trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Link] Learning how to exert self-control
by pinyaka — 2014-09-14T23:07:34.033Z

Here's a link to a short op-ed about some tips to develop self-control. The author get them from talking with Walter Mischel, a researcher who correlated impulsiveness as a child (measured by ability to delay eating sweets) and various metrics as an adult (education attainment/cocaine use/weight). Mischel has a new book coming out, but this is not a review of the book. I thought this might be of interest because it talks a little about how self-control is a skill that can be developed and even gave some specific things to do.

1. If possible remove unhelpful triggers from your environment. If not possible, try to reduce the emotional appeal of the trigger by mentally associating it with something unpleasant. One example he gives is imagining a cockroach crawling on the chocolate mousse that a server at a restaurant offers.

2. Develop specific if-then plans such as "if it is before noon, I won't check email" or "If I feel angry, I will count backward from ten." The goal of these kinds of checks is to introduce a delay between impulse and action during which you are reminded of your goal and have a chance to consider the impact of following the impulse on that goal.

3. Link the behavior that you want to modify to a "burning goal" so that you have emotional impetus to actually make the desired change.
Proposal: Use logical depth relative to human history as objective function for superintelligence
by sbenthall — 2014-09-14T20:00:09.849Z

I attended Nick Bostrom's talk at UC Berkeley last Friday and got intrigued by these problems again. I wanted to pitch an idea here, with the question: Have any of you seen work along these lines before? Can you recommend any papers or posts? Are you interested in collaborating on this angle in further depth?

The problem I'm thinking about (surely naively, relative to y'all) is: What would you want to program an omnipotent machine to optimize?

For the sake of avoiding some baggage, I'm not going to assume this machine is "superintelligent" or an AGI. Rather, I'm going to call it a supercontroller, just something omnipotently effective at optimizing some function of what it perceives in its environment.

As has been noted in other arguments, a supercontroller that optimizes the number of paperclips in the universe would be a disaster. Maybe any supercontroller that was insensitive to human values would be a disaster. What constitutes a disaster? An end of human history. If we're all killed and our memories wiped out to make more efficient paperclip-making machines, then it's as if we never existed. That is existential risk.

The challenge is: how can one formulate an abstract objective function that would preserve human history and its evolving continuity?

I'd like to propose an answer that depends on the notion of logical depth as proposed by C.H. Bennett and outlined in section 7.7 of Li and Vitanyi's An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications which I'm sure many of you have handy. Logical depth is a super fascinating complexity measure that Li and Vitanyi summarize thusly:

Logical depth is the necessary number of steps in the deductive or causal path connecting an object with its plausible origin. Formally, it is the time required by a universal computer to compute the object from its compressed original description.

The mathematics is fascinating and better read in the original Bennett paper than here. Suffice it presently to summarize some of its interesting properties, for the sake of intuition.

"Plausible origins" here are incompressible, i.e. algorithmically random.

As a first pass, the depth D(x) of a string x is the least amount of time it takes to output the string from an incompressible program.

There's a free parameter that has to do with precision that I won't get into here.

Both a string of length n that is comprised entire

...
High ulterior motives
by KatjaGrace — 2014-09-14T14:00:00.000Z

People with ulterior motives are often treated with suspicion and contempt. In a world driven round substantially by ulterior motives, this can lead to dispair, both for the ulteriorly motivated and the suspicious and contemptuous. How terrible to not be able to trust your friends, your brothers, yourself!

At this point it is worth noting two things:

This kind of extreme concern about everyone being corrupt only seems to concern more philosophically minded people. This suggests that few practical problems arise from everyone having poor motives.

In general, if you have a scorecard on which you always score zero, it is likely that you are not using the most useful scoring system. You shouldn’t neccessarily change your overall goal of doing better on that metric, but for now it might be convenient to differentiate the space within ‘zero’.

It seems to me that an important way in which ulterior motives vary is the extent to which they align with the non-ulterior motives you would like the person in question to have.

Suppose you would like to leave your small child with a babysitter, Sam. Unfortunately, you have learned that Sam is not motivated purely by the desire to care for your child. He has an ulterior motive for agreeing to babysit. How much does this trouble you?

If Sam runs a babysitting company, and really he just wants his babysitting company to thrive, then you should basically not be concerned at all.

If Sam just wants to try out babysitting once, to see what it’s like, you should be more concerned.

If Sam really just wants a chance to use your big-screen TV this one time you should be even more concerned.

If Sam just wants a chance to steal your baby so that he can sell it on the black market, you should be truly very worried.

Your worry in these cases tracks the extent to which Sam’s ulterior motives will cause him to do exactly what he would do if he just fundamentally wanted to care for your baby. If he wants his business to go well, he will do what you want him to do, to the extent that you can tell and are willing to pay. If he wants to try out babysitting, he will probably at least hang out with your child and do the basic babysitting motions. If he wants to use your TV, there’s not much reason he will do anything besides spend part of the evening in the same building as your child. If he wants to steal yo...
Should people be writing more or fewer LW posts?
by John_Maxwell — 2014-09-14T07:40:00.839Z

It's unlikely that by pure chance we are currently writing the correct number of LW posts. So it might be useful to try to figure out if we're currently writing too few or too many LW posts. If commenters are evenly divided on this question then we're probably close to the optimal number; otherwise we have an opportunity to improve. Here's my case for why we should be writing more posts.

Let's say you came up with a new and useful life hack, you have a novel line of argument on an important topic, or you stumbled across some academic research that seems valuable and isn't frequently discussed on Less Wrong. How valuable would it be for you to share your findings by writing up at post for Less Wrong?

Recently I visited a friend of mine and commented on the extremely bright lights he had in his room. He referenced this LW post written over a year ago. That got me thinking. The bright lights in my friend's room make his life better every day, for a small upfront cost. And my friend is probably just one of tens or hundreds of people to use bright lights this way as a result of that post. Given that the technique seems to be effective, that number will probably continue going up, and will grow exponentially via word of mouth (useful memes tend to spread). So by my reckoning, chaosmage has created and will create a lot of utility. If they had kept that idea to themselves, I suspect they would have captured less than 1% of the total value to be had from the idea.

You can reach orders of magnitude more people writing an obscure Less Wrong comment than you can talking to a few people at a party in person. For example, at least 100 logged in users read this fairly obscure comment of mine. So if you're going to discuss an important topic, it's often best to do it online. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs in human reasoning are shallow.

Yes, peoples' time does have opportunity costs. But people are on Less Wrong because they need a break anyway. (If you're a LW addict, you might try the technique I describe in this post for dealing with your addiction. If you're dealing with serious cravings, for LW or video games or drugs or anything else, perhaps look at N-acetylcysteine... a variety of studies suggest it helps reduce cravings (behavioral addictions are prett...
A kind or reverse "tragedy of the commons" - any solution ideas?
by D_Alex — 2014-09-14T04:42:28.200Z

I have recently come across a very practical example of a kind of "tragedy of the commons" - the unwillingness to invest in assets that benefit stakeholders indiscriminately. Specifically, on large strata-title apartment projects there is a reluctance to implement such measures as:

- central hot water heating (~ 10% lower all-up costs, ~20% lower operating costs)

- Solar hot water heating (>20% ROI)

- Solar electric power (~10% ROI)

UNLESS some kind of user-pays system is implemented, which would use up pretty much all of the gains.

The concern is of course that providing the above systems would create a "commons" that would tend to be exploited.

I am curious if there are any ideas on a usable solutions, perhaps some kind of workable protocol that would enable the above, or existing success stories - what made them work?
Ways to improve LessWrong
by Adam Zerner — 2014-09-14T02:25:26.228Z

I think it'd be a good idea to keep a list of the ways we'd like to see LessWrong improve, sorted by popularity. Ie. email alerts for new responses.

So if you have an idea for how LessWrong could be better, post it in the comments. As people up/downvote, we'll get a sense for what the consensus opinions are.

I think there's a pretty good amount to be gained by improving LessWrong.

I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (like email alerts for new responses).

Conversations here are actually useful and productive. Facilitating conversation should thus lead to more of these useful and productive conversations (as opposed to leading to more of an unproductive type of conversation). (Sorry, I didn't word this well; hopefully you guys know what I mean.)

Perhaps something big would come out of this list (like meet-ups). Perhaps rationality hack-a-thons (whatever that means)?

I'm not a good enough coder now, but once I am, I think I'd like to do what I can to make LessWrong better. I'm starting a coding bootcamp (Fullstack Academy) on Monday. By the end of it, I should at least be competent.

Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.
Causal decision theory is unsatisfactory
by So8res — 2014-09-13T17:05:52.884Z

This is crossposted from my new blog. I was planning to write a short post explaining how Newcomblike problems are the norm and why any sufficiently powerful intelligence built to use causal decision theory would self-modify to stop using causal decision theory in short order. Turns out it's not such a short topic, and it's turning into a short intro to decision theory.

