LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yeah I was reading the other day about the Treaty of Versailles and surround periods and saw a quote from a German minister about how an overseas empire would be good merely as an outlet for young men to find something productive to do. A totally different social and political environment when you have a young and growing population than an aging and shrinking population. And Russia is still relatively young: Italy, Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Austria all have median ages of 45 or higher.

Consider using strength as an analogy to intelligence. 

People debating the heredity or realism of intelligence sometimes compare intelligence to height. I think, however, "height" is a bad analogy. Height is objective, fixed, easy-to-measure, and basically invariant within the same person after adulthood.* 

In contrast intelligence is harder to determine, and results on the same test that's a proxy for intelligence varies a lot from person to person. It's also very responsive to stimulants, motivation, and incentives, especially on the lower end.

I think "strength" is a much better analogy, if you want a non-politicized analogy to think about intelligence more clearly. It's clear that strength has both environmental and genetic factors, and that strength is real. 

It's obviously possible to make a composite measure of strength if we wanted to do so. Further, singular tests of strength (eg dead lifts or something) would correlate well with other tests of strength, so you can cheaper proxies, while also being clearly limited in both normal and edge cases.

However, believing that there's a single objective and unambiguous measure of strength would be just as silly as believing that some people cannot be stronger than others. 

Strength is clearly valuable for getting through life, while not being enough by itself to solve most problems. A good composite measure of strength should have predicative validity. Being stronger is usually better. 

Most people don't build their identities or moral worth upon believing that stronger people are morally superior, though of course some people do.

*(you decline by maybe an inch between 20 and 60, but otherwise it's completely unchanging over time barring having your legs cut off or something).

This popped up in my Recommended feed, and it piqued my interest: I think it relates to a design skill I've picked up at Lightcone. When staging a physical space, or creating a website, I often want to stop iterating quite early, when the core idea is realised. "It would be a lot of work to get all the minor details here, but how much does stuff feeling a bit jank really matter?"

I think jank matters surprisingly much! When creating something, it's easy to think "wow, that's a cool idea. I've got a proof of concept sorted". But users, even if they think similar thoughts, either experience delight and ease, or they don't.

In design, it's kind of easy to "turn off your eyes [LW · GW]" for a bunch of problems, and stop being able to notice them as things to improve. Which seems a bit different from mortgages and driving.

Maybe or maybe not related: Latent variables for prediction markets: motivation, technical guide, and design considerations [LW · GW]

Not really. Robert Anton Wilson's description is more on-point:

Let me differentiate between scientific method and the neurology of the individual scientist. Scientific method has always depended on feedback [or flip-flopping as the Tsarists call it]; I therefore consider it the highest form of group intelligence thus far evolved on this backward planet. The individual scientist seems a different animal entirely. The ones I've met seem as passionate, and hence as egotistic and prejudiced, as painters, ballerinas or even, God save the mark, novelists. My hope lies in the feedback system itself, not in any alleged saintliness of the individuals in the system.

Although I prefer the colorful way Peter Watts put it:

Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?

There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity.

But that’s a myth too. The fact is, we are all humans; and humans come with dogma as standard equipment. We can no more shake off our biases than Liz Cheney could pay a compliment to Barack Obama. The best we can do— the best science can do— is make sure that at least, we get to choose among competing biases.

That’s how science works. It’s not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby. Every time you put out a paper, the guy you pissed off at last year’s Houston conference is gonna be laying in wait. Every time you think you’ve made a breakthrough, that asshole supervisor who told you you needed more data will be standing ready to shoot it down. You want to know how the Human Genome Project finished so far ahead of schedule? Because it was the Human Genome projects, two competing teams locked in bitter rivalry, one led by J. Craig Venter, one by Francis Collins — and from what I hear, those guys did not like each other at all.

This is how it works: you put your model out there in the coliseum, and a bunch of guys in white coats kick the shit out of it. If it’s still alive when the dust clears, your brainchild receives conditional acceptance. It does not get rejected. This time. ...

Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries. Science is alchemy: it turns shit into gold.

there's an analogy between the zurich r/changemyview curse of evals [LW(p) · GW(p)] and the metr/epoch curse of evals. You do this dubiously ethical (according to more US-pilled IRBs or according to more paranoid/pure AI safety advocates) measuring/elicitation project because you might think the world deserves to know. But you had to do dubiously ethical experimentation on unconsenting reddizens / help labs improve capabilities in order to get there--- but the catch is, you only come out net positive if the world chooses to act on this information

and computer use started off as a fraction of one person’s time,

Curious when this was. When was the earliest point that someone was working on computer use? When was the latest point that ONLY one person was?

Hard to buy tickets at large scale often I think.

I had terrible luck with symbolic regression, for what its worth.

Standard deviations are used to characterize the spread around the mean of a normal distribution -- it is not intended to characterize the tails. This is why discussion around it tends to focus on the 1-2 SDs, where the bulk of the data is, and rarely 3-4 SDs -- it is rare to have the data (of sufficient size or low noise) to support meaningful interpretation of even 4 SDs with real-world data. 

So in practice, using precise figures like 5, 7, or 20 SDs is misleading, because the tails aren't usually sufficiently characterized (and it certainly isn't with intelligence) -- all you can really say is that it's beyond the validated range of the test. It's like taking seriously a measurement of 151.887 when the instrument operates in integers up to 10 -- you're implying you're meaningfully operating on a level of precision and range that you don't realistically have. It comes across as incredibly careless with regard to statistical nuance and rigor.