trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On Inconvenient Truth
by PDV — 2017-11-10T01:21:41.840Z

What are your politics?

What frameworks have you acquired for structuring your interaction with the world?

What facts support them?

What possibilities would undermine them? What significant counterexamples could exist, and which of them could prove to be fact?

Ludwig Wittgenstein said:

If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

I assert that this is not as true as it seems. Yes, few if any people are willing or able to admit that they hold any specific false belief. If you don't count beliefs in belief or aliefs, it's speculative whether it's logically possible. But I, for one, do believe falsely. I falsely believe something. I am quite sure of it.

The world is wide, and beliefs are complex. Systems of beliefs, like politics, ideology, frameworks, even more so. A complex set of beliefs has many premises it rests on; perhaps none is individually a crux, but propositions that, if false, would cast the rest into doubt in a serious way.

And because there are so many, it is extremely likely, near-certain, that at least one of them is wrong. For almost any political position, there is at least one inconvenient fact.

You may not know it. Perhaps it turns out that, contrary to your ideals of rational actors and self-determination, people born with strawberry-blonde hair are inherently dangerously biased toward pyromania and risk-seeking behavior that they do not endorse, and no one has proposed this, let alone investigated it. Maybe there is a curiously-specific unified field theory that proves that blue is the best color.

But somewhere, the fact is out there. The world is not politically convenient; whatever you wish to believe, there is, somewhere, a fact that will cast doubt on it.

So what should you do?

You could take a strong stance of epistemic and moral modesty, and never take a position with confidence.

You could reject it and embrace views you know are probabilistically ill-founded.

You could try to bite bullets and believe the inconvenient facts.

You could try to find the facts and change your politics to fit.

As a rationalist, I feel committed to the last. I have had some success, but I don't truly believe there are no remaining inconvenient facts. If I'm lucky, it is something that suits my less-endorsed instincts, like an elitist "pure democracy and sane...
The Journal of High Standards


by ChristianKl — 2017-11-10T00:59:57.387Z

Our current academical journals are horrible. On the one hand charge a lot of money for access to their papers. On the other hand the fail to uphold the research standards they endorse.

The New England Journal of Medicine for example has endorsed the CONSORT guidelines on best practice in trial reporting. When Ben Goldacre sent him a letter about how out of 23 papers Ben Goldacre analysed only 3 were completely in accord with the CONSORT guidelines, they weren't even willing to print the letter.

The CONSORT guidelines don't require that researchers do fancy statistics instead of using p-values but just require basics like a paper explicitly mentioning when it reports outcomes that weren't preregistered. If the journal would care about high scientific standards it wouldn't be a big deal to uphold the CONSORT guidelines. Unfortunately, the other top medical journals aren't much better.

Why is it hard to establish a new journal that has higher standards? As Yudkowsky writes in Moloch's toolbox that academics have to publish in journals of high prestige and journals happens to be in high prestige when high quality papers are submitted to them. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.

How could we start a new journal that would get scientists willing to submit papers to the journal? If the journal would pay every author of a paper $50,000 for publishing the paper scientists would have an incentive to publish in the journal.

Even if the money alone isn't enough to warrant the scientist to publish in a no-name journal, the journal would soon stop being a no-name journal because scientists would expect that their colleges want to publish in the journal to get the money. That expectation makes the journal more prestigious. The expectations that other people expect the journal to get more prestigious in-turn will increase it's prestige.

Funding this Journal of High Standards wouldn't be a cheap project, but the money that payed to the scientists who publish the papers isn't going to waste. It's like giving a grant to the scientist expect that when you give them the grant you usually ask them what they want to do with the grant money and in this system they can decide for themselves what they are going to do with the money.

It would be a bit like XPrizes but instead of giving the scientists specific goals, it's &...
Some suggestions (desperate pleas, even)
by Jiro — 2017-11-09T23:14:14.427Z

A way to see all replies to your own comments or posts
Setting defaults for sorting rather than having to manually sort by recent every time
Put the see all comments link in a reasonably easy to find place
"All posts" which actually shows all posts without requiring that the user separately click on each one in order to read it
If you can't eliminate the huge gutter space, at least provide an option to reduce it
A way to edit the raw text of a post. It is hard to struggle with a malicious parser. When I typed "expand(underscore)less", "expand(underscore)more" below using real underscores, the parser decided I want to italicize everything between the two underscores.
Maybe a bugzilla to report bugs? Reporting bugs here or on intercom is suboptimal.
Edit: I tried to submit this post and it didn't appear. If your post is being held it should tell you that your post is being held because otherwise this is hard to distinguish from a malfunction. Also, when you submit your post it doesn't say where it's submitted to--I meant to submit this to Meta.

