trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Creating a Text Shorthand for Uncertainty
by ozziegooen — 2013-10-19T16:46:12.051Z

Most things I find I discuss are highly uncertain, but it can be really confusing and wordy to state that uncertainty in writing. In this last sentence for example I felt the need to write “I find” to point out uncertainty, for example.

First, people are really bad at agreeing on probabilities. So if I say something is “very certain”, that could mean 80% chance to me and 95% chance to you. This is rigorously explained in the Failure of Risk Management (by the same author from How to Measure Anything), where it is explained further to say that this is especially true of risk managers.

Second, there aren’t too many words to use to indicate uncertainty. I find that I need to repeat the same ones over and over again. And when they are used, these words can be quite wordy and confusing.

I think that

In my opinion

It makes sense that

There aren’t too many things

Perhaps,

Several years ago some people made the language E-Prime in large part to make this uncertainty crystal clear.

E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′) is a prescriptive version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime does not allow the conjugations of to be—be, am, is, are, was, were, been, being— the archaic forms of to be (e.g. art, wast, wert), or the contractions of to be—’s, ‘m, ‘re (e.g. I’m, he’s, she’s, they’re).
Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.[1] For example, the sentence “the film was good” could not be expressed under the rules of E-Prime, and the speaker might instead say “I liked the film” or “the film made me laugh”. The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker’s experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact.

While I do intend to look more into E-prime, it seems like a bit much to use on a routine basis.

A Possible (Written) Solution

I propose that we instead use a symbol at the end of our sentences or propositions to indicate uncertainty.

Choosing the Levels

A scale would have to be created of course in order to indicate what these levels are. My guess is that the optimal (for usefulness, popularity, and accuracy) amount of levels would be around 5-10, e

...
Meetup : Moscow, BeliefBusters
by Yuu — 2013-10-19T15:49:53.069Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, BeliefBusters

WHEN:
27 October 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

This time we will create new beliefs from the old ones.

We will also have short presentation about buying behaviour and attitudes toward money.

Please take your notes from the last gathering if you have it. If you did not come please think about beliefs you have, write some of them down and bring this notes to the meet up.

We still have Prediction Market and we will continue Scavenger Hunt. You can follow the corresponding links to the discussions on the Russian forum.

If you are going for the first time:

We gather in the Yandex office, you need the second revolving door with the sign “Яндекс”, here is the photo of the entrance you need. You need to pass the first entrance and the bicycle parking on you way. Here is additional guide how to get there: link.

You can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information.

We start at 16:00 and sometimes finish at night.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, BeliefBusters
Better Rationality Through Lucid Dreaming
by katydee — 2013-10-18T20:48:37.869Z

Note: this post is no longer endorsed by the author, for reasons partially described here.

In the spirit of radioing back to describe a path:

The truly absurd thing about dreams lies not with their content, but with the fact that we believe them. Perfectly outrageous and impossible things can occur in dreams without the slightest hesitance to accept them on the part of the dreamer. I have often dreamed myself into bizarre situations that come complete with constructed memories explaining how they secretly make sense!

However, sometimes we break free from these illusions and become aware of the fact that we are dreaming. This is known as lucid dreaming and can be an extremely pleasant experience. Unfortunately, relatively few people experience lucid dreams "naturally;" fortunately, lucid dreaming is also a skill, and like any other skill it can be trained.

While this is all very interesting, you may be wondering what it has to do with rationality. Simply put, I have found lucid dreaming perhaps the best training currently available when it comes to increasing general rationality skills. It is one thing to notice when you are confused by ordinary misunderstandings or tricks; it is another to notice while your own brain is actively constructing memories and environments to fool you!

I've been involved in lucid dreaming for about eight years now and teaching lucid dreaming for two, so I'm pretty familiar with it on a non-surface level. I've also been explicitly looking into the prospect of using lucid dreaming for rationality training purposes since 2010, and I'm fairly confident that it will prove useful for at least some people here.

If you can get yourself to the point where you can consistently induce lucid dreaming by noticing the inconsistencies and absurdities of your dream state,[1] I predict that you will become a much stronger rationalist in the process. If my prediction is correct, lucid dreaming allows you to hone rationality skills while also having fun, and best of all permits you to do this in your sleep!

