trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets - Part 3
by lsusr — 2020-12-01T12:43:42.647Z

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

Fred and George had carried concealed broomsticks at all times since the previous year's troll attack. When they heard Harry Potter's prophecy at the Quidditch final they flew just over the castle walls and then Apparated to the graveyard where they salvaged their map along with several rings, amulets and strange devices.

"Have you visited every room on this map?" Luna asked.

"Excuse me?" George said.

"What part of the school have you never visited?" Luna enunciated each word.

"Did she just insult us?" Fred said.

"Perhaps our reputation is in disrepair," George said.

"What makes you think there exists a single room in the school we hadn't explored by the end of our first year?" Fred said.

"Are you telling me you visited every room in Hogwarts in your first year?" Luna said.

"We make no such claim," George said, "For if were we to make such a claim then we would include not just mere rooms but also secret passages, pocket dimensions, secret dimensions, pocket passages, and docket sassages."

"Surely someone of your reputation must have visited every room, passage, dimension, sassage and chamber by the end of your first year," Luna said.

"Surely," Fred said.

"Had you visited the Chamber of Secrets before Headmistress McGonagall announced its existence today?" Luna said.

Someone said a rude word.

"Where is the Chamber of Secrets?" Luna asked.

"It's this complex of tunnels," George said, "It connects to this painting of Salazar Slytherin to this girls' bathroom and these places over here. This path goes to the Hogsmeade graveyard."

"Has the Chamber of Secrets always been on this map?" Luna asked.

"Yes," Fred said.

"How do you know?" Luna asked.

"I remember it," Fred said, "I just never really noticed it before McGonagall's announcement."

"Are there any other rooms on this map you haven't noticed?" Luna asked.

The students failed to find anything they hadn't found before.

"I have an idea," Luna said, "First we are going to look at this map normally. We are going to list every room and secret passage we know of, including the Chamber of Secrets. We are going to count them. Then you are going to conjure a grid over this map. We are going to count every single room without identifying them. Then we will compare the two numbers."

The two numbers came up exactly the same.

"Wait a minute. I have another idea. Give me that list. Is there any room in t...
Book Review: 'History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America' by Bruno Maçães
by tonyoconnor — 2020-12-01T11:47:06.003Z

This is a linkpost for https://www.themetasophist.com/chapter/on-history-has-begun-by-bruno-macaes

One of the iconic events during the fall of Hellenic-Classical civilisation was the burning of the library of Alexandria. The conquering Muslims apparently thought that the books therein would “either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.”

The story may be apocryphal, but it seems the tendency is very real, particularly in the US. Removing authors from reading lists, the knocking of statues, the renaming of buildings – is this a passing fad, or a world-historical event? Just as a nascent Arabic culture once cast off the forms of Hellenism, is a nascent American culture throwing off European patterns of thought and behaviour?

To help answer this question I turned to the new book “History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America” by Bruno Maçães. The book is not really seeking to solve a problem, but rather to describe a phenomenon called political virtualism.

The Idea of Political Virtualism

The underlying view of the book seems to be that the US is not undergoing a decline, but a metamorphosis: liberalism is mutating, and a new dispensation is starting to form. Maçães terms the emerging outlook political virtualism, meaning an immersion in stories and fantasies, none of which are held to be final. Importantly, fiction is not used to mask reality, as in Russia, but to replace it.

He uses a number of examples to illustrate this. Whereas politicians such as Reagan and Schwarzenegger used their acting skills to appear more credible as politicians, newer politicians use their political skills to perform in a way more suited to actors. Trump’s approach to governance was driven by what would look good on television. Of his own election night, he said “it was one of the greatest nights in the history of television”, and his obsession with cable news coverage has continued ever since.

Maçães also indicts Ocasio-Cortez on the same count — judging that the Green New Deal is lacking as a policy plan but complete as a movie script, he quotes the politician herself once stating that: “We have to become master storytellers. Everyone in public service needs to be a master storyteller.”

