trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2017-01-20T16:56:22.353Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on January 20th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Sao Paulo - Meetup de janeiro: 28 January 2017 02:00PM

The following 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:

[Amsterdam] #10: Making a difference: 22 January 2017 03:12PM
[Moscow] Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery: 25 January 2017 07:40PM
Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library: 03 February 2017 08:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Board Games: 23 January 2017 06:15PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - February 2017: 05 February 2017 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 28 January 2017 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 22 January 2017 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Netherlands, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Prague, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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 your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happe...
Willpower duality
by Gyrodiot — 2017-01-20T09:56:50.441Z
Link: http://www.jrmyp.net/blog/index.php?post/2017/01/07/Willpower-duality

Rationality is designed to make you win, to help you attain your objectives. One of the most prominent phenomena getting in the way is akrasia, the lack of willpower preventing us to perform whatever action we want to do.

So, wait, do we want to act or not? There are two facets of willpower, which I'll describe using Kahneman's System 1 and System 2, the two working modes of the mind (bear in mind it's a simplification to get the point across).

What we call System 1 willpower is what gets you up in the morning, out of a good shower, what makes you start things, the grit, the sudden confidence, the "just do it" part. It's the short-term impulse of "I can go one step further and my body shall obey. It's the thing many productivity methods want to trigger. For example, the 2-minute rule ("if it takes less than 2 minutes to perform, do it now") is based on the intuition that you won't need a lot of effort to get something done, akin to going briefly out of your way to help a friend. Of course you can do it. No planning needed. It's very appealing to your brain.

What we call System 2 willpower is the high-level justification, the reason behind the actions, the thought-out plan, the will to make good decisions, to make things right, to keep akrasia in check in order to achieve long-term goals, the thing that sees problems as obstacles to be overcome instead of monsters to avoid. It's the background buzzing of "I want to go there and I shall find a path". It's the thing many productivity methods want to manage. The Getting Things Done methods starts with a list of tasks, which you can process in orderly manner, setting long and short-term goals and stay in control at all times. It's also very appealing to your brain.

However, what makes you actually do things is S1 willpower, not S2. S1 is more low-level, and has no knowledge of plans. Your willpower can be misguided. You want to throw paper planes, scribbling randomly, following click-bait headlines, when your plan is to work, or train, or be otherwise productive. S2 willpower is supposed to keep S1 in check, to make you perform counter-intuitive actions for your own good.

The willpower tricks work, but they're costly. They require a part of your attention, a conscious effort to keep yourself focused. It's just much less cost...
Infinite Summations: A Rationality Litmus Test
by shev — 2017-01-20T09:31:09.358Z

You may have seen that Numberphile video that circulated the social media world a few years ago. It showed the 'astounding' mathematical result:

1+2+3+4+5+… = -1/12

(quote: "the answer to this sum is, remarkably, minus a twelfth")

Then they tell you that this result is used in many areas of physics, and show you a page of a string theory textbook (oooo) that states it as a theorem.

The video caused quite an uproar at the time, since it was many people's first introduction to the rather outrageous idea and they had all sorts of very reasonable objections.

Here's the 'proof' from the video:

First, consider P = 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1…
Clearly the value of P oscillates between 1 and 0 depending on how many terms you get. Numberphile decides that it equals 1/2, because that's halfway in the middle.
Alternatively, consider P+P with the terms interleaved, and check out this quirky arithmetic:
1-1+1-1…
+ 1-1+1…
= 1 + (-1+1) + (1-1) … = 1, so 2P = 1, so P = 1/2
Now consider Q = 1-2+3-4+5…
And write out Q+Q this way:
1-2+3-4+5…
+ 1 -2+3-4…
= 1-1+1-1+1 = 1/2 = 2Q, so Q = 1/4
Now consider S = 1+2+3+4+5...
Write S-4S as
1+2+3+4+5…
- 4 -8 …
=1-2+3-4+5… = Q=1/4
So S-4S=-3S = 1/4, so S=-1/12

How do you feel about that? Probably amused but otherwise not very good, regardless of your level of math proficiency. But in another way it's really convincing - I mean, string theorists use it, by god. And, to quote the video, "these kinds of sums appear all over physics".

