There is a related thing which might work, namely taking the downwards closure of the affine subspace w.r.t. some cone which is somewhat larger than the cone of measures. For example, if your underlying space has a metric, you might consider the cone of signed measures which have non-negative integral with all positive functions whose logarithm is 1-Lipschitz.

Linear infra-Bayesian Bandits

Vanessa Kosoy6d1812

My thesis is the same research I intended to do anyway, so the thesis itself is not a waste of time at least.

The main reason I decided to do grad school, is that I want to attract more researchers to work on the learning-theoretic agenda, and I don't want my candidate pool to be limited to the LW/EA-sphere. Most qualified candidates would be people on an academic career track. These people care about prestige, and many of them would be reluctant to e.g. work in an unknown research institute headed by an unknown person without even a PhD. If I secure an actual faculty position, I will also be able to direct grad students to do LTA research.

Other benefits include:

Opportunity for networking inside the academia (also useful for bringing in collaborators).
Safety net against EA-adjacent funding for agent foundations collapsing some time in the future.
Maybe getting some advice on better navigating the peer review system (important for building prestige in order to attract collaborators, and just increasing exposure to my research in general).

So far it's not obvious whether it's going to pay off, but I already paid the vast majority of the cost anyway (i.e. the time I wouldn't have to spend if I just continued as independent).

Selfmaker662's Shortform

Vanessa Kosoy6d70

Creating a new dating app is hard because of network effects: for a dating app to easily attract users, it needs to already have many users. Convincing users to pay for the app is even harder. And, if you expect your app to be only marginally profitable even if it succeeds, you will have a hard time attracting investors.

Dating Roundup #3: Third Time’s the Charm

Vanessa Kosoy7d50

FWIW, from glancing at your LinkedIn profile, you seem very dateable :)

Dating Roundup #3: Third Time’s the Charm

Vanessa Kosoy8d1010

One feature of polyamory is that it means continuous auditions of potential replacements by all parties. You are not trading up in the sense that you can have multiple partners, but one thing leads to another and there are only so many hours in the day.

Polyamory is not that different from monogamy in this respect. It's just that in monogamy "having a relationship" is a binary: either you have it or you don't have it. In polyamory, there is a scale, starting from "meeting once in a blue moon" all the way to "living together with kids and joint finances". So, if in monogamy your attitude might be "I will not trade up unless I meet someone x% better", then in polyamory your attitude might be "I will devote you y% of my time and will not reduce this number unless there's someone x% better competing for this slot". (And in both cases x might be very high.)

More generally, I feel that a lot of arguments against polyamory fail the "replace with platonic friendship" test. Like, monogamous people also have to somehow balance the time they invest in their relationship vs. friends vs. family vs. hobbies etc, and also have to balance the time allocated to different friends. I know that some mono people feel that sex is some kind of magic pixie dust which makes a relationship completely different and not comparable in any way to platonic friendship, but... Not everyone feels this way? (In both directions: I simultaneously consider romantic relationship comparable to "mere" platonic friendships and also consider platonic friendships substantially more important/committing than seems to be the culturally-prescribed attitude.)

Also, it feels like this discussion has a missing mood and/or a typical mind fallacy. For me, monogamy was a miserable experience. Even aside from the fact you only get to have one relationship, there's all the weird rules about which things are "inappropriate" (see survey in the OP) and also the need to pretend that you're not attracted to other people (Not All Mono, but I think many relationships are like that). All the "pragmatic" arguments about why polyamory is bad sound to me similar to hypothetical arguments that gay relationships are bad. I mean, there might be some aspects of gay relationships that are often worse than corresponding aspects of straight relationships. But if you're gay, a gay relationship is still way better for you! Even if you're bi and in some sense "have a choice", it still seems inappropriate to try convincing you about how hetero is much better.

Warning: About to get a little ranty/emotional, sorry about that but was hard to express otherwise.

Finally, not to be that girl, but it's a little insensitive to talk about this without the least acknowledgement that polyamory is widely stigmatized and discriminated against. I know it's LessWrong here, we're supposed to use decoupling norms and not contextualizing norms, and I'm usually fully in favor of that, but it still seems to me that this post would better on the margin, if it had a little in the way of acknowledging this asymmetry in the debate.

