trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Against responsibility
by Benquo — 2017-03-31T21:12:12.718Z

I am surrounded by well-meaning people trying to take responsibility for the future of the universe. I think that this attitude – prominent among Effective Altruists – is causing great harm. I noticed this as part of a broader change in outlook, which I've been trying to describe on this blog in manageable pieces (and sometimes failing at the "manageable" part).

I'm going to try to contextualize this by outlining the structure of my overall argument.

Why I am worried

Effective Altruists often say they're motivated by utilitarianism. At its best, this leads to things like Katja Grace's excellent analysis of when to be a vegetarian. We need more of this kind of principled reasoning about tradeoffs.

At its worst, this leads to some people angsting over whether it's ethical to spend money on a cup of coffee when they might have saved a life, and others using the greater good as license to say things that are not quite true, socially pressure others into bearing inappropriate burdens, and make ever-increasing claims on resources without a correspondingly strong verified track record of improving people's lives. I claim that these actions are not in fact morally correct, and that people keep winding up endorsing those conclusions because they are using the wrong cognitive approximations to reason about morality.

Summary of the argument

When people take responsibility for something, they try to control it. So, universal responsibility implies an attempt at universal control.

Maximizing control has destructive effects:

An adversarial stance towards other agents.

Decision paralysis.

These failures are not accidental, but baked into the structure of control-seeking. We need a practical moral philosophy to describe strategies that generalize better, and benefit from the existence of other benevolent agents, rather than treating them primarily as threats.

Responsibility implies control

In practice, the way I see the people around me applying utilitarianism, it seems to make two important moral claims:

You - you, personally - are responsible for everything that happens.

No one is allowed their own private perspective - everyone must take the public, common perspective.

The first principle is almost but not quite simple consequentialism. But it's important to note that it actually doesn't generalize; it's massive double-count...
Deriving techniques on the fly
by Elo — 2017-03-31T10:03:04.987Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/deriving-techniques-on-the-fly/

Last year Lachlan Cannon came back from a CFAR reunion and commented that instead of just having the CFAR skills we need the derivative skills. The skills that say, "I need a technique for this problem" and let you derive a technique, system, strategy, plan, idea for solving the problem on the spot.

By analogy to an old classic,

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he never go hungry again.

This concept always felt off to me until I met Anna. An american who used to live in Alaska where they have enough fish in a river that any time you go fishing you catch a fish, and a big enough one to eat. In contrast, I had been fishing several times when I was little (in Australia) and never caught things, or only caught fish that were too small to feed one person, let alone many people.

Silly fishing misunderstandings aside I think the old classic speaks to something interesting but misses a point. to that effect I want to add something.

Teach a man to derive the skill of fishing when he needs it. and he will never stop growing.

We need to go more meta than that? I am afraid it's turtles all the way down.

Noticing

To help you derive you need to start by noticing when there is a need. There are two parts to noticing:

triggers

introspection

What next

But before I fail to do it justice, agentyduck has written about this. Art of noticing, What it's like to notice things, How to train noticing.

The Art Of Noticing goes like this:

Answer the question, "What's my first possible clue that I'm about to encounter the problem?" If your problem is "I don't respond productively to being confused," then the first sign a crucial moment is coming might be "a fleeting twinge of surprise". Whatever that feels like in real time from the inside of your mind, that's your trigger.

Whenever you notice your trigger, make a precise physical gesture. Snap your fingers, tap your foot, touch your pinky finger with your thumb - whatever feels comfortable. Do it every time you notice that fleeting twinge of surprise.

How To Train Noticing

I guess. I remember or imagine a few specific instances of encountering weak contrary evidence (such as when I thought my

...
Meetup : [Metro Detroit / Ann Arbor], Michigan: LW and SSC meetup where I bring food
by excinera — 2017-03-30T17:42:46.652Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Metro Detroit / Ann Arbor], Michigan: LW and SSC meetup where I bring food

WHEN:
08 April 2017 04:20:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2065 Commerce Blvd. #327 Ann Arbor, MI 48103

The Ann Arbor Area Amalgam of Rationalist-Adjacent Anthropoids is having our biweekly* meetup on Saturday, 2017 April 8.

