trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Distinctions in Types of Thought
by sarahconstantin — 2017-10-10T03:36:06.820Z

Epistemic status: speculative

For a while, I’ve had the intuition that current machine learning techniques, though powerful and useful, are simply not touching some of the functions of the human mind. But before I can really get at how to justify that intuition, I would have to start clarifying what different kinds of thinking there are. I’m going to be reinventing the wheel a bit here, not having read that much cognitive science, but I wanted to write down some of the distinctions that seem important, and trying to see whether they overlap. A lot of this is inspired by Dreyfus’ Being-in-the-World. I’m also trying to think about the questions raised in the post “What are Intellect and Instinct?”

Effortful vs. Effortless

In English, we have different words for perceiving passively versus actively paying attention. To see vs. to look, to hear vs. to listen, to touch vs. to feel. To go looking for a sensation means exerting a sort of mental pressure; in other words, effort. William James, in his Principles of Psychology, said “Attention and effort, as we shall see later, are but two names for the same psychic fact.” He says, in his famous introduction to attention, that

Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Localization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.

Furthermore, James divides attention into two types:

Passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless ; or Active and voluntary.

In other words, the mind is always selecting certain experiences or thoughts as more salient than others; but sometimes this is done in an automatic way, and sometimes it’s effortful/voluntary/active. A fluent speaker of a language will automatically notice a grammatical error; a beginner will have to try effortfully to catch the error.

In the famous gorilla experiment where subjects instructed to count passes in a basketball game failed to notice a gorilla on the basketball field, “counting the passes” is paying effortful attention, while “noticing the gorilla” would be effortless or passive n

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Learnday
by hamnox — 2017-10-09T19:15:07.080Z

I've been toying with the idea of creating a 10-day cycle of themed days.
( Why not weekly? I suspect the slight inconvenience of misaligned calendars keeps concerns clearly separate and prevents practices from collecting unrelated cultural baggage. )
I took a mini-sabbath yesterday, effectively themed "Slack". Today, I experimentally theme "Learning". Not in the sense of academic literacy, but in the curious, experiential sense of looking at the world and finding the patterns in it.

It isn't possible to produce an accurate map of a city while sitting in your living room with your eyes closed, thinking pleasant thoughts about what you wish the city was like. You have to go out, walk through the city, and write lines on paper that correspond to what you see. - EY, Outside the Laboratory

(Edit) As of yet, I have no concrete ideas on what to positively do on learnday. We will need that part eventually. To begin with, though, you can at least avoid getting in the way of someone achieving their goals.

Things that block learning (1)

Planned Lessons.

You can benefit from structured exploration of a topic, but you may not notice when you start rehearsing facts or mantras instead of looking at the world.

Developing a Takeaway or Aesop.

Post-mortems and other methods of crystallizing insights can considerably strengthen your learning, but you might decide your conclusion prematurely and bias your exploration to fit its framing.

Logging information (2).

You can make important, strong generalizations from aggregate data, but you may instead practice collecting and classifying things instead of seeing them.

Accepting shame or guilt. Learnday does not permit harming yourself or allowing others to harm you (3).

You can find inspiration or motivation within a social context, but you may stifle your curiosity in favor of what you "should" study or avoid making learner's mistakes.

Doing the same thing you did last Learnday.

(Edit) You can discover new things from repeated exposure, or you might dampen your curiosity. You can think more clearly for working in a calm and familiar context, or you may bias your exposure to lead to forgone conclusions.

(1) Notice the examples' formulations of A can do X but it might do Y instead. When people try to talk about distributions in natural language, particularly non-normal and skewed distributions, the...
Initial thoughts on assisted formatting of discussion posts
by Ezra — 2017-10-09T18:46:47.479Z

Reading this discussion post is making me imagine specifying a discussion-formatting tool. In the fan community of the game Skyrates, we had a tool for taking chat logs from the in-game chat and formatting them for pretty display on web or forum. A similar tool could be used to simplify making chats into posts here.

The basic workflow is to paste a chat log into the tool, then use some combination of auto detection and interactive controls to prettify it into a post.

Besides reducing the formatting work, it could be possible to add fun features, like:

Introducing participants by full name the first time they speak, and by abbreviation afterwards

Linking those intros to account profiles on the site

Colorizing names to mnemonically double-code participants

It would be necessary for the paste input to recognize Facebook and Discord formats. Beyond that I don't know where rationalists tend to chat.

I would think that the next step on this would be to review the prior art and available off the shelf solutions.