If this sounds appealing to you, perhaps the most concise and efficient resource for learning lucid dreaming is the book Lucid Dreaming, by Dr. Stephen LaBerge. However, this is a book and costs money. If you're not into that, a somewhat less efficient but much more comprehensive view of lucid dreaming can be found on the website dreamviews.com. I furth...
New LW Meetup: Saint Petersburg
by FrankAdamek — 2013-10-18T16:09:36.876Z

This summary was posted to LW main on October 11th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Saint Petersburg, Russia: 27 October 2013 04:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Berlin: Fermi paradox discussion: 18 October 2013 07:00PM
Brussels monthly meetup: games!: 12 October 2013 01:00PM
Frankfurt (including effective altruism presentation): 27 October 2013 02:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 20 October 2013 03:00PM
Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Dealing with Emotional Vampires: 17 October 2013 08:00PM
Moscow, Beliefs 2: 13 October 2013 04:00PM
Tucson Meetup: 12 October 2013 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 12 October 2019 01:30PM
Columbus, OH MEGA-MEETUP, Oct 11-14: 12 October 2013 02:33AM
London social: 13 October 2013 02:00PM
[West LA] Complex problems, limited information, and rationality; How should we make decisions in real life?: 16 October 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wro...
Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch
by bokov — 2013-10-18T13:48:15.154Z

In an unrelated thread, one thing led to another and we got onto the subject of overpopulation and carrying capacity. I think this topic needs a post of its own.

TLDR mathy version:

let f(m,t) be the population that can be supported using the fraction of Earth's theoretical resource limit m we can exploit at technology level t

let t = k(x) be the technology level at year x

let p(x) be population at year x

What conditions must constant m and functions f(m,k(x)), k(x), and p(x) satisfy in order to insure that p(x) - f(m,t) > 0 for all x > today()? What empirical data are relevant to estimating the probability that these conditions are all satisfied?

Long version:

Here I would like to explore the evidence for and against the possibility that the following assertions are true:

Without human intervention, the carrying capacity of our environment (broadly defined1) is finite while there are no *intrinsic* limits on population growth.

Therefore, if the carrying capacity of our environment is not extended at a sufficient rate to outpace population growth and/or population growth does not slow to a sufficient level that carrying capacity can keep up, carrying capacity will eventually become the limit on population growth.

Abundant data from zoology show that the mechanisms by which carrying capacity limits population growth include starvation, epidemics, and violent competition for resources. If the momentum of population growth carries it past the carrying capacity an overshoot occurs, meaning that the population size doesn't just remain at a sustainable level but rather plummets drastically, sometimes to the point of extinction.

The above three assertions imply that human intervention (by expanding the carrying capacity of our environment in various ways and by limiting our birth-rates in various ways) are what have to rely on to prevent the above scenario, let's call it the Malthusian Crunch.

Just as the Nazis have discredited eugenics, mainstream environmentalists have discredited (at least among rationalists) the concept of finite carrying capacity by giving it a cultish stigma. Moreover, solutions that rely on sweeping, heavy-handed regulation have recieved so much attention (perhaps because the chain of causality is easier to understand) that to many people they seem like the *only* solutions. Finding these solutions unpalatable, they in

...
Creating an Optimal Future
by  — 2013-10-18T13:39:29.612Z

Creating an Optimal Future. It sounds very arrogant when I type it out. A more reasonable claim would be that it is possible to create a Less Wrong Future, but for reasons that will shortly become apparent that felt like stepping too hard on other people’s shoes. I suppose Working Towards an Optimal Future would be the best title for what I have in mind.

Let me backtrack and start at the beginning. I am not a rationalist. Well, I am not a rationalist as the term applies in this community. Not completely anyway. I have only read some of the Sequences and, although I’ve devoured HPMOR, I do understand and agree with a number of the criticisms that have been leveled toward it.

But I am here because of that Optimal Future I have mentioned. The way I see it, we are not currently on a trajectory that will lead to an optimal future and I am fairly confident that you agree with me on that. From what I have seen and heard from various online communities over the years, quite a few people do agree with me on that.

