trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
1987 Sci-Fi Authors Timecapsule Predictions For 2012
by namespace — 2018-12-28T06:50:28.202Z
Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20121015205244/http://www.writersofthefuture.com/time-capsule-predictions

I find it interesting how focused people were on certain trends such as venereal disease, which turned out almost irrelevant just 25 years later as drivers of global norms. Of the set I think Algis Budrys wins Most Accurate:

Because we will be in a trough between 20th-century resources and 21st-century needs, in 2012 all storable forms of energy will be expensive. Machines will be designed to use only minimal amounts of it. At the same time, there will be a general expectation that a practical cheap-energy delivery system is just around the corner. Individuals basing their career plans on any aspect of technology will concentrate on that future, leaving contemporary machine applications to the less ambitious or to those who foresee a different future. The most socially approved-of individuals will constitute a narrowly focused aristocracy, and will be at the mercy of dull functionaries and secretive rebels who actually perform the day-to-day maintenance of society. It should be noted that most minimal-energy devices process information and microscopic materials, not consumer goods. The function of "our" society may depend on processing information and biotechnology to subjugate goods-producing societies. These societies may be geographically external, or may be yet another social stratum within central North America. In either case, crowd-management technologies will have to turn away from forms that might in any way impair capital goods production. Social regimentation will then have become so deft that most people will regard any other social milieu as pitiable.
In what ways are holidays good?
by DanielFilan — 2018-12-28T00:42:06.849Z

I'd like a model of the benefits that holidays (vacations) can have, so that I can plan accordingly. Relevant questions that I have, although feel free to answer ones not listed here:

Do holidays teach you things about other places that you couldn't learn from Wikipedia?

Why are holidays more relaxing than just lying in bed at home and paying somebody else to take care of you?

Does visiting family count as a holiday in the relevant sense?

Are the benefits of tourism and/or pilgrimage the same as the benefits of holidays? What are they?

How much money should I be willing to spend on holidays?

Is 'holiday' a coherent enough category that I can treat it as primitive for the purpose of this question?
Sunscreen. When? Why? Why not?
by Viktor Riabtsev — 2018-12-27T22:04:42.597Z

Hello,
I've been wondering about sunscreen's effectiveness in reducing cancer risk.
The general impression I've gotten in my (admittedly brief) research on it seems: "If you know you'll be exposed for a long duration in the summer/spring, then yes, wear sunscreen. Otherwise, Vitamin D generation takes priority." (related)
I've looked around on lesswrong, and can't find any really all-encompassing informative posts about it. The most interesting comment I've seen was by Tem42, who references a study that claims that overall cancer rates are actually lower in southern states vs northern states.

Is my general impression correct enough? Or should people be lathering sunscreen all the time; or not at all?

Thanks in advance!
Can dying people "hold on" for something they are waiting for?
by Raemon — 2018-12-27T19:53:35.436Z

content note: death, old age, sickness

I've heard numerous anecdotal accounts of sick or old people who are on death's door "holding on" in a way suggestive that they were exerting some effort to do, until they had reached closure on some thing (a relative coming to visit, a manuscript published, somebody's birthday).

I could imagine this being a totally real thing that dying people can do for some limited time.

I can also imagine it just being cherry picked stories that were more a matter of luck.

It seems likely that there's at least situations where, say, eating is difficult/painful, and people continue exerting effort to do that so long as they have something that feels worth it to keep doing so, and then stop putting in the effort after hitting some milestone they cared about.

Some of the anecdotes I've heard implied something more immediate going on (where someone seemed to be holding on and literally a few minutes or seconds afterwards, died).

(Possible straightforward mechanism could just be that breathing becomes painful and difficult, and people only keep doing it when they have a concrete goal)
Reverse Doomsday Argument is hitting preppers hard
by avturchin — 2018-12-27T18:56:58.654Z

“Where is my Doomsday?” asks a prepper on a conspirological site, — “I spent thousands of dollars on ammunition and 10 years on waiting, and still nothing. My ammo is rusting!”

