Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# New music powers

Original post: [http://bearlamp.com.au/new-music-powers/](http://bearlamp.com.au/new-music-powers/)

* * *

I have [written before](http://bearlamp.com.au/one-model-of-understanding-independent-differences-in-sensory-perception/) about how I am pretty terrible at canvassing music in my head.  This lends to the appalling ability (to musically oriented people) to be able to do things like [listen to the same song on repeat](http://listenonrepeat.com/?v=JsntlJZ9h1U#Daryl_Hall_%26_John_Oates_-_Private_Eyes) 500 times or more in a row without being bothered by it either way.  I never cared more than the sense of "this is interesting but irrelevant" on the idea.

Being indifferent to music has given me the ability to be completely useless at holding a musical preference, or explore the value of music in terms of going to music events, or participating in musical experiences.

* * *

This week something changed!  Or more accurately last week.  Last week I was listening to a piece for the n'th time, but at the same time was quite badly sleep deprived.  As I was listening the music started falling apart.  Different parts of the music changed volume so that I could isolate different instruments and follow different features of the music.  At the time, being a bit sleep deprived I took it as a warning that maybe it was time to go to bed.  _hint hint: your going a little nuts_.

Today I noticed I can still do it.  When I am no longer sleep deprived I can pay attention to music in a different way than I used to be able to.  I can single out the drums and only "listen" to that part, or the guitar, or the vocals.  (it's pop music on the radio).  

Of course the reason I bothered to write about it, and the reason that it's interesting is; as half the readers can probably imagine - I told a musical friend of mine that I had developed new powers and he said, 

> Wait, people can't normally do that?

So I get to add this to the pile of typical mind, sensory perception assumptions that we make when we interpret our own individual world through our own senses.  What if your's worked a bit differently?  How much would that fundamentally change how you operate as a human?  How much you assume about the world around you and how it works?  And how everyone else works?  

* * *

Question:  What are your natural assumptions about how your senses work?  Have you ever noticed anyone else acting on different basic natural assumptions?

* * *

Meta: this took 45mins to write.
# [Link] How the Simulation Argument Dampens Future Fanaticism

[Very comprehensive analysis by Brian Tomasik](https://foundational-research.org/how-the-simulation-argument-dampens-future-fanaticism) on whether (and to what extent) the simulation argument should change our altruistic priorities. He concludes that the possibility of ancestor simulations somewhat increases the comparative importance of short-term helping relative to focusing on shaping the "far future".  
  
Another important takeaway: 

> \[...\] rather than answering the question “Do I live in a simulation or not?,” a perhaps better way to think about it (in line with Stuart Armstrong's anthropic decision theory) is “Given that I’m deciding for all subjectively indistinguishable copies of myself, what fraction of my copies lives in a simulation and how many total copies are there?"
# A Child's Petrov Day Speech

30 years ago, the Cold War was raging on. If you don’t know what that is, it was the period from 1947 to 1991 where both the U.S and Russia had large stockpiles of nuclear weapons and were threatening to use them on each other. The only thing that stopped them from doing so was the knowledge that the other side would have time to react. The U.S and Russia both had surveillance systems to know of the other country had a nuke in the air headed for them.

On this day, September 26, in 1983, a man named Stanislav Petrov was on duty in the Russian surveillance room when the computer notified him that satellites had detected five nuclear missile launches from the U.S. He was told to pass this information on to his superiors, who would then launch a counter-strike.

  

He refused to notify anyone of the incident, suspecting it was just an error in the computer system.

  

No nukes ever hit Russian soil. Later, it was found that the ‘nukes’ were just light bouncing off of clouds which confused the satellite. Petrov was right, and likely saved all of humanity by stopping the outbreak of nuclear war. However, almost no one has heard of him.

We celebrate men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who win wars. These were great men, but the greater men, the men like Petrov who stopped these wars from ever happening - no one has heard of these men.

  

Let it be known, that September 26 is Petrov Day, in honor of the acts of a great man who saved the world, and of who almost no one has heard the name of.

My 11-year-old son wrote and then read this speech to his six grade class.
# Linkposts now live!

![](http://i.imgur.com/Y9ECjP0.png)

You can now submit links to LW! As the rationality community has grown up, more and more content has moved off LW to other places, and so rather than trying to generate more content here we'll instead try to collect more content here. My hope is that Less Wrong becomes something like "the Rationalist RSS," where people can discover what's new and interesting without necessarily being plugged in to the various diaspora communities.

Some general norms, subject to change:

1.  It's okay to link someone else's work, unless they specifically ask you not to. It's also okay to link your own work; if you want to get LW karma for things you make off-site, drop a link here as soon as you publish it.
2.  It's okay to link old stuff, but let's try to keep it to less than 5 old posts a day. The [first link](/r/discussion/lw/nyq/yudkowskys_guide_to_writing_intelligent_characters/#comments) that I made is to Yudkowsky's Guide to Writing Intelligent Characters.
3.  It's okay to link to something that you think rationalists will be interested in, even if it's not directly related to rationality. If it's political, think long and hard before deciding to submit that link.
4.  It's not okay to post duplicates.

