All of papetoast's Comments + Replies

Literally just copy pasted your question.

https://chatgpt.com/share/681a16b2-58f4-8002-8e24-85912ba3d891 (seems to found another censored person, Brian Hood though)

For other models I asked in OpenRouter and idk any easy way of sharing chats

You got me curious, I thought "no way the newer models with late 2024 knowledge cutoff date and/or search cant figure this out" but apparently not. Tried 5 minutes and couldn't get any model to output the answer

2Mateusz Bagiński
care to share some chats?

FYI LessWrong has a somewhat hidden feature called Dialogues. Note that 

PSA - at least as of March 2024, the way to create a Dialogue is by navigating to someone else's profile and to click the "Dialogue" option appearing near the right, next to the option to message someone. 

Disagree with

  • Cooking / cutting vegetables (also other things)
  • Cutting vegetables / sharpening knives
  • QS experiments / knowing statistics

The first two is pretty much like sketch / making pencils and paper, and the third one is absolutely essential and not a skill than you can not have

1Huera
re 2: Now that you mention it, I realized sharpening can be easily outsourced. My mistake. re 1: I don't see it, buying pre-chopped onions is simply not equivalent to having a freshly chopped onion and some vegetables cannot be bought pre-cut. While cutting isn't a bottleneck for most people I had this chain in mind: (no cutting skills) -> (cooking takes more time and is less pleasant) -> (Less willingness to try new or complex recipes). (Also, if you don't have proper technique, you're at a higher risk of cutting yourself. In that respect, it's like free climbing / using safety ropes) re 3: I had self-experiments in general in mind (people run self-experiments, without knowing statistics, or even gathering data), but it did not occur to me that not all self-experiments are QS (probably most aren't). As written you are, of course, correct.

That article has no source, neither primary or secondary ones, it just made a lot of assertions. I wouldn't rely on it[1]. Because of how low quality it is, I find it even more annoying that you asked readers to fact check, rather than finding more information yourself. 

Still, even assuming that there is indeed groups of people who are only relying on social welfare to survive and do nothing else, the trade-off is that cutting social expenditure would in fact harm the other groups of people who genuinely need it. What percentage of homeless in Califor... (read more)

This comment is not shown as an answer because it is not an answer, it is asking clarifying questions. Notice how the LessWrong UI intentionally separates them.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04682 

Reading the abstract immediately reminds me of this post

We propose a novel framework, Meta Chain-of-Thought (Meta-CoT), which extends traditional Chain-of-Thought (CoT) by explicitly modeling the underlying reasoning required to arrive at a particular CoT. 

As someone who wrote pages of pedantic rules for minecraft doors, I relate to this post a lot. Rules are just hard to write and to enforce consistently

Answer by papetoast10

I am down to some level of tagging along and learning together, but not a full commitment. You probably want to find someone that can make a stronger commitment as an actual study partner.

I am a year 3 student (which means I may already know some of the stuff, and that I have other courses) and timezones likely suck (UTC+8 here). We can discuss on discord @papetoast if you like.

This is pretty cool. A small complaint about the post itself is that it does not explain what Squiggle is so I had to look around in your website to understand why this Squiggle language that I have never heard of is used.

2ozziegooen
Fair point! I should have more prominently linked to that.  There's some previous posts about it on LessWrong and the EA Forum explaining it in more detail.  https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/squiggle

The most obvious thing is that I post things out when I want people to see it, and LW/Twitter is mostly about how serious I want to be.

I don't really. Idea get revisited when I stumble on it again, but I rarely try to plan and focus on some ideas without external stimulation.

The rules are not completely consistent over time though, also it is just not articulatable in 1 minute of effort lol. I'm sure I can explain 80% of the internal rule with effort

1CstineSublime
lol, if you do have the patience or can justify the time to articulate it I'd be greatly appreciative but also understand if you don't. I said it in another comment but what I'm finding very interesting is not seeing idealized best practice, but descriptive practice - how do people actually make notes. And as always my follow up question is: how do you go about revisiting or reviewing things? For example I see you have a few [draft] of long forms in among your shortforms that have been there fore some months. How often do you revisit and review these (no judgement if you don't - that's the real reason I'm asking about where people put their notes).

Obsidian/LW Shortforms/Twitter for slightly different types of ideas, can't articulate the difference though

1CstineSublime
I'm just letting you know that I'll be speed reading your shortforms, trying to discern what patterns unify them.

