trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
One night, without sleep
by Mitchell_Porter — 2018-08-16T17:50:06.036Z

In memory of all those who fell and were not saved

(I normally have little regard for trigger warnings,

but on this occasion, imagine that my words are prefaced with every trigger warning ever)

A body, on a battlefield, maimed and bleeding;

terrible pain, staring at the sky,

left to die.

An experience that must have happened a million times in human history,

an experience that must be happening somewhere right now.

My situation is better - perhaps. I lie, not on a battlefield, but in a sickbed.

I just have some kind of flu;

and an eye haunted by a migraine that comes, and goes, and threatens to come again;

and I am not sleeping.

Also, I can write.

The smartphone battery was almost dead, I thought I was resigned to simply lying awake for long hours, without the catharsis of expression;

but enough time passed that I stirred, reached for the laptop, hauled it onto the bed, plugged in the phone.

.

The monotony of describing mundane acts

has removed me from the experiences that impelled me to write.

Those experiences said: no one should have to endure anything like this;

life should not be created.

But it was not just sensation that tortured me.

It was the defeat of my will, not just now, but many times.

It was all the lost opportunities to create in my own life,

the pointless obstruction, and being left to rust,

that denied everyone the benefits of what I might have made,

that negated my rare attempt to actually fix, and transform this malign existence.

.

The sun is still far from rising, but my mind has stirred to something like wakefulness.

Possible words now queue for attention and selection,

the hubbub of daylight communication,

rather than crystallizing in the dark,

a single phrase that repeats and repeats and repeats that it not be forgotten.

And I have remembered another thought:

that I am so tired of this. Of having to endure pain, whole days lost to waiting for pain to fade,

in order to keep carting my burdens uphill, alone.

Once, I was optimistic,

fruit of a happy childhood perhaps,

and I think I still carry the error implanted,

the expectation that everything works out for the best,

that in the end one will be noticed and saved.

There was a time, a long time, when I thought I would do the saving;

I thought I knew perspectives that would cheer everyone up,

and recipes that would materially change the world for the better.

After enough years had passed, I added the thought:

this world as it is, n

...
Tidying One’s Room
by Zvi — 2018-08-16T13:50:00.303Z

Previously (Compass Rose): Culture, Interpretive Labor, and Tidying One’s Room

Epistemic Status: A bit messy

“She’s tidied up and I can’t find anything! All my tubes and wires, careful notes!” – Thomas Dolby, She Blinded Me With Science

From Compass Rose:

Why would tidying my room involve interpretive labor?

It turns out, every item in my room is a sort of crystallized intention, generally past-me. (We’ve all heard the stories of researchers with messy rooms who somehow knew where everything was, and lost track of everything when someone else committed the violent act of reorganizing the room, thus deindexing it from its owner’s mind.) As I decided what to do with an item, I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose that information. So, I tried to Aumann with my past self – the true way, the way that filters back into deep models, so that I could pass my past self’s ideological turing test. And that’s cognitively expensive.

It’s generally too aggressive to tidy someone’s room without their permission, unless they’re in physical danger because of it. But to be unwilling to tidy my own room without getting very clear explicit permission from my past self for every action – or at least checking in – is pathologically nonaggressive.

From my wife, upon seeing the draft up to this point:

You know, in the time it takes you to write this, you could actually tidy your room.

Proof that the subject of cleaning, and cleaning that which does not belong to you, can escalate quickly in aggressiveness!

There are a few dynamics I’d like to talk about here. I won’t (today) be relating them back to Ben’s larger questions of how generally to deal with the intentions of the environment, instead choosing a more narrow scope.

I. Intention

Your past self left you an ideological Turing test, of a sort, by leaving items in seemingly random locations.

Good news! I have the cheat sheet.

Close, but wrong: “I’ll remember that it’s there and I’m too lazy to optimize its location further.”

Usually correct: “I’m done with this, I should put it somewhere. This is somewhere.”

Don’t give your past self too much credit.

Most things are (hopefully) where they are because you put them there on purpose. That’s where they ‘live’. If they’re not in a permanent location, they’re probably in an arbitrary location.

One should think about intention behind the current location of a thing if an...
Entropic Regret I: Deterministic MDPs
by Vanessa Kosoy — 2018-08-16T13:08:15.570Z

This is the first in a series of essays that aim to derive a regret bound for DRL that depends on finer attributes of the prior than just the number of hypotheses. Specifically, we consider the entropy of the prior and a certain learning-theoretic dimension parameter. As a "by product", we derive a new regret bound for ordinary RL without resets and without traps. In this chapter, we open the series by demonstrating the latter, under the significant simplifying assumption that the MDPs are deterministic.