I've been motivating MIRI's technical agenda (decision theory and otherwise) to outsiders quite frequently recently, and I received a few comments of the form "Oh cool, I've seen lots of decision theory type stuff on LessWrong, but I hadn't understood the connection." While the intended audience of my blog is wider than the readerbase of LW (and thus, the tone might seem off and the content a bit basic), I've updated towards these posts being useful here. I also hope that some of you will correct my mistakes!

This sequence will probably run for four or five posts, during which I'll motivate the use of decision theory, the problems with the modern standard of decision theory (CDT), and some of the reasons why these problems are an FAI concern.

I'll be giving a talk on the material from this sequence at Purdue next week.

1

Choice is a crucial component of reasoning. Given a set of available actions, which action do you take? Do you go out to the movies or stay in with a book? Do you capture the bishop or fork the king? Somehow, we must reason about our options and choose the best one.

Of course, we humans don't consciously weigh all of our actions. Many of our choices are made subconsciously. (Which letter will I type next? When will I get a drink of water?) Yet even if the choices are made by subconscious heuristics, they must be made somehow.

In practice, decisions are often made on autopilot. We don't weigh every available alternative when it's time to prepare for work in the morning, we just pattern-match the situation and carry out some routine. This is a shortcut that saves time and cognitive energy. Yet, no matter how much we stick to routines, we still spend some of our time making hard choices, weighing alternatives, and predicting which available action will serve us best.

The study of how to make these sorts of decisions is known as Decision Theory. This field of research is closely intertwined with Economics, Philosophy, Mathematics, and (of course) Game Theory. It will be the subjec...
[meta] New LW moderator: Viliam_Bur
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-09-13T13:37:30.719Z

Some time back, I wrote that I was unwilling to continue with investigations into mass downvoting, and asked people for suggestions on how to deal with them from now on. The top-voted proposal in that thread suggested making Viliam_Bur into a moderator, and Viliam gracefully accepted the nomination. So I have given him moderator privileges and also put him in contact with jackk, who provided me with the information necessary to deal with the previous cases. Future requests about mass downvote investigations should be directed to Viliam.

Thanks a lot for agreeing to take up this responsibility, Viliam! It's not an easy one, but I'm very grateful that you're willing to do it. Please post a comment here so that we can reward you with some extra upvotes. :)
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-09-12T15:38:25.361Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 5th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Bratislava: 08 September 2014 06:00PM
Copenhagen - September: This Wavefunction Has Uncollapsed: 13 September 2014 03:00PM
Houston, TX: 13 September 2014 02:00PM
Michigan Meetup: 07 September 2014 02:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: Practical Rationality: 07 September 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Improve your productivity: 06 September 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Debiasing techniques: 21 September 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Effective Altruism and Politics: 05 October 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Artificial Intelligence: 19 October 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Climate Change: 02 November 2014 03:00PM

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: 06 September 2025 01:30PM
[Cambridge MA] Prediction Markets and Futarchy: 07 September 2014 03:30PM
Canberra: Akrasia-busters!: 13 September 2014 06:00PM
[Melbourne] September Rationality Dojo - Fixed and Growth Mindset: 07 September 2014 03:30PM
Moscow Meetup: Codename Felix: 14 September 2014 10:11PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Habits: 07 September 2014 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 24 September 2014 06:30PM
Vienna - Superintelligence: 27 September 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, 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 all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having yo...
Meetup : Frankfurt: How to improve your life
by Kendra — 2014-09-12T08:12:15.201Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt: How to improve your life

WHEN:
28 September 2014 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Frankfurt

We're having another meetup! Join our mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/less-wrong-frankfurt) for more information. This meetup will have the theme "How to improve your life". Details are going to be published in time.
The meetup will happen at Ginnheimer Landstraße again.
If you have special needs re. the meetup (because of social anxiety, being a wheel chair user, whatever) please tell me in advance, I'll try to accommodate them as best as I can.

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt: How to improve your life
How realistic would AI-engineered chatbots be?
by kokotajlod — 2014-09-11T23:00:01.411Z

