trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Computing Natural Abstractions: Linear Approximation
by johnswentworth — 2021-04-15T17:47:10.422Z

Background: Testing The Natural Abstraction Hypothesis

Given a world-model, direct computation of natural abstractions basically amounts to figuring out which X-values give the same Y-distributions y↦P[Y=y|X], for various choices of the variables X and Y in some large Bayes net. In general, this computation is #P-Hard. (That’s like NP-Hard, but Harder.) That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s usually intractable in practice, but it means that we need to use heuristics and approximations right off the bat.

A linear-Guassian approximation is a natural starting point. It’s relatively simple - all of the relevant computations are standard matrix operations. But it’s also relatively general: it should be a good approximation for any system with smooth dynamics and small noise/uncertainty. For instance, if our system is a solid object made of molecules and sitting in a heat bath, then linear-Gaussian noise should be a good model. (And that’s a good physical picture to keep in mind for the rest of this post - solid object made of molecules, all the little chunks interacting elastically, but also buffeted about by thermal noise.)

So, we have some Bayes net in which each variable is Gaussian - a linear combination of its parents plus some IID Gaussian noise. For the underlying graph, I’m using a 2D Delaunay triangulation, mainly because it does a good job reflecting physically-realistic space/time structure. (In particular, as in physical space, most pairs of nodes are far apart - as opposed to the usual Erdos-Renyi random graph, where the distance between most points is logarithmic. We’ll revisit the choice of graph structure later.) Embedded in 2D, an example graph looks like this:

Example of the kind of Bayes net structure we’ll use. Each node is a variable, and the arrows show causal relationships in the model. The whole graph embeds nicely in a 2D space, so nodes which are “far apart” in the spatial embedding are also “far apart” in terms of steps in the graph.

… although the actual experiments below will use a graph with about 500X more nodes (50k, whereas the visual above uses 100). Each of those nodes is a Gaussian random variable, with the arrows showing its parents in the Bayes net. Weights on the edges (i.e. coefficients of each parent) are all random normal, with variance ⅔ (another choice we’ll revisit later).

Let’s start wit...
How & when to write a business plan
by bfinn — 2021-04-15T15:45:50.288Z

You’ve decided you need a business plan – so where do you start?

My previous post explained why you should write a plan – and what’s wrong with all your excuses for not doing so. Here I give tips on how, and how not, to write one. But first of all, when to.

When?

Business plans are often written too late. As a proper first draft takes weeks to research and write, people tend to procrastinate it – and do other things too soon instead.

In particular, don’t start the business or create a full product before writing a plan! Why plan a skyscraper after building it? (Remember from my previous post that a plan is a simulation of a business, to help decide whether it’s worth starting at all.)

With my first company, we began by developing the product (music software) – which took, oh, seven years. Only then did I write a business plan. But for all we knew, the research involved might have shown that there wasn’t a big enough market, or we had unbeatable competition, so all our effort would have been wasted. (By sheer luck it didn’t.)

It’s also possible to write a plan too early, before establishing whether it will be worth the time. So, do these things first:

Consider why you want to start a business. If it’s to get rich quick, that’s not going to happen – most start-ups fail, and almost all the rest take many years of hard work before you can enjoy success. Alternatively, if your aim is to break free and be your own boss, the reality is not quite like that either – as your customers, and maybe investors, end up becoming your boss.
Consider whether you’re the right kind of person. You need to be smart, confident, motivated, thick-skinned, and good at teamwork; if you fall down on any of these, don’t start a business. You also need the skills and experience/expertise for your particular role in the start-up.
Don’t just go with your first business idea, as it’s unlikely to be your best option. Come up with several ideas, in fields you or a co-founder know a lot about. Do initial research on them, then run any promising candidates past experts for their view (see below).
While you shouldn’t create a complete product yet, there may be a case for producing a minimum viable product (MVP) or mock-up to see what potential customers think (as in the lean start-up methodology). But only do this now if you can make one quickly, in days or weeks; otherwise, leave it till later.