Instead, the OP talks about "encouraging widespread adaptation". What?? I honestly don't know, maybe in the Mythic Bay Area, someone is encouraging widespread conversion to polyamory. In the rest of the world, we only want (i) not be stigmatized (ii) not be discriminated against (iii) having some minimal awareness that polyamory is even an option (it was certainly an eye-opening discovery for me!) and (iv) otherwise, being left alone, ~~and not have mono people endlessly explain to us how their way is so much better~~ [My spouse tells me this last bit was too combative. Sorry about that: we are certainly allowed to have respectful discussion about the comparative advantages of different lifestyles.]

Which skincare products are evidence-based?

Vanessa Kosoy11d20

Just flagging that the effect on sunscreen on skin cancer is a separate question from the the effect of sunscreen on visible skin aging (even if both questions are important).

Which skincare products are evidence-based?

Vanessa Kosoy12d30

Thanks for this!

Does it really make sense to see a dermatologist for this? I don't have any particular problem I am trying to fix other than "being a woman in her 40s (and contemplating the prospect of her 50s, 60s etc with dread)". Also, do you expect the dermatologist to give better advice than people in this thread or the resources they linked? (Although, the dermatologist might be better familiar with specific products available in my country.)

Which skincare products are evidence-based?

Vanessa Kosoy14d20

Can you say more? What are "anabolic effects"? What does "cycling" mean in this context?

Vanessa Kosoy's Shortform

Vanessa Kosoy26dΩ230

Sort of obvious but good to keep in mind: Metacognitive regret bounds are not easily reducible to "plain" IBRL regret bounds when we consider the core and the envelope as the "inside" of the agent.

Assume that the action and observation sets factor as and $O = O_{0} \times O_{1}$ , where $(A_{0}, O_{0})$ is the interface with the external environment and $(A_{1}, O_{1})$ is the interface with the envelope.

Let $Λ : Π \to □ (Γ \times (A \times O)^{ω})$ be a metalaw. Then, there are two natural ways to reduce it to an ordinary law:

Marginalizing over $Γ$ . That is, let ${p r}_{- Γ} : Γ \times (A \times O)^{ω} \to (A \times O)^{ω}$ and ${p r}_{0} : (A \times O)^{ω} \to (A_{0} \times O_{0})^{ω}$ be the projections. Then, we have the law $Λ^{?} := ({p r}_{0} {p r}_{- Γ})_{*} \circ Λ$ .
Assuming "logical omniscience". That is, let $τ^{*} \in Γ$ be the ground truth. Then, we have the law $Λ^{!} := {p r}_{0 *} (Λ ∣ τ^{*})$ . Here, we use the conditional defined by $Θ ∣ A := {θ ∣ A ∣ θ \in arg {max}_{Θ} Pr [A]}$ . It's easy to see this indeed defines a law.

However, requiring low regret w.r.t. neither of these is equivalent to low regret w.r.t $Λ$ :

Learning $Λ^{?}$ is typically no less feasible than learning $Λ$ , however it is a much weaker condition. This is because the metacognitive agents can use policies that query the envelope to get higher guaranteed expected utility.
Learning $Λ^{!}$ is a much stronger condition than learning $Λ$ , however it is typically infeasible. Requiring it leads to AIXI-like agents.

Therefore, metacognitive regret bounds hit a "sweep spot" of stength vs. feasibility which produces a genuinely more powerful agents than IBRL^[1].

^{^}
More precisely, more powerful than IBRL with the usual sort of hypothesis classes (e.g. nicely structured crisp infra-RDP). In principle, we can reduce metacognitive regret bounds to IBRL regret bounds using non-crsip laws, since there's a very general theorem for representing desiderata as laws. But, these laws would have a very peculiar form that seems impossible to guess without starting with metacognitive agents.

When is a mind me?

Vanessa Kosoy26d20

The topic of this thread is: In naive MWI, it is postulated that all Everett branches coexist. (For example, if I toss a quantum fair coin times, there will be $2^{n}$ branches with all possible outcomes.) Under this assumption, it's not clear in what sense the Born rule is true. (What is the meaning of the probability measure over the branches if all branches coexist?)