trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Triumph & Hope: How Far Humanity Has Come
by Ruby — 2021-02-21T18:07:17.308Z
Link: https://jesswhittlestone.com/blog/2015/2/25/reasons-for-hope

This is the second speech in the wedding ceremony of Ruby & Miranda. See the Sequence introduction for more info. The speech was written by Jess Whittlestone and read by Tara Mac Aulay.

Nate descends from podium.

Brienne: We acknowledge the depth of the darkness, as we must if we’re to have any hope of banishing it. But we do have hope! We wouldn't be here otherwise. We’ve come a long way, and we hope to keep going. I now call upon Tara, on behalf of Jess Whittlestone, to speak of our Triumphs and Hopes.

Tara ascends podium.

IMAGE 1 PROJECTED ON PLANETARIUM

Infrared image of the nearby star formation region Monoceros R2.

Tara commences speech.

The world today isn’t perfect - far from it. But it’s also much, much, better than it used to be. Just as it’s impossible for us to really feel the full extent of the suffering in the world today, we also can’t really feel the full extent of the progress humanity has made.

But it’s vital that we do, because it’s that sense of progress that will give us hope, hope that the future can be better.

Having hope isn’t always easy. We look to the past, and we see suffering. We look at the world today, and we also see suffering. It’s hard for your brain to tell the difference. 100,000 people dying feels roughly as bad as 1,000,000 people dying. But 100,000 deaths is a lot less than 1,000,000, even if it doesn’t seem it. It’s incredible progress.

To really see progress, first we have to look backwards. Imagine what your life would have been like had you been born just 300 years ago - as an average person living in the 1700s. There was no middle class back then, so chances are you’d be poor - very poor. So poor that you stood a real chance of starving. If you were lucky, and managed to keep enough food on the table, you’d still be severely malnourished - enough that you could easily be killed off by any one of the various common diseases of the time. And deadly diseases were common: if you were born in 1700 in Europe, by the age of ten you’d have lived through two smallpox epidemics, a measles epidemic, and a famine. Add to this the constant threat of infection - without running water and soap, without antibiotics, a mere cut could easily kill you.

You worked hard - not just long hours, but physically gruelling agricultural or industrial work. Not just physically demanding, but also physically dangerous. If you got inj...
[Ceremony Intro + ] Darkness
by Ruby — 2021-02-21T18:06:49.374Z
Link: http://mindingourway.com/a-torch-in-darkness/

This is the first speech in the wedding ceremony of Ruby & Miranda. See the Sequence introduction for more info. The speech was given by Nate Soares.

FULL DAYLIGHT WHILE GUESTS ENTER

START CEREMONY: NO IMAGE PROJECTED ON PLANETARIUM, COMPLETE DARKNESS

During the first section of the ceremony, Brienne stands to the side of the podium in her seat, sits when not speaking.

Brienne: We are here for a ritual of commitment. Before us, Ruby and Miranda will commit to each other, but they will also commit to their values and to their joint pursuit of them.

For this reason, we will speak of what matters most to Ruby and Miranda. We will speak of the darkness we face, of our triumphs, of hope, of the light humanity might attain, and of our unwavering commitment to becoming stronger.

Pause

Brienne: First, I call upon Nate to speak of the Darkness.

Darkness

Nate rises from seat and ascends podium, commences speech.

I don’t expect humanity to survive much longer.

Often, when someone learns this, they say:
"Eh, I think that would be all right."

So allow me to make this very clear: it would not be "all right."

Imagine a little girl running into the road to save her pet dog. Imagine she succeeds, only to be hit by a car herself. Imagine she lives only long enough to die in pain.

Though you may imagine this thing, you cannot feel the full tragedy. You can’t comprehend the rich inner life of that child. You can’t understand her potential; your mind is not itself large enough to contain the sadness of an entire life cut short.

You can only catch a glimpse of what is lost—
—when one single human being dies.

Now tell me again how it would be "all right" if every single person were to die at once.

