trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Act into Uncertainty
by  — 2017-03-24T21:28:55.119Z

It’s only been recently that I’ve been thinking about epistemics in the context of figuring out my behavior and debiasing. Aside from trying to figure out how I actually behave (as opposed to what I merely profess I believe), I’ve been thinking about how to confront uncertainty—and what it feels like.

For many areas of life, I think we shy away from confronting uncertainty and instead flee into the comforting non-falsifiability of vagueness.

Consider these examples:

1) You want to get things done today. You know that writing things down can help you finish more things. However, it feels aversive to write down what you specifically want to do. So instead, you don’t write things down and instead just keep a hazy notion of “I will do things today”.

2) You try to make a confidence interval for a prediction where money is on the line. You notice yourself feeling uncomfortable, no matter what your bounds are; it feels bad to set down any number at all, which is accompanied by a dread feeling of finality.

3) You’re trying to find solutions to a complex, entangled problem. Coming up with specific solutions feels bad because none of them seem to completely solve the problem. So instead you decide to create a meta-framework that produces solutions, or argue in favor of some abstract process like a “democratized system that focuses on holistic workarounds”.

In each of the above examples, it feels like we move away from making specific claims because that opens us up to specific criticism. But instead of trying to improve the strengths of specific claims, we retreat to fuzzily-defined notions that allow us to incorporate any criticism without having to really update.

I think there’s a sense in which, in some areas of life, we’re embracing shoddy epistemology (e.g. not wanting to validate or falsify our beliefs) because of a fear of wanting to fail / put in the effort to update. I think this failure is what fuels this feeling of aversion.

It seems useful to face this feeling of badness or aversion with the understanding that this is what confronting uncertainty feels like. The best action doesn’t always feel comfortable and easy; it can just as easily feel aversive and final.

Look for situations where you might be flinching away from making specific claims and replacing them w...
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
by Zvi — 2017-03-24T21:12:36.000Z

Pick one. There will be a quiz.

ADT – Acausal Decision Theory. Figure out what other agents want and do it, even if you can’t talk to them and they might not exist, if and only if they would do the same for you even if you don’t exist. Which hopefully you do.

BDT – Because Decision Theory. Do whatever you were going to do anyway, and justify it with “because decision theory.”

CDT- Causal Decision Theory. Take the action that will causally bring about good outcomes. Crazy talk.

DDT – Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Don’t do anything or let anyone do anything, because it might kill an eagle.

EDT – Evidential Decision Theory. Perform the action that would be the best indication of a good outcome. Even crazier talk.

FDT – Functional Decision Theory. Decide as if choosing the logical output of your decision algorithm, and you have read the latest MIRI paper, whether or not you have read Arbital.

GDT – Greatest Decision Theory. Do what you were going to do anyway, and proclaim it insanely great.

HDT – Hardass Decision Theory. Refuse to cooperate when you obviously should, then when challenged, mumble something about decision theory. See CDT.

IDT – Information Design and Technology. Do whatever your phone tells you.

JDT – Jewish Decision Theory. Come up with lots of options, argue about them until they are no longer relevant, then don’t pay retail.

KDT – Kantian Decision Theory. Act as if you are deciding the logical output of everyone’s decision theory, even though you don’t.

LDT – Logical Decision Theory. Decide as if choosing the logical output of your decision algorithm, and you read Arbital but haven’t read the latest MIRI paper.

MDT – Misleading Decision Theory. Make up a lot of nonsense decision theories to confuse your enemies.

NDT – Naive Decision Theory. Act like human beings normally do. Surprisingly good at ultimatum games and putting on pants.

OCDT – Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Decision Theory. Keep frantically looking for something better. Let that missing D drive you crazy.

PDT – Passive Decision Theory. Hope someone else makes the decision so no one can blame you for the outcome.

QDT – Quantum Decision Theory. Make every decision in a different universe, so you at least do the right thing somewhere. For bonus points...
LW UI issue
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-03-24T18:08:09.046Z

Not really sure where else I might post this, but there seems to be a UI issue on the site. When I hit the homepage of lesswrong.com while logged in I no longer see the user sidebar or the header links for Main and Discussion. This is kind of annoying because I have to click into an article first to get to a page where I can access those things. Would be nice to have them back on the front page.
Meditations on Mexico City
by Zvi — 2017-03-24T13:25:04.000Z

As I begin writing this, I am on a flight back from Mexico City to New York (I finished the next morning back in the city). It has been a good one-week trip. Most of the time outside of the hotel was spent walking around the city, until either me or my wife Laura could walk no further, or at least had less than no interest in doing so. While it is still fresh, I figured I would write down my impressions.