  

As before, everything will go into discussion. **Tag your links, please**. As we see what sort of things people are linking, we'll figure out how we need to divide things up, be it separate subreddits or using tags to promote or demote the attention level of links and posts.

  

(Thanks to James Lamine for doing the coding, and to Trike (and myself) for supporting the work.)
# Astrobiology III:  Why Earth?

After many tribulations, my astrobiology bloggery is back up and running using Wordpress rather than Blogger because Blogger is completely unusable these days.  I've taken the opportunity of the move to make better graphs for my old posts. 

"The Solar System: Why Earth?"  
  
https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/the-solar-system-why-earth/

Here, I try to look at our own solar system and what the presence of only ONE known biosphere, here on Earth, tells us about life and perhaps more importantly what it does not.  In particular, I explore what aspects of Earth make it special and I make the distinction between a big biosphere here on Earth that has utterly rebuilt the geochemistry and a smaller biosphere living off smaller amounts of energy that we probably would never notice elsewhere in our own solar system given the evidence at hand. 

Commentary appreciated.

Previous works:

Space and Time, Part I

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-i

Space and Time, Part II

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-ii
# MIRI AMA plus updates

MIRI is running an AMA on the Effective Altruism Forum tomorrow (Wednesday, Oct. 11): [**Ask MIRI Anything**](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/12r/ask_miri_anything_ama/). Questions are welcome in the interim!

Nate also recently posted [**a more detailed version of our 2016 fundraising pitch**](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/12n/miri_update_and_fundraising_case/) to the EA Forum. One of the additions is about our first funding target:

> We feel reasonably good about our chance of hitting target 1, but it isn't a sure thing; we'll probably need to see support from new donors in order to hit our target, to offset the fact that a few of our regular donors are giving less than usual this year.

The [Why MIRI's Approach?](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/12n/miri_update_and_fundraising_case/#2) section also touches on new topics that we haven't talked about in much detail in the past, but plan to write up some blog posts about in the future. In particular:

> Loosely speaking, we can imagine the space of all smarter-than-human AI systems as an extremely wide and heterogeneous space, in which "alignable AI designs" is a small and narrow target (and "aligned AI designs" smaller and narrower still). I think that the most important thing a marginal alignment researcher can do today is help ensure that the first generally intelligent systems humans design are in the “alignable” region. I think that this is unlikely to happen unless researchers have a fairly principled understanding of how the systems they're developing reason, and how that reasoning connects to the intended objectives.
> 
> Most of our work is therefore aimed at seeding the field with ideas that may inspire more AI research in the vicinity of (what we expect to be) alignable AI designs. When the first general reasoning machines are developed, we want the developers to be sampling from a space of designs and techniques that are more understandable and reliable than what’s possible in AI today.

In other news, we've uploaded **[a new intro talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOddW4cXS5Y)** on our most recent result, "[Logical Induction](https://intelligence.org/2016/09/12/new-paper-logical-induction/)," that goes into more of the technical details than [our previous talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsJd_CdBA3I).

See also [Shtetl-Optimized](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2918) and [n-Category Café](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2016/09/logical_uncertainty_and_logica.html) for recent discussions of the paper.
# Map and Territory: a new rationalist group blog

If you want to engage with the rationalist community, LessWrong is mostly no longer the place to do it. Discussions aside, most of the activity has moved into the diaspora. There are a few big voices like [Robin](http://www.overcomingbias.com/) and [Scott](http://slatestarcodex.com/), but most of the online discussion happens on individual blogs, [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/search/less+wrong), semi-private Facebook walls, and [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/lesswrong). And while these serve us well enough, I find that they leave me wanting for something like what LessWrong was: a vibrant group blog exploring our perspectives on cognition and building insights towards a deeper understanding of the world.

Maybe I'm yearning for a golden age of LessWrong that never was, but the fact remains that there is a gap in the rationalist community that LessWrong once filled. A space for multiple voices to come together in a dialectic that weaves together our individual threads of thought into a broader narrative. A home for discourse we are proud to call our own.

So with a lot of help from fellow rationalist bloggers, we've put together [Map and Territory](https://medium.com/map-and-territory), a new group blog to bring our voices together. Each week you'll find new writing from the likes of Ben Hoffman, Mike Plotz, Malcolm Ocean, Duncan Sabien, Anders Huitfeldt, and myself working to build a more complete view of reality within the context of rationality.

And we're only just getting started, so if you're a rationalist blogger please consider joining us. We're doing this on Medium, so if you write something other folks in the rationalist community would like to read, we'd love to consider sharing it through Map and Territory (cross-positing encouraged). Reach out to me on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/gworley3) or [email](mailto:gworley3+mat@gmail.com) and we'll get the process rolling.