There is a general problem of predicting the end of the world: it is not happening. There are many reasons for this, but one is purely mathematical: if something didn’t happen for a long time, this is very strong evidence that it will not happen any time soon. If we have no nuclear war for 70 years, its probability tomorrow is very small, no matter how serious are international relations.

The first who observed this was Laplace with the “sunrise problem”. He asked: What is the probability that the Sun will not rise tomorrow, given that it has risen for the last 5000 years. He derived an equation, and the probability of no sunrise is 1/N, when N is the number of days when the Sun has risen. This is known as a rule of succession and Laplace has even more general equation for it, which could account for a situation where the Sun had missed several sunrises.

The fact that something didn’t happen for a long time is an evidence that some unknown causal mechanism provides stability for the observed system, even if all visible causal mechanisms are pointing on "the end is nigh”.

“You see, the end of the US is near, as the dollar debt pyramid is unsustainable, it is growing more than a trillion dollars every year” — would say a preper. But the dollar was a fiat currency for decades, and it is very unlikely that it will fail tomorrow.

The same rule of succession could be used to get a rough prediction of the end times. If there is no nuclear war for 70 years, there is a 50 per cent chance that it will happen in the next 70 years. This is known as the Doomsday argument in J.R. Gott’s version.

Surely, something bad will happen in decades. But your ammo will rust first. However, on the civilizational level, we should be invest in preventing the global risks even if they have a small probability, as on a long run it ensures our survival

This could be called "Reverse Doomsday Argument", as it claims that the doomsday is unlikely to be very near. In AI safety, it is a (relatively weak) argument against near-term "near-term AI risk", that is, that dangerous AI is less than 5 years from now.

.
Card Collection and Ownership
by Zvi — 2018-12-27T13:10:00.977Z

Considers issues raised by: Artifact Embraces Card Balance Changes.

III. Card Collection and Ownership

What does it mean to own a card?

Good question.

In different games, with different principles, online and offline, it means different things.

Let us begin in good old paper Magic: The Gathering. What does it mean to own a card?

In its literal sense it means you physically own a card. This is my Black Lotus, or my Lightning Strike. The cardboard belongs to me and no one can take that away.

In a more interesting sense, it means I own a card that I can play in games of Magic, from the tabletop to the biggest tournaments.

There are catches.

The first category of catch is that the card might not be legal, or not legal in its current form.

Wizards can ban or restrict the card in various formats. Formats widely played can change, making the card no longer relevant or legal. Wizards can also errata the card, to change what it does.

To reassure players, Wizards has implemented a variety of measures against this.

They’ve stopped all power level errata; cards can be changed because to make them work as intended if a mistake is made, or to fix other rules or consistency issues, but not because the card is too good or too weak.

They’ve stopped restricting cards entirely outside of Vintage. They’ve promised not to ban (or in Vintage restrict) cards lightly, only doing so in the face of super strong evidence, and even then actively seek to lift such bans whenever feasible. When such moves do prove necessary, their announcements (link to a recent example) share their reasoning and data so players can better anticipate future actions.

Bans remain a concern, but Wizards has built a long track record of responsible behavior, so their impact is minimal except in cases where bans are likely for the right reasons.

A second category of concern is that what it rare today may be common tomorrow. Wizards might reprint your card, perhaps at a lower rarity, inflating the supply and depressing the price. This came to a head when Wizards printed large quantities of the Chronicles set, crashing the value of many cards. Wizards has since spent decades reassuring players that they will print cards, both new and old, responsibly.

The lynchpin of this is the reserve list. Wizards has promised that key old cards will never be reprinted. This has become a valuable costly signal that Wizards will treat all of ...
On Disingenuity
by Chris_Leong — 2018-12-26T17:08:47.138Z

Suppose someone claims that all morality is relative, but when pressed on whether this would apply even to murder, they act evasive and refuse to give a clear answer. A critic might conclude that this person is disingenuous in refusing to accept the clear logical consequences of their belief.

