trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Maine: Automatic Cognition
by imuli — 2015-06-17T23:48:03.804Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Maine: Automatic Cognition

WHEN:
29 June 2015 06:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
45 Wight St, Belfast, ME, USA

Imuli will present about Systems 1 and 2 and more specifically about the Inner Simulator and the group of questions one can ask of it.
As this is the first gathering, we'll also talk about plans for future events, what people are interested in, what people want to share, and where and when to meet.

Welcome at 6:30, starts at 7pm.

Inviting all who aspire to be more accurate in belief and effective in action.

Discussion article for the meetup : Maine: Automatic Cognition
Intrinsic motivation is crucial for overcoming akrasia
by JonahS — 2015-06-17T22:39:05.017Z

tl;dr: If you struggle with motivational problems, it's likely that the problem is not intrinsic to you, but instead that you haven't yet found work that you find very interesting.

How I discovered how to do great work

Last winter I did something that I had never done before. I spent ~1500 hours working on genuinely original scientific research.

I had done research for my PhD in pure math, but faced squarely, the problems that I worked on were of very little interest to anyone outside of the fields, and I was not very engaged with my research. Pure math is very heavily stacked with talent, and the low hanging fruit has been plucked, so unless you're one of the most talented people in the world, your prospects for doing anything other than derivative work are very poor.

What I did last fall was entirely different. As I trained to be a data scientist, I found that there's far more low hanging fruit in the field than there is in pure math, and found myself working on novel problems that are of broad interest almost immediately.

Having very high intrinsic motivation made a huge difference. I found myself spending all waking hours (~90 hours / week) working on it obsessively, almost involuntarily. Once I emerged, I realized that what I had done over the past ~3.5 months was far more significant than all of the other work that I had done over the span of my entire life combined. I was astonished to find myself having ascended to the pantheon of those who have made major contributions to human knowledge, something that I hadn't imagined possible in my wildest dreams.

The problem isn't "laziness"

Many of the most interesting people who I know are achieving at a level far below their potential. They often have major procrastination problems, and believe this to correspond to them having a character flaw of "laziness". I've become convinced that these people's problems don't come from them being insufficiently disciplined.

Their problems come from them spending their time trying to do work that they find boring. If you find your work boring, it's very likely that you should be doing something else.

References

My position is not unique to me: it's common to extremely high functioning people.

[1] Steve Jobs created Apple, which owns ~0.1%+ of the world's wealth. In his 2005 Stanford commencement address he said:

I'm convinced that the only thing that kept

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New Meetup in New Hampshire
by NancyLebovitz — 2015-06-17T20:30:01.435Z

The inaugural New Hampshire Less Wrong meet-up will take place the week of June 29-July 4. I've created a Doodle poll to find out the best date for likely participants. If you are interested in attending, please fill out the poll here: http://doodle.com/4ypehfkvsm7cvf76

The first meeting will be in Manchester, but I'm open to rotating locations throughout NH in the future, especially if people want to host meetings in their homes.

I hope to coordinate crossover meetings with Boston LW, e.g. field trips to Sundays at the Citadel."

*****

I've posted this for Elizabeth Edwards-Appell-- she's confirmed her LW email, but still can't post, not even comments. I've notified tech, but meanwhile, if anyone can help with her posting problem, let me know.
Effective altruism and political power
by Adam Zerner — 2015-06-17T17:47:11.509Z

I just saw that Donald Trump is running for president. Which led me to the following thought: would any of the big names in tech have a chance at being elected president of the US? Elon Musk? Sergey Brin? Jeff Bezos? Reid Hoffman? Peter Thiel? Edit: Bill Gates?

Some follow up questions/thoughts:

As far as maximizing altruistic impact goes, would it be a good idea for them to become president?

Do these people care about maximizing altruistic impact? To what extent? If so/enough, why not do it?

What other "sane" people have enough reputation in the public eye to have a chance at acquiring a lot of political power? My first thought was tech people, but I'm sure there are others. Big hedge fund managers? Ray Dalio? Or maybe some famous scientists?

What does EA have to say about acquiring political power?

Edit: hypothetically, if one of these big-name tech people were to try to gain political power, how should they go about doing so?
Autism, or early isolation?
by JonahS — 2015-06-17T08:52:01.356Z

I've often heard LWers describe themselves as having autism, or Asperger's Syndrome (which is no longer considered a valid construct, and was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders two years ago.) This is given as an explanation for various forms of social dysfunction. The suggestion is that such people have a genetic disorder.

