trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A self-experiment in training "noticing confusion"
by whales — 2014-02-20T01:55:12.742Z

I previously discussed the potential relevance of therapeutic and instructional models of metacognitive training to LW-style rationality skills. As an attempted concrete realization of what this connection could look like, I ran a self-experiment in which I counted instances of noticing confusion. Below I elaborate on the motivation and design of the experiment, then discuss some quantitative results and qualitative reflections.

Background

Self-monitoring as a treatment vehicle in cognitive-behavioral and related therapies can take many forms. In one (to my secondhand understanding), the patient is coached in noticing a physical or mental behavior by identifying examples of the behavior and heuristics for when to watch for it, and by examining the feeling of the behavior itself. This is accompanied by practice of coping strategies. The patient is instructed to count the occurrences of that behavior on zir own. This is ideally done with a "wrist counter," which is always available, can be incremented with the press of a single button, and gives both tactile and visual feedback on being pressed.

The patient might, for example, count instances of acting on zir own initiative, or of having positive thoughts about zirself. In this case, tying the thought to the specific physical action of pressing the button, as well as watching a "score" go up, helps with the reward circuit for both noticing the thought and the content of the thought.

The patient could also count negative thoughts, engaging in bad habits, inappropriate "should" statements or other "cognitive distortions." At first, so I'm told, the count will go up, as you get better at noticing; then (optimistically) back down over a few weeks, as your symptoms diminish. In this case, it's important not to focus on the fact you're doing something "bad." Instead, try to reward noticing and dispelling the bad thing, or at least to reward noticing that you're focusing on the bad thing rather than rewarding the noticing. (If all else fails, reward noticing that you're focusing on failing to reward noticing that you're focusing on the bad thing rather than rewarding the noticing. That should definitely do it, right?)

This seems doubly useful: not only are you practicing and rewarding the noticing skill, but in tying it to a physical action, you necessarily bring the noticed behavior to your conscious attention, s...
Testing my cognition
by RyanCarey — 2014-02-19T22:30:50.295Z

Hi all, I'm doing first quantified self experiment. How does this design sound to you?

Metrics

• 20 min sample of tests from Cambridge brain sciences site: spatial span, double trouble, object reasoning, rotations, hampshire tree task, spatial slider.

• 10 USMLE Rx questions in 11 mins covering neurology, psychiatry, cognitive sciences and epidemiology, randomised from a pool of 400 questions.

• Subjective report of cognitive ability from one to ten.

These will be taken daily at noon.

Intervention

• Take nothing for one week.

• Take creatine 5g daily for two weeks

• Then take nothing for two weeks

I'm starting with creatine because I'm vegetarian. Then I'll report my findings, re-evaluate value of further experiments and proceed on to some or all of piracetam+choline, Luminosity and dual n-back.

Thoughts on how I can improve this?
Meetup : Berkeley: Ask vs. Guess (vs. Tell) Culture
by Nisan — 2014-02-19T20:16:30.017Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Ask vs. Guess (vs. Tell) Culture

WHEN:
19 February 2014 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
2030 Addison, 3rd floor, Berkeley, CA

Hello all, tonight's meetup will feature the discussion topic of Ask Culture and Guess Culture, which is summarized in the first couple paragraphs of this Less Wrong post:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jis/tell_culture/

A friend of mine has remarked that this is a topic that causes even professed rationalists to engage in motivated cognition. Are you up to the challenge!?

Please arrive between 7pm and 7:30pm tonight. At 7:30pm we'll review our weekly goals and record goals for the coming week. The discussion of Ask vs. Guess Culture will follow.

Even though this takes place at CFAR, it's not a CFAR-sponsored event. The CFAR office is at 2030 Addison, 3rd floor, Berkeley, near the Downtown Berkeley BART. If you find yourself locked out, text me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Ask vs. Guess (vs. Tell) Culture
Managing your time spent learning
by JonahS — 2014-02-19T18:48:11.800Z

This article is written for people who are looking for advice on prioritizing activities, in particular, what to spend time learning.

In thinking about how to budget your time, it's helpful to explicitly prioritize the activities that you engage in in terms of their relative importance, and distinguish between what's important and what you find interesting. Sometimes we exaggerate the usefulness of interesting but only slightly useful activities in their minds, on account of wanting to believe that time spent on them is productive. If you think about how useful an activity is and, how interesting the activity is separately, you're less likely to do this. It's helpful to consider the following four categories of activities:

Important and interesting: Do, and take your time. Get it right!

Important and not interesting: Do as much as necessary, and maybe a bit more; look into ways of overcoming procrastination. Also consider ways to make them more interesting.

