trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Open thread, June 27 - July 3, 2016
by  — 2016-06-27T01:46:48.339Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Meetup : Dallas Meetup
by DubiousTwizzler — 2016-06-26T19:01:25.428Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas Meetup

WHEN:
09 July 2016 01:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
3725 Belt Line Rd, Addison, TX 75001

It's been too long since we last had a Dallas meetup. We will be meeting at Dunn Brothers Coffee. Look for the sign that says "LessWrong" on it.

Feel free to comment or PM me if you have any questions.

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas Meetup
Simpler, cruder, virtual world AIs
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-06-26T15:44:26.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Normal people start with simple ideas and complexify them; it seems that I start with complex ideas and then simplify them.

Partially inspired by a conversation with Tom Voice, here is the simpler version of the AIs in virtual worlds idea.

The idea is simply to physically confine the AI up to time T. The AI gets a reward or utility only before time T, and is motivated to care only about events before time T. We turn off the AI at time T, and inspect its output only afterwards.

We could try and enforce this by the usual trick of defining some event E that will erase the AI's output (and the AI?) at or before time T, and multiplying the AI's utility or reward by IE, the indicator function for erasure. Therefore, the argument goes, the AI will only care what happens in worlds where we won't see its output, thus not motivating it to manipulate us.

The weakness of imperfection

Unlike the original "virtual worlds" idea, it is not safe to spy on the AI while it's working, or at any time before time T, as this may motivate us to intervene in the AI's execution before time T. So this is more an oracle idea, but one that allow another class of outputs from the other two ideas: counterfactual utility estimation and the confirmed selective oracle.

Both those ideas, however, are stable under imperfect problem specification. If the AI doing counterfactual utility estimation, estimates that erasure E won't be perfect, then it is motivated to manipulate us only through the least significant figures in its output --- and the degree of manipulation its willing to try can be estimated. The confirmed selective oracle is naturally motivated to manipulate us, but will only do this if this is a more likely route to success than answering honestly; if we set the problem up right, this shouldn't happen.

The approach in this post works if the assumptions are perfect, but it is not robust if they are slightly wrong. A small probability of the AI valuing post-T means that it might throw in a "manipulate humans" trick into its output, if it can do this at no cost.

Of course, we can bring in other techniques to make this type of Oracle more robust --- by reducing the size of its output, erasing its run history (which we'd otherwise want to access), or specifying its reward function thus that the AI can't compute manipulations without sacrificing i

...
Vote on values
by KatjaGrace — 2016-06-26T00:34:13.000Z

I. A problem

I have heard pessimism lately about whether democracy can produce good decisions frequently enough to stop everything rapidly going to Hell. Primary concerns are that voters are ignorant and that voters are evil. Supposing voters are evil, arguably any good system of government should bring about Hell. However the ignorance seems like a real issue.

A popular response to all complaints about democracy is, ‘Well, what else are we going to do? Do you want dictatorship?’

I think this ignores the potential for mild variations on democracy. ‘Democracy’ is not very specific. Wikipedia lists a bunch of variations. I’d like to suggest a different one.

The basic problem I want to solve is that the people voting for policies (directly or indirectly) are ignorant about the likely consequences of policies.

But first I’d like to point out that this is a problem for everyone, not a conflict between an ignorant team and an informed team. That ignorant people vote for destructive policies is at least as bad for the ignorant people as it is for everyone else. That is, if people truly vote for bad policies due to ignorance, they would presumably prefer the outcomes that they voted against.

II. A (hand-wavy) solution

My proposal is for people to vote on what they want to happen, and then for someone else to put in the hard work of figuring out which policies correspond to which outcomes. That is, to vote on values.

Robin Hanson suggested this in Shall we Vote on Values, but Bet on Beliefs? (2013), as a component of Futarchy—a system where people elect representatives to stipulate their values, and use prediction markets to judge which policies will satisfy those values. Robin is mostly excited about the prediction markets aspect, but I think the idea of separating out values from policies is important on its own. Prediction markets are but one thing a population might use to figure out what to do, once they knew what their group as a whole wanted. Arguably a pretty good thing, but still. Any kind of voting on values then doing something else about beliefs seems like it would have a number of benefits unrelated to prediction markets.

