trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities
by linkhyrule5 — 2013-07-23T08:37:09.151Z

This article was composed after reading Torture vs. Dust Specks and Circular Altruism, at which point I noticed that I was confused.

Both posts deal with versions of the sacred-values effect, where one value is considered "sacred" and cannot be traded for a "secular" value, no matter the ratio. In effect, the sacred value has infinite utility relative to the secular value.

This is, of course, silly. We live in a scarce world with scarce resources; generally, a secular utilon can be used to purchase sacred ones - giving money to charity to save lives, sending cheap laptops to poor regions to improve their standard of education.

Which implies that the entire idea of "tiers" of value is silly, right?

Well... no.

One of the reasons we are not still watching the Sun revolve around us, while we breath a continuous medium of elemental Air and phlogiston flows out of our wall-torches, is our ability to simplify problems. There's an infamous joke about the physicist who, asked to measure the volume of a cow, begins "Assume the cow is a sphere..." - but this sort of simplification, willfully ignoring complexities and invoking the airless, frictionless plane, can give us crucial insights.

Consider, then, this gedankenexperiment. If there's a flaw in my conclusion, please explain; I'm aware I appear to be opposingthe consensus.

The Weight of a Life: Or, Seat Cushions

This entire universe consists of an empty white room, the size of a large stadium. In it are you, Frank, and occasionally an omnipotent AI we'll call Omega. (Assume, if you wish, that Omega is running this room in simulation; it's not currently relevant.) Frank is irrelevant, except for the fact that he is known to exist.

Now, looking at our utility function here...

Well, clearly, the old standby of using money to measure utility isn't going to work; without a trading partner money's just fancy paper (or metal, or plastic, or whatever.)

But let's say that the floor of this room is made of cold, hard, and decidedly uncomfortable Unobtainium. And while the room's lit with a sourceless white glow, you'd really prefer to have your own lighting. Perhaps you're an art aficionado, and so you might value Omega bringing in the Mona Lisa.

And then, of course, there's Frank's existence. That'll do for now.

Now, Omega appears before you, and offers you a deal.

It will give you a nanofab - a personal fabricator capable of creating...
Polyphasic Sleep Support Group
by KenChen — 2013-07-23T01:00:49.227Z

Because there are a significant number of people attempting polyphasic sleep simultaneously, I figured that it would be high-value to create a Google group / mailing list for those who are trying it and would like emotional support, advice, and encouragement. This is for sharing your experiences, techniques to fall asleep or wake up, questions about whether your response is typical, etc. Knowing that there are other people out there trying the same thing helps one stay the course -- especially in the middle of the night, when the people around you are probably sleeping.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/polyphasic-support
Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in software patents
by RolfAndreassen — 2013-07-22T20:22:37.694Z

This post contains some thoughts around software-patent strategies for large tech companies, in particular how the ability to block others' applications seems to set up an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and may change the strategic landscape for patents entirely.

Joel Spolsky writes of recent successes in blocking bad patent applications:

Micah showed me a document from the USPTO confirming that they had rejected the patent application, and the rejection relied very heavily on the document I found. This was, in fact, the first “confirmed kill” of Ask Patents, and it was really surprisingly easy.

and suggests that this may lead to a "Mexican Standoff" among major software companies:

My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn’t that be something!

It seems to me that this would be something of a Prisoner's Dilemma situation for the companies: Presumably, each of them is best off if it is the only one that can get any software patents (it defects by blocking the others, they cooperate by not setting up a patent-blocking team), better off if everyone can get patents (everyone cooperates by not having a blocking team), and worst off if nobody can get patents (everyone has a blocking team which they have to pay for). It is Iterated because the decision to block or not block can be made anew every month, or quarter, or whatever. So the question is, will these companies filled with smart people be able to recognise an IPD, and will they cooperate?

Some factors to consider: Setting up a patent-blocking team requires some small amount of effort, so inertia is in favour of cooperation. On the other hand, many individual engineers at these places are likely out of sympathy with the patents that their managers insist on, and may be delighted to push the 'D' button under the guise of sabotaging their competitors. (And at least some of the major tech companies have 20% time or equivalents, ...
Daily Schedules in Combating Akrasia 
by sentientplatypus — 2013-07-22T19:41:29.931Z

For the last several months I've had increasing troubles with motivation to work. Reading dense technical papers, writing, and exercise were all much more difficult to prompt myself into starting and completing. I decided to try making a plan for my day the night before about two weeks back to see if it would help me get the things I wanted to do done. So every night before I go to bed I've been writing up a schedule for the next day, detailing what exactly I want to accomplish for the day and when I intend to go do it.