But according to Maçães, this tendency also manifests in many other forms such college students pretending to be drunk in order to ...
My Fear Heuristic
by lsusr — 2020-12-01T08:00:57.608Z

My friends and family call me "risk tolerant". I wasn't always this way. It is the result of a 3-year-long scientific experiment.

You must do everything that frightens you…Everything. I’m not talking about risking your life, but everything else. Think about fear, decide right now how you’re doing to deal with fear, because fear is going to be the great issue of your life, I promise you. Fear will be the fuel for all your success, and the root cause of all your failures, and the underlying dilemma in every story you tell yourself about yourself. And the only chance you’ll have against fear? Follow it. Steer by it. Don’t think of fear as the villain. Think of fear as your guide, your pathfinder.

―The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer

When I was 18 I discovered a useful heuristic. Whenever I didn't know what to do I would pick whatever not-obviously-stupid[1] option frightened me the most.

My indecisions always centered around choosing between a scary unpredictable option and a comfortable predictable option. Since the comfortable option was always predictable, I always knew what the counterfactual would have been whenever I chose the scary option. If I chose the scary option then I could weigh the value of both timelines after the fact.

As an experiment, I resolved to choose the scarier option whenever I was undecided about what to do. I observed the results. Then I recorded whether the decision was big or little and whether doing what scared me more was the right choice in retrospect. I repeated the procedure 30-ish times for small decisions and 6-ish times for big decisions. If I were properly calibrated then picking the scary option would result in the correct choice 50% of the time.

Results:

For my 30-ish small decisions, picking the scary option was correct 90% of the time.

For my 6-ish big decisions, picking the scary option was correct 100% of the time.

The above results underestimate the utility of my fear heuristic. My conundrums were overwhelming social. The upsides earned me substantial value. The downsides cost me trivial embarrassments.

I terminated the experiment when my fear evaporated. The only things I still feared were obviously stupid activities like jumping off of buildings and unimportant activities like handling large arthropods. I had deconditioned myself out of fear.

I didn't lose the signal. I had just recalibrated myself.

"Stupid" incl

...
The LessWrong 2018 Book is Available for Pre-order
by Ben Pace — 2020-12-01T08:00:00.000Z

For the first time, you can now buy the best new ideas on LessWrong in a physical book set, titled:

A Map that Reflects the Territory: Essays by the LessWrong Community

It is available for pre-order here.

The standard advice for creating things is "show, don't tell", so first some images of the books, followed by a short FAQ by me (Ben).

The full five-book set. Yes, that’s the iconic Mississippi river flowing across the spines.

Each book has a unique color.

The first book: Epistemology.

The second book: Agency.

The third book: Coordination.

The fourth book: Curiosity.

The fifth book: Alignment.

FAQ

What exactly is in the book set?

LessWrong has an annual Review process (the second of which is beginning today!) to determine the best content on the site. We reviewed all the posts on LessWrong from 2018, and users voted to rank the best of them, the outcome of which can be seen here.

Of the over 2000 LessWrong posts reviewed, this book contains 41 of the top voted essays, along with some comment sections, some reviews, a few extra essays to give context, and some preface/meta writing.

What are the books in the set?

The essays have been clustered around five topics relating to rationality: Epistemology, Agency, Coordination, Curiosity, and Alignment.

Are all the essays in this book from 2018?

Yes, all the essays in this book were originally published in 2018, and were reviewed and voted on during the 2018 LessWrong Review (which happened at the end of 2019).

How small are the books?

Each book is 4x6 inches, small enough to fit in your pocket. This was the book size that, empirically, most beta-testers found that they actually read.

Can I order a copy of the book?

Pre-order the book here for $29. We currently sell to North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Israel. (If you bought it by end-of-day Wednesday December 9th and ordered within North America, you'll get it before Christmas.) You'll be able to buy the book on Amazon in a couple of weeks.

How much is shipping?

