The Best of LessWrong

LESSWRONG
The Best of LessWrong
LW

18Raemon

Self Review. I still endorse the broad thrusts of this post. But I think it should change at least somewhat. I'm not sure how extensively, but here are some considerations Clearer distinctions between Prisoner's Dilemma and Stag Hunts I should be more clear about what the game theoretical distinctions I'm actually making between Prisoners Dilemma and Stag Hunt. I think Rob Bensinger rightly criticized the current wording, which equivocates between "stag hunting is meaningfully different" and "'hunting rabbit' has nicer aesthetic properties than 'defect'". I think Turntrout spelled out in the comments why it's meaningful to think in terms of stag hunts. I'm not sure it's the post's job to lay it out in the exhaustive detail that his comment does, but it should at least gesture at the idea. Future Work: Explore a lot of coordination failures and figure out what the actual most common rules / payoff structures are. Stag Hunting is relevant sometimes, but not always. I think it's probably more relevant than Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a step up, but I think it's worth actually checking which game theory archetypes are most relevant most of the time. Reworked Example Some people comment that my proposed stag hunt... wasn't a stag hunt. I think that's actually kind of the point (i.e. most things that look like stag hunts are more complicated than you think, and people may not agree on the utility payoff). Coming up with good examples is hard, but I think at the very least the post should make it more clear that no, my original intended Stag Hunt did not have the appropriate payoff matrix after all. What's the correct title? While I endorse most of the models and gears in this post, I... have mixed feelings about the title. I'm not actually sure what the key takeaway of the post is meant to be. Abram's comment gets at some of the issues here. Benquo also notes that we do have plenty of stag hunts where the schelling choice is Stag (i.e. don't murder) I think

24johnswentworth

This is an excellent post, with a valuable and well-presented message. This review is going to push back a bit, talk about some ways that the post falls short, with the understanding that it's still a great post. There's this video of a toddler throwing a tantrum. Whenever the mother (holding the camera) is visible, the child rolls on the floor and loudly cries. But when the mother walks out of sight, the toddler soon stops crying, gets up, and goes in search of the mother. Once the toddler sees the mother again, it's back to rolling on the floor crying. A key piece of my model here is that the child's emotions aren't faked. I think this child really does feel overcome, when he's rolling on the floor crying. (My evidence for this is mostly based on discussing analogous experiences with adults - I know at least one person who has noticed some tantrum-like emotions just go away when there's nobody around to see them, and then come back once someone else is present.) More generally, a lot of human emotions are performative. They're emotions which some subconscious process puts on for an audience. When the audience goes away, or even just expresses sufficient disinterest, the subconscious stops expressing that emotion. In other words: ignoring these emotions is actually a pretty good way to deal with them. "Ignore the emotion" is decent first-pass advice for grown-up analogues of that toddler. In many such cases, the negative emotion will actually just go away if ignored. Now, obviously a lot of emotions don't fall into this category. The post is talking about over-applying the "ignore your emotions" heuristic, and the hazards of applying in places where it doesn't work. But what we really want is not an argument that applying the heuristic more/less often is better, but rather a useful criterion for when the "ignore your emotions" heuristic is useful. I suggest something like: will this emotion actually go away if ignored? The post is mainly talking about dealing

19fiddler

This post seems excellent overall, and makes several arguments that I think represent the best of LessWrong self-reflection about rationality. It also spurred an interesting ongoing conversation about what integrity means, and how it interacts with updating. The first part of the post is dedicated to discussions of misaligned incentives, and makes the claim that poorly aligned incentives are primarily to blame for irrational or incorrect decisions. I’m a little bit confused about this, specifically that nobody has pointed out the obvious corollary: the people in a vacuum, and especially people with well-aligned incentive structures, are broadly capable of making correct decisions. This seems to me like a highly controversial statement that makes the first part of the post suspicious, because it treads on the edge of proving (hypothesizing?) too much: it seems like a very ambitious statement worthy of further interrogation that people’s success at rationality is primarily about incentive structures, because that assumes a model in which humans are capable and preform high levels of rationality regularly. However, I can’t think of an obvious counterexample (a situation in which humans are predictably irrational despite having well-aligned incentives for rationality), and the formulation of this post has a ring of truth for me, which suggests to me that there’s at least something here. Conditional on this being correct, and there not being obvious counterexamples, this seems like a huge reframing that makes a nontrivial amount of the rationality community’s recent work inefficient-if humans are truly capable of behaving predictably rationally through good incentive structures, then CFAR, etc. should be working on imposing external incentive structures that reward accurate modeling, not rationality as a skill. The post obliquely mentions this through discussion of philosopher-kings, but I think this is a case in which an apparently weaker version of a thesis actually i

