trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Two Coordination Styles
by abramdemski — 2018-02-07T09:00:18.594Z

In game theory, assumptions of rationality imply that any "solution" of a game must be an equilibrium.* However, most games have many equilibria, and realistic agents don't always know which equilibrium they are in. Certain equilibrium strategies, such as tit-for-tat in iterated prisoner's dilemma, can also be seen in this broader context as coordination strategies: adopting them teaches others to adopt them, because you punish anyone playing some other strategy. In a narrow sense, these strategies solve both the game itself and the equilibrium selection problem. (Technically, such strategies are the evolutionarily stable ones.)

I want to make an informal point about two very different ways this can work out in real life: coordination strategies in which it feels like everyone is fighting to pull the system in different directions but it all cancels out, vs situations where it feels like the coordination strategy is your friend because it saves everyone effort. I believe the second case exists, but it is rather puzzling in terms of the existing literature.

*Different rationality assumptions give different equilibrium concepts; Nash equilibria are the most popular. Correlated equilibria are the second most popular and somewhat more relevant to the discussion here, but I won't get into enough technical details for it to matter.

This post made possible by discussions with Steve Rayhawk, Harmanas Chopra, Jennifer RM, Anna Salamon, and Andrew Critch. Added some edits proposed by Elo.

Schelling Negotiations

Schelling discussed agents solving the equilibrium selection problem by choosing points which other agents are most likely to choose based on prominence, and the term Schelling point was coined to describe such likely equilibria. The classic examples revolve around agents who cannot communicate with one another (highlighting the need for guesswork about each other's behavior), but adding the ability to communicate does not eliminate the equilibrium-selection problem; our community tends to use the term 'Schelling fence' to refer to the analogous concept when open negotiation is involved -- though my impression is that economic literature uses Schelling point for this case as well.

In A Positive Account of Property Rights, David Friedman** explains the emergence of property rights through the negotiation of Schelling fences. Ne...
Hammertime Day 9: Time Calibration
by alkjash — 2018-02-07T01:40:01.141Z

This is part 9 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.

I’ve been thinking about whether or not regular betting, prediction markets, and being well-calibrated is actually useful, and if so how to practice train calibration on a short feedback loop.

Being able to make accurate time-to-completion estimates, at least, is extremely powerful. This post describes my current strategy for staying calibrated about time estimates.

Day 9: Time Calibration

Of all the cognitive biases in the Sequences, Planning fallacy seems to be one of the most directly harmful and eminently fixable. The goal of today’s exercise is to build a tool for routinely checking your calibration about how long things take.

Although Planning fallacy is the clear antagonist in this situation, I also want to gesture at a second class of failures I’ve been facing which involve systematically overestimating the difficulty of things.

Vortices of Dread

After spending a few days checking my calibration, I was surprised at the sheer number of things I routinely overestimate the difficulty of, mostly because of an ingrained fear of housework and the bureaucratic machine.

Several years ago, I watched my father spend nearly a full week on taxes, reading all the fine print, cross-referencing internet forums, and triple-checking every field. I did my own taxes for the first time last year, expecting it to only be more nightmarish – after all, my father’s experience surely saved him mounds of time already, right? Instead, the whole process took me a single afternoon.

Two weeks ago, I set out to get a travel visa done with a travel agent after months of dread. I blocked off the entire afternoon in the (it seemed to me) likely event that I’d have to drive back and forth to pick up, print, and/or fix documentation. The visit ended up taking a total of ten minutes, not counting the two mile drive.

Last week, I set out on an odyssey to make a photo album for family members, dreading the many evenings I would pore over old files and spend arranging prints. The whole process took two and a half hours from start to finish with the timely aid of Yoda Timers.

What threw my award-winning calibration off so wildly? Two things were at play:

First, most of my System 1 data on how long things take comes from watching my anal-retentive parents. I instinctively feel that cooking a meal takes nearly an hour, that every ...
UDT as a Nash Equilibrium
by cousin_it — 2018-02-06T14:08:30.211Z

I realized today that UDT doesn't really need the assumption that other players use UDT. In any game where all players have the same utility function, "everyone using UDT" is a Nash equilibrium that gives everyone their highest possible expected utility. So you can just use it unilaterally.

That covers such cases as Absent-Minded Driver, Psy-Kosh's problem, Wei's coordination problem. Notably it doesn't cover the Prisoner's Dilemma, because the players assign different utilities to the same outcome.

(Also this shows how Von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility maximization is basically a restriction of UDT to single player games with perfect recall. For imperfect recall (AMD) or multiple players (Psy-Kosh) you need the full version.)

