trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
I found a wild explanation for two big anomalies in metaphysics then became very doubtful of it
by mako yass — 2019-04-01T03:19:44.080Z

It's april first so I'm going to talk about the theology I've been doing.

I wanted to play this as straight as I possibly could, but partway through writing the essay I tripped over some difficult questions I don't think I can answer. I can no longer in good conscience project the kind of anguished conviction that I'd need to be able to prank myself and my readers with a bostromian religious conversion. I am sorry. I still think it's an interesting theory, so instead of really trying to sell you on it I'll just summarise it and discuss the flaws. I'll include the rest of the essay, but I recommend it only to those with a special interest in this sort of thing.

Problems to be solved

I'll start by observing two things about the anthropics of our universe that don't make sense under the standard model (insofar as we have a standard model for anthropics)

Anthropic measure seems to be concentrated in humans/living things, even though most of the things that exist are dead clouds of hydrogen. It is strange that when existence observes itself, despite the relative rarity of living things, observers like you or I find our subjectivity situated in the positions of living things.

I assume panpsychism as the null hypothesis. It is often thought that any part of the universe that observes must be conscious or sentient to do it, that observing or measuring is intrinsically linked with those patterns of behaviour. It seems clear to me that that's overfitting. The thing you know to possess anthropic measure (you) happens to have conscious behaviour, so you presume there's a link. Your dataset has only one element. That's not enough.

Think of Alzheimers. If you progressively take away the features of conscious behaviour, memory formation, symbolic thought, would you really doubt that anthropic measure still remains? Subjectivity/experience and conscious behaviour are not the same thing.

If you don't consider anthropic measure to be a coherent or important concept, I wrote this short for you. The concept of anthropic measure is a mysterious bastard, but a time will come when betting agents wont be able to avoid dealing with it any more.

The Doomsday Argument. It is strange that we find ourselves in the early stages of a civilization's history, considering that there will be many millions of times more of us l

...
On the Nature of Agency

by Ruby — 2019-04-01T01:32:44.660Z

Epistemic status: Fairly high confidence. Probably not complete, but I do think pieces presented are all part of the true picture.

Agency and being an agent are common terms within the Effective Altruist and Rationalist communities. I have only used heard them used positively, typically to praise someone’s virtue as an agent or to decry the lack of agents and agency.

As a concept, agency is related to planning. Since I’ve been writing about planning of late, I thought I’d attempt a breakdown of agency within my general planning paradigm. I apologize that this write-up is a little rushed.

Examples of Agency and Non-Agency

Keeping the exposition concrete, let’s start with some instances of things I expect to be described as more or less agentic.

Things likely to be described as more agentic:

Setting non-trivial, non-standard (ambitious) goals and achieving them.
Dropping out of school and founding a startup.
Becoming president.
Making a million dollars.
Self-teaching rather than enrolling in courses.
Building and customizing your own things rather than purchasing pre-made.
Researching niche areas which you think are promising instead of the popular ones.
Disregarding typical relationship structures and creating your own which work for you.
Noticing there are issues in your workplace and instigating change.
Noticing there are issues in your society and instigating change.
Gaming the system (especially when the system is unjust).
Reading diverse materials to form your own models and opinions.
Being able to receive a task with limited instruction and able to execute it competently to a high standard.
Ignoring conventional advice and inventing your own better way.
Having heretical thoughts and believing things other people think are wrong or crazy.
Strong willingness to trust one’s own opinion despite the views of others and even experts.
Accomplishing any difficult task which most people are unable to.

Things likely to be described as less agentic:

Spending your life working on the family farm like your parents before you.
Unquestioningly adopting the views of your friends, family, faith, or other authorities.
Proceeding through school, undergraduate, graduate degree as the simplest pathway.
Sticking to conservatively prestigious or stable professions like medicine, law, nursing, construction, teaching, or even programming.
Seeking social approval for one’s plans and actions or at least en

...
Experimental Open Thread April 2019: Socratic method
by  — 2019-04-01T01:29:00.664Z

This post was popular, but the idea never got picked up. Let's have an experimental open thread this month!

The rules:

Top level comments would be claims. Second level comments would be discouraged from directly saying that someone is wrong and instead encouraged to ask them questions instead to get them to think

Let top level comments be debatable claims, first tier responses be questions, second tier answers, responses, answers, etc. Try to go as deep as possible, I'd expect an actual update to be increasingly likely to happen as you continue the conversation.
Open Thread April 2019
by  — 2019-04-01T01:14:08.567Z

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, you can put it here.

