trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Should You Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think?
by Arkanj3l — 2011-11-07T02:20:45.773Z

Related to: Living Luminously

Well? Should you?

Linked is a treatise on exactly this concept. If the effects of recording and classifying every thought pan out like the author says they'll pan out... well, read a (limited) excerpt (from the Introduction), and I'll let you decide whether it's worth your time.

If you do the things described in this book, you will be IMMOBILIZED for the duration of your commitment.The immobilization will come on gradually, but steadily. In the end, you will be incapable of going somewhere without your cache of notes, and will always want a pen and paper w/ you. When you do not have pen and paper, you will rely on complex memory pegging devices, described in "The Memory Book''. You will NEVER BE WITHOUT RECORD, and you will ALWAYS RECORD.

YOU MAY ALSO ARTICULATE. Your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. When someone shows you one corner, you'll have the other 3 in mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right information at the right time in the right place. It also means you may have trouble shutting up. Your mileage may vary.

You will not only be immobilized in the arena of action, but you will also be immobilized in the arena of thought. This appears to be contradictory, but it's not really. When you are writing down your thoughts, you are making them clear to yourself, but when you revise your thoughts, it requires a lot of work - you have to update old ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot of new thinking. There is also a "structural integrity'' to your old thoughts that will resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it would demand a lot of note keeping work. (Thus the notion that notebooks are best applied to things that are not changing.)

The full text is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, which is why I hesitated to post this topic in the first place. But there are probably note-taking junkies, or luminosity junkies, or otherwise interested folk amongst LW. So why not?

(Incidentally I'm reminded of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Chronofile. I wonder how he managed it, or what benefits/costs it wrought?)
Less Wrong and non-native English speakers
by kilobug — 2011-11-06T13:37:29.702Z

Hello Less Wrongers.

I'm still relatively new to the LW community, but I would like to share with you a few comments and ideas for making LW a better place for non-native English speakers.

There are two classes of people among non-native English speakers (of course, those boundaries are fuzzy) :

People who, like me, are relatively fluent in English, but not who don't have the same fluency at English as natives do.

People who don't speak much English at all.

The problems are of course different between 1. and 2., but yet I can see ways to improve things to both categories.

Moderately fluent English speakers

Being a member of 1., here are my feelings after a few months of lurking and then trying to participate a bit in LW, from my own French pov :

LW is still quite US-centric in many ways. That's not much of a problem, at least for me who is used to dealing with US citizen from IRC or other Internet places, but it still something to keep in mind. Political question of Yvain's census/survey (please Yvain don't take that personally, overall you're doing a great and useful thing with that survey, so thanks to you), your is a clear example of that, but it's much more general.

Writing an article on LW is not easy for non-native English speakers. I tried twice, and twice I got many remarks about my English skills. I don't take them badly, thanks for those who took the time to point to my mistakes and explain them so I can improve, but still, it feels like it's harder to participate.

I don't have any magical solution from 1., except for anyone to try to be more careful when stating things which are culture-dependant, but it's part of the most general problem of excepting short inferential distances.

For 2., I'm wondering if it would be possible to have some LW to volunteer to review articles done by non-native English speakers, and improve the English quality, before the article is published to LW in general. Do you think the idea is good overall ? Would any of you volunteer to do that ? If so, it would be nice to include a paragraph about it, or at least a link to a page explaining the modality (how to submit an article to that team, ...), on the Welcome to Less Wrong page.

Non-English speakers

I don't think non-English speakers (or people with only basic English skills) can reasonably participate on LW itself, of course. But there are ways to still be able t...
Anthropic Decision Theory VI: Applying ADT to common anthropic problems
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-11-06T11:50:21.148Z

A near-final version of my Anthropic Decision Theory paper is available on the arXiv. Since anthropics problems have been discussed quite a bit on this list, I'll be presenting its arguments and results in this and previous posts 1 2 3 4 5 6.

Having presented ADT previously, I'll round off this mini-sequence by showing how it behaves with common anthropic problems, such as the Presumptuous Philosopher, Adam and Eve problem, and the Doomsday argument.

The Presumptuous Philosopher

The Presumptuous Philosopher was introduced by Nick Bostrom as a way of pointing out the absurdities in SIA. In the setup, the universe either has a trillion observers, or a trillion trillion trillion observers, and physics is indifferent as to which one is correct. Some physicists are preparing to do an experiment to determine the correct universe, until a presumptuous philosopher runs up to them, claiming that his SIA probability makes the larger one nearly certainly the correct one. In fact, he will accept bets at a trillion trillion to one odds that he is in the larger universe, repeatedly defying even strong experimental evidence with his SIA probability correction.