[https://medium.com/map-and-territory](https://medium.com/map-and-territory)
# *How* people shut down thought because of high-status respectable halos

https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/

A detailed look at the belief that high status social structures can be so much better than anything one can think of that there's no point in even trying to think about the details of what to do, and how debilitating this is.  
  
[Discussion of the essay](https://www.facebook.com/sarah.constantin.94/posts/10100839593963772)
# What's the most annoying part of your life/job?

Hi, I'm an entrepreneur looking for a startup idea.

In my experience, the reason most startups fail is because they never actually solve anyone's problem. So I'm cheating and starting out by identifying a specific person with a specific problem.

So I'm asking you, what's the most annoying part of your life/job? Also, how much would you pay for a solution?
# Stand-up comedy as a way to improve rationality skills

_Epistemic status_: Believed, but hard to know how much to adjust for opportunity costs 

I'm wondering whether stand-up comedy would be a good way to expand and test one's "rationality skills" and/or just general interaction skills. One thing I like about it is that you get immediate feedback: the audience either laughs at your joke, or they don't. 

Prominent existential risk researcher Nick Bostrom [used to be a stand-up comedian](http://www.nickbostrom.com/): 

For my postgraduate work, I went to London, where I studied physics and neuroscience at King's College, and obtained a PhD from the London School of Economics. For a while I did a little bit stand-up comedy on the vibrant London pub and theatre circuit.

It was also [mentioned at the London LW meetup in June 2011](/lw/64f/london_meetup_05jun2011_very_rough_minutes/): 

Comedy as Anti-Compartmentalization - Another pet theory of mine. I was puzzled by the amount of atheist comedians out there, who people pay to see tell them that their religion is absurd. (Yes, Christian comedians exist too. Search YouTube. I dare you.) So my theory is that humour serves as a space where patterns and data from different fields are allowed to be superimposed on one another. Think of it as an anti-compartmentalization habit. Due to our brain design, compartmentalization is the default, so humour may be a hack to counter that. And we reward those who do it well with high status because it's valuable. Maybe we should have transhumanist/rationalist stand-up comedians? We sure have a lot of inconsistencies to point out.

Diego Caliero [thinks that there would be good material to draw upon from the rationalist community](/lw/h7m/pay_other_species_to_pandemize_vegetarianism_for/8rwt).

Does anyone have any experience trying this and/or have thoughts on whether it would be useful? Also, does anyone in NYC want to try it out?
# Recent AI control posts

| Over at [medium](https://medium.com/ai-control), I’m continuing to write about AI control; here’s a roundup from the last month. Strategy ======== * [Prosaic AI control](https://medium.com/ai-control/prosaic-ai-control-b959644d79c2#.64b7mg553) argues that AI control research should first consider the case where AI involves no “unknown unknowns.” * [Handling destructive technology](https://medium.com/ai-control/handling-destructive-technology-85800a12d99#.pklrg2qdb) tries to explain the upside of AI control, if we live in a universe where we eventually need to build a singleton anyway. * [Hard-core subproblems](https://medium.com/ai-control/hard-core-subproblems-8948463455ef#.omdgqhqiz) explains a concept I find helpful for organizing research. Building blocks of ALBA ======================= * [Security amplification](https://medium.com/ai-control/security-amplification-f4931419f903) and [reliability amplification](https://medium.com/ai-control/reliability-amplification-a96efa115687) are complements to [capability amplification](https://medium.com/ai-control/policy-amplification-6a70cbee4f34). Ensembling for reliability is now implemented in [ALBA on github](https://medium.com/ai-control/alba-on-github-5636ef510907). * [Meta-execution](https://medium.com/ai-control/meta-execution-27ba9b34d377) is my current leading contender for security and capability amplification. It’s totally unclear how well it can work ([some relevant speculation](https://medium.com/ai-control/of-humans-and-universality-thresholds-24b473e0c898#.fth63ahgp)). * [Thoughts on reward engineering](https://medium.com/ai-control/thoughts-on-reward-engineering-82b193ec03f6#.8kkzzmkgd) discusses a bunch of prosaic but important issues when designing reward functions. Terminology and concepts ======================== * Clarifying the distinction between [safety, control and alignment](https://medium.com/ai-control/ai-safety-vs-control-vs-alignment-2a4b42a863cc#.9r4hbpovg). * [Benignity](https://medium.com/ai-control/benign-ai-e4eb6ec6d68e#.cr7ssfh6g) may be a useful invariant when designing aligned AI. |
| --- |
# Which areas of rationality are underexplored? - Discussion Thread

There seems to actually be real momentum behind this attempt as reviving Less Wrong. One of the oldest issues on LW has been the lack of content. For this reason, I thought that it might be worthwhile opening a thread where people can suggest how we can expand the scope of what people write about in order for us to have sufficient content.

