trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Murphy’s Quest Postmorterm
by alkjash — 2018-03-11T20:10:00.818Z

Kudos to lifelonglearner for amazing cover art that is also an example of Murphy’s Law.

The full text of Murphy’s Quest (with many corrections) is now available in PDF.

Introduction

Having been kept away from expository writing for a week, I have all too many thoughts to express. This post will contain a long mishmash of my feelings about fiction-writing experienced during my week-long adventure into Murphy’s Quest. I have tried on at least three occasions in the past to write full-length novels, but this is the first product I would consider readable. This postmortem is a combination of how those projects failed, and why this one didn’t.

Better writers have given writing advice. However, due to the phenomenon I once called Teaching Ladders, the fundamentals I learned writing my first viable story may be more useful to the beginning writer than the grand strategies employed by masters.

If there is a single black hole remaining in my writing, it would be that I still have no idea how to write extended and psychologically dramatic scenes involving multiple thinking characters. The number of variables spins out of control too rapidly. Any ideas about how anyone has ever managed this would be appreciated.

The first section will describe my motivation for writing in the style of a light novel in particular.

The second section will describe the many technical details of writing I discovered along the way. In my opinion, the technical aspect of writing is altogether undervalued, and I would go so far as to say that cleaner writing directly produces cleaner thinking.

Motivation

I want this post to serve as encouragement for people to put out more rationalist-adjacent fiction online. HPMoR is an impossible the standard to live up to, but pretty much anyone could write at the level of Murphy’s Quest. And people still enjoyed reading it!

1. Light Novels

The aesthetic for Murphy’s Quest came from Eliezer’s wonderful light novels Dark Lord’s Answer and A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero?! and the rabbit-hole of Japanese light novels they led me down. When I read the medium I instantly knew that I would not be writing full-length novels for a long long time.

First of all, there’s an unbelievable psychological gap between writing a short story – which takes no more than a day or two – and a full-length novel – which takes at bare minimum a month. As far as I can tel...
ESPR 2018 Applications Are Open
by  — 2018-03-11T20:07:45.460Z

A few months ago, I wrote about some of the things that happened in ESPR 2017.

Applications are once again open for this year!

If you're between the ages of 16-19 and want to meet other intellectually curious students for chats about math, rationality, and psychology, I'd highly recommend applying!

Happy to answer any questions people have either below or via PMs.
Types of Confusion Experiences
by Hazard — 2018-03-11T14:32:36.363Z

The past week I've been using a tally counter alongside my TAPs. The trigger was a very general notice confusion, and the only action was paying attention and clicking the tally counter. This has helped be break down and separate different concepts that I’d been lumping together into the monolithic bundle of “confusion”.

Here are some sliders that a given “confusion experience” can have

Surprise: The experience of realizing that what you would have predicted is not how things turned out.

Update: In the face of surprise, what changes within your mind.

Confusion: The experience of some internal consistency checker setting off an alarm.

With those three sliders in mind, here are some recurring types of “confusion experience” that I’ve noticed.

---------------------------------------------

Oh shit, of course!

Strong surprise, strong update, no confusion.

Ex. “What? I was sure that would compile! Oh shit, I fucked up some for loop variables.”

Nothing special to say about these. Ideally everything would be like this.

Hmmm, weird…

Faint surprise, wimpy update, faint confusion.

Ex. “Hmmm, it’s weird that they have a tutoring appointment planned for the friday of spring break. I guess that’s just how they role.” (I read the schedule wrong, and there was no tutoring over spring break)

These are the super sneaky one’s that I’m trying to get better at handling. Most times when I screw up by being wrong, I can remember the feeling of “Hmmmm, weird…” and never acting on it.

Am I being followed?

No surprise, no update, faint to strong confusion.

Ex. “I’ve got a sinking feeling that there’s something deeply broken about this code, but I’m not sure what.”

Because there’s nothing actively surprising, there are no obvious leads on where to look. It seems like following up on these involves overcoming the pressure to go, “Everything is fine and there’s nothing to worry about.” Often, if I sit with this confusion and slowly ask it questions, I can figure out where the problem is.