What does ADT have to say about this problem? Implicitly, when the problem is discussed, the philosopher is understood to be selfish towards any putative other copies of himself (similarly, Sleeping Beauty is often implicitly assumed to be selfless, which may explain the diverge of intuitions that people have on the two problems). Are there necessarily other similar copies? Well, in order to use SIA, the philosopher must believe that there is nothing blocking the creation of presumptuous philosophers in the larger universe; for if there was, the odds would shift away from the larger universe (in the extreme case when only one presumptuous philosopher is allowed in any universe, SIA finds them equi-probable). So the expected number of presumptuous philosophers in the larger universe is a trillion trillion times greater than the expected number in the small universe.

Now if the philosopher is indeed selfish towards his copies, then ADT reduces to SSA-type behaviour: the philosopher will correctly deduce that in the larger universe, the other trillion trillion philosophers or so will have their decision linked with his. However, he doesn’t care about them: any benefit that ac...
[SEQ RERUN] Lost Purposes
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-06T00:14:52.216Z

Today's post, Lost Purposes was originally published on 25 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It is possible for the various steps in a complex plan to become valued in and of themselves, rather than as steps to achieve some desired goal. It is especially easy if the plan is being executed by a complex organization, where each group or individual in the organization is only evaluated by whether or not they carry out their assigned step. When this process is carried to its extreme, we get Soviet shoe factories manufacturing tiny shoes to increase their production quotas, and the No Child Left Behind Act.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[SEQ RERUN] The Hidden Complexity of Wishes
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-05T17:53:47.332Z

Today's post, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes was originally published on 24 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are a lot of things that humans care about. Therefore, the wishes that we make (as if to a genie) are enormously more complicated than we would intuitively suspect. In order to safely ask a powerful, intelligent being to do something for you, that being must share your entire decision criterion, or else the outcome will likely be horrible.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Leaky Generalizations, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Anthropic Decision Theory V: Linking and ADT
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-11-05T13:31:38.564Z

A near-final version of my Anthropic Decision Theory paper is available on the arXiv. Since anthropics problems have been discussed quite a bit on this list, I'll be presenting its arguments and results in this, subsequent, and previous posts 1 2 3 4 5 6.

Now that we've seen what the 'correct' decision is for various Sleeping Beauty Problems, let's see a decision theory that reaches the same conclusions.

Linked decisions

Identical copies of Sleeping Beauty will make the same decision when faced with same situations (technically true until quantum and chaotic effects cause a divergence between them, but most decision processes will not be sensitive to random noise like this). Similarly, Sleeping Beauty and the random man on the street will make the same decision when confronted with a twenty pound note: they will pick it up. However, while we could say that the first situation is linked, the second is coincidental: were Sleeping Beauty to refrain from picking up the note, the man on the street would not so refrain, while her copy would.

The above statement brings up subtle issues of causality and counterfactuals, a deep philosophical debate. To sidestep it entirely, let us recast the problem in programming terms, seeing the agent's decision process as a deterministic algorithm. If agent α is an agent that follows an automated decision algorithm A, then if A knows its own source code (by quining for instance), it might have a line saying something like:

Module M: If B is another algorithm, belonging to agent β, identical with A ('yourself'), assume A and B will have identical outputs on identical inputs, and base your decision on this.

This could lead, for example, to α and β cooperating in a symmetric Prisoner's Dilemma. And there is no problem with A believing the above assumption, as it is entirely true: identical deterministic algorithms on the same input do produce the same outputs. With this in mind, we give an informal definition of a linked decision as:

Linked decisions: Agent α's decisions are linked with agent β's, if both can prove they will both make the same decision, even after taking into account the fact they know they are linked.

An example of agents that are not linked would be two agents α and β, running identical algorithms A and B on identical data, e...
Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics
by lukeprog — 2011-11-05T11:06:42.308Z

Part of the Sequence: The Science of Winning at Life. Co-authored with Minda Myers and Hugh Ristik. Also see: Polyhacking.

When things fell apart between me (Luke) and my first girlfriend, I decided that kind of relationship wasn't ideal for me.

I didn't like the jealous feelings that had arisen within me. I didn't like the desperate, codependent 'madness' that popular love songs celebrate. I had moral objections to the idea of owning somebody else's sexuality, and to the idea of somebody else owning mine. Some of my culture's scripts for what a man-woman relationship should look like didn't fit my own goals very well.