I've come to think that the issues are seldom genetic in origin. There's a simpler explanation. LWers are often intellectually gifted. This is conducive to early isolation. In The Outsiders Grady Towers writes:

The single greatest adjustment problem faced by the intellectually gifted, however, is their tendency to become isolated from the rest of humanity. Hollingworth points out that the exceptionally gifted do not deliberately choose isolation, but are forced into it against their wills. These children are not unfriendly or ungregarious by nature. Typically they strive to play with others but their efforts are defeated by the difficulties of the case... Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. [...] Forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse.

Most people pick up a huge amount of tacit social knowledge as children and adolescents, through very frequent interaction with many peers. This is often not true of intellectually gifted people, who usually grew up in relative isolation on account of lack of peers who shared their interests.

They often have the chance to meet others similar to themselves later on in life. One might think that this would resolve the issue. But in many cases intellectually gifted people simply never learn how beneficial it can be to interact with others. For example, the great mathematician Robert Langlands wrote:

Bochner pointed out my existence to Selberg and he invited me over to speak with him at the Institute. I have known Selberg for more than 40 years. We are on cordial terms and our offices have been essentially adjacent for more than 20 years.This is nevertheless the only mathematical conversation I ever had with him. It was a revelation.

At first blush,...
Effectively Less Altruistically Wrong Codex
by diegocaleiro — 2015-06-16T19:00:53.934Z

My post on the fact that incentive structures are eating the central place to be for rationalists has generated 140 comments which I have generated no clear action in the horizon.

I post here again to incentivize that it also generates some attempts to shake the ground a bit. Arguing and discussing are fun, and beware of things that are fun to argue.

Is anyone actually doing anything to mitigate the problem? To solve it? To have a stable end state in the long run where online discussions still preserve what needs being preserved?

Intelligent commentary is valuable, pools are interesting. Yet, at the end of the day, it is the people who show up to do something who will determine the course of everything.

If you care about this problem, act on it. I care enough to write these two posts.
Pattern-botching: when you forget you understand
by MalcolmOcean — 2015-06-15T22:58:34.954Z

It’s all too easy to let a false understanding of something replace your actual understanding. Sometimes this is an oversimplification, but it can also take the form of an overcomplication. I have an illuminating story:

Years ago, when I was young and foolish, I found myself in a particular romantic relationship that would later end for epistemic reasons, when I was slightly less young and slightly less foolish. Anyway, this particular girlfriend of mine was very into healthy eating: raw, organic, home-cooked, etc. During her visits my diet would change substantially for a few days. At one point, we got in a tiny fight about something, and in a not-actually-desperate chance to placate her, I semi-jokingly offered: “I’ll go vegetarian!”

“I don’t care,” she said with a sneer.

…and she didn’t. She wasn’t a vegetarian. Duhhh... I knew that. We’d made some ground beef together the day before.

So what was I thinking? Why did I say “I’ll go vegetarian” as an attempt to appeal to her values?

(I’ll invite you to take a moment to come up with your own model of why that happened. You don't have to, but it can be helpful for evading hindsight bias of obviousness.)

(Got one?)

Here's my take: I pattern-matched a bunch of actual preferences she had with a general "healthy-eating" cluster, and then I went and pulled out something random that felt vaguely associated. It's telling, I think, that I don't even explicitly believe that vegetarianism is healthy. But to my pattern-matcher, they go together nicely.

I'm going to call this pattern-botching.† Pattern-botching is when you pattern-match a thing "X", as following a certain model, but then implicit queries to that model return properties that aren't true about X. What makes this different from just having false beliefs is that you know the truth, but you're forgetting to use it because there's a botched model that is easier to use.

†Maybe this already has a name, but I've read a lot of stuff and it feels like a distinct concept to me.

Examples of pattern-botching

So, that's pattern-botching, in a nutshell. Now, examples! We'll start with some simple ones.

Calmness and pretending to be a zen master

In my Againstness Training video, past!me tries a bunch of things to calm down. In the pursuit of "calm", I tried t

...
Accomplishing things takes a long time
by JonahS — 2015-06-15T21:59:33.014Z

At age 17, my future looked very promising. I had overcome a crippling learning disability, and discovered how to do research level math on my own. I knew that the entire K-12 infrastructure had failed to figure out how to teach the skills that I developed, and so I felt empowered to help others learn how to think about the world mathematically.

Things didn't go as I had been hoping they would. My years between 18 and 28 consisted of a long string of failed attempts to help people learn math, and to promote effective altruism. I learned a lot along the way, but I didn't have the outsized impact that I aspired to. On the contrary, I was only marginally functional, and I alienated most of the people who I tried to help. I found this profoundly demoralizing, and struggled with chronic depression. If I had died at age 28, my life would have been a tragedy.

Fortunately, at age 29, I'm still alive, and after spending a decade wandering in a wilderness, I've gotten my act together, and am back on my feet.

