trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Dispel your justification-monkey with a “HWA!”
by MalcolmOcean — 2018-01-24T04:51:12.579Z

I'm going to use a couple of words in this post that might not be immediately clear to some people. One of them is "justification". Another is "acceptance". I would like to suggest that if you think I'm saying something stupid when I'm using those words, that you instead consider what meaning I might be using for those words such that I'm not saying something stupid. My meanings, I think, are pretty clear if you look for them.

If you want more detail on "justification", see this blog post on Causal Explanations vs Normative Explanations for an in-depth explanation.

Justification—ie a normative explanation as opposed to a causal one—is sometimes necessary. But, for many of us, it’s necessary much less often than we feel it is.,

The reason we justify more often than we need to is that we live in fear of judgment, from years having to explain to authorities (parents, teachers, bosses, cops (for some people)) why things went differently than they “should have”. This skill is necessary to avoid punishment from those authorities.

We often offer justifications before they’re even asked for: “Wait I can explain—”

With friends, though, or in a healthy romantic partnership, or with people that we have a solid working relationship with, it is quite apparent that this flinch towards justification is actually in the way of being able to effectively work together. It is:

unhelpful for actually understanding what happened (since it’s a form of rationalization, ie motivated cognition)
an obstacle to feeling safe with each other
a costly waste of time & attention

And yet we keep feeling the urge to justify. So what to do instead? How to re-route that habit in a way that builds trust within the relationships where justification isn’t required? How to indicate to our conversational partners that we aren't demanding that they justify?

There are lots of ways to do this—here’s one.

Fundamentally, the issue with justification is that it’s an attempt to explain why we’re in the world that we’re in, as opposed to being in the world that we “should be” in. It indicates, therefore, that there’s a lack of acceptance of what is already real . There might be causal reasons to be understood about why what happened happened and how to do things differently in the future, but in order to actually See those without rationalizing, you...
Therapeutic Conversation
by alkjash — 2018-01-24T03:23:17.364Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/therapeutic-conversation/

In a mad world, all interaction is psychiatry.

Here is an idea which I believe originates from Carl Rogers: conversations should be therapeutic for both parties. Thus, one should approach a serious conversation between friends as both therapist and patient. This post is about taking Rogers seriously.

Many have written on how to be a therapist. What is missing from the discourse – and what I aim to correct – is how to be a good patient.

BE THE PATIENT

I fear that when people hear Rogers’ dictum, they imagine two people taking turns trying to therapy each other. I fear that an aspiring conversationalist who reads this kind of advice decides to spend his time exclusively pursuing the art and craft of psychotherapy.

Becoming a good therapist is hard, but it seems to me that becoming a good patient is easy, and that’s where people should marginal (am I using that word right?). Nobody thinks about their skill level as a patient. As a starting point to taking Rogers seriously, spend at least half your energy trying to increase your patient skill level.

What characterizes a great psychiatric patient? The best therapists recognize that a basic willingness to change is the minimum precondition for therapy. In the past, I have entered defensive or inattentive into conversations with master conversationalists, conversations I fully expected to change me

for good

, only to find the first hour or two entirely wasted on gradually kneading away my automatic defenses and aversions. A great psychiatric patient is someone who skips the superficial tug-of-war that frames the conversation and goes directly to the life-changing catharsis part.

I’m not saying one must immediately prostrate oneself as a mentally broken psych patient in every casual conversation one strikes up. However, in the course of many long nights of meandering conversations one develops a certain instinct for where things are going. It sounds like: right now, it’s only midnight and we are only allowed to skim the surface of things, but by the time 3am rolls around we’ll be inconsolably weeping about our anxieties and self-sabotaging tendencies. When such a foreshadowing strikes, don’t beat a tedious retreat against it. Surrender immediately.

The rest of this post is a meditation on the intrinsic value of human beings. It serves, I hope, to induce the requisite respect for another person that one needs to become a good...
What Is Love?
by Bound_up — 2018-01-24T02:05:09.794Z

There's probably more to this. What I'm about to describe may be more about intimacy than about love, per se. It could just as easily be the intimate understanding between archfoes as star-crossed lovers.

It seems to me that a lot of behaviors and feelings around love can be explained just as people simulating other minds in high fidelity, and then experiencing a shadow of the simulation's feelings as their own via empathy or mirror neurons.

So, I simulate you experiencing something, and then I feel a diluted version of what you would actually feel if you experienced it in real life. I emphathize with my model of you kind of like how I'd empathize with the real you if I were observing you.

Love at first sight, then, would be me feeling intense feelings about my model of you, but it wouldn't be a correct model. I'd be projecting a stereotype onto you, using your appearance as the skin of my mind's particular concept of an idealized angel or some such perfect being. That's the power of fantasy.

