trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Quantifying Human Suffering and "Everyday Suffering"
by willfranks — 2019-02-03T13:07:52.007Z

In the case of humans, it seems self-evident that suffering is a consciously experienced, mental or psychological phenomenon. This makes it difficult to quantify, given our lack of access to other beings’ qualia. However, the science of neuropsychology seeks to correlate reports of subjective experience with quantitative measures of physiological (brain) activity. If the variable being reported by subjects is the (relative) degree of suffering experienced at any moment, this gives us a way to quantify suffering by correlating this variable with relevant brain-scan variables.
Once quantitative measures are in place, different methods for suffering alleviation (e.g. meditation, therapy, psychotherapeutic drugs) can be assessed for their relative efficacy. This already happens in clinical contexts, for example by measuring the effect of “Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction” (MBSR) on variables such as cortisol levels, which are related to consciously experienced stress.
I’m not aware of any research to extend suffering-quantification (and subsequent alleviation) beyond clinical settings and into “everyday life”. Most people will never have a clinical symptom that requires a psychotherapeutic treatment, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be subject to significant amounts of suffering throughout their lives. We might call that “everyday suffering”.
Measuring everyday suffering, e.g. measuring cortisol levels of healthy subjects in their day-to-day lives, might inform opportunities to alleviate it. This is probably already happening to some extent. An example intervention: given MBSR’s efficacy at alleviating stress-levels of those with psychiatric disorders, it stands to reason that it will alleviate the stress of healthy subjects. Thus, one might imagine a government funded program to provide all citizens access to MBSR as a means of reducing cortisol/stress levels and their associated suffering.
Alleviating everyday suffering is akin to the “betterment of well people” and I simply want to raise the point (for discussion) that this might be a neglected cause. It’s not as pressing a challenge as mitigating the intense suffering of certain beings (like factory-farm animals) but if large, healthy populations are subject to any baseline of mental suffering, I think it’s important that we try to measure, and then work to reduce, that baseline. Even a small reduction of ...
How to stay concentrated for a long period of time?
by infinickel — 2019-02-03T05:24:28.455Z

I find it nearly impossible to focus on anything more than 2+ hours straight. Even if I enjoy an activity, I end up being distracted by a hell lot of things or just being too exhausted to continue doing it.

The situation is only getting worse if I have a task that is not rewarding in a short-term. Yet a lot of people I know can endure unpleasant tasks even for a few days (e.g. when they have to finish "that dull project" right before deadline).

The question is, how can a person develop ability for staying focused? What kind of tricks can be used? If these tricks can be harmful for health, I'd like to hear about them anyway.
How to notice being mind-hacked
by Shmi — 2019-02-02T23:13:48.812Z

Epistemic status: quite sure, but likely nothing new, I have not done the requisite literature search.

Human mind is not designed with security in mind. It has some defenses against basic adversaries that would have prevented our survival as a species, but not much more than that. It is also necessarily open to external influences because humans are social animals and cooperation is essential for survival. So, any security expert would be horrified at how vulnerable to adversarial mind hacking humans are. Humans generally do not like to accept how easy we are to sway, and how often it happens to us, but we can definitely see other people being easily influenced, and most of us aren't special in terms of mind security.

Another common term for it is "manipulation," but there is a slight difference. Manipulation generally presumes that the interests of the manipulator are detrimental to the mind being manipulated. Mind hacking does not have to have this negative connotation.

So, given that our minds are security sieves and we live in the world where influencing others (yet another term for mind hacking), and where we have certainly been mind-hacked by others over and over again, how does one notice a hack (unauthorized breach of mind security), whether when it is about to happen, when in progress, and after the fact? I am limiting the scope to just noticing. I am not implying that one has to try to stop a mind hack in preparation or in progress, or trying to undo it after it happened. Descriptive, not prescriptive.

Let's start with a a few obvious examples.

Your friend, noticing your distress, invites you to their church event, just to get your mind off things. A month later, you have converted to their faith, quote scriptures, believe in salvation and dedicate your life to spreading the gospel.

Or you come across a book, say, HPMoR or From AI to Zombies (I take partial credit/blame for the latter name), learn about rationality, get blown away by Eliezer's genius, and, next thing you know, you are at a local x-risk meetup worrying about an unaligned AI accidentally paper-clipping the universe and donating 10% of your income to an EA cause.

