trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Doubling Box
by Mestroyer — 2012-08-06T05:50:19.798Z

Let's say you have a box that has a token in it that can be redeemed for 1 utilon. Every day, its contents double. There is no limit on how many utilons you can buy with these tokens. You are immortal. It is sealed, and if you open it, it becomes an ordinary box. You get the tokens it has created, but the box does not double its contents anymore. There are no other ways to get utilons.

How long do you wait before opening it? If you never open it, you get nothing (you lose! Good day, sir or madam!) and whenever you take it, taking it one day later would have been twice as good.

I hope this doesn't sound like a reductio ad absurdum against unbounded utility functions or not discounting the future, because if it does you are in danger of amputating the wrong limb to save yourself from paradox-gangrene.

What if instead of growing exponentially without bound, it decays exponentially to the bound of your utility function? If your utility function is bounded at 10, what if the first day it is 5, the second 7.5, the third 8.75, etc. Assume all the little details, like remembering about the box, trading in the tokens, etc, are free.

If you discount the future using any function that doesn't ever hit 0, then the growth rate of the tokens can be chosen to more than make up for your discounting.

If it does hit 0 at time T, what if instead of doubling, it just increases by however many utilons will be adjusted to 1 by your discounting at that point every time of growth, but the intervals of growth shrink to nothing? You get an adjusted 1 utilon at time T - 1s, and another adjusted 1 utilon at T - 0.5s, and another at T - 0.25s, etc? Suppose you can think as fast as you want, and open the box at arbitrary speed. Also, that whatever solution your present self precommits to will be followed by the future self. (Their decision won't be changed by any change in what times they care about)

EDIT: People in the comments have suggested using a utility function that is both bounded and discounting. If your utility function isn't so strongly discounting that it drops to 0 right after the present, then you can find some time interval very close to the present where the discounting is all nonzero. And if it's nonzero, you can have a box that disappears, taking all possible utility with it at the end of that interval, and that, leading up to that interval, grows the utility in intervals tha...
[SEQ RERUN] The Cartoon Guide to Lob's Theorem
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-06T05:41:44.737Z

Today's post, The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem was originally published on 17 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

An explanation, using cartoons, of Lob's theorem.

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 When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid, 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.
Self-skepticism: the first principle of rationality
by aaronsw — 2012-08-06T00:51:32.688Z

When Richard Feynman started investigating irrationality in the 1970s, he quickly begun to realize the problem wasn't limited to the obvious irrationalists.

Uri Geller claimed he could bend keys with his mind. But was he really any different from the academics who insisted their special techniques could teach children to read? Both failed the crucial scientific test of skeptical experiment: Geller's keys failed to bend in Feynman's hands; outside tests showed the new techniques only caused reading scores to go down.

What mattered was not how smart the people were, or whether they wore lab coats or used long words, but whether they followed what he concluded was the crucial principle of truly scientific thought: "a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards" to prove yourself wrong. In a word: self-skepticism.

As Feynman wrote, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." Our beliefs always seem correct to us -- after all, that's why they're our beliefs -- so we have to work extra-hard to try to prove them wrong. This means constantly looking for ways to test them against reality and to think of reasons our tests might be insufficient.

When I think of the most rational people I know, it's this quality of theirs that's most pronounced. They are constantly trying to prove themselves wrong -- they attack their beliefs with everything they can find and when they run out of weapons they go out and search for more. The result is that by the time I come around, they not only acknowledge all my criticisms but propose several more I hadn't even thought of.

And when I think of the least rational people I know, what's striking is how they do the exact opposite: instead of viciously attacking their beliefs, they try desperately to defend them. They too have responses to all my critiques, but instead of acknowledging and agreeing, they viciously attack my critique so it never touches their precious belief.

Since these two can be hard to distinguish, it's best to look at some examples. The Cochrane Collaboration argues that support from hospital nurses may be helpful in getting people to quit smoking. How do they know that? you might ask. Well, they found this was the result from doing a meta-analysis of 31 different studies. But maybe they chose a biased selection of studies? Well, they systematically sear...
[SEQ RERUN] The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem 
by Oscar_Cunningham — 2012-08-05T08:28:19.128Z

Today's post, The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem was originally published on 17 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

An explanation, using cartoons, of Lob's theorem.

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 When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid, 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.
Random question about starfish
by Raemon — 2012-08-05T02:31:55.502Z

Anyone know how long a starfish can survive on land, and if it matters especially whether there is a hot sun.

I promise this will turn out to be (at least somewhat) important and Less-Wrong relevant. Googling for the answer gives me a bunch of "wiki-answers" type sites that I don't trust and news articles that don't give me the specifics. If anyone either has marine-biologist cred, or better google-fu than me, I'd appreciate it.
What are the optimal biases to overcome?
by aaronsw — 2012-08-04T15:04:14.699Z

If you're interested in learning rationality, where should you start? Remember, instrumental rationality is about making decisions that get you what you want -- surely there are some lessons that will help you more than others.

