trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Benefits of Taking Cold Showers: A 3 Month Trial
by JohnGreer — 2017-12-08T17:01:56.653Z

For the format that’s easy on the eyes: https://medium.com/@John_Greer/the-benefits-of-taking-cold-showers-a-3-month-trial-7e14ca25d79

There are many reported health benefits of cold showers like increased testosterone levels and better circulation. I haven’t done any in-depth research but it seems like the data those claims are based on are not very strong. I’ve been taking only cold showers for a little over three months now and here is what I’ve observed.

The tangible benefits:

1. I don’t have to spend time messing with the shower handles to get the temperature right. Hotel? Friend’s house? No problem.

2. I end up exercising more on average, partly because I want my body warmed up before I shower so the icy water is less uncomfortable.

3. I spend significantly less time in the shower. Hot water feels great. With normie showers, I usually end up falling into the cycle of turning the heat up a little, then a little more, and before I know it, I reach sauna temperature. You hot water addicts know what I’m talking about…once you’re enveloped in that warm cozy stream, you never want to get out and have to face the cold air. Cold water solves this problem, with the added benefit of the air being warmer than the water, so it’s actually pleasant to turn the water off. The Immortan said it best: http://i.imgur.com/pofUIxc.png Don't be like Spongebob: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FJlIZxEPHLY/maxresdefault.jpg

4. I don’t need lotion to keep my skin from drying out. With hot water showers, I would need to make sure to put lotion on my back, shoulders, and legs otherwise it would dry out. No more!

Convinced? Tips to get started:

1. Go cold turkey (ha). It’s been way easier to take cold showers consistently rather than switch back and forth.

2. Mindfulness helps. I’m a big believer in leaning into discomfort. For example: You’re afraid of spiders. Leaning into discomfort would mean paying attention to your breathing and making a conscious effort to stay calm while looking at spider pictures on Google Images or while seeing a spider in the room. The alternative would be succumbing to an autopilot reaction like violently closing the tab or jumping up and screaming. I know what you’re thinking: that’s easier said than done. Being in cold water is a good time to practice! Reframing it as soothing and refreshing changes the experience.

Two ways to get in:

1. Baby steps metho...
Fixing science via a basic income
by Kaj_Sotala — 2017-12-08T14:20:04.623Z

I ran across Ed Hagen’s article “Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam”, which pointed out that all the methodological discussion about science’s replication crisis is kinda missing the point: yes, all of the methodological stuff like p-hacking is something that would be valuable to fix, but the real problem is in the incentives created by the crazy publish-or-perish culture:

In my field of anthropology, the minimum acceptable number of pubs per year for a researcher with aspirations for tenure and promotion is about three. This means that, each year, I must discover three important new things about the world. […]

Let’s say I choose to run 3 studies that each has a 50% chance of getting a sexy result. If I run 3 great studies, mother nature will reward me with 3 sexy results only 12.5% of the time. I would have to run 9 studies to have about a 90% chance that at least 3 would be sexy enough to publish in a prestigious journal.

I do not have the time or money to run 9 new studies every year.

I could instead choose to investigate phenomena that are more likely to yield strong positive results. If I choose to investigate phenomena that are 75% likely to yield such results, for instance, I would only have to run about 5 studies (still too many) for mother nature to usually grace me with at least 3 positive results. But then I run the risk that these results will seem obvious, and not sexy enough to publish in prestigious journals.

To put things in deliberately provocative terms, empirical social scientists with lots of pubs in prestigious journals are either very lucky, or they are p-hacking.

I don’t really blame the p-hackers. By tying academic success to high-profile publications, which, in turn, require sexy results, we academic researchers have put our fates in the hands of a fickle mother nature. Academic success is therefore either a crapshoot or, since few of us are willing to subject the success or failure of our careers to the roll of the dice, a scam.

The article then suggests that the solution would be to have better standards for research, and also blames prestigious journal publishers for exploiting their monopoly on the field. I think that looking at the researcher incentives is indeed the correct thing to do here, but I'm not sure the article goes deep enough with it. Mainly, it doesn't ask the obvious question of why researchers hav...
MIRI's 2017 Fundraiser
by Malo — 2017-12-07T21:47:35.235Z

Update 2017-12-27: We've blown past our 3rd and final target, and reached the matching cap of $300,000 for the $2 million Matching Challenge! Thanks so much to everyone who supported us!

All donations made before 23:59 PST on Dec 31st will continue to be counted towards our fundraiser total. The fundraiser total includes projected matching funds from the Challenge.

