trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Decision Problem
by DragonGod — 2017-08-24T21:53:12.619Z

The idea for this problem is gotten from dmytryl.

Omega makes a simulation of you. One of you is presented with an offer Omega offers them $1000.
1. If the simulation is offered the $1000 dollars and rejects it, the real you gets a $10,000.
2. If the simulation is offered the $1,000 dollars and accepts it, the real you gets $100.
3. If the real you is offered $1000 and accepts it, the real you gets $1000.
4. If the real you is offered $1000 and rejects it, the real you gets $0.

Immeidately after completion of the decision problem, the simulation is terminated.
The probability of selecting simulation or real you by Omega is not known. (OMega may always select one option, select both options with equal probability, or select options with any valid probabilities).

You find yourself in the game, with the rules explained as such to you. You don't know if you're the simulation or real, do you accept the $1000 or reject it?

The payoffs only need be of the form: 1. $k*X (k: 1 < k) (X: 1 < X)
2. $X/k
3. $X
4. $0

If $1000 is irrelevant to you, then substitute for any enticing value of X, and replace $X with X utils. There is no diminishing returns on the utility you gain from the reward Omega gives you.

Do you have a strategy for a general form of this problem?
Using modal fixed points to formalize logical causality
by cousin_it — 2017-08-24T14:33:09.000Z

This post is a simplified introduction to existing ideas by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Wei Dai, Vladimir Nesov and myself. For those who already understand them, this post probably won't contain anything new. As always, I take no personal credit for the ideas, only for the specific mathematical model.

People usually think about decision-making in terms of causality, where an agent's action causes an outcome to happen. In this post I will outline a different idea of "causality", which can work even if regular causality isn't available. For example, in the world of natural numbers it doesn't make sense to say that the sentence 1+1=2 somehow "causes" the sentence 2+2=4 to be true. Yet we can devise a notion of "logical causality" that will work in such worlds, and allow us to make decisions which maximize utility in some sense. The rest of this post is devoted to making these claims precise.

We start off with a simple formal model. Recall that provability logic is a modal logic where the operator □ is interpreted as provability in Peano arithmetic. Let's define a propositional formula with two variables F(a,o)=□(a→o). Since all occurrences of propositional variables are inside □, we can build fixed points A such that A↔F(A,o) for different values of o, and see what happens.

If o=⊤ (the true sentence), then A=⊤, which is easy to verify directly.

If o=⊥ (the false sentence), then A=□⊥, which can be verified by Löb's theorem.

Now let's go a little deeper, and let o itself be defined in terms of a, using the fixed point to tie everything together:

In the simplest case where o=a, we see that A=⊤.

If o=¬a (the negation of a), we see that A=□⊥. You can verify that by hand, using the methods from the previous points.

By now an interesting pattern is starting to emerge. Let's say O is the formula that results from the variable o after applying the fixed point. In all cases except (2) where O is false by fiat, we see that A tries and succeeds to make O true! Metaphorically, here's what A is doing: "If I can prove that my truth implies the truth of O, then I choose to be true, otherwise I choose to be false". That's the basic idea of "logical causality", in the simplest possible setting where it works.

Note that all sentences above can be interpreted as sentences about natural numbers within Peano arithmetic, by using Gödel numbering to spell out the provability opera

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Emotional labour
by Elo — 2017-08-22T00:54:20.887Z

A brief breakdown:

event: I broke your vase.

event: I bought you a gift but then left it at home

event: I want to go to a (privately valuable event) on our (relationship important day)

Options:

I wanted to save you the effort of thinking about the thing and so I decided not to tell/ask you before it was resolved.

I wanted to not have to withhold a thing from you so I told you as soon as it was bothering me so that I didn't have to lie/cheat/withhold/deceive you even if I thought it was in your best interest

Discussion:

what is a better plan of action?

1 would be doing emotional labour in the form of:

I thought about the event and how you would feel about it and modelled how I thought you would feel and then acted according to what I thought was best for you feeling better.

2 would be to put an emotional burden on the other person but carries with it more honesty, more expectation that the other person is autonomous and able to make choices for themselves.

I didn't want to withhold anything, but instead burdened you with making the choice about what to do about the matter by telling you about my conundrum.

I used to do 1, but now I do 2. The relationship books tend to suggest 2.

All of the things my brain ever conjured up used to tell me 1.

Brain: Make the martyr choice for people. Don't tell them, suffer in secret.

