trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Social media probably not a deathtrap
by eukaryote — 2017-10-07T03:54:36.211Z

I'm underwhelmed and unconvinced by the recent burst of content that has strong flavors of “social media is a deathtrap, millennials are consumed in a never-ending race to signal status, and technology devouring people’s lives is a huge problem.” I think it's getting at something, but to me, none of it adequately addresses:

You can get large amounts of value out of the internet, etc, that you literally couldn’t get otherwise.

Sure, Facebook is a website that profits off of my use and operates via a slot-machine type content dispenser. It's also how I plan to go to events, talk to my best friends, and stay up to date on developments in my field.

More broadly: online friendships, learning everything about anything, finding communities, making art for fun, finding out you're not alone in meaningful ways, changing your life path and worldview, watching Jessica Jones, etc. This includes reflection, relaxation, connection, opportunities for introspection, etc.

A lot of social media is mindlessly looking for attention and crafting an image. Sure. I guess this is a little concerning, but a lot of any interaction is this. Did you know people used to wear corsets? Daily? That was probably just rich people, I'm not sure, but... petticoats? Bustles? What do you think makeup or a tie is? At least when I spend five minutes anhedonically refreshing Tumblr to see if anyone liked my meme, I can do it from my home in sweatpants.

When people have no enjoyable spare time, or literally cannot take a day off work once a week, I think that mostly, they already have correctly recognized that this a problem, and would vastly prefer that this not be the case.

(I wonder if the authors are thinking specifically of Silicon Valley-type people who make vast amounts of money and still work 10-hour days and don't take weekends off. If this is the case, I'm sympathetic but perhaps a specifically directed appeal is in order - I think these are the minority of people who are overworked.)

It would certainly be nice if I could walk to my friends' and partners’ houses, but this problem is actually frequently solved by public transit and cars. When it's not, or you know you'd be much happier if you moved but can't, see the previous bullet point.

Etc.

I'm sure lots of people could use more slack or leisure in their life, or the ability to step aw

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Clueless World vs. Loser World
by michael_vassar2 — 2017-10-07T00:03:18.045Z

In reply to Different Worlds;

It was a huge disappointment for me when Ben Hoffman compellingly argued in favor of parallel social worlds coexisting unobtrusively adjacent to one another without causing a large shift in our community discourse. It was consequentially a huge source of relief when the blog of record, made a similar argument almost exactly a year later, and the discussion was everything I could have hoped for.

The most common type of comment appeared to be the relating of instances where type two errors would have been natural if group identifiers were reversed. Such stories make good morality tales for an ethos that fears apophenia and endorses Hanlon's Razor in spite of Hanlon's Dodge. Most SSC readers reported having a low tendency to perceive threats, which is what one would expect from either the type one error heavy tone of the blog or the requirements of signaling. My favorite comment pointed out that even when people don't consciously notice threats, if they have a functioning amygdala, they are still regularly taking action to protect themselves from a mix of perceived threats which tolerates a much higher risk of type two error than they might accept when forming a narrative.

Another common sort of comment echoed James Damore in suggesting that complaints about gender discrimination come only from people who aren't good at engineering. Somewhat related were comments that suggested that people ought to leave workplaces where harassment occurs. Both of these attitudes presuppose the perspective that jobs are readily available and that people ought to try to excel in the objectively measurable. Unfortunately, the reality is that under any possible social arrangement, most people are not going to be exceptionally good in the domains that are most rewarded by society. For those who can afford not to play politics whether due to their excellence in engineering or in camming, it's wise to maintain a low sensitivity to threats. This avoids feeding the trolls and protects them from the self-fulfilling prophecies which can arise out of threat sensitivity. For the 80% of corporate employees who aren't at the top however, politics is the only way they can be in the game at all. Their higher threat sensitivity may exhaust them and leave them unhappy, but it allows them to capture more value than they contr

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Running a Futurist Institute.
by fowlertm — 2017-10-06T17:05:47.589Z

Hello,

My name is Trent Fowler, and I'm an aspiring futurist. To date I have given talks on two continents on machine ethics, AI takeoff dynamics, secular spirituality, existential risk, the future of governance, and technical rationality. I have written on introspection, the interface between language and cognition, the evolution of intellectual frameworks, and myriad other topics. In 2016 I began 'The STEMpunk Project', an endeavor to learn as much about computing, electronics, mechanics, and AI as possible, which culminated in a book published earlier this year.

Elon Musk is my spirit animal.

I am planning to found a futurist institute in Boulder, CO. I actually left my cushy job in East Asia to help make the future a habitable place.

Is there someone I could talk to about how to do this? Should I incorporate as a 501C3 or an LLC? What are the best ways of monetizing such an endeavor? How can I build an audience (meetup attendance has been anemic at best, what can I do about that)? And so on.