Also, I'm still having trouble reading this. It's only working on Chrome. Firefox has formatting problems; certain icons (search, "expand(underscore)less", "expand(underscore)more", "navigate(underscore)before", "navigate(underscore)next") show up as text instead of as icons. IE looks good but doesn't show the conversations icon and doesn't do anything if I click "LOGIN".
Set, Game, Match
by ryan_b — 2017-11-09T23:06:53.672Z

I am making an investigation of game theory, and wanted to get my intuitions about this down; this is a better location than most for the job.

Sets of Games

The objects which comprise a game are players, moves, and payoffs. A game is a set which contains the specified objects. Combinatorial games are a set of sets, which may include further payoffs. Game space is every possible combination of these objects; there can at least in theory be infinitely many players, infinitely many moves, and an infinite variety of payoffs. Therefore, gamespace is infinite.

What about information?

Information is special - conventionally it is specified as a part of the game. With the game defined as a set in this way, we can say that the information for a game is specified by the set of which the players believe they are a member. In a game with perfect information, the players each believe the correct set of objects. With incomplete information, the players each believe a subset of the correct set. Differential information means the players each believe a different game set. Errors are represented by believing a set with elements not in the real set.

To Do

Axioms? Update: I have achieved skepticism about the value of axioms for what I want to accomplish. I am separately reading a book about game-theoretic probability which argues that game theory should supplant measure theory as the base for probability, and one of the merits is that when people make mathematical decisions about probability, they often cite measure theory as justification - wrongly. The thing is that people treat axioms as eliminating assumptions, but in any applied context all that happens is that assumptions slide into the axioms. I am therefore wary of axioms tricking me into being wrong about the assumptions at work, when that information really should be obvious at all times.
How do operations work in this context? Unknown.
I fully expect that this has been covered elsewhere - Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays is a good candidate.
Productivity: Working towards a summary of what we know
by Adam Zerner — 2017-11-09T22:04:28.389Z

Epistemic effort

Spent 20-30 hours researching what we know about productivity. About an hour a day for two weeks, plus a few more days where I dedicated more than an hour to studying productivity.
Skimmed through the entire archives of Cal Newport's blog (the author of Deep Work, which I had read about a year or two ago), and read the posts that seem most useful.
Searched through lesswrong.com and lesserwrong.com and read relevant and useful posts, including How to Beat Procrastination.
Searched Google and Google Scholar for academic research on productivity (I couldn't really find anything).
Read a few Harvard Business Review articles on productivity, starting with For Real Productivity, Less is Truly More.
Read a few summaries of Getting Things Done, by David Allen. Watched his Ted Talk.
Read through about 5-7 pages of the highest voted questions on the Personal Productivity Stack Exchange and went down some link rabbit holes.
Spent about two hours thinking about how to categorize productivity advice.
I have a degree in neuroscience, know a decent amount about cognitive sciences more generally, and have read various related books such as Peak by Anders Ericsson, which reviews what we know about expert performance.
Spent about 20 hours writing and editing this post.

Meta

I've come across a lot of productivity-related advice over the years. Tips, tricks, blog posts, books, etc. I feel like I know a decent amount about productivity, and that I should be pretty damn productive. Unfortunately, the knowledge I've accumulated doesn't seem to have translated into actual success. Actual productivity.

So then, a few weeks ago I decided that enough is enough. That I need to take a step back and really spend some time "getting better at productivity". In order to "get better at productivity", I figured that I should start off doing some research. Why try to figure things out myself when I could just start off standing on the shoulders of others? This post outlines and summarizes what I have found in my research.

I initially wasn't planning on writing this post. I don't study productivity professionally. I'm not the most qualified person to be doing this. I've only spent 20-30 hours researching this, so there must be a lot of things I'm missing. Still, I think that there are some strong reasons for writing this p...
Living in an Inadequate World
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2017-11-09T21:23:25.451Z

Follow-up to: Moloch's Toolbox (pt. 1, pt. 2)

Be warned: Trying to put together a background model like the one I sketched in the previous chapter is a pretty perilous undertaking, especially if you don’t have a professional economist checking your work at every stage.

Suppose I offered the following much simpler explanation of how babies are dying inside the US healthcare system:

What if parents don’t really care about their babies?

Maybe parents don’t bond to their babies so swiftly? Maybe they don’t really care that much about those voiceless pink blobs in the early days? Maybe this is one of those things that people think they’re supposed to feel very strongly, and yet the emotion isn’t actually there. Maybe parents just sort of inwardly shrug when their infants die, and only pretend to be sad about it. If they really cared, wouldn’t they demand a system that didn’t kill babies?

