trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Shadow
by  — 2018-03-14T21:13:43.100Z

..only he saw the lump of shadow that clung to Ged, tearing at his flesh. It was like a black beast, the size of a young child, though it seemed to shrink and swell; it had no head or face, only the four taloned paws with which it gripped and tore.

A Wizard of Earthsea. Ursula K. Le Guin.

To name something is to gain power over it. So I am going to name another member of our pantheon. That is Shadow. Shadow exists in the creaking of the floorboards and the rustling of the leaves. They are the herald of all evil. To ignore them is

Shadow also known as the Black Cloak, often wraps around other nameless horrors obscuring their true nature. Insubstantial, they touch your heart and send you scampering or cowering, weakening you before the real Boss materialises. They have a cruelly whimsical side, sometimes they approach you alone or covering something harmless. Sometimes they appear to you alone, causing your fellows to doubt your sanity.

Moloch draws gobs of Shadow into itself as raw material. In the internal struggle that powers Moloch, Shadow is used to coerce conformity or convince people to buy worthless protective gewgaws.

The Group anoints the Other with Shadow that only the Group can see. Being a member of that Group is to see their Shadow. To spread the Group is to spread their particular Shadow. To question their Shadow

To fight Shadow there are weapons three. Sword, shield and lantern.

The Sword slices through Shadow, revealing clear arc of space and cleaving what is concealed. Sometimes you hit upon a monster, other times you find you are attacking an innocent as you were deceived by Shadow's inky tendrils. Or you slice and slice and slice until you are exhausted only to find nothing their at all.

The Shield will not hurt innocents. But it may not be enough to ward off what lurks beneath. Or fearing that you may build it too big and too heavy, so that you cannot move quickly enough.

The seering light of the Lantern burns away the Shadow, revealing what is beneath. This will allow you to strike true or get an appropriate shield. Some shadows are too inky black to penetrate with the Lantern you have. Hopefully you can find others to help shine their lights and dispel the yawning void.

Pick your weapons well.
LW Update 3/14 – Community, Markdown and More
by Raemon — 2018-03-14T18:29:06.532Z

We've been working on a lot of changes as we gear up for the final vote to migrate to lesswrong.com. Many of these changes are still in progress, but it seemed like a good point to stop and take stock of them.

Community Page

We now have a functioning community page. The core functionality is creating groups and events, which populate a big central map, which you can filter to only show particular information.

Groups

Groups are a local organizing body for events. Right now you can select multiple "types" of groups to give people an idea of what to expect and what ideas people will probably be interested in.

LessWrong
SlatestarCodex
Effective Altruism
MIRIx

When you create a group, it'll autocreate an "welcome post", which'll be the first thing people see when they click on your group page. The welcome post works like a normal post but is autopopulated with suggested questions to answer, and you'll want to edit it into something more useful.

Events

Events can either be created from a group page (in which they're associated with a that group), or from the main community hub (in which they're a freefloating one-off event).

Right now, anyone can create an event from a group page (regardless of whether they're the official group organizer). Eventually we'll build a fleshed out permission system for groups, right now we wanted to err on the side of making it easy for people to set up meetups.

In addition to location, time, etc, Events have most of the functionality that a post has. You can comment on them, upvote/downvote, etc.

Resources

Right now, this is a small stub, but we intend to expand the community page to provide a lot of help getting new meetups started, links to various corners of the rationalsphere (such as discord, slack, irc, explanations of how Rationalist Facebook and Rationalist Tumblr work, etc)

Frontpage

Right now we have a placeholder solution for exposing meetups to the frontpage – it's just a small stub-section. Once more meetups have been created we'll create a "nearest events" section, and eventually probably rework the page slightly so it's better integrated instead of an awkward extra posts section.

Editor Update

We're in the process of making some changes to the editor. We've pushed some updates that:

Added a new simple markdown editor (for comments) that you can

...
Optimum number of single points of failure
by Douglas_Reay — 2018-03-14T13:30:22.222Z

1. Optimum number of single points of failure

Summary of entire Series: An alternative approach to designing Friendly Artificial Intelligence computer systems.

Summary of this Article: The number of unnecessary Single Points of Failure in your design should be minimised; but some of them are too expensive to be worth getting rid of, so the optimum number of SPOFs isn't always zero.

Links to all the articles in the series:

Optimum number of single points of failure
Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Defect or Cooperate
Environments for killing AIs
The advantage of not being open-ended
Trustworthy Computing
Metamorphosis
Believable Promises

Links to the parts of this article:

What is a Single Point of Failure?
How can SPOFs be avoided?
The price of avoiding SPOFs
Finding the optimum number of SPOFs

Optimum number of single points of failure

What is a Single Point of Failure?

