trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Cargo Cult and Self-Improvement
by Sherrinford — 2018-08-07T12:45:30.661Z

Many people want to change themselves. They want to become happier, smarter, more successful, rich, or at least less disoriented. There are incredibly many books telling people how they can achieve this, along with seminars, youtube videos and email instructions. And the large majority of this self-improvement literature is nonsense.

There is of course a wide range of what the authors promise. But the typical "If you follow this author's system, then you will get rich / become world ruler / can do whatever you want" has some features worth noting.

The literature sells well because people are unhappy with their life, their abilities, their habits and *want* to have other lifes, other abilities, other habits, and there is only a limited number of ways to cope with this, the most apparent may be: Do nothing and be unhappy, find ways to attribute responsibility to external circumstances, find new perspectives or other ways to be happy without changing the things that you think make you unhappy - and finally, listen to people who tell you that they have a clue. Similarly, if you are not unhappy but just very ambitious and, in your own eyes, not very successful, you can try to be ok with that tension, or find authors promising you change. In any case, you have made the first step of blaming yourself, but in a way that you think you can change - as opposed to blaming your genes alone, or society. Thus, firstly, self-improvement books have to overemphasize what you can change over what you can't - it is their selling point. So, first advice: Be skeptical of authors who claim that everything is possible. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Secondly, the advice is rarely evidence-based, and the greater the promises, the less valid evidence. This, of course, should make a reader suspicious, but only if he has some understanding of scientific methods. Because many of the authors know this, there seems to be a tendency towards faked scientifc credibility in parts of the literature, namely those parts that want to seem not only credible, but also serious. These authors do not cite sources, but vaguely refer to studies conducted at some university, like the famous 1953 Harvard study or the 1979 Yale study on the effects of writing down goals on life success (Mike Morrison has done the research - these studies have not been conducted, ...
EA Tourism: London, Blackpool and Prague
by Jsevillamol — 2018-08-07T10:41:06.900Z

I have spent the last three weeks visiting three hubs of EA projects. This is a blogpost briefly describing my experiences and thoughts during these three weeks.

First week: London

In London I stayed in Newspeak House, a residence and community space inhabited by a rotating roster of fellows from diverse backgrounds who live for a short time (typically months) while trying to influence British politics in sensible directions and connect other groups trying to do similar things. While they do not identify as Effective Altruists, I think there is a huge overlap of goals. Events are happening all the time, so I recommend dropping by to meet some interesting people if you are based on or visiting London.

One of the events I attended in Newspeak house is a foundational meeting of the Ethics in Maths movement. We were a coalition of people with a background in mathematics, some of us EA or EA adjacent, discussing how to orient and empower mathematicians to tackle important global problems. I have been involved in advocacy among mathematicians for a fairly long time, through some fairly ambitious projects like the European Summer Program on Rationality. I would love to see more people discussing how to support and connect mathematicians to important problems in the LW and EA circles.

I also attended a couple of EA London events, where I re encountered some old friends and met some new people. I do appreciate local groups which consistently organize events where visitors from other areas are welcome. If you are in a local group, please consider organizing more of this! And if you are visiting a new area, consider putting yourself in touch with the locals!

Second week: Blackpool

In Blackpool I stayed in the EA Hotel, a wonderful initiative lead by Greg Colbourn. People are welcome to stay in the hotel for free (food included) while they are working on EA projects.

I think it is ideal if you have a concrete idea for a project you can work remotely on and you need space to focus on it. I would however currently advise against going to the hotel if you struggle with motivation issues, as there is little accountability structure in the hotel (just a weekly group check in).

But if you are ready to tackle an important problem, the EA Hotel is a great place to stay in. It is peaceful and there is a fairly high level of trust and complicity among the residents.

While I was staying in...
Learning strategies and the Pokemon league parable
by Jsevillamol — 2018-08-07T09:37:27.689Z

I have recently noted a shift in my learning strategy, which I reflectively approve of. On hindsight, it feels obvious.

However, I can vividly recall many people I respect and admire recommending me to try a very similar thing in the past, and myself scoffing at them and trusting my gut over their advice.

Take this as a word of caution if you feel like the advice I am giving is obviously wrong: I have fallen in this pit, and it took me a while to climb out.

I claim there are two broad learning strategies one can follow.

The default strategy is what in the software engineering lingo is called a waterfall strategy. People attend college and different courses and read books, and gain knowledge on a broad collection of subjects. Afterwards, they move to a second phase where they try to apply what they have learned. If they cannot reach their goals with their current strategy, they back down to the first phase and start again.

I claim that this strategy has some glaring flaws, which I plan to expose via my experience in an area of great importance: Pokemon videogames.