Does anyone have any ideas about which areas of rationality are underexplored? Please only list one area per comment.
# Land war in Asia

**Introduction**: Here's a misconception about World War II that I think is harmful and I don't see refuted often enough.

**Misconception**: In 1941, Hitler was sitting pretty with most of Europe conquered and no huge difficulties on the horizon. Then, due to his megalomania and bullshit ideology, he decided to invade Russia. This was an unforced error of epic proportions. It proved his undoing, like that of Napoleon before him.

**Rebuttal**: In hindsight, we think of the Soviet Union as a superpower and military juggernaut which you'd be stupid to go up against. But this is not how things looked to the Germans in 1941. Consider World War I. In 1917–1918, Germany and Austria had defeated Russia at the same time as they were fighting a horrifyingly bloody war with France and Britain - and another devastating European war with Italy. In 1941, Italy was an ally, France had been subdued and Britain wasn't in much of a position to exert its strength. Seemingly, the Germans had much more favorable conditions than in the previous round. And they won the previous round.

In addition, the Germans were not crazy to think that the Red Army was a bit of a joke. The Russians had had their asses handed to them by [Poland in 1920](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War_in_1920) and in 1939–1940 it had taken the Russians [three months](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War) and a ridiculous number of casualties to conquer a small slice of Finland.

Nevertheless, Russia did have a lot of manpower and a lot of equipment (indeed, far more than the Germans [had thought](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClR9tcpKZec)) and was a potential threat. The [Molotov-Ribbentrop pact](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact) was obviously cynical and the Germans were not crazy to think that they would eventually have to fight the Russians. Being the first to attack seemed like a good idea and 1941 seemed like a good time to do it. The potential gains were very considerable. Launching the invasion was a rational military decision.

**Why this matters**: The idea that Hitler made his most fatal decision for irrational reasons feeds into the conception that evil and irrationality must go hand in hand. It's the same kind of thinking that makes people think a superintelligence would automatically be benign. But there is no fundamental law of the universe which prevents a bad guy from conquering the world. Hitler lost his war with Russia for perfectly mundane and contingent reasons like, “the communists had been surprisingly effective at industrialization.”
# Combining Prediction Technologies to Help Moderate Discussions

I came across a [2015 blog post by Vitalik Buterin](https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/11/24/applications-of-security-deposits-and-prediction-markets-you-might-not-have-thought-about/) that contains some ideas similar to Paul Christiano's recent [Crowdsourcing moderation without sacrificing quality](/lw/o7p/crowdsourcing_moderation_without_sacrificing/). The basic idea in both is that it would be nice to have a panel of trusted moderators carefully pore over every comment and decide on its quality, but since that is too expensive, we can instead use some tools to predict moderator decisions, and have the trusted moderators look at only a small subset of comments in order to calibrate the prediction tools. In Paul's proposal the prediction tool is machine learning (mainly using individual votes as [features](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_%28machine_learning%29)), and in Vitalik's proposal it's [prediction markets](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Prediction_market) where people bet on what the moderators would decide if they were to review each comment.

It seems worth thinking about how to combine the two proposals to get the best of both worlds. One fairly obvious idea is to let people both vote on comments as an expression of their own opinions, and also place bets about moderator decisions, and use ML to set baseline odds, which would reduce how much the forum would have to pay out to incentivize accurate prediction markets. The hoped for outcome is that the ML algorithm would make correct decisions most of the time, but people can bet against it when they see it making mistakes, and moderators would review comments that have the greatest disagreements between ML and people or between different bettors in general. Another part of Vitalik's proposal is that each commenter has to make an initial bet that moderators would decide that their comment is good. The article notes that such a bet can also be viewed as a refundable deposit. Such forced bets / refundable deposits would [help solve](/lw/o7p/crowdsourcing_moderation_without_sacrificing/dit1) a security problem with Paul's ML-based proposal.

Are there better ways to combine these prediction tools to help with forum moderation? Are there other prediction tools that can be used instead or in addition to these?
# Is Caviar a Risk Factor For Being a Millionaire?

Today, my paper "Is caviar a risk factor for being a millionaire?" was published in the Christmas Edition of the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).  The paper is available at http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6536 but it is unfortunately behind a paywall. I am hoping to upload an open access version to a preprint server but this needs to be confirmed with the journal first. 

In this paper, I argue that the term "risk factor" is ambiguous, and that this ambiguity causes pervasive methodological confusion in the epidemiological literature. I argue that many epidemiological papers essentially use an audio recorder to determine whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, without being clear about which definition of "sound" they are considering.

Even worse, I argue that epidemiologists often try to avoid claiming that their results say anything about causality, by hiding behind "prediction models". When they do this. they often still control extensively for "confounding", a term which only has a meaning in causal models. I argue that this is analogous to stating that you are interested in whether trees falling in the forest causes any human to perceive the qualia of hearing, and then spending your methods section discussing whether the audio recorder was working properly.

