trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Conversational Presentation of Why Automation is Different This Time
by ryan_b — 2018-01-17T22:11:32.083Z

I have been frustrated recently with my inability to efficiently participate in discussions of automation which crop up online and in person. The purpose of the post is to refine a conversational presentation of what I believe to be the salient concerns; the chief goals are brevity and clarity, but obviously corrections of fact supersede this.

Epistemic status: plausible causal conjecture.

I think the current wave of automation will be different from previous ones, in ways which make it more disruptive. There are three reasons for this:

No Fourth Sector: The economy has three broad sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, and services. The first wave was in agriculture, and people could find adjacent work or switched to working in manufacturing. The second wave was in manufacturing, and people could find adjacent work or switched to work in services. The current wave is affecting services, but there is no fourth sector of the economy left for workers to switch to.

Skills Over Jobs: Agricultural automation was largely about tasks: a digging machine, a seeding machine, a pulling machine. Manufacturing automation took this to the next level, with robots performing defined sequences of tasks. But in both cases these were specific - any task or series of tasks which had not been specifically automated was still work to be had. The new wave of automation is entire skillsets, like apply this pattern or the ability to speak. This means when a job is lost to automation, all similar jobs are going away at the same time. There will be no adjacent work for people to switch to.

Speed: When automation was physical machines, they had to design them, and build them, and ship them, and customers had to rebuild their own factories to use manufacturing robots. Modern automation is largely software driven, so design and build are the same process, which is then practically free to copy and distribute. As soon as the method is ready, it can be picked up by businesses as fast as they can rent server space to run it. This gives local economies and institutions like government very little time to respond.

Automation is different this time because the problems we experienced last time will be more severe, and more widespread, and happen faster.
Sufficient
by  — 2018-01-17T19:16:44.463Z

In response to : What strange things might we find beneath the ice

Improving Autonomy might be too big of a step. Aiming for small groups being self-sufficient in technology and culture may just be unrealistic, with no way to get to there from here. I'm going to talk a bit about another possible way we can get better.

We are entering a time where we might be producing new cultures. Whether it be sea steading or trying colonize mars. So we might have a blank slate, to try again. What should we expect might work or be a good culture, what are the elements that would make it thrive?

There has also been criticism of capitalism, that it is destructive. We might want to improve on it, but no strong culture has risen that defeats the free rider problem in general. Can we do better? If so how?

In this blog post I will outline the first sketch of an proto-idea of a culture. A culture I am currently calling being Sufficient.

A group is Sufficient if that group produces or encourages the production of everything it needs to thrive. It doesn't free ride, it pays it's way. The contrast is a parasitic group. A parasitic group is a group that relies on the produce of some other group or resource but puts little to nothing into the maintenance of that group or resource.

We are all probably parasitic on one thing or another (even if it is second level parasitism, which I shall get on to later). It is hard to stop.

Trying to be Sufficient

There are lots of movements that try to be Sufficient in one particular thing. An example being the people worried about climate change buying carbon offsets for their flights. They want to maintain the shared resource of a less warm, less acidic oceans. They don't want to rely on other people solving the problem, so they do their bit. They try to make sure other people do their bit too. They prefer companies that are carbon neutral and may pay more for their services.

However there are lots of different things you can free ride on. If you aren't donating to the ACLU and are in America, are you free riding on them protecting your freedom of speech? Are you supporting the free software movement, wikipedia or the bloggers you read? Trying to create more public resources than you consume helps, but it is not a targeted intervention, the public goods you produce might be consumed by parasites.

We would need a general movement th...
Messaging Troubles
by SquirrelInHell — 2018-01-17T11:19:22.189Z

I can't see the content of any private messages. A person I talked to reports the same. So it must be true for everyone, based on the well known principle that that n=0: plausible hypothesis, n=1: near certainty for personal purposes, n=2: established science.

Btw, it's currently possible to set up a private two-way communications link by repeatedly editing the title of a conversation :)
TSR #10: Creative Processes
by Hazard — 2018-01-17T03:05:18.903Z

This is part of a series of posts where I call out some ideas from the latest edition of The Strategic Review (written by Sebastian Marshall), and give some prompts and questions that I think people might find useful to answer. I include a summary of the most recent edition, but it's not a replacement for reading the actual article. Sebastian is an excellent writer, and your life will be full of sadness if you don't read his piece. The link is below.

