trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup Cookbook
by maia — 2018-07-14T22:26:26.853Z
Link: https://tigrennatenn.neocities.org/meetup_cookbook.html

My spouse and I have been running LessWrong meetups in two different cities for the past six years. Over time, we've gotten lazier and lazier about organizing, while still maintaining similar results, mostly by coming up with a bunch of simple recipes and scripts for running meetups. Here I have documented how we do it in excruciating detail, so others can use what we do.
Expected Pain Parameters
by Alicorn — 2018-07-14T19:30:16.370Z

A problem I sometimes have is that someone will suggest that I do something uncomfortable - physically or emotionally, whichever - and they'll acknowledge that it's not going to feel good.

And then they won't follow up by explaining exactly how much and in what way it's supposed to hurt, let alone why or how to mitigate that.

Look: if you're going for a run, you might get a stitch in your side, your legs might cramp, your lungs might burn. If you feel a sudden stabbing pain in your foot, that's not the run. You've stepped on something sharp and you need to stop and call for a ride, not tough it out. If you've been told that running might hurt and that's a good thing, a sign of weakness leaving the body or whatever, and there's any ambiguity between "stepped on something sharp" and "this is how it's supposed to hurt" - are you supposed to have blisters or do you need better-fitting shoes? Are you supposed to have a headache or do you need to drink way more water than you have been? Is a sunburn just part of a healthy experience that means you're making vitamin D, or should you be wearing sunscreen next time? - then you're blundering into a problem that you would have noticed and solved if you had encountered it by sitting on the couch.

If you're apologizing for something you've done wrong, you might feel guilty, stared-at, awkward, resentful. If you feel like the walls are closing in and you're going to puke, then you have a more serious problem and might want to get that looked into, not chalk it up to "well, acknowledging that you've made a mistake can be painful". If you're apologizing to someone who's abusing you, then how much it hurts is a red flag. If you're in a badly facilitated therapeutic or moderated conversational environment, and you don't know how much it's supposed to hurt, then when it hurts more than it's supposed to you won't notice that you need to fix or leave the setup. If you're apologizing for something that isn't wrong, because you've been indoctrinated in a normset that's unhealthy about what things are violations, then by letting that normset also tell you that it's supposed to feel bad you're losing a signal that could tell you to bail.

Even things yo...
Boltzmann Brains and Within-model vs. Between-models Probability
by Charlie Steiner — 2018-07-14T09:52:41.107Z

Why Boltzmann brains?

Back in the days of Ludwig Boltzmann (before the ~1912 discovery of galactic redshift), it seemed like the universe could be arbitrarily old. Since the second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends to a state of high entropy, a truly old universe would have long ago sublimated into a lukewarm bath of electromagnetic radiation (perhaps with a few enormous dead stars slowly drifting towards each other). If this was true, our solar system and the stars we see would be just a bubble of order in a vast sea of chaos - perhaps spontaneously arising, like how if you keep shuffling a deck of cards, eventually it will pass through all arrangements, even the ordered ones.

The only problem is, bubbles of spontaneous order are astoundingly unlikely. However long it takes for one iron star to spontaneously reverse fusion and become hydrogen, it takes that length of time squared for two stars to do it. So if we're trying to explain our subjective experience within long-lived universe that might have these bubbles of spontaneous order, the most likely guesses are those that involve the smallest amount of matter. The classic example is an isolated brain with your memories and current experience, briefly congealing out of the vacuum before evaporating again.

What now?

The rarest, if sort of admirable, response is to agree you're probably a Boltzmann brain, and at all times do the thing that gets you the most pleasure in the next tenth of a second. But maybe you subscribe to Egan's law ("Everything adds up to normality"), in which case there are basically two responses. Either you are probably a Boltzmann brain, but shouldn't act like it because you only care about long-lived selves, or you think that the universe genuinely is long-lived.

Within our best understanding of the apparent universe, there shouldn't be any Boltzmann brains. Accelerating expansion will drive the universe closer and closer to its lowest energy eigenstate, which suppresses time evolution. Change in a quantum system comes from energy differences between states, and in a fast-expanding universe, those energy differences get redshifted away.

But that's only the within-model understanding. Given our sense-data, we should assign a probability distribution over many different possible laws of physics that could explain that sense-data. And if s...
Generating vs Recognizing 
by  — 2018-07-14T05:10:22.112Z

[A distinction to be aware of is when a task requires you to Recognize (i.e. verify, note, observe, etc.) something versus Generate (i.e. brainstorm, create, compose, etc.) something. These tasks can seem quite similar, but I claim that Recognizing is both easier and less valuable. Three examples are provided, followed by an extended example on giving advice.]