Think of a bridge, constructed from metal struts, held together by bolts:

A particular connection, holding two struts together, might fail for any number of reasons. The bolt might be rusty. Someone might deliberately unscrew the bolt. A stray bullet might hit it.

If breaking the structure at a particular point, while all the other bits remain unbroken, is sufficient to cause the bridge to fall down, then that point is known as a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF). A structure can have multiple SPOFs. Indeed, with some structures, every point in the structure, is a SPOF. Like a house of cards, remove just one card, any of the cards, and it all falls down:

We can extend the idea from structures to systems and plans. An SPOF is something which, if it fails, stops the entire system from working, or loses you the entire game.

Here are some examples:

A communications network linking computers together via a single central router. If that one router fails, then all communication ceases.
A small tree care company that has only one wood chipper. If the chipper breaks, the company can't complete its contract in time, and doesn't get paid.
A military leader whose battle plan requires that a particular position be held and, if the enemy break through, he has no contingency plan or reserves - the whole war is lost.

How can SPOFs be avoided?

In a chain, you have a series of links, where every link is an SPOF. Break just one link, any link, and the weight at the end of the chain drops:

With an 8-ply braided rope, you ...
Strengthening the foundations under the Overton Window without moving it
by KatjaGrace — 2018-03-14T02:20:00.604Z

As I understand them, the social rules for interacting with people you disagree with are like this:

You should argue with people who are a bit wrong

You should refuse to argue with people who are very wrong, because it makes them seem more plausibly right to onlookers

I think this has some downsides.

Suppose there is some incredibly terrible view, V. It is not an obscure view: suppose it is one of those things that most people believed two hundred years ago, but that is now considered completely unacceptable.

New humans are born and grow up. They are never acquainted with any good arguments for rejecting V, because nobody ever explains in public why it is wrong. They just say that it is unacceptable, and you would have to be a complete loser who is also the Devil to not see that.

Since it took the whole of humanity thousands of years to reject V, even if these new humans are especially smart and moral, they probably do not each have the resources to personally out-reason the whole of civilization for thousands of years. So some of them reject V anyway, because they do whatever society around them says is good person behavior. But some of the ones who rely more on their own assessment of arguments do not.

This is bad, not just because it leads to an unnecessarily high rate of people believing V, but because the very people who usually help get us out of believing stupid things – the ones who think about issues, and interrogate the arguments, instead of adopting whatever views they are handed – are being deprived of the evidence that would let them believe even the good things we already know.

In short: we don’t want to give the new generation the best sincere arguments against V, because that would be admitting that a reasonable person might believe V. Which seems to get in the way of the claim that V is very, very bad. Which is not only a true claim, but an important thing to claim, because it discourages people from believing V.

But we actually know that a reasonable person might believe V, if they don’t have access to society’s best collective thoughts on it. Because we have a whole history of this happening almost all of the time. On the upside, this does not actually mean that V isn’t very, very bad. Just that your standard non-terrible humans can believe very, very bad things sometimes, as we have seen.

So this all sounds kind of like the ...
Request for "Tests" for the MIRI Research Guide
by Hazard — 2018-03-13T23:22:43.874Z

Lately I've been looking into learning the material in the MIRI research guide. After some time, I noticed that my biggest trepidation about diving in was the nagging question of, "But how will I know if I actually learned the stuff?"

Once I realized that was the thing holding me back, it became easier to think about solutions. Some of the topics correspond with courses that are common in universities, so I can pilfer final exams from their sites (woot to MIT open courseware). But for other topics I wanted to see what people here thought.

In whatever domain you specialize in, what are some examples of problems or questions that one can only answer by having a solid understanding of a huge swath of said domain? Below I've listed everything from the MIRI research guide that I could perceive as a distinct category.

(ex. If you were learning about Digital Systems and Computer Architecture, my test would be "In systemVerilog, simulate a basic 16-bit processor that can be programmed using a RISC assembly language of your design.")

(edit: I know that "huge swaths" is pretty vague, and suggestions don't have to be things that you think certify/prove that you get a topic. While a "comprehensive test" would be nice, problems/prompts like what Qiaochu commented are exactly what I'm looking for)

Set theory
Probability
Probabilistic Inference
Statistics
Machine Learning
Solomonoff Induction
Naturalized Induction
VNM Decision Theory
Functional Decision Theory
Logical Uncertainty
First Order Logic
Vingean Reflection
Corrigibility
Linear Algebra
Topology
Category Theory
Type Theory
Caring less
by eukaryote — 2018-03-13T22:53:22.288Z

Why don't more attempts at persuasion take the form "care less about ABC", rather than the popular "care more about XYZ"?

People, in general, can only do so much caring. We can only spend so many resources and so much effort and brainpower on the things we value.