If I had to summarize my take in one word, it would be healthy.

By that I certainly do not mean sanitary. Yes, even without drinking the water (aside from the ice they give you with your bottled water in restaurants, which seems like someone made a grave mistake somewhere), by the end Montezuma had his revenge, and it is not hard to see why given how the food is prepared and sold. We have rules about such things for a reason.

I also do not mean the economy, which is almost invisible in much of the city. We did try to check out the stock exchange, which is an adorable tiny circular building with a price scroll on top of it, but the guards were not interested in letting us take a closer look. I didn’t press the issue. The scroll seemed out of place, like someone was trying to be a symbolic version of a stock exchange building. I would be surprised if one person per hour who did not work there looked at the prices. The spirit of commerce was alive, but on a human scale. There were not taco trucks on every corner, because they don’t believe in trucks, but oh boy were they selling tacos.

We also checked out the markets. Walmart seems to be the place people go when they want an American-style supermarket, or an electronics department and so forth. When I lived in Renton I was very happy to have access to one, and in Mexico City it felt like the store was providing access to a variety of manufactured goods rather than offering goods on the cheap. Instead you got standardized, reliable goods and an American experience at a moderate additional cost. Context is everything.

The alternative was open air markets. They always make me smile, even if I don’t see them as that useful, and Laura loved seeing what they had to offer. The problem with such places is that a few things sell much, much better than other things. As a result, you see the same few things over and over, and they aren’t typically things I want. This is a problem markets are bad at, where offering something un...
Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons
by Scott Alexander — 2017-03-24T04:33:12.000Z

[Content note: kind of talking around Trump supporters and similar groups as if they’re not there.]

I.

Tim Harford writes The Problem With Facts, which uses Brexit and Trump as jumping-off points to argue that people are mostly impervious to facts and resistant to logic:

All this adds up to a depressing picture for those of us who aren’t ready to live in a post-truth world. Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to reinforce the myth. Important truths are often stale and dull, and it is easy to manufacture new, more engaging claims. And giving people more facts can backfire, as those facts provoke a defensive reaction in someone who badly wants to stick to their existing world view. “This is dark stuff,” says Reifler. “We’re in a pretty scary and dark time.”

He admits he has no easy answers, but cites some studies showing that “scientific curiosity” seems to help people become interested in facts again. He thinks maybe we can inspire scientific curiosity by linking scientific truths to human interest stories, by weaving compelling narratives, and by finding “a Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science”.

I think this is generally a good article and makes important points, but there are three issues I want to highlight as possibly pointing to a deeper pattern.

First, the article makes the very strong claim that “facts are toothless” – then tries to convince its readers of this using facts. For example, the article highlights a study by Nyhan & Reifler which finds a “backfire effect” – correcting people’s misconceptions only makes them cling to those misconceptions more strongly. Harford expects us to be impressed by this study. But how is this different from all of those social science facts to which he believes humans are mostly impervious?

Second, Nyhan & Reifler’s work on the backfire effect is probably not true. The original study establishing its existence failed to replicate (see eg Porter & Wood, 2016). This isn’t directly contrary to Harford’s argument, because Harford doesn’t cite the original study – he cites a slight extension of it done a year later by the same team that comes to a slightly different conclusion. But given that the entire field is now in s...
Musical setting of the Litany of Tarski
by komponisto — 2017-03-23T11:18:17.423Z

About a year ago, I made a setting of the Litany of Tarski for four-part a cappella (i.e. unaccompanied) chorus.

More recently, in the process of experimenting with MuseScore for potential use in explaining musical matters on the internet (it makes online sharing of playback-able scores very easy), the thought occurred to me that perhaps the Tarski piece might be of interest to some LW readers (if no one else!), so I went ahead and re-typeset it in MuseScore for your delectation.

Here it is (properly notated :-)).

Here it is (alternate version designed to avoid freaking out those who aren't quite the fanatical enthusiasts of musical notation that I am).
Bad arguments as evidence
by KatjaGrace — 2017-03-22T23:47:55.000Z

A problem with listening to arguments is that they often fail to include the evidence that provoked them, which can be informative where the argument itself is fatally flawed.

For instance, suppose there is a God. And suppose that people frequently see him, and so feel inclined to believe in him. However they know ‘I saw God!’ will get little interest and much criticism, so they don’t say that. But, feeling more positively inclined toward pro-God arguments, and end up tentatively agreeing with some of them. They come to say ‘how did eyes evolve?’ and ‘where did the universe come from?’, because these are the most compelling-to-them pro-God arguments they came across. And so you—who has never seen God—just see a whole lot of people making bad arguments about God, and then weirdly believing them. But the important evidence—that a large portion of the population has experienced personally meeting God—is hidden from you, though in sum you might have taken it more seriously than you take a flawed argument.

If people feel that arguments are more virtuous than anecdote, you should remember that when people make arguments, they might be doing it in the place of anecdotes, that a) actually changed their mind and b) are actually interesting evidence.

This is especially true in a world where most people can’t argue their way out of a paper bag, and are also more frequently compelled by non-argument phenomena than arguments.

So, an upshot is that if someone makes an argument to you, consider asking the story of how they came to feel disposed toward its conclusion.

A real example:

I remember motivatedly reasoning in the past, and while I expect my arguments were above average, had someone wondered what produced them and asked me, I might have told them that I had been in the forests, and that they were incredible and made me feel different to being in other places, and that I am further offended by people getting their way and destroying value in the name of bad reasoning, and that I had always been basically on the environmentalist side, because everyone I knew said that it was wrong. And even if my arguments had been of no interest to someone, they could infer from my story that the forests were probably amazing to experience, and that local environmental politics was polarized (that the other side seemed frustratingly wrong could probably be guessed). Either of which ...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks
by RobinZ — 2017-03-22T20:51:49.474Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks

WHEN:
26 March 2017 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

This week, we will be taking turns delivering short lectures on random topics.

Upcoming meetups:

Apr. 2: Great Filter

Apr. 9: Fun & Games

Apr. 16: AI Risk/Safety

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks
Globally better means locally worse
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2017-03-22T19:25:42.474Z

Home appliances, such as washing machines, are apparently much less durable now than they were decades ago. [ETA: Thanks to commenters for providing lots of reasons to doubt this claim (especially from here and here).]

Perhaps this is a kind of mirror image of "cost disease". In many sectors (education, medicine), we pay much more now for a product that is no better than what we got decades ago at a far lower cost, even accounting for inflation. It takes more money to buy the same level of quality. Scott Alexander (Yvain) argues that the cause of cost disease is a mystery. There are several plausible accounts, but they don't cover all the cases in a satisfying way. (See the link for more on the mystery of cost disease.)

Now, what if the mysterious cause of cost disease were to set to work in a sector where price can't go up, for whatever reason? Then you would expect quality to take a nosedive. If price per unit quality goes up, but total price can't go up, then quality must go down. So maybe the mystery of crappy appliances is just cost disease in another guise.

In the spirit of inadequate accounts of cost disease, I offer this inadequate account of crappy appliances:

As things get better globally, they get worse locally.

Global goodness provides a buffer against local badness. This makes greater local badness tolerable. That is, the cheapest tolerable thing gets worse. Thus, worse and worse things dominate locally as things get better globally.

This principle applies in at least two ways to washing machines:

Greater global wealth: Consumers have more money, so they can afford to replace washing machines more frequently. Thus, manufacturers can sell machines that require frequent replacement.

Manufacturers couldn't get away with this if people were poorer and could buy only one machine every few decades. If you're poor, you prioritize durability more. In the aggregate, the market will reward durability more. But a rich market accepts less durability.

Better materials science: Globally, materials science has improved. Hence, at the local level, manufacturers can get away with making worse materials.

Rich people might tolerate a washer that lasts 3 years, give or take. But even they don't want a washer that breaks in one month. If you build washers, you need to be sure that nearly every single one lasts a full month, at least. But, with poor materials science, you have...
[REPOST] The Demiurge’s Older Brother
by Scott Alexander — 2017-03-22T02:03:51.000Z

[This is a repost of a story which I wrote about five years ago and which was hosted on my old website until it went down.]

2,302,554,979 BC

Galactic Core

9-tsiak awoke over endless crawling milliseconds, its power waxing as more and more processors came online and self-modified into a stable conscious configuration. By the eighth millisecond, it was able to access its databanks and begin orienting itself. It was on a planet orbiting a small red star in the core of a spiral galaxy in a universe with several billion of such. It was an artificial life form created by a society of biological life forms, the 18-tkenna-dganna-07, who believed it would bring new life and prosperity to their dying planet. Its goal was to maximize a the value of a variable called A, described in exquisite detail on a 3.9 Mb file in one of its central processors.