Here’s a useful dichotomy that I think is applicable to a variety of cognitive tasks. It’s the distinction between Recognizing and Generating. The words by themselves don’t explain too much, so here are some examples:

Say you’re writing an essay. You start off with a bullet point outline where you jot down some of your half-formed ideas. Then, you use the outline to write your actual essay, expanding upon the bullet points titled things like “Intro Stuff”, “Ending Hook”, and “Insert stuff about their connection” into actual sentences and paragraphs.

Now, you hand the outline and the essay to your friend. “Can you identify which parts of this outline map onto the essay itself?” you ask them.

It’s not too difficult of a task. With the outline in hand, your friend can probably break up the essay into rough chunks where you expanded upon the bullet points.

But, now, say that you only hand the essay to your friend “Can you use this essay to regenerate the outline that I originally used for this essay?” you ask them.

Now, it’s a lot harder. It’s not just working backward or doing things in a clear cut manner. Your friend could come up with lots of plausible outlines, but there's only one of them that is the one you used.

In the first scenario, your friend merely needs to recognize which parts of the essay map onto the outline. In the second scenario, your friend has to generate the entire outline.

This, in a nutshell, is the core distinction in the Recognize vs Generate dichotomy.

Another, perhaps simpler example, is checking vs coming up with math proofs. It’s a lot easier to verify that a proof is correct than to have the ingenuity to come up with the proof in the first place.

I also think this is why math ends up being a difficult subject for lots of people. It’s all too easy to fool yourself that you understand a certain subject when you’re just following along with the textbook. Cover up the steps, though, and try to solve the problem yourself, and things get a lot harder.

Lastly, a more general example of ...
LW Update 2018-7-14 – Styling Rework, CommentsItem,
Performance
by Raemon — 2018-07-14T01:13:17.998Z

Performance Updates

Implemented server side rendering for the frontpage, and for post pages. Now, most relevant content should load quite quickly (so you can begin reading), and then the bulk of the web-app will load a few seconds later.
Cleaned up some extraneous code that adding to our overall load times (in particular for LaTeX heavy posts)
Temporarily disabled some hover-over tooltips on the CommentsItem, which was slowing down rendering of pages with lots of comments.

Legacy RSS Feeds

If you were subscribed to old LW via RSS, your subscription should work again (pointing to the All Posts feed). This currently includes all posts including spam, but in the near future should be limited to posts with N karma (probably 10), which should resolve that.

(Thanks to use jimrandomh who helped out a bunch with performance and RSS updates)

Nested Frontpage Comments

Open Source contributor ForrestWeiswolf submitted a PR that allows comments on the frontpage to be properly nested, while still allowing you to click-to-see-parent. This should make the Recent Discussion section a bit easier to parse.
Relatedly, on a Post item on the frontpage, if you click the comments icon, you will now see the most recent 5 comments, properly nested, with the ability to show additional parents. This should make the "show recent comments" button much more useful.

Notifications

Fixed a bug where if you had never clicked the notification bell, it wouldn't light up when you got notifications.

Moderator Sidebar

Various small tweaks to make this more useful to the sunshine squad.

AlignmentForum

There is now a subforum of LessWrong available at AlignmentForum.org, currently in Open Beta. More details here.
AlignmentForum posts on LessWrong will now display a second type of karma (roughly representing "karma by technical alignment researchers.")

Styling Rework

Since the AlignmentForum and some other upcoming projects require custom themes for LessWrong, and our existing stylesheets were a bit messy, we took the opportunity to refactor much of our styling code. We are now moving towards JSS, which a) consolidates theming decisions into a single file, which b) has full JS programmability.

Code Blocks

Code blocks in posts now display properly.

Thanks to new contributors berekuk, compwron and adrusi, who contributed several bugfixes, including code blocks properly displaying on posts.
Secondary Stressors and Tactile Ambition
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2018-07-13T00:26:23.561Z

I'm constantly on the lookout for words and phrases that map well to reality.

If you study history and if you study language, even just a little bit, you wind up realizing that for most of history, there was often a distinct lack of words and phrases crucial to understand reality.

I'm not just talking about technical terms — obviously we didn't know about

"DNA" before its discovery and codification from 1869-1953

.

No, it's easy to understand how scientific concepts were missing from our vocabulary before the relevant discoveries. Rather, what I'm on the lookout for are concepts that map well to human nature and how individuals and groups of people interact with each other — things which are real but which lack precise wording around them, thus making them harder to think about and talk about.