Best,

-Trent
Instrumental Rationality 2: Planning 101
by  — 2017-10-06T14:23:06.190Z

[Instrumental Rationality sequence 2/7.]

[This section goes over the planning fallacy, our cognitive bias of making overconfident predictions in our time estimates. It starts with an overview of the field and moves into some models of how human planning works. We’ll move into three techniques to plan better and end with some more practical suggestions.]

Introducing the Planning Fallacy:

[We go over the basics of how humans can make overconfident predictions in their planning. Some basic statistics to maybe scare you a little bit.]

Humans are often overconfident, and perhaps for good reason.

Back on the savannah, overconfidence might have been an effective strategy for success. If you gave off the impression of being more capable than you really were, then being overconfident and bluffing could frighten stronger opponents and avoid direct conflict.

When it comes to making plans in the modern day, however, overconfidence in planning can be unhelpful. You might be able to convince everyone (including yourself) that you’ll finish that report in three days, but, if you don’t put in the effort, it’ll still really take you a week.

There’s a lot of evidence that suggests that our thinking is often subject to the planning fallacy, a tendency to make unrealistic predictions and plans.

Below is a scattering of stats and examples from different fields to guide your intuitions at the phenomenon I’m talking about:

First, some students were asked to predict when they were 99% sure they’d finish a project. But when the researchers actually followed up with them, we found that only about 45%, less than half of the students, had actually finished by their own predicted times *1.

In a related study, students were asked to predict when they’d finish, “assuming everything went as poor as it possibly could.” Basically, their worst-case scenario. Yet, only about 30% of students finished by their own self-appointed estimate *2.

In fact, similar results were also found in Japanese and Canadian cultures, giving evidence that this is a human (and not US-culture-based) phenomenon. Students continued to make overly optimistic predictions, even when they knew the task had taken them longer last time *3.

I don’t mean to just pick on students, though. The planning fallacy is present in many, many sectors.

For example, an overview of public transportation projects found that most of them w

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10/05/2017: Development update (performance & styles)
by habryka — 2017-10-06T07:22:36.777Z

Hey Everyone, here are the latest changes I just pushed to the page:

Significant speed improvements after the initial package load. Posts should now load reliably in less than 2-3 seconds (and usually faster than that).

Some speed improvements for the first visit of the page. This is still taking far too long, but it should be a good bit better now (more on that at the end of this post)

Typography improvements for posts and comments (things now have reasonable line-height, and upvote and downvote buttons are more recognizable)

Comments are now collapsable

Various small bugfixes all over the place

A lot of internal code refactoring and cleanup (as part of making things fast)

Overall, quite happy with the last week. Let me know what you think about the changes. I particularly want to thank Max Harms who spent some of his free time to work on LessWrong for part of the last two weeks, and has been extremely helpful.

This is not the final performance update. A large part of our performance rework was sadly somewhat stopped in its tracks by a bug in Meteor I ended up discovering, so some of the biggest gains will have to wait until that has been fixed. However, we've already made quite a bit of improvements, and are reaching load times that are only half a second slower than Reddit on some of our development servers, so I think we can definitely achieve reasonably fast loading speeds.

Let me know what you think about all the latest changes, and please always feel free to add new Bugs to our Github repo (or even better, come and help fix some of the bugs yourself!). We will continue to focus on performance improvements for now, but from now on things will be more incremental, and so you should see more frequent updates and faster bugfixes.
SSC Survey Results On Trust
by Scott Alexander — 2017-10-06T05:40:00.269Z

Last post talked about individual differences in whether people found others basically friendly or hostile. The SSC survey included a sort of related question: “Are people basically trustworthy?”

The exact phrasing asked respondents to rate other people from 1 (“basically trustworthy”) to 5 (“basically untrustworthy”). 4853 people answered. The average was 2.49 – so skewed a bit towards higher trust. The overall pattern looked like this:

Trust didn’t differ by gender. Women averaged 2.56 and men 2.48, not a significant difference even with our fantastic sample size.

And I couldn’t detect it differing by race. Whites averaged 2.47 and nonwhites 2.59, which was nonsignificant despite decent sample size. Blacks were 2.81 and trended toward significance vs. whites, but the sample size was too small to be sure.

And I couldn’t detect it differing by religiousity. Committed theists (n = 506) had a trust level of 2.54, no more or less trusting than the average (and mostly atheist) SSC population.

And I couldn’t detect it differing by intelligence. There was no correlation between trust and either IQ or SAT score. There was a significant difference (p = 0.001) based on education level, all the way from PhDs at 2.35 to high school graduates only at 2.62.

There were some decent-sized differences among different US states, with more urban and liberal states being more trusting. Among the states with decent sample size, California (n = 608) was 2.43, New York (n = 298) was 2.47, and Texas (n = 143) was 2.75; the California/Texas difference was significant at p = 0.001. I was only able to eyeball rather than actually significance-test the urban/liberal correlation, but it looked pretty strong.

