trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Harry Potter and the Methods of Psychomagic | Chapter 1: Affect
by Henry Prowbell — 2021-09-15T17:03:06.901Z

This is a Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fiction which contains spoilers. If you haven't, you should read or listen to Eliezer Yudkowsky's original work before reading this.

Chapter 2 >>

“The wizarding world has magical healers. So are there magical equivalents to muggle psychiatrists?”

Deputy Headmistress Minerva McGonagall was sitting in her office riffling through a thick pile of ministry paperwork. When the question registered she stopped and lifted her head to face Harry.

“Harry you poor thing. If there’s anything you need to talk about – anything at all – you can always come to me.”

Harry interrupted, “No, it’s not that. I’m fine. I really am. I just need to know, are there healers that specialize in illnesses like depression, addictions, phobias, those kinds of things?”

“Well, not as far as I know,” she replied. “Let me think... Healer training is 3 years and then another 3 working as an apprentice in Saint Mungo’s but the curriculum is the same for all healers. We have several Hogwarts alumni who started healer training just last year. I could put you in touch if you want? Are you sure you’re okay Harry?”

It was just as he had feared. If there were psychiatric spells as powerful as the healing spells he had seen you simply wouldn’t ever see an unhappy witch or wizard – and that wasn’t the world Harry saw around him.

“But do spells like that exist?” continued Harry.

“Well there’s a spell called Mulceo which can be used for students with phobias. We sometimes have first year students with, say, a crippling fear of spiders – and that’s a problem because they won’t turn up to Care of Magical Creatures class.

“I would have them imagine a spider in their mind’s eye and as they’re doing that, cast the spell. What it does is flood their mind with warm happy memories. Then you repeat it whilst they look at a muggle photograph of a spider, a moving magical photograph, all the way up to petting one of Mr Hagrid’s acromantulas. It’s a way for them to gradually get comfortable with spiders you see.”

Harry suspected that this would work even without magic involved. He couldn’t be entirely sure that the spell did anything. But it was a start.

“You have to understand, even these kinds of weak mind magic are delicate and dangerous. And they’re not taught to students because you can get addicted to using them.”

The night before, Harry had compiled a li...
How to deal with probabilities in the presence of clones?
by depressurize — 2021-09-15T17:01:28.768Z

You find yourself in a room. You know there are only two possible ways you could have gotten into the room, and just a moment earlier you considered them both equally likely:

A: I make 8 identical copies of you and put them in totally identical rooms. A minute passes, then I instantly kill 7 of the copies. (Also, I don't think it matters but your cognition is deterministic, so you know all 8 copies of you stay perfectly in sync until I kill 7 of them.)

B: I make one copy of you and put it in a room. A minute passes, then I do something that has a 7/8 chance of instantly killing the copy.

Now you've appeared in the room, but a minute hasn't passed yet. Regardless of whether A or B is true, you'd experience the same thing either way. Does your estimation of the odds of A:B change?

Now a minute passes and you're still alive. Des your estimation of the odds of A:B change now?.
Oracle predictions don't apply to non-existent worlds
by Chris_Leong — 2021-09-15T09:44:31.730Z

In this post, I hope to persuade you of what I consider to be an important principle when dealing with decision theory and counterfactuals.

Joe Carlsmith describes the Yankees vs. Red Sox Problem as below:

In this case, the Yankees win 90% of games, and you face a choice between the following bets:

Yankees win Red Sox win

You bet on Yankees 1 -2

You bet on Red Sox -1 2

Or, if we think of the outcomes here as “you win your” and “you lose your bet” instead, we get:

You win your bet You lose your bet

You bet on Yankees 1 -2

You bet on Red Sox 2 -1

Before you choose your bet, an Oracle tells you whether you’re going to win your next bet. The issue is that once you condition on winning or losing (regardless of which), you should always bet on the Red Sox. So, the thought goes, EDT always bets on the Red Sox, and loses money 90% of the time. Betting on the Yankees every time does much better.

The mistake is assuming that here is assuming that the Oracle's prediction applies in counterfactuals (worlds that don't...
The Motivated Reasoning Critique of Effective Altruism
by Linch — 2021-09-15T01:43:59.518Z
Link: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pxALB46SEkwNbfiNS/the-motivated-reasoning-critique-of-effective-altruism

I sketch out a plausible critique of effective altruism based on priors of how commonplace motivated reasoning is in the world at large, updated priors based on specific features of the effective altruism community, and some empirical evidence of observed motivated reasoning in our community (keeping in mind both that this is selection biased by my desire to find evidence but also by it being hard to detect motivated reasoning while you're in the middle of a situation).
I recommend keeping comments in the EA Forum if possible, to centralize the conversation.

