trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Write Down Your Process
by Zvi — 2017-07-24T21:02:27.000Z

Previously: Help Us Find Your Blog (and others)

Mark Rosewater is the lead designer of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. This means he is part of Magic’s R&D department, one of the world’s few pockets of cooperation, sanity and competence. They are not explicit rationalists as such, but they embody many of the most important virtues we aspire to, and by doing so they manage to create an amazing game and community with a far-too-small team on a shoestring budget.

One of the game’s and department’s best features is its openness. While work on future card sets and future decisions need to be kept secret, a tradition has developed that the thinking process used by R&D is shared freely with the world, as are the stories surrounding past card sets and decisions. Competitive Magic players have also developed the tradition of sharing their methods and ideas with the world whenever possible via articles and free discussion, only working in secret for brief periods before major competitions.

This is insanely great. Writing down your history, mental models and thought process makes you understand them better, helps others understand and learn from them, and those others respond to help you improve.

The secret is that this process is worth doing even if no one reads what you have written; this is the same principle that says that you do not fully understand a concept until you can teach it to someone else. Writing down your conclusions often makes you realize where your conclusions are wrong, or your techniques can be improved. Having to put all of your justifications into precise words, in a place others could read them, makes most bad reasoning obvious if you are paying attention. Often by the time I am finished writing about something, I understand the thing or my thinking about the thing in a whole new and much better way.

One of the big secrets of my Magic success was that I was constantly writing up what I had done and what I was thinking, in a style that chronicled my working and thinking process rather than sharing only the conclusions. I learned and improved by writing. Others told me they learned from my writing, which is always great to hear, but no one learned more than I did. Often I would start without knowing what I would conclude, and the result was better decks, thoughts and strategies than I would have had if I ...
Is Altruism Selfish?
by DragonGod — 2017-07-24T07:41:17.215Z

Altruism is just a hedonistic desire of people to feel good about themselves.

With the above quote as a prompt, let's discuss.

While I may not express it in such strong terms, I do support the idea expressed in the above prompt. For a brief elaboration: People are only capable of acting upon their own utility function. It is quite possible that this utility function includes others utility function. It is impossible for one to act on another's utility function (without first incorporating it into their own utility function). If the well being of others makes you happy, or you gain pleasure from it, then it grants you positive utility. In order for you to be truly selfless in your altruism, then you must not gain any pleasure from it. Helping others must not make you happy, or uplift you. If helping others doesn't grant you pleasure (in any form whatsoever), then you may be altruistic, but you would be quite alien to our conception of altruism (we don't imagine altruists don't like helping others do we), one might even argue that if you derive n pleasure from helping others, that you are not really altruistic but merely putting on airs.

I posit that altruism—at least as we conceive it—is inherently selfish. However, this is not a problem. Being selfish is not immoral, and some moral philosophies posit that people are only capable of acting in their own self interest. Altruism as a selfish endeavour, only becomes a problem if we operate under the assumption that "selfish = bad"—a grossly unfounded assumption. As a trivial counter example, if I save a loved one because I would be heavily distressed at their loss (an inherently selfish motive), then does my action become immoral? Perish the thought. Selfishness is not inherently immoral. It is merely that some selfish actions may be conceived of as immoral, which gives the whole position a bad reputation. If we accept that selfish actions can be moral, then the position of altruism as a selfish endeavour brooks no inconsistencies.

True selflessness—and true altruism if you demand that altruism is selfless—is the sociopath who decides to help someone else despite feeling no empathy for them (maybe out of moral principles or something).

Selfishness is not a problem. Selfishness is desirable; it is a virtue to be lauded, not a vice to be vilified. Humans should ac...
Open thread, July 24 - July 30, 2017
by Thomas — 2017-07-24T07:28:26.052Z

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
War of Wages part 1 – Apples and WalMarts
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-07-24T01:46:55.000Z

[Endorsement status: some of my readers have pointed out that, mildly speaking, this post isn’t my best work. Upon reflection, I kinda have to agree. It’s not a crucial enough argument for me to bother rewriting the entire thing, and I’m leaving it up here for the entertainment value and the good discussion in the comments.]

There’s an old saying: “If you want to hear a dumb opinion, ask someone their thoughts on the minimum wage”. It’s the ultimate Dunning-Kruger topic – so complex that everyone thinks it’s simple, so hard that everyone has an easy answer.

In a series of three posts, I’m going to describe a few economic approaches to analyzing minimum wage laws. Broadly, economics is the study of how people get what they want by interacting with each other in non-violent ways.

If you want an apple and you pick it off a tree in the wild, that’s not economics because no one else is involved. If you want my apple and you stab me and take it, that’s not economics either. If you want me to give you my apple, we have entered the realm of economics.

