trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Replacing guilt
by So8res — 2015-04-19T03:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/replacing-guilt/

In my experience, many people are motivated primarily by either guilt, shame, or some combination of the two. Some are people who binge-watch television, feel deeply guilty about it, and convert that guilt into a burning need to Actually Do Something on the following day. Others are people who feel guilty whenever they stop working before they literally fall over from exhaustion, and in attempts to avoid that guilty feeling, they consistently work themselves weary.

I find that using guilt as a motivation source is both unhealthy and inefficient, but yet, I find it to be a common practice, especially among effective altruists.

Thus, in the coming series of posts, I'm going to explore a whole slew of tools for removing guilt-based motivation and replacing it with something that is both healthier and stronger.

My goal is to help people remove guilt-based motivation entirely, and replace it with intrinsic motivation. I'm aiming to both reduce the frequency of netflix binges and reduce the bad feelings that follow. I'm aiming to help people feel like they're still worthwhile human beings if they stop working before they literally drop. I'd like to help people avoid the failure mode where they feel guilty about something for days (even after learning their lesson), and I'm also hoping to remove some shame-based motivation while I'm in the area.

My first goal will be to address the guilt that comes from a feeling of listlessness, the vague feeling of guilt that one might get when they play video games all day, or when they turn desperately towards drugs or parties, in attempts to silence the part of themselves that whispers that there must be something else to life.

This sort of guilt cannot be removed by force of will, in most people. The trick to removing this sort of guilt, I think, is to start exploring that feeling that there must be something else to life, that there must be something more to do — and either find something worth working towards, or find that there really isn't actually anything missing. This first sort of listless guilt, I think, comes from someone who wants to find something else to do, and hasn't yet.

Unfortunately, addressing this sort of guilt isn't as easy as just finding a hobby. In my experience, this listless guilt tends to be found in people who have fallen into the nihilistic trap — people who either believe they can't matter, or who beli...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games
by rocurley — 2015-04-19T02:41:39.523Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games

WHEN:
20 April 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1390 Market St., San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to hang out and play board games!

This is at our apartment because we have a table, call me at 301-458-0764 or tailgate to get in. As always, showing up late is fine.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games
A simple exercise in rationality: rephrase an objective statement as subjective and explore the caveats
by Shmi — 2015-04-18T23:46:49.750Z

"This book is awful" => "I dislike this book" => "I dislike this book because it is shallow and is full of run-on sentences." => I dislike this book because I prefer reading books I find deep and clearly written."

"The sky is blue" => ... => "When I look at the sky, the visual sensation I get is very similar to when I look at a bunch of other objects I've been taught to associate with the color blue."

"Team X lost but deserved to win" => ...

"Being selfish is immoral"

"The Universe is infinite, so anything imaginable happens somewhere"

In general, consider a quick check whether in a given context replacing "is" with "appears to be" leads to something you find non-trivial.

Why? Because it exposes the multiple levels of maps we normally skip. So one might find illuminating occasionally walking through the levels and making sure they are still connected as firmly as the last time. And maybe figuring out where the people who hold a different opinion from yours construct a different chain of maps. Also to make sure you don't mistake a map for the territory.

That is all. ( => "I think that I have said enough for one short post and adding more would lead to diminishing returns, though I could be wrong here, but I am too lazy to spend more time looking for links and quotes and better arguments without being sure that they would improve the post.")
[link] The surprising downsides of being clever
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-04-18T20:33:12.086Z

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden see here

Did you know The surprising downsides of being clever? Is Happiness And Intelligence: Rare Combination? There are longitudinal studies which seem to imply this: Being Labeled as Gifted, Self-appraisal, and Psychological Well-being: A Life Span Developmental Perspective

I found these via slashdot.

