trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Should Rationalists Tip at Restaurants?
by Mass_Driver — 2011-07-12T05:28:32.675Z

Related to: Robin Hanson on Freakonomics

DISCLAIMER: This is an exploration of a theoretical economics problem. This is not advice. I have not made up my mind. Please do not cite this post as support for your plans to indulge in mayhem or selfishness.

Suppose you want to lead a life that, compared to the average resident of an industrialized country, is relatively altruistic. Say you value your own comfort and pleasure at roughly 104 × the comfort and pleasure of a stranger who currently lives across the world from you. You are likewise relatively patient, risk-neutral, and scope-sensitive compared to your peers; if you believe that there is a 10-3 chance that 109 people will die in a specific kind of catastrophe that would occur in the year 2031, then you would factor that into your plans at a discount of only two orders of magnitude. In other words, you would be indifferent between (a) the risk of the future catastrophe and (b) the certainty of 104 people dying today. Moreover, you are reasonably well-calibrated; if you say something will happen with 95% certainty, it actually does happen about 90 out of 100 times. Finally, suppose you have an IQ of roughly 130, and no crippling physical or mental disabilities. My numbers are meant to sketch a crude portrait of one plausible kind of amateur rationalist; if you don't like the numbers, please mentally substitute your own and move on, because the exact numbers aren't my point.

My point is this: does it make sense to follow social norms like tipping, waiting in line, making small talk with strangers, and paying taxes when you're reasonably sure that nobody who's important to you is watching? Although such norms are cheap to follow in terms of individual situations, they recur frequently -- if you make a habit of skewing your time toward bars and clubs that take cash under the table, you'll put a serious dent in your entertainment budget. Repeat this across several different areas of your life, and you're looking at significant resources. As an amateur rationalist, with the time and money you save by cheating on 'responsible' habits, you should in theory be able to get slightly more work done and/or donate slightly more money to efficient charities. You might even be able to invest the time and money into bootstrapping your own economic productivity, allowing you to accelerate your donation timetab...
Voluntary Behavior, Conscious Thoughts
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-11T22:13:56.269Z

Skinner proposes a surprisingly easy way to dissolve the problem of what it means for an action to be "voluntary", or "under voluntary control".
We commonly perceive certain actions as under voluntary control: for example, I can control what words I'm typing right now, or whether I go out for dinner tonight. Other actions are not under voluntary control: for example, absent some exciting technique like biofeedback I can't control my heartbeat or my core body temperature or the amount of bile produced by my liver.
Other, larger-scale actions also get classified as involuntary. Many people consider sleepwalking involuntary, including the bizarre "sleep-eating" behaviors some people display on Ambien and related drugs. The tics of Tourette's are involuntary. Our emotions and preferences are at least a little involuntary: office workers might like to be able to will away their boredom, or mourners their sorrow, but most can't.
Here "involuntary" needs to be distinguished from "hard-to-resist". Most people do not define smoking as an involuntary behavior, because, although people may smoke even when they wish they wouldn't, they have the feeling that they could have chosen not to smoke, they just didn't.
The philosophy of voluntary versus involuntary behavior seems to run up against a wall when it hits the question of "what is truly me?". If we make the reductionist identification of "me" with "my brain", well, clearly it's my brain controlling sleepwalking and boredom, but it still doesn't feel like I am controlling these things. Trying to go deeper ends up hopelessly vague, usually with talk of "higher level brain processes" versus "lower level brain processes" and an identification of "myself" with the higher ones. There may be a role for this kind of talk, but it couldn't hurt to look for something more explanatory.
Skinner, true to his quest, explains the distinction without any discussion of "brain processes" or "self". He says that voluntary behavior is behavior subject to operant conditioning, and involuntary behavior is everything else.
It might be clearer to define voluntary behavior as fully transparent to reinforcement. Imagine a man with a gun, threatening to shoot me if I go out for dinner tonight. The fear of punishment will be effective: I'll avoid going out. Lust for reward, too, would be effective. If Bill Gates offered me $1 billion to stay in, that'...
Voluntary Behavior, Conscious Thoughts
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-11T22:13:44.201Z

