trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Press Your Luck
by Zvi — 2019-06-15T15:30:00.702Z

Epistemic Status: Oh, we’re doing this.

Press Your Luck is back! Press Your Luck is back! Wednesday Nights on ABC! Woo-hoo!

The great classic game shows each bring together several unique elements into a synergistic whole with a consistent aesthetic and central theme. Each winning game has its own style of questions, its own attitude, its own game theoretic issues. You can’t tweak an existing game show to create a great or even good new one. You must do something truly new, with its own logic.

Thus, we have very long runs of the games that have hit upon a winning formula, and revivals of them when they fail. Within a revival or long run, now you can tweak the game and improve your place in local design space. Otherwise, you can’t, even if the existing implementation left a lot on the table. Family Feud is a great example of a unique game that has severe design flaws, but which likely isn’t going to change or be improved upon.

Some of the games that I count on this list along with Press Your Luck, mostly but not entirely from my youth, would be Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, $100,000 Pyramid, Scrabble, Sale of the Century, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Greed, Let’s Make a Deal, The Price is Right, Family Feud, Deal or no Deal, Hollywood Squares and The Weakest Link.

Some of these are more evergreen and well-balanced products, with base content that informs and entertains, that one can watch for a long time, like Jeopardy. Others focus more on problems game theory,

The best reality competitions also feature this, but are much more vulnerable to cloning via minor variation (e.g. National Idol and its variations).

Enough general chatter. The new revival of Press Your Luck is here.

For those not familiar with Press Your Luck, the game takes place in two rounds with two stages each. In the first stage, contestants buzz in to answer questions. The questions are general (mostly easy) trivia. You can buzz in at any time, interrupting the question, which will finish after you answer. The first person to buzz in gets three spins if right, the others are given multiple choice between their answer and two other choices, and get one spin if right. There are four questions each round (three in the first round of the new version).

The strategy in this round mostly involves knowing when it is worth buzzing in despite not knowing for sure what the question is (they sometimes meander on ...
Paper on qualitative types or degrees of knowledge, with examples from medicine?
by Kenny — 2019-06-15T00:31:56.912Z

There's a paper (or essay or something similar) I can remember reading that I've been struggling to find for some time now. It described different qualitative types of knowledge and used various examples from medicine, e.g. the difference between various kinds of trauma or emergency care where we know exactly what a problem is and can fix it (almost) exactly/completely versus something like obesity where we basically don't know (at least in the sense of commonly shared knowledge) much of anything about what exactly the problem even is.

Any help in uncovering the paper would be greatly appreciated!
Recommendation Features on LessWrong
by habryka — 2019-06-15T00:23:18.102Z

Today, we're rolling out several new beta features on the home page, which display recommended posts to read. The first is a Continue Reading section: if you start reading a multi-post sequence, it will suggest that you read another post from that sequence. The second is a From the Archives section, which recommends highly-rated posts that you haven't read, from all of LessWrong's history.

To use these features, please ensure you are logged-in.

Continue Reading

Sequences are a mechanism on LessWrong for organizing collections of related posts. Anyone can create a Sequence from the library page. If you write a series of posts and add them to a Sequence, they will have Previous and Next links at the top and bottom; if you create a Sequence out of posts by other authors, they will have Previous and Next links for readers who came to them via the Sequence.

When you are logged in and read a post from a Sequence, the first unread post from that sequence will be added as a recommendation in the Continue Reading section, like this:

If you decide not to finish, hover over the recommendation and click the X button to dismiss the recommendation. For logged-out users, the Continue Reading section is replaced with a Core Reading section, which suggests the first posts of Rationality: A-Z, The Codex, and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

From the Archives

The home page now has a From the Archives section, which displays three posts randomly selected from the entire history of LessWrong. Currently, a post can appear in this section if:

(1) you've never read it while logged in (including on old-LessWrong),

(2) it has a score of at least 50, and

(3) it is not in the Meta section, or manually excluded from recommendation by moderators. (We manually exclude posts if they aged poorly in a way that wouldn't be captured by votes at the time -- for example, announcements of conferences that have already happened, and reporting of studies that later failed to replicate.)

Currently, if a post is eligible to appear in the From the Archives section, it will appear with probability proportional to the cube of its score.

Why These Features

LessWrong as a Repository for "long content"

Gwern’s about page has influenced me a lot in thinking about the future of LessWrong. Gwern uses the following quote:

The Internet is self destructing paper. A place wher

...
Discourse Norms: Moderators Must Not Bully
by Davis_Kingsley — 2019-06-14T23:22:15.741Z

One of the absolute worst things that can happen to a civic/public community online is for moderators to be bullies or for moderators to take the side of the bullies. Once that happens, the community is at grave risk of ceasing to be a public community and instead embracing cliquism. If the moderators enforce the will of their friends rather than good discussion norms, the space is no longer going to be a space for good discussion but rather one for a certain friend group.