As LessWrong is harbor to unusually high-IQ people (see section B in here). I wonder how happiness compares to the mean. What are your thoughts.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-04-18T06:47:22.290Z

This summary was posted to LW main on April 10th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta Meetup: Game Night: 11 April 2015 02:05PM
Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Cologne meetpu: 11 April 2015 05:00PM
[Edinburgh] LessWrong Scotland: 12 April 2015 02:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Munich April Meetup: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Small actions, big impact (part 2): 12 April 2015 02:19PM
Saint Petersburg meetup. Habits and spring.: 18 April 2015 06:00PM

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:

Austin, TX - Caffe Medici - Why People Fail: 11 April 2015 01:30PM
Canberra: A Sequence Post You Disagreed With + Discussion: 11 April 2015 06:00PM
Moscow meetup: lectures and tournaments: 12 April 2015 02:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Skill Training Part 2: 12 April 2015 05:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 09 May 2015 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Cherry Blossoms: 12 April 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 dis...
Resolving the Fermi Paradox: New Directions
by jacob_cannell — 2015-04-18T06:00:33.871Z

Our sun appears to be a typical star: unremarkable in age, composition, galactic orbit, or even in its possession of many planets. Billions of other stars in the milky way have similar general parameters and orbits that place them in the galactic habitable zone. Extrapolations of recent expolanet surveys reveal that most stars have planets, removing yet another potential unique dimension for a great filter in the past.

According to Google, there are 20 billion earth like planets in the Galaxy.

A paradox indicates a flaw in our reasoning or our knowledge, which upon resolution, may cause some large update in our beliefs.

Ideally we could resolve this through massive multiscale monte carlo computer simulations to approximate Solonomoff Induction on our current observational data. If we survive and create superintelligence, we will probably do just that.

In the meantime, we are limited to constrained simulations, fermi estimates, and other shortcuts to approximate the ideal bayesian inference.

The Past

While there is still obvious uncertainty concerning the likelihood of the series of transitions along the path from the formation of an earth-like planet around a sol-like star up to an early tech civilization, the general direction of the recent evidence flow favours a strong Mediocrity Principle.

Here are a few highlight developments from the last few decades relating to an early filter:

The time window between formation of earth and earliest life has been narrowed to a brief interval. Panspermia has also gained ground, with some recent complexity arguments favoring a common origin of life at 9 billion yrs ago.[1]

Discovery of various extremophiles indicate life is robust to a wider range of environments than the norm on earth today.

Advances in neuroscience and studies of animal intelligence lead to the conclusion that the human brain is not nearly as unique as once thought. It is just an ordinary scaled up primate brain, with a cortex enlarged to 4x the size of a chimpanzee. Elephants and some cetaceans have similar cortical neuron counts to the chimpanzee, and demonstrate similar or greater levels of intelligence in terms of rituals, problem solving, tool use, communication, and even understanding rudimentary human language. Elephants, cetaceans, and primates are widely separated lineages, indicating robustne

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High impact from low impact
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-04-17T16:01:56.000Z

Part of the problem with a reduced impact AI is that it will, by definition, only have a reduced impact.

Some of the designs try and get around the problem by allowing a special "output channel" on which impact can be large. But that feels like cheating. Here is a design that accomplishes the same without using that kind of hack.

Imagine there is an asteroid that will hit the Earth, and we have a laser that could destroy it. But we need to aim the laser properly, so need coordinates. There is a reduced impact AI that is motivated to give the coordinates correctly, but also motivated to have reduced impact - and saving the planet from an asteroid with certainty is not reduced impact.

Now imagine that instead there are two AIs, X and Y. By abuse of notation, let ¬X refer to the even that the output signal from X is scrambled away from the the original output.

Then we ask X to give us the x-coordinates for the laser, under the assumption of ¬Y (that AI Y's signal will be scrambled). Similarly, we Y to give us the y-coordinates of the laser, under the assumption ¬X.

Then X will reason "since ¬Y, the laser will certainly miss its target, as the y-coordinates will be wrong. Therefore it is reduced impact to output the correct x-coordinates, so I shall." Similarly, Y will output the right y-coordinates, the laser will fire and destroy the asteroid, having a huge impact, hooray!

The approach is not fully general yet, because we can have "subagent problems". X could create an agent that behave nicely given ¬Y (the assumption it was given), but completely crazily given Y (the reality). But it shows how we could get high impact from slight tweaks to reduced impact.
High impact from low impact
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-04-17T16:01:39.258Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Part of the problem with a reduced impact AI is that it will, by definition, only have a reduced impact.

Some of the designs try and get around the problem by allowing a special "output channel" on which impact can be large. But that feels like cheating. Here is a design that accomplishes the same without using that kind of hack.