17Benquo

There are two aspects of this post worth reviewing: as an experiment in a different mode of discourse, and as a description of the procession of simulacra, a schema originally advanced by Baudrillard. As an experiment in a diffferent mode of discourse, I think this was a success on its own terms, and a challenge to the idea that we should be looking for the best blog posts rather than the behavior patterns that lead to the best overall discourse. The development of the concept occurred over email quite naturally without forceful effort. I would have written this post much later, and possibly never, had I held it to the standard of "written specifically as a blog post." I have many unfinished drafts. emails, tweets, that might have advanced the discourse had I compiled them into rough blog posts like this. The description was sufficiently clear and compelling that others, including my future self, were motivated to elaborate on it later with posts drafted as such. I and my friends have found this schema - especially as we've continued to refine it - a very helpful compression of social reality allowing us to compare different modes of speech and action. As a description of the procession of simulacra it differs from both Baudrillard's description, and from the later refinement of the schema among people using it actively to navigate the world. I think that it would be very useful to have a clear description of the updated schema from my circle somewhere to point to, and of some historical interest for this description to clearly describe deviations from Baudrillard's account. I might get around to trying to draft the former sometime, but the latter seems likely to take more time than I'm willing to spend reading and empathizing with Baudrillard. Over time it's become clear that the distinction between stages 1 and 2 is not very interesting compared with the distinction between 1&2, 3, and 4, and a mature naming convention would probably give these more natural

51DirectedEvolution

1. Manioc poisoning in Africa vs. indigenous Amazonian cultures: a biological explanation? Note that while Josef Henrich, the author of TSOOS, correctly points out that cassava poisoning remains a serious public health concern in Africa, he doesn't supply any evidence that it wasn't also a public health issue in Amazonia. One author notes that "none of the disorders which have been associated with high cassava diets in Africa have been found in Tukanoans or other indigenous groups on cassava-based diets in Amazonia." Is this because Tukanoans have superior processing methods, or is it perhaps because Tukanoan metabolism has co-evolved through conventional natural selection to eliminate cyanide from the body? I don't know, but it doesn't seem impossible. 2. It's not that hard to tell that manioc causes health issues. Last year, the CDC published a report about an outbreak of cassava (manioc) poisoning including symptoms of "dizziness, vomiting, tachypnea, syncope, and tachycardia." These symptoms began to develop 4-6 hours after the meal. They reference another such outbreak from 2017. It certainly doesn't take "20 years," as Scott claims, to notice the effects. There's a difference between sweet and bitter cassava. Peeling and thorough cooking is enough for sweet cassava, while extensive treatments are needed for bitter cassava. The latter gives better protection against insects, animals, and thieves, so farmers sometimes like it better. Another analysis says that "A short soak (4 h) has no effect, but if prolonged (18 to 24 h), the amounts of cyanide can be halved or even reduced by more than six times when soaked for several days." Even if the level is cut by 1/6, is this merely slowing, or actually preventing the damage? Wikipedia says that "Spaniards in their early occupation of Caribbean islands did not want to eat cassava or maize, which they considered insubstantial, dangerous, and not nutritious." If you didn't know the difference between sweet and b

38johnswentworth

Looking back, I have quite different thoughts on this essay (and the comments) than I did when it was published. Or at least much more legible explanations; the seeds of these thoughts have been around for a while. On The Essay The basketballism analogy remains excellent. Yet searching the comments, I'm surprised that nobody ever mentioned the Fosbury Flop or the Three-Year Swim Club. In sports, from time to time somebody comes along with some crazy new technique and shatters all the records. Comparing rationality practice to sports practice, rationality has not yet had its Fosbury Flop. I think it's coming. I'd give ~60% chance that rationality will have had its first Fosbury Flop in another five years, and ~40% chance that the first Fosbury Flop of rationality is specifically a refined and better-understood version of gears-level modelling. It's the sort of thing that people already sometimes approximate by intuition or accident, but has the potential to yield much larger returns once the technique is explicitly identified and intentionally developed. Once that sort of technique is refined, the returns to studying technique become much larger. On The Comments - What Does Rationalist Self-Improvement Look Like? Scott's prototypical picture of rationalist self-improvement "starts looking a lot like therapy". A concrete image: ... and I find it striking that people mostly didn't argue with that picture, so much as argue that it's actually pretty helpful to just avoid a lot of socially-respectable stupid mistakes. I very strongly doubt that the Fosbury Flop of rationality is going to look like therapy. It's going to look like engineering. There will very likely be math. Today's "rationalist self-help" does look a lot like therapy, but it's not the thing which is going to have impressive yields from studying the techniques. On The Comments - What Benefits Should Rationalist Self-Improvement Yield? This is one question where I didn't have a clear answer

LESSWRONG
The Best of LessWrong
LW

LESSWRONG
The Best of LessWrong
LW

The Best of LessWrong

Rationality

Optimization

World

Practical

AI Strategy

Technical AI Safety