trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Levers, Emotions, and Lazy Evaluators:
by  — 2017-02-20T23:00:37.080Z

Levers, Emotions, and Lazy Evaluators: Post-CFAR 2

[This is a trio of topics following from the first post that all use the idea of ontologies in the mental sense as a bouncing off point. I examine why naming concepts can be helpful, listening to your emotions, and humans as lazy evaluators. I think this post may also be of interest to people here. Posts 3 and 4 are less so, so I'll probably skip those, unless someone expresses interest. Lastly, the below expressed views are my own and don’t reflect CFAR’s in any way.]

Levers:

When I was at the CFAR workshop, someone mentioned that something like 90% of the curriculum was just making up fancy new names for things they already sort of did. This got some laughs, but I think it’s worth exploring why even just naming things can be powerful.

Our minds do lots of things; they carry many thoughts, and we can recall many memories. Some of these phenomena may be more helpful for our goals, and we may want to name them.

When we name a phenomenon, like focusing, we’re essentially drawing a boundary around the thing, highlighting attention on it. We’ve made it conceptually discrete. This transformation, in turn, allows us to more concretely identify which things among the sea of our mental activity correspond to Focusing.

Focusing can then become a concept that floats in our understanding of things our minds can do. We’ve taken a mental action and packaged it into a “thing”. This can be especially helpful if we’ve identified a phenomena that consists of several steps which usually aren’t found together.

By drawing certain patterns around a thing with a name, we can hopefully help others recognize them and perhaps do the same for other mental motions, which seems to be one more way that we find new rationality techniques.

This then means that we’ve created a new action that is explicitly available to our ontology. This notion of “actions I can take” is what I think forms the idea of levers in our mind. When CFAR teaches a rationality technique, the technique itself seems to be pointing at a sequence of things that happen in our brain. Last post, I mentioned that I think CFAR techniques upgrade people’s mindsets by changing their sense of what is possible.

I think that levers are a core part of this because they give us the fe...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Create & Complete
by RobinZ — 2017-02-20T18:24:02.233Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Create & Complete

WHEN:
26 February 2017 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to work on our own projects, help others with theirs, or just hang out.

Upcoming meetups:

Mar. 5: Fun & Games

Mar. 12: Pi Day

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Create & Complete
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup: February
by Maelin — 2017-02-20T11:27:47.226Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup: February

WHEN:
24 February 2017 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
The Bull and Bear Tavern, Flinders Lane, Melbourne

Come along for this month's Social Meetup, now on the exciting new schedule of the fourth Friday of the month!

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/588587608005133/

Social meetups are informal get-togethers where we chat about topics of interest and have a couple of drinks together.

WHEN? Friday February 24, 18:30 until late. Don't worry about being on time, though - it's fine to rock up whenever.

WHERE? The Bull & Bear Tavern, on Flinders Lane (just a short walk from Flinders St Station).

FOOD? The B&B does reasonable pub food and we usually share a few plates of wedges. For those who stay late, we often go for a late night meal at around 11pm

CONTACT? Any issues on the night, comment in the Facebook event page (linked above)

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup: February
Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017
by Elo — 2017-02-20T04:51:06.102Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
A semi-technical question about prediction markets and private info
by CronoDAS — 2017-02-20T02:20:40.146Z

There exists a 6-sided die that is weighted such that one of the 6 numbers has a 50% chance to come up and all the other numbers have a 1 in 10 chance. Nobody knows for certain which number the die is biased in favor of, but some people have had a chance to roll the die and see the result.

You get a chance to roll the die exactly once, with nobody else watching. It comes up 6. Running a quick Bayes's Theorem calculation, you now think there's a 50% chance that the die is biased in favor of 6 and a 10% chance for the numbers 1 through 5.

You then discover that there's a prediction market about the die. The prediction market says there's a 50% chance that "3" is the number the die is biased in favor of, and each other number is given 10% probability.

How do you update based on what you've learned? Do you make any bets?