Then p...
Covid 4/15: Are We Seriously Doing This Again
by Zvi — 2021-04-15T13:00:01.288Z

Yes we are. It can happen here.

THIS IS LITERAL ONE IN A MILLION AND MUCH LESS THAN THE BASE RATE WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU DID YOU NOT SEE WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME ARE YOU COMPLETE MORONS OR ARE YOU MUSTACHE-TWIRLING VILLIANS YOU CAN’T NOT BE BOTH, AS IN IF YOU’RE NOT MORONS AND I LOOK AT PHOTOGRAPHS I WILL SEE MUSTACHES AND YOU PEOPLE WILL BE TWIRLING THEM:

If any of them don’t have mustaches, we need to get them some clip-on ones, because while lots of people die at least they should get to enjoy the pleasures of twirling.

Yes I am fully aware that it is technically a particular rarer blood clotting disorder that is happening here and thus in that subclass it is above the base rate and that there’s an argument this might be ‘real’ in some sense and no I do not care even a little bit about any of that and no I am not going to treat this with the dignity and respect that it does not in any way even potentially deserve. There are scientific details and if you find them interesting by all means read about them but I am ignoring them because like the points They. Do. Not. Matter.

In case you were wondering how people were going to react or what this would do to public confidence, these are from less than an hour after the announcement:

I mean, they’re wrong, but I can’t fault their reasoning from where they sit, if you asked me the ‘which is more likely’ game back in 2019 I would most definitely have not have gone with ‘no really they’re doing this in a pandemic because of six cases.’

Several hours in:

Again, seems logical to conclude they were rushed if they act in a way that would only make sense if they actually did rush.

The first time around with AstraZeneca, I could sort of understand the argument for the other side of the hesitancy effect when I squinted, that this would look like the Very Serious People Take Vaccine Safety Seriously and therefore we should now expect the people to trust the FDA more, and being untrustworthy stewards who kill a bunch of people in order to fool the public into thinking we are trustworthy is a tradeoff they thought we should make, but we ran the experiment on that hypothesis, and, yeah, no.

Seriously, people are not so stupid:

Also, when you keep saying loudly that any adverse things that happen will destroy your credibility, consider your c...
Are there opportunities for small investors unavailable to big ones?
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-04-15T09:13:22.481Z

Epistemic status: Not investment advice. Just pure speculation by a non-rich investor in index funds and EMH partisan, inexperienced in the details of financial markets, doing his best to fit a simple model to a complex problem and steelman the opposing view.

One explanation for why you should invest in index funds goes something like this:

"You're competing against hedge funds, physicists, and the most rococo of high-frequency trading algorithms. Good luck, sucker."

I want to give an explanation as to why this might not be a complete perspective. It's based on two advantages of a small investor relative to a large hedge fund or big-money investor:

Inertia vs. agility
Investment size floors

Inertia vs. agility

Professional investors are often managing huge funds. Bridgewater has almost $100 billion. It employs about 1,500 people to manage that money, so each employee is responsible, on average, for about $66 million. That's about average for a large hedge company.

There are about 630,000 publicly-traded companies in the world. If Bridgewater was looking at all of them, each employee would need to keep track of about 420 companies, giving each one just under 1 day of attention per year.

Realistically, hedge funds and their associated businesses have to specialize. And indeed, they do. They invest in forms of capital to support their monetary investments. They do things like using satellite imagery to monitor Walmart parking lots.

This gives them a gigantic advantage over individual investors. However, it also means that they are less agile, just like any other large company. The small time investor, not having spent a lot of money to analyze a certain company or market, may also be more able to explore new and strange markets, such as cryptocurrency.

Here, they may be more on an even playing field with the smart people in the hedge fund, who may not yet have figured out how to make sense of crypto. It's more a problem for individual human minds, not an experienced and organized collective of professionals.

