trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Open-Source Monasticism
by Nathan Rosquist — 2018-02-25T13:52:01.182Z

[I originally wrote most of the strings of text below for the online Art & Monasticism Symposium in 2012 through Transpositions, a collaborative effort of students associated with the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. What follows has been edited since it was first published, for tone as well as content. I used to write a lot about this topic on my blog (RIP otherhood.org). So I may be porting some old posts to this new version of LW.]

Monasticicismsms

Assertion: Monasticism is a recurring pattern in the world's religions. Looking at the things that different monasticisms have in common can teach us how (and how not) to live in communities of shared purpose.

[This word, monasticism, basically means "the way of life of people living in monasteries." And to further tighten down the jargon filter, by monastery I mean the class of objects that includes cloisters, abbeys, nunneries, convents, etc. and related things like ashrams and kibbutzes, but not necessarily all intentional communities. My favorite word in English for a person who lives in a monastery, even temporarily, is monk (which I hereby and for all time declare to be a gender-neutral word for nuns and male-nuns).]

Monasticism := Monks + Monasteries

While there is an ENORMOUS amount of variation and localized ornamentation, this monastic tendency–for serious practitioners of a religious tradition to band together to benefit from living in a disciplined community–shows up all over the place, e.g. in most strains of Christianity and Buddhism.

Why would this be the case? Clearly there are economic efficiencies. It’s easier to survive as a community, in which specialization becomes possible, than alone; some monks are good at holding the big picture, while some monks are better at painting icons, and others are virtuosos at cooking nourishing meals, or farming, or carpentry, or web design.

There are efficiencies that have to do with spiritual practice as well. It is much easier to hold a daily routine of work and contemplation when you do so with a group of like-minded brothers or sisters.

And when singing or chanting, of course, it is only possible to make harmonies together (unless you're throat-singing).

Stepping Meta

From this perspective, monasticism starts to look less like something spiritual and more like a type of technology, an ar...
Passing Troll Bridge
by Diffractor — 2018-02-25T08:21:17.000Z

In an earlier discussion about the Troll Bridge problem, Abram mentioned a Lobian proof that a logical induction based agent would converge to not crossing the bridge.

It looked rather sketchy, though, and further discussion by Paul in the comments revealed that Troll Bridge might be passable.

(as a quick refresher, Troll Bridge is the decision problem where action 1, ie, attempting to cross the bridge, will result in crossing the bridge for a utility of 1, unless you tried to cross the bridge because your exploration step was active, in which case, the troll blows up the bridge, and you get a utility of 0. Refraining from attempting to cross the bridge, which is action 2, will give a utility of 0.5, more about it will be typed up soon.)

Results:

The variant of logical induction that Abram mentioned, where the probabilities jump to 100% as soon as something gets proved, probably converges to failure on Troll Bridge.

The vanilla variant of logical induction that was discussed in the Logical Induction paper has an unexpected and novel sort of Lobian loophole that appears to allow converging to failure on Troll Bridge, and also might be usable to introduce the spurious counterfactual problem from proof-based decision theory into the logical inductor decision theory setting. This same loophole also renders the "proof" that different logical inductors may converge to different actions in 5-and-10 (mentioned here) invalid, and I strongly suspect that sufficiently interesting proof orderings may be used to make any given logical inductor converge to taking either the 10 dollars or the 5 dollars, and vice-versa.

There's a new variant of logical induction I came up with (a minor and somewhat hacky variant) that allows proofs about "you could have an enforcing trader that makes large bets on getting certain outcomes" to go through, and in particular, it seems to allow victory on troll bridge if you set up the initial set of traders right. (modulo a few very reasonable assumptions, and one thing that I wasn't quite able to prove but seems extremely likely) It's a custom-designed and horribly hacky solution, and I'd expect the True Solution to involve (somehow) dropping exploration steps entirely, but the process of constructing it did turn up that unexpected loophole mentioned in the above paragraph, and also was good for training an ability to prove bounds about what a logi

...
Three Miniatures
by alkjash — 2018-02-25T05:40:00.911Z

This is part 16 of 30 of Hammertime. Click here for the intro.

The sixth day always marks the boundary between concrete and abstract. Today, I mark the occasion with three essays on new techniques.

These essays are short because I lack data and examples. All concept handles and perspectives are preliminary. The two latter essays are, I think, two fingers pointing at the same moon.

Day 16: Three Miniatures

Pressure Points

I need to sleep earlier.

I can’t sleep now because I need to get this paper written by tomorrow.

I’ll just finish it in the morning.

I don’t trust myself to work in the morning.

