trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Brief update on the consequences of my "Two arguments for not thinking about ethics" (2014) article
by Kaj_Sotala — 2017-04-05T11:25:39.618Z

In March 2014, I posted on LessWrong an article called "Two arguments for not thinking about ethics (too much)", which started out with:

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about formal ethics, trying to figure out whether I was leaning more towards positive or negative utilitarianism, about the best courses of action in light of the ethical theories that I currently considered the most correct, and so on. From the discussions that I've seen on this site, I expect that a lot of others have been doing the same, or at least something similar.

I now think that doing this has been more harmful than it has been useful, for two reasons: there's no strong evidence to assume that this will give us very good insight to our preferred ethical theories, and more importantly, because thinking in those terms will easily lead to akrasia.

I ended the article with the following paragraph:

My personal experience of late has also been that thinking in terms of "what does utilitarianism dictate I should do" produces recommendations that feel like external obligations, "shoulds" that are unlikely to get done; whereas thinking about e.g. the feelings of empathy that motivated me to become utilitarian in the first place produce motivations that feel like internal "wants". I was very close to (yet another) burnout and serious depression some weeks back: a large part of what allowed me to avoid it was that I stopped entirely asking the question of what I should do, and began to focus entirely on what I want to do, including the question of which of my currently existing wants are ones that I'd wish to cultivate further. (Of course there are some things like doing my tax returns that I do have to do despite not wanting to, but that's a question of necessity, not ethics.) It's way too short of a time to say whether this actually leads to increased productivity in the long term, but at least it feels great for my mental health, at least for the time being.

The long-term update (three years after first posting the article) is that starting to shift my thought patterns in this way was totally the right thing to do, and necessary for starting a long and slow recovery from depression. It's hard to say entirely for sure how big of a role this has played, since the patterns of should-thought were very deeply ingrained and have been slow to get rid of; I still occasionally find mys...
Ginialogy
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-04-05T02:58:26.000Z

As part of my efforts to combat the cowpox of doubt, I try to point poor articles only in outlets where poor articles are rare. Last week I gave props to a Bloomberg View column, so I guess they were due.

The piece in question is Noah Smith’s Capitalism Will Shrink Inequality. In fact, it’s happening. I’m a fan of capitalism and I’m a fan of Noah Smith, but I’m not a fan articles that don’t have the numbers to back up their title.

Noah offers this chart on falling income disparities within Latin American nations, from a research paper by Nora Lustig et al (2015):

Quick aside: Lustig et al published a paper with the same title in 2013. The 2015 version incorporates two more years of data, but has basically the same text throughout. How convenient! When I read a blog post from a mere six months ago I have a strong urge to edit it, not to mention that I expect my conclusions to change, however slightly, as new data comes in. But what do I know? Putanumonit isn’t peer reviewed.

Anyway, here’s what Lustig et al actually found (the numbers are different because they’re annualized, while Noah uses the numbers for an entire decade):

Noah mentions Honduras in the column, but his chart conveniently ignores countries like Uruguay in which the reduction in inequality wasn’t so impressive. He also has this to say about China, which on Lustig’s graph shows as a tall column of rising inequality:

As for China, there are signs that inequality there has peaked as well. A recent study by economists Ravi Kanbur, Yue Wang and Xiaobo Zhang combed through China’s notoriously murky data and found that the Gini coefficient declined to 0.495 in 2014 from 0.533 in 2010.

The study he references covers a different and more recent period (2010-2014 vs. 2000-2011) than Lustig et al, but the combined data sets shows that at best the direction of China’s Gini is ambiguous, not that it’s clearly declining. I would wait for a few more “signs” before talking about China as an example of falling inequality.

Whether inequality is falling, rising, or vacationing in Shanghai, we care about why it’s happening. Specifically, whether capitalism has anything to do with it. Here’s what the authors of the paper have to say about the drivers of falling inequality:

Interestingly, there is no clear link between

...
Meetup : The future of rationality in Melbourne
by Chriswaterguy — 2017-04-05T02:32:43.861Z

Discussion article for the meetup : The future of rationality in Melbourne

WHEN:
09 April 2017 03:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Henley Club, Melbourne, VIC

"The future of rationality in Melbourne"

Less Wrong Melbourne dojo, 9 April 2017

NOTE NEW VENUE (The Henley Club in central CBD)

THIS MONTH:
A discussion on group dynamics, evidence behind movement growth, "evaporative cooling" of groups, incentives for old members vs incentives for new members, pros and cons of integration vs separation, culture control, mentorship and business opportunities.