___

Epistemic status: Half-baked at best

I have often been skeptical of the value of a)

critiques against effective altruism

and b)

fully general arguments

that seem like they can apply to almost anything. However, as I am also a staunch defender of

hypocrisy

, I will now hypocritically attempt to make the case for applying a fully general critique to effective altruism.

In this post, I will claim that:

Motivated reasoning inhibits our ability to acquire knowledge and form reasoned opinions.
Selection bias in who makes which arguments significantly exacerbates the problem of motivated reasoning
Effective altruism should not be assumed to be above these biases. Moreover, there are strong reasons to believe that incentive structures and institutions in effective altruism exacerbate rather than alleviate these biases.
Observed data and experiences in effective altruism support this theory; they are consistent with an environment where motivated reasoning and selection biases are rampant.
To the extent that these biases (related to motivated reasoning) are real, we should expect the harm done to our ability to form reasoned opinions to also seriously harm the project of doing good.

I will use the example of cost-effectiveness analyses as a jumping board for this argument. (I understand that effective altruism, especially outside of global health and development, has largely moved away from explicit expected value calculations and cost-effectiveness analyses. However, I do not believe this change invalidates my argument (see Appendix B)).

I also list a number of tentative ways to counteract motivated reasoning and selection bias in effective altruism:

Encourage and train scientific/general skepticism in EA newcomers.
Try marginally harder to accept newcomers, particularly altruistically motivated on

...
Film Study for Research
by jsteinhardt — 2021-09-14T18:53:25.831Z

Crossposted from my blog, Bounded Regret.

Research ability, like most tasks, is a trainable skill. However, while PhD students and other researchers spend a lot of time doing research, we often don't spend enough time training our research abilities in order to improve. For many researchers, aside from taking classes and reading papers, most of our training is implicit, through doing research and interacting with mentors (usually a single mentor--our PhD advisor or research manager). By analogy, we are like basketball players who somehow made it to the NBA, and are now hoping that simply playing basketball games will be enough to keep improving.

Drawing on this analogy, I want to talk about two habits that are ubiquitous among elite athletes, that have analogs in research that I feel are underutilized. Those who do pursue these habits as PhD students often improve quickly as researchers.

The first habit is film study. Almost every high-level athlete watches films of other players of the same sport, including historical greats, contemporary rivals, and themselves. This allows them to incorporate good ideas from other players' games as well as to catch and eliminate flaws in their own game. Even the very best players benefit from watching film of themselves and others.

The second habit, which I call act-reflect-ask, occurs in the course of a game or scrimmage. I'll describe this from my own experience (although I'm by no means an elite athlete, I've learned this from people who are). After a point ends, I generally think about what happened during the point--Was there anything I wanted to do better? Did anything unexpected happen? Then I'll re-run those parts in my head, simulating what I would have done differently until I feel like I know how to consistently make the right decision. In some cases, I can't figure it out--perhaps I was playing defense, someone beat me, and I can't figure out what they did or can't figure out the counter. In that case I'll ask a teammate about it (or the person who beat me, if it's a friendly scrimmage) and talk it over until I see the right strategy for the future.

Both of these strategies are invaluable for improving. They leverage the fact that as humans, we tend to learn socially: we are very good at adopting strategies from others, so film study and asking are efficient ways to learn. Both strategies also lead to deliberate pra...
Why didn't we find katas for rationality?
by ChristianKl — 2021-09-14T16:43:44.648Z

It's my impression that various rationalist groups formed what they called dojos with the intend of having a structure that's similar to a martial arts dojo.

One of the key aspects of that institution is the practice of katas. Katas are a series of moves that can be practiced together to learn a particular art.

As far as I can see we didn't find anything that fits into that spot.

Why didn't we? Is it because rationality inherently can't be broken down into that form? Is it because we approached the problem wrongly?
GPT-Augmented Blogging
by lsusr — 2021-09-14T11:55:34.302Z

This post was an exercise to find out how much of writing an article I could offload to a machine. In this post, anything written by me is in bold. Anything written by GPT-3 is in regular font. Headings and subheadings are a mix. The GPT-3 output is often highly-curated. Sometimes it is even stitched together from multiple outputs. I have also added light formatting such as title fonts and italicization where appropriate.

I think the most important use of GPT-3 will be to augment human writers. I'm curious how much of my writing can be automated so I started with titles. I took my top sixteen highest-rated articles on Less Wrong (excluding duplicates from series) and asked GPT-3 to generate other articles which might become popular too.

GPT-3 is really good at generating titles. It's better than I am. In fact, I had to pare down this list a lot to keep it down to a couple of minutes. I would be very curious to hear from GPT-3 about why these titles seem so excellent. These titles have a kind of "attention-getting cleverness" which I don't feel I can replicate by hand, even though many of them are a bit strange or nonsensical.

