trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Rationalists of the 1950s (and before) also called themselves “Rationalists”
by Owain_Evans — 2021-11-28T20:17:22.259Z

TLDR

There’s an organization based in London called the

Rationalist Association

. It was founded in 1885. Historically, it focused on publishing books and articles related to atheism and science, including works by Darwin, Bertrand Russell, J. B. S. Haldane, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Karl Popper.
The topics covered overlap with the present-day

rationalist movement

(centered on Lesswrong). They include religion and atheism, philosophy (especially philosophy of science and ethics), evolution, and psychology.
According to

Wikipedia

, membership of the Rationalist Association peaked in 1959 with more than 5000 members and with Bertrand Russell as President.
This post displays some covers of Rationalist Association publications, and links to full-text articles and other resources.
Prior to reading this biography, I hadn't heard of these earlier rationalists. So I did some quick and shallow research. I’d be curious to know more about this history. It might be worth adding a note to this LW Wiki

entry.

Past covers of the Rationalist Association publications

1896 Cover

This is a journal for short articles called the “Agnostic Annual” (later “Rationalist Annual”). The full text is

here

.
Some quotes from the article “Mind as controlled by matter” below.

1938 Cover

Includes articles by Bertrand Russell and evolutionary biologist and

proto-transhumanist

J. B. S. Haldane.

1954 Cover

1971 Cover

This is for a magazine called The Humanist, published by the Rationalist Association. It has since published articles by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.
Contents: “Rationalist Tasks”, “Motoring Safety”, “Quasi-rational Quarrelling” and the first appearance of the famous Philip Larkin

poem

that begins “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”.

Links and Full-text

1. Full-text

articles

from the Rationalist Annual by the prolific biologist, popular science writer and communist, J. B. S. Haldane. Some titles:

Why I am a Materialist
The Laws of Nature [probabilistic theories in physics and genetics, Laplace’s Demon]
The Limitations of Rationalism [cognitive limitations and biases -- see below]
A Rationalist Approach to the Problem of Sexual Relations
On Being Finite [reflections on death and meaning in life -- see below]

2. Full-text

article

by Ernest Gellner “On Being Wrong” [epistemic corrigibility]

3. Wikipedia on the (British)

Rationalist Association

, the

Indian Rationalist Association

...
Is it better to fix a problem directly, or start again so the problem never happens?
by Oluwalase Jotham — 2021-11-28T20:00:06.921Z

Recently, I've found myself in the dilemma between solving a problem directly by fixing it head on then moving to the next thing and starting again so this time i don't make the same mistakes or encounter the same problems I experienced before. Most of the time I find myself unconsciously choosing to restart rather than fix. Is this approach any better than the latter?
TTS audio of "Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty"
by Quintin Pope — 2021-11-28T18:11:38.498Z

My impression is that some people were put off by the length of the articles in Late 2021 MIRI Conversations. Personally, I've used my iPhone's text-to-speech functionality to listen to these and similarly long LessWrong posts as I do other things. After someone else commented on how convenient that seemed, I thought I should try posting a text-to-speech audio version of "Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty" and see if that made the content more accessible.

If you find TTS audio versions of longer posts helpful or have other feedback, please let me know. I'm planning to generate TTS versions of the other MIRI conversations after getting feedback here. In the future, we may even want some sort of integrated TTS service for long LessWrong posts. Edit: thanks to Steven Byrnes for pointing out that we already have such a service from the Nonlinear Library. Here's their version of "Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty".

Here is a SoundCloud link for my version.

The mp3 files are available at this Google Drive folder.

I generated the audio files with Amazon Polly using the neural version of the English/US voice Joanna.

Following TTS audio of technical discussions is difficult at first. I've used my iPhone's TTS for years, and it still took me a few minutes to adapt to the Amazon voice. I suggest listening for at least 10 minutes, and not getting too invested in following all the details, especially at first.

I've striped out the timestamps on the posts, since they're difficult to follow and distracting in an audio-only format. If any of the participants would like me to add them back, make other minor changes, or remove this post entirely, I'd be happy to oblige.
The bonds of family and community: Poverty and cruelty among Russian peasants in the late 19th century
by jasoncrawford — 2021-11-28T17:22:23.136Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/russian-peasant-life

Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia is an ethnographic account of Russian peasants around 1900. The author, Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia (“Semyonova” for short), spent four years researching in the villages—one of the first to study a people through prolonged direct observation and contact with them.

Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia

I was interested in the subject as part of learning, concretely, about the quality of life for people in various places and times and at various stages of development. Although material progress was advancing rapidly at the end of the 19th century, much of that progress had not yet reached the province of Riazan where Semyonova did most of her studies. What was life like there?