I need to try harder to trust myself and sleep earlier

This train of thought plagued me in a past life. Do you see what I was missing?

I was pushing on the wrong side.

I always lazed about in the morning. In this scenario, “Try harder to trust myself” is self-delusion. To fix it, I first needed to cultivate a habit of working in the morning, or at least being able to. Once I could do that, the original train of thought would automatically cut itself off in the middle.

Getting work done in the morning wasn’t easy, but it was the right place to try really hard. Once I solved that problem, I could trust my next-morning self. It became easy to correct my sleep schedule.

Pressure Points is a lateral thinking technique. For any given problem, there are many places to apply pressure, and all it takes is to find the pressure point to apply brute force most efficiently. The pressure point is rarely the obvious direction: chances are, you’ve already been pushing in that direction, and it hasn’t helped thus far. Look for counter-intuitive places to apply brute force.

Here are three examples of Pressure Points and its particular brand of creativity:

Lucid Dreaming is all about finding the right Pressure Points. Instead of “Intend really hard to lucid dream,” the two main techniques are practicing reality checks while awake, and keeping a dream journal to improve dream recall.

People often approach social anxiety with “Try to care less about what other people think.” This is about as effective as “Try not to notice your breathing.” A Pressure Point approach to social anxiety is “Try to focus on other people’s body language and notice their anxiety.”

I’ve been working on TAPs for building better posture. The only one that has had any effect is “Turn to face the shower nozzle.” When I face away from...
Arguments about fast takeoff
by paulfchristiano — 2018-02-25T04:53:36.083Z
Link: https://sideways-view.com/2018/02/24/takeoff-speeds/

I expect "slow takeoff," which we could operationalize as the economy doubling over some 4 year interval before it doubles over any 1 year interval. Lots of people in the AI safety community have strongly opposing views, and it seems like a really important and intriguing disagreement. I feel like I don't really understand the fast takeoff view.

(Below is a short post copied from Facebook. The link contains a more substantive discussion. See also: AI impacts on the same topic.)

I believe that the disagreement is mostly about what happens before we build powerful AGI. I think that weaker AI systems will already have radically transformed the world, while I believe fast takeoff proponents think there are factors that makes weak AI systems radically less useful. This is strategically relevant because I'm imagining AGI strategies playing out in a world where everything is already going crazy, while other people are imagining AGI strategies playing out in a world that looks kind of like 2018 except that someone is about to get a decisive strategic advantage.

Here is my current take on the state of the argument:

The basic case for slow takeoff is: "it's easier to build a crappier version of something" + "a crappier AGI would have almost as big an impact." This basic argument seems to have a great historical track record, with nuclear weapons the biggest exception.

On the other side there are a bunch of arguments for fast takeoff, explaining why the case for slow takeoff doesn't work. If those arguments were anywhere near as strong as the arguments for "nukes will be discontinuous" I'd be pretty persuaded, but I don't yet find any of them convincing.

I think the best argument is the historical analogy to humans vs. chimps. If the "crappier AGI" was like a chimp, then it wouldn't be very useful and we'd probably see a fast takeoff. I think this is a weak analogy, because the discontinuous progress during evolution occurred on a metric that evolution wasn't really optimizing: groups of humans can radically outcompete groups of chimps, but (a) that's almost a flukey side-effect of the individual benefits that evolution is actually selecting on, (b) because evolution optimizes myopically, it doesn't bother to optimize chimps for things like "ability to make scientifi...
Meta-tations on Moderation: Towards Public Archipelago
by Raemon — 2018-02-25T03:59:32.243Z

The recent

moderation tools announcement

represents a fairly major shift in how the site admins are approaching LessWrong. Several people noted important concerns about transparency and trust.

Those concerns deserve an explicit, thorough answer.

Summary of Concepts

The Problem of Private Discussion – Why much intellectual progress in the rationalsphere has happened in hard-to-find places
Public Discussion vs Intellectual Progress – Two subtly conflicting priorities for LessWrong.
Healthy Disagreement – How to give authors tools to have the kinds of conversations they want, without degenerating into echo chambers.
High Trust vs Functioning Low Trust environments – Different modes of feeling safe, with different costs and risks.
Overton Windows, Personal Criticism – Two common conversational attractors. Tempting. Sometimes important. But rarely what an author is interested in talking about.
Public Archipelago - A model that takes all of the above into account, giving people the tools to create person spaces that give them freedom to explore, while keeping all discussion public, so that it can be built upon, criticized, or refined.

i. The Problem

The issue with LessWrong that worries me the most:

In the past 5 years or so, there’s been a lot of progress – on theoretical rationality, on practical epistemic and instrumental rationality, on AI alignment, on effective altruism. But much of this progress has been on some combination of:

On various private blogs you need to keep track of.
On facebook – where discussions are often private, where searching for old comments is painful, and some people have blocked each other so it’s hard to tell what was actually said and who was able to read it.
On tumblr, whose interface for following a conversation is the most confusing thing I’ve ever seen.
On various google docs, circulated privately.
In person,

not written down at all

.