Investment size floors

The huge size of a hedge fund, and the sheer amount of money that each employee is responsible for (on average) means that they need to find big trades to make the kind of profits that will pay for their fees, and deliver the returns their investors expect. Fees aside, Bridgewater needs to make about $10 billion per year to keep up with the market...
Hell is wasted on the evil
by lsusr — 2021-04-15T08:52:01.466Z

Chuck Palahniuk is an author like no other. Consider his second-most-popular book Choke.

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park.

―from the summary of Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

Some authors write to entertain. Others write to educate. I want my reader to shout "What the fuck did I just read‽"

Fight Club is Chuch Palahniuk's cleanest and least happy book. This is not a coincidence. A common theme running through Palahniuk's works is the idea that extreme happiness and extreme suffering are two sides of the same coin. When editors compelled him to tone down the horrors in Fight Club, they sucked the happiness out of it too.

When I take vacations, I don't go anywhere nice. I don't make myself comfortable. My vacations tend to be desperate struggles for survival in the impoverished sectors of awful technodystopias like China. Or—you know—just desperate struggles for survival in the wilderness.

When I was 19 I took a Greyhound to Las Vegas. I earned enough money performing street magic to buy food at Panda Express. While I was there, a man offered to buy me dinner with his family. I turned it down because I didn't want to accept charity. Only later did it occur to me that I must have been the most interesting person he met in Las Vegas and that buying my stories for the price of a hamburger would be a steal compared to the alternative entertainment offerings.

Stories are about suffering. A good novelist tortures her characters. I know many software engineers (and other technicians) who were excited about their jobs in college and in their early 20s. I was jealous of them back then. Now, in their late 20s, my friends realize they are living in the Matrix.

On my imaginary bookshelf, beside the complete works of Chuck Palahniuk, is Goblin Slayer.

Every goblin had a weapon in hand, and all of them were bent on Priestess standing just outside the entrance…

“O Earth Mother, abo

...
Training the YouTube Algorithm
by lsusr — 2021-04-15T06:37:58.145Z

Listening to music and watching dance lessons on YouTube makes me happy. Everything else on YouTube makes me unhappy. It doesn't matter what the video is, watching YouTube makes me unhappy.

If all of YouTube made me unhappy then I should just not use YouTube. But I like listening to music and watching dance lessons on YouTube. I dislike getting recommendations for non-music non-dance videos. Fortunately, YouTube personalizes its recommendations. I wondered if I could train YouTube to only recommend music and dance lessons.

I created a brand new Google account just for YouTube. I carefully refrained from clicking on anything other than music and dance lessons. I quickly learned that "Don't recommend channel" works better than "Not interested". If you press "Don't recommend channel" then YouTube will stop recommending the channel.

I have trained my YouTube algorithm for about two years now. When I wanted to watch a non-music non-dancing video I did it incognito or on another account. Here are what my homepage recommendations look like right now.

The first 12 recommendations are all music. The 13th recommendation is a clip related to Doctor Who. I think the non-music Doctor Who recommendation came from clicking on The 10th Doctor Epic Suite which got recommended because I was watching music from Sherlock. From there, the next 72 recommendations are all music.

If I just keep scrolling and scrolling until I get non-music non-dance recommendations, they tend to be silly stuff like this, this or this. I think the Lord of the Rings recommendations come from listening to fantasy-themed music.

If you want to use YouTube for a specific purpose without distractions then it is entirely possible to train YouTube to do this. All you have to do is create an account, watch videos on a specific topic and press "Don't recommend channel" whenever you encounter an off-topic recommendation.
Psyched out
by Josh Smith-Brennan — 2021-04-15T04:45:14.104Z

I don't know where to begin as I've apparently spent my whole life working at being a Rationalist and didn't know it until I heard about this site and the Rationalist Movement. As a Starving Artist/Amateur Intellectual/Hermit, I'm not in a position to go to graduate school right now, and the people around me these days don't share my same interests. Like any human being I need to engage with people thinking about the same things I do. So here I am.

