trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
10/19/2017: Development Update (new vote backend, revamped user pages and advanced editor)
by habryka — 2017-10-19T09:09:06.061Z

Here are the latest changes I just pushed:

Navbar now changes depending on context:

If you visit a post on a user page, the header now changes to reflect that you are no longer on the frontpage. This will hopefully make the visual distinction between the frontpage and personal blog pages clearer, and generally improve navigation on the page.

+ Users will eventually be able to set their own personal color that will show up in their header and on a few navigation elements on their profile
+ Their will be unique colors for R:A-Z, The Codex and HPMOR that will serve a similar function
+ Meta will also get its own color

Voting backend-revamp

The vote backend has been revamped. So far this shouldn't have any effect on your user experience (besides slightly faster load times), but will soon allow us to implement gradual upvoting and downvoting where users can decide to upvote or downvote something n-times, where n is their current vote-weight. This also means there was about a 20-minute period before this push in which your votes might have been reset, I apologize if that happened to anyone.

Editor streamlining and advanced editor!

We removed the far too numerous and mostly useless selection of headers in the Toolbar and replaced it with two heading sizes, which should be enough for the vast majority of use-cases (and is also what's most common on other content sites like Medium).

You can now access our advanced editor on post pages! This allows you to insert images and a variety of other things into your posts. I am not a huge fan of the UI, but it's a very powerful editor that allows you to create basically whatever formatting you want, so it's somewhat hard to make the UI super simple as well. You can access the editor by pressing the palette icon on the right side of the editor Toolbar. (That button also exists for comment editors, but currently doesn't do anything. We will remove it soon from there)

We also fixed a bunch of smaller bugs in a variety of places. Let me know what you think, and whether you discover any new bugs. Also expect some more performance improvements to finally be pushed soon.
Use concrete language to improve your communication in relationships
by Elo — 2017-10-19T03:46:50.403Z

She wasn’t respecting me. Or at least, that’s what I was telling myself.

And I was pretty upset. What kind of person was too busy to text back a short reply? I know she’s a friendly person because just a week ago we were talking daily, text, phone, whatever suited us. And now? She didn’t respect me. That’s what I was telling myself. Any person with common decency could see, what she was doing was downright rude! And she was doing it on purpose. Or at least, that’s what I was telling myself.

It was about a half a day of these critical-loop thoughts, when I realised what I was doing. I was telling myself a story. I was building a version of events that grew and morphed beyond the very concrete and specific of what was happening. The trouble with The Map and the Territory, is that “Respect” is in my map of my reality. What it “means” to not reply to my text is in my theory of mind, in my version of events. Not in the territory, not in reality.

I know I could be right about my theory of what’s going on. She could be doing this on purpose, she could be choosing to show that she does not respect me by not replying to my texts, and I often am right about these things. I have been right plenty of times in the past. But that doesn’t make me feel better. Or make it easier to communicate my problem. If she was not showing me respect, sending her an accusation would not help our communication improve.

The concept comes from Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Better described as Non-Judgemental communication. The challenge I knew I faced was to communicate to her that I was bothered, without an accusation. Without accusing her with my own internal judgement of “she isn’t respecting me”. I knew if I fire off an attack, I will encounter walls of defence. That’s the kind of games we play when we feel attacked by others. We put up walls and fire back.

The first step of NVC is called, “observation”. I call it “concrete experience”. To pass the concrete experience test, the description of what happened needs to be specific enough to be used as instructions by a stranger. For example, there are plenty of ideas someone could have about not showing respect, if my description of the problem is, “she does not respect me”, my grandma might think she started eating before I sat down at the table. If my description is, “In the past 3 days she has not replied to any of my mess

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Use concrete language to improve your communication in relationships
by Elo — 2017-10-19T03:46:38.046Z

She wasn’t respecting me. Or at least, that’s what I was telling myself.

And I was pretty upset. What kind of person was too busy to text back a short reply? I know she’s a friendly person because just a week ago we were talking daily, text, phone, whatever suited us. And now? She didn’t respect me. That’s what I was telling myself. Any person with common decency could see, what she was doing was downright rude! And she was doing it on purpose. Or at least, that’s what I was telling myself.

It was about a half a day of these critical-loop thoughts, when I realised what I was doing. I was telling myself a story. I was building a version of events that grew and morphed beyond the very concrete and specific of what was happening. The trouble with The Map and the Territory, is that “Respect” is in my map of my reality. What it “means” to not reply to my text is in my theory of mind, in my version of events. Not in the territory, not in reality.

