Here is a google sheet.
yagudin(Misha Yagudin)
Karma: 386
[Link] Intro to causal inference by Michael Nielsen (2012)
An example from Feynman’s «The Character of Physical Law»:
The next guy who did something great was Maxwell, who obtained the laws of electricity and magnetism. What he did was this. He put together all the laws of electricity, due to Faraday and other people who came before him, and he looked at them and realized that they were mathematically inconsistent. In order to straighten it out he had to add one term to an equation. He did this by inventing for himself a model of idler wheels and gears and so on in space. He found what the new law was – but nobody paid much attention because they did not believe in the idler wheels. We do not believe in the idler wheels today, but the equations that he obtained were correct. So the logic may be wrong but the answer right.
I would appreciate it if the ToC linked to the web versions of the essay.
A follow-up (h/t LW review). I got quite a bit out of the workshop, most importantly
I found a close friend and collaborator, whom I don’t think I would have met otherwise.
I found a close friend and co-founder, whom I was likely to meet otherwise, but it’s unlikely that we would have a good enough bond by covid-times.
There was much more but much less legible and “evaluatable.” I think ESE was excellent, and I would have done it even if I knew that I wouldn’t get two close friendships out of it.
Or, to change tack: the operating budget of the LessWrong website has historically been ~$600k, and this budget is artificially low because the site has paid extremely below-market salaries. Adjusting for the market value of the labor, the cost is more like $1M/year, or $2,700/day. If I assume LessWrong generates more value than the cost required to run it, I estimate that the site provides at least $2,700/day in value, probably a good deal more.
I think this estimate is mistaken because it ignores marginalism: basically, the cost of disabling LW for a year is much larger than 365 * the cost of disabling LW for only a day. The same goes for disabling the whole website vs. disabling only the frontpage.
(Sorry for adding salt to hurt feelings; posting because impact evaluation of longtermism projects is important.)
ACX is probably a better reference class: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked. In Jan, ACX had 78.2k readers, of which 6.0k subscribers for a 7.7% subscription rate.
See also: the guide by Alex Vermeer is fruitful for reviewing the past and planning the following years in an analytical and systematic way.
The most in-depth, but a bit outdated (c. 2012) article on sleep is written by Piotr Wozniak, whom you might know as a pioneer of spaced repetition software. The article is ~300 pages long. It includes summary & myths sections which are a bit longer than this post.
I think Nuno’s time-capped analysis is good.
Thanks for the post. I would recommend reading the original blog post by Noam Brown as it has the proper level of exposition and more details/nuances.
Overall, it seems that Pluribus is conceptually very similar to Libratus; sadly, no new insights about >2-player games. My impression is that because poker players don’t collude/cooperate too much, playing something close to an equilibrium against them will make you rich.
I am quite sure, that Moscow’s LW will celebrate a Secular Solstice on 21 or 22 of Dec.
Youtube
I permanently blocked the website in all browsers I use. I use command line tool youtube-dl to download the videos I want/need to watch. This workflow gives me an option to watch videos (and also some friction to reevaluate the decision to watch a video); but prevents me from engaging with youtube, the risky game I might ‘loss’ otherwise.
I predict that a lot of people who would take rationalist lent’s advice seriously would try to quite the same things and there are others who has hit on a good diet of experience that they could try to emulate. So It would be helpful to have a list of diets for quitting unwanted behaviour. Feel free to leave your recipes as a reply to this comment.
I think it might be good to normalize “just try stuff until they fix your condition” as one of the treatment strategies. I guess it’s a bit ironic that Dr. Spray-n-pray’s indifference toward which pill worked and why seems so epistemically careless, while actually maybe being a correct way to orient towards success when you optimize for luck and have little reliable information.
I think this paper, which models winner-takes-all, public knowledge situations (ex. the space race between the US and USSR) by «Guess Who?» game, is interesting formal model of the first half of this post.
“Guess Who?” is a popular two player game where players ask “Yes”/“No” questions to search for their opponent’s secret identity from a pool of possible candidates. This is modeled as a simple stochastic game. Using this model, the optimal strategy is explicitly found. Contrary to popular belief, performing a binary search is not always optimal. Instead, the optimal strategy for the player who trails is to make certain bold plays in an attempt catch up. This is discovered by first analyzing a continuous version of the game where players play indefinitely and the winner is never decided after finitely many rounds.
I want to mention that Tsvi Benson-Tilsen is a mentor at this summer’s PIBBSS. So some readers might consider applying (the deadline is Jan 23rd).
I myself was mentored by Abram Demski once through the FHI SRF, which AFAIK was matching fellows with a large pull of researchers based on mutual interests.
Russian military doctrine allows the usage of nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory.
This is ~false. See: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TkLk2xoeE9Hrx5Ziw/nuclear-attack-risk-implications-for-personal-decision?commentId=ukEznwTnD78wFdZip#ukEznwTnD78wFdZip
It seems to me, that Dacyn’s code executes
[stuff]at least once for anyn. But iffn <= 0, originalwhileloop does not execute its body. Dacyn’s code looks like ado-whileloop.
A very successful crowdfunding for printing HPMoR has happened in Russia. 21k books are going to be printed: some of them will go to public/university libraries, some to gifted students. More good HPMoR related news are coming from Russia, but too early to announce them.