trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Planning 101: Debiasing and Research
by  — 2017-02-03T15:01:33.805Z

Planning 101: Techniques and Research

<Cross-posed from my blog>

[Epistemic status: Relatively strong. There are numerous studies showing that predictions often become miscalibrated. Overconfidence in itself appears fairly robust, appearing in different situations. The actual mechanism behind the planning fallacy is less certain, though there is evidence for the inside/outside view model. The debiasing techniques are supported, but more data on their effectiveness could be good.]

Humans are often quite overconfident, and perhaps for good reason. Back on the savanna and even some places today, bluffing can be an effective strategy for winning at life. Overconfidence can scare down enemies and avoid direct conflict.

When it comes to making plans, however, overconfidence can really screw us over. You can convince everyone (including yourself) that you’ll finish that report in three days, but it might still really take you a week. Overconfidence can’t intimidate advancing deadlines.

I’m talking, of course, about the planning fallacy, our tendency to make unrealistic predictions and plans that just don’t work out.

Being a true pessimist ain’t easy.

Students are a prime example of victims to the planning fallacy:

First, students were asked to predict when they were 99% sure they’d finish a project. When the researchers followed up with them later, though, only about 45%, less than half of the students, had actually finished by their own predicted times [Buehler, Griffin, Ross, 1995].

Even more striking, students working on their psychology honors theses were asked to predict when they’d finish, “assuming everything went as poor as it possibly could.” Yet, only about 30% of students finished by their own worst-case estimate [Buehler, Griffin, Ross, 1995].

Similar overconfidence was also found in Japanese and Canadian cultures, giving evidence that this is a human (and not US-culture-based) phenomenon. Students continued to make optimistic predictions, even when they knew the task had taken them longer last time [Buehler and Griffin, 2003, Buehler et al., 2003].

As I student myself, though, I don’t mean to just pick on ourselves.

The planning fallacy affects projects across all sectors.

An overview of public transportation projects found that most of them were, on averag

...
Meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group
by mingyuan — 2017-02-03T02:56:28.380Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group

WHEN:
05 February 2017 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Harper Memorial Library, 1116 E 59th St, Room 148

The Chicago Rationality Reading Group meets every Sunday from 1-3 PM in Room 148 of Harper Memorial Library. Though we meet on the University of Chicago campus, anyone is welcome to attend.

This week we will be discussing broad issues in instrumental rationality; the readings are as follows:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/l22/how_to_learn_soft_skills/

https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2016/06/18/gated-game-approach-to-a-better-life/

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/19/can-you-condition-yourself/

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group
Meetup : SF Meetup: Stories
by maia — 2017-02-03T01:21:26.553Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Stories

WHEN:
06 February 2017 06:15:12PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1655 Mission St., SF

We'll be meeting to tell each other stories! Ideally, come with a story from your life (doesn't have to be about anything in particular) that you want to tell other people. We'll have a list of prompts to make this easier.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Stories
Meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - trying something new!
by iarwain1 — 2017-02-03T00:09:02.730Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - trying something new!

WHEN:
05 February 2017 11:00:00AM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg 4th floor, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

We're going to try something for the next few weeks and see how it goes. Two main changes:

Meetup will be Sundays at 11:00 AM. Partly that's just because I'd like to start coming again, and that's when I can (usually) make it.

We'll actually have something on the agenda.

Meetup will be in the same place - upstairs philosophy department at UMBC. We can probably get access to the philosophy conference room again, I'll work on that.

For the agenda I'd like to loosely follow the order of EY's Rationality book, but only loosely and without sticking to his views in particular.

This week we'll be discussing the subject of Truth - what is it, what are we aiming for exactly, why is it a useful concept to think about, etc.

I'm going to put up some reading material for each week. The more people who glance over at least some of the material, the more intelligent the conversation will be.

Here's the material for this week, ordered roughly by ease of reading:

Eliezer Yudkowsky (EY): Why Truth? And ...

EY: The Simple Truth

EY: The Useful Idea of Truth

Why I Reject the Correspondence Theory of Truth

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP): Truth (or you could try the SEP or Wikipedia)

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - trying something new!
European Community Weekend 2017
by DreamFlasher — 2017-02-02T19:17:53.149Z

We are excited to announce this year's European LessWrong Community Weekend. For the fourth time, rationalists from all over Europe (and some from outside Europe) are gathering in Berlin to socialize, have fun, exchange knowledge and skills, and have interesting discussions.