The price above includes shipping to any location that we accept shipping addresses for. We are still figuring out some details about shipping internationally, so if you are somewhere that is not North America, there is a small chance (~10%) that we will reach out to you to ask you for more shipping details, and an even smaller chance (~6%) that we offer you the option to either pay for some additional shipping ...
Notes on Sincerity and such
by David Gross — 2020-12-01T05:09:45.198Z

This post examines a cluster of virtues that includes straightforwardness, frankness, sincerity, earnestness, candor, and parrhêsia. I hope it helps people who want to know more about these virtues and how to nurture them.

I am a technical writer by trade and have some strong opinions about the value of, and the techniques of, clear and accurate communication, and so I also draw on that experience to inform this post.

What are these virtues?

“[L]et sincerity and ingenuousness be thy refuge, rather than craft and falsehood: for cunning borders very near upon knavery. Wisdom never uses nor wants it. Cunning to the wise, is as an ape to a man.” ―William Penn[1]

These virtues have to do with communicating in clear, precise, efficient, and useful way. They show respect for those you communicate with by “giving it to them straight” and not requiring a lot of second-guessing and interpretation.

I briefly mentioned some of them in my post on the related virtue of honesty, but now I want to look at them more closely.

In short, what these virtues have in common is “saying what you mean, and meaning what you say” (but also not talking a lot of rot that’s not to the point). If honesty covers “the truth,” the rest of these virtues help to cover “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Other closely related virtues include trustworthiness, reliability, and authenticity.

In opposition to these virtues are things like beating around the bush, candy-coating, ambiguity, euphemism, flattery, winks-and-nods, insinuations, exaggerations, incantations, ostentation, deflection, pretension, evasion, false modesty, irony, sarcasm, manipulation, insincerity, flippancy (making light of serious matters), changing the subject, playing rhetorical motte and bailey, or being “all hat and no cattle.”

There is some tension between these virtues and the virtues of tact and discretion (see below).

These virtues span a spectrum of outspokenness. On the more reserved end, you may rarely speak, but when you do, you speak sincerely and straightforwardly to the point. Towards the middle, you may try to anticipate what people would want to know and, with frankness and candor express this, warts and all, whether they ask or not. At the unreserved extreme, you may feel compelled to reveal things that people don’t want to know but need to be confronted with: this is the parrhêsia that made the Cynic philoso...
What is “protein folding”? A brief explanation
by jasoncrawford — 2020-12-01T02:46:09.003Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/alphafold-protein-folding-explainer

Today Google DeepMind announced that their deep learning system AlphaFold has achieved unprecedented levels of accuracy on the “protein folding problem”, a grand challenge problem in computational biochemistry.

What is this problem, and why is it hard?

I spent a couple years on this problem in a junior role in the early days of D. E. Shaw Research, so it’s close to my heart. Here’s a five-minute explainer.

Proteins are long chains of amino acids. Your DNA encodes these sequences, and RNA helps manufacture proteins according to this genetic blueprint. Proteins are synthesized as linear chains, but they don’t stay that way. They fold up in complex, globular shapes:

A protein from the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus.Wikimedia / E A S

One part of the chain might coil up into a tight spiral called an α-helix. Another part might fold back and forth on itself to create a wide, flat piece called a β-sheet:

Wikimedia / Thomas Shafee

The sequence of amino acids itself is called primary structure. Components like this are called secondary structure.

Then, these components themselves fold up among themselves to create unique, complex shapes. This is called tertiary structure:

An enzyme from the bacteria Colwellia psychrerythraea. Flickr / Argonne National Lab

The protein RRM3. Wikimedia / Biasini et al

This looks like a mess. Why does this big tangle of amino acids matter?

