trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The meta-strategy 
by Elo — 2016-08-02T23:08:06.308Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/against-the-five-love-languages/

You are in a relationship, someone made some objection about communication, you don't seem to understand what's going on. Many years later you find yourself looking back at the relationship and reflecting with friends. That's when someone brings up The Five Love Languages. Oh deep and great and meaningful secrets encoded into a book.

The 5 languages are:

Gifts

Quality time

Words of affirmation

Acts of service (devotion)

Physical touch (intimacy)

Oooooh if only you had spent more energy trying to get quality time, and less effort on gifts that relationship could have been saved. Or the other way - the relationship was doomed because you wanted quality time and they wanted gifts as a show of love.

You start seeing the world in 5 languages, your coworker offering to get you a coffee is a gift. Your boss praising your good work is words of affirmation. You start thinking like a Man with a hammer. Strictly speaking I enjoy man with a hammer syndrome. I like to use a model to death, and then pick a new model and do it all again.

What I want you to do now is imagine you didn't do that. Imagine we cloned the universe. In one universe we gave you the love-languages book and locked you in a room to read it. In the second universe we offered to run you through a new relationship-training exercise. "It's no guide book on how to communicate with your partner, but it's a pretty good process", we lock you in a room with a chair, a desk, some paper, pens (few distractions) and order you to derive some theory and idea about how to communicate with your partner.

Which one do you predict will yield the best result?

When I ask my system 2, it is fairly happy with the idea that using someone else's model is a shortcut to finding the answers. After all they pre-derived the model. No need to spend hours working on it myself when it's all in a book.

When I ask my system 1, it thinks that the self-derived system is about a billion times better than the one I found in a book. It's going to be personally suited, it's going to be sharp and accurate, and bend to my needs.

Meta-strategy

Which is going to yield the best result for the pr...
The Problem (TM) - Part 2
by Elo — 2016-08-02T08:01:41.845Z

From part 1: http://bearlamp.com.au/the-problem-tm-analyse-a-conversation/
part 1 on lesswrong: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nsn/

(this) part: http://bearlamp.com.au/the-problem-analyse-a-conversation-part-2/

I had a chat with a person who admitted to having many problems themselves. I offered my services as a problem solving amateur, willing to try to get to the bottom of this. Presented is the conversation (With details changed for privacy).

I had my first shot at analysing the person's problems and drilling down to the bottom. I am interested in what other people have to say is the problem. Here we study the meta-strategy of how to solve the problem, which I find much more interesting than the object level analysis of the problem and how to solve it.

I don't think I got to the bottom of the problem, and I don't think I conducted myself in a top-notch capacity but needless to say I wonder if you have any comments about what IS TheProblem(tm), how did you come to that conclusion and what can be done about it (for the benefit of this person and anyone with a similar problem).

What is actually the problem? I have a theory, but I also wanted to publish this without declaring my answer. I will share my ideas in a few weeks but I want to know what you think and how you came to that answer.

This is a new style of post so I expected some responses along the lines of:

I considered downvoting. I opted instead to ignore after reading the preamble. - buybuydandavis

That's fine. It was literally a chat log. Not for everyone.

I also got some interesting and relevant responses. There are several and they overlap so I decided it's best to answer with another post.

Many people narrowed down to a few particularly alarming examples:

The most alarming part of that conversation for me was "A few weeks ago I punched a housemate in the face ten times, breaking her nose;" - Strangeattractor

Is it really the most alarming part? I would think suicide ideation more so. - Romashka

Treatment for mental illness (and possibly organic brain trauma) seems priority #1 here... -CronoDAS

Zebra was extremely bad at imagining good outcomes in a way which led to him taking action-- in other words, probably depression. - NancyLebovitz

And then this:

There are lots ...
Can we hybridize Absent-Minded Driver with Death in Damascus?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2016-08-01T21:43:06.000Z

Summary:

I was initially excited to re-encounter the Absent-Minded Driver problem in the light of causal decision theory, because I thought causal decision theory gave a clear-cut wrong answer of "Continue with probability 5/9." If so, it would be a case of CDT shooting off its own foot that didn't involve Omega, Death, or anyone else reading your mind, cloning you, or trying to predict you. The decision theory would have shot off its own foot without postulating anything more than anterograde amnesia or limited disk storage.

