trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Integral versus differential ethics
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-12-01T18:04:56.293Z

In population ethics...

Most people start out believing that the following are true:

That adding more happy lives is a net positive.

That redistributing happiness more fairly is not a net negative.

That the repugnant conclusion is indeed repugnant.

Some will baulk on the first statement on equality grounds, but most people should accept those three statements as presented. Then they find out about the mere addition paradox.

Someone who then accepts the repugnant could then reason something like this:

Adding happy people and redistributing fairly happiness, if done many, many times, in the way described above, will result in a repugnant conclusion. Each step along the way seems solid, but the conclusion seems wrong. Therefore I will accept the repugnant conclusion, not on its own merits, but because each step is clearly intuitively correct.

Call this the "differential" (or local) way or reasoning about population ethics. As long as each small change seems intuitively an improvement, then the global change must also be.

Adding happy people and redistributing fairly happiness, if done many, many times, in the way described above, will result in a repugnant conclusion. Each step along the way seems solid, but the conclusion seems wrong. Therefore I will reject (at least) one step, not on its own merits, but because the conclusion is clearly intuitively incorrect.

Call this the "integral" (or global) way of reasoning about population ethics. As long as the overall change seems intuitively a deterioration, then some of the small changes along the way must also be.

In general...

Now, I personally tend towards integral rather than differential reasoning on this particular topic. However, I want to make a more general point: philosophy may be over dedicated to differential reasoning. Mainly because it's easy: you can take things apart, simplify them, abstract details away, and appeal to simple principles - and avoid many potential biases along the way.

But it's also a very destructive tool to use in areas where concepts are unclear and cannot easily be made clear. Take the statement "human life is valuable". This can be taken apart quite easily, critiqued from all directions, its lack of easily described meaning its weakness. Nevertheless, integral reasoning is almost always applied: something called "human life" is taken to be "valuable", and many cav...
[Need advice] Likely consequences of disclosing you have Asperger's Syndrome - given you have a 2.5 years gap in your resume?
by chemotaxis101 — 2014-12-01T16:56:46.675Z

Background

A few years ago I (was forced to) left grad school (halfway into it) because of complications related to a set of anxiety disorders (a typical comorbidity in Autism Spectrum Disorders; I now have a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering. I'm also planning to return to grad school next year).

I have a family (2 children). Around the same time I left grad school, we received my daughter's diagnosis (she has more of a classical form of autism), followed by my own diagnosis.

With regards to my professional record, after approx. 2.5 years in grad school and 2.5 years completely out of the job market, I finally began to work at a small consulting firm. They are aware of my daughter's autism, but they don't know of my own diagnosis.

NGO

I'm also vice-president of a local, small, autism-related NGO who is now trying to convince me to disclose my being on the autism spectrum (for publicity and awareness reasons). They are planning to arrange an interview for me at a TV channel. In fact, the decision was already made, as I'm effectively coming out of the closet on December 9th, by means of an interview on a local radio station.

I'm enthusiasticaly in favour of such a move (for both egoistic and altruistic reasons), but am also afraid of potential consequences on my future professional prospects. Also consider that it's likely that I will need a new work position very soon.

In summary, I'm only worried with the fact of also having a track record of being out of the job market for quite some time, so that I'm afraid some hiring manager could be tempted to negatively associate the gap in my resume to my condition.
Meetup : London Social Meetup, 07/12/2014
by Tenoke — 2014-12-01T15:58:30.302Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social Meetup, 07/12/2014

WHEN:
07 December 2014 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Africa House, 64-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG, UK-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG, UK

LessWrong London is having another meetup this Sunday (07/12) at 2:00 PM. We are meeting at our usual venue - The Shakespeare's Head by Holborn tube station. There is no fixed topic of discussion nor is there anything planned so be prepared for anything. There will be a sign identifying us and if you have any problems feel free to contact me on 07425168803.

About London LessWrong:

We run this meetup almost every week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....
Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.

If you want more information about the meetup or anything else come by our google group or alternatively our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social Meetup, 07/12/2014
Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014
by MrMind — 2014-12-01T08:29:02.166Z

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.
December 2014 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2014-12-01T08:26:06.039Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Meetup : Australia onling hangout
by Elo — 2014-12-01T03:55:04.040Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Australia onling hangout

WHEN:
14 December 2014 07:00:29PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Canberra Ausralia

https://www.facebook.com/events/320866834780203/?ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular
See the facebook event for the link to the google hangout.

All welcome, interesting discussion, drop in to tell us something new you learnt or read about recently.

Discussion article for the meetup : Australia onling hangout
December 2014 Bragging Thread
by Morendil — 2014-11-30T23:54:24.498Z

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?
I'm in a really dark place right now, I think I need help.
by efim — 2014-11-30T23:34:49.229Z

Hi!
For a while now I've been having troubles with my life.

Today it got worse, likely I will feel better in a week, but problems related to a person I love and searching for the purpose of my life will not be solved, just ignored as I did for a couple of years now.

First thing to do would be to talk it out with friends or therapist (and I am now willing to spend money on it).

But the biggest problem is that they will probably not understand it, I tried to discuss it with a friend and got sympathetic and emotionally helpful advices that nonetheless don't contribute to solution at all.

I know that I will never let me kill myself (at least for anything less that amount of money that I can make in a lifetime), so I am lingering on with my life. Still I need help.

Conversations like this should not be held in comments, and I don't really know what kind of help am I expecting to get.

Sometime ago I saw an ad of therapist from lw that can council via Skype - please give me a link if you know anyone like that.

[edited: 1.12.14; 6:42] I thank everyone who send me link to Shannon at http://anxietygoaway.com/; i signed up for a free consultation, hope that something goog will come out of it.
Meetup : Munich Meetup in December
by Valeriy — 2014-11-30T22:25:11.192Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in December

WHEN:
13 December 2014 03:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Gast, Rosenheimer Straße 5, 81667 Munich, Germany

The next Munich meetup will take place on December 13th. We will play the calibration game and discuss recent articles people read. You are highly welcome to come and say hi, no matter how long you’ve been reading LessWrong.

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in December
Meetup : Bratislava
by Viliam_Bur — 2014-11-30T17:05:11.103Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

WHEN:
01 December 2014 06:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Laurinská 1, Bratislava

Careful! Now at different place than usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava
Utility indifference and infinite improbability drives
by Benya_Fallenstein — 2014-11-29T06:26:36.000Z

In MIRI's paper on Corrigibility, we describe a version of Stuart Armstrong's utility indifference technique (see also this LessWrong post), and show that an agent using our version acts as if it believes it has a "magical" way of influencing the world, similar to the problem described in my post on Exploiting EDT---Eliezer calls this an "infinite improbability drive".

Stuart has pointed out to me that the version of utility indifference we describe in the paper is different in an important way from his original proposal, which involves conditioning on a low-probability stochastic event. If my current understanding is correct, Stuart's version is indeed immune to the infinite improbability drive, as long as there is no way for the agent to influence the stochastic event. However, this version can still be interpreted as giving the agent an incorrect probability distribution, and it seems like any agent with this property will be willing to accept bets which are clearly bad.

Model

The model of utility indifference I will use in this post is an instance of the one in the Corrigibility paper, with specific support for the stochastic event in Stuart's original proposal.

As in the paper, for simplicity we'll look at a toy world where all that happens is that the agent takes an action from a set A1, makes a single observation from a set O1, and takes a second action from a set A2, and we assume that our utility functions are specified in terms of these actions and observations (rather than some underlying states of the world).

Our world model is given by a function p(o;a1), which gives the probability of different observations o∈O given that the agent's first action is a1∈A1. In other words, p(⋅;a1) is a probability distribution over O, for each a1∈A1. The implicit idea is that these probability distributions are computed by causal counterfactuals (or something better).

We are given two utility functions, u(a1,o,a2) and v(a1,o,a2). When choosing its first action, we want our agent to optimize for u(a1,o,a2). Then, its human operators get a chance to observe its behavior and change their minds about what its utility function should be, and if they give a "change utility function" command (which the agent observes as part of its observation o), then the agent should optimize for v(a1,o,a2) when choosing its second action. If the humans don't give this command, the

...
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Approaches, Conspecific Interactions, Arguments and Communications
by luminosity — 2014-11-29T01:30:51.012Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Approaches, Conspecific Interactions, Arguments and Communications

WHEN:
07 December 2014 04:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Humanist House, 10 Shepherd St Chippendale

This month we'll have the first ever dojo run by John August. Given that this dojo won't use material in the previous ones, it's a great opportunity to come along and be able to get right into it. As per usual, there will be an optional group dinner after the end of the dojo (6pm) for those who can make it.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Approaches, Conspecific Interactions, Arguments and Communications
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-11-28T19:08:38.081Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on November 21st. The following week's summary is here.

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

Bangalore Meetup: 22 November 2014 04:10PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

[Atlanta] MIRIxAtlanta - MIRI Research Guide + Corrigibility: 22 November 2014 06:00PM
East Coast Solstice Megameetup: 20 December 2014 03:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Saint Petersburg, Russia meetup: "Low hanging fruit": 19 December 2014 07:00PM
Tel Aviv Meetup: Rump Session: 25 November 2014 07:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: Experimentation: 23 November 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Rationality Games: 30 November 2014 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:

Austin, TX - Caffe Medici: 22 November 2025 01:30PM
Canberra: Liar's Dice!: 28 November 2014 06:00PM
London social meetup in my flat: 23 November 2014 02:00PM
Moscow Meetup: Codename Bilderberg: 23 November 2014 02:00PM
Seattle Secular Solstice: 13 December 2014 05:30PM
[Sydney] regular meetup - Significant things I have gotten wrong: 26 November 2014 06:30PM
Vienna: 22 November 2014 03:00PM
[Vienna] A Rationalist's Guide to Strength (Vienna): 23 November 2014 02:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Weekend Vienna: 13 December 2014 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 23 November 2014 03:00PM
West LA—The Relativity of Wrong: 26 November 2014 07:00PM

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, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, 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 a...
When the uncertainty about the model is higher than the uncertainty in the model
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-11-28T18:12:58.376Z

Most models attempting to estimate or predict some elements of the world, will come with their own estimates of uncertainty. It could be the Standard Model of physics predicting the mass of the Z boson as 91.1874 ± 0.0021 GeV, or the rather wider uncertainty ranges of economic predictions.

