trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Group Rationality Diary, January 1-15
by therufs — 2015-01-01T17:43:43.569Z

Happy new year to those who are celebrating! This is the public group rationality diary for January 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Next diary: January 16-31

Previous diary: December 16-31

Rationality diaries archive
Meetup : West LA—What Is FAI?
by OpenThreadGuy — 2015-01-01T17:35:48.621Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—What Is FAI?

WHEN:
07 January 2015 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Though it is not relevant to rationality and is very easy to think wrongly about if you have not studied the art, Friendly AI is often discussed by rationalists, for historical reasons involving the founder of Less Wrong and a spearhead FAI theorist being the same person. Friendly AI is not a technical term, so it should be easy to explain what it basically is.

Recommended Reading:

Friendly AI wiki article and the things linked to thence

Five theses, two lemmas, and a couple of strategic implications

The genie knows, but does not care

Superintelligence, by Bostrom. Chapter summaries available here

Friendly AI research forum

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—What Is FAI?
Overpaying for happiness?
by cousin_it — 2015-01-01T12:22:31.833Z

Happy New Year, everyone!

In the past few months I've been thinking several thoughts that all seem to point in the same direction:

1) People who live in developed Western countries usually make and spend much more money than people in poorer countries, but aren't that much happier. It feels like we're overpaying for happiness, spending too much money to get a single bit of enjoyment.

2) When you get enjoyment from something, the association between "that thing" and "pleasure" in your mind gets stronger, but at the same time it becomes less sensitive and requires more stimulus. For example if you like sweet food, you can get into a cycle of eating more and more food that's sweeter and sweeter. But the guy next door, who's eating much less and periodically fasting to keep the association fresh, is actually getting more pleasure from food than you are! The same thing happens when you learn to deeply appreciate certain kinds of art, and then notice that the folks who enjoy "low" art are visibly having more fun.

3) People sometimes get unrealistic dreams and endlessly chase them, like trying to "make it big" in writing or sports, because they randomly got rewarded for it at an early age. I wrote a post about that.

I'm not offering any easy answers here. But it seems like too many people get locked in loops where they spend more and more effort to get less and less happiness. The most obvious examples are drug addiction and video gaming, but also "one-itis" in dating, overeating, being a connoisseur of anything, striving for popular success, all these things follow the same pattern. You're just chasing after some Skinner-box thing that you think you "love", but it doesn't love you back.

Sooo... if you like eating, give yourself a break every once in a while? If you like comfort, maybe get a cold shower sometimes? Might be a good idea to make yourself the kind of person that can get happiness cheaply.

Sorry if this post is not up to LW standards, I typed it really quickly as it came to my mind.
Paris LW Meetup - LHC Exhibit - 17/01/2015
by kilobug — 2015-01-01T12:22:01.678Z

We'll be organizing a meetup of LW Paris at "Palais de la Découverte" in order to view the exhibit on LHC (link in French, sorry) and speak about it (and any related - or even unrelated - subject) between LWer.

The meeting is scheduled at 14h00 on Saturday 17th afternoon.

Map and location information available.

Hoping to see many Paris LWers !
Meetup : Paris LW Meetup - LHC Exhibit
by kilobug — 2015-01-01T12:17:49.346Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris LW Meetup - LHC Exhibit

WHEN:
17 January 2015 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Palais de la Découverte, Avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt 75008 Paris

We'll go see the LHC exhibit and speak about it (and any other related theme) between LWers.

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris LW Meetup - LHC Exhibit
Lifehack Ideas January 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-01-01T02:34:22.455Z

Life hacking refers to any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life.

— Wikipedia

This thread is for posting any promising or interesting ideas for lifehacks you've come up with or heard of. If you've successfully implemented your idea, please share the results. You are also encouraged to post lifehack ideas you've tried out that have not been successful, and why you think they weren't. If you can, please give credit for ideas that you got from other people.

To any future posters of Lifehack Ideas threads, please remember to add the "lifehacks_thread" tag.
Stupid Questions January 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-01-01T02:30:43.238Z

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Rationality Quotes January 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-01-01T02:23:30.742Z

It is the beginning of a new year, and time for the beginning of a new rationality quotes thread.