Why are the gods punishing me?

Strong surprise, no update, faint/no confusion

Ex. “The debugger keeps telling me that there is no tag field, but that can’t be true, so I’ve got no idea why this isn’t working.”

“Hmmm, Mike says he doesn’t understand what I’m saying, but that can’t possibly be true, so maybe if I just explain it again…”

This one is harder to describe. Some new data creates surprise and indicates that som...
Murphy’s Quest Ch 13: Existential Risk
by alkjash — 2018-03-11T07:10:00.683Z

FTH: -23335

The first battle is a rout.

Surrounded by a dedicated defensive squad, I pummel the enemy with gigantic balls of death. Negative FTH Heal deals an entirely new category of damage, completely bypassing Damage Reduction. I call it my Bubble of Doom.

After the battle, we track the trails of my orbs for thousands of feet. Crimson Inquisitor swords, chimes and robes scatter across the ground in long rows. Entire platoon vaporized in place, their equipment laid out in neat, legible squares.

Some of the robes are fitted for children.

The reality of the carnage has yet to hit me.

“This place is a graveyard.”

Nyra touches my hand, “As it should be. This is the Valley of the Dead, after all.”

She’s still working on the whole comforting thing.

—

FTH: -27881

The enemy beats a hasty retreat, and we pounce.

The One-Eyed Raven scouts out group after group of isolated enemies left behind by the larger force.

At my insistence, Nyra sends each group a final message: one chance to surrender.

The idiots never take it.

According to doctrine, if they surrender they will be executed and banished to Hell. This way at least, the Goddess will grant their loyal souls mercy in Heaven.

I send them there graciously.

What is it that Oppenheimer said?

I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.

—

FTH: -29316

The Inquisition pulls out all the stops. We face a new enemy: a Phoenix Rider.

One Final Boss-level Cleric rides the flaming bird, raining Holy Fire upon us from far above. He flies too fast to hit with Bubble of Doom.

“We’re taking too much damage!”

“We have to retreat!”

The army of the dead holes up in the old fort, waiting for an opportunity.

—

FTH: -30790

On the distant hilltops, well out of my range, the enemy sets up a ring of camps. They slowly begin to cast Consecrated Ground. The ring of light shrinks around us like a tightening noose.

The Phoenix Rider continues to take pot shots from on high. He begins to show frustration.

“Come out, cowards!”

The One-Eyed Raven is our only hope. Searching for a weakness.

If I have to eat any more consumables I’ll puke.

—

FTH: -31953

The enemy camps creep down into the valley, and Consecrated Ground surrounds us on all sides.

Even at midnight, it’s bright as day outside. Not as if the Dead need sleep.

Mencius orders me to switch into defensive gear.

Nyra unclasps her necklace and hands it to me. It’s a pink heart that opens up to show a ti...
Kegan and Cultivating Compassion
by  — 2018-03-11T01:32:31.217Z

[An overview of Kegan’s subject-object theory in terms of differing expectations. Worldview differences play a key role in disagreements. Using Kegan’s stages to model social relationships and expanding compassion.]

As far as fads go in the rationalist community, Robert Kegan’s constructive developmental theory and stages of human psychological development is so 2017. Right now the cool thing is triangulation, or circling, or tulpas. I’m not quite sure. Anyway, I finally got a chance to read Kegan’s In Over Our Heads, and I quite enjoyed it.

Moreover, I think that what I got from the book was quite different than what

others

have

written

about. When I see mention of Kegan, I feel like it often gets cherry-picked as a framework which enables further Bad Things. There seems to be this pervasive meme that people use Kegan’s stages of development as a way to feel superior to others.

As a strawmanned example, someone might say, “Oh, well you’re only on Kegan’s third stage, so of course it’d seem like that way to you…But me, I’m on the fourth stage, and I see it like this…”

(I’ll explain the stages briefly later on.)

I think that everyone engaging with Kegan’s ideas has actually been way too focused on specific levels in the stages of development. And the stages, as well as the transitions between them, weren’t actually the main takeaways for me. Okay, yes, subject-object theory is actually pretty cool, and it has several properties which I think rationalists will find shiny. But I think that there’s a few interesting lessons that you miss when you only focus on how to level up from one stage to the next.