MIRI’s 2017 fundraiser is live through the end of December! Our progress so far (updated live):

Donate Now

MIRI is a research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California with a mission of ensuring that smarter-than-human AI technology has a positive impact on the world. You can learn more about our work at “Why AI Safety?” or via MIRI Executive Director Nate Soares’ Google talk on AI alignment.

In 2015, we discussed our interest in potentially branching out to explore multiple research programs simultaneously once we could support a larger team. Following recent changes to our overall picture of the strategic landscape, we’re now moving ahead on that goal and starting to explore new research directions while also continuing to push on our agent foundations agenda. For more on our new views, see “There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence” and our 2017 strategic update. We plan to expand on our relevant strategic thinking more in the coming weeks.

Our expanded research focus means that our research team can potentially grow big, and grow fast. Our current goal is to hire around ten new research staff over the next two years, mostly software engineers. If we succeed, our point estimate is that our 2018 budget will be $2.8M and our 2019 budget will be $3.5M, up from roughly $1.9M in 2017.1

We’ve set our fundraiser targets by estimating how quickly we could grow while maintaining a 1.5-year runway, on the simplifying assumption that about 1/3 of the donations we receive between now and the beginning of 2019 will come during our current fundraiser.2

Hitting Target 1 ($625k) then lets us act on our growth plans in 2018 (but not in 2019); Target 2 ($850k) lets us act on our full two-year growth plan; and in the case where our hiring goes better than expected, Target 3 ($1.25M) would allow us to add new members to our team about twice as quickly, or pay higher salaries for new research staff as needed.

We discuss more d...
Can we see light?
by Zane Scheepers — 2017-12-07T12:54:35.566Z

Is "visible" light, actually visible? Claiming that visible light is called visible light and therefore it must be visible, is circular reasoning. This question is not about the definition of visible, because in that regard, light shows none of the characteristics of visible objects. Light is in fact, what makes objects visible.

Now I'm not talking about wavelengths we can't detect or even light that doesn't strike our eyes. I'm specifically referring to detectable light that strikes our retina. Many will see this as a futile argument about definitions until they actually grasp the differences and realize the implications.

The purpose of vision, what gives us an evolutionary advantage, is that it allows us to see things. For those unfamiliar with the concept of indirect realism, here's a link. http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/book/chap1.html . What we see are objects, like predators, food and possible mates. These objects exist in objective reality (outside our heads) but we perceive our brains representation of these objects in our subjective reality (the reality we perceive inside our heads).

DETECTION IS NOT PERCEPTION.

Our eyes detect light, but detection is a mechanical process of which we are not directly conscious of. We can deduce that the process is occurring due to the fact that we see objects and understand the visual process. Seeing something, on the other hand, is a conscious process. We sometimes don't even see things which are right in front of our eyes and I don't mean figuratively. Have you every moved something out of the way while looking in the fridge, when the thing you're looking for is the thing you moved? Seeing is not perceiving. Perception is consciously seeing something. Detection is not perception.

DO WE SEE OBJECTS OR LIGHT.

The most common held belief is that we perceive light, not objects. As far as detection goes, that's true. Our eyes detect light that strikes the retina. This begins the physiological aspect of vision. Phototransduction, electrochemical impulses travelling to the visual cortex via the optic nerve, the subconscious creating visual representations and sensations. All these processes are subconscious. It's only then that conscious perception comes in. And what we consciously perceive are the objects, from which the detected light, originates. So we...
Trolley Problem Experiment Run IRL 
by Eneasz — 2017-12-07T04:32:19.927Z
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA

Neat show. Claims to be the first time the Trolley Experiment was actually run in the real world.

The host of this show set up a Trolley Problem. Subjects were convinced they were part of a focus group about commuter rail. They're placed in a switching station, that mointors tracks remotely via CCTV, while waiting for the focus group to begin. A kindly old conductor shows them the ropes, and even has them switch a train coming down the tracks from one track to the other just for fun. Then he's called away.

While he's gone, convincing video footage is played of a 5-and-1 constructions workers stationing themselves on the two tracks. And then footage is played of an oncoming train that will hit the group of 5. The subject must choose to throw the switch or not, they don't have a lot of time, maybe a minute?

Test was run 7 times. How many people do you predict flipped the switch to save net-4 lives IRL? (answer in comment below)
Blinded by Insight
by Chris_Leong — 2017-12-07T02:45:53.587Z

Insight is often dangerous to the intellect because we may be so captivated by what we have discovered that we take it too far or bundle it with other falsehoods. We can be so focused on the strength behind this nugget of wisdom, that we fail to realise other claims sneaking their way in there.