So the question is this: when you see a video or hear a proof like this, do you 'believe them'? Even if it's not your field, and not in your area of expertise, do you believe someone who tells you "even though you thought mathematics worked this way, it actually doesn't; it's still totally mystical and insane results are lurking just around the corner if you know where to look"? What if they tell you string theorists use it, and it appears all over physics?
I imagine this is as a sort of rationality litmus test. See how you react to the video or the proof (or remember how you reacted when you initially heard this argument). Is it the 'rational response'? How do you weigh your own intuitions vs a convincing argument from authority plus math that seems to somehow work, if you turn your head a bit?

If you don't believe th...
An impossibility result for doing without good priors
by jessicata — 2017-01-20T05:44:26.000Z

My previous post suggested a strategy for making bets on uncertain propositions (e.g. the color of the sun) without having a good prior. Here I present an impossibility result for doing this in general.

Say there are n agents, and n−1 possible colors of the sun. Before observing the sun's color, each agent is only able to pick a single color of solar panel to buy (each color solar panel only produces power for a single possible sun color). The sun is revealed, and then the universe is split among the agents who bought the right color solar panel. Assume all agents have utility linear in the share of the universe they control.

Each agent from 1 to n−1 believes with certainty that the sun is a color equal to the agent's index (e.g. agent 2 believes the sun is color 2). Obviously, each of these agents the right color solar panel for the sun color they predict.

The nth agent is agnostic about what color the sun will be, and would like to ensure that in expectation they get a significant fraction of the universe regardless of the color of the sun.

Unfortunately, agent n cannot guarantee more than a 12(n−1) fraction of the universe in expectation across possible sun colors (whereas they "should" be able to get a 1n fraction according to the logic in my previous post). This is because, whenever this agent picks the right color solar panel, they will only get half of the universe (sharing with the agent whose index corresponds to the sun's color). So the best agent n can do is to pick a uniformly random color solar panel, yielding an expected 12(n−1) fraction of the universe for each possible sun color.

I'm pretty sure that allowing agents to make enforceable contracts with each other doesn't fix the problem. The issue is that agent n starts out from a pretty bad bargaining position, having very little to offer the other agents.

If the agent could buy a mixture of different solar panel colors, and the universe were divided proportionally to power generation, then the agent could spend 1n−1 of its resources on each color solar panel, yielding a 1n fraction of the universe in all possible worlds. But this does not seem realistic to assume that actions like this are always available.

I'm not sure what to do about this. It might be a deal-breaker for this whole approach, or it might turn out that there is some realistic assumption under which an agnostic agent can

...
Instrumental Rationality: Overriding Defaults
by  — 2017-01-20T05:14:03.218Z

[I'd previously posted this essay as a link. From now on, I'll be cross-posting blog posts here instead of linking them, to keep the discussions LW central. This is the first in an in-progress of sequence of articles that'll focus on identifying instrumental rationality techniques and cataloging my attempt to integrate them into my life with examples and insight from habit research.]

[Epistemic Status: Pretty sure. The stuff on habits being situation-response links seems fairly robust. I'll be writing something later with the actual research. I'm basically just retooling existing theory into an optimizational framework for improving life.]

I’m interested how rationality can help us make better decisions.

Many of these decisions seem to involve split-second choices where it’s hard to sit down and search a handbook for the relevant bits of information—you want to quickly react in the correct way, else the moment passes and you’ve lost. On a very general level, it seems to be about reacting in the right way once the situation provides a cue.

Consider these situation-reaction pairs:

· You are having an argument with someone. As you begin to notice the signs of yourself getting heated, you remember to calm down and talk civilly. Maybe also some deep breaths.

· You are giving yourself a deadline or making a schedule for a task, and you write down the time you expect to finish. Quickly, though, you remember to actually check if it took you that long last time, and you adjust accordingly.

· You feel yourself slipping towards doing something some part of you doesn’t want to do. Say you are reneging on a previous commitment. As you give in to temptation, you remember to pause and really let the two sides of yourself communicate.

· You think about doing something, but you feel aversive / flinch-y to it. As you shy away from the mental pain, rather than just quickly thinking about something else, you also feel curious as to why you feel that way. You query your brain and try to p

...
Optimizing Styles
by TheSinceriousOne — 2017-01-20T01:48:05.460Z

(Cross-Posted from my blog.)

