trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Smoking Lesion Steelman II
by abramdemski — 2017-10-02T22:11:35.000Z

After Johannes Treutlein's comment on Smoking Lesion Steelman, and a number of other considerations, I had almost entirely given up on CDT. However, there were still nagging questions about whether the kind of self-ignorance needed in Smoking Lesion Steelman could arise naturally, how it should be dealt with if so, and what role counterfactuals ought to play in decision theory if CDT-like behavior is incorrect. Today I sat down to collect all the arguments which have been rolling around in my head on this and related issues, and arrived at a place much closer to CDT than I expected.

CDT differs from EDT only in those cases where a parent of the decision node is not directly observed. If the causal parents of a decision are all observations, then there is no probabilistic relationship for causal reasoning to remove. So, there are two critical questions to motivate CDT as an alternative to EDT:

(Existence of cases where CDT ≠ EDT) Are there necessarily parents of the decision which cannot be observed?

(Correctness of CDT) If so, is CDT the correct way to account for this?

Existence of Cases

Smoking Lesion Steelman was an attempt to set up a scenario answering #1. However, it was very contrived; I had to specifically rob the agents of all introspection and set up an important piece of knowledge about their own decision process which they lacked. Are there more natural examples?

Certainly there will be influences on a real agent's decision process which the agent cannot observe. For example, it is always possible for a cosmic ray to hit a computer and change the output of decision calculation. However, CDT doesn't seem to help with this. The right way to guard against this is vie fault-tolerant implementations which use redundant calculations and memory; but to the extent that a decision procedure might guard against it by having checks in the world-model saying "if things look too goofy I've probably been hit in the head", CDT would potentially sever those probabilistic links, keeping the agent from inferring that it is in an error state. (More on this kind of failure of CDT later.)

Sam Eisenstat has argued (in an in-person discussion) that an example of #1 is the consistency of the logic an agent uses. In the counterexample to the trolljecture, an agent reasons as if if had control over the consistency of its logic, leading to an intuitively wrong decision. P

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Physicists say simulation hypothesis is impossible in principle
by polymathwannabe — 2017-10-02T20:36:43.784Z
Link: https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/physicists-find-we-re-not-living-in-a-computer-simulation

https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/physicists-find-we-re-not-living-in-a-computer-simulation

If these results are right, our universe being a simulation would require an impossibly big computer. They conclude the simulation hypothesis is impossible in principle.
Catalonia and the Overton Window
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2017-10-02T20:23:37.937Z

The thing with Catalonia strikes me as a case of "Arguments sure get weird when the truth is not inside the Overton Window of either side."

Historically, populations have usually been the subjects of governments, owned by them and farmed by them. The Catalan population is the property of the government of Spain. To let subgroups defy this system of property and take possession of themselves and the land on which they reside would greatly destabilize the current world system. I'm not sure it would be a good thing for anyone if states and counties seceded into ever-smaller units and elected the usual run of even more nitwit governments, especially if it was only the democracies that started doing that.

But you can't say that Catalans are the property of the people of Spain, subject to the command of Spain's bureaucracy and control system including its votes of the larger population of Spain in which Catalans will never be a majority, and that Spain has enough force to keep them as that property and we'll pragmatically respect that. We can't just admit we think it's better for the international system if we do things that way in general, so that we have fewer, larger national governments which we think is a public good. That goes against the mythology of democratic self-determination, and governments deriving their power from the consent of the governed.

So instead of appealing to it being best for everyone if the international order stays stable instead of fragmenting into ten thousand pieces, and this making it wiser not to disturb the current tacit policy that governments are allowed to keep whatever population-properties they currently own whether those people consent to it or not...

...people be like, "But the secession referendum is ILLEGAL! According to the CONSTITUTION OF SPAIN!"

I don't think I really understand this, in the sense that I don't think I could pass the Ideological Turing Test of somebody who can think that while keeping a straight face. One government passes a law saying that a population is not allowed to have their own government--and people are capable of getting worked up and indignant about that population trying to get it anyway, because that means for Catalonia to have an independence referendum is ILLEGAL?

I mean, really? This might make sense if they were voting to independent

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Productive Disagreement Practice Thread: Double Crux
by SilentCal — 2017-10-02T18:25:29.643Z

Inspired by the recent skepticism of the double crux technique, I thought I'd launch a thread to try using double crux, and productive disagreement in general, with other LessWrongers. I think this will work best with some structure, so I've laid out some rules.

