trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Frontpage Posting and Commenting Guidelines
by Ben Pace — 2017-09-26T06:24:59.649Z

Welcome to the new LessWrong! Our goal with the LessWrong frontpage is to host high-quality discussion on a wide range of topics, in a way that allows users to make better collective progress toward the truth.

New posts automatically get posted to a user's personal blog, where people are free to talk about whatever they like. By default, moderators will consider whether the post is a good fit for the frontpage. If you don't want the post to appear on frontpage, you can uncheck "moderators can promote".

1. Things to shoot for on frontpage

1.1. Usefulness, novelty, and fun. The frontpage of this site is for serious intellectual engagement with interesting ideas, with a focus on ideas that are important but challenging to evaluate. Topics that lack inherent importance are OK if the discussion quality is high enough, and particularly if the discussion is useful for other purposes, like building skills; but the best topics will usually be consequential and neglected ones.

1.2. Accuracy, kindness, and relevance to the discussion at hand, in the spirit of the Victorian Sufi Buddha ideal.

1.3. Clarity and openness about what you believe, your reasons for believing it, and what would cause you to change your mind. Try to make concrete predictions and bets, and to note the cruxes for your beliefs, where possible. It’s not always easy to clearly articulate a belief, and it's great to note places where you’re uncertain about what you believe, about your reasons, and about your cruxes. We don’t want people to feel like they have to conceal or immediately abandon their beliefs whenever those beliefs turn out to be nontrivial to articulate or justify. But incremental progress toward more clarity and openness, even if it’s incomplete, is highly valued here.

A corollary of 1.3 is that we often prefer descriptive language (including language describing your current beliefs, emotional state, etc.) over prescriptive language, all else being equal. Prescriptions are obviously an essential part of communication, but descriptions are generally easier to relate to evidence, predictions, and cruxes. We encourage putting a focus on them for that reason.

2. Things to keep to a minimum

2.1. Community-focused discussion — i.e., discussion about the LessWrong/rationality community, as opposed to discussion about particular object-level topics. We want to avoid dynamics l...
The Best Self-Help Should Be Self-Defeating
by  — 2017-09-26T06:16:32.059Z

Cross-post from blog.

[Self-help is supposed to get people to stop needing it. But typical incentives in any medium mean that it’s possible to get people hooked on your content instead. A musing on how the setup for writing self-help differs from typical content.]

Say you have a job as a Self-Help Guru. You spend your days giving out your worldly advice to those who seek guidance on their problems.

I claim that if you’re doing job as a Self-Help Guru right, then you should never have repeat customers.

That’s the gist behind the idea that the best self-help should be self-defeating.

Here are some analogies of things that I think are like self-help:

The point of taking antibiotics is so that you eventually stop taking them and feel better.

The point of wearing glasses is so that you can stop squinting and see more clearly.

The point of reading a programming textbook is so you can eventually start writing programs on your own.

My claim is that if you’re trying to do self-help right, you want people to be able to “graduate” from your ideas and figure out what actually works for them. In a sense, you want to catalyze people to find their own optimal solutions instead of consisting coming back to you for more help every time.

You want them to go off on their own adventures in life, confident that they have the ability to craft new tools when the ones you give them stop working.

Once again, the Recognize vs Generate dichotomy comes into play here. Following advice someone else gave you can look about the same as coming up with something similar on your own. But being the sort of person who can generate solutions independently is far more effective in the long run.

Basically I claim the whole point of self-help is to help people help themselves.

Not that controversial a viewpoint. The real problem, I think, comes in when we consider the way that self-help gets publicized and published.

First off, consider the incentives of many media like newspapers, television channels, novels, or vloggers. Growing an audience is an explicit part of their goals; after all, their profits are largely tied to their viewership. As a result, it makes a lot of sense for them to come out with constant content—it keeps the original crowd coming, and a constant presence means it can draw more people in.

But self-help is different. Arguably, the content isn’t even the real point; the real poi

...
Thinking on the page
by whales — 2017-09-26T02:22:38.440Z

“Thinking on the page” is a handle that I’ve found useful in improving my writing (and my introspection more generally). When I write, for the most part, I’m trying to put something that I already feel is true into words. But when I think on the page, the words are getting ahead of my internal sense of what’s true. I’m writing something that just sounds good, or even just something that logically flows from what I’ve already written but has come untethered from my internal sense. It’s kind of a generalized verbal overshadowing.

