trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Some Dynamics around Project Organization
by RTiberiu — 2018-01-11T23:23:52.969Z

Background: I worked on a 3 month-2 year project loosely affiliated with the Rationalist community and/or the EA community. The project may have been a 'satellite' project (e.g. it was not as core to the community as LesserWrong). I'd like to share insights without sharing my identity, so the project in question will remain anonymous.

In this post, I aim to draw attention to how internal politics plays a role in organizing projects, in a way that I personally did not anticipate.

The short version: In this particular project, political troubles and fighting turned out to be 50% of the work I faced and 90% of the burn. This was about 5 times more than I expected, and this was in a project that involved 3-10 people.

Longer version: The project I was part of required early volunteers who were committed to spending time on seeing the project through. (Why didn't we hire people for pay? No great reason). This had the following effects:

(A) We naturally attracted people who aimed to expand their glory in the rationalist community.

(B) Said people, in my observation, do not like taking no for an answer. This leads to power conflict, fights, etc. etc. etc.

(C) I personally find it very hard to say "no", and am anecdotally high on agreeability. When other people push hard for "yes" on their own ideas, this leads to a strong feeling of being squeezed against a wall.

(D) It is difficult to fire excited volunteers, for a variety of reasons. The one or two times we did so, it led to them feeling salty at me and the organization -- a feeling that I believe persists to this day.

This, to put it mildly, led to a huge organizational imbroglio.

Our project actually worked out very well in the end. However, in an ideal world we could have avoided this internal imbroglio on the way there. Note that (B) is a personal assessment, and not the self-reported internal experience of the project's volunteers.

Actionables I would take in the future:

-- Hire people with money, even outside people. I later did this, and it worked out much better for me than the infighting that stymied the volunteer group. Hiring establishes a known expectation between the contracted employee and the employer.

-- Volunteers with considerable working experience may be more valuable for team cohesion than volunteers without working experience. This is hard for me to elabora...
Surely, rhetorical question?
by Gust — 2018-01-11T20:56:07.403Z
Link: https://gusbicalho.com.br/post/2018/01/08/surely-rhetorical-question/

I just finished Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking. In the book, Dan exposes the reader to several concepts, thought experiments and red flags one may find relevant to the quest of philosophy. I thought I’d share a couple I found very practical, along with an exercise where we can apply them.
Something about Status Ladders in Berkeley
by RTiberiu — 2018-01-11T10:34:51.797Z

This is a quick post about some experiences with the Berkeley rationalist community. I haven't had great experiences talking about this in person to folks when I lived there for two months. The perceptive reader may be able to discern who I am, though I would respectfully like to remain anonymous. It is not clear that posting on LesserWrong is the right way to communicate such experiences, though if it's not just let me know and I'll update my content to better reflect what the site is looking for.

Preface: My experiences have been largely positive, but there were a few worrying signs. This came from spending about two months living in Berkeley and working closely with the Rationalist community, around the MIRI or CFAR office. I do not claim to speak for any organization or person except myself. The time frame was roughly February to March of 2017.

Background: I have been to a CFAR workshop, and have volunteered at two. Also, 1/4 of the details I've given about myself are falsified to prevent identity-detection. I really loved the environment of the CFAR workshop. I've also participated in 1-3 of CFAR's workshops, including but not limited to the CFAR workshop for machine learners, some workshops on AI safety, MIRI workshops, and the like. I have also worked on one or two smaller Rationalist projects.

Immediate thoughts: Honestly, spending lots of time in the community was scary.

Immediate thoughts part 2: I was worried about what I saw as the "status ladders" among the people who I socialized with or hung around. It seemed like there was a very clear pecking order, where a couple folks I interacted with who claimed to be above such status games quite evidently practiced them regularly.

I would have liked to believe this was only a small subset of the Rationalists, and that most people weren't like this. This may be the case. However, I am quite confident that said Rationalists are or were considered high-status in the community, whether people admit this or otherwise.

Sorry about the lack of detail and clarity here; I'm attempting to balance between my own anonymity, the anonymity of people I refer to, and providing enough detail to be informative.

One particular case study: when I saw some practice or some folks who gave me the willies, it seemed like whoever I reported to would say something like: "Why do ...
Babble
by alkjash — 2018-01-10T21:56:13.375Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/babble/

This post is an exercise in "identifying with the algorithm." I'm a big fan of the probabilistic method and randomized algorithms, so my biases will show.