Don't really want to touch the packages, but just setting the EVALS_THREADS environmental variable worked

2sjadler
Great! Appreciate you letting me know & helping debug for others

Tried running but I got [eval.py:233] Running in threaded mode with 10 threads! which makes it unplayable for me (because it is trying to make me to 10 tests alternating

2sjadler
Oh interesting, I’m out at the moment and don’t recall having this issue, but if you override the default number of threads for the repo to 1, does that fix it for you? https://github.com/openai/evals/blob/main/evals/eval.py#L211 (There are two places in this file where threads =, would change 10 to 1 in each)
papetoast1-1

Wealth $10k, risk 50% on $9999 loss, recommends insure for $9900 premium.

The math is correct if you're trying to optimize log(Wealth). log(10000)=4 and log(1)=0 so the mean is log(100)=2. This model assumes going bankrupt is infinitely bad, which is not accurate of an assumption, but it is not a bug.

2FireStormOOO
Hmm, I guess I see why other calculators have at least some additional heuristics and aren't straight Kelly.  Going bankrupt is not infinitely bad in the US.  If the insured has low wealth, there's likely a loan attached to any large asset that really complicates the math.  Making W just be "household wealth" also doesn't model "I can replace the loss next paycheck".  I'm not sure what exactly the correct notion of wealth is here, but if wealth is small compared to future earnings, and replacing the loss can be deferred, these assumptions are incorrect. And obviously, paying $10k premium to insure a 50% chance of a $10k loss is always a mistake for all wealth levels.  You're choosing to be bankrupt in 100% of possible worlds instead of 50%.

You can still nominate posts until Dec 14th?

Thought about community summaries a very little bit too, with the current LW UI, I envision that the most likely way to achieve this is to

  1. Write a distillation comment instead of post
  2. Quote the first sentence of the sequences post so that it could show up on the side at the top
  3. Wait for the LW team to make this setting persistent so people can choose Show All

2Adam Zerner
My instinct is that it's not the type of thing to hack at with workarounds without buy in from the LW team. If there was buy in from them I expect that it wouldn't be much effort to add some sort of functionality. At least not for a version one; iterating on it could definitely take time, but you could hold off on spending that time iterating if there isn't enough interest, so the initial investment wouldn't be high effort.

There is also the issue of things only being partially orderable.

When I was recently celebrating something, I was asked to share my favorite memory. I realized I didn't have one. Then (since I have been studying Naive Set Theory a LOT), I got tetris-effected and as soon as I heard the words "I don't have a favorite" come out of my mouth, I realized that favorite memories (and in fact favorite lots of other things) are partially ordered sets. Some elements are strictly better than others but not all elements are comparable (in other words, the set of all me

... (read more)

It is hard to see, changed to n.

papetoast*233

In my life I have never seen a good one-paragraph[1] explanation of backpropagation so I wrote one.

The most natural algorithms for calculating derivatives are done by going through the expression syntax tree[2]. There are two ends in the tree; starting the algorithm from the two ends corresponds to two good derivative algorithms, which are called forward propagation (starting from input variables) and backward propagation respectively. In both algorithms, calculating the derivative of one output variable  with respect to one input variable... (read more)

2habryka
Presumably you meant to say something else here than to repeat δyiδx1 twice? Edit: Oops, I now see. There is a switched i. I did really look quite carefully to spot any difference, but I apparently still wasn't good enough. This all makes sense now.

Strongly agreed. Content creators seem to get around this by creating multiple accounts for different purposes, but this is difficult to maintain for most people.

I rarely see them show awareness of the possibility that selection bias has created the effect they're describing.

In my experience with people I encounter, this is not true ;)

Joe Rogero: Buying something more valuable with something less valuable should never feel like a terrible deal. If it does, something is wrong.

clone of saturn: It's completely normal to feel terrible about being forced to choose only one of two things you value very highly.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dRTj2q4n8nmv46Xok/cost-not-sacrifice?commentId=zQPw7tnLzDysRcdQv

1papetoast
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dRTj2q4n8nmv46Xok/cost-not-sacrifice?commentId=zQPw7tnLzDysRcdQv
  1. Butterfly ideas?
  2. By default I expect the author to have a pretty strong stance on the main idea of a post, also the content are usually already refined and complete, so the barrier of entry to having a comment that is valuable is higher.