You might start with the most famous ones, which tend to be the ones popularized by Kahneman and Tversky. But K&T were academics. They weren't trying to help people be more rational, they were trying to prove to other academics that people were irrational. The result is that they focused not on the most important biases, but the ones that were easiest to prove.

Take their famous anchoring experiment, in which they showed the spin of a roulette wheel affected people's estimates about African countries. The idea wasn't that roulette wheels causing biased estimates was a huge social problem; it was that no academic could possibly argue that this behavior was somehow rational. They thereby scored a decisive blow for psychology against economists claiming we're just rational maximizers.

Most academic work on irrationality has followed in K&T's footsteps. And, in turn, much of the stuff done by LW and CFAR has followed in the footsteps of this academic work. So it's not hard to believe that LW types are good at avoiding these biases and thus do well on the psychology tests for them. (Indeed, many of the questions on these tests for rationality come straight from K&T experiments!)

But if you look at the average person and ask why they aren't getting what they want, very rarely do you conclude their biggest problem is that they're suffering from anchoring, framing effects, the planning fallacy, commitment bias, or any of the other stuff in the sequences. Usually their biggest problems are far more quotidian and commonsensical.

Take Eliezer. Surely he wanted SIAI to be a well-functioning organization. And he's admitted that lukeprog has done more to achieve that goal of his than he has. Why is lukeprog so much better at getting what Eliezer wants than Eliezer is? It's surely not because lukeprog is so much better at avoiding Sequence-style cognitive biases! lukeprog readily admits that he's constantly learning new rationality techniques from Eliezer.

No, it's because lukeprog did what seems like common sense: he bought a copy of Nonprofits for Dummies and did what it recommends. As lukeprog himself says, it wasn't lack of intelligence or...
A cynical explanation for why rationalists worry about FAI
by aaronsw — 2012-08-04T12:27:54.454Z

My friend, hearing me recount tales of LessWrong, recently asked me if I thought it was simply a coincidence that so many LessWrong rationality nerds cared so much about creating Friendly AI. "If Eliezer had simply been obsessed by saving the world from asteroids, would they all be focused on that?"

Obviously one possibility (the inside view) is simply that rationality compels you to focus on FAI. But if we take the outside view for a second, it does seem like FAI has a special attraction for armchair rationalists: it's the rare heroic act that can be accomplished without ever confronting reality.

After all, if you want to save the planet from an asteroid, you have to do a lot of work! You have to build stuff and test it and just generally solve a lot of gritty engineering problems. But if you want to save the planet from AI, you can conveniently do the whole thing without getting out of bed.

Indeed, as the Tool AI debate as shown, SIAI types have withdrawn from reality even further. There are a lot of AI researchers who spend a lot of time building models, analyzing data, and generally solving a lot of gritty engineering problems all day. But the SIAI view conveniently says this is all very dangerous and that one shouldn't even begin to try implementing anything like an AI until one has perfectly solved all of the theoretical problems first.

Obviously this isn't any sort of proof that working on FAI is irrational, but it does seem awfully suspicious that people who really like to spend their time thinking about ideas have managed to persuade themselves that they can save the entire species from certain doom just by thinking about ideas.
Smart non-reductionists, philosophical vs. engineering mindsets, and religion
by Kaj_Sotala — 2012-08-04T10:48:20.832Z

Concretizing the abstract is an interesting blog post in that it makes a relatively cogent argument for non-reductionism. While I don't agree with it, I found it useful in that it helped me better understand how intelligent non-reductionists think. It also helped clarify to me an old distinction, that of philosophers versus engineers.

We abstract when we consider some particular aspect of a concrete thing while bracketing off or ignoring the other aspects of the thing. For example, when you consider a dinner bell or the side of a pyramid exclusively as instances of triangularity, you ignore their color, size, function, and metal or stone composition. Or to borrow an example from a recent post, when aircraft engineers determine how many passengers can be carried on a certain plane, they might focus exclusively on their average weight and ignore not only the passengers’ sex, ethnicity, hair color, dinner service preferences, etc., but even the actual weight of any particular passenger. [...]

Abstractions can be very useful, and are of themselves perfectly innocent when we keep in mind that we are abstracting. The trouble comes when we start to think of abstractions as if they were concrete realities themselves -- thereby “reifying” them -- and especially when we think of the abstractions as somehow more real than the concrete realities from which they have been abstracted. [...]

I do not mean to deny that abstractions of the sort in question may have their uses. On the contrary, the mathematical conception of matter is extremely useful, as the astounding technologies that surround us in modern life make obvious. But contrary to what some proponents of scientism suppose, it simply doesn’t follow for a moment that that conception gives us an exhaustive conception of the material world, for reasons I have stated many times (e.g. here). [...]