People have complained about this. I think a common assumption is something like “if we just got all the good people back on LessWrong at the same time you’d have a critical mass that could reboot the system.” That might help, but doesn't seem sufficient to me.

I think LW2.0 has roughly succeeded at becoming “the happening place” again. But I still know several people who I intellectually respect, who find LessWrong an actively inhospitable place and don’t post here, or do so only grudgingly.

More Than One Way...
Lessons from the Cold War on Information Hazards: Why Internal Communication is Critical
by Gentzel — 2018-02-24T23:34:33.250Z

Due to their tremendous power, nuclear weapons were a subject of intense secrecy and taboo in the US government following WW2. After their first uses, President Truman came to consider atomic weapons a terror weapon of last resort and generally avoided discussion of their use.1 As a consequence, top-level decision makers in his administration (himself included), outside the Atomic Energy Commision (AEC) remained unaware of the US nuclear stockpile size as it grew,2 and relatively few means of achieving arms control were considered at a high level, given Stalin’s resistance to opening up the Soviet Union to inspections.3 Frustrated by failed negotiations and geopolitical expansion by the communists, US atomic weapons were made ready for use again in 1947,4 and no arms control talks were attempted again beyond a propaganda level for the next ten years.5

The consequences of a lack of internal communication, however, did not end with Truman. Somewhat insulated from Eisenhower’s stance against nuclear first use,6 Curtis LeMay’s plans with Strategic Air Command grew increasingly toward it.7 Growing from a 1000 weapon air force to an 18,000 weapon triad8 with up to potentially 27,000 megatons of explosive power by 19609 the arsenal went far beyond the necessity needed for Eisenhower’s massive retaliation strategy. If the warheads were equally sized and distributed, an airburst attack with such a number of weapons would have been capable of scorching more than half of the Soviet wilderness or shattering windows over more than 90% of the USSR, China, and North Korea.10 While one might argue that such a degree of force may have been rational for accounting for reliability, or retaining significant retaliatory capability after a first strike by the Soviet Union, LeMay’s plans presumed using nearly all the weapons in a preemptive strike11 as US bombers were vulnerable on open runways. Generally speaking, nuclear war planners of the 50s were uncoordinated, didn’t account for many of the known effects of nuclear weapons, and were given no war objectives to plan toward from which limits could be derived.12 Though Eisenhower learned that SAC’s plans were excessive even for counterforce, Eisenhower didn’t commission any study on the lasting environmental effects of such a massive use of force.13

With secrecy and taboo around nuclear weapons, each par

...
What we talk about when we talk about maximising utility
by Richard_Ngo — 2018-02-24T22:33:28.390Z

tl;dr: “Utility” is used on LW to mean what people want, but that’s not what's morally relevant. Utilitarians aren't trying to maximise this sort of utility, but rather "well-being".

Epistemic status: probably obvious to some, but this particular framing wasn't totally clear to me until recently, and the terminology is definitely ambiguous.

Use of the term “utility” on Less Wrong implicitly conflates two definitions. Consider person X. In the economic sense, X's utility corresponds to the things that X would choose to maximise; we can abstract this as a "utility function" which maps possible worlds to a real number. For example, if X would save the lives of their family even at the cost of their own life, then we'd say that X assigns higher utility to a world in which their family lives happily than one in which they do. This is perfectly reasonable and normal. (Some people argue that X is actually prioritising their own happiness because if they chose otherwise, they'd be miserable from guilt. But this seems like an implausible model of their actual reasoning; I don't think many people who would save their families over themselves would change their minds even if offered guaranteed happiness afterwards.) A similar definition of utility is used when reasoning about artificial agents; for example, LW Wiki says “Utility is how much a certain outcome satisfies an agent’s preferences”.

