trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Diffusing "I can't be that stupid"
by Hazard — 2018-03-24T14:49:51.073Z

Why does it hurt so much when I think that people I care about are very wrong about something I think is important? If I'm talking with someone I'm not super close with, I'm usually very capable of not getting emotional or riled up when we find important disagreements.

After some though, it seems like my mind is running a process similar to the one below.

Quick summary:

For some reason, I don't want to accept that someone can matter and be worthy of care, and still be (from what I know) very wrong about very important things. In order to work around this, I slightly dehumanize people when I think they're majorly wrong. When I think someone I care about is majorly wrong, I bounce around in a loop

I'd guess that the experience of pain and discomfort that comes from disagreeing with close ones about important things is produced by spending time stuck in the loop on the left.

I should note that it feels uncomfortable to say that the above process is one that I routinely use, primarily because of how obviously broken it is upon reflection. You'd never catch me audibly saying, or even explicitly thinking, "Dante doesn't matter/isn't human because he doesn't agree with me."

There was a non-trivial delay between when I first though I could be doing some sort of dehumanization, and when I seriously considered it as a possibility. I don't like how long that took. I think bugs like this can often be hard to deal with because there's a sense of, "There's no way I could be that stupid."

Sometimes it seems like the mechanism is, "I would feel bad if I turned out to be 'that stupid', and I don't want to feel bad, so I'm not going to consider it." But it seems like there's also plenty of instances where it's, "I genuinely assign a low probability to being 'that stupid', and so I'm not going to investigate it."

When I queried this belief, I found something like, "Given that I am capable of feats of great intelligence, all parts of me should be very intelligent, because that's how intelligent things work[citation not need because I'm an implicit belief]." Which again, when I say it out loud I can see right through that.

Hmmmm... wait, so is my conclusion just that you should pay attention to your beliefs, and th...
The most important step
by Jsevillamol — 2018-03-24T12:34:01.643Z

I have a penchant for the stories of the old, in the era before the Bayesian Enlightment and before the Singers and Cantors surfaced, the days when the students of the Art of Rationality met underground, away from prying eyes.

Without the Sacred Texts to guide them, the disciples of Rationality spent long times discussing and refining the Art. 'Twas an arduous task, yet they persevered, guided by the promise of Light and Truth, the glimpse of Polaris that decided their course.

In this story in particular, two disciples of the Temple of the Bay discussed about the most important step in a quest.

-Surely - said one of them - the most important step must be first; for no quest has come to fruition without going through the first step.

-But you forget - said the other - the same reasoning applies to the last. No quest is complete without its last step.

-What about the value of the journey? It is infinitely more valuable to get halfway through a sacred quest, and then fail the last step, than to never have embarked upon it to begin with.

-In the Art, all that matters is victory. We do not embark in the path of Rationality to try, but to reach that which really matters. One does not get points for effort. Only conclusions matter.

-How can you even talk about the last step? In the quests that really matter, we should not see the end. Those quests, like the pursue of the Art, are powerful, alive things. To seek to end them is to mean their death.

Both kept arguing about both things for ten days and ten nights, until the master of the Temple came back from a journey of sacred meditation, to find both her disciples in heated conversation.

-Silence! - said the master - You both have brought dishonor to this sacred house! You have unattended your tasks while talking about abstract things, and thus you have lost sight of the Enemy.

-But master - protested one disciple - this is important theory to be crafted! Our quests must wait, for as you taught us, a strike without purpose is a wasted motion.

-Had you really understood the lesson - said the master - you would clearly see how to dissolve this silly question. No step, nor the first one nor the last, is as important as the next one!

And the students were Enlightened.
Welcome to Berkeley LessWrong Meetup [Edit With Your Details]
by PeerInfinity — 2018-03-23T19:35:22.188Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Idea: Open Access AI Safety Journal
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2018-03-23T18:27:01.166Z

This is short because I'm mainly trying to gather feedback on how much the idea might be worth pursuing, but how much value does it seem the existence of an open access AI safety journal would provide? Some reasons I can think of in favor:

Have a journal focused on AI safety, giving the field better visibility.

Peer review from researchers active in AI safety research.

Open access venue for AI safety research to avoid ethical concerns with publishing in closed journals.

A venue where AI safety ideas too far outside the mainstream but are academically rigorous can be published.

Give AI safety researchers a respectable venue for publishing to satisfy their career needs while reducing the effort they have to expend to get their work published, allowing more AI safety research to happen.

Some reasons against:

There are already plenty of journals.

Pre-prints are good enough.

Journals are a waste of time to signal quality that is generally easy to assess from reading articles themselves.

Most of the value could be had by regularly publishing a reviewed list of pre-prints and otherwise published articles in AI safety.