Skinner proposes a surprisingly easy way to dissolve the problem of what it means for an action to be "voluntary", or "under voluntary control".
We commonly perceive certain actions as under voluntary control: for example, I can control what words I'm typing right now, or whether I go out for dinner tonight. Other actions are not under voluntary control: for example, absent some exciting technique like biofeedback I can't control my heartbeat or my core body temperature or the amount of bile produced by my liver.
Other, larger-scale actions also get classified as involuntary. Many people consider sleepwalking involuntary, including the bizarre "sleep-eating" behaviors some people display on Ambien and related drugs. The tics of Tourette's are involuntary. Our emotions and preferences are at least a little involuntary: office workers might like to be able to will away their boredom, or mourners their sorrow, but most can't.
Here "involuntary" needs to be distinguished from "hard-to-resist". Most people do not define smoking as an involuntary behavior, because, although people may smoke even when they wish they wouldn't, they have the feeling that they could have chosen not to smoke, they just didn't.
The philosophy of voluntary versus involuntary behavior seems to run up against a wall when it hits the question of "what is truly me?". If we make the reductionist identification of "me" with "my brain", well, clearly it's my brain controlling sleepwalking and boredom, but it still doesn't feel like I am controlling these things. Trying to go deeper ends up hopelessly vague, usually with talk of "higher level brain processes" versus "lower level brain processes" and an identification of "myself" with the higher ones. There may be a role for this kind of talk, but it couldn't hurt to look for something more explanatory.
Skinner, true to his quest, explains the distinction without any discussion of "brain processes" or "self". He says that voluntary behavior is behavior subject to operant conditioning, and involuntary behavior is everything else.
It might be clearer to define voluntary behavior as fully transparent to reinforcement. Imagine a man with a gun, threatening to shoot me if I go out for dinner tonight. The fear of punishment will be effective: I'll avoid going out. Lust for reward, too, would be effective. If Bill Gates offered me $1 billion to stay in, that'...
Other Useful Sites LWers Read
by atucker — 2011-07-11T19:44:24.645Z

There seems to be a lot of knowledge that LessWrongers have which is fairly awesome, but not particularly well-covered on Less Wrong.

What other sites do people recommend?

I originally came to LW through HN, and Paul Graham was somewhat influential on my early high school thoughts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/

http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

I also fairly regularly read

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/

http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/

I've poked through these a bit on recommendation from other people, and they seem ridiculously useful.

http://www.bulletproofexec.com/

http://quantifiedself.com/

There are a few blogs in the LW cluster, but I'm sure others read more of them than me.
If you want to be super nice, could you link to some of your favorite posts/articles?
Signatures for posts
by Oscar_Cunningham — 2011-07-11T18:45:13.050Z

Kaj_Sotala suggested here that some people may wish to add signatures to posts (i.e. top-level posts, not comments (hell no!)) to link to the author's homepage and such, and this idea was supported (poll). I suggested that we make such signatures into an official looking standard template, and this suggestion was upvoted. This post contains my design for such a template. The last time I learnt HTML was back in 2003 when I was about eleven, so this is probably bad code by modern standards, but I'm hoping that people will criticise until we have a version that looks good on all browsers.

Code (Improved by Dreaded_Anomaly):

<div style="background:#f7f7f8; display:table;">
<a href="/user/Your user name goes here/submitted/"><img style="float: left; margin: 5px;" src="URL of the image goes here" alt="Your name's posts" width="64" height="64" /></a>Text goes here (links entered as usual)
</div>

Which produces a signature like the one at the bottom of this post. To use the code in the article editor press the HTML button and enter it at the bottom of the page. (Note that having your image be 64*64 to begin with will mean that it doesn't need to be scaled. Scaling sometimes makes images look weird or pixelly.)

I suggest that everyone who uses such a signature writes about themselves in formally and in the third person. Think of an "About the Author" section on the dust-cover of a book. This will raise the status of the site by making it reminiscent of an edited publication.

Oscar Cunningham is a Mathematics student at Trinity College, Cambridge (UK). Interests include probability, decision theory, and Ultimate.
Things Man Was Not Meant To Know
by Multiheaded — 2011-07-11T18:01:29.721Z

Yes, those ones! This "acasual" stuff that Eliezer seems to take seriously. I already saw references to a few of them, and, He-Who-Is-Not forgive me, read Roko's deleted idea on pastebin. Sigh, guess I'll just have to pre-commit against it. I will avert my eyes from the thing in the welcome thread right now, if commenters tell me that it's a good idea.

My point is: WHAT THE FLYING F*CK?! I know I'm impressionable and easily scared, but how the hell can it be?! That's not a very nice thing, to have Yellow Signs floating about in a community. Please explain. I'm 100% serious here.

Oh, and no, I won't have nightmares like that guy who was scared of the first thing I mentioned. I can forget it quickly enough if neccessary. But right now, I've talked myself into viewing it as a serious possibility. And, well, I never wanted to be in this kind of a science fiction story!

And yeah, in my infinite wisdom, I did mention that occurence on TVTropes immediately after getting hit by it...

Got more information: it seems that it's only EY and a minority of contributors are actively suppressing the (gulp) Basilisk. Still, Eliezer could well know more about the subject then all the others here combined, which is why he's so devoted to keeping it down... things aren't getting any better.