In our taxonomy, this would be a “decisionmaker is not beneficiary” explanation, with the parents and doctors being the decisionmakers, and the babies being the beneficiaries.

A much simpler hypothesis, isn’t it?

When we try to do inadequacy analysis, there is such a thing as wrong guesses and false cynicism.

I’m sure there are some parents who don’t bond to their babies all that intensely. I’m sure some of them lie to themselves about that. But in the early days when Omegaven was just plain illegal to sell across state lines, some parents would drive for hours, every month, to buy Omegaven from the Boston Children’s Hospital to take back to their home state. I, for one, would call that an extraordinary effort. Those parents went far outside their routine, beyond what the System would demand of them, beyond what the world was set up to support them doing by default. Most people won’t make an effort that far outside their usual habits even if their own personal lives are at stake.

If parents are letting their babies die of liver damage because the parents don’t care, we should find few extraordinary efforts in these and other cases of baby-saving. This is an observational consequence we can check, and the observational check fails to support the theory.

For a fixed amount of inadequacy, there is only so much dysfunction that needs to be invoked to explain it. By the nature of i...
Reading Papers in Undergrad
by ryan_b — 2017-11-09T19:24:13.044Z

I went to school for electrical engineering, and in my capstone electromagnetic theory course I encountered a problem that I needed to read papers to learn about. I asked my professor for his advice on how to read them, owing to my lack of expertise, and he recommended the following:

Don't read the abstract. This is written by experts for other experts, so they can quickly see if it is relevant to their work. It will provide no useful information, and may intimidate or confuse you.

Do read the introduction. This will contain an overview of experiment, and most importantly describe some of the background and motivation for the experiment. As a non-expert, this context is at a premium. If the introduction does not suggest there will be useful information, you can stop here.

Skip the body of the paper. The methods and construction of the work are usually not the goal of students, and this part is the most dense and requires the greatest expertise.

Do read the conclusion. This is usually the meat of what a student is looking for - what do experts think, in their own words, about their work. With this information in hand, you can decide whether you need to go deeper into the paper or have what you need. If you decide to go deeper:

Return to the body of the paper. This is especially useful if you are greatly surprised by the conclusion, or if you need to be able to reference images or graphs in an informed way. Even as a non-expert you can profitably think about how the conclusion follows from the steps they have laid out. It is naturally required if you want to attempt to duplicate the experiment.

I have had pretty good success with this method, even in subjects for which I have less than undergrad expertise. I will add two additional steps I found necessary, both obvious:

Reread the paper. As you follow up on the problem with additional reading, you will gain important new perspectives and context that led to missing things the first pass.

Follow-up the references. The assumptions about how diligent readers are with following through vary; this can make something aggravatingly opaque suddenly clear because it was covered well in the reference, or reveal a gaping hole the authors failed to address.

Anecdotally, the problem I was thinking about was the electrical signature of cancer. I had found a few modern references to work done on the subject in animals, but could...
Bet Payoff 1: OpenPhil/MIRI Grant Increase
by Ben Pace — 2017-11-09T18:31:06.034Z

takes a deep breath

It has come to one of those most special times. A time when a long-term bet is resolved.

Gregory Lewis (aka Thrasymachus) made a bet with me that the Open Philanthropy Project would not report an increased confidence in MIRI's impact, nor an increased grant size in the next 2 years.

And today, just 4 months later, the Open Philanthropy Project has announced (early) a 3.75 million dollar grant to be spread over 3 years (that's half of MIRI's budget each year; it may also be increased if MIRI's budget increases), and that this was in large part due to a significant update of their views on MIRI after a very positive review of MIRI's work on Logical Uncertainty by an external Machine Learning expert.

The initial bet and wording is at my (4 month old) facebook post here.

Crossposted from Facebook
Rationality workshop Madrid 2015 - Post mortem
by  — 2017-11-09T11:52:16.750Z

I have received a couple of emails expressing interest about the results of a local rationality workshop I ran together with Nikolas Bernaola and Kadri Reis two years ago.

Since I was going to write this up for a reply to those emails, I figured I could just make it publicly available for future use.

Summary

The event was a two day immersive workshop with 3 teachers and 8 participants.

The event took place at a participant's house, starting at 18:00 on Friday and ending at 22:00 on Sunday. We slept and eat in place.

The workshop was free of charges for participants barring food costs.

Participant satisfaction was of 8.2/10 according to the follow up survey.

Content

The workshop was trying to give a concentrated version of CFAR's workshop.

The instructors were all CFAR alumni. We ran some training in the month previous to the workshop to prepare the content, but otherwise the staff was fairly untrained.