You can actually push game theory a bit further, and allow games where players have different utility functions, as long as some subset of players can jointly enforce their highest possible expected utilities. UDT doesn't support that kind of decision-making, but really it should be a no-brainer too...?
Crypto autopsy reply
by alexei — 2018-02-06T10:32:31.291Z

(X-posted from my FB post: https://www.facebook.com/alexei.andreev.3/posts/1403550339754401)

Reply to Eliezer's post on crypto: https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10156147605134228
Which itself is a response to Scott Alexander's post: https://www.lesserwrong.com/…/Ma…/a-lesswrong-crypto-autopsy

One thing I haven't seen discussed in either of the posts is the social aspect. When Bitcoin was created, LW was a hub for a lot of pretty smart contrarians. Just with that info alone, I'd give any crazy-seeming idea that surfaced there and wasn't immediately debunked pretty good odds of being vaguely correct and likely ahead of its time. (I think there is a good chance LW 2.0 might become that again.)

So I agree with Scott, the tragedy is that our very smart peers brought this idea to the community, and the community vaguely agreed that it's a good idea, but failed to execute. (Just like our community mostly agrees that cryo is a good idea, but also gave birth to the term cryostination.)

Eliezer's counter-claim about efficient markets seems weak to me. It was clear at the time that this was a very niche idea, and that not a lot of people have looked into it. It was also a difficult idea to digest: it required a solid understanding of the economics and the technical parts. Many people who care about making money are not technical, and can't evaluate cutting-edge technical ideas. I think Bitcoin was very clearly out of reach of efficient markets. (By Eliezer's reasoning, AGI would be a bad idea around 2010, and so would be cryo even now. Because if they were as good as they seemed, surely people who were interested in power/money would be putting way more effort into AGI, and people who were interested in not dying would be doing cryo right now.)

I don't think I saw those early Bitcoin posts on LW. My own story was that my brother asked me around 2012: "Hey, have you heard about this Bitcoin thing? I just read about it on Reddit. Seems cool, we should buy some!" And I laughed and said it was the dumbest thing ever.

Less than a year later he brought it up again, and it was clear by that time that I made a mistake. That's when my rationality training kicked in. "Ouch, I though. He was totally right, and I completely dismissed this idea. I should not make the same mistake again!" By that time my soc...
Pseudo-Rationality
by Chris_Leong — 2018-02-06T08:25:46.527Z

Pseudo-rationality is the social performance of rationality, as opposed to actual rationality. Here are some examples:

Being overly skeptical to demonstrate how skeptical you are
Always fighting for the truth, even when you’re burning more social capital than the argument is worth
Optimising for charitability in discussions to the point where you are consistently being exploited
Refusing to do any social signalling or ever bow to social norms to signal that you're above them
Spending too much time reading rationality content or the kinds of things rationalists are interested in
Adopting techniques like pomodoros or TAPs merely because all the cool (rationalist) kids are using them, instead of asking if they are really helping you
Hating things like post-modernism because other rationalists hate them and not because you've actually thought about it for yourself (but yes, post-modernism is mostly incoherent)
Over-analysing unimportant decisions so that you can prove you made the rational decision

Why does this happen? Status and social norms distort the way we see the world. Even if it doesn't fool everyone, it will fool some people. Or if it fools no-one, you'll at least fool yourself. Here are some thought patterns:

All the other rationalists think I’m a good rationalist, surely I must be (all social incentive systems have loopholes)
All the other rationalists do this, so it must be rational (can be applied even if you are doing it to a much higher degree)
I am so much more rational than those other people who are wrong/bow to social norms/aren’t at all skeptical (more rational does not equal rational)

Why did I write this post? Well, it seems the next thing you need after becoming a rationalist, is something to help you figure out if you're doing any of it wrong. I hope this helps, but let me know if I should add anything else to the list.

Reflection based on comments:

Where this gets complex is when you desire the successful social performance of rationality as a goal that holds up after reflection. Some people may value this to a level that seems excessive to most people and so may not be acting irrationally. More generally, it seems that every rationalist should value successfully performing rationality to some degree, even if only instrumentally. These considerations complicate discussions of what is or is not pseudo-rational, but do not inva...
Speed improvements and changes to data querying
by habryka — 2018-02-06T04:23:20.693Z

I changed the way we query for data and the way the page gets updated, so that we now basically never query for data without the user reloading the page. This is a pretty major change to the way the page updates, and I expect some bugs to show up somewhere.

This means scrolling on large comment threads or posts should now no longer lag, and comments should no longer resort when other people vote on things while you are looking at the comments (which quite annoyed some users). And in general the processing power the site requires should be massively reduced.

