trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Maps of Meaning: Abridged and Translated
by Vaniver — 2018-10-11T00:27:20.974Z

Jordan Peterson has come up in the rationalsphere before;

SSC

reviewed

his recent book 12 Rules for Life, which caused me to read it; Jacobian wrote about

The Jordan Peterson Mask

, and Robin Hanson

reviewed

his major scholarly work, Maps of Meaning. A key line from Hanson’s review:

In sum, Peterson comes across as pompous, self-absorbed, and not very self-aware. But on the one key criteria by which such a book should most be judged, I have to give it to him: the book offers insight.

So this article is my attempt to distill the core insight I found in Maps of Meaning. One reason I titled this “abridged” is because Peterson gives excellent summaries of his sections, which I will often just reprint fully. “Translated” is because he goes about his case much differently than I would; understandable, given the difference between our audiences. Peterson spends much of the book establishing plausibility that many different cultures have similar myths, and explaining what they represent using his terminology, whereas I am not moved by archaic human universality; even if all ancient cultures believed that the Sun revolved around an unmoving Earth, I want to believe in modern astronomy. To the extent that his subject matter is human psychology, even if all ancient cultures had the same view of what humans were like, I want to focus on what

WEIRD

people are like. But, thankfully, Peterson is primarily making an argument for a better understanding of progress, not obedience to the past. First I’ll try to explain the mythic perspective, and then Peterson’s characterization of the human condition, and then some commentary.

WHAT A MYTH IS

The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things.

The former manner of interpretation--more primordial, and less clearly understood--finds its expression in the arts of humanities, in ritual, drama, literature, and mythology. The world as a forum for action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or--at a higher level of analysis--implication for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action.

The latter manner of interpretation--the world as place of things--finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science.

...
Standard ML Oracles vs Counterfactual ones
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2018-10-10T20:01:13.765Z

EDIT: This post has been superceeded by all these four posts.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Paul Christiano about my counterfactual Oracle design.

We didn't get as far as criticising the method. Paul's question is far more fundamental - was my design even necessary?

Forwards or backwards looking

The counterfactual oracle design was setup to reward the oracle for correctly guessing the ultimate value of a random variable (an outcome). This guess was conditional on humans not actually getting to see the guess.

If we ignore the counterfactual aspect for the moment, assume that the oracle has seen a series of past data: pairs (xi,yi). The xi are the background data the Oracle uses to estimate the values of the target variables yi.

Then my design is a forward-looking oracle. If we use a quadratic loss function, at turn t, after seeing xt, it seeks to output zt, defined as:

argminztE[||zt−yt||2∣∣x1:ty1:t−1],

where x1:ty1:t−1 is the previous data (all xi including xt, all previous yi up to yt−1).

Paul instead recommended using a more traditional machine-learning approach, where you attempt to fit a function f that explains the past data, getting something like this:

argminf∑t−1i=0||f(xi)−yi||2/t+reg,

where the reg are regularising terms that prevent overfitting. The oracle will then output zt=f(xt). Call such oracle a backwards-facing oracle (BFO), because it only cares about the past.

Then the key facts about the BFO are:

The BFO can generally cope with humans observing zt=f(xt) and modifying our behaviour because of it (ie does not need a counterfactual approach).

The BFO is mildly manipulative in its outputs, though not generally in the way we fear an AI being.

The BFO will not generally be manipulative in a way that minimises its cost function.

However, the BFO may come to believe spurious correlations.

Because of this, the BFO may converge more slowly - or not at all - where another oracle design could easily deduce the correct formulas.

Observer perturbation effects

What happens if we observe the zt - and if this observation changes our behaviour so that yt itself is modified?

Assume the oracle knows our plans and its actions

First of all, note that unless we set up the system very carefully, the oracle will "know" whether we are planning to observe zt or not. The counterfactual oracle was deliberately designed that observing zt is dependent on a

...
We can all be high status
by  — 2018-10-10T16:54:19.047Z

Extension of Give praise.

This is part analysis, part a heartfelt story of my engagement with the LW/EA community. I usually don't like to kick up dust, but I've decided to write an honest representation of my feelings, here and there possibly sacrificing accuracy. Adjust your interpretation accordingly.

Starting out and reading about LW and EA, I was psyched to jump in with the movement and get stuff to happen. There was a romantic vista of joining the ranks of *reasonable* people, that *would* understand my unconventional ideas, and thus actually *get real shit done*. The prospect was liberating.