Participants specially loved and got lots of self reported value from Hamming Circles. The second most loved and reportedly useful class was the one on TAPs. Other activities that gelled specially well with the participants were Goal Factoring, 5 minute timers and the introduction of the workshop (which consisted of a mini class on brainstorming, buglist creation and standard CFAR advice on how to get the most out of the workshop).

You can check out a timetable here (it's in Spanish, with made up names for what are the standard CFAR techniques; if there is interest in a translation I will provide one later)

Culture

We achieved a fairly awesome environment during the camp. Participants and instructors felt focused and willing to be vulnerable and helpful with one another for the sake of self improvement.

It is hard to distill what contributed exactly to this culture, but if I had to guess I would go for some combination of the following factors:

Sleeping and eating together bonds.
The staff was really enthusiastic, and they let it show during the classes.
The participant's backgrounds were fairly homogeneous, as the participants were for the most part from the same circles as the staff. This also meant we were specially commited in helping one another with their personal problems.
An expectation of intensity and commitment was set up since the registration form, and reinforced during the introduction.
The small size of the participant group also helped with t

...
Call for Ideas: Industrial scale existential risk research 
by  — 2017-11-09T08:30:05.534Z

I have a slight problem with Existential Risk. Not as a thing to worry about, it makes lots of sense to worry about it. My problem will only emerge if it becomes an industry, with all the distortion that entails from inadequacy etc. If we want more than the current few odd rationalist academics we have currently working on it, we need to make sure everyones incentives are properly aligned when it is scaled up.

A company in the Existential Risk industry has very little reason to be accurate about the risk. The greater they can make the potential risk sound, the more money they can extract to study it from governments etc. So they have real reasons to inflate the risks. So what can we do to mitigate that problem?

I've had some ideas around trying to create a professional body that aligns the incentives of its members with truth seeking. Things like by giving prizes for accuracy of models (in the short term) and helping retrain people if a thing that society was worried about seems to not be such a problem. Giving them an economic line of retreat.

Then a government can make sure it hires companies that only hire members of this society. I'll write this up properly at some point, so it can get a good kicking.

But I was wondering if anyone else have thoughts around this?
Looking for Recommendations RE UDT vs. bounded computation / meta-reasoning / opportunity cost?
by IAFF-User-111 — 2017-11-08T22:58:55.000Z

The main issue I have with UDT is that it neglects the meta-reasoning problem of: "how much should I think before I act?"

Is there anything I should read / know about WRT this?

What are people's opinions on whether this is a serious issue, and how it could be resolved?
What is the relation to logical updatelessness?

There's generally an opportunity cost to deliberating.

Solving the UDT planning problem would take infinite compute, so it seems like we should be considering agents that can start acting without having solved this planning problem.

Maybe they should converge to doing what UDT would do. Alternatively, maybe it's better to do empirical updates in this situation.
Modesty and diversity: a concrete suggestion
by [deleted] — 2017-11-08T20:42:23.530Z

In online discussions, the number of upvotes or likes a contribution receives is often highly correlated with the social status of the author within that community. This makes the community less epistemically diverse, and can contribute to feelings of groupthink or

hero worship

.

Yet both the author of a contribution and its degree of support contain

bayesian evidence

about its value, arguably an amount that

should overwhelm

your own inside view.

We want each individual to invest the socially optimal amount of resources into critically evaluating other people’s writing (which is higher than the amount that would be optimal for individual epistemic rationality). Yet we also all and each want to give sufficient weight to authority in forming our all-things-considered views.

As Greg Lewis writes:

The distinction between ‘credence by my lights’ versus ‘credence all things considered’ allows the best of both worlds. One can say ‘by my lights, P’s credence is X’ yet at the same time ‘all things considered though, I take P’s credence to be Y’. One can form one’s own model of P, think the experts are wrong about P, and marshall evidence and arguments for why you are right and they are wrong; yet soberly realise that the chances are you are more likely mistaken; yet also think this effort is nonetheless valuable because even if one is most likely heading down a dead-end, the corporate efforts of people like you promises a good chance of someone finding a better path.

Full blinding to usernames and upvote counts is great for critical thinking. If all you see is the object level, you can’t be biased by anything else. The downside is you lose a lot of relevant information. A second downside is that anonymity reduces the selfish incentives to produce good content (we socially reward high-quality, civil discussion, and punish rudeness.)

I have a suggestion for capturing (some of) the best of both worlds:

first, do all your reading, thinking, upvoting and commenting with full blinding
once you have finished, un-blind yourself and use the new information to

form your all-things-considered view of the topic at hand
update your opinion of the people involved in the discussion (for example, if someone was a jerk, you lower your opinion of them).

To enable this, there are now two

user scripts

which hide usernames and upvote counts on (1)

the EA forum

and (2)

LessWrong 2.0

. You’ll need to in...