trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Review: Slay the Spire
by Zvi — 2018-12-09T20:40:01.616Z

Epistemic Status: Many hours played

Spoiler-Free Bottom Line: Slay the Spire is an amazing single-player roguelike deckbuilding game. When I wrote that Artifact was the most fun I’ve had gaming in a long time, the only alternative to give me pause was Slay the Spire. Each game, you work your way up the spire, with each room an opportunity to improve your deck, either with rewards from battle or other opportunities. Each turn of each battle, you see what the enemy is going to do, and by default you have three energy to spend on any combination of five drawn cards, to prepare to block their attacks while dealing damage back. If you die, that’s it, time to start over.

Early plays ideally involve discovery of what cards are out there, what decks are possible to assemble, what enemies there are and what they do, and everything else the spire has to offer. As you gain in skill and experience, you play it on additional levels and in new ways.

I highly recommend playing the game, and I highly recommend not learning more or reading further before doing so. Figuring the game out is half the fun.

My Mostly-Spoiler-Free Journey Through the Spire

I started off knowing the basics above, but nothing else. The game was in (earlier) early access, so a bunch of the details were different, but aside from missing the third class (The Defect) the game was largely the same as it is now.

I played my first few games as The Ironclad. At first things were tough, but a little experience went a long way. My first run ended on the Act I boss. My second run ended on the Act II boss. In my third run, I managed to get all the way through and win.

That surprised me quite a bit. Rogelike games are supposed to be way harder than that! I put it up to a lot of luck and a lot of deckbuilding game experience, and moved on to the second character class, The Outcast.

Once again, there was a learning curve, but once again it didn’t seem that hard, and on my second try I got all the way through. I assumed I was fortunate to win so fast, but it seemed powerful things would come my way reasonably often.

At that point, I stopped playing. What more was there to do? I saw some talk of trying to win *more consistently*, and there was the option to use ‘Ascension’ to make the game harder, but I did not see the appeal in either approach. When The Defect became available, I tried it and won on the third try. So af...
Kindergarten in NYC: Much More than You Wanted to Know
by Laura B — 2018-12-09T15:36:37.441Z

Kindergarten in NYC: Much More than You Wanted to Know

My son is turning five next year, which means one of the most important transitions in his childhood and potentially his life: starting Kindergarten. I always thought New York City moms who obsessed over this were clearly crazy.

Now I am one of those moms.

Why do we do this to ourselves? It’s not the one year of kindergarten. It’s securing that spot in the school where you want them to stay until middle school and potentially high school, and probably send your other kids to as well. It’s all of the social and class insecurities that come with choosing a school and its associated peer group. It’s the fear that if you choose poorly, your child will age 100 years and his face will melt off in front of you.

Not quite that severe. Still, you worry you’ll mess up their life and they’ll become drug addled sociopaths living on your couch until you kick them out when they bring back that prostitute.

Maybe going overboard again. They’ll go to State College, move to the suburbs, and work in retail.

Wo wo wo, lets not be unrealistic. Retail won't be around in 10 years. Your kid will be horribly miserable for the next 14 years, go through depressive episodes, and blame you for all of it. That’s what I’m actually worried about. Both my husband and I had horrible elementary school experiences. We still carry scars. We don’t want that for our sons.

So why not home school? All the cool kids are doing it. We have personal reasons why this would not work for our family. Our son has some social deficits, but is extremely bright. Literally everyone we’ve spoken to who knows our son agrees that he would do better in a structured environment with peers. We have observed his profound social-emotional growth upon starting the school year. We saw back-sliding over the summer when he lacked structure or regular peer interactions. He will not listen to us when we teach him. He is a different child in the school setting, soaking up knowledge.

People can rant all they like about how horrible school is philosophically, but that does not negate what we’ve personally witnessed in our own child. Philosophy aside, home-schooling is a lot of work and coordination. We both work full-time. While we would pick home-school over the horrid elementary school experiences we had, we hope we can do better and find a school where he will be happy...
New Ratfic: Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility
by Alicorn — 2018-12-09T05:00:41.749Z

For NaNoWriMo, I decided to do a rationality themed pastiche of the Phantom Tollbooth. It is complete and serializing at http://nyssa.elcenia.com on Saturdays and Wednesdays. There are three chapters up as of this posting.
What precisely do we mean by AI alignment?
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2018-12-09T02:23:28.809Z

We sometimes phrase AI alignment as the problem of aligning the behavior or values of AI with what humanity wants or humanity's values or humanity's intent, but this leaves open the questions of just what precisely it means for an AI to be "aligned" with just what precisely we mean by "wants," "values," or "intent". So when we say we want to build aligned AI, what precisely do we mean to accomplish beyond vaguely building an AI that does-what-I-mean-not-what-I-say?
LW Update 2018-12-06 – All Posts Page, Questions Page, Posts Item rework
by Raemon — 2018-12-08T21:30:13.874Z

First, an FYI – the LessWrong Team will be starting various holiday trips fairly soon. We'll probably still be doing some work and answering intercom, but may be more delayed than usual over the next few weeks.