The most common way I've seen this happen goes something like this. A newcomer with locally unusual ideas joins the community. Conflict between their ideas and the more established norms arises. Because these ideas are unpopular, people push back against them, often in mean or uncharitable ways. If left unchecked, the newcomer may soon become a target of bullying and sniping. [1]

At this point, moderators need to intervene in favor of the newcomer, because mean and uncharitable behavior shouldn't be allowed to stand in a civic/public space, even if it's towards ideas that are locally unpopular. Moderation is needed to rein in the attacks and keep things civil and productive. However, in practice what often ends up happening is that the moderators intervene against the newcomer, enforcing the local social hierarchy rather than good discussion norms.

This is toxic to a civic/public space and, if left unchecked, drives out views or discussion styles other than those that are locally popular.

One potential antidote to this sort of behavior is holding moderators to significantly higher standards than users. If a moderator and a user are in an angry, insulting argument with one another, the moderator should be removed from moderation or at minimum recuse themselves. If a moderator posts insults against another user - especially someone who isn't popular - they are at fault and should apologize or be removed from moderation.

Yes, this is a harsh standard. Yes, this means that being a moderator limits what you can say in some circumstances. But that's what you need to do to keep the bullies at bay, and ultimately, being a moderator shouldn't be a position of power but rather a position of responsibility.

Lastly, I want to point out that it's totally fine for a space to exist for a friend group or for those who agree with certain perspectives - and for those sorts of sp...
Welcome to LessWrong!
by Ruby — 2019-06-14T19:42:26.128Z

﻿The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain
﻿and simple to express:
﻿Err
﻿and err
﻿and err again
﻿but less
﻿and less
﻿and less.
– Piet Hein

LessWrong is an online forum and community dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. Each day, we aim to be less wrong about the world than the day before.

See also our New User's Guide.

Training Rationality

Rationality has a number of definitions[1] on LessWrong, but perhaps the most canonical is that the more rational you are, the more likely your reasoning leads you to have accurate beliefs, and by extension, allows you to make decisions that most effectively advance your goals.

LessWrong contains a lot of content on this topic. How minds work (both human, artificial, and theoretical ideal), how to reason better, and how to have discussions that are productive. We're very big fans of Bayes Theorem and other theories of normatively correct reasoning[2].

To get started improving your Rationality, we recommend reading the background-knowledge text of LessWrong, Rationality: A-Z (aka "The Sequences") or at least selected highlights from it. After that, looking through the Rationality section of the Concepts Portal is a good thing to do.

Applying Rationality

You might value Rationality for its own sake, however, many people want to be better reasoners so they can have more accurate beliefs about topics they care about, and make better decisions.

Using LessWrong-style reasoning, contributors to LessWrong have written essays on an immense variety of topics on LessWrong, each time approaching the topic with a desire to know what's actually true (not just what's convenient or pleasant to believe), being deliberate about processing the evidence, and avoiding common pitfalls of human reason.

Check out the Concepts Portal to find essays on topics such as artificial intelligence, history, philosophy of science, language, psychology, biology, morality, culture, self-care, economics, game theory, productivity, art, nutrition, relationships and hundreds of other topics broad and narrow.

LessWrong and Artificial Intelligence

For several reasons, LessWrong is a website and community with a strong interest in AI and specifically causing powerful AI systems to be safe and beneficial.

AI is a field concerned with how minds and intelligence works, overlapping a lot wi

...
LessWrong FAQ
by Ruby — 2019-06-14T19:03:58.782Z

This is a new FAQ written LessWrong 2.0. This is the first version and I apologize if it is a little rough. Please comment or message with further questions, typos, things that are unclear, etc.

The old FAQ on the LessWrong Wiki still contains much excellent information, however it has not been kept up to date.

Advice! We suggest you navigate this guide with the help on the table of contents (ToC) in the left sidebar. You will need to scroll to see all of it. Mobile users need to click the menu icon in the top left.

The major sections of this FAQ are:

LessWrong Meta
Getting Started
Reading Content
Posting & Commenting

special mention: The Editor

Karma & Voting
Notifications & Subscriptions
Messaging
Questions
Community Events Page
Moderation
Privacy Policy & Terms of Use

About LessWrong

What is LessWrong?

LessWrong is a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. More generally, we want to develop and practice the art of human rationality.

To that end, LessWrong is a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems.

