trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Impression track records
by KatjaGrace — 2017-09-24T04:40:00.131Z

It is good to separate impressions from beliefs.

It is good to keep track records.

Is it good to keep separate impression and belief track records?

My default guess would be ‘a bit, but probably too much effort, since we hardly manage to keep any track records.’

But it seems maybe more than a bit good, for these reasons:

Having good first impressions, and being good at turning everyone’s impressions into a good overall judgment might be fairly different skills, so that some people are good at one and some are good at the other, and you get a clearer signal if you separate them.

We probably by default mostly learn about beliefs and not impressions, because by assumption if I have both and they are different, I suspect the impression is wrong, and so will make me look worse if I advertise that I hold it.

Impressions are probably better than beliefs to have track records for, because the point of the track records is to know how much to weight to give different sources when constructing beliefs, and it is more straightforward to know directly which sources are good than to know which aggregations of sources are good (especially if they are mostly bad, because nobody has track records).

As in, perhaps we mostly keep belief track records when we keep track records, but would do better with impression track records. What would we do if we wanted to keep impression track records instead? (Do we already?)
Deontologist Envy
by ozymandias — 2017-09-23T20:21:49.558Z

Many consequentialists of my acquaintance appear to suffer from a tragic case of deontologist envy.

In consequentialism, one makes ethical decisions by choosing the actions that have the best consequences, whether that means maximizing your own happiness and flourishing (consequentialist ethical egoism), increasing pleasure and decreasing pain (hedonic utilitarianism), satisfying the most people's preferences (preference utilitarianism) or increasing the number of pre-defined Good Things in the world (objective list consequentialism). Of course, it's impossible to figure out all the consequences of your actions in advance, so many people follow particular sets of rules which they believe maximize utility overall; this is sometimes called "rule consequentialism" or "rule utilitarianism."

In deontology, one makes ethical decisions by choosing the actions that follow some particular rule. For example, one might do only the actions that you'd will that everyone do, or actions that involve treating other people as ends rather than means, or actions that don't violate the rights of other beings, or actions that don't involve initiating aggression, or actions that are not sins according to the teachings of the Catholic Church. While it's allowed to care about whether things are better or worse (some deontologists I know call it their "axiology"), you can only care about that within the constraints of the rule system.

In spite of my sympathies for virtue ethics, I do think it is generally better to make decisions based on whether the outcomes are good as opposed to decisions based on whether they follow a particular set of rules or are the decisions a person with particular virtues would make. (I continue to find it weird that these are the Only Three Options For Decision-Making About Ethics, So Says Philosophy, but anyway.) So do most people I know.

I have some consequentialist beliefs about free speech. For instance, I support making fun of people who say sexist or racist things in public. I think it is fine to call someone a bigoted asshole if they are, in fact, saying bigoted asshole things. I appreciate Charles Murray refusing to speak at an event Milo Yiannopoulous is at because he is "a despicable asshole" and I wish more people would follow his example. And when I express my consequentialist b

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Out to Get You
by Zvi — 2017-09-23T10:50:00.185Z

Epistemic Status: Reference.

Expanded From: Against Facebook, as the post originally intended.

Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You.

They seek resources at your expense. Fees are hidden. Extra options are foisted upon you. Things are made intentionally worse, forcing you to pay to make it less worse. Least bad deals require careful search. Experiences are not as advertised. What you want is buried underneath stuff you don’t want. Everything is data to sell you something, rather than an opportunity to help you.

When you deal with Out to Get You, you know it in your gut. Your brain cannot relax. You lookout for tricks and traps. Everything is a scheme.

They want you not to notice. To blind you from the truth. You can feel it when you go to work. When you go to church. When you pay your taxes. It is bad government and bad capitalism. It is many bad relationships, groups and cultures.

When you listen to a political speech, you feel it. Dealing with your wireless or cable company, you feel it. At the car dealership, you feel it. When you deal with that one would-be friend, you feel it. Thinking back on that one ex, you feel it. It’s a trap.

Get Gone, Get Got, Get Compact or Get Ready

There are four responses to Out to Get You.

You can Get Gone. Walk away. Breathe a sigh of relief.

You can Get Got. Give the thing everything it wants. Pay up, relax, enjoy the show.

You can Get Compact. Find a rule limiting what ‘everything it wants’ means in context. Then Get Got, relax and enjoy the show.

You can Get Ready. Do battle. Get what you want.

When to Get Got

Get Got when the deal is Worth It.