Background

The regret bound we previously derived for DRL grows as a power law with the number of hypotheses. In contrast, the RL literature is usually concerned with considering all transition kernels on a fixed state space satisfying some simple assumption (e.g. a bound on the diameter or bias span). In particular, the number of hypotheses is uncountable. While the former seems too restrictive (although it's relatively simple to generalize it to countable hypothesis classes), the latter seems too coarse. Indeed, we expect a universally intelligent agent to detect patterns in the data, i.e. follow some kind of simplicity prior rather than a uniform distribution over transition kernels.

The underlying technique of our proof was lower bounding the information gain in a single episode of posterior sampling by the expected regret incurred during this episode. Although we have not previously stated it in this form, the resulting regret bound depends on the entropy of the prior (we considered a uniform prior instead). This idea (unbeknownst to us) appeared earlier in Russo and Van Roy. Moreover, later Russo and Van Roy used to it formulate a generalization of posterior sampling they call "information-directed sampling" the can produce far better regret bounds in certain scenarios. However, to the best of our knowledge, this technique was not previously used to analyze reinforcement learning (as opposed to bandits). Therefore, it seems natural to derive such an "entropic" regret bound for ordinary RL, before extending it to DRL.

Now, Osband and Van Roy derived a regret bound for priors supported on some space of transition kernels as a function of its Kolmogorov dimension and "eluder" dimension (the latter introduced previously by Russo and Van Roy). They also consider a continuous state space. This is a finer approach tha...
Request for input on multiverse-wide superrationality (MSR)
by Johannes Treutlein — 2018-08-14T17:29:27.115Z
Link: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1rz/request_for_input_on_multiversewide/

I am currently working on a research project as part of CEA’s summer research fellowship. I am building a simple model of so-called “multiverse-wide cooperation via superrationality” (MSR). The model should incorporate the most relevant uncertainties for determining possible gains from trade. To be able to make this model maximally useful, I would like to ask others for their opinions on the idea of MSR. For instance, what are the main reasons you think MSR might be irrelevant or might not work as it is supposed to work? Which questions are unanswered and need to be addressed before being able to assess the merit of the idea? I would be happy about any input in the comments to this post or via mail to johannes@foundational-research.org.
Logical Counterfactuals & the Cooperation Game
by Chris_Leong — 2018-08-14T14:00:34.032Z

Update: Originally I set the utility for AB or BA to -10, -10; but I've now realised that unnecessarily complicates the problem.

Logical counterfactuals (as in Functional Decision Theory) are more about your state of knowledge than the actual physical state of the universe. I will illustrate this with a relatively simple example.

Suppose there are two players in a game where each can choose A or B with the payoffs as follows for the given combinations :

AA: 10, 10

BB, AB or BA: 0, 0

Situation 1:

Suppose you are told that you will make the same decision as the other player. You can quickly conclude that A provides the highest utility.

Situation 2:

Suppose you are told that the other player chooses A. You then reason that A provides the highest utility

Generalised Situation: This situation combines elements of the previous two. Player 1 is an agent that will choose A, although this is not known by Player 2 unless option b) in the next sentence is true. Player 2 is told one of the following:

a) They will inevitably make the same decision as Player 1

b) Player 1 definitely will choose A

If Player 2 is a rational timeless agent, then they will choose A regardless of which one they are told. This means that both agents will choose A, making both a) and b) true statements.

Analysis:

Consider the Generalised Situation, where you are Player 2. Comparing the two cases, we can see that the physical situation is identical, apart from the information you (Player 2) are told. Even the information Player 1 is told is identical. But in one situation we model Player 1's decision as counterfactually varying with yours, while in the other situation, Player 1 is treated as a fixed element of the universe.

On the other hand, if you were told that the other player would choose A and that they would make the same choice as you, then the only choice compatible with that would be to choose A. We could easily end up in all kinds of tangles trying to figure out the logical counterfactuals for this situation. However, the decision problem is really just trivial in this case and the only (non-strict) counterfactual is what actually happened. There is simply no need to attempt to figure out logical counterfactuals given perfect knowledge of a situation.

It is a mistake to focus too much on the world itself as given precisely what happened all (strict) counterfactuals are impossible. The only thing that...
Alignment Newsletter #19
by Rohin Shah — 2018-08-14T02:10:01.943Z

Highlights

OpenAI Five Benchmark: Results

(OpenAI's Dota Team): The OpenAI Five benchmark happened last Sunday, where OpenAI Five won two matches against the human team, and lost the last one when their draft was adversarially selected. They are now planning to play at The International in a couple of weeks (dates to be finalized). That will be a harder challenge, since they will be playing against teams that play and train professionally, and so will be better at communication and coordination than the human team here.

