trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Ideas for a fact checking widget
by Yoav Ravid — 2019-03-18T14:25:28.535Z

Just had this idea, writing while I'm excited about it -

We all know the problem of fake new, of too much information to be checked - and that most people don't know how to do that, don't want to, or just don't have the time or energy.

And i can't blame them, it is hard. it's not like i fact-check everything i read.

so here's what i would like to see -

An embedded widget for news-sites, that automatically curates fact checking from many/all fact-checking websites. this is not a website or a browser extension that does it, but server-side. so everyone reading the article would see the fact checking results, and also see whether there's a consensus or a disagreement between the fact-checkers.

This will make people think critically about the things they read, and journalists at major news organizations would think twice before publishing.

And this isn't useful only for news outlets - this can also be used by social media (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit). If a post had any fact checking made on it, it'll have a small icon, which brings up a popup with the widget once clicked. truly, it can be used in any place which wants it's audience to think critically.

It can be done using a URL based approach, like the new dissenter extension. but how it is developed matters less, so i won't elaborate on that.

the main caveat is - most news outlets don't have an incentive to embed this widget unless many do and it becomes the norm (cause the credibility it gives them isn't worth the added effort). so you got a coordination problem.

but I'm optimistic. i know many news sources which i believe would like to become first adopters. and when you already have ~40 websites (plus all the fact checkers) it's easier to put pressure on larger outlets. until it's embedded at most places it should, and people become septic of those who don't embed it.

I'm not a developer but to me it doesn't seem very complicated to develop (correct me if I'm wrong). but i think it has great potential.

Please share your thoughts, and if you would be willing to help make this a reality in any way.
Implications of living within a Simulation
by Tater — 2019-03-18T06:22:57.731Z

Disclaimer:

It is important to already understand the simulation argument given by Nick Bostrom. This post assumes that we are in an ancestor simulation, so if you do not know what that is, definitely read this first.

Reader discretion advised, as this rabbit hole is pretty deep...

Implications of living within a simulation

If we assume that we are in an ancestor simulation, then it might be worth while to consider what we know about our sim. There are a few things that we can immediately agree on, such as the physical rules of our universe that are not naturally breakable like the speed of light. Also we can agree that this simulation is vast if what we call "the universe" is our simulation.

Despite us knowing these thing, there is far more that we do not know such as the nature of the beings who created the sim. Is is us, or a different life form? For what purpose are we being simulated?

The question of the simulations purpose intrigues me the most. More specifically, what is our role in the simulation's purpose.

Surely it must have a purpose. Perhaps they are trying to discover things about the base universe that are only reasonably possible through simulation. If it is us, then they might be observing humans directly, and looking for answers they have lost to time. Point being, I could speculate all day on the purpose and achieve nothing concrete.

Okay so we don't know the purpose, but something disturbing occurred to me after this question consumed me for months. Any possible reason for the simulation has one of two facts attached to it. Either the simulation is one specifically of humans, or it has nothing to do with us whatsoever. In other words, we are either the subjects of it, or an anomaly in a simulation of infinite possibility created for an unknown purpose.

So if we are not the subject, then do we even want the simulators to know that we exist?

It is troubling not knowing the purpose because we could be interfering with it. For instance, if they want to observe large scale universal events (planets colliding, supernovas, etc.), then life has the potential to directly interfere with that goal. They could send an asteroid at us if they felt we interfered with their goals. Perhaps we stress the simulation by smashing particles together and creating extremely small black holes for a few nano-seconds. Frankly we could just be increasin...
What failure looks like
by paulfchristiano — 2019-03-17T20:18:59.800Z

The stereotyped image of AI catastrophe is a powerful, malicious AI system that takes its creators by surprise and quickly achieves a decisive advantage over the rest of humanity.

I think this is probably not what failure will look like, and I want to try to paint a more realistic picture. I’ll tell the story in two parts:

Part I: machine learning will increase our ability to “get what we can measure,” which could cause a slow-rolling catastrophe. ("Going out with a whimper.")
Part II: ML training, like competitive economies or natural ecosystems, can give rise to “greedy” patterns that try to expand their own influence. Such patterns can ultimately dominate the behavior of a system and cause sudden breakdowns. ("Going out with a bang," an instance of optimization daemons.)

I think these are the most important problems if we fail to solve intent alignment.

In practice these problems will interact with each other, and with other disruptions/instability caused by rapid progress. These problems are worse in worlds where progress is relatively fast, and fast takeoff can be a key risk factor, but I’m scared even if we have several years.

With fast enough takeoff, my expectations start to look more like the caricature---this post envisions reasonably broad deployment of AI, which becomes less and less likely as things get faster. I think the basic problems are still essentially the same though, just occurring within an AI lab rather than across the world.

