trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Knowing what you want is a prerequisite to getting what you want
by nwthomas — 2011-07-12T23:19:20.640Z

Frequently, we decide on a goal, and then we are ineffective in working towards this goal, due to factors wholly within our control. Failure modes include giving up, losing interest, procrastination, akrasia, and failure to evaluate return on time. In all these cases it seems that if our motivation were higher, the problem would not exist. Call the problem of finding the motivation to effectively pursue one's goals, the problem of motivation. This is a common failure of instrumental rationality which has been discussed from numerous different angles on LessWrong.

I wish to introduce another approach to the problem of motivation, which to my knowledge has not yet been discussed on LessWrong. This approach is summarized in the following paragraph:

We do not know what we value. Therefore, we choose goals that are not in harmony with our values. The problem of motivation is often caused by our goals not being in harmony with our values. Therefore, many cases of the problem of motivation can be solved by discovering what you value, and carrying out goals that conform to your values.

I will begin by making clear the distinction between goals and values. A goal is time-bound, contingent, and concrete. A value is permanent, unconditional, and abstract. A few goals are:

Become a comedian.

Bring about the Singularity.

Graduate college.

A few values are:

Humor

Transcendence

Money

For good measure, I'll list a few more values:

Truth

Love

Beauty

Social justice

Happiness

Interpersonal relationships

Money

Power

Spirituality

Rationality

Imagination

Security

Excitement

Self-expression

Life

I argue that goals are always in service of values. If we look at the terminal values in our decision tree, they will be big, mysterious abstractions such as these. Why would I think this? Why not have concrete things as the terminal values of our decision tree?

Because it's simpler. Consider this example. I can have a terminal value, "pleasure," and then sub-goals to this terminal value: let's say, "drinking," "smoking," and "eating." On the other hand, I can have "drinking," "smoking," and "eating" all as terminal values, without the node "pleasure" anywhere in sight.

The latter seems rather un-parsimonious. Why have multiple specifics in my utility function, when I can have one generality that replaces them all? Scientific theories are developed by subsuming specifics in generalities. ...
Knowing what you want is a prerequisite to getting what you want
by nwthomas — 2011-07-12T23:18:10.827Z

Frequently, we decide on a goal, and then we are ineffective in working towards this goal, due to factors wholly within our control. Failure modes include giving up, losing interest, procrastination, akrasia, and failure to evaluate return on time. In all these cases it seems that if our motivation were higher, the problem would not exist. Call the problem of finding the motivation to effectively pursue one's goals, the problem of motivation. This is a common failure of instrumental rationality which has been discussed from numerous different angles on LessWrong.

I wish to introduce another approach to the problem of motivation, which to my knowledge has not yet been discussed on LessWrong. This approach is summarized in the following paragraph:

We do not know what we value. Therefore, we choose goals that are not in harmony with our values. The problem of motivation is often caused by our goals not being in harmony with our values. Therefore, many cases of the problem of motivation can be solved by discovering what you value, and carrying out goals that conform to your values.

I will begin by making clear the distinction between goals and values. A goal is time-bound, contingent, and concrete. A value is permanent, unconditional, and abstract. A few goals are:

Become a comedian.

Bring about the Singularity.

Graduate college.

A few values are:

Humor

Transcendence

Money

For good measure, I'll list a few more values:

Truth

Love

Beauty

Social justice

Happiness

Interpersonal relationships

Money

Power

Spirituality

Rationality

Imagination

Security

Excitement

Self-expression

Life

I argue that goals are always in service of values. If we look at the terminal values in our decision tree, they will be big, mysterious abstractions such as these. Why would I think this? Why not have concrete things as the terminal values of our decision tree?

Because it's simpler. Consider this example. I can have a terminal value, "pleasure," and then sub-goals to this terminal value: let's say, "drinking," "smoking," and "eating." On the other hand, I can have "drinking," "smoking," and "eating" all as terminal values, without the node "pleasure" anywhere in sight.

The latter seems rather un-parsimonious. Why have multiple specifics in my utility function, when I can have one generality that replaces them all? Scientific theories are developed by subsuming specifics in generalities...
Knowing what you want is a prerequisite to getting what you want
by nwthomas — 2011-07-12T23:14:23.609Z