I made a lot of relationship mistakes doing 1's in various situations and now I do 2s. I don't know why this works but it lines up with everything I ever read - NVC, Daring greatly, Gottman institute research. I don't have much to add other than - I wonder if you do 1's or 2's.

I would prefer people do 2's not 1's around me. (A little more on emotional labour)

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/emotional-labour/
Open thread, August 21 - August 27, 2017
by Thomas — 2017-08-21T06:13:35.045Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

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
Ten small life improvements
by paulfchristiano — 2017-08-20T19:09:23.673Z

I've accumulated a lot of small applications and items that make my life incrementally better. Most of these ultimately came from someone else's recommendation, so I thought I'd pay it forward by posting ten of my favorite small improvements.

(I've given credit where I remember who introduced the item into my life. Obviously the biggest part of the credit goes to the creator.)

Video speed

Video Speed Controller lets you speed up HTML 5 video; it gives a nicer interface than the YouTube speed adjustment and works for most videos displayed in a browser (including e.g. netflix/amazon).

(Credit: Stephanie Zolayvar?)

Spectacle

Spectacle on OSX provides keyboard shortcuts to snap windows to any half or third of the screen (or full screen).

Pinned tabs + tab wrangler

I use tab wrangler to automatically close tabs (and save a bookmark) after 10m. I keep gmail and vimflowy pinned so that they don't close. For me, closing tabs after 10m is usually the right behavior.

Aggressive AdBlock

I use AdBlock for anything that grabs attention even if isn't an ad. I usually block "related content," "next stories," the whole youtube sidebar, everything on Medium other than the article, the gmail sidebar, most comment sections, etc. Similarly, I use kill news feed to block my Facebook feed.

Avoiding email inbox

I often need to write or look up emails during the day, which would sometimes lead me to read/respond to new emails and switch contexts. I've mostly fixed the problem by leaving gmail open to my list of starred emails rather than my inbox, ad-blocked the "Inbox (X)" notification, and pin gmail so that I can't see the "Inbox (X)" title.

Christmas lights

I prefer the soft light from christmas lights to white overhead lights or even softer lamps. My favorite are multicolored lights, though soft white lights also seem OK.

(Credit: Ben Hoffman)

Karabiner

Karabiner remaps keys in a very flexible way. (Unfortunately, it only works on OSX pre-Sierra. Would be very interested if there is any similarly flexible software that )

Some changes have helped me a lot:

While holding s: hjkl move the cursor. (Turn on "Simple Vi Mode v2") I find this way more convenient than the arrow keys.

While holding d: hjkl move the mouse. (Turn on "Mouse Keys Mode v2") I find this slightly more convenient than a mouse most of the time, but the big win i

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Altruism is Incomplete
by Zvi — 2017-08-20T16:29:11.000Z

Previously (SlateStarCodex) on Effective Altruism: Fear and Loathing at Effective Altruism Global 2017

I

A few weeks ago, I listened to a podcast from Freakonomics Radio that purported to ask the question, Are The Rich Less Generous Than The Poor?

A clever researcher decided he wanted to measure altruism. He’s tried testing it in the laboratory, but lab settings are often importantly different than the outside world, so he wanted to do an experiment in ‘the field’.

His idea was that he would pose as a postal worker in The Netherlands, and drop off envelopes addressed to someone else, with the envelope window showing visible cash money, up to 20 euros, along with a card like “thanks to Grandpa on his birthday.” He then waited to see how many rich and poor people returned the envelopes.

He found, to his surprise, that rich people returned far more of the envelopes than the poor. One thing he noted was that rich people returned the envelope at the same rate regardless of how much money was there, whereas the poor were more likely to return 10 euros than 20 euros, but he still essentially disbelieved the result.

To his credit, he still presented his findings at a conference, even though they were in conflict with his priors and the agenda pretty much everyone is trying to push these days.

Then Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame got up, and said you aren’t measuring altruism, you’re measuring who has the life skills and available time to return misaddressed envelopes.

Story checked out, at least to some extent. Rich people were more likely to know how to return an envelope or to have the time to do so. The findings were adjusted for this variable, and a new story emerged that rich and poor were exactly equally generous. What a coincidence!

My instincts tell me that if you issue a correction for an unexpected and hard to measure hidden variable, ignoring many other potential hidden variables and differences, and your result is now to find no result at all, there are two possibilities. Either your study is under-powered and you’re saying ‘no effect’ when you mean ‘the effect isn’t that large,’ or you “corrected” for the variable in a way that effectively assumed it was the entire difference.