However, this makes it very confusing to talk about maximising utility as a moral goal. Taken literally, maximising (economic) utility means wanting the sum of all people’s utility functions to be as high as possible. (Edit: in the standard definition of economic utility, this is not well-defined, since utilities can't be compared between people. The following argument is one intuitive reason why we can't maximise even versions of economic-style utility which do allow interpersonal comparision, such as the ones I'll discuss later.) But by doing so, we are double-counting! Let's say I assign utility U to living a happy life, and utility U+1 to my wife living a happy life; my wife does the converse. If we both have happy lives, we have total utility 4U+2, which means that our lives should be prioritised over the lives of four other people who value their own lives just as highly, but don't care much about ...
Links with underscores
by ShardPhoenix — 2018-02-24T11:32:48.752Z

I've found it hard to link to urls with underscores (common on Wikipedia). I wasn't sure how to escape them to prevent them from creating italics - adding a backslash just seemed to make the editor go haywire, with the cursor jumping around and putting characters in the wrong place as I typed. In general linking is awkward in Markdown so it might be nice to have a "create link" button that handles escaping etc.
A useful level distinction
by Charlie Steiner — 2018-02-24T06:39:47.558Z

Recently, I've constantly been noticing the importance of a certain sort of distinguishing between something happening in reality, and something happening in your model of reality. In part, I'm noticing it because I've been thinking about it, not vice versa, but I'll explain for a few specific cases, and maybe you'll see what I see.

Counterfactuals:

Possibilities, or possible worlds, or what have you, aren't things that exist (waves hand) out there in reality. Instead, they're conveniences of our model of the world - and as such, they don't interact with matter out there, they interact with other parts of your model.

When people imagine a model of a mind, they often have "possibilities" as a basic moving part within that model. But there is no fundamental possibility-particle - instead, possibilities are imagined by mutating your model of the world in some way. Different minds can use different classes of models, and different methods of mutating those models, and thus end up with different imagined possibilities.

CDT is a good basic example of how to really pin this down - you know both the model class (states of a specific causal graph) and method of imagining (intervene at a specific node). Under UDT, the situation is even more extreme - the agent models a universe as a stochastic game, and picks a high-performing strategy. But it does this even if the real universe is deterministic - the model in UDT is not a model of the world per se, it is part of the machinery of generating these useful fictions.

This distinction is particularly important in the case of logical counterfactuals, like "imagine that 247 was prime." It feels like we can imagine such things, but the things we're imagining are not external inconsistent universes (how could they be?) - instead you are making variations on your model of the world. Satisfactory accounts of logical counterfactuals (like Omega could use to simulate the counterfactual in logical counterfactual mugging) aren't going to look like methods of constructing alternate universes where 247 is prime, they're going to look like useful methods of mutating world-models.

Learning Abstract Objects:

Abstract objects, like the number 5, or morality, are real in the sense that they are citizens in good standing of the mental map. But humans, when thinking about th...
CoZE 2
by alkjash — 2018-02-24T05:40:00.805Z

This is part 15 of 30 of Hammertime. Click here for the intro.

Another of CFAR’s running themes is: Try Things!

When you’re considering adopting new habits or ideas, there’s no better way to gather data than actually trying […] This is particularly important because when something does work out, you get to keep doing it.

Hammertime will suggest lots of object-level advice. Try them all! A one-in-ten success rate may not feel encouraging, but you can repeat anything that actually works hundreds or thousands of times throughout your life.

Here’s a rule of thumb: if there’s a 1% chance it’ll regularly help in the long run, it’s worth trying for five minutes.

Day 15: CoZE

Previously: Day 5.

The basic CoZE experiment technique is:

Pick an experience to explore. This should be outside your comfort zone.
Devise an experiment or series of experiments. Deconstruct your path from Point A to Point B into palatable baby steps.
Try it! At each step, pay close attention to your internal experience, and make sure you’re not forcing yourself into anything. You’re free to stop at any point.

Today I dispel the illusion that every CoZE experiment should be glamorous. Then, I integrate Aversion Factoring directly into the technique.

Unglamorous CoZE

When I first learned about CoZE, I immediately imagined awesome, courageous, and glamorous experiments. Breaking through to my deepest emotions after subsisting for a month on nootropics and Buddhism, while stranded naked in Siberia. Lucid dreaming in a group hug with Kalahari bushmen while skydiving. Doing a one-finger handstand balanced on a unicycle while delivering extemporaneous limericks to Carnegie Hall.

Your comfort zone limits you in all directions, not just the glamorous ones. The most useful direction to expand can be orthogonal or even opposite to the instinctively shiny ones.

Unglamorous CoZE is expanding in these directions. Breaking down private fears and aversions that nobody will congratulate you for conquering. Trying out socially discouraged activities and points of view. Expansion towards an unappealing role doesn’t mean you have to inhabit that role forever – it just gives you a peek into your own versatility, the multitude of roles you could inhabit in different circumstances.

Exercise: Pick a glamorous CoZE experiment you tried in the past. Design a CoZE experiment to grow in the reverse direction. Set a Yoda Timer and explor...