trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Where I've Changed My Mind on My Approach to Speculative Causes
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-08-16T07:09:54.834Z

Follow up to Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)

Previously, I wrote "Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)" and a follow up essay "What Would It Take to Prove a Speculative Cause?". Both of these sparked a lot of discussion on LessWrong, on the Effective Altruist blog, and my own blog, as well as many hours of in person conversation.

After all this extended conversation with people, I've changed my mind on a few things that I will elaborate here. I hope in doing so I can (1) clarify my original position and (2) explain where I now stand in light of all the debate so people can engage with my current ideas as opposed to the ideas I no longer hold. My opinions on things tend to change quickly, so I think updates like this will help.

My Argument, As It Currently Stands

If I were to communicate one main point of my essay, based on what I believe now, it would be when you're in a position of high uncertainty, the best response is to use a strategy of exploration rather than a strategy of exploitation.

What I mean by this is that given the high uncertainty of impact we see now, especially with regard to the far future, we're better off trying to find more information about impact and reduce our uncertainty (exploration) rather than pursuing whatever we think is best (exploitation).

The implications of this would mean that:

We should develop more of an attitude that our case for impact is neither clear nor proven.

We should apply more skepticism to our causes and more self-skepticism to our personal beliefs about impact.

We should use the language of "information" and "exploration" more often than the language of "impact" and "exploitation".

We should focus more on finding specific and concrete attempts to ensure we're making progress and figure out our impact (whether it be surveys, experiments, soliciting external review from relevant experts, etc.).

We should focus more on transparency about what we're doing and thinking and why, when relevant and not exceedingly costly.

And to be clear, here are specific statements that address misconceptions about what I have argued:

I do think it is wrong to ignore unproven causes completely and stop pursuing them.

I don't think we should be donating everything to the Against Malaria Foundation instead of speculative causes.

I

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Optimizing optimizing LessWrong
by  — 2013-08-15T21:20:23.641Z

Our optimization process sucks.

Every now and then someone makes up a thread concerning the optimization of LW, we have a nice discussion, one or the other idea gets a number of upvotes, sometimes quite a lot, but in the end, nothing happens.

What's more, it is predictable that nothing will happen, which kills the motivation to contribute.

The LW staff (those who hold the authority to implement major changes!) needs to commit a considerable amount of time for the optimization of LW. If necessary, hire someone and make his main job LW optimization.

The people contributing to optimization threads need to get serious feedback from the staff. It is just frustrating to feel that those who are in charge of implementing changes will not even take the time to think my arguments through.

It is just a tragic waste to put so much time and effort into LW, and about nothing into optimizing it.
"Mind reading" - how is this done?
by CWG — 2013-08-15T15:31:45.682Z

I just want to burn him at a stake and watch his witch's heart bubble. It’s extraordinary. Great trick. - Stephen Fry

Derren Brown does many amazing tricks - I want to focus here on his "mind reading". This is way beyond any cold reading I've seen, but he insists that he uses no actors or stooges. He's also a skeptic, very clear about not being psychic. He does reveal some of his tricks, but maintains a lot of mystery.

Reading David Frost's mind - unusually, he struggles and gets the first one wrong, and seems to reveal tiny glimpses of his technique. Then at the end he gives more hints about his technique than usual.

Pet name - getting someone on the street to read another person's mind. In the full version (from the DVD of Trick of the Mind, series one) the segment starts with Derren telling the guy (the pet owner) that sorry, it won't work on you, then later changing his mind and bringing him in.

Creepy clown - the detail here is extraordinary.

Watch the videos then scroll down, if you want to watch it without being influenced by me... I have a few thoughts, but they don't go very far in explaining it...

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Whatever he's doing, he's extraordinarily good at it. Some speculations:

Derren Brown uses suggestion and "subliminal" messages very heavily in his tricks. Often he will have written down the person's choice long before they've chosen, and subtly gets them thinking about what he wants. In the examples above he doesn't have much opportunity to direct the thought, I think... except that in the case of David Frost choosing a place, Frost is looking in the direction of the city scape behind Derren, which presumably influences his choice.

