trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
New year's resolutions: Things worth considering for next year
by Elo — 2015-12-07T00:09:19.830Z

The beginning of the new year is a natural Schelling Point and swiftly approaching. With that in mind I have created a handy go-to list of things worth considering for next year.

Alongside this process; another thing you might like to do is conduct a review of this year, confirming your progress on major goals; double checking that you are on track. and conduct any last-minute summaries of potential failures or learning-cases.

This list is designed to be used for imagination, opportunity, and potential planning purposes. If you find yourself having the feelings of (disappointment, failure, fear, regret, burdens, guilt and others) reconsider looking at this list and instead do something that will not lead to negative feelings about the future. If you are not getting something positive out of doing this exercise, don't. That's a silly idea. I am banking on the fact that it will be more helpful than not; for most people. If you are in the category of people that it does not help - I am sorry; I assume you know your priorities and are working on them as reasonably effectively as possible - good luck with that task.

This list is going to look a bit like my List of common human goals because it was written concurrenlty with the ideas listed there (and by the same person).

You might want a pen and paper; and 10 minutes to go through this list and consider what things you want to do over the next year that fall into these categories. This time is not for you to plan out an entire year, but something of a chance to consider the playing field of "a year of time". After you have a list of things you want to do; there are lots of things you can do with them. i.e. time planning, research, goal factoring, task-generating.

without further ado; the list:

1. things I might want to study or learn next year

Often people like learning. Are you thinking of higher level study? Or keen to upskill? Thinking of picking up a textbook (our list of best textbooks on every subject) on a topic. Or joining a learning group for a skill

2. life goals I would like to have completed by next year

Do you already have a list of life goals? Should you review them and do you want to particularly work on one over the next year? Is something overdue? Is there something you have been putting off starting?

3. healt...
timeless quantum immortality
by Algernoq — 2015-12-06T04:14:17.784Z

Summary: The world looks normal despite Quantum Immortality, because the most likely Universe in which you're immortal is one where your immortality doesn't require much luck.

Recap of Quantum Immortality: The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics states that every time some event is observed (e.g. a coin flip), the Universe splits into separate universes, one for each possible outcome (e.g. Heads universe and Tails universe), and the conscious observer will find themselves in one of these universes (e.g. either see the coin come up Heads or see it come up Tails) with a likelihood proportional to the number of ways this event can happen (e.g. you'll probably never see a coin land on edge). Quantum Immortality states that my consciousness will follow the path of branchings in which it survives (e.g. if I set up a highly reliable system that will kill me if the coin ever comes up tails, I can flip and flip the coin and I will only ever see it come up heads).

New idea: Let's take a timeless perspective, and ask "what entire life path am I most likely to observe, from the set of all possible life paths?" Quantum Immortality restricts me to observing life paths in which I do not die. Some life paths are more probable than others. It's not clear what this probability is, but simpler life paths seem more likely than others (e.g. I'm more likely to observe a life path that can be described with any of many sets of physical laws and initial conditions, and less likely to observe a life path that requires a unique, complicated description.) I'm most likely to observe a world that follows physical laws all the time, in which many different sets of simple physical laws could create the world I see. I'm less likely to see a world in which I get improbably lucky.

Thus, I expect to live forever but I don't expect to get lucky.

2nd new idea: Let's generalize this timeless perspective across multiple individuals and lifetimes. Zooming out again and looking at the set of all possible evolutionary paths for a lifeform: it's most likely that I'm one of a lifeform that exponentially grows about as rapidly as possible. Over a long time horizon, the most numerous lifeform is the one that has the highest rate of growth. Thus, because I am conscious and Quantum Immortality appears to be correct, there's a good chance that I will spawn huge numbers of conscious immortal

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Obvious advice
by So8res — 2015-12-06T02:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/obvious-advice/

This is a common scene at the MIRI offices: I have a decision to make, like what sort of winter fundraiser to run. Before making any choices, I take a few minutes to write down all the obvious things to do before making the decision: spend five minutes brainstorming options before weighting any pros or cons; talk to people who have run different types of fundraisers in similar situations; and so on. I can usually generate a handful of obvious things to do before making my decision. I write those things down, and then I describe my decision to one of my advisors and see if they have any advice. They say "only the obvious," and then rattle off five more obvious things I hadn't thought of, all of them useful.