Thread Rules:

Discussions are to be one-on-one. Do not jump into others' debates.

The default platform for discussions will be the comment thread, but participants can use others at their discretion, such as instant messaging platforms or maybe even video chat. Try to keep a shareable record so others can potentially learn from it.

deadsimplechat.com is a setup-free, anonymous option for text chat.

To participate in the thread, either

make a top-level comment listing beliefs that you think might generate productive disagreements, as well as any preferences you have about discussion format,

or reply to someone else's top-level comment, selecting one of their beliefs that you disagree with. Don't make any arguments in this reply, just say which belief you're selecting, and what platform you'd like to discuss it on if the top-level commenter gave multiple options.

The top-level poster and the replier then conduct their discussion in replies to that reply, or in the agreed-upon outside platform.

Inflammatory topics are better discussed out-of-band. When listing a topic you think likely to be inflammatory, flag it as such and don't offer in-comments discussion as an option.

Remember to try to find double cruxes!

If you want to comment about the rules or the general idea of this thread, there's a meta post for that.
Rational Feed: Last Week's Community Articles and Some Recommended Posts
by sapphire — 2017-10-02T13:49:05.937Z

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Slack by Zvi Moshowitz - You need slack in your life. Slack lets you explore and invest. If you don't have slack you can't relax or uphold your morals. Fight hard to maintain your slack and don't let people or things take it away. Maya Millennial's lack of slack.

Personal Thoughts On Careers In Ai Policy And by carrickflynn (EA forum) - 3600 words. AI strategy is bottlenecked by hard research problems. Hence most people will find it hard to contribute effectively, even if they are very talented. Solving these problems has extremely high value. We should prepare to mobilize more talent once the blocking issues are solved. Operations work is still in high demand.

End Factory Farming by 80,000 Hours - Three hour podcast. How young people can set themselves up to contribute to scientific research into meat alternatives. Genetic manipulation of chickens. Skepticism of vegan advocacy. Grants to China, India and South America. Insect farming. Pessimism about legal or electoral solutions. Which species to focus on. Fish and crustacean consciousness.

===Scott:

Against Individual Iq Worries by Scott Alexander - "IQ is very useful and powerful for research purposes. It’s not nearly as interesting for you personally." IQ measurement problems. Even accurately measured IQ isn't that predictive.

Links: Hurly Burly by Scott Alexander - SSC links post. Copyright, genetic engineering, Autism, Machine Learning, Putin's fears of AI risk, the lesswrong relaunch and more

===Rationalist:

Dojo Bad Day Contingency Plan by Elo - Eleizer's discussion of why rationality theory isn't enough, you need to practice. An exercise about improving your mental on bad days.

Also Against Individual IQ Worries by Scott Aaronson - IQ tests tend to ask unclear questions and require you to reverse engineer what the test maker meant. Scott's own IQ was once measured at 106.

Predictive Processing by Entirely Useless - Responses to quotes from Surfing Uncertainty and Scott's review. A large focus is the "darkened room" problem.

Prosocial Manipulation by Katja Grace - Being calculating and guarded in communication is commonly considered manipulative and selfish. But many people's goals are pro-social, why do we assume manipulation is anti-social?

Humans As Leaky Systems by mindlevelup - "Fairly obvious stuff that prob...
dojo - Bad day contingency plan 
by Elo — 2017-10-02T07:46:53.852Z
Link: http://bearlamp.com.au/dojo-bad-day-contingency-plan/

http://bearlamp.com.au/dojo-bad-day-contingency-plan/

The following is an exercise I composed to be run at the Lesswrong Sydney dojos. It took an hour and a half but could probably be done faster with some adaptations that I have included in these instructions.

In regards to what are the dojos? I quote Eliezer in the preface of Rationality: From AI to Zombies when he says:

It was a mistake that I didn’t write my two years of blog posts with the intention of helping people do better in their everyday lives. I wrote it with the intention of helping people solve big, difficult, important problems, and I chose impressive-sounding, abstract problems as my examples.

In retrospect, this was the second-largest mistake in my approach. It ties in to the first-largest mistake in my writing, which was that I didn’t realise that the big problem in learning this valuable way of thinking was figuring out how to practice it, not knowing the theory. I didn’t realise that part was the priority; and regarding this I can only say “Oops” and “Duh.”