The event takes place September 1st to September 3rd and, like last year, it will be held in the beautiful Jugendherberge Wannsee which contains a large room for central events, several seminar rooms, and lots of comfortable spaces inside and out to socialize or relax.

This is primarily a community-driven event. That means that while there will be a keynote and pre-planned content, the bulk of the schedule will be filled by the participants. There will be space to give talks, short or long, provide workshops, or just gather some people to do an activity together. In previous years we had the talks, lightning talks and workshops you would expect, as well as lighter activities such as 7-minute-workouts, an improv acting workshop, swimming in the lake and a workshop on modular origami. Of course there will also be time to reconnect with friends and form new connections with other aspiring rationalists.

Some valuable information

Most of the talks and discussions will be held in English, so you do not need to be able to speak German to attend.

The ticket price of €150 includes accommodation for two nights, on-site meals and snacks, and a welcome lunch on Friday at 12:00.

The event wraps up Sunday afternoon around 15:00. In the days after the weekend, participants are invited to stay in Berlin a little longer to explore the city, go bouldering, play frisbee, etc. While this is not part of the official event, we will coordinate couch-surfing opportunities to avoid the need for hotels.

To sign up, fill out this form.

tl;dr

When? 1–3 September 2017

Where? JW Wannsee in Berlin

How much? €150

Where do I sign up? Here

If you have any questions, please email us at lwcw.europe@gmail.com.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

The Community Weekend organizers and LessWrong Deutschland e.V.
Civil resistance and the 3.5% rule
by morganism — 2017-02-02T18:53:09.467Z

Interesting, haven't seen anything data-driven like this before...

Civil resistance and the 3.5% rule.

https://rationalinsurgent.com/2013/11/04/my-talk-at-tedxboulder-civil-resistance-and-the-3-5-rule/

"no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that."

"Then I analyzed the data, and the results blew me away. From 1900 to 2006, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies. And there’s more. This trend has been increasing over time—in the last fifty years civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful."

Data viz:

http://www.navcodata.org/

Interesting strategic viewpoint

http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2016/11/15/how-can-we-know-when-popular-movements-are-winning-look-to-these-four-trends/

1. Size and diversity of participation.

2. Nonviolent discipline.

3. Flexible & innovative techniques. switching between concentrated methods like demonstrations and dispersed methods like strikes and stay-aways.

4. Loyalty shifts.
if erstwhile elite supporters begin to abandon the opponent, remain silent when they would typically defend him, and refuse to follow orders to repress dissidents, or drag their feet in carrying out day-to-day orders, the incumbent is losing his grip.

(observations from article above)

"The average nonviolent campaign takes about 3 years to run its course (that’s more than three times shorter than the average violent campaign, by the way)."

"The average nonviolent campaign is about eleven times larger as a proportion of the overall population as the average violent campaign.

"Nonviolent resistance campaigns are ten times more likely to usher in democratic institutions than violent ones."

original overview and links article:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/01/worried-american-democracy-study-activist-techniques

and a training site that has some exercises in group cohesion and communication tech, from Guardian.

https://www.trainingforchange.org/tools

edit: The article that got me looking, how to strike in a gig economy, and international reach

http://www.transnational-strike.info/2017/02/01/how-d...
Death - an essay
by dglukhov — 2017-02-02T17:25:14.685Z

This essay may not hold a position by the end. See the original meaning of writing essays if you're confused.

A cursory search for discussion articles on death, though not necessarily optimized to exploit the best results, yielded several results that I wasn't necessarily satisfied with. Particularly because nothing was definitive, nothing particularly convinced me one way or the other. Why?

Testimonials of how awful the death of a loved one was to a person doesn't satisfy me since I get emotional evidence, not necessarily empirical evidence. There were cultures that revered honorable deaths, I think of the Vikings that searched for the opportunity to die if it meant dying well, and I'm sure there were many other complex emotional testimonies one could have gleaned from such figures, and still might. Historical stories about the systematic killings of members of certain nationalities, religious groups and other affiliations strike me as the result of politics at its most grizzly, where death is the ultimate punishment. And yet I can't help but think of what a martyr must have been thinking in their minds as their doom drew to a close. Or what people do when death is an inevitability that they cannot control, and have to cope with the idea of dying. One might claim that there is an almost universal understanding of death, yet research suggests that the fear of death in children is a learned phenomenon, that understanding the dread of death is developmental milestone. (Note that these are not definitive sources on such subjects, and further discussion can improve or mitigate the effects of this potential evidence).

