trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
MIRI strategy
by ColonelMustard — 2013-10-28T15:33:10.040Z

Summary: I do not understand why MIRI hasn’t produced a non-technical (pamphlet/blog post/video) to persuade people that UFAI is a serious concern. Creating and distributing this document should be MIRI’s top priority.

If you want to make sure the first AGI is FAI, one way to do so is to be the first to create an AI, and ensure it is FAI. Another is to persuade people that UFAI is a legitimate concern, and do so in large numbers. Ideally this would become a real concern, so nobody runs into the trap of Eliezer1999ish of “I’m going to build an AI and see how it works”.

1) is tough for an organisation of MIRI’s size. 2) is a realistic goal. It benefits from:

Funding: MIRI’s funding almost certainly goes up if more people are concerned with AI x-risk. Ditto FHI.
Scalability: If MIRI has a new math finding, that's one new theorem. If MIRI creates a convincing demonstration that we have to worry about AI, spreading this message to a million people is plausible.
Partial goal completion: making a math breakthrough that reduces the time to AI might be counter-productive. Persuading an additional person of the dangers of UFAI raises the sanity waterline.
Task difficulty: creating an AI is hard. Persuading people that “UFAI is a possible extinction risk. Take it seriously” is nothing like as difficult. (I was persuaded of this in about 20 minutes of conversation.)

One possible response is “it’s not possible to persuade people without math backgrounds, training in rationality, engineering degrees, etc”. To which I reply: what’s the data supporting that hypothesis? How much effort has MIRI expended in trying to explain to intelligent non-LW readers what they’re doing and why they’re doing it? And what were the results?

Another possible response is “We have done this, and it's available on our website. Read the Five Theses”. To which I reply: Is this is in the ideal form to persuade a McKinsey consultant who’s never read Less Wrong? If an entrepreneur with net worth $20m but no math background wants to donate to the most efficient charity he finds, would he be convinced? What efforts has MIRI made to test the hypothesis that the Five Theses, or Evidence and Import, or any other document, has been tailored to optimise the chance of convincing others?
(Further &nda...
Goal Setting and Goal Achievement
by kerspoon — 2013-10-28T12:17:16.479Z

The reason people succeed is well-focused, regular, effort.

The reason for failure is more often lack of effort rather than the direction of the effort. For example, more people put on weight because they couldn't stick to their diet than those that chose a diet that wouldn't have caused weight loss.

1. How the Brain Decides what Task you Will Perform

You subconscious decides on your motivation for a task, but you can consciously choose to use your self-control and not do the easiest task. For example, my subconscious is saying that watching TV requires the least motivation but I have chosen to use up some of my self-control and write this article instead.

I'm going to discuss a few tactics to reduce the self-control required to complete a task (such as setting up a trigger) as well as ways of making your subconscious disfavour your distractions (for example by removing the plug from your TV).

1.1 Motivation

A good guideline for the motivation that your subconscious gives you for a task is given in the equation below.

The Expectancy and Value can be thought of in terms of gambling. The Value is how much you get paid if you win and the Expectancy is the probability of winning. The Value of a task changes constantly as it is how much you value completing the task at any given moment. Delay is the amount of time before you will get the pay-off. For writing an essay it is likely to be after the entire thing is written, watching TV is an almost instant hit. Impulsiveness is a more complex part which is covered in Piers Steel's “Procrastination”.

If you are struggling to put effort in to a task then it is probably because your motivation for it is lower than its alternatives. For example, there are many things I could do at the moment: I could get some food, play computer games, go for a walk, write this essay, etc. and each has a certain level of motivation based on the above equation. If I make sure I'm not hungry then the first task is of such low value that it wont be a problem. If I delete my computer games so I have to find the CD to be able to play them it increases the delay making that less of an issue.

Every time you get distracted take note of the task and see why you have a higher motivation for it than what you should be doing. Then go through each part of the equation in turn to see if you can reduce the motivation for tasks you don't want t...
Supplementing memory with experience sampling
by jefftk — 2013-10-28T11:52:13.319Z

If you asked me how happy I've been, I'd think back over my recent life and synthesize my memories into a judgement. Since I'm the one experiencing my life you would think this would be accurate, but our memories aren't fair. For example, people who had their hand in 57° water for 60 seconds rated the experience as less pleasant than people who had their hand in the same 57° water for the same 60 seconds, followed by 30 seconds with the water slowly rising to 59°. (Kahneman 1993, pdf) This is the peak-end rule where when we look back at an experience we don't really consider the duration and instead evaluate it based on how it was at its peak and how it ended.