Or you pick up a Siouxsie and the Banshees CD in a record store (back when CDs and record stores were a thing), and soon you are a part of the goth subculture, deathhawk up every weekend, your carefully cr...
Depression philosophizing
by aaq — 2019-02-02T22:54:16.363Z

Epistemic status: Weak confidence. Refine and dismantle as you see fit.

For certain people, philosophical thinking is net harmful to their everyday life.

This should not be that surprising. Certain kinds of cognitive behavior do reliably lead to unhappiness, and there's no a priori reason to suppose explicit, logical thinking is somehow exempt from that risk. For many people, it appears that a stable sense of identity, purpose in life, and place in society are important factors in creating and maintaining happiness and contentment. Philosophical thinking often involves destabilizing those concepts.

I want to point to something I have noticed in myself, and suspect happens in others as well. I call it "depression philosophizing." You begin to think philosophically about your life, and slowly, maybe imperceptibly, you feel worse and worse about yourself, as you meditate on such concepts as morality, meaning, and ontology in an abstract sense.

It's tempting to unilaterally demonize depression philosophizing. But there is one big thing about it that stands out and that makes it so hard to quit doing - and that's that the quality of your intellectual rigor doesn't correlate very much with your emotional state. Plenty of great philosophers were miserable people (Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer).

I think rationalists are likely to fall prey to this trap. As a group, we have a revealed preference towards abstract thinking and philosophy. Some of our folk heroes appear unusually good at facing philosophical problems without letting it get to them or divert them from their goals - Nate Soares pops to mind for me.

I don't have a good answer for how to combat this beyond the usual mechanisms used to treat depression. But I've had some success at simply reminding myself that even the act of stopping and thinking has an opportunity cost to it - it's not actually a very wise move to devote large amounts of time running your brain in circles around a tempting philosophical issue when you know people have tried and failed to answer it conclusively for thousands of years. Sometimes I even accept the maxim "ignorance is bliss", in this small domain of human experience. These experiences remind me strongly of cognitive-behavioral therapeutic techniques. I hope this helps someone else who grapples with depression philosophiz...
How does Gradient Descent Interact with Goodhart?
by Scott Garrabrant — 2019-02-02T00:14:51.673Z

I am confused about how gradient descent (and other forms of local search) interact with Goodhart's law. I often use a simple proxy of "sample points until I get one with a large U value" or "sample n points, and take the one with the largest U value" when I think about what it means to optimize something for U. I might even say something like "n bits of optimization" to refer to sampling 2n points. I think this is not a very good proxy for what most forms of optimization look like, and this question is trying to get at understanding the difference.

(Alternatively, maybe sampling is a good proxy for many forms of optimization, and this question will help us understand why, so we can think about converting an arbitrary optimization process into a certain number of bits of optimization, and comparing different forms of optimization directly.)

One reason I care about this is that I am concerned about approaches to AI safety that involve modeling humans to try to learn human value. One reason for this concern is that I think it would be nice to be able to save human approval as a test set. Consider the following two procedures:

A) Use some fancy AI system to create a rocket design, optimizing according to some specifications that we write down, and then sample rocket designs output by this system until you find one that a human approves of.

B) Generate a very accurate model of a human. Use some fancy AI system to create a rocket design, optimizing simultaneously according to some specifications that we write down and approval according to the accurate human model. Then sample rocket designs output by this system until you find one that a human approves of.

I am more concerned about the second procedure, because I am worried that the fancy AI system might use a method of optimizing for human approval that Goodharts away the connection between human approval and human value. (In addition to the more benign failure mode of Goodharting away the connection between true human approval and the approval of the accurate model.)

It is possible that I am wrong about this, and I am failing to see just how unsafe procedure A is, because I am failing to imagine the vast number of rocket designs one would have to sample before finding one that is approved, but I think maybe procedure B is actually worse (or worse in some ways). My intuition here ...
STRUCTURE: Reality and rational best practice
by Hazard — 2019-02-01T23:51:21.390Z

This post is part of my Hazardous Guide To Rationality. I don't expect this to be new or exciting to frequent LW people, and I would super appreciate comments and feedback in light of intents for the sequence, as outlined in the above link. Also, note this is a STRUCTURE post, again see the above link for what that means.

The Simple Truth
The shifting sands of belief

Updating as the winds of evidence shift, not in begrudging jumps and jerks

Why you don't need "certainty"

... and why it feels like you totally do need it.
0 and 1 aren't probabilities
Fallacy of the grey

Make your beliefs pay rent
Reductionism
Pole Vaulting over the Uncanny Valley of Bad Rationality

Crash course in VNM rational agents (and why you aren't one)
Rescuing the Utility function

More from a "how not to personally fall into an existential funk" perspective.
An Attempt To Explain No-Self In Simple Terms
by Justin Vriend — 2019-02-01T23:50:09.868Z

[this is a repost from my personal blog explanationing.wordpress.com. Look there for posts explaining my priors.]

