trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Muqaata'a by Fahad Himsi (I.)
by Martin Sustrik — 2019-03-10T15:10:00.962Z

When Black Panther came out I went to cinema hoping to finally see a science fiction movie about Sub-Saharan Africa. (District 9, for obvious reasons, doesn't count.)

Needless to say, I was disappointed. The film wasn't really about Africa. It was about America, pretending, half-heartedly, to be about Africa.

I was not sure how to feel about it. On one hand — trying to relate it to my own cultural background — a Hollywood movie about Slovak shepherds with laser weapons would be hilarious. On the other hand, it would be a wasted opportunity. All the stangeness and complexity of Slovak rural life would be thrown out, leaving only superficial, schematized image of an Eastern European country, presumably a mix of Dracula and Hunt for Red October.

Sub-Saharan Africa is much more complex and strange than boring Slovakia, but all we've got were some cringe-worthy depictions of local customs and a skyscraper that kind of looked like the mosque of Djenne.

For exactly the reasons above I loved Liu Cixin science fiction novels. They are distinctly non-American and, for that matter, non-European. They are unapologeticaly Chinese and thanks to that they are often shocking for the western reader. What left a lasting impression on me, personally, was their bleak worldview, the total resignation on the possibility of cooperation, the "it's either us or them" attitude, where neither party is particularly evil, yet nobody seems to be able to imagine a world where the civilizations would treat each other with anything better than genocide.

Muqaata'a by Fahad Himsi (self-published, 2017) is another such book. Not only it doesn't have much in common with either American or European science fiction, it doesn't really intersect with them. It's doing its own thing and it doesn't seem to care about what goes under the "science-fiction" label elsewhere in the world.

It is alien.

One wouldn't even call it science-fiction if the visitors from space weren't part of the story.

However, unlike with The Three-Body Problem, I can't imagine it ever becoming popular. Not only is the name of the novel impossible to remember. It's not even that it contains no less than three sounds that don't exist in English. It's also the lengthy discussions of Middle Eastern politics that are going to bore every science-fiction fan to death. And while there are undoubtely peop...
Plans are Recursive & Why This is Important
by Ruby — 2019-03-10T01:58:12.649Z

Epistemic status: Reference. Highly confident. I rely on what is presented here extensively in my own thinking.

Plans are recursive. Any plan can be decomposed into parts and those parts can be in turn be decomposed into further parts and so on until it is senseless to decompose any further. This is not a profound point, it is something we all appreciate intuitively and explicitly to at least some degree or another.

Nonetheless, the recursive nature is of such fundamental importance to the entire practice of planning that it warrants an explicit treatment.

Crucial principles of good planning are readily derived from a recursive model of planning. Having a solid grasp of the recursive models makes it harder to forget these key principles.
An explicit treatment of a topic can help it sink in deeper to intuition even if one already has some sense of it.
Even if everyone has an intuitive sense of something, it can be hard to talk about the thing if there isn’t a common explicit handle.

A quick definition of planning as used in this post: Planning is the selection of actions to be deliberately executed in order to achieve a desired outcome/goal. [1]

Plans are recursive

Usually, we treat plans in a very linear fashion. Step 1, Step 2, Step 3. To-Do lists capture this, and we can also draw an accompany thing diagram.

Example Linear Plan: Hosting a Dinner Party

Invite guests
Clean house
Prepare food

Linear diagram of a plan to host a dinner party

Of course, we all recognize that the three steps of the plan above are composed of further sub-steps. Nested to-do lists capture this well.

Example Recursive Plan: Hosting a Dinner Plan Expanded

Invite guests

Select date and time
Select guests
Issue invitations

Clean house

Call in favor from housemate

Prepare food

Buy ingredients
Cook food

These steps could be further decomposed, but this suffices to demonstrate the idea. We can draw another diagram.

Recursive tree diagram of a plan to host a dinner party

Why call it recursion?

Sometimes people use fancy technical terms in order to sound smart even though a more commonplace word would suffice. Arguably, I could have said that plans are hierarchical or nested or something. Why use the mathematics and computer science term, recursion?

I defend this choice with reference to the defining features of recursion:

You solve a problem by breaking it into smaller instances of the same type.
Each time you decomp

...
Show LW: Fallacyfiles
by CaiwitzAzaria — 2019-03-10T00:16:27.056Z

http://www.fallacyfiles.org

What are the fallacy files?

I began collecting and studying logical fallacies about thirty-eight years ago, when I first became interested in logic. This collection took two forms:

A collection of named fallacies—such as "ad hominem"—that is, types of bad reasoning which someone has thought distinctive and interesting enough to name and describe. This collection took the form, primarily, of the study and acquisition of books and articles on the named fallacies, especially textbooks and reference books. You can find individual files on the named fallacies via the Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies, or from the alphabetical index in the scroll bar to your left.

A collection of fallacious, or otherwise bad, arguments, that is, examples of reasoning which may commit one or more of the named fallacies under 1, or are bad in some way yet to be classified. This collection took the form of clippings from newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, photocopies of pages of books, and—in a few rare cases—entire articles or books which were rich sources of bad reasoning. I have used selections from my collection as examples in many of the files on named fallacies, and additional examples can be found in the file: Stalking the Wild Fallacy.

Some years after I began to amass these files, I wondered just what I ought eventually to do with them, how best to organize the information within them, and in what form to make them available to others interested in fallacy studies. The present hypertext web version, The Fallacy Files, was first published on March 11th, 2001, and is the result of this score of years of research and fieldwork on the fallacies.
On the Regulation of Perception
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2019-03-09T16:28:19.887Z

Have you ever had one of those unexpected flashes of metacognition?

It was towards the end of long, successful day. Around 9:30PM.

I’d woken late so I’d be up a while longer, and was sort of lounging for a little while, sometimes reading a little, sometimes half-napping and dozing a bit on the couch.

Then, a simple enough thought: “I’m hungry. Perhaps, Arabic food.”

Suddenly, a strange self-awareness and metacognition kicks in. Wholly unexpectedly, in fact. I wasn’t in any sort of philosophical mood, wasn’t analyzing, it just — there it was.

Wait. What is this “I - am - hungry”? What’s going on here?

Followed by an unexpected and delightful rush of questions — and possibly some answers.

###

To just cut right to the chase — I’m afraid I’m failing to “show to my work,” but we’re all busy, eh? — it dawns on me that perhaps we’re not regulating our bodies, but in fact regulating our subjective perception.

Hmm. How do I do this in a less wordy way?

I reckon the common perception is something like this —

“We eat because we’re hungry.”

But that’s not precisely true. It’s actually more like this —

“We eat because we perceive we're hungry.”

“Hunger” isn’t a single thing; it’s a rollup of a lot of things.

You could be at low blood sugar or high ghrelin levels; your stomach could be physically empty; or perhaps blood sugar is high, ghrelin is low, your stomach is somewhat full, but you’re mistaking boredom for hunger.

Regardless, the body isn’t quite so precise as the gasoline tank on your car, which a well-calibrated gasoline gauge will tell you is approaching empty.

No, not so. Hunger is a rollup of a lot of factors, and it’s a… perception/feeling/something. In any event, we can safely say it's subjective. Blood sugar levels, ghrelin levels, stomach contents — these are objective enough and could be measured. But you can’t necessarily predict the subjective experience of hunger from them — two people could have identical levels of blood sugar, ghrelin, and stomach contents, and one could be hungry while the other is not.

###

Stepping back from hunger for a moment, let’s talk about ontology.

Ontology is a fancy word for “being.” Wikipedia kindly informs us that it involves questions like,

"What can be said to exist? What is a thing? Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things? What are the meanings of being? What are the various modes of being of entities?&quo...
Sleeping Beauty Problem, Anthropic Principle and Perspective Reasoning
by dadadarren — 2019-03-09T15:21:02.258Z

Some may notice I have posted this idea before. Unfortunately it has not sparked much discussion. However I sincerely believe this idea is the key to paradoxes related to anthropic reasoning. So I’m making this post hoping to raise more attention. Feedbacks are very welcome.

1. What is it about.

To summarize my entire argument in one sentence: reasonings from different perspectives should not mix.

If I say "I'm a man" then it is definitely true and meaningful as the body most immediate to my perception is of a human male. To my wife the same statement is obviously false since she is a woman. It is rather trivial if "I" is defined by my first-person perspective's center then the statement may not be valid once switched to someone else's perspective. Of course in real life if I say "I'm a man" my wife would (hopefully) agree. She maybe interpreting the sentence as "My husband is a man". However "my husband" is still defined by her perspective and the sentence might be invalid to others (e.g. I do not have a husband). Or we can employ a third-person's perspective and reason as an impartial outsider. The statement may become "Dadadarren is a man." Here "The person named Dadadarren" is not defined by any perspective center. Notice the name is used to specify me in third person because for an impartial outsider I am just an ordinary person like everybody else. There is no apparent "I" anymore. So some feature must be used to specify me among all people. My argument is that a logic framework must be fully contained within one perspective. It cannot be partially from a first-person reasoning and partially from a third-person reasoning. For example, if my perspective center is used to define "I" then we cannot switch to an outsider's third-person perspective just as we cannot switch to my wife's perspective. Conversely if we reason as an outsider and treat every individual as ordinary, i.e. all in the same reference class, then my first-person perspective’s center cannot be used to define a self explanatory “I”.

A perspective’s center defines not only “I” but also concepts such as “this”, “here” and “now”. So these words are primitively apparent to the first person. No other information is needed to explain them. Only when reasoned from another perspective do they need to be explained by features. Many anthropic arguments do not recognize this difference. So in their log...
How dangerous is it to ride a bicycle without a helmet?
by habryka — 2019-03-09T02:58:23.964Z

Epistemic Status: An hour of googling combined with some highly dubious statistics and very rough notes. Take with at least 500 grams of salt.

I don't like wearing bike helmets, and have a bunch of friends who were horrified at me not wearing helmets when I occasionally ride a bicycle. On their request, here is a rough cost-benefit analysis of riding a bike without a helmet to my office and back (a total of ~20 minutes):

I decided to break down the question into the following three subquestions:

How great are the benefits from exercise when riding a bike?
What is the baseline risk of riding a bicycle?
How elevated is the risk by not wearing a bicycle helmet?

How great are the benefits from exercise when riding a bike?

https://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/2zx61c/on_micromorts_cycling_and_risk/

According to the first episode of More of Less (haven't gotten to the second one yet), the benefits of cycling outweigh the risks by about 5-10 times.

https://www.bikeforums.net/commuting/896396-risk-analysis-micromort-microlife.html

Micromorts are a unit of risk measuring a one-in-a-million probability of death. You can say that a mode of transport results in so many miles per micromort and the result is a number you can really use. For cycling, this is 10-20 miles, for driving it is about 230 miles.

Microlifes are a millionth of an (average remaining) lifespan = 30mins of life, so activities which extend your life or decrease it in a chronic rather than acute way can be measured.

In looking at the risk associated with cycling to work, people often quote the mort factor You also have to include the life factor. First 20mins of excercise = +2 microlifes . Sedentary behaviour = -1 microlife

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlife

First 20 minutes of moderate exercise: 2 microlifes

Subsequent 40 minutes of moderate exercise: 1 microlife

However, this is more complicated by the other costs of wearing a helmet, as well as a preference of mine to not die at a particularly young age. All-cause mortality is really low in my age-range, so bicycling might be a significantly higher proportional increase for that age range, and with shorter GCR timelines I might not care super much about my long-term health, which also reduces the value of exercise (though then there are also immediate cognitive benefits of exercise beyond all-cause mortality that start taking effect immedi...
Renaming "Frontpage"
by Raemon — 2019-03-09T01:23:05.560Z

We're about to revamp the frontpage design (you can see a hint of what's to come on the new /allPosts page).

While we're at it, I'd like to fix a longstanding problem, which is that "frontpage posts" is a fairly confusing concept for the site to rely on.

"Frontpage posts" are posts that the mods promote because they:

Avoid arguing to persuade and build social momentum. Instead they stay focused on the explanation (and exploration) of ideas.
They avoid particular hotbutton issues that are likely to spawn demon threads.
They avoid discussion of the site itself, and the surrounding community.

The main benefit a post has for being frontpage is that more users will see it by default (where as personal blogposts require you to actively turn on a setting to display them).

There are two problems with the name "frontpage":

1. It's confusing. Since you can display personal blogposts on the literal site frontpage (and there are contexts other than the literal frontpage where you might want to see "frontpage" posts, such as on the allposts page), it's a bit weird to use that word to convey a bunch of criteria.

2. It's a little too harsh-seeming to not get promoted to frontpage. I don't "frontpage" should mean "everything that's good and virtuous to talk about." I do think that's it good to err on the side of writing posts that meet the frontpage criteria, but I think of this as a default rather than the obviously-correct-way-everything-should-be.

This post explores what frontpage is trying to do, ways in which we might modify it, but ultimately (for now), answering the question of "what can we change the frontpage name to, to locally improve the current situation."

What is "Frontpage" Trying to Do?

Some value I think the "frontpage mechanic" provides include:

1. Disincentivze discourse that is more stressful or time wasting than it needs to be.

2. Retain LessWrong's strong foundation of epistemic clarity.

Rationality is harder when a discussion will directly impact your social landscape. Social coordination is important, but I want the default for LessWrong to be a place where you "only" have to think clearly about ideas, instead of "thinking about clear ideas in hard mode where you're tempted to round things off in directions that improve your political position."

3. Provide good "seed culture" (or "training data") for new users.

When you show up on LW, the first thing you see is a ...
[NeedAdvice]How to stay Focused on a long-term goal?
by OfficeClerk1069 — 2019-03-08T21:05:01.045Z

I have never worked for anything in my life. I'm a nihilistic person and I don't see the point or meaning in everything. Ultimately it won't matter. You will die and some long in to the future, the universe will die. There will be no life.

However ...