But, we also have a few more updates:

There is now a questions page, if you'd like to just view the latest question posts. (this uses a new backend view called "questions" for those interested in playing around with the API)
There is now a bare-bones All Posts page. We'll probably give it more features (i.e. sorting, filtering) at some point. For now it just loads the most recent 100 posts in chronological order. It doesn't have all the anti-spam filters that we've added to other sections yet, so, um, watch out for that I guess.
Post Items have been reworked a bit so it's easier to skim them for karma (while still trying to avoid making karma too visible). Also added some tooltips for vote-counts, alignment forum and word-count.
GraphQL tutorial for LessWrong and Effective Altruism Forum
by riceissa — 2018-12-08T19:51:59.514Z

This post is a tutorial on using GraphQL to query for information about
LessWrong and the Effective Altruism Forum. It's mostly intended for people who
have wanted to explore LW/EA Forum data but have found GraphQL intimidating
(this was the case for myself until several weeks ago).

General steps for writing a query

(This section will make more sense if you have seen some example queries; see
next section.)

For the queries that I know how to do, here is the general outline of steps:

Go to https://www.lesswrong.com/graphiql or
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/graphiql depending on which forum you
want to query data for.

Figure out what the output type should be (e.g. comments, comment,
posts, post).

Type {output_type(input)} into GraphiQL and hover over input.

Here is what it looks like for the comment output type:

Here is what it looks like for the comments output type:

Click
on the type that appears after input (e.g. MultiCommentInput, SingleCommentInput).
A column on the right should appear (if it was not there already).
Depending on the fields listed in that column, there will now be two ways to proceed.
(Generally, it seems like singular output types (e.g. comment) will have
selector and plural output types (e.g. comments) will have terms.)

Here is what it looks like for the comment output type. In the image, I have
already clicked on SingleCommentInput so you can see selector under the
documentation (rightmost) column.

Here is what it looks like for the comments output type. Again, in this image,
I have already clicked on MultiCommentInput so you can see terms under the
documentation (rightmost) column.

In the fields listed, if there is selector (e.g. for comment):

Click on the selector type (e.g. CommentSelectorUniqueInput). Use one of
the fields (e.g. _id) to pick out the specific item you want.

Here is what you should click on:

What it looks like after you have clicked:

If there is terms (e.g. comments):

Go to the
collections
directory in the LessWrong 2.0 codebase, and find the views.js file for
your output type. For example, if your output type is comments, then the
corresponding views.js file is located at
collections/comments/views.js.

Look through the various "views" in the views.js file to see if there is
a relevant view. (There is also a default view if you don't select any
view.) The main things to pay attention to are the selector

...
Prediction Markets Are About Being Right
by Zvi — 2018-12-08T14:00:00.281Z

Response To (Marginal Revolution): If you love prediction markets you should love the art world.

Previously on prediction markets: Prediction Markets: When Do They Work?, Subsidizing Prediction Markets

I’ll quote the original in full, as it is short, and I found it interestingly and importantly wrong. By asking the question of why this perspective is wrong, we see what is so special about prediction markets versus other markets.

Think of art markets, and art collecting, as an ongoing debate over what is beautiful and also what is culturally important. But unlike most debates, you have a very direct chance to “put your money where your mouth is,” namely by buying art (it is very difficult to sell art short, however). In this regard, debates over artistic value may be among the most efficient debates in the world. At least if you are persuaded by the basic virtues of prediction markets. The prices of various art works really do aggregate information about their perceived values.

I have, however, noted a correlation, how necessary or contingent I am not sure. The “white male nerd types” who are enamored of prediction markets tend to be especially skeptical of the market judgments of particular art works, most of all for conceptual and contemporary art.

In my view, discussions about the value of art, as they occur in the off-the-record, proprietary sphere, are indeed of high value and they deserve to be studied more closely. Imagine a bunch of people competing to make “objects that are interesting but not interesting for reasons related to their practical value.” And then we debate who has succeeded, or not. And those debates reflect many broader social, political, and economic issues. And it is all done with very real money on the line. The money concerns not just the value of individual art works, but also the prestige and social capital value that arises from having assembled a prestigious and insightful collection.

That’s exactly why (almost) everyone who loves prediction markets hates the high-end, expensive art markets, even if they love art and artists and buy original paintings to hang on their walls. This goes beyond ‘skepticism of the market judgments.’ Expensive art markets are not fundamentally markets. They are fundamentally a political status game.

