trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A summary and broad points of agreement and disagreement with Cal Newport's book on high school extracurriculars
by VipulNaik — 2014-04-08T01:55:54.292Z

Cal Newport (personal website, Wikipedia page) is a moderately well-known author of four books as well as a computer science researcher. I have read two of his four books: How To Become a Straight-A Student The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less and How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out). I'm particularly interested in his book on becoming a high school superstar. My interest arises as part of trying to figure out how people can better use their extracurricular activities to have more fun, learn more, and create more value for the world. As Jonah recently pointed out, choosing high school extracurricular activities could in principle have huge social value in addition to the private benefits. And as far as I know, Cal Newport is the only person who has given systematic advice on high school extracurriculars to a broad audience. He's been referenced many times on Less Wrong.

In this post, I'll briefly discuss his suggestions in the latter book and some of my broad philosophical disagreements. I'm eager to know about the experiences of people who've tried to implement Newport's advice (particularly that pertaining to extracurriculars, but also any of his other advice). First impressions of people who click through the links and read about Newport right now would also be appreciated. I intend to write on some of these issues in more detail in the coming days, though those later posts of mine will not be focused solely on what Newport has to say.

You might also be interested in the comments on this Facebook post of mine discussing Newport's ideas.

A quick summary of Newport's views

Newport's book advises high school students to pick an extracurricular activity and shine at it to the level that it impresses admissions officers (and others). He offers a three-step plan for highschoolers:

The Law of Underscheduling: Pack your schedule with free time. Use this free time to explore: In particular, avoid getting being involved in too many activities, whether academic or extracurricular. Use your free time to read and learn about a wide range of stuff.

The Law of Focus: Master one serious interest. Don't waste time on unrelated activities: Newport cites the superstar effect and the Matthew effect to bolster his case for focusing on one activity aft

...
Controversy - Healthy or Harmful?
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-04-07T22:03:55.836Z

Follow-up to: What have you recently tried, and failed at?

Related-to: Challenging the Difficult Sequence

ialdabaoth's post about blockdownvoting and its threads have prompted me to keep an eye on controversial topics and community norms on LessWrong. I noticed some things.

I was motivated: My own postings are also sometimes controversial. I know beforehand which might be (this one possibly). Why do I post them nonetheless? Do I want to wreak havoc? Or do I want to foster productive discussion of unresolved but polarized questions? Or do I want to call in question some point the community may have a blind spot on or possibly has taken something for granted too early.

Of course I see postings that provide objective information. These are almost never downvoted. Some members specialize in these. "Write a lukeprog-style post on X" is an appeal to invest time to provide a benefit (information) for the community. No problem here. Neither for a large body of 'typical' LW posts.

But some postings which I associate with newbies or aspiring rationalists (me included) which are sometimes personal, sometime objective often get a share of downvotes because they don't match some standards or norms. I mostly just don't vote these. I upvote them if I recognize that the poster has made a genuine effort I want to honor.

But progress is made by the discussion of controversial topics, where a consensus or synthesis has not (yet) been reached. Agreed - there are topics that are inherently ambiguous because different people have different values (and I don't mean politics which is abuse of topics for us-them-games). These topics can accumulate a sizeable share of downvotes. But even on these topics agreement should be possible at least on the meta-level of acceptance of the existence of different values. It is not necessary to downvote just because you have another position on this topic than taken or implied by the poster.

Beside these direct on-track controversial topics which are mostly civil with regard to voting (except possibly if a strong stance is taken by some party) we also have another kind of post - or often threads. These are posts and (sub) threads about topics like religion, recreation, politics, status, real life pragmatism, relationships, dealing with newbies and trolls (which actually is a range and precise placement is difficult in...
Rationality Quotes April 2014 
by elharo — 2014-04-07T17:25:18.273Z

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

And one new rule:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Polling Thread
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-04-07T15:13:19.142Z

This is the third installment of the Polling Thread.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

These are the rules:

Each poll goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.

You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.

Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.

This is a somewhat regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :

Use "Polling Thread" in the title.

Copy the rules.

Add the tag "poll".

Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.

Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar'

Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.
Meetup : Utrecht: Behavioural economics, game theory...
by SoerenMind — 2014-04-07T13:54:49.079Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Utrecht: Behavioural economics, game theory...

WHEN:
19 April 2014 05:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Cafe de Zaak, Korte Minrebroederstraat 9, Utrecht

In the this meetup we will discuss more rationality-related topics, like behavioral economics and game theory. Sjoerd, who used to be a PhD student in these areas will give a little intro. Marius can share some thoughts on goal factoring with us, which he recently learned at a CFAR workshop. (Notes on goal factoring from another LW meetup: tinyurl.com/ptsmlcj)

If you would like, you can add more discussion topics here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16bBtla1iVzkJjie-JK7Ozb9Ao8SbyJ9U924XyaEXTqY/edit?usp=sharing

We're moving to Cafe de Zaak, which is more quiet and we can bring own food or order in from other places (last time we got kind of hungry). It's around the corner from De Winkel van Sinkel, where we were the last times. Food is a little pricy there. In case de Zaak is too crowded we will just walk over. If you have trouble finding us you can call me at 0684140766.

Everyone is invited, and new people will be warmly welcomed!
We are particularly interested in the experiences of the people that attend the European Community weekend in Berlin!

Discussion article for the meetup : Utrecht: Behavioural economics, game theory...
Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-04-07T11:00:18.803Z

tl;dr An unconstrained search through possible future worlds is a dangerous way of choosing positive outcomes. Constrained, imperfect or under-optimised searches work better.

Some suggested methods for designing AI goals, or controlling AIs, involve unconstrained searches through possible future worlds. This post argues that this is a very dangerous thing to do, because of the risk of being tricked by "siren worlds" or "marketing worlds". The thought experiment starts with an AI designing a siren world to fool us, but that AI is not crucial to the argument: it's simply an intuition pump to show that siren worlds can exist. Once they exist, there is a non-zero chance of us being seduced by them during a unconstrained search, whatever the search criteria are. This is a feature of optimisation: satisficing and similar approaches don't have the same problems.

The AI builds the siren worlds

Imagine that you have a superintelligent AI that's not just badly programmed, or lethally indifferent, but actually evil. Of course, it has successfully concealed this fact, as "don't let humans think I'm evil" is a convergent instrumental goal for all AIs.

We've successfully constrained this evil AI in a Oracle-like fashion. We ask the AI to design future worlds and present them to human inspection, along with an implementation pathway to create those worlds. Then if we approve of those future worlds, the implementation pathway will cause them to exist (assume perfect deterministic implementation for the moment). The constraints we've programmed means that the AI will do all these steps honestly. Its opportunity to do evil is limited exclusively to its choice of worlds to present to us.

The AI will attempt to design a siren world: a world that seems irresistibly attractive while concealing hideous negative features. If the human mind is hackable in the crude sense - maybe through a series of coloured flashes - then the AI would design the siren world to be subtly full of these hacks. It might be that there is some standard of "irresistibly attractive" that is actually irresistibly attractive: the siren world would be full of genuine sirens.

Even without those types of approaches, there's so much manipulation the AI could indulge in. I could imagine myself (and many people on Less Wrong) falling for the following approach:

First, the siren world looks complicated, wrong and s...
AI risk, executive summary
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-04-07T10:33:34.423Z

MIRI recently published "Smarter than Us", a 50 page booklet laying out the case for considering AI as an existential risk. But many people have asked for a shorter summary, to be handed out to journalists for example. So I put together the following 2-page text, and would like your opinion on it.

In this post, I'm not so much looking for comments along the lines of "your arguments are wrong", but more "this is an incorrect summary of MIRI/FHI's position" or "your rhetoric is infective here".

AI risk

Bullet points

The risks of artificial intelligence are strongly tied with the AI’s intelligence.

There are reasons to suspect a true AI could become extremely smart and powerful.

Most AI motivations and goals become dangerous when the AI becomes powerful.

It is very challenging to program an AI with safe motivations.

Mere intelligence is not a guarantee of safe interpretation of its goals.

A dangerous AI will be motivated to seem safe in any controlled training setting.

Not enough effort is currently being put into designing safe AIs.

Executive summary

The risks from artificial intelligence (AI) in no way resemble the popular image of the Terminator. That fictional mechanical monster is distinguished by many features – strength, armour, implacability, indestructability – but extreme intelligence isn’t one of them. And it is precisely extreme intelligence that would give an AI its power, and hence make it dangerous.

