trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
2017: A year in Science
by Elo — 2017-12-30T06:09:41.666Z

Original post with better visibility on link formatting: http://bearlamp.com.au/2017-a-year-in-science/

In Classical tradition for the Sydney Summer Solstice. We look back over the year and gathering some exciting science that was worth sharing. I present this year's list of science (see previous years - 2016, 2015)

Credit this year goes to Erratio for compiling the list. And I hope that together with us you can celebrate some of humanity's success over a wonderful year in science!

- first human head transplant (on a corpse). (https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/professor-claims-doctors-successfully-performed-human-head-transplant/)

- gay marriage in Australia (finally!)

- human-pig hybrid embryos created (https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-alive-the-first-human-pig-hybrid-has-been-created-in-the-lab)

- major breakthrough in understanding the common cold (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/scientists-make-major-breakthrough-that-could-pave-the-way-for-cure-to-common-cold-a3474106.html)

- reversed aging in mice (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-04/scientists-reverse-ageing-process-in-mice/5865714)

- premature lambs grown in artificial womb (http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/artificial-womb-used-to-successfully-grow-premature-lamb-for-the-second-time/)

- CRISPR has been used on human embryos (http://www.bbc.com/news/health-40802147)

- SpaceX has successfully launched and landed a reused Falcoln 9 rocket (https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/30/15117096/spacex-launch-reusable-rocket-success-falcon-9-landing)

- Elon Musk building words largest lithium ion battery as backup for South Australia http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/sa-to-get-worlds-biggest-lithium-ion-battery/8687268

- Tesla has built electric self driving trucks (https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16667366/tesla-semi-truck-announced-price-release-date-electric-self-driving)

- AlphaGo beat everyone at Go (https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/19/google-alphago-zero-ai/)

- Alpha Zero taught itself chess in 24 hours, beats all the other AI’s (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609736/alpha-zeros-alien-chess-shows-the-power-and-the-peculiarity-of-ai/)

- Metallic hydrogen created (https://phys.org/news/2017-01-metallic-hydrogen-theory-reality.html)

- 51-qubit quantum simulator (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2141105-quantum-simulator-with-51-qubits-is-largest-ever/)

- Researchers demonstrate a...
Conceptual Similarity Does Not Imply Actionable Similarity
by  — 2017-12-30T05:06:04.556Z

This is another essay about naming things, dichotomies, and where subtle mix-ups can lead to errors. More specifically, I’d like to draw your attention to situations where a very real conceptual commonality is present between several problems, but this commonality doesn’t actually provide much insight into a unified solution for the aforementioned problems.

Concretely, we can refer to time-inconsistent preferences, the well-documented phenomenon where we’ll relent to in-the-moment urges, often for a temptation we will later regret. For example, a student might put off studying until the last moment, choosing instead to read a riveting novel. Or a partygoer might drink far too much they can handle, knowing they’ll soon end up regretting it.

In both of these cases, there is indeed something we can abstract from the nature of each of these situations—a human considers doing X and soon regrets it, instead wishing they had done Y. My claim here is that “time-inconsistent preferences” form a type of descriptive classification because they can help us see the larger shape of what’s going on, but they don’t tell us how to solve the general problem.

Or, more specifically, I claim that in these situations where you’ve got a descriptive classification, it’s actually the specific details (and not the ability to recognize that you’re engaging in a general phenomenon) which provide the most leverage towards solving your problem.

In the above two examples, it might be that our struggling student needs to reexamine their priorities. Perhaps the regret is misplaced and actually doing poorly on the upcoming test isn’t even that big of a deal. Or perhaps our student could rearrange their schedule around and study with a friend to shave off some of the aversion.

The point is, this ends up looking quite different from what our overzealous partygoer might want to do. Our partygoer may want to consider the sort of circumstances which brought them to said party in the first place; it might be the case that avoiding certain triggers means they could sidestep potential binge opportunities entirely.

The point is, there’s a sort of mental misstep that can happen where being able to simply identify the generalized principle at work could give the false impression that you also know how to solve the problem. But the two are very much independent, as the generalized principle is, in these case...
Mapping the Social Mind (Buttons)
by Bound_up — 2017-12-29T20:33:41.034Z

I said before that normal people were like a vast wall of buttons. Each button triggers a response: out pops a slip of paper with a rehearsed mini-speech, or an idea about what to do. Very much like cached responses, each one being triggered as its corresponding concept is activated by a stimulus.

I say "minimum wage." That is the stimulus.

The brain of a normal person resolves the sensory data and activates a concept. The "minimum wage" concept in the brain lights up. That is the pushing of the button.

The person says "Oh, yes, did you hear about the effects observed in ____land? Just goes that show that minimum wage is good/bad, doesn't it!" That is the cached response, the slip of paper that comes out.