However, imagine that there's a really strong social stigma against asserting that murder might not be bad, to the point of permanently damaging such a person's reputation, even though there's no consequence for making the actually stronger claim that all morality is relative. The relativist might therefore see the critic as the one who is disingenuous; trying to leverage social pressure against them instead of arguing on the basis of reason.

Thus in the right circumstances, each side can quite reasonably see the other as disingenuous. I suspect that everyone will have experienced both sides of the coin at different times depending on the issue being discussed.

This post was produced with the support of the EA Hotel
Artifact Embraces Card Balance Changes
by Zvi — 2018-12-26T13:10:00.384Z

Previously: Review: Artifact

Epistemic Status: I’m making a note here. HUGE SUCCESS!

Only a few weeks after the release of Artifact, a patch was released making two huge changes to the game.

The first was to introduce visible player rankings and award progression with free packs, free event tickets and player icons. Having numbers that can go up and a way to feel rewarded for playing was something Artifact clearly needed. This first version, while a work in progress on many levels and carrying economic implications that could be concerning, is far superior to nothing at all. It is a distinct topic, so I won’t say more about it here.

The second change is what I will focus on here. Artifact changed eight cards. Two of them, Axe and Drow Ranger, were the most valuable two cards in the game. They got strictly worse in important ways. One good but hated card, Cheating Death, changed to a different card entirely, whose new power level is a matter of debate. Five unplayable (in constructed) cards got better, at least one of which, Jasper Daggers, is now interesting and potentially important.

I. Philosophical Changes

This represents a wealth of philosophical changes in how cards are created, balanced and modified.

The old philosophy was that cards should be balanced to create a balance between colors and strategies, but not balanced to make all cards or heroes mostly equal.

Axe being the most valuable card and strongest hero was most certainly not an accident or a surprise – when I wrote an analysis of what one might do if a card in Artifact became too expensive – I assumed the card in question was Axe, as there was no question it would be the most expensive hero, and likely the most expensive card overall. If you had told me another hero was more expensive, I would have assumed it was Drow Ranger and green as a color had proven superior to red.

While the ubiquity of Red/Black in queue play was unfortunate before the patch, the deck was easy to beat and in my opinion not even that good. I had it at low tier one, with at least two decks clearly better. Prize tournaments reflected this opinion. The issue was more that Red/Black appears stronger when you first start playing, and most players were starting out.

The new philosophy appears to be that players dislike seeing the same heroes all the time, so weak heroes should be made incrementally stronger, and heroes played all th...
A Section for Innovation?
by Mindey — 2018-12-26T12:37:36.048Z

Rationality is about a type of optimality, and optimal states are often found only after multiple steps within a domain of a function explored. There are communities running these processes (e.g., halfbakery.com), and encouraging them through things like humor, that leads to exploration of new extremes, eventually arriving at something more optimal than what was originally posted.

I wonder, if we could support something like that on LessWrong, where, say, someone comes up with a new mechanism or invention to do something (e.g., an invention of a new kind of immutable database using a pseudo-random number generator, initial seed, salting data, or some other sort of theoretical invention), that one believes that the invention should help us become more rational, yet the poster doesn't have much time to elaborate very deeply, has not had time to complete the invention, and is not entirely sure of the viability of the invention, and whether it makes sense with respect to all possible aspects which community cares about.

Currently, in such a situation, the most sensible thing on LessWrong is probably writing a draft, and leaving it there until the time when one has more time to finish the writing.