There were similar differences between countries. Germany (n = 192) at 2.35, the UK (n = 353) at 2.37, and Canada (n = 2.39) were all significantly more trusting than the US (n = 3124) at 2.53 – but obviously the effect wasn’t too impressive. There were only two non-western countries with remotely usable sample sizes. Brazil (n = 28) was 2.89, and India (n = 27) was 2.81. The non-western/Anglosphere difference was significant even with the low sample size. The most trusting city in the world was Toronto (n = 60), at 2.23.

There were so many professions, with such small sample sizes, that I wasn’t really co...
The Problematic Third Person Perspective
by abramdemski — 2017-10-05T20:44:57.805Z

[Epistemic status: I now endorse this again. Michael pointed out a possibility for downside risk with losing mathematical ability, which initially made me update away from the view here. However, some experience noticing what it is like to make certain kinds of mathematical progress made me return to the view presented here. Maybe don't take this post as inspiration to engage in extreme rejection of objectivity.]

There are a number of conversational norms based on the idea of an imaginary impartial observer who needs to be convinced. It's the adversarial courtroom model of conversation. Better norms, such as common crux, can be established by recognizing that a conversation is taking place between two people.

Burden-of-proof is one of these problematic ideas. The idea that there is some kind of standard which would put the burden on one person or another would only make sense if there were a judge to convince. If anything, it would be better to say the burden of proof is on both people in any argument, in the sense that they are responsible for conveying their own views to the other person. If burden-of-proof is about establishing that they "should" give in to your position, it accomplishes nothing; you need to convince them of that, not yourself. If burden-of-proof is about establishing that you don't have to believe them until they say more... well, that was true anyway, but perhaps speaks to a lack of curiosity on your part.

More generally, this external-judge intuition promotes the bad model that there are objective standards of logic which must be adhered to in a debate. There are epistemic standards which it is good to adhere to, including logic and notions of probabilistic evidence. But, if the other person has different standards, then you have to either work with them or discuss the differences. There's a failure mode of the overly rationalistic where you just get angry that their arguments are illogical and they're not accepting your perfectly-formatted arguments, so you try to get them to bow down to your standards by force of will. (The same failure mode applies to treating definitions as objective standards which must be adhered to.) What good does it do to continue arguing with them via standards you already know differ from theirs? Try to understand and engage with their real reasons rather than replacing them w...
What is the pipeline?
by  — 2017-10-05T19:25:04.736Z

Lets say we solve the attention problem and all important posts get sufficient attention and feedback. We have a happy community of people well versed in important things. What is the next step? How does a small group of people knowing important thing move the world in a better direction?

Options:

A small sub group of people splits off and does something. I believe this has happened in the past, it seems to be people who were co-located? Should we be doing more to build communities where we are.

We try and explain the important thing to effective altruists. So that we/they can execute it in that context. We would have to make sure it fit into the community norms of EAs.

Come together as a community to work on a software project or book to get the idea out into the world.

Whichever we pick we should be practicing it/them constantly so that when it is important we can do this well. We are only good at things we do.

This would be a comunity post if I could figure out how to post one.
Delegative Reinforcement Learning with a Merely Sane Advisor
by Vanessa Kosoy — 2017-10-05T14:15:45.000Z

Previously, we defined a setting called "Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning" (DIRL) in which the agent can delegate actions to an "advisor" and the reward is only visible to the advisor as well. We proved a sublinear regret bound (converted to traditional normalization in online learning, the bound is O(n2/3)) for one-shot DIRL (as opposed to standard regret bounds in RL which are only applicable in the episodic setting). However, this required a rather strong assumption about the advisor: in particular, the advisor had to choose the optimal action with maximal likelihood. Here, we consider "Delegative Reinforcement Learning" (DRL), i.e. a similar setting in which the reward is directly observable by the agent. We also restrict our attention to finite MDP environments (we believe these results can be generalized to a much larger class of environments, but not to arbitrary environments). On the other hand, the assumption about the advisor is much weaker: the advisor is only required to avoid catastrophic actions (i.e. actions that lose value to zeroth order in the interest rate) and assign some positive probability to a nearly optimal action. As before, we prove a one-shot regret bound (in traditional normalization, O(n3/4)). Analogously to before, we allow for "corrupt" states in which both the advisor and the reward signal stop being reliable.

Appendix A contains the proofs and Appendix B contains propositions proved before.