Many people, when they picture the end of humankind, pattern match the idea to some romantic tragedy, where humans, with all their hate and all their avarice, had been unworthy of the stars since the very beginning, and deserved their fate. A sad but poignant ending to our tale.

And indeed, there are many parts of human nature that I hope we leave behind before we venture to the heavens. But in our nature is also everything worth bringing with us. Beauty and curiosity and love, a capacity for fun and growth and joy: these are our birthright, ours to bring into the barren night above.

Calamities seem more salient when unpacked. It is far harder to kill a hundred people in their sleep, with a k...
Intro to the Wedding Sequence
by Ruby — 2021-02-21T18:06:40.399Z

Our wedding was intended to be a ceremony of commitment, to each other, and also to our values. We (Ruben Bloom and Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) got married in the Lawrence Hall of Science planetarium in Berkeley on February 21st, 2015. Mostly because it took me six years to get the audio recording processed, I'm now, at last, posting on the occasion of our 6th anniversary the recordings and transcripts of our ceremony.

Our friends gave speeches, each expressing a different facet of the values that we were committing to pursue together. They delivered their words against the backdrop of wonderous starscapes, and in between the prose, we played music that captured our love and ambitions.

The speeches stand as excellent essays in their own right, and although some of the authors/speakers have published them independently on their blogs, it seems worthwhile bringing all of them together in one place, especially together alongside the accompanying images and music. (Since it was in a dark planetarium, there is no video).

Recording of the entire ceremony. Individual posts have the recordings for each speech alongside the transcript

The ceremony had the following structure and was graciously officiated by Logan Brienne Strohl:

Values

Darkness (Nate Soares)
Hope & Triump: How Far Humany Has Come (Tara Mac Aulay, written by Jess Whittlestone)
Light: The Grandest Vision for Humanity (Riva Melissa-Tez)
Tsuyoku Naritai (Ruby)

Community (Oliver Habryka)
Partnership (Miranda)
Declaration

Feelings and Admiration

Ruby towards Miranda
Miranda towards Ruby

Vows
Declaration, exchange of rings

Miranda and I met via LessWrong (me finding her many excellent writings), so it feels quite fitting to celebrate one of our anniversaries here.

This Sunday, I have published the first two speeches. I will post the remaining ones daily until the Sequence is complete.
Argumentative prison cells
by Malmesbury — 2021-02-21T17:40:22.062Z
Link: https://www.telescopic-turnip.net/essays/argumentative-prison-cells/

Two persons are trapped in a prison cell. The warden gives them a controversial question they disagree about, and promises to set them free if they manage to reach an honest agreement on the answer. They can discuss and debate for as long as they need, and all the relevant empirical data are available. Importantly, they are not allowed to just pretend to agree: they must genuinely find common ground with each other for the door of the prison cell to open. Needless to say, both participants want to escape the room as soon as possible, so they will do their best to reach a honest agreement (I know some of you would love to stay forever in a room with unlimited time and data – just pretend you want to leave the room for the sake of the thought experiment).

In most cases, a handful of good arguments from each side may be enough to settle the case. Sometimes, they would disagree on the meaning of the question itself, in which case they would first spend some time arguing about terminology, before arguing about the content of the question. In more complicated cases, the subjects might turn to a meta-discussion about the best method to reach agreement and get out of the room. If they must debate about whether to rely on the Scientific Method or the double-crux or any other advanced epistemic jutsu, they have all the time in the world to do that. The question is, is it always possible to escape the Argumentative Escape Room? Given unlimited time, will any two persons necessarily reach an agreement on any possible question, or are there cases where the two persons will never agree, despite their best efforts?

Of course, it is easy to find trivial cases where this will not work. For sure, if one participant is a human and the other is a pigeon, agreement might be hard to reach (although, you can't say the pigeon really disagrees either, right?). If one participant has Alzheimer's and forgets everything you say after two minutes, it will be hard to change their mind on any somewhat complicated topic. But these are edge cases.

