trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
BYOL (Buy Your Own Lunch)
by JohnGreer — 2018-04-08T19:32:57.520Z

For the format that’s easy on the eyes: https://medium.com/@John_Greer/buy-your-own-lunch-byol-351f6b772287

Imagine you’re at the tail end of a business meeting at a restaurant. Your plate is still 2/3 full since you didn’t get to eat as much as you wanted because you were too busy answering questions. (That’s a problem for a different post.) The check comes.

“I’ve got it, Jim!”

“No, Bob. Let me!”

“Really, it’s quite alright!”

*insert wrestling match over the check holder1*

I never liked playing the back and forth game of who pays the bill. I don’t like it as a diner and I didn’t like it when I worked as a server.

The problem seems to be one of signaling. I’ll have to get Robin Hanson or Scott Alexander's opinion but it seems like it’s rude if you don’t offer to pay for the group. It’s also rude and signals cheapness if you don’t argue with whoever is offering to pay.

In poorer families, when one person, let’s say Grandma, is known to have more money, everyone else knows not to argue with her and instead just says “thank you” with a hint of humility and shame.

The dating world has certain established norms like "the man pays for things". The problem in the non-dating world is it would be weird to say upfront that you aren’t going to pay for someone’s meal because there’s not an established norm of who pays for a meal outside of a potential employer paying for a potential new employee’s meal.

It’s like trying to break up a friendship. There’s no norm for that like there is for breaking up a romantic relationship: https://youtu.be/7x3knxMBHco

I wanted to try to solve the problem of communicating that we can pay for ourselves without it being so weird.

Enter BYOL. There’s (bring your own booze) BYOB. I am coining the term (buy your own lunch) BYOL. Well, technically my cofounder Kelsey helped me come up with the name so she deserves credit.

Examples:

We’d love to meet for lunch (byol).”

“We’re having a lunch meeting at Mendocino Farms (byol).”

“We’d love to meet for dinner at 6pm (byol).”

“Our meetings are BYOL.”

Yes, I know dinner and lunch are different things, but we like byol over byom and I don’t think anyone is going to get confused.

My next step is including it in messages and seeing how it goes. I'm going to include a hyperlink to the Medium post. It might look a little pompous to link to my own writing but someone has to do it.

Some other awkwardness t...
I desire U, grpfrt, but I won’t eat U.
by Jacob Falkovich — 2018-04-08T19:19:33.418Z

https://putanumonit.com/2018/04/08/i-desire-u-grpfrt-but-i-wont-eat-u/

This is an experimental Putanumonit. Consult with your physician regarding appropriate dosage. This is not part of the Putanumonit canon. Normal Putanumonit will resume, eventually.
GreaterWrong—more new features & enhancements
by Said Achmiz — 2018-04-07T20:41:14.357Z

(Previous posts: [1], [2])

GreaterWrong.com has been adding some more features and UI enhancements:

GreaterWrong now has an inbox feature, which notifies you of replies to your comments. When you have new notifications, a red envelope will appear next to your username in the navigation bar. Click it to go to your Inbox. (Alternatively, click your name to go to your user page, then click the Inbox tab.)

You can now use the keyboard to navigate lists of posts (e.g., the front page). Hit . (period) to select the next post in the list, or , (comma) to select the previous post; then hit Enter to go to the selected post.)

You can now select the date and time from which new comments are highlighted (this works the same way as the analogous feature on Slate Star Codex).

Note that on narrow screens, this “highlight-new-comments-since” date-time field isn’t shown by default; click the new comments count to show it:

Click the “three dots” icon in the post info line to open special linking options:

You can now view lists of comments (e.g., the Recent Comments) page in a compact view that fits many more comments. Use the buttons pictured below to switch between expanded view (the default) and compact view. (When in compact view, you can hover over the ellipsis (“…”) icon on the right-hand-side of the comment to reveal the full comment.)

The view selection buttons:

Compact view:

Hover over a comment’s “…” icon to expand it:

A number of new accesskeys have been added.
Meaning and Moral Foundations Theory
by bryjnar — 2018-04-07T17:59:24.227Z

(cross-posted from https://www.michaelpj.com/blog/2018/04/07/meaning-and-mft.html)

Robin Hanson writes (some time ago, but it's a classic):

So there is a bit of a tension here between the meaning that crusaders choose for themselves and the happiness they try give to others. They might reasonably be accused of elitism, thinking that happiness is good for the masses, while meaning should be reserved for elites like them. Also, since such folks tend to embrace far mode thoughts more, and tend less to think that near mode desires say what we really want, such folks should also be conflicted about their overwhelming emphasis on happiness over meaning when giving policy advice.