Bob can choose whether to to hide this waste (at a cost of the utility loss by having $300 and worse listening experience, but a "benefit" of misleading Tim about his misplaced altruism)

True in my example. I acknowledge that my example is wrong and should have been more explicit about having an alternative. Quoting myself from the comment to Vladimir_Nesov:

Anyways, the unwritten thing is that Bob care about having a quality headphone and a good pair of shoes equally. So given that he already has an alright headphone, he would get more utility by buying a g... (read more)

Again, seems like we are in agreement lol. I agree with what you said and I meant that, but tried to compress it into one sentence and failed to communicate.

It sure can! I think we are in agreement on sunk cost fallacy. I just don't think it applies to example 1 because there exists alternatives that can keep the sunk resources. Btw this is why my example is on the order of $100, at this price point you probably have a couple alternative things to buy to spend the money.

5Vladimir_Nesov
What matters is if those alternatives are better (and can be executed on, rather than being counterfactual). It doesn't matter why they are better. Being better because they made use of the sunk resources (and might've become cheaper as a result) is no different from being better for other reasons. The sunk cost fallacy is giving additional weight to the alternatives that specifically use sunk resources, instead of simply choosing based on which alternatives are now better.

(I need to defend the sad and the annoying in two separate parts)

  1. Yes, and but sometimes that is already annoying on its own (Bob is not perfectly rational and sometimes he just really want the quality headphone, but now math tells Bob that Tim gifting him that headphone means he would have to wait e.g. ~2 years before it is worth buying a new one). Of course Bob can improve his life in other ways with his saved money, but still, would be nice if you can just ask Tim to buy something else if you had known.
  2. Sometimes increasing sum(projects) does not translat
... (read more)
3Viliam
Seems like the problem is that in real life people are not perfectly rational, and also they have an instinct to reciprocate when they receive a gift (at least by saying "thank you" and not throwing the gift away). In a world where Bob is perfectly rational and Tim has zero expectations about his gift, the situation is simple. Previously, Bob's choices were "spend $300 on good headphone", "spend $100 on bad headphone and $200 on something else", and "spend $300 on something else". Tim's action replaced the last two options with a superior alternative "use Tim's headphone and spend $300 on something else". Bob's options were not made worse. But real people are not utility maximizers. We instinctively try to choose a locally better option, and how we feel about it depends on what we perceive as the baseline. Given the choice between 10 utilons and 3 utilons, we choose 10 and feel like we just "gained 7 utilons". Given the choice between 10 utilons and 9 utilons, we choose 10 again, but this time we feel like we just "gained 1 utilon". Given the choice between 10 utilons and 10 utilons of a different flavor, we might feel annoyed about having to choose. Also, if Tim expects Bob to reciprocate in a certain way, the new options are not strictly better, because "spend $300 on good headphone" got replaced by "spend $300 on good headphone, but owe Tim a favor for giving me the $100 headphone I didn't use".
2Seth Herd
There are infinite things to be sad and annoyed by, should you choose to focus on those. :) I'd rather focus on the world as a whole being made better in your examples.

This is a tangent, but Sunk cost fallacy is not really a fallacy most of the time, because spending more resources beforehand really increases the chance of "success" most of the time. For more: https://gwern.net/sunk-cost 

I am trying to pinpoint the concept of "A doing a mediocre job of X will force B to rationally do Y instead of X, making the progress of X worse than if A had not done anything". The examples are just examples that hopefully helps you locate the thing I am handwaving at. I do not try to make them logically perfect because that would... (read more)

5Vladimir_Nesov
The decision to go on with the now-easier rest-of-the-plan can be correct, it's not the case that all plans must always be abandoned on the grounds of "sunk cost fallacy". The fallacy is when the prior spending didn't actually secure the rest of the current plan as the best course of action going forward. Alternatives can emerge that are better than continuing and don't make any use of the sunk resources.
papetoast11-1

It is sad and annoying that if you do a mediocre job (according to the receiver), doing things even for free (volunteer work/gifting) can sabotage the receiver along the dimension you're supposedly helping.

This is super vague the way I wrote it, so examples.

Example 1. Bob wants to upgrade and buy a new quality headphone. He has a $300 budget. His friend Tim not knowing his budget, bought a $100 headphone for Bob. (Suppose second-handed headphones are worthless) Now Bob cannot just spend $300 to get a quality headphone. He would also waste Tim's $100 which ... (read more)

Dagon134

Allocation of blame/causality is difficult, but I think you have it wrong.

ex. 1 ... He would also waste Tim's $100 which counterfactually could have been used to buy something else for Bob. So Bob is stuck with using the $100 headphone and spending the $300 somewhere else instead.

