trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
2017 LessWrong Survey
by namespace — 2017-09-13T06:26:42.893Z

The 2017 LessWrong Survey is here! This year we're interested in community response to the LessWrong 2.0 initiative. I've also gone through and fixed as many bugs as I could find reported on the last survey, and reintroduced items that were missing from the 2016 edition. Furthermore new items have been introduced in multiple sections and some cut in others to make room. You can now export your survey results after finishing by choosing the 'print my results' option on the page displayed after submission. The survey will run from today until the 15th of October.

You can take the survey below, thanks for your time. (It's back in single page format, please allow some seconds for it to load):

Click here to take the survey
2017 LessWrong Survey
by namespace — 2017-09-13T06:18:33.074Z

The 2017 LessWrong Survey is here! This year we're interested in community response to the LessWrong 2.0 initiative. I've also gone through and fixed as many bugs as I could find reported on the last survey, and reintroduced items that were missing from the 2016 edition. Furthermore new items have been introduced in multiple sections and some cut in others to make room. You can now export your survey results after finishing by choosing the 'print my results' option on the page displayed after submission. The survey will run from today until the 15th of October.

You can take the survey below, thanks for your time. (It's back in single page format,please allow some seconds for it to load):

Click here to take the survey
Open thread, September 11 - September 17, 2017
by Thomas — 2017-09-11T07:46:02.103Z

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
Best of Don’t Worry About the Vase
by Zvi — 2017-09-10T12:18:08.000Z

Epistemic Status: Welcome everyone!

In honor of being linked to by Marginal Revolution, here is what the rest of this blog has to offer.

This blog is part of the rationalist community. The general interest links below are fully general interest, and require no knowledge of or interest in rationality.

What is rationality? This post is one good answer. It is believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory, and using that map to achieve your values.

To me, a rationalist is someone who highly values, and invests in, this process and the art thereof, both in themselves and others.

This blog strives to embody that way of thinking. If you are interested in the way of thinking you saw in the guide, and want to see or explore more of it, this blog might be for you.

If you’re wondering why anyone would think this way, my best responses to that are Responses to Tyler Cowen on Rationality and Why Rationality?

If you’re really interested, you should try reading the sequences. You can get the Kindle version here.

The rest of this post organizes what this blog has produced over the years, starting with highlighting the best posts of general or economic interest.

If you’re interested in getting involved in the community, especially in New York City, leave a comment with information on how to reach you, preferably email.

Top 5 General Interest / For Marginal Revolution Readers:

Something Was Wrong

Against Facebook

The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing

On the Seattle Minimum Wage Study (part 1) [Part 2] [Part 3]

Play in Hard Mode

Next 5 General Interest:

On Cutting Wages

Play in Hard Mode [Play in Easy Mode]

In a world… of venture capital

Book Review: How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

Book Review: Weapons of Math Destruction

Against Facebook Sequence:

Against Facebook

Against Facebook: Comparison to Alternatives and Call to Action

Help Us Find Your Blog (and others)

Choices Sequence:

Change Is Bad

Choices Are Really Bad

Complexity Is Bad

Choices Are Really Bad

Play in Easy Mode

Play in Hard Mode

Exploring Premium Mediocrity

Expanding Premium Mediocrity

Restaurant Guide (I owe part 3 at some point, maybe more):

Restaurant Guide 1: Restaurants should not look like (most) restaurants

Restaurant Guide 2: Pizza

About Rationality (General Interest):

Responses to Tyler Cohen on Ra...
Epistemic Spot Check: Exercise for Mood and Anxiety (Michael W. Otto, Jasper A.J. Smits)
by Elizabeth — 2017-09-09T23:50:00.293Z

Introduction

Everyone knows exercise (along with diet and sleep) makes a big difference in depression and anxiety. Depressed and anxious people are almost by definition bad at transforming information about how to improve their lives into actions with large up front costs, so this data is not as useful as it might be. Exercise for Mood and Anxiety (Michael W. Otto, Jasper A.J. Smits) aims to close that gap by making the conventional wisdom actionable. It does that through the following steps:

Present evidence that exercise is very helpful and why, to create motivation.

Walk you through setting up an environment where exercise requires relatively little will power to start.

Scripts and advice to make exercise as unmiserable as possible while you are doing it.

Scripts and advice to milk as much mood benefit as possible from a given amount of exercise.

An idiotic chapter on weight and food.

Parts 3 and 4 use a lot of techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness, and I suspect there’s a second order benefit of learning to apply these techniques to a relatively easy thing, so you can apply them to the rest of your life later.