However, the resolution which makes the Absent-Minded Driver work under CDT, is a resolution that we can pump money out of in the Death in Damascus case. I'm wondering if there's some way to hydridize the two scenarios to yield a clear-cut case of CDT shooting off its own foot without any other agent being involved.

Background:

In the Absent-Minded Driver dilemma, an absent-minded driver will come across two identical-looking intersections on their journey. The utility of exiting at the first section is $0, the utility of exiting at the second intersection is $4, and the utility of continuing past both intersections is $1.

Let p be the probability of continuing at each intersection, so 1−p is the probability of exiting given that you are at that intersection. The optimal p maximizes the function 0⋅(1−p)+4⋅p(1−p)+1⋅p2, so p=23.

I initially thought that CDT would yield a suboptimal answer of p=4/9, obtained as follows:

Suppose I think q is the policy I will decide on. Then my odds of being at the first vs. second intersection are 1:q.

If I'm already at the second intersection, my reward for a probability p of continuation is 4⋅(1−p)+1⋅p. And if I'm at the first intersection, my reward for a policy p is 4⋅p(1−p)+1⋅p2 as before.

So my best policy is found by maximizing 11+q[4⋅p(1−p)+p2]+q1+q[4(1−p)+p], which will have its maximum at 4−6p−3qq+1=0 or p=4−3q6. If p=q then p = 4/9.

This was in fact the first analysis ever published on the problem by Piccione and Rubinstein. However, as Aumann et. al. swiftly pointed out, a true causal decision theorist ought to believe that if it chooses p when at the first intersection, this has no effect on its probability q of continuing at the second intersection! (Aka: If we're going to ignore what LDT considers to be logical correlations, we'd better ignore all of them equally.)

So assuming its own str

...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Outdoor Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2016-08-01T21:12:27.982Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Outdoor Fun & Games

WHEN:
07 August 2016 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Meridian Hill Park

We will be going to the park to hang out, play games, and have fun conversation ... outside.

Location: Meridian Hill Park is around 16th & W Streets NW; it's a few blocks away from the Columbia Heights or Woodley Park-Zoo Metro stations. We will be meeting near this entrance, toward the southwest corner.

Upcoming meetups:

Aug. 14: TED Talks

Aug. 21: Mini Talks

Aug. 28: Legos

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Outdoor Fun & Games
Rationality Quotes August 2016
by Sabiola — 2016-08-01T09:32:22.095Z

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted 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 from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
August 2016 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2016-08-01T07:00:04.281Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Open Thread, Aug. 1 - Aug 7. 2016
by Elo — 2016-08-01T00:12:58.663Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
Clean work gets dirty with time
by  — 2016-07-31T19:59:08.770Z

Edited for clarity (hopefully) with thanks to Squirrell_in_Hell.

Lately, I find myself more and more interested in how the concept of "systematized winning" can be applied to large groups of people who have one thing in common, and that not even time, but a hobby or a general interest in a specific discipline. It doesn't seem (to me) to much trouble people working on their own individual qualities - performers, martial artists, managers (who would self-identify as belonging to these sets), but I am basing this on "general impressions" and will be glad to be corrected. It does seem to be a norm for some other sets, like sailors, who keep correcting maps every voyage.

The field in which I have been for some years (botany) does have something similar to what sailors do, which lets us to see how floras change over time, etc. However, different questions arise when novel sub-disciplines branch off the main trunk, and naturally, the people asking these new questions keep reaching back for some kind of pre-existing observations. And often they don't check how much weight can be assigned to these observations, which, I think, is a bad habit that won't lead to "winning".

It is not "industrial rationality" per se, but a distantly related thing, and I think we might have to recognize it somehow. Or at least, recognize that it requires different assumptions... No set victory, for example... Still, it probably matters to more living people than pure "industrial rationality" does, & ignoring it won't make it go away.