I needed to design romantic relationships that made sense (decision-theoretically) for me, rather than simply falling into whatever relationship model my culture happened to offer. (The ladies of Sex and the City weren't too good with decision theory, but they certainly invested time figuring out which relationship styles worked for them.) For a while, this new approach led me into a series of short-lived flings. After that, I chose 4 months of contented celibacy. After that, polyamory. After that...

Anyway, the results have been wonderful. Rationality and decision theory work for relationships, too!

We humans compartmentalize by default. Brains don't automatically enforce belief propagation, and aren't configured to do so. Cached thoughts and cached selves can remain even after one has applied the lessons of the core sequences to particular parts of one's life. That's why it helps to explicitly examine what happens when you apply rationality to new areas of your life — from disease to goodness to morality. Today, we apply rationality to relationships.

Relationships Styles

When Minda had her first relationship with a woman, she found that the cultural scripts for heterosexual relationships didn't work for a homosexual relationship style. For example, in heterosexual dating (in the USA) the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man's lead, and that she shouldn't initiate sex herself.

In the queer community, Minda quickly found that if she passively waited for a woman to hit on her, she'd be waiting...
Tell me what you think of me
by lukeprog — 2011-11-05T01:58:23.281Z

Time and time again, honest feedback has improved my life. I have sought it out on many specific occasions, but now I have a static, anonymous way for people to give me feedback — for any reason, at any time.

You can give me feedback on my personality, my conduct, or the organization for which I work by following this link right here.

Thank you. I apologize for making a discussion post that is all about me.

I operate by Crocker's Rules.
Reforming rot13
by DanielVarga — 2011-11-04T23:41:21.315Z

rot13.com is a service frequently used here to hide spoilers. I really hate it, though. If I had the time, I would build a simple, but much better alternative. Maybe somebody has more time to do that, so I'll share my rough specification:

Dynamic. The encoding happens on the client automatically, whenever the content of the input textbox changes. No Submit key needed.

Fully client-side. No server-side script, just a static page with Javascript.

Decoded content can be reached through an encoded URL. Instead of the receiver pasting the ciphertext into the rot13.com textbox, the sender can provide an encoded URL, and the receiver simply clicks on the link. This is slightly less convenient for the sender, but is much more convenient for the (hopefully many) receivers.

Many people can decrypt parts of rot13 ciphertexts without conscious effort. This defeats the purpose. The new service could provide some alternative encryption that is not a substitution cipher. It should still be a reciprocal cipher, that is a nice property of rot13.

rot13 fails for non-ASCII characters. (rot13.com leaves them intact.) The alternative encryption should work for all Unicode strings.

Strong, password-based encryption could also be added as an extra feature. I could send you a very long URL, and tell you a password on the phone, or only tell you the password at a later date.

The only important design problem I don't know how best to solve is making the encryption work for Unicode, with the following three constraints: making it a reciprocal cypher, outputting visually nice strings, and making it map ASCII to ASCII. One possible solution is to drop the constraint that it is a reciprocal cypher. For this service it is probably not crucial anyway: the ciphertext can be base64, with some escape prefix distinguishing it from plaintext.

After writing the above, I found this LW thread: Does anyone else find ROT13 spoilers as annoying as I do? There were several suggestions there, and two of the commenters, sketerpot and LightningRose even coded their own solutions to the spoiler problem. Each solution had some merit, and LightningRose's in particular was far superior to the rot13.com site I used to use, but basically, they only dealt with the third point of my proposal.
Is there anything like what I envision? Is anyone interested in building it? What changes or extra features would you lik...
A clever argument for buying lottery tickets
by RolfAndreassen — 2011-11-04T23:19:08.225Z

I use the phrase 'clever argument' deliberately: I have reached a conclusion that contradicts the usual wisdom around here, and want to check that I didn't make an elementary mistake somewhere.

Consider a lottery ticket that costs $100 for a one-in-ten-thousand chance of winning a million dollars, expected value, $100. I can take this deal or leave it, and of course a realistic ticket actually costs 100+epsilon where epsilon covers the arranger's profit, which is a bad deal.

But now consider this deal in terms of time. Suppose I've got a well-paid job in which it takes me an hour to earn that $100. Suppose further that I work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, and that my living expenses are a modest $40k a year, making my yearly savings $160k. Then, with 4% interest on my $160k yearly, it would take me about 5.5 years to accumulate that million dollars, or 11000 hours. Also note that with these assumptions, once I have my million I don't need to work any more.