Sometimes, I wonder how successful a person would be if they just did all the obvious things in pursuit of their goals.

So with that in mind, allow me to offer some quite obvious pieces of advice, which have proven very useful for me:

Before carrying out any plan, actually do the obvious things.

When you're about to make a big decision, pause, and ask yourself what obvious things a reasonable person would do before making this sort of decision. Would they spend a full five minutes (by the clock) brainstorming alternative options before settling on a decision? Would they consult with friends and advisors? Would they do some particular type of research?

Then, actually do the obvious things.

A corollary to this advice is to also occasionally consider not doing things the wrong way. Imagine someone who's recently failed at an endeavor that was important to them. They're fraught with despair, and you attempt to console them by saying "well, at least you learned something." They snap back, "yeah, I learned never to try hard things ever again!"

This may be just an emotional outburst, yes, but if they act upon this outburst — and withdraw, and become less curious, and become more bitter — then they are in solid need of the above corollary. In fact, the middle of an emotional outburst is one of the best times to use the corollary. I have often myself found it useful, mid-hasty-decision, to pause, reflect, and ask myself "wait… is this a terrible plan?"

(And then, if the answer is yes, I don't carry out the plan — a crucial step.)

Both pieces of advice above — "do the obvious preparation", and "don't execute bad plans" — each get a lot more useful as you expand your notions ...
My research priorities for AI control 
by paulfchristiano — 2015-12-06T01:57:12.058Z

I've been thinking about what research projects I should work on, and I've posted my current view. Naturally, I think these are also good projects for other people to work on as well.

Brief summaries of the projects I find most promising:

Elaborating on apprenticeship learning. Imitating human behavior seems especially promising as a scalable approach to AI control, but there are many outstanding problems.

Efficiently using human feedback. The limited availability of human feedback may be a serious bottleneck for realistic approaches to AI control.

Explaining human judgments and disagreements. My preferred approach to AI control requires humans to understand AIs’ plans and beliefs. We don’t know how to solve the analogous problem for humans.

Designing feedback mechanisms for reinforcement learning. A grab bag of problems, united by a need for proxies of hard-to-optimize, implicit objectives.

The post briefly discusses where I am coming from, and links to a good deal more clarification. I'm always interested in additional thoughts and criticisms, since changing my views on these questions would directly influence what I spend my time on.
EA as offsetting
by KatjaGrace — 2015-12-05T03:06:17.000Z

Scott made a good post about vegetarianism.

But the overall line of reasoning sounds to me like:

“There’s a pretty good case that one is morally compelled to pay for people in the developing world to have shoes, because it looks pretty clear now that people in the developing world have feet that can benefit a lot from shoes.

However, there is this interesting argument that it is ok to not buy shoes, and offset the failing through donating a small amount to effective charities.”

— which I think many Effective Altruists would consider at least strange and inefficient way of approaching the question of what one should do, though it does arrive at the correct answer. In particular, why take the detour through an obligation to do something that is apparently not as cost-effective as the offsetting activity? (If it were as cost effective, we would not prefer to do the offsetting activity). That it would be better to replace the first activity with the second seems like it should cast doubt on the reasoning that originally suggested the first activity. Assuming cost-effectively doing good is the goal.

That is, perhaps shoes are cost-effective. Perhaps AMF is. One thing is for sure though: it can’t be that shoes are one of the most cost-effective interventions and can also be cost-effectively offset by donating to AMF instead. If you believe that shoes can be offset, this demonstrates that shoes are less cost-effective than the offset, and so of little relevance to Effective Altruists. We should just do the ‘offset’ activity to begin with.

