trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Simple Rules of Law
by Zvi — 2019-05-19T00:10:01.124Z

Response To: Who Likes Simple Rules?

Epistemic Status: Working through examples with varying degrees of confidence, to help us be concrete and eventually generalize.

Robin Hanson has, in his words, “some puzzles” that I will be analyzing. I’ve added letters for reference.

A] People are often okay with having either policy A or policy B adopted as the standard policy for all cases. But then they object greatly to a policy of randomly picking A or B in particular cases in order to find out which one works better, and then adopt it for everyone.

B] People don’t like speed and red-light cameras; they prefer human cops who will use discretion. On average people don’t think that speeding enforcement discretion will be used to benefit society, but 3 out of 4 expect that it will benefit them personally. More generally people seem to like a crime law system where at least a dozen different people are authorized to in effect pardon any given person accused of any given crime; most people expect to benefit personally from such discretion.

C] In many European nations citizens send their tax info into the government who then tells them how much tax they owe. But in the US and many other nations, too many people oppose this policy. The most vocal opponents think they benefit personally from being able to pay less than what the government would say they owe.

D] The British National Health Service gets a lot of criticism from choosing treatments by estimating their cost per quality-adjusted-life-year. US folks wouldn’t tolerate such a policy. Critics lobbying to get exceptional treatment say things like “one cannot assume that someone who is wheel-chair bound cannot live as or more happily. … [set] both false limits on healthcare and reducing freedom of choice. … reflects an overly utilitarian approach”

E] There’s long been opposition to using an official value of life parameter in deciding government policies. Juries have also severely punished firms for using such parameters to make firm decisions.

F] In academic departments like mine, we tell new professors that to get tenure they need to publish enough papers in good journals. But we refuse to say how many is enough or which journals count as how good. We’d keep the flexibility to make whatever decision we want at the last minute.

G] People who hire lawyers rarely know their track record and winning vs. losing court
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Simulation Typology and Termination Risks
by avturchin — 2019-05-18T12:42:28.700Z
Link:  https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05792

The main idea of the article is that we likely live in a “Fermi simulation”, that is, a simulation which is created by aliens to solve Fermi paradox via simulating possible global risks, or in a "Singularity simulation", – a simulation where future AI models its own origin (gaming simulations will also play with our period of history as a most interesting one). It means that our simulation will be likely turned off soon, as at least one of three conditions will be reached:

- Our simulation will model a global catastrophe, which is subjectively equal to the termination.
- Our simulation will reach unknown to us goal (but likely related to our AI's origin conditions) and will be terminated.
- Our simulation will reach a nested simulation level shortly after strong AI creation, which will drastically increase computational resources demand and thus the simulation will be terminated.

We also suggested a classification of different types of simulations, patched the Simulation Argument and suggested Universal Simulation Argument which now has to take into account all possible civilisations in the universe. This makes SA's branches where we are not in the simulations ("extinction soon" or "ethical future") much less likely, as it would require that all possible civilisations will go extinct or all possible non-human civilisations will be ethical.
Yes Requires the Possibility of No

by Scott Garrabrant — 2019-05-17T22:39:32.879Z

1. A group wants to try an activity that really requires a lot of group buy in. The activity will not work as well if there is doubt that everyone really wants to do it. They establish common knowledge of the need for buy in. They then have a group conversation in which several people make comments about how great the activity is and how much they want to do it. Everyone wants to do the activity, but is aware that if they did not want to do the activity, it would be awkward to admit. They do the activity. It goes poorly.

2. Alice strongly wants to believe A. She searches for evidence of A. She implements a biased search, ignoring evidence against A. She finds justifications for her conclusion. She can then point to the justifications, and tell herself that A is true. However, there is always this nagging thought in the back of her mind that maybe A is false. She never fully believes A as strongly as she would have believed it if she just implemented an an unbiased search, and found out that A was, in fact, true.

3. Bob wants Charlie to do a task for him. Bob phrases the request in a way that makes Charlie afraid to refuse. Charlie agrees to do the task. Charlie would have been happy to do the task otherwise, but now Charlie does the task while feeling resentful towards Bob for violating his consent.

