trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Outside View isn't magic
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-09-27T14:33:28.308Z

The planning fallacy is an almost perfect example of the strength of using the outside view. When asked to predict the time taken for a project that they are involved in, people tend to underestimate the time needed (in fact, they tend to predict as if question was how long things would take if everything went perfectly).

Simply telling people about the planning fallacy doesn't seem to make it go away. So the outside view argument is that you need to put your project into the "reference class" of other projects, and expect time overruns as compared to your usual, "inside view" estimates (which focus on the details you know about the project.

So, for the outside view, what is the best way of estimating the time of a project? Well, to find the right reference class for it: the right category of projects to compare it with. You can compare the project with others that have similar features - number of people, budget, objective desired, incentive structure, inside view estimate of time taken etc... - and then derive a time estimate for the project that way.

That's the outside view. But to me, it looks a lot like... induction. In fact, it looks a lot like the elements of a linear (or non-linear) regression. We can put those features (at least the quantifiable ones) into a linear regression with a lot of data about projects, shake it all about, and come up with regression coefficients.

At that point, we are left with a decent project timeline prediction model, and another example of human bias. The fact that humans often perform badly in prediction tasks is not exactly new - see for instance my short review on the academic research on expertise.

So what exactly is the outside view doing in all this?

The role of the outside view: model incomplete and bias human

The main use of the outside view, for humans, seems to be to point out either an incompleteness in the model or a human bias. The planning fallacy has both of these: if you did a linear regression comparing your project with all projects with similar features, you'd notice your inside estimate was more optimistic than the regression - your inside model is incomplete. And if you also compared each person's initial estimate with the ultimate duration of their project, you'd notice a systematically optimistic bias - you'd notice the planning fallacy.

The

...
Tests make creating AI hard
by  — 2017-09-27T12:03:52.447Z

In my post on incentive structures I gave an potted summary of how to do incentive structures better when what you are trying to achieve is ill defined,

Improve Models using Measures, use the Model to update Targets.

I would add,

Try to hit Targets. Avoid Tests.

In this post I will recap what I mean by the above, give an abridged history of the field of AI and how it has failed to follow this maxim well and what following it might have looked like.

If we want to create safe AI we need good incentive structures for the people researching it, we need to get good at this.

Recap

A Model is your causal view of the thing you are trying to achieve. A Measure is something you can apply to your system to let you know if you are going in the right direction. Targets are things you are trying to do in the world. A Test in this formalism is something that is a Measure and Target all in one, you don't need a Model, if you do well at the Test you are doing well.

One of the key differences between a Measure and Test, if you do better than a Model predicts on a Measure you should change your Model (and maybe change your Target). If you do better than you expect on a Test, there is no need to change anything.

Measure 1: The Turing test

The most famous measure in AI is the Turing test.

[it] is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another.

From this we got the Loebner prize. This in turn has led to profusion of chat bots like this one. It might entertain the judges and give them a moments pause to try and figure out whether it is a human or not, but you can't get much real work out of it. It can't do maths, run a business or teach kids. It is a product of taking the Measure as a Test.
However it is still a good Measure: if something really passed it we would expect it to be intelligent.

Measure 2: Image net

This is not supposed to be a test of full intelligence, but how well an algorithm detects object in images . While it is creating algorithms that do better and better at this all the time, i

...
Stupid Questions - September 2017
by ChristianKl — 2017-09-27T09:51:54.246Z

The stupid questions thread was one of the regular threads on LessWrong. It's a place where no question is to stupid to be asked and anybody who answers is encouraged to be kind.

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
Sabbath hard and go home
by Benquo — 2017-09-27T07:49:40.482Z

Growing up Jewish, I thought that the traditional rules around the Sabbath were silly. Then I forgot to bring a spare battery on a camping trip. Now I think that something like the traditional Jewish Sabbath is an important cultural adaptation to preserve leisure, that would otherwise be destroyed in an urbanized, technological civilization.

Sabbath as easy mode

As a child, I first learned that the Sabbath was a “day of rest,” a day on which you don’t do “work.” I was brought up by liberal Jews in a society in which “work” tends to mean either business or wage labor. Things you do for money. Things you do because someone else demands them. This is for the most part how we observed the Sabbath.

But I was also taught about the older traditions in which many categories of mundane activity are forbidden: lighting a fire, cutting or mending cloth, writing or erasing letters. This seemed to me like an arbitrary superstition based on an excessive literality. Surely I could tell for myself whether I was writing as part of a leisure activity or a desk job. Surely I could tell for myself whether I was planting seeds for my private garden, or on a commercial farm. Why avoid these activities in the privacy of one’s own home, doing things for oneself, and not working at all?

Likewise, Orthodox Jews must walk to and from their synagogue on the Sabbath, because driving would involve lighting a fire. Automobile engines run on combustion, after all. Liberal Jews often argued, if there is inclement weather, or if the synagogue is far, is it not more restful to take an easy drive than to walk?

In short, I thought that the rest of the Sabbath meant, or ought to mean, playing life on easy mode.

Unplugging as leisure

Recently, I’ve been feeling too caught up in local social momentum. When it looked like it would be difficult and take a long time to book a cabin to spend some time alone, I asked a friend to teach me how to go camping, to improve my range of options for solitude, both by directly giving me the affordance for camping, and by more generally expanding the range of living conditions I had experience coping with.

On my first solo two-night camping trip, I forgot to bring a backup battery to charge my laptop or phone. I was car camping, so I could have charged them that way, but I felt like that was outside the spirit of the exercise, and inconvenient anyway. So instead, I mostl...
The Iron Law of Evaluation and Other Metallic Rules.
by panickedapricott — 2017-09-27T03:11:13.064Z
Link: https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1987-rossi

Gwern talks about the reasons why most policies that have been evaluated don't actually improve sociological problems. (poverty, dependency, mental illness, crime) I find it surprising they don't hurt either. Gwern hypothesizes that it might be sample bias or maybe the forces underlying these problems are more powerful than the current capabilities of our institutions to handle. (eg. age? genetics?).
It's pretty unsatisfying. I hear that giving aid to the poor is treating symptoms not underlying causes, but we may not actually know the underlying causes to begin with. I want to say maybe spend more money on sociological research instead of services to the poor? Is that just yet another untested "clearly obvious" mass sociological policy?
Economics of AI conference from NBER
by fortyeridania — 2017-09-27T01:45:49.392Z

Papers: http://papers.nber.org/sched/AIf17

Videos and slides: https://www.economicsofai.com/nber-conference-toronto-2017/

The speaker list (including presenters and moderators) includes many prominent names in the economics world, including:

Daniel Kahneman

Erik Brynjolfsson

Carl Shapiro

Hal Varian

Susan Athey

Larry Summers

Austan Goolsbee

David Autor

Paul Milgrom

Jeffrey Sachs

Rebecca Henderson

Joseph Stiglitz

Betsey Stevenson

Tyler Cowen

Joel Mokyr

And others with whom you might be more familiar than I.

H/T Marginal Revolution
Unfair outcomes from fair tests
by whales — 2017-09-26T23:48:47.316Z
Link: http://whaaales.com/unfair-outcomes-from-fair-tests/

[Summary: Say you use a fair test to predict a quality for which other non-tested factors matter, and then you make a decision based on this prediction. Then people who do worse on the test measure (but not necessarily the other factors) are subject to different error rates, even if you estimate their qualities just as well. If that’s already obvious, great; I additionally try to present the notion of fairness that lets one stop at “the test is fair; all is as it should be” as a somewhat arbitrary line to draw with respect to a broader class of notions of statistical fairness.] [Not sure if this text will appear anywhere in LW 2.0, so this is a test.]
Wikipedia pageviews: still in decline
by VipulNaik — 2017-09-26T23:03:27.902Z

In March 2015, I wrote about a decline in Wikipedia desktop pageviews over the last few years (and posted a short version to LessWrong). With a lot of help from Issa Rice over the last year, and a lot more quality data, I've revisited the claims of that post.

This post provides a high-level summary of my takeaways. If enough people express interest in the comments, I intend to write up in more detail on the aspects that people express interest in. If I do a more detailed writeup, it will probably be in the latter half of 2018, giving enough additional data to evaluate how well the decline hypothesis holds up.

Here are the top-level conclusions.

Have English desktop Wikipedia pageviews (i.e., pageviews of Wikipedia pages from desktop devices) actually declined?
Short answer: Yes, they have declined by over 50% since the peak between late 2012 and late 2013. Some supposedly timeless page types have declined by up to 75-80%. The effect of per-page decline is partly cancelled by increase in number of pages.
If I do a longer post, I'll compare the time periods September to November 2012 against September to November 2017, and April to June 2013 against April to June 2018. Both are three-month periods, with equal representation of all days of week, the same time of the year, and with a separation of five years.

Why have English desktop pageviews declined?
Short answer: Substitution to mobile could explain between 10 and 40 percentage points of the desktop decline. I personally gravitate to the lower end of the estimate range.
Inclusion/exclusion of non-human traffic could explain between 5 and 20 percentage points of the decline.
Switch to HTTPS and the block of Wikipedia in China explain a sharp mid-2015 decline, but use of Chinese Wikipedia (which should have been most affected) has recovered, and I expect the long-term effect to be close to zero. At most, it is 5 percentage points.
The residual decline is between 0 and 20 percentage points, which, after rebasing, is between 0 and 40% for desktop. Two leading candidates to explain the residual are increased reliance on social media and search engine algorithm changes.

Have total (desktop + mobile) human English Wikipedia pageviews declined? Why?
Short answer: Total (desktop + mobile) human pageviews likely peaked around late 2013, and have declined by about 20% since then. Per-page pageviews have gone down signifi
...
Happy Petrov Day! If Today is Also Your Birthday, Happy Birthday!
by Waltus — 2017-09-26T22:56:00.812Z
Link: https://akataskeuastos.wordpress.com/2017/09/26/happy-petrov-day-if-today-is-also-your-birthday-happy-birthday/

A discussion of September 26 and September 1993, and an invitation to join the club if that's your birthday too
The Anthropic Principle: Five Short Examples
by Optimization Process — 2017-09-26T22:35:24.102Z

(content warning: nuclear war, hypothetical guns, profanity, philosophy, one grammatically-incorrect comma for readability’s sake)

This is a very special time of year, when my whole social bubble starts murmuring about nuclear war, and sometimes, some of those murmurers, urging their listeners to worry more, will state: "Anthropic principle."

To teach people about the anthropic principle and how to use it in an epistemically virtuous way, I wrote a short dialogue featuring five examples.

1. Life and death and love and birth

Avery: But how can you not believe the universe was designed for life? It's in this cosmic Goldilocks zone, where if you tweaked the speed of light or Planck's Constant or the electron mass by just a few percent, you couldn't have atoms, you couldn't have any patterns complex enough to replicate and evolve, the universe would just be this entropic soup!

Brook: I'm not sure I buy the "no complex patterns at all" bit, but even granting it for the sake of argument -- have you heard of the anthropic principle?

Avery: No. Explain?

Brook: We're alive. Life can only exist in a universe where life exists, tautologically. If the cosmos couldn't support life, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Avery: And so, a universe... created... ngh, I vaguely see what you're getting at. Elaborate?

Brook: And so, a universe created by some kind of deity, and tuned for life, is indistinguishable from a universe that happens to have the right parameters by coincidence. "We exist" can't be evidence for our living in one or the other, because that fact doesn't correlate with design-or-lack-of-design -- unless you think that, from inside a single universe, you can derive sensible priors for the frequency with which all universes, both designed and undesigned, can support life?

Avery: I... oof. That argument feels vaguely like cheating, but... I'll think about it.

2. ...and peace and war on the planet Earth

Avery: In any case, it's interesting that the topic of Earth's hospitality comes up today of all days, given that we so nearly made it inhospitable.

Brook: What do you mean, "today of all days"?

Avery: Oh! You don't know!? September 26 is Petrov Day! It's the anniversary of when some Soviet early-warning system sounded an alarm, and the officer in charge

...
Cognitive Empathy and Emotional Labor
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-09-26T20:39:48.877Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/cognitive-empathy-and-emotional-labor-cb256c38597d

The concept of emotional labor has been popularized in the last couple years as a way of talking about the work people do to manage other people’s emotions. Most of that discussion has been around how women are often expected to perform emotional labor without compensation both professionally and personally. Women report being asked to perform social glue functions in the workplace without it being part of their job, part of how they are evaluated, or part of how they are paid, and they are culturally expected to perform most of the emotional labor in personal relationships. And perhaps most frustratingly, while men are lauded when they perform emotional labor and mostly given a pass when they don’t, the situation is reversed for women who mostly only see punishment for not doing enough.

But ultimately emotional labor is for everyone, and although there is a sex differential in its performance, there is little new I can say on that aspect of the topic. What I can say is something about how emotional labor is related to developmental psychology and cognitive empathy. Specifically, how skill at emotional labor depends on the development of cognitive empathy and lack of cognitive empathy is a limiting factor in being able to perform emotional labor.

I described emotional labor as “managing other people’s emotions”, but to be more precise emotional labor is acting to influence the emotions of others. To do this one must have some knowledge of the emotions of others and how they can be affected. This knowledge typically comes from either affective empathy or cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is feeling another person’s feelings, like being sad because your friend is sad or being scared because a character in a horror movie is scared. Affective empathy’s source is probably mirror neurons, and a lack of affective empathy is associated with sociopathy. For this reason affective empathy is sometimes also called “primitive” empathy because it seems to naturally develop on its own and is rarely missing in a person.

Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is the skill of thinking about others ontologically and is anything but “primitive”. In order to be able to think of ways to make your friends happy or worry about what others will think of you, you must model other people and predict their resp...
Map of the AI Safety Community
by SoerenE — 2017-09-26T08:39:10.136Z
Link: https://aisafety.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/AI_Safety_Community_Map_Version__1_0.jpg

I have made a map of the AI Safety Community!

The map is greatly inspired by the map of the rationalist community made by Scott Alexander.

There are bound to be omissions and misunderstandings, and I will be grateful for any corrections. I promise that I will incorporate the feedback into a new version of the map.

The sizes of the cities/dwellings reflect my understanding of how much they contribute to AI Safety. The locations and borders reflect my judgement of who focus on what, and I had to make some difficult choices.

(Made with Fractal Mapper 8, and crossposted to AISafety.com and r/controlProblem)

I hope that you will find the map useful, and find inspiration to visit new places.
Why I am not a Quaker (even though it often seems as though I should be)
by Benquo — 2017-09-26T07:00:28.116Z

In the past year, I have noticed that the Society of Friends (also known as the Quakers) has come to the right answer long before I or most people did, on a surprising number of things, in a surprising range of domains. And yet, I do not feel inclined to become one of them. Giving credit where credit is due is a basic part of good discourse, so I feel that I owe an explanation.

The virtues of the Society of Friends are the virtues of liberalism: they cultivate honest discourse and right action, by taking care not to engage in practices that destroy individual discernment. The failings of the Society of Friends are the failings of liberalism: they do not seem to have the organizational capacity to recognize predatory systems and construct alternatives.

Fundamentally, Quaker protocols seem like a good start, but more articulated structures are necessary, especially more closed systems of production.

This post reflects a lot of thought, but there's a lot of speculation which I hope I've managed to mark as such. I'm optimizing for clearly communicating my present state in the hopes of furthering dialogue, not saying things that are maximally defensible; I haven't worked out the relevant models in extreme detail. That said, I don't think I'm misreporting any facts, and corrections on any level are welcome.

Some reasons to respect the Society of Friends

Liberalism is nice, and the Quakers instilled it in America.

They pioneered the radical practice of personal integrity.

Their social technology is designed to avoid overriding individual conscience and judgment, thus preserving information that is typically destroyed by more common systems oriented around momentum or dominance.

They don’t advertise much.

Proto-liberals

The Quakers first came to my attention when Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex wrote about them. His review of Albion’s Seed describes them as proto-liberals with an outsized effect on the United States of America, basically winning over the culture to their ideals:

Fischer warns against the temptation to think of the Quakers as normal modern people, but he has to warn us precisely because it’s so tempting. Where the Puritans seem like a dystopian caricature of virtue and the Cavaliers like a dystopian caricature of vice, the Quakers just seem ordinary. […]

George Fox […] believed people were basically good and had an Inner Light t

...
Translating CFAR to Therapy
by squidious — 2017-09-26T07:00:00.000Z

The Center for Applied Rationality has given its alumni a number of excellent tools to work on their bugs. Going through a workshop myself, I found that a lot of these tools are similar to therapeutic techniques, just reformatted to fit a more self-help-y context. Going through the workshop as a therapist, I had two goals: learn to use these techniques myself, and learn the translation between therapeutic technique and self help (in both ways!). As a therapist, it is useful to take self help techniques and turn them into something you can use in the room with a client. Similarly, it is useful to be able to take a therapeutic technique and find a way for the client to do it themselves at home. After all, the ultimate goal of a therapist is to get their clients to a space where they don't need therapy.
Just as translating therapy to self help is useful for ending therapy, translating self help to therapy is useful in beginning. When I begin seeing a client, one of my first questions is "What have you tried?". I want to know not only what has worked, but also what hasn't, and why, because this informs my theory as well as my choice of techniques.
That said, below I'm going to write a little bit about some of the techniques, and what you can learn about yourself based on which techniques work for you. Some of this may even hint at what types of therapy may work well for you. Of course, none of this is certain. You are not my client and I don't know you personally; most of this ranges from well-researched speculation to evidenced by anecdotes.
Bugs lists
If just the process of writing out your bugs is helpful in fixing them, there are a number of self help CBT resources that might be helpful. One of my favorites is called Mood Gym. If you are the kind of person who feels better just noticing how your thinking is illogical, CBT will probably do very well for you.
Inner Simulator
What CFAR calls the Inner Sim is pretty close to what Attachment Theory calls the Internal Working Model, and while pure Attachment Theory is something I'd use only for particular, deeply rooted issues, it is possible that including attachment work in your therapy would be useful if your Inner Sim tends to fail when it comes to what you expect out of interpersonal interactions.
It is also possible that kinks in your Inner Sim are due to problems with your narrative. If attempting Pre-hindsight al

...