I don’t think this is challenging only to people who think [of themselves as thinking] non-verbally, considering how much more universal are experiences like “this puts exactly what I believe into words better than I ever could” or even the satisfaction of finding a word on the tip of the tongue. Some people seem to be better than others not just at describing their internal sense of truth, but at tapping into it at all. But if you think only in internal monologue, you may have a very different perspective on “thinking on the page”—I’d be interested to hear about it.

At best, this is what happens in what Terry Tao calls the “rigorous” stage of mathematics education, writing, “The point of rigour is not to destroy all intuition; instead, it should be used to destroy bad intuition while clarifying and elevating good intuition.” At worst, it’s argument based on wordplay. Thinking on the page can be vital when you’re working beyond your intuition, but it’s equally vital to notice that you’re doing it. If what you’re writing doesn’t correspond to your internal sense of what’s true, is that because you’re using your words wrong, or because you need to use the page as prosthetic working memory to build a picture that can inform your internal sense?

The two places this becomes clearest for me are in academic writing and in art critique. Jargon has the effect of constantly pulling me back towards the page. If it doesn’t describe a native concept, I can either heroically translate my entire sense of things and arguments about them into jargon, or I can translate the bare raw materials and then manipulate them on the page—so much easier. As for art, the raw material of the work is already there in front of me—so tempting to take what’s easy to point to and sketch meaning from it, while ignoring my experience of the work, let alone what the raw m

...
Why I Quit Social Media
by sarahconstantin — 2017-09-26T00:58:28.379Z
Link: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/

Epistemic Status: Personal

I’m not a Puritan. I eat dessert, enjoy a good cocktail, and socialize a lot. I like fun, and I don’t think fun is wrong.

So I really understand the allergy to messages of ascetic self-denial.

But lately I’ve found it necessary to become more like this... and less like this.

More balanced, deliberate, reflective. Less needy, emotionally unstable, dramatic, and attention-seeking.

I’ve written about this process here, here, here, here, and here. I’ve been at it for about a year.

Why is it worth being less of a drama queen? In some ways, equinamity is a lot less fun.

But, ultimately, being a drama queen is a dependent’s lifestyle. It makes you unable to function on your own. As a practical matter, I am not a dependent, and so I sometimes need to do things — in real life, outside of my own head, where the actual state of the world matters.

I also think it’s wrong to constantly interrupt things other people are doing to change the subject to All About Me.

And, basically, that’s what social media does. It distances you from reality, makes you focus on a shadow-world of opinions about opinions about opinions; it makes you more impulsive and emotionally unstable; it incentivizes derailing conversations to fish for ego-strokes.

I don’t dislike petty bullshit — I enjoy it all too much. I could happily spend eternity picking fights and chasing drama if somehow that were feasible.

So I asked myself “is there, ultimately, anything wrong with living in a world of screams and shadows and impulse pleasures? Do I actually care about anything else?” And the answer was “Unfortunately, yeah. I have to literally sustain my own life, and there are people I genuinely care about. So…ok, reality matters.”

And if reality matters, obviously you shouldn’t be doing stuff that makes you into a moron.

Life after social media isn’t hard, in my experience. Life without one pleasure isn’t miserable, because there are other pleasures. The brain’s pleasure mechanisms are damnably homeostatic; you adjust to about the same amount of average happiness, regardless of how intense or mild the pleasures in your daily life. I miss the drama of social media now and then, but not most days.

I think if you consider yourself reality-oriented or “serious”, then quitting social media should be overdetermined.

I’m a little more ambivalent about all that — I’m the kind of person who might

...
Travel Journal: Hawaii
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-09-25T22:00:48.000Z

Putanumonit is on the road. With a few hours before my next flight, I have time to share some wiki impressions from a week in Hawaii.

Aloha

The Hawaiian language is built from some pretty basic blocks. It uses seven consonant sounds (h, k, l, m, n, p, w) and five vowels. Every syllable ends with a vowel and contains at most one consonant. This means that there are only 40 syllables possible in the Hawaiian language, and thus only 65,640 possible words of 3 syllables or less. In contrast, English has hundreds of thousands such words (of course, Hawai’i is supposed to have four syllables in it and no one cares).

This isn’t a problem for Hawaiians. They have around 30,000 distinct words for distinct things, and everything else is simply covered by Aloha. Aloha means: hello, love, peace, compassion, mercy, affection, and goodwill towards mankind. It’s a greeting, an acronym, and a motto. 90% of businesses in Hawaii contain the word, from Aloha Airlines to Aloha Septic Services Inc.

I will name every section of this post in accordance with the local custom.

Decimaloha

The sales tax in Hawaii is supposed to be 4%, but on every restaurant bill it shows up as 4.166%, or exactly 1/24th, or 4% divided by (1 minus 4%). I found this delightful enough that I didn’t mind paying extra.