Drag on time of folks who could be doing research instead of reviewing and editing articles.

It appears that starting an open access journal is a little tedious but not especially hard, sc. this step-by-step guide, so it could probably be done by a team of 1-3 volunteers, but hopefully could be professionalized if it takes off.

Thoughts?
Systemizing and Hacking
by SatvikBeri — 2018-03-23T18:01:33.212Z

Let's call two broad clusters of problem-solving "systemizing" and "hacking." Systemizing roughly refers to building general, robust solutions. Hacking refers to quickly building one-offs. You would expect to accrue technical debt while hacking and pay it down while systemizing.

Both are useful in different situations. A big win for systemizing would be finding patterns in code and dramatically reducing the complexity by factoring out those patterns. A big win for hacking would be quickly testing several UIs to find one that potential customers love.

As you can probably guess, I lean very heavily towards systemizing, and have typically sucked at hacking – I generally relied on coworkers for that skill. But I started working on solo projects where I couldn't easily rely on someone else, so naturally, I developed a system for hacking things together.

The concrete example here is that I wanted to be able to run thousands of completely independent machine learning jobs quickly in parallel across a lot of computers, and I was looking into AWS Batch to do this.

Here's how I would have approached this in "systemizing" mode:

Break down all the parts involved, e.g. AWS Batch, Docker, boto3, etc.
Study them in detail until I grok each one, writing small bits of code primarily designed to help me understand
Assemble a solution

Here's how I did this in hacking mode:

Find a valuable point of high uncertainty (e.g., running Python scripts through Docker)
Find something that does something similar to what I want (e.g., an online introduction to Docker that involved running a particular Python script)
Modify that until it does what I want (successfully running my Python script and uploading data to AWS)
Find the next valuable point of uncertainty and repeat (running a single Docker image on AWS Batch)

This was really effective – previously, I might have spent ~40 hours deeply learning all the tools involved before I got the system up and running. Using the hacking approach, it only took me about 3 hours – literally an order of magnitude faster.

Of course, the hacking approach has clear disadvantages – I don't deeply understand Docker or any of the tools involved, and my experience here won't save me a ton of time if I work on a similar project. But in this case, I don't expect to do anything similar in the near-term, so hac...
LessWrong.com URL transfer complete, data import will run for the next few hours
by habryka — 2018-03-23T02:40:47.836Z

As you can easily see when you visit LessWrong.com, the site transfer is complete, and we are now on the new URL. The data import will run for the next few hours, and by tomorrow morning everything should be complete.

Let us know if you run into any problems, find any broken links, or anything of that sort!
Bug Hunt - Lesserwrong/Lesswrong.com Browser Compatibility
by Raemon — 2018-03-22T23:24:46.943Z

As we get ready for the final move of lesserwrong.com to lesswrong.com, we're addressing various browser compatibility issues.

We've recently updated some compatibility tools that fixed several of the older bugs. If you've run into compatibility bugs in the past, and are using one of our (newly) supported browsers, it'd be helpful if you tried using lesserwrong.com again and see if you run into any issues.

The site does require javascript to login and interact, although we'll try to make it a fairly friendly reading experience, and users who prefer a non-javascript experience can use saturn's greaterwrong.com.

The oldest browsers we're officially trying to support are:

Firefox 45

Chrome 49

Safari 9

Internet Explorer 11

Edge

Samsung Internet 6

(These are all the browsers that make up more than .4% of our userbase. If there turn out to be major issues for other browsers we'll try to look into them but can't necessarily promise to prioritize them all uniformly highly. It's still useful to have the bugs collected so we have a sense of the spread of issues across various devices)

Let us know what issues you've run into. Please include your browser and OS (and version). Bonus points if you try to replicate the issue in another browser to help triangulate what software is causing problems.
Browser Bug Hunt for LessWrong.com migration
by Raemon — 2018-03-22T23:23:04.315Z

As we get ready for the final move of lesserwrong.com to lesswrong.com, we're addressing various browser compatibility issues.

We've recently updated some compatibility tools that fixed several of the older bugs. If you've run into compatibility bugs in the past, and are using one of our (newly) supported browsers, it'd be helpful if you tried using lesserwrong.com again and see if you run into any issues.

The site does require javascript to login and interact, although we'll try to make it a fairly friendly reading experience, and users who prefer a non-javascript experience can use saturn's greaterwrong.com.

The oldest browsers we're officially trying to support are:

Firefox 45
Chrome 49
Safari 9
Internet Explorer 11
Edge
Samsung Internet 6

(These are all the browsers that make up more than .4% of our userbase. If there turn out to be major issues for other browsers we'll try to look into them but can't necessarily promise to prioritize them all uniformly highly. It's still useful to have the bugs collected so we have a sense of the spread of issues across various devices)

Let us know what issues you've run into. Please include your browser and OS (and version). Bonus points if you try to replicate the issue in another browser to help triangulate what software is causing problems.
My Hammertime Final Exam
by moridinamael — 2018-03-22T18:40:55.539Z

I, too, will take the Hammertime Final Exam.

