Open & Welcome Thread – October 2020

I’m Elizabeth.You may remember me from such series as Epistemic Spot Checks and the LessWrong Covid Effort [LW · GW], but for the last year my main focus has been developing a method for Knowledge Bootstrapping- going from 0 to 1 in an unfamiliar field without undue deference to credentialism. I’m at the stage where I have a system that works well for me, and I’ve gotten feedback from a few other people about what works and doesn’t work for them, but there’s a long way to go. A lot of my knowledge is implicit and not explained on the page, plus I am only one person; what works for me will not translate perfectly for every human. So I’m looking for test subjects.

One particular part of my method is breaking down one large question into many smaller questions. This has several purposes: it forces you to clarify what you actually care about, and makes it more obvious what information is relevant. I describe this process and the reasoning behind it here, but not very well.  I’m looking for test subjects that have a research question, and would like to practice breaking it down into smaller questions, with the goal of refining the technique and my teaching of it.

What This Looks Like

1. Come up with a question you might like to research.
2. You book a phone call with me via calendly, or email me at elizabeth -at- acesounderglass.com to set up a time. 
3. We discuss your question in an attempt to break it down into smaller parts.
4. I sure hope some people actually go off and research the new questions but there’s no commitment required to do so.

What Are the Expected Outcomes?

• You will have a better understanding of what you actually want to know and will be better positioned to find answers.
• You will be better able to break down your next research question, without me.
• I will make some of my metis on breaking down questions more explicit.
• I will become better at teaching the technique of breaking down questions.
• I learn techniques from you I couldn’t have learned on my own.

Watching cancel culture go after rationalists/EA, I feel like one of the commentators on the Known Net watching the Blight chase after Out of Band II. Also, Transcend = academia, Beyond = corporations/journalism/rest of intellectual world, Slow Zone = ...

(For those who are out of the loop on this, see https://www.facebook.com/bshlgrs/posts/10220701880351636 for the latest development.)

Hello there! :)

For about a month I have been reading lots on LessWrong and correlating websites/blogs. Now I finally want to become active and maybe in the future if it ever comes down to that contribute in some way... But first I will introduce myself:

I am 17 years old, currently I want to dedicate my future for AI stuff and also for making the world a better place. I found LessWrong by accident and was so delighted to find out that there is such a huge community about rationality, effective altruism, and other things. The way the people treat each other here is rare to find somewhere else (-> awesome community -> You - yes you - are a great person). Also many users of LessWrong have awesome blogs themselves or are fans of other awesome stuff. As a result, I learned so much and it changed my life in many aspects :)! At first I was hoping to contribute with essays that I wrote for myself about systematic approaches to improve one's life, biases, effective altruism etc. which I wrote before finding out about Lesswrong. After starting reading the sequences and other posts I had decided that I should probably read more, write completely new essays, throw my old ones away... :'P So just writing comments, maybe short posts and getting lots of feedback seems like the best way to go right now... If you have tips for improving my writing style, that would be awesome!

I want to further improve myself, update my beliefs, integrate Bayesian theory, etc. into my thinking, help where I can -> become an overall more rational being, therefore feedback is greatly appreciated :D

Any questions or recommendations etc.? 

Thanks for taking your time to read this :)

I propose a norm change for using Google Docs.

I'm not a fan of the way Google Docs encourages people to only give in-line comments, rather than comments on the document as a whole. It's a format that lends itself to nitpicks over substance.

So by default, if I'm given comment access, I add a new heading at the bottom, then write freely my thoughts on the doc overall. This often fills up 0.5-1.5 pages. I leave a comment saying "delete this if you didn't want it" but 100% of the time so far the person who shared it with me likes that I did it.

At minimum, I'd suggest by-default writing an overall-comment inline at the top. Otherwise people just get lots of things that feel like nitpicks, and don't get people's overall impressions.

Hi everyone! :)

So I'm actually introducing myself now!

I'm a long-time lurker, 21 years old, living in Germany, and I'm currently in… the equivalent of high school (my education path is pretty serpentine – long story). I will hopefully be graduating next spring/summer and then presumably study mathematics.

I actually don‘t know how I first ended up here – I vaguely remember stumbling across a few articles and then succumbing to link-hopping (resulting in a few dozen open tabs). It seems to be ages since I know about LessWrong. Also, last December I attended a meetup.

Currently, I am working myself through the Sequences; although I will probably revisit at least some of the parts later. Especially those with probability theory.

