trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Tabletop Role Playing Game or interactive stories for my daughter
by kotrfa — 2019-12-14T14:05:10.318Z

Hey,

my daughter is about 3 and a half year old and we have been enjoying some interactive story telling where she is manipulating the story somehow.

When I was ~18, I played tabletop RPG with my friends (for about a year). I really enjoyed it and I think I would really enjoy something like that with my daughter too. So far I have been making things up as we go and sometimes I just get stuck, so I am trying to create some plot and ideas, print out/draw some graphics, maps around the area where we live...

...and I think it's a great playground and opportunity to try to slowly incorporate some of the rationality-related ideas (or simply "those stuff I learned about the world which makes me happier or stronger"). Thins like:

some people have better ideas than others

information is valuable and costly to get

updating is valuable

fundamental attribution error

you can deal with anxiety (CBT/Unlocking the emotional brain stuff)

some useful models or concepts like multi-agent minds, Chesterton fence...

Julia Galef's + EY's "things to teach kids" here

and so on

Anyone knows about some nice plots, materials, stories, tools, game settings and systems or whatever to get some inspiration? It doesn't matter if it's for the older kids, I can slowly get there or adjust it for the current age. I would also appreciate if the game system was quite light-weight (she can't grasp anything more than talking right now anyway) and combat or aggression wasn't the main focus. E.g. Ryuutama type of games.

Thanks
[Personal Experiment] One Year without Junk Media
by lsusr — 2019-12-14T08:26:05.318Z

I wrote in a previous post how my life is better when I avoid certain kinds of media. It increases my happiness, lowers my stress and makes me smarter.

I should follow my own advice. I hereby commit myself to abstaining from junk media for one year.

There's a long list of rules, definitions and exceptions but the basic idea is I'll avoid videogames, news, Reddit, web surfing, Hot Network Questions and similar mindless media feeds. YouTube is special case. Music and dance videos are okay so I created a new YouTube account and trained the recommendation algorithm to recommend only these kinds of videos.

I've been abstaining from junk media for increasingly long periods of time. My record is around two months. Now's finally the time to pull the trigger and go a whole year.

New Years resolutions usually fail so instead I'm starting this resolution on the 317th anniversary of the 47 Ronin.

万歳！
Acknowledgements & References
by JesseClifton — 2019-12-14T07:04:06.272Z

This post is part of the sequence version of the Effective Altruism Foundation's research agenda on Cooperation, Conflict, and Transformative Artificial Intelligence.

Acknowledgements

As noted in the document, several sections of this agenda
drew on writings by Lukas Gloor, Daniel Kokotajlo,
Anni Leskelä, Caspar Oesterheld, and Johannes Treutlein.
Thank you very much to David Althaus, Tobias Baumann,
Alexis Carlier,
Alex Cloud, Max Daniel, Michael
Dennis, Lukas Gloor, Adrian Hutter,
Daniel Kokotajlo,
János Kramár, David Krueger,
Anni Leskelä,
Matthijs Maas, Linh Chi
Nguyen, Richard Ngo, Caspar Oesterheld,
Mahendra Prasad,
Rohin Shah, Carl Shulman, Stefan Torges,
Johannes Treutlein, and Jonas Vollmer
for comments on drafts of this document.
Thank you also to the participants of the
Effective Altruism Foundation research retreat and workshops, whose
contributions also helped to shape this agenda.

References

Arif Ahmed. Evidence, decision and causality. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

AI Impacts. Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of agi. https://aiimpacts.org/likelihood-of-discontinuous-progress-around-the-development-of-agi/, 2018. Accessed: July 1 2019.

Riad Akrour, Marc Schoenauer, and Michele Sebag. Preference-based policy learning. In Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, pages 12–27. Springer, 2011.

Steffen Andersen, Seda Ertaç, Uri Gneezy, Moshe Hoffman, and John A List. Stakes matter in ultimatum games. American Economic Review, 101(7):3427-39, 2011.

Giulia Andrighetto, Daniela Grieco, and Rosaria Conte. Fairness and compliance in the extortion game. 2015.

Scott E Atkinson, Todd Sandler, and John Tschirhart. Terrorism in a bargaining framework. The Journal of Law and Economics, 30(1):1-21, 1987.

Robert Axelrod. On six advances in cooperation theory. Analyse & Kritik, 22(1):130-151, 2000.

Robert Axelrod and William D Hamilton. The evolution of cooperation. science, 211 (4489):1390-1396, 1981.

Kyle Bagwell. Commitment and observability in games. Games and Economic Behavior, 8(2):271-280, 1995.

Tobias Baumann. Surrogate goals to deflect threats. http://s-risks.org/using-surrogate-goals-to-deflect-threats/, 2017. Accessed March 6, 2019.