I've kept boxes of sketchbooks and journals for a couple decades that are full of ideas and concepts I've developed from my own personal experience, reading and studies, but my work doesn't do well on traditional 'art' forums. It's usually very dry, scientific, conceptual work looking for a form, but as a trained artist I've run into technical issues - requiring skills, experience and/or data and resources I don't have - so my work stays theoretical and stacks up in boxes in my living room. I've attempted to write research papers, grant proposals, blogs, twitter posts, essays and books but can't quite finish them because I've lacked a support network. My work is my passion, but I've been unable to share it because I hadn't found a place where so many of my interests could be satisfied. When I look at the list of topics of discussion on this site, I feel agitated I didn't find this community sooner.

So as a newbie looking to develop, share, develop, and share my own work, contributing while benefiting from the work of the others on this board, I'm a little overwhelmed by the scope of this place. Since I'm pretty comfortable in my sexual and gender identity as a man, I wouldn't mind a little hand holding in the beginning.
Placebo effect report: chiropractic adjustment
by supposedlyfun — 2021-04-15T02:50:11.893Z

Content warning: I accidentally got chiropractic treatment and felt better afterward, and I think talking too much about the placebo effect might be a mild cognitohazard, but less hazardous than not talking about it.

This is a story about being treated by a medical practitioner with poor epistemics, and the placebo effect that I experienced despite knowing that her medical treatment is no better than a placebo and has no medically sensible mechanism of action and despite the fact that the intervention consisted of gently tugging on my leg exactly once.

Background

I developed an acute lumbar spasm on one side (7 out of 10 pain on movement) a while back after a heavy weightlifting session. I went to the ER of the U.S. health system that I belong to. They prescribed skelaxin and menthol patches and referred me to a doctor at the PT clinic a week later.

By the time of the appointment, the pain was 4 out of 10. The doctor had me demonstrate the movements that triggered pain. She stated that the spasm was probably due to an underlying "pelvic misalignment."

Bullshit detector, go!

Please note that I am doing my best to recall what I said--I was on point that day for some reason.

Informed consent (???)

SF: A what?

Doc: Yeah, the muscles around your pelvis are very strong, especially with your back squats [~300 pounds was my 1-rep max at the time, not high among trained members of my age/gender cohort], and if one side is stronger or tighter, they can pull the pelvis out of alignment.

SF: What does alignment mean?

Doc: So your pelvis is made of different bones--

SF: Yes, os coxae, ilium, pubis, ishium, sacrum.

Doc: Right, and they can get misaligned.

SF: So the bones move relative to each other? I thought it was all one big stiff system.

Doc: Yeah, it is. The whole thing gets misaligned.

SF: What does misaligned mean?

Doc: Your pelvis gets rotated.

SF: Like, if I'm looking at myself in a mirror, rotated from that perspective?

Doc: Yes.

SF: Can you see it?

Doc: No, a lot of cases of pelvic misalignment don't show up on an x-ray.

SF: So it's misaligned enough to cause pain but not enough to be visible?

Doc: Yes, it's the most likely explanation [her exact words] for the unilateral pain. That's really unusual.

SF: So what are you going to do?

Doc: An alignment.

SF: What is that?

Doc: Lie down on your stomach here. [I did.] Now put your hand here ...
The secret of Wikipedia's success
by Aaron Bergman — 2021-04-14T22:18:52.871Z
Link: https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/the-secret-of-wikipedias-success

Why its reputation for unreliability is Wikipedia's greatest asset

Intro

Wikipedia is everything the internet was supposed to be. Before social media became a battleground for foreign election meddling, corporate and political messaging wars, and algorithmic competition for our attention, it was going to be a means of sharing information across geographic, social, and political borders.

Over the last 30 years, this egalitarian-techno-optimist naiveté has given way to pragmatism about the social and economic forces governing the internet. But one beacon of innocent, brilliant functionality reminiscent of the old ethos remains:

wikipedia.org

.