When I got my first videoconsole, the first videogame I ever owned was Pokemon Gold. I absolutely loved that game, and I spent many hours absorbed trying to complete it.

For the most part, the level of challenge was adequate for an 8 year old, but there comes a point where the game suddenly spikes up in difficulty: the Pokemon league. In the league, you have to defeat five trainers with full teams of high level Pokemon in a row.

When I first confronted the Pokemon league, I was quite under leveled and I was utterly crushed.

My response to the problem was to back down and go to easier areas, where I could train with easier challenges.

After around 10h of training, I came back to the League and defeated the five trainers with relatively ease, and I won the title of Pokemon master, officially achieving my most ambitious 8 year old goal.

"Well Jaime", you may say, "That does not look like your learning strategy had a problem. You successfully completed the challenge!"

And yes, I did. But it was awfully inefficient! I leveled at a very slow rate by fighting easier fights, I ended up training for too long and I picked up tactics to fight other trainers instead of learning the tactics that would have been optimal to fight through the league.

If instead I had kept fighting the trainers in the leag...
Probabilistic Tiling (Preliminary Attempt)
by Diffractor — 2018-08-07T01:14:15.558Z

We know a decent amount about how to get tiling in proof-based environments where the objective is for the AI to achieve a goal, or to write an AI to achieve a goal, or to write an AI that writes an AI that achieves a goal, and so on, as long as the chain of deferral is finite. The probabilistic setting is far less explored. This post will outline some necessary conditions to achieve tiling of an expected utility maximizer in fully general environments. Some of these conditions are fulfilled by a logical inductor in the limit. It's entirely possible that there are serious problems with this proof, so I'm hoping that it gets a good kicking.

DEFINITIONS:

πx is an inputless computation that outputs a bitstring, which will be interpreted as a 2-tuple of an action, and another computation, an element of A×Π .

πnx is the n'th computation in the infinite sequence of computations defined by starting at πx and taking the computation that each computation outputs. When n=1, the superscript will be omitted.

anx is the action selected by πnx.

En is some probability distribution or something that can be used to evaluate complicated computations. Like the n'th stage of a logical inductor, although we aren't necessarily assuming that it has to be a logical inductor.

underlining something refers to replacing the symbol with the thing being described. If the variable aπ is used as a way of abstractly representing some action, then aπ––– refers to the actual action chosen by the policy.

U(a1:n−1st,x,a1:∞π) is the utility function, which is some large computation of type Aω→[0,1]. So this would be the utility function output when it is fed the past actions generated by starting at πstart, the current action, and the infinite sequence of future actions is given by whatever sequence of actions is produced by the self-modification chain starting with π . Note that this only explicitly writes the starting code, and the code that might be modified to, not the past or future action sequence! This is important for the agent to be able to reason about this computation, despite it taking an infinite input.

Given some sequence of probability distributions, and some sequence of sets of policies, let π∗n be the computation

argmaxx,π∈A×ΠnEn(U(a∗1:n−1,x,a1:∞π)|a∗n=x)

This is basically maximizing expected utility, conditional on the agent itself taking some action, wit...
Alignment Newsletter #18
by Rohin Shah — 2018-08-06T16:00:02.561Z

Highlights

Learning Dexterity

(Many people at OpenAI): Most current experiments with robotics work on relatively small state spaces (think 7 degrees of freedom, each a real number) and are trained in simulation. If we could throw a lot of compute at the problem, could we do significantly better? Yes! Using the same general approach as with

OpenAI Five

, OpenAI has built a system called Dactyl, which allows a physical real-world dexterous hand to manipulate a block. It may not seem as impressive as the videos of humanoids running through obstacle courses, but this is way harder than your typical Mujoco environment, especially since they aim to get it working on a real robot. As with OpenAI Five, they only need a reward function (I believe not even a shaped reward function in this case), a simulator, and a good way to explore. In this setting though, "exploration" is actually domain randomization, where you randomly set parameters that you are uncertain about (such as the coefficient of friction between two surfaces), so that the learned policy is robust to distribution shift from the simulator to the real world. (OpenAI Five also used domain randomization, but in that case it was not because we were uncertain about the parameters in the simulator, but because the policy was too specialized to the kinds of characters and heroes it was seeing, and randomizing those properties exposed it to a wider variety of scenarios so it had to learn more general policies.) They use 6144 CPU cores and 8 GPUs, which is much less than for OpenAI Five, but much more than for a typical Mujoco environment.

They do separate the problem into two pieces -- first, they learn how to map from camera pictures to a 3D pose (using convolutional nets), and second, they use RL to choose actions based on the 3D pose. They can also get better estimates of the 3D pose using motion tracking. They find that the CNN is almost as good as motion tracking, and that the domain randomization is crucial for getting the system to actually work.