One of the mistakes I made before I understood this system is that I expected people to be less hypocritical. Better said (for they're not really being hypocrites, at least, not in the important sense of the word), I expected their expressed beliefs to give me clues to how they would behave.

For example, respectable people in American society will tell you that "family is the most important thing."

Ah, you might think (subconsciously). I shall hereafter expect their revealed preferences to favor family very highly. If their brother comes looking for some help, you might predict that help will gladly be given.

Hahaha, yeah, that's pretty silly, amiright?

Think of it this way. The brother asking for help is like one button being pushed, the brother-wants-help button. Mentioning "family values" pushes another button, the recite-respectable-mantra-about-family-values button. What happens when you push those buttons? The deeper question behind that is, What determines what gets written on the little slips of paper? What determines which thoughts get cached and which don't?

For normal humans, the answer is that their social experiences decide what will be on the papers. You can predictably expect to find written on their papers whatever response that they have, so far, found to give them the most prestige in their in-group. Responses that win the adoration and adulation of their audience are kept, and refinements are tested over time and made permanent if found favorable.

Now, it is clear, yes? Why would the slip of paper from one button tell you anything about the slip of paper of another button? They&#...
A List Of Questions & Exercises For Reviewing Your Year
by Krishaan Khubchand — 2017-12-29T12:59:04.445Z

As the year comes to an end, I thought it might be useful to share some questions that might help with reviewing your past year.

This is an adapted post, based on what I have written here.

And, I've put together an interactive suite so you can answer the questions in a more frictionless way. It's on PH right now. I hope the exercise increases your utilotons.

Before starting, here are a few reasons why reflecting on your year might be a good idea:

You're essentially using System 2 to learn from the general unarticulated patterns of data gathered by System 1. This can help reduce possible Garfield errors.
According to Dr. Jordan Peterson, written reflection also transforms the way the brain processes your experiences, as neural activity shifts from the emotional, stress-related parts of your brain (amygdala) to the more logical and detatched parts of your brain (pre-frontal cortex).
It's always great to have an increase in self-knowledge. You are an individual after all, might as well get to know yourself better.

I struggled with clearly categorising the questions, but here's my attempt nonetheless.

Looking at the stuff that has shapes you over the last year:

365 days is a long time. The purpose of these questions is to become more aware of the experiences and ideas that have influenced you and the person you’ve become in the last year.

What were some significant experiences that occurred in the last year? Describe 3–5. How did they change your perceptions and actions? Were they good or bad?
What new things did you discover this year? (Books, Ideas, People) Which ones influenced you the most? How?
What did I encounter that was unexpected — Which surprised me?
What did I continue to enjoy this year?
What did I continue to work on this year?
What new priorities have emerged for you this year that you are committed to honoring? Which old ones would you like to reaffirm. Write your WHY next to each one.

Learning from the good times and the bad times:

Make a list of 3–5 things that went really well in the last year. Why do you think these were successes? What stopped them from being catastrophes?
Make a list of 3–5 things that went horribly wrong this year. Why do you think this occured? What might have led to a different outcome? What actionable changes might you make?
What was painful? What caused this pain? List 5 examples.
What were the largest obstac

...
Empirical philosophy and inversions
by Charlie Steiner — 2017-12-29T12:12:57.678Z

A regular installment. Index is here.

This post is in large part a linkpost for an excellent talk on experimental philosophy, given by Ned Block (don't be put off by the title): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lHHxcxurhQ . Apologies to those who dislike videos, but (especially at 1.5x or 2x speed) it's faster and more fun than reading a bunch of his papers, I swear.

Here's an example: one experiment Block talks about sticks electrodes to peoples' heads, and then subtly shows them a geometrical shape while they're doing another task. In the after-experiment report, some participants report they noticed the shape, and their electrode data can then be reviewed to see what brain activity was neccessary for noticing the shape even if they didn't know they had to notice it. It turns out, your brain doesn't need to be very active for you to be able to recall seeing the shape.

Block uses results like this to defend his thesis about the richness of conscious perception, and how early in the brain's perceptual systems activity can be experienced consciously. But this forms an interesting contrast with a deflationary view of consciousness.

Our agent of deflation is Marvin Minsky. Here's a video of him being deflationist. He has a favorite point, which is that people associate consciousness with lots of tasks, like being able to remember smells, or being able to imagine applying verbs to nouns, et cetera, but that this grouping is a human-made category, and thinking about these things as a group can get in the way of understanding them. The stuff we call conscious activity can, he says, be broken up into lots of sub-processes like smelling and abstract-verb-imagining that have a strong internal coherence but not much overlap with each other.