But the problem is, a few thousand people visit Less Wrong regularly, generating and evolving a unique memescape. And a few miles down the information highway, another few thousand people post to Humanity+ mailing lists; building up a different memescape. There is some overlap, naturally, but not nearly enough. And in another corner of the internet, environmentalist factions sit in their own forums and discuss a different set of problems affecting (trans)humanity’s future. In yet another corner, socialists imagine utopias built on free access to nanofabricators (while anarchists imagine a similar utopia sans the government).

All in all, there may be near to a million people looking at future problems and solutions. But as long as they do so in small fringe groups, the solutions they can think up are limited. Worse, “junk” memes start sweeping into the community, harming recruitment and giving the underlying philosophies a bad name. To push the metaphor about as far as it can go: these communities tend to get a bit inbred over time.

And a million voices fail to affect policies in any way, because for all the hopes and fears they share they fail to coordinate and collaborate. Meanwhile, the world continues to move along a sub-optimal trajectory.

Which, finally, leads us back to Optimal Future. In discussing the problems above with frien...
Of all the SIA-doomsdays in the all the worlds...
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-10-18T12:56:47.729Z

Ideas developed with Paul Almond, who kept on flogging a dead horse until it started showing signs of life again.

Doomsday, SSA and SIA

Imagine there's a giant box filled with people, and clearly labelled (inside and out) "(year of some people's lord) 2013". There's another giant box somewhere else in space-time, labelled "2014". You happen to be currently in the 2013 box.

Then the self-sampling assumption (SSA) produces the doomsday argument. It works approximately like this: SSA has a preference for universe with smaller numbers of observers (since it's more likely that you're one-in-a-hundred than one-in-a-billion). Therefore we expect that the number of observers in 2014 is smaller than we would otherwise "objectively" believe: the likelihood of doomsday is higher than we thought.

What about the self-indication assumption (SIA) - that makes the doomsday argument go away, right? Not at all! SIA has no effect on the number of observers expected in the 2014, but increases the expected number of observers in 2013. Thus we still expect that the number of observers in 2014 to be lower than we otherwise thought. There's an SIA doomsday too!

Enter causality

What's going on? SIA was supposed to defeat the doomsday argument! What happens is that I've implicitly cheated - by naming the boxes "2013" and "2014", I've heavily implied that these "boxes" figuratively correspond two subsequent years. But then I've treated them as independent for SIA, like two literal distinct boxes.

In reality, of course, the contents of two years are not independent. Causality connects the two: it's much more likely that there are many observers in 2014, if there were many in 2013. Indeed, most of the observers will exist in both years (and there will be some subtle SSA issues of "observer moments" that we're eliding here - does a future you count as the same observer or a different one). So causality removes the independence assumption, and though there may be some interesting SIA effects on changes in growth rates, we won't see a real SIA doomsday.

Exit causality

But is causality itself a justified assumption? To some extent it is: some people who think they live in 2013/2014 will certainly be in a causal relationship with people who think they live in 2014/2013.

But many will not! What of Boltzmann brains? What of Boltzmann worlds - brief worlds that last less than a year?...
Suggestion : make it easier to work out which tags to put on your article
by Douglas_Reay — 2013-10-18T10:50:36.207Z

It would improve the usefulness of article navigation, if people tended to use the same tag for the same thing.

Currently, if you want to decide whether to tag your article "fai" or "friendly_ai", your best bet is to manually try:

http://lesswrong.com/tag/fai/

http://lesswrong.com/tag/friendly_ai/

And count how many articles use which variant. But, even then, there might be other similar variants you didn't think to check.

What would be nice is a tag cloud, listing how many articles there are (possibly weighted by ranking) that use each variant. The list of tags on the wiki isn't dynamically generated, and is very incomplete.

It wouldn't need to be something fancy, like:

Just an alphabetical list, with a number by each entry, would be an improvement over the current situation.

If you are downvoting this article, and would like to provide constructive feedback, here's a place to provide it: LINK
Subjective Altruism
by Scott Garrabrant — 2013-10-18T04:06:54.419Z

Let us assume for the purpose of this argument that Bayesian probabilities are subjective. Specifically, I am thinking in terms of the model of probability expressed in model 4 here. That is to say that the meaning of P(A)=2/3 is "I as a decision agent care twice as much about possible world in which A is true relative to the possible world in which A is false." Let us also assume that it is possible to have preferences about things that we will never observe.