For instance: Avery spends 40 hours a week working at a homeless shelter, and a substantial amount of their free time researching issues and lobbying for better policy for the homeless. Avery learns about existential risk and decides that it's much more important than homelessness, say 100 times more, and is able to pivot their career into working on existential risk instead.

But nobody expects Avery to work 100 times harder on existential risk, or feel 100 times more strongly about it. That's ridiculous. There literally isn't enough time in the day, and thinking like that is a good way to burn out like a meteor in orbit.

Avery also doesn't stop caring about homelessness - not at all. But as a result of caring so much more about existential risk, they do have to care less about homelessness (in any meaningful or practical sense) as a result.

And this is totally normal. It would be kind of nice if we could put a meaningful amount of energy in proportion to everything we care about, but we only have so much emotional and physical energy and time, and caring about different things over time is a natural part of learning and life.

When we talk about what we should care about, where we should focus more of our time and energy, we really only have one kludgey tool to do so: "care more". Society, people, and companies are constantly telling you to "care more" about certain things. Your brain will take some of these, and through a complicated process, reallocate your priorities such that each gets an amount of attention that fits into your actual stores of time and emotional and physical energy.

But since what we value and how much is often considered, literally, the most important thing on this dismal earth, I want more nuance and more accuracy in this process. Introducing "consider caring less" into the conversation does this. It describes an important mental action and lets you describe what you want more accurately. Caring less already happens in people's beliefs, it affects the world, so let's talk about it.

On top of that, th...
Looking and the no-self
by ChristianKl — 2018-03-13T19:39:15.016Z

(This post is a reply to Kaj's "My attempt to explain Looking" and Valentine's Kenshō. The target audience is people who feel like they have a good grasp on the underlying concepts but of course the post might also be interesting for other people)

I have the feeling that both you and Valentine mix the concept of Looking together with no-self even through they are independent for each other. In the Zen Buddhist theoretical landscape they are linked together but linking them together is a specific position of that tradition.

My main approach and the concept I have to think about this space comes from Danis Bois. He is an interesting Frenchman, who discovered mediation while learning to be an osteopath. The next ten years he spent 8 hours per day meditating, traveled to guru's in India and taught what he called at the time Fascia therapy. At a time where he was successful with his life in the spiritual community he thought they were too dogmatic and decided to go to university. He studied education as his major and become a professor in Portugal and recently retired from being a professor.

There's no renunciation of the self in Bois work. He grants that it often makes sense to think about having multiple 'I' but neither of them is false. On the other hand having a strong feeling of existence is a key in his way.

David Chapman wrote a lot about the conflict between Consensus Buddhism and Tantra Buddhism. Zen Buddhism is part of what Chapman calls consensus Buddhism. One of the key differences is that consensus Buddhism seeks the renunciation of the self while Tantra doesn't.

While the path of renunciation exists, I consider it to be in conflict with the standard rational goals of having an impact on the world. Given the predominance of Zen in popular culture it might seem like it's the only valid path, but it's not the only spiritual path that enables the ability to Look.

Both Danis Bois paradigm and Tantra care a lot about relationships and consider relating to be important. Going deeply into what that means is a subject for another post but fortunately we have the shared concept of Circling. Circling is about exploring how we relate to each other.

Just like mindfulness meditation is a condensed version of Zen, Circling feels to me like a condensed version of a spiritual path of being in relati...
Yoda Timers 3: Speed
by alkjash — 2018-03-13T18:00:00.861Z

This is part 22 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.

At some point around the end of high school, being fast became unfashionable. When did this happen?

Why do we channel so much more energy into doing more difficult things, instead of doing simple things faster? How much faster could you do your job? Two times faster? Five times?

Instead of I want to be stronger, say I want to be faster.

If you pay attention to speed, you might just find a way to do a whole week’s worth of work in five minutes.

Day 22: Speed

Here are three exercises to help you find that rush of mind working on overdrive:

Typeracer. Play this game for five minutes. How much faster did you get at typing? What did you learn?
Go on YouTube and watch a talk at 2x speed for five minutes. If you’re having trouble following, turn on subtitles. Notice that this is possible.
The Arithmetic Game. Play three rounds of this with standard settings. How much faster did you get?

Here are three principles I’ve extracted from using Yoda Timers to do everything faster.

1. Mistakes Are Fatal

When I first played Typeracer, I started out at a measly 70 wpm and worked my way up to around 90 by just trying harder. Eventually, I hit a plateau because I was still constantly making typos and backspacing. Each mistake cost the time of four or five characters. The backspace key was my Achilles heel.

That’s why I forced myself to slow down and get everything right the first time. At first, this lowered my wpm, but with a bit of work, my fingers felt more nimble and intentional. I cut down the number of typos I made by a factor of 4 or so – it turns out there’s a handful of sequences of keys I constantly get wrong or out of order. My wpm skyrocketed to 120.