This disagreement between emotion as it is experienced and emotion as it is remembered is called the memory-experience gap, and the peak-end rule is only one of the causes. The problem is, generally we only have access to memories of our emotion, which means if you're given the ice-water choice you'll repeatedly choose the option with more suffering. How can we get around this?

When psychologists want to get at experiential emotion they give people little timers. Every time the timer goes off the person writes down how happy/sad they are at that moment. This is an external sampling method that lets us use any sort of aggregation we would like, and it's fair in a way our internal methods are not. When I first read about this I thought "neat" and moved on, but recently I realized I that with a computer in my pocket I could do this myself. After asking around I ended up with the TagTime Android app, which is the only way I've found to do this that (a) works without an internet connection and (b) has an equal probability of sampling at every moment.

The response screen looks like:

You tap tags to say which ones currently apply. I have them sorted by frequency. To add new tags you turn the phone sideways and type text:

That's a little annoying, but most of the time I'm not entering a new tag.

I have tags for happiness (numbers 0-9, added as I need them), for aspects of activities, and for people I'm with. Every so often I email the data to myself and add it to my full log which backs a graph:

Retrospective happiness still matters; you want to be happy with your life looking back. Because this is our memory, however, we're already aware of it and already optimize for it in our life. Adding ...
Social incentives affecting beliefs
by John_Maxwell — 2013-10-28T06:08:35.679Z

Having weird ideas relative to your friends and associates means paying social costs. If you share your weird ideas, you'll have more arguments, your associates will see you as weird and you'll experience some degree of rejection and decreased status. If you keep your weird ideas to yourself, you'll have to lead a double life of secret constructed knowledge on the one hand and public facade on the other.

For people reading this site, the most vivid analogy here might be being forced to live in a town full of religious hicks in the south of the USA, with minimal contact with the outside world. (I've heard from reliable sources that the stereotypes about the South are accurate.) Not many of us would choose to do this voluntarily.

The weirder your beliefs get relative to your peer group, the greater the social costs you'll have to pay. Imagine we plot the beliefs of your associates on a multidimensional plot and put a hook at the center of mass of this plot. Picture yourself attached with an elastic band to this hook. The farther you stray from the center of mass, the greater the force pulling you towards conventional beliefs.

This theorizing has a few straightforward implications:

If you notice yourself paying a high social or psychological cost for your current set of beliefs, and you have reasons to not abandon the beliefs (e.g. you think they're correct), consider trying to find a new set of associates where those psychosocial costs are lower (either people who agree with you more, people who are less judgmental, or some combination) so you can stop paying the costs. If you can't find any such associates, create some: convince a close friend or two of your beliefs, so you have a new center of mass to anchor yourself on. Also cultivate psychological health through improving your relationships, meditation, self-love and acceptance, etc.

If you're trying to help a group have accurate beliefs on aggregate, stay nonjudgmental so that the forces pulling people towards conventional wisdom will be lower, and they'll be more influenced by the evidence they encounter as opposed to the incentives they encounter. You may say "well, I'm only judgmental towards peoples' beliefs when they're incorrect." But even if you happen to be perfect at figuring out which beliefs are incorrect, this is still a bad idea.

...
Is it worth your time to read a lot of self help and how to books?
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-10-28T02:25:20.296Z

Some time ago, I noticed that lukeprog seems to have an exceptional knack for reading up on a subject and actually putting what he's learned to practical use. At first I thought he might be some weird genetic freak, literally - some people are good at math, others are good at languages, maybe Luke is just good at putting stuff he's read to practical use. That, or I hoped he had some secret to it that he could put into words and share with the rest of us.

But then then it occurred to me that Luke, by his own account, has spent a ridiculous amount of time reading self-help books. In a LessWrong post, he says, "I've spent several years studying scientific self-help"; IIRC his personal site used to have a ridiculous number of reviews of self-help books, including ones with a less scientific approach. This makes me suspect that probably, spending all that time reading self-help books made him better at learning how to do things. Even reading crappy self-help books (which again IIRC Luke's old website said he did a lot of, at first) may have helped, insofar as it taught him to tell good advice from bad.

He may be able to verbalize some of what he learned, like "look for books that take a scientific approach," but I suspect he's developed considerable non-verbalizable yet learnable skill in this area. I see a parallel here for my own skill at doing library research factual questions: some of it I can verbalize (Google it, read the Wikipedia article, look rigorous academic work, look for hard data on the opinions of experts), but a lot of it is stuff I can't verbalize, which another person could only gain through spending as much time doing research as I have.

I've previously had an aversion to reading much in the way of self help and how to books because of an expectation that mostly they'll suck, but now I think that maybe, when I get some spare time, I should buckle down, pick a topic (maybe writing), and read a bunch of how to books anyway, with a hope of actually getting better at the thing but mostly as an exercise in learning to learn how to do things. But I'm curious to know if other people think this is a good idea - if they see a flaw in my logic, or if anyone who's read a lot of self help and how to books can comment on whether they think it helped them tell good advice from bad.
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Discussion
by Mestroyer — 2013-10-27T22:26:59.864Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Discussion

WHEN:
03 November 2013 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
40.109545,-88.227318

Coordinates are:
40.109545,-88.227318
Meetup will be held in the Courtyard Cafe in the Illini Union, on the ground floor, at 2PM.

Discussion will be about the first 70 pages of Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Up to but not including "Norms, Surprises, and Causes."

If you don't have it, googling "Thinking Fast and Slow PDF" could help you find t' booty yer lookin' for, if ye be a swashbucklin' scallywag.

There will also be cookies.

Cross posted on the mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Discussion
Meetup : Atlanta: November Meetup (First of Two)
by Nova_Division — 2013-10-26T19:03:24.547Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: November Meetup (First of Two)

WHEN:
03 November 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1314 Hosea L Williams Dr. NE, Atlanta

Come join us! We'll be doing our normal eclectic mix of self-improvement brainstorming, educational mini-presentations, structured discussion, unstructured discussion, and social fun and games times! Please check back for the location. Please contact me if you have cat allergies, as our meeting space usually has cats. Incredibly cute cats. Check out ATLesswrong's facebook group, if you haven't already: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Atlanta.Lesswrong/ where you can connect with Atlanta Lesswrongers, suggest a topics for discussion at this meetup, and join our book club or study group!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: November Meetup (First of Two)
Replicating Douglas Lenat's Traveller TCS win with publicly-known techniques
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-10-26T15:47:03.222Z

Douglas Lenat's program EURISKO is legendary in the AI community for a distinct real-world achievement: allowing Lenat to win the the Traveller TCS roleplaying game tournament two years in a row (and then semi-voluntarily not competing subsequent years). Lenat never released EURISKO's source code, leaving how he managed to pull off this feat somewhat of a mystery. Yet Lenat's later work based on EURISKO does not seem to have yielded anything else in the way of practical benefits.

Some time ago on LessWrong, someone proposed trying to figure out what Lenat did and reimplementing EURISKO. But Eliezer is worried this could be dangerous. So I have another proposal: see if Lenat's accomplishment can be replicated using machine learning and genetic programming techniques that are already publicly known.

My suspicion is that Lenat's TCS win tells us more about TCS than about EURISKO, that TCS is likely a game that's inherently vulnerable to the "find winning strategies by simulating a lots of games on a computer" meta-strategy. I've heard, for example, that battles are often tactically trivial, with the outcome of battles effectively determined by the composition of the two fleets (and fleet composition is what Lenat used EURISKO for). If that hypothesis is correct, though, it suggests it shouldn't be necessary to reimplement EURISKO specifically to get a program that's good at designing TCS fleets. If that turns out not to be the case, it would be evidence that there really is something special about EURISKO after all.

Does anyone know if anyone has tried this? As a novice computer programmer, I think it might be a good project to hone my programming skills. Input on how to approach such a project would be appreciated.
Only You Can Prevent Your Mind From Getting Killed By Politics
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-10-26T13:59:59.544Z

Follow-up to: "Politics is the mind-killer" is the mind-killer, Trusting Expert Consensus

Gratuitous political digs are to be avoided. Indeed, I edited my post on voting to keep it from sounding any more partisan than necessary. But the fact that writers shouldn't gratuitously mind-kill their readers doesn't mean that, when they do, the readers' reaction is rational. The rules for readers are different from the rules for writers. And it especially doesn't mean that when a writer talks about a "political" topic for a reason, readers can use "politics!" as an excuse for attacking a statement of fact that makes them uncomfortable.

Imagine an alternate history where Blue and Green remain important political identities into the early stages of the space age. Blues, for complicated ideological reasons, tend to support trying to put human beings on the moon, while Greens, for complicated ideological reasons, tend to oppose it. But in addition to the ideological reasons, it has become popular for Greens to oppose attempting a moonshot on the grounds that the moon is made of cheese, and any landing vehicle put on the moon would sink into the cheese.

