trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On Equivalence of Supergoals
by Alexey Feldgendler — 2018-04-20T15:06:20.377Z

This is a response to Ars Longa, Vita Brevis, an excellent piece by Scott Alexander. In fact, it moved me so much that I signed up on LessWrong just to write this response. I'm going to argue that the essay's central idea is wrong, and that's a good thing. You should read Alexander's essay before reading mine.

Alexander writes:

The first student has no master, and must discover everything himself. He researches for 70 years, then writes his wisdom into a book before he dies. The second student reads the book, and in 7 years, he has learned 70 years of research. Then he does his own original research for 63 years and writes a book containing 133 years of research. The third student reads for 13.3 years, then does his own research for 66.7 years, ending up with 200 years. Imagine going further and further. After many generations, 690 years of research have been done, and it takes a student 69 years to master them. The student only has one year left of life to research further, leaving the world with 691 years of research total. So the cycle creeps onward, always approaching but never quite reaching 700 years of architectural research.

He then admits that real research doesn't work that way, adding:

It would only work that way if there were an Art so unified, so perfect, that a seeker had to know the totality of what had been discovered before, if he wanted to know anything at all.

Of course, there are lots of ways in which this model is an over-simplification. Every model has to cut some corners, but this one has a bigger problem: it disagrees with the reality. The model predicts decelerating rate of progress with individual contributions diminishing over generations. In reality, however, scientific progress seems to be accelerating. Of course, it's hard to measure, but I've seen claims that the portion of the 21st century that has passed has already brought more scientific discoveries than all of the 20th century, let alone the ones before, and these claims don't seem implausible to me.

Still, the central idea of Alexander's essay doesn't look unreasonable. We do have more scientific knowledge to learn now than a century ago, in any given direction of study. However, the age at which a young scientist can start making a useful contribution, doesn't seem to be increasing. Grad students do it all the time at roughly the same age.

At least a part of what keeps ...
Oops Prize update
by Benquo — 2018-04-20T09:10:00.873Z

I'm overdue to publish an update on the Oops Prize. It fell off my priority list because I received exactly one nomination. I followed up with the nominee and couldn't get enough clarification to confirm eligibility, but my sense was that while the nominee clearly changed their mind, it wasn't a particularly clear case of public error correction as specified in the prize criteria.

Since the Oops Prize remains unclaimed, I'm offering it again this year. To clarify, I don't think the prize amount is enough to incentivize overt error-correction on its own, but it might be enough to give people an incentive to bother informing me if such error correction is in fact happening.

If anyone at an EA Global conference this year publicly repudiates an old belief, and the efforts they made and asked others to make on this basis, and explained what they're doing differently, then I'd like to celebrate this. Since talk is cheap, I'm offering $1,000 in prize money for the best example of such error-correcting; $900 to the person who most clearly reports changing their mind about something big they’d already invested their time or money or credibility in and asked others to invest in, and $100 to the first person to nominate them. Self-nomination is encouraged.

To qualify, an entry has to have the following attributes:

It is explicitly error correction, not an account that spins things to look like a series of successes evolving over time, or "I used to think X, and now I think X'."

The nominee successfully encouraged a public commitment of resources based on the original belief (e.g. funds raised or volunteer hours).

There is a record of the error-correction statement. If it's not a recorded talk, an independent witness (neither the nominator nor prizewinner) is enough evidence.

It happened at EA Global, and either was part of a scheduled talk, or an independent witness (neither the nominator nor the nominee) believes that at least ten people were present.

Anyone who speaks at EA Global this year is eligible for the prize, including leaders of EA organizations such as CEA, EAG leadership, and GiveWell / Open Philanthropy Project staff. If no qualifying entries are submitted, then no prize will be awarded. I am the sole, unaccountable judge of this, but will get people to check my work if I don't think anyone's eligible or feel like I'm too close to the person I think should...
Weird question: could we see distant aliens?
by paulfchristiano — 2018-04-20T06:40:18.022Z

ETA: Contest is closed.

Suppose there was a large alien civilization halfway across the observable universe, using a galaxy's resources to try to get our attention. Would we have noticed? What if they were using 0.1% of a galaxy's resources, or 1000 galaxies' resources?

I've argued recently that such an alien civilization is (a) not that unlikely a priori, even given that there aren't any closer aliens, (b) potentially really important to notice.

I believe the answer to my question is probably "definitely." But I can't tell with any confidence, so while it's probably definitely it might be maybe and could be probably not. I'd like to know the answer, but space isn't my thing.

