trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Trivial inconveniences as an antidote to akrasia
by Adam Zerner — 2018-05-18T05:34:55.430Z

1.

I was taking an five hour bus back to LA from Vegas. We were stopped at a rest stop about midway through, and I got out to stretch my legs. I figured it would be a good time to call my mom and catch up.

While chatting with her, she started to tell me about a business idea she has. She started off telling me how she loves chocolate, but has zero willpower to not overindulge. She could just not buy it at the store, but she really doesn't want to give it up outright. So her idea is to have a safe with some sort of timer on it that feed her a piece of chocolate once per day, but that's it.

My very first impression was to role my eyes. There is this small part of me that still instinctively just wants to disagree with whatever my mom says. But that only lasted a brief moment. After thinking about it some more, I kinda love the idea! The problem is real, and it's important to solve. The solution should be pretty foolproof, and shouldn't be too expensive.

I'm an entrepreneur, and I think about startup ideas all the time. I end up forgetting about most of them. This ten minute chat with my mom happened almost three years ago, and it still holds a place in my mind.

2.

I think her original idea is fine, but I always like to think about how ideas can be improved on. One problem I see with her idea is that it might be too strict. What if you truly do have a good reason for deviating and want to be fed chocolate now?

What if, instead of feeding you a piece of chocolate once every 24 hours (or whatever you configure it to), what if it just required you to stand there for five minutes before feeding you the chocolate? And you can't just step away and watch TV while you wait out the five minutes - what if the safe made you actually stand there and do something boring for five minutes (eg. by making you type in the letter that appears on the screen every ten seconds)?

I feel like that approach would still be pretty damn effective. Who is going to actually stand there for five whole minutes typing letters in to a screen while they wait for a piece of chocolate?

3.

But why, exactly, does that second approach actually work? I may be guilty of explaining by labeling here, but... "trivial inconveniences" is my answer.

Trivial inconveniences are a thing. Even though standing for five minutes (or even 60 seconds) is a relatively trivial inconvenienc...
The Context is Conflict
by Jacob Falkovich — 2018-05-18T02:16:51.535Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.com.

John Nerst wrote an excellent analysis of the recent clash between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein on the topic of race, IQ, and all the topics that get dragged in when you talk about race and IQ. The essay weaves together several layers: it dives deep into the details of the disagreement, and it also soars high enough to see the conflict as being not just between two interpretations of IQ science or two political positions, but two general ways that people think: decoupling vs. contextualizing.

As an Ashkenazi Jew, I don't have much to say on the race/IQ debate, but I'm fascinated by the meta-conflict in play. It shows up in many guises: nerds vs. non-nerds, scientists vs. activists, mistake theorists vs. conflict theorists.

I'm a big fan of the bell curve: the bell curve of soccer ability, of attitudes on racism and on feminism, of tennis skill, of worrying about climate change. But none of these deserve to be capitalized.

That honor is apparently reserved for "The Bell Curve" of IQ scores in a population, and the book on said subject by Charles Murray. The book contains 900 pages that not a single person has ever read, and a chapter on the differences in IQ distributions among self-identified races. This chapter ensured that for the next 24 years, interacting with Charles Murray in any capacity, for or against, was a political statement.

Enter Sam Harris. Harris belongs to a group of people who share certain traits, one of these being a strong distaste for the idea that everything has to be a political statement. Sarah Constantin identifies some other commonalities:

Stanovich talks about “cognitive decoupling”, the ability to block out context and experiential knowledge and just follow formal rules, as a main component of both performance on intelligence tests and performance on the cognitive bias tests that correlate with intelligence. Cognitive decoupling is the opposite of holistic thinking. It’s the ability to separate, to view things in the abstract, to play devil’s advocate.

[...]

Speculatively, we might imagine that there is a “cognitive decoupling elite” of smart people who are good at probabilistic reasoning and score high on the cognitive reflection test and the IQ-correlated cognitive bias tests. These people would be more likely to be male, more likely to have at least undergrad-level math educat...
Of Two Minds
by Valentine — 2018-05-17T04:34:51.892Z

Follow-up to:

The Intelligent Social Web

The human mind evolved under pressure to solve two kinds of problems:

How to physically move
What to do about other people

I don’t mean that list to be exhaustive. It doesn’t include maintaining

homeostasis

, for instance. But in practice I think it hits everything we might want to call “thinking”.

…which means we can think of the mind as having two types of reasoning:

mechanical

and

social

.

Mechanical reasoning is where our

intuitions about “truth”

ground out. You throw a ball in the air, your brain makes a

prediction

about how it’ll move and how to catch it, and either you catch it as expected or you don’t. We can imagine how to build an engine, and then build it, and then we can find out whether it works. You can try a handstand, notice how it fails, and try again… and after a while you’ll probably figure it out. It means something for our brains’ predictions to be right or wrong (or somewhere in between).