(None of the concerns in this post are novel.)

Part I: You get what you measure

If I want to convince Bob to vote for Alice, I can experiment with many different persuasion strategies and see which ones work. Or I can build good predictive models of Bob’s behavior and then search for actions that will lead him to vote for Alice. These are powerful techniques for achieving any goal that can be easily measured over short time periods.

But if I want to help Bob figure out whether he should vote for Alice---whether voting for Alice would ultimately help create the kind of society he wants---that can’t be done by trial and error. To solve such tasks we need to understand what we are doing and why it will yield good outcomes. We still need to use data in order to improve over time, but we need to understand how to update on new data in order to improve.

Some examples of easy-to-measure vs. hard-to-measure goals:

Persuading me, vs.

...
Insights from Munkres' Topology
by Rafael Harth — 2019-03-17T16:52:46.256Z

This is about the Math Textbook Topology from Miri's research guide. (You can find the pdf online for free.) I got this book about a year ago. It takes a rigorous bottom-up approach that requires almost no prior knowledge but a lot of time. It's long and there are many exercises. I've read most of the book and done most of the exercises in the parts I read. It taught me about topology, about proving theorems, and about being efficient with Latex.

Chapter 1: Set Theory and Logic

This is a general introduction to highest mathematics and has nothing to do with topology. It introduces fundamental concepts such as logical implications, sets, tuples, relations, and functions. I've worked through this perhaps more thoroughly than I needed to, but I got some real value out of it: the book makes some things explicit that are often brushed over, such as when and why one is allowed to use proofs by induction, or what hides behind the supremum operation on an ordered set, and when one is allowed to use it.

The most interesting part about this was the construction of the usual number sets. Rather than beginning by defining N (for example through n={0,...,n−1} as is done in ZFC), it starts by asserting the existence of a set R called the real numbers, and of two operators +,⋅:R2→R and an order relation < on R which fulfil a list of eight axioms. From there, the sets Z and Q are constructed out of R.

Two of the axioms on R state that < has the least-upper-bound property (which is precisely what is needed for the supremum) and that, given x<y in R, there is an element z∈R such that x<z<y.

This approach is quite different from the ZFC construction: now R is taken to be the most fundamental set rather than something one needs to be constructed through a sequence of complicated steps. This intuition is compatible with the rest of the book: as a topological space, R is a more standard example than N. The approach also requires less work.

Chapter 2: Topological Spaces and Continuous Functions

A topological space is a pair (X,T) where X is any set and T a set of subsets of X, that is, T∈P(P(X)), or equivalently T⊂P(X). One can think of the topology as a bunch of bubbles covering the elements of X. A topology must meet the following three axioms:

(1): ∅,X∈T

(2): ∀O1,...,On∈T:(O1∩...∩On)∈T

(3): ∀{Oj}j∈J⊂T:(⋃j∈JOj)∈T

That is, the topology is closed under arb...
Motivational Meeting Place
by Vincent B — 2019-03-17T16:17:05.119Z

This is an idea that appealed to me, so I decided to give it a shot. Read on if you’re interested.

What’s the idea?

Provide a place where people can ‚meet‘ and talk about their work, without feeling like aliens and having to explain themselves all the time.

Why LessWrong?

Where I live, there are no Meetups (LessWrong, MIRI or otherwise) nearby. The greatest probability of meeting like-minded people is the internet; even there, you have to know where to look. This isn’t a problem usually. Much of the work that I do can be done alone. It is not required to have someone nearby, with whom I can talk about my work. Yet not having someone to talk to, who understands what my goals are or why I care about these sorts of things, often made me feel very alone and frustrated.

I tried telling my friends on a semi-regular basis what I was working on and how I was faring, but while this generated some interest, I often ended up having to explain thrice as much as the content of my actual talk, just to get a fraction of the meaning across. It was both time-consuming and exhaustive: that counteracted its purpose as a simple motivational tactic. Not to mention, I’m still not quite sure that it is right to use other people like this, when it is clear that you’re the only one who gets something out of it.
LessWrong would provide a safe alternative, if one could set up such a ‚meeting place‘ in the form of a sub-page or something.

What prompted this idea?

