trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Mental Habits are Procedural
by  — 2016-11-07T14:53:36.726Z

<Cross-posted from my blog>

Lately, I’ve realized that there’s something I’ve been fundamentally doing wrong in my head when it comes to building good mental architecture: Whenever I decide to integrate a new habit of mind, I get easily frustrated when it doesn’t stick after a few days. This has been a recurring occurrence.

I’ve finally realized that my expectations may be the culprits here.

To judge how long it takes to start utilizing a certain heuristic, I appear to have been using an intuitionist approach, classifying such habits under a “mental stuff” label, because it seems like mental notions should be easier to learn.

Perhaps more concretely, I’ve been fooled because mental notions feel like declarative knowledge, but they’re really more procedural. Knowing about pre-mortems seems easy; I just link it to other concepts under the “planning” label in my head. But this misses the point that the whole reason I even understand pre-mortems is to actually use it.

I confess that I’ve had a similar experience with mathematics a while back. For much of the course, I merely reviewed my notes, letting my brain run over the same grooves. The familiarity of the concepts gave me the illusion of understanding; yes, I could grasp the main ideas, but comprehension and capability are miles apart. When it came time to independently solve problems, I was totally lost.

What appears needed in these situations where certain topics “masquerade” as declarative knowledge (when you actually care about the procedural part) is to find analogs to concrete procedural skills. For example, I have much better estimates on how long it will take to learn an instrument, a new magic trick, or a sport. In my mind, the aforementioned actions feel very “physical”, rather than “mental”. This may appears to trigger a reframe.

The key, then, is to renormalize my expectations for learning new habits of mind, by drawing parallels to analogous skills where I have good estimates. Reframing the situation in this way makes it less frustrating when I fail to develop agency in a few days. Learning other skills have timelines of weeks or months, and that’s with solid practice.

To think otherwi...
Open thread, Nov. 7 - Nov. 13, 2016
by MrMind — 2016-11-07T08:01:00.124Z

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.
postCDT: Decision Theory using post-selected Bayes nets
by Scott Garrabrant — 2016-11-06T22:22:32.000Z

The purpose of this post is to document a minor idea about a new type of decision theory that works using a Bayes net. This is not a concrete proposal, since I will give no insight on which Bayes net to use. I am not that excited by this proposal, but think it is worth writing up anyway.

The main object used in this proposal has more information than a standard Bayes net. It is the result you get by taking a Bayes net and conditioning on the values of some of the nodes. The data type is a Bayes net, along with a subset of the nodes, and values for each of those nodes. I will call this a post-selected Bayes net.

First, and observation:

Given a collection of dependent random variables, one can sometimes infer a Bayes net relating them, for example by taking the network with the fewest parameters. Sometimes a network can be made simpler by adding in extra hidden variables, which are common causes. Sometimes it can be made simpler still by adding extra hidden variables which are common effects, and conditioning on the values of these common effects.

Philosophically, this is kind of weird. It is hard to imagine what would happen if we were trying to discover the causal structure of the universe, and we discover that there is some hidden variable that always turns out to be a certain way, in spite of appearing to be causally downstream from the other variables.

And now a decision theory, postCDT:

Given a post-selected Bayes net, and a special node representing my action, and a special node representing my utility, sever all edges directed into my action. For each possible action, compute the expectation of the value of the utility node in the newly severed network, given I take that action, and all the post-selected nodes have their specified value. Take the action resulting in the highest expected utility.

This can do some things that decision theories based on non-post-selected Bayes nets cannot:

Consider a twin prisoner's dilemma. There is a node representing your output, a node representing your twin's output, a node representing your utility, a node representing your twin's utility, and possibly some other nodes correlating you with your twin. The two utilities are decedents of the two actions.

Observe that if you and your twin share the same non-post-selected diagram, then an least one of you must not be causally downstream of the other. Without loss of generality, a

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What do you actually do to replenish your willpower?
by Sable — 2016-11-06T00:05:35.048Z

After a bit of brief research, I still have no idea how willpower depletion actually works, or if I'm mistaking depletion for distraction, etc., etc. I get the impression that there isn't much a consensus in the field on this subject.