Examples:

Postmodernism makes a few important insights - that we should be suspicious of grand narratives, that we should be very skeptical of claims that one particular model has all the answers, that society often distorts what counts as "reasonable" or "logical" or "scientific". However, they try to universalise this to the point where if they took their own arguments seriously, they would have to believe that throwing darts against a board is just as reliable as the top researchers running randomised controlled trials with large sample sizes.
Pragmatists are blinded by the idea that knowledge is an instrumental, rather than a terminal goal. This leads them to a incoherent definition of truth - that truth and usefulness are always the same thing. In many ways, it can be understood as a reaction against the idea that we should pursue knowledge for its own sake. We should always be especially suspicious of these reactive insights.
Someone will discover a new philosophy or intellectual movement, discover that it is way more persuasive or insightful on the topic then they are currently and then adopt it wholeheatedly, to the point of becoming an ideologue.
My last post, The Basic Object Model and Definition by Interface was so focused on explicating the idea that we often use the same word to cover ontologically different situations when both situations share a similar "interface", that I managed to give a definition of existence that didn't create a divide between existence and non-existence.
There have been times when I've been really proud of something that I've written, because I know that it is so much better that what I could have written before. It's possible to be so proud of implementing a particular strategy, that you forget to ask about whether you could have done something even better.

My main motivation behind writing this article was answering the question, "How can intelligent people believe things that are obviously stupid?". There are a few posibilities:

That they are actually stupid
That the

...
Levels of Play
by Davis_Kingsley — 2017-12-06T21:55:42.429Z

One method that I find very easy to use to evaluate adequacy concerns is "level of play". If you look at different games or different leagues of the same game, it's pretty apparent that the "level of play" - the amount of athleticism, effort, skill, planning, strategy, etc. that is on display - is quite different.

For instance, in the United States the NFL is operating at a higher level of play than college football. Similarly, baseball in the United States operates at a higher level of play than baseball in Japan, and both are significantly elevated compared to the rest of the world. In South Korea, Starcraft is treated as a professional sport.
The Critical Rationalist View on Artificial Intelligence
by Fallibilist_duplicate0.16882559340231862 — 2017-12-06T17:26:25.706Z

Critical Rationalism (CR) is being discussed on some threads here at Less Wrong (e.g., here, here, and here). It is something that Critical Rationalists such as myself think contributors to Less Wrong need to understand much better. Critical Rationalists claim that CR is the only viable fully-fledged epistemology known. They claim that current attempts to specify a Bayesian/Inductivist epistemology are not only incomplete but cannot work at all. The purpose of this post is not to argue these claims in depth but to summarize the Critical Rationalist view on AI and also how this speaks to things like the Friendly AI Problem. Some of the ideas here may conflict with ideas you think are true, but understand that these ideas have been worked on by some of the smartest people on the planet, both now and in the past. They deserve careful consideration, not a drive past. Less Wrong says it is one of the urgent problems of the world that progress is made on AI. If smart people in the know are saying that CR is needed to make that progress, and if you are an AI researcher who ignores them, then you are not taking the AI urgency problem seriously.

Universal Knowledge Creators

Critical Rationalism [1] says that human beings are universal knowledge creators. This means we can create any knowledge which it is possible to create. As Karl Popper first realized, the way we do this is by guessing ideas and by using criticism to find errors in our guesses. Our guesses may be wrong, in which case we try to make better guesses in the light of what we know from the criticisms so far. The criticisms themselves can be criticized and we can and do change those. All of this constitutes an evolutionary process. Like biological evolution, it is an example of evolution in action. This process is fallible: guaranteed certain knowledge is not possible because we can never know how an error might be exposed in the future. The best we can do is accept a guessed idea which has withstood all known criticisms. If we cannot find such, then we have a new problem situation about how to proceed and we try to solve that. [2]

Critical Rationalism says that an entity is either a universal knowledge creator or it is not. There is no such thing as a partially universal knowledge creator. So animals such as dogs are not universal knowledge creators — they have no ability what...
Teaching rationality in a lyceum
by Hafurelus — 2017-12-06T16:57:21.915Z

There is one lyceum in Irkutsk(Siberia) that is allowed to form its own study curriculum (it is quite rare in Russia). For example, there was a subject where we were watching the lectures of a famous speaking coach. In retrospect, this course turned out to be quite useful.
In light of this opportunity to create new subjects, I thought "What if I introduce them to the idea of teaching Rationality?"
Tomorrow (8th Dec) I meet with a principal and we discuss the idea of teaching critical thinking, cognitive biases and the like.

There are several questions I want to ask:

1. This idea definitely was considered before. Were there any cases of it being implemented? If so, is there any statistics about its efficiency?

2. Are there any shareable materials regarding this issue? For example, course structures of similar projects.

3. The principal will likely be curious about what authorities back this idea. If you approve it and are someone recognizable, I would be glad if you told me about it.
TSR #4 Value Producing Work
by Hazard — 2017-12-06T02:44:27.822Z

**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 saddness if you don't read his piece. The link is below.

The Strategic Review Background Ops #4: Value Producing Work

Summary

Odds are a lot of any given process in your life has a fair amount of waste in it.
One can often significantly increase their output by making reducing the waste in an existing process that you already sink time into.
Toyota is worth studying independantly?

Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Manufacturing

.

Walking to the sandwich shop is not the essential good part of getting a sandwich (unless, of course, it is).
Though this approach can seem like it will increase stress, a more streamlined life helps reduce stress.
The process

Take action out of the background.
Completely explicate it.
What are the unessential steps that don’t have to be there?

Be hardcore

Start with high standards, then gradually work towards meeting them.
Be skeptical that anything you’re doing adds value.

Eliminate waste. Pretty solid directive. It’s almost tautologically a good thing. It seems like the easiest way to run into trouble is to be caught up in thinking about the symbolic representation of waste, and not the actual thing.

Eliminating things from your life because they match the symbolic representation of waste can do you a lot of harm. I’m an undergrad in engineering, and I know a lot of people who operate as if they’ve decided that sleep is a waste of their time. I doubt that many of them are actually genetic freaks whose peak performance comes at 5 hours of sleep each night.

Think of waste in a pure sense, an activity, motion, or effort that does not serve your values. This requires having a solid grasp on what you value.

The most interesting part of thinking about waste to me, is thinking about the edge cases. Things that seem to be wasteful, but a part of you argues that there is a key part that you really do value. These cases are a great oppurtunity to ask yourself, “Is there a way to get a more direct supply?”

See if you can break apart the pieces of...
LDL 8: A Silly Realization
by magfrump — 2017-12-06T02:20:44.216Z

Maybe deep learning researchers are just like mathematicians. They think of coding as the hard part of what they do so they spend a lot of time teaching people how to implement neural nets from scratch. But actually the hard part of what they do is math (or at least keeping track of tensor shapes).

So I'm frustrated that I've heard a dozen explanations of gradient descent, which I understood in high school, but I have to learn about variational autoencoders from scratch by reading academic papers.
Strategic High Skill Immigration
by Gentzel — 2017-12-06T01:15:19.387Z

How to improve the global economy, increase strategic stability, and safeguard the far future.

Part 1: The current situation: shifting balance of power

When trying to help people at scale, it is often prudent to go beyond direct interventions and to seek equilibria which are in the long run interest of humanity, especially if we assign any significant value to the far future. From this we can derive the instrumental value of reducing risks which are multi-generational or permanent in nature, and ensuring the safe development of transformative technologies which could pose immense risks either on their own or in the wrong hands. Historically, wars and state competition have had a great deal of influence on these sorts of concerns: competitions between nations can lead to arms races that produce new dangerous or beneficial technologies, the destruction of wars themselves can have permanent effects, and the victors of wars determine the institutions which govern humanity and its technology going forward in time.

As China’s economic growth continues to outpace US economic growth, and its military expenditure as a percentage of GDP continues to remain stable it is plausible that the US and China may find themselves in a different equilibrium from the current peace they are used to, and plausibly a similar trap to the one the UK and Germany faced just before WW1. Though the British Empire spanned much of the globe and had the largest Navy in the world, in 1898 Germany began a naval arms race with Britain, just before 1914 the German economy caught up, and shortly after World War 1 followed.

Known as the Thucydides Trap, in 12 out of 16 cases where a rising power challenged an established power in the past 500 years, war was the result. Though the pattern may seem surprising, it is rather consistent: with no outside enforcer with coercive power to make peace agreements between great powers trustworthy, it is fairly difficult for countries to credibly commit to one of the many outcomes that leaves both parties better off than war, especially since as the rising power becomes more powerful, it continuously gains negotiating advantage, while the formerly ruling power loses it. In the four cases above where war was avoided, one involved a prior war, and external intervention by the pope, two cases involved competing allies, and the remaining case was the rise of the Sovi...