"If you can read this sentence, you're invited. If someone told you about it, you're invited. If someone re-posted it somewhere else and you read it, you're invited. (Feel free to repost, mention, or link to this announcement anywhere you think people will be interested.) No level of expertise is required. Do not worry if you don't think you're interesting enough. You're much more interesting than you think you are. Even if you're not, you're invited anyway. "

(We have a community website at http://memeware.org/A4RA2 with detailed information on this meetup and a calendar of future events, as well as directions and other stuff! Wow!)

The mailing list post for this meetup is also archived on Google Groups.

In addition to the website and mailing list, we have an IRC channel at irc://irc.freenode.net/a4ra2 (click for in-browser chat), where someone is usually around and paying attention if you want to ask any questions, or see if someone can give you a ride, or shitpost, or whatever.

Once every two weeks, not twice a week

Discussion article for the meetup : [Metro Detroit / Ann Arbor], Michigan: LW and SSC meetup where I bring food
Meetup : April Pub meetup + SlateStarCodex meetup
by Elo — 2017-03-30T07:44:00.950Z

Discussion article for the meetup : April Pub meetup + SlateStarCodex meetup

WHEN:
20 April 2017 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
lvl2, 565 George st, Sydney

You can find us sitting at the large table outside the pizza oven.
Come along to our regular monthly pub meetup to talk all things math, science, technology, engineering, thinking, growth, reasoning and beliefs.
If you are an aspiring rationalist, a nerd, geek, scientist or just a quiet thinker - we can't wait to meet you to share ideas, discuss, debate, learn and grow together.
This month also includes the Global SlateStarCodex meetup,

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/27/ssc-meetup-everywhere/

See you there! Also, while you are at it - bring a friend along too!

https://www.facebook.com/events/180273879151236/

call 0438481143 if you are lost

https://www.meetup.com/lesswrong-Sydney0/events/238822756/

Discussion article for the meetup : April Pub meetup + SlateStarCodex meetup
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Great Filter
by RobinZ — 2017-03-30T04:38:41.257Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Great Filter

WHEN:
02 April 2017 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

This week, we will be talking about the concept of the great filter - a term for whatever factor explains the dearth of intelligent spacefaring life observed from Earth (i.e. the Fermi paradox) - and some of its potential implications.

Upcoming meetups:

Apr. 9: Fun & Games

Apr. 16: AI Risk/Safety

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Great Filter
Avoiding Emotional Dominance Spirals
by Zvi — 2017-03-30T00:43:36.000Z

Follow Up to: Dominance, care, and social touch

One thing Ben said in his latest post especially resonated with me, and I wanted to offer some expanded thoughts on it:

Sometimes, when I feel let down because someone close to me dropped the ball on something important, they try to make amends by submitting to me. This would be a good appeasement strategy if I mainly felt bad because I wanted them to assign me a higher social rank. But, the thing I want is actually the existence of another agent in the world who is independently looking out for my interests. So when they respond by submitting, trying to look small and incompetent, I perceive them as shirking. My natural response to this kind of shirking is anger – but people who are already trying to appease me by submitting tend to double down on submission if they notice I’m upset at them – which just compounds the problem!

My main strategy for fixing this has been to avoid leaning on this sort of person for anything important. I’ve been experimenting with instead explicitly telling them I don’t want submission and asking them to take more responsibility, and this occasionally works a bit, but it’s slow and frustrating and I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

This resonated on multiple levels.

There is the basic problem of someone dropping the ball, and offering submission rather than fixing the problem on some level. As someone who tried to run a company, this is especially maddening. I do not want you to show your submission, I want you to tell me how you are going to fix what went wrong, and avoid making the same mistake again! I want you to tell me how you have learned from this experience. That makes everyone perform better. I also want to see you take responsibility. These are all highly useful, whereas submission usually is not. However, you have to hammer this, over and over again, for not only some but most people – too many people to never rely on such folks.

