LW admins—Is there a good reason why half my browser window when viewing the LW home page needs to be taken up with an enormous map? It’s pretty horrible (and somehow pushes the same mental buttons as those whole-screen “why not sign up for our mailing list?” popups some sites give you, though obviously it’s not actually very similar to those). I guess the idea is to encourage more people to go to meetups or something, but I promise it does not make me the least bit more inclined to do so.
gjm
Karma: 14,748
Dunno. I don’t think the way it is does any actual harm. Maybe something with “meetings” in it, as per Teerth Aloke’s suggestion.
Somehow the word “predicted” in the title (as opposed to, say, “future” or “planned”) led me to expect entries for things like “OpenAI releases explicit model of human utility function” and “Entire mass of planet earth converted to paperclips”...
The Lipschitz constant of a function gives an indication of how horizontal it is rather than how locally linear it is. Naively I’d expect that the second of those things matters more than the first. Has anyone looked at what batch normalization does to that?
More specifically: Define the 2-Lipschitz constant of function at to be something like and its overall 2-Lipschitz constant to be the sup of these. This measures how well is locally approximable by linear functions. (I expect someone’s already defined a better version of this, probably with a different name, but I think this’ll do.) Does batch normalization tend to reduce the 2-Lipschitz constant of the loss function?
[EDITED to add:] I think having a 2-Lipschitz constant in this sense may be equivalent to having a derivative which is a Lipschitz function (and the constant may be its Lipschitz constant, or something like that). So maybe a simpler question is: For networks with activation functions making the loss function differentiable, does batchnorm tend to reduce the Lipschitz constant of its derivative? But given how well rectified linear units work, and that they have a non-differentiable activation function (which will surely make the loss functions fail to be 2-Lipschitz in the sense above) I’m now thinking that if anything like this works it will need to be more sophisticated...
Consider a pizza-eating agent with the following “grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” preference: it has no “initial” preference between toppings but as soon as it has one it realises it doesn’t like it and then prefers all other not-yet-tried toppings to the one it’s got (and to others it’s tried).
There aren’t any preference cycles here—if you give it mushroom it then prefers pepperoni, but having switched to pepperoni it then doesn’t want to switch back to mushroom. If our agent has no opinion about comparisons between all toppings it’s tried, and between all toppings it hasn’t tried, then there are no outright inconsistencies either.
Can you model this situation in terms of committees of subagents? Can you do it without requiring an unreasonably large number of subagents?
The MVP described here doesn’t seem functionally any different from an open thread.
The future features clearly go beyond that, and the current MVP seems a reasonable stepping stone towards those. But … is it worth considering just adding those features to comments generally, or comments in threads with some special flag set (which would then need to be set on the open threads), rather than introducing a whole new thing?
(I’ll hazard a guess that that’s actually roughly how the current implementation works.)
I’m thinking, e.g., that “convert a comment into a full post” might be something people sometimes want to do to comments anywhere, not just ones they called shortform posts. And that it’s not entirely impossible that someone might want to be able to subscribe to a feed of all of some other user’s comments, though that seems a bit extreme.
Apparently “slip box” is roughly equivalent to “card index” and Luhmann’s system is as follows:
Make notes on small cards / pieces of paper.
Don’t attempt to categorize them with things like alphabetical order of subject or Dewey decimal notion.
Give them all unique identifiers, and allow these to have a “nested” structure when one note leads to others which lead to others.
Cross-link them by adding to each note references (via those unique IDs) to other notes that you know are related to it.
Obviously something very similar could be done on a computer, with many practical advantages over the version made out of pieces of paper.
I have a suspicion that Luhmann’s alleged great productivity (“alleged” only because I haven’t verified for myself) is best ascribed either (1) to things other than his use of a card-index system or (2) to idiosyncratic things about _how_ he used it that are not captured by what I wrote above or by the contents of the post here...