LessWrong serves these purposes with its library of rationality writings, community discussion forum, open questions research platform, and community page for in-person events.

See also: Welcome to LessWrong!

What is rationality?

Rationality is a term which can have different meanings to different people. You might already associate with a few things. On LessWrong, we mean something like the following:

Rationality is thinking in ways which systematically arrive at truth.
Rationality is thinking in ways which cause you to systematically achieve your goals.
Rationality is trying to do better on purpose.
Rationality is reasoning well even in the face of massive uncertainty.
Rationality is making good decisions even when it’s hard.
Rationality is being self-aware, understanding how your own mind works, and applying this knowledge to thinking better.

See also: What Do We Mean By "Rationality"?, Why Spock is Not Rational, What are the open problems in Human Rationality?

What is the history of LessWrong?

In 2006, Eliezer Yudkowsky and others began writing on Overcoming Bias, a group blog with the general theme of how to move one’s beliefs closer to reality despite biases such as overconfidence and wishful thinking. In 2009...
On Freud's examination of the Uncanny in Literature
by KyriakosCH — 2019-06-14T17:40:25.520Z

It is often mentioned that Freud’s Psychoanalytical theory has influenced literature very considerably. Regarding stories that aspire to cause dread, his article on the Uncanny in Literature provides good insight – particularly his interpretation of “The Sandman”, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s bleak and magical story of fiery circles, monsters and doppelgangers, is worth mentioning...

The Sandman, the eponymous fiend of this story, is both a magical entity (a flying beaked demon that abducts little children and uses their eyes so as to feed his own offspring) and a dyad of mysterious men: an ominously looking old lawyer, Coppelius, and a merchant of eyeglasses, called Giuseppe Coppola. Both names etymologically are derived from the Italian word for “eye”, and their links to the monstrous Sandman of legend do not stop there.

The Lawyer Coppelius

Coppelius is a very unpleasant-looking man, who seems to despise children. The protagonist of the story, the student Nathaniel, recalls how he hated and feared Coppelius ever since he was a boy. While at first the antipathy was caused by disgust at how the old man looked, as well as due to the antagonistic attitude he consistently demonstrated when invited to Nathaniel's family home by his father, later on Nathaniel comes to regard Coppelius as the actual murderer of his father – whose death took place during a chemical, possibly alchemy-related, experiment.

Coppelius had already been fused in Nathaniel's mind with the mythical Sandman – the child’s governess was reckless enough to fill his mind with tales of horror, and it should be noted that she was the one who first suggested that his father’s night-time guest was the Sandman. Nathaniel always loved stories of mystery and the macabre, so the repugnant and terrifying figure of the winged and beaked Sandman soon assumed a central position in his personal pantheon of ghouls.

Coppelius manages to escape after the apparent accident that killed Nathaniel's father, and Nathaniel will only see him again – or at any rate believe he saw him – years later, while studying far away from his home city.

The optometrist Giuseppe Coppola

Coppola first appears to the student Nathaniel wishing to sell him some of his wares – lenses, small telescopes and eyeglasses. Nathaniel immediately feels repulsed, because the visage of this merchant is uncannily similar to the lawyer Coppeliu...
Unknown Unknowns in AI Alignment
by sayan — 2019-06-14T05:07:21.193Z

It seems to me that no matter how many problems from different research agendas we solve, there is always the possibility that some 'unknown unknown' misalignment scenario can occur. I can imagine an approach of building model-agnostic, environment-agnostic minimal assumption alignment guarantees (which seems to be super hard), but I feel like things can go wrong in myriad other ways, even then.

Has there been any discussion about how we might go about this?
Storytelling and the evolution of human intelligence
by Richard_Kennaway — 2019-06-13T20:13:03.547Z

This is a notice of a recent paper that may be of interest here, "The storytelling arms race: origin of human intelligence and the scientific mind" by Enrico Coen. It is a more specific working out of the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, taking storytelling as the means through which the deception arms race operated, and which (it suggests) also raised up language alongside intelligence. It also discusses the relationship between storytelling (where, as in war, truth is the first casualty) and science (where truth is the goal).

Disclosure: I work closely with the author, although not on the subject of this paper.
Real-World Coordination Problems are Usually Information Problems
by johnswentworth — 2019-06-13T18:21:55.586Z

Let’s start with a few examples of very common real-world coordination problems.