Imagine there is an asteroid that will hit the Earth, and we have a laser that could destroy it. But we need to aim the laser properly, so need coordinates. There is a reduced impact AI that is motivated to give the coordinates correctly, but also motivated to have reduced impact - and saving the planet from an asteroid with certainty is not reduced impact.

Now imagine that instead there are two AIs, X and Y. By abuse of notation, let ¬X refer to the event that the output signal from X is scrambled away from the the original output.

Then we ask X to give us the x-coordinates for the laser, under the assumption of ¬Y (that AI Y's signal will be scrambled). Similarly, we Y to give us the y-coordinates of the laser, under the assumption ¬X.

Then X will reason "since ¬Y, the laser will certainly miss its target, as the y-coordinates will be wrong. Therefore it is reduced impact to output the correct x-coordinates, so I shall." Similarly, Y will output the right y-coordinates, the laser will fire and destroy the asteroid, having a huge impact, hooray!

The approach is not fully general yet, because we can have "subagent problems". X could create an agent that behave nicely given ¬Y (the assumption it was given), but completely crazily given Y (the reality). But it shows how we could get high impact from slight tweaks to reduced impact.

EDIT: For those worried about lying to the AIs, do recall http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lyh/utility_vs_probability_idea_synthesis/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/ltf/false_thermodynamic_miracles/
Concept Safety: The problem of alien concepts
by Kaj_Sotala — 2015-04-17T14:09:36.499Z

In the previous post in this series, I talked about how one might get an AI to have similar concepts as humans. However, one would intuitively assume that a superintelligent AI might eventually develop the capability to entertain far more sophisticated concepts than humans would ever be capable of having. Is that a problem?

Just what are concepts, anyway?

To answer the question, we first need to define what exactly it is that we mean by a "concept", and why exactly more sophisticated concepts would be a problem.

Unfortunately, there isn't really any standard definition of this in the literature, with different theorists having different definitions. Machery even argues that the term "concept" doesn't refer to a natural kind, and that we should just get rid of the whole term. If nothing else, this definition from Kruschke (2008) is at least amusing:

Models of categorization are usually designed to address data from laboratory experiments, so “categorization” might be best defined as the class of behavioral data generated by experiments that ostensibly study categorization.

Because I don't really have the time to survey the whole literature and try to come up with one grand theory of the subject, I will for now limit my scope and only consider two compatible definitions of the term.

Definition 1: Concepts as multimodal neural representations. I touched upon this definition in the last post, where I mentioned studies indicating that the brain seems to have shared neural representations for e.g. the touch and sight of a banana. Current neuroscience seems to indicate the existence of brain areas where representations from several different senses are combined together into higher-level representations, and where the activation of any such higher-level representation will also end up activating the lower sense modalities in turn. As summarized by Man et al. (2013):

Briefly, the Damasio framework proposes an architecture of convergence-divergence zones (CDZ) and a mechanism of time-locked retroactivation. Convergence-divergence zones are arranged in a multi-level hierarchy, with higher-level CDZs being both sensitive to, and capable of reinstating, specific patterns of activity in lower-level CDZs. Successive levels of CDZs are tuned to detect increasingly complex features. Each more-complex feature is defined by the conjunction and configuration of multiple less-com

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Effective effective altruism: Get $400 off your next charity donation
by Baisius — 2015-04-17T05:45:37.644Z

For those of you unfamiliar with Churning, it's the practice of signing up for a rewards credit card, spending enough with your everyday purchases to get the (usually significant) reward and then cancelling it. Many of these cards are cards with annual fees (which is commonly waived and/or the one-time reward will pay for). For a nominal amount of work, you can churn cards for significant bonuses.

Ordinarily I wouldn't come close to spending enough money to qualify for many of these rewards, but I recently made the Giving What You Can pledge. I now have a steady stream of predictable expenses, and conveniently, GiveWell allows donations via most any credit card. I've started using new rewards cards to pay for these expenses each time, resulting in free flights (this is how I'm paying to fly to NYC this summer), Amazon gift cards, or sometimes just straight cash.

Since the first of the year (total expenses $4000, including some personal expenses) I've churned $700 worth of bonuses (from a Delta Amazon Express Gold and a Capital One Venture Card). This money can be redonated, saved, spent, or whatever.

Disclaimers:

1. I hope it goes without saying that you should pay off your balance in full each month, just like you should with any other card.