Not important and interesting: Do only if you feel like it, don't try to press yourself, and consider substituting with activities that are interesting and important.

Not important and not interesting: Avoid.

More below

Interesting and important

When you find an academic subject interesting, and when it's important (e.g. for your future job, as a prerequisite to courses that you'll take in the future or otherwise related to your future goals), you should delve deeply into it. Gaining deep understanding takes time, and you shouldn't feel as though you're working inefficiently if you find yourself spending a disproportionate amount of time on it.

Interesting but not important

Intellectually curious people often have intellectual interests that don't advance their career goals. Such interests can absorb a lot of time and hinder one's professional success.

The question of how to balance these interests with one's career goals is a very personal one.

In general, if there are two activities that are of comparable interest to you, but of unequal importance, you should choose the more important one.

If you find that your time is uncomfortably crowded with things that are interesting but not important, you should look for instances where you're exerting willpower on them, and cut back on those, reserving the time that you spend doing things that you find interesting to activities that require relatively li...
Meetup : Moscow, Different Reports
by Yuu — 2014-02-19T18:31:21.749Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Different Reports

WHEN:
23 February 2014 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

We will gather at the same second entrance, but we will go to a room inside the building at 16:00. So please do not be late. We will have:

Report about genetics and epigenetics.

Report about "Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work" book.

Stumbling on happiness for rationalists presentation.

Something about Cognitive behavioural therapy, possibly a report.

We gather in the Yandex office, you need the second revolving door with the sign “Яндекс”, here is the photo of the entrance you need. You need to pass the first entrance and through the archway. Here is additional guide how to get there: link.
You can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information.

We start at 16:00 and sometimes finish at night. Please pay attention that we only gather near the second entrance and then come inside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Different Reports
[link] Nick Beckstead on improving disaster shelters to increase the chances of recovery from a global catastrophe
by Pablo — 2014-02-19T17:27:04.303Z

Nick Beckstead just published a post on disaster shelters over at the Effective Altruism Blog. Summary:

What is the problem? Civilization might not recover from some possible global catastrophes. Conceivably, people with access to disaster shelters or other refuges may be more likely to survive and help civilization recover. However, existing disaster shelters (sometimes built to ensure continuity of government operations and sometimes built to protect individuals), people working on submarines, largely uncontacted peoples, and people living in very remote locations may serve this function to some extent.

What are the possible interventions? Other interventions may also increase the chances that humanity would recover from a global catastrophe, but this review focuses on disaster shelters. Proposed methods of improving disaster shelter networks include stocking shelters with appropriately trained people and resources that would enable them to rebuild civilization in case of a near-extinction event, keeping some shelters constantly full of people, increasing food reserves, and building more shelters. A philanthropist could pay to improve existing shelter networks in the above ways, or they could advocate for private shelter builders or governments to make some of the improvements listed above.

Who else is working on it? Some governments maintain bunkers in order to maintain continuity of government and/or to protect their citizens. Some individuals purchase and maintain private disaster shelters.

Questions for further investigation: With the possible exception of pandemic specifically engineered to kill all humans, I am aware of no scenario in which improved disaster shelters would plausibly enable a small group of people to survive a sudden near-extinction event. In the case of other catastrophes where a much larger number of people would survive, I would guess that improved refuges would play a relatively small role in helping humanity to recover because they would represent a small share of relevant people and resources. Many challenging questions about improving refuges remain, but I would prioritize investigating other issues at this point because refuges seem likely to be of limited value and alternative strategies (such as improving biosecurity and increasing the resilience of industrial and agricultural systems) seem more likely to effectively reduce th

...
Rationality training: academic and clinical perspectives
by whales — 2014-02-19T07:09:21.514Z

What can existing research tell us about teaching and learning key rationalist skills? One central idea is the monitoring and adjustment of mental processes, which appears in various forms in the LW community, debiasing research, education research concerning metacognition, and cognitive-behavioral and related therapies. I expect that rationality training can benefit from fully realizing the connections between these fields, which some mainstream research is already beginning to do. In another post, I discuss a self-experiment in noticing confusion based on these ideas.