A more difficult question is whether some people just lack the fundamental intelligence to understand certain arguments, or if anybody can eventually understand anything given enough time. To take an extreme case, suppose one of the participants is a rudimentary AI with a very limited amount of memory space. Some arguments based on experimental data ...
Remarks on morality, shuddering, judging, friendship and the law
by KatjaGrace — 2021-02-21T08:10:12.899Z

I lately listened to Julia Galef and Jonathan Haidt discuss Haidt’s theorized palate of ‘moral foundations’—basic flavors of moral motivation—and how Julia should understand the ones that she doesn’t naturally feel.

I was interested in Julia’s question of whether she was just using different words to those who for instance would say that incest or consensual cannibalism are ‘morally wrong’.

She explained that her earlier guest, Michael Sandel, had asked whether she didn’t ‘cringe’ at the thought of consensual cannibalism, as if he thought that was equivalent to finding it immoral. Julia thought she could personally cringe without morally condemning a thing. She had read Megan McArdle similarly observing that ‘liberals’ claim that incest is moral, but meanwhile wouldn’t befriend someone who practices it, so do in fact morally object after all1. As if morality was defined by friendship preferences or inclination to pass judgment. Again Julia is perplexed. Do these people agree with her, and just call their facial movements and personal social preferences ‘morality’? Michael Sandel even explained that he didn’t want to ban consensual cannibalism, he just thought it was immoral. Julia says, “I don’t even know what people are talking about when they talk about whether a thing is moral or immoral, if they’re not talking about wanting to use legal pressure to change people’s behavior”

Here’s how I see morality and its relationship with shuddering, judging, declining friendship, and the law:

Morality is about what is actually good.

Shuddering, cringing and wincing are instinctive guesses about what is actually good. But much like your instinctive guesses about whether a spider is dangerous or whether you are driving well, they can err, and can even continue to err after you have seen the error. They are especially likely to err when the goodness of a thing is not readily available to your imagination. For instance, if you are a twelve-year-old hearing about sex, you might shudder, but you are missing a lot of the good bits of the picture. Or if you are thinking about a baby coming from a test-tube in 1977, you may be mostly focused on the test tube situation, and not on the century of happy life that the child will have, and the love and joy in the family that would have been emptier.

Judging people is a response to your guesses about morality, but also to your guesses ab...
How to build common knowledge of rationality and honesty?
by MikkW — 2021-02-21T06:07:29.478Z

From my shortform:

If you know someone is rational, honest, and well-read, then you can learn a good bit from the simple fact that they disagree with you.

If you aren't sure someone is rational and honest, their disagreement tells you little.

If you know someone considers you to be rational and honest, the fact that they still disagree with you after hearing what you have to say, tells you something.

But if you don't know that they consider you to be rational and honest, their disagreement tells you nothing.

It's valuable to strive for common knowledge of you and your partners' rationality and honesty, to make the most of your disagreements.

This is a restatement of the ideas behind Aumann's Agreement Theorem. On Less Wrong, one can often assume that a writer or commentor is interested in rationality, but that doesn't mean that the writer can be assumed to actually be rational.

How can we help build common knowledge of people's rationality and honesty?
Principles of Agile Rationalism
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-02-21T01:47:06.090Z

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to seek cruxes
through early and continuous delivery
of unfiltered evidence.

Welcome changing beliefs, even late in
writing. Agile rationality updates beliefs for
our culture's collective intelligence.

Deliver useful ideas frequently, from a
couple of days to a couple of weeks, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.

Readers and writers must comment
together daily throughout the frontpage.

Consider analysis by properly incentivized individuals.
Create for ourselves the environment and support we need,
and trust ourselves to converge on the truth.

The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a rationality
team is face-to-face conversation.

But it's a pandemic, Zoom is fine.

Actionable ideas, gears-level models, and predictions
are the primary measures of progress.

Agile rationality promotes sustainable writing.
The dev team, writers, and readers should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good prose enhances agility.