This is a difficult lesson for everyone in at least one direction.

I am among those with a natural hatred of Getting Got. I needed to learn to relax and enjoy the show when the deal is Worth It. Getting Got imposes a large emotional cost for people like me. I have worked to put this aside when it’s time to Get Got, while preserving my instincts as a defense. That’s hard.

Others make the mistake of not hating Getting Got. They might not even notice. This is bad. If you Get Got without realizing, you’ll Get Got often for large amounts. Bad habits will form. Deals won’t be Worth It. Reasonable is insufficient: Out to Get You is engineered to fool. Only accept capital letters Worth It.

When you Get Got, do it on purpose.

Never Get Got without saying to yourself “I am Getting Got. It is Worth It....
Nobody does the thing that they are supposedly doing
by Kaj_Sotala — 2017-09-23T10:40:06.155Z

I feel like one of the most important lessons I’ve had about How the World Works, which has taken quite a bit of time to sink in, is:

In general, neither organizations nor individual people do the thing that their supposed role says they should do. Rather they tend to do the things that align with their incentives (which may sometimes be economic, but even more often they are social and psychological). If you want to really change things, you have to change people’s incentives.

But I feel like I’ve had to gradually piece this together from a variety of places, over a long time; I’ve never read anything that would have laid down the whole picture. I remember that Freakonomics had a few chapters about how incentives cause unexpected behavior, but that was mostly about economic incentives, which are just a small part of the whole picture. And it didn’t really focus on the “nothing in the world works the way you’d naively expect” thing; as I recall, it was presented more as a curiosity.

On the other hand, Robin Hanson has had a lot of stuff about “X is not about Y“, but that has mostly been framed in terms of prestige and signaling, which is the kind of stuff that’s certainly an important part of the whole picture (the psychological kind of incentives), but again just a part of the picture. (However, his upcoming book goes into a lot more detail on why and how the publicly-stated motives for human or organizational behavior aren’t actually the true motives.)

And then in social/evolutionary/moral psychology there’s a bunch of stuff about social-psychological incentives, of how we’re motivated to denounce outgroups and form bonds with our ingroups; and how it can be socially costly to have accurate beliefs about outgroups and defend them to your ingroup, whereas it would be much more rewarding to just spread inaccuracies or outright lies about how terrible the outgroups are, and thus increase your own social standing. And how even well-meaning ideologies will by default get hijacked by these kinds of dynamics and become something quite different from what they claimed to be.

But again, that’s just one piece of the whole story. And you can find more isolated pieces of the whole story scattered around in a variety of articles and books, also stuff like the iron law of oligarchy, rational irrationality, public choice theory, etc etc. But no grand synthesis.

There’s also a

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LW 2.0 Site Update: 09/22/17
by habryka — 2017-09-23T10:10:10.594Z

Another set of quick updates done today:

We had a bad bug where in about 50% of cases when a user created a post on the frontpage, it would neither show up on their userpage, nor on the frontpage, but only on the all-posts view. This is now fixed. Sorry for anyone who was confused by this!

Profiles should now accurately show both frontpage posts and personal blog posts

The karma/posts/comments icons now have tooltips that explain what they are

Imported all old blogposts for Zvi and Katja and set up automatic crossposting from their blogs

Added a new post link to a more accessible position (the user menu in the top right corner)

Fixed the sort order of comments on user's profile pages

This time actually fixed the LessWrong title in the top left corner and properly made it a link (i.e. you can now middle-click it and it should open the page in a new tab)

Fixed permission issues with a bunch of content in The Codex. The Codex should now be fully accessible
Intuitive explanation of why entropy maximizes in a uniform distribution?
by roland — 2017-09-23T09:43:44.265Z

What is the best mathematical, intuitive explanation of why entropy maximizes in a uniform distribution? I'm looking for a short proof using the most elementary mathematics possible.

Please no explanation like "because entropy was designed in this way", etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%29#Definition
Voting Weight Discussion
by Raemon — 2017-09-22T22:48:25.040Z

One of the distinguishing features of LW 2.0 is Voting Weight. People with more karma will be able to give higher-weighted upvotes and downvotes.

This is part of an overall plan to make it better at sorting signal-from noise. But it's a major change to the system and seemed worthy of a dedicated-discussion thread.