What I'd like to know is this: what do you actually do to replenish willpower?

In other words, after working for several days in a row and being tired and not wanting to work on project x that has a large delay and little expectation (from the Procrastination Equation), how do you then work on project x? Do you eat something sugary, recite a mantra, meditate, sleep?

I've read (I can't remember where) that completing difficult tasks gives a boost to willpower, but then how do you convince yourself to start that difficult task? And what difficult task do you use?

Thanks.
Slaves to fashion signaling
by KatjaGrace — 2016-11-05T21:45:16.000Z

I understand the signaling theory of clothes fashions to be something like this: wearing fashionable clothing in spite of fashion changing all the time demonstrates that you are socially well connected and know what is up (not to mention that you have money and are not too weird, much like many kinds of signaling).

However in practice it seems at least some elements of fashion are basically enforced by shops, so you can’t dress unfashionably unless you save up unfashionable clothes from the past, or go to special effort to acquire them. I go out shopping for clothes with not much more than a passing understanding of which twenty year window of fashion I am in—just the kind of person who should not be dressed fashionably on the signaling theory—and then when I set out to buy the kinds of clothes that I want, shops don’t stock them, and shopkeepers say ‘sorry, that isn’t in this season’. In fact my understanding of what is in fashion is mostly based on which things shops will allow me to buy.

I hesitate to claim I am consequently fashionable—presumably I am still failing at a vast many fashiony things. But what is the point of changing which things are in season every few months if you are just going to tell the unfashionable people anyway and refuse to sell them things that aren’t fashionable?

A natural answer is that there isn’t a point, but there also isn’t a single agent behind all this, so there is not much reason to expect a point. Once you have fashion cycles in place for the kind of signaling reasons suggested, then shops have little reason to stock the stuff that’s out of fashion, unless there are a whole lot of unfashionable people and they agree somewhat on which unfashionable things to wear. And there probably are some shops like that.

But should the fashion cycles persist if fashion signaling is so inescapably easy as to be meaningless? Imagine that you are a moderately fashionable person. Once every intrinsically untrendy person is wearing maroon this season because it was the only thing they could buy, why do you even bother with it?

I think the answer is that I am only seeing the very bottom of the fashion signaling hierarchy. And the lowest rungs are indeed being cut off by the market herding the people who would dress without regard to fashion into ‘fair...
Year 1 Redux – Friends and Rationalists
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-11-05T16:30:54.000Z

Welcome to day 14 of Putanumonit’s birthday week celebration! It’s time to wrap up the year-in-review and get ready for a couple of serious writing projects.

In Zero Agents and Plastic Men I tried to conjure up some new jargon, and it turned out kind of lame and confusing. My buddy Ryan and I came up with a better term for what I was talking about: the skunk whistle.

A dog whistle is a phrase that sounds innocuous to the broad public but communicates a “secret” message to the intended audience, a message that outsiders would find objectionable . When Ted Cruz tells rural Texans he’s against “New York values” and they hear him saying “I hate Jews”, that’s a dog whistle. Of course, the people who assume that Cruz means “I hate Jews” when he talk about “New York” are mostly Jews from New York and not actual rural Texans. I guess “Ted Cruz uses anti-Semitic dog whistles” is a dog whistle for “I think all Republicans and their voters are bigots”. Everyone can play the dog whistle game!

A skunk whistle is the parallel opposite: it’s a statement that sounds much worse to the broad public than the actual message it conveys to listeners “in the know”. Staying on the theme: when my Syrian acquaintance writes “I hate Jews” in the context of Assad being a Mossad spy it could be a skunk whistle for “I hate Bashar Assad” or simply “I am loyal to my country”.

The Trump example I gave, “Mexican immigrants are lazy and criminal”, could be either whistle: it could be a skunk whistle for “I respect working class whites” or a dog whistle for “urban blacks are lazy and criminal”.

Point is: if you’re not the target audience for the secret message, don’t assume you know what the secret message is. And if you don’t know, give people the benefit of the doubt.