I think there's something interesting here, with my gloss on the interesting question being: when we intervene in other people's lives, why don't we try more often to make them meaningful rather than happy?

Let's take two premisses. First, that people often gain meaning in their lives from being good (as Hanson argues policy-makers do). This obviously isn't the only source of meaning, but it is one.

Secondly, let's suppose that we buy Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory. "Elites" are anecdotally biased towards the Harm/Care foundation, and thus they get meaning out of helping other people. But what would it mean it mean to help other people have more (morally) meaningful lives? You would have to help people to help some third party. Now, this may be an effective approach to helping the third party, but in most situations you might expect that it would be easier and more straightforward to just help the third party directly, rather than doing it indirectly.

Harm/Care is unusual among the foundations in that it's other-directed. The goal is to help other people, and it does not especially matter how that occurs. In particular, it seems somehow inappropriate for someone who cares about harm/care to care about who does the helping - this focusses the attention on the helper, when it is the helpee who is relevant.

In contrast, the other foundations centre on the moral actor themselves. I cannot be just, loyal, a good follower, or pure for you. You have to do this yourself, and so any attempt to make the world better for one of these foundations is going to require getting lots of other actors to be more moral. Which may also make their...
No Constant Distribution Can be a Logical Inductor
by Diffractor — 2018-04-07T09:09:49.000Z

The title says it all.

Consider some valuation over sentences, P:S→[0,1].

Now consider some set of unproved sentences that make a binary tree, where it is propositionally provable that exactly one of the sentences at the m'th level in the tree are true. The most conceptually clear example is sentences of the form "the first m bits of an infinite bitstring σ are [bitstring]", as in universal inductors.

However, every deductive process for theorems of a consistent theory has something like this, by the incompleteness theorem. In particular, for the instance where the deductive process outputs all theorems of PA, you can translate bitstrings into unprovable sentences that fulfill this property. 010 would translate to
¬con(PA)∧con(PA+¬con(PA))∧¬con(PA+¬con(PA)+con(PA+¬con(PA)))

Now, consider the trader that, on day n, sells back all the shares it has purchased, and buys 1 dollar worth of shares in the n'th sentence (or just a very large number of shares). This trader has a worst-case value of -1.

There cannot be any arbitrageable propositional inconsistencies in the constant distribution, otherwise, a trader could exploit this for unbounded money.

Because all the sentences in the m'th "stage" of the binary tree are provably mutually exclusive and exhaustive, their prices must add up to 1. Because there are 2m sentences in the m'th stage, at least one must have a price less than 2−m. When the trader gets around to buying that one, it will have a best-case value of 2m or more.

As the trader goes through all sentences, its best-case value will be unbounded, as it buys up larger and larger piles of sentences with lower and lower prices. This behavior is forbidden by the logical induction criterion. And it isn't necessarily in a different world each time. By propositional consistency, there's some infinite bitstring where the price of the prefix drops by a factor of 2 or more on each time step (always pick the lowest-price continuation of the bitstring prefix), so if we consider that as the world of interest, the supremum of the value of the trader is unbounded above.

This doesn't seem like much, but it gets extremely weird when you consider that the limit of a logical inductor, P∞, is a constant distribution, and by this result, isn't a logical inductor! If you skip to the end and use the final, perfected probabilities of the limit, there's a trader that could rack up unbou

...
Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2018-04-07T04:25:46.134Z

(Cross-posted from Facebook.)

0.

Tl;dr: There's a similarity between these three concepts:

A locally valid proof step in mathematics is one that, in general, produces only true statements from true statements. This is a property of a single step, irrespective of whether the final conclusion is true or false.
There's such a thing as a bad argument even for a good conclusion. In order to arrive at sane answers to questions of fact and policy, we need to be curious about whether arguments are good or bad, independently of their conclusions. The rules against fallacies must be enforced even against arguments for conclusions we like.
For civilization to hold together, we need to make coordinated steps away from Nash equilibria in lockstep. This requires general rules that are allowed to impose penalties on people we like or reward people we don't like. When people stop believing the general rules are being evaluated sufficiently fairly, they go back to the Nash equilibrium and civilization falls.

i.

The notion of a locally evaluated argument step is simplest in mathematics, where it is a formalizable idea in model theory. In math, a general type of step is 'valid' if it only produces semantically true statements from other semantically true statements, relative to a given model. If x = y in some set of variable assignments, then 2x = 2y in the same model. Maybe x doesn't equal y, in some model, but even if it doesn't, the local step from "x = y" to "2x = 2y" is a locally valid step of argument. It won't introduce any new problems.

Conversely, xy = xz does not imply y = z. It happens to work when x = 2, y = 3, and z= 3, in which case the two statements say "6 = 6" and "3 = 3" respectively. But if x = 0, y = 4, z = 17, then we have "0 = 0" on one side and "4 = 17" on the other. We can feed in a true statement and get a false statement out the other end. This argument is not locally okay.

You can't get the concept of a "mathematical proof" unless on some level—though often an intuitive level rather than an explicit one—you understand the notion of a single step of argument that is locally okay or locally not okay, independent of whether you globally agreed with the final conclusion. There's a kind of approval you give to the pieces of the argument, rather t...
Survey: Help Us Research Coordination Problems In The Rationalist/EA Community
by namespace — 2018-04-06T23:29:01.306Z

Hi everyone,

I think by this point we're all aware that our world is in an ongoing state of mundane quasi-apocalypse on several dimensions. Climate change, insect population decline, people dying around the world at a relentless pace, AI risk, global thermonuclear war. The question is not what's wrong with the world, you probably have a good understanding of that. The question is what we're going to do about it. And for too many of us so far the answer is "well, nothing".

Some of the lowest hanging fruit for changing that centers around coordination. I've been creating lists to map out the LessWrong Diaspora, what active projects exist in the community, tools to help people make their projects more credible, and more because I believed it would help create common knowledge of what resources exist. Eventually I realized that trivial inconveniences eat most of the gains. It's nice that I can show newbie organizers a list of writeups and reports, but becomes less impressive when you consider it would take an impractical amount of time for them to absorb that knowledge. It doesn't matter how many resources I put together if they can't answer people's questions without a ton of effort.

I'm prepared to put together a team that will run a service solving exactly this problem. A query about what the community has learned so far about meetups could be answered by a summary from someone who has done the research. But before doing that I want to be sure this is a thing people actually want. I'd also like to confirm that the necessary resources to coordinate exist. For this reason I invite you to take a survey looking at the combination of talent, project ideas, donor capital, popularity of cause areas and willingness to work within the wider rationalist and effective altruist communities.

You should especially take this survey if:

You are looking for projects to support, either to help the projects succeed or as opportunities for you to level up

You have ideas for projects related to EA/Rationality/X-Risk things for which you want collaborators or financial support

You are available to help mentor, assist and guide other people with their projects

You want other people to create projects you would be interested in giving money to. Or want to discover existing projects you can support financially.

Survey Link: https://goo.gl/forms/sKUk3YTLvhV12CpS2

In any ca...
Is Rhetoric Worth Learning?
by sarahconstantin — 2018-04-06T22:03:47.918Z

A lot of what we talk about on this site is, effectively, how to speak well. How to communicate in a way that leads people to believe truer things.

I rarely see it pointed out that, for many centuries, this used to be called rhetoric and was taught as part of a liberal arts education.

I didn't have a classical liberal arts education, so I'm still in the process of trying to learn what rhetoric is, and whether there really is a "science" of rhetoric that STEM-educated people like myself are missing. Certainly, some parts of the classical curriculum, like syllogistic logic, seem pretty basic, while others, like memorization, may be less relevant in the modern day.

However, there's definitely a "level above mine."

I've had a piece of my writing edited by the staff of a major magazine; they restructured the rhythm and pacing and added vivid turns of phrase, while keeping all the important content in place. I still haven't worked out exactly how they did it, or what principles lie behind the changes, but suddenly it sounded like a more graceful, alive voice was making my argument.

That's elocutio.

I've seen a law professor speak in exactly 17 minutes of perfectly organized paragraphs, extemporaneously in a debate, while his opponent got confused as to the structure of the argument and wound up lamely repeating a single point that didn't refute the whole thesis.

That's dispositio.

I recently watched The Ten Commandments, and Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner's resonant voices and dignified, expansive gestures are beautiful in a way I've hardly ever seen anyone in my generation allow themselves to be.

That's pronuntiatio.

On LessWrong, people often make a hard distinction between being correct and being persuasive; one is rational while the other is "dark arts." That's a real tension in rhetoric, and it's as old as Plato. But it's also been traditional in the West to combine the study of persuasiveness and the study of logical argument as a single subject, and there might be a sense in which that's reasonable. An argument is both something that one understands individually, and a format for communicating between people.

From a societal perspective, making any kind of improvement, at any scale above literally one-man jobs, depends on both correctness and persuasiveness. ...
Open Thread April 2018
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2018-04-06T21:02:38.311Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one (use search for Open Thread <year>).

2. Let's discuss further installments in a separate comment thread.
LW Update 04/06/18 – QM Sequence Updated
by Ben Pace — 2018-04-06T08:53:45.560Z

I just updated the Quantum Mechanics Sequence to have working images, links, and formatting.

Thanks to all the readers who pinged me in intercom to let me know that the stuff was broken for them, it caused me to do this more urgently.

Also a big thanks to Said Achmiz who already had turned Rationality: AI to Zombies into html and turned the images into SVG files, this saved me a *ton* of time.

If you take a look through, please let me know if I missed something.
A Test of Faith
by Serpent-Stare — 2018-04-06T04:36:14.949Z

A personal, experiential response to: Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points, by Eleizer Yudkowsky.

I wrote the following article in order to help me express and process and eventually publish my thoughts, while setting myself to accept the challenge posed in Eleizer's post, which I had just reached in the official podcast of Rationality: AI to Zombies:

To do better: When you’re doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts the most.

Wishing to become stronger, I tried to ask the unasked question. Find a reason that, even if I do not generally acknowledge it as a reason of my own, might be a potential reason for someone to hold onto a belief that I had been holding onto. A reason other than ranking it as the most likely thing to be true. I looked for what scary thing might be hiding behind it, that having a comfortable and habitual answer might be saving me from having to look at directly.

And... I think I found it.

This experience took place nine days ago. I began writing this record identifying myself as still holding the beliefs to be challenged, and ended it feeling that that may no longer be the case. Looking back, and looking at the way I have felt and thought since then, I think I did succeed in dislodging my habitual way of looking at the world somewhat from its privileged position. The cognitive habits are still there, but I'm taking notice as I fall into them, and marking them as something to counter-balance against. Giving them penalties for arising from a process I acknowledge to have particular and known flaws.

Naturally, this is a very emotional, very personal, and potentially very challenging post. It may qualify as an infohazard. You could, depending on your current set of beliefs and how entrenched they are, be hurt by the consequences of following me through to the other side of the fire. Just wanted to give you fair warning, and a chance to stop reading now. With that out of the way... Let the journey begin.

I wish to test myself by the standards set here, as I understand them, in a public confessional. Others with an outside perspective of my beliefs may judge me, and their judgements may show me that there are things they see that I have ignored without meaning to.

I am agnostic now about beliefs I used to hold with more confidence, abo...
Boxes for Our Thoughts
by Tueskes — 2018-04-06T01:15:05.805Z
Link: https://contexturalthought.wordpress.com/2017/12/26/boxes-for-our-thoughts/

Thinking outside of the box has long been held up in our popular culture as the epitome of critical thought — the ability to see beyond arbitrary lines to the truth, those flashes of genius we can follow in posterity but would never be able to forge ourselves. To me, this is kindred with meta-thinking, when you take a thought or idea about the world and remove the specificities to come up with a more generalized form of that thought or idea.

Perhaps I’m designing a door and I know that the initial friction between the door and the floor will make it harder and harder to get the door moving at first. Then I realize that this same mechanism could also explain why, when I have a messy desk (the initial friction), it’s harder for me to get started on writing my next article (the movement). This realization is an example of meta-thinking – taking the idea of friction out of the engineering box and stripping it back until I can apply it to any situation in which something is beginning, which is a far bigger box to be in.

This is an addictive way of thinking and I found that soon after I began to form these more generalized insights into the world, I was doing it more often, and my mind couldn’t help but notice the box it was in at the time. A recipe for chicken broth? That’s just a combination of elements that produce a meal high in salt, high in warmth, soft in consistency and hearty on the umami scale, otherwise known as the genre of western food, sub-genre soup. A recipe for the genre of EDM might be low in frequency, low in tonal variation, high in BPM and with a few too many pinches of decibels (at least according to my mother’s recipe). Once you know this, you’ve discovered the underlying mechanism of remix culture – by playing around with the elements that make up a certain form of music you can create a new sound, or subvert the entire genre of soup. A meta-step further and every experience is really just a combination of nerve signals, coming from a variety of receptor types at different frequencies and amplitudes, and this rule can sum up everything from a dawn-lit swim in the ocean to the sensation of looking up in the Sistine Chapel.

This ‘urge to meta’ has it’s roots in perfectionism, and you see it across diverse disciplines and ways of thinking. The entirety of science itself has been arranged in a hierarchical structu...