The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
January 2015 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2015-01-01T00:50:52.890Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Treating anthropic selfish preferences as an extension of TDT
by Manfred — 2015-01-01T00:43:56.587Z

I

When preferences are selfless, anthropic problems are easily solved by a change of perspective. For example, if we do a Sleeping Beauty experiment for charity, all Sleeping Beauty has to do is follow the strategy that, from the charity's perspective, gets them the most money. This turns out to be an easy problem to solve, because the answer doesn't depend on Sleeping Beauty's subjective perception.

But selfish preferences - like being at a comfortable temperature, eating a candy bar, or going skydiving - are trickier, because they do rely on the agent's subjective experience. This trickiness really shines through when there are actions that can change the number of copies. For recent posts about these sorts of situations, see Pallas' sim game and Jan_Ryzmkowski's tropical paradise. I'm going to propose a model that makes answering these sorts of questions almost as easy as playing for charity.

To quote Jan's problem:

It's a cold cold winter. Radiators are hardly working, but it's not why you're sitting so anxiously in your chair. The real reason is that tomorrow is your assigned upload, and you just can't wait to leave your corporality behind. "Oh, I'm so sick of having a body, especially now. I'm freezing!" you think to yourself, "I wish I were already uploaded and could just pop myself off to a tropical island."

And now it strikes you. It's a weird solution, but it feels so appealing. You make a solemn oath (you'd say one in million chance you'd break it), that soon after upload you will simulate this exact scene a thousand times simultaneously and when the clock strikes 11 AM, you're gonna be transposed to a Hawaiian beach, with a fancy drink in your hand.

It's 10:59 on the clock. What's the probability that you'd be in a tropical paradise in one minute?

So question one is the probability question: what's your probability that you go to the tropical paradise? And question two is the decision problem: is this actually a good idea?

The probability question is straightforward, and is indeed about a 1000/1001 chance of tropical paradise. If this does not make sense, feel free to ask about it, or go check out these two rambling complementary posts: Deriving probabilities from causal diagrams, More marbles and Sleeping Beauty.

One might then make an argument about the decision question that goes like this: Before I swore this oath, my probability of goi

...
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin mentions LessWrong, discusses the various camps and ideologies in Cryptocurrency development
by Ander — 2014-12-31T22:23:09.227Z

Vitalik says cryptocurrency developers should "reach out to LessWrong more", in order to not be ignorant of advanced computer science and game theory topics.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/12/31/silos/

I think Vitalik raises several major important points, namely:
* Bitcoin's $600 million wasted on electricity yearly in order to secure the network is a huge problem. Various Proof of Stake algorithms are attempting to improve upon this. The ideal solution would be one which combines the low cost of the Proof of Stake algorithm, with the high security or Proof of Work. I not enough of an expert to be able to say which solution is best, but both the Ripple consensus algorithm and the Bitshares Delegated Proof of State algorithm look promising. I am interested to see what algorithm Vitalik will choose for Ethereum.
* ASIC miners are a problem due to the resulting centralization. They have also lead to increased centralization in Bitcoin, as the network is now increasingly controlled by a few large mining pools.
* Blockchain technologies have a great potential to change the world, and solve governmental and organizational problems that society is facing. Beyond simply revolutionizing money, blockchain technologies could also be used in the future to support prediction markets, voting/consensus building, exchanges, etc.
Identity crafting
by robot-dreams — 2014-12-31T18:34:27.426Z

I spend a LOT of time on what I'll call "identity crafting". It's probably my most insidious procrastination tactic--far worse than, say, Facebook or Reddit.