How do human beings produce knowledge? When we describe rational thought processes, we tend to think of them as essentially deterministic, deliberate, and algorithmic. After some self-examination, however, I've come to think that my process is closer to babbling many random strings and later filtering by a heuristic. I think verbally, and my process for generating knowledge is virtually indistinguishable from my process for generating speech, and also quite similar to my process for generating writing.

Here's a simplistic model of how this works. I try to build a coherent sentence. At each step, to pick the next word, I randomly generate words in the category (correct part of speech, relevance) and sound them out one by one to see which continues the sentence most coherently. So, instead of deliberately and carefully generating sentences in one go, the algorithm is something like:

Babble. Use a weak and local filter to randomly generate a lot of possibilities. Is the word the right part of speech? Does it lie in the same region of thingspace? Does it fit the context?
Prune. Use a strong and global filter to test for the best, or at least a satisfactory, choice. With this word in the blank, do I actually believe this sentence? Does the word have the right connotations? Does the whole thought read smoothly?

This is a babble about embracing randomness.

Baby Babble

Research on language development suggests that baby babble is an direct forerunner to language. You might imagine that infants learn by imitation, and that baby babble is just an imperfect imitation of words the baby hears, and progress occurs as they physiologically adapt to better produce those sounds. You would be wrong.

Instead, infants are initially capable of producing all the phonemes that exist in all human languages, and they slowly prune out which ones they need via reinforcement learning. Based on the sounds that their parents produce and respond to, babies slowly filter out unnecessary phonemes. Their babbles begin to drift as they prune out more and more phonemes, and they start to combine syllables into proto-words. Babble is the process of generating random sounds, and looking for clues about which ones are useful. So...
Are these arguments valid?
by Erfeyah — 2018-01-10T14:06:42.301Z

I have lately found myself using two particular strategies quite often during discussions and want to make sure that their logical structure is valid. So, I thought what better place to have them dismantled than LW :)

[1] The first strategy involves sending a hypothetical example's equivalent back in time and using the present knowledge of the outcome as a justification for the validity or not of the argument. The last time I used this was when someone tried to convince me that IQ is the main factor for human value by asking me which one is superior, a technologically developed, high IQ culture vs an under-developed mid IQ one?

I responded that I can not rationaly know what to do based on only this information. When pushed on why and on making a choice, I responded that if you were asking me this question about pre-war Germany in the place of the highly developed country using your own logic you would choose Germany as superior but we now know that the 'superior' country was morally inferior (I assumed correctly that they accept similar definitions of good and evil and German actions in the war were evil). With the benefit of hindsight we now know that this would be the wrong decision so their argument is demonstrably wrong.

Now, I don't want to get into this argument here. I just want to know if the strategy I used is logicaly valid as they did not accept it and instead, more or less, accused me of sophistry.

[2] The second strategy is more suspect to my estimation but I am not sure why. In this method I demonstrate humanities miniscule understanding of reality (when put in proper perspective) and use this as a basis for a kind of attitude. Here is an example:

When discussing whether life has meaning or not one answer I use is a pragmatic one. The issue at hand is deciding how to act. In other words which belief to use as a motivation for action. There are two epistemic possibilites:

[2.1] life has meaning
[2.2] life does not have meaning.

First of all, we do not know if life has meaning or can estimate with any reasonable confidence. We can estimate based on current data but our data is tiny compared to the whole of reality. Therefore, we should always act as if [2.1] is true on the basis that, if true, we (personally or humanity as a whole) might understand and even contribute towards it. If [2.2] is true on the other hand the things to be...
1/9/2018 Update - Frontpage Views
by Raemon — 2018-01-10T01:37:22.901Z

A few people had complained that the frontpage views (i.e. "Curated Content", "Frontpage", etc) were still a bit counterintuitive.

I made a couple quick changes:

make the buttons green, so that it's more clear you might want to click there at all
add a hover-menu, which hopefully improves discoverability and provides some context.
in particular, I hope that adding a hover-menu to the "..." more-options button gives it just the right amount of discoverability (i.e. enough that you can find it if you're looking for it or if you've been using the site awhile, but not a choice that newcomers are confronted with immediately)

Responding to Gwillen

Gwillen had asked a question in a non-meta thread, and this seems like a good place to respond:

People have the option to post either to personal blog or frontpage, right? Even people like me with not that much karma? So under what circumstances would a mod move a post from personal blog to frontpage? Might an author not object to that? I'm trying to understand whether I have a good model of the purpose of personal blog versus frontpage, and of what moderators can do, and what they normally do.

The exact details are still being fleshed out here, and the implementation will probably change over time as the site grows and moves from open-beta to launch-ready.