Some might find death a liberation from their lives of pain, whether they be attributed to individual circumstances or otherwise because they convinced themselves their life is hell, or for other reasons. I will occasional see a promoter for death, talking about lowering overpopulation, elder influence, and stagnation as a result of not having a timed lifespan to operate under. I'll see people arguing death is a meaningless concept, where time is an illusion, or where there are infinitely many copies of you existing in the multiverse, making immortality a moot concept and goal. Otherwise, some may claim that the fear of death is an evolutionary bi-product, where those individual organisms that feared death had better overa...
Death - an essay
by dglukhov — 2017-02-02T17:01:51.353Z

This essay may not hold a position by the end. See [the original meaning of writing essays if you're confused](http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html).

[A cursory search for discussion articles on death](http://lesswrong.com/search/results?cx=015839050583929870010%3A-802ptn4igi&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=death+good+bad&siteurl=lesswrong.com%2Flw%2Fup%2Fshut_up_and_do_the_impossible%2F&ref=&ss=2344j623296j14), though not necessarily optimized to exploit the best results, [yielded](http://lesswrong.com/lw/f4q/ambitious_utilitarians_must_concern_themselves/) [several](http://lesswrong.com/lw/joh/thoughts_on_death/) [results](http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/) [that](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/) [I wasn't](http://lesswrong.com/lw/k3k/lsd_meditation_enlightenment_and_ego_death/) [necessarily satisfied with](http://lesswrong.com/lw/c39/quotes_about_death_from_the_conventional/). Particularly because nothing was definitive, nothing particularly convinced me one way or the other. Why?

Testimonials of how awful the death of a loved one was to a person doesn't satisfy me since I get emotional evidence, not necessarily empirical evidence. There were cultures that revered honorable deaths, I think of the Vikings that searched for the opportunity to die if it meant dying well, and I'm sure there were many other complex emotional testimonies one could have gleaned from such figures, and still might. Historical stories about the systematic killings of members of certain nationalities, religious groups and other affiliations strike me as the result of politics at its most grizzly, where death is the ultimate punishment. And yet I can't help but think of what a martyr must have been thinking in their minds as their doom drew to a close. Or what people do when death is an inevitability that they cannot control, and have to cope with the idea of dying. One might claim that there is an almost universal understanding of death, yet research suggests that the fear of death in children is a [learned phenomenon](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mfr/4919087.0001.107/--children-s-concepts-of-death?rgn=main;view=fulltext), that understanding the dread of death is [developmental milestone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_development_stages). (Note that these are not definitive sources on such subjects...
Is Evidential Decision Theory presumptuous?
by Tobias_Baumann — 2017-02-02T13:41:05.261Z

I recently had a conversation with a staunch defender of EDT who maintained that EDT gives the right answer in the Smoker’s Lesion and even Evidential Blackmail. I came up with the following, even more counterintuitive, thought experiment:

--

By doing research, you've found out that there is either

(A) only one universe or

(B) a multiverse.

You also found out that the cosmological theory has a slight influence (via different physics) on how your brain works. If (A) holds, you will likely decide to give away all your money to random strangers on the street; if there is a multiverse, you will most likely not do that. Of course, causality flows in one direction only, i.e. your decision does not determine how many universes there are.

Suppose you have a very strong preference for (A) (e.g. because a multiverse would contain infinite suffering) so that it is more important to you than your money.

Do you give away all your money or not?

--

This is structurally equivalent to the Smoker's lesion, but what's causing your action is the cosmological theory, not a lesion or a gene. CDT, TDT, and UDT would not give away the money because there is no causal (or acausal) influence on the number of universes. EDT would reason that giving the money away is evidence for (A) and therefore choose to do so.

Apart from the usual “managing the news” point, this highlights another flaw in EDT: its presumptuousness. The EDT agent thinks that her decision spawns or destroys the entire multiverse, or at least reasons as if. In other words, EDT acts as if it affects astronomical stakes with a single thought.

I find this highly counterintuitive.