Also, if you are new to LessWrong and want to introduce yourself, this is the place to do it. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are welcome. If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, and seeing if there are any meetups in your area.

The Open Thread sequence is here.
What are effective strategies for mitigating the impact of acute sleep deprivation on cognition?
by  — 2019-03-31T18:31:29.866Z

I've recently been finding that I struggle much more with intellectual work (math, hard programming, writing, etc.) when I sleep less 6.5-7 hours. While I'm at peace with the fact that I seem to generally require >7 hours a sleep, it's frustrating that even though I set aside enough time for adequate sleep, I'll often wake up after only ~6 hours of sleep and not be able to fall back asleep.

My cognitive ability seems to be impacted by a single night of bad sleep even when I've been sleeping well in the recent past. Concretely, if I've slept 8 hours every night for two weeks, a single night of poor sleep can still result in a ~50% less productive day.

In addition to impacting productivity, acute sleep deprivation also leaves me much less capable of entertaining myself by thinking, so I become much more inclined to seek out distracting forms of entertainment like scrolling through the internet. It also seems to increase my cravings for generally "unhealthy" foods (I've seen references to this in literature, but won't bother linking them since it's not the focus of my question).

Other useful notes about my general sleep habits/history include:

I'm not sure if I've always been this sensitive to sleep deprivation and just notice it more due to a combination of more introspective and spending more time on certain activities or if something's changed and I've become more sensitive.

I generally have 1 cup of coffee in the morning around when I wake up. More cups of coffee do not seem to offset sleep deprivation's impact on my cognitive ability, and in fact have at times exacerbated it.

I've tried napping when it's fit with my schedule and each time ended up lying awake for the 20-40 minutes during which I intended to nap.

I'd love to hear others' strategies for mitigating the impact of acute sleep deprivation on cognitive ability. I've done some preliminary searching for papers, articles, etc., but those that I've found focus on reducing tiredness rather than on returning cognitive ability to baseline. I'm open to trying strategies including but not limited to diet changes, supplements, medication, and habit changes.
The Case for The EA Hotel
by Matt Goldenberg — 2019-03-31T12:31:30.969Z

Epistemic Status: I strongly believe all the things I’m writing here. These are mostly heuristics and mental models rather than hard data, which I think is necessary for a project so young. I’m trying to make a strong case for the EA hotel, not a balanced one (although it will probably be balanced by the $100 on the line for articles taking the opposite view).

The EA Chasm

There’s

something broken

about the pipeline for both

talent

and

projects

in the EA Community. There’s a space in which there’s a lot of talented people in EA who want to do good, and there’s a lot of people with ideas about projects that could do good. Finally, projects like

Charity Entrepreneurship

seem to indicate that there’s no shortage of ways to do good. What’s missing is a way to go from a talented EA—with no evidence behind your project, no previous projects under your belt, and little status within the EA community—to someone who has enough capital to prove that their project has merit.

This gap exists for a number of reasons, including strong risk aversion in the EA community, a lack of diversity in grant decision making processes, and a lack of manpower to vet hundreds of projects for the small amount of money they would need to prove themselves enough to move up to the “projects with strong evidence” category. A number of solutions have also been proposed to fill in this gap, including an

EA projects evaluation platform

and a suggestion for

EAs to work on Non-EA projects

in order to get a good track record and higher status (and thus be able to be hired or get grants). However, both of these suggestions miss out on one of the big reasons the chasm needs to be filled—strong vetting is nice, but there’s no replacement for simply trying many things and seeing what works.

Why The Chasm Matters

This Chasm is a big deal for the community. Organizations like CEA can work to guide the community towards a better future, and organizations like Charity Entrepreneurship can slowly work to allow more organizations that do good work. But by not tapping into the creativity and sheer variety of thought of the bottom two sections of the picture above, the EA community is losing out on a large number of utils that come from trying a lot of things from a diversity of perspectives, creating tight feedback loops, and seeing what works.

Silicon Valley is great proof of this concept. While it...
What LessWrong/Rationality/EA chat-servers exist that newcomers can join?
by habryka — 2019-03-31T03:30:20.819Z

A few times over the past few years newcomers to the community have asked me how they can start engaging with the community, and one of the lowest-cost ways to engage has historically been chatrooms.