Using a neural network to generate good titles also suggests a new way to get people interested in Less Wrong. We can use GPT-3 to generate a bunch of high quality articles, put them on the recommended list, and then watch as people enjoy our content without us needing to work very hard. This seems like a much more scalable model for writing than the "one person writing hard every day" model we're currently on.

My favorite titles:

How to Write an Essay that Grabs the Reader's Attention

The First Three Times I Took LSD

How to Write Fiction Without Plotting or Outlining

Rationality and Openness in Relationships

The Wisdom of the Hive Mind

I deliberately overplanned my life and everything is going wrong

The Two Deaths of Draco Malfoy

[Short Story] How I Would Have Invented the Singularity, if I Were So Inclined

[Short Story] How to Delete Your Account on Less Wrong

Jumping Off the AI Safety Bandwagon

Why I am just a bit more cheerful about AI safety than Eliezer

Theoretically Impossible Minds

Mediocrity is Boring

Becoming a Rationalist is like becoming a Christian: Not by Reason Alone

Two Hundred Thousand Hours of Practice

[Debate] How would a world government go about curing Cancer?

[Debate] What can we learn from AI research about the hum

...
Is there a beeminder without the punishment?

by warrenjordan — 2021-09-14T02:51:19.111Z

I used Beeminder for a few months and found it extremely effective. However, a huge pain point of mine was forgetting to manually log the datapoints since a lot of my goals couldn't be logged automatically. This involved having to message their support e-mail each time. Eventually, this became such a huge friction point that I quit Beeminder.

Since then, I noticed that I haven't maintained my goals as much as I did on Beeminder. I believe that recording that I did X goal made Beeminder so effective for me, rather than the avoiding the punishment that comes when you don't do X goal. It was satisfying that I did X goal and seeing the graph change.

That being said, I want to find another solution like Beeminder without the punishment. Any ideas?
LessWrong is paying $500 for Book Reviews
by Ruby — 2021-09-14T00:24:23.507Z

Kudos to

Kelsey Piper

and

Buck

for this idea. See

Buck’s shortform post

for another formulation.

LessWrong is trialing a new pilot program: paying USD500 for high-quality book reviews that are of general interest to LessWrong readers, subject to our judgment and discretion.

How it Works

Pick a book that you want to review.
[Optional] Contact LessWrong (Intercom in the bottom right or team@lesswrong.com) to check in on whether the book is on-topic (to reduce the probability of not getting the bounty).
Write the review and post it on LessWrong. Contact LessWrong to let us know you’re submitting your review for payment. Optionally, send us your book review before posting to get free feedback. (In fact, feel free to send us your draft at any stage for feedback.)
If we like your book review and it’s the kind of post we had in mind, we pay out the $500.

The program will by default run for one month (until October 13). At the end of the month, a bonus $750 will be split evenly between the top three book reviews received, as judged by us.

Desired Reviews

Most non-fiction topics related to science, history, and rationality will merit payment if the book review is of sufficient quality. By “quality” I’m referring to both content and form. Do the inferences seem correct? Does the reviewer seem to be asking the right questions? Does the summary feel informative or lacking? Do I feel confused or enlightened? Is it riveting or a slog to get through? On the writing side, relevant aspects are sentence construction, word choice, pacing, structure, imagery, etc.

I don’t want to be too prescriptive about form since I expect that being of sufficiently high quality (nebulously defined) is enough to make for exceptions, but generally, I’m interested in book reviews that:

Convinces the reader that the topic is interesting, usually by explaining how the topic is relevant to the user’s life or other interests.
Summarize the core claims and arguments in the book so that others can benefit without having to read it.
Perform an epistemic review of the book–which, if any, of its claims seem correct? Book reviews that involve a degree of fact-checking/

epistemic spot checking

will be considered favorably.
Describe what the reviewer has come to believe and why.

(An extra great format is to compare and contrast two or more books on the same topic.)

Examples of Desired and Undesired Book Reviews

Since it’s h...
Digital People FAQ
by HoldenKarnofsky — 2021-09-13T15:24:11.350Z

Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"

This is a companion piece to

Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal

, which is the third in a series of posts about the possibility that we are in the

most important century for humanity

.

This piece discusses basic questions about "digital people," e.g., extremely detailed, realistic computer simulations of specific people. This is a hypothetical (but, I believe, realistic) technology that could be key for a transition to a

stable, galaxy-wide civilization

. (The

other piece

describes the consequences of such a technology; this piece focuses on basic questions about how it might work.)

It will be important to have this picture, because I'm going to argue that AI advances this century could quickly lead to digital people or similarly significant technology. The transformative potential of something like digital people, combined with how quickly AI could lead to it, form the case that we could be in the most important century.