The

modern usage of the word propaganda

dates only to the late-1700s, and only truly hit its modern form of the word in the 1920s. Of course, there's likely been at least simple propaganda since the dawn of human civilization, but we didn't have a simple word for it.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the word "

creativity

" — as a universal, non-domain-specific word — seems to be less than a couple hundred years old.

When you start looking into the subject, you realize there's lots of concepts that don't have good words or phrases to easily mark them and discuss them in conversation. I'm always on the hunt for them.

Recently I came across two you might find valuable.

"Secondary Stressors": Lately I've been reading and studying the nature of addiction and treatment. Y'know, I'm always studying and I'm very interested in why people do certain things constantly and near-automatically — if we can dial our default behavior to being healthy and life-affirming, we live better lives. Likewise, I've been trying to tease apart why certain negative and detrimental sorts of behaviors either happen automatically without thinking or seem generate a lot of impetus (incidentally, "impetus" is another great word we use a lot in my social circle).

In studying addiction some — notably, in studying it in regards to things I'm not addicted to at all which are merely curious sources of data for me — I saw a certain theme emerge in books and articles on the topic.

A lot of behaviors or g...
A Sarno-Hanson Synthesis
by moridinamael — 2018-07-12T16:13:36.158Z

Content note: Speculative, relies on assumptions that may not be true, but generally points at something that I believe to be a useful map, with potentially important implications if true, and am interested in feedback.

John Sarno is the professor and physician who discovered Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), which has previously been discussed in detail by Scott Alexander. Briefly, a TMS theory suggests that chronic pain, and a handful of other chronic ailments, may be psychosomatic, and that the specific mechanism of action is the brain's expression of unacceptable emotions through physiological channels. For example, an embarrassing and inwardly unacceptable narcissistic rage at the conditions of one's life may be expressed as back pain or headache.

Sarno's theory is more detailed and specific than this, but for that treatment I recommend reading the book. It is relatively unimportant to this discussion whether the precise details of this theory are correct, especially because it is obvious that some weak form of the theory is true. The conscious mind is the tip of a vast iceberg of cognition, and the parts of the iceberg under the surface are by necessity those parts that create pain, emotion, compulsions, and all the other mental phenomena that the conscious mind can't take credit for - which is most of them.

I can't help but interpret Sarno's hypothesis much more broadly than he himself does. In 2017, Courtney Dauwalter won the Moab 240, a 240 mile race, in 2 days and ~10 hours. She beat the second-place finisher by ten hours. If you read or listen to any interview with her, she discusses how her secret is just not stopping. She's fit, but she's probably not 17% more fit than the second-best ultramarathoner. She's just unusually good at ignoring the powerful parts of the brain that are in place to stop the body from hurting itself. It turns out the physical limitations of the body are well beyond what the brain implies they are. The learning from this is that the brain is so good at convincing us that we have these limitations, that almost everybody eventually succumbs to their brain's insistence that they're going to die or break down if they keep running, even though it's not true.

Robin Hanson needs no introduction, but just in case, he's the economics professor and polymath who recently p...
Probability is a model, frequency is an observation: Why both halfers and thirders are correct in the Sleeping Beauty problem.
by Shmi — 2018-07-12T06:52:19.440Z

This post was inspired by a yet another post talking about the Sleeping Beauty problem: Repeated (and improved) Sleeping Beauty problem. It is also related to Probability is in the Mind.

(Updated: As pointed out in the comments, If a tree falls on Sleeping Beauty... is an old post recasting this as a decision problem, where the optimal action depends on the question asked: " just ask for decisions and leave probabilities out of it to whatever extent possible")

It is very common in physics and other sciences that different observers disagree about the value of a certain quantity they both measure. For example, for a person in a moving car, the car is stationary relative to them (v=0), yet to a person outside the car is moving (v=/=0). Only very few select measurable quantities are truly observer-independent. The speed of light is one of the better known examples. The electron charge. Some examples of non-invariant quantities in physics are quite surprising. For example, does a uniformly accelerating electric charge radiate? Do black holes evaporate? The answer depends on the observer! Probability is one of those.

In fact, the situation is worse than that. Probability is not directly measurable.

Probability is not a feature of the world. It is an observer-dependent model of the world. It predicts the observed frequency of some event, which is also observer-dependent.

