trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Strategic Goal Pursuit and Daily Schedules
by Rossin_duplicate0.6898194309641386 — 2017-09-20T20:19:49.366Z

In the post Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic, Anna Salamon writes:

there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out. We do not automatically:

(a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;

(b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;

(c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;

(d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);

(e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;

(f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;

(g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;

(h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;

When I read this, I was feeling quite unsatisfied about the way I pursued my goals. So the obvious thing to try, it seemed to me, was to ask myself how I could actually do all these things.

I started by writing down all the major goals I have I could think of (a). Then I attempted to determine whether each goal was consistent with my other beliefs, whether I was sure it was something I really wanted, and was worth the effort(g).

For example, I saw that my desire to be a novelist was more motivated by the idea of how cool it would feel to be able to have that be part of my self-image, rather than a desire to actually write a novel. Maybe I’ll try to write a novel again one day, but if that becomes a goal sometime in the future it will be because there is something I really w...
Publication of "Anthropic Decision Theory"
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-09-20T15:41:02.206Z

My paper "Anthropic decision theory for self-locating beliefs", based on posts here on Less Wrong, has been published as a Future of Humanity Institute tech report. Abstract:

This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct decision to make. It creates an anthropic decision theory (ADT) that decides these problems from a small set of principles. By doing so, it demonstrates that the attitude of agents with regards to each other (selfish or altruistic) changes the decisions they reach, and that it is very important to take this into account. To illustrate ADT, it is then applied to two major anthropic problems and paradoxes, the Presumptuous Philosopher and Doomsday problems, thus resolving some issues about the probability of human extinction.

Most of these ideas are also explained in this video.

To situate Anthropic Decision Theory within the UDT/TDT family: it's basically a piece of UDT applied to anthropic problems, where the UDT approach can be justified by using generally fewer, and more natural, assumptions than UDT does.
HPMOR and Sartre's "The Flies"
by wMattDodd — 2017-09-19T20:53:23.338Z

Am I the only one who sees obvious parallels between Sartre's use of Greek mythology as a shared reference point to describe his philosophy more effectively to a lay audience and Yudkowsky's use of Harry Potter to accomplish the same goal? Or is it so obvious no one bothers to talk about it? Was that conscious on Yudkowsky's part? Unconscious? Or am I just seeing connections that aren't there?
Unusual medical event led to concluding I was most likely an AI in a simulated world
by wMattDodd — 2017-09-18T17:03:49.763Z

(Edited version of what I posted to the Open Thread)

I registered because I had a very interesting experience earlier this week and I thought it might be of some interest to the community here. I suffered some sort of psychological or medical event (still not sure what, although my leading theories are dissociative episode or stroke) that seemed to either suppress my emotions or perhaps just my awareness of them. What followed was a sort of, as I later looked back on it, 'pathological rationality'. Which is to say, given the information I had, I seemed to make solid inferences about what was likely to be true, and yet in many ways the whole thing was maladaptive from a survival standpoint.

One of the interesting things is that the morning after the event, while I was still affected, I wrote down my thoughts in a text file to help me evaluate them. Since returning to 'normal', I've reread that file multiple times, and I'm pretty fascinated by it. I thought others might also be.

natureofreality.txt

Scenario 1: I observe objective reality, I am suffering from delusions. Other people are genuinely trying to help me.

Scenario 2: My existence is in some way important enough to an external entity or entities that I am being systematically, intentionally, deceived. Other people are fully or partially under the control of the deceiving entity and acting to further the deception.

Scenario 3: My existence is unknown and/or considered unimportant by any external entities. I am being systematically deceived but it is unintentional or otherwise untargeted. Other people are entities similar to myself but unaware of the nature of their existence.

I cannot fully discount any of these three scenarios. Cognition is greatly improved but still somewhat suspect. Short term memory has returned to functioning at a 'normal' level. I still feel no emotions.

Support for scenario 1: Many aspects of my recent and ongoing experience align perfectly with prior information regarding delusions and paranoia.

Counter-evidence: Some aspects, such as my apparent lack of emotions and continued ability to reason, run directly counter to prior information regarding delusions and paranoia. All prior information suspect in any case--the only basis for considering prior information difficult to fake is from prior information itself. Even prior information suggests nested simulation far more like

...
Open thread, September 18 - September 24, 2017
by Thomas — 2017-09-18T08:30:37.911Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top-level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting
Rational Feed
by sapphire — 2017-09-17T22:03:25.134Z

Note: I am trying out a weekly feed.

