trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Conned
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-01-02T20:09:52.000Z

Once in a while I’m asked “what makes you special?” It’s hard to give an honest answer other than “I’m not a snowflake, there’s nothing really unique about me”. Even my most esoteric pursuits form great tribes around them. The raison d’être of Putanumonit is that whatever peculiar idea I can write about, it will resonate with at least a thousand people somewhere in the world.

With that said, I probably have a pretty singular reaction to utility company vans.

Text: “If just 20% of all U.S. households paid their bills online, in one year we could save almost two million trees.”

Most people would pass by this truck and not think twice about it. Most wouldn’t even think once. I pass by this truck and think: 20% of household is like 20 mil, so 10 households per tree per year sounds completely made up and I’ll bet 5:1 that this number is off by at least a factor of 2 and ConEdison are lying because everyone is innumerate.

Then I get home and do some Googling:

There are 125 million households in the United States. Generously assuming that they all get electrical bills, 20% of them are 25 million households.

My own bill from ConEdison is 2 pages. If ConEdison cared about trees they’d use double sided printing, but let’s be generous again and assume 4 total pages of paper statement per household per month, including the envelope and the check.

A letter sized page is 8.5″ x 11″, or 216 mm x 279 mm, which comes out to 0.06 m2. Four pages have an area of 0.24 m2.

We needed the area calculation because paper weight is measured in GSM, or grams per square meter. Common printer paper weighs 74 GSM, so 0.24 square meters of that paper weigh 74 x 0.24 = 17.7 grams.

17.7 grams of paper per month * 12 monthly bills = 213 grams of paper per year per household that refuses to pay their bills online.

With 25 million households, that’s 5.3 million kg of paper per year.

24 trees make 1 ton of printer paper, so a single tree makes 41.7 kg.

5.3 million / 41.7 = 127,000 trees.

Not “almost two million”, not even within an order of magnitude of two million. A mere 127,000 trees. For scale, that’s 0.25% of the 50 million trees a single country can plant in a day.

By the way, did I mention that I worked for a major paper manufacturer? American paper companies pract...
Rationality Quotes January - March 2017
by Sabiola — 2017-01-02T10:48:32.090Z

Another quarter, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

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.

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.
Open thread, Jan. 02 - Jan. 08, 2017
by MrMind — 2017-01-02T07:50:31.498Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
Double Crux — A Strategy for Mutual Understanding
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2017-01-02T04:37:25.683Z

Preamble

Double crux is one of CFAR's newer concepts, and one that's forced a re-examination and refactoring of a lot of our curriculum (in the same way that the introduction of TAPs and Inner Simulator did previously). It rapidly became a part of our organizational social fabric, and is one of our highest-EV threads for outreach and dissemination, so it's long overdue for a public, formal explanation.

Note that while the core concept is fairly settled, the execution remains somewhat in flux, with notable experimentation coming from Julia Galef, Kenzi Amodei, Andrew Critch, Eli Tyre, Anna Salamon, myself, and others. Because of that, this post will be less of a cake and more of a folk recipe—this is long and meandering on purpose, because the priority is to transmit the generators of the thing over the thing itself. Accordingly, if you think you see stuff that's wrong or missing, you're probably onto something, and we'd appreciate having them added here as commentary.

Casus belli

To a first approximation, a human can be thought of as a black box that takes in data from its environment, and outputs beliefs and behaviors (that black box isn't really "opaque" given that we do have access to a lot of what's going on inside of it, but our understanding of our own cognition seems uncontroversially incomplete).

When two humans disagree—when their black boxes output different answers, as below—there are often a handful of unproductive things that can occur.

The most obvious (and tiresome) is that they'll simply repeatedly bash those outputs together without making any progress (think most disagreements over sports or politics; the people above just shouting "triangle!" and "circle!" louder and louder). On the second level, people can (and often do) take the difference in output as evidence that the other person's black box is broken (i.e. they're bad, dumb, crazy) or that the other person doesn't see the universe clearly (i.e. they're biased, oblivious, unobservant). On the third level, people will often agree to disagree, a move which preserves the social fabric at the cost of truth-seeking and actual progress.

Double crux in the ideal solves all of these problems, and in practice even fumbling and inexpert steps toward that ideal seem to produce a lot of marginal value, both in increasing understanding and in decreasing conflict-due-to-disagreement.

Prerequisites

This...
Meetup : Meetup #9 - 2017 is prime
by  — 2017-01-01T16:06:08.061Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #9 - 2017 is prime

WHEN:
08 January 2017 03:11:11PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands

Part relaxed socializing, part rationalist dojo. Hang around at the coffee shop, having the most interesting conversations you'll have all week, occasionally interrupted by practicing and discussing the next big applied rationality technique.

In spirit of new year's resolutions we'll be discussing Hamming questions. Mathematician Richard Hamming was known to approach experts from other fields and ask “what are the important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?”. The same question can be applied to personal life: “what are the important problems in your life, and what is stopping you from working on them?”.

See you on Sunday the 8th!

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #9 - 2017 is prime
January 2017 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2017-01-01T15:06:35.396Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Act into Fear and Abandon all Hope
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-01-01T01:39:11.704Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/act-into-fear-and-abandon-all-hope-81bcc114c5fd#.2723rfhvv

The first time I received truly life-changing advice was when a friend pointed me in the direction of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I was in the middle of getting my graduate degree, struggling to keep up with the demands of school, teaching, friends, and romance, and although I wasn’t drowning — that would come a couple years later — I was fighting to tread water. Learning about GTD was like being thrown a life preserver.

The core idea of GTD is simple: write down everything you want to do in a trusted system, keep the info in the system honest and up-to-date, then look at the system to figure out what to do. It doesn’t matter if your system consists of scraps of paper, emails, a spreadsheet, or fancy to do software: as long as you trust it to include everything and be available, it acts as a sort of extended memory that you can offload your worries to. This let’s you get things done because the system is more reliable than your memory alone and it frees your mind to focus on the here and now rather than everything else you could be doing.

I’m happy to say that GTD changed my life! I went from forgetting to do things to remembering everything and from spending hours worrying about all the things I wasn’t doing to spending hours in flow. My grades improved, teaching was less stressful, I had more time for friends, and I managed to do one or two romantic things. It gave me so much more capacity for doing stuff that it even created time for me to spend telling other people about how great GTD was. Everywhere I looked I saw problems in people’s lives that could be solved if they would just read Allen’s short book. My life was made better, and I wanted share my new-found wisdom with anyone who would listen.

But I often found myself in the position of a zealot preaching salvation upon deaf ears. Most people weren’t that interested in my advice to try GTD, and some people even found it offensive. “What do you mean I should use a system instead of my memory? That doesn’t feel natural — it takes all the soul out of my actions!” I myself even eventually turned against GTD, finding a strong need for less structure. The great advice that had helped me so much just didn’t seem to work for other people, including my f...
Throw a prediction party with your EA/rationality group
by eukaryote — 2016-12-31T23:02:11.284Z

TL;DR: Prediction & calibration parties are an exciting way for your EA/rationality/LessWrong group to practice rationality skills and celebrate the new year.
On December 30th, Seattle Rationality had a prediction party. Around 15 people showed up, brought snacks, brewed coffee, and spent several hours making predictions for 2017, and generating confidence levels for those predictions.
This was heavily inspired by Scott Alexander’s yearly predictions. (2014 results, 2015 results, 2016 predictions.) Our move was to turn this into a communal activity, with a few alterations to meet our needs and make it work better in a group.
Procedure:

Each person individually writes a bunch of predictions for the upcoming year. They can be about global events, people’s personal lives, etc.

If you use Scott Alexander’s system, create 5+ predictions each for fixed confidence levels (50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 95%, etc.)

If you want to generate Brier scores or logarithmic scores, just do 30+ predictions at whatever confidence levels you believe.

Write down confidence levels for each prediction.

Save your predictions and put it aside for 12 months.

Open up your predictions and see how everyone did.

To make this work in a group, we recommend the following:

Don’t share your confidence intervals. Avoid anchoring by just not naming how likely or unlikely you think any prediction is.

Do share predictions. Generating 30+ predictions is difficult, and sharing ideas (without confidence levels) makes it way easier to come up with a bunch. We made a shared google doc, and everyone pasted some of their predictions into it.

Make predictions that, in a year, will verifiably have happened or not. (IE, not “the academic year will go well”, which is debatable, but “I will finish the year with a 3.5 GPA or above”.)

It’s convenient to assume that unless stated otherwise predictions that end by the next year (IE, "I will go to the Bay Area" means "I will go to the Bay Area at least once in 2017.") It’s also fine to make predictions that have other end dates (“I will go to EA Global this summer.”)

Make a bunch of predictions first without thinking too hard about how likely they are, then assign confidence levels. This post details why. You could also generate a group list of predictions, and everyone individually lists t

...
A review of cryonics/brain preservation in 2016
by Andy_McKenzie — 2016-12-31T18:19:56.460Z

Relevance to Less Wrong: Whether you think it is for better or worse, users on LW are about 50,000x more likely to be signed up for cryonics than the average person.

Disclaimer: I volunteer at the Brain Preservation Foundation, but I speak for myself in this post and I'm only writing about publicly available information.

In 2016, cryonics remains a fringe operation. When it is discussed in the news or on social media, many express surprise that cryonics is a "real thing" outside of science fiction. Many others who do know about cryonics tend to label it a pseudoscience. Brain preservation (BP) through non-conventional cryonics methods such as those using aldehyde fixation is even more fringe, with most people not aware of it, and others dismissing it because it uses "toxic" chemicals.

Here's a rundown of some events important to cryonics/BP in 2016.

Research progress

- The Brain Preservation Foundation prize was won in February by Robert McIntyre and Greg Fahy. Their winning technique uses glutaraldehyde fixation followed by glycerol cryoprotection (in addition to a step to improve blood-brain barrier permeability and several other components) and allows for the preservation of neural structure as verified by electron microscopy across the cortex. McIntyre has since started a company called Nectome in part to improve and refine this procedure.