4. Derek has an accomplishment. Others often talk about how great the accomplishment is. Derek has imposter syndrome and is unable to fully believe that the accomplishment is good. Part of this is due to a desire to appear humble, but part of it stems from Derek's lack of self trust. Derek can see lots of pressures to believe that the accomplishment is good. Derek does not understand exactly how he thinks, and so is concerned that there might be a significant bias that could cause him to falsely conclude that the accomplishment is better than it is. Because of this he does not fully trust his inside view which says the accomplishment is good.

5. Eve is has an aversion to doing B. She wants to eliminate this aversion. She tries to do an internal double crux with herself. She identifies a rational part of herself who can obviously see that it is good to do B. She identifies another part of herself that is afraid of B. The rational part thinks the other part is stupid and can't imagine being convinced that B is bad. The IDC fails, and Eve continues to have an ...
Announcing my YouTube channel
by Samo Burja — 2019-05-17T17:50:01.342Z

Social theory. Geopolitics. Power. New videos every week.

Recently I launched a YouTube channel. This channel provides another medium in which to share my thoughts, as well as a place to access recordings of my talks and interviews.

New content

The first several videos dive into my thoughts on institutions, history, and modern society.

Silicon Valley Was Wrong: The Internet Centralized Society It is commonly claimed that the Internet has been a decentralizing force for society, providing more power to individuals who can wield the new technology. This theme is ubiquitous within hacker culture and the cyberpunk literary genre, for example. However, today we find precisely the opposite: the Internet has, on the whole, been a centralizing force for society. A few large media companies have massive influence over public discourse as well as access to data about the behaviors of millions of users. While this has made individuals more transparent and more legible to large institutions at great scale, I argue that it has not made those large institutions more legible to us.
Why America is Not an Open Society In this video, I explore three common models given as explanations for the success of America, and argue that they don’t capture the complete picture. If these common perceptions are not true, then what more nuanced theory of history explains America’s success and prosperity?
I. America as an open, transparent society. Do ideas rise and fall on their own merits and strength of evidence, or is it possible to manipulate public opinion towards misinformation given enough material resources? To answer this question, I explore Edward Bernays’ 1928 book Propaganda, psychiatry in communist Yugoslavia, Lysenkoism, and the (lack of) transparency of modern media institutions such as Facebook.
II. The American public as rational, self-interested actors. I discuss the success of Sweden’s welfare state and examples of how individuals often make economic choices that depend on trust and that reflect care for others around them, as opposed to making all choices out of pure economic self-interest.
III. Decisions in American governance as the output of democratic processes. In reality, many decisions are not made by officials in elected positions, because much political steering power is instead held by entrenched bureaucracies and civil servants.
Will China Out-Innovate the United Stat

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Why exactly is the song 'Baby Shark' so catchy?
by Pee Doom — 2019-05-17T06:26:24.824Z

(Epistemic status: low-level infohazard, class Earworm. You have been warned.)

The video, "Baby Shark Dance", has over 2,773,743,743 views as of the time of this post. It bit into me while captive to a parent soothing their child on the BART subway some time ago and has occasionally reared its ugly snout ever since.

I am curious what models of music psychology have to say about this phenomenon and also what those explanations would suggest for increasing the virality of a given piece of music, audiovisuals, or any memetic content in general if applicable.
Offer of collaboration and/or mentorship
by Vanessa Kosoy — 2019-05-16T14:16:20.684Z

UPDATE: Offer of mentorship is closed, since I received sufficiently many candidates for now. Offer of collaboration remains open for experienced researchers (i.e. researchers that (i) have some track record of original math / theoretical compsci research, and (ii) are able to take on concrete open problems without much guidance).

I have two motivations for making this offer. First, there have been discussions regarding the lack of mentorship in the AI alignment community, and that beginners find it difficult to enter the field since the experienced researchers are too busy working on their research to provide guidance. Second, I have my own research programme which has a significant number of shovel ready open problems and only one person working on it (me). The way I see it, my research programme is a very promising approach that attacks the very core of the AI alignment problem.

Therefore, I am looking for people who would like to either receive mentorship in AI alignment relevant topics from me, or collaborate with me on my research programme, or both.