I think I know the answer for this toy problem, but I'm not sure if I'm right or how it generalizes to real life...
Meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
by maia — 2017-02-19T17:51:23.728Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Projects

WHEN:
20 February 2017 06:15:03PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1045 Mission St., SF

(Yes this is tomorrow, pardon the late notice)

We’ll be meeting to work on projects!

Near the beginning, we’ll go around and talk about what we’ll be working on, then do a couple of pomodoros quietly. At some point we’ll break into general conversations and socializing.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
Book Review: How Asia Works by Joe Studwell
by Zvi — 2017-02-18T18:43:17.000Z

How Asia Works has a theory about how development economics works: You must follow The Way. To the extent that you follow The Way, your country will prosper. To the extent that you fail to follow The Way, your country will languish. The Way is divided into three commandments:

Thou shalt enact real land reform.

Thou shalt protect infant industries and enforce upon them export discipline.

Thou shalt repress and direct thine financial system.

The author is supremely confident in his conclusions, considering them “proven” by history. He takes us on tours of Asian countries, to show us the wonders that await the faithful, and the failures of those who strayed from The Way. He does not, however, expect us to take his prescriptions on faith. He explains why there is no other way but The Way, shows how each divergence leads to ruin. At each step of development, he has a model for what is going on, whether or not he quite describes or thinks of himself as having one, and all three models fit into a unified model of how to think about developing countries.

It also implies a lot about the developed world, along with other interesting consequences, but he never mentions this. My guess for why is that they are not conclusions he particularly likes.

From here on in, except where stated otherwise, I’ll be stating the book’s perspective rather than my own, and what seem like its implications.

Let’s take a look at the model’s components, starting with the first one: Agriculture.

I

The model goes something like this:

In America, farms are big. Really big. No, bigger than that. Farms are big! Labor, on the other hand, is expensive. Thus, we build our agriculture around being able to get a reasonable crop out of a large amount of land, rather than trying to maximize the yield on a farm of a given size.

In most other places, farms are small, and land is often a limiting factor. In places like Japan and South Korea, every inch of available farmland is in use, so it is vital to maximize yield on that land. If you get good farm yields, you can export food to generate precious foreign capital, whereas if you get bad yields, you need to import food, eating up the money you need to spend on industrialization. The question is, what determines yields?

The thesis of this section is that intensive, motivated labor is the most important input, with proper tools and equipment a distant but vital ...
Ontologies are Operating Systems
by  — 2017-02-18T05:00:14.594Z

Ontologies are Operating Systems: Post-CFAR 1

[I recently came back from volunteering at a CFAR workshop. I found the whole experience to be 100% enjoyable, and I’ll be doing an actual workshop review soon. I also learned some new things and updated my mind. This is the first in a four-part series on new thoughts that I’ve gotten as a result of the workshop. If LW seems to like this one, I'll post the rest too.]

I’ve been thinking more about the idea of how we even reason about our own thinking, our “ontology of mind”, and how our internal mental model of how our brain works.

(Roughly speaking, “ontology” means the framework you view reality through, and I’ll be using it here to refer specifically to how we view our minds.)

Before I continue, it might be helpful to ask yourself some of the below questions:

What is my brain like, perhaps in the form of a metaphor?

How do I model my thoughts?

What things can and can’t my brain do?

What does it feel like when I am thinking?

Do my thoughts often influence my actions?

<reminder to actually think a little before continuing>

I don’t know about you, but for me, my thoughts often feel like they float into my head. There’s a general sense of effortlessly having things stream in. If I’m especially aware (i.e. metacognitive), I can then reflect on my thoughts. But for the most part, I’m filled with thoughts about the task I’m doing.

Though I don’t often go meta, I’m aware of the fact that I’m able to. In specific situations, knowing this helps me debug my thinking processes. For example, say my internal dialogue looks like this:

“Okay, so I’ve sent to forms to Steve, and now I’ve just got to do—oh wait what about my physics test—ARGH PAIN NO—now I’ve just got to do the write-up for—wait, I just thought about physics and felt some pain. Huh… I wonder why…Move past the pain, what’s bugging me about physics? It looks like I don’t want to do it because… because I don’t think it’ll be useful?”