Circadialoha

There’s not much to do in Maui after dark, so we went to sleep at 10 pm each night and woke up at exactly 6:33 am, when the sun would peek over the volcano ridge and into my eyes. I was in a great mood for the entire vacation, and I wonder if it’s partly due to falling into a precise circadian rhythm, something that is impossible in New York.

I like having seasons, but there’s an upside to having each day be identical besides needing a much smaller wardrobe.

Colonialoha

In case you missed it, there’s been an academic freedom controversy so confusing that Noam Chomsky took the right side on it: a professor got a pro-colonialism article published in an anti-colonial journal, leading to an all-too-predictable shitshow. I don’t know the first thing about colonialism studies, but I began to wonder how colonialism looked like from the point of view of “regular” Hawaiians.

Before white people came, Hawaii had a feudal system with 11 hereditary nobility classes. Most citizens had to pay a tax and serve in the armies of the va...
Life Updates Strike Again!
by Kallisti — 2017-09-25T21:51:09.782Z

(Crossposted from srconstantin.wordpress.com)

So, I have again changed jobs — I am now working at Starsky Robotics helping build self-driving trucks!

I’m still interested in biotech, but there are a lot of interesting problems in autonomous vehicles that I’m excited to work on. Also, this job is in San Francisco, unlike my last job, and since I am pregnant, I’d like to work in the same state as my future kid.

The great thing about California is that local laws allow freelancing, so I am once again open for business, to the extent that I have time. If you have a question that could benefit from a personalized literature review, particularly in the biomedical sciences, I can do that, and you can contact me at srconstantin@gmail.com.

Currently my main freelance research project is surveying current experimental avenues for life extension, in cooperation with an investor who’s interested in funding longevity research. I love working on stuff like this, and will be updating this blog with progress.

I’m also going to start seriously preparing to get my cancer research book published, which, I’m told, involves doing your own marketing. I’m going to be looking for opportunities to write shorter articles for magazines/blogs and otherwise get publicity, so if you know of any good venues, please let me know.
The Five Hindrances to Doing the Thing
by moridinamael — 2017-09-25T17:04:53.643Z

"Compare your normal level of consciousness with that of an athlete in the zone, or with a person in an emergency. You'll realize that daily life consists mostly of different degrees of dullness and mindlessness."

- Culadasa (John Yates, Ph.D.), The Mind Illuminated

It has been noted that the term akrasia does not seemingly carve reality at the joints in a useful way. The general problem of knowing that you should do a thing and yet having trouble getting yourself to do it is an ancient problem, and luckily, people have actually been working on solving it for a long time.

A useful approach for solving a general problem is often to thoroughly solve a specific instance of that problem and then to try to generalize it. For thousands of years, humans have been working on solving a specific very difficult problem: how to make themselves sit down for up to an hour a day and meditate.

Meditation, on its face, is an overwhelmingly boring task, providing almost no intrinsic reward, especially for beginners. It is almost the degenerate case of making yourself do the most boring possible thing within the realm of actual human activity. It might (or might not) come as a surprise that over the centuries, those who teach meditation have narrowed the potential obstacles to meditation to only five:

Desire

,

aversion

,

laziness or lethargy

,

agitation due to worry or remorse

, and

doubt

. In this article, I will attempt to generalize these five hindrances to be applicable to any task, not just meditation. In so doing, I hope to provide a road map to fighting akrasia in the moment.

The following section is organized as follows: Each hindrance has specific qualities, which will help you recognize its occurrence; a cause, which explains why this specific form of resistance arises; and remedies to be employed in the moment of recognizing it.

Desire

Qualities

Distraction due to intrusive thoughts of pleasures related to material existence or attempts to avoid their opposites.

Gain/loss, fame/obscurity, pleasure/pain, praise/blame.

Cause

Desire is the sensation of wanting to obtain or keep something, and is healthy and good in the appropriate context.

Remedies

"Unification of mind" - cognitively emphasize the utility of having a mind that is singularly engaged on the current task, and set the firm intention to do so.

Briefly address the negative consequences that would come

...
Rational Feed: Last Week's Community Articles and Some Recommended Posts
by sapphire — 2017-09-25T13:41:55.117Z

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Why I Am Not A Quaker Even Though It Often Seems As Though I Should Be by Ben Hoffman - Quakers have consistently gotten to the right answers faster than most people, or the author. Arbitrage strategies to beat the quakers. An incomplete survey of alternatives.

Could A Neuroscientist Understand A Microprocessor by Rationally Speaking - "Eric Jonas, discussing his provocative paper titled 'Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?' in which he applied state-of-the-art neuroscience tools, like lesion analysis, to a computer chip. By applying neuroscience's tools to a system that humans fully understand he was able to reveal how surprisingly uninformative those tools actually are."

Reasonable Doubt New Look Whether Prison Growth Cuts Crime by Open Philosophy - Part1 of a four part, in depth, series on Criminal Justice reform. The remaining posts are linked below. "I estimate, that at typical policy margins in the United States today, decarceration has zero net impact on crime. That estimate is uncertain, but at least as much evidence suggests that decarceration reduces crime as increases it. The crux of the matter is that tougher sentences hardly deter crime, and that while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their criminality after release. As a result, “tough-on-crime” initiatives can reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in the long run. Empirical social science research—or at least non-experimental social science research—should not be taken at face value. Among three dozen studies I reviewed, I obtained or reconstructed the data and code for eight. Replication and reanalysis revealed significant methodological concerns in seven and led to major reinterpretations of four. These studies endured much tougher scrutiny from me than they did from peer reviewers in order to make it into academic journals. Yet given the stakes in lives and dollars, the added scrutiny was worth it. So from the point of view of decision makers who rely on academic research, today’s peer review processes fall well short of the optimal."

Deterrence De Minimus by Open Philosophy - Part 2.

Incapacitation How Much Does Putting People Inside Prison Cut Crime Outside by Open Philosophy - Part 3.

Aftere...
An incentive structure that might not suck too much.
by  — 2017-09-25T09:07:57.559Z

You want to make things better or live in a world which makes things better. But how do you go about actually doing that? There is truth to Drucker's maxim

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it."

But you have also heard of Goodheart's law.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

But you have measures. How can you use them without them becoming a target?

Delegation

If you are delegating work this becomes even trickier. You can't give the people the you are delegating the measures you use (unless you trust them to use them properly and not use them as targets). So you give people rules to follow or goals to meet that aren't the measures.

Then evaluate them on how well they follow the rules or goals (not on how well they meet the measure), and iterate on the rules or goals. If you have people that follow the rules and achieve the goals *AND* you iterate on those things you can actually affect change in the world. If you don't iterate you'll just end up optimising whatever the first set of rules points at, rather than the thing you actually want to acheive.

You also probably want to give people some slack with the rules/goals, so that they have spare energy to look at the world and figure out what they think is best. If people are run ragged trying to meet a goal to survive, all other considerations fall by the way side.

Fixing the goals

During the iteration of the rules, how do you avoid Goodheart's law yourself? You want people to lead good happy lives, but don't want to end up secretly giving people drugs to make them happy, because you are short-circuiting things. You also don't want to kill everyone to reduce long term suffering.

So instead you build yourself a model of what Good looks like. This model is important it allows you to decouple your measure from your target. An example might be, "It is Good for People to be wealthy as it allows them to do more things". You use your model to generate a target, in this case "make people wealthier". Then you alter the rules and goals to hit that target.

What happens if your model is wrong? Let us say some people are becoming unhappier as they become wealthier, due to pollution causing health issues.

This is where the measure comes in. You then use your measures to see if your model is correc

...
Open thread, September 25 - October 1, 2017
by Thomas — 2017-09-25T07:36:19.474Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, 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 start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top-level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting
Test post
by the gears to ascension — 2017-09-25T05:43:46.089Z

So, apparently I can just make blog posts, and they don't show up anywhere but my user page. Cool.

edit 2024-12-21: gonna use this to exercise every lw element type, to test my post copy-to-clipboard button. Horizontal divider:

latex fraction:

ab

table:

a1	b1	c1
a2	b2	c2

footnote[1]

heading 1

heading 2

heading 3

bold in a paragraph - italic nested in bold - just bold again; no longer bold or italic, italic again, no longer italic, strikethrough, normal again.

quoted text.

quoted bullet point.
another bullet point.

unquoted bullet point.

nested bullet, with an inverted color bullet point.

third level of nested, with a square bullet.

another bullet point on the first level.

unquoted numbered list.
another.

nested list, denoted "a".
second item, denoted "b".

third level of nesting, denoted "i".
second item on third level, denoted "ii".

fourth level, also denoted "i".
second item on fourth level.

fifth level, also denoted "i".
second item on fifth level.

third item on fourth level.

third item on third level.

third item on second level.

third item on first level.

code block, plain text.

import derp
x = derp.herp()
print("test")
# is any of this highlighted?

inline code phrase.

image uploaded from computer:

caption of the image, which appears below the image, even if the image loads

youtube video embed:

collapsible section title

here's the contents of the collapsible section

^

here's the contents of the footnote