Due to space constraints and other considerations, I am unable to state these analogies explicitly in the paper, but it does include a call for a taboo on the word risk factor, and a reference to Rationality: AI to Zombies. To my knowledge, this is the first reference to the book in the medical literature.

I will give a short talk about this paper at the Less Wrong meetup at the MIRI/CFAR office in Berkeley at 6:30pm tonight.

(I apologize for this short, rushed announcement, I was planning to post a full writeup but I was not expecting this paper to be published for another week)
# A quick note on weirdness points and Solstices [And also random other Solstice discussion]

Common knowledge is important. So I wanted to note:  
  
Every year on Solstice feedback forms, I get concerns about songs like "[The X days of X-Risk](https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/track/the-x-days-of-x-risk)" or "[When I Die](https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/track/when-i-die)" (featuring lines including 'they may freeze my body when I die'), that they are too weird and ingroupy and offputting to people who aren't super-nerdy-transhumanists  
  
But I also get comments from people who know little about X-risk or cryonics or whatever who say "these songs are hilarious and awesome." Sunday Assemblies who have no connection to Less Wrong sing When I Die and it's a crowd favorite every year.  
  
And my impression is that people are only really weirded out by these songs on behalf of other people who are only weirded out by them on behalf of other people. There might be a couple people who are genuinely offput the ideas but if so it's not super clear to me. I take very seriously the notion of making Solstice inclusive while retaining it's "soul", talk to lots of people about what they find alienating or weird, and try to create something that can resonate with as many people as possible.

So I want it to at least be clear: if you are personally actually offput by those songs for your own sake, that makes sense and I want to know about it, but if you're just worried about other people, I'm pretty confident you don't need to be. The songs are designed so you don't need to take them seriously if you don't want to.  
  
-  
  
Random note 1: I think the only line that's raised concern from some non-LW-ish people for When I Die is "I'd prefer to never die at all", and that's because it's literally putting words in people's mouths which aren't true for everyone. I mentioned that to Glen. We'll see if he can think of anything else  
  
Random note 2: Reactions to more serious songs like "[Five Thousand Years](https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/track/rehearsal-five-thousand-years)" seem generally positive among non-transhumanists, although sometimes slightly confused. The new transhumanist-ish song this year, [Endless Light](https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/track/demo-endless-light), has gotten overall good reviews.
# Buckets and memetic immune disorders

AnnaSalamon's [recent post](/lw/o2k/flinching_away_from_truth_is_often_about) on "flinching" and "buckets" nicely complements PhilGoetz's 2009 post [Reason as memetic immune disorder](/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/). (I'll be assuming that readers have read Anna's post, but not necessarily Phil's.) Using Anna's terminology, I take Phil to be talking about the dangers of merging buckets that started out as separate. Anna, on the other hand, is talking about how to deal with one bucket that should actually be several.

Phil argued (paraphrasing) that rationality can be dangerous because it leads to beliefs of the form "_P_ implies _Q_". If you convince yourself of that implication, and you believe _P_, then you are compelled to believe _Q_. This is dangerous because your thinking about _P_ might be infected by a bad meme. Now rationality has opened the way for this bad meme to infect your thinking about _Q_, too.

It's even worse if you reason yourself all the way to believing "_P_ if and only if _Q_". Now any corruption in your thinking about either one of _P_ and _Q_ will corrupt your thinking about the other. In terms of buckets: If you put "Yes" in the _P_ bucket, you must put "Yes" in the _Q_ bucket, and vice versa. In other words, the _P_ bucket and the _Q_ bucket are now effectively one and the same.

In this sense, Phil was pointing out that rationality merges buckets. (More precisely, rationality creates dependencies among buckets. In the extreme case, buckets become effectively identical). This can be bad for the reasons that Anna gives. Phil argues that some people resist rationality because their "memetic immune system" realizes that rational thinking might merge buckets inappropriately. To avoid this danger, people often operate on the principle that it's suspect even to consider merging buckets from different domains (e.g., religious scripture and personal life).

This suggests a way in which Anna's post works at the meta-level, too.

Phil's argument is that people resist rationality because, in effect, they've identified the two buckets "Think rationally" and "Spread memetic infections". They fear that saying "Yes" to "Think rationally" forces them to say "Yes" to the dangers inherent to merged buckets.

But Anna gives techniques for "de-merging" buckets in general if it turns out that some buckets were inappropriately merged, or if one bucket should have been several in the first place.

In other words, Anna's post essentially de-merges the two particular buckets "Think rationally" and "Spread memetic infections". You can go ahead and use rational thinking, even though you will risk inappropriately merging buckets, because you now have techniques for de-merging those buckets if you need to.

In this way, Anna's post may diminish the "memetic immune system" obstacle to rational thinking that Phil observed.
# Project Hufflepuff

(This is a crossposted FB post, so it might read a bit weird)

My goal this year (in particular, my main focus once I arrive in the Bay, but also my focus in NY and online in the meanwhile), is to join and champion the growing cause of people trying to fix some systemic problems in EA and Rationalsphere relating to "lack of Hufflepuff virtue".