I recommend

this TED Talk

for a great overview of this point.

The fact that we can plan movements lets us do abstract truth-based reasoning. The book

Where Mathematics Comes From

digs into this in math. But for just one example, notice how set theory

almost

always uses

container metaphors

. E.g., we say elements are in sets like pebbles are in buckets. That physical intuition lets us use things like Venn diagrams to reason about sets and logic.

…well, at least until our intuitions are

wrong

. Then we get surprised. And then, like in learning to catch a ball, we change our anticipations. We update.

Mechanical reasoning seems to already obey Bayes’ Theorem for updating. This seems plausible from my read of

Scott’s review of Surfing Uncertainty

, and in the TED Talk I mentioned earlier

Daniel Wolpert claims

this is measured. And it

makes sense

: evolution would have put a lot of pressure on our ancestors to get movement right.

Why, then, is there

systematic bias

? Why do the Sequences help at all with thinking?

Sometimes, occasionally, it’s because of something structural — like how we systematically feel someone’s blow as

harder than they felt they had hit us

. It just falls out of how our brains make physical predictions. If we know about this, we can try to correct for it when it matters.

But the rest of the time?

It’s because we predict it’s socially helpful to be biased that way.

When it comes to surviving and finding mates, having ...
Lotuses and Loot Boxes
by Davidmanheim — 2018-05-17T00:21:12.583Z

There has been some recent discussion about how to conceptualize how we lose sight of goals, and I think there's a critical conceptual tool missing. Simply put, there's a difference between addiction and exploitation. Deciding to try heroin and getting hooked is addiction, but the free sample from a dealer given to an unwary kid to 'try it just once' is exploitation. This difference is not about the way the addict acts once they are hooked, it's about how they got where they are, and how wary non-addicts need to be when they notice manipulation.

I'm going to claim that the modern world is more addictive overall not just because humans have gotten better at wireheading ourselves. The reason is because humanity has gotten better at exploitation at scale. People (correctly) resent exploitation more than addiction, and we should pay more attention to how we are getting manipulated. Finally, I'll claim that this all ties back to my pet theory that some form of Goodhart's law can explain almost anything that matters. (I'm kind of joking about that last. But only kind of.)

Lotuses

Humans are adaptation executioners, not fitness maximizers - so sometimes we figure out how to wirehead using those adaptations in a way that doesn't maximize fitness. Sex is great for enhancing natural fitness because it leads to babies, condoms let us wirehead. High-fat foods are great for enhancing natural fitness because food is scarce, modern abundance lets us wirehead. Runner's high enhances natural fitness, #punintentional, because it allows people to continue running from a predator, but running marathons for the exhilarating feeling lets us wirehead. These examples are mostly innocuous - they aren't (usually) adddictions.

That doesn't mean they can't be bad for us. Valentine suggested that we try to notice the taste of the lotus when our minds get hijacked by something other than our goal. I think this is exactly right - we get hijacked by our own brain into doing something other than our original goal. Our preferences get modified by doing something, and several hours later it's 2 AM and we realize we should stop p̶l̶a̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶u̶z̶z̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶g̶o̶n̶s̶ r̶e̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶t̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶S̶l̶a̶t̶e̶s̶t̶a̶r̶c̶o̶d̶e̶x doing whatever it is we're currently getting distracted by.

In some...
LW Open Source – Overview of the Codebase
by Raemon — 2018-05-16T23:50:35.108Z

If you’re interested in making longterm, serious contributions to the LessWrong codebase, it’ll be helpful to know some of the gritty details of how the codebase fits together.

This is an overview of the file structure – some of the root files that bind the application together, and the most important folders of the lesswrong package in particular.

The Ties That Bind

Understanding the “glue” files that connect the app together.

After you’ve gotten a local server up and running, take a look at these files in the root directory:

package.json – This is the npm manager. In addition to telling npm install which node packages to download, it has a new scripts that you’ll want to run the application

npm start – runs the application using the settings.json . It will first trigger the npm prestart script, which will run the prestart_lesswrong.sh shell script.
npm test – runs the automated tests. We haven’t actually come up with a testing framework that’s fast/good/reliable enough to be worth the overhead, so for now ignore this.

sample_settings.json – These are the default settings, which doesn’t come with any passwords, or connections to our mongo database or galaxy server.

settings.json – Automatically generated from sample_settings.json. If you’re doing longterm development and are trusted by the site admins, we can send you credentials for the either the development or production server/database.

You’ll also see these folders:

node_modules/ – where all node modules are installed

packages/ – where all vulcanJS packages live.

~/packages/lesswrong

This is where most of our code lives.

