trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Hufflepuff Cynicism on Crocker's Rule
by abramdemski — 2018-02-14T00:52:37.065Z

Yesterday, I mainly talked about Hufflepuff Cynicism from the cynic's end. However, there's a lot to be said about the receiving end. Hufflepuff cynicism can come off as a very patronizing strategy. Is this a point against it?

In the original conversation where I came up with the idea of Hufflepuff cynicism, I was talking about norms for aspiring rationalists around trying to get other people to be more rational. Maybe we agree that double crux is a good conversation procedure, but should we try to convince someone of that? Should we try to get them to double-crux with us about it? Maybe we believe you should bet or update when a disagreement hasn't been resolved, but what should we do with a disagreement about the bet-or-update rule?

My argument from the Hufflepuff Cynicism side was in favor of chesterton-fencing such disagreements. Don't try to convince others about rationality norms; at least, stop after the first explanation falls on deaf ears. Instead, figure out why the person isn't already following the norm. It seems likely that there's some important reason; if you can figure it out, maybe you can come up with a better norm which would address the concern (in much the same way bet-or-update addresses objections to the simpler strategies "bet on disagreements" or "talk out disagreements until you converge").

To my surprise, not everyone wants to be treated so carefully. Some people find this attitude patronizing or overly cautious, and request that I just tell them what they are doing wrong, possibly telling them more than just one time if they don't get it the first time. This is, more or less, an invocation of Crocker's Rule.

To quote the sl4 wiki on Crocker's Rules:

Declaring yourself to be operating by "Crocker's Rules" means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you. Crocker's Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind - if you're offended, it's your fault. Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong, or they think they have to dance around it.) Two people using Crocker's Ru

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Rationalist Lent
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2018-02-13T23:55:29.713Z

It's that time of year again. Pick something to give up for 40 days as an experiment / comfort zone expansion. Post about it here. Good luck and have fun!

Edit: For anyone who wants it, here are some prompts for brainstorming things to try giving up (set a 5-minute timer for the brainstorm):

What takes up too much of my time?
What takes up too much of my attention?
What in my life is most out to get me?
What superstimuli am I most attracted to?
What in my life feels the most like pica?

And also for anyone who wants it, here are some concrete suggestions for things to give up, in no particular order:

Video games
Smartphones
Facebook, Reddit, etc.
Sugar
Caffeine
Figures!
by Куля Ботаніки — 2018-02-13T21:43:27.424Z

Cases of limited standard context

In a scientific text, a good illustration is simple and necessary. Forget the second part for now. What is "simple"? Some things are better presented not as diagrams or graphs, but as detailed images that never are fully discussed because that would distract the reader.

For example, X-rays of broken bones or scans of stained electrophoretic gels are a step more detailed than doodles: they tell something about quality of the process of picturing. They can be blurry or crisp, maybe unevenly, and it matters. They have context, and people who routinely read the literature will be looking for it without thinking, while people who only start to do it need to pay conscious attention. It is teachable, up to an expected level of competency and perhaps beyond. Hard to say.

But textbooks (in my experience - YMMV) don't stop to define the proper context. You're supposed to see the break in the bone, or the molecular weight of the protein, and move on. You are expected to waste a few gels of your own and gain the "clarity of vision" by trial and error, even though the skill of recognizing untrustworthy images is very important and you might need it even if you've never personally done something similar. Especially if you work in a remote field (like plant hormone research) and don't even plan to do something similar, but happen to need to check something (like what paleontologists think of how leaves evolved).

At least you often can ask a friend what to look for. (Seems that Before Infrastructure, researchers just had to re-invent that wheel now and again. Are there any ways to get insight into it? A history of science source?)

Cases with some unknown amount of context

Happen.

It's when you don't know whom to ask. It's when you can't name what you see. It's when you suspect the picture goes with the text, but have no clue what the connection is. Lastly, it's when you stop staring at it and try to fit questions to force it to make sense.

I think there should be a moment, at the beginning of studying something in depth, to have an order of understanding the image. Like, 1) what is this, 2) why is it here, 3) what was before it (in time or space) and what will be after, and 4) what is missing. (Maybe "what is missing" should go first. Sometimes the meaning of a char...
Spamming Micro-Intentions to Generate Willpower
by moridinamael — 2018-02-13T20:16:09.651Z

The purpose of this post is to outline a potentially general trick for getting yourself out of a rut or motivating yourself to do a small task that you don't feel like doing. Part (i) describes the source of the idea. Part (ii) outlines an example for testing the technique. Part (iii) is a more abstract discussion about how this technique engenders an awareness of your moment-to-moment intentions which is itself valuable.

i.

I recently made some meaningful strides in my meditation practice by following this advice from a reddit post (emphasis mine):

Having clear, strong intentions is what drives all progress through the TMI stages. But intentions become clear and strong, not through force or the intensity of delivery of the intention, but rather, through a very light, gentle touch that is consistently, repeatedly reinforced.