Does the above line of reasoning make more sense in the case of vegetarianism? If so, what is the difference? I have some answers, but I’m curious about which ones matter to others.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-12-04T16:37:56.024Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on November 27th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Cologne meetup: 28 November 2015 05:00PM
Prague Less Wrong Meetup: 02 December 2015 07:00PM
San Antonio Meetup!: 29 November 2015 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

NYC Solstice: 19 December 2015 05:30PM
Seattle Solstice: 19 December 2015 05:00PM
[Vienna] Five Worlds Collide - Vienna: 04 December 2015 08:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), Singapore, St. Louis, Vancouver, Warsaw, Waterloo.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Rationality Diary
by rocurley — 2015-12-04T07:20:25.239Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Rationality Diary

WHEN:
07 December 2015 06:15:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to tell stories about when we tried to solve a problem in our lives, and how it went. This is a followup to the last meetup where we tried to solve each others problems, but it's not a prerequisite!
As always, I can be reached at 301-458-0764 if you need to be let in.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Rationality Diary
Strict Dominance for the Modified Demski Prior
by abramdemski — 2015-12-04T05:57:11.000Z

I previously noted that difficulties with the modified Demski prior were less than previously thought: I was failing to distinguish between the two different kinds of update. Here, I analyze more fully what it succeeds at.

In order to apply the logical prior to sequence induction, we will add an empirical predicate to it. We define the modified Demski prior P(ϕ) as in this post, but with ϕ in the language of PA plus one additional predicate, B(n), which is true or false according to the bits in the bit-sequence we're trying to predict. We wish to compare this to the universal semimeasure, M. For b a finite or infinite binary sequence, M(b) is defined as:
Σp:U(p)=b∗2−|p|
where U is a universal machine, and p is a minimal program such that the output of U is equal to or an extension of b. Let P be the probability distribution on binary sequences which results from P via encoding such sequences into logic as conjunctions of B(n) and ¬B(n).

Definition 1. Consider two probability distributions f and g defined on the same σ-algebra Σ. f dominates g iff ∃α∈R such that ∀x∈Σ we have αf(x)≥g(x). The dominance is strict if g does not also dominate f.

This is similar to the definition of (multiplicative) dominance in Li & Vitanyi's An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications; however, here we consider x from the entire σ-algebra where they did not. This matters especially for Theorem 2.

Theorem 1. P is dominant over M.

Proof. For a constant complexity penalty l, we can encode a sentence-enumerator which simulates feeding random bits to the universal machine used by the universal semimeasure and asserts the sentences B(n) or ¬B(n) encoding the bit-sequence output by it. All of these hypotheses will be consistent with PA. Therefore, P(b) will be at least 2−lM(b). □

Theorem 2. The dominance from Theorem 1 is strict.

Proof. A hypothesis with positive probability in P is to encode a truth predicate for PA in B(n), as follows. Let ┌ϕ┐ be the Goedel-number of sentences ϕ in the language of PA. We assert the T-schema, ϕ↔B(┌ϕ┐), for each ϕ in the language of PA. (We do not assert this for the sentences including the predicate B().) This hypothesis forces the binary sequence to encode a complete and consistent extension of PA. As a result, P will assign positive probability to this. (Each such extension will have zero measure, but the set of such extensions will

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Meetup : Sydney solstice
by Elo — 2015-12-04T03:19:30.057Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney solstice

WHEN:
12 December 2015 05:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
63 york rd, Queens park, sydney,

https://goo.gl/maps/7Zm8dea7hGF2
Centennial park, in the park, closest gate at 63 york st, 5pm local time.

See the facebook page for any last minute updates i.e. weather problems. or call (04--3848--11-43) me to confirm any details you want to know.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1651519248459695/

https://goo.gl/maps/7Zm8dea7hGF2
Centennial park, in the park, closest gate at 63 york st.

Same place as last year.

Bring a dish! Something tasty... Try to aim for something inclusive of vegetarian/vegan, at the very least - know what is in your dish for when people ask.

Agenda:
Eat food; be merry!
Our year in review (as a local community, as a country, as humanty)
Talk about goals for the past year, share successes and failures (as individuals)
Lachlan - making resolutions for the new year
Taryn - songs
Over the next year: plans for ourselves
Over the next year: predictions about the state of the future of the world

Bonus mini-game: prepare for the Candles VS wind game, and this time bring a solution with you.

Post below what you plan to bring so we don't get duplicates...

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney solstice
[Link] Huffington Post article promoting Effective Altruist ideas
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2015-12-04T02:02:31.638Z

Disclaimer: This post is mainly of interest to EA-oriented Less Wrongers

Happy to share that I got this article promoting effective giving, and especially advocating Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save, published in The Huffington Post.