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Superintelligence Risk Project: Conclusion by Jeff Kaufman - "I'm not convinced that AI risk should be highly prioritized, but I'm also not convinced that it shouldn't. Highly qualified researchers in a position to have a good sense the field have massively different views on core questions like how capable ML systems are now, how capable they will be soon, and how we can influence their development." There are links to all the previous posts. The final write up goes into some detail about MIRI's research program and an alternative safety paradigm connected to openAI.

On Bottlenecks To Intellectual Progress In The by Habryka (lesswrong) - Why LessWrong 2.0 is a project worth pursuing. A summary of the existing discussion around LessWrong 2.0. The models used to design the new page. Open questions.

Patriarchy Is The Problem by Sarah Constantin - Dominance hierarchies and stress in low status monkeys. Serotnonin levels and the abuse cycles. Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Submission displays. Morality-As-Submission vs. Morality-As-Pattern. The biblical God and the Golden Calf.

Ea Survey 2017 Series Donation Data by Tee (EA forum) - How Much are EAs Donating? Percentage of Income Donated. Donations Data Among EAs Earning to Give (who donated 57% of the total). Comparisons to 2014 and 2015. Donations totals were very heavily skewed by large donors.

===Scott:

Classified Thread 3 Semper Classifiedelis by Scott Alexander - " Post advertisements, personals, and any interesting success stories from the last thread". Scott's notes: Community member starting tutoring company, homeless community member gofundme, data science in North Carolina.

Toward A Predictive Theory Of Depression by Scott Alexander - "If the brain works to minimize prediction error, isn’t its best strategy to sit in a dark room and do nothing forever? After all, then it can predict its sense-data pretty much perfectly – it’ll always just stay “darkened room”." But why would low confidence cause sadness? Well, what, really, is emotion?

Promising Projects for Open Science To by SlateStarScratchpad - Scott answers what the most promising projects are in the field of transparent and open science and meta-science.

Ot84 Threadictive Processing by Scott Alexand...
David C Denkenberger on Food Production after a Sun Obscuring Disaster
by JenniferRM — 2017-09-17T21:06:27.996Z

Having paid a moderate amount of attention to threats to the human species for over a decade, I've run across an unusually good thinker with expertise unusually suited to helping with many threats to the human species, that I didn't know about until quite recently.

I think he warrants more attention from people thinking seriously about X-risks.

David C Denkenberger's CV is online and presumably has a list of all his X-risks relevant material mixed into a larger career that seems to have been focused on energy engineering.

He has two technical patents (one for a microchannel heat exchanger and another for a compound parabolic concentrator) and interests that appear to span the gamut of energy technologies and uses.

Since about 2013 he has been working seriously on the problem of food production after a sun obscuring disaster, and he is in Lesswrong's orbit basically right now.

This article is about opportunities for intellectual cross-pollination!

Appearances On Or Near Lesswrong In The Past

On 2016-05-10 RyanCarey posted Improving long-run civilisational robustness and mentioned Denkenberger as one of the main authors in the literature of shelter construction after really major disasters, with a special interest in the food production that would happen in such facilities.
On 2017-08-24 ChristianKl posted [Link] Nasas ambitious plan to save earth from a supervolcano in whose comments turchin mentioned Denkenberger as a relevant expert.
Slightly farther afield but very recent and still nearby, on 2017-09-14 Robin Hanson posted Prepare for Nuclear Winter which was a very abstract and formal exhortation to care about global food production in the event of a sun obscuring disaster, until the final sentence where he called attention to "ALLFED" which is very dense with citations to papers on the subject, and basically every paper has Denkenberger as a co-author.
In the last few hours I saw Denkenberger working his way through comments on Hanson's couple-day-old posts, correcting the factual mistakes in people's comments with links pointing to papers that contain the correct information.

There is probably an intellectual opportunity to get Denkenberger's attention and help Lesswrong get smarter about an important sub area related to the mitigation of existential risks.

A Generic Solution To Many Classes Of Risk

One of the long term deep insights on X-risks that is somewhat ...
The Wedding Ceremony
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-09-17T00:54:10.000Z

Family and friends of the groom and bride, we are gathered here today to join this young couple in the union of permanent cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.