Because my ontology of how my thoughts operate includes the understanding that metacognition is possible, this is a “lever” I can pull on in my own mind.

I suspect that people who don...
Meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion
by iarwain1 — 2017-02-17T17:13:55.570Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion

WHEN:
19 February 2017 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg 4th floor, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

No parking restrictions on weekends, so park wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2017-02-17T16:51:41.924Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on February 17th. The following week's summary is here.

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 - Meetup #12 - Friendly AI: 19 February 2017 03:13PM
[Berlin] Sequences Reading Group: 23 February 2017 07:15PM
Chicago Rationality Reading Group - Luminosity Part 1: 19 February 2017 01:00PM
Cologne - Monthly meetup: Saturday Feb 18 2017: 18 February 2017 05:00PM
Moscow: unconference: 19 February 2017 02:00PM
[Moscow] Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery: 22 February 2017 07:40PM
Sydney Pub meetup - February : 23 February 2017 06:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - March 2017: 05 March 2017 04:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Nonsense: 19 February 2017 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Ann Arbor, Austin, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Chicago, Cologne, 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 l...
Highlights From The Comments On Cost Disease
by Scott Alexander — 2017-02-17T07:28:52.000Z

I got many good responses to my Considerations On Cost Disease post, both in the comments and elsewhere. A lot of people thought the explanation was obvious; unfortunately, they all disagreed on what the obvious explanation was. Below are some of the responses I found most interesting.

John Cochrane:

So, what is really happening? I think Scott nearly gets there. Things cost 10 times as much, 10 times more than they used to and 10 times more than in other countries. It’s not going to wages. It’s not going to profits. So where is it going?

The unavoidable answer: The number of people it takes to produce these goods is skyrocketing. Labor productivity — number of people per quality adjusted output — declined by a factor of 10 in these areas. It pretty much has to be that: if the money is not going to profits, to to each employee, it must be going to the number of employees.

How can that happen? Our machines are better than ever, as Scott points out. Well, we (and especially we economists) pay too much attention to snazzy gadgets. Productivity depends on organizations not just on gadgets. Southwest figured out how to turn an airplane around in 20 minutes, and it still takes United an hour.

Contrariwise, I think we know where the extra people are. The ratio of teachers to students hasn’t gone down a lot — but the ratio of administrators to students has shot up. Most large public school systems spend more than half their budget on administrators. Similarly, class sizes at most colleges and universities haven’t changed that much — but administrative staff have exploded. There are 2.5 people handling insurance claims for every doctor. Construction sites have always had a lot of people standing around for every one actually working the machine. But now for every person operating the machine there is an army of planners, regulators, lawyers, administrative staff, consultants and so on. (I welcome pointers to good graphs and numbers on this sort of thing.)

So, my bottom line: administrative bloat.

Well, how does bloat come about? Regulations and law are, as Scott mentions, part of the problem. These are all areas either run by the government or with large government involvement. But the real key is, I think lack of competition. These are above all areas with not much competition. In turn, however, they are not by a long shot &#

...
Increasing GDP is not growth
by PhilGoetz — 2017-02-16T18:04:16.959Z

I just saw another comment implying that immigration was good because it increased GDP. Over the years, I've seen many similar comments in the LW / transhumanist / etc bubble claiming that increasing a country's population is good because it increases its GDP. These are generally used in support of increasing either immigration or population growth.

It doesn't, however, make sense. People have attached a positive valence to certain words, then moved those words into new contexts. They did not figure out what they want to optimize and do the math.

I presume they want to optimize wealth or productivity per person. You wouldn't try to make Finland richer by absorbing China. Its GDP would go up, but its GDP per person would go way down.

I know why LWers want to say that increasing GDP is good. Historically, LessWrong is associated with transhumanism and specifically extropianism, and one of the main opponents of transhumanism is the romantic, anti-technology part of the environmentalist movement. The Extropians were strong supporters of Julian Simon, an economist who argued against environmentalists that population growth would not lead to collapse, but to lower rather than higher prices.

Growth is good. That was one of our mantras in the 1990s. And economists measure growth via GDP. So increasing GDP is good, right?

