trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
You are Dissociating (probably)
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2021-01-04T14:37:02.207Z

You are probably dissociating all the time and don't realize it. Let's look at just what I mean by this bold claim.

Disclaimer: I'm not a medical professional, and although I'm talking about "dissociation" here I definitely don't mean to give medical explanation or advice about clinical dissociation. I'm going to talk about the same mental phenomena that cause clinical dissociation disorders, but focus on situations and people for whom it doesn't rise to the level of disorder. If you are seeing or think you need to see a medical professional about dissociation, maybe don't read this if you think reading about dissociation might make it worse and don't disregard medical advice in favor of anything I say.

Much of my claim that most people are dissociating frequently depends heavily on just what I mean by dissociation, so let's start by trying to nail down just what I mean by this term.

Clinically dissociation is "a disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions or sense of who he or she is." That's general enough to cover all phenomena psychiatric professionals would like included as "dissociation" but doesn't cleanly distinguish dissociation from other conditions like schizophrenia and psychosis on its own. Helpfully there are a few specific disorders that count as dissociation: depersonalization disorder, derealization disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. These disorders point towards concrete experiences people have that will help us explore dissociation.

NB: Each disorder includes phenomena that, on their own, are not necessarily indicative of disorder. That is, it's totally normal to experience depersonalization, derealization, or some level of identity dissociation without it being disruptive enough to be a disorder. My understanding is that standard criterion to test if is something a psychiatric disorder is to check if it significantly interferes with a person's ability to live their life as they would like to.

Depersonalization is probably the kind of dissociation most people have clear memories of having experienced: it's a kind of disidentification with the self. Some people describe it as being out of their body; I might describe it as being trapped in my head, failing to identify with the body in which the mind sits like a homunculus. The mind and body seem detached, or the body seems unreal or fake, or in some cases ev...
Open & Welcome Thread - January 2021
by jsalvatier — 2021-01-04T07:39:13.166Z

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.
Review: The Gioconda Smile
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-04T07:00:17.962Z

(Spoiler alert: discusses entire plot of The Gioconda Smile by Aldous Huxley)

I’ve been reading short stories lately, which are often confusing to me, and I frequently wish that the author resolved the actual tension and relieved my actual curiosity more, by including some sort of short note at the end on what they were even trying to do.

With that said, I read Aldous Huxley’s The Gioconda Smile, and was somewhat confused by it. I mean, it was a story. But since I got it from ‘50 Great Short Stories…a comprehensive selection from the world’s finest short fiction’, I’m expecting it to be somehow surpassingly great.

The protagonist is a relatively uncaring womanizer, who we first meet making a friendly visit to one woman while another waits in his car, to be dropped off before he gets home to his wife, who he finds disgusting in her aged ill-health. He seems to be largely driven by avoiding boredom and upholding an image of himself as a sophisticated and charming stud. He knows that his tendency to feel loathing in the place of pity toward the unfortunate in general is not ‘comely’, but has abandoned feeling shame about this unfortunate fact of his nature. When his wife dies, he immediately marries his young mistress, on an apparently humor-fueled whim and with little regard for her. He is ever detached, lightheartedly throwing back strategic retorts to questions sent his way, never actually with another person in spirit. He seems intelligent and reasonable aside from being callous to the point of ridiculous imprudence. For instance, if you marry a woman as a ‘practical joke’, this might predictably cause inconvenience to your own life at some point, even if you are dedicatedly indifferent to her welfare.

In fact the biggest thing that goes wrong is that the intriguing woman he visits but doesn’t dally with—she with the mysterious Gioconda (Mona Lisa) smile—falls in love with him, surreptitiously murders his wife, attempts too late to claim him, then frames him for the murder.

So why is this good to read? What would one come to this for?

It is probably a memorable story, but why is it worth remembering? Has it added anything rich to my life?

Is it perhaps a moralizing story? The protagonist is gratuitously awful, which is some hint. One way it could be this is as a tale of his errors coming back to get him, where by emptily seducing every woman around, he was careles...
The Sense-Making Web
by Chris_Leong — 2021-01-04T06:17:03.752Z

I want to attempt to convey the sense of what it feels like to be in a particular scene. Sadly, blogposts are a poor medium for this, but I think it's important, so I'll try my best. In particular, I'll be focusing on the (vaguely defined) Sensemaking scene. I'm honestly surprised that very little has been written about this given how vibrant the space feels.

