trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rationality Quotes 25
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-28T08:39:46.000Z

"People want to think there is some huge conspiracy run by evil geniuses. The reality is actually much more horrifying. The people running the show aren't evil geniuses. They are just as stupid as the rest of us."
-- Vaksel

"Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g., religion."
-- Ben Casnocha

"Truth is not always popular, but it is always right."
-- Anon

"Computer programming is omnipotence without omniscience."
-- Prospero

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave, impartially."
-- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

"Those who take delight in their own might are merely pretenders to power. The true warrior of fate needs no adoration or fear, no tricks or overwhelming effort; he need not be stronger or smarter or innately more capable than everyone else; he need not even admit it to himself. All he needs to do is to stand there, at that moment when all hope is dead, and look upon the abyss without flinching."
-- Shinji and Warhammer40k

"Though here at journey's end I lie
in darkness buried deep,
beyond all towers strong and high,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
and Stars forever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the Stars farewell."
-- Banazîr Galbasi (Samwise Gamgee), The Return of the King
OB Status Update
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-27T09:34:03.000Z

Followup to: Whither OB?

Overcoming Bias currently plans to transition to a new format, including a new and more open sister site, tentatively entitled "Less Wrong". The new site will be built out of Reddit's source code, but you won't be limited to posting links - the new site will include a WYSIWYG HTML editor as well. All posts will appear on Less Wrong and will be voted up or down by the readers. Posts approved by the chief editors will be "promoted" to Overcoming Bias, which will serve as the front page of Less Wrong.

Once the initial site is up and running, the next items on the agenda include much better support for reading through sequences. And I'll organize more of my old posts (and perhaps some of Robin's) into sequences.

Threaded comments and comment voting/sorting are on the way. Anonymous commenting may go away briefly (it's not built into the Reddit codebase) but I suspect it's important for attracting new participation. So I do hope to bring back non-registration commenting, but it may go away for a while. On the plus side, you'll only have to solve a captcha once when signing up, not every time you post. And the 50-comment limit per page is on the way out as well.

Timeframe... theoretically, one to two weeks of work left.

I've reserved a final sequence on Building Rationalist Communities to seed Less Wrong. Also, I doubt I could stop blogging completely even if I tried. I don't think Robin plans to stop completely either. And it's worth remembering that OB's most popular post ever was a reader contribution. So don't touch that dial, don't unsubscribe that RSS feed. Exciting changes on the way.

PS: Changes also underway at the Singularity Institute, my host organization. Although no formal announcement has been made yet, Tyler Emerson is departing as Executive Director and Michael Vassar is coming on board as President. I mention this now because Michael Vassar is usually based out of the East Coast, but is in the Bay Area for only the next couple of days, and any Bay Area folks seriously interested in getting significantly involved might want to take this opportunity to talk to him and/or me. Email michael no space aruna at yahoo dot com.
31 Laws of Fun
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-26T10:13:14.000Z

So this is Utopia, is it? Well
I beg your pardon, I thought it was Hell.
-- Sir Max Beerholm, verse entitled
In a Copy of More's (or Shaw's or Wells's or Plato's or Anybody's) Utopia

This is a shorter summary of the Fun Theory Sequence with all the background theory left out - just the compressed advice to the would-be author or futurist who wishes to imagine a world where people might actually want to live:

Think of a typical day in the life of someone who's been adapting to Utopia for a while. Don't anchor on the first moment of "hearing the good news". Heaven's "You'll never have to work again, and the streets are paved with gold!" sounds like good news to a tired and poverty-stricken peasant, but two months later it might not be so much fun. (Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun.)

Beware of packing your Utopia with things you think people should do that aren't actually fun. Again, consider Christian Heaven: singing hymns doesn't sound like loads of endless fun, but you're supposed to enjoy praying, so no one can point this out. (Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun.)

Making a video game easier doesn't always improve it. The same holds true of a life. Think in terms of clearing out low-quality drudgery to make way for high-quality challenge, rather than eliminating work. (High Challenge.)

Life should contain novelty - experiences you haven't encountered before, preferably teaching you something you didn't already know. If there isn't a sufficient supply of novelty (relative to the speed at which you generalize), you'll get bored. (Complex Novelty.)

People should get smarter at a rate sufficient to integrate their old experiences, but not so much smarter so fast that they can't integrate their new intelligence. Being smarter means you get bored faster, but you can also tackle new challenges you couldn't understand before. (Complex Novelty.)