1. Information inheritance?

Questions change. For a very simply put example, they might go from "what grows here?" to "how is this plant different from the type specimen?" to [...] to "what plants indicate older habitats?" to "what grew here before?" The first one and the last one are very different problems. The first one might have been answered with pure agriculture/"traditional land use" in mind, and the last one - with timing plants' invasions, estimating tolerance to pollution and the "shell life" of seeds in soil. (And often, the data are patchy, collected by somebody who wanted to clarify something narrow and specific.)

It is not a feasible goal to ask future botanists to keep monitoring this-or-that habitat or solve the placing of such-and-such genus (although steps can be taken to make these particular problems attractive to them); and who knows...
Should we enable public binding precommitments? 
by David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet) — 2016-07-31T19:47:05.588Z

The ability to make arbitrary public binding precommitments seems like a powerful tool for solving coordination problems.
We'd like to be able to commit to cooperating with anyone who will cooperate with us, as in the open-source prisoner's dilemma (although this simple case is still an open problem, AFAIK). But we should be able to do this piece-meal.
It seems like we are moving in this direction, with things like Etherium that enable smart contracts. Technology should enable us to enforce more real-world precommitments, since we'll be able to more easily monitor and make public our private data.
Optimistically, I think this could allow us to solve coordination issues robustly enough to have a very low probability of any individual actor making an unsafe AI. This would require a lot of people to make the right kind of precommitments.
I'm guesing there are a lot of potential downsides and ways it could go wrong, which y'all might want to point out.
Meetup : Language – The Stuff of Thought (Rationality Dojo - Melbourne)
by Chriswaterguy — 2016-07-31T03:37:33.310Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Language – The Stuff of Thought (Rationality Dojo - Melbourne)

WHEN:
07 August 2016 03:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Ground Floor, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane. Melbourne, Vic

The next rationality dojo for Less Wrong Melbourne will be next Sunday, 7 August.

Turn up at 3:30pm to socialise, because we start at 4pm sharp.

NOTE: We are meeting Sunday this month, and we're in a different room. We'll make it easy to find.

We watch some Pinker, read some Orwell and discuss, in a bid to undertand how language shapes our thinking.

We'll finish with some strategic self-improvement options (none of which involve walking across breaking boards with your bare hands or being asked to chant).

At about 6:30pm some of us will probably head for dinner in the CBD, and you are welcome to join us.

WHEN: Sun 7 August, 3:30pm to 6:30pm

WHERE: Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane.
Ground Floor, past the front desk near the back. Rather than the right hand door where we usually go in, it will be easiest to enter via the main door on the left.

If you have any trouble finding the venue or getting in, text or call Chris on 0439 471 632. For convenience and prompt service, please arrive before 4 pm - that also gives us more chance to catch up before things start.

WHAT'S THIS ABOUT?: The Less Wrong Melbourne Rationality Dojos are self-improvement sessions for those committed to the art of rationality and personal growth. We welcome new members who are interested in exploring rationality. We're "aspiring rationalists" and always open to learn.

Discussion article for the meetup : Language – The Stuff of Thought (Rationality Dojo - Melbourne)
[Effective Altruism] Promoting Effective Giving at Conferences via Speed Giving Games
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2016-07-30T15:16:37.832Z

Conferences provide a high-impact opportunity to promote effective giving. This is the broad take-away from an experiment in promoting effective giving at two conferences in recent months: the Unitarian Universalist (UU) General Assembly and the Secular Student Alliance (SSA) National Convention. This was an experiment run by Intentional Insights (InIn), an EA meta-charity devoted to promoting effective giving and rational thinking to a broad audience, with financial sponsorship from The Life You Can Save.

The outcomes, as detailed below, suggest that conferences can offer cost-effective opportunities to communicate effective giving messages to important stakeholders. An especially promising way to do so is to use Speed Giving Games (SGG) as a low-threshold strategy since recent findings show GGs are an excellent means of promoting effective giving. This encourages participants to self-organize full-length Giving Games (GG) when they return back to their homes.