In real life, mistakes are even costlier. Getting sick is way costlier than having good hygiene. In programming, it’s common knowledge that testing and bug-fixing takes at least three times as long as writing code in the first place. In math, months of paper-writing can go down the drain when you finally notice a severe and unfix-able logical misstep. At the Olympics, every single mistake will cost you the medal.

If you want to be faster, you must have zero tolerance for even the slightest errors, and slowing down (at first) to practice perfectionism will be worth it. Get it right the first time.

2. Speed Limits are in the Mind

Everyone has a rough idea of how ...
A Developmental Framework for Rationality
by  — 2018-03-13T01:36:27.492Z

[A way of looking at rationality as a set of transitioning worldviews that operate under different assumptions. The short summary of progression looks like techniques → habits → introspection → feelings → multiple ontologies. Skills which appear to be at odds with one another can be seen as operating under different models of what the question of rationality is even about.]

I started mindlevelup with the goal of figuring out self-improvement.

Over 2 years later and over 100 (!) essays later, I’m still at it.

Looking back, one thing that stands out is how I can identify distinct shifts in the ways I’ve approached this problem. The concepts I’ve written about, they haven’t all been operating on the same level of abstraction or assumptions. Some are concrete techniques, while others are overviews of mechanisms, still others are generalizations about the process of learning the techniques, and there’s even a few musing about the nature of self-improvement as a whole.

I’d like to outline what I think is a plausible way that someone’s thoughts might evolve as they approach this problem, based off my own experiences. I think this will be useful in identifying what the underlying models behind different rationality skills looks like. In particular, I’ll be using this to give additional context for where I think a lot of my own essays slot into the worldviews I’ll be introducing.

A] Techniques Rule:

You’re on a quest to find the One True Rationality.

When you first encounter rationality, it’s in the context of cognitive biases, pesky glitches which lead us down suboptimal paths when we can clearly see a better way forward.

For example:

When we say we’re going to finish something in an hour, it’ll really take us more than that. Somehow, projects basically never get finished on schedule, even when everyone knows this sort of thing happens all the time!
Lots of say that we want to exercise, and somehow only a few of us actually get it done. This disparity exists for just about anything else, from reading more books, writing more code, or meeting new people!
People on different sides of a topic will get into a room to share their opinions. And, yet, when both sides leave, they end up more sure of their original opinion then before they began to argue!

Given these observations, you look at self-improvement as one of

overriding your body’s silly built-in defaults

. The right thing to...
Bug Hunt 3
by alkjash — 2018-03-13T00:20:00.912Z

This is part 21 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.

I took a long break from Hammertime to check the fundamental question: am I actually better at achieving my values now?

The answer is a solid yes. Problems that used to live in the category of “not within my capabilities” disintegrated into so many puffs of malevolent smoke. Paper-writing got itself done. Fifteen hundred words of half-decent fiction got written every day. For the first time in my life, I live in such a thoughtfully decorated room I’ll actually miss it when I move away. I felt like a rationality Warlock:

A high-level Aversion appears…Hah! With the power of FOCUSING, I’ll scry your true name, Demon!

“Status Regulation, Begone!”

This section feels impossible to write…

I know! I’ll do it in FIVE MINUTES!

I have no idea what my problem is…

Fear not! I’ll blast it with the magic of FRIENDSHIP!

So you’re stuck on a quest to save the world…

Have you tried REMOVING TRIVIAL INCONVENIENCES?

If you’re reading Hammertime simply for my scintillating wit, that’s completely fine! Just remember that these techniques might also help you achieve your values if you give them a chance.

Hammertime: The Third Cycle

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

~ Plato.

The third cycle is ten days of review. On each day, we will attempt to tease out the unifying meta-principles behind each technique, taking them (and all the others) to the limit of their power. Here’s a tentative schedule:

Bug Hunt 3
Yoda Timers 3: Speed
TAPs 3: Reductionism
Design 3: Intentionality
CoZE 3: Empiricism
Growth Triplets
Internal Double Crux: Duality
Focusing 2: Fusion
Murphyjitsu 2: Humility
TDT 2: Post-Consequentialism

Day 21: Bug Hunt 3

Today we’re back to Bug Hunt with three more sets of prompts to help find the biggest bottlenecks in your life. After you read each, set a Yoda Timer to brainstorm bugs.

1. Getting Got

The world is Out to Get You. Social media. Capitalism. Your job. Your family. Your friends. Your hobbies. Everyone wants your time, money, and attention. How do you keep yourself from Getting Got all the time?

Do you know how to say no? If you don’t Get Gone regularly, you’re easy pickings. Things are often worse than they appear. Things deteriorate over time. Things want more and more of your soul. There’s no such thing as a one-hour game of Civ. Get Gone. You don’t owe anybody everythin...