trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Cognitive Costs to Doing Things
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2011-05-02T09:13:17.840Z

What's the mental burden of trying to do something? What's it cost? What price are you going to pay if you try to do something out in the world.

I think that by figuring out what the usual costs to doing things are, we can reduce the costs and otherwise structure our lives so that it's easier to reach our goals.

When I sat down to identify cognitive costs, I found seven. There might be more. Let's get started -

Activation Energy - As covered in more detail in this post, starting an activity seems to take a larger of willpower and other resources than keeping going with it. Required activation energy can be adjusted over time - making something into a routine lowers the activation energy to do it. Things like having poorly defined next steps increases activation energy required to get started. This is a major hurdle for a lot of people in a lot of disciplines - just getting started.

Opportunity cost - We're all familiar with general opportunity cost. When you're doing one thing, you're not doing something else. You have limited time. But there also seems to be a cognitive cost to this - a natural second guessing of choices by taking one path and not another. This is the sort of thing covered by Barry Schwartz in his Paradox of Choice work (there's some faulty thought/omissions in PoC, but it's overall valuable). It's also why basically every significant military work ever has said you don't want to put the enemy in a position where their only way out is through you - Sun Tzu argued always leaving a way for the enemy to escape, which splits their focus and options. Hernan Cortes famously burned the boats behind him. When you're doing something, your mind is subtly aware and bothered by the other things you're not doing. This is a significant cost.

Inertia - Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote that humans are "Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers." He was speaking in terms of large scale evolution, but this is also true of our day to day affairs. Whatever personal adaptations and routines we've gotten into, we tend to perpetuate. Usually people do not break these routines unless a drastic event happens. Very few people self-scrutinize and do drastic things without an external event happening.

The difference between activation energy and inertia is that you can want to do something, but be having a hard time getting started - that's activation energy. Whereas inertia sugg...
SIAI - An Examination
by BrandonReinhart — 2011-05-02T07:08:30.768Z

12/13/2011 - A 2011 update with data from the 2010 fiscal year is in progress. Should be done by the end of the week or sooner.

Disclaimer

I am not affiliated with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

I have not donated to the SIAI prior to writing this.

I made this pledge prior to writing this document.

Notes

Images are now hosted on LessWrong.com.

The 2010 Form 990 data will be available later this month.

It is not my intent to propagate misinformation. Errors will be corrected as soon as they are identified.

Introduction

Acting on gwern's suggestion in his Girl Scout Cookie analysis, I decided to look at SIAI funding. After reading about the Visiting Fellows Program and more recently the Rationality Boot Camp, I decided that the SIAI might be something I would want to support. I am concerned with existential risk and grapple with the utility implications. I feel that I should do more.

I wrote on the mini-boot camp page a pledge that I would donate enough to send someone to rationality mini-boot camp. This seemed to me a small cost for the potential benefit. The SIAI might get better at building rationalists. It might build a rationalist who goes on to solve a problem. Should I donate more? I wasn’t sure. I read gwern’s article and realized that I could easily get more information to clarify my thinking.

So I downloaded the SIAI’s Form 990 annual IRS filings and started to write down notes in a spreadsheet. As I gathered data and compared it to my expectations and my goals, my beliefs changed. I now believe that donating to the SIAI is valuable. I cannot hide this belief in my writing. I simply have it.

My goal is not to convince you to donate to the SIAI. My goal is to provide you with information necessary for you to determine for yourself whether or not you should donate to the SIAI. Or, if not that, to provide you with some direction so that you can continue your investigation.

The SIAI's Form 990's are available at GuideStar and Foundation Center. You must register in order to access the files at GuideStar.

2002 (Form 990-EZ)

2003 (Form 990-EZ)

2004 (Form 990-EZ)

2005 (Form 990)

2006 (Form 990)

2007 (Form 990)

2008 (Form 990-EZ)

2009 (Form 990)

SIAI Financial Overview

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) is a public organization working to reduce existential risk from fu...
Berkeley LW Meet-Up Saturday May 7
by LucasSloan — 2011-05-02T04:07:46.851Z

Hey everyone! It is once again the time of the month when all the LW-folk in the SF Bay Area get together. As usual, we will be meeting at the Oxford Street Starbucks at 7 pm and then moving to the Valley Life Sciences Building on the UC Berkeley Campus. We will make time for people to get take out dinner from restaurants in downtown Berkeley, to be eaten at the VLSB. This is great time to meet the Bay Area Less Wrong community, and I welcome newcomers and, from the old hands, guests.

If you enjoy LW meetups, and want to go to them more often, there is the weekly meetup in Berkeley, which also meets at the Oxford Street Starbucks, on Wednesdays at 7. This week we will be having a party. To receive regular information about the LW events planned in the Bay Area, please sign up for the Google Group.