Background Ops #10: Creative Processes

SUMMARY

Focus on the results vs “doing work”.
Though creative work appears to be “Some days you got it, some days you don’t”, this is not the case.
“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the [human] race.”
Separate the different phases of your writing process so they aren’t all competing for mental space at the same time.
Break a process down into its “universal movement”

Examples in martial arts

Imi Litchtenfeld (Krav Maga)
Bruce Lee (Jeet Kune Do)

There is no magic, it’ll be boring, but it works.
Universal movements of writing

Brainstorm
Categorize
Outline
Writing
Editing

Guidance

Read Pozen’s Extreme Productivity Chapter 8
Create or learn the universal movements of your field.
Personalize and develop

Sebastian made research it’s own step in his writing process.

Cross pollinate ideas from unrelated domains.

*Just realised that there were two more babble posts, and what I point out as anchors and what alkjash called beacons

I’ve really enjoyed the ideas and discussion in the Babble post and its follow up, and will be looking at this TSR edition through the lens of babble and prune.

The standout claim in this article is that there are ways to structure your approach to a creative task such that you don’t end up stuck. What’s going on when you get stuck? Getting stuck is when your pruning filter has a higher standard than the quality of your babble, leaving you with “nothing to say” and an unsatisfying feeling of being stuck.

What then, would be the solution to getting stuck? As people were pointing out, often the first step is to tone down the aggressiveness of your pruning. Babbling nonsense beats not saying anything. But what comes after that? How do you end up getting your babble to a point where even with whatever pruning standard you think is appropriate, y...
The First Fundamental
by namespace — 2018-01-17T01:31:06.776Z

Why is it, that some people read a mere fraction of The Sequences and achieve something like 'rationality', where others read the whole thing and get nothing. Why is it that I have ostensibly novel thoughts on 'rationality' reading a book on the history of science, but a physics Ph.D reads that same book and gets little from it but fun trivia? The following is my best current hypothesis, for the first thing that needs to be taught for someone to even pursue 'rationality'. (This text is edited in to provide context that should have been there when I first posted.)

Paths are walked one foot after the other, by careful repetition. Crossbow is closer to Mars than pen. Zeno's wisdom of measurement must be considered carefully to achieve Erasmus's glory. The artists thieving eyes permit no wasted motion. All the world is stolen by their dedication. It is easy to confuse that which is stolen with that which New Caledonia's cartographer made, in telling the difference you'll map while you travel and cut with no blade.
The Solitaire Principle: Game Theory for One
by alkjash — 2018-01-17T00:14:07.782Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/the-solitaire-principle-game-theory-for-one/

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

This post is an exercise in taking Whitman seriously. If the self is properly understood as a loose coalition of many agents with possibly distinct values, beliefs, and incentives, what does game theory have to say about self-improvement?

The Solitaire Principle is the principle that human beings can be usefully thought about as loose coalitions of many agents. Classes of interpersonal problems often translate into classes of intrapersonal problems, and the tools to solve them are broadly similar. The Solitaire Principle is a corollary of the paradigm that the universe is self-similar at every level of organization: the organizational principles and faults of a civilization are not wildly different from those of a single human mind.

Self-improvement is often framed in terms of optimization of a monolithic whole. Instead, the Solitaire Principle suggests that self-improvement can also be achieved by alignment of pieces within the whole to cooperate more efficiently.

First, I fractionate the self across the time dimension and investigate self-improvement as an iterated game for one. This is partially inspired by this essay on becoming more legible to other agents.

Second, I fractionate the self into multiple sub-personalities and investigate self-improvement as a single sub-personality taking unilateral action to improve the whole.

1. Iterated Games for One

i. Basic Thought Experiments

Imagine that a human being dies and is re-instantiated the following day. Across a year, one agent A actually behaves like 365 very weakly dependent agents A1, A2, ..., A365.

A1 wants to write a novel, and can either write a page today (cooperate) or Netflix (defect). The novel is completed if and only if A1, A2, ..., A365 all cooperate. A1 decides the probability of that happening is vanishingly small, so she defects. No pages are written.

B1 wants to write a novel. The novel is completed if at least 300 of B1, B2, ..., B365 all cooperate. B1 simulates the 364 other agents and expects only half of them to cooperate. B1 defects and no pages are written.

C1 wakes up on New Year's Day inspired to write a novel. C1 feels excited about the project and decides it's likely that everyone will cooperate, so she writes Page 1. The other 364 agents don't know about the book. One page is wri...
1/16/2018 Update - Parent Comments, and Nearterm Horizon
by Raemon — 2018-01-16T23:59:01.367Z

One issue I've ran into on the frontpage is seeing something in "recent comments", which is missing the context of it's parent comment. I got annoyed with having to click through the post just to figure out the context.