Micromuscle reading: When he or a participant tries to read a thought, there's often something about picking up the sound of a letter. Perhaps he reads involuntary micromuscle movements related to the mouth and throat that happen while saying something loudly in one's head, but suppressing it. (I would have guessed that was impossibl

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
by palladias — 2013-08-15T02:18:54.850Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 97. The previous thread is at nearly 500 comments.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.

Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
An illicit theory of costly signaling
by KatjaGrace — 2013-08-14T23:57:51.000Z

I’m sympathetic to the view that many human behaviors are for signaling. However so far it doesn’t seem like a very tight theory. We have a motley pile of actions labeled as ‘maybe signaling’, connected to a diverse range of characteristics one might want to signal. We have a story for why each would make sense, and also why lots of behaviors that don’t exist would make sense. However I don’t know why we would use the signals we do in particular, or why we would particularly signal the characteristics that we do. When I predict whether a middle class Tahitian man would want to appear to his work colleagues as if he was widely traveled, and whether he would do this by showing them photographs, my answers are entirely based on my intuitive picture of humans and holidays and so on; I don’t see how to derive them from my theory of signaling. Here are two more niggling puzzles:

Why would we use message-specific costly signals for some messages, when we use explicit language + social retribution for so many others?

Much of the time when you speak to others, your values diverge from theirs at least a little. Often they would forward their own interests best by deceiving you, ignoring social costs and conscience. But even in situations where risks from their dishonesty are large, your usual mode of communication is probably spoken or written language.

This is still a kind of costly signaling, as long as if the person faces the right threats of social retribution. Which they usually do I think. If a person says to you that they have a swimming pool, or that they write for the Economist, or that your boyfriend said you should give his car keys to them, you will usually trust them. You are usually safe trusting such claims, because if someone made them dishonestly they could expect to be found out with some probability, and punished. In cases where this isn’t so – for instance if it is a stranger trying to borrow your boyfriend’s car – you will be much less trusting accordingly.

This mode of costly signaling seems very flexible – spoken language can represent any message you might want to send, and the same machinery of social sanctions can be used to guard many messages at once. And we do use this for a lot of our communication. So why do we use different one-off codes for some small class of messag...
Practical Limits to Giving Now and The Haste Consideration
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-08-14T21:32:53.800Z

Quite a few people have talked about whether or not it's better to donate money or donate time now rather than save and donate more money later. While there's lots of nuance on these positions, there does seem to be roughly these two camps -- weighing in (mostly) on the give now side includes GiveWell, Giving What We Can, Scott Alexander, Matt Wage, and me. Weighing in (mostly) on the give later side include Paul Christiano, Robin Hanson, and maybe Brian Tomasik.

The general idea in favor of giving/working now is what Matt Wage calls the haste consideration, or the idea that we can spend resources now to get additional people involved in the movement, and doing so multiplies our impact substantially -- getting just one person to pursue altruism with the same effectiveness we would have done doubles our impact for the rest of our life.

This haste consideration, if true, has strong implications. It means not only would we want to donate as soon as possible, but we'd want to make sure we earn money as soon as possible as well, meaning opportunities like law or medicine that have high incomes but also significantly more schooling may be less appealing from an altruistic perspective. It also would mean we should be donating higher percentages of our income instead of saving, even if this would lead to giving less money over the long term.

However, I think the haste consideration might not be as powerful as it might appear, for three reasons I haven't seen discussed much:

Money and talent seems to encounter some bottlenecks in their usage and it seems difficult to make good use them at the rate they could be given.

There could be significantly better opportunities in the future that need funding and talent, and we need resources around to take up these opportunities as well.

If we take the haste consideration to it's logical conclusion, we face a potential reductio ad absurdum that we should be taking out large loans to finance the effective altruist movement.

Caveats

Before I begin to elaborate on these three points, I'd like to remind everyone that I'm speculating about funding needs that I know only a little bit about and it's quite possible I'm misrepresenting organization's needs for money or how they plan on using their funds.

I offer these ideas in the spirit of "putting things out there" for discussi...
Meetup : Bratislava Meetup VI.
by Viliam_Bur — 2013-08-14T19:31:48.762Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup VI.

WHEN:
19 August 2013 06:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Bistro The Peach, Heydukova 21, Bratislava

How to change yourself (in Slovak language).

Stretneme sa o šiestej v bistre The Peach na Heydukovej ulici (priamo oproti poliklinike). Téma: ako sa zmeniť -- ako sa stať optimistom, ako mať viac šťastia, ako získať motiváciu, ako všetko stihnúť, a ako zmeniť názor.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup VI.
[LINK] EdTech startup hosts AI Hunger Games (cash prize $1k)
by MalcolmOcean — 2013-08-14T08:39:58.848Z

TL;DR = write a python script to win this applied game theory contest for $1000. Based on Prisoner's Dilemma / Tragedy of the Commons but with a few twists. Deadline Sunday August 18.

https://brilliant.org/competitions/hunger-games/rules/

I. Food and Winning

Each player begins the game with 300(P−1) units of food, where P is the number of players.

If after any round you have zero food, you will die and no longer be allowed to compete. All players who survive until the end of the game will receive the survivor's prize.

The game can end in two ways. After a large number of rounds, there will be a small chance each additional round that the game ends. Alternatively, if there is only one person left with food then the game ends. In each case, the winner is the person who has the most food when the game ends.

II. Hunts

Each round is divided into hunts. A hunt is a game played between you and one other player. Each round you will have the opportunity to hunt with every other remaining player, so you will have P−1 hunts per round, where P is the number of remaining players.

The choices are H = hunt (cooperate) and S = slack (defect), and they use confusing wording here, but as far as I can tell the payoff matrix is (in units of food)

H / C
S / D

H / C
0:0
-3:1

S / D
1:-3
-2:-2

What's interesting is you don't get the entirety of your partner's history (so strategies like Tit-Tit-Tit for Tat don't work) instead you get only their reputation, which is the fraction of times they've hunted.

To further complicate the Nash equilibria, there's the option to overhunt: a random number m, 0 < m < P(P−1) is chosen before each round (round consisting of P−1 hunts, remember) and if the total number of hunt-choices is at least m, then each player is awarded 2(P−1) food units (2 per hunt).

Your python program has to decide at the start of each round whether or not to hunt with each opponent, based on:

the round number

your food

your reputation

m

an array of the opponents' reputations

Based on the fact they're giving you some values you'd already know if you had access to memory, I'm assuming it must be a memoryless script that gets run each round. (EDIT: I take that back, I looked at the sample code and while it says you don't need to track this stuff, it notes that you can use instance variables).

Submissions close on the 18th.

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Meetup : Washington DC meetup: Robin Hanson visits again
by maia — 2013-08-14T01:50:37.453Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Robin Hanson visits to talk about prediction markets

WHEN: 08 September 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: National Portrait Gallery

(This meetup is being posted a few weeks before it will occur.)

Since we mostly talked about ems and AI last time he was here, Robin Hanson is visiting again, this time with more of a focus on economics and prediction markets. (Though as always, the discusssion will also be shaped by the interests of the participants.)

The meetup will be in the courtyard adjacent to the National Portrait Gallery, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Robin Hanson visits to talk about prediction markets
Engaging Intellectual Elites at Less Wrong
by lukeprog — 2013-08-13T17:55:05.719Z

Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.

Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!

In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").

Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?

Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:

Pay some intellectual elites with unusually good writing skills (like Eliezer) to generate a constant stream of new, interesting content.

Comb through Less Wrong to replace community-specific jargon with more universally comprehensible terms, and change community norms about jargon. (E.g. GiveWell's jargon tends to be more transparent, such as their phrase "room for more funding.")

Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)

To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.

In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.
Bets on an Extreme Future
by JoshuaFox — 2013-08-13T08:05:58.268Z

Betting on the future is a good way to reveal true beliefs.

As one example of such a bet on a key debate about a post-human future, I'd like to announce here that Robin Hanson and I have made the following agreement. (See also Robin's post at Overcoming Bias):

We, Robin Hanson and Joshua Fox, agree to bet on which kind of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will dominate first, once some kind of AGI dominates humans. If the AGI are closely based on or derived from emulations of human brains, Robin wins, otherwise Joshua wins. To be precise, we focus on the first point in time when more computing power (gate-operations-per-second) is (routinely, typically) controlled relatively-directly by non-biological human-level-or-higher general intelligence than by ordinary biological humans. (Human brains have gate-operation equivalents.)

If at that time more of that computing power is controlled by emulation-based AGI, Joshua owes Robin whatever $3000 invested today in S&P500-like funds today is worth then. If more is controlled by AGI not closely based on emulations, Robin owes Joshua that amount. The bet is void if the terms of this bet make little sense then, such as if it becomes too hard to say if capable non-biological intelligence is general or human-level, if AGI is emulation-based, what devices contain computing power, or what devices control what other devices. But we intend to tolerate modest levels of ambiguity in such things.

[Added Aug. 17:] To judge if “AGI are closely based on or derived from emulations of human brains,” judge which end of the following spectrum is closer to the actual outcome. The two ends are 1) an emulation of the specific cell connections in a particular human brain, and 2) general algorithms of the sort that typically appear in AI journals today.

It's a bet on the old question: ems vs. de novo AGI. Kurzweil and Kapor bet on another well-known debate: Will machines pass the Turing Test. It would be interesting to list some other key debates that we could bet on.

But it's hard to make a bet when settling the bet may occur in extreme conditions:

after human extinction,

in an extreme utopia,

in an extreme dystopia or,

after the bettors' minds have been manipulated in ways that redefine their personhood: copied thousands of times, merged with other minds, etc.

MIRI has a "te...
Biases of Intuitive and Logical Thinkers
by pwno — 2013-08-13T03:50:55.679Z

Any intuition-dominant thinker who's struggled with math problems or logic-dominant thinker who's struggled with small-talk knows how difficult and hopeless the experience feels like. For a long time I was an intuition thinker, then I developed a logical thinking style and soon it ended up dominating -- granting me the luxury of experiencing both kinds of struggles. I eventually learned to apply the thinking style better optimized for the problem I was facing. Looking back, I realized why I kept sticking to one extreme.
I hypothesize that one-sided thinkers develop biases and tendencies that prevent them from improving their weaker mode of thinking. These biases cause a positive feedback loop that further skews thinking styles in the same direction.
The reasons why one style might be overdeveloped and the other underdeveloped vary greatly. Genes have a strong influence, but environment also plays a large part. A teacher may have inspired you to love learning science at a young age, causing you to foster to a thinking style better for learning science. Or maybe you grew up very physically attractive and found socializing with your peers a lot more rewarding than studying after school, causing you to foster a thinking style better for navigating social situations. Environment can be changed to help develop certain thinking styles, but it should be supplementary to exposing and understanding the biases you already have. Entering an environment that penalizes your thinking style can be uncomfortable, stressful and frustrating without being prepared. (Such a painful experience is part of why these biases cause a positive feedback loop, by making us avoid environments that require the opposite thinking style.)
Despite genetic predisposition and environmental circumstances, there's room for improvement and exposing these biases and learning to account for them is a great first step.
Below is a list of a few biases that worsen our ability to solve a certain class of problems and keep us from improving our underdeveloped thinking style.

Intuition-dominant Biases

Overlooking crucial details

Details matter in order to understand technical concepts. Overlooking a word or sentence structure can cause complete misunderstanding -- a common blunder for intuition thinkers.

Intuition is really good at making fairly accurate predictions without complete information, enabling us...