They also have a couple of sections on surprising results and things that didn't work. Probably the most interesting part was that they didn't need to use the tactile sensors to get these results. They couldn't get these sensors in simulation, so they just did without and it seems to have worked fine. It also turns out that the robot's r...
Counterfactuals for Perfect Predictors
by Chris_Leong — 2018-08-06T12:24:49.624Z

Parfit's Hitchhiker with a perfect predictor has the unusual property of having a Less Wrong consensus that you ought to pay, whilst also being surprisingly hard to define formally. For example, if we try to ask about whether an agent that never pays in town is rational, then we encounter a contradiction. A perfect predictor would not ever give such an agent a lift, so by the Principle of Explosion we can prove any statement to be true given this counterfactual.

On the other hand, even if the predictor mistakenly picks up defectors only 0.01% of the time, then this counterfactual seems to have meaning. Let's suppose that a random number from 1 to 10,000 is chosen and the predictor always picks you up when the number is 1 and is perfect otherwise. Even if we draw the number 120, we can fairly easily imagine the situation where the number drawn was 1 instead. This is then a coherent situation where an Always Defect agent would end up in town, so we can talk about how the agent would have counterfactually chosen.

So one response to the difficulties of discussing counterfactual decisions with perfect predictors would be to simply compute the counterfactual as though the agent has a (tiny) chance of being wrong. However, agents may quite understandably wish to act differently depending on whether they are facing a perfect or imperfect predictor, even choosing differently when facing an agent with a very low error rate.

Another would be to say that the predictor predicts whether placing the agent in town is logically coherent. On the basis that the agent only picks up those who it predicts (with 100% accuracy) will pay, it can assume that it will be payed if the situation is coherent. Unfortunately, it isn't clear what this means in concrete terms for an agent to be such that it couldn't coherently be placed in such a situation. How is, "I commit to not paying in <impossible situation>" any kind of meaningful commitment at all? We could look at, "I commit to making <situation> impossible", but that doesn't mean anything either. If you're in a situation, then it must be possible? Further, such situations are contradictory and everything is true given a contradiction, so all contradictory situations seem to be the same.

As the formal description of my solution is rather long, I'll provide a summary: We w...
LW Update 2018-08-03 – Comment Sorting
by Raemon — 2018-08-03T23:39:48.114Z

Comment Sorting

Comments can now be sorted by "oldest"
Old posts from the time-before-nested comments now default to sorting comments by "oldest."
You can set your profile preferences for default-comment sorting. Comments will attempt to sort by the following algorithm:

If you've manually set the comment ordering, it'll use that first.
If the page has a default sorting (see previous bullet), it defaults to that
If you've set a default sorting preference for yourself, it'll use that
Otherwise defaults to sorting comments by highest karma first.

Comment Tooltips

Added tooltips back to comment voting (mousing over upvote/downvote clarifies how to strong vote, and mousing over the karma total tells you the number of votes).

We had removed this because the old tooltip component took a long time to render (a problem on posts with hundreds of comments), but it should be fine now.

AlignmentForum

On the comment sorting options, you can now choose "magical sorting (include LW comments)" which lets you see LessWrong comments as well as Alignment Forum ones.

(On AlignmentForum, you can't vote on LW comments)

Creating a post or comment now properly auto-upvotes by default, as intended.
All AlignmentForum users can move comments from on alignment-posts over to the AlignmentForum version of that post. (That comment can then be upvoted and start accruing alignment karma for it's author. The commenter can't post comments of their own unless an admin has made them an AlignmentForum user)

Bug Fixes

Facebook links should now properly show the post title and metadata, as intended. (Accidentally broke this in the last update)
Event pages now list contact info if that's been included.
Finland Museum Tour 1/??: Tampere Art Museum
by Kaj_Sotala — 2018-08-03T15:00:05.749Z

I haven’t really been to museums as an adult; not because I’d have been particularly Anti-Museum, but just because museums never happened to become a Thing That I Do. I vaguely recall having been to a few museums with my parents when I was little, an occasional Japan exhibition as a teen when Japan was a Thing, and a few visits to various museums with school. I think my overall recollection of those visits afterwards could be summarized as being around 5.5 on the BoardGameGeek rating scale grade of “5/10: Slightly boring, take it or leave it” and “6/10: Ok – will play if in the mood”. (The BGG rating scale is my favorite of the ones that I’ve seen, but I digress.)

So I’m not sure, but it’s at least possible that between becoming an adult and yesterday, I didn’t visit a single museum.