Both rationalists and sensemakers share the common goal of trying to make sense of the world and by examining these movements side-by-side we can produce a clearer image of the strengths and limitations of each. In particular, I would suggest that the Sensemaking scene draws better on lessons from spirituality, has a better understanding of narrative, makes better use of recorded conversations and has a stronger understanding of the importance of local community. Beyond this, I suspect it'll make a valuable contribution towards ending the culture wars.

Given the difficulty of describing a scene, I feel it'd be worthwhile to pick out some words that capture my felt sense of being present in it. The first word I'll pick is "openness". People who are low on openness tend to react strongly to ideas that are incompatible with their world view or which are too "weird", whilst people who are high in openness are much more likely to find aspects that resonate with them and put the rest aside. The sensemaking scene is highly open in that participants often discourse with those who hold completely different political views than them and in their embrace of spirituality or spirituality-adjacent practises. Much emphasis is put on being able to hold tension or uncomfortableness, which I think is almost definitionally necessary to explore new intellectual territory.

The second word I'll pick is "coherence" (see also: common knowledge). In some ways this is the opposite of the previous as openness tends to lead to divergence and coherence to convergence. However, the production of new ideas requires both convergence and coherence. Without any kind of shared beliefs - even at some kind of meta-level or about the purpose of the discussion - productive conversation becomes impossible.

In the sensemaking web, coherence is produced by a shared belief that each party possesses at least a partial truth and that the purpose of conversation is to create greater mutual understanding, rather than to fight each other like soldiers. P...
What the rational decision process for deciding for or against cryonics when there's a possibility the future might be "bad"?
by prolyx — 2021-01-04T05:08:11.305Z

Hi, I'm new to LessWrong, and happened to read the Normal Cryonics article shortly after reading about Roko's basilisk.

It seems to me that if you believe in Roko's basilisk, nearly the worst thing you could possibly do is to freeze yourself indefinitely such that a future artificial intelligence can have all the time in the world to figure out how to revive you and then torture you for eternity. (Technically, I guess, if you really/truly believe in Roko's basilisk, and still want to live during the period it activates, you probably are doing what you can to advance the "inevitable" AI, in the hopes that it will reward you. So I guess you could still be for cryonics.)

Even forgoing Roko's basilisk and just considering generic evil-all-powerful AIs in the future (similar to AM in Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"), or just the possibility of a bad future in general, seems to me to complicate the decision process for whether you should undergo cryonics. How do you weigh the uncertain future against the uncertain afterlife, and how do you choose between complete unknown (death) versus a probability distribution function (what we expect of the future), especially if you believe that PDF to be bad? (I guess from a rational point of view, you probably should at least do real number-crunching on the PDF to see if it's likely to be bad instead of making arbitrary assumptions, but the question still stands, as it is independent of how favorable that PDF is.)

Of course, the bolded question is only interesting if you don't assume that mere existence is the primary goal. If you think endless torture is a better state of being than complete cessation of sensation (and assume that the afterlife coincides with the latter), then your choice is clear, and freezing yourself can only give you benefit.

Notably, people contemplating suicide face a similar decision process, but the difference is I would argue suicide is fairly irrational, because while living you usually always retain the choice to die on your own terms, forbidding possibilities such as falling into a coma. Then if you make the reasonable assumption that it doesn't really matter when you die (in terms of what happens in the afterlife), you might as well stick around, because chances are your living circumstances can get better. In cryonics, if you assume revivability is possible (which if you don'...
Akrasia is Hypocrisy.
by Lev Protter — 2021-01-04T05:07:58.558Z

And separating the two is just meta-akrasia, which
is just hypocrisy.
The basic self deception, is that we failed because of some
unknown x, and if only we had factored x in, we
would not have failed.

I claim that x is just our own hypocrisy.
The reason we fail to account for x, is volatility.
The world is a messy place, and our self honesty varies with it.

“But much more importantly: who says that people who claim to care about truth, and then deceive themselves, "really don't care" about the truth?”

Self-deception:Hypocrisy or Akrasia

It's not that they “really don't care”, it's that their convictions aren't
stable enough.

