trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Reductionism Revisited
by alkjash — 2018-03-20T06:00:01.379Z

This is part 28 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.

The last three days of Hammertime, I’ll wrap up with some scattered thoughts to reinforce important principles.

Today, I’ll return to applications of reductionism to instrumental rationality.

Day 28: Reductionism Revisited

Mysterious Answers: A Brief Review

I had a conversation with a friend in which the topic of comedy popped up briefly. I will strawman his argument to make a point:

Friend: Well, there’s no step-by-step training drill to make someone funny. When I imagine a comedy coach, they probably just ask you to tell jokes and rate how funny they are.

Me: If you didn’t know math, would you say the same thing about studying math? That there’s no step-by-step approach to teaching induction. Instead, a math teacher just has to let the student try to prove things and rate how rigorous each proof is?

Friend: Point taken.

Irreducible and mysterious complexity, as we know, is a property of the map and not of the territory. It’s an easy cognitive mistake to make to believe that many skills, especially the ones you’re ignorant of, can’t be broken down with reductionism and must instead be learned organically and intuitively.

I think this is a symptom of a general cognitive error that can only be cured by rereading Mysterious Answers half a dozen times. It’s important enough to highlight again. The error goes like this:

In my subjective experience, my domain of expertise is concrete and gears-like, amenable to reductionism. I have a detailed mental model of how to go about solving a math problem or writing a blog post, step by atomic step. In my subjective experience, skills I don’t have are fuzzy, mysterious, and magical. Training them requires intuition, creativity, and spontaneity. From these defects in the map, I then incorrectly deduce that mysteriousness is an actual property of the territory beyond my competence, i.e. outside my comfort zone.

Mysteriousness is in the mind. Go forth with a Zeno‘s conviction that all of the territory breaks into infinitesimal pieces, each of which you can individually chew.

Build Form by Cleaning Your Room

One of the most important things to encourage in the early stages of a new skill is the development of good form. Once you have it, trying harder works, whereas if you don’t have it,

...
Internal Double Crux
by alkjash — 2018-03-19T05:50:00.733Z

This is part 27 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.

Focusing is a tool for accessing the messages the many sub-personalities in your subconscious are trying to send you. What happens when two or more of these messages are in conflict with each other?

Internal Double Crux (IDC) is CFAR’s answer to this problem. Roughly speaking, it’s a script for taking turns Focusing on two conflicting inner voices and holding space for them to debate and compromise. A sort of internal couples therapy, if you will.

Day 27: Internal Double Crux

I had a particularly hard time writing this post, so I’ll defer to CFAR’s script. Then, I’ll list a bunch of points I want to emphasize that one would completely miss reading this script.

It’s also possible that what I’m doing is not at all the IDC that CFAR has in mind – in that case, I claim that what I’m doing is also useful.

The IDC Algorithm

Here’s the complete script for IDC. It’s best to get pen and paper and write down each step, as if you are a neutral observer recording a conversation.

1. Find an internal disagreement

A “should” that’s counter to your current default action
Something you feel you aren’t supposed to think or believe (though secretly you do)
A step toward your goal that feels useless or unpleasant

2. Operationalize the disagreement

If there are more than two sides, choose two to start with; focus on what feels important
Choose names that are charitable and describe the beliefs as they feel from the inside, rather than names that are hostile or judgmental (e.g. the “I deserve rest” side, not the “I’m lazy” side)

3. Seek double cruxes

Check for urgency

Is one side more impatient or emotionally salient than the other? Does one side need to “speak first”?
Is one side more vulnerable to dismissal or misinterpretation (i.e. it’s the sort of thing you don’t allow yourself to think or feel, because it’s wrong or stupid or impractical or vague or otherwise outside of your identity)?

Seek an understanding of one side

Let whichever side feels more impatient “explain itself” – why does it feel right or important to react in this way?
What things does the other side not understand about the world, that this side does? Why can’t the other viewpoint be trusted – what’s bad about letting it call the shots?

Seek an understanding of the other side

Check for resonance with what the other side just said – did any of it ring

...
A Motorcycle (and Calibration?) Accident
by boggler — 2018-03-18T22:21:36.432Z

Last week I saw a motorcycle accident.