I subscribe to the idea of human needs, in the sense that our utility function is an addition of sigmoids that project amounts of resources to allocate to the fulfillment of each need. Each sigmoid would have a different offset, meaning that we only start caring about the second need when the first one is mostly satisfied. Happiness would be a function of satisfaction, with 0 happiness corresponding to a state where a special subset of "deficiency" needs are satisfied, and nothing else. In that sense, I think Maslow's hierarchy was mostly right. Not in the sense of the specific needs he proposed, or their order, but in the sense of the underlying logic.

One of these deficiency needs is status, which I define as having some level of influence on social reality. I hold this need to approach fulfillment as it approaches a level of influence that is the same as the highest status person around. Complete fulfillment happens if you're equal or higher status than everyone else around you. As a corollary, everyone is fulfilled if and only if everyone is equal.

Additionally, these needs are all represented by subagents that are 'activated' (i.e. run a process in the background) if the need is not fulfilled. We have limited processing resources, and so a lack of status lowers one's IQ.

EA is NOT status balanced, and it's been eating me up. I feel threatened, have burned myself out multiple times, and expect this to be the major source of the mental health epidemic that is plaguing us.

I've worked with volunteers. No problem from an impact perspective. We all want to save the world, right?

Of the approximately 50 people that signed up, only 2 have stayed around until now, and only about 4 stayed around for longer than a week. Wh...
Eternal: The Exit Interview
by Zvi — 2018-10-10T16:50:02.776Z

Previously: Eternal, and Hearthstone Economy versus Magic Economy, The Eternal Grind, My Referral Link to download Eternal if you want to play.

Epistemic Status: Played a lot of games. Wrote a lot of words. Those not interested in Magic, Eternal or game design may want to skip this one.

Eternal remains modern Magic, with some simplifications, on a phone, with a Hearthstone interface economy.

That remains super high praise. Everyone involved should be very happy with what they have accomplished, and I’m excited to see them move into tournament play.

Despite that, I did still bounce off the game in the end. I enjoyed it during my morning and evening commutes for several months, quite possibly played it another month or two when I wasn’t enjoying it all that much, then realized I had grown tired slash bored of it and stopped playing, mostly all at once.

This is a summary of my experiences, followed by a more detailed analysis of what went both right and wrong. Where Eternal changes vocabulary (e.g. it renames the colors) I will mostly use Magic’s words for things and Magic’s mana symbols, as I expect this to confuse exactly zero people.

What Happened: Overview

For several months, as I commuted to and from work, I would play Eternal on my phone. Once the new player experience was out of the way, I would use that window to complete my daily quests, get my win of the day. At first, I’d spend a lot of the time after that in the Gauntlet, since that was the most efficient way to get gold and my card pool remained weak. As my card pool improved, and I grew bored of Gauntlet, I’d move on to grinding for masters rank.

When events didn’t eat up all my gold, I’d do the occasional draft. Draft was fun, especially when I was able to put together streaks and keep the drafting going. What was less fun was grinding for over a week to get the coins to do one draft, having it go poorly, and having little or nothing to show for it.

I would occasionally check out Eternal Warcry to see what decks people would be playing that week.

Early on I used a mono-white Timekeeper deck centering around mana acceleration and the mechanic rewarding you for creatures with five or more power. Once I had better creatures than Timekeeper I moved to Red/White to get me a four mana 5/4 flying dragon and some removal in Purify, which was good enough to reliably defeat the Gauntlet and to get me to Master the...
Some cruxes on impactful alternatives to AI policy work
by Richard_Ngo — 2018-10-10T13:35:27.497Z

Ben Pace and I (Richard Ngo) recently did a public double crux at the Berkeley REACH on how valuable it is for people to go into AI policy and strategy work: I was optimistic and Ben was pessimistic. During the actual event, we didn't come anywhere near to finding a double crux on that issue. But after a lot of subsequent discussion, we've come up with some more general cruxes about where impact comes from.

I found Ben's model of how to have impact very interesting, and so in this post I've tried to explain it, along with my disagreements. Ben liked the goal of writing up a rough summary of our positions and having further discussion in the comments, so while he edited it somewhat he doesn’t at all think that it’s a perfect argument, and it’s not what he’d write if he spent 10 hours on it. He endorsed the wording of the cruxes as broadly accurate.

(During the double crux, we also discussed how the heavy-tailed worldview applies to community building, but decided on this post to focus on the object level of what impact looks like.)

Note from Ben: “I am not an expert in policy, and have not put more than about 20-30 hours of thought into it total as a career path. But, as I recently heard Robin Hanson say, there’s a common situation that looks like this: some people have a shiny idea that they think about a great deal and work through the details of, that folks in other areas are skeptical of given their particular models of how the world works. Even though the skeptics have less detail, it can be useful to publicly say precisely why they’re skeptical.