Which brings us back to Ned Block and consciousness of perception. It's possible to look at the several experiments Block talks about, not as different probes of a unified consciousness, but as probes of several functions of the brain that fall under the umbrella of consciousness.

Another of Block's examples is presenting different images to each eye, and using eye-tracking to determine which image the subject is experiencing. It's natural and effortless for us to think that this sort of consciousness is the same thing as the consciousness of remembering the shape, form the fir...
Against Love Languages
by Ben Pace — 2017-12-29T09:51:29.609Z

The other day, a friend on facebook shared a post on love languages and asked their friends what their's were. I said that this did not fit my ontology for affection in a deep romantic relationship, and when someone asked me what ontoloy I used, I gave this short response (copied here so I can link people to it in the future).

Background: the notion of love languages is that there's five main ways humans express affection, and they are

gift giving,
quality time
words of affirmation
acts of service (devotion)
and physical touch

The reason this is useful to think about (according to the wikipedia summary of the book) is that

[P]eople tend to naturally give love in the way that they prefer to receive love, and better communication between couples can be accomplished when one can demonstrate caring to the other person in the love language the recipient understands. An example would be if a husband's love language is acts of service, he may be confused when he does the laundry for his wife and she doesn't perceive that as an act of love, viewing it as simply performing household duties, because the love language she comprehends is words of affirmation (verbal affirmation that he loves her). She may try to use what she values, words of affirmation, to express her love to him, which he would not value as much as she does. If she understands his love language and mows the lawn for him, he perceives it in his love language as an act of expressing her love for him; likewise, if he tells her he loves her, she values that as an act of love.

My comment is below.

It often seems to me like the seemingly important things people say in relationships, even good relationships, are the sorts of things you could say in any relationship. "It was really great to see you" "Let's do this again sometime" "Tell me about your day" "I love you".

Alternatively, the compliments I most enjoy giving and receiving, are the ones that could only be said to that person. To pull an example from my recent life, I'd moved into a place for ~3 months, and was leaving to return to university. I gave someone the following goodbye (I'll pretend their name is John):

"Hey John, when I found out I'd be living with you for 3 months, I was initially disappointed. I remembered you from meeting you during my CFAR workshop as someone who...
Epistemic Spot Check: Full Catastrophe Living (Jon Kabat-Zinn)
by Elizabeth — 2017-12-29T06:10:00.419Z

Full Catastrophe Living is a little weird, because between the first edition and the second a lot of science came out testing the thesis. For this blog post, I’m reviewing the new, scienced-up edition of FCL. However I have ordered the older edition of the book (thanks, Patreon supporters and half.com) and have dreams of reviewing that separately, with an eye towards identifying what could have predicted the experimental outcome. E.g. if the experimental outcome is positive, was there something special about the model that we could recognize in other self-help books before rigorous science comes in?

I originally planned on fact checking two chapters, the scientific introduction and one of the explanatory chapters. Doing the intro was exhausting and demonstrated a consistent pattern of “basically correct, from a small sample size, finding exaggerated”, so I skipped the second chapter of fact checking. I also skipped the latter two thirds of the book.

Overview

You’ve probably heard about mindfulness, but just in case: mindfulness is a meditation practice that involves being present and not holding on to thoughts, originally created within Buddhism. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a specific class created by the author of this book, Jon Kabat-Zinn. The class has since spread across the country; he cites 720 programs in the introduction. Full Catastrophe Living contains both a playbook for teaching the class to yourself, the science of why it works (I’m guessing this is new?), a section on stress, and followup information on how to integrate meditation into your life.

Introduction

Claim: Humans are happier when they focus on what they are doing than when they let their mind wander, which is 50% of the time.

Accurately cited, large effect size, possible confounding effects. (PDF). The slope of the regression between mind wandering and mind not-wandering was 8.79 out of a 100 point scale, and the difference between unpleasant mind wandering and any mind not-wandering task was ~30 points. Pleasant mind wandering was exactly as pleasant as focusing on the task at hand. Focusing accounting for 17.7% of the between-person variation in happiness, compared to 3.2% from choice of task.

Some caveats:

People’s minds are more likely to wander when they’re doing something unpleasant, and when they are having trouble coping with that unpleasantness. The stud

...
Comments on Power Law Distribution of Individual Impact
by Ben Pace — 2017-12-29T01:49:26.791Z

I had a discussion online yesterday, stemming from whether you should expect to be able to identify individuals who will most shape the long term future of humanity. It was on a discussion of whether CEA should have staff work on doing this full time, and I was expecting boring comments that just expressed a political opinion about what CEA should do. However, Jan Kulveit offered some concrete models for me to disagree with, and I had a fun exchange and appreciated the chance to make explicit some of my models in this area.

With permission of all involved, I have reproduced the exchange below.