Rich and poor differ in lots of different ways. There are reasons to think poor people would be ...
Paths Forward on Berkeley Culture Discussion
by Zvi — 2017-08-20T16:27:40.000Z

Epistemic Status: Not canon, not claiming anything, citations not provided, I can’t prove anything and you should definitely not be convinced unless you get there on your own.

Style Note: Phrases with Capitalized Words other than that one, that are not links, indicate potential future posts slash ideas for future rationalist concepts, or at least a concept that is (in a self-referential example) Definitely A Thing.

I got a lot of great discussion, at this blog and elsewhere, about my post What Is Rationalist Berkley’s Community Culture? There are a lot of threads worth full responses. I hope to get to at least some of them in detail.

This post came out of a discussion with Ben Hoffman. I mentioned that I had more places to go next and more threads to respond to than I could possibly have time to write, and he suggested I provide a sketch of all the places. As an experiment, I’m going to try that, at least for the subset that comes to mind. Even as I finish up writing this, I think of new possible paths.

None of this is me making claims. This is me sketching out claims I would like to make, if I was able to carefully build up to and make those claims, and if after doing that I still agreed with those claims; trying to robustly defend your own positions is sometimes a great way to end up changing your mind.

In particular, I am definitely not claiming the right to make these claims. An important problem is that often people know something, but do not have the social right to claim that it is true, leaving them unable to share, defend or act upon that knowledge. As we as a culture become unable to state more and more true things explicitly, this problem gets worse. I have left out some claims that I am not socially safe even saying that I believe, let alone claiming that they are true or claiming the right to claim that they are true.

One thread is to expand on the question of folk values versus mythic values, as I think the original post was pointing to a hugely important thing but got important things about it wrong – I think that people with only folk values are helping, if you chose your folk values wisely, and should be honored. So we might call this (1A) Yay Folk Values.

A second thread is to address the question Sarah asked: “What Is The Matrix Mission?” This deserves not only one but at least two careful and full posts, one (2A) ab...
Autopoietic systems and difficulty of AGI alignment
by jessicata — 2017-08-20T01:05:10.000Z

I have recently come to the opinion that AGI alignment is probably extremely hard. But it's not clear exactly what AGI or AGI alignment are. And there are some forms of aligment of "AI" systems that are easy. Here I operationalize "AGI" and "AGI alignment" in some different ways and evaluate their difficulties.

Autopoietic cognitive systems

From Wikipedia:

The term "autopoiesis" refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself.

This isn't entirely technically crisp. I'll elaborate on my usage of the term:

An autopoietic system expands, perhaps indefinitely. It will feed on other resources and through its activity gain the ability to feed on more things. It can generate complexity that was not present in the original system through e.g. mutation and selection. In some sense, an autopoietic system is like an independent self-sustaining economy.

An autopoietic system, in principle, doesn't need an external source of autopoesis. It can maintain itself and expand regardless of whether the world contains other autopoietic systems.

An autopoietic cognitive system contains intelligent thinking.

Some examples:

A group of people on an island that can survive for a long time and develop technology is an autopoietic cognitive system.

Evolution is an autopoietic cognitive system (cognitive because it contains animals).

An economy made of robots that can repair themselves, create new robots, gather resources, develop new technology, etc is an autopoietic cognitive system.

A moon base that necessarily depends on Earth for resources is not autopoietic.

A car is not autopoietic.

A computer with limited memory not connected to the external world can't be autopoietic.

Fully automated autopoietic cognitive systems

A fully automated autopoietic cognitive system is an autopoietic cognitive system that began from a particular computer program running on a computing substrate such as a bunch of silicon computers. It may require humans as actuators, but doesn't need humans for cognitive work, and could in principle use robots as actuators.

Some might use the term "recursively self-improving AGI" to mean something similar to "fully automated autopoietic cognitive system".

The concept seems pretty similar to "strong AI", though not identical.

Difficulty of aligning a fully automated autopoietic cognitive system

Creating a good and extrem

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The Reality of Emergence
by DragonGod — 2017-08-19T21:58:18.871Z

Reply to The Futility of Emergence

In The Futility of Emergence, Eliezer takes an overly critical position on emergence as a theory. In this (short) article, I hope to challenge that view.

Emergence is not an empty phrase. The statements "consciousness is an emergent phenomenon" and "consciousness is a phenomenon" are not the same thing; the former conveys information that the latter does not. When we say something is emergent, we have a well defined concept that we refer to.
From Wikipedia:

emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit.