However, in this fast-pacing world, it may well be that sharing early or sharing something is way better than sharing nothing. So, just like we have a section for "meta", maybe we could have a section for sharing ideas, and encouraging more relaxed discussion, that is focused on humor and pragmatic correctness (exploration of possibilities), more than technical correctness (hygiene of reasoning)?
Bay Area: reading, writing, moving, celebrating
by KatjaGrace — 2018-12-26T03:40:00.722Z

The interesting things going on in my life seem either too important to write about quickly, or too informative regarding some sensitive thing or another. This is perhaps exacerbated by my lack of a serious boyfriend: if I don’t have to regularly turn whatever is happening in my head into a communicable narrative, the plot arcs in my life seem to get stranger. Or perhaps I just don’t remember the less communicable plot arcs from earlier, or perhaps one always becomes stranger over time. Anyway, here are a few mundane and inoffensive things that happened lately in my life:

I went to a party. I It was a relief when it ended because my face hurt from smiling for so long. I don’t know if I was happy. I liked it when a guy performed his favorite poem for me.

I read A Grief Observed. For some reason I have always felt like C.S.Lewis was presumably my friend, or my fellow traveler or peer somehow, though I suppose I hadn’t read any of his writing except Narnia as a child. I was not disappointed. Which is strange, though it feels expected. I’m not sure what I particularly wanted, but something like a sensibility that is sincere and steady yet contends with the magic and wonder of the world, whatever those are. (Do most serious people seem less trustworthy and respectable in a way, because they set aside for respectability a swathe of what seems important and in need of contending with? Maybe.) I especially liked the idea in the book of appreciating the bracing resistance one meets when one’s imaginary world contacts reality, perhaps in meeting the real version of a person one often imagines, or in finding that one’s ideas of God or love do not match the real thing. It went well among my own thoughts lately about what one’s mental relationship with reality is or should be.

C.S.Lewis apparently insisted on writing with a dip pen forever, in spite of fountain pens and typewriters being common in his lifetime. He said not to use typewriters, because ‘…the noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training’. I was curious enough to try this, given my esteem for his writing. I can almost write with a dip pen now, and it is a decently different experience. If it turns out to be good, one explanation would be that it is slow, yet physically aesthetically pleasing, which means that I’m not bored but have time to think through each word several time

...
Reinterpreting "AI and Compute"
by habryka — 2018-12-25T21:12:11.236Z
Link: https://aiimpacts.org/reinterpreting-ai-and-compute/

Some arguments saying that the recent evidence about the speed at which compute has been increasing and has been responsible for rapid progress in machine learning, might mean that we should be less worried about short timelines, not more.

[...] Overall, it seems pretty common to interpret the OpenAI data as evidence that we should expect extremely capable systems sooner than we otherwise would.

However, I think it’s important to note that the data can also easily be interpreted in the opposite direction. The opposite interpretation goes like this:

1. If we were previously underestimating the rate at which computing power was increasing, this means we were overestimating the returns on it.

2. In addition, if we were previously underestimating the rate at which computing power was increasing, this means that we were overestimating how sustainable its growth is.

3. Let’s suppose, as the original post does, that increasing computing power is currently one of the main drivers of progress in creating more capable systems. Then — barring any major changes to the status quo — it seems like we should expect progress to slow down pretty soon and we should expect to be underwhelmed by how far along we are when the slowdown hits.
Alignment Newsletter #38
by Rohin Shah — 2018-12-25T16:10:01.289Z

Merry Christmas!

Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can sign up, or look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Highlights

AI Alignment Podcast: Inverse Reinforcement Learning and the State of AI Alignment with Rohin Shah (Lucas Perry and Rohin Shah): Lucas interviewed me and we talked about a bunch of different topics. Some quick highlights, without the supporting arguments:

- If we want to use inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to infer a utility function that we then optimize, we would have to account for systematic biases, and this is hard, and subject to an impossibility result.

- Humans do seem to be good at inferring goals of other humans, probably because we model them as planning in a similar way that we ourselves plan. It's reasonable to think that IRL could replicate this. However, humans have very different ideas on how the future should go, so this seems not enough to get a utility function that can then be optimized over the long term.