We can think of selecting policy as something like:

Everyone has their own values and empirical beliefs. Everyone has to share policies. Values and empirical beliefs together determine the best policies. We basically...
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part Three (Mental Health, Basilisk, Blogs and Media)
by namespace — 2016-06-25T03:40:40.627Z

2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis

Overview

Results and Dataset

Meta

Demographics

LessWrong Usage and Experience

LessWrong Criticism and Successorship

Diaspora Community Analysis

Mental Health Section

Basilisk Section/Analysis

Blogs and Media analysis (You are here)

Politics

Calibration Question And Probability Question Analysis

Charity And Effective Altruism Analysis

Mental Health

We decided to move the Mental Health section up closer in the survey this year so that the data could inform accessibility decisions.

LessWrong Mental Health As Compared To Base Rates In The General Population

Condition	Base Rate	LessWrong Rate	LessWrong Self dx Rate	Combined LW Rate	Base/LW Rate Spread	Relative Risk

Depression
17%
25.37%
27.04%
52.41%
+8.37
1.492

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
2.3%
2.7%
5.6%
8.3%
+0.4
1.173

Autism Spectrum Disorder
1.47%
8.2%
12.9%
21.1%
+6.73
5.578

Attention Deficit Disorder
5%
13.6%
10.4%
24%
+8.6
2.719

Bipolar Disorder
3%
2.2%
2.8%
5%
-0.8
0.733

Anxiety Disorder(s)
29%
13.7%
17.4%
31.1%
-15.3
0.472

Borderline Personality Disorder
5.9%
0.6%
1.2%
1.8%
-5.3
0.101

Schizophrenia
1.1%
0.8%
0.4%
1.2%
-0.3
0.727

Substance Use Disorder
10.6%
1.3%
3.6%
4.9%
-9.3
0.122

Base rates are taken from Wikipedia, US rates were favored over global rates where immediately available.

Accessibility Suggestions

So of the conditions we asked about, LessWrongers are at significant extra risk for three of them: Autism, ADHD, Depression.

LessWrong probably doesn't need to concern itself with being more accessible to those with autism as it likely already is. Depression is a complicated disorder with no clear interventions that can be easily implemented as site or community policy. It might be helpful to encourage looking more at positive trends in addition to negative ones, but the community already seems to do a fairly good job of this. (We could definitely use some more of it though.)

Attention Deficit Disorder - Public Service Announcement

That leaves ADHD, which we might be able to do something about, starting with this:

A lot of LessWrong stuff ends up falling into the same genre as productivity advice or 'self help'. If you have trouble with getting yourself to work, find yourself reading these things and completely unable to implement them, it's entirely possible that you have a mental health condition which impacts y...
Evidence on why abstract research is or isn’t respected
by KatjaGrace — 2016-06-25T03:00:21.000Z

I previously suggested an explanation for very abstract research sometimes not being well respected: very abstract thought often looks superficially similar to very basic confusion, which looks amusingly silly. For instance, thinking about paraconsistent logic looks a lot like being confused about whether yes means no.

This theory suggests that abstract thought would mostly be less respected in areas that people have common sense views, because common sense is where it looks especially silly to be confused about basic assumptions.

I think this describes the abstract topics that Robin Hanson is interested in—and originally asked about—pretty well: the future, the human mind, the economy, practically relevant philosophy, and human behavior.

Maybe it’s just true of all areas? I don’t think so— biology and chemistry probably don’t have so many common sense views I think. Though physics and engineering probably have some, due to people having intuitive physics models.

So I think this is some evidence for the earlier theory, but I still don’t believe it that much.
Powering Through vs Working Around
by  — 2016-06-24T19:42:31.233Z

Lately, I’ve been musing on the nature of self-improvement in general. When I notice that something I’ve been doing-- be it mental or physical, the next immediate chain of thought is “Okay, how do I improve my life now, knowing this phenomena exists?” In doing so, I’ve recently realized that this is missing a crucial distinction that can lead to more confusion later down the road.