Yes, sometimes those big issues really are big and really are important; but that doesn’t change the basic truth that to master skills you need to practice them and it’s harder to practice on things that are further away.

Lesswrong is a global movement of rationality. And with that in mind, the Dojos are our attempt in Sydney to be working on the actual practical stuff. Working on the personal problems and literal implementation of The plans after they undergo first contact with the enemy.

You can join us through our meetup group, facebook group and as advertised on lesswrong.

Below is the instructions for the Dojo. I can't emphasise enough the process of actually doing and not just reading. If you intend to participate, grab some paper or a blank document and stop for a few minutes to make the lists. Then check your answers against ours.

If you don't do the exercise - don't fool yourself into thinking you have this skill under your belt. Just accept that you didn't really "learn" this one. you kinda said, "that's great I wish I could find the time to get healthy" Or "If only I was the type of person who did things.". If this is especially difficult for you, that's okay. It is difficult for all of us. I believe in you!

Good luck.
Bad day contingency Dojo
by Elo — 2017-10-02T07:43:40.861Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/dojo-bad-day-contingency-plan/

The following is an exercise I composed to be run at the Lesswrong Sydney dojos. It took an hour and a half but could probably be done faster with some adaptations that I have included in these instructions. In regards to what are the dojos?

I quote Eliezer in the preface of Rationality: From AI to Zombies when he says:

It was a mistake that I didn’t write my two years of blog posts with the intention of helping people do better in their everyday lives. I wrote it with the intention of helping people solve big, difficult, important problems, and I chose impressive-sounding, abstract problems as my examples. In retrospect, this was the second-largest mistake in my approach.

It ties in to the first-largest mistake in my writing, which was that I didn’t realise that the big problem in learning this valuable way of thinking was figuring out how to practice it, not knowing the theory. I didn’t realise that part was the priority; and regarding this I can only say “Oops” and “Duh.” Yes, sometimes those big issues really are big and really are important; but that doesn’t change the basic truth that to master skills you need to practice them and it’s harder to practice on things that are further away.

Lesswrong is a global movement of rationality. And with that in mind, the Dojos are our attempt in Sydney to be working on the actual practical stuff. Working on the personal problems and literal implementation of The plans after they undergo first contact with the enemy. You can join us through our meetup group, facebook group and as advertised on lesswrong.

Below is the instructions for the Dojo. I can't emphasise enough the process of actually doing and not just reading.

If you intend to participate, grab some paper or a blank document and stop for a few minutes to make the lists. Then check your answers against ours. If you don't do the exercise - don't fool yourself into thinking you have this skill under your belt. Just accept that you didn't really "learn" this one. you kinda said, "that's great I wish I could find the time to get healthy" Or "If only I was the type of person who did things.". If this is especially difficult for you, that's okay. It is difficult for all of us. I believe in you!

Good luck.

Everyone has bad days...
What are some Meta-Umeshsims?
by Chris_Leong — 2017-10-02T06:57:56.610Z

Scott Aaronson wrote a blog post in which he defined Umeshisms.
Umesh was his advisor at Berkley who used to frequently repeat: "If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports."

Scott then asked his readers to provide more examples, ie.:

If you never cut yourself while shaving, you’re not shaving close enough.

If you’ve never been robbed, you’re spending too much time locking doors.

If you’ve never been rejected, you’re not asking enough. (The easiest to state, the hardest to practice.)

If you’ve never regretted a blog entry, your blog is boring.

What are some meta-Umeshisms, ie. good principles stated as a concise phrase that can easily be rephrased to apply to other situations?

I'd suggest posting meta-Umeshisms in the top-level comments (at most one per post), with derivatives posted in the second-level comments.
Tensions in Truthseeking 
by Raemon — 2017-10-02T00:54:49.164Z

Epistemic Effort: I've thought about this for several weeks and discussed with several people who different viewpoints. Still only moderately confident though.

So, I notice that people involved with the rationalsphere have three major classes of motivations:

Truthseeking (how to think clearly and understand the world)

Human/Personal (how to improve your life and that of your friends/family)

Impact (how to change/improve the the world at large)

All three motivations can involve rationality. Many people who end up involved care about all three areas to some degree, and have at least some interest in both epistemic and instrumental rationality. And at least within the rationalsphere, the Personal and the Impact motivations are generally rooted in Truth.

But people vary in whether these motivations are terminal, or instrumental. They also have different intuitions about which are most important - or about how to pursue a given goal. This sometimes results in confusion, annoyance, distrust, and exasperated people working at cross purposes.