OK! OK! Get this post back to -1 and I'll delete it myself!
Self-improving AGI: Is a confrontational or a secretive approach favorable?
by Friendly-HI — 2011-07-11T15:29:43.279Z

(I've written the following text as a comment initially, but upon short reflection I thought it was worth a separate topic and so I adapted it accordingly.)

Lesswrong is largely concerned with teaching rationality skills, but for good reasons most of us also incorporate concepts like the singularity and friendly self-improving AGI into our "message". Personally I wonder however, if we should be as outspoken about that sort of AGI as we currently are. Right now talking about self-improving AGI doesn't pose any kind of discernible harm, because "outsiders" don't feel threatened by it and look at it as far-off —or even impossible— science fiction. But as time progresses, I worry that through exponential advances in robotics and other technologies people will become more aware, concerned and perhaps threatened by self-improving AGI and I am not sure whether we should be outspoken about things like... the fact that the majority of AGI's in "mind-design-space" will tear humanity to shreds if its builders don't know what they're doing. Right now such talk is harmless, but my message here is, that we may want to reconsider whether or not we should talk publicly about such topics in the not-too-distant future, so as to avoid compromising our chances of success when it comes to actually building a friendly self-improving AGI.

First off, I suspect I have a somewhat different conception of how the future is going to pan out in terms of what role the public perception and acceptance of self-improving AGI will play: Personally I'm not under the impression, that we can prepare a sizable portion of the public (let alone the global public) for the arrival of AGI (prepare them in a positive manner that is). I believe singularitarian ideas will just continue to compete with countless other worldviews in the public meme-sphere, without ever becoming truly mainstream until it is "too late" and we face something akin to a hard takeoff and perhaps lots of resistance.

I don't really think that we can (or need to) reach a consensus within the public for the successful takeoff of AGI. Quite to the contrary, I actually worry that carrying our view to the mainstream will have adverse effects, especially once they realize that we aren't some kind of technophile crackpot religion, but that the futuristi

...
Motivation research presentation
by jsalvatier — 2011-07-11T14:20:45.681Z

I did a presentation on motivation and procrastination research to the Seattle meetup group and an exercise trying to apply the material to a real life example. Eight people came. They were a skeptical bunch and questioned me on exactly the parts I am most interested in an know the least about: how exactly scientists assess the psychological quantities (expectancy, value, delay and impulsiveness). I'd like to learn more about the research and be able to give such presentations to others in the future. I'd also like to record a presentation like it and put it up on the internet.

People seemed to think the exercise was pretty valuable. It was also fairly fun. The presentation is here, the exercise is here and here.

Luke's suggestion for how to learn how psychologists assess expectancy, value and delay was

As for how scientists assess the relevant psychological qualities, and for why the 'procrastination equation' is taken seriously, all the references are provided in my post 'How to Beat Procrastination'. I also uploaded quite a few of the studies myself so anyone who is actually interested can check the data for themselves. (Prediction: Almost nobody will.)
The papers in footnote 6 are the place to start, for they explain why the equation (called temporal motivation theory by researchers) was developed to predict experimental results, and those papers point to all the individual studies which show how scientists assess expectancy, value, delay, and impulsiveness. For example, 'expectancy' in TMT is measured under a variety of psychological constructs, but largely by measures of self-efficacy and optimism.
There is no short summary of these issues, though Piers Steel's recent book 'The Procrastination Equation' is a decent attempt while being much longer than my article. Psychology is very complicated, and our understanding of it is less certain than our understanding of physics or computer science.
Community norm question: brief text ad signatures
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-07-11T08:42:02.292Z

I've written several posts on this site, many of which were promoted to the front page. Some of my writings have been quite popular. Looking through the Google Analytics stats for this site showed that my writing has had at least 50 000 unique views over time. The full total is probably more, since I only looked at the stats of the 1000 most viewed Less Wrong pages.
As I have been looking for sources of side income, I was wondering whether it'd be deemed acceptable if I started signing my posts to the main section with something brief like this:
To see the novel I'm writing, click here. If you liked this post, you may also Flattr me here.
I'm currently thinking about trying to make a living on writing, and being able to do something like this would make it considerably easier to help build a personal brand. Although I wouldn't dare to claim to write as well as Eliezer or Yvain, say, I would like to think that my posts have been valuable for several people. The fact that sixteen of my articles were among the 1000 most viewed LW pages would support this. Being able to get back some of that value would only seem fair to me.
As an additional bonus, currently my LW writing has gotten sidelined as it hasn't seemed that useful for my personal goals. Being allowed to have such ads would make writing on LW more personally useful for me, incentivizing me to spend more time on writing quality posts here.
I can understand not everyone being fully enthusiastic about this, though. For one, several Internet communities are quite stringent about things that might be considered spam. Also, people might also be worried about the fact that LW is currently mostly operating as a gift economy. Letting people make money off their posts directly, such as with Flattr links, might change the community norms in an undesirable direction. Folks such as matt, who are hard at work at improving the technical side of the site, might rightfully feel that they deserve a cut.
So I figured I'd better ask first. For what it's worth, I have donated to SIAI in the past, and do intend to donate to either SIAI or FHI or both in the future. Part of any income I'd make through this site would go to fund my donations. I'm also already spending some of my time writing academically about LW-related issues. You can e.g. expect to see a full-length paper draft based on my previous conference paper before the mon...
Physical and Mental Behavior
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-10T20:20:00.731Z

