trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Las Vegas Meetup
by Adam Zerner — 2017-04-28T00:52:37.705Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Las Vegas Meetup

WHEN:
30 April 2017 05:52:32PM (-0700)

WHERE:
611 Freemont Street, Las Vegas, NV 89101

WHEN: First and third Sunday of the month. 7pm-9pm. Maybe hang around later if we want to.

I vow to try be there for the next three months, including this upcoming Sunday, regardless of whether anyone else attends. My girlfriend will probably be there too. There is some traveling, and some medical stuff I plan on doing but don't have dates for yet, so If I'm not there, I'll update this page, and the email list. Dates: 4/30, 5/7, 5/21 (cancelled, not feeling well), 6/4, 6/18, 7/2, 7/16.

WHERE: The Market. It's a mini-super market/coffee shop/restaurant. I'll be there ten minutes early at a table with my laptop and a "LessWrong meet up here" sign. There's free wifi, and it's fast. It isn't crowded or loud there, and there's a lot of seating space.

PARKING: There's free street parking on 8th street between Stewart and Mesquite. From there, it's <5 minute walk to The Market. It's not the safest area though. See http://themarketdtlv.com/parking/ for other options.

WHAT: First meet up - introductions, getting to know one another, and figuring out what our interests are and what we want to do.
I was thinking we'd walk to Gold Spike afterwards for some fun! It's an "adult playground" (not sexual) with a bunch of fun games.

If there is interest in a concrete activity, we can do some poker hand analysis. Various people, including me, believe that poker is a good way to train as a rationalist. If you don't know how to play (and are interested), I can teach you. I'm decent. I play recreationally and am profitable at low limits.

White boards are awesome, so I will be bringing a white board.

EMAIL LIST: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-vegas

ME: 24 year old male, studied neuroscience in college, web developer, autodidacting right now, plans to start startups and use profits to do good for the world. See http://adamzerner.github.io/ for more.

Discussion article for the meetup : Las Vegas Meetup
Scenario analysis: a parody
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-04-27T15:21:47.438Z

Based on a idea from Nick Bostrom.

Suit A: "Welcome to our futurology meeting extravaganza, where we are going to do a complete analysis of the future using... drumroll... Scenario analysis!"

All: "All hail mighty scenario analysis!"

Suit A: "So, what are the big risks in the future?"

Suit B: "Global warming? I heard that's bad."

Suit A: "Indeed it is. What else do we have that's bad?"

Suit C: "How about obesity?"

Suit B: "I still think global warming is rather more important, it's getting hot and..."

Suit C: "Well, my grandfather was fat, and he suffered and died because..."

Suit A: "No need to argue, gentlewomen! We'll simply do a scenario analysis with both variables. So here we have the Sweaty Fat quadrant... Let me put it up on the board:"

Suit A: "Now let's give each scenario a thorough analysis!"

Suit D: "Isn't fat an insulant?"

Suit A: "That's the kind of incisive commentary we need!"

...

...

Much later:

Suit C: "So we have an ideal strategy: keep an eye on sweat pants purchase, and adjust our investment accordingly."

Suit D: "What about our social responsibilities?"

Suit A: "Good point."

Suit B: "Well, then we can track the size of suits and ice cream consumption and adjust health spending and gas subsidies in function of these."

Suit A: "Well, I think we've done a fabulous job today; really. No-one could have done a better job predicting than us. And it's all thanks to... Scenario analysis!"

All: "All hail!"

(very tangentially connected to the problem of models that are over-precise in narrow areas)
A permutation argument for comparing utility functions
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-04-27T15:01:00.000Z

When doing intertheoretic utility comparisons, there is one clear and easy case: when everything is exactly symmetric.

This happens when, for instance, there exists u and v such that p([u])=p([v])=0.5 and there exists a map σ:S→S, such that σ2 is the identity (hence σ is an involution) and for all s∈S), u(s)=v(σ(s)).

Note that this implies that (u(s),v(s))=(v(σ(s)),u(σ(s)), so σ is essentially a 'reflection'.

Then, since everything is so symmetric, we can say there is no way of distinguishing u from v, so the correct approach is to maximise [u+v].

See the following graph, with the strategy to be followed marked in red:

Permutation

Symmetry is good as far as it goes, but is very fragile. It doesn't say anything about what happens when p([u])=49/100 and p([v])=51/100, for instance.

There is an argument, however, that resolves the unequal probability cases and extends the results to non-symmetric cases.

Consider for instance the case where u and v are as follows, for 5 strategies in S:

Nothing obvious springs to mind as to what the best normalisation process is -- the setup is clearly unsymmetrical, and four of the five options are on the Pareto boundary. But let's rescale and translate the utilities:

This is still unsymmetrical, but note that u and v have the same values: −1, 0.5, 2, 3, and 3.5.

Thus there is a permutation ρ:S→S such that for all s∈S, u(s)=v(ρ(s)).

Another type of uncertainty

This permutation ρ allows us to transform the uncertainty about one's own values (which we don't know how to handle) to other types of uncertainty (which we can).

How so? Let S′ be another copy of S, but with different labels, and let i:S→S′ be the identity map that re-assigns each element to its original label.

Then instead of seeing u and v as different utility functions on S, we can see them as both being the same utility function w on S′, with uncertainty over a map m from S to S′. This map m is i with probability p([u]) and i∘ρ with probability p([v]).

Thus the agent should see itself as a w-maximiser, with standard uncertainty over the map m (this could be seen as uncertainty over the consequences of choosing a strategy). This means it will maximise [p([u])u+p([v])v], as long as u and v are related by a permutation on S.

In this particular case, if p([u]) and p([v]) are close to 0.5, this means that the red strategy will be selected:

Note that permutations includes the symmetric

...
Use and misuse of models: case study
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-04-27T14:36:15.140Z

Some time ago, I discovered a post comparing basic income and basic job ideas. This sought to analyse the costs of paying everyone a guaranteed income versus providing them with a basic job with that income. The author spelt out his assumptions and put together a two models with a few components (including some whose values were drawn from various probability distributions). Then he ran a Monte Carlo simulation to get a distribution of costs for either policy.

Normally I should be very much in favour of this approach. It spells out the assumptions, it uses models, it decomposes the problem, it has stochastic uncertainty... Everything seems ideal. To top it off, the author concluded with a challenge aiming at improving reasoning around this subject:

How to Disagree: Write Some Code

This is a common theme in my writing. If you are reading my blog you are likely to be a coder. So shut the fuck up and write some fucking code. (Of course, once the code is written, please post it in the comments or on github.)

I've laid out my reasoning in clear, straightforward, and executable form. Here it is again. My conclusions are simply the logical result of my assumptions plus basic math - if I'm wrong, either Python is computing the wrong answer, I got really unlucky in all 32,768 simulation runs, or you one of my assumptions is wrong.

My assumption being wrong is the most likely possibility. Luckily, this is a problem that is solvable via code.

And yet... I found something very unsatisfying. And it took me some time to figure out why. It's not that these models are helpful, or that they're misleading. It's that they're both simultaneously.

To explain, consider the result of the Monte Carlo simulations. Here are the outputs (I added the red lines; we'll get to them soon):

The author concluded from these outputs that a basic job was much more efficient - less costly - than a basic income (roughly 1 trillion cost versus 3.4 trillion US dollars). He changed a few assumptions to test whether the result held up:

For example, maybe I'm overestimating the work disincentive for Basic Income and grossly underestimating the administrative overhead of the Basic Job. Lets assume both of these are true. Then what?

The author then found similar results, with some slight shifting of the probability masses.

The problem: what really determined the result

So what's wrong with this ap...
Meetup : Slatestar Codex Sao Paulo
by leohmarruda — 2017-04-27T12:48:26.128Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Slatestar Codex Sao Paulo

WHEN:
06 May 2017 02:00:00PM (-0300)

WHERE:
Rua Antonio Carlos 452, São Paulo Brazil

Encontro mensal de racionalistas, novatos são bem vindos!
Falaremos sobre Slatestar codex, teremos discussões diversas e jogos de tabuleiro no final.

Discussion article for the meetup : Slatestar Codex Sao Paulo
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Shallow Questions
by rocurley — 2017-04-27T04:08:32.752Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Shallow Questions

WHEN:
01 May 2017 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Yerba Buenna Gardens

PLEASE NOTE: THE MEETUP WAS MOVED TODAY.
We’re trying another new format this week! Please come and let us know what you think.
This time, instead of doing deep questions with a few people, we’ll be doing quick rounds where you spend 5 minutes talking to someone else, then rotate. We’ll have a couple of conversational prompts to help out, but it won’t be too structured; the goal is to just get familiar with a lot of individual faces at the meetup group.
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.
We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Shallow Questions
Introducing the Instrumental Rationality Sequence
by  — 2017-04-26T21:53:17.784Z

What is this project?

I am going to be writing a new sequence of articles on instrumental rationality. The end goal is to have a compiled ebook of all the essays, so the articles themselves are intended to be chapters in the finalized book. There will also be pictures.

I intend for the majority of the articles to be backed by somewhat rigorous research, similar in quality to Planning 101 (with perhaps a few less citations). Broadly speaking, the plan is to introduce a topic, summarize the research on it, give some models and mechanisms, and finish off with some techniques to leverage the models.

The rest of the sequence will be interspersed with general essays on dealing with these concepts, similar to In Defense of the Obvious. Lastly, there will be a few experimental essays on my attempt to synthesize existing models into useful-but-likely-wrong models of my own, like Attractor Theory.

I will likely also recycle / cannibalize some of my older writings for this new project, but I obviously won’t post the repeated material here again as new stuff.

What topics will I cover?

Here is a broad overview of the three main topics I hope to go over:

(Ordering is not set.)

Overconfidence in Planning: I’ll be stealing stuff from Planning 101 and rewrite a bit for clarity, so not much will be changed. I’ll likely add more on the actual models of how overconfidence creeps into our plans.

Motivation: I’ll try to go over procrastination, akrasia, and behavioral economics (hyperbolic discounting, decision instability, precommitment, etc.)

Habituation: This will try to cover what habits are, conditioning, incentives, and ways to take the above areas and habituate them, i.e. actually putting instrumental rationality techniques into practice.

Other areas I may want to cover:

Assorted Object-Level Things: The Boring Advice Repository has a whole bunch of assorted ways to improve life that I think might be useful to reiterate in some fashion.

Aversions and Ugh Fields: I don’t know too much about these things from a domain knowledge perspective, but it’s my impression that being able to debug these sorts of internal sticky situations is a very powerful skill. If I were to write this section, I’d try to focus on Focusing and some assorted S1/S2 communication things. And maybe also epistemics.

Ultimately, the point...
Background Reading: The Real Hufflepuff Sequence Was The Posts We Made Along The Way
by Raemon — 2017-04-26T18:15:44.592Z

This is the fourth post of the Project Hufflepuff sequence. Previous posts:

Introduction
Who exactly is the Rationality Community? (i.e. who is Project Hufflepuff trying to help)
Straw Hufflepuffs and Lone Heroes

Epistemic Status: Tries to get away with making nuanced points about social reality by using cute graphics of geometric objects. All models are wrong. Some models are useful.

Traditionally, when nerds try to understand social systems and fix the obvious problems in them, they end up looking something like this:

Social dynamics is hard to understand with your system 2 (i.e. deliberative/logical) brain. There's a lot of subtle nuances going on, and typically, nerds tend to see the obvious stuff, maybe go one or two levels deeper than the obvious stuff, and miss that it's in fact 4+ levels deep and it's happening in realtime faster than you can deliberate. Human brains are pretty good (most of the time) at responding to the nuances intuitively. But in the rationality community, we've self-selected for a lot of people who:

Don't really trust things that they can't understand fully with their system 2 brain.
Tend not to be as naturally skilled at intuitive mainstream social styles.
Are trying to accomplish things that mainstream social interactions aren't designed to accomplish (i.e. thinking deeply and clearly on a regular basis).

This post is an overview of essays that rationalist-types have written over the past several years, that I think add up to a "secret sequence" exploring why social dynamics are hard, and why they are important to get right. This may useful both to understand some previous attempts by the rationality community to change social dynamics on purpose, as well as to current endeavors to improve things.

(Note: I occasionally have words in [brackets], where I think original jargon was pointing in a misleading direction and I think it's worth changing)

To start with, a word of caution:

Armchair sociolology can be harmful [link] - Ozy's post is pertinent - most essays below fall into the category of "armchair sociology", and attempts by nerds to understand and articulate social-dynamics that they aren't actually that good at. Several times when an outsider has looked in at rationalist attempts to understood human interaction they've said "Oh my god, this is the blind...
Meetup : Chicago Applied Rationality Training 
by mingyuan — 2017-04-26T16:17:50.334Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Applied Rationality Training

WHEN:
30 April 2017 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Harper Memorial Library Room 148, 1116 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637

The Chicago rationality 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 Sunday we'll do a third session of applied rationality training! At this week's meeting I'll be teaching Internal Double Crux. If you're unfamiliar with the normal Double Crux technique, take a few minutes to look through the write-up here - though this is quite different from what we'll be doing, it's useful to have the concept of finding cruxes. And don't worry if you missed the last meetings; I'll make sure you're caught up!