Externalizing ‘Akrasia’, to me, seems like a dangerously seductive concept.
Multi-dimensional rewards for AGI interpretability and control
by Steven Byrnes — 2021-01-04T03:08:41.727Z

Update August 2021: Re-reading this post, I continue to think this is a good and important idea, and I was very happy to learn after I wrote it that what I had in mind here is really a plausible, viable thing to do, even given the cost and performance requirements that people will demand of our future AGIs. I base that belief on the fact that (I now think) the brain does more-or-less exactly what I talk about here (see my post A model of decision-making in the brain), and also on the fact that the machine learning literature also has things like this (see the comments section at the bottom).

~~

(I’m not a reinforcement learning expert—still learning—please call me out in the comments if I’m saying anything stupid, or reinventing wheels. Status: brainstorming.)

It’s not guaranteed, but I strongly expect that a reward signal and value function (a.k.a. reward prediction function) will be an important component of future AGI systems. For example, humans are our one current example of a general intelligence, and every thought we think has a value (reward prediction) in our brain, and we are thinking that thought at least in part because its value is higher than the value of whatever alternative thought we could have thunk instead.

But I think that reward systems as used in the brain (and in today's model-based RL systems) have room for improvement, in ways that might make it (marginally) less difficult to keep very powerful AGIs under human control. And I have an idea! Before I get to that, I'll go through the two motivations for this idea—two deficiencies that I see in reward learning systems as they exist in AIs and brains today.

Motivation

Motivation 1: Value functions add essentially nothing to the system’s interpretability

Let's say I figure out (somehow) that my AGI is currently thinking some metacognitive thought. Is this part of a plan to sabotage my interpretability tools

and other control systems

? Or is it optimizing its thought processes in a way I would endorse? Don't expect the value (reward prediction) that the AGI assigned to that thought to give me an answer! In either of these cases, it just says "this thought has high value". Of course, I can try to get interpretability by looking at other aspects of that thought—what is it connected to in the predictive world model / web of knowledge, when has that thought been active in the past, etc. But the value o...
The despair of normative realism bot
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-01-03T23:07:08.767Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

This post is about a certain type of normative realism, and a related type of despair (I don’t think “despair” is quite the right word, but I haven’t found a better one). My aim is to question an assumption underlying this realism and this despair, using a toy robot as an analogy to illustrate the point.

I. More than the natural world?

The type of normative realism I have in mind includes commitments in the following vicinity:

Cognitivism: normative judgments are candidates for truth or falsehood.
Judgment non-naturalism: In order for these judgments to be true, there need to be normative facts that are, in some sense, irreducibly “over and above” facts about the natural world.
Metaphysical non-naturalism: There are in fact such non-natural facts.

Characterizing the “natural facts” and the “over-and-aboveness” in question here is difficult. Very broadly and loosely, “natural” here refers to the type of thing that one expects to feature in our best scientific (and generally, non-normative) picture of the world, at all levels of abstraction. The connotation is meant to be one of empiricism, concreteness, scientific respectability, “is” instead of “ought,” “facts” instead of “values,” Richard Dawkins instead of C.S. Lewis, etc — though, perhaps instructively, none of these distinctions are particularly straightforward.

Realists of the type I have in mind think that this familiar (if somewhat hazily defined) naturalist world-picture isn’t enough to get normativity off the ground. Normative facts, they argue, are not reducible to, explicable in terms of, or constituted by any of the non-normative facts that hard-nosed scientist-types would readily accept. They are their own thing — something naturalists are in a deep sense missing.

It’s natural to think that facts of this kind require that there be a normative aspect of reality — a normative “territory,” to which our “map” of normativity aims to correspond. And this has seemed to many an objectionable inflation of our basic ontology — a strange and overly ambitious departure from a much more reliable scientific worldview — and to bring with it various further problems besides (for example, problems to do with explaining why we should expect our intuitive “map” of this territory, even after extensive reflection and revision, to be remotely accurate).

Partly in order to avoid o...
Notes on Attention
by David Gross — 2021-01-03T21:52:34.139Z

This post examines the virtue of attention and its facets like awareness, discernment, mindfulness, presence, focus, and concentration.

I mean to explore what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than expressing my own opinions, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I hope it helps people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is this virtue?