Consider three (non-exhaustive) types of markets: Consumption markets, commercial markets and pr...
Book review: Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security
by PeterMcCluskey — 2018-12-08T03:47:17.098Z
Link: http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2018/12/06/artificial-intelligence-safety-and-security/

Book review: Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security, by Roman V.
Yampolskiy.

This is a collection of papers, with highly varying topics, quality, and
importance.

Many of the papers focus on risks that are specific to
superintelligence, some assuming that a single AI will take over the
world, and some assuming that there will be many AIs of roughly equal
power. Others focus on problems that are associated with current AI
programs.

I've tried to arrange my comments on individual papers in roughly
descending order of how important the papers look for addressing the
largest AI-related risks, while also sometimes putting similar topics in
one group. The result feels a little more organized than the book, but I
worry that the papers are too dissimilar to be usefully grouped. I've
ignored some of the less important papers.

The book's attempt at organizing the papers consists of dividing them
into "Concerns of Luminaries" and "Responses of Scholars". Alas, I see
few signs that many of the authors are even aware of what the other
authors have written, much less that the later papers are attempts at
responding to the earlier papers. It looks like the papers are mainly
arranged in order of when they were written. There's a modest cluster of
authors who agree enough with Bostrom to constitute a single scientific
paradigm,
but half the papers demonstrate about as much of a consensus on what
topic they're discussing as I would expect to get from asking medieval
peasants about airplane safety.

Drexler's paper is likely the most important paper here, but it's
frustratingly cryptic.

He hints at how we might build powerful AI systems out of components
that are fairly specialized.

A key criterion is whether an AI has "strong agency". When I first read
this paper a couple of years ago, I found that confusing. Since then
I've read some more of Drexler's writings (not yet published) which are
much clearer about this. Drexler, hurry up and publish those writings!

Many discussions of AI risks assume that any powerful AI will have goals
that extend over large amounts of time and space. Whereas it's fairly
natural for today's AI systems to have goals which are defined only over
the immediate output of the system. E.g. Google translate only cares
about the next sentence that it's going to create, and normal
engineering practices aren't pushing toward having it look much further
into the

...
Is the human brain a valid choice for the Universal Turing Machine in Solomonoff Induction?
by habryka — 2018-12-08T01:49:56.073Z

I've recently been thinking about Solomonoff induction, and in particular the free choice of Universal Turing Machine.

One variable that seems like a potential choice here is a human brain (my brain for example). It's obviously a bit of a weird choice, but I don't see any reason to disprefer it over a Python interpreter, given that the whole point of Solomonoff induction is to define a prior and so my knowledge of physics or atoms shouldn't really come into play when choosing a UTM.

Concretely, the UTM would be a human simulated in an empty room with an infinitely large notebook symbolizing the tape. It's output would be an encoding of sensory data, and it's input would be a string of instructions in english.

If we do that, then the sentence "the woman at the end of the street is a witch, she did it" suddenly becomes one of the simplest hypotheses that are available to us. Since the english sentence is so short, we now basically just need to give an encoding of who that woman is and what the action in question is, which is probably also going to be a lot shorter in human language than machine language (since our UTM already understands basic physics, society, etc.), and then our simulated human (which since Solomonoff induction doesn't have runtime constraints can take as much time as they want) should be able to produce a prediction of historical sensory input quite well, with relatively little input.

I feel like I must be missing something in my understanding of Solomonoff induction. I have a lot more thoughts, but maybe someone else has already thought of this and can help me understand this. Some thoughts that come to mind:

I don't know how to build a human brain, but I know how to build a machine that runs a Python interpreter. In that sense I understand a Python interpreter a lot better than I do a human brain, and using it as the basis of Solomonoff induction is more enlightening
There is a weird circularity about choosing a human brain (or your own brain in particular) as the UTC in Solomonoff induction that I can't quite put my finger on
Maybe I am misunderstanding the Solomonoff induction formalism so that this whole construction doesn't make any sense
LW Update 2018-12-06 – Table of Contents and Q&A
by Raemon — 2018-12-08T00:47:09.267Z

After a couple months of work, we're ready for a significant update to LessWrong:

Post Page Redesign
Open Questions (aka Q&A)
Table of Contents (aka ToC)
Comment Guidelines

Post Page Redesign

The first thing you probably noticed is that we redesigned the post page. This was more of an incidental change, which turned out to be necessary in order for both Table of Contents and Question posts to work nicely.

Table of Contents

We wanted a Table of Contents that not only helped you orient at the beginning of a post, but provided a frame of reference while reading a post, that would help make longer, more complicated posts more skim-able.

Features:

Right now the ToC displays to the left of posts on desktop screens, for posts that have 3 or more headings.
An element that is entirely bold counts as a heading
On small screens, the Table of Contents is available when you click on the site-navigation icon in the upper left. (The icon will change to indicate a ToC)

There are some additional nice-to-have features we plan to add soonish, such as the ability to collapse the ToC, and the ability to preview it while drafting a post.