I know I could be right about my theory of what’s going on. She could be doing this on purpose, she could be choosing to show that she does not respect me by not replying to my texts, and I often am right about these things. I have been right plenty of times in the past. But that doesn’t make me feel better. Or make it easier to communicate my problem. If she was not showing me respect, sending her an accusation would not help our communication improve.

The concept comes from Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Better described as Non-Judgemental communication. The challenge I knew I faced was to communicate to her that I was bothered, without an accusation. Without accusing her with my own internal judgement of “she isn’t respecting me”. I knew if I fire off an attack, I will encounter walls of defence. That’s the kind of games we play when we feel attacked by others. We put up walls and fire back.

The first step of NVC is called, “observation”. I call it “concrete experience”. To pass the concrete experience test, the description of what happened needs to be specific enough to be used as instructions by a stranger. For example, there are plenty of ideas someone could have about not showing respect, if my description of the problem is, “she does not respect me”, my grandma might...
Feature Request - Disable Voting on Main Page
by Chris_Leong — 2017-10-19T03:15:16.270Z

Enabling voting on the main page encourages people to vote before they've read an article based on things such as the title. This is bad for a community that aims for substance. It would not require very much effort to hide these buttons on the main page.

As an alternative, we could choose to leave these buttons up if you have actually clicked into the page and just come back, but this is much more complex and probably not worth the effort.
LessWrong: West vs. East
by Neuroff — 2017-10-19T03:13:13.450Z

There is a particular distinction in Western and Eastern ways of seeing the world and interpreting Truth. I want to point at how I think LessWrong is more aligned with the Western way of truth-seeking.

[ Epistemic status is speculative / playful. ]

One illustration of the distinction is that there was a study where Japanese and American students were shown images of fish tanks[1]. Later, they were asked to recall the scene. Japanese students were twice as likely to recall background objects. They also often started by describing the environment—“it looked like a pond.” While Americans were more likely to describe the foreground—“there were three big fish swimming to the left.” The Japanese attended more to the context and relationships within the image, while the Americans attended more to the "main actors."

Some pattern-matching words to further triangulate the difference here:

East Asians see things in context, while Westerners focus on the point at hand; the former are dependent, the latter independent; the former are holistic, the latter analytic. … Asians are collectivistic, Westerners individualistic. [2]

LessWrong feels like a further continuation of this long-standing, analytic Western tradition.

1. It features anonymous users (wiping clean the context of name, social group, cultural background, etc.).

2. It has a sense of “the argument should stand for itself.” It doesn’t matter who writes it—the words themselves should be taken into consideration and judged to be convincing or not. The truth will be evaluated based solely on the logical structure, the content, and the evidence. Similar to how mathematical proofs don’t rely on the perspective of the person constructing it or the one reading it.

3. It tries to keep emotion at bay. There is a sense that emotion risks making things distracting or “tribal.” Emotion takes away clear-headedness and disables people’s ability to think. Signs of hostility or aggression are quick to be pointed out in comments. The implication is that one of the jobs of moderation is to keep discussion free of emotional charge. Again, it seems the point is to highlight the argument on its own ground and to remove the “background layers” of emotion and social signaling, as much as possible.

These features hint at underlying assumptions about the nature of reality and Truth. LessWrong was formed as an attempt to clarify,

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Alpha Go Zero comments
by Kyre — 2017-10-19T01:27:40.306Z
Link: http://www.nature.com/news/self-taught-ai-is-best-yet-at-strategy-game-go-1.22858

DeepMind has published a new paper in Nature detailing "Alpha Go Zero", a Go AI that was trained with only self-play. Alpha Go Zero equalled the ability of a system trained with supervised learning on a Go profession game corpus in 24 hours (using the same computing resources) and exceeded the ability of the version of Alpha Go that defeated Lee Sedol in 48 hours.

This surprised me. I remember Demis Hassabis saying during the Lee Sedol game coverage that he'd like to look at learning Go from scratch, using only self play and no supervised learning from human games. I thought that that sounded much harder, and guessed that if supervised training times were on the order of a month then from scratch it would take anywhere from three months to years to recapitulate what was learned from human games.

Other things I noted from the paper were that Alpha Go Master (which played and won 50 games against professional players in 2016-2017) used a different architecture to the previous versions, and is about 12 times more computationally efficient as well as being a significantly better player. Zero is based on that architecture (I think), and took about 35 days of training (i.e. self-play) to equal, and then exceed Master's ability. I don't know how long Master took to train, but going by the results of this paper I'm guessing that the supervised training would have provided maybe only a day or so worth of head-start compared to zero.
Distinctions Between Natalism Positions
by ozymandias — 2017-10-19T01:06:30.630Z

I have noticed that several distinct positions tend to be collapsed into two positions, "pro-natalism" and "anti-natalism". I think discussions about natalism would work better if people made more distinctions.