For those in the South Bay, there is a weekly meet up at Tortuga on Thursdays. There is a LW sequences study session from 7 to 7:30, with the meet up starting at 7:30. For more information, please join their Google Group.
Rationality Quotes: May 2011
by CronoDAS — 2011-05-02T02:33:45.352Z

It looks like, this month, I get to be the one to start the quotes thread.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
[Altruist Support] LW Go Foom
by Giles — 2011-05-02T02:22:17.129Z

In which I worry that the Less Wrong project might go horribly right. This post belongs to my Altruist Support sequence.

Every project needs a risk assessment.

There's a feeling, just bubbling under the surface here at Less Wrong, that we're just playing at rationality. It's rationality kindergarten. The problem has been expressed in various ways:

not a whole lot of rationality

rationalist porn for daydreamers

not quite as great as everyone seems to think

shiny distraction

only good for certain goals

And people are starting to look at fixing it. I'm not worried that their attempts - and mine - will fail. At least we'd have fun and learn something.

I'm worried that they will succeed.

What would such a Super Less Wrong community do? Its members would self-improve to the point where they had a good chance of succeeding at most things they put their mind to. They would recruit new rationalists and then optimize that recruitment process, until the community got big. They would develop methods for rapidly generating, classifying and evaluating ideas, so that the only ideas that got tried would be the best that anyone had come up with so far. The group would structure itself so that people's basic social drives - such as their desire for status - worked in the interests of the group rather than against it.

It would be pretty formidable.

What would the products of such a community be? There would probably be a self-help book that works. There would be an effective, practical guide to setting up effective communities. There would be an intuitive, practical guide to human behavior. There would be books, seminars and classes on how to really achieve your goals - and only the materials which actually got results would be kept. There would be a bunch of stuff on the Dark Arts too, no doubt. Possibly some AI research.

That's a whole lot of material that we wouldn't want to get into the hands of the wrong people.

Dangers include:

Half-rationalists: people who pick up on enough memes to be really dangerous, but not on enough to realise that what they're doing might be foolish. For example, building an AI without adding the friendliness features.

Rationalists with bad goals: Someone could rationally set about trying to destroy humanity, just for the lulz.

Dangerous information discovered: e.g. the rationalist community develops a Theory of Everything that reveals a recipe for a p

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Ethics and rationality of suicide
by anonymous259 — 2011-05-02T01:38:45.629Z

I was saddened to learn of the recent death by suicide of Chris Capel, known here as pdf23ds. I didn't know him personally, but I was an occasional reader of his blog. In retrospect, I regret not having ever gotten into contact with him. Obviously, I don't know that I could have prevented his death, but, as one with mental-health issues myself, at least I could have made a friend, and been one to him. Now I feel a sense of disappointment that I'll never get that chance.

Having said that, I must say that I take his arguments here very seriously. I do not consider it to be automatic that every suicide is the "wrong" decision. We can all imagine circumstances under which we would prefer to die than live; and given this, we should also be able to imagine that these kinds of circumstances may vary for different people. And if one is already accepting of euthanasia for incurable physical suffering, it should not be that much of a leap to accept it for incurable psychological suffering as well.

Of course, as Chris acknowledges, this doesn't imply that everyone who is contemplating suicide is actually being rational. People may for instance be severely mistaken about their prospects for improvement, especially while in the midst of acute crisis.(Conceivably, that could even have been his own situation.) Nonetheless, I think many of the usual arguments that people use to show that suicide is "wrong" are bad arguments. For example, consider what is probably the most common argument: that committing suicide will inflict pain upon friends and family. It frankly strikes me as absurd (and grotesquely unempathetic) to suppose that someone for whom life is so painful that they would rather die somehow has an obligation to continue enduring it just in order to spare other people the emotion of grief (which they are inevitably going to have to confront at some point anyway, at least until we conquer all death).

Ironically, society's demonization of suicide and suicidal people has negative consequences even from the standpoint of preventing suicide itself, as Chris points out:

I passionately hate that all of the mental health people are obligated by law to commit me to an asylum if they think I’m about to kill myself. They can’t be objective. You know, if they could talk to me without such stupid constraints, they might have prevented this very

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Ottawa LW meetup, May 9, 7pm; Bayes study group, May 5, 9pm
by Cyan — 2011-05-02T01:04:07.300Z

Less Wrong meeting:

Date: Monday May 9, 7:00pm until at least 9:00pm.

Venue: Fox and Feather, private room 1 (upstairs behind the pool tables)

Bayes study group: Anyone in the region interested in learning how to do Bayesian statistics is welcome to join us. High school algebra and calculus are the prerequisites for Bayes, but if you don't know them, I'll be happy to teach them to you. We'll be using the statistical package R (http://cran.r-project.org/) as a platform, so bring your laptop if you have one.

Date: Thursday May 5, 9:00pm to 10:00pm.

Venue: 347 Preston St., cafe seating behind the security desk. (Andrew can't make it out to Will's this week, and Chris has difficulty getting there in general, so we'll stick with the Preston Street venue for this week at least.)
On Being Okay with the Truth
by lukeprog — 2011-05-02T00:17:12.817Z

On January 11, 2007, I timidly whispered to myself: "There is no God."

And with that, all my Christian dreams and hopes and purposes and moral systems came crashing down.

I wrote a defiant email to the host of an atheist radio show I'd been listening to:

I was coming from a lifetime high of surrendering… my life to Jesus, releasing myself from all cares and worries, and filling myself and others with love. Then I began an investigation of the historical Jesus… and since then I’ve been absolutely miserable. I do not think I am strong enough to be an atheist. Or brave enough. I have a broken leg, and my life is much better with a crutch… I’m going to seek genuine experience with God, to commune with God, and to reinforce my faith. I am going to avoid solid atheist arguments, because they are too compelling and cause for despair. I do not WANT to live in an empty, cold, ultimately purposeless universe in which I am worthless and inherently alone.

I was not okay with the truth. I had been taught that meaning and morality and hope depended on God. If God didn't exist, then life was meaningless.

My tongue felt like cardboard for a week.

But when I pulled my head out of the sand, I noticed that millions of people were living lives of incredible meaning and morality and hope without gods. The only thing I had 'lost' was a lie, anyway.

This crisis taught me a lesson: that I could be okay with the truth.

When I realized that I am not an Unmoved Mover of my own actions, I was not much disturbed. I realized that 'moral responsibility' still mattered, because people still had reasons to condemn, praise, punish, and reward certain actions in others. And I realized that I could still deliberate about which actions were likely to achieve my goals, and that this deliberation would affect my actions. Apples didn't stop falling from trees when Einstein's equations replaced Newton's, and humans didn't stop making conscious choices that have consequences when we discovered that we are fully part of nature.

I didn't freak out when I gave up moral absolutism, either. I had learned to be okay with the truth. Whatever is meant by 'morality', it remains the case that agents have reasons to praise and condemn certain desires and actions in other agents, and that there are more reasons to praise and condemn some actions than others.

I've gone throug...
[SEQ RERUN] Just Lose Hope Already
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-05-01T21:08:42.324Z

Today's post, Just Lose Hope Already, was originally published on 25 February 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Casey Serin owes banks 2.2 million dollars after lying on mortgage applications in order to simultaneously buy 8 different houses in different states. The sad part is that he hasn't given up - hasn't declared bankruptcy, and just attempted to purchase another house. While this behavior seems merely stupid, it recalls Merton and Scholes of Long-Term Capital Management who made 40% profits for three years and then lost it all when they overleveraged. Each profession has rules on how to be successful which makes rationality seem unlikely to help greatly in life. Yet it seems that one of the greater skills is not being stupid, which rationality does help with.

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 Politics is the Mind-Killer, 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.
What would an Incandescence about FAI look like?
by VNKKET — 2011-05-01T20:30:43.049Z

This post spoils Greg Egan's Incandescence.

Incandescence is a success story about some people who notice an existential threat and avoid it using science and engineering. We see them figure out how gravity works, which is more interesting than it might sound, partly because their everyday experiences are full of gravitational effects that we don't notice on Earth. At first they do science out of pure curiosity, but it turns into an urgent collective action problem when they discover that their orbit will lead them towards all sorts of disasters, including falling into a black hole. The solution, it turns out, is to move some dirt around.

Has anyone considered writing a success story about using Friendly AI to solve an existential threat?
[Altruist Support] How to determine your utility function
by Giles — 2011-05-01T06:33:52.080Z

Follows on from HELP! I want to do good.

What have I learned since last time? I've learned that people want to see an SIAI donation; I'll do it as soon as PayPal will let me. I've learned that people want more "how" and maybe more "doing"; I'll write a doing post soon, but I've got this and two other background posts to write first. I've learned that there's a nonzero level of interest in my project. I've learned that there's a diversity of opinions; it suggests if I'm wrong, then I'm at least wrong in an interesting way. I may have learned that signalling low status - to avoid intimidating outsiders - may be less of a good strategy than signalling that I know what I'm talking about. I've learned that I am prone to answering a question other than that which was asked.

Somewhere in the Less Wrong archives there is a deeply shocking, disturbing post. It's called Post Your Utility Function.

It's shocking because basically no-one had any idea. At the time I was still learning but I knew that having a utility function was important - that it was what made everything else make sense. But I didn't know what mine was supposed to be. And neither, apparently, did anyone else.