My calculation of how long it will take to catch each Pokemon didn’t address the four location specific Pokemon, like Mr. Mime in Europe and Farfetch’d in Japan. Last month, my girlfriend and I walked 120 miles on foot in Japan over 9 days. We saw a few robots, several cats, lots of monkeys, a throng of deer, and zero Farfetch’ds. So, overall, the trip was a disappointment.

Arashiyama Park, K

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The Pyramid And The Garden
by Scott Alexander — 2016-11-05T06:03:06.000Z

I.

A recent breakthrough in pseudoscience: the location of the Great Pyramid of Giza encodes the speed of light to seven decimal places.

This is actually true. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second. The coordinates of of the Great Pyramid are 29.9792458° N, 31.1342880° E (you can confirm with Google Maps that this gets you right on top of the Pyramid). The speed of light and the latitude number there have all the same digits. That’s a pretty impressive coincidence.

You might think this is idiotic because the meter was invented by 1600s French people. If ancient aliens or Atlanteans built the pyramids, why would they encode their secret wisdom using a unit of measurement from 1600s France? But there’s a way around this objection: the 1600s French people defined their meter as 1/10,000,000th the distance between the Equator and the North Pole. If the aliens also thought that was an interesting way to measure length, then they could have encoded their secret wisdom in it. So you wouldn’t need aliens who could predict the thoughts of 1600s Frenchmen. Just aliens who thought exactly like 1600s Frenchmen.

(actually, a different group of 1600s Frenchmen proposed a different version of the meter, defined as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second. This turned out to be 99.7% of the 1/10,000,000th-the-way-to-the-North-Pole definition, so either one works unless you want super-exactness. I think a much more interesting conspiracy theory would be that aliens designed the Earth to encode secret wisdom about the periods of pendulums.)

But realistically, aliens who think suspiciously like French people probably weren’t involved. So how do we explain the coincidence?

II.

The following is indebted to user mrfintoil’s great explanation on metabunk.org.

First, it’s not a coincidence to seven decimal places. Yes, that particular nine-digit sequence lands you atop the Great Pyramid. But that gives you way more precision than you need – cutting off the last three digits actually gets you closer rather than further from the center of the Pyramid. The only numbers that are doing any work are the 29.9792° N. So you really only get four decimal places worth of coincidence.

On the other hand, matching six digits is still pretty good. That’s literally a one-in-a-million chance.

So here the explanation has to go to how hard the pseudoscientists worked...
Updatelessness and Son of X
by Scott Garrabrant — 2016-11-04T22:58:23.000Z

The purpose of this post is to discuss the relationship between the concepts of Updatelessness and the "Son of" operator.

Making a decision theory that is reflectively stable is hard. Most agents would self-modify into a agent if given the chance. For example if a CDT agent knows that it is going to be put in a Newcomb's problem, it would precommit to one-box, "causing" Omega to predict that it one-boxes. We say "son of CDT" to refer to the agent that a CDT agent would self-modify into, and more generally "son of X" to refer to the agent that agent X would self-modify into.

Thinking about these "son of" agents is unsatisfying for a couple reasons. First, it is very opaque. There is an extra level of indirection, where you cant just directly reason about what agent X will do. Instead have to reason about what agent X will modify into, which gives you a new agent, which you probably understand much less than you understand agent X, and then you have to reason about what that new agent will do. Second, it is unmotivated. If you had a good reason to like Son of X, you would probably not be calling in Son of X. Important concepts get short names, and you probably don't have as many philosophical reasons to like Son of X as you have to like X.

Wei Dai's Updateless Decision Theory is perhaps our current best decision theory proposal. A UDT agent chooses a function from its possible observations to its actions, without taking into account its observations, and then applies that function.

The main problem with this proposal is in formalizing it in a logical uncertainty framework. Some of the observations that an agent makes are going to be logical observations, for example, an agent may observe the millionth digit of π. Then it is not clear how an agent can not take the digit of π into account in its calculation of the best policy. If we do not tell it the digit through the standard channel, it might still compute the digit while computing the best policy. As I said here, it is important to note logical updatelessness is about computations and complexity, not about what logical system you are in.