In this case I’m often skeptical when folks tell me they’re working to reduce x-risk by focusing on policy. Folks doing policy work in AI might be right, and I might be wrong, but it seemed like a good use of time to start a discussion with Richard about how I was thinking about it and what would change my mind. If the following discussion causes me to change my mind on this question, I’ll be really super happy with it.”

Ben's model: Life in a heavy-tailed world

A

heavy-tailed distribution

is one where the probability of extreme outcomes doesn’t drop very rapidly, meaning that outliers therefore dominate the expectation of the distribution. Owen Cotton-Barratt has written a brief explanation of the idea

here

. Examples of heavy-tailed distributions include the Pareto distribution and the log-n...
non-judgemental awareness
by brown — 2018-10-10T03:32:57.786Z

Alice and Bob are playing each other in tennis.

However their internal experience is quite different.

Alice: "I’ve got to keep my elbow straight, knees firm, don’t tense". Her experience is mentally effortful, there are lots of words in her internal monologue. She spends many mental cycles on success or failure. It takes much willpower. Her attention is very focused on individual parts. She’s micromanaging. Alice is not paying attention to what is going on right now. She’s living in the world of what should be as opposed to what is.

Bob: He is curious about where the ball is, he’s conscious of his body in space, the many things he’s feeling. He intends to absorb the whole motion, his thoughts are mostly non-verbal. conscious experience is much more static.

What's going on here?
When practicing to improve in a skill you want to get as much good quality information as possible (eg: Bob). This is your raw data. Nuances you are not aware of don’t exist. They’re invisible to you. The more you’re curious and aware of your body, it’s fluctuations, the surrounds the more you experience. You actually look at reality as opposed to hallucinate it.

You get much closer to the raw sense data. Think about how your butt feels on the chair you’re currently sitting on. You probably expect it to feel like a pressure shaped like an oval. That’s how you expect a somewhat rigid solid (human muscles) to conform to the flat surface of the chair. But if you pay attention to the sensations it doesn’t really feel like that. There's more of a bundle of sensations. If you stub your toe or experience some kind of pain, asking questions like where exactly is the pain, what kind of pain, what shape can sometimes make the pain lessen or change. Sensations are neutral, your brain places this “BAD” label on particular sensations. Which are then felt as unpleasant. [1]

For an exercise, Try:

Throw a nearby object at a somewhat difficult target. [2]

First → Really focus, think about the steps, effortful, repeat to yourself what you’re going to do. Try to explain how you are going to throw it.

Second → Visualise throwing the ball a few times, perhaps mime the motion, see what the ball feels like in your hand, imagine the trajectory the ball might take, now let the ball slip out from your fingertips, were you correct about the shape of the ball's flight?

[1] Much of this is taken from Jon

...
The funnel of human experience
by eukaryote — 2018-10-10T02:46:02.240Z
Link: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2018/10/09/the-funnel-of-human-experience/

[EDIT: Previous version of this post had a major error. Thanks for jeff8765 for pinpointing the error and esrogs in the Eukaryote Writes Blog comments for bringing it to my attention as well. This has been fixed. Also, I wrote FHI when I meant FLI.]

The graph of the human population over time is also a map of human experience. Think of each year as being "amount of human lived experience that happened this year." On the left, we see the approximate dawn of the modern human species in 50,000 BC. On the right, the population exploding in the present day.

It turns out that if you add up all these years, 50% of human experience has happened after 1309 AD. 15% of all experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now.

I call this "the funnel of human experience" - the fact that because of a tiny initial population blossoming out into a huge modern population, more of human experience has happened recently than time would suggest.

50,000 years is a long time, but 8,000,000,000 people is a lot of people.

If you want to expand on this, you can start doing some Fermi estimates. We as a species have spent...

1,650,000,000,000 total "human experience years"

See my dataset linked at the bottom of this post.

7,450,000,000 human years spent having sex

Humans spend 0.45% of our lives having sex. 0.45% * [total human experience years] = 7E9 years

52,000,000,000 years spent drinking coffee

500 billion cups of coffee drunk this year x 15 minutes to drink each cup x 100 years* = 5E10 years

*Coffee consumption has likely been much higher recently than historically, but it does have a long history. I’m estimating about a hundred years of current consumption for total global consumption ever.

1,000,000,000 years spent in labor

110,000,000,000 billion humans ever x ½ women x 12 pregnancies* x 15 hours apiece = 1.1E9 years

*Infant mortality, yo. H/t Ellie and Shaw for this estimate.