If you're interested in rationality-related events in the Chicago area, request to be added to our Google Group and I'll approve you!

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Applied Rationality Training
[Stub] Extortion and Pascal's wager
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-04-26T13:07:54.118Z

The premises of Pascal's wager are normally presented as abstract facts about the universe - there happens to (maybe) be a god, who happens to have set up the afterlife for the suffering of unbelievers.

But, assuming we ever manage to distinguish trade from extortion, this seems a situation of classical extortion. So if god follows a timeless decision theory - and what other kind of decision theory would it follow? - the correct answer would seem to be to reject the whole deal out of hand, even if you assume god exists.

Or, in other words, respond to a god that offers you heaven, but ignore one that threatens you with hell.
Actors and scribes, words and deeds
by Benquo — 2017-04-26T05:12:29.199Z

[Epistemic status: exploratory exercise in naming and concept-formation.]

Among the kinds of people, are the Actors, and the Scribes. Actors mainly relate to speech as action that has effects. Scribes mainly relate to speech as a structured arrangement of pointers that have meanings.

I previously described this as a distinction between promise-keeping "Quakers" and impulsive "Actors," but I think this missed a key distinction. There's "telling the truth," and then there's a more specific thing that's more obviously distinct from even Actors who are trying to make honest reports: keeping precisely accurate formal accounts. This leaves out some other types – I'm not exactly sure how it relates to engineers and diplomats, for instance – but I think I have the right names for these two things now.

Summary

Everyone agrees that words have meaning; they convey information from the speaker to the listener or reader. That's all they do. So when I used the phrase “words have meanings” to describe one side of a divide between people who use language to report facts, and people who use language to enact roles, was I strawmanning the other side?

I say no. Many common uses of language, including some perfectly legitimate ones, are not well-described by "words have meanings." For instance, people who try to use promises like magic spells to bind their future behavior don't seem to consider the possibility that others might treat their promises as a factual representation of what the future will be like.

Some uses of language do not simply describe objects or events in the world, but are enactive, designed to evoke particular feelings or cause particular actions. Even when speech can only be understood as a description of part of a model of the world, the context in which a sentence is uttered often implies an active intent, so if we only consider the direct meaning of the text, we will miss the most important thing about the sentence.

Some apparent uses of language’s denotative features may in fact be purely enactive. This is possible because humans initially learn language mimetically, and try to copy usage before understanding what it’s for. Primarily denotative language users are likely to assume that structural inconsistencies in speech are errors, when t...
In support of yak shaving part 2
by Elo — 2017-04-26T01:41:15.455Z

part 1 of yak shaving. It wan necessary to write part two because part 1 was not clear enough about what the problem is. I don't disagree with the comments, and I apologise for not presenting it better in the first round. (part 1 on lesswrong)

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/yak-shaving-2/

You decide today is a day for getting things done, it is after all your day off. You do what any person concerned with work does. You sit down at your desk. When you do you notice two empty tea cups and a one-sip-left in a can of soft drink. Not liking a messy environment you figure you will quickly tidy up. You take the teacups and put them on the kitchen bench. You take the can to the recycling bin when you realise it's full and needs to be taken out to the garbage bin.

You take the rubbish to the garage and realise tonight is bin night anyway so you put the recycling bin. While you are at it you put all the bins to the curb. You get back to the kitchen and find the teacup is actually sitting on a pile of unopened mail. You open what looks like the bills in the pile and mentally note to deal with them when you get back to your desk. so you leave them on the kitchen table to take back with you.

You get to the teacups and realise you are out of dishwashing detergent. You will have to go buy some. You go to get the car keys and notice the washing basket is full. You decide to quickly put the washing on before you go. That will save time. You get in the car and discover it's nearly out of petrol. And the supermarket is it the other direction from the petrol station.

While you are out you grab a coffee and lunch before getting back. Then you hit traffic and get home quite late. You bring in the mail but notice the mailbox post is rotting. you have some spare wood in the garage but your work bench has the remnants of when you tried to fix the shelf for your bathroom. You could just fix the mailbox post with cable ties but how long would that last?

With a stubborn determination to get SOMETHING done today you take the mailbox into your work bench, and start working on top of the other project because you basically have no choice any more. When you go to measure and mark the wood it seems like every pencil needs sharpenin...