So what would true logical updatelessness look like? Well the agent would have to not update on computations. Since it is a computation itself, we cannot keep it independent from all computations, but we can restrict it to some small class of computations. The way we do this is b

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New LW Meetup: Amsterdam
by FrankAdamek — 2016-11-04T15:55:28.294Z

This summary was posted on LW Main on November 4th. The following week's summary is here.

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

[Amsterdam] Meetup #5 - Amsterdam edition!: 06 November 2016 04:10PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup: 06 November 2016 09:00PM
Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources: 11 November 2016 05:15PM

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:

Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox: 17 December 2016 06:00PM
[Melbourne] Conflicted Brains & Competing Goals: The Non-Unitary Self: 05 November 2016 03:30PM
San Francisco Meetup: Projects: 07 November 2016 07:15PM
San Jose Meetup: Park Day (IX), 3pm: 06 November 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - November 2016: 06 November 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - December 2016: 04 December 2016 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 26 November 2016 03:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 17 December 2016 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 06 November 2016 04:30PM

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, St. Petersburg, 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 over...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
by rocurley — 2016-11-04T05:48:09.795Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects

WHEN:
07 November 2016 07:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1769 15th St, San Francisco, CA

We’ll be meeting to work on projects!

Near the beginning, we’ll go around and talk about what we’ll be working on, then do a couple of pomodoros quietly. At some point we’ll break into general conversations and socializing.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
Meetup : Austin Meetup
by math_viking — 2016-11-04T05:32:37.705Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin Meetup

WHEN:
07 November 2020 02:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
4001 N Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX 78756

Actually meets every saturday. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Central+Market,+4001+N+Lamar+Blvd,+Austin,+TX+78756/

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin Meetup
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2016-11-04T00:49:12.568Z

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

WHEN:
06 November 2016 04:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

(Reminder: Daylight Saving Time ends on the morning of November 6th. The meeting begins at 3:30 p.m. as normal, but this will be one hour later relative to UTC.)

Upcoming meetups:

Nov. 13: Gardening

Nov. 20: Cooking

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-11-03T23:56:04.565Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
06 November 2016 09:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg Room 456, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

Meeting is on 4th floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. Permit parking designations do not apply on weekends, so park pretty much wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
A failed attempt at Updatelessness using Universal Inductors
by Scott Garrabrant — 2016-11-03T20:25:09.000Z

Here, I present a failed attempt to build an updateless decision theory out of universal inductors. It fails because it is is mistaking updatelessness about which logical theory it is in for true logical updatelessness about computations. I will use Tsvi's notation.

Fix a UGI, (Pn). Fix a sequence of utility functions (Un:2ω→R), which assigns a utility to all propositionally consistent worlds (represented by infinite bit strings). We assume that Un(W) is computable function of n and the first k(n) bits for some computable function k. In the simplest example, Un is just equal to a single bit in the string.

We define a sequence of agents (An) which output a single bit 1 or 0. These agents will be broken into two pieces, a deductive process, which outputs a bunch of logical facts, and a decision process, which chooses a policy in the form of a function from the possible outputs of the deductive process to {0,1}.

Let Pn denote the set of policies that the decision process can output. There is a computable partition of worlds into sets of worlds where each policy is output, Sn:2ω→Pn. For each p∈Pn, we can compute the expectation, E(Un(W)|Sn(W)=p), where W is sampled according to Pn. The decision process outputs the policy p which maximizes E(Un(W)|Sn(W)=p), and the agent An outputs the result of applying that policy to the output of the deductive process.

There are actually many things wrong with the above proposal, and many similar proposals that fail in similar or different ways. However, I want to focus on the one problem that proposals like this have in common:

Universal Induction is a model for uncertainty about what theory/model you are in; it is not a model for uncertainty about the output of computations.

It is easiest to see why this is a problem using the counterfactual mugging problem. We would like to use a universal inductor to be uncertain about a digit of π, and thus reason about the world in which it went another way. The problem is that a powerful universal inductor has the digits of π in its probabilities, even if it does not know that it is in PA. This is because the Kolomorogov complexity of a infinite string of the digits of π is very low, while the Kolomorogov complexity of a string that looks like π for a very long time, and then changes is high. We do not have to direct our UGI at PA for it to have good beliefs about late bits in a string that

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