A is an emergent property of X, means that A arises from X in a way in which it is contingent on the interaction of the constituents of X (and not on those constituents themselves). If A is an emergent property of X, then the constituents of X do not possess A. A comes into existence as categorial novum at the inception of X. The difference between system X and its constituent components in regards to property A is a difference of kind and not of degree; X's constituents do not possess A in some tiny magnitude—they do not possess A at all.

Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem

This is blatantly not true; size and mass for example are properties of componentary particles.

You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before. It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don't anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed. The hypothesis has no moving parts—there's no detailed internal model to manipulate. Those who proffer the hypothesis of "emergence" confess their ignorance of the internals, and take pride in it; they contrast the science of "emergence" to other sciences merely mundane.

I repectfully disagree.

When we say A is an emergent property of X, we say that X is more than a sum of its parts. Aggregation and amplification of the properties of X's constituents does not produce the properties of X. The proximate cause of A is not the constituents of X themselves—it is the in

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Embracing Metamodernism
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-08-18T19:23:15.521Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/embracing-metamodernism-5d4ebe8a8ddf

I’ve never much felt like I was part of a cultural movement. I’m too much a “digital native” to be fully part of Gen X. I’m insufficiently idealistic to be a Millennial. I’m part of the transhumanist, the rationalist, and the effective altruist subcultures, but in a weak way that more resembles atomization than membership. And my philosophy is one of irreducible complexity. So I was surprised to discover I’m a metamodernist.

In a The Huffington Post piece from January, Seth Abramson describes metamodernism this way:

[M]etamodernism believes in reconstructing things that have been deconstructed with a view toward reestablishing hope and optimism in the midst of a period (the postmodern period) marked by irony, cynicism, and despair.

Generally speaking, metamodernism reconstructs things by joining their opposing elements in an entirely new configuration rather than seeing those elements as being in competition with one another. If postmodernism favored deconstructing wholes and then putting the resulting parts in zero-sum conflict with one another — a process generally referred to as “dialectics” — metamodernism focuses instead on dialogue, collaboration, simultaneity, and “generative paradox” (this last being the idea that combining things which seem impossible to combine is an act of meaningful creation, not anarchic destruction). Metamodernists will often say that they “oscillate” between extremes, which really just means that they move so quickly between two extremes that the way they act incorporates both these two extremes and everything between them. The result is something totally new.

Abramson goes on to examine how metamodernism manifests in music, art, film, literature, and memes and finds examples in the Childish Gambino, Shia LaBeouf, My Dinner with Andre, David Foster Wallace, and The Bee Movie. Elsewhere Abramson has compared metamodernism to other living cultural philosophies and sees similar relationships to those Chapman sees between different modes of meaning. Of greatest interest to me, though, is that metamodernism gives wider context to the philosophical work of myself and other post-rationalists.

Or maybe we should be the meta-rationalists to allude to metamodernism since there is much in metamodernism that jive...
Seattle Minimum Wage Study (Part 3): Tell Me Why I’m Wrong, Please!
by Zvi — 2017-08-17T23:56:48.000Z

Previously: On the Seattle Minimum Wage Study (part 1), On the Seattle Minimum Wage Study (part 2)

To summarize the finding of my previous two part analysis:

There was a study of the recent raising of the Seattle minimum wage and its effects on low wage workers. Everyone who wrote about the paper thought that it showed that the rise in the minimum wage severely hurt the hours and pay of lower wage workers, or thought it was a bad study and should be ignored.

The numbers seemed odd to me, so I took a closer look. I found what appears to me to be a fundamental error. During this period, overall wages in Seattle rose by 13.3%. If you raise the threshold for ‘low-wage worker’ by 13.3% between the two time periods, all bad effects from the minimum wage disappear, it looks like nothing bad happened, and low wage workers likely benefited. It also presumably didn’t hurt Seattle much, since it was booming the whole time.

If anything, the study seems to be providing evidence that, at least in some situations, raising the minimum wage is good, rather than it being bad. It’s still weak evidence, because Seattle was unusually well situated to handle the change, but it seems important. It also seems like a lot of people have a strong interest in shouting this result from the rooftops, if true.

Several hundred people saw the posts in question, and I got two good detailed comments, both of which essentially agreed with the analysis.

No one told me where I went wrong.

So while I work on harder, more substantive posts that I’m a bit stuck on at the moment, I’m going to ask: If no one’s going to start shouting the result from the rooftops, can someone please explain why I’m wrong here?