It‘s not like I don‘t have at least basic knowledge about statistics and probabilities – I have math as AP for Gauß‘s sake! – it‘s just (at least for now) not my particular cup of tea (I tend to like abstract stuff more – algebra, number theory, set theory, I've dipped my toes in category theory – probability and statistics seems like so much calculating) and I think, I should go over this with more time and intent to practice; instead of (just?) trying to get a complete overview.

I‘m not (yet?) used to explicitly calculate how certain I should be about whatever. -- I'm planning on starting a journal for that particular purpose, and also doing a deep dive... some time... but I don't know when I'll actually get to that, especially considering my already way-to-long to-do-list. Also, perhaps I should learn estimating probabilities (and betting) properly first, I don't know?

My interests tend to be quite broad, but very much aligned with this site and its orbit - this might actually partially be a chicken-and-egg-problem; this site might actually have influenced me quite a bit.

I originally planned to finish the sequences first before I write anything at all here; but that might take a lot of time and I'm starting to think that that might be a bad idea...

On the other hand, I don't know exactly what I could contribute just yet, except for maybe one other comment. But I think, that will be alright in time - one comment at a time.

...I don't quite know what to write, but feel free to ask me what you would like to know!

Best regards,

smiley314

Motherflipping new Bostrom paper! (With Carl Shulman!) Hurrah! Time for some new concepts!

https://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/monster.pdf

I'll make a post with some overview shortly, for people to share their favorite quotes in the comments.

There hasn't been an LW survey since 2017 [LW · GW]. That's the longest we've ever gone without a survey since the first survey. Are people missing the surveys? What is the right interval to do them on, if any?

Welcome everyone!  New and long-standing members, I appreciate your participation in LessWrong.  Thank you for being here.

There's a time-sensitive trading opportunity (probably lasting a few days), i.e., to short HTZ because it's experiencing an irrational spike in prices. See https://seekingalpha.com/article/4379637-over-1-billion-hertz-shares-traded-on-friday-because-of-bankruptcy-court-filings for details. Please only do this if you know what you're doing though, for example you understand that HTZ could spike up even more and the consequences of that if it were to happen and how to hedge against it. Also I'm not an investment advisor and this is not investment advice.

I recently had opportunity to introspect on my conflicted feelings about Calendly. I wrote the following down, which has helped me resolve my feelings quite a bit.

My feelings are both that it's a great app and yet sometimes I'm irritated when the other person sends me theirs.

If I introspect on the times when I feel the irritation, I notice I feel like they are shirking some work. Previously we were working together to have a meeting, but now I'm doing the work to have a meeting with the other person, where it's my job and not theirs to make it happen.

I think I expect some of of the following asymmetries in responsibility to happen with a much higher frequency than with old-fashioned-coordination:

• I will book a time, then in a few days they will tell me actually the time doesn't work for them and I should pick again (this is a world where I had made plans around the meeting time and they hadn't)
• I will book a time, and just before the meeting they will email to say they hadn't realized when I'd booked it and actually they can't make it and need to reschedule, and they will feel this is calendly's fault far more than theirs
• I will book a time, and they won't show up or will show up late and feel that they don't hold much responsibility for this, thinking of it as a 'technical failure' on behalf of calendly.

All of these are quite irritating and feel like I'm the one holding my schedule open for them, right up until it turns out they can't make it.

I think I might be happier if there was an explicit and expected part of the process where the other person  confirms they are aware of the meeting and will show up, either by emailing to say "I'll see you at <time>!" or if they have to click "going" to the calendar invitation and I would get a notification saying "They confirmed", and only then was it 'officially happening'.

Having written this out, I may start pinging people for confirmation after filling out their calendlys...

We get to argue about published research but not the kind that was so bad it remained unpunished. And it certainly exists. I wish there were an "Editors Anonymous" platform to just rant and vent about why they don't accept manuscripts. Or how they wish they could decline ones that might follow the technical requirements but really just suck "epistemically".

So that one could unburden one's soul without compromising one's journal.

Really sorry for the downtime for parts of the last hour. The cause was a straightforward merge conflict that wasn't highlighted by Git, and in a particularly sad instance of carelessness we merged even though our tests told us the build wasn't working. This was basically fully a process failure on our side to not pay attention to the systems we put in place to prevent exactly this happening, and pressing big red override buttons because a previous problem with our CI-system had forced us to press some override buttons frequently enough that we weren't thinking of it as something to be really careful with. Again, sorry for that. 