In general, the intent with LW2.0 is to focus on:

giving people a place to develop ideas, and improve their ability to make intellectual progress over time
design a system so that that the most important ideas bubble up into public common knowledge.

Right now, we want to make sure the site is usable, so we're making it easy for everyone to post to the front page, and only moving their posts back to personal-blog-space if they violate the norms.

As our userbase grows over time, this would eventually result in the frontpage being flooded with content of varying quality. So the rough plan is to gradually ramp up the requirements for posting to Frontpage (eventually limiting it to people with higher karma who have a clear understanding of the guidelines), with options to get personal blogposts moved to Frontpage when appropriate.

Right now we're erring on the side of moving posts from personal-blogs to frontpage fairly quickly. This may also change. (We've considered creating settings where users can flag if they want a p...
In Defense of Psycho-Conservatism
by alkjash — 2018-01-09T21:49:41.112Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/in-defense-of-psycho-conservatism/

I'm experimenting in putting some of my rationality-adjacent posts on LessWrong. The Schelling place for comments is LessWrong.

Also, it seems like people prefer content mirroring over linkposts. Is there a standard way to do that or is it just copy-pasting?
TSR #9: Hard Rules
by Hazard — 2018-01-09T14:57:15.708Z

This is part of a series of posts where I call out some ideas from the latest edition of The Strategic Review (written by Sebastian Marshall), and give some prompts and questions that I think people might find useful to answer. I include a summary of the most recent edition, but it's not a replacement for reading the actual article. Sebastian is an excellent writer, and your life will be full of sadness if you don't read his piece. The link is below.

Background Ops #9: Hard Rules

SUMMARY

Examples

“Hell yes or no"

If you’re overcommitted, say no to everything that doesn’t make you say “Hell yes!”

Client standards

Don’t work with bad clients, and maybe only work for awesome clients.

Only work with people you admire

“If I worked with this person intensely 10+ hours per day for 14+ days straight and I was taking 3 days off to go relax on the beach, would I want them to go with me rather than be alone?”

Hard rules simplify decision making.
Banning certain foods (never eating cookies again).
Clean Separation

Work and play computer.

Rewrite better software instead of bug patching
Guidance

Make hard rules “easy to follow” by making them concrete and super clear cut.
Generalize skills

Quitting things in general

What are your needs? Can you get it better somewhere else?

Actionable Steps

Start thinking through why you do everything you do.
Gradually look to understand what needs a given activity is meeting.
Develop criteria for how you’ll meet those needs slowly, over time.
Build generalized skills like environment design, “the general skill of quitting things”, and introspection as to your motives on why you select activities.
Carefully select “hard rules” that make decisions for you automatically that are maximally healthy and life-affirming.
Ensure your hard rules are easy to follow. Don’t jump in too deep too fast.

Clear separation is a super useful idea. The work computer vs play computer example seems to draw out the key parts. First there is an acknowledgement that a given activity is trying to accomplish multiple things at once, and you'd be better served by doing them seperately. Second, there is a mechanism of seperation (two seperate computers) that makes it slightly effortful to switch gears, forcing you to consciously acknowledge when you are making the switch (as opposed to how you can reflexively get to reddit without ever having consciously chosen to do so)....
Optimizing a Week of Machine Learning Learning
by Raemon — 2018-01-09T06:55:10.168Z

status: rough braindump. doesn't really attempt to communicate my background assumptions.

tldr: help Raemon optimize a week of Machine Learning reading/practice, with an eye for relevance towards understanding and/or helping with AI safety

I'd like to spend some time in January learning some cursory stuff about machine learning.

I currently know "the layman's gist" of what Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning and Neural Networks mean, but nothing about how to apply them.

My coding background is in web development.

I have no math bathground.

Some plausible goals

(I'm not actually sure which of these should be highest priority, listed approximately in the order the occurred to me)

Goal 1 Gain some literacy in ML stuff for purposes of understanding technological developments relevant to AI safety. Subgoals:

Understand for myself what's going on rather than relying on other people's judgment
Be able to communicate with people in the industry and have some idea what they're talking about and vice-versa.

Goal 2: I know of at least a few positions currently for "ML technician that assists a researcher" (the ones I know of are AI safety related, and I have an impression that non-AI-Safety positions might exist as well, or in the future). I want to explore whether this is a plausible thing I might become competent enough at to be hireable.

Depending on how the field of Machine Learning is shaped, this might be something I want to do just to keep up with the world in general for career purposes, or it might be a set of skills useful for projects I care about.