They are happy to share this moment with all their guests, and are grateful that you provide the social pressure that allows them to commit to cooperation with credibility, by providing external enforcement.

As groom and bride prepared for this ceremony, they reflected on the alignment of values and capabilities that lets the utility function of each one be pursued better by joining together in a partnership with no easily predictable end date. The groom wants to thank the social stratification that encourages assortative mating by educational attainment, ensuring that both partners have equal capacity to pursue their utility in the information age. The bride wants to thank the pervasive surveillance of social media that assured her that the couple’s utility functions align with high correlation before she even met the groom.

Bride, do you come here freely and without reservation to modify your utility function to the arithmetic mean of the two utility functions, for each current and possible world-state?

– I do.

Groom, do you agree to self-modify to the same end, up to any structural or informational uncertainty you may have in modeling the bride’s preexisting utility function?

– I do.

Now, by the power vested in me by timeless decision theory, it is my honor and pleasure to declare you sub-modules of a unified agent. You may seal this declaration with a saliva-based exchange of immune system data.
Perspective Reasoning’s Counter to The Doomsday Argument
by Xianda_GAO_duplicate0.5321505782395719 — 2017-09-16T19:39:21.597Z

To be honest I feel a bit frustrated that this is not getting much attention. I am obviously biased but I think this article is quite important. It points out the controversies surrounding the doomsday argument, simulation argument, boltzmann's brain, presumptuous philosopher, sleeping beauty problem and many other aspects of anthropic reasoning is caused by the same thing: perspective inconsistency. If we keep the same perspective then the paradoxes and weird implications just goes away. I am not a academic so I have no easy channel for publication. That's why I am hoping this community can give some feedback. If you have half an hour to waste anyway why not give it a read? There's no harm in it.

Abstract:

From a first person perspective, a self-aware observer can inherently identify herself from other individuals. However, from a third person perspective this identity through introspection does not apply. On the other hand, because an observer’s own existence is a prerequisite for her reasoning she would always conclude she exists from a first person perspective. This means observers have to take a third person perspective to meaningfully contemplate her chance of not coming into existence. Combining the above points suggests arguments which utilize identity through introspection and information about one’s chance of existence fails by not keeping a consistent perspective. This helps explaining questions such as doomsday argument and sleeping beauty problem. Furthermore, it highlights the problem with anthropic reasonings such as self-sampling assumption and self-indication assumption.

Any observer capable of introspection is able to recognize herself as a separate entity from the rest of the world. Therefore a person can inherently identify herself from other people. However, due to the first-person nature of introspection it cannot be used to identify anybody else. This means from a third-person perspective each individual has to be identified by other means. For ordinary problems this difference between first- and third-person reasoning bears no significance so we can arbitrarily switch perspectives without affecting the conclusion. However this is not always the case.

One notable difference between the perspectives is about the possibility of not existing. Because one’s existence is a prerequisite for her think...
Against Facebook: The Stalking
by Zvi — 2017-09-16T12:41:44.000Z

Epistemic Status: Nothing we didn’t basically already know, but felt obligated to share

Previously: Against Facebook, Against Facebook: Comparison to Alternatives and Call to Action

Also Previously But Fully Optional: Help Us Find Your Blog (and others), How to Destroy Civilization

I knew that when Facebook went it would go spooky. It was still spooky.

After the events of How to Destroy Civilization, I had definitive proof that Facebook was not only using terrible software, it was making my life appreciably worse to interact with Facebook. It still took me several weeks and new inspiration to delete the app from my phone. That came in the form of the article Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation? which is the summary version of the book iGen.

Later I also read the book. The book has some neat charts, but unless you’re super fascinated I would stick to the article. Both make a strong case that smartphones and social media are destroying young people’s lives and making them miserable. I have reviewing the book on my ‘maybe’ stack.

Today on the radio I heard from an author whose book makes an explicit case for boredom. She claims we need quiet time to reflect and develop ideas. Therefore filling every spare moment with our phones is really bad. I am skeptical, but find it plausible.

In any case, I finally deleted the app.

This made me instantly happy.

It also set Facebook into action.

Its first trick was that suddenly its notifications were turned back on. It seems that it thought the two of us had a deal. I keep it on my phone, and in exchange it will agree to not spam me with an email every time my friends like a photo.