Frequently, we decide on a goal, and then we are ineffective in working towards this goal, due to factors wholly within our control. Failure modes include giving up, losing interest, procrastination, akrasia, and <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p1/a_failure_to_evaluate_returnontime_fallacy/">failure to evaluate return on time</a>. In all these cases it seems that if our motivation were higher, the problem would not exist. Call the problem of finding the motivation to effectively pursue one's goals, <i>the problem of motivation</i>. This is a common failure of instrumental rationality which has been discussed from numerous different angles on LessWrong.
I wish to introduce another approach to the problem of motivation, which to my knowledge has not yet been discussed on LessWrong. This approach is summarized in the following paragraph:
<blockquote>
We do not know what we value. Therefore, we choose goals that are not in harmony with our values. The problem of motivation is often caused by our goals not being in harmony with our values. Therefore, many cases of the problem of motivation can be solved by discovering what you value, and carrying out goals that conform to your values.
</blockquote>
I will begin by making clear the distinction between goals and values. A goal is time-bound, contingent, and concrete. A value is permanent, unconditional, and abstract. A few goals are:
<ul>
<li>Become a comedian.</li>
<li>Bring about the Singularity.</li>
<li>Graduate college.</li>
</ul>
A few values are:
<ul>
<li>Humor</li>
<li>Transcendence</li>
<li>Money</li>
</ul>
For good measure, I'll list a few more values:
<ul>
<li>Truth</li>
<li>Love</li>
<li>Beauty</li>
<li>Social justice</li>
<li>Happiness</li>
<li>Interpersonal relationships</li>
<li>Money</li>
<li>Power</li>
<li>Spirituality</li>
<li>Rationality</li>
<li>Imagination</li>
<li>Security</li>
<li>Excitement</li>
<li>Self-expression</li>
<li>Life</li>
</ul>
I argue that goals are always in service of values. If we look at <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/sm/the_meaning_of_right/">the terminal values in our decision tr...
A funny argument for traditional morality
by cousin_it — 2011-07-12T21:25:25.597Z

I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:

Many of my moral values arose from my upbringing, as opposed to biology. This is evidenced by the fact that biologically similar people living in different places and epochs have different ideas of what's right.

Therefore many of my values originally came from the society that raised me.

Society's values were strongly influenced by Christian values, and many of our core moral prohibitions are inherited from Christian tradition.

The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda.

Also my values may drift, and most drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values.

A good recipe for countering this insidious deterioration of values is to consciously pull them back toward their original source, as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.

That means editing my values to more closely match Christianity. QED.

What do you think?
Meetup : Weekly Berkeley Meetup
by FrankAdamek — 2011-07-12T21:11:54.216Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Weekly Berkeley Meetup

WHEN:
13 July 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2128 Oxford Street, Berkeley, CA 94704

We will meet at the usual Oxford and Center St Starbucks, and depart for a nearby restaurant at 7:20. Feel free to give me a call at 952.217.0505 if you arrive later and would like to find us. Since we didn't get to it last week, the topic will be Aumann updating, and whether our beliefs can, do, and should count as evidence about the world.

Discussion article for the meetup : Weekly Berkeley Meetup
Trivers on Self-Deception
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-12T21:04:25.975Z

People usually have good guesses about the origins of their behavior. If they eat, we believe them when they say it was because they were hungry; if they go to a concert, we believe them when they say they like the music, or want to go out with their friends. We usually assume people's self-reports of their motives are accurate.
Discussions of signaling usually make the opposite assumption: that our stated (and mentally accessible) reasons for actions are false. For example, a person who believes they are donating to charity to "do the right thing" might really be doing it to impress others; a person who buys an expensive watch because "you can really tell the difference in quality" might really want to conspicuously consume wealth.

Signaling theories share the behaviorist perspective that actions do not derive from thoughts, but rather that actions and thoughts are both selected behavior. In this paradigm, predicted reward might lead one to signal, but reinforcement of positive-affect producing thoughts might create the thought "I did that because I'm a nice person".

Robert Trivers is one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, responsible for ideas like reciprocal altruism and parent-offspring conflict. He also developed a theory of consciousness which provides a plausible explanation for the distinction between selected actions and selected thoughts.
TRIVERS' THEORY OF SELF-DECEPTION
Trivers starts from the same place a lot of evolutionary psychologists start from: small bands of early humans grown successful enough that food and safety were less important determinants of reproduction than social status.
The Invention of Lying may have been a very silly movie, but the core idea - that a good liar has a major advantage in a world of people unaccustomed to lies - is sound. The evolutionary invention of lying led to an "arms race" between better and better liars and more and more sophisticated mental lie detectors.
There's some controversy over exactly how good our mental lie detectors are or can be. There are certainly cases in which it is possible to catch lies reliably: my mother can identify my lies so accurately that I can't even play minor pranks on her anymore. But there's also some evidence that there are certain people who can reliably detect lies from any source at least 80% of the time without any previous training: microexpressions expert Paul Ekman...
Follow-up on ESP study: "We don't publish replications"
by CarlShulman — 2011-07-12T20:48:19.884Z

Related to: Parapsychology: the control group for science, Dealing with the high quantity of scientific error in medicine

Some of you may remember past Less Wrong discussion of the Daryl Bem study, which claimed to show precognition, and was published with much controversy in a top psychology journal, JPSP. The editors and reviewers explained their decision by saying that the paper was clearly written and used standard experimental and statistical methods so that their disbelief in it (driven by physics, the failure to show psi in the past, etc) was not appropriate grounds for rejection.