Prompts

Design an instrumental rationality technique.
Introduce a rationality principle or framework.
Describe a cognitive defect, bias, or blindspot.

1. Partner

I suspect that most people don't even need willpower if you have a partner to work with.

If you want to write more fiction, find a writing buddy and agree that you'll send them X pieces of fiction of minimum length Y every interval Z, and they'll do the same. Also commit to giving each other primate-reaffirming feedback at every success.

If you like the idea of doing a podcast and wish you could start one, find a partner to do it with.

Many, if not most goals can be broken down this way and made into a mutually supporting partnership. Challenge yourself and see if your goals can be framed in this way. Not everything lends itself to a project you could share with a partner, but with a little creativity you can get pretty far.

2. Upholders, Obligers, Questioners, Rebels

Gretchen Rubin puts forth a decent fake framework of dividing people into Upholders, Obligers, Questioners and Rebels according to their intrinsic nature.

Upholders generally meet both inner and outer expectations, meaning they don't let others or themselves down.

Questioners meet only inner expectations. They push back against and question all expectations. Above all, they do something only if they think it makes sense — they hate anything arbitrary.

Obligers meet outer expectations but not always inner ones. In other words, they usually need some form of external accountability.

Rebels resist both inner and outer expectations. They value authenticity and self-determination.

Under this fake framework, the reason why I've been so successful with partners and so mediocre when relying on my own willpower is that I'm an Obliger. I find external obligations intrinsically motivating, and don't find inner commitments at all compelling.

I have a friend who is a very successful Questioner. Never does anything he's told, but is now a professor.

It seems that being an Upholder is the most desirable classification. At least, I would like to become that way. But I haven't had any luck changing my nature in this regard, and it has actually helped me a lot to just embrace my Obligerness and get other people involved with any and all things that I want to actually accomplish.

3....
Hammertime Postmortem
by alkjash — 2018-03-22T18:10:01.627Z

Intro.

A bit less than two months ago, I set out to write about instrumental rationality every day for thirty days. In this post, I will quickly evaluate how well I felt I did along each of my four stated objectives. I will simultaneously evaluate all the Hammertime techniques and ideas by their effectiveness to my life.

This period was my deadline to 80/20 instrumental rationality. Thus, I do not plan to blog any more about it for a while. However, I do want to express my strong intent to write a fourth cycle of Hammertime in the early months of 2019, if only to check my long-term progress.

1. Hammertime Report Card

I will grade myself on the four goals I stated in the first Intermission thread:

My reasons for writing this sequence were, in clear order of importance: (a) to practice writing, (b) to review CFAR techniques for my own benefit, (c) to entertain, and (d) to teach instrumental rationality.

On reflection, these were equally important goals and I only listed them in that relative order because I believed the later ones would be harder to achieve. I will grade everything out of 100, counting up from zero. Only the relative sizes of the numbers mean anything.

Writing Practice: 90/100

This worked out quite well. I produce content about three times faster than I did at the beginning of Hammertime, with perhaps the slightest decrease in quality. Speed I value as much as strength, so this was an amazing improvement. There are things like organization and style I should have played around with more, and a Yoda Timer of copy-editing after each post would have benefited the writing quality greatly.

Personal CFAR Review: 95/100

Through this process I was forced to reflect on, try out, and push the boundaries of almost every single technique in the manual. Other than a handful of techniques that don’t click with me at all, this two-month period has been the perfect amount of time to throw at dedicated instrumental rationality practice. The long-term value of the learning I did at CFAR at least tripled because I did this.

Entertainment: 65/100

Hit or miss. Handful of posts that were really fun to write, and still look fun to read. I noticed a number of clear limitations in my writing toolkit that don’t seem to be fixable in a day or two (but might be if I actually tried). Despite my best efforts, I’m still not Eliezer or Scott.

What am I missing? I plan to experiment more ...
Taking the Hammertime Final Exam
by  — 2018-03-22T17:22:17.964Z

[alkjash just finished his superb Hammertime sequence. I'm taking him up on his Hammertime Final Exam to come up with:

an instrumental rationality technique
a concept / framework
a cognitive bias

with just 5 minutes of brainstorming + 5 minutes of writing for each. The results are below.]

Box Your Brain:

Sometimes, your brain will come up with really great reasons to do really stupid things. Well, maybe they’re not totally stupid, but you don’t have the time to do some sort of fancy in-depth analysis to see what’s up. Or, you know that your System 1 is compromised. In those cases, just Box Your Brain.

Okay, so boxing AIs doesn’t seem to work that well. Unless you precommit, of course, such that you can’t yourself boxed. That’s the same idea here. You know that you know that you know…(and all the way up) that you’re running off faulty hardware.

So just tell yourself, “Nope, boxing my brain right now.” And go off and do the Virtuous Thing that you already know is Good and Correct. It’s your brain, and you can use it how you want. Sometimes the right thing to do is to stop listening and run with your meta-knowledge.

Exceptions All The Way Down:

You know how the right thing to do is always listen to your gut? Except for when your gut’s wrong?

You know how the right thing to do is always to write stuff down? Except for when writing stuff down isn’t helpful?

Yeah, so there’s this thing here that’s sort of like the metacontrarian cycle happening in rationality. At least a good third of rationality is trying to draw generalizations around things. We love to work off abstraction. This is going to lead to quite valuable heuristics; and of course there will be lots of edge cases.

Rules aren’t absolute. Sometimes they get broken. So what does that leave us with? Well, one thing is we can get specific down to the situation to make our judgments, much like the way you can still tell that certain moral decisions are repugnant, even if The System declares that said decision is the “right one”.

No Do-overs:

Here’s a thing I think at least some people are averse to: doing things again. Imagine you’re chatting with a stranger. The conversation finishes, and the two of you part ways. Then, BAM! You remember something cool that’d be great to bring up.

I postulate that the aversion you feel towards running back to the other person and bringing up said piece of coolness grows faster than yo...
LessWrong Diaspora Jargon Survey
by namespace — 2018-03-22T03:18:10.298Z

Introduction

Jargon is underrated in its importance to the framework of science. Luis Reyes-Galindo points out that jargon quite often ends up literally determining the boundaries of a field[0]. Given the disparity between how much attention is paid to jargon as a subject and its scholarly import, I decided to test the hypothesis that LessWrongers practice weak scholarship in regards to jargon. In particular, that for many important terms the true source of knowledge has not been transmitted to community members. Rather than a pedantic issue, this would imply deep issues with the way that LWers handle knowledge. Without a connection back to original sources, literature review on the part of community members could be severely suppressed.

Hypothesis

I started with a weak hypothesis and a strong hypothesis.

Weak Hypothesis: There will be at least one term in this list which respondents misidentify in origin overwhelmingly. In specific, at least 80% of respondents on at least one term or phrase will choose the wrong response.

Strong Hypothesis: There will be at least one term in this list which respondents misidentify in origin overwhelmingly. In addition, at least one third (4) of the words or phrases will have 50% or more of respondents incorrectly identify its origin.

These hypothesis were chosen in advance largely based on my gut intuition about the severity of the problem, and what would consitute 'sufficient evidence' to me that a problem existed.

Methodology

The methodology for this survey was preregistered here.

A list of search terms I used on Google Scholar for lit review before writing this article can be found here.

A survey was administered to 53 LWers on various chatrooms as well as my personal friends list. This survey contained twelve terms or phrases I felt were especially ambiguous as to their origin. (i.e, they were lacking obvious 'tells' of LW or academic origin)

Terms Used

Alief

Inside View/Outside View

Epistemic Learned Helplessness

Chinese Robber Fallacy

Anti-Inductive

Motte and Bailey

Map and Territory

Observer Effect

Terminal vs Instrumental Values/Goals

Ugh-Field

Illusion of Transparency

Optimiser's Curse

At least one term was chosen to sound especially academic and one term chosen to sound especially 'LessWrong Diaspora' to provide a baseline. These terms are HtuSvryq and BofreireRssrpg respectively (rot13). All...
LW Migration Announcement
by Vaniver — 2018-03-22T02:18:19.892Z

The votes are in, and of the eligible 376 voters, 102 voted to Migrate and 15 voted to archive. With 87% in favor, we’re going ahead with the transition, which will begin tomorrow (3/22) at 6pm Pacific time. Trike will take a snapshot of the database, transfer it to us, and we’ll begin the database import of new material since the last import. At 7pm, the DNS server will point to our server instead of Trike’s, and so people visiting lesswrong.com will see the new site. The import will run in parallel with the site operating, so there won’t be any downtime of the new site.

Some things to note:

Old links will continue to work, redirecting to the right new URL. We’ll be watching the analytics to notice any failures, and you can also alert us through Intercom (which we’ll shut off a few days into the transition, as problems get fixed).
Lesserwrong links will redirect to the same page at lesswrong.
We’ll add old karma scores to new karma scores, and may adjust the vote weight algorithm accordingly.
Please report issues

here

.

Also, for those of you near Berkeley, we’ll be throwing a launch party on April 7th at 7pm (

LW

,

Facebook

).