This has actually worked incredibly well for me in helping with my motivation problems, in fact in a couple days I felt more motivated to work than I can ever remember being before. I'm trying to change up my schedule and leave time for spontaneity to avoid having the plan become monotonous and it doesn't feel that way so far. And the results I'm getting are great: I find I get about 95% of what I plan done when I have a specific time written down for when I'm supposed to do it as opposed to what I'd roughly estimate at 60% completion when I just have some general idea in my head of what to work on over the course of the day.

My theory for why this is working is that when I have a specific time to do something I feel as though I have to do it now or I've failed some test of willpower. If I just have general work to be done, it's far too easy for me to defer to later, so that a lot of what was planned for doesn't get done. I also feel like if I expect to brace my mind for dense technical learning I have a much easier time finishing the material instead of giving up and procrastinating on it halfway through.

I feel like this solution will work mainly for people who have more flexible schedules (as I do at the moment) but could still serve a purpose for anyone with a more rigid schedule who wants to be more productive in their free time.

Has anyone else has tried this type of thing and if so, how did it work out for you over a longer period of time? Also what are people's thoughts on the general idea?
Resources from the Boston Megameetup
by KenChen — 2013-07-22T12:18:29.577Z

LW Boston had a megameetup last week, and it went well. There were a few presentations and an exciting unconference. Here are some materials from the presentations.

Direct Detection of Classically Imperceptible Dark Matter through Quantum Decoherence
Jess Riedel

Slides (PDF): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12316221/Media/Talks/Waterloo_Auxillary_Talk_3.pdf

Paper (arXiv): http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.3061

Julia Programming Language

Leah Hanson

Learn Julia in Y minutes: http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/julia/
The official manual: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/

Complexity Classes Intermediate between P and NP

Joshua Zelinsky

Additional practice exercises and further reading: http://www.scribd.com/doc/155291719/Exercises-for-Intermediate-Complexity
Superrationality and network flow control
by Alex Flint — 2013-07-22T01:49:46.093Z

Computers exchanging messages on a network must decide how fast or slow to transmit messages. If everyone transmits too slowly then the network is underutilized, which is bad for all. If everyone transmits too quickly then most messages on the network are actually flow control messages of the form "your message could not be delivered, please try again later", which is also bad for everyone.

Unfortunately, this leads to a classic prisoner's dilemma. It is in each node's own self-interest to transmit as quickly as possible, since each node has no information about when exactly an intermediate node will accept/drop a message, so transmitting a message earlier never decreases the probability that it will be successful. Of course, this means that the Nash equilibrium is a near-complete network breakdown in which most messages are flow control messages, which is bad for everyone.

Interestingly, some folks at MIT noticed this, and also noticed that the idea of superrationality (of Douglas Hofstadter origins, and the grandfather of TDT and friends) is one way to get past prisoner's dilemmas --- at least if everyone is running the same algorithm, which, on many networks, people mostly are.

The idea put forward in the paper is to design flow control algorithms with this in mind. There is an automated design process in which flow control algorithms with many different parameter settings are sampled and evaluated. The output is a program that gets installed on each node in the network.

Now, to be fair, this isn't exactly TDT: the end-product algorithms do not explicitly consider the behavior of other nodes in the network (although they were designed taking this into account), and the automated design process itself is really just maximizing an ordinary utility function since it does not expect there to be any other automated designers out there. But nevertheless, the link to superrationality, and the fact that the authors themselves picked up on it, was, I thought, quite interesting.
Notes on "The Limits to Growth" and surrounding material
by JonahS — 2013-07-21T22:46:07.370Z

In 1972, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III published The Limits to Growth, a book about the consequences of unchecked population growth and economic growth. The book was very popular at the time, selling 12 million copies. As a part of my work on the project "Can we know what to do about AI?" I did a preliminary investigation of the claims in the book, whether they've been born out, and what the book's impact has been.

The book uses the framework of "systems dynamics," which was pioneered by Jay Forrester. Paul Krugman criticized Forrester as having been unaware of prior overlapping work by economists. So it's possible that the ideas in The Limits to Growth are less novel than it appears on the face of things. I haven't investigated the extent to which this is the case, but may do so later. This blog post focuses on The Limits to Growth.

My initial impression of the book based on what people have written about it was very different from the impression that I formed upon reading the book. The book has been misrepresented (whether denotatively or connotatively) both by critics and by sympathizers. In the first section below, I discuss how the book has been misrepresented, and in the second section I discuss what the book says.