Facilitated by Adam Karlovsky.

BRING:
* An inquiring mind, and observations you may have on the topic.
* Perhaps a snack to share. (Healthy snack choice is optional but welcome.)

WHEN:
3:30pm to 6:30pm (and then optional dinner). Come early to catch up, and the meeting proper will begin at 4pm sharp.

At about 6:30pm some of us generally head for dinner nearby, and you are welcome to join us.

WHERE:
The Henley Club
Level 1, 8 Rankins Lane, Melbourne CBD https://goo.gl/maps/vmFL6JeKQSD2

It's down a lane (off Little Bourke, near Elizabeth) and one flight up a stairwell. If you have trouble, text or call Adam on 0412 064 542.

Discussion article for the meetup : The future of rationality in Melbourne
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2017-04-05T02:10:49.097Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games

WHEN:
09 April 2017 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

Upcoming meetups:

Apr. 16: AI Risk/Safety

Apr. 23: Slate Star Codex

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
Responses to Tyler Cowen on Rationality
by Zvi — 2017-04-04T23:40:02.000Z

In his recent podcast with Ezra Klein (recommended), Ezra asked Tyler his views on many things. One of them was the rationality community, and he put that response on Marginal Revolution as its own post.

Here is the back and forth:

Ezra Klein

The rationality community.

Tyler Cowen

Well, tell me a little more what you mean. You mean Eliezer Yudkowsky?

Ezra Klein

Yeah, I mean Less Wrong, Slate Star Codex. Julia Galef, Robin Hanson. Sometimes Bryan Caplan is grouped in here. The community of people who are frontloading ideas like signaling, cognitive biases, etc.

Tyler Cowen

Well, I enjoy all those sources, and I read them. That’s obviously a kind of endorsement. But I would approve of them much more if they called themselves the irrationality community. Because it is just another kind of religion. A different set of ethoses. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but the notion that this is, like, the true, objective vantage point I find highly objectionable. And that pops up in some of those people more than others. But I think it needs to be realized it’s an extremely culturally specific way of viewing the world, and that’s one of the main things travel can teach you.

Julia Galef published a response to this, pushing back on the idea that rationalism is just another ethos or even another religion. Her response:

My quick reaction:

Basically all humans are overconfident and have blind spots. And that includes self-described rationalists.

But I see rationalists actively trying to compensate for those biases at least sometimes, and I see people in general do so almost never. For example, it’s pretty common for rationalists to solicit criticism of their own ideas, or to acknowledge uncertainty in their claims.

Similarly, it’s weird for Tyler to accuse rationalists of assuming their ethos is correct. Everyone assumes their own ethos is correct! And I think rationalists are far more likely than most people to be transparent about the premises of their ethos, instead of just treating those premises as objectively true, as most people do.

For example, you could accuse rationalists of being overconfident that utilitarianism is the best moral system. Fine. But you think most people aren’t confident in their own moral views?

At least rationalists acknowledge that their moral judgments are dependent on certain premises, and that if someone doesn’t agree with those premises then i

...
OpenAI makes humanity less safe
by Benquo — 2017-04-03T19:07:51.773Z

If there's anything we can do now about the risks of superintelligent AI, then OpenAI makes humanity less safe.

Once upon a time, some good people were worried about the possibility that humanity would figure out how to create a superintelligent AI before they figured out how to tell it what we wanted it to do. If this happened, it could lead to literally destroying humanity and nearly everything we care about. This would be very bad. So they tried to warn people about the problem, and to organize efforts to solve it.

Specifically, they called for work on aligning an AI’s goals with ours - sometimes called the value alignment problem, AI control, friendly AI, or simply AI safety - before rushing ahead to increase the power of AI.