This piece is part of my broader work at Intentional Insights, a nonprofit devoted to promoting effective altruism and rational thinking to a broad audience effectively, by using modern promotion and marketing methods. Our goals with this and similar articles is to channel both money to effective charities and encourage people to think about donations in a rational, science-based, data-driven manner. These articles are also aimed to be a good fit for those supportive of EA ideas to share with others on social media, to help encourage non-EAs to adopt effective giving strategies, since the articles are aimed to be easy to read and engaging.

I'd love your feedback on how well you think this article works in accomplishing the goals outlined above, both strengths and weaknesses, to help me improve my writing and to help Intentional Insights improve its efforts. For those of you who are EA-oriented, would you share this on your social media? Why or why not?

Also, I would value any ideas on how to evaluate the QALYs gained from channeling people's money and thinking toward effective giving, as that's something we at Intentional Insights are trying to figure out. For example, how many QALYs are gained from publishing an article like this in a broad venue such as The Huffington Post? What are good approaches to estimating this number? The best we came up with so far is a first-order intuitive gut reactions of how much would you pay to not have this article and its influence on people disappear, so I'd be curious about your response to this question.

P.S. Note that based on previously-expressed concerns about purity of content and the rationality/Less Wrong brand, we at Intentional Insights have updated and are no longer presenting ourselves publicly as promoting rationality or Less Wrong explicitly, though we are bringing up rationality and Less Wrong to those who have engaged with our content extensively and are guiding them first to ClearerThinking and then to Less Wrong.

P.P.S. I'd be glad to speak to anyone who wants to know more about and collab

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Social games
by KatjaGrace — 2015-12-04T02:00:40.000Z

An interesting thing about playing board games is that in order to get the most out of the game, you have to pretend that you mostly care about winning the game. And not, for instance, about enjoying yourself, making your friend happy, or being cooperative or trustworthy outside of the game. This is sometimes uncomfortable, and causes real conflict, because everybody does care about things outside of the game, and people vary in how thoroughly they are willing or able to pretend otherwise for the sake of the game.

Sports are similar: to enjoy soccer, you have to pretend for a bit that you want to get the ball into the goals so badly that you are willing to risk being hit in the face by a soccer ball. You might even be playing soccer because you think it will improve your health. Inside the soccer, you just care about scoring goals (I think—I don’t actually know how soccer works, in part because I am unable to suspend my preferences about not being hit by balls).

I think social interaction is often similar. Suppose you go out to lunch with a group of work colleagues. The group chooses an outside cafe, overlooking a river. You talk about what kind of boats you are looking at. You talk about how much it must cost to rent property like this. You talk about what other eating options are nearby, and so on. Do you care about kinds of boats? Probably not. Are you going to go home and look up real estate prices for fun? No. You might care a bit about the quality of eating places nearby, but Yelp will probably inform you better than this group. You are adopting a kind of fake, short term interest in the topics, because you have to be interested in the topics to play properly at the social interaction, and thus to enjoy it.

Sometimes I don’t like these fake goals in socializing. Perhaps because you can’t be explicit about them the way you can about soccer and board games. Or perhaps because the real goal is often to be closer with people, and to understand what they really care about, and pretending together that you care about something else feels like an active obstruction to that. It’s just hard to sit there with a straight face and pretend I care about boats, when really I just want to be closer to the person I’m talking to and am willing to adopt any stance regarding boats to get there. Pretending we both care about boats together withou...
Starting University Advice Repository
by Bryan-san — 2015-12-03T23:51:46.259Z

I know quite a few (12+) rationalists and CFAR graduates who are entering University soon or have just recently started University.

There was a lot of advice I wish I had been given or heard before I entered University and I think having a good repository of rationalist-contributed knowledge/advice/suggestions/information/links/DireWarnings could be very helpful to people in that situation.

1. What advice do students starting University need to hear?

2. What advice did your past self need to hear or what advice would have benefited you at that point in time?

3. Many people fail to ask the right questions. What questions do students need to ask themselves and other people?

Any links or guides on any related topics would be helpful. I will be posting some of my own ideas and links in the comments.

Possibly Relevant Repositories

Life Advice Repository

Boring Advice Repository

Grad Student Advice Repository

Repository Repository