Tobias Baumann. Challenges to implementing surrogate goals. http://s-risks.org/challenges-to-implementing-surrogate-goals/, 2018. Accessed Mar

...
Eggy Waffles
by jefftk — 2019-12-14T02:40:01.773Z

A few months ago I posted about making

eggy
crepes as a way to get the kids to eat more protein. Lately
they've been interested in waffles, and I wanted to figure out how to
make something similar. It turns out if you search for [eggy
waffles] you tend to find people making waffles that have only
slightly more eggs than usual. We can do better than that:

3 Eggs

1/4C full fat Greek yoghurt

2T butter

2T flour

As with the crepes, they taste a bit like eclairs, but that's not a
bad thing and the kids like them a lot.

It's possible that they could use a bit less flour, but if you leave
the flour out entirely they come out rubbery and won't crisp.

How much more protein is this? Here's the first
recipe I found searching for [waffle recipe], which looks pretty
normal:

2 eggs

2C flour

1 3/4C milk

1/2C oil

1T sugar

4t baking powder

1/4t salt

1/2t vanilla

These aren't the same size, but after normalizing both to 1,000
calories (sheet)
the regular waffles have 22g of protein vs 41g (1.9x) in the eggy
version. If we look specifically at lysine, the amino acid someone
who mostly only wants to eat carbs is most at risk of being deficient
in, it's 3.0g vs 1.1g (2.7x).

I was also curious how Eggo frozen waffles compare, since they have
"egg" in the name. I count 23g protein per 1,000 calories, which is
like regular waffles.

Comment via: facebook
Book Recommendations for social skill development?
by Teach — 2019-12-14T00:36:55.019Z

I have come to a realisation a bit later than I should have. Although I am still quite young and definitely have time to act on this realisation now, I wish I had started sooner.

I am studying to become a teacher, and I hope to go into education policy later, with quite some large ambition in mind. And yet, my social skills are quite poor, and I have hardly any charisma. I seek to change this. I know that much of the cause of my poor social skills is never having created or found opportunities to develop them in the natural developmental path of a child/teenager.

And so I take to reading books in order to learn, and then apply what I read in life. I suppose I could just sit and think and figure out what to improve, but in the name of efficiency I want to at least start with the guidance of someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

So, any book recommendations that explicitly teach social skills and charisma? I've started working through Just Listen by Mark Goulston, which so far seems quite valuable.
[Link] "Doing being rational: polymerase chain reaction" by David Chapman
by Kenny — 2019-12-13T23:54:45.189Z

This is a link post for:

Doing being rational: polymerase chain reaction | Meaningness

I'm not going to quote the content at the link itself. [Should I?]

David Chapman – the author of the linked post – claims that "meta-rational" methods are necessary to 'reason reasonably'. I, and I think a lot of other people broadly part of the greater rationalist community, have objected to that general distinction. I still stand by that objection, at least terminologically.

But with this post and other previous recent posts/'pages' that he's posted at his site Meaningness, I think I'm better understanding the points he was gesturing or hinting at with what he describes as meta-rationality and I think that's because 'rationality', in his understanding, is grounded in the actual behavior people perform. The notion that Richard Feynman is quoted as insisting on of having to "work on paper", or the idea of 'repair' are almost certainly real and important facts about how we actually reason.

I think there's less and less object-level disagreement between him and myself, even about something like 'Bayesian reasoning'. His recent writing has crystalized the notion in me that he's really on to something and dispelled the notion that we shared some kind of fundamental disagreement. It seems relatively unimportant whether I or others subsume 'meta-rationality' within 'rationality' (or not).

I'm less sure how much of this applies to arbitrary reasoners or artificial intelligence, e.g. an AI could maintain a checklist 'internally' instead of relying on an external physical device to perform the same function, but the ideas he's discussing seem to be insightful and true to me about our own rational practices nonetheless.
Preface to CLR's Research Agenda on Cooperation, Conflict, and TAI 
by JesseClifton — 2019-12-13T21:02:48.552Z

The Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR) is focused on reducing risks of astronomical suffering, or s-risks, from transformative artificial intelligence (TAI). S-risks are defined as risks of cosmically significant amounts of suffering[1]. As has been discussed elsewhere, s-risks might arise by malevolence, by accident, or in the course of conflict.

We believe that s-risks arising from conflict are among the most important, tractable, and neglected of these. In particular, strategic threats by powerful AI agents or AI-assisted humans against altruistic values may be among the largest sources of expected suffering. Strategic threats have historically been a source of significant danger to civilization (the Cold War being a prime example). And the potential downsides from such threats, including those involving large amounts of suffering, may increase significantly with the emergence of transformative AI systems. For this reason, our current focus is technical and strategic analysis aimed at addressing these risks.