The marketing department at a car dealership posts ads for specific cars, but the salespeople don’t know which cars were advertised, causing confusion when a customer calls in asking about a specific car. There’s no intentional information-hoarding, it’s just that the marketing and sales people don’t sit next to each other or talk very often. Even if the info were shared, it would need to be translated to a format usable by the salespeople.
Various hard problems in analysis of large-scale biological data likely have close analogues in econometrics. The econometricians have good methods to solve the problems, and would probably be quite happy to apply those methods to biological data, and the bio experimentalists would love some analytic help. But these people hardly ever talk to each other, and use different language for the same things anyway.
When the US invaded Grenada in the ‘80’s, the marines occupied one side of the island and the army occupied the other. Their radios were not compatible, so if an army office needed to contact their counterpart in the marines, they had to walk to the nearest pay phone and get routed through Fort Bragg on commercial telephone lines.
Various US intelligence agencies had all of the pieces necessary to stop the 9/11 attacks. There were agencies which knew something was planned for that day, and knew who the actors were. There were agencies which knew the terrorists were getting on the planes. There were agencies which could have moved to stop them, but unfortunately the fax(!) from the agencies which knew what was happening wasn’t checked in time.
There are about 300 million people in the US. If I have a small company producing doilies, chances are there are plenty of people in the US alone who’d love my doilies and be happy to pay for them. But it’s hard to figure out exactly which people those are, and even once that’s done it’s hard to get them a message showing off my product. And even if all that works out, if the customers really want a slightly different pattern, it’s hard for them to communicate back to me what they want - even if I’d be happy to make it.
Just yesterday I was looking for data on turnover time of atherosclerotic plaques. I know plaques increase with age, but is it the same plaques in the same places growing, or is it an incre

...
Learning Over Time for AI and Humans and Rationality
by jmh — 2019-06-13T13:23:58.639Z

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLZ3bdeng4u5W8Yft/let-s-talk-about-convergent-rationality-1

make the observation that natural and artificial intelligence will learn over time. Given the post's title that got me thinking about the two learning settings and how that might apply to concepts of rationality.

AI will presumably not face the same life time limitation that humans currently do. The implication is that learning will be different in the two settings. Human learning is very much dependent on prior generation and various social/group type aspects.

But I've generally thought of rationality (as generally understood) bound to a single mind, as it were. The idea of applying many rules about rational thought or behavior to aggregates, such as "the mob" largely a misapplication.

I wonder if the learning process based on knowledge learned (including the potential for mis-knowledge transmission) via a larger social process performs better in both general learning and development of rational though processes or if the AI single, long lived "mind" has some advantage.

I might also wonder a bit about how this might apply to questions such as that asked regarding why China did not develop science.

I suspect various aspects of my though have been discussed here -- or at least can inform on the though but there are lots of post to search.
Some Ways Coordination is Hard
by Zvi — 2019-06-13T13:00:00.443Z

Response to (Raymond Arnold at Less Wrong): The Schelling Choice is Rabbit, Not Stag and by implication Duncan’s Open Problems in Group Rationality

Stag Hunt is the game whereby if everyone gets together, they can hunt the Stag and win big. Those who do not hunt Stag instead hunt Rabbit, and win small. But if even one person instead decides to hunt Rabbit rather than hunt Stag, everyone hunting Stag loses rather than wins. This makes hunting Stag risky, which makes Stag risky (since others view it as risky, and thus might not do it, and view others as viewing it as risky, making it even more likely they won’t do it, and so on). Sometimes this can be overcome, and sometimes it can’t.

Raymond claims that the Schelling point of this game, by default, is Rabbit, not Stag.

Whether or not this is true depends on the exact rules of the game and the exact game state, what one might call the margin of coordination.

If you haven’t yet, click through to at least to Raymond’s article and his quote from Duncan’s original description, and consider reading Duncan’s full article.

Questions

What is the risk versus reward on the stag hunt? How often must it work to be worth trying?

Can we afford to fail? Can others? For how long?

Can the stag hunt fail even if everyone chooses stag?

Do we have time to iterate or communicate to establish future coordination, and will our actions now act as a signal?

How many people need to cooperate before the stag hunt is worthwhile? Can we afford to lose anyone? Is there a lesser stag we can go after instead with a smaller group?

Is there a particular player who has reason to worry, or might cause others to worry?

Are the players known to be aware of the stag hunt? If there are multiple possible stag hunts, do we all know which one we’re going for?

Are the players confident others know the payoff and agree it is known to be there for everyone? Does everyone even know what stag is and what rabbit is?

Does this group have a history of going on stag hunts? Is going on the stag hunt praiseworthy or blameworthy if no one follows you, or not enough people do?

Do the rabbit hunts have network effects such that failure to coordinate on them is bad for everyone, not only for the person going stag?

Are there players who value relative success rather than absolute success, and want others to fail?

Do we tru

...