In general we'll probably experiment a bit more with the format.

Props to GreaterWrong for implementing a Table of Contents quite a while ago. :)

Open Questions

I wrote a couple weeks ago about our new Questions and Answers system. We're now ready to deploy the minimum-viable-version of this.

Current Features

Ask a Question. In your user menu (in the upper right corner of the screen) there is now an option for questions to ask a question, which will create a post with the question-flag. For now, it'll appear normally in lists of recent posts (including the home page, daily and your personal profile)
Answer a Question. This is similar to a comment, but the formatting is different to highlight that this is meant to have a different feel than commenting. Answers should aspire to resolve a question as accurately and thoroughly as possible, such that if you just read the question-followed-by-single-answer you'd have a pretty complete understanding of the issue.
Comment on an Answer. By default, only the top 3 comments will be displayed, but if you want to dig into the discussion of a given answer you can expand them.
Comment on a Question. You can comment on an overall question, without answering. This is for if you're still trying to un

...
Transhumanists Don't Need Special Dispositions
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2018-12-07T22:24:17.072Z

This essay was originally posted in 2007.

I have claimed that transhumanism arises strictly from love of life. A bioconservative humanist says that it is good to save someone's life or cure them of debilitating syndromes if they are young, but once they are "too old" (the exact threshold is rarely specified) we should stop trying to keep them alive and healthy. A transhumanist says unconditionally: "Life is good, death is bad; health is good, death is bad." Whether you're 5, 50, or 500, life is good, why die? Nothing more is required.

Then why is there a widespread misunderstanding that transhumanism involves a special fetish for technology, or an unusually strong fear of death, or some other abnormal personal disposition?

I offer an analogy: Rationality is often thought to be about cynicism. The one comes to us and says, "Fairies make the rainbow; I believe this because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside." And you say, "No." And the one reasons, "I believe in fairies because I enjoy feeling warm and fuzzy. If I imagine that there are no fairies, I feel a sensation of deadly existential emptiness. Rationalists say there are no fairies. So they must enjoy sensations of deadly existential emptiness." Actually, rationality follows a completely different rule - examine the rainbow very closely and see how it actually works. If we find fairies, we accept that, and if we don't find fairies, we accept that too. The look-and-see rule makes no mention of our personal feelings about fairies, and it fully determines the rational answer. So you cannot infer that a competent rationalist hates fairies, or likes feelings of deadly existential emptiness, by looking at what they believe about rainbows.

But this rule - the notion of actually looking at things - is not widely understood. The more common belief is that rationalists make up stories about boring old math equations, instead of pretty little fairies, because rationalists have a math fetish instead of a fairy fetish. A personal taste, and an odd one at that, but how else would you explain rationalists' strange and unusual beliefs?

Similarly, love of life is not commonly understood as a motive for saying that, if someone is sick, and we can cure them using medical nanotech, we really ought to do that. Instead people suppose that t...
Is cognitive load a factor in community decline?
by ryan_b — 2018-12-07T15:45:20.605Z

This is speculation; I had the thought and then ran in to trouble disentangling the question I am trying to answer from other research on a different question, and also the sources I know about are not conveniently available to me. Ideally I can either get a swift negation or a line on the right kind of research to look at from here.

From here I get the notion that more effort is required per hour of work than was the case in the past. It's very long, but here's the part that piqued my interest:

So labour productivity growth in textiles came from a combination of “speed-up” and “stretch-out”, which is equivalent to “labour intensification” — making each worker exert more effort for every hour of work.

Clark (1987) notes that over the course of the 19th century the average Lancashire operative roughly doubled the number of machines tended, even as the speed of machines also increased. This higher workload makes it “unsafe to infer that the increase in output per worker resulted solely from technical progress”.

That view is powerfully supported by Bessen (2012), who estimates approximately 1/4 of the 50-fold increase in cloth output per worker-hour between 1800 and 1900 was due to each weaver simply operating more looms than they had done initially. That’s really big. But if you cut off the initial quantum leap from the hand loom (1800) to the power loom (1819) and consider only the mechanised era after 1819, the share of the productivity growth due to greater exertion of effort is even bigger — more than 60% !

From this Kathy Sierra talk I saw some months ago, I get the notion of total cognitive resources used during work. Combining these two suggests to me that the total cognitive resources used on the job have increased over time.

Finally I have been wondering about the decline of community in the United States these last few weeks. Referring to Putnam, it seems this has been pretty consistent since ~1965.

So what I am wondering is: did we cross some threshold around 1965 where the demands of work ate up the all cognitive resources we had available, so none were left for working in/on our community?

In pseudoerasmus' post the term "labor intensification" is used, but when I search for variations on labor intensity/ification, mostly what I get is the ratio of labor expenditures to capital expenditures. I also don&...