So, when Culadasa instructs you to “tighten your focus on the meditation object”, for example, all that’s required is a very light touch of intention, as if you were trying to brush a fragile snowflake with the tip of a feather.

When this quick, gentle intention is repeated consistently (perhaps with every breath cycle, or even two or three times during each breath cycle), it’s power grows and the mind eventually complies.

I call these “micro-intentions” to highlight their, quick, light, gentle quality.

It’s important to understand that there will often be a delay (sometimes considerable), between when you begin to apply micro-intentions and when you notice an effect. Often, it can take a few breath cycles of “micro-intending to notice greater detail and vividness in the meditation object” before you actually perceive a change.

So, be patient and diligent, keep refreshing the intentions, and stuff will happen =)

The truth of this advice can be easily demonstrated. Your first micro-intention appears to do nothing, and your metacognitively monitoring vantage point scoffs at its ineffectiveness, but after three or four breaths of "tip of the feather" nudges, you're suddenly percieving sensations with peak clarity. Maybe beyond what you've ever achieved previously.

ii.

It occurred to me that sustained micro-intentions could be a very generally powerful tool. I have tested it enough to certify it as something that I will keep in my toolkit, and I figured I would just share it, since I think it should be replicable in its most ba...
Hufflepuff Cynicism
by abramdemski — 2018-02-13T02:15:50.945Z

Summary: In response to catching a glimpse of the dark world, and especially of the extent of human hypocrisy with respect to the dark world, one might take a dim view of one's fellow humans. I describe an alternative, Hufflepuff cynicism, in which you lower your concept of what the standards were all along. I give arguments for and against this perspective.

This came out of conversations with Steve Rayhawk, Harmanas Chopra, Ziz, and Kurt Brown.

In See the Dark World, Nate describes a difficulty which people have in facing the worst of a situation. In one of his examples, in which Alice and Bob grapple with the idea that the market price of saving a life is $3000, Bob's response is to deny what this means about people -- to avoid concluding that humans aren't generally willing to pay more than 3k to save a life, Bob decides that money is not a relevant measure of how much people would sacrifice to save a life. This is a non-sequiter, but allows Bob to sleep at night.

Alice, on the other hand, decides that a life really is only worth about 3k. This, to me, is something like Hansonian cynicism -- when revealed preferences differ from stated preferences, assume that people are lying about what they value.

Nate calls both Alice and Bob's response "tolerification", and recommends undoing tolerification by entertaining the what-if question describing the dark world (following the leave-a-line-of-retreat method).

Ziz gives a somewhat similar analysis in social reality: when you recognize the distance between the social reality most people are willing to endorse and the real reality, you have three options:

Make a buckets error where your map of reality overwrites your map of social reality, and you have the “infuriating perspective”, typified by less-cunning activists and people new to their forbidden truths. “No, it is not ‘a personal choice’, which means people can’t hide from the truth. I can call people out and win arguments”.

Make a buckets error where your map of social reality overwrites your map of reality, and you have the “dehumanizing perspective” of someone who is a vegetarian for ethical reasons but believes truly feels it when they say “it’s a personal choice”, the atheist who respects religion-the-proposition, to some extent the trans person who feels the gender presentation they want would be truly out of line…

But it was all

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A Proper Scoring Rule for Confidence Intervals
by Scott Garrabrant — 2018-02-13T01:45:06.341Z

You probably already know that you can incentivise honest reporting of probabilities using a proper scoring rule like log score, but did you know that you can also incentivize honest reporting of confidence intervals?

To incentize reporting of a 90% confidence interval, take the score −S−20⋅D, where S is the size of your confidence interval, and D is the distance between the true value and the interval. D is 0 whenever the true value is in the interval.

This incentivizes not only giving an interval that has the true value 90% of the time, but also distributes the remaining 10% equally between overestimates and underestimates.

To keep the lower bound of the interval important, I recommend measuring S and D in log space. So if the true value is T and the interval is (L,U), then S is log(UL) and D is log(TU) for underestimates and log(LT) for overestimates. Of course, you need questions with positive answers to do this.

To do a P% confidence interval, take the score −S−200100−P⋅D.

This can be used to make training calibration, using something like Wits and Wagers cards more fun. I also think it could be turned into app, if one could get a large list of questions with numerical values.
Open thread, February 2018
by EnterUsername — 2018-02-12T21:10:53.038Z

Apologies if it's already there, but I just can't find the open thread.

In case it's not there, open thread for February 2018! Hurray!