You know roughly what a fighting style is, right? A set of heuristics, skills, patterns made rote for trying to steer a fight into the places where your skills are useful, means of categorizing things to get a subset of the vast overload of information available to you to make the decisions you need, tendencies to prioritize certain kinds of opportunities, that fit together. Fighting isn't the only optimization problem where you see "styles" like this. Some of them are general enough that you can see them across many domains.

Here are some examples:

"Move fast and break things."

"Move fast with stable infra."

"Fail Fast."

"Before all else, understand the problem."

"Dive in!"

"Don't do hard things. Turn hard things to easy things, then do easy things."

The "Yin and Yang" of rationality.

The Sorting Hat Chats's secondary house system.

"Start with what you can test confidently, and work from there. Optimize the near before the far. If the far and uncertain promises to be much bigger, it's probably out of reach."

"Start with the obviously most important thing, and work backwards from there."

"Do the best thing."

"The future is stable. Make long-term plans."

"The future is unstable. Prioritize the imminent because you know it's real."

"Win with the sheathed sword."

Just as fighting styles are distinct from why you would fight, optimizing styles are distinct from what you value.
In limited optimization domains like games, there is known to be a one true style. The style that is everything. The null style. Raw "what is available and how can I exploit it", with no preferred way for the game to play out. Like Scathach's fighting style.

If you know probability and decision theory, you'll know there is a one true style for optimization in general too. All the other ways are fragments of it, and they derive their power from the degree to which they approximate it.

Don't think this means it is irrational to favor an optimization style besides the null style. The ideal agent, may use the null style, but the ideal agent doesn't have skill or non-skill at things. As a bounded agent, you must take into account skill as a resource. And even if you've gained skills for irrational reasons, those are the resources you have.

Don't think that since one of the optimization styles you feel motivated to use is explicit in the way...
On Arrogance
by casebash — 2017-01-20T01:04:27.188Z

Arrogance is an interesting topic.

Let's imagine we have two people who are having a conversation. One of them is an professor in quantum mechanics and the other person is an enthusiast who has read a few popular science articles online.

The professor always gives his honest opinion, but in an extremely blunt manner, not holding anything back and not making any attempts to phrase it politely. That is, the professor does not merely tell the enthusiast that they are wrong, but also provides his honest assessment that the enthusiast does possess even a basic understanding of the core concepts of quantum mechanics.

The enthusiast is polite throughout, even when subject to this criticism. They respond to the professors objections about their viewpoints, to the best of their ability throughout, trying their best to engage directly with the professors arguments. At the same time, the enthusiast is convinced that he is correct - equally convinced as the professor in fact - but he does not vocalise this in the same way as the professor.

Who is the most arrogant in these circumstances? Is this even a useful question to ask - or should we be dividing arrogance into two components - over-confidence and dismissive behaviour?

Let's imagine the same conversation, but imagine that the enthusiast does not know that the professor is a professor and neither do the bystanders. The bystanders don't have a knowledge of quantum physics - they can't tell who is the professor and who is the enthusiast since both appear to be able to talk fluently about the topics. All they can see is that one person is incredibly blunt and dismissive, while the other person is perfectly polite and engages with all the arguments raised. Who would the bystanders see as most arrogant?
What would you like to see posts about?
by shev — 2017-01-19T23:39:59.164Z

I've just come back from the latest post on revitalizing LW as a conversational locus in the larger Rational-Sphere community and I'm personally still very into the idea. This post is directed at you if you're also into the idea. If you're not, that's okay; I'd still like to give it a try.

A number of people in the comments mentioned that the Discussion forum mostly gets Link posts, these days, and that those aren't particularly rewarding. But there's also not a lot of people investing time in making quality text posts; certainly nothing like the 'old days'.

This also means that the volume of text posts is low enough that writing one (to me) feels like speaking up in a quiet room -- sort of embarrassingly ostentatious, amplified by the fact that without an 'ongoing conversation' it's hard to know what would be a good idea to speak up about. Some things aren't socially acceptable here (politics, social justice?); some things feel like they've been done so many times that there's not much useful to say (It feels hard to have anything novel to say about, say, increasing one's productivity, without some serious research.)

(I know the answer is probably 'post about anything you want', but it feels much easier to actually do that if there's some guidance or requests.)

So, here's the question: what would you like to see posts about?