Suppose you're a Green, but you know perfectly well that the claim the moon is made of cheese is ridiculous. You tell yourself that you needn't be too embarrassed by your fellow Greens on this point. On the whole, the Green ideology is vastly superior to the Blue ideology, and furthermore some Blues have begun arguing we should go to the moon because the moon is made of gold and we could get rich mining the gold. That's just as ridiculous as the assertion that the moon is made of cheese.

Now imagine that one day, you're talking with someone who you strongly suspect is a Blue, and they remark on how irrational it is for so many people to believe the moon is made of cheese. When you hear that, you may be inclined to get defensive. Politics is the mind-killer, arguments are soldiers, so the point about the irrationality of the cheese-mooners may suddenly sound like a soldier for the other side that must be defeated.

Except... you know the claim that the moon is made of cheese is ridiculous. So let me suggest that, in that moment, it's your duty as a rationalist to not chastise them for making such a "politically charged" remark, and not demand they refrain from saying such things unless they mak...
Intellectual energy
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-10-26T13:06:39.481Z

One of the big variations I see between people is the amount of energy they habitually put into thinking, and I haven't seen this discussed anywhere.

General advice about improving health and lowering intellectual friction would seem to help increase the ability to think, and ideas like "take five minutes to consider the problem" adds impetus, but I'm not sure what the general difference is between me and most people, or Yvain and me.

Intellectual drive isn't an unalloyed good-- cranks have high drive combined with low self-editinig, and some types of depression include a compulsion to think about topics that cause misery and/or inertia. Part (all?) of the value of meditation is getting some time off from thinking. Still, increasing intellectual drive would probably be a good thing for a lot of people.

Has anyone found that rationality training or anything else increases the default desire to think?
Methods of Introspection: Brainstorming and Discussion
by RomeoStevens — 2013-10-25T21:47:57.878Z

At a recent meetup one of the topics of discussion was methods of introspection. This is an interesting topic to me because sometimes all it takes is becoming aware of a new method to clarify an area where you were making little progress. Different methods also appeal more to people with different cognitive styles. I think it would be awesome to be surprised by useful modes we haven't thought of before!

Before you fill your brain up with what we came up with, I am asking you to spend 1-5 minutes writing down names or descriptions of the different methods you use when engaged in thought. This can be normal thought, metacognition, etc. If you can think of a label or description that communicates something useful about it, it's fair game. An example if you have no idea what I'm talking about: imagining counterfactuals is a method of introspection, meditation can also be one, etc. It is a lot harder to brainstorm once you see 20 different ideas.

Rot13 notes from meeting, you don't have to rot13 your comments, but this means you should make your comment before reading others.

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Meetup : West LA—Inside the 5-Second Level
by OpenThreadGuy — 2013-10-25T21:17:21.833Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Inside the 5-Second Level

WHEN:
30 October 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA

How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for three hours, or for longer if you are good at improvising.

Discussion:

ED-209: You have 5 seconds to comply. —RoboCop

Of all generalized rationality skills, this is the most important. If you cannot think the right thought in the first five seconds upon encountering anything, inertia will almost certainly carry you where you do not want to be. So the question for discussion is: what are the generalized principles for turning abstract principles into thoughts at the 5-second level? And how do we apply those principles to themselves, so that we use them on the 5-second level?

Recommended Reading

The 5-Second Level

Problems vs. Tasks

5-Second Level Case Study: Value of information

The PNG of Rationality

5-Second Skill: From First Principles

How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside

Prior exposure to Less Wrong is not required. However, if you show up without prior exposure to Less Wrong, you will be vaporized within five seconds.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Inside the 5-Second Level
Why you really want a physicist to speak at your funeral
by Scott Garrabrant — 2013-10-25T19:38:27.559Z

A response to Aaron Freeman's "You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral."

If I had a physicist speak at my funeral, I would hope that he would talk about a lot more than the conservation of energy. I don't particularly care about what happens to my energy.

If I am lucky, he will speak about relativity. My family will probably have the mistaken intuition that only things in the present are truly real. Teach them about spacetime. They need to know that time and space are connected - that me being in the past is just like me being far away. The difference is that we will only have one way communication. Even if they will no longer be able talk to me, I will still talk to them through memories.

If I am not so lucky, he will speak about quantum mechanics. If I die young, my family will be grieving over the potential future I have lost. Teach them about many worlds. They need to know that our world is constantly splitting - that just before I died, the world split off a different future in which I am still alive. There is another world, just as real as our own, in which I survive. This world will even interact with our own in very tiny ways.

I want a physicist to speak at my funeral. I want everyone to understand that my continued existence is way more verifiable than a religious afterlife and way more substantial than a simple conservation of energy.