In case it is, would it be difficult to check the title string for "open thread" and show a link to the current month's open thread, ask if that's what the person was looking for, and still have an option to post if not?
Rationality Feed: Last Month's Best Posts
by sapphire — 2018-02-12T13:18:39.909Z

I write a daily rational feed. I write up summaries/teasers for the previous day's article that I found interesting and/or enjoyable. I follow most rationalist blogs as well as LW2.0 and the EA Forum on RSS. The daily feed is posted in the SSC Discord and on my Wordpress Blog . However the rational feed includes quite alot of articles and many people have requested a more heavily pruned feed. In the past my best-of lists have been well received. I am going to try a monthly best-of list. Lets get to it:

=== The Babble and Prune Sequence by alkjash

This series is probably my favorite concept posted on lesswrong 2.0 so far.

Babble - Babble and Prune model of thought generation: Babble with a weak heuristic to generate many more possibilities than necessary, Prune with a strong heuristic to find a best, or the satisfactory one.

More Babble - Modeling Babble as a random walk on a graph where nodes can represent concepts or words and edges are mental connections. You can improve your babel/prune by increasing connections between different areas or by reducing connections to unproductive clusters. An Analogy between babble/prune perspective on writing and Generative Adversarial Neural Nets.

Prune - People’s filters on their babble are far too strong. The early filters: What you think consciously, what you speak, and what you write down. These filters eliminate all but a trickle of babble. Specific mental techniques to weaken the gates.

NP is the God of Babble. His law is: humans will always be much better at verifying wisdom than producing it. Therefore, go forth and Babble!

=== Politics and Social Dynamics:

An Apology Is A Surrender by Zachary Jacobi – [Recommended largely based on the comments]. If you apologize you should surrender. If you keep fighting its not a real apology. However fake apologies are common. Many commenters point out this implies you often should not surrender to the people demanding an apology. Hence its often rational to ‘fake apologize’.

Nice-manning by The Unit of Caring – How to put yourself in a situation where you are equipped to be nice. Niceness advice: Have a wide audience in mind, When someone is a dick, you can actually just pretend they weren’t, Vary topics a lot.

Whence Comes Nhilism by samzdat – Samzdat wrote a long series of posts on modernity, power and nhilism. References include Nietzche and Seeing Like a State. This peic...
Some conceptual highlights from “Disjunctive Scenarios of Catastrophic AI Risk”
by Kaj_Sotala — 2018-02-12T12:30:04.401Z

My forthcoming paper, “Disjunctive Scenarios of Catastrophic AI Risk”, attempts to introduce a number of considerations to the analysis of potential risks from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As the paper is long and occasionally makes for somewhat dry reading, I thought that I would briefly highlight a few of the key points raised in the paper.

The main idea here is that most of the discussion about risks of AGI has been framed in terms of a scenario that goes something along the lines of “a research group develops AGI, that AGI develops to become superintelligent, escapes from its creators, and takes over the world”. While that is one scenario that could happen, focusing too much on any single scenario makes us more likely to miss out alternative scenarios. It also makes the scenarios susceptible to criticism from people who (correctly!) point out that we are postulating very specific scenarios that have lots of burdensome details.

To address that, I discuss here a number of considerations that suggest disjunctive paths to catastrophic outcomes: paths that are of the form “A or B or C could happen, and any one of them happening could have bad consequences”.

Superintelligence versus Crucial Capabilities

Bostrom’s Superintelligence, as well as a number of other sources, basically make the following argument:

An AGI could become superintelligent
Superintelligence would enable the AGI to take over the world

This is an important argument to make and analyze, since superintelligence basically represents an extreme case: if an individual AGI may become as powerful as it gets, how do we prepare for that eventuality? As long as there is a plausible chance for such an extreme case to be realized, it must be taken into account.

However, it is probably a mistake to focus only on the case of superintelligence. Basically, the reason why we are interested in a superintelligence is that, by assumption, it has the cognitive capabilities necessary for a world takeover. But what about an AGI which also had the cognitive capabilities necessary for taking over the world, and only those?

Such an AGI might not count as a superintelligence in the traditional sense, since it would not be superhumanly capable in every domain. Yet, it would still be one that we should be concerned about. If we focus too much on just the superintelligence case, we might miss the emergence of a “dumb”...
"Just Suffer Until It Passes"
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2018-02-12T04:01:13.922Z

I started a "universal problemsolving" journal a few months ago — whenever anything goes wrong, I write down (1) what happened, (2) the universal problems / root causes that might underlie that problem, and (3) generalized countermeasures for that situation in the future.

Many of these are basic, boring stuff — "Lack of Relevant Supplies" is a universal problem; lacking food or coffee at home makes the morning run worse. (The countermeasure is having adequate secondary stocks of supplies, and I adjusted my grocery orders accordingly after realizing it.)

Some of them are interesting, though.

Perhaps the most interesting general countermeasure is "Just Suffer Until It Passes."

Sometimes you lie down and can't sleep. What do most people do? Get up and do something stimulating.