Different people have different reactions they want to see when someone lets them down or makes a mistake. I have one set of reactions I use at work, one set I use at home, another I use with other rationalists, and so on, and for people I know well, I customize further.

The bigger problem, also described here, is the anger feedback loop, which the main thing I want to talk about. Ben gives an e...
Meetup : Madrid - First meetup
by Pablo Villalobos — 2017-03-29T20:35:25.355Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madrid - First meetup

WHEN:
05 April 2017 07:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Starbucks Calle de la Princesa, 40, 28008 Madrid

This is our first "official" meetup in Madrid. Since there will probably be some newcomers, we will mainly discuss basic rationality stuff. However, we encourage everyone to come and propose topics for future meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Madrid - First meetup
What's up with Arbital?
by Alexei — 2017-03-29T17:22:21.751Z

This post is for all the people who have been following Arbital's progress since 2015 via whispers, rumors, and clairvoyant divination. That is to say: we didn't do a very good job of communicating on our part. I hope this posts corrects some of that.

The top question on your mind is probably: "Man, I was promised that Arbital will solve X! Why hasn't it solved X already?" Where X could be intuitive explanations, online debate, all LessWrong problems, AGI, or just cancer. Well, we did try to solve the first two and it didn't work. Math explanations didn't work because we couldn't find enough people who would spend the time to write good math explanations. (That said, we did end up with some decent posts on abstract algebra. Thank you to everyone who contributed!) Debates didn't work because... well, it's a very complicated problem. There was also some disagreement within the team about the best approach, and we ended up moving too slowly.

So what now?

You are welcome to use Arbital in its current version. It's mostly stable, though a little slow sometimes. It has a few features some might find very helpful for their type of content. Eliezer is still writing AI Alignment content on it, and he heavily relies on the specific Arbital features, so it's pretty certain that the platform is not going away. In fact, if the venture fails completely, it's likely MIRI will adopt Arbital for their personal use.

I'm starting work on Arbital 2.0. It's going to be a (micro-)blogging platform. (If you are a serious blogger / Tumblr user, let me know; I'd love to ask you some questions!) I'm not trying to solve online debates, build LW 2.0, or cure cancer. It's just going to be a damn good blogging platform. If it goes well, then at some point I'd love to revisit the Arbital dream.

I'm happy to answer any and all questions in the comments.
Meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group
by mingyuan — 2017-03-29T13:47:22.118Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group

WHEN:
02 April 2017 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Harper Memorial Library Room 148, 1116 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637

The Chicago Rationality Reading Group meets every Sunday from 1-3 PM in Room 148 of Harper Memorial Library. Though we meet on the University of Chicago campus, anyone is welcome to attend.

The next few weeks will be SSC-heavy as we welcome new members (thanks Scott!) This week's readings are as follows:
* http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
* http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/

Note also that the SSC meetup will take place on April 9th at our normal meeting time and place. More information on that next week.

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group
Naturally solved problems that are easy to verify but that would be hard to compute
by Douglas_Reay — 2017-03-29T13:01:54.336Z

Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument hit the news recently when a physicist published a blog post about it:

No, we probably don’t live in a computer simulation

Some of the ensuing responses discussed the fidelity with which such a simulation would need to be run, in order to keep the population living within it guessing as to whether they were in a digital simulation, which is a topic that's been discussed before on LessWrong:

comments on [Paper] On the 'Simulation Argument' and Selective Scepticism by Eliezer_Yudkowsky and nigerweiss

If a simulation can be not just run, but also loaded from previous saved states then edited, it should be possible for the simulation's Architect to start it running with low granularity, wait for some inhabitant to notice an anomaly, then rewind a little, use a more accurate but computing intensive algorithm in the relevant parts of the inhabitant's timecone and edit the saved state to include that additional detail, before setting the simulation running again and waiting for the next anomaly.

nigerweiss suggested:

construct a system with easy-to-verify but arbitrarily-hard-to-compute behavior ("Project: Piss Off God"), and then scrupulously observe its behavior. Then we could keep making it more expensive until we got to a system that really shouldn't be practically computable in our universe.

but I'm wondering how easy that would be.

