trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Proposal for a Simpler Solution To All These Difficult Observations and Problems
by Flinter — 2017-01-16T18:13:42.905Z

I am not perfectly sure how this site has worked (although I skimmed the "tutorials") and I am notorious for not understanding systems as easily and quickly as the general public might. At the same time I suspect a place like this is for me, for what I can offer but also for what I can receive (ie I intend on (fully) traversing the various canons).

I also value compression and time in this sense, and so I think I can propose a subject that might serve as an "ideal introduction" (I have an accurate meaning for this phrase I won't introduce atm).
I've read a lot of posts/blogs/papers that are arguments which are founded on a certain difficulties, where the observation and admission of this difficulty leads the author and the reader (and perhaps the originator of the problem/solution outlines) to defer to some form of a (relative to what will follow) long winded solution.
I would like to suggest, as a blanket observation and proposal, that most of these difficult problems described, especially on a site like this, are easily solvable with the introduction of an objective and ultra-stable metric for valuation.
I think maybe at first this will seem like an empty proposal. I think then, and also, some will see it as devilry (which I doubt anyone here thinks exists). And I think I will be accused of many of the fallacies and pitfalls that have already been previously warned about in the canons.
That latter point I think might suggest that I might learn well and fast from this post as interested and helpful people can point me to specific articles and I WILL read them with sincere intent to understand them (so far they are very well written in the sense that I feel I understand them because they are simple enough) and I will ask questions.
But I also think ultimately it will be shown that my proposal and my understanding of it doesn't really fall to any of these traps, and as I learn the canonical arguments I will be able to show how my proposal properly addresses them.
Tragedy of the free time commons
by KatjaGrace — 2017-01-16T09:29:32.000Z

Procrastination often seems a bit like an internal tragedy of the commons.

In a tragedy of the commons, a group of people share something nice, like a shared pasture on which to raise their cows. If they together refrained from overusing it they would all benefit (e.g. because it doesn’t become a mud pit), but if any one person alone refrains (e.g. by having a smaller herd of cows), they expect to see little of the benefit themselves, and they probably expect someone else to use more resources (e.g. by adding an additional cow to another herd), so that there isn’t even a shared benefit to the group from the person’s selfless action.

Suppose you have a paper due on Friday, and it is going to take 60 minutes to finish it. Think of yourself over the preceding day as 960 you-minutes. Each you-minute would much prefer the paper be done than not done the following morning, but would somewhat prefer to not work on it themselves. Because these time-slices make their decisions about whether to work one after another, and know what decisions were made in the past, the final N you-minutes in the day will definitely work, if there are N minutes of paper left to write. This means for you-minutes where there are fewer minutes of paper left to write than you-minutes left who might write them, working doesn’t help—it just relieves a later you-minute of working which would otherwise be forced to. And that is certainly worse for the you-minute deciding. So the 60 minutes of writing is done in the last 60 minutes. Which doesn’t destroy any value in this model, so all is good.

But let’s make it more realistic. Suppose that there are better and worse times to work, and which are which is not known ahead of time. Working during a worse minute either produces less than a minute of work, or incurs other costs to the relevant you-minute (e.g. extra suffering). Then instead of everyone doing nothing until exactly sixty minutes before the deadline and then working full time after that, work becomes more worthwhile as you move toward the sixty minute mark, because it becomes increasingly likely that the bad minutes later will not be able to fulfill the work demanded of them. So relatively good you-minutes begin to work sometimes and then less good ones and then close to the deadline even the worst you-minutes work. The you-minutes still mostly work to avoid failing, they...
Open thread, Jan. 16 - Jan. 22, 2016
by MrMind — 2017-01-16T07:52:56.197Z

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.
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup: January
by Maelin — 2017-01-16T04:09:24.829Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup: January

WHEN:
20 January 2017 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
347 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Come along for our first Social Meetup for 2017!

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1815597732048398/

Social meetups are informal get-togethers where we chat about topics of interest. They happen on the third Friday of each month.

WHEN? Friday January 20, 18:30 until late. Don't worry about being on time, though - it's fine to rock up whenever.

WHERE? The Bull & Bear Tavern, on Flinders Lane (just a short walk from Flinders St Station).