It seems to me that, given the assumptions above, I could view the lottery deal as paying one hour of my life for a one-in-ten-thousand chance to win 11000 hours, expected value, 1.1 hours. (Note that leisure hours when young are probably worth more, since you'll be in better health to enjoy it; but this is not necessary to the argument.)

Of course it is possible to adjust the numbers. For example, I could scrimp and save during my working years, and make my living expenses only 20k; in that case it would take me less than 5 years to accumulate the million, and the ticket goes back to being a bad deal. Alternatively, if I spend more than 40k a year, it takes longer to accumulate the million; in this case my standard of living drops when I retire to live off my 4% interest, but the lottery ticket becomes increasingly attractive in terms of hours of life.

I think, and I could be mistaken, that the reason this works is that the rate at which I'm indifferent between money and time changes with my stock of money. Since I work for 8 hours a day at $100 an hour, we can reasonably conclude that I'm *roughly* indifferent between an hour and $100 at my current wealth. But I'm obviously not indifferent to the point that I'd work 24 hours a day for $2400, nor 0 hours a day for $0. Further, once I have accumulated my million dollars (or more generally, enough money to live off the interest), my indifference level become...
[link] Back to the trees
by  — 2011-11-04T22:06:39.148Z

So we say we know evolution is an alien god, which can do absolutely horrifying things to creatures. And surely we are aware that includes us, but how exactly does one internalize something like that? Something so at odds with default cultural intuitions. It may be just my mood tonight, but this short entry on the West Hunter (thanks Glados) blog really grabbed my attention and in a few short paragraphs on a hypothesis regarding the Hobbits of Flores utterly changed how I grok Eliezer's old post.

There is still doubt, but there seems to be a good chance that the Flores Hobbit was a member of a distinct hominid species, rather than some homo sap with a nasty case of microcephalic dwarfism. If this is the case, the Hobbits are likely descended from a small, Australopithecus-like population that managed to move from Africa to Indonesia without leaving any fossils in between, or from some ancient hominid (perhaps homo erectus) that managed to strand themselves on Flores and then shrank, as many large animals do when isolated on islands.

Island dwarfing of a homo erectus population is the dominant idea right now. However, many proponents are really bothered by how small the Hobbit’s brain was. At 400 cc, it was downright teeny, about the size of a chimpanzee’s brain. Most researchers seem to think that hominid brains naturally increase in size with time. They also suspect that anyone with a brain this small couldn’t be called sentient – and the idea of natural selection driving a population from sentience to nonsentience bothers them.

They should get over it. Hominid brain volume has increased pretty rapidly over the past few million years, but the increase hasn’t been monotonic. It’s decreased about 10% over the past 25,000 years. Moreover, we know of examples where natural selection has caused drastic decreases in organismal complexity – for example, canine venereal sarcoma, which today is an infectious cancer, but was once a dog.

I have to break here to note that was the most awesome fact I have learned in some time.

There is a mechanism that might explain what happened on Flores – partial mutational meltdown. Classic mutational meltdown occurs when a population is too small for too long. Selection is inefficient in such a small population: alleles that decrease fi

...
On the fragility of values
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-11-04T18:15:01.512Z

Programming human values into an AI is often taken to be very hard because values are complex (no argument there) and fragile. I would agree that values are fragile in the construction; anything lost in the definition might doom us all. But once coded into a utility function, they are reasonably robust.

As a toy model, let's say the friendly utility function U has a hundred valuable components - friendship, love, autonomy, etc... - assumed to have positive numeric values. Then to ensure that we don't lose any of these, U is defined as the minimum of all those hundred components.

Now define V as U, except we forgot the autonomy term. This will result in a terrible world, without autonomy or independence, and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth (or there would, except the AI won't let us do that). Values are indeed fragile in the definition.

However... A world in which V is maximised is a terrible world from the perspective of U as well. U will likely be zero in that world, as the V-maximising entity never bothers to move autonomy above zero. So in utility function space, V and U are actually quite far apart.

Indeed we can add any small, bounded utility to W to U. Assume W is bounded between zero and one; then an AI that maximises W+U will never be more that one expected 'utiliton' away, according to U, from one that maximises U. So - assuming that one 'utiliton' is small change for U - a world run by an W+U maximiser will be good.

So once they're fully spelled out inside utility space, values are reasonably robust, it's in their initial definition that they're fragile.