Then there is social science. When we abstract from concrete human beings their purely economic motivations, ignoring everything else and then reifying this abstraction, the result is homo economicus, a strange creature who, unlike real people, is driven by nothing but the desire to maximize utility. Nietzschean analyses of human motivation in terms of the will to power are less susceptible of mathematical modeling (and thus less “scientific”),

...
Meetup : Pittsburgh: Semantic Stopsigns
by KatjaGrace — 2012-08-03T22:14:18.183Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Semantic Stopsigns

WHEN:
08 August 2012 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Eatunique, Craig Street, Pittsburgh

Suggested reading: http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/
Eatunique serves salads, wraps, sandwiches, drinks, and that kind of thing. Call 412-304-6258 if you can't find us.
Our mailing list is at https://groups.google.com/group/lw-pgh?pli=1

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Semantic Stopsigns
"Epiphany addiction"
by cousin_it — 2012-08-03T17:52:47.311Z

LW doesn't seem to have a discussion of the article Epiphany Addiction, by Chris at succeedsocially. First paragraph:

"Epiphany Addiction" is an informal little term I came up with to describe a process that I've observed happen to people who try to work on their personal issues. How it works is that someone will be trying to solve a problem they have, say a lack of confidence around other people. Somehow they'll come across a piece of advice or a motivational snippet that will make them have an epiphany or a profound realization. This often happens when people are reading self-help materials and they come across something that stands out to them. People can also come up with epiphanies themselves if they're doing a lot of writing and reflecting in an attempt to try and analyze their problems.

I like that article because it describes a dangerous failure mode of smart people. One example was the self-help blog of Phillip Eby (pjeby), where each new post seemed to bring new amazing insights, and after a while you became jaded. An even better, though controversial, example could be Eliezer's Sequences, if you view them as a series of epiphanies about AI research that didn't lead to much tangible progress. (Please don't make that statement the sole focus of discussion!)

The underlying problem seems to be that people get a rush of power from neat-sounding realizations, and mistake that feeling for actual power. I don't know any good remedy for that, but being aware of the problem could help.
Rationality Quotes August 2012
by Alejandro1 — 2012-08-03T15:33:53.905Z

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

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.
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Madison, NYC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-08-03T15:21:10.113Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on July 27th, and has been moved to discussion.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Dublin, Ireland Meetup: 05 August 2012 03:00PM
Washington DC Biased Boardgames meetup: 05 August 2012 03:00PM
Brussels meetup: 11 August 2012 12:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 28 July 2018 01:30PM
Madison: Team Problem-Solving: 29 July 2012 07:00PM
Humanist Open Mic, NYC, Wednesday August 1st: 01 August 2012 02:35PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become inactive, let me know so we can present more accurate information to newcomer...
What are you working on? August 2012
by RobertLumley — 2012-08-03T15:10:05.004Z

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.

Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).

Talk about your goals for the project.

Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.

Link to your work if it's linkable.
[Link] Holistic learning ebook
by John_Maxwell — 2012-08-03T00:29:54.003Z

This ebook is kind of dopey, but it's one of the few resources I've seen where someone who's reasonably good at learning stuff tries to dissect and communicate the mental mechanisms they use for learning:

http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/Programs/HolisticLearningEBook.pdf

Here's a quick summary.

You can learn things faster and better by improving the strategies you use for learning stuff.

"Holistic" learning is opposed to "rote" learning. Holistic learners make lots of connections between different things they learn, and between things they learn and things that are personally relevant to them. An example might be this diagram of various concepts in electrostatics, which I no longer know how to interpret. Another example might be me remembering about that diagram when reading the book.

Holistic learners understand concepts in many different ways in order to really "get" them. They focus on building mental models instead of memorizing facts or procedures.

If you understand a body of knowledge well enough, and forget a specific thing, you should be able to reconstruct your understanding of it based on related things you understand.

The book refers to a "model" as something specific you understand particularly well that you can explain other things in terms of. For example, your "model" of a subspace (in linear algebra) might be a plane cutting through 3d space. Not all subspaces are planes, but thinking of a plane could be a way to quickly preload a bunch of relevant concepts in to your head.

To learn holistically:

"Visceralize" concepts by summarizing them with a specific image, sound, feeling, and/or texture. Example: when learning programming, think of an array as a bunch of colored cubes suspended along a cord.

Use metaphors to understand things better. Whenenever you learn something new, try to figure out what it reminds you of. If it's something from a totally unrelated domain, that's great.

Explore your understanding network, ideally by solving problems, in order to fix glitches in your understanding and refresh it.

Holistic learning works great for some subjects, like science and math, but it's not as good for others, like history and law. It also helps less with concrete skills, like playing golf.

The author sells various information & coaching products in this vein, but as far as I ca...
Meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
by matt — 2012-08-02T17:15:04.020Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality

WHEN:
03 August 2012 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
55 walsh st west melbourne 3003 australia

Practical rationality, as distinct from the social and rationality outreach meetups. Look for a social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong

This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month.

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

(Sorry for the late notice.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
Meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
by matt — 2012-08-02T17:14:10.036Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality

WHEN:
03 August 2012 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
55 walsh st west melbourne 3003 australia

Practical rationality, as distinct from the social and rationality outreach meetups. Look for a social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong

This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month.

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

(Sorry for the late notice.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality