trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Norms For Link Posts
by DragonGod — 2017-10-08T14:30:40.506Z

There are a lot of interesting content I read on the internet (some of which may not have been produced by the rationalist diaspora (and which the authors wouldn't want to crosspost to Lesswrong)) that I nonetheless found interesting and feel like sharing with other Lesswrongers. However, I am not sure if the posts would be well received. I have not found explicit discussion (I searched the titles in Meta) indicating what is and is not acceptable to be linked. I don't want to gain information by experimenting (which has significant negative externalities for both me and the community. Me in the form of lost karma, and the community in the form of degradation of quality, and annoyance/displeasure of community members). I would appreciate if the norms for link posts were explicitly outlined, so that I would know if a link is acceptable or not.

Points that I feel should be explicitly spelled out:

Time: Are links older than <insert time frame here> not allowed?

Frequency: Should we limit our link posts to a certain frequency? One a week, One a day? Not more than X a day?

Content: What topics are not acceptable for link posts (if it is the same as for front page posts, then feel free to skip this). If link posts have a wider or narrower scope please indicate this.

I think those are the main areas for which I would appreciate explicit guidelines as far as link posts are concerned.
HOWTO: Screw Up The LessWrong Survey and Bring Great Shame To Your Family
by namespace — 2017-10-08T03:43:40.713Z

Let's talk about the LessWrong Survey.
First and foremost, if you took the survey and hit 'submit', your information was saved and you don't have to take it again.

Your data is safe, nobody took it or anything it's not like that. If you took the survey and hit the submit button, this post isn't for you.

For the rest of you, I'll put it plainly: I screwed up.

This LessWrong Survey had the lowest turnout since Scott's original survey in 2009. I'll admit I'm not entirely sure why that is, but I have a hunch and most of the footprints lead back to me. The causes I can finger seem to be the diaspora, poor software, poor advertising, and excessive length.

The Diaspora

As it stands, this years LessWrong survey got about 300 completed responses. This can be compared with the previous one in 2016 which got over 1600. I think one critical difference between this survey and the last was its name. Last year the survey focused on figuring out where the 'Diaspora' was and what venues had gotten users now that LessWrong was sort of the walking dead. It accomplished that well I think, and part of the reason why is I titled it the LessWrong Diaspora Survey. That magic word got far off venues to promote it even when I hadn't asked them to. The survey was posted by Scott Alexander, Ozy Frantz, and others to their respective blogs and pretty much everyone 'involved in LessWrong' to one degree or another felt like it was meant for them to take. By contrast, this survey was focused on LessWrong's recovery and revitalization, so I dropped the word Diaspora from it and this seemed to have caused a ton of confusion. Many people I interviewed to ask why they hadn't taken the survey flat out told me that even though they were sitting in a chatroom dedicated to SSC, and they'd read the sequences, the survey wasn't about them because they had no affiliation with LessWrong. Certainly that wasn't the intent I was trying to communicate.

Poor Software

When I first did the survey in 2016, taking over from Scott I faced a fairly simple problem: How do I want to host the survey? I could do it the way Scott had done it, using Google Forms as a survey engine, but this made me wary for a few reasons. One was that I didn't really have a Google account set up that I'd feel comfortable hosting the survey from, another was that I had been unimpressed with what I'd seen from the Google Forms software up t...
Stubs of Posts I'd like to Write
by Raemon — 2017-10-07T23:27:08.406Z

Right now I feel like LW has too much "meandering around meta-community-stuff" and not enough "actually go out into the world, try to think about object level things, and then do stuff with that thinking stuff."

I'm not actually very good at the latter, but want to practice.

But, there's a bunch of ideas I have percolating that I do think are pretty decent things worth pursuing on the meta-community-front, and the only thing wrong with them is that if I follow the incentive gradient that attracts them, I'll never get around the to object-thinking-stuff I want to do.

But, wanted to at least get them out of my head. Post stubs for the future:

Benign and Malignant Demon Threads (i.e. how to tell when an internet discussion is about to go bad, and what to do)

Hard and Soft Mythology: HPMOR, Steerswoman, and Hatchet as "rationality" stories, and the strengths of each.

The Archipelago Model of Community Standards (many people agree the rationality community needs higher standards. They don't necessarily agree on what those standards should be. Different people want/need different things. One problem is confusion (or inevitable strife) over who owns which space. I think people should stake out spaces that they own and pro-actively foster whatever higher-standards they want there. Inspired by Scott Alexander's Archipelago post)

Relatedly, What Standards Do I Personally Want to Raise, in myself and hopefully the people I interact with?

Social Reality and Pressure Against Thinking Clearly (I mostly want other people who understand it better to write it, although by now I do have some ideas [fake-edit: this isn't quite the thing I was pointing towards but is one of the things)

Lessons From the Steampunk World (What living on a boat for a week taught me about physicality and problem solving)

Building the Agency Pipeline (It seems like people need 1-on-1 conversations with people who are further along their path to help give them confidence/ambition to continue, but the people further along the path are often busy, and trying to make it too legible who is more and less available to help people midway-through-the-agency-pipeline comes with weird knock-on effects)
RFC on an open problem: how to determine probabilities in the face of social distortion
by ialdabaoth — 2017-10-07T22:04:08.756Z

So, I have a problem that I want help with, but I don't want to focus on the object-level thing except as a particularly sharp example of the abstract problem. Please only throw suggestions here if you have a reasonable understanding of Bayes' rule, *and* grok the problem I'm pointing at.

First, the problem I'm ACTUALLY trying to solve: If I believe I solved a practical problem to the satisfaction of its stakeholders, what is the probability that my belief is correct?

Now, the problem *around* the problem I'm actually trying to solve:

I can look at a solution I implemented to a practical problem, and judge whether I'm satisfied with it or not. BUT, often there are more actual stakeholders than just me. These stakeholders ALSO have opinions about whether I implemented the solution to their satisfaction.

Note I said "have opinions about", *not* "have information about". This is an important distinction, as you're about to see.

So. Let's say I have a confidence probability of p=0.65 that I performed a particular task well.

There are five other identified stakeholders, and their averaged confidence is something like p=0.4 that I performed that task well.

I have some weighting process that says whose opinion I take more seriously, so I adjust my confidence down to p=0.55.

I notice that this adjusts their averaged confidence downward, to something like p=0.35.

I perform more tasks, and poll more. I notice that people's opinion of my performance tracks mine, but is invariably adjusted downward by about 33%. So I adjust my opinion of my performance downward by about 30%.

Magically, this causes their opinion of my performance to drop by about 25%.

After taking enough samples, I start deliberately adjusting my opinion of my performance *upwards* massively. If I feel a 0.7 probability that I satisfied the requirement, I convince myself that it's actually an 0.9 probability. Consistently, other people start treating my performance as if it were higher quality - but they ALSO treat me as if I'm an arrogant ass who can't judge the quality of my performance. Because they're still setting their own opinions to something like 33% below mine, but when they translate the probability into something like 'confidence weight' (which I assume is some kind of log-odds transform), being 33%

...
The Typical Sex Life Fallacy
by ozymandias — 2017-10-07T21:48:29.229Z

[Related to: Different Worlds.]

[Please note that this post contains explicit discussion of sexuality (without pictures), including discussion of my own sex life.]

[I have no moderation control, but I would definitely really appreciate it if further discussion of whether this post and ones like it are appropriate for LW move to here.]

My friend Andrew Rettek remarked to me a while back about the tremendous diversity in how people shower.

People may take anywhere between five minutes and forty minutes to shower. They may wash their hair daily, once a week, or not at all. They may wash their bodies thoroughly, only clean the parts that look dirty, only clean certain parts (such as the armpits or genitals), or just stand under the water. They may use a loofah, a sponge, or nothing. They may bring in a comb to comb out the conditioner. They may sing. They may zone out. They may jerk off. They may bathe instead, and bathing may involve reading a book or bath bombs or lighting candles and drinking a nice bottle of wine or bubble bath or none of those things at all. The one thing that is consistent is that everyone thinks the way they shower is the way normal people shower.

The reason for all this diversity, of course, is that after early childhood we don't shower together (except in locker rooms or as a form of sexual foreplay, both of which are likely to be unusual) and we rarely discuss exactly how we shower. We can get a certain amount of information about typical showers (such as length) from living with people, but again most people don't live with that many people, and the people they live with may be unusual. The rule follows: for things that are private and rarely discussed, there may be a good deal of unacknowledged diversity.

Sex is interesting because, while private, it is often discussed. People (including myself) have a certain tendency to deduce what sex is like for everyone from what sex is like for ourselves. As an example, consider pubic hair. There are innumerable thinkpieces about the pressure experienced by women to shave their pubic hair and the disgust of their male sexual partners if they are unshaven.