Parsimony--the art of maximizing the amount
of noise not learned--is essential.

The best models, problems, and prose
emerge from decentralized rationalists.

At regular intervals, the rationalists reflect on how
to become more effective, then tune and adjust
their behavior accordingly.
Curing Sleep: My Experiences Doing Cowboy Science
by jayterwahl — 2021-02-20T23:59:08.640Z

Epistemic status: Subjective report describing youthful exuberance. The actual experimentation part of this was very badly executed.

In light of the recent homemade peptide vaccine, this is a writeup of my experiences in insufflating internet chemicals.

This happened during a period of my life when I was very bored, kinda rich, and getting really into darknet libertarian culture. This is cowboy science, and upon reflection, I was insufficiently concerned about either of legal troubles or brain damage.

Background

Orexin (aka hypocretin-α) is a neuropeptide which promotes wakefulness, weight loss, and happiness. Damage to the orexinergic system seems to cause Type 1 Narcolepsy—comorbid with sleepfulness, obesity, and depression.

Deadwyler et al attempted to prove a causal relationship, by sleep-depriving rhesus monkeys and having them insufflate orexin. It appears that sleep-deprived monkeys snorting orexin perform as well on cognitive tests as the non-sleep-deprived monkeys.

So there I was, a graduate student reading through this paper, and you can hear the gears in my head turning.

Orexin insufflation appears to promote wakefulness in sleep-deprived primates.
I am a sleep-deprived primate.
...

Transhuman Greed

Will this cause some kind of...anti-narcolepsy? Have I found a cure for sleep itself??

I was properly embracing More Dakka. But this Kerbal Space Program-tier science thought wasn't as nuts as it seemed. This was 2012, the orexin research was fresh, and my neuroscience professors were still touting the party line of “perhaps the only purpose of sleep is to keep humans indoors and conserving calories during the night, because their comparative advantage is day. We don't even know why, or even if, we really need sleep!"

(We didn't know about sleep-as-memory-post-processing, or that, during sleep, the brain lobes spread apart to let the CSF pressure-wash away all of the metabolite byproducts. We just thought sleep was one of those no-longer-adaptive biological quirks inflicted by evolution, which, in defense of past neuroscientists, happen all the time.)

And so, at the thought of no longer needing to sleep, I was filled with a transhuman greed...

The Experiment

So I ordered a vial of primate-brain orexin from the internet, and got to snortin'.

(Did you know that places selling chemicals "for research ...
Utilitarian doppelgangers vs. making everything smell like bananas
by Rob Bensinger — 2021-02-20T23:57:34.724Z

[epistemic status: attempt to quickly summarize how I feel about efforts to promote more diverse moral foundations, push back against cost-benefit comparisons as "utilitarianism", or split the difference between this notion of "utilitarianism" and rival approaches]

I think human value is incredibly complicated; and I don't think it's strictly about "harm/care" (to use Haidt's term), or happiness, or suffering. Indeed, I suspect a utopian society would value transhuman versions of "beauty", "sanctity", etc. that sometimes have nothing to do with optimizing anyone's subjective experience.

And yet, in everyday decision-making and applied ethics, I think the utilitarians, effective altruists, welfare-maximizers, etc. are basically always right. In deciding on an ideal initial response to COVID-19, or an ideal budget breakdown for an aid program, or anything else that affects large numbers of people, it would be unimaginably foolish to try to find a "balance" between the simple "prevent as much disability and death as you can" goal and some other moral framework.

Why?

Well, I think the world is pretty messed up. I think that noticing this makes the case for the SLLRNUETSSTAWMC view pretty trivial. (SLLRNUETSSTAWMC = "superficially looks like (reflective, non-two-boxing) utilitarianism even though strictly speaking things are way more complicated".)

Imagine that you lived in a world dominated by a bunch of political coalitions with organizing principles like "all other moral concerns should be subordinate to making everything smell as much like rancid meat as possible" and "our overriding duty is to make everything smell as much like isoamyl acetate as possible".