This virtue concerns having command over your attention, and attending skillfully to the right things in the best manner. Different terms associated with attention are used in a variety of ways by different authors; I’ll use the following terms to differentiate them:

Mindfulness (presence, being observant) is the ability to consciously perceive the full breadth of what is currently available to your senses.
Awareness (understanding, comprehension) is the ability to contextualize what you are experiencing, including in that context things that are relevant but not currently available to your senses.
Discernment (orientation), in this context, is the ability to direct your attention to specific things in your field of awareness, and to identify the most important or relevant things.
Focus (absorption, concentration) is the ability to narrow the attention so as to apply it in a more detailed and penetrating way for sustained periods of time on some chosen part of your present experience.

There is also a sort of meta-skill (I don’t know a good name for it) that covers the ability to transit in a timely way between these various modes of attention: to be mindful when it’s time to be mindful, to incorporate awareness when awareness is called for, to notice when it’s time to orient yourself toward something in particular, and then to apply your focus where it is needed for as long as it is needed.

The virtue of attention includes all of these skills as components, and you have that virtue if you characteristically practice these skills proficiently.

Some related virtues or skills include savoring (attending to delight), elevation/awe/wonder (attending to the sublime), perspective (a facet of awareness), curiosity and intellectual humility (so you’re not closed to mindfulness), acceptance/surrender (willingness to see reality as it is), vigilance/alertness (discer...
Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners
by jefftk — 2021-01-03T21:20:03.563Z

Bets and bonds are tools for handling different epistemic states and
levels of trust. Which makes them a great fit for negotiating with
small children!

A few weeks ago Anna (4y) wanted to play with some packing material. It
looked very messy to me, I didn't expect she would clean it up, and I
didn't want to fight with her about cleaning it up. I considered
saying no, but after thinking about how things like this are handled
in the real world I had an idea. If you want to do a hazardous
activity, and we think you might go bankrupt and not clean up, we make
you post a bond. This money is held in escrow to fund the cleanup if
you disappear. I explained how this worked, and she went and got a
dollar:

Then:

When she was done playing, she cleaned it up without complaint and got
her dollar back. If she hadn't cleaned it up, I would have, and kept
the dollar.

Some situations are more complicated, and call for bets. I wanted to
go to a park, but Lily (6y) didn't want to go to that park because the
last time we had been there there'd been lots of bees. I remembered
that had been a summer with unusually many bees, and it no longer
being that summer or, in fact, summer at all, I was not worried.
Since I was so confident, I offered my $1 to her $0.10 that we would
not run into bees at the park. This seemed fair to her, and when
there were no bees she was happy to pay up.

Over time, they've learned that my being willing to bet, especially at
large odds, is pretty informative, and often all I need to do is
offer. Lily was having a rough morning, crying by herself about a
project not working out. I suggested some things that might be fun to
do together, and she rejected them angrily. I told her that often
when people are feeling that way, going outside can help a lot, and
when she didn't seem to believe me I offered to bet. Once she heard
the 10:1 odds I was offering her I think she just started expecting
that I was right, and she decided we should go ride bikes. (She
didn't actually cheer up when we got outside: she cheered up as soon
as she made this decision.)

I do think there is some risk with this approach that the child will
have a bad time just to get the money, or say they are having a bad
time and they are actually not, but this isn't something we've run
into. Another risk, if we were to wager large amounts, would be t...
What technical-ish books do you recommend that are readable on Kindle?
by Rudi C — 2021-01-03T20:54:57.916Z

I am looking for nonfiction non-historical books that aren’t too dumbed-down/light (essentially, a book that needs careful reading, not something skimmable), but still readable on an e-reader such as Kindle (so equations should be very scarce, and the book should be available in a reflowable format such as EPUB).

Some examples:

Darwin‘s Dangerous Idea (and other books by Dennett)
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Norton’s Introduction to Philosophy
LW’s sequences and The Codex (generally, most equation-less LW posts fit the bill)
Most Programming books (though I prefer a hands-on approach for learning these, which is not possible on an e-reader)
Rational Ottawa Predictions for 2021
by  — 2021-01-03T20:53:40.934Z
Link: https://grandunifiedempty.com/2021/01/03/predictions-2021/

"Rational Ottawa" (the Ottawa, Canada meetup group) held our 2021 predictions night on Friday, and since we did it online via Google Doc this year we decided that I could clean them up and share them with the community.

They're uh... not quite to the same quality bar as Scott's usual list, but hopefully interesting none-the-less.

The full list of predictions is at the link - I've already reformatted everything once for WordPress and I really don't want to do it all again here.