FOOD? The B&B does reasonable pub food and we usually share a few plates of wedges. For those who stay late, we often go for a late night meal at around 11pm

CONTACT? Any issues on the night, just call Richard on 0421231789

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup: January
X Is Not About Y: Technological Improvements and Cognitive-Physical Demands
by Gram_Stone — 2017-01-15T17:49:29.649Z

(I, the author, no longer endorse this article. I find it naive in hindsight.)

Recall the following template:

In some cases, human beings have evolved in such fashion as to think that they are doing X for prosocial reason Y, but when human beings actually do X, other adaptations execute to promote self-benefiting consequence Z.

I work in the sign industry, and it's worth knowing that the sign industry mostly involves printing images on cast sheets of polyvinyl chloride with adhesive on the back of it. This allows you to stick a graphic just about anywhere. Good-old-fashioned signs are now just a special case of vinyl application where the surface is a quadrilateral.

But sometimes, it seems like you could cut out the vinyl installation process: if you just wanted a solid white sign with some black text, and the substrate you're going to apply the vinyl to is already white, wouldn't it be nice if you could just print some black text directly on the substrate?

That's what a flatbed printer is for, which you can imagine as your standard HP desktop printer at 100x magnification with an unusually long air hockey table where the paper slot should be.

Now, when the management was trying to get the workforce excited about this new technological artifact, they would say things like, "This new artifact will reduce the amount of time that you spend on vinyl application, leaving you less stressed and with a decreased workload."

But when we actually started to use the artifact, our jobs didn't actually become less stressful, and our workloads didn't actually decrease.

I mean, yeah, we could technically produce the same number of signs in less time, but a corollary of this statement is that we could produce more signs in the same amount of time, which is what we actually did.

So, I propose the subtemplate:

Employer proposes the introduction of technological artifact X, ostensibly to reduce physical or cognitive demands, but when the employer actually introduces technological artifact X, they realize it can be used to increase output and do that instead.

I wonder if anyone else has more examples?
Meetup : #10: Making a difference
by  — 2017-01-14T17:29:32.945Z

Discussion article for the meetup : #10: Making a difference

WHEN:
22 January 2017 03:12:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Meester Treublaan 18, Amsterdam, Netherlands

(apologies to Tim for choosing this week's subject without consulting him)
This week's theme will be 80.000hours, which is an EA-affiliated research group in Oxford that is figuring out for us how to do the most possible good with your career.
Spoiler: you can matter a lot, but it's counterintuitive. Are you studying to become a doctor to save lives? You will on average save 3 lives over your career. If you become a Google employee instead, and give half of your income to charity, you might save 2000.
If you plan to come, you are kindly requested to read up on 80k's career guide (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/). Buckle up though: it can be quite a life-changing read.

Discussion article for the meetup : #10: Making a difference
Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2017-01-13T17:32:41.790Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
15 January 2017 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg Room 456, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

Meeting is on 4th floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. Permit parking designations do not apply on weekends, so park pretty much wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2017-01-13T16:49:32.061Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on January 13th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Kyiv: 14 January 2017 18:15 (+0200): 14 January 2017 06:15PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Melbourne Rationality Dojo, January - Lightning Talks: 15 January 2017 04:00PM
Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library: 03 February 2017 08:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - February 2017: 05 February 2017 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 28 January 2017 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Half-Assing: 15 January 2017 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Netherlands, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Prague, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, Southern California...
Poked
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-01-13T05:15:04.000Z

This was supposed to be the post analyzing the survey results.Then I thought: if I’m writing that, I may as well show examples of some basic Bayesian analysis, like using likelihood ratios. And if I’m doing analysis, I may as well give some more background on data science and also show how the results depend on assumptions. And if the results depend on assumptions, I may as well fit a full consequential model with continuous interdependent parameters and the appropriate prior.

Bottom line: I spent the week reading a textbook on data analysis and didn’t write anything. Instead, this short post is a sequel to Conned, part of an emerging series tentatively called “what it’s like being a crazy person who nitpicks random numbers he sees”.

So, a crazy person walks into a new poke restaurant. First, he notices that this restaurant, like the last 7 poke restaurants he went to, isn’t called Pokestop. This is puzzling, because the perfect name for a poke restaurant exists, and it’s Pokestop.

Then, the crazy person notices a Number:

200,000! That’s even more than the number of trees we could save by paying our electricity bills online!

The crazy person flips the menu, and gets so caught up in the math that he somehow orders a grotesque monstrosity made of surimi (I learned that it’s just a fancy word for imitation crab sticks), mango, seaweed, and Hawaiian salt (I learned that it’s just a fancy word for salt).

