Open & Welcome Thread November 2021

Hi! I'm new here. I was introduced by a friend of mine, and reading some of these blog articles make me feel real sad about not having encountered all this earlier.

I grew up homeschooled in a rather closed-minded Church environment in rural / non coastal urban China. When I talk to some friends here in Northern Virginia I get really jealous of what they get to read and learn growing up. I get that sensation extra strongly when I'm browsing here.

I love the articles and comments here at less wrong, but I get this sense that I'm reading holy writing by Gods on pedistals.

I would love to get some help remedying that, to see the people behind the great and awesome ideas. Shoot me an email at cedar.ren@gmail.com if you feel comfortable telling a stranger about your humanity. The things you wish you had growing up. How you became who you are today. Things like that.

Oh and my English name is Cedar. My mum wanted me to be upright and incorruptible. Not sure how well that hope went, but I joke about being a Pokemon professor because I have a tree name.

Does anyone have an informed comment about the use of gauge theory in decision theory? 

Eric Weinstein just gave a controversial econophysics talk [edit: link added] at the University of Chicago about "geometric marginalism", which uses geometric techniques from Yang-Mills theory to model changing preferences. 

If this can be used in economics, it can probably be used in decision theory in general, and I see at least one example of a physicist doing this ("decision process theory"), but I don't know how it compares to conventional approaches. 

I am looking for software which will help me learn to sing a song I want to sing. I have extracted its vocal track as an mp3 file. I want to sing it in the same frequencies it's sung in the vocal track, or perhaps one or two octaves lower. I want a program which will help me do that. I imagine a program would load the mp3 file, then I would tell it that I want to sing one octave lower, and it would, in real time, draw me a graph of the frequencies I am singing together with the frequencies in the mp3 file. I imagine something like this - the frequencies I am supposed to sing in red, my actual frequencies in yellow. Operating systems suitable for me are Linux, Ipad OS, and Android. If instead of loading an mp3 file into the program I'll have to transcribe the music to sheets myself, that's worse but perhaps still ok. If you don't know such a program but know something else I can use to achieve my goal, do tell.

To those who haven't seen it and would care about such a thing, there's currently a short-term donation matching event by the site Every.org. (That is, the event was supposed to run for all of November, but the funds have been mostly depleted already.) Here [EA · GW] is the corresponding thread on the EA forums. Matching is a bit better than 1:1 and limited to 100$ per charity, but here [EA(p) · GW(p)] is a subthread with a few offers for donation trades.

Open thread is presumably the best place for a low-effort questions, so here goes: 

I came across this post from 2012: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) [LW · GW] by Holden Karnofsky (then-Co-Executive Director of GiveWell). Interestingly enough, some of the object-level objections (under subtitle "objections") Karnofsky raises[1] are similar to some points that were came up in the Yudkowsky/chathamroom.com discussion and Ngo/Yudkowsky dialogue I read the other day (or rather, read parts of, because they were quite long).

What are people's thought about that post and objections raised today? What the 10 year (-ish, 9.5 year) retrospective looks like?

Some specific questions.

Firstly, how his arguments would be responded today? Any substantial novel contra-objections? (I ask because its more fun to ask than start reading through Alignment forum archives.)

Secondly, predictions. When I look at the bullet points under the subtitle "Is SI the kind of organization we want to bet on?", I think I can interpolate a prediction Karnofsky could have made: in 2012, SI [2] had not the sufficient capability nor engaged in activities likely to achieve its stated goals ("Friendliness theory" or Friendly AGI before others), as it was not worth a GiveWell funding recommendation in 2012.

A perfect counterfactual experiment this is not, but given what people on LW today know about what SI/MIRI did achieve in the NoGiveWell!2012 timeline, was Karnofsky's call correct, incorrect or something else? (As in, did his map of the situation in 2012 matched the reality better than some other map, or was it poor compared to other map?) What inferences could be drawn, if any?

Would be curious to hear perspectives from MIRI insiders, too (edit. but not only them). And I noticed Holden Karnofsky looks active here on LW [? · GW], though I have no idea if how to ping him.

[1] Tool-AI; idea that advances in tech would bring insights into AGI safety.

[2] succeeded by MIRI I suppose

edit2. fixed ordering of endnotes.

I remember at some point finding a giant messy graph that was all of The Sequences and the links between posts. I can't track down the link, anyone remember this and have a lead?

Is there any rationalist fiction about a group of rationalists (instead of just one rationalist protagonist)?

Continuing my ability to stumble on weird niche bugs by accident:

1. Take a comment with bullet points nested two levels deep, like this one [LW(p) · GW(p)].
2. Copy a bullet point nested two-deep via Ctrl+C.
3. Paste elsewhere on Less Wrong via Ctrl+V, e.g. into a comment here. (Do not use Ctrl+Shift+V, which pastes plaintext; this does not trigger the bug.)

Expected behavior: The text is pasted into the new comment, either with the nested bullet points or without them.

Instead, here's a gif of what actually happens:

What you see there: Pasting doesn't work. Instead a weird grey box appears, which also messes with anything I subsequently type into the editor. (The grey box disappears if I click elsewhere in the editor, but I didn't record that part.)

PS: If you mods want me to post this as a github issue, I can do so; or if you prefer, you can do it yourselves. I just don't want this bug report to get lost.

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I've used Eliezer's prayer to good effect, but it's a bit short. And I have considered The Sons of Martha, but it's a bit long.

Has anyone, in their rationalist readings, found something that would work as a Thanksgiving invocation of a just-right length?

Hi I just found site this while looking for "textbooks I should read."

I recently had this thought in my head that most popular non-fiction books or radioshows on science aren't well received by scientists working in that field, no matter if it's Guns, Germs and Steel; Sapiens; Freakonomics; the Hidden Brain; or anything by Malcolm Gladwell.  From what I understand, the more popular the book, the more likely it is to focus on an easy-to-market narrative at the expense of a factual and balanced presentation of the evidence.

This isn't very concrete, just an idea bouncing around my head as a way of introducing myself.