Blitz (one of the human players)

said

: "The only noticeable difference in the mechanical skill aspect was the hex from the Lion, but even that was sorta irrelevant to the overall game flow. Got outdrafted and outmaneuvered pretty heavily, and from a strategy perspective it was just better then us. Even with the limitations in place it still 'felt' like a dota game, against a very good team. It made all the right plays I'd expect most top tier teams to make."

On the technical side, OpenAI implemented a brute-force draft system. With a pool of 18 heroes, you get some combinatorial explosion, but there are still only ~11 million possible matchups. You can then do a simple tree search over which hero to draft, where at the leaves (when you have a full draft) you choose which leaf you want based on the win probability (which OpenAI Five already outputs). Seeing this in action, it seems to me like it's a vanilla minimax algorithm, probably with alpha-beta pruning so that they don't have to evaluate all ~159 billion nodes in the tree. (Or they could have done the full search once, hardcoded the action it comes up with for the first decision, and run the full search for every subsequent action, which would have under 10 billion nodes in the tree.)

Besides the win probabilities, there are other ways to get insight into what the model is "thinking" -- for example, by asking the model to predict where the hero will be in 6 seconds, or by predicting how many last hits / denies / kills / deaths it will have.

The model that played the benchmark has been training since June 9th. Of course, in that time they've changed many things about the system (if for no other reason than to remove many of the restrictions in the original post). This is not a thing that you can easily do -- typically you would change your...
Preliminary thoughts on moral weight
by lukeprog — 2018-08-13T23:45:13.430Z

This post adapts some internal notes I wrote for the Open Philanthropy Project, but they are merely at a "brainstorming" stage, and do not express my "endorsed" views nor the views of the Open Philanthropy Project. This post is also written quickly and not polished or well-explained.

My 2017 Report on Consciousness and Moral Patienthood tried to address the question of "Which creatures are moral patients?" but it did little to address the question of "moral weight," i.e. how to weigh the interests of different kinds of moral patients against each other:

For example: suppose we conclude that fishes, pigs, and humans are all moral patients, and we estimate that, for a fixed amount of money, we can (in expectation) dramatically improve the welfare of (a) 10,000 rainbow trout, (b) 1,000 pigs, or (c) 100 adult humans. In that situation, how should we compare the different options? This depends (among other things) on how much “moral weight” we give to the well-being of different kinds of moral patients.

Thus far, philosophers have said very little about moral weight (see below). In this post I lay out one approach to thinking about the question, in the hope that others might build on it or show it to be misguided.

Proposed setup

For the simplicity of a first-pass analysis of moral weight, let's assume a variation on classical utilitarianism according to which the only thing that morally matters is the moment-by-moment character of a being's conscious experience. So e.g. it doesn't matter whether a being's rights are respected/violated or its preferences are realized/thwarted, except insofar as those factors affect the moment-by-moment character of the being's conscious experience, by causing pain/pleasure, happiness/sadness, etc.

Next, and again for simplicity's sake, let's talk only about the "typical" conscious experience of "typical" members of different species when undergoing various "canonical" positive and negative experiences, e.g. consuming species-appropriate food or having a nociceptor-dense section of skin damaged.

Given those assumptions, when we talk about the relative "moral weight" of different species, we mean to ask something like "How morally important is 10 seconds of a typical human's experience of [some injury]...
Welcome to Kyiv SlateStarCodex
by mingyuan — 2018-08-13T21:15:17.002Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Rationality Retreat in Europe: Gauging Interest
by ZeitPolizei — 2018-08-13T20:33:29.932Z

If you're interested in attending a rationality retreat in Europe I would appreciate if you participate in my survey (Link). Just answering the first three questions would already be helpful.

I would like to organize a smallish (up to 20 people) rationality retreat in Europe. With the survey I want to estimate how much interest there is, and what participants would like such an event to look like. Feel free to share the survey with anyone who might be interested.
Cause Awareness as a Factor against Cause Neutrality
by Darmani — 2018-08-13T20:00:49.513Z

[Epistemic status: Sudden insight + some reflection]

[Novelty status: I Googled some stuff on cause neutrality, and didn’t see this category of concerns mentioned]

Trying to live an optimized, impactful life can be quite a burden. There is no time for fun when there is world-saving to do. You can't learn math unless it helps your career. And you must sacrifice the charitable causes you most care about for the ones that have the most impact.