Due to limitations of the Less Wrong mobile editor it is tragically impossible not to end this post with a paragraph of only the letter "t".

t
The Just World Hypothesis
by michael_vassar2 — 2017-10-09T06:03:41.485Z

Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Maybe most of the time even, it's hard to know, and even harder to create common knowledge on the topic because if it is so we don't want to know, and tell stories to cover it up when it happens.

Back in the golden age of psychology, long before the replication crisis, the scientific method was understood very differently from today. Effect sizes were expected to be visible with the naked eye, not just statistically significant, and practices such as IRBs, peer review and even the use of control groups were much more optional. For instance, the original Milgram Experiment lacked a control group, bur instead of saying that nothing had been learned, or suppressing it on dubious ethical grounds, the psychological community investigated an enormous number of variations on the Milgram experiment in order to tease out the impacts of slight variations, which were statistically compared with one another.

In 1965 Melvin J. Lerner discovered that experimental subjects disliked the people who they saw subjected to electric shocks. This effect was alleviated when the experimental subjects were able to offer the presumed victims appropriate compensation. Apparently, they wanted to make the situation fair. Unfortunately, if they couldn't make it fair with compensation they wanted to make it fair by claiming that the victim deserved it. Lerner and others followed up with a series of investigations victim blaming. They discovered that the phenomenon is pervasive, robust and measurable via psychological surveys. When given a story about a date, higher scores in 'Belief in a just world' are associated with a greater tendency to see whatever ending the reader is given as following with high probability from the earlier events even if the earlier events are identical while the endings differ.

"Might people on the internet sometimes lie?... If you’re like me, and you want to respond to this post with “but how do you know that person didn’t just experience a certain coincidence or weird psychological trick?”, then before you comment take a second to ask why the “they’re lying” theory is so hard to believe. And when you figure it out, tell me, because I really want to know."

-- Slate Star Codex, 12/12/2016

One advantage of just world belief is that it makes it much easier to believe anything a

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Double Crux Example: Should HPMOR be on the Front Page?
by Raemon — 2017-10-09T03:50:55.531Z

Note: I'm leaving this in Meta for now since the object-level-discussion is very "talk about community norms" as opposed to object level. I think ideally someone else does a non-community-non-politics Public Double Crux and posts that to the front page. But if that fails to happen, I'd tentatively lean towards "put this where everyone can see it."

Lately, we've been talking a lot about Double Crux. Many have complained that there is not a clear, public, real example you can look and learn from.

SilentCal put together the Productive Disagreements Practice Thread, where people could post controversial opinions and then resolve them via Double Crux. There were a few good starts, although most of the examples didn't end up very exhaustive.

I posted the following:

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality should be displayed prominently on the front page of this site.

I chose that because it seemed likely to get into some messy differences in aesthetics and goals, while a) not being too intense a discussion that people'd be embarrassed to discuss publicly, b) actually being useful.

And another user, gjm, took me up on it. We had a pretty good discussion, and found an actionable common crux. The discussion here is long, but I think approximately how long I'd expend any serious disagreement to take to resolve.

I'm turning into it's own post so it can be skimmed more easily.

GJM's 1st Response

Before getting into any specific double-crux machinery, I'll briefly make my case. The front page here plays two obvious roles:

(1) it's a natural entry point for established users wanting to see what's new, and

(2) it's a place others may encounter, perhaps after seeing some specific thing on the LW website and wondering what else there is there, or perhaps because someone said "hey, there's this thing called Less Wrong; you should take a look". So, how does having HPMOR prominently on the front page serve those two cases?

Case 1 (established users): It's taking up space that could be used for something else. Most LWers already know about HPMOR, and either have read it already or have decided they aren't interested. It's mentioned often enough (I think) that active LW participants are in little danger of never hearing of it. So here I think HPMOR comes out clearly but n

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Community Capital
by weft — 2017-10-09T03:49:06.926Z

Argument: There is a Thing called Community Capital (closely related to social capital), and because it is based more on How Humans Work, you can get a lot more out of it than just plain old Money.

Epistemic Status: Opening a conversation. All these ideas are in sand.

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I used to compare the prices of Various Weekend Activities to the pricetag of one of my main hobbies (we'll randomly call it "Ballooning" to keep it simple). I might pay $35 for a weekend of Ballooning, which would include lodging, delicious food and alcoholic beverages, classes and activities, and lots of one-on-one help. Other Various Weekend Activities tend to be... quite a bit more than that. You would think Ballooning events must be operating at a loss, but it turns out that they actually tend to MAKE money. So what's happening here?