What I finally realized out is that my failures had come from me having very poor communication skills, something that I had been oblivious to until very recently. Recognizing the problem was just the first step. It's still the case that most of what I try to communicate is lost in translation. I know that the issue is not going to go away overnight, or even over the next 6 months. Sometimes it's frustrating, because my self-image is so closely tied with my desire to help people, and even now, in practice, most of my efforts are fruitless.

But I'm not concerned about that. I probably still have 30 or 40 productive years ahead of me. I'm ok with the fact that no matter how hard I try, I fail most of the time. Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham emphasizes the importance of relentless resourcefulness. Every failure is a learning opportunity. I know that if I keep experimenting and learning, eventually I'll succeed. Figuratively speaking, I know that even if I lose dozens of battles over the next four decades, in the end, I'll win the war. And that's enough to keep me going.

Something analogous is true of everyone who has a strong passion, and is willing and able to learn from failure. Steve Jobs expressed a similar view in his 2005 Stanford commencement address (transcript | video):

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm con

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Theories of Regret
by SilentCal — 2015-06-15T18:22:05.878Z

(The following is armchair psychological speculation based on anecdotal evidence. If anyone can respond with relevant science, that'd be awesome, but otherwise responses in kind are quite welcome.)

I'm puzzled regarding the motivational effects of negative emotion, particularly shame, guilt, and regret--I'll just say 'regret' going forward, though there could be important differences between them. In particular, I've observed people being oddly unmotivated to avoid doing things that will very predictably cause them unhappiness, in a way that seems to go beyond garden variety akrasia. It recently occurred to me that homo hypocritus theories of regret predict this result.

In contrast to the naive theory, under which regret is inflicted by a brain on itself to teach it to change its behavior, the homo hypocritus theory holds that regret exist to convince other observers that its behavior will change. This allows someone to continually do antisocial things while convincing others that they won't do so in the future. Look at it from the perspective of a gene-selfish brain designer: self-inflicted regret, unlike externally-inflicted injuries, doesn't carry any intrinsic harms, so there's no reason to behave in a way that avoids it.

On closer inspection, neither theory makes a whole lot of sense on its own. Regret has distinctive displays that would be pointless if they were only for internal consumption. And there would be no reason for others to think regret would lead to changed behavior if this were never the case. So a revised theory combines the two as follows:

Naive 2.0) Regret originally evolved to act both as impetus for an individual to change behavior and signal to others that such a correction was taking place.

Homo Hypocritus 2.0) Sometimes brains exploit this by feeling regret and sending the signal while somehow blocking the behavior update--this is advantageous if the regretted action only harms the agent via others' disapproval and the emotional display allays that disapproval.

This could vary by individual, by situation, or both. And it comes with the standard evo-psych disclaimer that people with HH brains aren't faking their suffering. Rather, this might explain behavior we'd call 'compulsive' or 'self-destructive'--it could be that the compulsion to do regrettable things isn't extra-strong, but rather that the brain's motivation to avoid those behavi...
Noodling on a cloud : how to converse constructively
by Douglas_Reay — 2015-06-15T10:30:07.427Z

Noodling on a cloud

SUMMARY:

By teaching others, we also learn ourselves. How can we best use conversation as a tool to facilitate that?

Sensemaking

How do people make sense out of raw input?

Marvin Cohen suggests that it is usually a two-way process. Not only do we use the data to suggest a mental models to try for good fit, but also we simultaneously try to use mental models to select and connect the data. (LINK)

The same thing applies when the data is a cloud of vaguely associated concepts in our head. One of the ways that we can make sense of them, turn them into crystallized thoughts that we can then associate with a handle, is by attempting to verbalize them. The discipline of turning something asyndetic into a linear progression of connected thoughts forces us to select between possible mental models and actually pick just one, allowing us to then consider whether it fits the data well or not.

But the first possibility we pick won't necessarily be the one that fits best. Going around a loop, iterating, trying different starting points or angles of approach, trying different ways of stating things, and seeing what associations those raise to add to the cloud, takes longer but can often produce more useful results. However, its a delicate process, because of the way memory works.

Working memory

The size of cloud you can crystallize is limited. The type of short term memory that the brain uses to store them where you're aware of them lasts about 18 seconds. (LINK) For a concept or datum to persist longer than that, part of your attention needs to be used to 'revisit' it. The faster your ability to do that, the more mental juggling balls you can keep in the air without dropping one. Most adults can keep between 5 and 7 balls in the air, in their 'working memory'. (LINK)

There are a number of ways around this limitation. You can group multiple concepts together and treat them as a single 'ball', if you can attach to them a mental handle (a reference, such as a word or image, that recalls them). (LINK)

You can put things down on paper, rather than doing it all in your head, using the paper to store links to different parts of the cloud. So, for instance, rather than try to consider 12 things at once, split them into 4 groups of 3 (A, B, C & D), and systematically consider the concepts 6 at a time: A+B, A+C, ...
[Link] Robots Program People
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-06-15T08:42:11.732Z

On Scott Adams' Blog: Robots Program People:

It won’t be long before all new drugs are discovered by robots. This start-up is an example of that trend.