What a relief when, last week, I realized how it may be possible to support personal pet causes while living an optimized life.

Cause-neutrality is one of the cornerstones of EA thought. It goes like this: Bob took a trip to a village in Indonesia and was really struck by the poverty there. He wants to dedicate his life to helping people in this village because it can do a lot of good. Boo Bob!

For you see, this is just one of many impoverished villages around the world, and probably neither the one suffering most nor the one where he can have the biggest impact cheaply. He should instead go to the List of Suffering Villages™ and pick the one where he can do the most good. And that’s assuming it’s not better for him to just become an investment banker and donate all his money.

But to make this decision, first the village must be on the list.

We live in a world where every village has a Wikipedia entry. But in other areas, there are a large number of local problems where the resources needed to raise awareness about the problem are a substantial fraction of the resources needed to solve it. In these cases, working on it immediately can be more effective than trying to get it properly prioritized and allocated to the most efficient person.

For comparison, consider personal productivity. The philosophy of Getting Things Done is all about moving tasks into a centralized system so you can do them at an optimal time. But, there’s an exception: if something takes less than two minutes, you should do it now.

In altruism, this looks like: If you see someone bleeding on a deserted street, you call 911 instead of weighing its impact it against all the phone calls to Congress you should be making. But it also applies in cases where the cost/benefit ratio is less extreme.

This is most evident in obscure political causes. Suppose you’re a skilled professional whose time is worth $100/hour. One day, you realize that your local town council ...
Is there a practitioner's guide for rationality?
by cedric — 2018-08-13T05:39:06.563Z

Hi everyone, I'm new to the community, and am currently working my way through the sequences — yes, all of them.

In the introduction to the first book of Rationality A-Z, Eliezer says:

I didn’t realize that the big problem in learning this valuable way of thinking was figuring out how to practice it, not knowing the theory. I didn’t realize that part was the priority; and regarding this I can only say “Oops” and “Duh.” Yes, sometimes those big issues really are big and really are important; but that doesn’t change the basic truth that to master skills you need to practice them and it’s harder to practice on things that are further away. (Today the Center for Applied Rationality is working on repairing this huge mistake of mine in a more systematic fashion.)

Just wanted to ask if CFAR has got any of those reorganised materials up, and if they're linked to from anywhere on this site? Any links to other rationality-as-practice blog posts or books or sequences would also be incredibly appreciated!
Welcome to Effective Altruism San Diego [Edit With Your Details]
by OptimistIndustries — 2018-08-13T04:41:13.740Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Trust Me I'm Lying: A Summary and Review
by quanticle — 2018-08-13T02:55:16.044Z
Link: http://quanticle.net/reviews/trust_me_im_lying.html

Trust Me I'm Lying, by Ryan Holiday, is probably the most influential book I've read in the past two years. This book is a guidebook to the twenty-first century media ecosystem, and shows how the structures and incentives of online media serve to polarize us by stoking fear and anger. First published in 2012, the book is eerily prophetic in many places, as it talks about the toxic influence of online publishing on politics and society.

Ryan Holiday is a marketer and publicist who specializes in manipulating blogs in service of his clients. So what is a blog? A blog is any online publishing platform which derives its revenue from advertising. Blogs range in size from small, fly-by-night local publications all the way up to multi million dollar properties like Gawker and the Huffington Post. Blogs may be independent, such as Huffington Post or Politico or they may be associated with an existing media franchise. For example the Monkey Cage politics blog is hosted by the Washington Post, and MoneyWatch is a financial blog hosted by CBS.

The key observation that Ryan makes is that all blogs, no matter how large or small they are, no matter if they're associated with an existing media franchise or not, are driven by the same economic incentives. The revenue a blog makes can be expressed as (price per page-view) × (number of page-views). Since blogs have little control over how much they are paid per reader, blogs universally tend to work to maximize the number of readers they get. Moreover the sheer number of blogs, and the extremely low barrier to entry creates a brutally Darwinian marketplace where any content that doesn't maximize page-views is rapidly superseded by content that does.

In order to maximize the number of people clicking on their stories (and thus viewing the ads on those stories), blogs exploit every flaw in human psychology they can find. Chief among these is provocation. Ryan cites a study by Berger and Milkman from 2012 which shows that content with high emotional valence spreads much faster than content which is emotionally neutral. The study compared stories on the New York Times website, and found that articles which induced anger were 34% more likely than the median article to make the top-10 most e-mailed list. Articles that induced awe also did well, being 30% more likely than the median article to make the most e-mailed list. Both anger an

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