Here, I’ll try to present a different reading of Kegan’s work:

First and foremost, I see Kegan as writing about the conflict between people and the roles they play. One way to characterize how this sort of conflict arises is by explaining conflict in terms of differing expectations of our internal states.

Adapting from Kegan’s opening example, let’s think of a teenager, we’ll call her Alice. Let’s say that Alice arrives home late one night after a party:

Alice’s parents will be worried and say lots of things reprimanding her (EX: “How could you do this? Didn’t you know that we were worried sick?”).

Alice will in response try to play down her behavior (“I’m only 15 minutes late! We ran into traffic on the way back!”)

And thus the argument goes.

Kegan argues that there’s a ...
Misery Pits
by Alicorn — 2018-03-10T23:50:37.820Z

This is an attempt at a description, more intensional than extensional, of a phenomenon that can adversely affect communities. I'm trying to avoid having anyone specific (especially specific-and-local) in mind while I write it; I just mean to define the phenomenon as a reference point and wave tentatively at some possible modes of address. Content warning: exercise caution if prone to psychological spirals about your value as a person.

Some people are needy. Really, really needy. Not so much in a "loan me fifty bucks" sense, although that can be an inconvenient comorbidity. More in the "stay up until 3am reassuring me that I have value... four times a week" way. In the "sudden escalation to romantic advances at tiny to negligible signs of openness" way. In the "every life setback is a catastrophic trigger leading to a monthlong mental health crisis" way. And this neediness directly reduces how rewarding it is to provide reassurance, romance, or crisis support. And if the needy person finds a source anyway, they're unlikely to improve much before the source is burned out and has to abandon them out of self-preservation.

I've taken to calling the class "misery pits", because you can throw enormous amounts of help and companionship and unconditional valuation into them and they look as deep as ever, but in general it's not paradigmatically manipulative. The need is genuine. They're really suffering! They actually need the things they ask for! It's just that they need insane amounts of upfront investment, amounts that individual humans can virtually never muster and would generally be ill-advised to try to scrape together, before they become able to do normal-person self-maintenance tasks so that any support can stick, let alone before they're able to provide normal-person friendship contributions*. They are not, typically, suited to being paired off in mutually beneficial codependence; they just don't have the resources or skills.

Non-misery-pit humans have a wide range of susceptibility to the desperation of nearby misery pits. Some people can't resist them, or certain instances of them, and pour their lives into trying to help a misery pit; they're so sad. (This is most of the adverse effect on communities I mentioned.) Some people find them repel...
Murphy’s Quest Ch 12: Meta-Contrarianism
by alkjash — 2018-03-10T23:00:00.941Z

[Any resemblance to actual persons, intentional or otherwise, is entirely coincidental.]

“Where’s Mencius?”

“In the old fort.”

Nyra leads me through the bedraggled Undead camp. Skeletons and embalmed dead make way respectfully, but they shoot me glares that send shivers up my spine.

As the creaky drawbridge to the fort lowers ponderously, she briefs me on the Dead King.

“Mencius is a wise and competent king, but he has peculiar ideas about government.”

“Such as?”

“He insists that a king is a public servant, and must be – what does he call it – democratically selected by his people on a regular basis.”

“That’s common where I come from.”

She shoots me a queer look.

—

“That’s him,” Nyra whispers as we enter the courtyard.

The skeleton she points to stands half a head shorter than his attendants, wearing sleek metal armor under a black cape. His left eye is covered by an eye-patch.

“Mencius, I’ve brought the boy.”

“Nyra, welcome home. And you must be Murphy!”

Just to be on the safe side, I bow. “Your Majesty -”

Two firm skeletal hands lift me out of the bow.

“Save the formalities. Here we are all equals, living or dead. Call me Mencius.”

“Nyra told me all about you, sir.”

“Uhoh. You must forgive an old man his crazy ideas.”

The attendants laugh a little too genuinely. A shadow flits across the few remaining sinews of Mencius’s face.

“We have a saying in my homeland: government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Mencius beams widely.