- Aschwin de Wolf of Advanced Neural Biosciences announced in November at the CryoSuisse conference that Advanced Neural Biosciences has developed a method that reduces dehydration in rat brain vitrification by using "brain optimized cryoprotectants." There is no peer-reviewed data or more detailed procedure available as of yet, and viability of the tissue may be a concern.

Legal progress

- In Canada, Keegan Macintosh and Carrie Wong are challenging the anti-cryonics laws in British Columbia.

- A right-to-die law passed in Colorado. Although not directly relevant to cryonics, it increases the number of locations where it might be possible to start brain preservation procedures in a more controlled manner by taking advantage of physician-assisted suicide in a terminally ill patient. This has been described as "cryothanasia" and is controversial both within the cryonics community and outside of it.

- As far as I know, cryonics and brain preservation remain illegal in France, C

...
Claim explainer: donor lotteries and returns to scale
by Benquo — 2016-12-30T19:46:48.314Z

Sometimes, new technical developments in the discourse around effective altruism can be difficult to understand if you're not already aware of the underlying principles involved. I'm going to try to explain the connection between one such new development and an important underlying claim. In particular, I'm going to explain the connection between donor lotteries (as recently implemented by Carl Shulman in cooperation with Paul Christiano)1 and returns to scale. (This year I’m making a $100 contribution to this donor lottery, largely for symbolic purposes to support the concept.)

I'm not sure I'm adding much to Carl's original post on making bets to take advantage of returns to scale with this explainer. Please let me know whether you think this added anything or not.

What is a donor lottery?

Imagine ten people each have $1,000 to give to charity this year. They pool their money, and draw one of their names out of a hat. The winner gets to decide how to give away all $10,000. This is an example of a donor lottery.

More generally, a donor lottery is an arrangement where a group of people pool their money and pick one person to give it away. This selection is randomized so that each person has a probability of being selected proportional to their initial contribution.

Selfish reasons to gamble

Let's start with the case of a non-charitable expenditure. Usually, for consumption decisions, we have what economists call diminishing marginal utility. This is because we have limited ability to consume things, and also because we make the best purchases first.

Food is an example of something we have limited appetite for. After a certain point, we just aren't hungry anymore. But we also but the more important things first. Your first couple dollars a day make the difference between going hungry and having enough food. Your next couple dollars a day go to buying convenience or substituting higher-quality-foods, which is a material improvement, but nowhere near as big as the difference between starving and fed.

To take a case that's less universal, but maybe easier to understand the principle in, let's say I'm outfitting a kitchen, and own no knives. I can buy one of two knives – a small knife or a large one. The large knife can do a good job cutting large things, and a bad job cutting small things. The small knife can do a good job cutting small things, and a bad...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-12-30T15:44:56.164Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on December 30th. The following week's summary is here.

The following 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:

[Berlin] AI safety Berlin: 07 January 2017 04:00PM
Cambridge/Boston Less Wrong: Planning 2017: 01 January 2017 03:30PM
Denver Area LW January Meetup: 03 January 2017 07:00PM
[Moscow] Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow: 07 January 2017 03:00PM

Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 01 January 2017 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Netherlands, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Prague, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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 is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are 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 Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), Singapore, St. Louis, Vancouver, Warsaw, Waterloo.

Whether or not there's currently ...
Pursuing convergent instrumental subgoals on the user's behalf doesn't always require good priors
by jessicata — 2016-12-30T02:36:48.000Z

I recommend reading Scalable AI control before reading this post.

In particular, in the "Hard values, easy values" section of this post, Paul writes:

My statement of the control problem is only really meaningful because there are instrumental subgoals that are shared (or are extremely similar) between many different values, which let us compare the efficacy with which agents pursue those different values. Performance on these very similar subgoals should be used as the performance metric when interpreting my definition of AI control problem.

In fact even if we only resolved the problem for the similar-subgoals case, it would be pretty good news for AI safety. Catastrophic scenarios are mostly caused by our AI systems failing to effectively pursue convergent instrumental subgoals on our behalf, and these subgoals are by definition shared by a broad range of values.

Convergent instrumental subgoals are mostly about gaining power. For example, gaining money is a convergent instrumental subgoal. If some individual (human or AI) has convergent instrumental subgoals pursued well on their behalf, they will gain power. If the most effective convergent instrumental subgoal pursuit is directed towards giving humans more power (rather than giving alien AI values more power), then humans will remain in control of a high percentage of power in the world.

If the world is not severely damaged in a way that prevents any agent (human or AI) from eventually colonizing space (e.g. severe nuclear winter), then the percentage of the cosmic endowment that humans have access to will be roughly close to to the percentage of power that humans have control of at the time of space colonization. So the most relevant factors for the composition of the universe are (a) whether anyone at all can take advantage of the cosmic endowment, and (b) the long-term balance of power between different agents (humans and AIs).

I expect that ensuring that the long-term balance of power favors humans constitutes most of the AI alignment problem, and that other parts of the AI alignment problem (e.g. ensuring AIs are beneficial in the short term, ensuring that AI systems don't cause global catastrophic risks that cause the cosmic endowment to become unavailable to any agent) will be easier to solve after thinking about this part of the problem. So I'm going to focus on power acquisition for now.

Pri

...