And it won’t be long before IBM’s Watson can diagnose and prescribe treatments better than any human doctor.

Put those two trends together and robots will be programming humans with drugs. Drugs are the user interface to our moistware.

[...]

Someday, for sure, machines will be programming humans. And that day will probably be in your lifetime. But don’t be afraid because the robots will someday have a drug that will make you feel totally okay with being their pet.

I think this is quite relevant as that is actually quite likely and has lots of failure modes from UFAI to Moloch.

The post also has some discussion of whether the machines are actually actors in this ("You are thinking that humans program the machines, and the machines just do their job.") and does some insightful comparisons on that.
Alien neuropunk slaver civilizations
by D_Malik — 2015-06-15T06:30:32.795Z

Here's some blue-sky speculation about one way alien sapients' civilizations might develop differently from our own. Alternatively, you can consider it conworlding. Content note: torture, slavery.
Looking at human history, after we developed electronics, we painstakingly constructed machines that can perform general computation, then built software which approximates the workings of the human brain. For instance, we nowadays use in-silico reinforcement learning and neural nets to solve various "messy" problems like computer vision and robot movement. In the future, we might scan brains and then emulate them on computers. This all seems like a very circuitous course of development - those algorithms have existed all around us for thousands of years in the form of brains. Putting them on computers requires an extra layer of technology.
Suppose that some alien species's biology is a lot more robust than ours - their homeostatic systems are less failure-prone than our own, due to some difference in their environment or evolutionary history. They don't get brain-damaged just from holding their breath for a couple minutes, and open wounds don't easily get infected.
Now suppose that after they invent agriculture but before they invent electronics, they study biology and neurology. Combined with their robust biology, this leads to a world where things that are electronic in our world are instead controlled by vat-grown brains. For instance, a car-building robot could be constructed by growing a brain in a vat, hooking it up to some actuators and sensors, then dosing it with happy chemicals when it correctly builds a car, and stimulating its nociceptors when it makes mistakes. This rewarding and punishing can be done by other lab-grown "overseer" brains trained specifically for the job, which are in turn manually rewarded at the end of the day by their owner for the total number of cars successfully built. Custom-trained brains could control chemical plants, traffic lights, surveillance systems, etc. The actuators and sensors could be either biologically-based (lab-grown eyes, muscles, etc., powered with liquefied food) or powered with combustion engines or steam engines or even wound springs.
Obviously this is a pretty terrible world, because many minds will live lives with very little meaning, never grasping the big picture, at the mercy of unmerciful human or vat-brai...
Associated vs Relevant
by abramdemski — 2015-06-15T01:12:25.091Z

Also cross-posted to my blog.

The List of Nuances (which is actually more of a list of fine distinctions - a fine distinction which only occurred to its authors after the writing of it) has one glaring omission, which is the distinction between associated and relevant. A List of Nuances is largely a set of reminders that we aren't omniscient, but it also serves the purpose of listing actual subtleties and calling for readers to note the subtleties rather than allowing themselves to fall into associationism, applying broad cognitive clusters where fine distinctions are available. The distinction between associated and relevant is critical to this activity.

An association can be anything related to a subject. To be relevant is a higher standard: it means that there is an articulated argument connecting to a question on the table, such that the new statement may well push the question one way or the other (perhaps after checking other relevant facts). This is close to the concept of value of information.

Whether something is relevant or merely associated can become confused when epistemic defensiveness comes into play. From A List of Nuances:

10. What You Mean vs. What You Think You Mean

Very often, people will say something and then that thing will be refuted. The common response to this is to claim you meant something slightly different, which is more easily defended.

We often do this without noticing, making it dangerous for thinking. It is an automatic response generated by our brains, not a conscious decision to defend ourselves from being discredited. You do this far more often than you notice. The brain fills in a false memory of what you meant without asking for permission.

As mentioned in Epistemic Trust, a common reason for this is when someone says something associated to the topic at hand, which turns out not to be relevant.

There is no shame in saying associated things. In a free-ranging discussion, the conversation often moves forward from topic to topic by free-association. All of the harm here comes from claiming that something is relevant when it is merely associated. Because this is often a result of knee-jerk self-defense, it is critical to repeat: there is no shame in saying something merely associated with the topic at hand!

It is quite ...