Our conscious experience of the world is tuned to the level of detail that our mind deems most important to our continued survival. We experience shapes, colour, depth, size, velocity, et cetera. Anything that would be useful in tracking a deer, climbing a tree, spotting a mountain lion. This world of solid objects, heat, light, and sound, is eminently comprehensible.

However, we know that it is only part of the picture.

Our experience of a body of water changes profoundly when we analyze it at the level of fluid dynamics, or molecules, or quarks. The same is true when we analyze it at the level of the water cycle, or meteorology, or geology. Any given object of experience may be understood at different levels of analysis. These levels bleed into one another, and seem to extend from our baseline perception of objects in all possible conceptual directions.

In the 19th century, while the scientific consensus held that matter is made of particles, humanity at large was still struggling with the idea. It’s easy to imagine the difficulty people had bridging the gap between this novel level of analysis and their intuitive view of a world. Up until that point, for most people most of the time, objects were exactly as they appeared. Rocks are made of rock, full stop.

Taking consciousness itself as the object of analysis leads to the same difficulties. Compelled by force-of-habit so deeply ingrained that it manifests in our physiology, it is difficult for most people to see beyond their usual approach to consciousness. In the west, this level of analysis talks about the Self and Choice.

A more robust understanding of psychology and neuroscience can provide some sparse furniture for further levels of analysis. However, consciousness can only be fully understood from within. Exploration of one’s own mind is required to get a full picture of the most significant levels of consciousness adjacent to the level of Self. This sort of exploration is laborious and unintuitive for anyone, let alone those unpracticed in any serious contemplative traditions.

This is why most people have to take it on trust that there is a level of analysis wherein the Self is completely absent, let alone that it is possible for anyone to inhabit the No Self just as completely as they inha...
STRUCTURE: How the Social Affects your rationality
by Hazard — 2019-02-01T23:35:43.511Z

This post is part of my Hazardous Guide To Rationality. I don't expect this to be new or exciting to frequent LW people, and I would super appreciate comments and feedback in light of intents for the sequence, as outlined in the above link. Also, note this is a STRUCTURE post, again see the above link for what that means.

You brain is primarily designed for social reasoning, not reality reasoning.

Posts: face of the ice, of two minds,
Hansionian exploration of how our minds are structured to play politics.
Most people don't actually need to be that attuned to reality to get by and live an okay/great life.
Much of what people say is debate or arguing about the truth, is actually a coordination game where people are trying to make social outcomes happen by "logically trapping" others and "appealing to the reasonable person interface"
It is possible for YOU to be trying to achieve a social outcome, yet think you are just talking about your beliefs about reality.

Insert A Humans Guide to Words (but condensed)

There are a lot of English sentences that feel like questions you can ask about the world, that are just nonsense
It feels like words mean something, but they don't. It's people who mean things, and they happen to use words.

Given all that a lot of the people you will interact with won't have a deep understanding on all of the ways their natural manner of thinking can lead to nonsense, how might you go about communicating with people?

Double Crux
STRUCTURE: A Crash Course in Your Brain
by Hazard — 2019-02-01T23:17:23.872Z

This post is part of my Hazardous Guide To Rationality. I don't expect this to be new or exciting to frequent LW people, and I would super appreciate comments and feedback in light of intents for the sequence, as outlined in the above link. Also, note this is a STRUCTURE post, again see the above link for what that means.

Intro

Talking about truth and reality can be hard. First, we're going to take a stroll through what we currently know about how the human mind works, and what the implications are for one's ability to be right.

Outline of main ideas. Could be post per main bullet.

The Unconscious exists

There is "more happening" in your brain than you are consciously aware of
S1 / S2 introduction (research if I actually recommend Thinking Fast and Slow as the best intro)

Confabulation is a thing

You have an entire sub-module in your brain which is specialized for making up reasons for why you do things. Because of this, even if you ask yourself, "Why did I just tip over that vase?" and get a ready answer, it is hard to figure out if that is a true reason for your behavior.

By default, thoughts feel like facts.

The lower-level a thought produced by your brain, the less it feels like, 'A thing I think which could be true of false" and the more it feels like, "The way the world obviously is, duh."
Your intuitions do not have special magical access to the truth. They are sometimes wrong, and sometimes right. But unless you pay attention, you are likely to by default, believe them to be compleely correct.