What do I mean by "identity crafting"? Here are some examples:

Brainstorming areas of my life where I want to improve (e.g. social skills, sleep habits)

Searching for new hobbies to start (e.g. snowboarding, guitar)

Making a "character sheet" for myself, complete with a huge list of "badass skills" that I'd want to learn (e.g. martial arts, lock picking)

Creating and revising my "four-year plan", i.e. schedule of university courses (at my university I had a lot of flexibility in which courses to take each term)

Finding books that I "ought to read" (bonus points if the list includes "The Art of Computer Programming") and movies that I "ought to watch"

Looking up variants on "renaissance man" (e.g. "Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar"), and imagining how I could become one

In other words, "identity crafting" is some combination of making lists and daydreaming. And since the vast majority of the "identities" that I "craft" never become reality, I should really say that "identity crafting" is some combination of making lists and self-aggrandizing delusion.

What's so bad about this? Besides the obvious waste of time, this gives me a false sense of accomplishment and productivity--I often feel as though the "identity" that I "crafted" were already real, and I often feel as though I've already done enough for the day (week, month, year). Thus in the short term, this is a great way to ensure that I don't do any "actual work", and in the long term, this is a great way to become a poser with an epically inflated opinion of myself.

So... does anyone else do this?
Meetup : London First 2015 Meetup, 04/01/2015
by Tenoke — 2014-12-31T18:01:57.256Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London First 2015 Meetup, 04/01/2015

WHEN:
04 January 2015 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Africa House, 64-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG, UK-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG, UK

LessWrong London is having its first Meetup of 2015 this Sunday (04/01) at 2:00 PM. We are meeting at our usual venue - The Shakespeare's Head by Holborn tube station. There is no fixed topic of discussion nor is there anything planned so be prepared for anything. There will be a sign identifying us and if you have any problems feel free to contact me on 07425168803.

About London LessWrong:
We run this meetup almost every week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....
Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.

If you want more information about the meetup or anything else come by our google group or alternatively our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London First 2015 Meetup, 04/01/2015
Meetup : Warsaw January Meetup
by  — 2014-12-31T13:45:21.136Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw January Meetup

WHEN:
13 January 2015 06:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Warsaw

Themes propositions: new year's resolutions, self-development without bullshit, growth mindset, rationalist-friendly fiction. Maybe Go playing.

Place: Pub Frodo, Chmielna 98, pawilon 16. http://www.pubfrodo.pl/

Join our Facebook group for better coordination: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwwarsaw/

Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw January Meetup
Dark Arts 101: Be rigorous, on average
by PhilGoetz — 2014-12-31T00:37:28.765Z

I'm reading George Steiner's 1989 book on literary theory, Real Presences. Steiner is a literary theorist who achieved the trifecta of having appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. His book demonstrates an important Dark Arts method of argument.

So far, Steiner's argument appears to be:

Human language is an undecidable symbol-system.

Every sentence therefore carries with it an infinite amount of meaning, the accumulation of all connotations, contexts, and historical associations invoked, and invoked by those invocations, etc. Alternately, every sentence contains no meaning at all, since none of those words can refer to things in the world.

The meaning of a sentence, therefore, is not finite or analyzable, but transcendent.

The transcendent is the search for God.

Therefore, all good literature is a search for God.

The critics quoted on the back of the book, and its reviews on Amazon, praise Steiner's rigor and learning. It is impressive. Within a single paragraph he may show the relationship between Homer, 12th-century theological works, Racine, Shakespeare, and Schoenberg. And his care and precision with words is exemplary; I have the impression, even when he speaks of meaning in music or other qualia-laden subjects, that I know exactly what he means.

He was intelligent enough to trace the problems he was grappling with out past the edges of his domain of expertise. The key points of his argument lie not in literary theory, but in information theory, physics, artificial intelligence, computability theory, linguistics, and transfinite math.

Unfortunately, he knows almost nothing about any of those fields, and his language is precise enough to be wrong, which he is when he speaks on any of those subjects. How did he get away with it?

Answer: He took a two-page argument about things he knew little about, spread it across 200 pages, and filled the gaps with tangential statements of impressive rigor and thoroughness on things he was expert in.

For example, the first chapter discusses, with perhaps a hundred references, his opinion that the best art criticism is art made in response to art, his theory that good art is always derived from earlier art, and observations on the etymology of words; but most especially his consternation at the hundreds of thousands of articles, books, and talks on literature produced yearly by people who are not professors at...
Recent AI safety work
by paulfchristiano — 2014-12-30T18:19:09.211Z

(Crossposted from ordinary ideas).