This important divide is the question of optimizing around, or powering through. So before figuring out what actions I should be taking, it seems important to ask myself, “What am I trying to optimize for?” If the negative biases and habits I manage to identify are rocks, then the question is whether or not the best plan of action is to plan around these rocks, or crush them entirely. This is far from a clear-cut division, however. It appears that breaking bad habits--powering through is going to be more costly in terms of resources spent. Additionally, a successful plan for overcoming these errors will probably have a mix of these, especially if ridding oneself of the tendency entirely is the goal.

For an example of how these two are often blurred, take the planning fallacy:

One strategy may be to overestimate times when planning, pushing through the “it feels wrong” feeling to develop a better sense of how long things take. To augment this, there are also planning techniques, like Murphyjitsu designed to get you considering “hidden factors”. It’s far from clear how much actions that compensate for biases by countering their effects actually reduce the bias entirely, especially if the helpful action also becomes second nature.

But overall, I think this is an important distinction to keep in mind, because I’ll often be stuck asking myself “Should I work around X, or should I actively try to defeat X?”

Does anyone have experience trying to go specifically in one way or the other to counter their biases?
Meetup : Ann Arbor Area Amalgam of Rationalist-Adjacent Anthropoids: Assemblage at Adam's
by Asymmetric — 2016-06-24T16:39:15.679Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ann Arbor Area Amalgam of Rationalist-Adjacent Anthropoids: Assemblage at Adam's

WHEN:
09 July 2016 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2065 Commerce Blvd. #327 Ann Arbor, MI 48103

(Reposted from the advert on the Google Group).

I propose that the next meetup be on Saturday, the Ninth of July in the Two-Thousand-Sixteenth Year of the Common Era, at around 1900 EST.

(It would have been sooner, but I'm busy this weekend and the weekend after is the Fourth of July Weekend.)

If you can read this sentence, you're invited.

If you had to have someone else read that sentence for you or you divined its meaning through clairvoyance or some dark ritual, you're still invited, but in the latter case we will expect a lightning talk on how to practice clairvoyance or dark rituals.

If someone told you about it, you're invited.

If someone re-posted it somewhere else and you read it, you're invited.

--

No level of expertise is required, however I will expect some people to discourse on the subjects of Alabama and Memory.

They know who they are.

Do not worry if you don't think you're interesting enough. You're much more interesting than you think you are.

Even if you're not, you're invited anyway.

If you're interested in anything at all, speak up. No topic is off limits. (I expect civility, but that hasn't ever been an issue and I don't think it will be.)

--

We will be meeting at my apartment. Located at:
2065 Commerce Blvd. #327
Ann Arbor, MI
48103

If you need a ride there or back, please let someone know or mail the group well beforehand so we can figure out a way to transport you.

The apartment building has two entrances. If you go around the strip of buildings, there will be a parking lot, vast and free. Buzz at the door (just push the button labelled 327) and I (or someone) will let you in.

To get there on the bus from Down Town Ann Arbor, you can:

Take the 28 to Pine Lake Cooperative which is near Pennsylvania Avenue.

Take the 29 bus to Liberty and Maple, cross to the kitty corner (there are push-buttons on the signals), and walk south on Maple to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Take the 27 bus to Pauline and Maple and walk north to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Pennsylvania Avenue leads into the back parking lot, see above for instructions from there.

If you are allergic to cats, please take s

...
New LW Meetup: Bay City, MI
by FrankAdamek — 2016-06-24T15:58:05.275Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on June 24th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Bay City Meetup: 30 June 2016 03:23PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Baltimore Weekly Meetup: 26 June 2016 08:00PM
European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
San Antonio Meetup: 26 June 2016 02:00PM
Sao Paulo - Meetup de junho: 25 June 2016 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Moscow: Words of estimative probability, transparency illusion, belief investigation, rational games: 26 June 2016 02:00PM
[Moscow] Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game: 29 June 2016 07:40PM
Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library: 01 July 2016 07:50AM
[Moscow] Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow: 16 July 2016 03:00PM
[NYC] Summer Solstice Party, NYC: 25 June 2016 03:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Projects: 27 June 2016 06:15PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - July: 03 July 2016 04:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates: 26 June 2016 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion se...
Effective hypocrisy?
by KatjaGrace — 2016-06-24T03:58:44.000Z

You know what is cheap? Talk.

You know what is expensive? Action.

You know what is cost-effective? Hypocrisy.