I'm personally probably equipped to write about ideas in math, physics, and computer science, so if there are requests in those areas I might be able to help (I have some ideas that I'm stewing, also). I'm not sure what math level to write at, though, since there's no recent history of mathematically technical posts. Is it better to target "people who probably took some math in college but always wished they knew more?" or better to just be technical and risk missing lots of people?
My personal requests:
1. I really value surveys of subjects or subfields. They provide a lot of knowledge and understanding for little time invested, as a reader, and I suspect that as overviews are relatively easy to create as a writer since they don't have to go deep into details. Since they explain existing ideas instead of introduce new ones they're easier and less stressful to get right. If you have a subject you feel like you broadly understand the landscape of, I'd encourage you to write out a quick picture of it.
For instance, u/JacobLiechty poste...
If rationality is purely winning there is a minimal shared art
by  — 2017-01-19T21:39:28.299Z

This sites strapline is refining the art of human rationality. It assumes there is something worth talking about.

However I've been seeing "rationality as winning" bare of any context. I think the two things are in conflict.

Let me take the old favourite of the twelve virtues of rationality as representative of the arts (although I could probably find similar situations where any proposed tool doesn't win). Can I find contexts in which humans will not win if they adopt these virtues?

1) Curiousity. There are lots of instances in history where curiousity may have killed you, cramping your winning. Wandering in the wrong part of town, trying out the wrong berry. Curiousity can also be not useful if most facts are boring or useless. I am happy to be ignorant of many facts about the world (who won various sports games, colour of peoples socks).

2&3&4) Relinquishment/lightness/evenness. You might avoid going see the evidence or disbelieve evidence presented by someone you suspect of being a clever charlatan. If you "see" a woman in box get cut in half you shouldn't automatically think that the magician can actually do magic. There is no magic data to evidence converter. See also defying the data.

5) Argument. This is not a useful virtue if you are alone on a desert island. It also might not be worth engaging with people who are trying to waste your time or distract you from something else. See also trolls.

6) Empiricism. This is great if you've got plenty of time. Collecting data always takes time and energy, if you need these things to survive, I wouldn't recommend empiricism.

7) Simplicity: Simplicity is predictable. If you involved in a contest with someone you may need to chose to be unpredictable in order to win.

8) Humbleness: This is a sign of weakness and may be exploited by your opponents in some social situations.

9 & 10) Perfection & Precision: There is an aphorism for this. In social games you don't need to be perfect or infinitely precise just better or faster than your opponent. Anything more is wasted effort.

11) Scholarship: This doesn't make much sense for people on the poverty line.

That said:

All the virtues makes sense when the context is trying to figure out something very hard and important with other people who are also trying to figure out the same thing and you've got a fair amount of time and resources, wi...
Thoughts on "Operation Make Less Wrong the single conversational locus", Month 1
by Raemon — 2017-01-19T17:16:03.508Z

About a month ago, Anna posted about the Importance of Less Wrong or Another Single Conversational Locus, followed shortly by Sarah Constantin's http://lesswrong.com/lw/o62/a_return_to_discussion/
There was a week or two of heavy-activity by some old timers. Since there's been a decent array of good posts but not quite as inspiring as the first week was and I don't know whether to think "we just need to try harder" or change tactics in some way.
Some thoughts:
- I do feel it's been better to quickly be able to see a lot of posts in the community in one place
- I don't think the quality of the comments is that good, which is a bit demotivating.
- on facebook, lots of great conversations happen in a low-friction way, and when someone starts being annoying, the person's who's facebook wall it is has the authority to delete comments with abandon, which I think is helpful.
- I could see the solution being to either continue trying to incentivize better LW comments, or to just have LW be "single locus for big important ideas, but discussion to flesh them out still happen in more casual environments"
- I'm frustrated that the intellectual projects on Less Wrong are largely silo'd from the Effective Altruism community, which I think could really use them.
- The Main RSS feed has a lot of subscribers (I think I recall "about 10k"), so having things posted there seems good.
- I think it's good to NOT have people automatically post things there, since that produced a lot of weird anxiety/tension on "is my post good enough for main? I dunno!"
- But, there's also not a clear path to get something promoted to Main, or a sense of which things are important enough for Main
- I notice that I (personally) feel an ugh response to link posts and don't like being taken away from LW when I'm browsing LW. I'm not sure why.
Curious if others have thoughts.