My dad, known to be the most careful driver in my family, was attempting to pull out of the mall parking lot. Suddenly, a motorcyclist came into view, and as he saw our car, he stomped on the brakes. My dad saw him and stopped, but the motorcyclist had hit the brakes too hard and from his face - his eyes wider than I'd ever seen - I could tell he had lost control of his vehicle.

The motorcycle slipped and slid in front of our car as the motorcycle-man managed to somehow stay free of the cycle as he slammed into the concrete. There was a collective holding of breath in the car as my dad jumped out of the driver's seat and ran to the man.

The man looked at my dad and said, "You scared the shit out of me."

"Sorry," my dad said. "Are you alright?"

The man nodded. He looked shaken, but it quickly became apparent that the man and his motorcycle were both fine. We, in the car, released our breath. Suddenly, my long held desire to ride a motorcycle felt foolish, and my mom's words sprung to mind:

"Do you know what your aunt (an ER nurse) calls motorcyclists?" I could hear her say.

"Organ donors."

Although I had looked up the risks of riding a motorcycle, and yes, the fatalities were worse than automobile operators, I did not feel as though they were so high that the utility I would gain from riding a motorcycle would be outweighed by the risks. This was especially true when I learned that a large proportion of the accidents were from riding in poor weather conditions or at night when visibility was impaired. I reasoned to myself that by being exceptionally careful about the variables I can control, that I would be safe enough to warrant motorcycle riding.

Now, all that intuition arithmetic felt very counter-intuitive.

Was I correct the first time in believing it to be a good idea to pick up motorcycle riding, or am I correct now? How do I calibrate my perception of risks to reality when my intuition is so swayed by experience?

One idea is to speak to motorcyclists. A priori, I predict that I'll be warned about the risks, but that the cyclists will claim that the joy of riding outweigh its risks. Yet, by definition, this is a population that must believe in this claim.

Another thought is to try out a motorcycle to test if riding a motorcycle is as desirable as I imagine...
Musings on LessWrong Peer Review
by Raemon — 2018-03-18T21:47:56.362Z

In the context of:

On The Importance of LessWrong, or Another Conversational Locus

(Anna Salamon)

Meta-tations on Moderation

(me), along with

some particular comments

by Paul Christiano and Zvi

In the spirit of

writing down conversations

, this is a rough summary of some recent conversations with Oliver Habryka and Zvi Mowshowitz about how and why to implement peer review on Less Wrong.

This is not meant to argue for a point or outline a specific plan, just to highlight a bunch of the thoughts we’re currently thinking about. I haven’t put much effort towards polishing it, but it’s here for people who want to follow along with our thought process.

Curation, Canon and Common Knowledge

If 90% of the people around have the idea, when I’m not confident that 100% do then I often explain the basic idea for everyone. This often costs a lot of time.

– Ben Pace on Common Knowledge

Right now we curate about 3 posts a week. This feels about right from the perspective of readers checking in on good content regularly, and authors having a reasonable chance of getting into curated if their posts are good. But it means curation isn’t that strong a signal of quality or importance. A 90th percentile LW post doesn’t necessarily mean “6 months later, we’d expect this idea to still seem important.”

Our intention was for curated to be a fairly big deal and to only curate things we’re confident are “important”, but in practice it seems hard.

We’ve considered either raising standards for Curated, or introducing a new category above it. Early ideas here were renaming “Curated” to “Common Knowledge” with the intent to slightly raise standards and imply that if you want to stay up to date on “what it’s expected you know if you’re participating in LW discourse”, you should read things in the “Common Knowledge” section.

As cute as this name was, a major strike against it was that common knowledge is a useful technical term, and we don’t want to degrade it’s meaning.

We considered other terms like “Canon”, with slightly different connotations: maybe once every few months we could look back and see which posts (curated or otherwise) seemed like they were likely to enter the longterm rationalsphere lexicon.

I chatted separately with Zvi and Oliver about this idea, and found that we had different intuitions about what "Canon" means.

Canon as History

To Zvi and I, the main association for canon wa...
Welcome to Less Wrong Warsaw [Edit With Your Details]
by kaftanowicz — 2018-03-18T15:52:24.223Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
The advantage of not being open-ended 
by Douglas_Reay — 2018-03-18T13:50:04.467Z

5. The advantage of not being open-ended

Summary of entire Series: An alternative approach to designing Friendly Artificial Intelligence computer systems.