Misrepresentations of The Limits to Growth

In his 2008 paper A comparison of limits to growth with 30 years of reality, Graham Turner describes how the book has been misrepresented by critics:

This is perhaps partly a result of sustained false statements that discredit the LtG. From the time of its publication to contemporary times, the LtG has provoked many criticisms which falsely claim that the LtG predicted resources would be depleted and the world system would collapse by the end of the 20th century. Such claims occur across a range of publication and media types, including scientific peer reviewed journals, books, educational material, national newspaper and magazine articles, and websites (Turner, unpublished).

An article in The Nation seems to suggest that the book's reputation has been tarnished by association with others who made outlandish claims:

[Bjorn] Lomborg and others have accused Limits of hysteria. The book is not hysterical. It was, however, taken up by a social milieu heavily populated by hysterics

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Choose that which is most important to you
by CarlJ — 2013-07-21T22:38:20.032Z

Followup to: The Domain of Politics

To create your own political world view you need to know about societies and your own political goals/values. In this post I'll discuss the latter, and in the next post the former.

What sort of goals? Those which you wish to achieve for their own sake, and not because they simply are a means to an end. That is, those goals you value intrinsically. Or, if you believe that there exists only one ultimate goal or value, then think of those means which are not that far removed from being intrinsic goal. That is, a birthday party might be just of instrumental value but most would agree that it is more far away from the intrinsic value than, say, good tires. I will for the rest of the post assume that most people value a lot of things intrinsically, and by values I will denote intrinsic values.

So, I'd like to draw a line between values and that which achieve those values. The latter is what we're trying to figure out what they are, without first proposing what they are. Those are political systems, or parts of them; they are institutions and laws. This is not to say that these things cannot be valued for their own sake – I put value on a system, possibly for aesthetic reasons – but those values should be disentangled from the other benefit a system produces.

With that in mind, you should now list all the things you value in ranking order. To rank them is necessary since we live in a world of scarce resources, so you won't necessarily achieve all your goals, but you will want to achieve those that are most important to you.

Now, what one values may change over time, so naturally what seems to be most important may also change. That which was on place #7 may go to #1 and vice versa. That is, values are changing with new information and a change in one's condition. That said, one's political values don't probably shift all that much. And even if they do, if you can't predict how they will change, you still need them to be able to know what political system is good for you.

There are many ways to get a feel of what your most highly valued political values are. Introspection, discussing with friends, think through a number of thought experiments, read the literature on what makes most people happy, listen to what experiences have been most horrible or pleasurable to others, etc.. In any case, here's a thought experiment to help...
[Link] Sparrows may be vulnerable to sunk-cost-like effects
by Ishaan — 2013-07-21T22:12:34.534Z

You walk into a store that sells two identical candies. Would you buy the candy that ordinarily costs $2 at 50% off (for one dollar), or the candy that ordinarily costs 10$ for 80% off (for one dollar)?
In an isomorphic situation, sparrows preferred the latter deal.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/publications/pdf/kacelnik_marsh_2002_animbehav_costs.pdf
Introducing Effective Fundraising, a New EA Org
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-07-21T21:39:18.945Z

Many people know about GiveWell and their top-ranked charities. But how easy would it be to make a better one? In "Why It Should Be Easy to Dominate GiveWell's Recommendations", Rob Wiblin notes the simple solution -- fundraise for whatever organizations GiveWell recommends, and raise more than a dollar with each dollar you receive.

Organizations themselves are wary of fundraising, mainly because spending a lot of resources on fundraising messes with their "overhead ratio" or percentage of funds spent directly on the mission. Even if an organization could achieve gains through fundraising, it's outweighed by "looking bad". So ideally, we'd need other people to come together and create an organization that does full-time fundraising for other organizations.

Luckily, an organization has been founded to do just that. Joey Savoie, Xiomara Kikauka, and Lucas Zamprogno have come together to create Effective Fundraising an organization that provides free fundraising to charities with a proven track record of effectiveness, as ranked by GiveWell, Giving What We Can, or Effective Animal Activism. Currently, they're fundraising for both the Against Malaria Foundation and The Humane League, both of which don't do any grant fundraising themselves.

Not only that, but they fundraise using the most effective methods that has been proven by studies -- grant writing and high net worth fundraising. The UK Institute of Fundraising estimates that grant writing returns, on average, $7 for every $1 invested and focusing on high net worth giving can get average returns of $4 for every $1 invested.

Fund Raising: Evaluating and Managing the Fund Development Process also claims that these two are the highest return fundraising campaigns, with a return of $10 and $5 per $1 invested respectively.

