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The Open Thread sequence is here.
In Q3 of 2019, the LessWrong team picked the growth of a single metric as our only goal. For the duration of this quarter, the overwhelming consideration in our decision-making what would most increase the target metric.
Why target a simple, imperfect metric?
The LessWrong team pursues a mixture of overlapping long-term goals, e.g. building a place where people train and apply rationality, building a community and culture with good epistemics, and building technologies which drive intellectual progress on important problems.
It’s challenging to track progress on these goals. They’re broad, diffic
... (Read more)Having a high enough karma that my vote strengths (3 for weak and 10 for strong) are pretty identifiable, so I have to think more about social implications. (Maybe I shouldn't, but I do.)
Hmm, I was starting to notice that a bit myself, and I think this is especially strong the more vote weight you have, which is an incentive counter to the very point of weighted voting. One option is to obscure some karma things a little to avoid this.
(consider skipping 0, 1, 2, and 3)
0. a mind thinks using an ontology, which answers "what things can exist, how do they relate, and how do they change?".
00. an atemporal ontology is a collection of types of things that can exist, along with ways in which those things can relate to each other.
01. a situation sustained by an ontology is a collection of some things, i.e. instances of the types from the ontology, along with instances of relations between those things.
02. a temporal ontology is an atemporal ontology O along with ways in which situations in O can develop into other situati... (Read more)
Hello,
I would like to try double crux https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/exa5kmvopeRyfJgCy/double-crux-a-strategy-for-resolving-disagreement with someone. My statement A is "There is God" (I indeed believe in it, it is not just for the sake of trying the technique). I have three cruxes (well, two and a half, to be honest), according to the rules I do not publish it here so that you would prepare your cruxes independently.
Thank you!
That's your crux? Lesser interpretations than E won't do?
I am not convinced that E is logically coherent. It's as meaningless as "married bachelor".
- Suppose that God's memory is the set of "all facts" O.
- The set of all subsets (or powerset) of O, we'll call p(O).
Then, for any given fact f, there is a further fact f ' stating that it's either in or not in each subset of O in p(O).
Thus, there must be at least as many facts as there are elements of p(O), which, being the powerset of O, by Cantor's Theorem must have a strictly greater cardinality than O.
B
Decision-making is life. Over time, our decisions carve an identity for ourselves and our organizations, and it is our decisions, more than anything else, that determine how we are remembered after we’re gone. Despite their importance, though, we barely pay attention to most of the decisions we make. Biology has programmed in us a powerful instinct to make decisions using our intuitions rather than our conscious selves whenever possible. There are good reasons for this; if we had to think about every little decision we made, we’d never get anything don... (Read more)
You’ll notice in the screenshot that there’s an image of something that looks like a lopsided bell curve on the bottom right. That’s because the software I’m using (Guesstimate) calculates a Monte Carlo simulation for this estimate right there in the model. Monte Carlo simulation is a statistical technique that randomly generates thousands of scenarios from the information you feed the model. Originally developed by nuclear physicists, it’s now used to aid decision-making in everything from politics to sports and beyond.... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Different people seem to have different strategies, which they use systematically across different parts of their lives, and that we recognize and talk about. For instance people vary on:
- Spontaneity
- Inclination toward explicit calculations
- Tendency to go meta
- Skepticism
- Optimism
- Tendency to look at the big picture vs. the details
- Expressed confidence
- Enacted patience
I don’t know of almost anyone experimenting with varying these axes, to see which setting is best for them, or even what different settings are like. Which seems like a natural thing to do in some sense, given the variation in ... (Read more)
It seems largely true to me that it is not hard to create a temporary change in one of the axes, but I am curious if these can lead to permanently changed settings in the long run. I would be very curious to hear from anyone who's created lasting change through an experiment like this and what axis in particular they changed.
Personally, I've experimented with acting much more extroverted than I typically am in certain social contexts (interviews are a good example) and the new setting feels comfortable or even better at times. Gaining more experi... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
The hermeneutic spiral is the process of understanding a text (or more generally, anything big and confusing) by passing over it again and again, each time using what you've learned to more deeply understand the workings and roles of each part and grow a truer image of the whole. The hermeneutic spiral is not depth-first search; it's more like bread-first search, but it can also involve depth, and altering the ordering you use to search, and expanding the set you're searching over.
The hermeneutic spiral involves noticing landmarks, principles, cruxes, and
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postI remember seeing a talk by a synthetic biologist, almost a decade ago. The biologist used a genetic algorithm to evolve an electronic circuit, something like this:
(source)
He then printed out the evolved circuit, brought it to his colleague in the electrical engineering department, and asked the engineer to analyze the circuit and figure out what it did.