Summary of this Article: When setting a computer a task, there are advantages to defining the task in such a way that a finite budget of some resource (such as time) is allocated to the task, and to giving the task completion criteria such that it will always be possible for the computer to determine if the solution it came up within that budget met the criteria.

Links to all the articles in the series:

Optimum number of single points of failure
Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Defect or Cooperate
Environments for killing AIs
The advantage of not being open-ended
Trustworthy Computing
Metamorphosis
Believable Promises

Links to the parts of this article

Finite Resources
Finite CPU cycles
Chess versus River Crossing
Open ended problems
Limitations

Finite Resources

In 1856 a Presbyterian sermon, entitled "The Dull Axe", raised the question of whether a wood-cutter is better off trying to cut down a tree with a dull axe, or to first spend some time sharpening it.

The answer depends on the scope of the task. For each level of sharpness you can give an axe, how much time per tree does it save? And how much time does the sharpening take? If you know in advance that you have 10 trees to cut down, then you could, in theory, keep sharpening until you just reach the point where an additional minute spent sharpening would only just save 6 more seconds per tree.

Similarly, if you know that you only have 10 hours to split between axe sharpening and tree felling, then you could split those hours between the two activities in a way which would maximise the number of trees you'd end up felling in that time.

And, in theory, if sharpening a particular axe were a time consuming process (say, for example, requiring a visit to a specialist axe sharpener), and you only had one tree to chop down, the optimum solution might be to not spend any time increasing the axe's sharpness.

Unlike the actual chopping of the tree, once you have the numbers, using them to decide how to split the available time is a simple problem, if the scope is kept finite and well defined.

Finite CPU cycles

Suppose I have a computer program whose input is a stream of numbers, and whose output is the square of those numbers. And that the...
Is the Star Trek Federation really incapable of building AI?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2018-03-18T10:30:03.320Z

In the Star Trek universe, we are told that it’s really hard to make genuine artificial intelligence, and that Data is so special because he’s a rare example of someone having managed to create one.

But this doesn’t seem to be the best hypothesis for explaining the evidence that we’ve actually seen. Consider:

In the TOS episode “The Ultimate Computer“, the Federation has managed to build a computer intelligent enough to run the Enterprise by its own, but it goes crazy and Kirk has to talk it into self-destructing.
In TNG, we find out that before Data, Doctor Noonian Soong had built Lore, an android with sophisticated emotional processing. However, Lore became essentially evil and had no problems killing people for his own benefit. Data worked better, but in order to get his behavior right, Soong had to initially build him with no emotions at all. (TNG: “Datalore“, “Brothers“)
In the TNG episode “Evolution“, Wesley is doing a science project with nanotechnology, accidentally enabling the nanites to become a collective intelligence which almost takes over the ship before the crew manages to negotiate a peaceful solution with them.
The holodeck seems entirely capable of running generally intelligent characters, though their behavior is usually restricted to specific roles. However, on occasion they have started straying outside their normal parameters, to the point of attempting to take over the ship. (TNG: “Elementary, Dear Data“) It is also suggested that the computer is capable of running an indefinitely long simulation which is good enough to make an intelligent being believe in it being the real universe. (TNG: “Ship in a Bottle“)
The ship’s computer in most of the series seems like it’s potentially quite intelligent, but most of the intelligence isn’t used for anything else than running holographic characters.
In the TNG episode “Booby Trap“, a potential way of saving the Enterprise from the Disaster Of The Week would involve turning over control of the ship to the computer: however, the characters are inexplicably super-reluctant to do this.
In Voyager, the Emergency Medical Hologram clearly has general intelligence: however, it is only supposed to be used in emergency situations rather than running long-term, its memory starting to degrade after a sufficiently long time of continuous use. The recommended solution is to reset it, removing all of the accumulated

...
Distributed Cooperation
by Diffractor — 2018-03-18T05:46:56.000Z

Reflective oracles can be approximated by computing Nash equilibria. But is there some procedure that produces a Pareto-optimal equilibrium in a game, aka, a point produced by a Cooperative oracle? It turns out there is. There are some interesting philosophical aspects to it, which will be typed up in the next post.

The result is not original to me, it's been floating around MIRI for a while. I think Scott, Sam, and Abram worked on it, but there might have been others. All I did was formalize it a bit, and generalize from the 2-player 2-move case to the n-player n-move case. With the formalism here, it's a bit hard to intuitively understand what's going on, so I'll indicate where to visualize an appropriate 3-dimensional object.