I know that there has been a pretty significant proliferation of LW/Rationality/EA-related chat-servers in the past few years, and it seems like a good idea to collate all of them into a central repository.

I know about Elo's LW-Slack, and I know of the abstract existence of a bunch of EA-related Discord channels, but haven't been super active in this space, so I would appreciate other people's contributions.

If we get a good list, I think it would make sense to add that list to the community tab to make it easier to discover (or at least link this question from the community section).
Why Planning is Hard: A Multifaceted Model

by Ruby — 2019-03-31T02:33:05.169Z

Epistemic confidence: Highly confident. This post doesn’t cover everything relevant to the topic, but I am confident that everything presented is solid.

You may have noticed that planning can be rather difficult. Granted, not all plans are difficult, planning what you’re going to have for dinner isn’t too bad usually; however serious planning can range from merely daunting to seemingly intractable. Think of the challenge of planning towards a satisfying career, a fulfilling relationship, the success of your startup, or the simple preservation and flourishing of human civilization.

I present here a gears-level, reductionist account of planning which makes it starkly clear why planning is hard. The point not being that we should give up because planning is futile. Far from it. With a detailed model of the factors which make planning hard, we can derive a unified roadmap for how to get better at planning and ultimately have a unified, powerful approach to making better plans.

Contents

What is planning?
Planning is a prediction/information problem
Planning is a computation problem
Planning is a self-knowledge and self-mastery problem
Planning is a recursive problem
Summary: what it takes to be a good planner
Appendix: mathematical formalism of the computation problem

What is planning?

We can’t talk about why planning is hard before clarify what planning is. It’s pretty simple:

Planning is the selection of actions in order to achieve desired outcomes. [1]

The need for planning arises when the following conditions hold:

There are multiple states that the world can be in.
You have preferences over which states the world is in.
There are multiple actions available to you, each of which might cause the world to more likely be in some states rather than others.
You cannot take all of the actions, either because you lack the resources to do so or because the actions are inherently exclusive.

These conditions lead to a refinement of the definition above: planning is the selection of actions from among competing alternatives. One must prioritize among one’s available options and allocate resources to whichever options rank most highly.

Often one is allocating resources among multiple options in proportion to their priority, but I think we can still rightly call it prioritization even when one is only deciding between allocating 100% of their resources to only one option of out two. In o...
Will superintelligent AI be immortal?
by avturchin — 2019-03-30T08:50:45.831Z

There are two points of view. Either such AI will be immortal and it will find ways to overcome the possible end of the Universe and will make an infinite amount of computations. For example, Tipler's Omega is immortal.

Or the superintelligent AI will die at the end, few billion years from now, and thus it will make only a finite amount of computations (this idea is behind Bostrom's "astronomical waste").

The difference has important consequences for the final goals for AI and for our utilitarian calculations. In the first case (possibility of AI's immortality) the main instrumental goal of AI is to find ways to survive the end of the universe.

In the second case, the goal of AI is to create as much utility as possible before it dies.
List of Q&A Assumptions and Uncertainties [LW2.0 internal document]
by Ruby — 2019-03-29T23:55:41.168Z

Context

1. This is the second in a series of internal LessWrong 2.0 team document we are sharing publicly (with minimal editing) in an effort to help keep the community up to date with what we're thinking about and working on.

I suggest you first read this other document for context.

2. Caveat! This is internal document and does not represent any team consensus or conclusions; it was written by me (Ruby) alone and expresses my own in-progress understanding and reasoning. To the extent that the models/arguments of the other team members are included here, they've been filtered through me and aren't necessarily captured with high fidelity or strong endorsement. Since it was written on March 18th, it isn't even up to date with my own thinking
.

.

Epistemic status: Since the 18th when I first wrote this, I have many new lists and a lot more information. Yet this one still serves as a great intro into all the questions to be asked about Q&A and what it can and should be.

Originally written March 18, 2019

Related:

Q&A Review + Case for a Marketplace

HIGH LEVEL

Is it actually the case that Q&A for serious research is this big, new, different thing which requires a big shift for people? Maybe it's not such an adjustment?
How willing are people to do serious research work for others on the internet?

RESEARCH PROCESS (and suitability for collaboration) <tease these out by talking through their recent research>

Can "significant research" be partitioned into discrete questions?

Or is it more that there is a deeper bigger question around which someone needs to become an expert, and that any question posed in downstream of the real question and can't be treated in isolation?
Perhaps talk to the Ought folk about this.