This article aims both to describe our experiences at UU and SSA and to serve as a guide to others who want to adopt these approaches to promote effective giving via conferences. The article is thus divided into several parts:

Evaluating the demographic group you want to target;

Evaluating the potential impact and cost of the conference;

Steps to prepare for the conference;

Outcomes of the conference;

Assessment of the experiment and conclusions;

Picking the Right Conference: Consider Demographics

Before deciding on a conference, make sure you target the right demographic. We at InIn, in agreement with The Life You Can Save, picked the two conferences mentioned above for a couple of reasons.

First, the UU and SSA both unite people who we thought were well-suited for promoting effective giving. Members of these organizations already put a considerable value both on improving the world, and on using reason and evidence to inform their actions in doing so.

Our work at SSA is part of our broader effort, in collaboration with The Life You Can Save and the Local Effective Altruist Network, to promote effective giving to secular, humanist, and skeptic groups. We do so by holding GGs targeted to their needs: appearing on podcasts, writing articles in secular venues about effective giving, and collaborating with a number of national and international common-interest...
The map of p-zombies
by turchin — 2016-07-30T09:12:21.321Z

No real p-zombies exist in any probable way, but a lot of ideas about them have been suggested. This map is the map of ideas. It may be fun or may be useful.

The most useful application of p-zombies research is to determine whether we could loose something important during uploading.

We have to solve the problem of consciousness before we will be uploaded. It will be the most stupid end of the world: everybody is alive and happy but everybody is p-zombie.

Most ideas here are from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Lesswrong wiki, Rational wiki, recent post of EY and from works of Chalmers and Dennett. Some ideas are mine.

The pdf is here.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-07-29T15:45:40.510Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on July 29th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Bay City Meetup: 19 August 2016 01:25PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup: 31 July 2016 08:00PM
European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
[Gen Con/Indianapolis] Gen Con: Applied Game Theory: 06 August 2016 02:00PM
New Hampshire Meetup: 09 August 2016 07:00PM
San Antonio Meetup: 31 July 2016 02:00PM

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

[Austin] Welcome Scott Aaronson to Texas: 13 August 2016 06:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games: 01 August 2016 06:15PM
San Jose Meetup: Park Day (VI): 31 July 2016 03:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - August 2016: 07 August 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - September 2016: 04 September 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - October 2016: 02 October 2016 04:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Visiting Museums: 31 July 2016 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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

Please note that for your meetup t...
Meetup : San Antonio Meetup
by Bryan-san — 2016-07-29T15:14:42.076Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup

WHEN:
31 July 2016 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
12651 Vance Jackson Rd #118, San Antonio, TX 78230

Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong at Yumi Berry.

Topic of the Week: Topics of the Week

Look for the sign that says "LW".

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup
Meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-07-28T20:13:30.815Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
31 July 2016 08:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1726 reisterstown road pikesville maryland 21208

Pikesville DoubleTree - Hilton, at the restaurant / bar or at one of the tables outside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup
Effective altruisms large and small
by KatjaGrace — 2016-07-28T07:42:52.000Z

Here is one way the world could be. By far the best opportunities for making the world better can be supported by philanthropic money. They last for years. They can be invested in a vast number of times. They can be justified using widely available information and widely verifiable judgments.

Here is another way the world could be. By far the best opportunities are one-off actions that must be done by small numbers of people in the right fleeting time and place. The information that would be needed to justify them is half a lifetime’s worth of observations, many of which would be impolite to publish. The judgments needed must be honed by the same.

These worlds illustrate opposite ends of a spectrum. The spectrum is something like, ‘how much doing good in the world is amenable to being a big, slow, public, official, respectable venture, versus a small, agile, private, informal, arespectable one’.

In either world you can do either. And maybe in the second world, you can’t actually get into those good spots, so the relevant intervention is something like trying to. (If the best intervention becomes something like slowly improving institutions so that better people end up in those places, then you are back in the first world).

An interesting question is what factor of effectiveness you lose by pursuing strategies appropriate to world 1 versus those appropriate to world 2, in the real world. That is, how much better or worse is it to pursue the usual Effective Altruism strategies (GiveWell, AMF, Giving What We Can) relative to looking at the world relatively independently, trying to get into a good position, and making altruistic decisions.

I don’t have a good idea of where our world is in this spectrum. I am curious about whether people can offer evidence.