Because of all the attention received by the paper (unlike similar claims published in parapsychology journals) it elicited a fair amount of both critical review and attempted replication. Critics pointed out that the hypotheses were selected and switched around 'on the fly' during Bem's experiments, with the effect sizes declining with sample size (a strong signal of data mining). More importantly, Richard Wiseman established a registry for advance announcement of new Bem replication attempts.

A replication registry guards against publication bias, and at least 5 attempts were registered. As far as I can tell, at the time of this post the subsequent replications have, unsurprisingly, failed to replicate Bem's results.1 However, JPSP and the other high-end psychology journals refused to publish the results, citing standing policies of not publishing straight replications.

From the journals' point of view, this (common) policy makes sense: bold new claims will tend to be cited more and raise journal status (which depends on citations per article), even though this means most of the 'discoveries' they publish will be false despite their p-values. However, this means that overall the journals are giving career incentives for scientists to massage and mine their data for bogus results, but not to challenge bogus results by others. Alas.

1 A purported "successful replication" by a pro-psi researcher in Vienna turns out to be nothing of the kind. Rather, it is a study conducted in 2006 and retitled to take advantage of the attention on Bem's article, selectively pulled from the file drawer.

ETA: The wikipedia article on Daryl Bem makes an unsourced claim that one of the registered studies has repl...
Diet Advice?
by Vaniver — 2011-07-12T18:16:49.605Z

So, I know a number of friends on Paleo who recommend it. I recently read through a lot of bulletproofexec, who recommends his own variant of paleo. I care about my health, and so I need to resolve my diet and their advice somehow. Summarized data points:

My diet is about 80% wheat, and the rest is sweet potatoes, exotic grains (like amaranth or quinoa), rice, margarine, honey, cheese, and meat. The primary principle of paleo is that Grains Are Bad, and accepting that premise would require a radical restructuring of my diet. Right now I bake a loaf or two of (sourdough) bread a day, eat pasta about every other day, eat at least some raw sweet potato a day, eat cereal every other day, boil quinoa and rice every now and then, and eat meat only when I go out with friends.

I strongly prefer wheat to rice, and rice to corn (also, white wheat to whole wheat). I enjoy the bread I bake enough to eat until I physically can't store more food in my stomach. When I bake bread with 75% wheat and 25% amaranth, it tastes noticeably worse (which I can tell because I eat what I cut and don't try to eat it all).

I am rarely sick (maybe something on the level of a sore throat once a year), and I've been intelligent and lively my entire life, and have been on a meat-heavier version of this diet (less bread, more pasta, more chicken) until recently.

To the best of my knowledge, I do not experience meat cravings. I chewed ice growing up (which suggests an iron deficiency), but this habit mostly stopped a few years ago. I have craved fat once or twice in the last year, which I responded to by whipping up and eating a batch of cookie dough. Most of my friends on paleo experience bread/grain cravings about once a week, though my friend on a slow carb diet (which allows him to eat bread once a week) doesn't.

I'm 6'0" tall and weigh 160 lbs (182 cm / 73 kg) for a BMI of 21.7, which is the exact middle of the "normal" range. I have a sedentary lifestyle with no regular exercise besides walking (which has been reduced to about once a week thanks to summer), and thus am not as muscular as I would like. I used to weigh about 180 lbs, and a change in diet (from eating out frequently to eating in frequently, the replacement of meat with bread, and a general reduction in portion size) dropped that down to 160 lbs with no exercise. A brief experiment with creatine supplementation and high-in

...
Call for volunteers: clean up the LW issue tracker
by matt — 2011-07-12T18:15:36.579Z

I'm looking for a volunteer (or volunteers).

We've let the Lesswrong issue tracker get out of hand - there are 99 open issues on it, and I think that many of them are resolved by changes since they were opened, are less than awesome ideas, or, for the remainder, are valid ideas.

I'd love someone to volunteer to go through all of the open issues, close those that are complete or silly, and tag/prioritise those that remain. I'll need to give you the power to do that, so please nominate yourself in the comments.

Once the list is cleaned up, I think Trike can keep it organised.