This was fairly easy to fix, so I went and added a "see parent" option for recent comments.

Easy vs Hard Bugs

I know a few people have flagged pretty substantial bugs (in particular with the editor, such as the weird way it forcibly parses markdown), as well as major features the site is still missing for parity with Old LessWrong (such as meetups). We haven't gotten around to those, so it may be frustrating to see "small quality of life" fixes like the Recent Comment thing rather than addressing those major issues.

This is mostly a factor of "easy things vs hard things." Generally each week we set some major goals for ourselves that involve a lot of thinking/planning, and we spend a few hours each day working on those. Then, in the evening, or on weekends, we work on easier things that just happen to annoy us a lot, that we're motivated to work on in our off hours.

In particular, changes to the editor require a major upfront investment of time. We do want to fix it but we'll need to set aside a couple days for it.

Nearterm Horizon

It also seemed helpful to clarify what's upcoming, with the overall plan is to reach feature parity with Old LessWrong. (Note: this is not a promise to get these things done in a certain timeframe, more of a "this is what we currently intend.")

Notifications rework - Better styling, ultimately designing a notifications menu similar to wordpress that makes it easier to navigate the site. We'rue also fixing various bugs that make notifications unreliable (for example, unlisted or draft posts sometimes to show up in the notifications feed, even when you can't read the post).
Meetups - some kind of minimum-viable-version of this, most likely similar to the Meta page in that it's a separate view you click on in the upper-left corner menu, see a list of meetups and click on them for more information. (Sometime later we'll flesh this out in a more fully-featured system that notifies people about upcoming meetups in their area, but we're wary of accidentally spamming people and want to take the time to do that carefully)
Testing

...
Explanations: Ignorance vs. Confusion 
by Charlie Steiner — 2018-01-16T10:44:18.345Z

When people notice that they don't understand something, they want an explanation. Normally this works out okay, and we can either find an explanation or gracefully admit our ignorance. To use Richard Feynman's example, suppose someone asks why their Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. "Because she slipped and fell on the ice and broke her hip" will explain the matter to them, and nobody has to do any weird meta-reasoning about the nature of explanations.

In contrast, consider a deep philosophical question, like why do mirrors flip left and right, but not up and down? (If this is old hat, hopefully you can still remember how it felt. If this is new hat, and you like puzzles, stop and give it a think before reading Brienne on it.) Here, it's not that we're ignorant, but that we're confused. The resolution isn't like filling in a blank space of ignorance, it's like putting together a puzzle out of a pile of pieces not all of which match.

Weird meta-reasoning about explanations is somewhat useful in this second kind of puzzle, and is especially useful when you're not sure whether a puzzle is ignorance or confusion. You want to be able to recognize an explanation when you've got one, and most importantly you want to avoid declaring victory prematurely.

If you read my posts on numbers, or if you just really liked Righting a Wrong Question, it will not surprise you that I want to go even more meta. Rather than immediately trying to lay out how to tell if something is explained, we want to start with some nice easy questions about what explanations do inside our heads.

When Aunt Minnie is in the hospital, you already know more or less how the explanation will fit into your map of the world. You'll take the mental item for "Aunt Minnie in the hospital now," in your big warehouse of mental representations and associations, and associate it with some events or actions that provide some history for Aunt Minnie getting hospitalized, and then you'll feel done.

This isn't how it is in the case of the mirror. At the start you think the mirror flips things left to right, perhaps associated with a visualization of a person standing on the other side of the mirror, because that is a cognitively easy mechanism that generates what you see. But this belief conflicts with an understanding that mirrors are symm...
Plan to Be Lucky
by Jacob Falkovich — 2018-01-16T01:00:00.535Z
Link: https://putanumonit.com/2018/01/15/plan-to-be-lucky/

Like other rationalists, I’ve written about the dangers inherent in our instincts for tribalism. Unlike other rationalists, I think that instead of being suppressed tribalism should be indulged in a productive manner. That’s why I take a couple of hours each week, alone or with friends, to scream at a TV showing some sports game that involves Carolina, Tottenham or the Philadelphia Eagles.

So there I was on Saturday as the Eagles went into a playoff game against the Falcons as 3.5 point underdogs. Philadelphia had the best team in the league for most of the season, but in week 14 their star player Carson Wentz tore his ACL on a meaningless play and was replaced by Nick Foles, a loveable goofball whose career was so up-and-down-and-down-and-down that he considered retiring from football at age 26.