I want Hufflepuff Virtue to feel exciting and important, because it is, and I want it to be something that flows naturally into our pursuit of both epistemic integrity, intellectual creativity, and concrete action.

Some concrete examples:

\- on the 5 second reflex level, notice when people need help or when things need doing, and do those things.

\- have an integrated understanding that being kind to people is \*part\* of helping them (and you!) to learn more, and have better ideas.

(There are a bunch of ways to be kind to people that do NOT do this, i.e. politely agreeing to disagree. That's not what I'm talking about. We need to hold each other to higher standards but not talk down to people in a fashion that gets in the way of understanding. There are tradeoffs and I'm not sure of the best approach but there's a lot of room for improvement)

\- be excited and willing to be the person doing the grunt work to make something happen

\- foster a sense that the community encourages people to try new events, actively take personal responsibility to notice and fix community-wide problems that aren't necessarily sexy.

\- when starting new projects, try to have mentorship and teamwork built into their ethos from the get-go, rather than hastily tacked on later

I want these sorts of things to come easily to mind when the future people of 2019 think about the rationality community, and have them feel like central examples of the community rather than things that we talk about wanting-more-of.
# Thoughts on "Operation Make Less Wrong the single conversational locus", Month 1

About a month ago, Anna posted about the [Importance of Less Wrong or Another Single Conversational Locus](/lw/o5z/on_the_importance_of_less_wrong_or_another_single/), followed shortly by Sarah Constantin's [http://lesswrong.com/lw/o62/a\_return\_to_discussion](/lw/o62/a_return_to_discussion/ "A Return to Discussion")/  
  
There was a week or two of heavy-activity by some old timers. Since there's been a decent array of good posts but not quite as inspiring as the first week was and I don't know whether to think "we just need to try harder" or change tactics in some way.  
  
Some thoughts:  
 \- I do feel it's been better to quickly be able to see a lot of posts in the community in one place   
  
 \- I don't think the quality of the comments is that good, which is a bit demotivating.  
 \- on facebook, lots of great conversations happen in a low-friction way, and when someone starts being annoying, the person's who's facebook wall it is has the authority to delete comments with abandon, which I think is helpful.  
\- I could see the solution being to either continue trying to incentivize better LW comments, or to just have LW be "single locus for big important ideas, but discussion to flesh them out still happen in more casual environments"  
  
 \- I'm frustrated that the intellectual projects on Less Wrong are largely silo'd from the Effective Altruism community, which I think could really use them.  
  
 \- The Main RSS feed has a lot of subscribers (I think I recall "about 10k"), so having things posted there seems good.  
 \- I think it's good to NOT have people automatically post things there, since that produced a lot of weird anxiety/tension on "is my post good enough for main? I dunno!"  
 \- But, there's also not a clear path to get something promoted to Main, or a sense of which things are important enough for Main  
  
 \- I notice that I (personally) feel an ugh response to link posts and don't like being taken away from LW when I'm browsing LW. I'm not sure why.  
  
Curious if others have thoughts.
# How often do you check this forum?

I'm interested from hearing from everyone who reads this.

Who is checking LW's Discussion area and how often?

1\. When you check, how much voting or commenting do you do compared to reading?

2\. Do bother clicking through to links?

3\. Do you check using a desktop or a smart phone?  Do you just visit the website in browser or use an RSS something-or-other?

4\. Also, do you know of other places that have more schellingness for the topics you think this place is centered on? (Or used to be centered on?) (Or should be centered on?)

I would ask this in [the current open thread](/r/discussion/lw/ojw/open_thread_jan_30_feb_05_2017/) except that structurally it seems like it needs to be more prominent than that in order to do its job.

If you have very very little time to respond or even think about the questions, I'd appreciate it if you just respond with "Ping" rather than click away.
# Civil resistance and the 3.5% rule

Interesting, haven't seen anything data-driven like this before...

Civil resistance and the 3.5% rule.

https://rationalinsurgent.com/2013/11/04/my-talk-at-tedxboulder-civil-resistance-and-the-3-5-rule/

"no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of [just 3.5% of the population](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820)—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that."

"Then I analyzed the data, and the results blew me away. From 1900 to 2006, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were [twice as likely to succeed](http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2008.33.1.7) outright as violent insurgencies. And there’s more. This trend has been increasing over time—in the last fifty years civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful."

Data viz:

http://www.navcodata.org/

Interesting strategic viewpoint

http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2016/11/15/how-can-we-know-when-popular-movements-are-winning-look-to-these-four-trends/

1\. **Size and diversity of participation**.

2\. **Nonviolent discipline**.

3\. **Flexible & innovative techniques**. switching between concentrated methods like demonstrations and dispersed methods like strikes and stay-aways.