Eliezer commented 'in prescriptive terms, how do you "help" someone without a utility function?'. This post is an attempt to start to answer this question.

Firstly, what the utility function is and what it's not. It belongs to the field of instrumental rationality, not epistemic rationality; it is not part of the territory. Don't expect it to correspond to something physical.

Also, it's not supposed to model your revealed preferences - that is, your current behavior. If it did then it would mean you were already perfectly rational. If you don't feel that's the case then you need to look beyond your revealed preferences, toward what you really want.

In other words, the wrong way to determine your utility function is to think about what decisions you have made, or feel that you would make, in different situations. In other words, there's a chance, just a chance, that up until now you've been doing it completely wrong. You haven't been getting what you wanted.

So in order to play the utility game, you need humility. You need to accept that you might not have been getting what you want, and that it might hurt. All those little subgoals, they might just have been getting you nowhere more quickly.

So only play ...
Mitigating Social Awkwardness
by Cayenne — 2011-05-01T00:54:55.746Z

Edit - many apologies to anyone that feels that this discussion was a waste of time.

I just ran across an article (http://techno-anthropology.blogspot.com/2011/04/rough-guide-to-social-skills-for.html) on Hacker News that gives the barest minimum of a guide for social interaction. Unfortunately this isn't the high-quality advice you need to really handle social situations, though it will help with a few of the worst problems.

A few other rules that will help:

Don't intrude on a conversation no matter how stupid or incorrect the arguments on either side are. No matter how you try, you will have turned your attempt to help into an intrusion into their social territory, and they will respond aggressively.

Don't assume that being smart is the same thing as social authority; seeing that people are going the wrong way and telling them won't work. This is really social territory again, you're trying to take leadership.

Don't assume that people equate brilliance and desirability. Don't even assume that people can tell that you're brilliant after talking to you for a while. Even if they do, they may not value brilliance.

Learn to listen to people. Conversations have a natural pause inserted between concepts that is an opportunity for the other person to respond. Do not talk over anyone, instead wait for that pause. Try to stay on the same topic as the previous speaker, or a related topic. Avoid jumping back more than one previous topic without explicitly saying something like "I had a few more questions about <topic>," unless they do it first in the same conversation.

To have a conversation with someone, ask them about their interests and when you find one that doesn't bore you talk about that. Try very hard not to talk about yourself unless they specifically ask first, and try to focus on what they have to say instead of what you have to say. If you are successful, they will give you opportunities to talk about your insights naturally. Avoid direct challenges; if you disagree then ask a question that exposes a hole, or say "it seems to me that ..."

Conversations share a volume, and speaking at the same volume as someone else is a signal to them that you are part of their conversation.

Avoid completing other people's words or sentences for them to speed up the conversation.

If people don't laugh at your joke, don't explain it. Just continu

...
META: application for adminship on the wiki
by gwern — 2011-04-30T22:15:06.002Z

So, as people have probably noticed, there's fairly regular vandalism on the LW wiki which has been taking a while to address and which regular users have been trying to cope with by moving and blanking pages. This is a little silly - it doesn't resolve the problem and just generates more noise in the RSS feed for Recent Changes (to which I've long subscribed).

We need more administrators.

I suggest myself. I'm a longtime LWer with high karma, so I can't be too crazy. More to the point, I currently handle vandalism as an administrator on the Haskell wiki and have done so ~July 2010; I was formerly an administrator on the English Wikipedia (where I have been a contributor since ~2005); nor have I abused access that has been given to me elsewhere (eg. my shell account on http://community.haskell.org, the commit bit on the PredictionBook.com repo, etc.). In general, I think of myself as a wiki-savvy and trustworthy guy.

Administrators are created by bureaucrats; there are currently 3. Rather than simply message Yudkowsky or Matt of Trike, I thought I'd make my request public along the line of Wikipedia's Requests for Adminship.

If people object, please leave comments; if there are any other users who would like to be admins (David Gerard comes to mind as someone I know from Wikipedia and would trust as a LW wiki admin), likewise.
Phoenix Less Wrong Meetup- Saturday, 5-7-11, 5pm
by Danny_Hintze — 2011-04-30T21:04:56.019Z

We're excited to have a second Phoenix meetup. As always, absolutely anyone is welcome. This time we'd like to change the location to the Barrett Honors College Dining Hall at ASU (It's extremely nice and has excellent food). I'll be there from 5 to 7 on Saturday and have a copy of Godel, Escher, Bach on the table.

The address is 698-798 Apache Blvd E, Tempe, AZ, and here it is on a map. The parking garage on Lemon is probably ideal, Barrett is south of that.

My phone number is 602-501-9420, feel free to call or text me.