In brief, I went in expecting poverty, which I found. I did not expect to also find a disturbing degree of cruelty and abuse.

First, let me share some passages from the book that I highlighted, roughly organized by theme. At the end I’ll discuss how to interpret this and what to make of it.

In the block quotes that follow, brackets indicate insertions by the editor of the volume, David Ransel, not by me. Photographs are all taken from the Kindle edition (and presumed to be out of copyright).

Poverty

Brick masonry home, presumably in the village of Muraevnia

Here is the typical peasant diet:

Dinner consists of cabbage soup, porridge (kasha), or, again, potatoes and bread. The soup, of course, has no meat in it, just cabbage, but occasionally sour cream is added. Potatoes are mixed with kvass and onions. The porridge—usually millet—is eaten either with milk, in what is known as the thin form (kulesh), or in a thicker form made with hemp-seed oil. After dinner, the peasants take a rest and then return to the fields. They take along some bread for an afternoon snack sometime between three and five o’clock. When the sun sets, the peasants go home, and at about nine in the evening they eat their supper, which is warmed-over dinner, with the possible addition of skim milk.

You get a better sense of the standard of living from the foods that they consider special treats:

Foods that can be found on a peasant’s table only during the annual festival, or during a wedding or baptismal dinner, include pancakes (bliny), meat (veal designated for holidays—uboina), potato fritters (drachena), buns (pyshki), salamata (a kind of thin gruel), kalinnik (a kind of cake), fritters (olad’i),

...
Solve Corrigibility Week
by Logan Riggs — 2021-11-28T17:00:29.986Z

A low-hanging fruit for solving alignment is to dedicate a chunk of time actually trying to solve a sub-problem collectively.

To that end, I’ve broken up researching the sub-problem of corrigibility into two categories in this google doc (you have suggestion privileges):

Previous Work: let’s not reinvent the wheel. Write out links to any past work on corrigibility. This can range from just links to links & summaries & analyses. Do comment reactions to other's reviews to provide counter-arguments. This is just a google doc, low-quality posts, comments, links are accepted; I want people to lean towards babbling more.
Tasks: what do we actually do this week to make progress? Suggest any research direction you find fruitful or general research questions or framings. Example: write an example of corrigibility (one could then comment an actual example).

Additionally, I’ll post 3 top-level comments for:

Meetups: want to co-work with others in the community? Comment availability, work preferences, and a way to contact you (eg calendly link, “dm me”, “ my email is bob and alice dot com”, etc) For example, I’m available most times this week with a Calendly link for scheduling 1-on-1 co-working sessions. Additionally, you yourself could message those you know to collaborate on this, or have a nerdy house co-working party.
Potential topics: what other topics besides corrigibility could we collaborate on in future weeks?
Meta: what are different formats this type of group collaboration could take? Comment suggestions with trade offs or discuss the cost/benefits of what I’m presenting in this post.

I do believe there’s a legitimate, albeit small, chance that we solve corrigibility or find its “core” this week. Nonetheless, I think it’s of great value to be able to make actual progress on alignment issues as a community and to figure out how to do that better. Additionally, it’s immensely valuable to have an alignment topic post include a literature review, the community's up-to-date thoughts, and possible future research directions to pursue. I also believe a collaborative project like this will put several community members on the same page as far as terminology and gears-level models.

I explicitly commit to 3 weeks of this (so corrigibility this week and two more the next two weeks). After that is Christmas and New Years, after which I may resume depending on...
Apparently winning by the bias of your opponents
by tailcalled — 2021-11-28T13:20:16.284Z

There's a thing I've sometimes noticed happening in social science debates. In the spirit of How to Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor, let's consider an example.

A note: I'm going to pick a controversial example, of the causes of transsexuality. This is because for the past few years, I have been studying transsexuality to try to understand its causes better, and so it's an example I have thought deeply about and know a lot about. And because I've been hit by the problem described in this post.

But understandably, it's also something that a lot of people, particularly trans people and people involved in pro- or anti-trans politics, care a lot about. Given the centrality of the example, I think its reasonable to debate object-level matters of the example in the comments, but everyone on all sides should be careful about mindkilling.

Blanchard's autogynephilia theory

Why do trans women transition? As in, what is it that causes them to be transgender, rather than to live happily as men? While there is disagreement about this question, insofar as the trans community gives you an answer, it tends to be something like:

Your brain expects to have a certain kind of body, either male or female, and it expects to live in a specific gender role, either as a man or as a woman. Some people are born with brains of the opposite sex. This causes distress, and can be fixed by transitioning to live as the sex that matches their brain. And thus you get trans people.