4\. **Loyalty shifts.**  
if erstwhile elite supporters begin to abandon the opponent, remain silent when they would typically defend him, and refuse to follow orders to repress dissidents, or drag their feet in carrying out day-to-day orders, the incumbent is losing his grip.

(observations from article above)

"The average nonviolent campaign takes about 3 years to run its course (that’s more than three times shorter than the average violent campaign, by the way)."

"The average nonviolent campaign is about eleven times larger as a proportion of the overall population as the average violent campaign.

"Nonviolent resistance campaigns are ten times more likely to usher in democratic institutions than violent ones."

original overview and links article:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/01/worried-american-democracy-study-activist-techniques

and a training site that has some exercises in group cohesion and communication tech, from Guardian.

https://www.trainingforchange.org/tools

edit: The article that got me looking, how to strike in a gig economy, and international reach

http://www.transnational-strike.info/2017/02/01/how-do-we-strike-when-our-boss-is-a-machine-a-software-or-a-chain-struggles-in-the-gig-economy/
# European Community Weekend 2017

We are excited to announce this year's European LessWrong Community Weekend. For the fourth time, rationalists from all over Europe (and some from outside Europe) are **gathering in Berlin** to socialize, have fun, exchange knowledge and skills, and have interesting discussions.

The event takes place **September 1st to September 3rd** and, like last year, it will be held in the beautiful Jugendherberge Wannsee which contains a large room for central events, several seminar rooms, and lots of comfortable spaces inside and out to socialize or relax.

  

This is primarily a community-driven event. That means that while there will be a keynote and pre-planned content, the bulk of the schedule will be filled by the participants. There will be space to give talks, short or long, provide workshops, or just gather some people to do an activity together. In previous years we had the talks, lightning talks and workshops you would expect, as well as lighter activities such as 7-minute-workouts, an improv acting workshop, swimming in the lake and a workshop on modular origami. Of course there will also be time to reconnect with friends and form new connections with other aspiring rationalists.

Some valuable information
-------------------------

Most of the talks and discussions will be held in English, so you do not need to be able to speak German to attend.

  

The ticket price of €150 includes accommodation for two nights, on-site meals and snacks, and a welcome lunch on Friday at 12:00.

  

The event wraps up Sunday afternoon around 15:00. In the days after the weekend, participants are invited to stay in Berlin a little longer to explore the city, go bouldering, play frisbee, etc. While this is not part of the official event, we will coordinate couch-surfing opportunities to avoid the need for hotels.

  

To sign up, fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfjnjUrizMpiZKd8NL0UCtoK71B-DnoPikSLJGCoWM05oh8Dg/viewform).

tl;dr
-----

*   When? 1–3 September 2017
*   Where? [JW Wannsee in Berlin](http://jh-wannsee.de/)
*   How much? €150
*   Where do I sign up? [Here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfjnjUrizMpiZKd8NL0UCtoK71B-DnoPikSLJGCoWM05oh8Dg/viewform)

  

If you have any questions, please email us at lwcw.europe@gmail.com.

  

Looking forward to seeing you there,

The Community Weekend organizers and LessWrong Deutschland e.V.
# What are you surprised people don't just buy?

Two of the main resources people have are time and money.  The world offers many opportunities to trade one for the other, at widely varying rates.

I've often heard people recommend trading money for time in the abstract, but this advice is rarely accompanied by specific recommendations on how to do so.

How do you use money to buy time or otherwise make your life better/easier?

See also the flip-side of this post, "[what are you surprised people pay for instead of doing themselves?](/r/discussion/lw/omb/what_are_you_surprised_people_pay_for_instead_of/)"
# Musical setting of the Litany of Tarski

About a year ago, I made a setting of the [Litany of Tarski](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Litany_of_Tarski) for four-part _a cappella_ (i.e. unaccompanied) chorus.

More recently, in the process of experimenting with [MuseScore](https://musescore.org/) for potential use in explaining musical matters on the internet (it makes online sharing of playback-able scores very easy), the thought occurred to me that perhaps the Tarski piece might be of interest to some LW readers (if no one else!), so I went ahead and re-typeset it in MuseScore for your delectation. 

[Here it is](https://musescore.com/user/17866926/scores/3617316) (_properly_ notated :-)).

[Here it is](https://musescore.com/user/17866926/scores/3617321) (alternate version designed to avoid freaking out those who aren't quite the fanatical enthusiasts of musical notation that I am).
# LW UI issue

Not really sure where else I might post this, but there seems to be a UI issue on the site. When I hit the homepage of lesswrong.com while logged in I no longer see the user sidebar or the header links for Main and Discussion. This is kind of annoying because I have to click into an article first to get to a page where I can access those things. Would be nice to have them back on the front page.
# What's up with Arbital?

This post is for all the people who have been following Arbital's progress since 2015 via whispers, rumors, and clairvoyant divination. That is to say: we didn't do a very good job of communicating on our part. I hope this posts corrects some of that.