Workers want a lot of things from employers. Mostly they want wages, but also a pleasant workplace, stability, good conditions, and respect. Employers want several things from workers too, mostly labor but some of the above as well. How they deal with each other is thus a matter of economics. Even if we’re interested in the moral and political implications (which I’ll also touch on), we have to first understand as well as we can the economics of employment and wages.

I won’t keep you in suspense – I think that minimum wage laws are a huge mistake, both economically and morally. I have 95% confidence that low-skilled workers would be much better off on all accounts if the minimum wage was repealed and replaced with any half-sensible form of redistribution. Redistribution that is even 3/4 sensible, e.g. negative income tax paid for by increased taxes on corporate profits, can make rich and poor Americans alike better off. If the minimum wage is repealed with no additional redistribution there would be a lot of short term pain, but I still think it’s more likely than not that workers would be better off in the long term.

With that said, my goal isn’t to write a polemic against the minimum wage, but an overview of increasi...
What is Intelligence?
by DragonGod — 2017-07-23T00:12:13.420Z

As far as Artificial Intelligence is concerned, what is "intelligence"? The definition I see on various sites like Wikipedia:

Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including as one's capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, planning, creativity, and problem solving

Merriam Webster:

The ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason.

The ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests).

etc seem to be a bit broad and nebulous, and not necessarily what I would be thinking of if I wanted to build an AI, or evaluate the intelligence of non human life-forms.

The definition I currently go with is:

General problem solving ability.

However, I'm not sure if this is broad enough to encompass all we think of when we say "intelligence" in the context of AI, or what we would be looking for in "intelligent" life-forms. What's a useful definition of intelligence. Broad enough to encompass all the we consider when we think intelligence, yet narrow enough to exclude particular idiosyncrasies of specific intelligent agents? A universal definition of intelligence applicable to all intelligent agents.
Book Review: Mathematics for Computer Science (Suggestion for MIRI Research Guide)
by richard_reitz — 2017-07-22T19:26:44.228Z

tl;dr: I read Mathematics for Computer Science (MCS) and found it excellent. I sampled Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications (Rosen)—currently recommended in MIRI's research guide—as well as Concrete Mathematics and Discrete Mathematics with Applications (Epp), which appear to be MCS's competition. Based on these partial readings, I found MCS to be the best overall text. I therefore recommend MIRI change the recommendation in its research guide.

Introduction

MCS is used at MIT for their introductory discrete math course, 6.042, which appears to be taken primarily by second-semester freshman and sophomores. You can find OpenCourseWare archives from 2010 and 2015, although the book is self-contained; I never had occasion to use them throughout my reading.

If you liked Computability and Logic (review), currently in the MIRI research guide, you'll like MCS:

MCS is a wonderful book. It's well written. It's rigorous, but does a nice job of motivating the material. It efficiently proves a number of counterintuitive results and then helps you see them as intuitively obvious. Freed from the constraint of printing cost, it contains many diagrams which are generally useful. You can find the pdf here or, if that link breaks, by googling "Mathematics for Computer Science". (See section 21.2 for why this works.)

MCS is regularly updated during the semester. Based on the dates of revision given to the cover, I suspect that the authors attempt to update it within a week of the last update during the semester. The current version is 87 pages longer than the 2015 version, suggesting ~40 pages of material is added a year. My favorite thing about the constant updates was that I never needed to double check statements about our current state of knowledge to see if anything had changed since publication.

MCS is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution share-alike license: it is free in the sense of both beer and freedom. I'm a big fan of such copyleft licenses, so I give MIT major props. I've tried to remain unbiased in my review, but halo effect suggests my views on the text might be affected by the text's license: salt accordingly.

Prerequisites

The only prerequisite is single-variable calculus. In particular, I noted integration, differentiation, and convergence/infinite sums coming up. That said, I don't remember seeing them coming up in ...
Sleeping Beauty Problem Can Be Explained by Perspective Disagreement (III)
by Xianda_GAO_duplicate0.5321505782395719 — 2017-07-22T14:50:58.609Z

This is the third part of my argument for the importance of perspective disagreement in the sleeping beauty problem.

Different part of the argument can be found here: I, II, III, IV.

In this part I would give a simple example to show how two agents can reach to an agreement in a typical probability problem. It would also highlight why such an agreement cannot be reached in the sleeping beauty problem.

Balls In Urns(BIU):

Suppose there is a urn filled with either 2 blue balls and 1 red ball(BBR) or 2 red balls and a blue ball(BRR) with equal chances. Andy randomly picked 2 balls from the urn and finds one ball of each colour. He correctly conclude the probability of BBR is 1/2, same as the probability of BRR. Afterwards Bob asked for a red ball and was given one, he then randomly picked 1 ball from the 2 remaining balls in the urn and saw a blue one. He correctly concluded the probability of BBR is 2/3. It turns out however Andy and Bob actually saw the exact same 2 balls. The two of them are free to communicate and argue. Suppose both of them are rational can they reach to an agreement? Who should change his answer?