Epistemic Spot Checking

Claim: “a study of 55,000 adults in the United States and Canada found that people who exercised had fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression.” (Kindle Locations 103-104).

Correctly cited, paper has no proof of causation. (abstract) (PDF) The study does in fact say this, but it also says “Despite the fact that none of these surveys [of which this paper is a metaanalysis] was [sic] originally designed to explore this association… “. I’m not saying you can never repurpose data, but with something like this where the real question is causality, it seems suspicious. The authors do consider the idea that causation runs from mental health (=energy, hopefulness, executive function) -> exercise and dismiss if, for reasons I find inadequate.

Claim: “Other studies add to this list of mood benefits by indicating that exercise is also linked to less anger and cynical distrust, as well as to stronger feelings of social integration.” (Kindle Locations 104-106).

Correctly cited, paper has no proof of causation. (Abstract).

Claim: And these benefits don’t just include reducing symptoms of distress in people who have not been formally diagnosed with depression or anxiety. The benefits of exercise also include lower rates

...
Is Feedback Suffering?
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-09-09T22:20:51.323Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/is-feedback-suffering-cf18006deca8

NB: Some of the terminology and concepts I used here are incompatible with my more recent work because this was written before I formalized my philosophy, but is dangerously close enough to them that it may cause confusion. Caveat lector.

In the future, the world may be filled with creatures other than humans and animals. There may be ems, superintelligences, and other sorts of processes we’d recognize as alive, and it seems likely that there will be many orders of magnitude more of these living things in the future than at present. As a result there may be many orders of magnitude more future suffering. Depending on your moral stance, even if you’re an anti-realist like me and simply express a preference for the satisfaction of preferences of others, this means that the lives of these future creatures are of great concern.

Brian Tomasik and others with the Foundational Research Institute have been exploring the interaction between suffering-focused ethics and the far future for a few years now. Their work has included measuring suffering and happiness, formalizing ethical calculations, and understanding the benefits of compromise with other value systems, but of particular interest to me are Brian’s looks into issues around suffering of minimally conscious processes because his thoughts on consciousness resemble mine. Thus when I read FRI researcher Lukas Gloor’s recent piece on tranquilism I was primed to find myself wondering, rather alarmingly, is feedback suffering?

To understand why, recall that feedback is another name for the process by which a subject is phenomenologically conscious and experiences itself as object. Further, most feedback is either positive or negative, meaning it causes action towards or away from a state, respectively. As humans we experience positive and negative feedback as a desire that the world be in a state other than the one it is currently in, and tranquilism suggests that suffering arises from desire since not experiencing desire yields a state we call contentment. But if we can avoid suffering by not experiencing desire, which is to say positive and negative feedback, then it looks a lot like feedback is inherently painful and thus the source of suffering. That’s distressing because it implies most existence is pain and almost all physical processes suffer constantly, so it seems to me wor...
Rational Feed
by sapphire — 2017-09-09T19:48:18.079Z

=== Updates:

I have been a little more selective about which articles make it onto the feed. I have not been overly selective and all of the obviously general interest rationalsit articles still make it.

Unless people object I am going to try a "weekly feed". The bi-weekly feed is pretty long. I currently post on the SSC reddit and lesswrong. Weekly seems fine for the SSC reddit but lesswrong is a lower activity forum. I will see how it goes. Obviously on a weekly feed there will about half as many recommended articles.

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Object, Subjects and Gender by The Baliocene Apocrypha - "Under modern post-industrial bureaucratized high-tech capitalism, it is less rewarding than ever before to be a subject. Under modern post-industrial bureaucratized high-tech capitalism, it is more rewarding than ever before to be an object. This alone accounts for a lot of the widespread weird stuff going on with gender these days."

Winning Is For Losers by Putanumonit (ribbonfarm) - Zero vs Positive Sum Games. The strong have room to cooperate. Rene Girard's theory of mimetics and competition. College Admissions. Tit for Tat. Spiked dicks in nature. Short and long term strategies in dating. Quirky dating profiles. Honesty on the first date. Beating Moloch with a transhuman God.

Premium Mediocre by Jacob Falkovich - Being 30% wrong is better than being 5% wrong. Consumption: Signaling vs genuine enjoyment. Dating other PM people. Venkat is wrong about impressing parents. He is more wrong, or joking, about cryptocurrencies. Fear of missing out.

Ten New 80000 Hours Articles Aimed At The by 80K Hours (EA forum) - Ten recent articles and descriptions from 80K hours. Over and underpaid jobs relative to their social impact, the most employable skills, learning ML, whether most social programs work and other topics.

Minimizing Motivated Beliefs by Entirely Useless - The tradeoffs between epistemic and instrumental rationality. Yudkowsky's argument such tradeoffs either very stupid or don't exist. Issues with Yudkowsky: Denial that belief is voluntary, thinking that trading away the truth requires being blind to consequences. Horror victims and transcendent meaning. Interesting things are usually false.

===Scott:

How Do We Get Breasts Out Of Bayes Theorem by Scott Alexander - "But evolutionary psychologists make claims like 'Men ha...
Book Reviews: Zoolitude and the Void
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-09-09T15:32:17.000Z

This is a novel review post, it contains minor spoilers for One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, and The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray, as well as Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer which I mention briefly.

Update from the previous episode: I concluded my review of Too Like The Lightning on a note of worry. Parts of that book wasted the rich and exciting weirdtopia Ada Palmer created on incongruous plots and whole chapters in Latin, and the ending seemed to set up the sequels to do the same. I didn’t think that Palmer would be willing to give up all the baggage that made Lightning not-quite-great, and Lightning was successful enough that she could afford not to.

But she did anyway, Seven Surrenders is quite-great. Palmer mercilessly cut out all the bad parts, from the obsession with pronouns to the characters that made the story stuck. Seven Surrenders delivers a tight plot that focuses on the politics, personalities, and philosophy that made Lightning so intriguing.

As with movies, it’s very rare for a book sequel to be so much better than the original. Seven Surrenders is rated 0.34 points higher on Goodreads than Lightning, which is the gap between an average book and “best of” lists. The only two comparisons I could find are Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Iain Banks’ Culture Series. In both cases, every book past the second one was as good as #2 and the first book remained a low-quality outlier. I have every reason to believe that this will also be the case with Palmer’s series, and I can’t wait for The Will to Battle, the third book in the series, to come out this winter.

A Bit of Magic

One of my main worries about Lightning was that it introduced too much magic into a world that didn’t need it. George R. R. Martin said in an interview that he wanted to keep the supernatural elements of Song of Ice and Fire to the minimum required to spice up the story. An occasional dragon, a rumor of white walkers, but no archmages dueling with world-shattering powers. The mundane world of human relationships and survival has enough tumult and mystery. How a story’s characters react to the supernatural should illuminate their reaction to the natural, not make the latter irrelevant.

Although they may seem unrelated, all three novels I will talk about deal with the...
Instrumental Rationality Sequence Finished! (w/ caveats)
by  — 2017-09-09T01:49:53.109Z

Hey everyone,

Back in April, I said I was going to start writing an instrumental rationality sequence.

It's...sort of done.

I ended up collecting the essays into a sort of e-book. It's mainly content that I've put here (Starting Advice, Planning 101, Habits 101, etc.), but there's also quite a bit of new content.

It clocks in at about 150 pages and 30,000 words, about 15,000 of which I wrote after the April announcement post. (Which beats my estimate of 10,000 words before burnout!!!)

However, the editor for LW 1.0 editor isn't making it easy to port the stuff here from my Google Drive.

As LW 2.0 enters actual open beta, I'll repost / edit the essays and host them there.

In the meantime, if you want to read the whole compiled book, the direct Google Doc link is here. That's where the real-time updates will happen, so it's what I'd recommend using to read it for now.

(There's also an online version on my blog if for some reason you want to read it there.)

It's my hope that this sequence becomes a useful reference for newcomers looking to learn more about instrumental rationality, which is more specialized than The Sequences (which really are more for epistemics).

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to write the book/sequence I set out to write. The actual book as it is now is about 10% as good as what I actually wanted. There's stuff I didn't get to write, more nuances I'd have liked to cover, more pictures I wanted to make, etc.

After putting in many hours of research and writing, I think I've learned more about the sort of effort that would need to go into making the actual project I'd outlined at the start.

There'll be a postmortem essay analyzing my expectations vs reality coming soon.

As a result of this project and a few other things, I'm feeling burned out. There probably won't be any major projects from me for a little bit, while I rest up.
Inconsistent Beliefs and Charitable Giving
by Rossin_duplicate0.6898194309641386 — 2017-09-08T07:33:19.893Z

There is common tendency in human life to act in ways contrary to what we believe.

The classic example is the German people under Nazi rule, most of whom likely thought of themselves as good people—the kind of people who would help their neighbors even at risk to themselves, but did not do anything about the rounding up of Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals into concentration camps. They didn’t want to give up their self-image as a good person, but they also didn’t want themselves and their family to potentially face the wrath of the SS. So, many convinced themselves that they didn’t care about what was happening. That was far easier, less painful, than admitting that they were not quite as moral and upright as they thought or having to put themselves in mortal danger.

I used to think that I would have been one of the few who did in fact shelter the “undesirables” from the Nazis. Now, I am less confident. But I want to be better. Just recently, I realized I have been similarly inconsistent by not donating to organizations that help people dying of preventable diseases and can measure lives saved in relatively low numbers of dollars.

If you had accused me of this up until a few days ago I would have given you all sorts of excuses for why this lack of action and my belief “the death and suffering of others is bad and I should prevent it if I can” were not inconsistent. I would have told you how I feel terrible about the dying children when I think about them, but I am prioritizing other problems. And besides, I’m a college student with very little disposable income and it’s really just financially prudent to save all my money in case of an unforeseen contingency. Once I start making more money later on in life, then I’ll start contributing to organizations that send people malaria nets.

But that’s all a self-deception. The truth is that my beliefs and actions were inconsistent. Because I quite firmly believe that saving lives is more important than beer, yet I continually find money for beer and yet none for the Against Malaria Foundation.

I think the root cause of this kind of inconsistency is often a feeling of being overwhelmed. If you imagine a single child dying of malaria, feverish and convulsing weakly in her bed while her parents look on in helpless horror, you’ll probably...
New business opportunities due to self-driving cars
by chaosmage — 2017-09-06T20:07:47.183Z

This is a slightly expanded version of a talk presented at the Less Wrong European Community Weekend 2017.

Predictions about self-driving cars in the popular press are pretty boring. Truck drivers are losing their jobs, self-driving cars will be more rented than owned, transport becomes cheaper, so what. The interesting thing is how these things change the culture and economy and what they make possible.

I have no idea about most of this. I don't know if self-driving cars accelerate or decelerate urbanization, I don't know how public transport responds, I don't even care which of the old companies survive. What I do think is somewhat predictable is some of the business opportunities become economical that previously weren't. I disregard retail, which would continue moving to online retail at the expense of brick and mortar stores even if the FedEx trucks would continue to be driven by people.

Diversification of vehicle types

A family car that you own has to be somewhat good at many different jobs. It has to get you places fast. It has to be a thing that can transport lots of groceries. It has to take your kid to school.

With self-driving cars that you rent for each seperate job, you want very different cars. A very fast one to take you places. A roomy one with easy access for your groceries. And a tiny, cute, unicorn-themed one that takes your kid to school.

At the same time, the price of autonomy is dropping faster than the price of batteries, so you want the lowest mass car that can do the job. So a car that is very fast and roomy and unicorn-themed at the same time isn't economical.

So if you're an engineer or a designer, consider going into vehicle design. There's an explosion of creativity about to happen in that field that will make it very different from the subtle iterations in car design of the past couple of decades.

Who wins: Those who design useful new types of autonomous vehicles for needs that are not, or badly, met by general purpose cars.

Who loses: Owners of general purpose cars, which lose value rapidly.

Services at home

If you have a job where customers come to visit you, say you're a doctor or a hairdresser or a tattoo artist, your field of work is about to change completely. This is because services that go visit the customer outcompete ones that the customer has to go visit. They're more convenient and they can also easily service less mobil...
Come check out the Boulder Future Salon this Saturday!
by fowlertm — 2017-09-06T15:49:16.899Z

I'm giving a talk on the STEMpunk Project this Saturday at the Boulder Future Salon:

https://www.meetup.com/future-51/events/243043394/

I love BFS and I would encourage you to come check it out if you're in the area.

Let me tell you a story which illustrates why I think they're a valuable group. Once upon a time I went to a presentation there given by a member who'd written a program that generates artificial music. As we were waiting around one of the other guys (whose name I can't remember off the top of my head) just randomly handed me a book and said "you'd probably get a kick out of this."

It was Rudolph Carnap's "The Logical Structure of The World". I read the introduction, thumbed through it a bit, and we had a brief conversation about its relevance to philosophy and to recondite areas of software engineering like database design.

Reflecting on this episode later I realized how remarkable it was. It's not like this other person knew me very well, but by the mere fact that I'd walked through the door he assumed I'd be able to read a book like this and that I'd want to.

I have encountered precious few places like this anywhere.

There wound up being a guitar in the facility, and later in that same meetup I had a duel with the software my friend had created.

Any place where you can find robot music and logical positivism is a place worth exploring.