There are many other important interventions for s-risk reduction which are beyond the scope of this agenda. These include macrostrategy research on questions relating to s-risk; reducing the likelihood of s-risks from hatred, sadism, and other kinds of malevolent intent; and promoting concern for digital minds. CLR has been supporting work in these areas as well, and will continue to do so.

In this sequence of posts, we will present our research agenda on Cooperation, Conflict, and Transformative Artificial Intelligence. It is a standalone document intended to be interesting to people working in AI safety and strategy, with academics working in relevant subfields as a secondary audience. With a broad focus on issues related to cooperation in the context of powerful AI systems, we think the questions raised in the agenda are beneficial from a range of both normative views and empirical beliefs about the future course of AI development, even if at CLR we are particularly concerned with s-risks.

The purpose of this sequence is to

communicate what we think are the most important, tractable, and neglected technical AI research directions for reducing s-risks;

communicate what we think are the most promising directions for reducing downsides from threats more generally;

explicate several novel or little-discussed considerations concerning cooperation and AI safet

...
Under what circumstances is "don't look at existing research" good advice? 
by Kaj_Sotala — 2019-12-13T13:59:52.889Z

In How I do research, TurnTrout writes:

[I] Stare at the problem on my own, ignoring any existing thinking as much as possible. Just think about what the problem is, what's confusing about it, what a solution would look like. In retrospect, this has helped me avoid anchoring myself. Also, my prior for existing work is that it's confused and unhelpful, and I can do better by just thinking hard.

The MIRI alignment research field guide
has a similar sentiment:

It’s easy to fall into a trap of (either implicitly or explicitly) conceptualizing “research” as “first studying and learning what’s already been figured out, and then attempting to push the boundaries and contribute new content.”

The problem with this frame (according to us) is that it leads people to optimize for absorbing information, rather than seeking it instrumentally, as a precursor to understanding. (Be mindful of what you’re optimizing in your research!) [...]

... we recommend throwing out the whole question of authority. Just follow the threads that feel alive and interesting. Don’t think of research as “study, then contribute.” Focus on your own understanding, and let the questions themselves determine how often you need to go back and read papers or study proofs.

Approaching research with that attitude makes the question “How can meaningful research be done in an afternoon?” dissolve. Meaningful progress seems very difficult if you try to measure yourself by objective external metrics. It is much easier when your own taste drives you forward.

And I'm pretty sure that I have also seen this notion endorsed elsewhere on LW: do your own thinking, don't anchor on the existing thinking too much, don't worry too much about justifying yourself to established authority. It seems like a pretty big theme among rationalists in general.

At the same time, it feels like there are fields where nobody would advise this, or where trying to do this is a well-known failure mode. TurnTrout's post continues:

I think this is pretty reasonable for a field as young as AI alignment, but I wouldn't expect this to be true at all for e.g. physics or abstract algebra. I also think this is likely to be true in any field where philosophy is required, where you need to find the right formalisms instead of working from axioms.

It is not particularly recommended that people try to invent their own math instead of st

...
Vantress Gargoyle Dimir
by Zvi — 2019-12-13T12:50:00.630Z

Recently I decided to take Vantress Gargoyle Dimir seriously. While it remained legal, Veil of Summer rendered Dimir strategies unplayable. For one mana, green decks could and would stop anything you tried to do, from counters to discard to removal. Field of the Dead was also a nightmare. Since much of deck design is incremental, this neglect of Dimir strategies in general, and opponent-cards-in-graveyard-threshold strategies in particular, there is a good chance that any viable builds of Dimir decks would still not be found.

This, together with seeing Dimir decks do interesting things in Constructed Events, was part what motivated me to explore these strategies recently, despite their lack of success or even presence on the ladder or in tournaments. Dimir offered several cards that packed a very strong punch given their mana cost, if you could get cards into your opponents’ graveyard. Which seems like a thing that you can do most of the time without too much trouble. There were clearly a deck’s full of excellent cards to consider playing, so it seemed likely the deck could be good.

The core cards of the deck are the payoff cards for putting cards into the opponents’ graveyard: Vantress Gargoyle, Into the Story and Drown in the Lock. You get a two mana universal counter and removal spell, a draw four for four mana, and a two-mana 5/4 flyer, and the flyer can help fill up the enemy graveyard. To that we can add Thought Erasure, which is so good it is effectively a payoff card for being Dimir at all. We clearly want four of each of those four cards and at least 24 lands, leaving us twenty slots to round out the deck with some mix of counters, removal, card draw, ways to put cards into the enemy graveyard, and a true finisher.

I have been running three copies of Opt. That gives me the effective land ratio I want, and seems like the amount of card selection the deck can afford to buy without risking drawing too many without enough time to use them. Often you’ll be using all of your mana every turn starting with turn two until after the game is effectively all but over, and you also want to spend that one mana on Merfolk Secretkeeper or Fabled Passage, so drawing multiple copies of Opt seems bad enough that I don’t want the fourth. Then again, I don’t rule out that this is rationalization of not being able to find anything I’m willing to cut.