Intended Outcomes

There are roughly three goals for the improved karma system:

I. A reasonable pace of quality content on the front page, which is the single conversation locus. (We're aiming for about 3-7 featured posts per week)

II. A reasonable opportunity for people (newcomers and otherwise) to get their ideas seen, receive feedback. (The front page involves an inherently limited supply of attention, so not everything can go there. But good posts should at least stick around on the Recent Posts page for awhile)

III. Implement goals I and II in a way that is (and feels) fair.

Current Implementation of Voting Weight

The problem is that LessWrong is an oddly specific community, and it won't be necessarily obvious to a newcomer what are the sorts of post we want to incentivize. So we want more experienced users who have a proven track epistemic record to be able to draw attention to posts more easily.

In light of Goal III, we don't want a high-karma user's vote to be overwhelming. So the current mathematical implementation is:

floor(log_5(karma)+1)+1

What this means in non-math-speak is that is that your voting weight looks something like:

0 karma: 1 voting weight
5 karma: 2 voting weight
25 karma: 3 voting weight
125 karma: 4 voting weight
625 karma: 5 voting weight
...
... roughly capping out for practical purposes at approximately:
400,000 karma: 9 voting weight (currently no users are near this level)

You may have noticed that when you upvote or downvote a post, it changes by more than 1 point. This is why.

New posts also start with their user having upvoted them once, so if you have 25 karma, you'll start with 3 points. This is to reflect that people who've been around longer are more likely to be writing things that are worth paying attention to. (Although note that this initial upvote doesn't count towards their overall karma score)

Shifting to a voting-weight based system also makes it easier to notice people who are abusing the system and nullify their votes (preventing mass-downvote attacks)

Thoughts?

The LW 2.0 team...
LessWrong-Portable
by AABoyles — 2017-09-22T20:48:41.200Z

I have created the latest in a long history of independent, disorganized projects to scrape collections of posts from LessWrong into ebooks. A few selected examples of others:

jb55's lesswrong-print

dato's lesswrong-bundle

OneWhoFrog's lw2ebook

srlee309's LessWrongEBookCreator

natewind's lesswrong-fb2

...Not to mention the official version of the Sequences. So, why could we possibly need another?

LessWrong 2.0.

If LessWrong 2.0 is voted to replace LessWrong Classic (see point 4), All the existing aggregators will break. This isn't a big deal, since they really only need to run once (correctly) in order to create the ebook, but anyone who wants to modify them and scrape new ebooks won't be able to use them.

Separately, Scott Alexander's Codex is open for reading now that the site is in open beta. Not that all this content wasn't available elsewhere before, but this is the most promising linearly-organized collection of (some of) his writings I've seen. I want to read it, and as I read most things, I want to do it on my ebook reader. I'm sharing this on the off chance I'm not alone.

Currently, it only compiles The Codex. I may add others later, though HPMOR and R:A-Z seem vastly less urgent, since they're already available as ebooks elsewhere.

P̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶s̶e̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶b̶r̶o̶k̶e̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶k̶s̶,̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶u̶l̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶a̶r̶g̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶e̶m̶p̶t̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶d̶u̶c̶t̶.̶ ̶I̶ ̶s̶u̶s̶p̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶u̶l̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶u̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶L̶W̶2̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶o̶l̶v̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶.̶

[Edit: This issue has been resolved.]
In Defense of Unreliability
by ozymandias — 2017-09-22T15:46:55.865Z

In a long post mostly about a different issue, Zvi Mowshowitz writes:

I also strongly endorse that the default level of reliability needs to be much, much higher than the standard default level of reliability, especially in The Bay. Things there are really bad.

When I make a plan with a friend in The Bay, I never assume the plan will actually happen. There is actual no one there I feel I can count on to be on time and not flake. I would come to visit more often if plans could actually be made. Instead, suggestions can be made, and half the time things go more or less the way you planned them. This is a terrible, very bad, no good equilibrium. Are there people I want to see badly enough to put up with a 50% reliability rate? Yes, but there are not many, and I get much less than half the utility out of those friendships than I would otherwise get.

First of all, I'd like to say that nothing in my post should be construed as saying Zvi's desire for reliable friends is invalid or wrong. It's disappointing to expect a friend to come over and then they don't. If you're a busy person, on vacation or otherwise limited in time, a friend's canceled plans may mean that you've missed out on an important opportunity to do something productive and/or fun. It is very reasonable to want to befriend people who will reliably show up places they said they will on time. However, I do want to explain why I myself am quite unreliable and how I benefit from a social norm in which this unreliability is acceptable. (We should also note that I have lived in the Bay for the majority of my adult, actually-socializing life, so I may be unfamiliar with the benefits of a non-flake lifestyle.)