Wrong. Increasing GDP is not the same as productivity growth. Productivity makes sense either per person (when speaking locally) or per planet (or other isolated system, when looking at the big picture or the rate of technological change). GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product. It refers to the total yearly market value of the product of those people contained within some rather arbitrarily drawn border on a map, and is used for national budget planning. Both are surprisingly complex to compute, but in very different ways.

If you have a constant population, and GDP increases, productivity per person has increased. But if you have a border on a map enclosing some people, and you move it so it encloses more people, productivity hasn't increased. If instead of moving the border over the people, you move the people over the border, productivity still hasn't increased. Those people might be more productive on the other...
Meetup : Sydney Pub meetup - February 
by Elo — 2017-02-16T09:14:58.032Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Pub meetup - February

WHEN:
23 February 2017 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
565 george st, sydney

https://www.meetup.com/lesswrong-Sydney0/events/237546781/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1816134538644351/

Find us at the big table outside the pizza kitchen on level 2.

Come along to our regular monthly pub meetup to talk all things math, science, technology, engineering, thinking, growth, reasoning and beliefs.

If you are an aspiring rationalist, a nerd, geek, scientist or just a really great thinker - we can't wait to meet you to share ideas and learn and grow together.

See you there!

0438481143 if you need help finding us

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Pub meetup - February
Meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group - Luminosity Part 1
by mingyuan — 2017-02-16T03:09:58.836Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group - Luminosity Part 1

WHEN:
19 February 2017 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Harper Memorial Library Room 148, 1116 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637

The Chicago Rationality Reading Group meets every Sunday from 1-3 PM in Room 148 of Harper Memorial Library. Though we meet on the University of Chicago campus, anyone is welcome to attend.

This week we will be reading the introductory posts of the Luminosity sequence, as well as a short essay on pressing societal problems:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mu/sorting_out_sticky_brains/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ty/mental_crystallography/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1xh/living_luminously/

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/02/neglected-big-problems.html

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group - Luminosity Part 1
Meetup : Moscow: unconference
by Slava Matyukhin — 2017-02-15T18:02:32.312Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: unconference

WHEN:
19 February 2017 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

Note: most our members join meetups through other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a link to other meetup pages here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

We'll keep following our new unconference format for this meetup, which was a success last time.

Read more about this meetup in FB event or VK.
We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: unconference
Meetup : Amsterdam - Meetup #12 - Friendly AI
by  — 2017-02-15T15:08:00.708Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Amsterdam - Meetup #12 - Friendly AI

WHEN:
19 February 2017 03:13:37PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands

AI timelines have shortened. This meetup is dedicated to brainstorming ways to save, well, our lives.

Discussion article for the meetup : Amsterdam - Meetup #12 - Friendly AI
Indifference and compensatory rewards
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-02-15T14:49:36.918Z

Crossposted at the Intelligent Agents Forum

It's occurred to me that there is a framework where we can see all "indifference" results as corrective rewards, both for the utility function change indifference and for the policy change indifference.

Imagine that the agent has reward R0 and is following policy π0, and we want to change it to having reward R1 and following policy π1.

Then the corrective reward we need to pay it, so that it doesn't attempt to resist or cause that change, is simply the difference between the two expected values:

V(R0|π0)-V(R1|π1),

where V is the agent's own valuation of the expected reward, conditional on the policy.

This explains why off-policy reward-based agents are already safely interruptible: since we change the policy, not the reward, R0=R1. And since off-policy agents have value estimates that are indifferent to the policy followed, V(R0|π0)=V(R1|π1), and the compensatory rewards are zero.
Philosophical love poetry
by KatjaGrace — 2017-02-14T23:26:02.000Z

Because Daily Nous asked for it.

***

Roses are red

And their redness canonic

I’m longing to take you

To realms less platonic

***

Violets are bled

Roses are rue

Induction’s mysterious

But long live ye and mou

***

Roses are red,

And I’d read rose reviews

But I viewed your red posy

And knew something new

***

Roses are red

Your cat is now too

Signaling’s hard

And so are you?

***

Roses are red,

Romance is too,

But I’ll never know

What red’s like for you

***