I met this girl. She has given meaning to my life and all life on Earth. If she would disappear, everything will become meaningless. And I want my life to have meaning. It's nice. So I have decided to become something of myself, to deserve the company of a such a wonderful person.

I want to improve myself. Since this is new, that I have the wish to change my self in a positive direction. So I don't have any experience. I was wondering where should I begin. I have a goal of improving myself in these areas: intellectual, mentally and physically.

My question is, where do I begin and what is the best way to completely focus on this goal of improving myself. Should I create a schedule? How do I improve my self intellectually? Read more books, be in the company of smarter people than yourself? I literally haven't good a single idea on how to reach this immense goal of creating a new version of myself, that is stronger intellectually, mentally and physically. I know what I have to do, but how do I stay disciplined for a journey that will take years, maybe decades(you probably think I'm insane for spending my time for one person. But I think she's worth all the time in the world) to achieve, where you will not have any positive feedback for a long time, no support from anyone and lastly the option that I might fail.
Alignment Research Field Guide
by abramdemski — 2019-03-08T19:57:05.658Z

This field guide was written by the MIRI team with

MIRIx

groups in mind, though the advice may be relevant to others working on AI alignment research.

⠀

Preamble I: Decision Theory

Hello! You may notice that you are reading a document.

This fact comes with certain implications. For instance, why are you reading this? Will you finish it? What decisions will you come to as a result? What will you do next?

Notice that, whatever you end up doing, it’s likely that there are dozens or even hundreds of other people, quite similar to you and in quite similar positions, who will follow reasoning which strongly resembles yours, and make choices which correspondingly match.

Given that, it’s our recommendation that you make your next few decisions by asking the question “What policy, if followed by all agents similar to me, would result in the most good, and what does that policy suggest in my particular case?” It’s less of a question of trying to decide for all agents sufficiently-similar-to-you (which might cause you to make the wrong choice out of guilt or pressure) and more something like “if I were in charge of all agents in my reference class, how would I treat instances of that class with my specific characteristics?”

If that kind of thinking leads you to read further, great. If it leads you to set up a MIRIx chapter, even better. In the meantime, we will proceed as if the only people reading this document are those who justifiably expect to find it reasonably useful.

⠀

Preamble II: Surface Area

Imagine that you have been tasked with moving a cube of solid iron that is one meter on a side. Given that such a cube weighs ~16000 pounds, and that an average human can lift ~100 pounds, a naïve estimation tells you that you can solve this problem with ~150 willing friends.

But of course, a meter cube can fit at most something like 10 people around it. It doesn’t matter if you have the theoretical power to move the cube if you can’t bring that power to bear in an effective manner. The problem is constrained by its surface area.

MIRIx chapters are one of the best ways to increase the surface area of people thinking about and working on the technical problem of AI alignment. And just as it would be a bad idea to decree "the 10 people who happen to currently be closest to the metal cube are the only ones allowed to think about how to think about this problem"...
Smoothmin and personal identity
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2019-03-08T15:16:28.980Z

I value existential risk reduction; I also value poverty reduction. These two things trade off against each other.

I value being generous; I also value reading interesting books. These two things trade off against each other.

But the way the two tradeoffs work do not seem to be the same. For the first one, I feel comfortable having a utility U¬X (for no existential risks) and U¬P (for no poverty), and then weighting them and maximising the sum:

λ¬XU¬X+λ¬PU¬P.

If this ends up with me only reducing existential risks, or only reducing poverty, then that's fine, I'm working on the option with the most marginal impact.

For the second one, I would not want to maximise some sum λGUG+λRUR, and would certainly complain if I ended up never reading again, or never being generous again. I'd prefer to maximise something like the smooth minimum of UG and UR, something like:

(λGe−UGe−UG+e−UR)UG+(λRe−URe−UG+e−UR)UR.

And I'd want the weights to be chosen so that I am very likely to both be generous and read, to some extent, over longer periods of time.

World preferences vs identity preferences

Some time ago, I wrote a post about "preferences over non-rewards". I'm planning to collect most of these preferences into the category of "personal identity": the sort of being you want to be.

The "You're not the boss of me!" preference from that post - meaning you change your preferred action because you were told to/told not to - is very similar to the "4 Problems with self-referential Θ" from this post, and will be both be grouped under "personal identity".

It's my hope that all human preferences and meta-preferences can be synthesised into one of "world preferences" or "personal identity preferences". As this post suggests, the methods of aggregation may be different for the two categories.
Show LW: Carl Sagan Documentary
by ArthurLidia — 2019-03-08T14:23:58.748Z

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKSi40WEKtMxykDBP8_vrC6bKXotys8KJ

It's a 13 episodes Documentary. It's not very entairtaining like modern science YouTube channel: Vsauce, Veritasium etc. But it is a good framework to see who influence them all