417,000,000 years spent worshipping the Greek gods

1000 years* x 10,000,000 people** x 365 days a year x 1 hour a day*** = 4E8 years

*Some googling suggested that people worshipped the Greek/Roman Gods in some capacity from roughly 500 BC to 500 AD.
**There were about 10 million people in Ancient Greece. This probably tapered a lot to the beginning and end of that period, but on the other hand worship must have been more widespread than just Greece, and there have been pagans a

...
Decision Theory Anti-realism
by TruePath — 2018-10-10T00:08:33.242Z

This is crossposed from my blog. While I think the ideas here are solid I think the presentation still needs some work so I'd also appreciate comments on the presentation so I can turn this into a more polished essay, e.g., is the second section worth keeping and what should be expanded/cut.

With the recent flurry of posts in the rationalist community about which decision theory ( e.g. CDT EDT UDT etc..) it's time to revisit the theme of this blog: rejecting rationality realism In this case that means pointing out that there isn't actually a well-defined fact of the matter about which decision theory is better. Of course, nothing stops us from arguing with each other about the best decision theory but those disagreements are more like debates about what's the best programming language than disagreements about the chemical structure of Benzene.. , ,

Any attempt to compare decision theories must first address the question: what does it mean for one decision theory to be better than another? Unlike many pseudo-problems there is a seemingly meaningful answer to this question: one decision theory is better than another to the extent that the choices it recommends lead to better outcomes for the agent. Other than some ambiguity about which theory is better if neither dominates the other it seems like this gives a straightforward criteria for superiority: we just look at actual outcomes and see which decision theory offers the best results for an agent. However, this only appears to give a well-defined criteria because in every day life the subtle differences between the various ways to understand a choice and how to conceptualize making a choice don't matter.

In particular, I argue here that the kind of scenarios which distinguish between theories like EDT and CDT are hazardous places to deploy our raw intuitions and support different theories depending on how exactly one precisifies the question being asked. As such, there isn't a well-defined fact of the matter as to which decision theory is right or the best as we only appear to have specified a clear conception of what it means for one theory to be better than another. This doesn't mean the various decision theories aren't interesting notions to play with but it does mean there is no deep fact to get at about which one is right.

Intuitions and Motivation

So ...
One-person Universe
by Martin Sustrik — 2018-10-09T20:10:00.997Z

One day, professor Wheeler from Princeton called Richard Feynman and exclaimed: "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass!"

"Why?" asked Feynman.

"Because they are all the same electron, travelling back and forth in time!"

Upon hearing this story, Zarathustra said: "Wheeler was right. Likewise, all the living men are the same man, revived after he dies and carried back in time, for ever and ever, infinitely."
On insecurity as a friend
by Kaj_Sotala — 2018-10-09T18:30:03.782Z

There’s a common narrative about confidence that says that confidence is good, insecurity is bad. It’s better to develop your confidence than to be insecure. There’s an obvious truth to this.

But what that narrative does not acknowledge, and what both a person struggling with insecurity and their well-meaning friends might miss, is that that insecurity may be in place for a reason.

You might not notice it online, but I’ve usually been pretty timid and insecure in real life. But this wasn’t always the case. There were occasions earlier in my life when I was less insecure, more confident in myself.

I was also pretty horrible at things like reading social nuance and figuring out when and why someone might be offended. So I was given, repeatedly, the feedback that my behavior was bad and inappropriate.

Eventually a part of me internalized that as “I’m very likely to accidentally offend the people around me, so I should be very cautious about what I say, ideally saying nothing at all”.

This was, I think, the correct lesson to internalize at that point! It shifted me more into an observer mode, allowing me to just watch social situations and learn more about their dynamics that way. I still don’t think that I’m great at reading social nuance, but I’m at least better at it than I used to be.

And there have been times since then when I’ve decided that I should act with more confidence, and just get rid of the part that generates the insecurity. I’ve been about to do something, felt a sense of insecurity, and walked over the feeling and done the thing anyway.

Sometimes this has had good results. But often it has also led to things blowing up in my face, with me inadvertently hurting someone and leaving me feeling guilty for months afterwards.

Turns out, that feeling of insecurity wasn’t a purely bad thing. It was throwing up important alarms which I chose to ignore, alarms which were sounding because it recognized my behavior as matching previous behavior which had had poor consequences.

Yes, on many occasions that part of me makes me way too cautious. And it would be good to moderate that caution a little. But the same part which generates the feelings of insecurity is the same part which is constantly working to model other people and their experience, their reactions to me. The part that is doing its hardest to make other people feel safe and comfortable around me, to avoi...