We can use a frequentist approach to solve this problem. Suppose the experiment is repeated many times with equal number of BBR and BRR. We can count the total number of occurrences when they both see the same 1 red and 1 blue balls. The relative frequency of BBR and BRR among these occurrences would indicate the correct probability. Both Andy and Bob should have no problem agreeing with this method. Here it becomes apparent that the exact procedure of the experiment determines whose initial probability is correct and who need to adjust his answer. More specifically how is the red ball given to Bob determined.

Scenario 1: The red ball picked by Andy is always given to Bob. In this case Andy is correct, Bob should adjust his answer of BBR from 2/3 to 1/2. This is because for both BBR and BRR Andy has the same chance to pick a red and a blue ball. Given the same red ball Andy has Bob would have equal chance to pick the same blue ball again regardless the colour of the last ball left. The relative frequency of BBR and BRR given the occurrences (that they both have the same 1 red and 1 blue balls), would be about the same.

Scenario 2: Any red ball in the urn can be given to Bob. In this case Bob’s initial judgem...
Choices are Bad
by Zvi — 2017-07-22T11:51:06.000Z

Epistemic Status: Spent way too long deciding what to put here

Kind of a Follow-Up to: Change is Bad

Will Hopefully Lead To, But No Promises: Some combination of, when and if I write them: Complexity is Bad, Choices Are Really Bad, Frontload Choices, Delay Choices, Avoid Choices, Simplify Choices, Destroy Choices, Make Good Choices, On Choice Algorithms

Note that the title is not: Against Choices

We all know about The Paradox of Choice. There have been posts and lectures, and a book by that name.

It’s even two of the ten principles of economics, as is explained here:

I recommend it. It’s quite fun and is more insightful than you would think. I’ll assume below that you’ve watched at least the explanation of the first two laws.

Choices Reduce Perceived Value

If I give you a snickers bar you value at a dollar, you feel like you got a free dollar. It’s easy, all you’re thinking is ‘free Snickers bar, sweet.’ If I give you a choice between a snickers bar and some M&Ms that you value at sixty cents, you still feel like you got a free snickers bar, which is a lot like getting a free dollar (since in this example you value it at a dollar). The trick is, now you had to start with ‘free candy, sweet’ to ‘which of these do I want more?’ and then to ‘the Snickers bar is forty cents better.’

When you finish this sequence, even if you know exactly what you want, you are left with the feeling of making a choice where you did better by forty cents. Most people typically don’t quantify these effects, but in my model they often still do have the gut feelings involved.

Even worse, you might be thinking ‘I had a choice of candy and I chose the Snickers bar’ and comparing the value of the Snickers bar not to the value of the M&Ms, but to the value of a choice of two candies. Now things get dangerous. You could reasonably value a choice of candies very close to or higher than a dollar! If you are thinking Choices Are Good rather than Choices Are Bad, you could even think of the optionality as being worth more than the choice you eventually make, and now you got a free candy bar and potentially actually feel bad about it, because you lost value. You might even get tricked into thinking about how what you really wanted was a Milky Way, or a banana.

The more you were forced into choosi...
How long has civilisation been going?
by Elo — 2017-07-22T06:41:20.830Z

I didn't realise how short human history was. Somewhere around 130,000 years ago we were standing upright as we are today. Somewhere around 50,000 years ago we broadly arrived at:

the fully modern capacity for Culture *

That's roughly when we started, "routine use of bone, ivory, and shell to produce formal (standardized) artifacts". Agriculture and humans staying still to grow plants happened at about 10,000BCE (or 12,000 years ago).

Writing started happening around 6600BCE* (8600 or so years ago).

This year is 5777 in the Hebrew calendar. So someone has been counting for roughly that long.

The pyramids are estimated to have been built at around 2600 BCE (4600 years ago)

Somewhere between then and zero by the christian calendar we sorted out a lot of metals and how to use them.

And somewhere between then and now we finished up all the technological advances that lead to present day.

But it's hard to get a feel for that. Those are just some numbers of years. Instead I want to relate that to our lives. And our generations.

12,000 years ago is a good enough point to start paying attention to.

If a human generation is normally between 12* and 35* years. Considering that further back the generations would have been closer to 12 years apart and today they are shifting to being more like 30 years apart (and up to 35 years apart). That means the bounds are:

12,000/12=1,000
12,000/35 = 342

342-1000 generations. That's all we have. In all of humanity. We are SO YOUNG!

(if you take the 8600 year number as a starting point you get a range of 717-242.)

