makes sense to share it here.

The world can be divided into five (highly unequally sized) parts, with increasing levels of uncertainty, some places are unclear on whether they’re in groups two, three or four:

South Africa and other already-peaked areas.
Uncontrolled spread: Europe, North America, India, Israel, Australia and Argentina.
Without an Omicron wave, or without good data: Third world, Russia.
Previous containment: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and New Zealand.
Special case of previous containment: China.

South Africa and Other Already-Peaked Areas

This is the easy story to tell. Predictions about the past are often still hard, but they’re a lot easier.

A few African countries have already finished their Omicron waves, and got through mostly unscathed. Since they’re in the southern hemisphere, one can worry that there’s a wave coming in their winter a few months from now, but I would expect any such wave to be mild even if relatively little is done to prepare, given how things went this time, and that those infections are now baked in.

Uncontrolled spread: Europe, North America, India, Israel, Australia and Argentina.

This is where most of my readers live, and where I live, so it’s been my main focus. There is now a very clear baseline scenario.

Infection rates increase exponentially until they hit a peak. In major cities, this plateau will usually be quite high, with more than 1% of people infected each day, and likely 10%+ of the population testing positive at any given time. In rural areas, the plateau is likely going to be somewhat lower, but not dramatically lower.

Once you hit that peak, there will be a short period (a week or less probably in most cases) before the decline starts in earnest, then picks up speed. Once it’s gone down to something that will usually be between 25% and 50% of its maximum over the course of a few weeks, the decline starts ...
Third Time: a better way to work
by bfinn — 2022-01-07T21:15:57.789Z

HOW CAN you be more productive? Instead of half-working all day, it’s better to work in focused stints, with breaks in between to recover.

There are various ways to do this, but here's my new technique, called Third Time. The gist of it is:

Work for as long or as short as you like, until you want or need to break; then
Break for up to one-third of the time you’ve just worked.

So after 15 minutes of dealing with emails, you could stop for up to 5 minutes. After an hour-long meeting, you can take a good 20-minute break. And if a task bores you after 3 minutes, you can even break then — but only for 1 minute! Breaks reward you for working, but proper breaks have to be earned.

Work stints can be any length; breaks are (up to) one-third of the time just worked

This kind of pattern is natural; research confirms that people tend to take longer breaks after working for longer. (One-third is just a recommendation; you can use other break fractions if you prefer.)

Third Time has many advantages over other techniques such as Pomodoro (which I’ll discuss later), but the key one is flexibility. It adapts to your attention span, energy, and schedule, as well as to other people and events. And Third Time isn’t just for your day-job — it suits anything that needs focus or effort, such as studying, practicing an instrument, personal admin, writing, or fitness training.

Using Third Time

Here’s an example of the basic procedure:

Note the time, or start a stopwatch
Work for as long or short as you like, until you want or need to break
Suppose you worked for 45 minutes. This earns you 45 ÷ 3 = 15 minutes off; so set an alarm for 15 minutes
Break until the alarm goes off
Go back to step 1.

Breaks

You needn’t take the full break. Maybe you have a tight deadline, an important customer calls, you’re keen to resume work, or only have a short gap before a meeting. Whatever the reason, if you end a break (say) 5 minutes early, add 5 minutes to your next break. You don’t lose the remaining time, it’s just postponed:

You can shorten and postpone breaks like this, but don’t let them overrun. Break time must be earned by working; it’s like a debit card, not a credit card. So always set an alarm for the end of a break, and resume work as soon as it goes off (don’t snooze it!)

Take breaks whenever you like. Surprisingly, you’ll still end up doing the same amount of work! For example: instead of work...
Why maximize human life?
by lise — 2022-01-07T14:11:04.621Z

There is an idea, or maybe an assumption, that I've seen mentioned in many Lesswrong posts. This is the idea that human life should be maximized: that one of our goals should be to create as many humans as possible. Or perhaps even: that preventing humans from being born is as bad as killing living humans.

I've seen this idea used to argue for a larger point, but I haven't yet seen arguments to justify the idea itself. I only have some directional notions:

I understand not wanting human life, and possibly the various human cultures, to die out, and we should make sure that there are enough humans to prevent that. This in no way necessitates maximization, though.
If you accept the grabby aliens model, this necessitates that humans should be grabby, because otherwise, grabby aliens will cause us to die out. This would also imply maximization of human life across the galaxy. However, I get the idea that this isn't the main reason for people to want maximization, as the other implication — that we need to be grabby — is almost never mentioned in the relevant posts.
I could see an argument for maximizing utility, under the utilitarian framework, where you argue that creating more life would create more potential utility. However, this means that

you should also actually create the utility for all these new lives, or they will not add to (or even subtract from) your utility calculation; simply wanting to create lives without considering living conditions does not seem to take this into account
it is possible that maximizing animal life, or perhaps alien or artificial life, would create more utility, as these lives might be optimized with way less effort

So I would like to hear, from people who actually hold the "maximizing human life" position, some of your explanations for why. (Or pointers to a source or a framework that explains it.)
Believing in magic pyramids shows that you think differently
by tomdekan — 2022-01-07T11:06:22.065Z

Believing in magic pyramids shows that you think differently

https://www.tomdekan.com/think-differently

Last week I moved to Bonn. My new landlord, Jenno, had left lots of his stuff in the house. Because of this, I spent my first night sleeping next to a large glass pyramid; a bowling ball filled with gold that counteracts the earth's "geopathic stress"; and two salt crystal lights that glow orange.1

My initial reaction was to joke about the magical bowling ball that Jenno had left. But, actually, his stuff shows an admirable quality: he is an independent thinker. He believes things that most people don't believe, which many people would criticise him or mock him for believing in.

Looking at the "archtypes of godhood" poster that was sellotaped to the wall, I thought about how at any point in human history, most people in the present society:

a) think that the commonly held beliefs are true, and

b) many of the things that the previous generation thought were obviously wrong.

For example, nowadays most people think: how could previous generations have been so stupid not to realise that smoking / not wearing seatbelts / asbestos / environmental destruction / burning fossil fuels / slavery were so bad?

The natural follow-up thought is: if I had lived at that time, I would have realised how wrong most people's beliefs were.

Maybe that's true.2 But, this reminds me of the the Cross study where 94% of teachers rated themselves as above average teachers. And the Svenson study where 93% of polled US drivers said that they were a better than average driver.

The power of group influence is also strong. The Asch conformity experiments provided a nice example of this. A person (who was being tested) came into a room with a group of people (who were actors). Everyone was shown four lines on a board. One line was clearly longer than the others. The examiners asked each person to say which line he or she thought was the longest.

75% of the time, the person being tested agreed with the clearly wrong suggestion that the majority of the group suggested. Only 25% of the time did the person disagree with the group.

Thinking unconventionally

To have radical ideas, you need to think in an unconventional way. For instance, Isaac Newton spent time on both physics and alchemy. Both ideas probably seemed equally stupid to most people at the time. They were wrong, Newton was right.

Newt...