For the last year or so however, I’ve had a definite feeling of being stuck in a rut, life-wise. Up until summer last year, I used to have a lot of anxiety; I’m still not totally free of it, but I’ve reduced the amount of it enough that escaping from it is no longer my main driving motivation, the way that it used to be. Meaning that I’m more free to focus on things that I actually enjoy.

But once you have spent most of your adult life feeling a desperate need to escape from a constant level of background anxiety, anxiety which was preventing you from doing anything slow-paced as that would have been insufficient to drown out the suffering… then it’s hard to know *what* you really enjoy anymore. Because you haven’t really been looking for enjoyable things, you have been looking for things that would make the pain go away.

What I was left with, even after getting rid of most of the anxiety, was some level of anhedonia – a difficulty deriving any pleasure from something. And most of my old routines were built around doing things that were mainly palliatives for anxiety, rather than being particularly enjoyable.

Then one day, I happened to see a news article saying something about how the national Museum Card – a single card that you can buy for a year, that gives you free access to various museums around the country – had brought more visitors to museums. And it crossed my mind that visiting museums is a Thing That People Do, which I wasn’t doing, and that...
What are your plans for the evening of the apocalypse?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2018-08-02T08:30:05.174Z

If everyone found out for sure that the world would end in five years, what would happen?

My guess is that it would take time before anything big happened. Finding out about the end of the world, that’s the kind of a thing that you need to digest for a while. For the first couple of days, people might go “huh”, and then carry on with their old routines while thinking about it.

A few months later, maybe there still wouldn’t be all that much change. Sure, people would adjust their life plans, start thinking more near-term, some would decide not to go to college after all. But a lot of people already don’t plan much beyond a couple of years; five years is a long time, and you’ll still need to pay your bills until the Apocalypse hits. So many people might just carry on with their jobs as normal; if they were already doing college, well, you need to pass the time until the end of the world somehow. Might as well keep studying.

Of course, some people would have bigger reactions, right from day one. Quit their unsatisfying job, that kind of thing. People with a lot of savings might choose this moment to start living off them. And as the end of the world got closer and closer, people might get an increasingly relaxed attitude to work; though there might also be a feeling of, we’re all in this together, let’s make our existing institutions work until the end. I could imagine doctors and nurses in a hospital, who had decided that they want to make sure the hospital runs for as long as it can, and to make sure that nobody has to die before they really have to.

But I could also imagine, say, the waiter at some restaurant carrying on, serving customers even on the night of the apocalypse. (Be sure to make a reservation, we expect to have no free tables that evening.) Maybe out of principles, maybe out of professional pride, but maybe just out of habit.

I’m guessing there would be gradual changes to society, with occasional tipping points when a lot of people decided to stop whatever they had been doing and that created a chain reaction of others doing so as well. But it seems really hard to guess for how long things would remain mostly normal.
Anti-tribalism and positive mental health as high-value cause areas
by Kaj_Sotala — 2018-08-02T08:30:04.961Z

I think that tribalism is one of the biggest problems with humanity today, and that even small reductions of it could cause a massive boost to well-being.

By tribalism, I basically mean the phenomenon where arguments and actions are primarily evaluated based on who makes them and which group they seem to support, not anything else. E.g. if a group thinks that X is bad, then it’s often seen as outright immoral to make an argument which would imply that X isn’t quite as bad, or that some things which are classified as X would be more correctly classified as non-X instead. I don’t want to give any specific examples so as to not derail the discussion, but hopefully everyone can think of some; the article “Can Democracy Survive Tribalism” lists lot of them, picked from various sides of the political spectrum.

Joshua Greene (among others) makes the argument, in his book Moral Tribes, that tribalism exists for the purpose of coordinating aggression and alliances against other groups (so that you can kill them and take their stuff, basically). It specifically exists for the purpose of making you hurt others, as well as defend yourself against people who would hurt you. And while defending yourself against people who would hurt you is clearly good, attacking others is clearly not. And everything being viewed in tribal terms means that we can’t make much progress on things that actually matter: as someone commented, “people are fine with randomized controlled trials in policy, as long as the trials are on things that nobody cares about”.

Given how deep tribalism sits in the human psyche, it seems unlikely that we’ll be getting rid of it anytime soon. That said, there do seem to be a number of things that affect the amount of tribalism we have:

* As Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature, violence in general has declined over historical time, replaced by more cooperation and an assumption of human rights; Democrats and Republicans may still hate each other, but they generally agree that they still shouldn’t be killing each other.

* As a purely anecdotal observation, I seem to get the feeling that people on the autism spectrum tend to be less tribal, up to the point of not being able to perceive tribes at all. (this suggests, somewhat oddly, that the world would actually be a better place if everyo...