I'm interested in how easy it would be to simulate just one present-day person's life rather than an entire planet's worth of people. Currently our chatbots are bad enough that we could not populate the world with NPC's; the lone human would quickly figure out that everyone else was... different, duller, incomprehensibly stupid, etc.
But what if the chatbots were designed by a superintelligent AI?
If a superintelligent AI was simulating my entire life from birth, would it be able to do it (for reasonably low computational resources cost, i.e. less than the cost of simulating another person) without simulating any other people in sufficient detail that they would be people?
I suspect that the answer is yes. If the answer is "maybe" or "no," I would very much like to hear tips on how to tell whether someone is an ideal chatbot.
Thoughts?
EDIT: In the comments most people are asking me to clarify what I mean by various things. By popular demand:
I interact with people in more ways than just textual communication. I also hear them, and see them move about. So when I speak of chatbots I don't mean bots that can do nothing but chat. I mean an algorithm governing the behavior of a simulated entire-human-body, that is nowhere near the complexity of a brain. (Modern chatbots are algorithms governing the behavior of a simulated human-hands-typing-on-keyboard, that are nowhere near the complexity of a brain.)
When I spoke of "simulating any other people in sufficient detail that they would be people" I didn't mean to launch us into a philosophical discussion of consciousness or personhood. I take it to be common ground among all of us here that very simple algorithms, such as modern chatbots, are not people. By contrast, many of us think that a simulated human brain would be a person. Assuming a simulated human brain would be a person, but a simple chatbot-like algorithm would not, my question is: Would any algorithm complex enough to fool me into thinking it was a person over the course of repeated interactions actually be a person? Or could all the bodies around me be governed by algorithms which are too simple to be people?
I realize that we have no consensus on how complex an algorithm needs to be to be a person. That's OK. I'm hoping that this conversation can answer my questions anyhow; I'm expecting answers along the lines of

(A) "For a program only a few orders of magni...
Meetup : Washington D.C.: Parkour (Backup: Task Management)
by RobinZ — 2014-09-11T22:39:32.938Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington D.C.: Parkour (Backup: Task Management)

WHEN:
14 September 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
U.S. Navy Memorial

Weather permitting, we will meet at the Navy Memorial (south on 8th St from the Portrait Gallery, between D St and Pennsylvania Ave) to practice basic parkour techniques.

If the weather seems to be unsuited to an outdoors meetup, we will meet at the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to discuss to-do lists, task management, prioritization, and related topics.

In either case, we plan to congregate between 3:00 and 3:30 p.m. to begin the meeting proper at 3:30.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington D.C.: Parkour (Backup: Task Management)
Do Virtual Humans deserve human rights?
by cameroncowan — 2014-09-11T19:20:14.514Z

Do Virtual Humans deserve human rights?

Slate Article

I think the idea of storing our minds in a machine so that we can keep on "living" (and I use that term loosely) is fascinating and certainly and oft discussed topic around here. However, in thinking about keeping our brains on a hard drive we have to think about rights and how that all works together. Indeed the technology may be here before we know it so I think its important to think about mindclones. If I create a little version of myself that can answer my emails for me, can I delete him when I'm done with him or just turn him in for a new model like I do iPhones?

I look forward to the discussion.
Meetup : LessWrong Tel Aviv: Rational Career Development
by Squark — 2014-09-11T17:35:10.315Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Tel Aviv: Rational Career Development

WHEN:
18 September 2014 08:33:43PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Yigal Alon Street 98, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

The organization of this meetup was presided by Aur Saraf. The text below is by him.

WHEN: 18 September 2014 07:00:00PM (+0300)
WHERE: 98 Yigal Alon St., 29th floor, Tel Aviv

We're going to have a meetup on Thursday, September 18th at Google Israel's offices, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon st., Tel Aviv.

This time will be a talk about Rational Career Development by Joshua Fox. It won't be a very long talk, so you're invited to prepare your own short perspective on the subject.

We'll start the meetup at 19:00, and we'll go on as much as we like to or until Anatoly kicks us out.

Please come on time, as we will begin the talk close to when we start. But, if you can only come later, thats totally ok!

We'll meet at the 29th floor of the building (Note: Not where Google Campus is). If you arrive and cant find your way around, call Anatoly who is graciously hosting us at 054-245-1060.

The Israeli Less Wrong Meetup happens once every two weeks. This is to allow people who cant make it to a meetup to not have to wait a whole month to meet again, and because we'd like to have both subject based and social meetups without having to wait for a month in between.

If you have any question feel free to email me at sonoflilit@gmail.com or call me at 054-9400-840.

Aur

PS I misread Guy's proposed time for ending voting. He wrote tomorrow, I read today. Since it's not a vote where people are likely to wait for the last moment, since I already talked to both speakers and organized all the details, and since Joshua keeps Shabbas and would probably want some weekend time to prepare the talk, I'm closing the vote early and announcing the talk now. Sorry.

PS2 I think everything went quite well this time. Please take a moment to go to Trello and post more talk proposals (or own a talk with many votes and no speaker) so that it would go as well next month!

PS3 Thanks again to Anatoly for hosting us almost every two weeks us at such a great location, and thanks to Gal who almost never takes vacations from organizing meetings.

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Tel Aviv: Rational Career Development