When I searched for information on it I found that people had previously made a distinction between global and local anti-natalism, where local anti-natalism holds that at least some people shouldn't reproduce and global anti-natalism holds that everyone shouldn't reproduce. I feel this is not a very satisfactory division; for one thing, I'm not sure if there is anyone who isn't a local anti-natalist by this taxonomy.

So here are my proposed replacements:

Very strong anti-natalism. It is morally wrong to have children. The human race should slowly go extinct. For example: Human beings cause irreversible harm to the biosphere, which is intrinsically valuable. It is possible to harm a person by creating them but not to benefit them (nonexistent people are not harmed by being deprived of good things), so bringing people into existence is always a great harm to them.

Strong anti-natalism. In general, people should not have children; there are a very few exceptions. For example: Most human lives, even in the developed world, are not worth living and unless you have a strong reason to suspect your child's life would be worth living, it is wrong to have a child.

Weak anti-natalism. People should err on the side of having children less than they currently do. For example: Raising children is a waste of resources that are better spent improving the lives of already existing people. Most people don't enjoy interacting with children, and having children tends to worsen marriages and make people more stressed and unhappy (please note that while the first few chapters of this book are anti-natalist, overall the book comes to a pro-natalist conclusion). It would be easier to solve environmental problems if there were fewer humans.

Natalism neutrality. It is difficult to make general conclusions about whether people should have children. Some people should err on the side of having more children than they currently are, while other people should err on the side of having fewer children. For example: many traits are genetic and only people with desirable traits should have children. Many people who would be good parents hav

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De-Centering Bias
by Chris_Leong — 2017-10-18T23:24:01.786Z

Summary: A perspective that synthesises biases with other considerations incl. game theory, virtue ethics and knowledge of your limitations.

Intro: Adopting a way of thinking in which you are aware of your own biases is clearly important and one of the areas of rationality that is most based solid evidential grounds. However, this also needs to be reconciled with evolutionary psychology arguments that are psychological functioning has evolved to maximise our reproductive fitness, a big part of which is survival. This post attempts to synthesise these two views. I would also like to suggest a new term, De-Centering Bias to describe this technique given how it marks a shift from bias being the central explanation, to bias having to share the stage with other considerations. The best way to understand this is by example:

(This post was originally title Post-Bias Thinking (or Post-Bias-ism). Unsurprisingly, this was controversial, so I decided to rename it.)

Example 1, one of the most famous experiments in psychology is the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, which was originally interpreted as showing that children who could resist eating one marshmallow now for the promise of two later tended to have better life outcomes. However, later interpretations showed that this could actually be rational for children in some environments where such promises were not reliable and that the presence of such an environment could explain these results by being a common cause of both effects.

Example 2, often revenge will make people take actions that harm both them and the other person. If we model an actor as a self-interested rational agent then we will come to the conclusion that they are being "irrational". On the other hand, if an actor is willing to go to such extreme lengths to punish someone who wrongs them, then there is a strong incentive not to wrong them in the first place (Scott has argued that it could be considered charitable because it also created a disincentive within the wider community). In the Most Convenient World, the actor will gain the benefits of such a threat existing, whilst never having to carry out their threat.

Example 3, the sunk cost fallacy is the tendency of humans to want to continue a project that they have invested a lot of resources (time, money, effort) into, even if the project is not valuable enough to be worth the resources requi...
Adjust for the middleman.
by MaryCh — 2017-10-18T14:40:38.129Z

This post is from the point of view of the middleman standing between the grand future he doesn't understand and the general public whose money he's hunting. We have a certain degree of power over what to offer to the customer, and our biases and pet horses are going to contribute a lot to what theoreticians infer about "the actual public"'s tastes. Just how a lot it is, I cannot say, & there's probably tons of literature on this anyway, so take this as a personal anecdote.

Nine months as a teacher of botany (worst gripes here) showed me a glimpse of how teachers/administration view the field they teach. A year in a shop - what managers think of books we sell. The scientific community here in my country grumbles that there's too little non-fiction produced, without actually looking into why it's not being distributed; but really, it's small wonder. Broadest advice - if your sufficiently weird goals depend on the cooperation of a network of people, especially if they are an established profession with which you haven't had a cause to interact closely except as a customer, you might want to ask what they think of your enterprise. Because they aren't going to see it your way. Next thing, is to accept it.

I work in a bookshop that is a part of a publishing house and also sells some selected books from several dozens of other PHs. Think about 9000 kinds of "our" products + 4000 kinds of "theirs".