We are Predictably Wrong
You don't automatically know what you actual beliefs are.

You also have the ability to say "I believe XYZ" while having no meaningful/consequential relations of XYZ to the rest of your world model. You can also not notice that this is the case.
Luckily, you do still have some non-zero ability to have anticipation/expectations about reality, and have world models/beliefs.

When beliefs are secretly decisions, not models.
What kind of information would serve as the best evidence for resolving the debate of whether a centrist or leftist Democratic nominee is likelier to take the White House in 2020?
by Evan_Gaensbauer — 2019-02-01T18:40:12.571Z

The public debate for who should be the Democratic Party presidential candidate for the 2020 electoral race hinges on whether the Dems are likelier to win by nominating a progressive or socialist, or by nominating a centrist or moderate. Assuming this is a problem one wanted to approach epistemically (as opposed to just viewing the debate as a power struggle), we should look for facts of the matter about whether, overall, Americans are likelier to elect a progressive/socialist, or moderate/centrist to the Presidency in 2020. Unfortunately there is no apparent consensus about how to make traction on this problem.

Having read a variety of sources for months now, left-leaning media outlets give all the usual arguments for why the Dems must nominate Sanders or another progressive to win, and all the more moderate media outlets say the exact opposite. Ideally, some people from both sides would come together for an adversarial collaboration, but it doesn't appear either side can even agree on what would count as good or bad evidence for their positions. In other words, most of the time on both sides of this issue are playing reference class tennis, and neither side is aware this is what they're doing.
On social media I started a discussion on this topic among some rationalists and effective altruists to see if it would elicit hope to make traction on this issue. None of them who had a strong opinion on this issue could or would back it up at length, which I'm assuming means they don't have strong, asymmetrical evidence (at least not in the eyes of the opposition) for their position. It's my expectation two rationalists should be aware when they're playing a game of reference class tennis. If on this topic they are aware, it doesn't appear rationalists know how to get out of this failure mode better than anyone else.
My search of last resort, at least under the streetlight (read: my attempt to answer this question without doing any work myself), was to check PredictIt. As of this posting, the top 6 contenders have been assigned between a 9% chance and 23% chance of winning the Democratic nomination. In roughly the same rank order for chances of winning the Presidency overall, those same 6 prospective Democratic nominees are currently receiving an assignment of between a 6% and 19% chance of winning. These 6 contenders run the gamut

...
Urgent & important: How (not) to do your to-do list
by bfinn — 2019-02-01T17:44:34.573Z

The Eisenhower Box is a well-known, simple decision matrix for dealing with tasks such as a to-do list, based on whether they’re urgent or important.

I reckon it has multiple flaws. But by fixing each flaw in turn, we end up with a better matrix, which I'll call Hopscotch. It's much more useful for planning your day, and can also be simplified further.

What to do?

The great problem of life is what to do. Your life consists of millions of decisions large and small, from making coffee to running for President. Which should you do, and when, and how?

There’s all the things to be done at work and home, constant demands and distractions, unfulfilled ambitions at the back of your mind – and barely time to think, let alone get through all this stuff.

Happily, a box has been invented to help you out. A bit like an Amazon Echo – but made only of paper & ink – it not only tells you how to deal with everything on your plate, but magically makes some of it disappear.

Or so it is claimed.

The box

The Eisenhower Box (or Matrix) was invented by Stephen Covey in his bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It was later named after US President Dwight Eisenhower, who once said:

“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

The point being, people spend too much time on urgent-seeming but unimportant distractions, instead of on important, non-urgent matters – such as planning, people, and future opportunities. Short-term trivia divert you from what really counts.

To solve this, the Eisenhower Box tells you what to do with each task that happens along, based on whether it’s important or urgent:[1]

The kind of tasks that end up in each cell, starting top-left, are:

Important & Urgent (green): things that need action ASAP, such as important meetings/calls/emails, tight deadlines, and crises. They’ve got to be done, so – like the box says – you’d better Do them.
Important & Non-Urgent (blue): big-picture, longer-term, proactive things you don’t do enough of – planning, identifying opportunities, talking to people, recruiting, training, self-improvement, etc. Such things are rarely pressing, but can prevent the scrambles and crises of the stressful green cell. So Schedule these tasks in your calendar, to avoid procrastinating them for ever.
Unimportant & Urgent (orange): e.g. unnecessary

...