The simulation + empathy model could also explain why we like doing nice things for each other. I want to give you positive experiences so that I can simulate you enjoying them, and then enjoy my empathetic kickback. "Just seeing the look on their faces makes it all worth it."

It can explain why real love requires time, but why the real measure is knowledge. We have to be able to simulate high-fidelity models of each other.

It can clarify the line between meaningful and meaningless sex. Meaningless sex is that without intimacy, that is, sex during which your mind is a black box to me, and I cannot accurately simulate how you're experiencing things. Alternatively, I might desire to hear your thoughts or voice, to see your reactions. I want to have sex with people whose minds I know in great detail. All this that I might receive and process information about my partner's mind, model it, and then get a kickback from empathizing with their pleasure. A cheap shortcut might be to project an imaginary detailed mind onto a sex partner and pretend that the partner is experiencing what the imaginary mind is (being simulated as feeling).

I said before that I was probably describing intimacy more than love. Intimacy + something negative = archfoes, while intimacy combined with something positive might equal true love. I'm no...
Interpersonal Approaches for X-Risk Education
by TurnTrout — 2018-01-24T00:47:44.183Z

Much of the AI research community remains unaware of the Alignment Problem (according to my personal experience), and I haven't seen much discussion about how to deliberately expand the community (all I've seen to this effect is Scott's A/B/C/D/E testing on alignment articles).

Expanding the number of people aware of (and ideally, working on) the alignment problem is a high-leverage activity: a constant amount of effort spent educating someone in exchange for a chance of recruiting an ally who will work hard at our sides. Another metric by which we should evaluate approaches is whether we have to convince or simply educate; professors and high-status researchers may be more dismissive (possibly due to the inside view, their wariness of strange-sounding ideas, and overconfidence in their long-term predictions), but their influence would be greater. On the other hand, a good friend in a CS or Math under-/post-graduate program may be more receptive.

In my case, I stumbled upon HP:MoR one year ago, read the Sequences, and then read more about Alignment and CEV. I appreciated that Alignment was a serious problem, but it wasn't until I got through Superintelligence that I realized it's basically The Problem. Being in the second year of my doctorate program, I didn't know whether I was "too late" to start learning the math, "too far behind" people like Eliezer to make a difference. What I did know is that everyone can't defect - we need people to put in the work, and we probably need substantially more people doing so.

What happened to me took a lot of time and may be unrealistic to recommend to others. The articles Scott tested seem equally effective; instead, I'd like to discuss what social approaches work best for taking people from friend to friend-who-takes-alignment-seriously (while optimizing against effort expended), and whether this is an efficient use of our time.
Book Review - Probability and Finance: It's Only a Game!
by ryan_b — 2018-01-23T18:52:23.602Z

Update: This post has been substantially revised in response to feedback and incorporating answers to good questions. If something seems ridiculous or nonsensical it is definitely best to assume that is my error rather than the authors'.

Probability and Finance: It's Only a Game

by Glenn Shafer and Vladimir Vovk is about math and a new field within math. It is a book-length argument for an extraordinary claim about probability theory. In the course of making this claim they do a lot of what has become my favorite thing to read in math and science - carefully revisit the philosophy and assumptions that underly things we have mostly taken for granted. The claim itself is this: they have used game theory to replace measure theory as the basis for probability.

I'll allow you to digest that for a moment.

The website for the book is here: http://www.probabilityandfinance.com/. The authors have provided a number of reviews, and their own responses; they are diligent in offering corrections and clarifications even in the case of reviews which are completely favorable. This is the first time I followed the back-and-forth in book reviews in any detail, and I found it very helpful to see the criticisms and confusions of better-educated, more-qualified reviewers voiced and addressed. A word on the authors: Vovk was a student of Kolmogorov directly, and Shafer has previously published on mathematical theories of evidence. They also do work in machine learning, on Conformal Prediction. They appear to take seriously the magnitude of their claim, and consistently highlight what is different about their approach and where the advantages lay. The book argues for a game-theoretic basis to probability theory in Part I, and goes on in Part II to apply this same game-theoretic treatment to achieve finance theory.

Of particular interest is the section of the book on historical background, which is mostly Chapter 2. What strikes me is that there is not much overlap between their history and the one we hear about Bayesian probability, particularly from Jaynes' book. They begin in the same place as usual with Pascal and Fermat, but hew strongly to formal mathematics throughout - which is to say that Bayes is not mentioned at all. They do discuss some of the different interpretations of probability, including the interpretation of personal choice; this is the closest I...
An Untrollable Mathematician
by abramdemski — 2018-01-23T18:46:17.000Z

Follow-up to All Mathematicians are Trollable.