Imagine further that this has caused people who care about things like insecticide-treated bednets and world peace to self-identify as "oriented toward harm/care", in contrast to the people who are "oriented toward smell".

The take-away from this shouldn't be "there's nothing good or valuable about making things smell nicer". The take-away should be "the people who agitate about smell in today's world are largely optimizing for totally the wrong smells, and their level of concern for smell is radically out of step with what's actually going on in the world". So out of step, in fact, that if you literally just completely ignore smell in all your altruistic activities (at least until after we've ended diseas...
The Crux of Understanding Written Text - Text reading and inference
by JohnCheese — 2021-02-20T22:20:53.875Z
Link: Hazard's Gödel's Legacy: A game without end https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gfAkp2wMy4zHrAfic/goedel-s-legacy-a-game-without-end#The_Ghost_of_G_del

What are the neural/brain faculties in humans which enable us to read and understand text/messages/thoughts of others by reading and unconsciously processing them whilst inferring their meaning from what we already know ? (knowledge of the language being processed, the usual/generic meaning of its words as well as the point of the question/topic is understood)

Especially poetry, adages "Little strokes fell great oaks." and useful and insightful texts which doesn't actually state/give direct and blunt advice in the spirit of "Do not overthink every decision or move you make, both in everyday tasks and specific projects , just do it with full force and witness/bear the results." kind of advice versus something like this - Gödel's Legacy: A game without end. That is, how do you (fellow humans, don't know about ML NLP or whichever way machines use to understand human-generated text) understand what I am asking you despite me not being more direct or cryptic with my written request?

Thanks!

Edit: Changed the title from "The Crux of Intelligence and Understanding - Text reading and inference" to "The Crux of Understanding Written Text - Text reading and inference" <- I do think this ability alone is the most advanced faculty of learning about the world in general and thinking about it with goal-seeking motivation in mind is the pinnacle of human ability and intelligence. Feel free to correct me/criticize me if I am overstating or if this kind of thoughts generally get on your nerves. :)
The Prototypical Negotiation Game
by johnswentworth — 2021-02-20T21:33:34.195Z

Suppose you want to meet up with someone in New York City. You did not arrange a time and place beforehand, and have no way to communicate. Where and when do you go to maximize your chances of meeting? Empirically, the most popular answer is the Empire State Building, at noon. (Does that change your answer?)

This is the explanation of

Schelling points

which I hear most often: there are games where the main goal is for everyone to coordinate on the same answer, but it doesn’t really matter which answer. So, we look for points with some symbolic significance - “Schelling points”.

The message of this post is that this is not the prototypical form of a Schelling-style coordination game which actually comes up most often in the real world. In practice, Schelling points come up when coordinating on the same answer is the most important thing for each player, but they still have different preferences for which answer is chosen. This leads to negotiation - indeed, we could call this the defining property of a negotiation problem. (Abram’s

Most Prisoner’s Dilemmas Are Stag Hunts, Most Stag Hunts Are Schelling Problems

says something similar, although the emphasis will be different here.)

The Game

As before, you and a friend want to meet up in New York City. This time you do have a communication channel: you each have a cell phone and the other’s number. BUT you’re both lazy and don’t want to move very far from wherever you happen to be - let’s say you’re at central park zoo and your friend is in chinatown. Successfully meeting up is still far more important than the location chosen, but given a successful meetup, you both disagree on preferred location.

Source. Chinatown is near the bottom, central park zoo is in the lower right of the big park in the center, and the Empire State Building is in the Garment District between the two.

Here’s a few ways this could play out.

Story 1: you and your friend agree to meet at the midpoint of your locations. But in a fit of laziness-inspired brilliance, you lie and claim to be at the far end of central park, rather than the zoo. As a result, the supposed “midpoint” is much closer to you.

Story 2: Same as the previous story, but your friend also lies about their location.

Story 3: Same as previous story, but each of you correctly anticipates that the other will lie and does not believe anything they say. You will both ignore whatever the ...