Before he can reply a raven swoops in from the heavens and lands on his outstretched hand. It has only one bulbous eye.

The courtyard falls silent.

“What have you learned, darling?”

Mencius strokes the bird with his bony fingers, and it dissolves into smoke, leaving behind the much-too-large eyeball. He pulls back his eyepatch and pops it into the waiting socket. With a flick of his a finger, the eye spins it into place.

“I’m sorry, but there’s no time for banter. The enemy will be upon us by nightfall. Will you shed blood with us, Murphy?”

In the eyes of the king of the Undead, I see what I can only describe as a triumphant call to life.

“With all my heart, sir!”

—

Nyra leads me from tent to tent, outfitting me with custom-made equipment. Had we been less pressed for time, I might have befriended the blacksmith brothers LeBrawn and LeBrain despite their heavy accents. I might have acquired a fetch quest or ten from the alchem...
The hunt of the Iuventa
by NunoSempere — 2018-03-10T20:12:13.342Z

From the January 20th 2018 issue of the German magazine Der Spiegel, the article Jagd auf Iuventa (The hunt of the Iuventa) reports on NGOs which rescue immigrants who try to reach Europe through the Mediterranean.

"One can perhaps understand what we are doing here after watching first hand how someone drowns," says a volunteer.

The crux of the article is that some volunteers have been accused of directly cooperating with smugglers, which may have brought the refugees directly to NGO ships. The volunteers deny direct cooperation.

However, in their desire to help, they have also optimized for other things, namely:

The Libyan smugglers have come to use cheaper inflatable boats, which often run out of air after several miles, trusting they will be rescued in a timely manner. And help does indeed often come [...]

The volunteers are aware of the dilemma. Of course the smugglers are going to abuse their readiness to help, says Lea Reisner; of course they are part of a system in which criminals take part. She would prefer that the problem be solved in some other way, and to be portrayed as a crazy leftist [linke Spinner] with a good heart who collaborates with smugglers makes her furious.

"We didn't create this situation in which thousands must drown in the Mediterranean," says Constantine Nestler, the doctor. "We came after the first died." He asks himself what the alternative would be: "to let tens of thousands die so that the message reaches Africa and nobody dares come? The calculus of the authorities is cynical.
Murphy’s Quest Ch 11: Resolve
by alkjash — 2018-03-10T06:40:01.081Z

As far as the eye can see, the ground is lit up by white-gold runes, tongues of blue flame and roving God Rays. The mountains ahead look like someone applied a “Heaven” filter to a demonic hellscape.

“Consecrated Ground. I’ve never seen a patch this large.”

“I’m guessing it’s not Undead-friendly?”

“You could say that. Wait here.”

Nyra walks up to the boundary of the Consecrated Ground, whispering spells under her breath.

She darts through the traps, dancing and weaving past the patchwork of holy flames, seals, and rays of light. A thousand feet into the Consecrated Ground, she’s visibly fatigued and the runes grow denser.

“Shit!” A slight misstep sets off a nearby rune, which explodes in a ring of blue fire.

Stymied, she dashes back to me.

—

“Go on without me. Consecrated Ground doesn’t hurt the living.”

“What? No way!”

“Put on these rings. This one will boost your HP, and this one will take you to Mencius when you arrive in the Valley. Show it to any Undead who trouble you.”

The girl begins slipping rings off her fingers, ignoring my protests.

“I’ll find another way.”

“Only one road leads to the Valley of the Dead,” I repeat her words back to her.

“Murphy, just go!” Nyra glares at me, “Cast Heal as soon as you see the enemy.”

Think, Murphy! There has to be a way to get her through with me.

“This is more important than me, idiot!”

Think!

The words – drawn from distant memory as if by narrative force – stumble off my tongue.

“Curious is the trapmaker’s art, his efficacy never witnessed by his own eyes.”

“What?”

“Trapmaking, however effective, is almost impossible to learn because it lacks feedback loops. Trapmakers never witness their own creations in action. So they always miss things.”

I start stripping off my clothes.

—

“What are you doing, pervert?! Have you lost your mind?”

“I’m going to keep casting Heal in your direction. Keep contact with the orb and it’ll outheal the Holy damage.”