Unless I am missing something, this post never actually says what a slip-box is or how to make and use one. What then am I supposed to do with the advice that “to start the habit of using slip-boxes” I should “start by making literature notes”? I can make some literature notes … and what then? What do I do with them for them to be slip-box notes?
It seems like the single most important piece of information here is being wilfully withheld...
I’m sure you took into account things like house price appreciation. But what you said about investing the difference between what renters pay and what owners pay was misleading and wrong. You can do as careful and accurate and insightful a simulation as you please, but if what you say is “people pay more in mortgage + fees + taxes than in rent, which is bad because they could have invested the difference in the market and then they’d have got some actual returns” or “rent is bad because it’s just throwing money away” then you are making a broken argument and I think you shouldn’t do that. Not even if the conclusion of the broken argument happens to be the same as the conclusion of the careful accurate insightful simulation.
The question isn’t whether back-testing is hard, it’s how well you did it and whether whatever assumptions you made seem reasonable to any given reader. Again, my complaint isn’t that your final results are bad, it’s that we have no way of telling whether your final results are good or bad because you didn’t show us any of the information we’d need to decide.
[EDITED to add:] This is all coming out more aggressive-sounding than I would like, and I hope I’m not giving the impression that I think the OP is terrible or that you’re a bad person or any such thing. It just seems as if your responses to my comments aren’t engaging with the actual points those comments are trying to make. That may be wholly or partly because of lack of clarity in what I’ve written, in which case please accept my apologies.
Repayment versus interest etc.: Looking at total money in and total money out is fine so long as you do it carefully; in this case “carefully” means you can’t just say “If that money were invested in the market it would be earning you a return” as if those mortgage payments aren’t earning any return. I don’t know how a typical homeowner’s payments divide between repayment, interest, and other things, but it seems quite possible to me that more than the difference you’re talking about is repayment, in which case it could even be that the higher returns you (might hope to) get from investing the money in index funds rather than housing are more than counterbalanced by the fact that more of the money is being invested.
Of course the right way to answer this is to do the actual calculations, and you very reasonably suggest that your readers go and find a rent-versus-buy calculator and try to do them. Nothing wrong with that. But I think the way you describe the situation is no more accurate than the “if you rent you’re throwing the money away” line one hears from people arguing on the opposite side.
Stock market investors: If those numbers for hypothetical investors A,B,C come from a simulation you did then I think the article should say so, and should say something about what assumptions you made. As it stands, you’re just asking us to take them on faith. I don’t find them terribly implausible, and your simulations may be excellent, but we can’t tell that.
Anecdotal nonsense: Yup, the forced savings thing is a good point (and presumably not very applicable to anyone who’s bothering to read a lengthy article about the financial merits of renting versus buying). My suspicion is that the “poorer people rent, richer people buy” dynamic is an even bigger reason why my observations aren’t much evidence about what any given person here should do. But I don’t think the counterfactual is relevant here, because the observation I was drawing attention to wasn’t “buyers are doing OK” but “buyers are doing better than renters”.
I’m not feeling any glaring lacks. Of course it’s possible that there are possible changes that once made would be obvious improvements :-).
I do use the “recent discussion” section. I actually don’t mind the collapsing there—it’s not trying to present the whole of any discussion, and clearly space is at a big premium there, so collapsing might not be a bad tradeoff.
There is a lot of good sense in this article, but I have some problems with it. Perhaps the biggest: It appears to be written as if a house is only an investment; as if the buy-or-rent decision is made entirely on the basis of what will maximize your future overall wealth. I’m all in favour of maximizing wealth (all else being equal, at any rate) but a house is not only an investment; it is, as you point out, also a place where you are likely to be spending ~87k hours of your life, and you may reasonably choose to do something that makes you poorer overall if those 87k hours are substantially more pleasant for it.