Mentorship

I am planning to allocate about 4 hours / week to mentorship, which can be done over Skype, Discord, email or any other means of remote communication. For people who happen to be located in Israel, we can do in person sessions. The mathematical topics in which I feel qualified to provide guidance include: linear algebra, calculus, functional analysis, probability theory, game theory, computability theory, computational complexity theory, statistical/computational learning theory. I am also more or less familiar with the state of the art in the various approaches other people pursue to AI alignment.

Naturally, people who are interested in working on my own research programme are those who would benefit the most from my guidance. People who want to work on empirical ML approaches (which seem to be dominant in OpenAI, DeepMind and CHAI) would benefit somewhat from my guidance, since many theoretical insights from computational learning theory in general and my own research in particular, are to some extent applicable even to deep learning algorithms whose theoretical understanding is far from complete. People who want to work on MIRI's core research agenda would also benefit somewhat from my guidance but I am less knowledgeable or interested in formal logic and approaches based on formal logic.

Coll

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Which scientific discovery was most ahead of its time?
by Richard_Ngo — 2019-05-16T12:58:14.628Z

Looking into the history of science, I've been struck by how continuous scientific progress seems. Although there are many examples of great intellectual breakthroughs, most of them build heavily on existing ideas which were floating around immediately beforehand - and quite a few were discovered independently at roughly the same time (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries).

So the question is: which scientific advances were most ahead of their time, in the sense that if they hadn't been made by their particular discoverer, they wouldn't have been found for a long time afterwards? (Ideally taking into account the overall rate of scientific progress: speeding things up by a decade in the 20th century seems about as impressive a feat as speeding things up by half a century in ancient Greece).
Kevin Simler's "Going Critical"
by habryka — 2019-05-16T04:36:32.470Z
Link: https://www.meltingasphalt.com/interactive/going-critical/

An interactive blogpost by Kevin Simler on network dynamics, with a final section on academia and intellectual progress. I generally think careful exploration of small-scale simulations like this can help quite well with understanding difficult topics, and this post seems like a quite good execution of that approach.

Also some interesting comments on intellectual progress and academia (though I recommend reading the whole post):

For years I've been fairly dismissive of academia. A short stint as a PhD student left a bad taste in my mouth. But now, when I step back and think about it (and abstract away all my personal issues), I have to conclude that academia is still extremelyimportant.

Academic social networks (e.g., scientific research communities) are some of the most refined and valuable structures our civilization has produced. Nowhere have we amassed a greater concentration of specialists focused full-time on knowledge production. Nowhere have people developed a greater ability to understand and critique each other's ideas. This is the beating heart of progress. It's in these networks that the fire of the Enlightenment burns hottest.

But we can't take progress for granted. If the reproducibility crisis has taught us anything, it's that science can have systemic problems. And one way to look at those problems is network degradation.

Suppose we distinguish two ways of practicing science: Real Science vs. careerist science. Real Science is whatever habits and practices reliably produce knowledge. It's motivated by curiosity and characterized by honesty. (Feynman: "I just have to understand the world, you see.") Careerist science, in contrast, is motivated by professional ambition, and characterized by playing politics and taking scientific shortcuts. It may look and act like science, but it doesn't produce reliable knowledge.

(Yes this is an exaggerated dichotomy. It's a thought exercise. Bear with me.)

Point is, when careerists take up space in a Real Science research community, they gum up the works. They angle to promote themselves while the rest of the community is trying to learn and share what's true. Instead of striving for clarity, they complicate and obfuscate in order to sound more impressive. They engage in (what Harry Frankfurt might call) scientific bullshit. And consequently, we might model t

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How do you know it's time for a break?
by Elizabeth — 2019-05-16T04:33:38.312Z

My original question was something like "how much productive work can people do in a day?", but even if I got a signed piece of paper from God telling me the exact average, that wouldn't be very useful to individuals except as cover for stopping once they'd reached the average. Some people are clearly capable of doing more than others, the same person has different capacities for different kinds of work.

So instead I'm asking "How do you know when you need a break? When you're done for the day?". My hope is that reading answers will inspire people to recognize tells in themselves they previously hadn't, and this will let them better assess when to push through and when to break.
Feature Request: Self-imposed Time Restrictions
by Adam Zerner — 2019-05-15T22:35:15.883Z

Hacker News has a feature called "noprocrast". Here's how they explain it in the FAQ:

In my profile, what is noprocrast?

It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on HN. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours.