I’ve chosen three copies...
CHAI Internship applications are due by 12/15
by martinfukui — 2019-12-13T09:19:58.566Z

Hi everyone,

I'm the Assistant Director at CHAI and as some of you may know, CHAI is currently accepting applications for our 2020 internship program.

The application closes at 11:59pm PST on 12/15 (this upcoming Sunday). If you are an undergrad or grad student interested in technical AI safety research, then please apply! We also rely on word of mouth so if you know anyone who is interested, please share the application with them.

You can find more information and the application itself here

Please e-mail me at chai-admin@berkeley.edu if you have any questions!
ialdabaoth is banned
by Vaniver — 2019-12-13T06:34:41.756Z

ialdabaoth is banned from LessWrong, because I think he is manipulative in ways that will predictably make the epistemic environment worse. This ban is unusual in several respects: it relies somewhat heavily on evidence from in-person interactions and material posted to other sites as well as posts on LessWrong, and the user in question has been an active user of the site for a long time. While this decision was made in the context of other accusations, I think it can be justified solely on epistemic concerns. I also explain some of the reason for the delay below.

However, in the interests of fairness, and because we believe ideas from questionable sources can be valid, we’ll make edits he suggests to his post Affordance Widths so that it can fully participate in the 2018 Review. My hope is that announcing this now will cause the discussion on that post to be focused solely on the post rather than social coordination about whether he should or should not be banned. (Commentary on this decision should happen here.)

Some background context:

Back in September of 2018, I posted

this comment

about a discussion involving allegations of serious misconduct, and said LW was not the place to conduct investigations, but that it would be appropriate to link to findings once the investigation concluded.

As far as I'm aware, he has made no claims of either guilt or innocence, and went into exile, including ceasing posting or commenting on LessWrong. To the best of my knowledge, none of the panels that conducted investigations posted findings, primarily for reasons of legal liability, and so there was never an obvious time to publicly and transparently settle his status (until now).

One of the primary benefits of courts is that they allow for a cognitive specialization of labor, where a small number of people can carefully collect information, come to a considered judgment, and then broadcast that judgment. Though a number of groups have run their own investigations and made calls about whether ialdabaoth is welcome in their spaces, generally choosing no, there has been no transparent and accountable process which has made public pronouncement on the allegations brought against him.

About six months ago, ialdabaoth messaged Raemon, asking if he was banned. Raemon replied that the team was considering banning him but had multiple conflicting lines of thought that hadn’t been work

...
A Re-Interpretation of the Normative Foundations of Majority Rule
by June Ku — 2019-12-13T04:09:11.618Z
Link: https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/5d7f0a9093d9fe0012e1a1c2

This is a working paper on group rationality by Mahendra Prasad, who has previously published, among other things, "Social Choice and the Value Alignment Problem" in Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security, edited by Roman V. Yampolskiy. He's provided me with this summary to share:

Resolving Majority Rule’s Irrationality

Since the 1950s, majority rule has been interpreted as majority preference. But this has led to problems. For example, suppose there are three voters and three candidates. Suppose:

The first voter prefers: x over y over z

The second voter prefers: y over z over x

The third voter prefers: z over x over y

Notice, a majority (i.e., the first and third voters) prefer x over y. A majority (i.e., the first and second voters) prefer y over x. Thus, by transitivity, since a majority prefers x over y, and y over z, then we should expect a majority prefers x over z.

But that expectation is incorrect. A majority (i.e., the second and third voters) prefer z over x. In other words, the majority prefers x over y over z over x. This is akin to saying 3 > 2 > 1 > 3. Just as such an intransitivity makes the idea of a largest integer in a finite set of integers meaningless, majority preference’s intransitivity makes the notion of a best or winning candidate meaningless.

This paradox, known as Condorcet’s paradox, has been considered so fatal, many serious political philosophers have argued that majority rule and voting are meaningless.

In the linked paper below, Mahendra Prasad argues that by adopting a “consent of the majority” interpretation of majority rule, which we can see in the works of philosophers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Nicolas de Condorcet, and John Rawls, we can overcome Condorcet’s paradox. Specifically, Prasad takes the standard normative arguments for majority rule on two candidates (i.e., May’s theorem, Condorcet’s jury theorem, the Rae-Taylor theorem, and maximization of the number of self-determined individuals) and generalizes them to multiple candidates using consent of the majority (e.g., approval voting) without falling to Condorcet’s paradox.

The main takeaway from this paper should not be that approval voting is *the* correct way to interpret majority rule; rather it should be that there exists some interpretation of majority rule, w...