People should live in a world that fully engages their senses, their bodies, and their brains. This means either that the world resembles the ancestral savanna more than say a windowless office; or alternatively, that brains and bodies have changed to be f

...
BHTV: Yudkowsky / Wilkinson
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-26T01:10:30.000Z

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Will Wilkinson. Due to a technical mistake - I won't say which of us made it, except that it wasn't me - the video cuts out at 47:37, but the MP3 of the full dialogue is available here. I recall there was some good stuff at the end, too.

We talked about Obama up to 23 minutes, then it's on to rationality. Wilkinson introduces (invents?) the phrase "good cognitive citizenship" which is a great phrase that I am totally going to steal.
The Fun Theory Sequence
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-25T11:18:23.000Z

(A shorter gloss of Fun Theory is "31 Laws of Fun", which summarizes the advice of Fun Theory to would-be Eutopian authors and futurists.)

Fun Theory is the field of knowledge that deals in questions such as "How much fun is there in the universe?", "Will we ever run out of fun?", "Are we having fun yet?" and "Could we be having more fun?"

Many critics (including George Orwell) have commented on the inability of authors to imagine Utopias where anyone would actually want to live. If no one can imagine a Future where anyone would want to live, that may drain off motivation to work on the project. The prospect of endless boredom is routinely fielded by conservatives as a knockdown argument against research on lifespan extension, against cryonics, against all transhumanism, and occasionally against the entire Enlightenment ideal of a better future.

Fun Theory is also the fully general reply to religious theodicy (attempts to justify why God permits evil). Our present world has flaws even from the standpoint of such eudaimonic considerations as freedom, personal responsibility, and self-reliance. Fun Theory tries to describe the dimensions along which a benevolently designed world can and should be optimized, and our present world is clearly not the result of such optimization. Fun Theory also highlights the flaws of any particular religion's perfect afterlife - you wouldn't want to go to their Heaven.

Finally, going into the details of Fun Theory helps you see that eudaimonia is complicated - that there are many properties which contribute to a life worth living. Which helps you appreciate just how worthless a galaxy would end up looking (with very high probability) if the galaxy was optimized by something with a utility function rolled up at random. This is part of the Complexity of Value Thesis and supplies motivation to create AIs with precisely chosen goal systems (Friendly AI).

Fun Theory is built on top of the naturalistic metaethics summarized in Joy in the Merely Good; as such, its arguments ground in "On reflection, don't you think this is what you would actually want for yourself and others?"

Posts in the Fun Theory sequence (reorganized by topic, not necessarily in the original chronological order):

Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun: Fun Theory is an attempt to actually answer questions about eternal boredom th

...
Rationality Quotes 24
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-24T04:59:04.000Z

"A wizard may have subtle ways of telling the truth, and may keep the truth to himself, but if he says a thing the thing is as he says. For that is his mastery."
-- Ursula K. Leguin, A Wizard of Earthsea

"Neurons firing is something even a slug can do, and has as much to do with thinking as walls and doors have to do with a research institute."
-- Albert Cardona

"Mental toughness and willpower are to living in harmony with the Tao, as the ability to make clever arguments is to rationality."
-- Marcello Herreshoff

"Destiny always has been something that you tear open with your own hands."
-- T-Moon Complex X 02

"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then... The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."
-- Pascal, Pensees

"Goals of Man: ☑ Don't get eaten by a lion ☑ Get out of Africa ☐ Get out of Earth ☐ Get out of Solar System ☐ Get out of Galaxy ☐ Get out of Local Group ☐ Get out of Earth-Visible Universe ☐ Get out of Universe"
-- Knome
Higher Purpose
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-23T09:58:11.000Z

Followup to: Something to Protect, Superhero Bias

Long-time readers will recall that I've long been uncomfortable with the idea that you can adopt a Cause as a hedonic accessory:

"Unhappy people are told that they need a 'purpose in life', so they should pick out an altruistic cause that goes well with their personality, like picking out nice living-room drapes, and this will brighten up their days by adding some color, like nice living-room drapes."

But conversely it's also a fact that having a Purpose In Life consistently shows up as something that increases happiness, as measured by reported subjective well-being.

One presumes that this works equally well hedonically no matter how misguided that Purpose In Life may be—no matter if it is actually doing harm—no matter if the means are as cheap as prayer. Presumably, all that matters for your happiness is that you believe in it. So you had better not question overmuch whether you're really being effective; that would disturb the warm glow of satisfaction you paid for.