If you notice any bugs in the meantime, reloading the page should almost always fix it, and then send us a message so we can fix things properly.
Introduction to Noematology
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2018-02-05T23:28:32.151Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/introduction-to-noematology-fac7ae7d805d

NB: Originally posted on Map and Territory on Medium, so some of the internal series links go there.

Last time we performed a reduction of the phenomenon of conscious self experience and through it discovered several key ideas. To refresh ourselves on them:

Things exist ontologically as patterns within our experience of them.
Things exist ontically as clusters of stuff within the world.
Things exist ephemerally though chains of experiences creating the perception of time.
Through ephemeral existence over time, things can feed back experiences of themselves to themselves, making them cybernetic, and in so doing create information.
Things can exist within information, those things can experience themselves, and it’s from those information things that ontology, and thus consciousness, arises.

We covered all of these in detail except the last one. We established that the feedback of things created from the information of feedback gives rise to ontology by noting that information things have ontological existences that transcend their ontic existences even as they are necessarily manifested ontically. From there I claimed that, since people report feeling as if they experience themselves as themselves, consciousness depends on and is thus necessarily created by the ontological experience of the self. Unfortunately this assumes that our naive sense of self could not appear any other way, and in the interest of skepticism, we must ask, can we be sure there is not some more parsimonious way to explain consciousness that does not depend on ontological self experience?

I think not, but some philosophers disagree. Consider the idea of p-zombies: philosophical “zombies” that are exactly like “real” people in all ways except that they are not really conscious. Or consider John Searle’s Chinese room, where a person who cannot understand Chinese nevertheless is able to mimmic a native Chinese speaker via mechanistic means. In each of these cases we are presented with a world that looks like our own except that consciousness is not necessary to explain the evidence of consciousness.

Several responses are possible, but the one I find most appealing is the response from computational complexity. In short, it says that p-zombies and Chinese rooms are possible by unrolling the feedback loops of ontological self experience, but this requires thin...
"Cheat to Win": Engineering Positive Social Feedback
by sarahconstantin — 2018-02-05T23:16:50.858Z

This post outlines a very simple strategy that's been working for me lately. It may be obvious to some, but it only clicked for me recently.

Positive social stimulation is fun for humans, right? We like to be liked. It makes us cheerful. We're motivated to do things that make people smile at us and praise us.

But purely optimizing for being liked is a bad idea for lots of reasons: it leads away from your real goals and values, it motivates you to be deceptive, it's kind of shallow and unsatisfying in the long run.

So here's what you do instead: first, decide what you actually want to do. Then, seek out people who will socially reward you for doing that, and set yourself up to get social rewards.

Marketing experts will tell you that you have to "find your tribe", find the fans of your product, and focus on delighting them. It's fine if you have haters. Haters are almost irrelevant. You succeed if you have enough fans who value your stuff highly enough.

This applies across areas of life. You only need (about) one job. You only need one spouse. You only need a small number of close friends. Having great supporters is more important than avoiding having any haters.

I used to have the intuition that "fairness" meant I wasn't allowed to bias my social environment in my favor; that I should expose myself equally to people who liked and disliked me, people who did and didn't share my values, in order to get a "balanced" impression of the world.

This is pretty stupid, actually.

You, as a very small creature moving through infinite space, don't learn about the universe by drawing uniform samples from it. You learn through pursuing goals, which means you'll spend more attention on areas of the universe that are useful to you, which means things that are easy for you or helpful for your life, things that give you energy and resources to explore more.

An amoeba, as it crawls around, is going to learn more about the parts of the petri dish with food than the parts without. This is because the amoeba is alive. So are you.

As a motivational hack towards any kind of project, it really helps to set yourself up to have recurrent social interactions with people who support you in that project.

Meetup groups are good for this. Mixers. Mailing lists. Actually select for people who like the thing ...
Fun Theory in EverQuest
by moridinamael — 2018-02-05T20:26:34.761Z

This is an excerpt from my personal blog/newsletter that a couple of people said was worth sharing. It was originally written for a handful of close friends, and I have not edited it much. It was either post it as-is or probably never post it, but I think there's something worthwhile to be found here, even in its current form.

I've been thinking about EQ way too much since our podcast on the topic. When I think of EQ, I feel something like the Longing that the Elves of Middle Earth feel for Valinor. I don't feel anything like that for any other phase of my life.

I know, I know, I probably love EQ and want to marry it simply because it was something that I did very intensely for an important phase of my life, and I would have the same exact feelings about WOW if I had been born five years later than I was.

All that said, I think EQ did some things pretty perfectly, and I want real life to be more like EQ.