The problem would need to be physical (for example, make a net with labelled strands of differing lengths joining the nodes, then hang it from one corner), else humanity would have to be doing as much work as the simulation.

The solution should be discrete (for example, what are the labels on the strands making up the limiting path that prevents the lowest point from hanging further down)

The solution should be not just analytic, but also difficult to get via numerical analysis.

The problem should be scalable to very large sizes (so, for example, the net problem wouldn't work, because with large size nets making the strands sufficiently different in length that you could tell two close solutions apart would be a limiting factor)

And, ideally, the problem would be one that occurs (and is solved) naturally, such that humanity could just record data in multiple locations over a period of years, then later decide which examples of the problem to verify. (See this paper by Scott Aaronso...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
by rocurley — 2017-03-29T02:07:37.529Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks

WHEN:
03 April 2017 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1655 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94103-2413, United States

We’ll be meeting to give and listen to very short talks!

We’ll do 7-minute lightning talks with 3 additional minutes allowed for questions. We’ll also limit the number of programming-related talks to no more than half of all talks, in order to promote variety.

A talk doesn’t have to be formal, planned, or even something that you’d expect someone to Give A Talk About; it can be as simple as telling the group about something you find interesting or cool. In the past, we’ve had people talk about topics like: how complicated the process of organizing fresh food for airplane flights is, their experience volunteering for a local political campaign, a video game they were designing and writing, and many others.

We don't expect any sort of preparation or practice for these kinds of talks. They're very casual and the expectations are low. If your talk isn't great, it's okay because we'll just move on to another one in a few minutes. If it helps, think of it this way: you're just being given the conversational floor for a few minutes, in a slightly more organized way than usual.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
by rocurley — 2017-03-29T01:32:05.990Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks

WHEN:
03 April 2017 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1655 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94103-2413, United States

We’ll be meeting to give and listen to very short talks!

We’ll do 7-minute lightning talks with 3 additional minutes allowed for questions. We’ll also limit the number of programming-related talks to no more than half of all talks, in order to promote variety.

A talk doesn’t have to be formal, planned, or even something that you’d expect someone to Give A Talk About; it can be as simple as telling the group about something you find interesting or cool. In the past, we’ve had people talk about topics like: how complicated the process of organizing fresh food for airplane flights is, their experience volunteering for a local political campaign, a video game they were designing and writing, and many others.

We don't expect any sort of preparation or practice for these kinds of talks. They're very casual and the expectations are low. If your talk isn't great, it's okay because we'll just move on to another one in a few minutes. If it helps, think of it this way: you're just being given the conversational floor for a few minutes, in a slightly more organized way than usual.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
by rocurley — 2017-03-29T01:28:35.458Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks

WHEN:
03 April 2017 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1655 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94103-2413, United States

We’ll be meeting to give and listen to very short talks!

We’ll do 7-minute lightning talks with 3 additional minutes allowed for questions. We’ll also limit the number of programming-related talks to no more than half of all talks, in order to promote variety.

A talk doesn’t have to be formal, planned, or even something that you’d expect someone to Give A Talk About; it can be as simple as telling the group about something you find interesting or cool. In the past, we’ve had people talk about topics like: how complicated the process of organizing fresh food for airplane flights is, their experience volunteering for a local political campaign, a video game they were designing and writing, and many others.

We don't expect any sort of preparation or practice for these kinds of talks. They're very casual and the expectations are low. If your talk isn't great, it's okay because we'll just move on to another one in a few minutes. If it helps, think of it this way: you're just being given the conversational floor for a few minutes, in a slightly more organized way than usual.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks