trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Upvote/downvote amounts
by gwillen — 2018-01-27T08:00:26.533Z

In light of the variable voting powers that the new karma system has, I keep finding myself wanting to be able to vote less than my "full power" on a comment.

But in particular, the thing I think I always want in practice is to be able to downvote less than that. Downvoting a comment by 4 feels like a huge slap in the face, especially if the comment already has 4 or fewer points. I think the default downvote weight should probably be 1, or n/2, or something less than the default upvote weight. Upvoting is a positive community interaction, and downvoting, while necessary, is sort of a necessary evil at best.

I'm not sure whether I'd argue in favor of going further to actually enable choosing the amount for up/down votes, or just down-weighting downvoting.
Strategy Nonconvexity Induced by a Choice of Potential Oracles
by Diffractor — 2018-01-27T00:41:04.000Z

One notable aspect of the extant cooperative oracle results is that they are in a different setting from the usual reflective oracle results.

The usual reflective oracle results show a fixed point in the space of potential oracles,[0,1]M×[0,1]∪Q×[0,1]M. The first component of this is a function query:M×[0,1]∪Q→[0,1] which dictates the probability of the potential oracle outputting 1 (0 otherwise), when asked about whether turing machine M outputs 1 with probability greater than some rational number. The second component of this is a function that maps each turing machine using the oracle to a probability of outputting a 1.

The cooperative oracle results elsewhere on IAFF show a fixed point in the space of strategies for a game, ∏i∈IΔ(Si), where Si is the set of strategies for the i’th player.

I was able to successfully translate the cooperative oracle existence proof from strategy-space to function-space.
However, the further step of taking an arbitrary point that’s a fixed point in strategy space, and explicitly building a true reflective oracle in function-space that results in that fixed point being played in the associated game, ran into some problems. There were assumptions that needed to be made to get that to work out, but the most unrealistic by far was the requirement of strategy continuity.

As an example, in the game of matching pennies, if the probability of the other player outputting “heads” is 0.5, the set of acceptable strategies goes from a simple “heads” or “tails” to “any possible mixture of heads and tails”, while this requirement mandates that the strategy chosen just shifts very fast from “all heads” to “all tails” in the vicinity of 0.5.

At the heart of this insufficiently strong result is the question of “just what does it mean to have a convex set of possible responses without one picked out in particular?” One possible interpretation is that the convex set comes from the turing machine/player having a probability of not halting, so there’s a degree of freedom in what probability distribution the oracle says about it. This doesn’t seem realistic. An oracle-equipped player playing matching pennies against coin-flip bot has their “set of acceptable strategies” include all mixtures of heads and tails, but it doesn’t make sense to say “ah, well, the player just doesn’t ever halt and select a move, and they can only be said to play heads with 5

...
Magic Brain Juice
by alkjash — 2018-01-26T17:54:56.390Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/26/magic-brain-juice/

Shorter and less Pruned due to CFAR.

A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other.
One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear.
The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”
The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feed.

I circumambulated the idea of meta-processes with the wonderfully inscrutable SquirrelInHell recently, and a seed of doubt has been circling in my head like a menacing sharkfin ever since.

At grave peril of strawmanning, a first order-approximation to SquirrelInHell’s meta-process (what I think of as the Self) is the only process in the brain with write access, the power of self-modification. All other brain processes are to treat the brain as a static algorithm and solve the world from there.

It seems to me that due to the biology of the brain there is a very serious issue with isolating the power of self-modification to the meta-process. After all, every single thought and experience causes self-modification at the neural level.

This post is another step towards a decision theory for human beings.

Unintentional Self-Modification

There is a central theme buried in my post The Solitaire Principle about building habits across time: human beings are not rational agents. We are not even “bounded-rationality agents,” whatever that means. We are agents who cannot simply act because every action is accompanied by self-modification.

Every time you take an action, the associated neural pathways are bathed in the magic brain juice [citation needed]. When you go to the gym, it becomes easier to decide to go to the gym next time. The activation energy for the second blog post you write is lower than that of the first. Acquired tastes are a real thing. After repeating a habit for a month, it is practically free.

Due to magic brain juice, every action is accompanied by an unintentional self-modification.

Let that sink in.