- Another issue with having a utility function that is optimized over the long term is that it would have to somehow solve a whole lot of very difficult problems like the nature of identity and population ethics and metaphilosophy.

- Since human preferences seem to change as the environment changes, we could try to build AI systems whose goals are constantly changing by continuously running IRL. This sort of approach is promising but we don't know how to get it working yet.

- IRL, agency and optimization all seem to require a notion of counterfactuals.

- One view of agency is that it is about how a search process thinks of itself, or about other search processes. This gives it a feeling of "choice", even though the output of the search process is determined by physics. This can explain the debates over whether evolution is an optimization process -- on the one hand, it can be viewed as a search process, but on the other, we understand it well enough to think of it as a "deterministic" procedure.

- One way to view the AI alignment problem is to view it as a human-AI interaction problem, so that we get an AI that evolves over time along with us.

- Rather than building a function maximizer, we could aim to build an AI system that is corrigible, or one that follows norms.- Both iterated amplification and debate operate on an ...
What are the axioms of rationality?
by Yoav Ravid — 2018-12-25T06:47:54.363Z

I'm new here (my first post), i just started to get serious about rationality, and one of the questions that immediately came to my mind is "What are the axioms of rationality?". I looked it up a bit, and didn't find (even on this site) a post that'll show them (and i'm quite sure there are).

So this is intended as a discussion, And I'll make a post with the conclusions afterward.

curious to see your reply's! (as well if you have feedback on how i asked the question)

thanks :)
Contrite Strategies and The Need For Standards
by sarahconstantin — 2018-12-24T18:30:00.480Z

Epistemic Status: Confident

There’s a really interesting paper from 1996 called The Logic of Contrition, which I’ll summarize here. In it, the authors identify a strategy called “Contrite Tit For Tat”, which does better than either Pavlov or Generous Tit For Tat in Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

In Contrite Tit For Tat, the player doesn’t only look at what he and the other player played on the last term, but also another variable, the standing of the players, which can be good or bad.

If Bob defected on Alice last round but Alice was in good standing, then Bob’s standing switches to bad, and Alice defects against Bob.

If Bob defected on Alice last round but Alice was in bad standing, then Bob’s standing stays good, and Alice cooperates with Bob.

If Bob cooperated with Alice last round, Bob keeps his good standing, and Alice cooperates.

This allows two Contrite Tit For Tat players to recover quickly from accidental defections without defecting against each other forever;

D/C -> C/D -> C/C

But, unlike Pavlov, it consistently resists the “always defect” strategy

D/C -> D/D -> D/D -> D/D …

Like TFT (Tit For Tat) and unlike Pavlov and gTFT (Generous Tit For Tat), cTFT (Contrite Tit For Tat) can invade a population of all Defectors.

A related contrite strategy is Remorse. Remorse cooperates only if it is in bad standing, or if both players cooperated in the previous round. In other words, Remorse is more aggressive; unlike cTFT, it can attack cooperators.

Against the strategy “always cooperate”, cTFT always cooperates but Remorse alternates cooperating and defecting:

C/C -> C/D -> C/C -> C/D …

And Remorse defends effectively against defectors:

D/C -> D/D -> D/D -> D/D…

But if one Remorse accidentally defects against another, recovery is more difficult:

C/D -> D/C -> D/D -> C/D -> …

If the Prisoner’s Dilemma is repeated a large but finite number of times, cTFT is an evolutionarily stable state in the sense that you can’t do better for yourself when playing against a cTFT player through doing anything that deviates from what cTFT would recommend. This implies that no other strategy can successfully invade a population of all cTFT’s.

REMORSE can sometimes be invaded by strategies better at cooperating with themselves, while Pavlov can sometimes be invaded by Defectors, depending on the payoff matrix; but for all Prisoner’s Dilemma payoff mat...