I already made some of the most obvious changes to our process to prevent this from happening again, and am working on a bunch of larger changes that will make stuff in this reference class much less bad.

Another (mild) norm proposal: I am against comments that do a line-by-line reply to the comment it's replying to. 

I think it reliably makes a conversation very high effort and in-the-weeds, to the cost of talking about big picture disagreements. It often means there's no part of the comment which communicates directly, saying "this is my response and where I think our overarching disagreement lies", it just has lots of small pieces. 

This is similar to my open thread post about google docs [LW(p) · GW(p)] which was about how inline commenting seems to disincentivize big-picture responses. 

It's fine to drop threads in conversations, not everything needs to be addressed, the big picture is more important in most situations. Writing a flowing paragraph is often much better conversationally than loads of one-line replied to one-lines.

This bit of popular science news crossed my feed: "A new interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests reality does not depend on the measurer", about this paper; claims to eliminate any need to have observer-dependence in QM. I guess this would apply even if one was skeptical of many-worlds, but I don't know enough to evaluate the paper or its significance at all; anyone able to tell whether the paper's actually meaningful?

AI Camera Ruins Soccer Game For Fans After Mistaking Referee's Bald Head For Ball

By "planting flags" on various potentially important and/or influential ideas (e.g., cryptocurrency, UDT, human safety problems), I seem to have done well for myself in terms of maximizing the chances of gaining a place [LW(p) · GW(p)] in the history of ideas. Unfortunately, I've recently come to dread [LW(p) · GW(p)] more than welcome the attention of future historians. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

Free speech norms can only last if "fight hate speech with more speech" is actually an effective way to fight hate speech (and other kinds of harmful speech). Rather than being some kind of human universal constant, that's actually only true in special circumstances when certain social and technological conditions come together in a perfect storm. That confluence of conditions has now gone away, due in part to technological change, which is why the most recent free speech era in Western civilization is rapidly drawing to an end. Unfortunately, its social scientists failed to appreciate the precious rare opportunity for what it was, and didn't use it to make enough progress on important social scientific questions that will become taboo (or already has become taboo) once again to talk about.

Replication Markets is going to start a new project focusing on COVID studies. Infos:

• Surveys open on October 28, 2020.
• Markets open on November 11, 2020.
• A total of $14,520 in prizes will be awarded.
• Contest will forecast (1) publication, (2) citation, (3) replication, and (4) usefulness for the Top-400 claims from COVID-19 research, using both surveys and markets.

Hello, I would like to ask, whether you think that some ideas can be dangerous to discuss publicly despite you are honest with them and even despite you are doing your best attempt to be logical/rational and even despite you are wishing nothing bad to other people/beings and even despite you are open for its discussion in terms of being prepared for its rejection according to a justified reason.

In this stage, I will just tell you I would like to discuss a specific moral issue, which might be original, and therefore I am skeptical this way and I feel a little insecure about discussing it publicly. 

• I noticed a thing that might hinder the goals of longevity as described here [LW · GW] ("build on what was already said previously"): it feels like a huge cost to add a tiny/incremental comment to something because of all the zero-sum attention games it participates in. 
  
  It would be nice to do a silent comment, which:
  
  
  • Doesn't show up in Recent Comments
  • Collapsed by default
  • (less confident) Doesn't show up in author's notifications (unless "Notify on Silent" is enabled in personal settings)
  • (kinda weird) Comment gets appended automatically to previous comment (if yours) in a nice, standard format.
• The operating metaphor is to allow the equivalent of bulleted lists to span across time, which I suppose would mostly be replies to yourself.
  • It feels strange to keep editing one comment, and too silent. Also disrupts flow for readers.
• I don't see often that people have added several comments (via edit or otherwise) across months, or even days. Yet people seem to use a lot of nested lists here. Hard to believe that those list-erious ways go away if spread out in time.

I'm posting on behalf of my friend, who is an aspiring AI researcher in his early 20's, and is looking to live with likeminded individuals. He currently lives in Southern California, but is open to relocating (preferably USA, especially California).

Please message jeffreypythonclass+ea@gmail.com if you're interested!

Somewhat urgent: can anyone recommend a good therapist or psychiatrist for anxiety/depression in the UK? Virtual sessions are probably required. Private is fine. Also, they shouldn't be someone biased towards rationalist types. The person I'm thinking of has nearly no knowledge of these ideas.

Other recommendations that seem relevant welcome.

I just had a question about post formatting, how do I turn a link into text like this example? Thanks.