And here we verge on Zen, because you can't deliberately pursue "a purpose that takes you outside yourself", in order to take yourself outside yourself. That's still all about you.

Which is the whole Western concept of "spirituality" that I despise: You need a higher purpose so that you can be emotionally healthy. The external world is just a stream of victims for you to rescue.

Which is not to say that you can become more noble by being less happy. To deliberately sacrifice more, so that you can appear more virtuous to yourself, is also not a purpose outside yourself.

The way someone ends up with a real purpose outside themselves, is that they're walking along one day and see an elderly women passing by, and they realize "Oh crap, a hundred thousand people are dying of old age every day, what an awful way to die" and then they set out to do something about it.

If you want a purpose like that, then by wanting it, you're just circling back into yourself again. Thinking about your need to be "useful". Stop searching for your purpose. Turn your eyes outward to look at things outside yourself, and notice when you care about them; and then figure out how to be effective, instead of priding yourself on how much spiritual benefit you're getting just for trying.

With that said:

In today's world, most of ...
Investing for the Long Slump
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-22T08:56:20.000Z

I have no crystal ball with which to predict the Future, a confession that comes as a surprise to some journalists who interview me. Still less do I think I have the ability to out-predict markets. On every occasion when I've considered betting against a prediction market - most recently, betting against Barack Obama as President - I've been glad that I didn't. I admit that I was concerned in advance about the recent complexity crash, but then I've been concerned about it since 1994, which isn't very good market timing.

I say all this so that no one panics when I ask:

Suppose that the whole global economy goes the way of Japan (which, by the Nikkei 225, has now lost two decades).

Suppose the global economy is still in the Long Slump in 2039.

Most market participants seem to think this scenario is extremely implausible. Is there a simple way to bet on it at a very low price?

If most traders act as if this scenario has a probability of 1%, is there a simple bet, executable using an ordinary brokerage account, that pays off 100 to 1?

Why do I ask? Well... in general, it seems to me that other people are not pessimistic enough; they prefer not to stare overlong or overhard into the dark; and they attach too little probability to things operating in a mode outside their past experience.

But in this particular case, the question is motivated by my thinking, "Conditioning on the proposition that the Earth as we know it is still here in 2040, what might have happened during the preceding thirty years?"

There are many possible answers to this question, but one answer might take the form of significantly diminished investment in research and development, which in turn might result from a Long Slump.

So - given the way in which the question arises - I know nothing about this hypothetical Long Slump, except that it diminished investment in R&D in general, and computing hardware and computer science in particular.

The Long Slump might happen for roughly Japanese reasons. It might happen because the global financial sector stays screwed up forever. It might happen due to a gentle version of Peak Oil (a total crash would require a rather different "investment strategy"). It might happen due to deglobalization. Given the way in which the question arises, the only thing I want t...
Failed Utopia #4-2
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-21T11:04:43.000Z

Shock after shock after shock—
First, the awakening adrenaline jolt, the thought that he was falling. His body tried to sit up in automatic adjustment, and his hands hit the floor to steady himself. It launched him into the air, and he fell back to the floor too slowly.
Second shock. His body had changed. Fat had melted away in places, old scars had faded; the tip of his left ring finger, long ago lost to a knife accident, had now suddenly returned.
And the third shock—
"I had nothing to do with it!" she cried desperately, the woman huddled in on herself in one corner of the windowless stone cell. Tears streaked her delicate face, fell like slow raindrops into the décolletage of her dress. "Nothing! Oh, you must believe me!"
With perceptual instantaneity—the speed of surprise—his mind had already labeled her as the most beautiful woman he'd ever met, including his wife.