Protein structure is not random! Each protein folds in a specific, unique, and largely predictable way that is essential to its function. The physical shape of a protein gives it a good fit to targets it might bind with. Other physical properties matter too, especially the distribution of electrical charge within the protein, as shown here (positive charge in blue, negative in red):

Surface charge distribution of Oryza sativa Lipid Transfer Protein 1. Wikimedia / Thomas Shafee

If a protein is essentially a self-assembling nanomachine, then the main purpose of the amino acid sequence is to produce the unique shape, charge distribution, etc. that determines the protein’s function. (How exactly this happens, in the body, is still not fully understood, and is an active area of research.)

In any case, understanding structure is crucial to understanding function. But the DNA sequence only gives us the primary structure of a protein. How can we learn its secondary and tertiary structure—the exact shape of the blob...
Giving Tuesday 2020
by jefftk — 2020-11-30T22:30:06.330Z

As they did in

2018 and

2019, Facebook
is running donation matching for Giving Tuesday. The match is "real"
in that you can choose which charity receives the money, but not
"real" in that the money will go to some charity whether or not you
donate. Because I think some charities are much higher priority than
other, however, from my perspective the match is real.

As in previous years, they have a limit of $20k/person and
$2,499/donation. More details and instructions at EA Giving Tuesday.

I am planning to (nearly) max out all of my credit cards, and donate
over $20k:

We are not sure exactly when the matching clock actually
starts, so I'm planning to start several seconds early.

Some of my donations may get declined.

You can donate with a credit card, and Facebook is covering the
processing fees:

This means that you can get cash
back on donations, which is 1-2% of potentially quite a lot of
money.

I made some practice donations today to refamiliarize myself with the
interface. While these donations are not eligible for the match, they
still have credit card processing fees waived, so they are still a
good deal. I donated the $2,499 maximum for each test, in the vague
hope that this might make my credit card processors think that $2,499
charges from Facebook are normal.

I've set an alarm for tomorrow morning, half an hour before the timer
begins. The main thing I want to check tomorrow is that Facebook has
not reinstated "confirm your donation" dialog box from previous years.

This is a mad scramble for free money, but with practice and
preparation you have a good chance of directing some of it. I managed
the full $20k in 2018, but only $12.5k in 2019 due to increasing
competition. If I even get one donation matched this year, however,
an extra $2,499 to a charity I think is doing really good work is
still worth the hassle.

Comment via: facebook
Non-Book Review: Patterns of Conflict
by johnswentworth — 2020-11-30T21:05:24.389Z

Soviet MiG-15 (left) and American F-86 (right)

From 1951-53, the Korean war saw the first major dogfights between jet aircraft - mainly the American F-86 and the Soviet MiG-15. On paper, the MiG-15 looked like the superior aircraft: it could out-climb, out-accelerate, out-turn, and generally out-perform the F-86 by most performance measures.

US Air Force colonel and fighter pilot John Boyd, however, would argue that these are the wrong metrics to consider. Winning a dogfight isn’t about out-accelerating the enemy, it’s about outsmarting the enemy. It’s about being able to predict their next move faster than they can predict your next move. It’s about “getting inside their OODA loop” - observing, orienting, deciding and acting faster than they can, making a decisive move before they have an opportunity to respond.

To evaluate the F-86 vs the MiG-15, we need to look at the whole OODA loop - observation, orientation, decision and action. Looking at aircraft performance metrics only tells us about the “action” component - i.e. which actions the aircraft allows the pilot to take. If we look at the other components, the MiG looks less dominant:

The F-86 had better visibility, with a full “bubble” cockpit; pilots had fewer blind spots
F-86 pilots had more training on average, allowing them to better track the fight in their mind (i.e. “orient”) and make faster decisions

Even in terms of performance, the MiG wasn’t strictly dominant - the F-86 could dive faster, for instance. The MiG could gain energy faster, but the F-86 could lose energy faster - and if the goal is to move in a way the enemy didn’t expect or can’t match, that’s often just as good.

So under this view, the F-86 had the advantage in many ways. An F-86 pilot could see the enemy better, and keep track of what was going on better. Even if the MiG could outmaneuver them in theory, the F-86 pilots could make good decisions faster, leaving the MiG pilots confused and eventually gunning them down. Statistics from the war back up this picture - both sides wildly exaggerated kill ratios in their favor, but however we slice the data, the F-86 beat the MiG-15 at least as often as it lost, and a kill ratio 2:1 in favor of the F-86 is a

typical estimate

. Even against more experienced MiG pilots, the F-86 traded slightly better than 1:1.

Beyond Dogfights

The real insight is that these ideas apply beyond dogfights. Boyd’s r...
SETI Predictions
by hippke — 2020-11-30T20:09:41.715Z

I enjoyed reading through people's views of the AGI Predictions. I know only a little about AI and a little bit more about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), so I decided to make a similar poll.

The First Contact scenario with extraterrestrial intelligence shares certain similarities with the emergence of AGI. In the following, I ask similar questions to those in the AGI post. In addition, I add questions derived from the SETI literature. These are intended to reflect on AGI from a new perspective.

In SETI, it is debated that First Contact can cause great disturbance and change, positive and negative. After all, civilizations which are capable of contacting us across the oceans of time and space are expected to be much more advanced - just like AGI is expected to be "superior" (whatever that means) to baseline humans.

The form of First Contact

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/RkLssuCrJ)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/dZ0ZTzPuE)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/5JWXrNKXX)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/qi1GGHSfe)

Its timeline

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/5GGrhl1F9)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/kmTnf6_gK)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/BD2RSu5os)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/SFuDzSC-j)

Our response

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/LKPmY9FBE)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/AYfDCij9R)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/tu8e3B_7x)

The consequences

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/z0rClHx76)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/ixfD5kuGO)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/Y0Qq6tXY8)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/vBwrDBIqi)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/C9d206Soq)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/dFBwknL6z)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/4GhUodJjC)

Elicit Prediction (elicit.org/binary/questions/Phb9

...
Idealized Factored Cognition
by Rafael Harth — 2020-11-30T18:49:47.034Z

(This post is part of a sequence that's meant to be read in order; see the preface.)

1. HCH and Ideal Debate

Recall from post #-2 that we have two perspectives on stock IDA.[1] One is that of a human with access to a model, the other is that of an HCH tree.[2] We can think of HCH as 'pure' or 'idealized' Factored Cognition that abstracts away implementation details,[3] and the training procedure as trying to implement this ideal.

One might now ask the following:

If HCH is the ideal of stock IDA, then what is the ideal of Debate? Since this is a sequence about Factored Cognition, we are primarily interested in analyzing the idealized versions, so this is the first question we'd like to answer.

Interlude on notation: throughout this sequence, we will need to refer to single statements, sequences of statements, and sets of statements. To make telling them apart as easy as possible, we follow the following norms:

single statements use lower case letters, like s or s1 or sn or sj

sequences of statements use uppercase bold letters, like S or S1 or Sn

sets of statements use the 'pretty' S, like Sh or STh

We'll use the first two of those in the following definition that will be crucial in our discussion of Debate. If s is a statement and S=(s1,...,sn+1) a sequence of statements such that sn+1=“(s1,...,sn) imply s.”, we say that S is an explanation for s and denote this by writing Se→s. In this setting, sn+1 is what we call an implication statement: it precisely says that the statements (s1,...,sn) imply the statement sn+1. Here's a made-up example where s4 is the implication statement:

The purpose of having implication statements is to ensure that s trivially follows from s1,s2,s3,s4 since the implication itself is among those statements (here s4). If you dispute s, you must dispute one of the si.

Armed with this concept, we can define our idealization of the Debate scheme:

Ideal Debate

The input to the game is a question in English. The first agent begins by giving an answer plus an explanation[4] (s1,...,sn+1) for the answer. At every subsequent step, the second agent points to one of the statements sj in the explanation, j∈{1,...,n+1}, and the first agent responds by either giving an explanation for sj or declaring that the debate is over. In the latter case, a judge attempts to verify that sj is true. If she succeeds, the first agent wins the d

...