What makes it even worse is that this is not even a contrived thought experiment. Our brains are in fact shaped by physics, and it is plausible that different physical theories or constants both make an agent decide differently and make the world better or worse according to one’s values. So, EDT agents might actually reason in this way in the real world.
A question about the rules
by phl43 — 2017-02-01T22:55:43.750Z

I'm new to Less Wrong and I have a question about the rules. I posted a link to the latest post on my blog, in which I argue in a polemical way against the claim that Trump's election caused a wave of hate crimes in the US. Someone complained about the tone of my post, which is fair enough (although I tend not to take very seriously criticism about tone that aren't accompanied by any substantive criticism), but I noticed that my link was taken down.

The same person also said that he or she thought LW tried to avoid politics, so I'm wondering if that's why the link was taken down. I don't really mind that my link was taken down, although I think part of the criticism was unfair (the person in question complained that I hadn't provided any evidence that people had made the claim I was attacking, which is true although it's only because I don't see how anyone could seriously deny it unless they have been living on another planet these past few months, but in any case I edited the post to address the criticism), but I would like to know what I'm permitted to post for future reference.

Like I said, I'm new here, so I apologize if I violated the rules and I'm not asking you to change them for me (obviously), but I would like to know what they are. (I didn't find anything that says we can't share links about politics, though it's true that when I browse past discussions, which I should probably have done in the first place, there doesn't seem to be any.) Is it forbidden to post anything that is related to politics, even if it makes a serious effort at evidence-based analysis, as I think it's fair to say my post does? I plan to post plenty of things on my blog that have nothing to do with politics, such as the post I just shared about moral relativism, but I just want to make sure I don't run afoul of the rules again.
Humans as a truth channel
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-02-01T16:53:49.702Z

Crossposted at Intelligence Agents Forum.

Defining truth and accuracy is tricky, so when I've proposed designs for things like Oracles, I've either used a very specific and formal question, or and indirect criteria for truth.

Here I'll try and get a more direct system so that an AI will tell the human the truth about a question, so that the human understands.

The basic idea is simple. The first AI wishes to communicate certain facts to a second AI, but has to use the human as an intermediary. The first AI talks to the human, and then the human talks with the second AI. If the facts are to be accurate, the human has to understand them.

Of course, this will immediately fail for a variety of reasons. Even if neither AI hacks the human directly, the human doesn't have to understand anything to serve as a conduit. So the rest of this post is dedicated to making that basic idea much more secure. If you just want to have the final idea and avoid the justifications, then you can skip directly to the end.

The knowledge to pass on

The human would have a good understanding of a subject, if they are able to answer a large quantity of questions about it. Having a long conversation with the second AI is tiring, among other things. A human simply won't be able to answer ten million questions about what they understand, at least not well.

So the idea could be to have the second AI ask a single question, randomly chosen from a large collection of questions, and have the human give a single yes or no answer. Both AIs are then graded on the accuracy of the answer.

The answer...

What does the second AI want to do? It basically wants to dissect the human (figuratively or literally), suck out all their knowledge, and infer what the first AI was trying to communicate. Note that this doesn't require the human to understand anything, just that the second AI can infer what the first one wanted by taking the human apart.

So instead of allowing the second AI unrestricted access to the human, it instead formulates its (boolean) question without interference, and then the human choose yes or no, and that choice is counted as an answer.

...and the question

We could have a list of actual questions, but that makes the second AI redundant, and means that the first AI will optimise for certain answers from a set of questions, not for genuine understanding.

Instead, the second AI then gets a tec...
Hacking humans
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-02-01T16:08:57.478Z

Crossposted at the Intelligent Agents Forum.

It should be noted that the colloquial "AI hacking a human" can mean three different things:

The AI convinces/tricks/forces the human to do a specific action.

The AI changes the values of the human to prefer certain outcomes.

The AI completely overwhelms human independence, transforming them into a weak subagent of the AI.

Different levels of hacking make different systems vulnerable, and different levels of interaction make different types of hacking more or less likely.
Hacking humans
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-02-01T16:06:43.000Z

It should be noted that the colloquial "AI hacking a human" can mean three different things:

#. The AI convinces/tricks/forces the human to do a specific action.
#. The AI changes the values of the human to prefer certain outcomes.
#. The AI completely overwhelms human independence, transforming them into a weak subagent of the AI.

Different levels of hacking make different systems vulnerable, and different levels of interaction make different types of hacking more or less likely.
Group Rationality Diary, February 2017
by Viliam — 2017-02-01T12:11:44.212Z

This is the public group rationality diary for February, 2017. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

(Note: Seems like we didn't have Group Rationality Diary for a few months, so feel free to write about things that happened in the previous months, too.)