I'm offering a prize for anyone who answers this question. To be a bit more precise:

Your goal is to construct a strategy that a technologically mature civilization could use to get our attention, even if they were halfway across the observable universe.
The strategy is allowed to use the resources of an average galaxy. Note that they don't know when they are looking, so they need to run the strategy for a few billion years. And they have no idea what direction we are in, so it needs to be visible from any direction (no lasers).
By "get our attention" I mean: be interesting enough that we would already have noticed it and devoted some telescope time to looking in more detail at that part of the sky. (Once they have our attention it seems significantly cheaper to send a message.)
Alternatively, you can also win by providing an argument for why this isn't likely to be possible. Basically just saying anything that convinces me that the question is no longer open.
The second and third parts of the question are the same as the first half, but for 1000x and 1/1000th of an average galaxy's resources.

A simple example of a strategy is to create a really bright beacon somewhere far away from any galaxy, which looks weird in some way. I expect (based mostly on super informal discussions with Anders Sandberg and Jared Kaplan) that this strategy is good enough, i.e. that 0.1% of a galaxy's power is plenty to make a beacon that would be really obvious to us from halfway across the universe. But I'm definitely not sure. The beacon can have a weird spectrum, or flicker in a strange way, or only be active 1% of the tim...
Welcome to Berkeley SSC Meetup [Edit With Your Details]
by brianwang712 — 2018-04-20T03:41:32.405Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Funeral Ritual
by Raemon — 2018-04-20T01:40:02.925Z

Followup to:

Solstice: What Memes May Come (Part II)

Content note: My own opinionated thoughts on rationalist funeral ritual, which have evolved a bit since I first started thinking about it in 2012. I expect that if you haven't thought about funeral ritual and find that you need to, this will make for a better starting point than figuring things out from scratch.

But, human mindspace is diverse enough that I wouldn't be surprised if this anti-resonated with some people. Make of it what you will.

[Edit: In this post, I was specifically exploring 'funerals where a majority of attendees are "culturally rationalist"', as opposed to general secular funerals. However, it turns out much of the advice is still relevant regardless]

Prior: a desire for deep cultural ritual

In October 2012, as I planned the Winter Solstice ceremony, I was thinking a lot about death. In the space of three weeks, three friends of mine had lost someone closed to them. And it occurred to me that the rationality community had very little in the way of funeral ritual.

My friends were all young, but it seemed likely at least someone in the community wouldn’t make it. And we were not ready.

When my Grandmother died, I went to a Catholic funeral. And as much as I don’t believe in any of the doctrine, there was something comforting in having several hundred people join together to say the Lord’s prayer in unison. The literal content of the words was basically meaningless – what mattered was the knowledge that my Grandmother was not alone, that hundreds of people were connected to her, and to each other.

Another friend of mine lost their mother, and had a similar experience. They said (paraphrased) “when you lose someone, you do not have the energy to try new things. You are lost. You don’t know what to do. The point of funeral ritual is not to be epistemologically sound, it’s to give you something to do, that you know how to do, that everyone knows you’re supposed to do, so that at least you can do something.”

A ritual that completely fails will feel hollow. Ritual that almost succeeds but doesn’t match your values or aesthetic feels cringey. I think pushing past that cringe is an important piece of the modern search for meaning and culture.

But funerals are not the time to experiment.

I looked at this set of facts, and it seemed like the solution (if you wanted an epistemic...
Some Simple Observations Five Years After Starting Mindfulness Meditation
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2018-04-19T22:28:47.338Z

BACKGROUND

I learned the basics of mindfulness meditation in April 2013, which was five years ago to the month.

The type of meditation I learned and would go on to practice would be closing one's eyes and concentrating on one's breath.

The goal would be to literally have one's concentration follow one's breathing — literally directing one's attention to the experience of inhaling and feeling air pass through one's nostrils when breathing through the nose, feeling the air pass through the throat/trachea, and feeling the air settle into one's lungs.

Then I'd hold the breath for ever so slightly, and follow the path of the air as I exhaled out the nose or mouth.

I meditated every single day for a few years, at first for a mere five minutes a day in the morning, and eventually ten minutes per day, and sometimes twice per day. Occasionally I'd do longer sessions in the 20-30 minute range, and sometimes I adopted somewhat similar mindfulness practices in the gym or when unable to fall asleep promptly.

I was never particularly strict in the position I'd meditate — sometimes I'd be sitting down, or sometimes I'd be laying down. I'd meditate wherever was convenient given the furniture layout of where I was at — often laying flat on top my bed after I'd gotten up for the day and made the bed, sometimes sitting at the kitchen table or at the sofa.