If you try to use HN when you precommitted to not using it, you'll get the following message from them:

Get back to work!

Sorry, you can't see this page. Based on the anti-procrastination parameters you set in your profile, you'll be able to use the site again in 43 minutes.

I was thinking that something like this would be awesome for LessWrong. Personally, I have a rather large problem browsing the web - which includes browsing LessWrong - when I should be doing other things. After reading Digital Minimalism, I get the impression that such struggles are moreso the norm than the exception.
Why I've started using NoScript
by benwr — 2019-05-15T21:32:20.415Z

Edit: I've updated somewhat based on Said's comment below, to think that NoScript is not a tool for everyone. I haven't decided to stop using it, but I have decided to stop strongly recommending that others use it. I especially urge you to read about the other extensions he lists at the end of his comment.

Edit 2: It's also been pointed out to me that uBlock Origin also has capabilities for blocking 3rd party JavaScript, and might be even better at it than NoScript; in line with the idea that this is not for everyone, this functionality requires the user to explicitly claim to be an "advanced user" and read various documentation first. You may also be interested in reading the discussion for this post on lobste.rs

NoScript is a browser extension[1] that prevents your browser from loading and running JavaScript without your permission. I recently started using it, and I highly recommend it.

I had first tried using NoScript around a decade ago. At the time it seemed like too much of a hassle. I ended up wanting to enable almost all the scripts that were included, and this was somewhat annoying to do. Things have changed a lot since then.

For one, NoScript's user interface has become much better: Now, if a page isn't working right, you simply click the NoScript icon and whitelist any domains you trust, or temporarily whitelist any domains you trust less. You can set it to automatically whitelist domains you directly visit (thereby only blocking third-party scripts).

A more pressing change is that I'm now much less comfortable letting arbitrary third parties run code on my computer. I used to believe that my browser was fundamentally capable of keeping me safe from the scripts that it ran. Sure, tracking cookies and other tricks allowed web sites to correlate data about me, but I thought that my browser could, at least in principle, prevent scripts from reading arbitrary data on my computer. With the advent of CPU-architecture-based side channel attacks (Meltdown and Spectre are the most publicized, but it seems like new ones come out every month or so), this belief now seems quite naïve.

Finally, in that decade, third-party scripts for tracking and ads have become almost literally ubiquitous on the web. Just about every web site I visit, I've discovered, has at least a couple of third-party dependencies, whose provenance I don't trust, and which I'd rather not

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Emotional valence as cognition mutator (not a bug, but a feature)
by Slider — 2019-05-15T12:49:40.661Z

Maybe because of my neurotype I view it important that I have good general way of handling things. I noticed a a pattern where people would process seemingly similar requests very differently and got curious whether there is an actual difference or are people being needlessly inconsistent.

Can you pass the salt, please?
Step aside
Can I have your wallet, please?

2 of these are supposed to have a "well, he did ask" kind of reaction and the reminaing a "no, why would I?". The difference in suggestibility is great althought they all are supposed to be straight forward requests for X or a "can i have X? yes/no" kind of questions.

Now if I give a complicated answer why you should give me your wallet you are likely to remain pessimistic about complying. This also seems to have the weird property of increasing the sophistication of the argument is unlikely to increase compliance probability. It would seem like the person is not willing to entertain the proposition but is prejudiced to reject it from the get go. This would seem to go contrary to "intellectual openness/readiness".

However the behaviour is not really mysterious and the reasons for it are pretty well founded. Your wallet contains a lot of your money which is important for a lot of things you do. Should something bad happen to it a lot of things will get a lot messier. It's also an attractive prey target. It's plausible that someone might lie to you just to get a hold on your wallet just to have its possession.

When I thought about a straight up thief trying to get the wallet by asking I realised that increasing the sophistication of the reason why to give up the wallet is not a good strategy. However asking for any "innocent" target is likely to encounter a lot more suggestibility. Some of these suggestions might put you in the position to better grab the wallet. That is a "Hey what's over there?" and pointing away and then physically grabbing the wallet is likely to be more effective than a sophisticated argument why to give the wallet. The strange thing here seems to be that if the target percieves your motivation to be the wallet it's effectively game over to you as the thief. A lot of the targets psychological defences know to activate on that cue.

The surprising result that I ended up on upon thinking is that the phenomenon is...