Recently, things changed a bit. Two wonderful professionals retired, one was given a very different administrative position, and one went on to another job because she didn't want to adjust to a new team after 10+ years with the old one.

It made me, for a while, the unofficial authority on literature for adults and non-fiction non-school-related-stuff for kids. (My new colleagues currently specialize in: maps and atlases (our "senior salesperson"); stationery and such; "books in general" without knowing the products of the publishing houses we have historically dealt with (edit: the person does have several months of relevant experience); logistics; and organizing everybody. They are all willing, capable and smart and will get acquainted with this specific job too soon enough, if they don't go on to something else. Just listing their backgrounds as examples of people who actually sell the thing.) I waited until the rush for textbooks mostly petered out and started to Enj...
Seeding a productive culture: a working hypothesis
by Benquo — 2017-10-18T09:10:00.882Z

This is a compact account of my current working hypothesis for what's wrong with our culture and what needs to be done.

I'm not trying to explain my reasoning fully here - some of this I've already covered, some I plan to cover later. I expect no one to be persuaded by this post - but I hope it's helpful context. And this is just my current best guess, subject to change as I learn more.

There are many subcultures that seem okay, but the dominant, elite, world-ruling culture is a homogenizing, commodifying force. This culture is ultimately self-defeating - it is currently at war with itself and in the process of destroying its own attention - but it is unfortunately the only culture I know of that has the tools to do life-extension research and space travel.

Because the central regime has lost most of its deliberative capacity, persuading it to change is not an option. We need a sustainable alternative.

There are alternative “sustainable” cultures. Some are even growing. Earthship is an example. But the ones that have avoided triggering society’s immune system are mostly not complete in the relevant sense - they're not the sort of thing that make efficient use of the whole accessible universe, for human flourishing. In particular, they seem targeted for static sustainability, not technical or intellectual progress. “Sustainability” is not quite the right term. A culture that is productive, and trying to live, would be closer.

There have been revolutionaries who tried to seize power and reform the whole system at once. This usually ends in either catastrophic failure, or more of the same, unless it is a conservative revolution like the American one. The problem is that optimizing for seizing power can easily destroy the information you might want to preserve about how to do better.

Instead, we need to construct a seed that will grow into the right thing. This seed needs to be sustainable at all levels, not something that will only pay off at the last stage. This is how you avoid failures like revolutionary Communism. It also needs to grow, without being dependent on growth. If you don’t grow, you don’t replace the empire. If you depend on growth, you may not actually be productive, and may instead collapse when you reach the limit of your range.

We need an alternative that does not depend on permanent growth, but knows how to make and retain intellectual and t...
Instrumental Rationality 6: Attractor Theory
by  — 2017-10-18T03:54:28.211Z

[Instrumental Rationality Sequence 6/7]

[Attractor Theory is a hybrid model that tries to reconcile the effects of internal and external factors of motivation. It makes the claim that an important additional consideration in decision-making is how the action affects your ability to take future actions.]

The Model:

Attractor Theory is a qualitative model that’s aimed at changing your intuitions about yourself and decision-making. That means it explains the how but not the why. As a brief summary, Attractor Theory basically states that you should consider any action you take as having meta-level effects on changing your local preferences for which actions feel desirable.

That is to say, taking actions changes which actions you’ll take, later down the road.

I’ll first introduce the three parts of the model, then I’ll go over the implications of the model.

1) First, there’s You. Imagine that you’re in a clear hamster ball:

IMAGE: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*gEu9UeKBdLyDBtQo.

As a human inside this ball, you can kinda roll around by exerting energy. But it’s hard to do so all of the time — you’d likely get tired. Still, if you really wanted to, you could push the ball and move.

We’ll explore this later, but you can basically think of the energy you have left for rolling as a proxy for willpower.

2) Second, there are these Utilons, which just represent stuff you want.

IMAGE: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*HUqxllO2S_BiZkEv.

They represent productivity hours, lives saved, HPMOR fan-fictions written, or anything else you care about getting a lot of. As a human in a hamster ball, you are trying to roll around and collect as many Utilons as possible.

3) Third, there are all these Attractors that pull you in.

IMAGE: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*vandHod3cgtgnGZb.

And, uh, technically, anything could be an Attractor. But that clearly isn’t useful. A more concrete framing is to think of Attractors as actions or situations. For example, reading a book, going on vacation, and doing some pushups are all examples of Attractors.

The bottom line is that something is classified as an Attractor if it changes how you currently feel.

(I know this is still pretty vague, but there are some more examples later, so you might want to just black-box it for now.)

Attractors are like valleys or magnets. The point is that there’s a potential difference, wh

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