For example, dungeons and grouping. Groups were hard-limited as six people. This limitation was a blessing in disguise. You can't organically coordinate more than around six people without having something like an "official" group leader. Six people feels like just about the maximum that the human mind can cope with on a one-to-one basis. Research says that small task forces peak in effectiveness at roughly seven people, and I think rounding down to six is safe in a game-world where things can change very quickly.

At the time I don't remember reading anything about the "culture" of EQ, but in retrospect, the culture was actually really great. (I have a feeling that if EQ were popular in 2018 there would be thinkpieces about the "culture of EQ" and this would ruin the culture of EQ in a Hofstadterian fashion.)

You look for a group. You find a group, or a group finds you. You behave in a cordial and competent fashion, and the existing group members will instantly accept you as one of them. This dynamic by itself set off all kinds of primate chemical cascades in my brain and may even be partially responsible for the addictiveness of the game. I recall a relatively consistent feeling of camaraderie in EQ groups. Rarely there would be some member who was a douchebag or a freeloader, and these people were usually abandoned relatively quickly. The system was self-policing with minimal drama and generally operated lik...
European Community Weekend 2018 Announcement
by DreamFlasher — 2018-02-05T15:43:37.898Z

We are excited to announce this year's European LessWrong Community Weekend. For the fifth time, rationalists from all over Europe (and some from outside Europe) are gathering in Berlin to socialize, have fun, exchange knowledge and skills, and have interesting discussions.

The event takes place September 7th to September 9th and, like last year, it will be held in the beautiful Jugendherberge Wannsee which contains a large room for central events, several seminar rooms, and lots of comfortable spaces inside and out to socialize or relax.

This is a community-driven event. That means that while there will be a keynote and pre-planned content, the bulk of the schedule will be filled by the participants. There will be space to give talks, short or long, provide workshops, or just gather some people to do an activity together. In previous years we had the talks, lightning talks and workshops you would expect, as well as lighter activities such as morning-workouts, meditation sessions, authentic relating games, swimming in the lake and many more. Of course, there will also be time to reconnect with friends and form new connections with other aspiring rationalists.

Some valuable information

Most of the talks and discussions will be held in English, so you do not need to be able to speak German to attend.

The ticket price of €150 includes accommodation for two nights, on-site meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and snacks, and a welcome lunch on Friday at 12:00.

The event wraps up Sunday afternoon around 15:00. In the days after the weekend, participants are invited to stay in Berlin a little longer to explore the city, go bouldering, play frisbee, etc. While this is not part of the official event, we will coordinate couch-surfing opportunities to avoid the need for hotels.

tl;dr

When? 7-9 September 2018
Where?

http://jh-wannsee.de

How much? €150
Apply here:

http://tiny.cc/lwcw2018_signup

and
Submit a contribution to support your application:

http://tiny.cc/lwcw2018_contribution

If you have any question, please email us at

lwcw.europe@gmail.com

.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

The Community Weekend organizers and LessWrong Deutschland e.V.
Beware Social Coping Strategies
by Lulie — 2018-02-05T04:48:08.219Z

Worlds

The world is a huge, complex, scary place.

Winter used to freeze us dead, and today lives are still destroyed by natural disasters like tsunami and forest fires. Plagues used to destroy our communities, and people still die from disease every day. We want more power over our surroundings — more intelligent computers, better space rockets — but construction is difficult and often dangerous. As a child, navigating the world directly is also terrifying: sharp objects, distressingly loud sounds, heights, electric shocks, etc. It takes an incredible amount of thought to merely understand and predict the world, let alone to avoid being hurt by it.

The social world is even worse.

Every person is a world in themselves. Every person has their own model of the world, plus their own thoughts and dreams and desires and morality. These may not always be consistent with your own, and that can cause conflicts. Their preferences are not always consistent with the preferences of other people, and conflicts between them can affect you. Individuals can also have conflicts inside themselves, making them unpredictable and confusing.

And it's not just individuals you have to navigate. When people get together, they form groups and institutions. You are born, and find it's not just sharp objects you have to watch out for, but violating codes that were made up by people you've never met. You find yourself in complicated systems with their own logic and rules: government, school, a family structure, religious or political groups. These systems are additional worlds to learn — and they share the frustrating property of individuals that they are not entirely consistent.

Navigating all these worlds, and learning how to follow or evade their rules without getting hurt, is tough.

Being Thwarted

As if that weren't bad enough, the social world has a special property that the natural world doesn't have: adaptive problems. That is, problems which adapt when you try to solve them[1].

In the natural and abstract world, problems are broadly static. If you move a rock out of your way, it stays there. When you realise 1+1=2, it doesn't change its mind and become 3. But if you try to solve a problem in the social world, people are constantly changing the problem landscape. They can intentionally thwart you — using their own creativity to adapt the problem and make it...