ETA: Nic_Smith seems to have this well in hand - serious kudos, Nic. Thank you.
Should rationalists put much thought into tipping and/or voting?
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-07-12T18:13:20.354Z

It seems to me that tipping involves rather little money, and voting involves rather little time. For the latter, I'm assuming that you follow politics enough anyway that you have at least one candidate you prefer.

I'm willing to bet that there are people who spend more time in a year on whether voting is rational than they would if they just went and voted and ignored the arguments.

What are the biggest wins you've gotten in terms of time and/or money from thinking about what you're doing?
ALCOR finances
by gwern — 2011-07-12T16:32:12.547Z

Mike Darwin has posted some financial history of Alcor in a post, "The Armories of the Latter Day Laputas, Part 5". While there were some errors (see the comments), Darwin has apparently corrected them.

It makes interesting reading in general. It's not a straight analysis of filings like Brandon's "SIAI - An Examination", but more of a financial history (eg. the graph of revenues vs expenses etc.)
Defaulting to not noticing the meetup list
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-07-12T16:12:06.743Z

I just registered that I'm not looking at the meetup list to see whether there's anything in my area-- the letters are too small and faint.

Are other people skimming past the meetup list, too?

If it's a general problem, I recommend bolding the city names.
Discussion: Ideas for a Lesswrongian anticipation Sci-Fi set in 2060
by Raw_Power — 2011-07-12T06:35:42.848Z

So, the usual bet is that the GAI, both F and UF will be created at around that time at the latest. I'd like to set a novel, a thriller, right at that critical moment where everything could be lost or won, and humanity is in the balance. But human societies and the way they interact with each other will have changed a lot by then. So, well, I haven't read throughly enough here to understand how far we are anticipating what will happen. Not just the friendliness of AI development, but our own impact in the world, and how it will react when it finds out about us and our goals, and takes them seriously.

So I was wondering if you'd help me out here with some brainstorming. I'm looking for some seminal ideas for how the world will look like by then. We don't need to be 100% precise, although keeping the pieces of the setting vague by avoiding Burdensome Details is a way of avoiding glaring mistakes, and gives a Lord Of The Rings, Ruins In The Distance feel of false depth. Don't hesitate to suggest seemingly weird but actually reasonable ideas: the future I want to build is a Weirdtopia. The point is to frighten, wonder, and suck the reader in.

Let's see, for a start: cryogenics and cybernetics are a solved problem, and people's heads are being resurrected and put on mechanical bodies by default (they could ask for recreated biological bodies, but usually after the first tantrums... they don't ^_^). The audience can be given someone to identify with through a Temporal Fish Out Of Water, one of the resurrected Human Popsicles. The funny part is that, even though that person happens to be a transhumanist AND a singularitarian, they hadn't surpassed the Shock Level (I think that's what Yudkowsky called it when you were enthused with an idea because you don't think of it as normal yet?), and they are only marginally less freaked out by the world they find themselves into than the normal sci-fi fan readers (or even the mainstream ones, if this ends up so good as to have any).
Having Useful Conversations
by paulfchristiano — 2011-07-12T06:29:42.779Z

Holding conversations in person is useful; feedback is quick, and it seems to be much easier to change your behavior as a result of actually talking with people.

Having effective goal-oriented conversations is somewhat difficult. One source of difficulty is a strong tendency to stray from useful talk into entertaining talk. A typical example is the tendency of many (otherwise potentially productive) conversations between rationalists simply wandering into an extended dialog about the nature of existential risk or some interesting philosophical problem, and then stagnating there (potentially treading interesting new intelligence-demonstrating terrain, but not in point of fact getting anything done or refining beliefs in a meaningful way).

If this is what all participants want out of the conversation, then it's great that we've found a community where people can get their kicks in this particular abstruse way. If this is what some but not all participants want out of the conversation, then perhaps the conversation should divide or conclude. But conversations seem to get derailed--either for significant lengths of time, or indefinitely--even when participants honestly want to get things done, and view conversations with other rationalists as instruments to serve their values.

In the interest of getting things done, I (and Nick Tarleton and Michael Curzi, with the tiniest bit of testing) suggest that the rationalist community try really hard to adopt the following norm: when someone else is talking, and the conversation would be significantly better served by them stopping, let them know. Either point out that the topic is nice to think about but unhelpful, that the topic should be considered later rather now, or whatever else the speaker seems to have failed to notice. To help make adoption a little easier, it might be help to choose one person in advance who will have some responsibility to arbitrate.

If a participant disagrees about the relevance of a remark, don't push it--our hope is that such a system could help people who have honestly wandered from the topic pursuing an interesting tangent or happy thought, not to resolve any actual dispute. If a participant doesn't want to adhere closely to any particular notion of usefulness--for example, if someone is having a conversation to simply enjoy themselves and unwind--then the conversing p...