Foles, who hasn’t practiced with the rest of the Eagles’ first-string offense, played poorly in the last three weeks of the regular season. Every preview of the upcoming playoff game talked about the Eagles having to run the ball, pass conservatively, and win with their defense, given how unlikely it was that Foles could play well.

The game started, and Nick Foles dropped back to attempt his first playoff pass in four years. But instead of dumping the ball for a short pass, Foles launched a 42-yard bomb as if he were a battle-tested superstar.

The pass missed the receiver by ten feet.

And the thing I screamed at the TV was: “Yes! That’s how you f%#&ing do it!!!”

Continue reading on Putanumonit.
Book Review: Why Buddhism Is True
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2018-01-15T20:54:37.431Z

Robert Wright of The Moral Animal fame recently published a book about Buddhism. He titled it Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment and in it seeks to demonstrate the connections between evolutionary psychology and Buddhism. In an appendix to the book he sums the work up himself this way:

[I]f you want the shortest version of my answer to the question of why Buddhism is true, it's this: Because we are animals created by natural selection. Natural selection built into our brains the tendencies that early Buddhist thinkers did a pretty amazing job of sizing up, given the meager scientific resources at their disposal. Now, in light of the modern understanding of natural selection and the modern understanding of the human brain that natural selection produced, we can provide a new kind of defense of this sizing up.

I'd say this is a pretty accurate summary of the book. If you are already familiar with both evolutionary psychology and Buddhism and spent some time thinking about their synergy then nothing in this book will be surprising. But if you are only familiar with evolutionary psychology or only familiar with Buddhism then I think you can learn a lot about how another discipline addresses the same issues.

Now, a few nits to pick:

Wright makes use of some probably now unproved psychology results due to the replication crisis. Given book publication cycles this is forgivable but worth noting.
His approach is not systematic, and he mainly focuses on places where evolutionary psychology and Buddhism agree. Maybe they don't disagree strongly anywhere but he doesn't make a clear case for this.
In particular I think he may fail to the level of a just-so story when it comes to explaining why humans are natural essentialists/idealists. Not that they aren't; it's just that I think his explination is not sufficiently rigorous from an evolutionary psychology standpoint.

The most interesting thing I learned about in the book was the default mode network. There's some disagreement on exactly how it works to the point that the name may be misleading, but the idea of the default mode network is that it's what your brain does when it's not focused on a task. During a task normally only some parts of your brain are active, based on fMRI studies, that are presumably relevant to the task. When you...
Circumambulation
by alkjash — 2018-01-15T19:17:26.528Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/circumambulation/

This is Part 4 of the Babble and Prune sequence.

In the previous parts, I described the brain's thought-generation process as an adversarial learning system between Babble - which generates low-quality content - and Prune - which filters for high-quality content.

My primary motivation for understanding this system is to solve writer's block. On some days, I achieve a state of flow and write two thousand lucid words in two hours, which somehow coalesce a previously disconnected body of thoughts. On others, I give up after one or two navel-gazing abortions. These irregularities are a sign that my model of Babble and Prune is insufficiently predictive.

Babble and Prune are part of the picture, and a conscious effort of systematically relaxing the lower Gates of Prune has helped me produce more material. However, there's at least one important point which is entirely missing in this model: the choice of subject matter, the focus of one's attention towards which Babble and Prune approach.

Today I will fit Babble and Prune into another piece of the puzzle: Circumambulation - walking around the truth, spiraling towards it.

Truth is a process of successive approximation. More precisely: truth is a process of circumambulation. Deep truths are not mere point masses on a line to be approached with binary search or gradient descent. They are sprawling manifolds in high-dimensional space, and to map out such a Titan requires patience, false starts, and approach from many directions.

Circumambulation is the underlying directive of Babble, the process of circling around the holes in your understanding to pin down their shape and fill them in with substance.

1. Circumambulation

From Jung:

I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self.
There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, at the beginning; later, everything points toward the centre.
This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned.

This quote is accompanied by the lovely picture of one of the labyrinths found in many cathedrals. Classically, cathedrals are built in the shape of a cross, e.g. Notre Dame:

At the center of the cross (X marks the spot) is the labyrinth. Walking the labyrinth is a ritual reflecting on the nonlinearity with which we circle the truth.

Our imagery for reality is deeply tie...