No.  TIM wasted $100 on a headset that Bob did not want (because he planned to buy a better one).  Bob can choose whether to to hide this waste (at a cost of the utility loss by having $300 and worse listening experience, but a "benefit" of misleading Tim about his mispl... (read more)

4Seth Herd
In both cases one particular project was harmed but the sum total of projects was helped.

Now Bob cannot just spend $300 to get a quality headphone. He would also waste Tim's $100

That's a form of sunk cost fallacy, a collective "we've sacrificed too much to stop now".

Andy and Bob never touching it again because they have other books to work on

That doesn't follow, the other books would've also been there without existence of this book's poor translation. If the poor translation eats some market share, so that competing with it is less appealing, that could be a valid reason.

I want to use this chance to say that I really want to be able to bookmark a sequence

Agreed on the examples of natural abstractions. I held a couple abstraction examples in my mind (e.g. atom, food, agent) while reading the post and found that it never really managed to attack these truly very general (dare I say natural) abstractions.

1deepthoughtlife
The good thing about existence proofs is that you really just have to find an example. Sometimes, I can do that.

I overlayed my phone's display (using scrcpy) on top of the website rendered on Windows (Firefox). Image 1 shows that they indeed scaled to align. Image 2 (Windows left, Android right) shows how the font is bolder on Windows and somewhat blurred.

The monitor is 2560x1440 (website at 140%) and the phone is 1440x3200 (100%) mapped onto 585x1300.

I am on Windows. This reply is on Android and yeah definitely some issue with Windows / my PC

papetoast*84

Re: the new style (archive for comparision)

Not a fan of

1. the font weight, everything seem semi-bolded now and a little bit more blurred than before. I do not see myself getting used to this.

2. the unboxed karma/argeement vote. It is fine per se, but the old one is also perfectly fine.

 

Edit: I have to say that the font on Windows is actively slightly painful and I need to reduce the time spent reading comments or quick takes.

4habryka
Are you on Windows? Probably an OS-level font-rendering issue which we can hopefully fix. I did some testing on Windows (using Browserstack) but don't have a Windows machine for detailed work. We'll look into it in the next few days.
3kave
I don't think we've changed how often we use serifs vs sans serifs. Is there anything particular you're thinking of?

One funny thing I have noticed about myself is that I am bad enough at communicating certain ideas in speech that sometimes it is easier to handwave at what a couple things that I don't mean and let the listener figure out the largest semantic cluster in the remaining "meaning space".

Even as I’m caught up in lazy activity, I’m making specific plans to be productive tomorrow.

How? I personally can't really make detailed or good plans during lazy mode

1Wuje
Thanks — bonehead mistake. Fixed.
papetoast*1116

Manifold is pretty weak evidence for anything >=1 year away because there are strong incentives to bet on short term markets.

The list of once “secret” documents is very cool, thanks for that. (But I skimmed the other parts too)

I think the interchangeability is just hard to understand. Even though I know they are the same thing, it is still really hard to intuitively see them as being equal. I personally try (but not very hard) to stick with X -> Y in mathy discussions and if/only if for normal discussions

For nondeterministic voting surely you can just estimate the expected utility of your vote and decide whether voting is worth the effort. Probably even easier than deterministic ones.

Btw, I feel like the post is too incomplete on its own for the title Should we abstain from voting?. It feels more like Why being uninformed isn't a reason to not vote.

Maybe make a habit of blocking https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/*  while writing?

The clickbait title is misleading, but I forgive this one because I do end up finding it interesting, and it is short. In general I mostly don't try to punish things if it end up to be good/correct.

Yeah, you kind of have to expect from the beginning that there's some trick, since taken literally the title can't actually be true. So I think it's fine

papetoast*20

Starting today I am going to collect a list of tricks that websites use to prevent you from copy and pasting text + how to circumvent them. In general, using ublock origin and allow right click properly fixes most issues.

1. Using href (https://lnk.to/LACA-15863s, archive)

behavior: https://streamable.com/sxeblz

solution: use remove-attr in ublock origin - lnk.to##.header__link:remove-attr(href)

2. Using a background image to cover the text (https://varium.jp/talent/ahiru/, archive)

Note: this example is probably just incompetence. 

behavior: https://stream... (read more)

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