The top question on your mind is probably: "Man, I was promised that Arbital will solve X! Why hasn't it solved X already?" Where X could be intuitive explanations, online debate, all LessWrong problems, AGI, or just cancer. Well, we did try to solve the first two and it didn't work. Math explanations didn't work because we couldn't find enough people who would spend the time to write good math explanations. (That said, we did end up with some [decent posts on abstract algebra](https://arbital.com/explore/math/). Thank you to everyone who contributed!) Debates didn't work because... well, it's a very complicated problem. There was also some disagreement within the team about the best approach, and we ended up moving too slowly.

So what now?
------------

[You are welcome to use Arbital in its current version.](https://arbital.com) It's mostly stable, though a little slow sometimes. It has a few features some might find very helpful for their type of content. Eliezer is still writing [AI Alignment content](https://arbital.com/explore/ai_alignment/) on it, and he heavily relies on the specific Arbital features, so it's pretty certain that the platform is not going away. In fact, if the venture fails completely, it's likely MIRI will adopt Arbital for their personal use.

I'm starting work on Arbital 2.0. It's going to be a (micro-)blogging platform. (If you are a serious blogger / Tumblr user, let me know; I'd love to ask you some questions!) I'm not trying to solve online debates, build LW 2.0, or cure cancer. It's just going to be a damn good blogging platform. If it goes well, then at some point I'd love to revisit the Arbital dream.

I'm happy to answer any and all questions in the comments.
# Net Utility and Planetary Biocide

I've started listening to the audiobook of Peter Singer's _Ethics in the Real World_, which is both highly recommended and very unsettling. The essays on non-human animals, for example, made me realize for the first time that it may well be possible that the net utility on Earth over all conscious creatures is massively negative. 

Naturally, this led me to wonder whether, after all, efforts to eradicate all consciousness on Earth - human and non-human - may be ethically endorsable.This, in turn, reminded me of a recent post on LW asking whether the possibility of parallelized torture of future uploads justifies killing as many people as possible today. 

I had responded to that post by mentioning that parallelizing euphoria was also possible, so this should cancel things out. This seemed at the time like a refutation, but I realized later I had made the error of equating the two, utility and disutility, as part of the same smooth continuum, like \[-100, 100\] ∈ R. There is no reason to believe the maximum disutility I can experience is equal in magnitude to the maximum utility I can experience. It may be that max disutility is far greater. I really don't know, and I don't think introspection is as useful in answering this question as it seems intuitively to be, but it seems quite plausible for this to be the case.

As these thoughts were emerging, Singer, as if hearing my concerns, quoted someone or other who claimed that the human condition is one of perpetual suffering, constantly seeking desires which, once fulfilled, are ephemeral and dissatisfying, and therefore it is a morally tragic outcome for any of us to have emerged into existence. 

Of course these are shoddy arguments in support of Mass Planetary Biocide, even supposing the hypothesis that the Earth (universe?) has net negative utility is true. For one, we can engineer minds somewhere in a better neighborhood of mindspace, where utility is everywhere positive. Or maybe it's impossible even in theory to treat utility and disutility like real-valued functions of physical systems over time (though I'm betting it is). Or maybe the universe is canonically infinite, so even if 99% of conscious experiences in the universe have disutility, there are infinite quantities of both utility and disutility and so nothing we do matters, as Bostrom wrote about. (Although this is actually not an argument against MPB, just not one for it). And anyway, the state of net utility today is not nearly as important as the state of net utility could potentially be in the future. And perhaps utilitarianism is a naive and incorrect ethical framework. 

Still, I had somehow always assumed implicitly that net utility of life on Earth was positive, so the realization that this need not be so is causing me significant disutility.
# An OpenAI board seat is surprisingly expensive

The Open Philanthropy Project [recently bought](http://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/openai-general-support) a seat on the board of the billion-dollar nonprofit AI research organization OpenAI for $30 million. Some people have said that this was surprisingly cheap, because the price in dollars was such a low share of OpenAI's eventual endowment: 3%.

To the contrary, this seat on OpenAI's board is very expensive, not because the nominal price is high, but precisely because it is so low.

If OpenAI hasn’t extracted a meaningful-to-it amount of money, then it follows that it is getting something other than money out of the deal. The obvious thing it is getting is buy-in for OpenAI as an AI safety and capacity venture. In exchange for a board seat, the Open Philanthropy Project is aligning itself socially with OpenAI, by taking the position of a material supporter of the project. The important thing is mutual validation, and a nominal donation just large enough to [neg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negging) the other AI safety organizations supported by the Open Philanthropy Project is simply a customary part of the ritual.

By my count, the grant is larger than all the Open Philanthropy Project's other AI safety grants combined.

([Cross-posted](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/an-openai-board-seat-is-surprisingly-expensive/) at my personal blog.)