B.F. Skinner called thoughts "mental behavior". He believed they could be rewarded and punished just like physical behavior, and that they increased or declined in frequency accordingly.
Sadly, psychology has not yet advanced to the point where we can give people electric shocks for thinking things, so the sort of rewards and punishments that reinforce thoughts must be purely internal reinforcement. A thought or intention that causes good feelings gets reinforced and prospers; one that causes bad feelings gets punished and dies out.
(Roko has already discussed this in Ugh Fields; so much as thinking about an unpleasant task is unpleasant; therefore most people do not think about unpleasant tasks and end up delaying them or avoiding them completely. If you haven't already read that post, it does a very good job of making reinforcement of thoughts make sense.)
A while back, D_Malik published a great big List Of Things One Could Do To Become Awesome. As David_Gerard replied, the list was itself a small feat of awesome. I expect a couple of people started on some of the more awesome-sounding entries, then gave up after a few minutes and never thought about it again. Why?
When I was younger, I used to come up with plans to become awesome in some unlikely way. Maybe I'd hear someone speaking Swahili, and I would think "I should learn Swahili," and then I would segue into daydreams of being with a group of friends, and someone would ask if any of us spoke any foreign languages, and I would say I was fluent in Swahili, and they would all react with shock and tell me I must be lying, and then a Kenyan person would wander by, and I'd have a conversation with them in Swahili, and they'd say that I was the first American they'd ever met who was really fluent in Swahili, and then all my friends would be awed and decide I was the best person ever, and...
...and the point is that the thought of learning Swahili is pleasant, in the same easy-to-visualize but useless way that an extra bedroom for Grandma is pleasant. And the intention to learn Swahili is also pleasant, because it will lead to all those pleasant things. And so, by reinforcement of mental behavior, I continue thinking about and intending to learn Swahili.
Now consider the behavior of studying Swahili. I've never done so, but I imagine it involves a lot of long nights hunched over books of Swahili grammar...
too much consistency considered harmful
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-07-10T18:24:04.738Z

In many instances of Akrasia the it's pointed out that the victim has a preference reversal either due to time differences or due to different context. E.g. I might be enjoying staying up late tonight, but tomorrow I will experience headache, sluggishness and frustration which would by far outweigh tonight's pleasures. I am going to hate myself tomorrow, but at the moment I might look my tomorrow's self in the face and tell him to piss off. Oh, if only I was more consistent! - my overall life happiness would increase quite a bit. Should I try?

Maybe; I don't know if a direct approach to "increasing consistency" would hit the mark, thought it definitely seems worth investigating.

On the other hand, I recently noticed another phenomenon, where the ability to be less consistent is a potential benefit. Just to be clear, I am not talking about consistency of opinion - it a different topic well covered by Churchill's "I've often had to swallow my words, and found it a wholesome diet". I am talking about the ability to dissociate from certain future versions of self, same kind of dissociation that allows me to tell the Tomorrow Me to piss off (yes, I've actually done that).

Here is an example. I am swimming for exercise, but every time I jump in the pool the water will give me an uppleasant shock. So here I am, standing in my swim trunks in front of the pool and deciding when I am ready to take the pain. This is clearly self-inflicted "addition of insult to injury". And it's all based on thinking and imagining how much pain I am going to experience in the next few seconds.

Of course, in a sense I have already dealt with the problem - I am after all in front of the pool, in public, and not at home, deciding whether to jump in the pool; so it seems that in a sense the problem has been dealt with. On the other hand, the pain of pain anticipation is not nothing, and perhaps it will eventually propagate back (via, say, reinforcement learning) to the decision to stay home one day when I'm feeling tired and maybe the next day... So there are two reasons to address the issue: Less Pain=More Fun and to avoid stacking the deck against yourself in terms of achieving your goals.

So one thing that comes to mind is to use the ability to dissociate from yourself in order to Just Do It. As a matter of fact your swimming-pool pals might have already learn...