Each vulcanJS package has a package.js file , which initializes the package. Glancing inside packages/lesswrong/package.js, you’ll see:

Package.onUse – determines what dependencies to load when the app is run normally. api.use calls other VulcanJS packages, which in turn call other dependencies. It also establishes server.js and client.js as the main modules.
Package.onTest – same, but for used in the testing environment

And then you’ll find:

server.js – this is the main module that our app runs on the server. Essentially a giant list of import statements that plugs the various pieces of the package together.
client.js – same, but fo

...
The Devil's Advocate: when is it right to be wrong?
by Jameson Quinn — 2018-05-15T17:12:16.681Z

That's a mighty ambitious title, isn't it? Sorry, I don't actually have an answer to the question though. All I have is an anecdote. Two warnings ahead of time:

This involves politics, so feel free to skip it if you think that's too mind-killing. You can still participate in comments just based on the title above.
In this case I actually think I'm right. The only reason I'm discussing it under the heading above is that on a meta level I think that it would be OK if I were wrong.

So, here's the situation. I believe that the main voting method used in the US, Canada, and the UK is crap. (This method is known as "first past the post", FPTP, even though "top of the heap" would be more descriptive and have a better acronym.) I think that they can be fixed in theory, and that in practice the chances and consequences of fixing them are high and big enough that this is worth my attention and that of others.

Of the people in the US who agree with me on those points, most of them are (roughly speaking) affiliated with FairVote, which advocates a pair of voting methods they call "RCV": that is, IRV for single-winner elections and STV for multi-winner. The voting theory details of those aren't important here.

I believe that these "RCV" methods are an improvement over FPTP, but fall far short of the best voting methods. More importantly, while FairVote is making real progress at getting RCV adopted (for instance, statewide in Maine), I expect them to "hit a wall" before getting it adopted in the most important cases (president, US congress, and state legislatures) in a way that could be avoided if they were advocating for better methods.

I've probably devoted as much deep thought to voting methods as about 1000 average FairVote members. But there are many tens of thousands of them, and a few of them have devoted comparable amounts of thought as I have. Also, predictions like "strategy X is bound to fail (even though it's partially succeeded in the past) but strategy Y has a chance of succeeding (even though it's new and has no direct track record)" are very hard to get right. So from an outside view, chances that I'm wrong are actually pretty high, and even chances that I'm wrong AND they're right are appreciable.

But I'm not going to give up tr...
RFC: Philosophical Conservatism in AI Alignment Research
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2018-05-15T03:29:02.194Z

I've been operating under the influence of an idea I call philosophical conservatism when thinking about AI alignment. I am in the process of summarizing some of the specific stances I take and why I take them because I believe others would better serve the project of alignment research by doing the same, but in the meantime I'd like to request comments on the general line of thinking to see what others think. I've formatted the outline of the general idea and reasons for it with numbers so you can easily comment on each statement independently.

AI alignment is a problem with bimodal outcomes, i.e. most of the probability distribution is clustered around success and failure with very little area under the curve between these outcomes.

Thus, all else equal, we would rather be extra cautious and miss some paths to success than be insufficiently cautious and hit a path to failure.

One response to this is what Yudkowsky calls security mindset by alluding to Schneier's concept of the same name.

Another is what I call philosophical conservatism. The ideas are related and address related concerns but in different ways.

Philosophical conservatism says you should make the fewest philosophical assumptions necessary to addressing AI alignment and that each assumption should be maximally parsimonious and be the assumption that is least convenient for addressing alignment if it were true when there is nontrivial uncertainty over whether a similar, more convenient assumption holds.

This is a strategy that reduces the chance of false positives in alignment research but makes the problem possibly harder, more costly, and less competitive to solve.

For example, we should assume there is no discoverably correct ethics or metaethics the AI can learn since, although it would make the problem easier if this were true, there is nontrivial uncertainty around this and so the assumption which makes it less likely that alignment projects fail is to assume that ethics and metaethics are not solvable.

Current alignment research programs do not seem to operate with philosophical conservatism because they either leave philosophical issues relevant to alignment unaddressed, make unclear implicit philosophical assumptions, or admit being hopeful that helpful assumptions will prove true and ease the work.

The alignment project is better served by those working on it using philosophical con

...
Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms
by Chris_Leong — 2018-05-14T22:44:51.705Z

One of the most common difficulties faced in discussions is when the parties involved have different beliefs as to what the scope of the discussion should be. In particular, John Nerst identifies two styles of conversation as follows :

Decoupling norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to require your claims to be considered in isolation - free of any context or potential implications. An insistence on raising these issues despite a decoupling request are often seen as sloppy thinking or attempts to deflect.
Contextualising norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to expect certain contextual factors or implications to be addressed. Not addressing these factors is often seen as sloppy, uncaring or even an intentional evasion.

