trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Smoking Lesion Steelman
by abramdemski — 2017-07-02T02:17:08.000Z

It seems plausible to me that any example I've seen so far which seems to require causal/counterfactual reasoning is more properly solved by taking the right updateless perspective, and taking the action or policy which achieves maximum expected utility from that perspective. If this were the right view, then the aim would be to construct something like updateless EDT.

I give a variant of the smoking lesion problem which overcomes an objection to the classic smoking lesion, and which is solved correctly by CDT, but which is not solved by updateless EDT.

UDT as originally described involved a "mathematical intuition module" which would take some sort of logical counterfactual. However, I'll be using the term "updateless" purely to describe the decision theory you get by asking another decision theory to choose a policy as soon as it is born, rather than using that decision theory all along. Hence, updateless CDT is what you get when you ask a CDT agent to choose a policy; updateless EDT is what you get when you ask an EDT agent to choose a policy.

I'll also be treating "counterfactual" as synonymous with "causal". There are cases where physical causal reasoning seem to give the wrong counterfactual structure, like Newcomb's problem. I won't be trying to solve that problem here; I'm more trying to ask whether there are any cases where causal/counterfactual reasoning looks like what we really want at all.

The "common wisdom", as I have observed it, is that we should be aiming to construct something like an updateless CDT which works well with logical uncertainty. I'm not sure whether that would be the dominant opinion right now, but certainly TDT set things in this direction early on. From my perspective, I don't think it's been adequately established that we should prefer updateless CDT to updateless EDT; providing some evidence on that is the implicit aim of this post. Explicitly, I'll mostly be contrasting updateful CDT with updateful EDT.

It might be impossible to construct an appropriate logically-updateless perspective, in which case we need logical counterfactuals to compute the effects of actions/policies; but, in some sense this would only be because we couldn't make a sufficiently ignorant prior. (I think of my own attempt at logically updateless decisions this way.) However, that would be unfortunate; it should be easier to construct good counterfactual

...
Rescuing the Extropy Magazine archives
by Deku-shrub — 2017-07-01T14:25:13.501Z

Possibly of more interest to old school Extropians, you may be aware the defunct Extropy Institute's website is very slow and broken, and certainly inaccessible to newcomers.

Anyhow, I have recently pieced together most of the early publications, 1988 - 1996 of 'Extropy: Vaccine For Future Shock' later, Extropy: Journal of Transhumanist Thought, as a part of mapping the history of Extropianism.

You'll find some really interesting very early articles on neural augmentation, transhumanism, libertarianism, AI (featuring Eliezer), radical economics (featuring Robin Hanson of course) and even decentralised payment systems.

Along with the ExI mailing list which is not yet wikified, it provides a great insight into early radical technological thinking, an era mostly known for the early hacker movement.

Let me know your thoughts/feedback!

https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Extropy_Magazines
July 2017 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2017-07-01T06:40:19.557Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Epistemic Spot Check: A Guide To Better Movement (Todd Hargrove)
by Elizabeth — 2017-07-01T05:20:00.841Z

This is part of an ongoing series assessing where the epistemic bar should be for self-help books.

Introduction

Thesis: increasing your physical capabilities is more often a matter of teaching your neurological system than it is anything to do with your body directly. This includes things that really really look like they’re about physical constraints, like strength and flexibility. You can treat injuries and pain and improve performance by working on the nervous system alone. More surprising, treating these physical issues will have spillover effects, improving your mental and emotional health. A Guide To Better Movement provides both specific exercises for treating those issues and general principles that can be applied to any movement art or therapy.

The first chapter of this book failed spot checking pretty hard. If I hadn’t had a very strong recommendation from a friend (“I didn’t take pain medication after two shoulder surgeries” strong), I would have tossed it aside. But I’m glad I kept going, because it turned out to be quite valuable (this is what triggered that meta post on epistemic spot checking). In accordance with the previous announcement on epistemic spot checking, I’m presenting the checks of chapter one (which failed, badly), and chapter six (which contains the best explanation of pain psychology I’ve ever seen), and a review of model quality. I’m very eager for feedback on how this works for people.

Chapter 1: Intro (of the book)

Claim: “Although we might imagine we are lengthening muscle by stretching, it is more likely that increased range of motion is caused by changes in the nervous system’s tolerance to stretch, rather than actual length changes in muscles. ” (p. 5).

Overstated, weak. (PDF). The paper’s claims to apply this up to 8 weeks, no further. Additionally, the paper draws most (all?) of its data from two studies and it doesn’t give the sample size of either.

Claim: “Research shows the forces required to deform mature connective tissue are probably impossible to create with hands, elbows or foam rollers.” (p. 5).

Misleading. (Abstract). Where by “research” the Hargrove means “mathematical model extrapolated from a single subject”.

Claim: “in hockey players, strong adductors are far more protective against groin strain than flexible adductors, which offer no benefit” (p. 14).

Misleading. (Abstract) Sample size is small, and...
Anecdotal panic prevention strategies
by KatjaGrace — 2017-06-30T22:00:56.000Z

I have panic attacks somewhere between every few months and multiple times per week. At the moment it seems to be mostly restricted to when I wake up and haven’t got the hang of being a human again yet, so it isn’t a huge problem.

But when it is, I have often found that eating honey vastly and quickly improves the problem. Not sugar, not sugar syrup, just honey. Not after the sugar has reached my bloodstream, but when it touches my tongue. Often not in a ‘hmm, I guess I feel better?’ way, but in a ‘I was tumbling head over heels down a hill, and then it just stopped’ way.

I’m hesitant to point this out much, because 1) it doesn’t make any sense, which suggests it is imaginary and 2) I feel uncomfortable about the whole complicated and murky landscape of people giving often unwanted advice, with various motives, about awkward things, that probably only work for that person, and probably only do so because of the placebo effect.

On the other hand, I caused someone else to try this, who also found that it worked. Plus as far as I can tell having an additional thing to try if you are having a panic attack is good, even if it turns out not to work. And I dislike the equilibrium where people who do have useful advice in expectation are worried about sharing it in case they seem annoying.

So, if anyone else has panic attacks and feels like trying this out, I am curious to hear how it goes. I usually squeeze half a teaspoon of honey or so into a spoon and eat it straight.

***

Since I already maybe mostly have the attention of people interested in panic attack relief, below is my longer list of things I have found probably-useful over the years (in more expected, explicable, hit-or-miss, or time-taking ways).

Collected panic attack mitigation strategies

Honey

Playing DDR (both as a thing to do actually during a panic attack, and as a really good way to get prophylactic exercise if you find leaving your room or committing to more than five seconds of exercise aversive, e.g. because you have an anxiety disorder.)

Saying ‘I can be anxious and still be in control’, and noticing over time that this is true, every time.

Estimating how long panic attacks go for, looking at a clock, noting at what time this one will probably be done, and expecting/planning/predicting to feel better then. Maybe kind of thinking of the clock as a machine that is resolving

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A cheating approach to the tiling agents problem
by cousin_it — 2017-06-30T13:56:46.000Z

(This post resulted from a conversation with Wei Dai.)

Formalizing the tiling agents problem is very delicate. In this post I'll show a toy problem and a solution to it, which arguably meets all the desiderata, but only by cheating in a new and unusual way.

Here's a summary of the toy problem: we ask an agent to solve a difficult math question and also design a successor agent. Then the successor solves another math question and designs its own successor, and so on. The questions get harder each time, so they can't all be solved in advance, and each of them requires believing in Peano arithmetic (PA). This goes on for a fixed number of rounds, and the final reward is the number of correct answers.

Moreover, we will demand that the agent must handle both subtasks (solving the math question and designing the successor) using the same logic. Finally, we will demand that the agent be able to reproduce itself at each round, not just design a custom-made successor that solves the math question with PA and reproduces itself by quining.

To nail down the formalization, we will use good old computable programs with proof limits, not oracles or modal formulas. The universe program U will contain the agent program A as a subprogram, and A will know the full source code of U (including A) by diagonalization. At each round, the agent will receive the text of a math question as input, and return a pair consisting of the answer to the math question and the source code of the successor agent.

The math questions will be of the form "you're allowed to use N_i computation steps, here's the source code of a program P_i, what does it return?" The programs P_i will be chosen so that N_i steps isn't enough to run them, but is more than enough to find a PA proof that P_i returns some particular value.

To give the agent some assurance of the above, the universe program will use the following transparent procedure to evaluate the agent's answer:

Run P_i to determine the right answer, and compare it with the agent's answer.

Verify that there exist PA proofs about P_i that can be found in much fewer than N_i computation steps. Ignore the answers found in the proofs.

Increment the agent's utility if (1) succeeded or (2) failed.

We will also assume that all math questions are so difficult, and all N_i are so large, that doing any fixed work up front is a rounding error by comparison.

...
One-Magisterium Bayes
by tristanm — 2017-06-29T23:02:54.784Z

[Epistemic Status: Very partisan / opinionated. Kinda long, kinda rambling.]

In my conversations with members of the rationalist community as well as in my readings of various articles and blog posts produced by them (as well as outside), I’ve noticed a recent trend towards skepticism of Bayesian principles and philosophy (see Nostalgebraist’s recent post for an example), which I have regarded with both surprise and a little bit of dismay, because I think progress within a community tends to be indicated by moving forward to new subjects and problems rather than a return to old ones that have already been extensively argued for and discussed. So the intent of this post is to summarize a few of the claims I’ve seen being put forward and try to point out where I believe these have gone wrong.

It’s also somewhat an odd direction for discussion to be going in, because the academic statistics community has largely moved on from debates between Bayesian and Frequentist theory, and has largely come to accept both the Bayesian and the Frequentist / Fisherian viewpoints as valid. When E.T. Jaynes wrote his famous book, the debate was mostly still raging on, and many questions had yet to be answered. In the 21st century, statisticians have mostly come to accept a world in which both approaches exist and have their merits.

Because I will be defending the Bayesian side here, there is a risk that this post will come off as being dogmatic. We are a community devoted to free-thought after all, and any argument towards a form of orthodoxy might be perceived as an attempt to stifle dissenting viewpoints. That is not my intent here, and in fact I plan on arguing against Bayesian dogmatism as well. My goal is to argue that having a base framework with which to feel relatively high confidence in is useful to the goals of the community, and that if we feel high enough confidence in it, then spending extra effort trying to prove it false might be wasting brainpower than can potentially be used on more interesting or useful tasks. There could always be a point we reach where most of us strongly feel that unless we abandon Bayesianism, we can’t make any further progress. I highly doubt that we have reached such a point or that we ever will.

This is also a personal exercise to test my understanding of Bayesian theory and my ability to communicate ...
What is Wisdom?
by ig0r — 2017-06-29T21:44:07.117Z

Cross-posted on my blog: http://garybasin.com/what-is-wisdom/

What could go wrong if we develop technology to significantly amplify the intelligence of human minds? Intelligence is tricky to understand and I get confused when comparing it to the related concepts of wisdom and rationality. I'd like to draw clear distinctions between them. In a nutshell, rationality is the tendency to apply the capacity of intelligence, whereas wisdom describes the embodied knowledge of human behavioral patterns, specifically in terms of failure modes.

The relationship between rationality and intelligence seems better understood. My favorite exposition is in the excellent What Intelligence Tests Miss (good summary on LW). Of course, LessWrong itself is partially devoted to understanding this distinction and CFAR was built to see if we can isolate and train rationality (as opposed to intelligence). Intelligence is typically viewed as the capacity to perform the relevant moves -- explicit reasoning, analogical application of past experiences, and avoiding biased heuristics of thought -- when presented with a well-formed problem. In practice, the hard part of taking advantage of intelligence is having the awareness that one is facing a situation where intelligence can be explicitly applied. Thus, one can perform well when formally posed a problem, such as on an IQ or SAT test, yet still behave foolishly in the real world where the problems are not clearly structured and labeled. A colloquialism which approximates this dynamic is the idea of "book" and "street" smarts. Thus, to be rational requires not only some capacity for intelligence but, more importantly, the habits of identifying when and where to apply it in the wild.

How does wisdom fit into this? Informally, wisdom refers to the ability to think and act with sound judgment and common sense, often developed through a diversity of life experiences. We tend to look to the aged members of society as a font of wisdom rather than those with merely a large raw capacity for reasoning (intelligence). This corresponds with the heuristic of listening to your elders even when it doesn't always make sense. Wisdom is often associated with conservativism and functions as a regulatory mechanism for societal change. The young and clever upstart has the energy and open-mindedness to create new t

...
What useless things did you understand recently?
by cousin_it — 2017-06-28T19:32:20.513Z

Please reply in the comments with things you understood recently. The only condition is that they have to be useless in your daily life. For example, "I found this idea that defeats procrastination" doesn't count, because it sounds useful and you might be deluded about its truth. Whereas "I figured out how construction cranes are constructed" qualifies, because you aren't likely to use it and it will stay true tomorrow.

I'll start. Today I understood how Heyting algebras work as a model for intuitionistic logic. The main idea is that you represent sentences as shapes. So you might have two sentences A and B shown as two circles, then "A and B" is their intersection, "A or B" is their union, etc. But "A implies B" doesn't mean one circle lies inside the other, as you might think! Instead it's a shape too, consisting of all points that lie outside A or inside B (or both). There were some other details about closed and open sets, but these didn't cause a problem for me, while "A implies B" made me stumble for some reason. I probably won't use Heyting algebras for anything ever, but it was pretty fun to figure out.

Your turn!

PS: please don't feel pressured to post something super advanced. It's really, honestly okay to post basic things, like why a stream of tap water narrows as it falls, or why the sky is blue (though I don't claim to understand that one :-))
Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?
by Scott Alexander — 2017-06-28T19:00:00.000Z

[Epistemic status: So, so speculative. Don’t take any of this seriously until it’s replicated and endorsed by other people.]

I.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a glitch in the Matrix, watch this spinning mask:

Source: http://hearingthevoice.org/2013/11/14/predictive-coding-masterclass/

Did you see it? As the face started to turn away from you, your brain did…something, and then you were seeing a normal frontwards-facing mask again. It turns out your visual system has really strong views about whether faces should be inside-out or not, and it’s willing to execute a hard override on perception if it doesn’t like what it sees.

But not always. Some people get glitchier glitches than others; a few seem almost immune. Studies find schizophrenics and autistic people to be consistently less glitchy than the rest of us. The correlation’s not perfect. But it’s definitely there. Something about these people’s different cognitive processing styles lets them see through the illusion.

I wanted to replicate this result myself. So a few months ago, when I surveyed readers of my blog, I included some questions about perceptual illusions (including a static version of the hollow mask). I got five thousand responses, including a few from schizophrenic and autistic readers. Sure enough, the effect was there.

Schizophrenic readers were about twice as likely to report a weak reaction to the mask illusion as non-schizophrenics (28% vs. 14%, p = 0.04). They were also more likely to have a weak reaction to a similar illusion, the Spinning Dancer (58% vs. 81%, p = 0.01). Readers with a family history of schizophrenia landed in between schizophrenics and healthy controls (16% for mask, 63% for dancer, ns).

Autistic readers were only slightly more likely to report a weak reaction to the mask illusion than neurotypicals (17% vs. 14%), but thanks to our big sample size we could be pretty confident that this was a meaningful difference (p = 0.004). There was no different between autists and neurotypicals on the Spinning Dancer, not even a weak trend (58% vs. 60%, p = 0.4).

Looking deeper, I found a few other anomalies on illusion perception. Most were small and inconsistent. But one stood out: transgender people had an altered response pattern on both illusions, stronger than the alteration for autism and almost as strong as the one for schizophre...
Self-conscious ideology
by casebash — 2017-06-28T05:32:23.146Z

Operating outside of ideology is extremely hard, if not impossible. Even groups that see themselves as non-ideological, still seem to end up operating within an ideology of some sort.

Take for example Less Wrong. It seems to operate within a few assumptions:

That studying rationality will provide use with a greater understanding of the world.

That studying rationality will improve you as a person.

That science is one of our most important tools for understanding the world.

...

These assumptions are also subject to some criticisms. Here's one criticism for each of the previous points:

But will it or are we dealing with problems that are simply beyond our ability to understand (see epistemic learned helplessness)? Do we really understand how minds work well enough to know whether a mind uploaded would still be "you"?

But religious people are happier.

Hume's critique of induction

I could continue discussing assumptions and possible criticisms, but that would be a distraction from the core point, which is that there are advantages to having a concrete ideology that is aware of it's own limitations, as opposed to an implicit ideology that is beyond all criticism.

Self-conscious ideologies also have other advantages:

Quick and easy to write since you don't have to deal with all of the special cases.

Easy to share and explain. Imagine trying to explain to someone, "Rationality gives us a better understanding of the world, except when it does not". Okay, I'm exaggerating, epistemic humility typically isn't explained that badly, but it certainly complicates sharing.

Easier for people to adopt the ideology as a lens through which to examine the world, without needing to assume that it is literally true.

I wrote this post so that people can create self-conscious ideologies and have something to link to so as to avoid having to write up an explanation themselves. Go out into the world and create =P.