As the astonished cook reaches for the salted mango, the crazy person starts doing mental math.

200,000 combinations and we have 6 categories, so the average number of items in each category must be the 6th root of 200,000, or the cube root of the square root of 200,000. The square root of every even power of 10 is easy, i.e. √10,000 = 100. We’ll break 200,000 into 10,000*20. 20 is between 16 and 25 so the square root of 20 is ~4.5. This means that √200,000 ≈ 100*4.5 = 450. OK, I need the cube root of 450. Do I remember any cubes? 103=1,000, that’s too much. 83=29=512, bingo! The sixth root of 200,000 is the cube root of 450 is just below 8, so there should be 7-8 combinations on (geometric) average in each category. (The actual answer turns out to be 7.65).

That’s how I do math quickly in my head. I remember a few basic facts (like powers of 2 up to 1,024) and a few basic rules (l...
Meetup : Kyiv: 14 January 2017 18:15 (+0200)
by networked — 2017-01-12T17:05:53.819Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 14 January 2017 18:15 (+0200)

WHEN:
14 January 2017 06:15:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Lva Tolstoho St, 3, Kyiv, Ukraine

We plan to have a short talk about the technological singularity followed by a discussion about the same, talk about the origins of cognitive biases and play Fallacymania. You can find more information about the upcoming meetup (in Ukrainian) here: https://www.meetup.com/LessWrong-Kyiv/events/236816739/. If you plan on coming, please join our group on Meetup.com and RSVP there so that we know how many people to expect. If you join the group, you will get email notifications about future meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 14 January 2017 18:15 (+0200)
Fear or fear?
by KatjaGrace — 2017-01-12T03:49:01.000Z

I wrote recently about how people tend to use the same words—and sometimes concepts—for ‘want’ as in ‘yearn for’ and ‘want’ as in ‘intend’. As in, ‘It’s so lovely here I want to stay forever’, yet ‘I want leave before midnight, because otherwise I will miss my train’. And the trouble this causes.

I think we do something similar with fear. ‘I’m concerned that X’ can mean ‘I feel fear about the possibility of X’ or it can mean ‘I think X (which would be bad) might be true’. I’m not sure which words naturally distinguish these two different messages, but whatever they are, I don’t seem to use them. For instance, what would avoid ambiguity in this sentence? ‘I ……………. that not enough people are going to vote’. I can think of several ways to fill the slot: worry, fear, am concerned, am scared, am frightened, am anxious. But I think they can either be used in both ways, or suggest a more specific kind of feeling.

The ambiguity of these words is especially noticeable if one has unusual levels of anxiety (for instance because of an anxiety disorder, or I suppose because a relaxation disorder). If you try to express a different one to that which people expect, it becomes clear that interpreting such a statement relies on on context. If you are known to usually be anxious, and you say ‘I fear our shoe rack is not large enough for all of our shoes’ you will be misunderstood to mean ‘my heart is pounding and I can’t breathe or think because of this shoe rack’ when you might be more accurately interpreted as, ‘I feel no emotions about the shoe rack, but may I draw your attention to a problem with it?’.

I don’t know if this causes problems, like the ‘want’ case. It is almost the opposite—you are mixing up ‘I have an urge to avoid this thing’ with ‘I judge there to be a problem here’. So you might expect it to go wrong in an analogous way: we feel fear regarding things, and then jump to expensively avoiding them without taking the other stakes into consideration.

It is certainly true that people behave in this way sometimes. For instance, once I was putting a golden necklace on in a dark car, and when I touched my hands to my neck I found a giant hairy spider on it. I jumped to expensively avoiding the ...
Open problem: thin logical priors
by TsviBT — 2017-01-11T20:00:08.000Z

author:

'Tsvi Benson-Tilsen'
title: 'Open problem: thin logical priors'
...

Background / Motivation

Problem statement

Type signature

Desiderata

Comments

In short, and at a high level, the problem of thin priors is to
understand how an agent can learn logical facts and make use of them in
its predictions, without setting up a reflective instability across
time. Before the agent knows the fact, it is required by logical
uncertainty to “care about” worlds where the fact does not hold; after
it learns the fact, it might no longer care about those worlds; so the
ignorant agent has different goals than the knowing agent. This problem
points at a hole in our basic understanding, namely how to update on
logical facts; logical induction solves much of logical uncertainty, but
doesn’t clarify how to update on computations, since many logical facts
are learned “behind the scenes” by traders.