After a few years of this, one day I came to feel something like, "You know, I've gotten everything I can get out of this, and it's not very valuable any more." From there, I mostly stopped meditating for a couple years before picking the practice back up a couple months ago.

###

OBSERVATIONS

Here's a few simple observations I've taken from meditation, without commentary or lessons, which I'll get to in a moment —

1. Bringing Awareness to Automatic Practices: We're breathing constantly, but most of the time, we don't notice it. It happens more-or-less automatically without any conscious thought.

2. Constant Streams of Thought: It might sound simple, when described, to just concentrate on one's breath. Not so! Thoughts constantly arise, sometimes very quickly and sometimes less quickly. I never counted the frequency of thoughts unrelated to breathing that came into my awareness and concentration, but I reckon it was o...
Humans need places
by Benquo — 2018-04-19T19:50:01.931Z

If, when you try to improve the world, you think about people but not about communities, you will tend to favor unsustainable net outflows of resources from your community. I wrote about this in Why I am not a Quaker. Effective Altruist (EA) and Rationalist communities such as the one in the San Francisco Bay Area suffer from this problem. Occasionally individuals - more often than not women, more often than not uncompensated and publicly unacknowledged - do something constructive about this problem. I’m now aware of one such effort where the person involved (Sarah Spikes) is publicly willing to accept support: The Berkeley REACH. The fundraiser page is here.

In case it doesn’t go without saying, the opinions in this post are mine and not necessarily hers.

The basic problem The Berkeley REACH is meant to solve is that people who are in community need a place to be together. If EA or Rationality were a religion, there would be a church or temple of some kind to go to. If it were a school or academic discipline, there would usually be a campus. If a town, perhaps a library or Y. In past years the Center For Applied Rationality's office informally served this purpose, but CFAR is increasingly focusing its efforts in ways that seem right and proper but leave the community center role unfilled. In areas with a lower cost of housing, informal communities may have some slack in the form of surplus personal living space; not so in the SF Bay Area.

When I first heard about The Berkeley REACH, I was under the impression that it was going to receive a CEA community-building grant. It was apparently rejected on the basis of insufficient impact. When an impact narrative is required in advance for resource usage, this creates two problems.

First, anyone asking people to support a project that is speculative at all is forced to choose between deliberately selling a narrative they know will not be implemented in order to build momentum, and sticking to a bad plan on purpose in order to keep their word.

Second, illegibly prosocial activities - ones the predominant metrics are not well-suited to counting - will not be supported. This is imposes an unfair burden on the people well-suited to such work, which ultimately dooms us to a world in which that work gets done poorly or not at all.

But that only happens if we don’t do anything about the problem. And Sarah has taken the in...
Github Repo and Issue Tracker
by Raemon — 2018-04-19T18:25:17.086Z

LessWrong 2.0 is open source. We wanted to have a handy link for people who want to check out the codebase, add new issues to the tracker, or potentially get involved with development.

The git repository is here.

You can see our issue tracker here.

We're not currently set up well for "Open Source at scale". We have some plans to write up a more comprehensive guide to help people get oriented, but it's a fair amount of work and we most likely won't get to it in the immediate future.

For now this post is just a quick stub, but I'll update it with further information once I get some time.
An Undergraduate Reading Of: Macroscopic Prediction by E.T. Jaynes
by ryan_b — 2018-04-19T17:30:39.893Z

I stumbled across a paper from 1996 on Macroscopic Prediction by E.T. Jaynes which interested me; I thought I would document my reading in the style I recommended in this post. I don't have any expertise in Jaynes' fields, so it will serve as a good check for intuitions. It also may be of historical interest to the community. Lastly, I don't call it an undergraduate reading for nuthin', so it may be directly informational for people with less mathematical or scientific background.

This paper is organized a little differently, with the following sections:

1. INTRODUCTION

2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

3. THE BASIC IDEA

4. MATHEMATICAL FORMALISM

5. THE MAXIMUM CALIBER PRINCIPLE

6. BUBBLE DYNAMICS

7. CONCLUSION

8. REFERENCES

I will match these sections up to the divisions I used originally, and go from there.

Abstract

There isn't one in the version I have, which makes sense on account of this paper not proving a particular result.

Introduction

This includes sections 1 and 2. The question is why macrophenomena are difficult to predict. The goal is to find a principle sufficiently general that it can be used for physics questions and for questions of biology and economics. The latter is an example where predictions are very poor, but even physics has difficulties with the relationship between macrophenomena and microphenomena, e.g. lasers. Some key points:

Microphenomena and macrophenomena are defined in relation to each other: in general, understanding the elements that make up something else is insufficient for understanding the something else. An additional principle is needed.