“I refuse to analyze this circuit,” the colleague replied, “because it was not designed to be understandable by humans.” He has a point - that circuit is a big, opaque mess.
This, the biologist argued, is the root pro... (Read more)
Curated. Just discussed this with Oli a bunch. Some reasons for curation:
- High quality book reviews are very valuable and a key step in being able to interface with expertise in other communities and fields.
- Biology is a field that is a major blindspot on LessWrong, where most of us have relatively little expertise. One reason for this is that we take a very reductionistic approach to understanding the world, and biology often seems very messy and unprincipled. This post really shocked me with the level of principle that apparently can be found in such syste
I'm mostly going to use this to crosspost links to my blog for less polished thoughts, Musings and Rough Drafts.
New post: Some musings about exercise and time discount rates
[Epistemic status: a half-thought, which I started on earlier today, and which might or might not be a full thought by the time I finish writing this post.]
I’ve long counted exercise as an important component of my overall productivity and functionality. But over the past months my exercise habit has slipped some, without apparent detriment to my focus or productivity. But this week, after coming back from a workshop, my focus and productivity haven’t really booted up.
Her... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
DeepMind released their AlphaStar paper a few days ago, having reached Grandmaster level at the partial-information real-time strategy game StarCraft II over the summer.
This is very impressive, and yet less impressive than it sounds. I used to watch a lot of StarCraft II (I stopped interacting with Blizzard recently because of how they rolled over for China), and over the summer there were many breakdowns of AlphaStar games once players figured out how to identify the accounts.
The impressive part is getting reinforcement learning to work at all in such a vast state space- that took breakthroug... (Read more)
I know more about StarCraft than I do about AI, so I could be off base, but here's my best attempt at an explanation:
As a human, you can understand that a factory gets in the way of a unit, and if you lift it, it will no longer be in the way. The AI doesn't understand this. The AI learns by playing through scenarios millions of times and learning that on average, in scenarios like this one, it gets an advantage when it performs this action. The AI has a much easier time learning something like "I should make a marine" (which it perceive... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
For the last year I've been playing with some exotic software technologies. My company has already used them to construct what we believe is the best algorithm in the world for IMU-based gesture detection.
I've checked ML engineers at major tech companies, successful startup founders and the Kaggle forums. None of them are using these particular technologies. When I ask them about it they show total disinterest. It's like asking an Ottoman cavalry officer what he's going to do about the Maxim gun.
This personal experience indicates that
- simple tools already exist that could make our machine lea
Epsilon value maybe?
In a certain sense, this is a trivial claim. Obviously some people are going to have 'local' competitive advantages but nothing speaks louder than success so word gets out eventually.
But I'm intrigued, so maybe this is not literally valueless.
This is the eleventh post in the Novum Organum sequence. For context, see the sequence introduction. For the reading guide, see earlier posts in the sequence.
We have used Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in the version presented atwww.earlymoderntexts.com. Translated by and copyright to Jonathan Bennett. Prepared for LessWrong by Ruby.
[[In the previous section, Bacon introduced his "three tables": his careful collection of data and observations that are core to building up his scientific method.
These tables are:
1) A table of presence which lists many examples where phenomena of int... (Read more)
TBD is a quarterly-ish newsletter about deploying knowledge for impact, learning at scale, and making more thoughtful choices for ourselves and our organizations. This is the second issue, which was originally published in June 2019. Enjoy! --Ian
An Introduction to Decision Modeling
Decision-making is life. Over time, our decisions carve an identity for ourselves and our organizations, and it is our decisions, more than anything else, that determine how we are remembered after we’re gone. Despite their importance, though, we barely pay attention to most of the decis... (Read more)
A distinction I don't see made often enough is between what I call randomness and ignorance. Roughly, every expression of uncertainty is either about "where in the universe am I?" or "what is the universe like?" (or both). The former is the domain of randomness, the latter of ignorance.
Suppose you roll a die. You know that you're in a situation where you've just rolled a die, and that, in roughly 1/6th of the situations where one has just rolled a die, the die will come up a three. Thus, your uncertainty about the die roll is random.
Suppose you're wonder... (Read more)
This is aleatory (inherent randomness) vs. epistemic (knowledge) uncertainty. You can parse this as uncertainty inherent in the parameters vs. uncertainty inherent in your estimates of the parameters / the parameterization of the model.
This is a very important distinction that has received treatment in the prediction literature but, indeed, is not applied enough to interpreting others' predictions among laypeople.