A long white dress concealed most of her, though it left her shoulders naked; and her bare ankles, peeking out from beneath the mountains of her drawn-up knees, dangled in sandals. A light touch of gold like a webbed tiara decorated that sun-blonde hair, which fell from her head to pool around her weeping huddle. Fragile crystal traceries to accent each ear, and a necklace of crystal links that reflected colored sparks like a more prismatic edition of diamond. Her face was beyond all dreams and imagination, as if a photoshop had been photoshopped.
She looked so much the image of the Forlorn Fairy Captive that one expected to see the borders of a picture frame around her, and a page number over her head.
His lips opened, and without any thought at all, he spoke:
"Wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-"
He shut his mouth, aware that he was acting like an idiot in front of the girl.
"You don't know?" she said, in a tone of shock. "It didn't—you don't already know?"
"Know what?" he said, increasingly alarmed.
She scrambled to her feet (one arm holding the dress carefully around her legs) and took a step toward him, each of the motions almost overloading his vision with gracefulness. Her hand ros...
Interpersonal Entanglement
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-20T06:17:42.000Z

Today I shall criticize yet another Utopia. This Utopia isn't famous in the literature. But it's considerably superior to many better-known Utopias—more fun than the Christian Heaven, or Greg Egan's upload societies, for example. And so the main flaw is well worth pointing out.

This Utopia consists of a one-line remark on an IRC channel:

<reedspacer> living in your volcano lair with catgirls is probably a vast increase in standard of living for most of humanity

I've come to think of this as Reedspacer's Lower Bound.

Sure, it sounds silly. But if your grand vision of the future isn't at least as much fun as a volcano lair with catpersons of the appropriate gender, you should just go with that instead. This rules out a surprising number of proposals.

But today I am here to criticize Reedspacer's Lower Bound—the problem being the catgirls.

I've joked about the subject, now and then—"Donate now, and get a free catgirl or catboy after the Singularity!"—but I think it would actually be a terrible idea. In fact, today's post could have been entitled "Why Fun Theorists Don't Believe In Catgirls."

I first realized that catpeople were a potential threat, at the point when a friend said—quotes not verbatim—

"I want to spend a million years having sex with catgirls after the Singularity."

I replied,

"No, you don't."

He said, "Yes I do."

I said, "No you don't. You'd get bored."

He said, "Well, then I'd just modify my brain not to get bored—"

And I said: "AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE"

Don't worry, the story has a happy ending. A couple of years later, the same friend came back and said:

"Okay, I've gotten a bit more mature now—it's a long story, actually—and now I realize I wouldn't want to do that."

To which I sagely replied:

"HA! HA HA HA! You wanted to spend a million years having sex with catgirls. It only took you two years to change your mind and you didn't even have sex with any catgirls."

Now, this particular case was probably about scope insensitivity, the "moment of hearing the good news" bias, and the emotional magnetism of specific fantasy.

But my general objection to catpeople—well, call me a sentimental Luddite, but I'm worried about the prospect of nonsentient romantic partners.

(Where "nonsentient romantic/sex partner" is pretty much what I use the word "catgirl" to indicate, in futuristic discourse. Th...
Sympathetic Minds
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-01-19T09:31:03.000Z

"Mirror neurons" are neurons that are active both when performing an action and observing the same action—for example, a neuron that fires when you hold up a finger or see someone else holding up a finger. Such neurons have been directly recorded in primates, and consistent neuroimaging evidence has been found for humans.

You may recall from my previous writing on "empathic inference" the idea that brains are so complex that the only way to simulate them is by forcing a similar brain to behave similarly. A brain is so complex that if a human tried to understand brains the way that we understand e.g. gravity or a car—observing the whole, observing the parts, building up a theory from scratch—then we would be unable to invent good hypotheses in our mere mortal lifetimes. The only possible way you can hit on an "Aha!" that describes a system as incredibly complex as an Other Mind, is if you happen to run across something amazingly similar to the Other Mind—namely your own brain—which you can actually force to behave similarly and use as a hypothesis, yielding predictions.

So that is what I would call "empathy".

And then "sympathy" is something else on top of this—to smile when you see someone else smile, to hurt when you see someone else hurt. It goes beyond the realm of prediction into the realm of reinforcement.

And you ask, "Why would callous natural selection do anything that nice?"

It might have gotten started, maybe, with a mother's love for her children, or a brother's love for a sibling. You can want them to live, you can want them to fed, sure; but if you smile when they smile and wince when they wince, that's a simple urge that leads you to deliver help along a broad avenue, in many walks of life. So long as you're in the ancestral environment, what your relatives want probably has something to do with your relatives' reproductive success—this being an explanation for the selection pressure, of course, not a conscious belief.

You may ask, "Why not evolve a more abstract desire to see certain people tagged as 'relatives' get what they want, without actually feeling yourself what they feel?" And I would shrug and reply, "Because then there'd have to be a whole definition of 'wanting' and so on. Evolution doesn't take the elaborate correct optimal path, it falls up the fi...