The human brain is not much bigger than that of a chimpanzee. And yet those extra neurons account for the difference of outcomes between the two species: between a population of a few hundred thousand and basic wooden tools, versus a population of several billion and heavy industry. The human brain has allowed us to spread across the surface of the world, land on the moon, develop nuclear weapons, and coordinate to form effective groups with millions of members. It has granted us such power over the natural world that the survival of many other species is no longer determined by their own efforts, but by preservation decisions made by humans.

In the last sixty years, human intelligence has been further augmented by automation: by computers and programmes of steadily increasing ability. These have taken over tasks formerly performed by the human brain, from multiplication through weather modelling to driving cars. The powers and ...
SHRDLU, understanding, anthropomorphisation and hindsight bias
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-04-07T09:59:26.854Z

EDIT: Since I didn't make it sufficiently clear, the point of this post was to illustrate how the GOFAI people could have got so much wrong and yet still be confident in their beliefs, by looking at what the results of one experiment - SHRDLU - must have felt like to those developers at the time. The post is partially to help avoid hindsight bias: it was not obvious that they were going wrong at the time.

SHRDLU was an early natural language understanding computer program, developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. It was a program that moved objects in a simulated world and could respond to instructions on how to do so. It caused great optimism in AI research, giving the impression that a solution to natural language parsing and understanding were just around the corner. Symbolic manipulation seemed poised to finally deliver a proper AI.

Before dismissing this confidence as hopelessly naive (which it wasn't) and completely incorrect (which it was), take a look at some of the output that SHRDLU produced, when instructed by someone to act within its simulated world:

Person: Pick up a big red block.
Computer: OK.
Person: Grasp the pyramid.
Computer: I don't understand which pyramid you mean.
Person (changing their mind): Find a block which is taller than the one you are holding and put it into the box.
Computer: By "it", I assume you mean the block which is taller than the one I am holding.
Computer: OK.
Person: What does the box contain?
Computer: The blue pyramid and the blue block.
Person: What is the pyramid supported by?
Computer: The box.
Person: How many blocks are not in the box?
Computer: Four of them.
Person: Is at least one of them narrower than the one which I told you to pick up?
Computer: Yes, the red cube.

It's hard not to project an intelligence into those responses. Humans are the main producers of language, so we're probably primed to anthropomorphise anything that speaks to us this way; add to that SHRDLU's seeming ability to cope with some level of ambiguity ("Is at least one of them..." - one of what?), its very human turns of phrase ("By "it", I assume you mean...", "I don't understand...") and you can see why naive outsiders could believe that SHRDLU might show genuine understanding. It would be natural to give SHRDLU the benefit of the doubt, and assume it was far more complex that it really was.

We can also see why smart insiders might...
LW Australia Weekend Retreat
by Ruby — 2014-04-07T09:45:35.729Z

EDIT: The Mega-Meetup has been scheduled! http://lesswrong.com/meetups/z8 Registration: http://goo.gl/425hyo

The organisers of Less Wrong Melbourne, Less Wrong Sydney, and Less Wrong Canberra had a meeting last night. We're pretty stoked to announce plans for a LESS WRONG AUSTRALIA MEGA-EVENT.

WHAT Weekend Retreat
WHERE: Near Sydney
WHEN: May 9-11, Friday night - Sunday night
COST: $200-$250*

*Food and accommodation.

This is for those who like improving their rationality and effectiveness, being surrounded by others who do so too, making new friends, socialising, enjoying the outdoors, and adventure!

Anticipate sessions on rationality skills, revision and teaching of CFAR modules, prediction markets, nature walks, lightning talks, board games, tasty food, and all round enlightenment.

If you're in Australia but are yet to get involved with a local Less Wrong meetup, now is a great time to start.
Register your interest here.

We're aiming to have an incredible program for the weekend and would immensely appreciate anyone sharing their ideas, resources, experience or advice for making an utterly awesome rationality weekend retreat.
Meetup : Stanford Salon and LW inaugural meetup 
by BraydenM — 2014-04-07T04:26:11.105Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Stanford Salon and LW inaugural meetup

WHEN:
07 April 2014 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
489 Arguello Way

Have you been craving the creation of a new Less Wrong meetup on campus at Stanford? Maybe you have been searching for a more local crowd of rationalists to learn from, or a group of readers of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to talk to in person?