The plan dawns on her.

“Good idea!”

I check my stats. With only my Salamander Leggings of Knowledge on, my INT comes out to 85. Heal orbs will travel at the speed of a brisk jog.

“Ready?”

“Ready!”

—

What a strange sight we must have been. The purple-haired mummy girl jogging next to a moving dark-purple orb the size of a sphere. The shirtless youth running a cautious distance behind, pausing every so often to cast another orb.

The hill steepens and grass all but disappears unde...
Unconscious Competence and Counter-Incentives
by  — 2018-03-10T06:38:34.057Z

[Some things are better done when you don’t think about them. This has an interesting extension when you consider situations where the default response does very little to actually solve things. Maybe we’ve been Goodharted by social incentives.]

Cue the

four stages of competence

.

The four stages represent a framework for modeling how people get better at a task, from unconscious to conscious incompetence, followed by conscious to unconscious competence.

In other words:

Unconscious incompetence: :“What are these two sticks for?”
Conscious incompetence: “Man, I really suck at using these chopsticks.”
Conscious competence: “Left…right…squeeze…there we go! Grabbed that cucumber slice!”
Unconscious competence: “Nomnomnom…what chopsticks?”

What gets touted as the highest stage of mastery here is that of unconscious competence, when you get so good at a task that you don’t need to focus on the task at hand to do well at it.

Some quick examples that come to mind:

Magicians are not focused on the coins hidden in their hand when they perform.
Teachers are not reviewing the content material in their heads when they teach.
Athletes are not focused on the step-by-step process of moving their feet when they run.

One common thread to observe about the above three examples is that they all involve a “performance” of sorts. Especially in the cases of physical activities, it’s easy to chalk it up to “muscle memory” and consider the case of unconscious competence closed. What is interesting for me right now, though, is the paradoxical nature of the generalized concept where thinking about how to do X well is antithetical to doing X well.

A few more examples:

Thinking about how you are going to die is not conducive to a state of mind where you can take meaningful action to change that fact.
If you’re socially anxious, focusing on how you’re talking to someone will not make it easier to hold a good conversation.
(UNSONG spoilers!) Wanting to go to Hell for the altruistic reason of saving everyone suffering there makes it impossible to get there in the first place.

There’s been a lot of talk recently on LessWrong about fake frameworks and how they relate to what’s true and/or correct. I think the above three examples do a good job of showcasing the value of framings other than the directly-optimizing/overanalyzing mindset rationalists are often stereotypically depicted as having.

And if you ...
Press Your Luck (1/3)
by Douglas_Reay — 2018-03-10T03:42:31.477Z

This is the first in a three part sequence, examining the scenario in which software development organisations might knowingly take a significant risk of unintentionally launching an AI program into inadequately supervised or controlled self-improvement, by comparing the scenario to the 'press your luck' game mechanic.

This first part explains what that mechanic is.

The mechanic

Many board games bear similarities to each other. The BoardGameGeek website lists some of these common themes. It describes the 'Press your luck' mechanic thus:

Games where you repeat an action (or part of an action) until you decide to stop > due to increased (or not) risk of losing points or your turn. Double or Quits, Keep going or stop, cash your gains or bet them. The idea is not new.

An example

Six players sit down at a table to play a game.

There are six turns, and at the end of the game, each player calculates their total score by adding up the score they got for each turn. The aim is get higher scores than as many other players as possible.

During a turn, a standard die is rolled, once every 20 seconds, in the center of the table where everyone can see it. Between rolls, players can choose to declare that they are banking, in which case their score for the turn is the sum of the rolls so far. But if the die turns up "6", the players still in go bust, and score nothing. When everyone has banked or gone bust, a bonus of 10 is added to the score of the person who banked the most (if there's a tie, nobody gets the bonus).

Analysis

If there were infinite turns, and the aim were just to make as much as possible per turn, the strategy would be simple. But with this version, how long it makes sense to stay in depends upon how much others made in previous rounds, and whether you are ahead or behind them. This competitive mechanic, were people are tempted to take higher risks in order to beat other people, is known as "Press your luck".