Consider the following thought experiment:

Alice and Bob are agents who disagree about the fairness of a coin. Alice believes that the coin will come up heads with probability 2/3 and Bob believes the coin will come up tails with probability 2/3. They discuss their reasons for a long time and realize that their disagreement comes from different initial prior assumptions, and they agree that both people have rational probabilities given their respective priors. Alice is given the opportunity to gamble on behalf of Bob. Alice must call heads or tails, then the coin will be flipped once. If Alice calls the coin correctly, then Bob will be given a dollar. If she calls the coin incorrectly, then nothing happens. Either way, nobody sees the result of the coin flip, and Alice and Bob never interact again. Should Alice call heads or tails?

The meat of this question is this: When trying to being altruistic towards a person, should you maximize their expected utility under their priors or your own. I will present an argument here, but feel free to stop reading here and think about it on your own and post the results.

First of all, notice there there are actually 3 options:

1) Maximize your own expectation of Bob's utility

2) Maximize Bob's expectation of his utility

3) Maximize what Bob's expectation of his utility would be if he were to update on the evidence of everything that you have observed.

At first it may have looked like the main options were 1 and 2, but I claim that 2 is actually a very bad option and the only question is between options 1 and 3. Option 2 is stupid because for example it would cause Alice to call tails even if she has already seen the coin flip and it came up heads. There is no reason for Alice not to update on all of the information she has. The only question is whose prior should she update from. In this specific thought experiment, we are assuming that 2 and 3 are the same, since Alice has...
Meetup : Washington DC: Jobs/project show and tell 
by rocurley — 2013-10-18T02:43:11.632Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Jobs/project show and tell

WHEN:
20 October 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to tell each other about the things we're working on. (I think this would segue well into doing another quick goals discussion).

This is suspiciously similar to last meetup because it is last meetup: largely due to the Columbus trip, not many people were at the last meetup.

The government is open again: We're meeting at the normal place again!

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Jobs/project show and tell
story idea...
by Voltairina — 2013-10-18T02:25:39.820Z

I have an idea for a setting for a writing project (or, possibly a comic) and was wondering what people thought of it.

The setting is in the far future, but the rise of superintelligent ai, friendliness uncertain, has resulted in everyone living within a gameified version of the world, with technology strictly bounded by an ever-present nanotechnological fog that dissassembles anything beyond a certain level of apparent technical development - we're strictly limited from developing further AI- for purposes unknown to the protagonist. On death, people are "resurrected" (possessions are lost, but a fresh body is printed, and monitoring nanites at the cellular level constantly update a buffered version of "you" that is then printed when your vital signs are lost) at locations that look like gates. There are 'monsters', various "magic" items, 'npcs' / autonomous agents of the AI, quests and puzzles to solve. It is unknown to the protagonist whether the world is some kind of a test or not, although very rarely, some people are not resurrected. In other respects, though, it is simply a somewhat-in-the-future version of our Earth. Cities were, prior to the 'event', largely 3d printed, so there are city-scapes resembling different eras. Their ability to self repair autonomously has been left on, although some of them have grown 'cancerous', sprouting bits of mixed architecture in places. They have also been integrated into a reengineered ecosystem with the spawning of a bunch of synthetic organisms that can tear apart and consume cities or break down waste emissions.

Sometimes, on 'resurrection', people get minor details adjusted - such as having abilities or skills they never had before, or subtly altered memories.

The main character is a transgender woman who was cryogenically frozen, who wakes up to find herself in a more ideal body, in the future, with super powers. Kind of a Mary Sue for me I guess, although I'm planning to give her flaws to balance her out, although I haven't decided on which ones.

I'm not a terribly experienced writer and can't promise it won't suck, but I like playing with these ideas and thinking about them... thoughts? Suggestions? Similar stuff I should read? I've read Diaspora and The Rapture of the Nerds already, and really enjoyed those...
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Decision Theory
by Mestroyer — 2013-10-17T22:34:07.587Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Decision Theory

WHEN:
20 October 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
40.111220,-88.227363

Meetup will be held here at 2pm Sunday October 20.

Topics we might discuss include (but are not limited to):

Pascal's mugging and pascal's wager

Newcomb's problem
The ultimate Newcomb's problem

acausal trade

Cross-posted on the mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Decision Theory