This table (also in the other piece) serves as a summary of the two pieces together:

Normal humans	Digital people
Possible today (

More

)

Probably possible someday (

More

)

Can interact with the real world, do most jobs (

More

)

Conscious, should have human rights (

More

)

Easily duplicated, ala

The Duplicator

(

More

)

Can be run sped-up (

More

)

Can make "temporary copies" that run fast, then retire at slow speed (

More

)

Productivity and social science: could cause unprecedented economic growth, productivity, and knowledge of human nature and behavior (

More

)

Control of the environment: can have their experiences altered in any way (

More

)

Lock-in: could live in highly stable civilizations with no aging or death, and "digital resets" stopping certain changes (

More

)

Space expansion: can live comfortably anywhere computers can run, thus highly suitable for galaxy-wide expansion (

More

)

Good or bad? (

More

)	Outside the scope of this piece	Could be very good or bad

Table of contents for this FAQ

Basics

Basics of digital people

I'm finding this hard to imagine. Can you use an analogy?

Could digital people interact with the real world? For example, could a real-world company hire a digital person to work for it?

Humans and digital people

Could digital people be conscious? Could they deserve human rights

?

Let's say you're wrong, and digital people

couldn't

be conscious. How

...
Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal
by HoldenKarnofsky — 2021-09-13T15:23:41.195Z

Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"

This is the third post in a series explaining my view that we could be in the most important century of all time. (

Here's the roadmap for this series.

)

The

first piece

in this series discusses our unusual era, which could be very close to the transition between an Earth-bound civilization and a stable galaxy-wide civilization.
This piece discusses "digital people," a category of technology that could be key for this transition (and would have even bigger impacts than the hypothetical

Duplicator

discussed previously).
Many of the ideas here appear somewhere in sci-fi or speculative nonfiction, but I'm not aware of another piece laying out (compactly) the basic idea of digital people and the key reasons that a world of digital people would be so different from today's.
The idea of digital people provides a concrete way of imagining how the right kind of technology (which I believe to be almost certainly feasible) could change the world radically, such that "humans as we know them" would no longer be the main force.
It will be important to have this picture, because I'm going to argue that AI advances this century could quickly lead to digital people or similarly significant technology. The transformative potential of something like digital people, combined with how quickly AI could lead to it, form the case that we could be in the most important century.

Intro

Previously

, I wrote:

When some people imagine the future, they picture the kind of thing you see in sci-fi films. But these sci-fi futures seem very tame, compared to the future I expect ...

The future I picture is enormously bigger, faster, weirder, and either much much better or much much worse compared to today. It's also potentially a lot sooner than sci-fi futures: I think particular, achievable-seeming technologies could get us there quickly.

This piece is about digital people, one example

1

of a technology that could lead to an extremely big, fast, weird future.

To get the idea of digital people, imagine a computer simulation of a specific person, in a virtual environment. For example, a simulation of you that reacts to all "virtual events" - virtual hunger, virtual weather, a virtual computer with an inbox - just as you would. (Like

The Matrix

? See footnote.

2

) I explain in more depth in the

FAQ companion pie

...
[linkpost] The Psychological Economy of Inaction by William Gillis
by Quinn — 2021-09-12T22:04:43.991Z
Link: http://humaniterations.net/2021/09/11/psychological-economy-of-inaction/

William Gillis is an excellent essayist, LessWrong amongst their influences, who doesn't post on LessWrong.

I wanted to open up a dialogue about their new essay to see what commenters here have to say, it's just under 2k words.

Gillis is a compelling philosopher of agency, in this they argue that consciousness is insufficient for agency.

All of which is to underline: just because you’re conscious doesn’t mean you’re agential. Agency is – perhaps unfortunately – habituated.

Speaking for myself, I feel like Gillis' take on "what actually is freedom?" is closest to my own, yet I think they go farther than I've gone with this idea of processes that habituate less or more agency (rather than simply agency as a metric on scenarios, as if evaluated on a snapshot )

But taking away choice isn’t a path to happiness, it’s a path to depression. Freedom from stress or fatigue, perhaps, but certainly not a freedom to influence the wider universe. This is not to praise the shallow causal depth that a choice over mere toothpaste has, but to emphasize the often overlooked degree to which even small situations of immediate choice in our lives help habituate our capacity to act.

Toward the bottom, the comment about projects that don't pay out for a long time vs. projects with immediate payout seems like one way to operationalize the utilons-fuzzies distinction

The general idea of tipping the scale in favor of action over inaction is tricky, it calls to mind the Catch 22 of Advice that I think Kelsey TUOC used to write about-- that you can't determine if the people who need to hear it will hear it more than the people who need to hear the exact opposite. Can we do better than the Catch 22?

There's a comment in methods chapter 93, actually, (don't click if you haven't read it before, spoilers) where Harry takes the side of action

"because Neville tried to do something, even if it wasn't the right thing, doing what's right is the second lesson, you can start practicing that after you learn to do anything at all -"