This narrative has a great degree of flaws and inconsistencies, which I won't belabor here (though if you can't see any, feel free to ask in the comments, and I will reply). It's probably not surprising that the narrative is so flawed; it's not selected for truth, but instead for political convenience, because it allows an easy way to describe what it is like to be trans, and because the policies people tend to derive from it favor trans people.

But given the inaccuracy, we might wish for another, more accurate narrative. There are a million other idiosyncratic theories than this one, but there's probably one narrative that stands above all of the others in terms of scientific support, quality of derivation, and so on. It has many names, but I will call it the Blanchardian model, named after Ray Blanchard, a major figure in its development:

There are two different kinds of trans women, homosexual (exclusively

...
Why Bedroom Closets?
by jefftk — 2021-11-28T03:20:05.979Z

Bedrooms, at least in the US, are nearly always constructed with
built-in closets, but I don't see why? What's the appeal?

Personally, I don't like them. I want the flexibility to arrange
furniture however currently best suits my needs, and a built-in closet
permanently reserves a portion of the floor area. Stand-alone
wardrobes also offer flexibility when occupants vary in how much
stuff they have that is a good fit for a closet.

When we were adding dormers
to our house four years ago we needed to decide whether to
include closets in each of the rooms. Here's what the three
new/expanded bedrooms looked like with and without closets:

Anna's bedroom

What will be Nora's bedroom once she's out of our room. Currently my
office and where I sleep for the second half of the night.

Lily's bedroom

We decided to construct all three without closets, and in retrospect
we're both very happy with that decision: each of the three has the
bed in a position that wouldn't be possible if we had kept the
closets.

(Sometimes people will say that it doesn't matter whether you like
closets, building code requires them. This is a myth: the
International Residential Code (IRC) says nothing about bedroom
closets. And our building inspector had no issues with our closetless
bedrooms.)

Comment via: facebook
Frame Control
by Aella — 2021-11-27T22:59:29.436Z

Crossposted from my blog

When I mention my dad’s abuse, I mention salient things - physical pain, insults, and controlling behavior. These are “clearly bad” - if I tell you that he often told me I was lazy and would fail horribly at life once I left home, you know it's bad, because it’s concrete, easy to imagine and obviously unkind. But this wasn’t the worst of the abuse; the most terrible parts were extraordinarily hard to understand or describe.
In his world, I felt insane - I couldn’t tell what was real, who was at fault, or why my heart hurt so much. My sense of clarity around my own intentions crumbled; everything I thought or did might have seemed good on the surface, but that goodness became just a disguise for my true, darker intentions - all helpfully revealed to me by my dad. And none of it was salient or concrete or easily understandable; I remember my mom once telling me, “I can’t describe what this is like to other people. The individual things seem so silly, I can’t put the important thing into words.”

I’m going to try to put it into words, and the words I personally use for “the important thing” are frame control.

This isn’t just about my dad, and he wasn’t even particularly good at it when children weren’t his targets; frame control pops up elsewhere. It’s a feature of cults, leaders, of some charismatic people, of abusers in relationships, of some parents, of some ideological movements. It’s hit communities around me, hurt friends of mine. I don’t know how to fight it, but I at least want to name it. And naming it is really hard, because at first glance frame control looks like completely normal behavior. Every individual instance is “not that bad”; and when the knife that wounds you is invisible, you might doubt that you’re bleeding at all. Frame control is inherently illegible; it’s not something that checks a few clear boxes, it’s only really visible through the experience of the receiver.

In this post I’m going to advocate for some perspectives that I think can also be really dangerous. I’m going to avoid too many disclaimers or safety warnings throughout, and will discuss safety altogether at the end.

Your frame is basically the set of assumptions you hold about the world around you, in every way there is - your values, your identity, your beliefs about meaning and social norms and economics and whatever, although most of it tend...
Why Study Physics?
by johnswentworth — 2021-11-27T22:30:21.163Z

Physics seems to have a bunch of useful epistemic techniques which haven’t been made very legible yet.

The two big legible epistemic techniques in technical fields are Mathematical Proofs, and The Scientific Method. Either derive logically X from some widely-accepted axioms, or hypothesize X and then do a bunch of experiments which we’d expect to come out some other way if X were false. It seems pretty obvious that science requires a bunch of pieces besides those in order to actually work in practice, but those are the two which we’ve nailed down most thoroughly.

Then there’s less-legible methods. Things like

fermi estimates

,

gears-level models

, informal mathematical arguments, an aesthetic sense for kinds-of-models-which-tend-to-generalize-well, the habit of figuring out qualitative features of an answer before calculating it, back-of-the-envelope approximations, etc.