My guess is that money is not actually an efficient unit of exchange, as compared to social or community capital. When you buy things with money you are paying people a premium to do tasks they are not inherently motivated to do, often in situations that are not convenient for them. I can do my own dishes in the two minutes that I’m in my kitchen waiting for my tea water to heat up. However if I am paying someone, in most cases they have to schedule a large chunk of time and travel out of their way to my house to do a task they have no motivation to do except for the exchange of money.

People in communities generally have an inherent desire to contribute to their community. They are often already in a position to help. They are preselected for being interested in many of the sorts of tasks the community needs (e.g. a swing dance community needs swing dance instructors and swing dance music djs). They have social ties to the people they are helping, as opposed to being strangers. They gain social status by contributing and thus find it satisfying.

When I go to a Ballooning weekend I am not just spending $35. I may spend 3 hours washing dishes after a meal. I may spend 10 hours prepping material for a class, and one hour teaching it. I may spend 20 hours making items that are going to be given away. I may spend 3 hours at a meeting helping to organize the event. I may spend an hour on setting up or cleaning up. I may spend 5 hours working with a new person one-on-one.

Sure, if I were to value my time at $20/hour, then my $35 Ballooning

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Personal Model of Social Energy
by PDV — 2017-10-09T03:14:16.283Z

Epistemic Status: This is a model I have derived from my own experience, with a fair amount of very noisy data to back it up. It may not generalize to anyone else. However, it seems like a framework that might be useful, so I'm sharing it here.

The excessively simple model of social energy is the introvert/extravert dichotomy. Introverts lose energy from social situations, extraverts gain energy. This is then elaborated into the I/E scale, where the sign of your energy change in social situations is mapped to an integer. This is clearly more descriptive of reality, but as many have pointed out, still imperfect.

I find that for me there are separate sets of factors that determine energy gain and energy loss.

For energy gain, it is a positive-slope, negative-curvature function of the number of people present. There is energy in a room, and I do pick up some of it. (Something like sqrt(n), or possibly 10-10/n

For energy loss, it is a function of how much I trust the person in the room I trust least; f(min(trust(p) for p in room)). This grows much faster than the number of people present. Trust also seems to be a function of my pre-existing mood (that part I expect won't generalize).

Naively, I would have expected this to be a weighted average of my trust of people in the room, where five people I trust very much and one I trust very little would feel very different from five I trust somewhat and one I trust very little. I have difficulty arranging that test, but preliminary data suggests that expectation was wrong; one person who I cannot relax around spoils things thoroughly. ('Trust', here, is very much a System 1 thing; feeling safe/open around someone, rather than feeling/thinking that they are trustworthy/upstanding/honest.)

The predictions made by this model are that you should choose your social gatherings carefully, even if extroverted, as the benefits of size can be wiped out by one or two poorly-chosen guests.

More broadly, I think that considering gain and loss separately will clarify the feelings toward socializing of many self-identified introverts. Since it seems quite plausible that 'true introverts' who never get energy from social interaction are not actually a thing, I expect this would help improve the day to day lives of many.
Instrumental Rationality 4.1: Modeling Habits
by  — 2017-10-09T01:21:41.396Z

[Instrumental Rationality Sequence 4.1/7.]

[This is part 1 of a 3-part sequence on habits, which is itself part of the greater Instrumental Rationality Sequence. This was initially one monstrous article; in the interests of readability, I've decided to split it into three essays.]

Outline:

The Habits 101 mini-sequence is broken up into 3 sections:

Introduction, Models, and Statistics:
We cover a basic model of how habits work, three of their properties (insensitivity to reward changes, independence of intentions, and automaticity), and some closing remarks on base rates for habituation.

Techniques for Creating Habits:
We cover three techniques for habit creation: Trigger Action Planning (TAPs), Systematic Planning (which has three sub-techniques), and Scaling Up.

Techniques for Breaking Habits and Conclusion:
We cover two techniques for breaking habits: Going Upstream and Substitution (which has two sub-techniques).

(The current evidence base has many more interventions for forming habits than breaking them, so that's why there's an asymmetry between parts 2 and 3. Also, this is probably just a good thing to keep in mind, the fact that forming habits is easier than breaking existing ones.)

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Introduction:

People, as the saying goes, are creatures of habit. Many of our actions every day are repeated often, typically without much thought.

This type of thoughtlessness, though, isn’t necessarily bad. Habits can help reduce cognitive load, allowing us to get through the day. Imagine if you had to explicitly weigh the pros and cons of behavior like flushing the toilet every single time you did them.