If you’ve read a few of my other pieces, you may know that I love linking to Wikipedia. It is my default source for any event, item, or concept that I think readers might not know a ton about. The Capitol riots?

Got that

. A book summary?

Yup

. An author’s background?

That too

.

Is it any good?

Lots of people have commented on Wikipedia’s notable, and frankly surprising, reliability, breadth and depth all fueled by earnest online volunteers and a little over

$100 million

each year, or about 2% of

American annual spending on ice cream

. Although anyone can edit just about any Wikipedia page to say just about anything,

several studies

find that Wikipedia is very reliable, albeit not always comprehensive or very analytical.

In my opinion, Wikipedia is often the best source of information on topics with an intermediate amount of salience. That is, extremely popular (say, the views of two presidential candidates) or extremely banal (say, “rice”) topics of inquiry naturally attract so much attention that there are likely other excellent resources on the topic.

On the other end, Wikipedia pages on the very specific or obscure likely cannot attract enough attention to warrant confidence that something important has not been omitted. But for things in between -

juggling

, the city of

Oakland, CA

, or

flips-flops

- Wikipedia is often unambiguously the best single, easily accessible resource.

How is this possible?

There are several articles (like

this one

and

this one

) out there praising Wikipedia and speculating about the reasons for its success. Without a doubt, the organization makes good use of explicit rules and guidelines, community norms, and a social structure that awards status to people for high-quality contributions.

However, it strikes m...
Place-Based Programming - Part 1 - Places
by lsusr — 2021-04-14T22:18:15.184Z

When I write machine learning software, I tend to use the Place-Based Programming (PBP) paradigm. PBP caches your computations so you rarely have to perform the same computation twice.

The fundamental unit of data is a place, which refers to a location on disk. Consider the hard-coded string "I am Satoshi Nakamoto.". You can complete the place of a string by hashing it.

;; This code is written in Hy.
;; See https://docs.hylang.org/en/stable/ for documentation of the language.
(import [hashlib [md5]] os)
(setv +place-dir+ ".places/")

(defn place-of [expression]
"Returns the place of an expression"
(os.path.join
+place-dir+
"str/"
(+ (.hexdigest (md5 (.encode (str expression))))
".pickle")))

;; prints ".places/<class 'hy.models.HyString'>/17f36dc3403a328572adcea3fd631f55.pickle"
(print (place-of '"I am Satoshi Nakamoto."))

In Lisp, the ' tag means "do not evaluate the following expression". Note how we did not compute the place of the string's value directly. We evaluated the place of the source code which defines the string. We can replace our function with a macro so the user does not have to quote his or her code.

(import [hashlib [md5]] os)
(setv +place-dir+ ".places/")

(defmacro place-of [expression]
"Returns the place of an expression"
`(os.path.join
+place-dir+
(str (type '~data))
(+ (.hexdigest (md5 (.encode (str '~expression))))
".pickle")))

;; prints ".places/<class 'hy.models.HyString'>/17f36dc3403a328572adcea3fd631f55.pickle"
(print (place-of "I am Satoshi Nakamoto."))

Whenever a function returns a place, it implicitly guarantees that the place is populated. The place-of macro is not allowed to just compute where a place would be if it existed. The macro must also save our data to the place if the place is not already populated.

(defmacro/g! place-of [expression]
"Returns the place of an expression"
`(do
(setv ~g!place
(os.path.join
+place-dir+
(str (type '~code))
(+ (.hexdigest (md5 (.encode (str '~expression))))
".pickle")))
(if-not (os.path.exists ~g!place)
(with [f (open ~g!place "wb")]
(pickle.dump (eval '~expression) f)))
~g!place))

;; prints ".places/<class 'hy.models.HyString'>/17f36dc3403a328572adcea3fd631f55.pickle"
(print (place-of "I am Satoshi Nakamoto."))

...