Notation

The notation K:Xk→Y means K is Markov kernel from X to Y. When Y is a finite set, this is the same as a measurable function K:X→ΔY, and we use these notations interchangeably. Given K:Xk→Y and A⊆Y (corr. y∈Y), we will use the notation K(A∣x) (corr K(y∣x)) to stand for Pry′∼K(x)[y′∈A] (corr. Pry′∼K(x)[y′=y]). Given Y is a finite set, μ∈ΔYω, h∈Y∗ and y∈Y, the notation μ(y∣h) means Prx∼μ[x|h|=y∣x:|h|=h].

Given Ω a measurable space, μ∈ΔΩ, n,m∈N, {Ak}k∈[n], {Bj}j∈[m] finite sets and {Xk:Ω→Ak}k∈[n], {Yj:Ω→Bj}j∈[m] random variables (measurable mappings), the mutual information between the joint distribution of the Xk and the joint distribution of the Yj will be denoted

Iω∼μ[X0,X1…Xn−1;Y0,Y1…Ym−1]

We will parameterize our geometric time discount by γ=e−1/t, thus all functions that were previously defined to depend on t are now considered functions of γ.

Results

We star

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Meaningfulness and the scope of experience
by Kaj_Sotala — 2017-10-05T11:30:03.863Z

I find that the extent to which I find life meaningful, seems strongly influenced by my scope of experience [1, 2].

Say that I have a day off, and there’s nothing in particular that I need to get done or think about. This makes it easy for the spatial scope of my experience to become close. My attention is most strongly drawn to the sensations of my body, nearby sounds, tempting nearby things like the warmth of the shower that I could take, the taste of a cup tea that I could prepare, or the pleasant muscle fatigue that I’d get if I went jogging in the nearby forest. The temporal scope of my experience is close as well; these are all things that are nearby in time, in that I could do them within a few minutes of having decided to do them.

Say that I don’t have a day off, and I’m trying to focus on work. My employer’s website says that our research focuses on reducing risks of dystopian futures in the context of emerging technologies; this is a pretty accurate description of what I try to do. Our focus is on really large-scale stuff, including the consequences of eventual space colonization; this requires thinking in the scale of galaxies, a vast spatial scope. And we are also trying to figure out whether there is anything we can do to meaningfully influence the far future, including hundreds if not thousands of years from now; that means taking a vast temporal scope.

It is perhaps no surprise that it is much easier to feel that things are meaningful when the scope of my experience is close, than when it is far.

My favorite theory of meaning actually comes from a slightly surprising direction: the literature on game design and analysis. In Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman define meaningful play in a game as emerging when the relationships between actions and outcomes are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game. In other words:

The consequences of your actions in a game have to be discernable: you need to have some idea of what happened as a result of your actions. If you shoot at an opponent and the opponent dies, that’s pretty clear and discernable. If you press a button and a number changes but you have no idea of what that number means or why it’s relevant, that’s not very clear nor discernable. If you don’t know what happens as a result of...
Smoking Lesion Steelman III: Revenge of the Tickle Defense
by abramdemski — 2017-10-05T07:28:30.000Z

I improve the theory I put forward last time a bit, locate it in the literature, and discuss conditions when this approach unifies CDT and EDT.

Improvements

Where I left off last time, I proposed that decisions should obey the constraint

achosen=argmaxaEP(.|A=achosen)(U|do(A=a))

IE, evidentially conditioning on the chosen action, we should still find that if we causally evaluate different actions, we make the same choice. (My notation of this continues to be rather awkward, sorry.) This is supposed to combine the advantages of CDT and EDT, since we make maximal use of the information revealed by our choice of action, but avoid confusing evidence with influence in doing so.

Really, I should have instead said that the chosen action must be among the maximal choices, so that tie-breaking behavior doesn't matter.

This constraint may be satisfied by several actions; I referred to this as a challenge of "choosing an equilibrium" by analogy to game-theoretic equilibria. I neglected to consider that it may also be satisfied by no actions.

Choosing Between Multiple Options

I mentioned a concern that choosing between equilibria using expected value might sometimes select equilibria which hide information in order to look better. This doesn't actually happen in any of the examples I discussed, because being consistent with CDT-style choice prevents the information-hiding actions from being equilibria. However, we can easily make an example where it does happen. In the suicidal smoking lesion problem, we might additionally stipulate that the smoke-lovers intrinsically prefer to be non-smoke-lovers, placing -1000 utility on smoke-loving. Then, an equilibrium which leaves a significant chance of not being a smoke-lover looks much better in expected value. So, this method of equilibrium selection would choose the equilibrium where the agent doesn't smoke (and CDT doesn't know enough to switch to smoking, since it looks possible that the agent could smoke and not die).

This makes the solution seem clear to me: we require CDT at a higher level. The error is in choosing equilibria as if the modification of information states actually modified our attributes; but, alas, the self-hating smoke-lover is a smoke-lover whether they smoke or not.

Choosing equilibria via CDT just means selecting an action by CDT, out of those actions which could be equilibria. A question arises as to what

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