Jaynes argues that the Gibbs entropy from thermodynamics is that principle.

Statistical mechanics does not work for this because its theorems treat the microstate as getting close to all possible states allowed by the total energy. This does not match observations, e.g. solids and organisms.

Over human-relevant timescales, we see far fewer configurations of macrophenomena than allowed by their energy.

Given information about macroscopic quantities A, other relevant information I, what can we say about other macroscopic quantities B?

Not enough information for deduction, therefore inference

Carnot -> Kelvin -> Clausius

Clausius' statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics gives little information about future macrostates, and only says entropy trends toward increasing. Intermediate states undefined

...
Honest Friends Don't Tell Comforting Lies
by Serpent-Stare — 2018-04-19T16:34:17.917Z

I originally wrote this blog post on a night when I counselled my friends to stop counting the deaths that occured every second while they were unable to stop them. I prefaced my advice by telling them I understood that they wouldn't have wanted to hear any comfort that could be destroyed by the truth... So I wouldn't bother with empty promises that it would all be okay. I set out to offer a reassurance that would not be destroyed by the truth, because it was the truth. That truth is laid out in A Different Prisoner's Dilemma, and my friends may not have taken me seriously if not for the fact that I had established a trust with them. I wrote this post about the nature and the standards of that kind of trust. I post it here in order to be more accessible to the rationalist community.

If your aim is to believe the truth, if you believe that anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be, then all illusion, even comforting illusion, is your enemy.

However, when we as human beings encounter things that are painful to us, when we are disappointed or heartbroken, those who care about our feelings (generally including ourselves) will have to fight not to reach for anything that makes the sting a little less painful.

You're crying and inconsolable because your boyfriend dumped you. The best friend you called in order to have someone to talk to about it wants to tell you it'll all be okay. That he'll be back next week, just you wait. Or he was a real jerk and he was never worth your time to begin with. Anything that will let you stop crying, or make it a little easier to get through the day. She wants you to feel better, because she cares about you. That's why she's the one you called.

But if your now-ex-boyfriend was really a nice person, and you wanted it to work out but for whatever reason of life circumstances or incompatible goals or different religions or whatever it was it just wasn't working and it's gone now... Believing anything else, even if it's just to ease the pain, is an illusion. Believing that he'll come back or you could still make it work if that isn't the case can also hurt you all over again next week.

If you know this, and your friend knows this, and she remembers and notices the flicker of wrongness on her conscience when she thinks about telling you your ex boyfriend was a jerk...
Welcome to Austin LW [Edit With Your Details]
by viking_math — 2018-04-18T22:03:57.870Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Sentience
by David Cooper — 2018-04-18T21:58:37.003Z

Consciousness is primarily sentience. There may be parts of it that aren't, but I haven't managed to pin any down - consciousness all seems to be about feelings, some of them being pleasant or unpleasant, but others like colour qualia are neutral, as is the feeling of being conscious. There is a major problem with sentience though, and I want to explore that here, because there are many people who believe that intelligent machines will magically become sentient and experience feelings, and even that the whole internet might do so. However, science has not identified any means by which we could make a computer sentient (or indeed have any kind of consciousness at all).

It is fully possible that the material of a computer processor could be sentient, just as a rock may be, but how would we ever be able to know? How can a program running on a sentient processor detect the existence of that sentience? There is no "read qualia" machine code instruction for it to run, and we don't know how to build any mechanism to support such an instruction.

Picture a "sentient" machine which consists of a sensor and a processor which are linked by wires, but the wires pass through a magic box where a sentience has been installed. If the sensor detects something damaging, it sends a signal down a "pain" wire. When this signal reaches the magic box, pain is experienced by something in the box, so it sends a signal on to the processor down another pain wire. The software running on the processor receives a byte of data from a pain port and it might cause the machine to move away from the thing that might damage it. If we now remove the magic box and connect the "pain" wire to the pain wire, the signal can pass straight from the sensor to the processor and generate the same reaction. The experience of pain is unnecessary.

Worse still, we can also have a pleasure sensor wired up to the same magic box, and when something tasty like a battery is encountered, a "pleasure" signal is sent to the magic box, pleasure is experienced by something there, a signal is sent on down the pleasure wire, and then the processor receives a byte of data from a pleasure port which might cause the machine to move in on the battery so that it can tap all the power it can get out of it. Again this has the same functionality if the magic box is b...