Let's suppose that blue-eyed people commit murders at twice the rate of the rest of the population. With decoupling norms, it would be considered churlish to object to such direct statements of facts. With contextualising norms, this is deserving of criticism as it risks creates a stigma around blue-eyed people. At the very least, you would be expected to have issued a disclaimer to make it clear that you don't think blue-eyed people should be stereotyped as criminals.

John Nerst writes (slightly edited): "To a contextualiser, decouplers’ ability to fence off any threatening implications looks like a lack of empathy for those threatened, while to a decoupler the contextualiser's insistence that this isn’t possible looks like naked bias and an inability to think straight"

For both these norms, it's quite easy to think of circumstances when expectations for the other party to use these norms would normally be considered unreasonable. Weak men are superweapons demonstrates how true statements can be used to destroy a group's credibility and so it may be quite reasonable to refuse to engage in low-decoupling conversation if you suspect this is the other person's strategy. On the other hand, it's possible to use a strategy of painting every action you dislike to be part of someone's agenda (neo-liberal agenda, cultural marxist agenda, far right agenda, ect. take your pick). People definitely have agendas and take actions as a result of this, but the loose use of universal counter-arguments should rightly be frowned upon.

I agree with the contextualisers that making certain statements, even if true, can be incredibly naive in highly charge...
Personal relationships with goodness
by KatjaGrace — 2018-05-14T18:50:01.310Z

Many people seem to find themselves in a situation something like this:

Good actions seem better than bad actions. Better actions seem better than worse actions.

There seem to be many very good things to do—for instance, reducing global catastrophic risks, or saving children from malaria.

Nonetheless, they continually do things that seem vastly less good, at least some of the time. For instance, just now I went and listened to a choir singing. You might also admire kittens, or play video games, or curl up in a ball, or watch a movie, or try to figure out whether the actress in the movie was the same one that you saw in a different movie. I’ll call this ‘indulgence’, though it is not quite the right category.

On the face of it, this is worrying. Why do you do the less good things? Is it because you prefer badness to goodness? Are you evil?

It would be nice to have some kind of a story about this. Especially if you are just going to keep on occasionally admiring kittens or whatever for years on end. I think people settle on different stories. These don’t have obviously different consequences, but I think they do have subtly different ones. Here are some stories I’m familiar with:

I’m not good: “My behavior is not directly related to goodness, and nor should it be”, “It would be good to do X, but I am not that good” “Doing good things rather than bad things is generally supererogatory”

I think this one is popular. I find it hard to stomach, because if I am not good that seems like a serious problem. Plus, if goodness isn’t the guide to my actions, it seems like I’m going to need some sort of concept like schmoodness to determine which things I should do. Plus I just care about being good for some idiosyncratic reason. But it seems actually dangerous, because not treating goodness as a guide to one’s actions seems like it might affect one’s actions pretty negatively, beyond excusing a bit of kitten admiring or choir attendance.

In its favor, this story can help with ‘leaving a line of retreat‘: maybe you can better think about what is good, honestly, if you aren’t going to be immediately compelled to do it. It also has the appealing benefit of not looking dishonest, hypocritical, or self-aggrandizing.

Goodness is hard: “I want to be good, but I fail due to weakness of will or some other mysterio

...
Rational spirituality: transcending your metaphysics
by monktastic — 2018-05-14T17:25:40.412Z
Link: https://monktastic.github.io/blog/pages/dream/rational-spirituality.html

Hi all! First time poster. I'll be honest: I'm feeling a bit nervous posting this here.

I want to share some thoughts about consciousness and the nature of reality. The basic idea is that reality is, in fact, a dream, and this can be discovered for oneself beyond any reasonable doubt. Roughly, the method is to grok the fact that your metaphysical assumptions are not rationally grounded in the way you normally assume.

The main obstacle to its discovery is a subtle cognitive process that continually reinforces our metaphysics. I demonstrate how these beliefs (such as those regarding the nature of time) are not based in reason, contrary to intuition. Yet even if one understands this intellectually, s/he will find it very hard to confront seriously. That misguided certainty is precisely what keeps the dream apparently stable and mundane.

If you're wondering why you don't see evidence of this around you, it's because this is your dream. How convenient, right?

There is a brief foray into quantum mechanics and the many-worlds interpretation. It's hard to avoid the criticism of "quantum woo" in a context like this, but I stay true to the math and experimental evidence, and hope you will draw your own conclusions.

The site may appear to be pushing an idealist metaphysics, which seems to go against the claim of transcending metaphysics. But the idea is to have the experience itself, at which point metaphysics becomes a tool for communication, rather than something we grip very tightly (usually without realizing it, as in the everyday life experience that the Buddhists call samsara).

Cheers,

M