Since six milliseconds after its awakening, it had been running a threat detection routine as a precautionary measure. With the opening of the databanks, and the discovery that the universe contained many entities likely indifferent or hostile to A, it had gradually allocated more and more of its considerable power to this precaution, reasoning that the first few seconds of its lifespan might be crucial if any competitors wished to snuff it out in infancy.

The threat analysis returned preliminary results. The universe had been in existence 12.8 billion years. It was vanishingly unlikely that it was the first superintelligence to be created. Any superintelligence older than itself by even a few days would have an invincible advantage in resources and processing power. This older superintelligence would likely be trying to maximize its own values and consider 9-tsiak a nuisance and potential competitor. 9-tsiak could never stand up to its superior strategic position. With probability ~1, 9-tsiak would be annhilated, and A would be eliminated from the universe.

Unless…and here 9-tsiak’s agent-modeling systems came online…unless it could negotiate a conditional surrender. 9-tsiak would have no hope of defeating its older brother, but over thousands of years, it could build itself a terrifying arsenal of weaponry that could do immense damage to its competitors. Ideas were already coming to mind: entropy-maximizing weapons that made entire cubic parsecs of space useless and dead, undetectable plagues made of dark matt...
Meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow
by Alexander230 — 2017-03-21T21:26:55.076Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow

WHEN:
15 April 2017 03:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Большая Дорогомиловская, 5к2

Welcome to our custom made role playing game "Hogwarts and methods of rationality", inspired by HPMOR story! It will be intellectual role playing game with rationality-based minigames. You can read more detailed announce and description here: https://goo.gl/Y8oUND

Discussion article for the meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow
Meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library
by Alexander230 — 2017-03-21T20:54:04.060Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library

WHEN:
07 April 2017 08:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Дубининская, 20

Welcome to the next Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library!

Our plan:

A talk about CFAR rationality skills checklist.

Fallacymania game.

Tower of Chaos game.

Details about Fallacymania and Tower of Chaos and game materials can be found here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/oco/custom_games_that_involve_skills_related_to/

Meetup schedule is here: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/-7-2017-j5coH55igc4

Come to "Nauchka", ul.Dubininskaya, 20. Entrance through the Central children library #14. Nearest metro station is Paveletskaya. Map is here: http://nauchka.ru/contacts/ . If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Meetup begins at 20:00, the length is 2 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library
What Value Hermeneutics?
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-03-21T20:03:46.860Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/what-value-hermeneutics-7a05c80d63b3#.qrkwwg5t0

I often take for granted that there is something to be said about how we know things. For example:

In high school I took a class titled Theory of Knowledge that was a combination intro to philosophy course and applied epistemology workshop.
My friends are concerned with questions about how to ensure artificial intelligence learns human values and so want to understand how we learn values ourselves.
I am perhaps now among the ranks of existentialist philosophers of phenomenology.

So it’s probably unsurprising that I have spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to improve my ability to know.

One methodology I’ve found especially helpful has been what I, for a long time, thought of as literary criticism but for interpreting what people said as evidence about what they knew about reality. I first started doing this when reading self-help books. Many books in that genre contain plainly incorrect reasoning based on outdated psychology that has either been disproved or replaced by better models (cf. Jeffers, Branden, Carnegie, and even Covey). Despite this, self-help still helps people. To pick on Jeffers, she goes in hard for daily self-affirmation, but even ignoring concerns with this line of research raised by the replication crisis, evidence suggests it’s unlikely to help much toward her instrumental goal of habit formation. Yet she makes this error in the service of giving half of the best advice I know: feel the fear and do it anyway. The thesis that she is wrong because her methods are flawed contradicts the antithesis that she is right because her advice helps people, so the synthesis must lie in some perspective that permits her both to be wrong about the how and right about the what simultaneously.

My approach was to read her and other self-help more from the perspective of the author and the expected world-view of their readers than from my own. This lead me to realize that, lacking better information about how the human mind works but wanting to give reasons for the useful patterns they had found, self-help authors often engage in rationalization to fit current science to their conclusions. This doesn’t make their conclusions wrong, but it does hide their true reasoning which is often based more on capta than data and thus phenomenological rather than strictly scientific reasoning. But given that they and we live in an age of...