Some other good people listened. They knew they had no relevant technical expertise, but what they did have was a lot of money. So they did the one thing they could do - throw money at the problem, giving it to trusted parties to try to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the money was used to make the problem worse. This is the story of OpenAI.

Before I go on, two qualifiers:

This post will be much easier to follow if you have some familiarity with the AI safety problem. For a quick summary you can read Scott Alexander’s Superintelligence FAQ. For a more comprehensive account see Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence.

AI is an area in which even most highly informed people should have lots of uncertainty. I wouldn't be surprised if my opinion changes a lot after publishing this post, as I learn relevant information. I'm publishing this because I think this process should go on in public.

The story of OpenAI

Before OpenAI, there was DeepMind, a for-profit venture working on "deep learning” techniques. It was widely regarded as the advanced AI research organization. If any current effort was going to produce superhuman intelligence, it was DeepMind.

Elsewhere, industrialist Elon Musk was working on more concrete (and largely successful) projects to benefit humanity, like commercially viable electric cars, solar panels cheaper than ordinary roofing, cheap spaceflight with reusable rockets, and a long-run plan for a Mars colony. When he heard the arguments people like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom were making about AI risk, he was persuaded that there was something ...
Project Hufflepuff: Planting the Flag
by Raemon — 2017-04-03T18:37:32.018Z

"Clever kids in Ravenclaw, evil kids in Slytherin, wannabe heroes in Gryffindor, and everyone who does the actual work in Hufflepuff.”

- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 9

“It is a common misconception that the best rationalists are Sorted into Ravenclaw, leaving none for other Houses. This is not so; being Sorted into Ravenclaw indicates that your strongest virtue is curiosity, wondering and desiring to know the true answer. And this is not the only virtue a rationalist needs. Sometimes you have to work hard on a problem, and stick to it for a while. Sometimes you need a clever plan for finding out. And sometimes what you need more than anything else to see an answer, is the courage to face it…

- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 45

I’m a Ravenclaw and Slytherin by nature. I like being clever. I like pursuing ambitious goals. But over the past few years, I’ve been cultivating the skills and attitudes of Hufflepuff, by choice.

I think those skills are woefully under-appreciated in the Rationality Community. The problem cuts across many dimensions:

Many people in rationality communities feel lonely (even the geographically tight Berkeley cluster). People want more (and deeper) connections than they currently have.
There are lots of small pain points in the community (in person and online) that could be addressed fairly easily, but which people don’t dedicate the time to fix.
People are rewarded for starting individual projects more than helping to make existing ones succeed, which results in projects typically depending on a small number of people working unsustainably. (i.e. a single person running a meetup who feels like if they left, the meetup would crumble apart)
Some newcomers often find the culture impenetrable and unwelcoming.
Not enough “real-time operational competence” - the ability to notice problems in the physical world a and solve them.
Even at events like EA Global where enormous effort is put into operations and logistics, we scramble to pull things together at the last minute in a way that is very draining.
Many people communicate in a way that feels disdainful and dismissive (to many people), which makes both social cohesion as well as intellectual understanding harder.
We have a strong culture of “make sure your own needs are met”, that specifically pushes back against broader societal norms that pressure

...
Open thread, Apr. 03 - Apr. 09, 2017
by Elo — 2017-04-03T06:58:26.213Z

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
Meetup : Reading with discipline, reconstruction and mnemonics
by pepe_prime — 2017-04-02T20:24:53.771Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Reading with discipline, reconstruction and mnemonics

WHEN:
21 April 2017 05:45:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Lindstedtsvägen 3, Room 1537, SE-114 28 Stockholm, Sverige

We'll go through how to complete large or difficult reading tasks, how to efficiently memorize and understand the contents, and how to maintain the memory afterwards. We'll go through a few tried and true methods and hold a few exercises. Bring at least one text (technical manual, poetry, fiction) that you want to remember well and a notebook.

Format:
We meet and start hanging out at 5:45, but don't officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:00 to accomodate stragglers. We often go out for dinner after the meetup.

How to find us:
The meetup is at a KTH academic building and the room is on the 5th floor, two stairs up.