Terminal vs Instrumental Truth

For some, truthseeking is important because the world is confusing. Whether you're focused on your personal life or on changing the world, there's a lot of ways you might screw up because something seems right but doesn't work or has a lot of negative externalities. It's necessary to do research, to think clearly, and to be constantly on the lookout for new facts that might weigh on your decisions.

For others, truth-seeking seems more like a fundamental part of who they are. Even if it didn't seem necessary, they'd do it anyway because because it just seems like the right thing to do.

I think there's a couple layers of conflict here. The first is that instrumental-truthseekers tend to have an intuition that lots of other things matter as much or more than truth.

It's more important to be able to launch a startup confidently than to have an accurate perception of its chance of success. It's important not to immediately criticize people because that disincentivizes them from trying new things. Interpersonal relationships seem to need 5x as many compliments as criticisms to flourish. It's important to be able to run a successful marketing campaign, and even if you're trying to run an honest marketing campaign, comprehensive honesty requires effort tha

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Discussion: Linkposts vs Content Mirroring
by the gears to ascension — 2017-10-01T17:18:56.916Z

Link posts have the effect of taking you off the site when you're done reading. I don't like that about them; it moves comments off lesswrong, and I want to incentivize comments here. They also currently have a bug that makes it not really possible to see the comments section on lesswrong at all, but independent of that, I don't like how linkposts lead off the site. What are your thoughts on replacing link posts with posts that have the original source's content, but link through to where they're from at the bottom of the post?
Metarationality: a messy introduction
by drossbucket — 2017-10-01T08:09:25.313Z
Link: https://drossbucket.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/metarationality-a-messy-introduction

This post tries to address 'all we got were these lousy Kegan levels' critiques of metarationality by pointing at a bunch of interesting concrete topics and shouting excitedly.

It's pretty long, tl;dr below:

How we think we think, vs. how we actually think: if you look closely at even the most formal types of reasoning, what we're actually doing doesn't tend to look so rigorous and logical.

Still, on its own that wouldn't preclude the brain doing something very rigorous and logical behind the scenes, in the same way that we don't consciously know about the image processing our brain is doing for our visual field. Some discussion of why the prospects for that don't look great either.

Dumb confused interlude on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

The cognitive flip: queering the inside-the-head/outside-the-head binary. Sarah Perry's theory of mess as a nice example of this.

Through fog to the other side: despite all this confusion, we can navigate anyway.
Prosocial manipulation
by KatjaGrace — 2017-10-01T05:30:00.210Z

There is an axis of social calculativeness: whether your speech and social actions were carefully designed for particular outcomes, versus being instinctive responses to the situation.

This is related to an axis of honesty: whether your words represent your actual state. I suppose because the words most likely to produce the best response naively are often not true. Though I’m not sure if this is reliably true: feelings in the moment are often misleading, and honesty is often prudent.

Another axis is selfishness versus pro-socialness: whether your actions are meant to produce good outcomes for you (potentially at the expense of others) or a larger group such as the world.

The calculativeness axis seems widely expected match the selfishness axis well. Manipulative people are bad. I don’t see why they should go together though, in theory. You can say what you feel like in conversation, or say things calculated to achieve goals. Shouldn’t people saying things to achieve goals do so for all kinds of goals, many venerable? In about the same distribution as people doing other things to achieve goals?

A natural question is whether calculated behavior really is reliably selfish, or whether people just feel like it is for some reason. I can think of cases where it isn’t selfish. For instance, a diplomat trying to arrange peace is probably choosing their words very carefully, and with regard to consequences. But it is hard to say how rare those are.

Perhaps we just don’t think of that as being calculative? Or I wonder if we do, and while we like it if peace is arranged, we would still be somewhat wary of a very good diplomat in our own dealings with them. Because even if they are acting for the good of the world, we suspect that it won’t be for our good, if we are the one being calculated about.

After all, we are presumably being led away from whatever our default choice would have been after hearing the person just represent their internal state as came naturally. And moving away from that sounds probably worse, so more likely that manipulation means to exploit us somehow than to secretly help us get an even better outcome. This is closely related to the honesty axis, and would mean ‘manipulative’ doesn’t really imply ‘globally consequentially bad’ so much as ‘dangerous to deal with’.

I am specula...
October 2017 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2017-10-01T02:08:17.634Z

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

Rules:

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

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

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

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

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.