2. This has some negative impact on your credit, in the short term.

3. It should be noted that credit card companies make at least some money (I think 3%) off of your transactions, so if you're trying to hit a target of X% to charity, you would need to donate X/0.97, or 10.31% for 10% to account for that 3%. The reward should more than cover it.

4. Read more about this, including the pros and cons, from multiple sources before you try it. It's not something that should be done lightly, but does synergize very nicely with charity donations.
Rationality Reading Group: Introduction and A: Predictably Wrong
by  — 2015-04-17T01:40:49.547Z

This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post.

Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This week we discuss the Preface by primary author Eliezer Yudkowsky, Introduction by editor & co-author Rob Bensinger, and the first sequence: Predictably Wrong. This sequence introduces the methods of rationality, including its two major applications: the search for truth and the art of winning. The desire to seek truth is motivated, and a few obstacles to seeking truth--systematic errors, or biases--are discussed in detail.
This post summarizes each article of the sequence, linking to the original LessWrong posting where available, and offers a few relevant notes, thoughts, and ideas for further investigation. My own thoughts and questions for discussion are in the comments.
Reading: Preface, Biases: An Introduction, and Sequence A: Predictably Wrong (pi-xxxv and p1-42)

Introduction

Preface. Introduction to the ebook compilation by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Retrospectively identifies mistakes of the text as originally presented. Some have been corrected in the ebook, others stand as-is. Most notably the book focuses too much on belief, and too little on practical actions, especially with respect to our everyday lives. Establishes that the goal of the project is to teach rationality, those ways of thinking which are common among practicing scientists and the foundation of the Enlightenment, yet not systematically organized or taught in schools (yet).

Biases: An Introduction. Editor & co-author Rob Bensinger motivates the subject of rationality by explaining the dangers of systematic errors caused by *cognitive biases*, which the arts of rationality are intended to de-bias. Rationality is not about Spock-like stoicism -- it is about simply "doing the best you can with what you've got." The System 1 / System 2 dual process dichotomy is explained: if our errors are systematic and predictable, then we can instil behaviors and habits to correct them. A number of exemplar biases are presented. However a warning: it is difficult to recognize biases in your own thinking even after learning of them, and knowing about a bias may grant unjustified overconfidence that you yourself do not fall pray to such mistakes in your thinking. To develop as a rati...
LessWrong experience on Alcohol
by Elo — 2015-04-17T01:19:56.216Z

following on from this thread:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/m14/id_like_advice_from_lw_regarding_migraines/c9kr?context=3

User Algon asked:
I don't drink alcohol, but is it really all that? I just assumed that most people have alcoholic beverages for the 'buzz'/intoxication.

I related my experience:

I have come to the conclusion that I taste things differently to a large subset of the population. I have a very sweet tooth and am very sensitive to bitter flavours.

I don't eat olives, most alcohol only tastes like the alcoholic aftertaste (which apparently some people don't taste) - imagine the strongest burning taste of the purest alcohol you have tasted, some people never taste that, I taste it with nearly every alcoholic beverage. Beer is usually awfully bitter too.

The only wine I could ever bother to drink is desert wine (its very sweet) and only slowly. (or also a half shot of rum and maple syrup)

Having said all this - yes; some people love their alcoholic beverages for their flavours.

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I am wondering what the sensory experience of other LW users is of alcohol. Do you drink (if not why not?)? Do you have specific preferences? Do you have a particular pallet for foods (probably relevant)?

I hypothesise a lower proportion of drinkers than the rest of the population. (subject of course to cultural norms where you come from)

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Edit: I will make another post in a week about taste preferences because (as we probably already know) human tastes vary. I did want to mention that I avoid spicy things except for sweet chilli which is not spicy at all. And I don't drink coffee (because it tastes bad and I am always very awake and never need caffeine to wake me up). I am also quite sure I am a super-taster but wanted to not use that word for concern that the jargon might confuse people who don't yet know about it.

Thanks for all the responses! This has been really interesting and exactly what I expected (number of posts)!

In regards to experiences, I would mention that heavy drinking is linked with nearly every health problem you could think of and I am surprised we had a selection of several heavy drinkers (to those who are heavy drinkers I would suggest reading about the health implications and reconsidering the lifestyle, it sounds like most of you are not addicted). about the heavy drinkers - I susp...