AllAmericanBreakfast

Karma: 7,784

Monkeypox checklist: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kPQAAb7ayZpKYPzME/?commentId=gJqJwdDHXpPjNMx7Q

Correlation does imply some sort of causal link.

For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.

Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink

Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.

Replications prove there’s something new under the sun.

Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?

Are they both controlled by something already begun?

Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?

AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Dec 2022 17:28 UTC
4 points
on: Oliver Sipple
I haven’t thought about Oliver Sipple since I posted my original comment. Revisiting it now, I think it is a juicier consequentialist thought experiment than the trolley problem or the surgeon problem. Partly, this is because the ethics of the situation depend so much on which aspect you examine, at which time, and illustrates how deeply entangled ethical discourse is with politics and PR.
It’s also perfectly plausible to me that Oliver’s decline was caused by the psychological effect of unwanted publicity and the dissolution of his family ties. But I’m not sure. Was he going to spiral into alcoholism, obesity, schizophrenia, and heart failure anyway? I’d be inclined to cite the collider paradox and say “no,” it would be really unusual to find that these two unlikely aspects of his life are not causally linked.
Except that I also think Oliver Sipple’s story wouldn’t be as visible as it is without the tragic ending. If this story had ended 4 paragraphs earlier than it did, it would still be sad, but not quite as profoundly tragic. So it seems plausible that we are reading about Oliver because he had two extraordinary but uncorrelated aspects to his life: his heroism and his rapid decline, and together they make such a good story that we choose to infer a causal connection where there is none. Perhaps his health decline was more related to his Vietnam experience: “Wounded Vietnam vet drinks himself into oblivion.”
I wonder if journalism ethics classes examine this aspect of the story. Because selecting from among all possible lives for those having a tragic shape due to two mostly uncorrelated extraordinary events is exactly the sort of mistake I expect journalists to make.

AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Dec 2022 17:03 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 0
on: The LessWrong 2021 Review (Intellectual Circle Expansion)
It might also be a good idea to pin this post while the review’s going on.

AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Dec 2022 6:14 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: c.trout’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
It sounds like what you really care about is promoting the experience of empathy and fellow-feeling. You don’t particularly care about moral calculation or deference, except insofar as they interfere or make room for with this psychological state.

I understand the idea that moral deference can make room for positive affect, and what I remain skeptical of is the idea that moral calculation mostly interferes with fellow-feeling. It’s a hypothesis one could test, but it needs data.
What links here?
- c.trout's comment on SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists by c.trout (2 Dec 2022 6:47 UTC; 1 point)

AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Dec 2022 5:11 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: c.trout’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
It’s better when we have our heart in it, and my point is that moral reasoning can help us do that. From my point of view, almost all the moral gains that really matter come from action on the level of global initiatives and careers directed at steering outcomes on that level. There, as you say, consequentialism is the way to go. For the everyday human acts that make up our day to day lives, I don’t particularly care which moral system people use—whatever keeps us relating well with others and happy seems fine to me. I’d be fine with all three ethical systems advertising themselves and competing in the marketplace of ideas, as long as we can still come to a consensus that we should fund bed nets and find a way not to unleash a technological apocalypse on ourselves.

AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Dec 2022 3:06 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: c.trout’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
It sounds like you’re arguing not so much for everybody doing less moral calculation, and more for delegating our moral calculus to experts.
I think we meet even stronger limitations to moral deference than we do for epistemic deference: experts disagree, people pose as experts when they aren’t, people ignore expertise where it exists, laypeople pick arguments with each other even when they’d both do better to defer, experts engage in interior moral disharmony, etc. When you can do it, I agree that deference is an attractive choice, as I feel I am able to do in the case of several EA institutions.
I strongly dislike characterizations of consequentialism as “dancing around” various abstract things. It is a strange dance floor populated with strange abstractions and I think it behooves critics to say exactly what they mean, so that consequentialists can make specific objections to those criticisms. Alternatively, we consequentialists can volley the same critiques back at the virtue ethicists: the Catholic church seems to do plenty of dancing around its own seedy history of global-scale consquest, theft, and abuse, while asking for unlimited deference to a moral hierarchy it claims is not only wise, but infallible. I don’t want to be a cold-hearted calculator, but I also don’t want to defer to, say, a church with a recent history of playing the ultimate pedopheliac shell game. If I have to accept a little extra dancing to vet my experts and fill in where ready expertise is lacking, I am happy for the exercise.

AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Dec 2022 0:41 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Also, let’s remember that the deontologists and virtue ethicists share plenty of blame for “one thought too many.” I’ve spent hours fielding one objection after another to the simple and obvious rightness of permitting carefully regulated kidney sales from virtue ethicists who go on for hours concocting as hoc ethical objections to the practice. I’m not sure why consequentialism is being singled out here as being unusually provocative of excessive moral perseveration.

AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Dec 2022 0:37 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Thinking more about the “moral ugliness” case, I find that ethical thought engenders feelings of genuine caring that would otherwise be absent. If it weren’t for EA-style consequentialism, I would hardly give a thought to malaria, for example. As it is, moral reason has instilled in me a visceral feeling of caring about these topics, as well as genuine anger at injustice when small-potatoes political symbolism distracts from these larger issues.

Likewise, when a friend is down, I am in my native state cold and egocentric. But by reminding myself intellectually about our friendship, the nature of their distress, the importance of maintaining close connections and fellow feeling, I spark actual emotion inside of myself.

AllAmericanBreakfast 1 Dec 2022 23:28 UTC
7 points
on: Core Pathways of Aging
Both this document and John himself have been useful resources to me as I launch into my own career studying aging in graduate school. One thing I think would have been really helpful here are more thorough citations and sourcing. It’s hard to follow John’s points (“In sarcopenia, one cross-section of the long muscle cell will fail first—a “ragged red” section—and then failure gradually spreads along the length.”) and trace them back to any specific source, and it’s also hard to know which of the synthetic insights are original to John and which are insights from the wider literature that John is echoing here.
While eschewing citations makes the post a little easier to scan, and probably made it a lot easier to write, I think that it runs the risk of divorcing the post from the wider literature and making it harder for the reader to relate this blog post to the academic publications it is clearly drawing upon. It would have also been helpful if John had more often referenced specific terms—when he says “Modern DNA sequencing involves breaking the DNA into little pieces, sequencing those, then computationally reconstructing which pieces overlap with each other,” it’s true, but also, DNA sequencing methods are diverse and continue to evolve on a technological level at a rapid pace. It’s hard to know exactly which set of sequencing techniques he had in mind, or how much care he took in making sure that there’s no tractable way to go about this.
Overall, I’m just not sure to what extent I ought to let this post inform my understanding of aging, as opposed to inspiring and motivating my research elsewhere. But I still appreciate John for writing it—it has been a great launch point.

AllAmericanBreakfast 1 Dec 2022 22:59 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: The LessWrong 2021 Review (Intellectual Circle Expansion)
Oh, that explains why I wasn’t seeing any review-writing or voting options. When I change the URL to the 2021 posts it works. Just needs an update to the link.

AllAmericanBreakfast 1 Dec 2022 22:58 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The LessWrong 2021 Review (Intellectual Circle Expansion)
I’m not seeing either voting options or review-writing options on any of the posts in my past upvotes page.

AllAmericanBreakfast 1 Dec 2022 20:57 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Adam Shai’s comment on: Call For Distillers
Yes. I posted the description of the aging distillation project I described above on the AskAcademia subreddit, and was met with a firestorm of downvotes and strident claims from multiple respondants that it would be plagiaristic/stealing, and that I was obviously unfit to be a graduate student for even considering it.
One important caveat is that I originally posted that I was going to “publish” this essay, which many respondants seem to have initially taken as meaning “publish in a peer reviewed journal, passing the ideas and structure off as my own.” But even after updating the OP and specifically addressing that point in numerous replies, respondants generally continued to see the idea as a form of intellectual theft and of making no useful contribution to the reader.
It’s entirely possible that my initial post grabbed the attention of a couple redditors who are a few SDs from the mean in terms of sensitivity to plagiarism concerns, and that they got so fired up about that possibility that they couldn’t really make a distinction between the scenario they had imagined I was proposing and what I actually intended to do. But I think the more likely explanation is that a lot of academics would see a thorough rewrite of a specific source in new language as a form of intellectual laziness/theft, even with proper citations, and that people almost never do this for that exact reason. Up close, it might not be plagiarism, but from a distance, it sure looks like it. You have to do a lot of explaining to show why it’s maybe not plagiarism. Even if you convince one person, they might even still feel pressured to accuse you of plagiarism, because otherwise it looks like they’re being soft on crime. And even if not, they might still think you’re a fool for provoking a potentially ugly controversy, and want to distance themselves from you.
There are probably ways to do distillations that avoid this sort of issue, but I think anybody planning to do it ought to have a carefully thought-through plan for how they’re going to avoid accusations of plagiarism. Distillation of a single source is an unconventional format. Conventional formats—the book review, the summary, etc—exist because we, as a culture, have carved out a set of generally acceptable ways for people to respond to the works of other authors. Distillations aren’t really one of them (correct me if I’m wrong and you can point to sources on things like “how to write a distillation” from the wider world). When people write academic works, they might expect a review, a piece of science journalism, or whatever, but not that some stranger will come along and try to write a “distillation” of their entire paper and publish it online. And they might be pissed off to have their expectations violated.
By analogy, it’s a person deciding that since dancing is fun and healthy and they believe in “ask culture,” it’s OK for them to walk up to strangers at the bus stop and ask them to dance. It’s a weird thing to be asked, people will be confused about your motives and get anxious, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you quickly develop a reputation as a creep even if you always politely walk away when you get rejected and never ask the same person twice. We do not have a cultural norm of asking for dances at bus stops, and we don’t have a cultural norm of writing distillations. So at the very least, you should carefully vet the proposed distillation with the original author and be super clear on why, in each specific case, it’s OK for you to be producing one.

AllAmericanBreakfast 1 Dec 2022 17:23 UTC
2 points
on: Call For Distillers
I want to point out what could be a serious problem for anybody attempting to do “distillation” in a public setting. Although here, “distillation” is specifically couched as a way of explicating mathematics, I believe the concept generalizes to any repackaging dry, terse and abstract set of ideas into more intuitive language.
Let me start by giving a specific example of an unpublished piece of writing I produced as a form of distillation. The Handbook of the Biology of Aging is a great intellectual resource on the subject of geroscience, but it’s written in terse, abstract academese. I rewrote chapter 4 in much livelier language, with expanded examples and a slightly reworked structure, and credited the original author with both the ideas and the structure, being clear that I’m not claiming any intellectual novelty in my new version. It was always intended for my blog, not for publication in any peer-reviewed journal. I’m pretty confident that most lay audiences would prefer to absorb the original author’s ideas via my version than via the original.
The problem is plagiarism. Plagiarism isn’t just about copying words—it’s also about copying ideas. Although a careful distiller could avoid risk of violating formal policies/laws concerning plagiarism by carefully citing their sources and being clear that their work is not attempting to provide any form of intellectual novelty, it also poses a potential reputational risk to the distiller.
Here, distillation is highlighted in part as a way for students to build into a career as a researcher. However, even if it’s unfair, distillation can look like intellectual laziness—the academic version of an artist copying someone else’s work and displaying it in a gallery. Even if the artist cites the original source, perhaps by labeling the image with the tag “a copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night” displaying their copy in public is likely to undermine their reputation for being capable of original artistry and build their reputation as a “mere copier.” They might be perceived not only as artistically weak, but as a seedy sort of person who may well be on the road to selling art forgeries. A distiller faces the same reputational risk.
Think of it like the difference between an action that violates the law, and an action that could result in being sued. If a lawyer wants to sue you, then even if you ultimately win the case, you might be tied up in court for years, and suffer massive legal expenses. Smart people don’t skirt the edge of being potentially sued, at least not as part of their normal business operations. They steer well clear of this whenever possible. I think that distillation is skirting so close to potential perceptions of plagiarism and intellectual laziness that it creates an analogous risk.
I think this is deeply unfortunate, because distillation has all the benefits described in the OP. A good distillation can make important ideas more accessible, and that might in fact be the bottleneck for creating new intellectual contributions based on those ideas. But unfortunately, academia doesn’t really have a culture of considering distillation as a valuable form of scientific outreach. It will tend to see distillation as somewhere between plagiarism and intellectual laziness. Even if a persistent argument with one particular person who might accuse the distiller of these failings manages to convince them to see the value in the work of distillation, there will be another person right behind them to lobby the same accusation. And then the distiller looks like the sort of person who doesn’t have the judgment to know what’s going to rile up academics and create a perception of plagiarism—and who wants to work with somebody like that?
There’s a difference between a literature review or piece of journalism, which weaves together properly cited ideas from a variety of sources into a fundamentally new structure in a way that everybody can understand is not plagiaristic, and a distillation which, as I understand it, takes the intellectual architecture of a single source and dresses it up in new language. The latter looks a lot like plagiarism to many people.
The difficulty with producing distillation that doesn’t create laziness/plagiarism perceptions is unfortunate. But I think it’s akin to the unfortunate effect of patent law in slowing innovation. Right now, we prioritize the need of intellectuals to protect their intellectual contributions over the need for writers to supply audiences with more accessible versions of those ideas.
So if I was going to leave potential distillers with a takeaway message, it would be this:
Be EXTREMELY CAREFUL in how you write distillations. If you must write them, consider not publishing them. It’s not enough to properly cite your sources. Every time you publish a distillation, you are taking a reputational risk, and in many situations, there isn’t any real personal reward to counterbalance it. Even if you have not plagiarized, and even if you are capable of original thought, you might create a perception that you are an intellectually lazy plagiarizer hiding these failings under the term “distillation.” This might permanently damage your career prospects in academia. Unless you’re very confident that your specific approach to distillation will avoid that reputational risk to yourself, strongly consider keeping your distillation private.

AllAmericanBreakfast 1 Dec 2022 0:49 UTC
13 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Be less scared of overconfidence
I have a few ideas for subtitles:
- “Quitting your job is a legal way to cash in on insider information. It’s the only way to short a startup.”
- “Many markets fail to meet the assumptions of the EMH, and that’s you’re opportunity.”
- “Each expert has one piece of the puzzle, but nobody knows exactly how they all fit together.”
- “Why don’t I just trust the experts? Because they’re not answering the questions I’m asking.”

AllAmericanBreakfast 28 Nov 2022 0:36 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Science and Math
The highly educated are more willing to defer to experts on mathematical or scientific questions than we are on philosophical questions. It seems to me that the reverse is true for less educated people, though I am not confident about this.

Part of philosophy is making a legible model to explain the way things “seem to us,” to capture our intuitions. If our intuitions are not coherent or consistent, then insofar as philosophy attempts to reflect those intuitions and take them seriously, it will either fail to be coherent or become counterintuitive. Philosophy that does focus on topics more distant from human intuition, and that is grounded in physics or axioms, seems to achieve greater durability and consensus.

AllAmericanBreakfast 24 Nov 2022 22:55 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: strawberry calm’s comment on: Against “Classic Style”
I don’t think people do all the hedging because they think it would be informative. That’s the problem. The policy of advocating classic style is that people are either bad at using meta-discourse well, or they’re unconsciously using it in pursuit of a goal other than being maximally informative. By eliminating it and sticking with classic style, the writer comes closer to being maximally informative in most cases.

AllAmericanBreakfast 24 Nov 2022 22:42 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Against “Classic Style”
Why can’t you just use classic style through most of the document as a rule, then break it when necessary? That’s how we use all the other rules of style.

AllAmericanBreakfast 23 Nov 2022 22:43 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: When do you visualize (or not) while doing math?
The first math problem I created was spawned from a visualization on a rare occasion smoking marijuana. I started imagining cubes falling from the sky, and just observing this process. I got curious about the chance of one cube landing on top of another. This led to the problem:

Given a square boundary of size B, place squares of side length S one at a time completely inside of the boundary at random locations. How many squares on average will you place before a pair of squares overlaps?

AllAmericanBreakfast 23 Nov 2022 20:35 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: When do you visualize (or not) while doing math?
What’s the most important problem you are trying to solve by visualizing?

AllAmericanBreakfast 23 Nov 2022 5:55 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AI will change the world, but won’t take it over by playing “3-dimensional chess”.
This is quite well-written. The first point where I ran into a wall was the distinction you drew between short-term goals and long-term strategies as two categorically different things.

I note that AIs can trivially set long-term strategy. I just generated this on GPT-2:

“The President of the United States says, “my fellow Americans, the long-term strategy for our country is this:
1. Let’s get rid of the Bush tax rates
2. Cut income taxes for ordinary American workers (including retirees) and for corporations”
The question is how to translate this strategy into action. It seems to me that a more realistic distinction is whether an AI can take over certain specific human jobs. An AI can do the job of a human calculator. Can an AI successfully take over the job of the President of the USA? No, not yet—but this is in large part because people wouldn’t listen to its directives, not because it couldn’t issue them.

But I am not sure why we’d think that short term plans are somehow easier to make than long term goals. I bet GPT-2 could give me an equally plausible explanation for what chores I should do from my todo list.

AllAmericanBreakfast 18 Nov 2022 7:45 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: hello_ea_wrong’s comment on: If Professional Investors Missed This...
Why do you think the goal is ambiguous? I’m not sure if this quote is why you think it is ambiguous:
we lack the basic knowledge and tools to even predict let alone change the “world” in the next two years
But this is questioning our capacity to predict or change the world, rather than whether “putting serious effort into not wiping ourselves out” is a good goal to have.
There is a very specific and concrete definition of “wipe ourselves out”: the complete extinction of the human species. There are a few other specific cases too, but this is the main one.