This has never been my experience. I have literally never had a man offer any opinion on my pubic hair whatsoever. If he did I would consider him to be an utter boor, I would never hook up with him again, and I would complain to my friends

...
Polling Thread October 2017
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2017-10-07T21:32:00.810Z

Maybe the last installment of the Polling Thread.

At least I guess it's the last one before we switch to the LesserWrong codebase which sadly doesn't seem to support polls. Maybe to easen the transition we can share polls, e.g. on Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Or discuss alternatives.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

These used to be the rules:

Each poll (or link to a poll) goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.

You must should at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than your own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.

Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.

This is a somewhat regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :

Use "Polling Thread" in the title.

Copy the rules.

Add the tag "poll".

Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.

Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar'

Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.
Ideas to make saving the world easier?
by  — 2017-10-07T21:15:59.571Z

I covered some of the psychological difficulties one might face when saving the world. So what can we do to mitigate them.
1. Improve organisations

If we could make organisations more trustworthy and open to feedback, this might help people come together.
It seems that organisations naturally Goodheart themselves, the metric and measure tends to be cash flow based (even in charities). Could we structure a charity so they are separate? Control Markets perhaps? So there would be other feedback to charities than donations, to encourage the person in charge to change how things were run.

2. Stop trying to save the world
Instead try and understand it. Perhaps we also need to re-organise the incentive structures in research centres to be more truth tracking as well. I wonder if it would be possible to separate out the experimental design and the carrying out the experiment, so that people could be rewarded for both individually rather than for the 'exciting result'.
Any other ideas?
Why is trying to save the world (tm) psychologically taxing?
by  — 2017-10-07T15:20:44.354Z

This is a bit of a brain dump, not much new. I'm putting them down to see if any solutions come to mind.

Difficulty of problems

The problems we have are hard. You don't get the dopamine hit of solving something or getting money from a product. You have to keep at it knowing what you are doing might be a dead end or a distraction.

Difficulty of knowing you have made progress

Even if you identify a sub-problem to solve sometimes it is hard to know if solving that problem we really help.

Self-trust

Because of these two things, and all the content on biases that we read, you have to constantly doubt what you think you know and what you should be doing. Because of Goodhearts you have to worry about lost purposes when you actually try to do something uncertain.

Trusting Others

If you can't trust yourself, you can't trust other people. Even if you trust their motivation to save the world you cannot trust their knowledge and that they are not protecting the epistemology. And they find it hard to trust you. Working with people can raise the trust level of their knowledge, but not of their sub-goals.

Trusting Organisations

A whole bunch of people, you don't know very well, acting together, trying to maintain a public persona so the organisation can persist over time. That is even harder to trust.

In short it is hard to find contented feeling of a job well done or relax in the knowledge that competent people are on the job. This is different from problems that have short time frames.
Bring Back the Sabbath
by Zvi — 2017-10-07T12:10:00.249Z

Epistemic Status: Several months of experimentation

Previously: Choices are Bad, Choices Are Really Bad, Complexity Is Bad, Play in Easy Mode, Play in Hard Mode, Out to Get You, Slack

For More Thoughts After: Sabbath Commentary

Alternate Take (Endorsed): Sabbath Hard and Go Home.

Slack is life. It is under attack. We must fight for it.

Choices Are Bad. Really Bad. We need a break.

Complexity Is Bad. We need a break.

Work is exhausting. We need a break.

Relaxation is hard. Our attempts fail or backfire.

The modern world is Out to Get You. We need a break.

We need time for ourselves. Time that is truly our own.

Without setting aside such time, that won’t happen. Even when you take time, you’ll be continuously choosing to take time, and… well, whoops.

Modern life made the problem worse, but the problem is ancient. The ancients had an answer.

We need rules. We need ritual.

We need the Sabbath.

Cabin in the Woods

The parallels of my and Ben Hoffman’s Sabbath realizations are striking.

A few months ago, like Ben, I needed a break. My job puts me under constant pressure. My weekends weren’t refreshing me. Like Ben, I experimented with camping. Like Ben, I had no spare battery, and left my phone off. I read The Great Transformation. I had meant to do that for weeks. I loved the world leaving me alone. Like Ben, I could relax, slow down, think.

I wasn’t worried about things I could be doing – I couldn’t do them.

Could I get this without the trip? Friends had started hosting Friday night dinners. What about the whole thing? What if we brought back the Sabbath?

Tradition makes rules easier to justify and explain, to others and yourself. These rules were time tested. I could take them and make them my own.

I thought about the components. Which made sense? What rules would let me cut the enemy, and relax?

Return of the Ritual

Rituals need clear beginnings and endings.