I discovered that reporting what I work on during the day, even in the form of keeping automated records (there are useful apps for this), is a great motivation booster. It’s a version of a feedback-loop that I can control:

1. I work on goal X for 2 hours or more.
2. After which I write a short note of what I worked on.
3. This repeats throughout the day, with various topics and length of work.
4. At the end of the day, I see a full record of what I worked on and for how long.
5. This is physical, undeniable evidence of actually being the person that I want to be. I get a mental boost of happiness, confirming that yes, today I actually did work on what I wanted to work on. This strengthens my resolve to do just as well or better the next day. In the evening, I can quite happily spend the time until I fall asleep thinking about what I did throughout the day, how it affected my goals in a real, measurable way (for example, studying a cer...
Ask LW: Have you read Yudkowsky's AI to Zombie book?
by CaiwitzAzaria — 2019-03-17T13:31:07.155Z

How many times have you read it? Did you start with the book and move to the website? (Anecdotally: I enjoyed until the half of it reading it while commuting but lately I've found that you can read them online (for free?!) And also have comments to every essay in part.(which I found insightful) should one start again but read it through LessWrong and the comments?
How large is the fallout area of the biggest cobalt bomb we can build?
by habryka — 2019-03-17T05:50:13.848Z

Cobalt bombs are the currently most effective way I know of to make large areas of land unlivable for a long period of time. I don't actually know the fallout area of such a bomb. The Wikipedia article only has the following mildly helpful section:

Theoretically, a device containing 510 metric tons of Co-59 can spread 1 g of the material to each square km of the Earth's surface (510,000,000 km2). If one assumes that all of the material is converted to Co-60 at 100 percent efficiency and if it is spread evenly across the Earth's surface, it is possible for a single bomb to kill every person on Earth. However, in fact, complete 100% conversion into Co-60 is unlikely; a 1957 British experiment at Maralinga showed that Co-59's neutron absorption ability was much lower than predicted, resulting in a very limited formation of Co-60 isotope in practice.

I don't know whether a single bomb that efficiently distributes 510 tons of material is remotely feasible, and the section about Co-60 conversion also suggests that the actual effectiveness of such a bomb would be far below this theoretical maximum.

Does there exist any existing literature that estimates the practical fallout area of a cobalt bomb? Or can we just do a simple Fermi to estimate things ourselves?

I am interested in this question because it seems relevant to estimate the worst case scenario of a nuclear war, and the likelihood of civilization recovering after such an event.

I will award $50 to the best answer by the end of next week, based on my gut sense, and I might pay out more if someone gives a particularly exceptional answer.
A cognitive intervention for wrist pain
by rmoehn — 2019-03-17T05:26:58.910Z

Intention

(Added 2019-03-19.)

The web contains much information about wrist pain, RSI, carpal tunnel syndrome
etc. Most of it suggests that it comes from repetitive small movements, such as
typing. It warns about dire consequences, and recommends improving workplace
ergonomics, stretching and doing other exercises. This is helpful when the cause
of the pain is physiological.

For other people the repetitive movements are harmless, but stress is the
primary cause of the pain. For these the common advice, although no doubt given
with good intention, can lead to a vicious cycle of pain causing stress causing
more pain. I don't know the proportion of the two groups, but I belonged to the
latter.

In this article I propose a way to break the vicious cycle. Ideally, everyone
writing about wrist issues would take care not to plunge the members of the
second group into anxiety and pain.

The intervention

I assume that your thoughts follow this pattern:

I have wrist pain. It comes from typing. Typing is a repetitive movement that
strains my wrists and causes accumulating injury. I can't stop typing, because
it's necessary for my job. I am afraid that the pain will get worse until I
can't do my job anymore and lose my income.

You can probably substitute any desired outcome for ‘income’, any necessary
activity that you think is harmful for ‘typing’, and some other locations for
‘wrist’. If your thoughts don't follow this pattern, this intervention might not
help you. I'd be curious to read your particular thoughts in the comments, though.

Let's introduce three more thoughts. One:

Stress (in the common language sense – worrying, anxiety, things not going the
way you want them to) can cause physical issues, including pain. Should I
believe that? Well, I've heard of people who get a headache when they're
stressed. And some people get chest
pain when they're
anxious. There is a whole branch of
medicine trying to find
out when and how our mind affects our body. And there are people who claim
that their wrist pain went away after they changed their thinking. So I should
at least assign some credence to the hypothesis that my wrist pain is caused
by stress.

Two:

Typing isn't necessarily bad for the body. The majority of high-volume typers
have no problem with it. (Otherwise it would be a major productivity crisis in
typing-heavy workplaces.) And many of them type without break

...
Has "politics is the mind-killer" been a mind-killer?
by SonnieBailey — 2019-03-17T03:05:06.935Z

To my mind, one of the seminal pieces of writing in the rationalsphere is Eliezer's short essay titled "Politics is the mind-killer".

YMMV, but it had a big influence on me personally. On reflection, however, I think its influence was negative rather than positive - for me, personally.

I don't really put the blame on Eliezer. It's on me, for not reading closely enough and taking broader conclusions than were appropriate. But the net effect for me was that the idea that "politics is the mind-killer" was, to some extent, a mind-killer of its own.

