Early COVID response on LW was a generalized "this is a big deal." I can't find the post that originally caught my eye, but I remember hitting the supermarkets in Buenos Aires, stocking up on masks and hand sanitizer, and two weeks later seeing the city freak the hell out. Jacob's "Seeing the Smoke" was a strong early signal, and Zvi's updates often considered explicit numbers.

I'm glad you like it!

Fixed the footnotes. They were there at the end, but unlinked. Some mixup when switching between LW's Markdown and Docs-style editor, most likely.

I see... so trolling by patenting something akin to convolutional neural networks wouldn't work because you can't tell what's powering a service unless the company building it tells you.

Maybe something on the lines of "service that does automatic text translation" or "car that drives itself" (obviously not these, since a patent with so much prior art would never get granted) would be a thing that you could fight over?

You're welcome! I'd like hearing a bit about how it helped, if you are ok with sharing.

Hi! I wrote a summary with some of my thoughts in this post as part of an ongoing effort to stop sucking at researching stuff. This article was a big help, thank you!

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I agree that more should be done. Just listing the specific search advice on the new table of contents would help a lot.

I'm gonna do the work, I promise. I'm just working up the nerve. Saying, in effect, "this experienced professional should have done his work better, let me show you how" is scary as balls.

First of all: thank you for setting up the problem, I had lots of fun!

This one reminded me a lot of D&D.Sci 1, in that the main difficulty I encountered was the curse of dimensionality. The space had lots of dimensions so I was data-starved when considering complex hypotheses (performance of individual decks, for instance). Contrast with Voyages of the Grey Swan, where the main difficulty is that broad chunks of the data are explicitly censored.

I also noticed that I'm getting less out of active competitions than I was from the archived posts. I'm so concerned with trying to win that I don't write about and share my process, which I believe is a big mistake. Carefully composed posts have helped me get my ideas in order, and I think they were far more interesting to observers. So I'll step back from active competitions for a bit. I'll probably do the research summaries I promised, "Monster Carcass Auction", "Earwax" (maybe?), then come back to active competitions.

Thank you for doing the work of correcting this usage; precision in language matters.

I made some progress (right in the nick of time) by...

q = "1 <= dragon <= 6 and 1 <= lotus <= 6"
display(decks.query(q).corr()["win"].drop("win").sort_values(ascending=False).plot.bar())
decks.query(q)["win"].agg(["mean", "sum", "count"])

My deck submission (PvE and PvP) is:

See response to Ben Pace for counterpoints.

My counterpoints, in broad order of importance:

1. If you lie to people, they should trust you less. Observing you lying should reduce their confidence in your statements. However, there is nothing in the fundamental rules of the universe that say that people notice when they are deceived, even after the fact, or that they will trust you less by any amount. Believing that lying, or even being caught lying, will result in total collapse of confidence without further justification is falling for the just-world fallacy.
2. If you saw a man lying to his child about the death of the family dog, you wouldn't (hopefully) immediately refuse to ever have business dealings with such a deceptive, amoral individual. Believing that all lies are equivalent, or that lie frequency does not matter, is to fall for the fallacy of grey.
3. "Unethical" and "deceptive" are different. See hpmor ch51 for hpmor!Harry agreeing to lie for moral reasons. See also counterarguments to Kant's Categorical Imperative (lying is always wrong, literally never lie).
4. The point about information theory stands.

Note that "importance" can be broadly construed as "relevance to the practical question of lying to actual people in real life". This is why the information-theoretic argument ranks so low.

If good people were liars, that would render the words of good people meaningless as information-theoretic signals, and destroy the ability for good people to coordinate with others or among themselves.

My mental Harry is making a noise. It goes something like Pfwah! Interrogating him a bit more, he seems to think that this argument is a gross mischaracterization of the claims of information theory. If you mostly tell the truth, and people can tell this is the case, then your words convey information in the information-theoretic sense.

EDIT: Now I'm thinking about how to characterize "information" in problems where one agent is trying to deceive another. If A successfully deceives B, what is the "information gain" for B? He thinks he knows more about the world; does this mean that information gain cannot be measured from the inside?

Followed up on this idea and noticed that

Sorry in advance for an entirely too serious comment to a lighthearted post; it made me have thoughts I thought worth sharing. The whole "Karma convertibility" system is funny, but the irony feels slightly off. Society (vague term alert!) does in fact reward popular content with money. Goodhart's law is not "monetizing an economy instantly crashes it". My objections to Karma convertibility, are:

1. Exploitability. Put in enough people on a system, and some of them will try to break it. Put in even more people, and they will likely succeed.
2. Inefficiency. There is a big upfront cost to generating good ideas. Ie: you've got to invest putting interesting things inside your mind before you can make up your own. Specialization pays off just as much in intellectual labor as in other areas.
3. Pareto's law. A small, selected group can be a consistent performance outlier.
4. Marginal returns on money. The marginal value of money goes down dramatically when you get above the subsistence threshold.

I think that providing a salaried position to a small number of intrinsically motivated individuals is a much more efficient way of buying ideas. I think RAND is basically structured this way?

Epistemic status: Don't quote me on any of this. I've done no research, instead I'm pattern-matching from stuff that I've passively absorbed.

If there is a place where "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" is to be disobeyed with prejudice, I'd reckon this is it. ;)

Just the obvious contrarian poke:

observation
[412050, 104483, 17805, 2257, 246, 16, 1]

simulations
[411712, 104617, 17885, 2245, 213, 23, 1]
[412504, 104559, 17665, 2240, 212, 20, 5]
[412884, 104509, 17528, 2256, 225, 25, 1]
[413170, 104376, 17629, 2190, 217, 23]
[411926, 104692, 17828, 2209, 202, 23, 2]
[411883, 104746, 17624, 2302, 244, 16, 3]
[411866, 104728, 17779, 2258, 190, 24, 1]
[412771, 104106, 17813, 2294, 210, 24]
[412746, 104561, 17640, 2205, 209, 22, 1]
[412083, 104869, 17627, 2205, 237, 13, 1]
[412093, 104377, 17854, 2287, 224, 18, 1]

I'm interested! Thank you for the heads-up. I'll be sure to pop by.

Hm. I expected to do terribly on this problem since I hardly exhausted my avenues of research (I didn't even clean up the infohazardous object, despite knowing about it from other's comments). I ended up doing the worst out of everybody, which tracks, but the results are still clustered rather close.

I enjoyed the problem a lot, and I'm very grateful to aphyer for pinging me when he made the problem available. Tragically, I was sick at the time. :P

Brief notes:

• Unlike Umberto Eco's "How to Write a Thesis", and like johnwensworth's "How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor", this does not propose you sacrifice the importance of questions on the altar of rigor
• There is a pretty big hole on how to find "the 1-3 most prominent pieces on each side". When first encountering a claim on the context of an academic debate, this is usually not an issue. Often, not so much. Obviously, if you simply came up with the claim you have no conveniently laid out pointer to the academic literature.
• "Just write something", or the vomit pass, is an invaluable technique. I have been doing this more and more over the last two years. Having full license to be wrong is incredibly freeing, and it makes it much easier to iterate on an idea. You just read what you wrote and pay attention to the parts that make you cringe.

I came in pretty late, so I haven't gotten much to share.

Final allocations

And here is my impressions after seeing the spoilers and solution.

This post should be spoilered. Use >! to hide information that could tip somebody off, which in this case is everything.

I wrote my independent work in a post.

Maybe it is. Feynman's abacus story suggests that he (and colleagues) were familiar with lots of specific numbers and that it matters, somehow. Perhaps I should pick up the habit. Or perhaps that's backwards, and there's some particularly useful skill tree that, as a side effect, results in learning to recognize lots of numbers. Either way, just knowing that this is a common thing among the mathematically inclined is worth knowing.

I see. The spikiness is a tipoff that the numbers are being generated by some simple underlying process. I'm still not clear about why primes, though.

I'm guessing the idea is looking out for multiplicative processes, like looking out for the hump-tail shape of the distribution? Multiplying numbers together is an addition on their multiplicities-of-factors representation, so nd6 can never generate a number with a prime factor of 7 or higher. But I'm not explicitly hearing that as the rationale, so it feels like "primes are bound to show up, just keep an eye out for them".

Thank you gjm and Guy for the responses! It lifts my spirits immensely to know that my work is being received favorably.

Reproduced verbatim so both recipients are notified.

Thank you gjm and Guy for the responses! It lifts my spirits immensely to know that my work is being received favorably.

Reproduced verbatim so both recipients are notified.

My thoughts after reading the solution and spoiler comments.

I've written my independent work into a post. There is also a preface with some explanation as to the choice of tools.

It's great fun! I'm very pleased you are enjoying the posts. :)

Retrospective thoughts after seeing the solution.

I'm late for the party. I put my blind analysis on a full post, and will be going through all the problems in order.

Certainly for crux-hunting, you need two people who are fundamentally collaborating.

It has been pointed out to me that therapy is analogous to depositions in a way relevant to your argument: in therapy both patient and therapist are there with the stated purpose of resolving emotional tensions in the patient, but the patient can prove unhelpful or actively oppose the therapist's probes.

I think this is an example of an interaction that is collaborative in principle, but where techniques designed for adversarial interactions may do good.

"I don't know" can be a accurate. I think the advice is intended against people playing dumb, like Bill Clinton's "depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" or this witness denying knowledge of what a photocopier is. I know I've pulled this bullshit on myself at least once.

Using strategies that still work when some people act adverserial with you and try to deceive you is in line with being rational.

I think this gets close to the insight that motivated my post: a part of ourselves often tries to curl into a ball and deny reality to avoid emotional stress, interacting with that part of you is kind of adversarial.

Thank you for the comment!

No and no.

When I appear in the room I observe that I exist, but I couldn't have observed that I didn't exist, thus I don't update.

When a minute passes I observe that I survived, but I couldn't have observed that I didn't survive, thus I don't update.

This comment did not deserve the downvotes; I agree with asking for disclosure.

It does deserve criticism for tone. "Alarmist and uninformed" and "AGI death cult" are distractingly offensive.

The same argument for disclosure could could have been made by "given that LW's audience has outsized expectations of AI performance" and "it costs little, and could avoid an embarrasing misunderstanding".

To expand on 5:

I may be explaining Scrum for a job interview, and completely forget that the sprint review is a thing. Ask me about the sprint review however, and I can make a cogent case for (or against) the necessity of the dev team being involved (customer interactions are the purview of the project owner! agile methodologies emphasize cutting red tape! or something on those lines).

I use notes as reminders/pointers rather than longform descriptions (adopted from "The Bullet Journal Method", ch 2 "Events"). This helps with three things:

1. reviewing (looking back on my month),
2. remembering ideas when they are relevant,
3. building a big-picture view while reading.

1. Not very, still developing habit.
2. Mostly for work-related minutae, but trying to expand that.
3. Yes. I keep a stack of clipped together A8 sheets of paper on me at all times (essentially as a "RAM" extension), write a (modified) Bullet Journal, and keep an Obsidian vault with more topic-oriented permanent notes (this is also where book summaries go). I also use Zotero for digital collection management.
4. Sort of. I've tried a few different ideas (Zettelkasten, Bullet Journal, Getting Things Done, Cornell notes, plus some hacked-together monstruosities) for several months at a time. So far nothing stuck for more than a year.
5. I find it that the problem with memory tends to be retrieving memories, rather than storing them. I.e.: things are in my head, I just... forget that is the case. The exception is permanent topic notes. I write these longform for six-months-in-the-future me.

Some time ago I noticed this trend among people I respect on Twitter (motivating examples). It seems to me that there is a consensus view that openness has a damaging effect on discourse.

This view does not seem to stem from the problem addressed by "Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism" and "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs" -the gradual decline of a community due to environmental exposure- but rather from the problem that you percieve: the reputational hazard of public fora.

My current stance on public discourse is that it serves as a discovery mechanism: writing and speaking in public serves to find people worth talking with in private.

I have not yet read the book, but from a recommendation I infer that Leo Strauss' "Persecution and the Art of Writing" goes into considerable depth on the mechanics of using vagueness as a dogwhistling mechanism.

And remember: on-site backups are not backups. Even if you are working on a git repo, it is surprisingly easy to screw up your commit history so badly you have to burn it all down and start over, and that is not by far the worst possible disaster.

It is a direct response to a quotation from the article, so not really.

I guess I want to be "a normal [...] man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing."

Is that weird? Is that wrong?

Okay, yes, it's obviously weird and wrong, but should I care more about not being weird and wrong, than I do about my deepest most heartfelt desire that I've thought about every day for the last nineteen years?

I know this misses most of the point of the article, but I also believe it's worth pointing out: I don't think a male wanting a female body form is any weirder or wronger that a male wanting to be 2 inches taller, buff, and having 20/20 eyesight.

PS: I did try reducing "weird and wrong" to their components. Result of the excercise: I find the OP uncontroversially "statistically rare" or "heterodox", but neither "viscerally repulsive" nor "morally reprehensible". I can see the value of explicitly reducing complex concepts in the general case, but I'm not sure it was worthwhile for this instance.

May I propose "appraisals" as a substitute for "opinions"? It is more precise, in that it implies judgement of worth

Who wouldn't watch an ad for $10? Hell, at 10 cents per 1-minute ad, that is near minimum wage.

Appreciated. To my rss it goes.

Currently grappling with this problem (compsci undergrad). I'm pulling ideas from Allen's Getting Things Done, Carroll's Bullet Journal, and Ahrens' How to take smart notes

Hanabi

It is an excellent game to really get the concepts of priors and subjectively objective probabilities. Try a round and ask "what is the probability that the next card on the deck is a 5?", interesting discussion ensues.