It is relatively easy to see that no computable Bayesian prior on logic can converge to a single coherent probability distribution as we update it on logical statements. Furthermore, the non-convergence behavior is about as bad as could be: someone selecting the ordering of provable statements to update on can drive the Bayesian's beliefs arbitrarily up or down, arbitrarily many times, despite only saying true things. I called this wild non-convergence behavior "trollability". Previously, I showed that if the Bayesian updates on the provabilily of a sentence rather than updating on the sentence itself, it is still trollable. I left open the question of whether some other side information could save us. Sam Eisenstat has closed this question, providing a simple logical prior and a way of doing a Bayesian update on it which (1) cannot be trolled, and (2) converges to a coherent distribution.

Major parts of this post were cribbed from Sam's notes, with some modifications.

Construction

Set some prior on sampling individual sentences, μ(ϕ), which gives positive probability to every sentence. Now sample an infinite sequence of sentences, ϕ1,ϕ2,... by at each step rejection-sampling from μ with the requirement of propositional consistency with the sentences sampled so far. The prior probability of a sentence, P(ψ), is the probability that it appears anywhere in this sequence.

This is nothing new -- it's just the old Demski prior with propositional consistency only. However, Sam's idea is to interpret the sequence of sentences as the sequence of things Nature tells us / the sequence of things which is proved. (Why didn't I think of that?) Thus, in addition to the raw probability distribution over sentences, we use the probability distribution over sequence locations. Start with n=1. When a sentence ψ is proved (or otherwise observed), we perform a Bayesian update on ψ=ϕn, and increment n.

This distribution can be computed to any desired accuracy ϵ in finite time. The probability of a sequence prefix ϕ1,ϕ2,...ϕn can be computed to within ϵ by computing the normalization factor for μ at each step in the sequence to within sufficient accuracy to ensure the accuracy of the whole, by enumerating sentences and checking which are propositionally consistent with the sequence so far. The joint probability of any finite set of ord...
One-Consciousness Universe
by adrusi — 2018-01-23T08:46:55.965Z
Link: https://practicalontology.com/2018/01/23/one-consciousness-universe/

There’s an idea in physics that there might in fact be only one electron in the universe, an electron that moves through space and time in such a way that it appears, when humans observe the world around them, like there’s many different electrons all throughout the universe, all with precisely the same physical properties. There might be more to it, I wouldn’t be qualified to say, but I view this one-electron universe model as an ontological koan. It makes us think “hey, reality could be this way rather than the way we think it is and we would be none the wiser — let’s try to deepen our understanding of reality in light of that.”

There’s a short story by Andy Weir called The Egg. It falls under the umbrella of metaphysics porn which also covers The Matrix and Fight Club, the kind of story that makes some part of you believe it’s true for the first half hour after you read/watch it, giving you a philosophical high — an intimation of a mystical experience. I don’t want to deny you that, so go read it; it’s short, shorter than this post, you’ve got no excuse. Did you read it? Well in case you’re reading this after the collapse of civilization and Weir’s story has been lost to time, I’ll summarize the relevant detail. A man dies and meets God, who informs him that he (the man) is everyone. Everyone he has met, and everyone he hasn’t across the planet and throughout history, past and future, is him. Every time he dies, he’s sent to be born again as a different person in a different place and at a different time. God then sends the man off to be reincarnated as someone else. The Egg describes a one-consciousness universe.

Derek Parfit’s theory of personal identity detailed in Reasons and Persons relies on what he calls person-slices, snapshots of a person at an instant in time. This is somewhat contentious because it’s hard to make sense of what a person-slice is — what would it be like to be a person-slice? This seems to me to be analogous to asking “how can we observe a snapshot of an electron in time?” We can’t! Observation can only be done over an interval of time, but just because we can’t observe electron-slices doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t expect to be able to observe electrons over time, nor does the fact that we can observe electrons over time suggest that electron-slices are a nonsensical concept. Likewise, if there’s no...
Hammers and Nails
by alkjash — 2018-01-23T01:19:04.803Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/hammer-and-nails/#more-2328

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The most important idea I've blogged about so far is Taking Ideas Seriously, which is itself a generalization of Zvi's More Dakka. This post is an elaboration of how to fully integrate a new idea.

I draw a dichotomy between Hammers and Nails:

A Hammer is someone who picks one strategy and uses it to solve as many problems as possible.

A Nail is someone who picks one problem and tries all the strategies until it gets solved.

Human beings are generally Nails, fixating on one specific problem at a time and throwing their entire toolkit at it. A Nail gets good at solving important problems slowly and laboriously but can fail to recognize the power and generality of his tools.

Sometimes it's better to be a Hammer. Great advice is always a hammer: an organizing principle that works across many domains. To get the most mileage out of a single hammer, don't stop at using it to tackle your current pet problem. Use it everywhere. Ideas don't get worn down from use.