Let's make it personal

I know my grandparents which means I am a not-negligible chance to also know my grandchildren and maybe even more (depending on medical technology). I already have a living niece so I have already experienced 4 generations. Without being unreasonable I can expect to see 5 and dream to see 6, 7 or infinite.

(5/1000)->(7/342) = between a half a percent and two percent of human history. I will have lived through 1/2% - 2% of human generations (ignoring longevity escape for a moment) to date.

Compared to other life numbers:

Days in a year * 100 year = 36,500 days in a 100 year lifespan.

52 weeks *100 = 5200. Or one week of a 100 year lifespan is equivalent to one generation of humans.

12,000 years / 365 ...
Can anyone refute these arguments that we live on the interior of a hollow Earth?
by Fivehundred — 2017-07-21T16:51:09.671Z

I found a website run by an interesting fellow called 'Wild Heretic' and it seems incredibly intricate and comprehensive. I've yet to see any other person argue as well for half so radical a claim. Think of this as an opportunity to examine arguments for highly unpopular views.

Wild Heretic believes that we live on the inside of a hollow sphere, lit by a half-light half-dark Sun at its center (he claims that light bends in order to produce the effect of rising and setting), that the moon is an optical illusion, that manmade satellites don't really exist, that the stars are light artifacts produced in the atmosphere and can never be seen above it, and he has a bunch of explanations for the other celestial bodies like comets and galaxies.
It all seems shockingly intelligent (aside from when he insists that the fact that the Earth doesn't move under your feet when you jump disproves heliocentrism). He also has nine main pieces of evidence for his model:
1. Some early modern maps have inversed latitude and longitude
2. Modern polyconic maps show more accurate sizes and shapes
3. 19th century balloon observations (that is, without an intervening medium) gave the impression of a concave surface
4. 4,000 foot plumb lines reportedly were farther away from each other at the bottom of a mine shaft
5. A laser shot between two posts (over water) seems to curve downwards
6. An old rectilineator experiment indicates a concave surface (the experiment has been criticized here)
7. Radar and radio wave horizons cannot be explained on a convex ball
8. Ships disappearing below the horizon are an optical illusion
9. Light bends upwards, which allows for the rising/setting illusion of the sun and moon
I would really like to know what people here have to say about this, since the comments on the site itself are very disappointing. (A lot of it does rely on a massive conspiracy involving scientists of many stripes, but it's probably best to overlook that.)
MILA gets a grant for AI safety research
by Dr_Manhattan — 2017-07-21T15:34:55.493Z

http://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/montreal-institute-learning-algorithms-ai-safety-research

The really good news is that Yoshua Bengio is leading this (he is extremely credible in modern AI/deep learning world), and this is a pretty large change of mind for him. When I spoke to him at a conference 3 years ago he was pretty dismissive of the whole issue; this year's FLI conference seems to have changed his mind (kudos to them)

Of course huge props to OpenPhil for pursuing this
Ways of Seeing
by ig0r — 2017-07-21T01:42:20.873Z

Cross-posted on my blog: http://garybasin.com/ways-of-seeing/

Tough problems often feel insurmountable without more information and better models — more data and thinking. An alternative approach is to be able to see the problem, and the whole world, in a new way. By looking through different eyes, different aspects of the world get highlighted and new actions become visible. An entrepreneur sees the world differently. They notice opportunities for improvement and innovation where someone else only sees stress and pain. Similarly, while a typical person enters a living room and sees the couches and artwork on the walls, a parent of a young child perceives a menagerie of death traps. We are doing this in our own ways all of the time and this defines our experience — our reality.

Several ways of seeing come pre-installed for us — drives to obtain food, sex, safety, and socialization — as a result of our mind rewarding itself for continued survival and gene propagation. These powerful recurring waves of hallucination affect us to the core: how we see and how we experience. The world takes on a different character when we are hungry in contrast to when we are cold and wet. We develop new ways of seeing as we are exposed to more complex patterns: being unemployed or playing a game of chess. At times, we glimpse perspectives of overwhelming curiosity and open-mindedness — fertile soil for our capacity for reason. Unfortunately, we often overestimate this capacity, causing us to fool ourselves and others, and get stuck in the same old ways of thinking and perceiving.

The way we experience and how we look are two sides of the same coin. A way of seeing guides our attention in the service of some purpose, which highlights some parts of experience at the expense of others. The purpose is perhaps not a cause but rather a justification: a way that we understand, or talk about, the behaviors we undertake. One can imagine that if the earth was a conscious thing, it may understand one of its purposes — one of its ways of seeing — as life creation. The way we see also seems to define which actions appear available to us — which levers are pullable. When we feel stuck, it is useful to explore alternative ways of seeing. The way you perceive the world may be

...