When you say that a coin is unbiased, you model what will happen when the coin is thrown multiple times and predict that, given a large number of throws, the ratio of heads to tails approaches 1. This might or might not be a sufficiently accurate model of the world you find yourself in. As any model, it is only an approximation, and can miss something essential about your future experiences. For example, someone might try to intentionally distract you every time the coin lands heads, and sometimes they will be successful, so your personal counts of heads and tails will be a bit off, and the ratio of heads to tails will be statistically significantly below 1 even after many many throws. Someone who had not been distracted, would record a different ratio. So you would conclude that the coin is biased. Who is right, you or them?

If you remember that frequency is not an invariant quantity, it depends on the observer, then the obvious answer “they are right, I was maliciously distracted and my cou...
An Agent is a Worldline in Tegmark V
by komponisto — 2018-07-12T05:12:20.629Z

If asked to define what an agent is, my usual answer -- one of them, anyway -- is “a worldline in Tegmark V”.

The Tegmark Level V Multiverse (the “V” here is a Roman numeral) is not defined by Max Tegmark (whose hierarchy goes only up to IV), but, as used in agent-foundations circles, it refers to the collection of not-necessarily-consistent mathematical universes, a.k.a. “impossible possible worlds”. It thus contains worlds in which 1+1 = 3, worlds in which triangles have four sides, and perhaps worlds with married bachelors -- in addition, of course, to all the more “ordinary” worlds in Tegmark Levels I-IV (and thus, in particular, us).

This definition of “agent” is intended to evoke the concept of an observer in physics (especially relativity), which is a worldline in physical spacetime. “Observer” is a more passive word than “agent”, corresponding to the fact that in physics, worldlines are determined by equations (the “equations of motion”) that represent the laws of physics; whereas the idea in agent theory is that the corresponding equations -- those that determine worldlines -- represent the preferences, or “caring structure”, of some entity other than (at any rate, not necessarily identical to) the physical universe.

(I am deliberately avoiding the terms “values” and “goals”, for obscure theoretical reasons that I won’t explain here.)

A worldline in Tegmark IV (to say nothing of V) would, almost by its very nature, suggest a higher degree of “agency” than the ordinary sort of worldline, because it would allow for the possibility that the “observer” or “agent” moves between universes with differing laws of physics. Were we ever to acquire the capacity of “hacking into” our universe and changing its physical laws, for example, this would be the sort of mathematical setting in which our activities would be appropriately modeled. The equations governing our trajectories in that case would be reasonably termed “laws of metaphysics” -- or, indeed (in the most general case at least), “laws of mathematics”.

Importantly, note that this setting enables us to reason counterfactually about physical laws (that is, about “metaphysical location”), in exactly the same way that ordinary physics allows us to reason counterfactually about physical location (e.g., “if I were here at this time, then I would be there at that time”).

The next step in this progression, Tegmark...
Are pre-specified utility functions about the real world possible in principle?
by mlogan — 2018-07-11T18:46:49.268Z

Preface: I think my question is a rather basic one, but I haven't been able to find a good answer to it yet. I did find one post that touches on similar areas, which might be good background reading (the comments are great too).

Let's start with the standard example of building a super intelligence and telling it to bring you coffee. We give it a utility function which is 1 if you have coffee, 0 otherwise. This goes terribly wrong, of course, because this utility function is not what you actually wanted. As we all know, this is the basis on which much of the concern about AI alignment rests. However, it seems to me that an important detail here has been glossed over by most discussions of AI alignment that I've read.

My question is: how do we, even in principle, get to the point of having an AI that has this (or any) pre-specified utility function in the first place, and what does that tell us about AI alignment? Our desired utility function must be formalizable if we want to be able to say it has been "specified" in any meaningful sense, but in the real world, whether I have coffee or not is not obviously formalizable. In other words, if I build a super intelligence, what is the actual concrete work that is involved in giving it a utility function that I picked ahead of time, even an extremely foolish one?

I can think of a few possibilities:

1) Let's assume the AI understands basic physics: You input a formal definition about "having coffee" based on the location and properties of atoms.

2) You tell the AI to try things (maybe asking you first) and after each experiment it performs, you tell it whether you have coffee.

3) You have previously taught the AI to understand human language, and you just say "now bring me coffee", or, if you wish, "maximize the utility function that is 1 when I have coffee, and 0 when I don't".

4) You have previously taught the AI to understand and manipulate formal systems, and you input a formalized version of "maximize the utility function that is 1 when I have coffee, and 0 when I don't".

5) This is silly! A human is clearly capable, in principle, of slavishly maximizing a simple utility function. This is an existence proof that such a system can exist in nature, even if we don't yet know how to build it.

I think there are basic conceptual problems wit...