Debiasing

In Is Rationality Teachable?, Luke noted some promising successes in teaching statistics and logic, and also in the growing body of research on debiasing. The main lines of research consider debiasing techniques that are socially-administered (incentives, accountability, group decision making) or imposed "top-down" as rules ("consider the opposite"). While individuals can internalize and use the latter techniques on their own, the top-down and domain-general nature inhibits transfer (their conversion from declarative to tacit knowledge, or migration from System 2 to System 1).1

A better debiasing technique from the individual perspective would teach someone to notice the feeling of distorted cognition and trigger corrective action: to notice mental flinching, rationalization, or confusion, and then to bring it to full conscious attention and act on it appropriately. I currently see that as the most important component of what Eliezer's getting at with The 5-Second Level.2 3

Larrick (2004) anticipated this idea in his speculation on future directions for debiasing research:

[One direction] comes from the growing focus on how affect, motivation, and self-esteem inﬂuence decision making (see Larrick, 1993; Payne & Bettman, Chapter 6, this volume; Rottenstreich & Shu, Chapter 22, this volume). Identifying debiasing techniques for affect-based biases is a promising new area – What interventions help people cope effectively with emotion endogenous to a decision, such as anticipated regret? Or help them recognize and discount emotion that is extraneous to a decision, such as anger from some unrelated experience? The answers may bring decision research surprisingly close to clinical psychology, such as techniques used in cognitive-behavioral therapy [emphasis mine].

Cogni

...
Meetup : Second Canberra Meetup - Paranoid Debating
by DanielFilan — 2014-02-19T04:00:42.751Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Second Canberra Meetup - Paranoid Debating

WHEN:
28 February 2014 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
148 Bunda St, Canberra

For our second meetup, we will be playing paranoid debating (for details, see http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paranoid_debating). We will be meeting on Friday the 28th of February at 6:30 pm at Grill'd in Canberra Centre - it is on the ground floor near Supabarn, and offers vegetarian and vegan options.
If you are interested in attending regular LW meetups in Canberra, whether you can or can't come to this one, please fill in when you would be regularly available at http://doodle.com/z4se4kpq7kepf737 . In addition, we have a FB group where these events will also be announced: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwcanberra/ . Finally, if you would like to receive email updates, please email me at danielfilan@yahoo.com.au, and I will send you emails about upcoming meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Second Canberra Meetup - Paranoid Debating
Meetup : Washington DC EA meetup (now with guests!)
by rocurley — 2014-02-19T02:40:15.550Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC EA meetup (now with guests!)

WHEN:
23 February 2014 03:00:02PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to talk about EA with some people from the DC EA meetup group.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC EA meetup (now with guests!)
Bridge Collapse: Reductionism as Engineering Problem
by Rob Bensinger — 2014-02-18T22:03:08.008Z

Followup to: Building Phenomenological Bridges

Summary: AI theorists often use models in which agents are crisply separated from their environments. This simplifying assumption can be useful, but it leads to trouble when we build machines that presuppose it. A machine that believes it can only interact with its environment in a narrow, fixed set of ways will not understand the value, or the dangers, of self-modification. By analogy with Descartes' mind/body dualism, I refer to agent/environment dualism as Cartesianism. The open problem in Friendly AI (OPFAI) I'm calling naturalized induction is the project of replacing Cartesian approaches to scientific induction with reductive, physicalistic ones.

I'll begin with a story about a storyteller.

Once upon a time — specifically, 1976 — there was an AI named TALE-SPIN. This AI told stories by inferring how characters would respond to problems from background knowledge about the characters' traits. One day, TALE-SPIN constructed a most peculiar tale.

Henry Ant was thirsty. He walked over to the river bank where his good friend Bill Bird was sitting. Henry slipped and fell in the river. Gravity drowned.

Since Henry fell in the river near his friend Bill, TALE-SPIN concluded that Bill rescued Henry. But for Henry to fall in the river, gravity must have pulled Henry. Which means gravity must have been in the river. TALE-SPIN had never been told that gravity knows how to swim; and TALE-SPIN had never been told that gravity has any friends. So gravity drowned.

TALE-SPIN had previously been programmed to understand involuntary motion in the case of characters being pulled or carried by other characters — like Bill rescuing Henry. So it was programmed to understand 'character X fell to place Y' as 'gravity moves X to Y', as though gravity were a character in the story.1

For us, the hypothesis 'gravity drowned' has low prior probability because we know gravity isn't the type of thing that swims or breathes or makes friends. We want agents to seriously consider whether the law of gravity pulls down rocks; we don't want agents to seriously consider whether the law of gravity pulls down the law of electromagnetism. We may not want an AI to assign zero probability to 'gravity drowned', but we at least want it to neglect the possibility as Ridiculous-By...
Audio Version of "How to Actually Change Your Mind"
by Rick_from_Castify — 2014-02-18T20:23:48.752Z

The audio version of the mega-sequence "How to Actually Change Your Mind" is now available. It's the biggest sequence we've done yet, coming in at over 8 hours of audio. Here at Castify we think this sequence is the most important one we've done so far.

On the wiki it says, "The most important technique that Less Wrong can offer you is 'How to Actually Change Your Mind'". I couldn't agree more. If you haven't read it already I'd strongly recommend it. If you have more free "ear time" than "eye time" or you learn better from listening this audio version is for you.