Take informal mathematical arguments, for example. We’re talking about things like the use of infinitesimals in early calculus, or delta functions, or Fourier methods, or renormalization. Physicists used each of these for decades or even centuries before their methods were rigorously proven correct. In each case, one could construct pathological examples in which the tool broke down, yet physicists in practice had a good sense for what kinds-of-things one could and could not do with the tools, based on rough informal arguments. And they worked! In every case, mathematicians eventually came along and set the tools on rigorous foundations, and the tools turned out to work in basically the cases a physicist would expect.

So there’s clearly some epistemic techniques here which aren’t captured by Mathematical Proof + The Scientific Method. Physicists were able to figure out correct techniques before the proofs were available. The Scientific Method played a role - physicists could check their results against real-world data - but that’s mostly just checking the answer. The hard part was to figure out which answer to check in the first place, and that involved informal mathematical arguments.

We don’t really have a legible Art of Informal Mathematical Arguments, the way we have a legible Art of Mathematical Proofs or Art of Scientific Method. Informal mathematics clearly played a key role historically in figuring out useful tools, and will likely continue to play a key role in the future, but we don’t hav...
[Linkpost] Being Normal by Brian Caplan
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2021-11-27T22:19:18.051Z

Being Normal

The Principle of Normality: A normal person says what others say, but does what others do.

I found this via a Tweet by Paul Graham:

Very interesting point: Conformists conform separately in words and actions, and since conventional words are at odds with conventional actions, this thereby makes them hypocrites as well.
How could a friendly AI deal with humans trying to sabotage it? (like how present day internet trolls introduce such problems)
by M. Y. Zuo — 2021-11-27T22:07:15.960Z

After close observation of behaviours online and in person, for a few years, it becomes ever clearer in my mind that a significant fraction (>1%) of the regular adult population would intentionally sabotage any future friendly AI. (speaking of Canada and US, though this probably applies to most if not all countries) Some wouldn’t even particularly be against friendly AI but would still behave destructively for the kicks, such as sadists and so on.

And that’s not to mention career criminals, or the really deranged who probably would be even less inhibited. I would bet even many teenagers would do so just for curiosity’s sake.

The phenomena, I think, would closely mirror the behaviour of present internet trolls when given an opportunity and an anonymizing screen to shield them. Probably a significant fraction would be the same people. As on most large online communities including LW, I assume everyone reading this would have encountered such individuals already so I will spare the examples.

The most straightforward solution I can think of is for the ‘friendly AI’ to treat these people adversarially, as if they were really trying to destroy or confound it, even if they might not actually want to. Excluding those AI that are completely isolated from uncontrolled interaction. But of course this introduces the problem of the supposedly ‘friendly‘ AI needing to ‘combat’, ‘doubt’, ‘interrogate’, ‘oppress’, etc., some percentage of humans in order to carry out its normal functions.

—

Also, there seems to be a slippery slope because it seems highly unlikely that once any such ‘friendly’ AI regularly carries out such operations that it will be able to resist applying the same methods to the merely annoying humans that are not quite as dangerous. Such as those that reduce trust by breaking written promises, confidences, rules, etc., due to carelessness, temptations, and so on. Then onwards to compulsive alcoholics, gamblers, drug addicts, cultists, and others that negatively affect communities. Then perhaps even seemingly average people who nonetheless ruin conversations they participate in, such as by invoking Godwin’s law or other specious comparisons.

Admittedly, this slippery slope may take decades or centuries to slide down as there are defensible Schelling points, and other factors along the way well discussed on LW, that would counteract this pheno...
How common are abiogenesis events?
by Dach — 2021-11-27T19:40:21.140Z

As far as I'm aware, only one abiogenesis event has happened on earth- a place with copious amounts of the exact right molecules in cosmically unique quantity, density, and environment to form self-replicating RNA. If abiogenesis has happened anywhere else, it hasn't evolved into intelligent life whose work has intercepted our light cone. My current model for how abiogenesis went down in our world begins with the semi-random coalescence of more than a thousand nucleotides- for reference, the smallest known self-replicating bacterium has a roughly 580,000 base-pair genome. Assuming each additional required nucleotide introduces a 1/2 chance of failure, each random coalescence event has a less than (1/2)^1000 ~= 10^-300 chance of forming a viable self-replicator. This estimate is completely off the scale with respect to events that you can expect to occur in a 100 billion l.y. radius sphere.

This is my current idea, at least. Do you know of a more persuasive argument?
EDIT: For future readers, I now consider the Grabby Aliens paper to present a compelling alternate model.