In many cases, though, the uncertainties in or about the model dwarf the estimated uncertainty in the model itself - especially for low probability events. This is a problem, because people working with models often try to use the in-model uncertainty and adjust it to get an estimate of the true uncertainty. They often realise the model is unreliable, but don't have a better one, and they have a measure of uncertainty already, so surely doubling and tripling this should do the trick? Surely...

The following three cases are going to be my go-to examples for showing what a mistake this can be; they cover three situations: extreme error, being in the domain of a hard science, and extreme negative impact.

Black Monday

On October 19, 1987, the world's stock markets crashed, shedding a huge value in a very short time. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 22.61% that day, losing between a fifth and a quarter of its value.

How likely was such an event, according to the prevailing models of the time? This was apparently a 20-sigma event, which means that the event was twenty standard deviations away from the expected behaviour.

Such events have a probability of around 10-50 of happening, which in technical mathematical terms is classified as "very small indeed". If every day were compressed into a second, and the stock markets had been running since the big bang... this gives us only about 1017 seconds. If every star in the observable universe ran its own stock market, and every day were compressed into a second, and we waited a billion times the lifetime of the universe... then we might expect to observe a twenty sigma event. Once.

No amount of reasonable "adjusting" of the probability could bring 10-50 into something plausible. What is interesting, though, is that if we took the standard deviation as the measure of uncertainty, the adjustment is much smaller. One day in a hundred years is a roughly 3x10-5 event, which corresponds very roughly to three standard deviations. So "simply" multiplying the standard deviation by seven would have been enough. It seems t...
Is arguing worth it? If so, when and when not? Also, how do I become less arrogant?
by 27chaos — 2014-11-27T21:28:14.867Z

I've had several political arguments about That Which Must Not Be Named in the past few days with people of a wide variety of... strong opinions. I'm rather doubtful I've changed anyone's mind about anything, but I've spent a lot of time trying to do so. I also seem to have offended one person I know rather severely. Also, even if I have managed to change someone's mind about something through argument, it feels as though someone will end up having to argue with them later down the line when the next controversy happens.
It's very discouraging to feel this way. It is frustrating when making an argument is taken as a reason for personal attack. And it's annoying to me to feel like I'm being forced into something by the disapproval of others. I'm tempted to just retreat from democratic engagement entirely. But there are disadvantages to this, for example it makes it easier to maintain irrational beliefs if you never talk to people who disagree with you.
I think a big part of the problem is that I have an irrational alief that makes me feel like my opinions are uniquely valuable and important to share with others. I do think I'm smarter, more moderate, and more creative than most. But the feeling's magnitude and influence over my behavior is far greater than what's justified by the facts.
How do I destroy this feeling? Indulging it satisfies some competitive urges of mine and boosts my self-esteem. But I think it's bad overall despite this, because it makes evaluating the social consequences of my choices more difficult. It's like a small addiction, and I have no idea how to get over it.
Does anyone else here have an opinion on any of this? Advice from your own lives, perhaps?
You have a set amount of "weirdness points". Spend them wisely.
by Peter Wildeford — 2014-11-27T21:09:22.804Z

I've heard of the concept of "weirdness points" many times before, but after a bit of searching I can't find a definitive post describing the concept, so I've decided to make one. As a disclaimer, I don't think the evidence backing this post is all that strong and I am skeptical, but I do think it's strong enough to be worth considering, and I'm probably going to make some minor life changes based on it.

-

Chances are that if you're reading this post, you're probably a bit weird in some way.

No offense, of course. In fact, I actually mean it as a compliment. Weirdness is incredibly important. If people weren't willing to deviate from society and hold weird beliefs, we wouldn't have had the important social movements that ended slavery and pushed back against racism, that created democracy, that expanded social roles for women, and that made the world a better place in numerous other ways.

Many things we take for granted now as why our current society as great were once... weird.

Joseph Overton theorized that policy develops through six stages: unthinkable, then radical, then acceptable, then sensible, then popular, then actual policy. We could see this happen with many policies -- currently same-sex marriage is making its way from popular to actual policy, but not to long ago it was merely acceptable, and not too long before that it was pretty radical.

Some good ideas are currently in the radical range. Effective altruism itself is such a collection of beliefs typical people would consider pretty radical. Many people think donating 3% of their income is a lot, let alone the 10% demand that Giving What We Can places, or the 50%+ that some people in the community do.

And that's not all. Others would suggest that everyone become vegetarian, advocating for open borders and/or universal basic income, theabolishment of gendered language, having more resources into mitigating existential risk, focusing on research into Friendly AI, cryonicsand curing death, etc.

While many of these ideas might make the world a better place if made into policy, all of these ideas are pretty weird.

Weirdness, of course, is a drawback. People take weird opinions less seriously.

The absurdity heuristic is a real bias that ...