*****

The ideas in this post seem to have been discussed for some time.
Jessica brought them up in a crisper form in a conversation a while go
with me, and also came up with the name; this post is largely based on
ideas in that conversation and some subsequent ones with other people,
possibly refined / reframed.

Background / Motivation

It would be nice to have a reflectively stable decision theory (i.e. a
decision theory that largely endorses itself to continue making
decisions over other potential targets of self-modification); this the
most basic version of averting / containing instrumental goals, which is
arguably necessary in some form to make a safe agent. Agents that choose
policies using beliefs that have been updated on (logical) observations
seem to be unstable, presenting an obstacle. More specifically, we have
the following line of reasoning:

Updating on empirical evidence leads to reflective instability.
If A1 is uncertain about the future even given all its
observations; and its future instantiation A2 would choose
actions based on further data; then A1 has an incentive to
precommit / self-modify to not choose its future actions by updating
its beliefs on future observations.

For example, say that A1 is looking forward to a counterfactual
mugging with a quantum coin, and A2 is going to model the world
as having some particular unknown state that is then observed when
the coin is revealed. Then A2 would not pay up on tails, so A1
wants to precommit to payin

...
Planning the Enemy's Retreat
by Gram_Stone — 2017-01-11T05:44:56.471Z

Related: Leave a Line of Retreat

When I was smaller, I was sitting at home watching The Mummy, with my mother, ironically enough. There's a character by the name of Bernard Burns, and you only need to know two things about him. The first thing you need to know is that the titular antagonist steals his eyes and tongue because, hey, eyes and tongues spoil after a while you know, and it's been three thousand years.

The second thing is that Bernard Burns was the spitting image of my father. I was terrified! I imagined my father, lost and alone, certain that he would die, unable to see, unable even to properly scream!

After this frightening ordeal, I had the conversation in which it is revealed that fiction is not reality, that actions in movies don't really have consequences, that apparent consequences are merely imagined and portrayed.

Of course I knew this on some level. I think the difference between the way children and adults experience fiction is a matter of degree and not kind. And when you're an adult, suppressing those automatic responses to fiction has itself become so automatic, that you experience fiction as a thing compartmentalized. You always know that the description of consequences in the fiction will not by magic have fire breathed into them, that Imhotep cannot gently step out of the frame and really remove your real father's real eyes.

So, even though we often use fiction to engage, to make things feel more real, in another way, once we grow, I think fiction gives us the chance to entertain formidable ideas at a comfortable distance.

A great user once said, "Vague anxieties are powerful anxieties." Related to this is the simple rationality technique of Leaving a Line of Retreat: before evaluating the plausibility of a highly cherished or deeply frightening belief, one visualizes the consequences of the highly cherished belief being false, or of the deeply frightening belief being true. We hope that it will thereby become just a little easier to evaluate the plausibility of that belief, for if we are wrong, at least we know what we're doing about it. Sometimes, if not often, what you'd really do about it isn't as bad as your intuitions would have you think.

If I had to put my finger on the source of that technique's power, I would name its ability to reduce the perceived hedonic costs of truthseeking. It's hard to estimate th...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Half-Assing
by RobinZ — 2017-01-11T01:10:34.088Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Half-Assing

WHEN:
15 January 2017 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to talk about the underappreciated life hack of half-assing, and some of the circumstances when it is useful.

Upcoming meetups:

Jan. 22: Fun & Games

Jan. 29: Meta Meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Half-Assing
Meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library
by Alexander230 — 2017-01-10T21:23:00.903Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library

WHEN:
03 February 2017 08:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Дубининская, 20

Welcome to the next Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library!

Our plan:

A talk about learning from mistakes.

Fallacymania game.

Tower of Chaos game.

Details about Fallacymania and Tower of Chaos and game materials can be found here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/oco/custom_games_that_involve_skills_related_to/

Meetup schedule is here: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/-3-2017-vUDiyhwzCs6

Come to "Nauchka", ul.Dubininskaya, 20. Entrance through the Central children library #14. Nearest metro station is Paveletskaya. Map is here: http://nauchka.ru/contacts/ . If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Meetup begins at 20:00, the length is 2 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library