I marked a few of those as spam and Google made the problem go away.

Later that day, Facebook fired its second salvo, with an email that said “Having trouble logging into Facebook? Get back on with just one click!”

Needless to say, this did not work.

A few weeks later, I made the mistake of checking Facebook’s website for the few people I have See First on for, which I’ve been doing less and less often. While there, I was chatted up briefly by an old friend. It was nice to hear from her.

Her second message mysteriously had a giant link to installing the messenger application.

I asked her what that was doing there. She laughed and said she hadn’t meant to put it there. An accident. I’m sure...
Stupid Questions September 2017
by Erfeyah — 2017-09-15T21:21:02.019Z

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
LW 2.0 Strategic Overview
by habryka — 2017-09-15T03:00:07.826Z

Update: We're in open beta! At this point you will be able to sign up / login with your LW 1.0 accounts (if the latter, we did not copy over your passwords, so hit "forgot password" to receive a password-reset email).

Hey Everyone!

This is the post for discussing the vision that I and the rest of the LessWrong 2.0 team have for the new version of LessWrong, and to just generally bring all of you up to speed with the plans for the site. This post has been overdue for a while, but I was busy coding on LessWrong 2.0, and I am myself not that great of a writer, which means writing things like this takes quite a long time for me, and so this ended up being delayed a few times. I apologize for that.

With Vaniver’s support, I’ve been the primary person working on LessWrong 2.0 for the last 4 months, spending most of my time coding while also talking to various authors in the community, doing dozens of user-interviews and generally trying to figure out how to make LessWrong 2.0 a success. Along the way I’ve had support from many people, including Vaniver himself who is providing part-time support from MIRI, Eric Rogstad who helped me get off the ground with the architecture and infrastructure for the website, Harmanas Chopra who helped build our Karma system and did a lot of user-interviews with me, Raemon who is doing part-time web-development work for the project, and Ben Pace who helped me write this post and is basically co-running the project with me (and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future).

We are running on charitable donations, with $80k in funding from CEA in the form of an EA grant and $10k in donations from Eric Rogstad, which will go to salaries and various maintenance costs. We are planning to continue running this whole project on donations for the foreseeable future, and legally this is a project of CFAR, which helps us a bunch with accounting and allows people to get tax benefits from giving us money.

Now that the logistics is out of the way, let’s get to the meat of this post. What is our plan for LessWrong 2.0, what were our key assumptions in designing the site, what does this mean for the current LessWrong site, and what should we as a community discuss more to make sure the new site is a success?

Here’s the rough structure of this post:

My perspective on why LessWrong 2.0 is a project worth pursuing
A summary of the exis

...
LW 2.0 Open Beta starts 9/20
by Vaniver — 2017-09-15T02:57:10.729Z

Two years ago, I wrote Lesswrong 2.0. It’s been quite the adventure since then; I took up the mantle of organizing work to improve the site but was missing some of the core skills, and also never quite had the time to make it my top priority. Earlier this year, I talked with Oliver Habryka and he joined the project and has done the lion’s share of the work since then, with help along the way from Eric Rogstad, Harmanas Chopra, Ben Pace, Raymond Arnold, and myself. Dedicated staff has led to serious progress, and we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So what’s next? We’ve been running the closed beta for some time at lesserwrong.com with an import of the old LW database, and are now happy enough with it to show it to you all. On 9/20, next Wednesday, we’ll turn on account creation, making it an open beta. (This will involve making a new password, as the passwords are stored hashed and we’ve changed the hashing function from the old site.) If you don't have an email address set for your account (see here), I recommend adding it by the end of the open beta so we can merge accounts. For the open beta, just use the Intercom button in the lower right corner if you have any trouble.

Once the open beta concludes, we’ll have a vote of veteran users (over 1k karma as of yesterday) on whether to change the code at lesswrong.com over to the new design or not. It seems important to look into the dark and have an escape valve in case this is the wrong direction for LW. If the vote goes through, we’ll import the new LW activity since the previous import to the new servers, merging the two, and point the url to the new servers. If it doesn’t, we’ll likely turn LW into an archive.

Oliver Habryka will be posting shortly with his views on LW and more details on our plans for how LW 2.0 will further intellectual progress in the community.