Well search no more! A Less Wrong meetup event on campus is in the works, and to gauge the size of the community, a crossover event will be held with the Monday Stanford Salon Series. The salon has been a regular event for some time, but this is the first time that it has been cobranded with Less Wrong. Come and express your interest in what you want to get out of your new less Wrong community.

Come to the Arillaga family dining commons, downstairs in the "study room", tomorrow night at 7:30pm. There will be introductions, lightning talks from a number of speakers, and plenty of time for mingling and having interesting discussions. If additionally you have a topic to talk about for 5-10 minutes, post about it below. The event officially concludes at 9:30pm.

The host of this event is Rafael Cosman, who you can reach on +1 (858) 775-2858 if you get lost.

I'm looking forward to kicking off a new community with you all!

Discussion article for the meetup : Stanford Salon and LW inaugural meetup
Meetup : The Second Warsaw Meetup
by  — 2014-04-06T21:48:17.837Z

Discussion article for the meetup : The Second Warsaw Meetup

WHEN:
10 April 2014 06:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Cafe Kulturalna, Plac Defilad 1, 00-901 Warszawa

I haven't been to the first meetup in Warsaw (BTW, did it finally take place at all?), so I'd like to schedule a second one this Thursday, 18:00.
Here's a Facebook group intended for Warsaw LessWrong users.

Discussion article for the meetup : The Second Warsaw Meetup
Stock phrases
by KnaveOfAllTrades — 2014-04-06T19:32:46.326Z

‘Stock phrases’, in the sense I am using it here, refers to established phrases (in the more common, more specific sense), noises, gestures, etc.; they form a canon of well-known signifiers for messages one might want to convey, like the verbalisation ‘I am happy’, or the gesture of nodding in agreement. They can be very useful, because they save communicators the time, effort, and distraction of forming descriptions from existing phrases. Sometimes a stock phrase has been honed so finely that to try to recreate its precise meaning from scratch would not be possible in any practical period of time. As with language in general, novel or less common combinations of stock phrases are more liable to be misinterpreted. (For example, winks, nods, and other individual gestures are generally less ambiguous than chains of gestures.)

To put it another way: Compression is useful because some amount of upfront time and effort (learning meanings of stock phrases) can save a lot of time and effort later (having to construct new stock phrases repeatedly from scratch).

Two considerations that arise from this are over-reliance on the existing canon of stock phrases, and the skill of originating successful new stock phrases.

With the former, stock phrases are used even in situations where it would be better to construct a phrase not already in the canon. It is very tempting to round off a complex sentiment into the nearest available stock phrase, because it is so much more convenient—they are available. For example, saying ‘I’m an atheist’ can be a lot more convenient than saying, ‘I put an effectively-zero, but non-zero, probability on the existence of God’. And in some contexts, the former might genuinely be just a useful approximation. But in some other contexts, it can lead to spending an hour arguing with someone before they realise that you don’t rule out God entirely like they were arguing against, and you realise that they have been disagreeing with you ruling out God entirely, rather than you not believing in God with high probability. (Of course, this might not mean the argument is over since there will probably be remaining disagreement. But it might shorten the argument by a frustrating hour.)

Over-reliance on stock phrases can also not only fail to communicate to others, but actually alt

...
Observational learning and the importance of high quality examples
by casebash — 2014-04-06T07:00:27.187Z

There was a post (which I unfortunately couldn't locate) that argued that rationalists should aspire to more - that a successful rationalist should be able to master other skills too that make it obvious that being a "rationality master" is something to aspire to.
Several skills such as writing, speech craft and social skills are different from more procedural skills in that they are best learned by observational learning. Strong logic skills don't provide the same advantages here that they do in maths or science - in fact an intermediate level of logic is often a disadvantage as it leads to expecting other people to behave logically.
So if we wish to develop these skills as a community, we would need to develop a repository of examples with notes to explain what principles each example is intended to show. There might be some disagreement as to how applicable each principle is and whether a particular decision is correct - but it would still be far, far better than what else is out there. Unfortunately most communities on the Internet (ie. reddit.com/r/socialskills) end up with huge amounts of rather general advice. This advice is helpful in the beginning, but you quickly get to a stage where you have heard all of it before many, many times. But with examples, even people who are extremely talented may get something out of it.