Making in-depth, reasoned decisions all the time can be very costly in terms of both time and attention. Habits allow us to compartmentalize certain behaviors, so that our energy and focus can move to other, perhaps more important, things.

A frequent part of our lives, habits make up at least roughly 40% of our everyday activities, which thus makes them a strong candidate to target when we’re thinking about behavior change *1.

Knowledge about exactly how habits work, how we can create new ones, and how we can remove old ones thus seems very useful because they represent a way of providing benefit continuously over time. It’s a little like your time spent learning in school: while the actual knowledge may soon fade, the automatic response patterns you develop can

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Contra double crux
by Thrasymachus — 2017-10-08T16:29:35.193Z

Summary: CFAR proposes double crux as a method to resolve disagreement: instead of arguing over some belief B, one should look for a crux (C) which underlies it, such that if either party changed their mind over C, they would change their mind about B.

I don't think double crux is that helpful, principally because 'double cruxes' are rare in topics where reasonable people differ (and they can be asymmetric, be about a considerations strength rather than direction, and so on). I suggest this may diagnose the difficulty others have noted in getting double crux to 'work'. Good philosophers seem to do much better than double cruxing using different approaches.

I aver the strengths of double crux are primarily other epistemic virtues, pre-requisite for double crux, which are conflated with double cruxing itself (e.g. it is good to have a collaborative rather than combative mindset when disagreeing). Conditional on having this pre-requisite set of epistemic virtues, double cruxing does not add further benefit, and is probably inferior to other means of discussion exemplified by good philosophers. I recommend we look elsewhere.

What is a crux?

From Sabien's exposition, a crux for some belief B is another belief C which if one changed one's mind about C, one would change one's mind about B. The original example was the impact of school uniforms concealing unhelpful class distinctions being a crux for whether one supports or opposes school uniforms.
A double crux is a particular case where two people disagree over B and have the same crux, albeit going in opposite directions. Say if Xenia believes B (because she believes C) and Yevgeny disbelieves B (because he does not believe C), then if Xenia stopped believing C, she would stop believing B (and thus agree with Yevgeny) and vice-versa.

How common are cruxes (and double cruxes)?

I suggest the main problem facing the 'double crux technique' is that disagreements like Xenia's and Yevgeny's, which can be eventually traced to a single underlying consideration, are the exception rather than the rule. Across most reasonable people on most recondite topics, 'cruxes' are rare, and 'double cruxes' (roughly) exponentially rarer.
For many recondite topics I think about, my credence it in arises from the balance of a variety of considerations pointing in

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I Can Tolerate Anything Except Factual Inaccuracies
by DragonGod — 2017-10-08T14:59:29.353Z
Link: http://greyenlightenment.com/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-factual-inaccuracies/

A wonderful post by greyenlightenment that touches on contrarian and intellectualism signalling. It mentions the dilemma between agreeing with the broad thrust of a piece, and agreeing with factual claims of the piece. We are suggested to consider not criticising a piece when we agree with the message but find little factual inaccuracies—a norm against nitpicking so to speak.
I suspect a norm against nitpicking would destroy a chesterton fence and lead down a slippery slope into anti-intellectualism and greater irrationality.
As Julia Galef says:

Not caring about validity of an argument, as long as conclusion is true ~=

Not caring about due process, as long as guilty guy is convicted

I think the same criticism appears to relaxing the norm against factual inaccuracies.

If we stop caring about whether the facts of the matter are very correct, then what next? I suspect the long term consequences of such a norm to be detrimental.

If it leads to a reduction in the quantity of articles I'll otherwise agree with (because the authors wanted to be as accurate as possible), then that's a trade off I would gladly accept.

I do recognise that I am a contrarian and love to signal intellectualism—for what it's worth.

What are your thoughts?
NSFW Content on LW
by ozymandias — 2017-10-08T14:31:01.909Z

There's some discussion of this on my post but I think it properly belongs on a meta post to which the mods can refer.

Points for consideration:

Do we want content about sex on LW at all? Yes, but only on people's own blogs? Yes, but only with a content warning? Yes, but only with some sort of NSFW tag? Yes, and with no limits?

It is probably a good idea to have at least a little idea what "about sex" means. Do STD etymology fact posts count? Or posts about rational romantic relationships?

Cursing: is it off-limits entirely? Certain words only? (Which ones?) No excessive cursing?

What norms apply to titles?

Even if the content is content-warned or on people's own blogs, the recent comments show up in the recent comments feed, which could make some people feel uncomfortable browsing LW in public.