Every action you take is accompanied by an unintentional self-modification.

In an iterated game involving human beings, the choices made in each round influence not only their scores but their utility functions in perpetuity. Even disregarding sunk costs and irrat...
The Dogma of Evidence-based Medicine
by ChristianKl — 2018-01-25T21:15:20.252Z

In polite society it's currently fashionable to be in favor of Evidence-based Medicine and proclaim that we don't have enough of it. In this article I want to argue that this preference isn't backed up by good reasons. The paradigm of Evidence-based Medicine isn't backed up by evidence that proves the virtues of the paradigm but by faith.

What's Evidence-based Medicine in the first place? The term was defined in a scientific paper by Guyatt et al in their paper "

Evidence-Based Medicine - A New Approach to Teaching the Practice of Medicine

" in 1992. According to the paper Evidence-based medicine requires new skills of the physician, including efficient literature searching and the application of formal rules of evidence evaluating the clinical literature. Evidence-based Medicine was supposed to be about replacing theory-based medicine with empirically-backed medicine.

They make the assumption that physicians who learn the skill of literature searching and applications of formal rules of evidence will produce better clinical results for their patients. Theoretically there are valid reasons why someone might believe in this assumption. For a community who sincerely beliefs in evidence-based thinking instead of practicing

belief-in-belief

I would however expect that they test their assumptions.

It would be possible to run a controlled study whereby some doctors get more classes on learning those efficient literature searching skills and the skills of application of formal rules of evidence. If the cost of that experiment would be too big, it would even be possible to seek correlation evidence. To my knowledge, nobody tried to run either study.

I opened a question on Skeptics.StackExchange to find out whether anybody could find studies who

prove core assumptions of Evidence-Based Medicine

and nobody replied with studies that validated the idea that teaching doctors more of those evidence based skills improves patient outcomes.

Brienne Yudkowsky wrote on Facebook that she thinks that the Hamming question for epistemic rationality might be "To which topics, or under what circumstances, do you apply different epistemic laws?". For many people medicine is such a field. The majority of supposed defenders of Evidence-based Medicine accept without evidence from controlled studies that those Evidence-based methods of practicing medicine are better. At the same time, they figh...
On not getting swept away by mental content
by Kaj_Sotala — 2018-01-25T20:30:03.750Z

There’s a specific subskill of meditation that I call “not getting swept away by the content”, that I think is generally valuable.

It goes like this. You sit down to meditate and focus on your breath or whatever, and then a worrying thought comes to your mind. And it’s a real worry, something important. And you are tempted to start thinking about it and pondering it and getting totally distracted from your meditation… because this is something that you should probably be thinking about, at some point.

So there’s a mental motion that you make, where you note that you are getting distracted by the content of a thought. The worry, even if valid, is content. If you start thinking about whether you should be engaging with the worry, those thoughts are also content.

And you are meditating, meaning that this is the time when you shouldn’t be focusing on content. Anything that is content, you dismiss, without examining what that content is.

So you dismiss the worry. It was real and important, but it was content, so you are not going to think about it now.

You feel happy about having dismissed the content, and you start thinking about how good of a meditator you are, and… realize that this, too, is a thought that you are getting distracted by.

So you dismiss that thought, too. Doesn’t matter what the content of the thought is, now is not the time.

And then you keep letting go of thoughts that came to your mind, but that doesn’t seem to do anything and you start to wonder whether you are doing this meditation thing right… and aha, that’s content too. So you dismiss that…

—

The thing that is going on here is that usually, when you experience a distracting thought and want to get rid of it, you often start engaging in an evaluation process of whether that thought should be dismissed or not. By doing so, you may end up engaging with the thought’s own internal logic – which might be totally wrong for the situation.

Yes, maybe your relationship is in tatters and your partner is about to leave you. And maybe there are things that you can do to avoid that fate. Or maybe there are not. But if you try to dismiss the thought by disputing the truth or importance of those things, you will fail. Because they are true and important.

The way to short-circuit that is to move the evaluation a meta-lev...
European Community Weekend 2018 Announcement
by DreamFlasher — 2018-01-25T13:49:31.338Z

We are excited to announce this year's European LessWrong Community Weekend. For the fifth time, rationalists from all over Europe (and some from outside Europe) are gathering in Berlin to socialize, have fun, exchange knowledge and skills, and have interesting discussions.

The event takes place September 7th to September 9th and, like last year, it will be held in the beautiful Jugendherberge Wannsee which contains a large room for central events, several seminar rooms, and lots of comfortable spaces inside and out to socialize or relax.

This is a community-driven event. That means that while there will be a keynote and pre-planned content, the bulk of the schedule will be filled by the participants. There will be space to give talks, short or long, provide workshops, or just gather some people to do an activity together. In previous years we had the talks, lightning talks and workshops you would expect, as well as lighter activities such as morning-workouts, meditation sessions, authentic relating games, swimming in the lake and many more. Of course, there will also be time to reconnect with friends and form new connections with other aspiring rationalists.

Some valuable information

Most of the talks and discussions will be held in English, so you do not need to be able to speak German to attend.

The ticket price of €150 includes accommodation for two nights, on-site meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and snacks, and a welcome lunch on Friday at 12:00.

The event wraps up Sunday afternoon around 15:00. In the days after the weekend, participants are invited to stay in Berlin a little longer to explore the city, go bouldering, play frisbee, etc. While this is not part of the official event, we will coordinate couch-surfing opportunities to avoid the need for hotels.

tl;dr

When? 7-9 September 2018

Where? http://jh-wannsee.de

How much? €150

Apply here: http://tiny.cc/lwcw2018_signup and

Submit a contribution to support your application: http://tiny.cc/lwcw2018_contribution

If you have any question, please email us at lwcw.europe@gmail.com.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

The Community Weekend organizers and LessWrong Deutschland e.V.
Notification update and PM fixes
by habryka — 2018-01-25T01:06:42.589Z

Hey everyone,

I just pushed an update that changes the layout of the notifications section to something that should be significantly easier to navigate (and after we've seen it work well for a few days, we will also add a small number next to the bell-icon that tells you how many unread notifications you have).

I've also fixed the private messaging system to now be functional, though still horrible on many dimensions. But at least people should now get notifications if you send them messages, and actually be able to see your messages.

I've also fixed a bunch of bugs that caused comments to appear on the wrong post. Sorry for anyone who was affected by that.

Let us know if you run into any problems, this was a pretty major update behind the scenes, so there is a higher than normal chance that something broke somewhere.
Form and Feedback in Phenomenology
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2018-01-24T19:42:30.556Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/form-and-feedback-in-phenomenology-d44f4e5c72b3

NB: Originally posted on Map and Territory on Medium, so some of the internal series links go there.

Now that we’ve covered phenomenology’s foundations and its methods, we’re almost ready to begin addressing AI alignment from a phenomenological perspective, but before we can start talking about AI or how to align it we need to build a clear understanding of what AI is and what aligning it would mean. To do this we need to understand noematology, which requires understanding consciousness and qualia, which requires understanding feedback, which requires understanding things and time. That’s a lot to tackle at once, so we’ll split the inferential chain and start where many philosophers have started — consciousness. Specifically, we’ll begin with a phenomenological reduction of self experience.

To start our reduction, let’s first bracket the experience of self as a phenomenon in a clear way that makes precise what we consider its subject, experience, and object. English grammar encourages us to phrase this phenomenon as “I experience myself”, but in normalized form we instead denote it {I, experience, I} to mean that the subject, I, has some experience of itself. This immediately invites many questions. What is the I? How do we know it’s both the subject and the object of this phenomenon? Does the I know it’s experiencing itself or is it only experiencing itself without knowing what it’s experiencing? We’ll need to address all of them, but since they all ask something about the I, we’ll begin by bracketing it and exploring its role as intentional subject and object.

Things

It’s tempting to start by asking what kind of thing I is, but this immediately exposes an assumption we need to suspend — that I is a thing. Epoche of this idea is often a jumping off point for considering the essential nature of (or rather the lack of essence of) the self, and that’s a topic we’ll cover, but to address the I now would be to put the cart before the horse because doing so assumes we have a solid understanding of what a thing is! That may sound silly if you aren’t used to philosophical discourse, but, as we’ll see, understanding just what we mean when we talk about a thing is the cornerstone of complex phenomenological analysis.

It’s a little hard to talk about what a thing is, though, because we naively think of things as ontologically basic. Look in a dictionary and you’ll find mo...
Teaching Ladders
by alkjash — 2018-01-24T19:01:56.848Z
Link: https://radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/teaching-ladders/

I've been teaching math to people one or two levels below me my entire life. Although this seems like a limitation, I think it's the natural state of affairs.

On the Kiseido Go Server (KGS), there's a room called the KGS Teaching Ladder where players can find teaching games with players just a few stones stronger than them. The few times I participated, it was extraordinarily positive. Because of the relative linearity of progression in Go, losing to a slightly stronger player is legible: they will usually play a move you considered but just barely don't understand, or find the simplest good moves that you don't know yet. Losing to a much stronger player, however, is completely illegible. Much stronger players will often play completely incorrect moves ("overplays") just to test your instincts, or play otherwise incomprehensibly complicated variations and traps that you immediately fall into.

I distinguish between two models of teaching:

(Traditional) The master teaches everyone.
(Teaching Ladder) The students one or two stages up from you teach you.

Previously, I noted that many progressions come in three stages: "naive, cynical, naive but wise," where the third stage bears more resemblance to the first than the second. The value of Teaching Ladders is that they naturally mesh with the three stages: Stage 3's have a difficult time teaching Stage 1's, and Stage 2's are needed to fill that gap.

Scaffolding and Assimilation

The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’, the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question, ‘Where shall we have lunch?’ (Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“)

In Singularity Mindset, I articulated the following model of development without explaining its origins:

Oftentimes, progress curves look like “naive, cynical, naive but wise”:
For mathematicians, the curve is pre-rigor, rigor, post-rigor.
Picasso said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
Scott Alexander foretold that idealism is the new cynicism.
Knowing about biases can hurt you.

This is a general pheno...
"Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast"
by moridinamael — 2018-01-24T16:52:23.704Z

I think it's worthwhile to signal boost bits of wisdom that turn out to be surprisingly useful. Apparently "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast" is a Navy SEAL saying. The meaning is pretty clear. Practice slowly so that the correct motor patterns are ingrained. And perhaps equally importantly, execute "slowly", that is to say, don't rush. Pushing your nervous system to perform faster than it's trained to will simply cause you to fumble what you're doing, and the end result is that your rushed performance is slower than if you had attempted a measured cadence in the first place.

On the rare occaisions that I've worked closely with high performers, be they artists or athletes or academics, I've noticed that they are all slow. The skilled artists never rush through their warmup exercises. The athletes are patient with their bodies. The academics will spend ten minutes on a task that might take me two minutes, because they're doing things like checking for consistency, giving themselves time to think things through and notice irregularities, and perhaps even formatting a table or graph to look nicer even if it's not necessarily ever going to be seen by anyone but themselves. The end result of all this "slowness" at the micro level is acceleration and efficiency at the macro level, and improved overall performance.

Show me somebody who gets things done at an unbelievable pace and I'll show you somebody whose life probably looks unbearably slow when you actually look at what they're doing on a daily basis.
What are the Best Hammers in the Rationalist Community?
by Bound_up — 2018-01-24T14:43:18.611Z

I've toyed with the idea of giving an intro to rationality, hoping I can find the 20% of the material that provides 80% of the gains (or the 5% that provides 50% of the gains).

Here and there, I've also been asked what the rationality community is about, and I've struggled to give an effective summary. I usually say the 3 keys are seeing in terms of concepts rather than words (a la rationalist Taboo or hyperdimensional thingspace), fighting motivated reasoning (since most people are already strong enough to prove others wrong and just need to turn that force upon themselves), and correcting for the heuristics and biases. But are these really the top 3 most important pieces? Even if they are, what other Hammers would take 4th, 5th, and 6th place?

The Hammers and Nails post got me thinking again: What are the most powerful pieces of rationalist lore? If I had 1 day to tutor a brilliant, but untrained mind, what are the most powerful techniques that can most easily be taught?

The comments under Hammers and Nails are full of people saying what their favorite and most powerful techniques are, but I'd like to make an explicit invitation here to share. What are your hammers? (see https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/QzBuuNEqJGQFeWM4f/hammers-and-nails)