Boredom. What do most people do? Do something stimulating.

If you've ever done mindfulness meditation, even for just 5-10 minutes per day, you know that there's periods of massive raw unpleasantness than occur from time to time. You want to get up and stop meditating.

The answer? Just... suffer until it passes.

You can quibble with the wording — some people won't like the word "suffer"... feel free to swap in "endure" or even "wait" for a more neutral-valence word.

But I'm starting to realize a lot of problems aren't huge problems in-and-of themselves, and it's the flight to distraction and stimulation that compound the problem and create bad ongoing habits (internet surfing, games, junk food, whatever).

Potential Takeaways —

(1) I'm getting immense mileage out of my Universal Problemsolving journal. Feel free to think about it and try something like it out. If there's interest, I might write up how I go about doing it.

(2) "Just Suffer [Endure/Wait/Whatever] Until It Passes" — it's possible to accept negative affect and wait, and it... passes. This is often more productive than trying to banish it via distraction or stimulation, which often compounds the problem at hand.
Discord Server Emoji: A Community Dialect
by Adrian Smith — 2018-02-11T00:47:33.836Z

I — Background

Discord is a popular online chat platform, that started as a tool for video game players to communicate. It acted as a replacement for other preexisting tools like Teamspeak. However, in a relatively short time the combination of powerful moderation tools, easy startup time, and simplicity of use placed it as a popular tool for providing a live environment for many kinds of communities. As of 2017 the platform was receiving roughly 1.5 million new users each week. The in depth analysis of why Discord has seen such success as a home for online communities is an interesting one, but also outside the scope of this essay. Here we are specifically interested in the role of a later addition to Discord’s feature set, custom emojis.

Emojis have been a part of the digital landscape for several years, but rarely have they become part of the way people communicate to the degree found on Discord communities. In a quick test, I looked at 100 of the most recent messages on 3 different servers that I personally use, and an average of 23 either contained emojis or had reactions (a feature where users can “react” with an emote to a message). Part of this is likely due to the way Discord handles emoji through shortcodes, making it easy to place them while typing a message. However, I think that the rapid text format found in a online chat is particularly well suited for emoji. They allow users to convey emotions or tones without a large body of text, a necessary tool in a relatively fast flowing back and forth conversation.

However, all of this is background to the key point of interest, server emoji. Discord allows the moderators of a server to add custom emoji to the server that users can take advantage of. Additionally, users who pay for the premium version of the service can use emoji from one server on any other server. The combination of these two features leads us to some of the interesting dynamics of Discord communication.

II — The custom emoji and its habitat

To understand the degree to which custom emoji are widespread, one only has to look at the chat history for any large Discord server. In a quick check, of the last 95 emoji used on a particular server, 59 were custom. At first glance, the success of server-specific emoji seems strange. They are often used to communicate something that could just as well be said in text, and some fit extremely specifi...
The Signal and the Corrective
by MalcolmOcean — 2018-02-11T00:28:35.759Z
Link: https://everythingstudies.com/2017/12/19/the-signal-and-the-corrective/

This is one of the most important articles I've read in awhile. It makes a generalization from something Scott pointed out in this SSC post.

Here are a few excerpts, but it's worth clicking through and reading the whole thing!

From the inside, when you subscribe to a narrative, when you believe in it, it feels like you’ve stripped away all irrelevant noise and only the essence, The Underlying Principle, is left — the signal, in the language of information theory. However, that noise you just dismissed as irrelevant has other signals in it and sometimes people will consider them stronger, truer and more important.

The core of the concept:

Most people have somewhat moderate views and they recognize that there is a bit of truth to both of two apparently opposing narratives. This can mask fundamental differences between those appearing to be in agreement.

Like, look at this zebra:

We can all agree on what it looks like. But some of us will think of it as a white horse with black stripes and some as a black horse with white stripes, and while it doesn’t actually matter now, that might change if whether “zebras are fundamentally white” or “zebras are fundamentally black” ever becomes an issue of political importance.

In the real world zebras are (thank God) still politically neutral, but similar patterns exist. Two people with political views like:

“The free market is extremely powerful and will work best as a rule, but there are a few outliers where it won’t, and some people will be hurt so we should have a social safety net to contain the bad side effects.”

and

“Capitalism is morally corrupt and rewards selfishness and greed. An economy run for the people by the people is a moral imperative, but planned economies don’t seem to work very well in practice so we need the market to fuel prosperity even if it is distasteful.”

. . . have very different fundamental attitudes but may well come down quite close to each other in terms of supported policies. If you model them as having one “main signal” (basic attitude) paired with a corrective to account for how the basic attitude fails to match reality perfectly, then this kind of difference is understated when the conversation is about specific issues (because then signals plus correctives are compared and the correctives bring “opposite” people closer together) but overstated when the conversation is about general prin

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