Jan:

I would be also worried. Homophily is of the best predictors of links in social networks, and factors like being member of the same social group, having similar education, opinions, etc. are known to bias selection processes again toward selecting similar people. This risks having the core of the movement be more self encapsulated that it is, which is a shift in bad direction.

Also I would be worried with 80k hours shifting also more toward individual coaching, there is now a bit overemphasis on "individual" approach and too little on "creating systems".

Also it seems lot of this would benefit from knowledge from the fields of "science of success", general scientometry, network science, etc. E.g. when I read concepts like "next Peter Singer" or a lot of thinking along the line "most of the value is created by just a few peple", I'm worried. While such thinking is intuitively appealing, it can be quite superficial. E.g., a toy model: Imagine a landscape with gold scattered in power-law sized deposits. And prospectors, walking randomly, and randomly discovering deposits of gold. What you observe is the value of gold collected by prospectors is also power-law distributed. But obviously the attempts to emulate "the best" or find the "next best" would be futile. It seems open question (worth studying) how much some specific knowledge landscape resembles this model, or how big part of the success is attributable to luck.

Ben (me):

That’s a nice toy model, thanks for being so clear :-)

But it’s definitely wrong. If you look at Bostrom on AI or Einstein on Relativity or Feynman on Quantum Mechanics, you don’t see people who are roughly as competent as their peers, just being lucky in which part of the rese...
Why did everything take so long?
by KatjaGrace — 2017-12-29T01:00:00.324Z

One of the biggest intuitive mysteries to me is how humanity took so long to do anything.

Humans have been ‘behaviorally modern’ for about 50 thousand years. And apparently didn’t invent, for instance:

rope until 28 thousand years ago.
the wheel until at least 4000BC
writing until 3000BC
woodblock printing until 200AD

This kind of thing seems really weird introspectively, because it is hard to imagine going a whole lifetime in the wilderness without wanting something like rope, or going a whole day wanting something like rope without figuring out how to make something like rope. Yet apparently people went for about a thousand lifetimes without that happening.

Some possible explanations:

Inventions are usually more ingenious than they seem. LiveScience argues that it took so long to invent the wheel because “The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It’s figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder.” I feel like that would explain why it took a month rather than a day. But a couple of thousand lifetimes?
Knowing what you are looking for is everything. If you sat a person down and said, “look, how do you attach a stationary platform to a rolling thing?” they could figure it out within a few hours, but if you just give them the world, they don’t think about whether a stationary platform attached to a rolling thing would be useful, so “how do you attach a stationary platform to a rolling thing” doesn’t come up as a salient question for a couple of thousand lifetimes.
Having concepts in general is a big deal, and being an early human who had never heard of any invention was a bit like being me when I’m half asleep.
Everything is always mysteriously a thousand times harder than you might think. Consider writing a blog post. Why haven’t I written a blog post in a month?
Others?
The expected value of the long-term future
by [deleted] — 2017-12-28T22:46:06.511Z

I wrote an article describing a simple model of the long-term future. Here it is:

in PDF format
in tex format

Summary:

A number of ambitious arguments have recently been proposed about the moral importance of the long-term future of humanity, on the scale of millions and billions of years. Several people have advanced arguments for a cluster of related views. Authors have variously claimed that shaping the trajectory along which our descendants develop over the very long run (Beckstead, 2013), or reducing extinction risk, or minimising existential risk (Bostrom, 2002), or reducing risks of severe suffering in the long-term future (Althaus and Gloor, 2016) are of huge or overwhelming importance. In this paper, I develop a simple model of the value of the long-term future, from a totalist, consequentialist, and welfarist (but not necessarily utilitarian) point of view. I show how the various claims can be expressed within the model, clarifying under which conditions the long-term becomes overwhelmingly important, and drawing tentative policy implications.
More Stubs of Posts I want to Write
by Raemon — 2017-12-28T22:25:18.148Z

Followup to prior stubs of posts I want to write. Progress:

Archipelago got written.
Recognizing Demon Threads is on its way.
I feel like someone wrote something about Social Reality but I'm not sure.
I wrote things about the personal standards I wanted to cultivate but then it got longwinded and it didn't feel like the right frame.

"Building the Agency Pipeline" feels like the main post that still feels urgent. The others seem like nice-to-haves.

Other posts I'm mulling over now:

Actually Thinking
Thinking about How I Spend My Time (working example of How to Think)
Things I Wish I Had a Week To Think About
Building Models of AI Timelines
Building Decision Trees given AI Timeline distributions
How to Refactor Your Goals So People Can Help You
Google Docs, and Refactoring Your Writing Process So People Can Help You
Using Fiction to Practice Model-Building
Demon Thread Post-Mortems / Retrospectives
Getting Serious About AI (And Turning Money into Understanding)