Sabbath begins with candles. One lights two candles, and recites a blessing.

For the evening meal, one says additional words and blessings, drinks wine, eats bread from one of two whole loafs and sits down to a proper meal with friends and family.

The candles are a signpost and deadline. Your week is complete and your work is done. There will be guests, so the apartment is ready. The ritual objects, and your needs for tomorrow, are secured. The meal is prepared. Time to feast and rela...
Sabbath Commentary
by Zvi — 2017-10-07T12:10:00.214Z

Epistemic Status: Several months of experimentation, then talking from the hip

Commentary On: Bring Back the Sabbath

Required: Slack

I have a lot of thoughts on the topic that don’t belong in the main presentation. I’m going to put them here in disorganized form for the curious. These claims are believed, but I may not have good explicit evidence to defend them with. I’m fine with that.

I. Slack Against Slack

One might challenge Sabbath with, “Isn’t it weird protecting Slack by taking Slack away? Aren’t you avoiding hard bounds on behavior by imposing hard bounds on behavior?“

Yes, I am doing that. Yes it is weird. Also suspicious.

You’re taking some types of Slack away by forbidding and requiring activities, to guard and create the Slack that matters.

This can backfire. When I was a kid the Sabbath was rules preventing fun. Saturday was just Sunday except nothing worked and you sat in a room for three hours while people mumbled in Hebrew. That’s not a solution, that’s making the problem worse. Sunday was free from outside pressures and insanely great! Why not do that?

So no, not everyone needs a Sabbath for Slack or relaxation. It is one solution among many to the problems of outside pressures, to too many choices, to having less than no time and not enough money. Not everyone even has those problems. If you have so much time and so little to do, rather than striking that and reversing it, a regular Sabbath is not right for you. This is your periodic reminder to reverse all advice you hear.

You still need to take stock sometimes. If there’s nothing worth doing, forcing the issue by taking away your social media and match three games might help solve your rut. Is that worth one day in seven? Probably not, but one in forty-nine?

II. Sabbath Dinner

I kept and went into a lot of detail on the Sabbath dinner. The dinner speaks to me and my needs a lot. It might not speak to yours, but I’m a big fan, and want to say more about that. Here are some non-obvious benefits, in addition to the ones I already mentioned – a place and time that enables social gatherings and visits and/or family/relationship time, a strong demarcation and strongly positive experience for the transition to your day of rest, and providing urgency and incentive to take care of business around the house and make it a place worth living in.

Sabbath dinner gives...
Instrumental Rationality 3: Interlude I 
by  — 2017-10-07T05:22:09.663Z

[Instrumental Rationality Sequence 3/7].

[Here, we’ll cover two concepts: Acting into Uncertainty and Fading Novelty. They’re both sort of about two (generalizable, I hope) mental feelings (i.e. internal experiences) that can occur when you start trying to act on any of the instrumental rationality techniques.]

++++

Acting into Uncertainty:

[Acting into Uncertainty is about how it can feel scary to get started in environments with incomplete information. It looks at why the feeling of vagueness might be deceptively comforting, and then it dives into explication as a potential solution.]

For many areas of life, I think we shy away from confronting uncertainty and instead flee into the comforting non-falsifiability of vagueness.

Consider these examples:

You want to get things done today. You know that writing things down can help you finish more things. However, it feels aversive to write down what you specifically want to do. So instead, you don’t write things down and instead just keep a hazy notion of “I will do things today”.

You try to make a confidence interval for a prediction where money is on the line. For example: “I am 90% sure Norway has between 100 and 1 billion people”. You notice yourself feeling uncomfortable, no matter what your bounds are. Somehow, it feels bad to set down any number at all, which is accompanied by a dread feeling of finality.

You’re trying to find solutions to a complex, entangled problem. Coming up with specific solutions feels bad because none of them seem to completely solve the problem. So instead you decide to go one level up. You end up just thinking about what properties a good solution should have in the first place and find yourself throwing around buzzwords like "democracy" and "holistic workaround".

In each of the above examples, it feels like we move away from making specific claims because that opens us up to specific criticism. But instead of trying to acknowledge that, we retreat to fuzzily-defined notions that allow us to incorporate any criticism without having to really update.

In other words, there’s a sense in which, in some areas of life, we’re embracing shoddy epistemology (EX: not wanting to validate or falsify our beliefs) because of a fear of being shown wrong.

I think this potential failure is what fuels the badness when we confront uncertainty.

It seems useful to face this feeli...