You can read more about their values, their epistemology, and strategy, as well as why they're interested in fundraising on their website.

They're still in the "proof of concept" phase and are not currently actively accepting funding, but they seem like a promising opportunity to keep an eye on for the future.

-

Disclaimer: As of 22 July 2013, I am now a volunteer for this organization.

Edited on 22 July 2013 to correct a mistaken citation.

Edited on 2 Oct 2014 -- The Effective Fundraising website has shut down and is

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Meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
by matt — 2013-07-21T19:46:50.427Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality

WHEN: 02 August 2013 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE: 491 King Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003, Australia

Practical rationality. This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month and is distinct from our social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Topics for August:

CfAR Melbourne workshop in February - how to help lock this in

Melbourne Effective Altruism progress report & next actions

Rationality Hacks hosted by Brayden

Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

ETA 2013-07-23: Rationality Hacks hosted by Brayden is our new proposed activity, subject to change by popular outcry on the night.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
The Domain of Politics
by CarlJ — 2013-07-21T18:30:39.355Z

Followup to: How To Construct a Political Ideology

Related to: What Do We Mean By "Rationality"?

Politics is the art of the possible.
The word 'politics' is derived from the Greek word 'poly', meaning many, and the English word 'ticks', meaning blood sucking parasites.

Politics can be inspiring; there have been several groups that have organized to achieve wonderful ends now and in the past. Such as ending slavery, the subjugation of women, and the censorship of ideas. (None of these have, however, been brought to their full completion yet.)

Politics can also be irritating. As when some politician or bureaucrat wastes money or lies in a particularly annoying way, or when the supporters of that politician or that bureau talk about the wonders of politics while ignoring all its bad parts. (Politics can also be horrible and devastating.)

Predictably, some of us who find politics today to be more irritating than inspiring will define politics somewhat differently. For some, politics is ”a relic of a barbaric past” because politics always entails the threat of violence, and if we should ever find ourselves in a better state of affairs, politics will have had nothing to do with it. But many others would contend that wherever there's civic life there's politics – for some that's true even in a stateless society.

So, there's a little disagreement on the definition of politics. For my part, I will use the latter definition, which contends that politics deals with certain areas of life – regarding civic life, elections, war, fund-raising for a cause, influencing cultural norms, establishing alliances and so on. This is almost the same as the definition used by Wiktionary, but it seems to have a broader focus than the one used by Wikipedia. The goal of political action can then be said to be to act rationally in this domain, just as one would act rationally in any other domain.
That definition isn't too detailed, so let me try and give a fuller definition. I will do that by introducing a hypothetical scenario which explores some fundamental political strategies:
You live in a village by a river, and you are interested in building a bridge across it. But a fisherman also lives in the village and if you'd build the bridge it would make it difficult for him to fish during that time. No one else will be directly effected by this project. You bring up...
How To Construct a Political Ideology
by CarlJ — 2013-07-21T15:00:39.411Z

Related to: Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, Logical Rudeness

Politics is sometimes hard to discuss. Partly since most of us seem to unconsciously take political matters with the same degree of seriousness as our forefathers used to, because we use the same mode of thought as they used to. Back then, a bad political choice or alliance, could mean death, while the normal cost today in a democratic society might be ridicule for having supported the losing team or position.

Nevertheless, politics should be taken seriously. Bad politics means that it'll take longer for us humans to reach world peace, an end to hunger and disease, and favourable conditions so that no one will create an unfriendly AI. Therefore, discussing politics is vital so that, someday, some collective actions could be performed to alter the political course for the better.

But what should that collective action be? - what should the new course(s) be? - and who should do it? - and what does "for the better" imply? To engage in politics one needs to be able to give some (implicit or explicit) answers to these questions. This can be done, and in so doing one has constructed a political ideology - which might be similar to existing ideologies or it might be different.

A political ideology might be constructed in various ways. In this and a few more posts I will propose one way of doing that. These posts might be seen as a tutorial in constructing a political ideology. In these posts I will not suggest an answer to what the best political system should be, nor will I follow my own instructions. But if one should follow these instructions I believe that one can answer the questions mentioned above.

Political ideologies might be constructed in various other ways. The one I discuss in my following posts is based on two principles: (1) that one should not propose an answer until one has thought about the question extensively, and (2) that one should consider the most important questions first.

Before writing the next post, here are the points I will discuss in each of them - I will write the posts as an instruction manual so I'll address you, dear reader, through them out:

what is politics, what is the goal of engaging in politics?

what are your most highly valued political goals?

what facts (and interpretations) can explain most societal features, what facts/interpretations will damn most societie

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