At least if non-word actions are not much more effective than words, which seems right. Differences to the world you can make without communicating seem limited. And for communication, words seem better. Maybe actions speak louder than words, when they speak. But words do most of the talking, because actions are private and not very intelligible. They are like a really loud mumble to oneself. Words are so much easier to hear that when you know about someone else’s actions, it’s virtually always just because you heard some words about them.

Does Effective Altruism fundamentally push toward hypocrisy?
Meetup : Moscow: Words of estimative probability, transparency illusion, belief investigation, rational games
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-06-24T00:23:34.331Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Words of estimative probability, transparency illusion, belief investigation, rational games

WHEN:
26 June 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, 5к2

Note: most our members join meetups via other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a short link to the hackpad document with the schedule here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

Pad with the details about 26.06.2016 meetup.

We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Words of estimative probability, transparency illusion, belief investigation, rational games
Meetup : Baltimore Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-06-23T16:28:43.883Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
26 June 2016 08:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1726 reisterstown road pikesville maryland 21208

Pikesville DoubleTree - Hilton, at the restaurant / bar or at one of the tables outside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Weekly Meetup
Meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
by maia — 2016-06-23T16:03:54.960Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Projects

WHEN:
27 June 2016 06:15:45PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St., San Francisco

We’ll be meeting to work on projects!

Near the beginning, we’ll go around and talk about what we’ll be working on, then do a couple of pomodoros quietly. At some point we’ll break into general conversations and socializing.

For help getting into the building, please call: three zero one, three five six, five four two four.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
Diaspora roundup thread, 23rd June 2016
by philh — 2016-06-23T14:03:32.105Z

Guidelines: Top-level comments here should be links to things written by members of the rationalist community, preferably that have some particular interest to this community. Self-promotion is totally fine. Including a brief summary or excerpt is great, but not required. Generally stick to one link per top-level comment, so they can be voted on individually. Recent links are preferred.

Rule: Do not link to anyone who does not want to be linked to. In particular, Scott Alexander has asked people to get his permission, before linking to specific posts on his tumblr or in other out-of-the-way places.
Meetup : Meetup : San Antonio Meetup
by Bryan-san — 2016-06-22T21:10:13.810Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup : San Antonio Meetup

WHEN:
26 June 2016 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
12651 Vance Jackson Rd #118, San Antonio, TX 78230

Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong at Yumi Berry.

Look for the sign that says "LW".

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup : San Antonio Meetup
Mistakes #5: Blinded by winning
by KatjaGrace — 2016-06-22T20:53:45.000Z

(Mistakes #1, #2, #3, #4)

I used to be a practicing atheist. I figured I had strong arguments against God’s existence. I talked to some Christians, and found that they were both ill-prepared to defend their views and shockingly uninterested in the fact that they couldn’t. This made them look like the epistemological analogues of movie villains; trivial to scorn.

Alas, this made me less likely to wonder if I was mistaken about the whole topic. If a person responds to criticisms of their beliefs with fluster and fascination with all other subjects, my natural response is not to back down and think about why I am wrong.

Yet I should have been confused. If a person is apparently doing a host of things because of fact X, and the balance of evidence doesn’t seem to support X, and the person don’t appear to care about that, one should probably question one’s assumption that X is a central part of their worldview. I still think I wasn’t wrong about X, but I was probably wrong about all these people toiling under peculiar and willingly misinformed views on X.

Thinking about it now, it seems unlikely that the existence and exact definition of God is anywhere near as central to religion as it seems to a literal-minded systematization-obsessed teenager with little religious experience. Probably religious people mostly believe in God, but it’s not like they came to that conclusion and then reluctantly accepted the implications of it. It’s part of a big cluster of intersecting things that are appealing for various reasons. I won’t go into this, because I don’t know much about it, and this post isn’t about what religion is about. (If you want a post that is about that, at least a bit, Scott Alexander wrote two good ones recently that seem about right to me.)

This post is about winning arguments. If you repeatedly win an argument too easily, I claim that you should be less sure that you know what is going on at all, rather than smug. My boyfriend points out that being perturbed by the weakness of your opponents’ arguments is perhaps the smuggest way to be unsure of yourself, so maybe I just think you should be less sure of yourself as well as smug.