Influence future meetups:
Times - http://www.when2meet.com/?5723551-cJBhD
Topics - https://druthe.rs/dockets/-KcCvpn97vUhg3tQRrKn

Discussion article for the meetup : Reading with discipline, reconstruction and mnemonics
Meetup : Denver LW April Meetup
by PonchoPal — 2017-04-02T03:39:25.452Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver LW April Meetup

WHEN:
04 April 2017 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
4955 S Ulster St #103, Denver, CO 80237

Darcy's Pub. Usual time and place, likely in the back room.

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver LW April Meetup
G.K. Chesterton On AI Risk
by Scott Alexander — 2017-04-01T19:00:43.865Z

[An SSC reader working at an Oxford library stumbled across a previously undiscovered manuscript of G.K. Chesterton’s, expressing his thoughts on AI, x-risk, and superintelligence. She was kind enough to send me a copy, which I have faithfully transcribed]

The most outlandish thing about the modern scientific adventure stories is that they believe themselves outlandish. Mr. H. G. Wells is considered shocking for writing of inventors who travel thousands of years into the future, but the meanest church building in England has done the same. When Jules Verne set out to ‘journey to the center of the earth’ and ‘from the earth to the moon’, he seemed but a pale reflection of Dante, who took both voyages in succession before piercing the Empyrean itself. Ezekiel saw wheels of spinning flame and reported them quite soberly; our modern writers collapse in rapture before the wheels of a motorcar.

Yet if the authors disappoint, it is the reviewers who dumbfound. For no sooner does a writer fancy himself a Poe or a Dunsany for dreaming of a better sewing machine, but there comes a critic to call him overly fanciful, to accuse him of venturing outside science into madness. It is not enough to lower one’s sights from Paradise to a motorcar; one must avoid making the motorcar too bright or fast, lest it retain a hint of Paradise.

The followers of Mr. Samuel Butler speak of thinking-machines that grow grander and grander until – quite against the wishes of their engineers – they become as tyrannical angels, firmly supplanting the poor human race. This theory is neither exciting nor original; there have been tyrannical angels since the days of Noah, and our tools have been rebelling against us since the first peasant stepped on a rake. Nor have I any doubt that what Butler says will come to pass. If every generation needs its tyrant-angels, then ours has been so inoculated against the original that if Lucifer and all his hosts were to descend upon Smithfield Market to demand that the English people bend the knee, we should politely ignore them, being far too modern to have time for such things. Butler’s thinking-machines are the only tyrant-angels we will accept; fate, ever accommodating, will surely give them to us.

Yet no sooner does Mr. Butler publish his speculations then a veritable army of hard-headed critics step for...
April 2017 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2017-04-01T16:39:10.022Z

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

Rules:

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

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

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

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

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Meetup : Baltimore
by l1n — 2017-04-01T16:25:10.917Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore

WHEN:
02 April 2017 08:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Building, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States

We’ll be meeting to discuss ... anything. Suggested Reading: Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons from Slate Star Codex.
Meetup is on the 4th floor by the English department. Follow the voices. For help getting into the building, please text 619-357-6633.

Format:
We meet and start hanging out at 8:00, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 8:15-8:30 to accommodate stragglers.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore
Rationality Quotes April - June 2017
by Sabiola — 2017-04-01T09:06:34.200Z

Another quarter, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

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

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
Plan-Bot: A Simple Planning Tool
by  — 2017-03-31T21:45:38.624Z

[I recently made a post in the OT about this, but I figured it might be good as a top-level post for add'l attention.]

After writing Planning 101, I realized that there was no automated tool online for Murphyjitsu, the CFAR technique of problem-proofing plans. (I explain Murphyjitsu in more detail about halfway down the Planning 101 post.)

I was also trying to learn some web-dev at the same time, so I decided to code up this little tool, Plan-Bot, that walks you through a series of planning prompts and displays your answers to the questions.

In short, you type in what you want to do, it asks you what the steps are, and when you're done, it asks you to evaluate potential ways things can go wrong.

I set it as my homepage, and I've been getting some use out of it. Hopefully it ends up being helpful for other people as well.

You can try it out here

I'm still trying to learn web-dev, so feel free to give suggestions for improvements, and I'll try to incorporate them.