I’ve recently been thinking about AI safety, and some of the writeups might be interesting to some LWers:

Ideas for building useful agents without goals: approval-directed agents, approval-directed bootstrapping, and optimization and goals. I think this line of reasoning is very promising.

A formalization of one piece of the AI safety challenge: the steering problem. I am eager to see more precise, high-level discussion of AI safety, and I think this article is a helpful step in that direction. Since articulating the steering problem I have become much more optimistic about versions of it being solved in the near term. This mostly means that the steering problem fails to capture the hardest parts of AI safety. But it’s still good news, and I think it may eventually cause some people to revise their understanding of AI safety.

Some ideas for getting useful work out of self-interested agents, based on arguments: of arguments and wagers, adversarial collaboration [older], and delegating to a mixed crowd. I think these are interesting ideas in an interesting area, but they have a ways to go until they could be useful.

I’m excited about a few possible next steps:

Under the (highly improbable) assumption that various deep learning architectures could yield human-level performance, could they also predictably yield safe AI? I think we have a good chance of finding a solution---i.e. a design of plausibly safe AI, under roughly the same assumptions needed to get human-level AI---for some possible architectures. This would feel like a big step forward.

For what capabilities can we solve the steering problem? I had originally assumed none, but I am now interested in trying to apply the ideas from the approval-directed agents post. From easiest to hardest, I think there are natural lines of attack using any of: natural language question answering, precise question answering, sequence prediction. It might even be possible using reinforcement learners (though this would involve different techniques).

I am very interested in implementing effective debates, and am keen to test some unusual proposals. The connection to AI safety is more impressionistic, but in my mind these techniques are closely link

...
Meetup : January 2015 Rationality Dojo - How to learn faster and teach more effectively and teaching
by MelbourneLW — 2014-12-30T14:47:18.875Z

Discussion article for the meetup : January 2015 Rationality Dojo - How to learn faster and teach more effectively and teaching

WHEN:
04 January 2015 03:30:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
Errol St park, between Errol St and Harcourt St in North Melbourne

The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are crafted to be serious
self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of
Rationality and personal growth. Each month a community member will run a session involving a presentation of content, discussion, and
exercises.

Continuing the succession of immensely successful dojos, Stephanie
will run a session on powering up your training by both learning and
teaching others. Stephanie brings insights from training animals and coaching humans to creating the habits and responses that we desire in ourselves and others.

For our first dojo of the year we'll have something outside! If the weather is poor we will move to Helen's place which is nearby.

As always, we will review the personal goals we committed to at the
previous Dojo (I will have done X by the next Dojo). Our goals are now being recorded via Google Forms here -
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MCHH4MpbW0SI_2JyMSDlKnnGP4A0qxojQEZoMZIdopk/viewform,
and Melbourne Less Wrong organisers have access to the form results if you wish to review the goals you set last month.

This month, we are also seeking 2-3 lightning talks from members. Have you learned something cool? Gained an insight from one of the LessWrong sequences? Give a lightning talk and share it with Melbourne LW! Speakers will be limited to 5 minutes with room for questions. If you have something you would like to present a lightning talk on, please contact Louise with your topic at lvalmoria@gmail.com

The Dojo is likely to run for 2-3 hours. After the dojo, we will then
have a low key gathering at Helen's place to give LW Melbourne a
chance to get to know Alyssa Vance, a Google software engineer who is visiting from the Bay Area. Bring drinks or snacks, and we might order something to eat.

If you have any trouble finding either the park or Helen's place, call
Louise on 0419 192 367.

If you would like to present at a future Dojo or suggest a topic,
please fill it in on the Rationality Dojo Roster:
http://is.gd/dojoroster

To organise similar events, please send an email to melbournelw@gmail

...
[LINK] Yudkowsky's Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters
by katydee — 2014-12-30T06:37:35.402Z

Some of you have likely seen this already, but for those of you who haven't, Eliezer recently finished a series of Tumblr posts on writing intelligent characters in fiction. It can be found at http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing and is IMO worth a read.