Goal 3: After a brief bit of reading, it became clear this would involve re-acquainting myself with mathematical notation, which currently makes my eyes glaze over. It seemed like re-training that skill might at least make it possible to skim papers and have a rough idea of what they say, and this might be useful even if I don't pursue this professionally.

Time Allotted

Right now I don't have huge amounts of time for this, but will be dedicating the third week of January to putting as much effort into it as I can. (Realistically I'm guessing 5 hours a day of serious effort). Prior to 3rd week of January I'll be doing a few 1-hour sessions of work in the evening

So, goal is to optimize approximately 40 hours total of learning, mostly aiming for &qu...
Video: The Phenomenology of Intentions
by Matt Goldenberg — 2018-01-09T03:40:45.427Z

We all know intuitively what it feels like to "intend" a certain outcome or action. However, knowing what a thing is intuitively is different from having a deep introspective take on how the thing actually plays out in your own brain. In this Mental Model Monday, I go deep into the phenomology of intentions, and how you can create intentions and intentionality, as well as decide how much intentionality to have in any given situation.

Watch The Video

Edited Transcript Below

What I Learned About Intentions from Hypnotizing My Hands Together

I first started playing with intentions when I was maybe about 13, 14.

I was playing around with self-hypnosis. I a common hypnosis exercise where I hypnotized myself into believing my hands were glued together, that the harder I tried to get them apart, the more they would become stuck together. Then, I tried as hard as I could to pull them apart. I found no matter how much I struggled, I couldn't get them apart.

What was happening was my arms were tightening and doing some of the things you might do when you're actually trying hard to pull your hands apart, but they weren't actually moving outwards. After I played with this for a while, I decided to stop trying to pull them apart. Instead I focused on the part that was blocking me from pulling them apart. For me, it was located up in the right area of my forehead. Instead of pulling harder, I had to consciously let that block go. After I let it go, my hands came apart with no struggle at all.

I did this a number of times with various hypnosis exercises like forgetting my name, not being able to say my name,and not being able to say the word 'the', until I could implant that thing in my forehead without the hypnosis, and I could get rid of it when I wanted to. That part, it turns out, was how I experienced intentions.

Intentions Vs. Other Things

Intentions are different from desires. What you want is different from what you intend to do. I think there's value in separating the two and not getting them confused, so take some time to feel the difference between what it is to want something and what it is to intend to get that thing. They're also different from expectations or should. An intention is not this thing that you're supposed to do, it's something that you are going to do. It's a sense of resolve and purpose in you...
Niceness Stealth-Bombing
by things_which_are_not_on_fire — 2018-01-08T22:16:45.621Z

Epistemic status: Tested in an environment very favorable to its success.

Guys, I know it’s hard to believe and I’m sure very few of us have experience with it, but sometimes the people around us have opinions we think are really stupid.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to this problem. It’s a well-established fact that telling people they’re Hitler immediately converts them to your side of the issue.

Rationalists are supposed to discuss topics with the goal of finding the truth. Non-rationalists are supposed to discuss topics with the goal of convincing others they’re right (or at least I assume that if you asked they’d say that, not “WE MUST POUND OUR ENEMIES INTO THE EARTH!”). Neither of these two goals is fulfilled when debates turn acrimonious, when we respond to disagreement with fury or to fury with more fury. People who perceive enemy fire drop their original goals in the process of picking up their laser blasters. I’m gonna go really radical here and say that setting yourself against someone is not a great way to make them honestly consider your points. And that this is obvious enough that people who do it anyway have probably lost sight of their priorities. And that forgetting what you’re trying to do is really bad if you want to actually do it. Maybe some people enjoy this kind of argument, and maybe there are social benefits to showing that certain opinions will be shouted down. But it's still better to convert your enemies than to shut them up.

So I present to you: niceness stealth-bombing.

Niceness stealth-bombing slips quietly under the “enemy argument” radar, so confirmation bias and all its friends don’t know to shoot it out of the sky. The military metaphors end there, because stealth-bombing means finding a point at which we’re all on the same side.

The trick is to communicate specific disagreement, but broader support. You have to demonstrate to the other person that you share a goal with them, and that you think your idea will help them reach that goal. You also have to communicate that you see them as an ally, that you recognize they're also playing for the good guys. “It’s awesome that you care enough about helping people to give up your own money for strangers. I just think that checking out GiveWell would help you help people even more.” Or “I agree with you that x-risks sound pretty crazy, I totally reacted the same way w...