Below I'm going to break down some of the comments and how they impacted me:

The first thing I want to acknowledge is that there was one aspect of this article that I totally misread/misinterpreted. Eliezer says "Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality - but it's a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality".

But he adds a caveat to the above sentence - "unless all the discussants are already rational". I think the source of my misreading is that I took this to mean that you can't talk about politics rationally, unless you're talking with "rational" actors - period. Reading this excerpt more closely I can see where I went wrong. But I wonder if I'm alone.

The first sentence in the article is that "People go funny in the head when talking about politics". It's a good lede, but it would be more accurate to say that "People TEND TO go funny in the head when talking about politics". I don't think it should be a given that if you're talking about politics, people are going funny in the head. In fact, wouldn't this presupposition put you off talking about politics? Personally, it did for me, for many years.

Eliezer says that "In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death". The truth of the matter is, that policy decisions can often have life-and-death consequences. It may not be immediate, and it may not be personal, which I think is the point he's trying to make. But the scope of political decisions impact a lot of people, and this shouldn't be downplayed. Arguably, policy decisions have a much bigger impact on our fellow countrypeople than any individual decision we can make.

He also
...
Comparison of decision theories (with a focus on logical-counterfactual decision theories)
by riceissa — 2019-03-16T21:15:28.768Z

Introduction

Summary

This post is a comparison of various existing decision theories, with a focus
on decision theories that use logical counterfactuals (a.k.a. the kind of decision theories most discussed on LessWrong). The post compares the
decision theories along outermost iteration (action vs policy vs algorithm),
updatelessness (updateless or updateful), and type of counterfactual used
(causal, conditional, logical). It then explains the decision theories in more
detail, in particular giving an expected utility formula for each. The post then gives
examples of specific existing decision problems where the decision theories
give different answers.

Value-added

There are some other comparisons of decision theories (see the “Other comparisons” section),
but they either (1)
don’t focus on logical-counterfactual decision theories; or (2) are outdated
(written before the new functional/logical decision theory terminology came about).

To give a more personal motivation, after reading through a bunch of papers and posts about these
decision theories, and feeling like I understood the basic ideas, I
remained highly confused about basic things like “How is UDT different from
FDT?”, “Why was TDT deprecated?”, and “If TDT performs worse than FDT, then
what’s one decision problem where they give different outputs?”
This post hopes to clarify these and other questions.

None of the decision theory material in this post is novel. I am still learning
the basics myself, and I would appreciate any corrections (even about subtle/nitpicky stuff).

Audience

This post is intended for people who are similarly confused about the
differences between TDT, UDT, FDT, and LDT. In terms of reader background assumed,
it would be good to know the statements to some standard decision theory
problems (Newcomb’s problem, smoking lesion, Parfit’s hitchhiker, transparent
box Newcomb’s problem, counterfactual mugging (a.k.a. curious benefactor; see page 56, footnote 89)) and the “correct” answers to
them, and having enough background in math to understand the expected utility
formulas.

If you don’t have the background, I would recommend reading
chapters 5 and 6 of
Gary Drescher’s Good and Real (explains well the idea of subjunctive means–end relations),
the FDT paper (explains well how FDT’s action selection variant works, and how FDT differs from CDT and EDT),
“Cheating Death in Damascus”, and
“

...
Terrorism and Russell's love of excitement
by CaiwitzAzaria — 2019-03-16T06:53:39.382Z

For some closure for the events that happened in New Zealand I just want to share this speech by Bertrand Russell that he delivered winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The title means love for excitement is the subject that Bertrand Russell points in the speech that follows. If human would get along this love for excitement that creates war should be solved.

[...] come now to other motives which, though in a sense less fundamental than those we have been considering, are still of considerable importance. The first of these is love of excitement. Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings. When white men first effect contact with some unspoilt race of savages, they offer them all kinds of benefits, from the light of the gospel to pumpkin pie. These, however, much as we may regret it, most savages receive with indifference. What they really value among the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor which enables them, for the first time in their lives, to have the illusion for a few brief moments that it is better to be alive than dead. Red Indians, while they were still unaffected by white men, would smoke their pipes, not calmly as we do, but orgiastically, inhaling so deeply that they sank into a faint. And when excitement by means of nicotine failed, a patriotic orator would stir them up to attack a neighbouring tribe, which would give them all the enjoyment that we (according to our temperament) derive from a horse race or a General Election. The pleasure of gambling consists almost entirely in excitement. Monsieur Huc describes Chinese traders at the Great Wall in winter, gambling until they have lost all their cash, then proceeding to lose all their merchandise, and at last gambling away their clothes and going out naked to die of cold. With civilized men, as with primitive Red Indian tribes, it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace applaud when war breaks out; the emotion is exactly the same as at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat more serious.

To read it full on: https://www.nobelprize.org/pr

...