I primarily get places through public transit and Uberpool. The Bay Area's public transit system is really really good compared to public transit in most of the rest of the country (for one thing, it is possible to get places on it). However, our public transit is certainly inferior to, say, New York City's. One of the ways this works is that sometimes, based on the Inscrutable Whim of the Train Gods, the train will choose to show up fourteen minutes late. Uberpool also has high variance in time estimates, because they have to pick up and drop off other people. What this means is that when I say "I will get there at such-and-such a time", I mean "

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Naturalized induction – a challenge for evidential and causal decision theory
by Caspar Oesterheld — 2017-09-22T08:15:09.999Z

As some of you may know, I disagree with many of the criticisms leveled against evidential decision theory (EDT). Most notably, I believe that Smoking lesion-type problems don't refute EDT. I also don't think that EDT's non-updatelessness leaves a lot of room for disagreement, given that EDT recommends immediate self-modification to updatelessness. However, I do believe there are some issues with run-of-the-mill EDT. One of them is naturalized induction. It is in fact not only a problem for EDT but also for causal decision theory (CDT) and most other decision theories that have been proposed in- and outside of academia. It does not affect logical decision theories, however.

The role of naturalized induction in decision theory

Recall that EDT prescribes taking the action that maximizes expected utility, i.e.

where is the set of available actions, is the agent's utility function, is a set of possible world models, represents the agent's past observations (which may include information the agent has collected about itself). CDT works in a – for the purpose of this article – similar way, except that instead of conditioning on in the usual way, it calculates some causal counterfactual, such as Pearl's do-calculus: . The problem of naturalized induction is that of assigning posterior probabilities to world models (or or whatever) when the agent is naturalized, i.e., embedded into its environment.

Consider the following example. Let's say there are 5 world models , each of which has equal prior probability. These world models may be cellular automata. Now, the agent makes the observation . It turns out that worlds and don't contain any agents at all, and contains no agent making the observation . The other two world models, on the other hand, are consistent with . Thus, for and for . Let's assume that the agent has only two actions and that in world model the only agent making observation takes action and in the only agent making observation takes action , then and . Thus, if, for example, , an EDT agent would take action to ensure that world model is actual.

The main problem of naturalized induction

This example makes it sound as though it's clear what posterior probabilities we should assign. But in general, it's not that easy. For one, there is the issue of anthropics: if one world model contains more agents observing than ...
LW 2.0 Site Update: 09/21/17
by Ben Pace — 2017-09-22T07:43:31.740Z

Hey! A few quick updates on edits done today (well, yesterday - we have late work hours).

Thanks Chris_Leong for making a post to document folks' bugs. In the comments ozymandias requested that the page containing every post published to the site organised by day, be more findable. That's now located in the menu (top left-hand corner).

Also in the comments philh wrote a comment of many requests; today we fixed a few of them.

You no longer need to include 'http://' at the start of your blog URL

You can now see a user's comments in their user page

You can now see your own comments in your user page

Other things we did:

There is a now page with all comments sorted by recency, findable on the frontpage just under the 'recent comments' section header

Fixed a bug where some users were unable to post to Meta

When you login, you no longer get redirected to the front page

Fixed formatting of RSS posts (more RSS changes coming soon)

If you click through to a recent comment, it also has a button to take you to its position in the comment thread.

Added various error messages for login and post editing and other things.

And answered an infinite number of support requests (where infinity = 56).
LW 2.0 Site Update: 09/21/17
by Ben Pace — 2017-09-22T07:42:09.542Z

Hey! A few quick updates on edits done today (well, yesterday - we have late work hours).

Thanks Chris_Leong for making a post to document folks' bugs. In the comments ozymandias requested that the page containing every post published to the site organised by day, be more findable. That's now located in the menu (top left-hand corner).

Also in the comments philh wrote a comment of many requests; today we fixed a few of them.

You no longer need to include 'http://' at the start of your blog URL

You can now see a user's comments in their user page

You can now see your own comments in your user page

Other things we did:

There is a page with all comments sorted by recency, findable on the frontpage just under the 'recent comments' section header

Fixed a bug where some users were unable to post to Meta

When you login, you no longer get redirected to the front page

Fixed formatting of RSS posts (more RSS changes coming soon)

If you click through to a recent comment, it also has a button to take you to its position in the comment thread.

Added various error messages for login and post editing and other things.

And answered an infinite number of intercom support requests (where infinity = 56).