Do people have general open research questions they want vaguely want answered and are willing to have sit unanswered for a relatively long period of time?

Or do they mainly have (and prioritize) research questions which are currently part of their work?

How much interaction between the research requester and research contributor is required?

Can someone take a research question and execute successfully on their own without too much feedback from the person requesting the research?
If necessary, does Q&A facilitate this adequately? Are back and forth comments good enough?
Are busy research requesters willing to put in

...
Review of Q&A [LW2.0 internal document]
by Ruby — 2019-03-29T23:15:57.335Z

Context

1. This is the first in a series of internal LessWrong 2.0 team documents we are sharing publicly (with minimal editing) in an effort to help keep the community up to date with what we're thinking about and working on.

2. Caveat! This is internal document and does not represent any team consensus or conclusions; it was written by me (Ruby) alone and expresses my in-progress understanding and reasoning. To the extent that the models/arguments of the other team members are included here, they've been filtered through me and aren't necessarily captured with high fidelity or strong endorsement. Since it was written on March 17th, it isn't even up to date with my own thinking

3. I, Ruby (Ruben Bloom), am trialling with the LessWrong 2.0 team in a generalist/product/analytics capacity. Most of my work so far has been trying to help evaluate the hypothesis that Q&A is a feasible mechanism to achieve intellectual progress at scale. I've been talking to researchers; thinking about use-cases, personas, and jobs to be done; and examining the data so far.
.

.

Epistemic status: this is one of the earlier documents I wrote in thinking about Q&A and my thinking has developed a lot since, especially since interviewing multiple researchers across EA orgs. Subsequent documents (to be published soon) have much more developed thoughts.

In particular, subsequent docs have a much better analysis of the uncertainties and challenges of making Q&A work that this one. This document is worth reading in addition to them mostly for an introduction to thinking about the different kinds of questions, our goals, and how things are going so far.

Originally written March 17th

I’ve been thinking a lot about Q&A the past week since it’s a major priority for the team right now. This doc contains a dump of many of my thoughts. In thinking about Q&A, it also occurred to me that an actually marketplace for intellectual labor could do a lot of good and is strong in a number of places where Q&A is weak. This document also describes that vision and why I think it might be a good idea.

1. Observations of Q&A so Far.

First off, pulling some stats from my analytics report (numbers as of 2019-03-11):

How long has Q&A been live?

Since 2018-12-07. Just about 3 months as of 2019-03-11 (94 days)

How many questions?

94 questions published + 20 drafts

How man

...
Parable of the flooding mountain range
by RocksBasil — 2019-03-29T15:07:02.265Z

A mountaineer is hiking in a mountain range. There is a thick fog so he cannot see beyond a few meters.

It is raining heavily and so the mountain range is being flooded, the mountaineer has to climb to a high place so he won’t get washed away.

He will climb towards the highest point in his sight, and if he sees another higher point he will change his direction towards there.

Now the mountaineer is standing on the top of a hill, and to his knowledge every direction is downwards, and there is no higher peak in sight. He sits on the hilltop, anxiously watching the rain and hearing the water raising.

The water floods the hill and drowns him, washing his dead body into the abyss.

Is he on the highest peak of the mountain range? Unlikely

Can he ever get there if he cannot see beyond a few metres? Very unlikely.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A band of mountaineers are hiking in a mountain range. There is a thick fog so they cannot see beyond a few meters.

It is raining heavily and so the mountain range is being flooded, the mountaineers have to climb to a high place so they won’t get washed away.

They elected the most experienced mountaineer as their leader, in the fog he can see a couple metres further than everybody else, and so he is the best guide possible for anyone.

The band all followed him onto a hilltop, every direction is downwards so they stayed there, anxiously watching the rain and hearing the raising waters.

Until the water floods the hilltop and drowns them, washing their dead bodies into the abyss.

This band is functionally the same as a lone mountaineer.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A band of mountaineers are hiking in a mountain range. There is a thick fog so they cannot see beyond a few meters.

It is raining heavily and so the mountain range is being flooded, the mountaineers have to climb to a high place so they won’t get washed away.

They spread out and walked away from each other, then went on to search for a place to stay.

They end up on different hilltops, some higher than others. They individually yet simultaneously watch the rain and hear the water raising, anxiously.

Until the water floods some hills and drowns many mountaineers, washing their corpses into the abyss. A few mountaineers end up on the higher peaks and are left un...