Those non-financial factors aren’t all in favour of buying over renting. The article mentions one that goes the other way, though of course only in the context of what it means for your financial welfare: if you rent and don’t own, then it’s often easier to move. Here are some others:
Buy, because if you rent there are likely to be a ton of onerous restrictions on what you’re allowed to do. No pets! No children! No replacing the crappy kitchen appliances! No changing the horrible carpets!
Buy, if the properties available to buy (where you are) are more to your taste than the ones available for rent. Or: Rent, if the properties available to rent are more to your taste than the ones available to buy.
Buy, because if you rent then your landlord can kick you out on a whim. (Exactly how readily they can do that varies from place to place, but they always have some ability to do it and it’s a risk that basically doesn’t exist if you buy.)
Buy, if you get a sense of satisfaction or security from owning the place you live in. Or: Rent, if you find that being responsible for the maintenance of the place feels oppressive.
Some other quibbles.
People spend on average 50% more money on mortgages, taxes, and fees than they spend on rent. If that money were invested in the market it would be earning you a return.
Does that include morgage repayment as well as mortgage interest? Mortgage interest, taxes, and fees are straightforwardly “lost” in the same sort of way as rent is; mortgage repayment, though, is just buying a house slowly. That money is invested, in real estate rather than in equities, and it is earning you a return. (Possibly a smaller, more volatile, and/or less diversified return, for sure; I’m not disagreeing with that bit.)
let’s look at three examples of people trying to time the market. All three people invest at a rate of $200/mo. [...]
OK, let’s look. Where are the actual numbers? All I see is vague descriptions (e.g., A invests immediately before each crash, but how much do they invest on each occasion? An amount derived somehow from that $200/mo, but how? E.g., is the idea that the money sits there until a crash is about to happen and then however much is available gets invested, or what?) and final numbers with no explanation or justification or anything. For all I can tell, romeostevensit might just have made those numbers up. I bet he didn’t, but without seeing the details no one can tell anything.
Also: $200/mo 40 years ago is a very different figure from $200/mo now. Does anyone do anything at all like investing at a constant nominal rate over 40 years? It seems unlikely. If instead of “$200/month” you make it “whatever corresponds to $200/month now, according to some standard measure of inflation” then the numbers will look quite different. (For the avoidance of doubt, I expect that A,B,C would still come out in the same order.)
[EDITED to add:] Anecdotally, the people I know who have bought houses generally seem to have done OK, largely independent of when they’ve bought; the people I know who have rented seem to have had no end of problems. But (1) this is a small and doubtless unrepresentative sample, and (2) I think richer people are more likely to buy and poorer people more likely to rent (especially as I live somewhere where buying is generally assumed to be something you want to do), so I don’t think this is very strong evidence of anything.
Sure. But the thing I was saying might be useful (which, I understand, has nothing to speak of in common with what’s on offer right now) is auto-collapsing all comments I can be presumed to have read or decided not to bother reading on the grounds that they were already there the last time I visited the discussion. That would be useful even on posts with <=50 comments. (At least, it would be useful there if useful at all; it might be that I’m wrong in thinking it would be useful.)
If someone’s writing a whole post then for sure they should try to make its structure clear, perhaps with headings and tables of contents and introductory paragraphs and bullet points and whatnot.
I don’t think that’s usually appropriate for comments, which are usually rather short.
So, e.g., I don’t think your comment to which I’m replying right now would have been improved by adding such signposts. But, even so, I don’t see how I could tell whether I want to read the whole thing from knowing that it begins “I want to argue that this is a huge problem”.
There might be benefit in providing some sort of guidance for readers of a whole comment thread. But it’s hard to see how, especially as comment threads are dynamic: new material could appear anywhere at any time, and if order of presentation is partly determined by scores then that too can be rearranged pretty much arbitrarily. (And who’d do it?)
You might hope that a collapsed pile of comments is itself a sort of roadmap to the comments themselves, but I think that just doesn’t work, just as you wouldn’t get a useful summary of A Tale of Two Cities or A Brief History of Time by just taking the first half-sentence of each paragraph.
If comments took up the whole width of my browser window, I would find them acutely unpleasant to read. I like my text fairly small and I have my window full-screen; text becomes difficult to read when each line is more than about 15-20 words. (The exact figure depends on size, personal preference, how long those words are, line spacing, etc.)
Yes, I _do_ tend to read every comment on a thread. Or, sometimes, none, but usually if I’m bothering even to look at the comments on a post then I’m going to look at them all.
I don’t eat at restaurants with literally no menu. If a restaurant has a large intimidating menu, I read it all anyway; if I visit it a few times I will get to know what I like. I won’t be helped by a menu that says “Something containing chicken. Something containing turmeric. Something roughly round in shape.” which is roughly what the collapsed comments provide. The menu is only useful in so far as it (together with my past experience, the overall look of the place, etc.) gives me a good enough mental picture of each dish to have a good idea whether I’ll like it.
(An important distinction between visiting a restaurant and visiting Less Wrong: When I go to a restaurant, typically I intend to each a roughly fixed, fairly small number of dishes. I don’t generally go to LW with the intention of reading three comments and then leaving. I don’t so much mind there being no menu if what there is instead is a great multitude of little snacks I can try dozens of without feeling ill.)
Collapsed comments don’t (for me; I must stress that I’m not claiming to speak for anyone else) give me any useful view of what’s available; seeing the first few words of a comment tells me little, and I try not to prejudge things too much on the basis of author or score.
Expanding comments that are new since you last visited is a good idea. If I could get that (on all posts, not just ones with 50+ comments; why would I want that restriction) without any collapsing of comments I haven’t read yet, that would probably be useful. I’m interested in tools that let me read all the comments efficiently. I’m interested in tools that help me decide which comments are worthy of more attention. I am not interested in tools that try to decide for me which comments I will want to read. If I want that then I can go and read Facebook with “top stories” mode turned on instead of LW.
OK, so my feedback is that I have never ever seen a feature of this sort (unless intended only to hide outright spam and the like) that is any improvement over just leaving everything there, and this instance is no exception.
Perhaps the ability to collapse discussions, rather than having them start collapsed and providing a way to un-collapse them, might be useful sometimes, though I’m struggling to think when I’d actually use it. But this is (for me) a waste of time. Seeing half a line of a comment is usually not enough information to decide whether reading the whole thing is worth while, so the overall minimum-hassle solution is just to uncollapse everything. Thankfully I can make that the global default here on LW; if not, I’d just be clicking the “please expand everything” button every time. (Or, if there weren’t one, expanding everything by hand and cursing the admins.)
Perhaps it might be different if I were reading LW in order to acquire information about some particular thing as efficiently as possible. And perhaps there is some desire for LW to be more the sort of place one goes to acquire information efficiently, rather than e.g. a chatty social venue. Except that if LW were more “academic” in that way—something more like the Alignment Forum, perhaps—then I would expect an (even) higher proportion of the comments to be ones well worth reading for anyone interested in the topic at hand, so auto-collapsing would still be a net loss.
Are you looking for feedback on single line comments?
Information leakage alert: the screenshot there includes a comment from a now-deleted user; ordinary LW users viewing the same thing will see neither that user’s name nor their comment. I don’t think exposing that will do any grave harm, but you might consider using a different screenshot. (Also, if anyone thinks that deleting their account on LW _actually deletes their account_ they should be advised that apparently it does not.) [EDITED to add: to be more precise, in collapsed view ordinary LW users will see an error message in red instead of the username and truncated comment text; when expanded they _will_ see the text but _won’t_ see the username.]
Either your understanding is correct or mine isn’t: AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero _do_ do a tree search that the DM papers call “Monte Carlo Tree Search” but that doesn’t involve actual Monte Carlo playouts and that doesn’t match e.g. the description on the Wikipedia page about MCTS.
Aha, thanks. Sorry for being grumpy about it! (I hadn’t known there was a profile setting to turn it off.)