In "Against Lie Inflation", the immortal Scott Alexander argues that the word "lie" should be reserved for knowingly-made false statements, and not used in an expanded sense that includes unconscious motivated reasoning. Alexander argues that the expanded sense draws the category boundaries of "lying" too widely in a way that would make the word less useful. The hypothesis that predicts everything predicts nothing: in order for "Kevin lied" to mean something, some possible states-of-affairs need to be identified as not lying, so that the statement "Kevin lied" can correspond to redistributing
... (Read more)This is a great post! A lot of these points have been addressed, but this is what I wrote while reading this post:
It's not immediately clear that an 'appeal to consequences' is wrong or inappropriate in this case. Scott was explicitly considering the policy of expanding the definition of a word, not just which definition is better.
If the (chief) purpose of 'categories' (i.e. words) is to describe reality, then we should only ever invent new words, not modify existing ones. Changing words seems like a strict loss of information.
It also seems pretty evident
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postSometimes it seems consequentially correct to do things that would also be good for you, if you were selfish. For instance, to save your money instead of giving it away this year, or to get yourself a really nice house that you expect will pay off pragmatically while also being delightful to live in.
Some people are hesitant to do such things, and prefer for instance to keep a habit of donating every year, or err toward sparse accommodation more than seems optimal on the object level. I think because if their behavior is indistinguishable from selfishness, it is hard for them to be sure thems... (Read more)
where are we with reacts? Need a :raises hand: emoji.
Early this year, Conor White-Sullivan introduced me to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. I would say that this significantly increased my research productivity. I’ve been saying “at least 2x”. Naturally, this sort of thing is difficult to quantify. The truth is, I think it may be more like 3x, especially along the dimension of “producing ideas” and also “early-stage development of ideas”. (What I mean by this will become clearer as I describe how I think about research productivity more generally.) However, it is also very possible that th... (Read more)
How'd it go?
There are a lot of senses in which I or the people around me can be considered unsafe. Many-tonned hunks of metal whiz by us on the same streets we have to navigate on foot to buy our groceries. The social infrastructure by which we have access to clean drinking water is gradually being adulterated. Our country is run by occasionally genocidal white nationalists. And, of course, The Bomb. But when I hear people talk about feeling unsafe, they are almost never describing a concrete threat to their physical well-being. (As usual, life may be different for the less privileged classes, who have re
... (Read more)I worry a lot about trying to reason about very complex equilibria when only looking at one force. It's _BOTH_ an adversarial and cooperative game - there are (asymmetric, but usually same sign) benefits to clear, honest communication. And even for adversarial portions, there may be a positive sum even when one player is harmed, if other players gain more than the harm.
I can make a model, even, that outsourcing the punishment so that extra-judgey people get most of the flak for the judgement, but still provide overall value, is optimal for some util... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
[Edit: Changed the post title from the original article title to something more meaningful.]
I came across this article today, and I have to agree with it strongly based on my own recent trip to China. The update it triggered for me is the realization that China is genuinely doing better than the US on many fronts, most importantly on governance. How/why did that happen? Did anyone or any political theory predict this ahead of time? (In case it's not clear, this is not meant to be a rhetorical question. I'm surprised and confused and am wondering if someone or some theory can offer an explanati
... (Read more)Sorry your thing got downvoted hard without much explanation. Mostly agree the article has a bunch of weird nationalistic assumptions and doesn’t provide much evidence for its claims. I think your comments here are ending up fairly fraught and hyperbolic and false. For example, while the LessWrong team is based in the US, we’re mostly not American, coming from Germany, England and Australia. At no point did I think you were being racist, nor consider the hypothesis anyone else did. Also, complaining about downvotes is not a good look.
Unit of action is a term I have been using internally to be more specific when thinking about groups of people. This post is for fleshing out and clarifying my thinking for myself, and seeing if it would be useful to anyone else. Also it feels like there really ought to be a term for this already, and I might be able to find more information if someone knows it.
Definition
A unit of action is a group that takes actions, as a group.
I take the word unit from the military, and also from unit of analysis, reflecting my belief that this is the correct level of analysis for big-picture problems. Actio... (Read more)
I wonder if the idea of unit testing might fit with your thinking, and perhaps have some useful approaches as well as caveats.
Perhaps also either the idea of factions or special interests in political/social choice theories -- but here fear those might be a bit too broad a "unit".
My general sense is that I see a lot of interesting people go to Twitter when they are committed to being on the outside of most elite institutions, but still want conversation. And Twitter gives a lot of control in who you see, and makes engaging those people in conversation very low cost. I think there's a valuable contrarian cluster on there.