Regardless of which you are at a given moment, be systematic because Choices are Bad.

Only a Few Tricks

I am reminded of a classic speech of the mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota. His fifth point is to be a Hammer (emphasis mine):

A long time ago an older and well known number theorist made some disparaging remarks about Paul Erdos' work. You admire contributions to mathematics as much as I do, and I felt annoyed when the older mathematician flatly and definitively stated that all of Erdos' work could be reduced to a few tricks which Erdos repeatedly relied on in his proofs. What the number theorist did not realize is that other mathematicians, even the very best, also rely on a few tricks which they use over and over. Take Hilbert. The second volume of Hilbert's collected papers contains Hilbert's papers in invariant theory. I have made a point of reading some of these papers with care. It is sad to note that some of Hilbert's beautiful results have been completely forgotten. But on reading the proofs of Hilbert's striking and deep theorems in invariant theory, it was surprising to verify that Hilbert's proofs relied on the same few tricks. Even Hilbert had only a few tricks!

The greatest mathematicians of all time created vast swathes of their work by applying a single precious technique to every proble... ,,,,,,,,,
Understanding-1-2-3
by Zvi — 2018-01-23T00:10:00.214Z

Epistemic Status: Seems worth sharing

Assumes Knowledge Of: System 1 and System 2 from Thinking, Fast and Slow

While in San Francisco this past week, I found myself in many complex and rapid conversations, with new ideas and concepts flying by the second. I hadn’t experienced this since least February’s AI Safety Unconference. It is wonderful to be pushed to one’s limits, but it means one must often rely on System-1 rather than System-2, or one will be left behind and lost. I now realize this is what happened to me in foreign language classes – I was using System-2 to listen and talk, and that doesn’t work at all if others don’t wait for you.

This meant that often I’d grasp what was being said in an intuitive sense using System-1, or agree or disagree in that fashion, without the time to unpack it. This can lead to great understanding, but also lead to waking up the next day having no idea what happened, or thinking about it in detail and realizing you didn’t understand it after all. So when people asked if I understood things, I instinctively started saying things like “I understand-1 but not 2.” I also did this for beliefs and agreements.

I debated explaining it but decided not to, as a test to see if others would intuit the meaning, most seemed to (or ignored the numbers, or came up with something equivalent in context); one person explicitly asked, and said he’d use it. I think this may be a valuable clarification tool, as it’s very different to understand-1 versus understand-2, or agree-1 versus agree-2, and seems better than saying something like “I kind of agree” or “I think I agree but I’m not sure,” which are both longer and less precise ways people often say the same thing.

My system-1 also added understand-3. Understand-3 means “I understand this well enough to teach it.” By extension, believe-3 or agree-3 means “I believe this, know how to convince others, and think others should be convinced.” To truly understand something, one must be able to explain, teach or defend it, which also means you and others can build solidly upon it. Writing has helped me turn much understanding-2 (and understanding-1) into understanding-3.
Adequacy as Levels of Play
by Davis_Kingsley — 2018-01-22T20:57:41.557Z

Adequacy as Levels of Play

One method that I find very useful for evaluating adequacy concerns is "level of play". If you look at different games or different leagues of the same game, it's pretty apparent that the "level of play" - the amount of athleticism, effort, skill, planning, strategy, etc. that is on display - is quite different.

For instance, in the United States the NFL is operating at a higher level of play than college football. Similarly, baseball in the United States operates at a higher level of play than baseball in Japan, and either is significantly elevated compared to the rest of the world. In South Korea, Starcraft is treated as a professional sport, and is thus predictably operating at a higher level than Starcraft in the United States. This sort of consideration doesn't just apply to sports - cryptocurrency trading operated at an obviously much lower level of play than normal finance for a long time (though that may be changing).

A similar concept can be applied to general adequacy - one can quite usefully analyze existing organizations or programs by asking "what's the level of play here?" There are three basic questions that I think are quite useful for analyzing what level something is on:

Seriousness. Do people take this seriously? There are many areas that nobody really tries very hard at, and those areas usually operate at a low level of play - why bother to do it right if you don't really care that much? In sports, think about the difference between a niche sport like jai alai and something like soccer.
Competitiveness. Do different groups compete to do better? If so, how close is the competition? There are some fields that are taken very seriously but are nevertheless not very competitive - medicine, for instance - and this tends to yield lower-level outcomes overall, since there is less incentive to integrate new advances into the system.
Aliveness. Are the conclusions being tested in actual practice? If not, are they being tested under realistic training conditions? It may surprise you to learn that there are matters that are taken seriously and competitively and yet not actually tested, but this is the state of the world! The biggest example of this I can think of would, surprisingly enough, be military strategy. History is rife with examples of situations where war planners, desp

...