Feedback is welcome: support@castify.co
A Fervent Defense of Frequentist Statistics
by jsteinhardt — 2014-02-18T20:08:48.833Z

[Highlights for the busy: de-bunking standard "Bayes is optimal" arguments; frequentist Solomonoff induction; and a description of the online learning framework. Note: cross-posted from my blog.]

Short summary. This essay makes many points, each of which I think is worth reading, but if you are only going to understand one point I think it should be “Myth 5″ below, which describes the online learning framework as a response to the claim that frequentist methods need to make strong modeling assumptions. Among other things, online learning allows me to perform the following remarkable feat: if I’m betting on horses, and I get to place bets after watching other people bet but before seeing which horse wins the race, then I can guarantee that after a relatively small number of races, I will do almost as well overall as the best other person, even if the number of other people is very large (say, 1 billion), and their performance is correlated in complicated ways.

If you’re only going to understand two points, then also read about the frequentist version of Solomonoff induction, which is described in “Myth 6″.

Main article. I’ve already written one essay on Bayesian vs. frequentist statistics. In that essay, I argued for a balanced, pragmatic approach in which we think of the two families of methods as a collection of tools to be used as appropriate. Since I’m currently feeling contrarian, this essay will be far less balanced and will argue explicitly against Bayesian methods and in favor of frequentist methods. I hope this will be forgiven as so much other writing goes in the opposite direction of unabashedly defending Bayes. I should note that this essay is partially inspired by some of Cosma Shalizi’s blog posts, such as this one.

This essay will start by listing a series of myths, then debunk them one-by-one. My main motivation for this is that Bayesian approaches seem to be highly popularized, to the point that one may get the impression that they are the uncontroversially superior method of doing statistics. I actually think the opposite is true: I think most statisticans would for the most part defend frequentist methods, although there are also many departments that are decidedly Bayesian (e.g. many places in England, as well as some U.S. universities like Columbia). I have a lot of respect for many of th...
The January 2013 CFAR workshop: one-year retrospective
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2014-02-18T18:41:13.935Z

About a year ago, I attended my first CFAR workshop and wrote a post about it here. I mentioned in that post that it was too soon for me to tell if the workshop would have a large positive impact on my life. In the comments to that post, I was asked to follow up on that post in a year to better evaluate that impact. So here we are!

Very short summary: overall I think the workshop had a large and persistent positive impact on my life.

Important caveat

However, anyone using this post to evaluate the value of going to a CFAR workshop themselves should be aware that I'm local to Berkeley and have had many opportunities to stay connected to CFAR and the rationalist community. More specifically, in addition to the January workshop, I also

visited the March workshop (and possibly others),

attended various social events held by members of the community,

taught at the July workshop, and

taught at SPARC.

These experiences were all very helpful in helping me digest and reinforce the workshop material (which was also improving over time), and a typical workshop participant might not have these advantages.

Answering a question

pewpewlasergun wanted me to answer the following question:

I'd like to know how many techniques you were taught at the meetup you still use regularly. Also which has had the largest effect on your life.

The short answer is: in some sense very few, but a lot of the value I got out of attending the workshop didn't come from specific techniques.

In more detail: to be honest, many of the specific techniques are kind of a chore to use (at least as of January 2013). I experimented with a good number of them in the months after the workshop, and most of them haven't stuck (but that isn't so bad; the cost of trying a technique and finding that it doesn't work for you is low, while the benefit of trying a technique and finding that it does work for you can be quite high!). One that has is the idea of a next action, which I've found incredibly useful. Next actions are the things that to-do list items should be, say in the context of using Remember The Milk. Many to-do list items you might be tempted to right down are difficult to actually do because they're either too vague or too big and hence trigger ugh fields. For example, you might have an item like

Do my taxes

that you don't get around to until right before you have to because you h...
Meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong Meetup: How to Increase Your Brainpower
by Nova_Division — 2014-02-18T17:48:57.854Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong Meetup: How to Increase Your Brainpower

WHEN:
23 February 2014 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
491 Lindbergh Place NE Apt 618 Atlanta, GA 30324

Dual N-back, transcranial electrical stimulation, nootropics, what's all that about? What does the research say on what works and what doesn't? Come found out at Atlanta Lesswrong!

A presenter will be giving a summary of the Dan Hurley book, "Smarter" (http://www.amazon.com/Smarter-Science-Building-Brain-Power/dp/1594631271) as well as smaller discussions on individual topics.

More presenters are needed and encouraged, if you'd like to talk on your favorite method!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong Meetup: How to Increase Your Brainpower