Definitions:

First, we will define cell sets and cell products.

Cell Set and Cell Product:

A family of sets is a cell set of some convex polytope in finite-dimensional euclidean space, iff all elements of the family are compact convex polytopes, the union of the family equals the original convex polytope, and for all pairs of elements of the family, the intersection has Lebesgue measure 0.

More intuitively, a cell set is just a set of cells where they perfectly cover some space you want, the cells only overlap at boundaries, and the cells are all finitely big, convex, and include their boundaries (so a point may be part of multiple cells if it's on a boundary, that's intentional). If you make a big cube out of a bunch of little cubes arranged in a space-filling honeycomb pattern, the set of all those little cubes is a cell set of the big cube.

Now the cell product will be defined. Fix two cell sets, A⋄ and B⋄. Index their elements with the index sets IA and IB. Let CA,i be the cell in A⋄ with the index i∈IA. Define the cell product ~× as follows:

A⋄~×B⋄:={CA,i×CB,j|(i,j)∈IA×IB}

This family of sets has the following properties:

1: All elements are compact convex polytopes, because the product of two convex compact polytopes is a convex and compact polytope.

2: Given a point in A×B, the projection of that point to A lies inside some cell in A⋄, and the same goes for B. Therefore, the point lies in the cell that is the product of the cells in A⋄ and B⋄ it was projected into. Similarly, given some arbitrary point in an arbitrary cell of the product, that cell is associated with a pair of indices, so the projection of the point to the space con

...
Silence
by alkjash — 2018-03-18T04:10:00.941Z

This is part 26 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.

满罐子水不响，半罐子水响叮当

The full can is silent, but the half-empty can makes a loud noise.

~ Chinese proverb.

Take a bottle or soda can and fill it halfway with water. Shake the can – the water will slosh around loudly.

Now, fill the can to the brim and shake it again. It’s almost completely silent.

This is an essay about inner silence – calming one’s loudest inner voices to allow quieter voices to speak. Usually, the quieter ones have urgent messages, especially given how long they’ve been neglected.

This post is, in some sense, a followup to Babble.

An Ocean of Voices

It is common sense that the loudest politician is rarely the wisest. That the child who cries the loudest is rarely the one suffers most. That the friend who criticizes most harshly rarely has the best advice. If anything, the volume of a voice negatively correlates with its value.

The Solitaire Principle states that any failure mode of groups of people also applies within the heart of each single human being. A dozen sub-personalities fight over control of your mind, each of their voices clamoring to drown out the others. Perhaps only one or two of them are consistently allowed to speak.

This picture is further complicated by two features. First, voices are quiet for a reason. There are many things your brain is doing that it doesn’t want you to know about (see The Elephant in the Brain). These “meta-cognitive blindspots” may be huge issues in your life that you somehow never get to thinking about. Every time you start, you feel unexpectedly sleepy or preoccupied. Your brain sends an army of louder voices to crowd out the tiny note of confusion whispering: Look at the elephant! Acknowledge the elephant!

Second, external voices are also competing for airtime in your head, and may easily drown out even your strongest inner voice, e.g. the phenomenon “the music is so loud I can’t hear myself think.” All sorts of reading, listening, and watching are processes by which we supplant our internal voices with external ones.

This post is about how attractive and dangerous it is to allow external voices drown internal ones out, once and for all.

The Burden of Consciousness

There are a handful of activities that routinely swallow my time like bottomless holes. Playing video games. Watching anime. Reading fiction. Clicking through Reddit. I feel the urg...
The Salmon of Knowledge
by Conor White-Sullivan — 2018-03-18T03:45:42.569Z

http://pages.citebite.com/h5t3v8t1a5wnw

All desires save one are fleeting, but that one lasts for ever. Fionn, with all desires, had the lasting one, for he would go anywhere and forsake anything for wisdom; and it was in search of this that he went to the place where Finegas lived on a bank of the Boyne Water. But for dread of the clann-Morna he did not go as Fionn. He called himself Deimne on that journey.

We get wise by asking questions, and even if these are not answered we get wise, for a well-packed question carries its answer on its back as a snail carries its shell. Fionn asked every question he could think of, and his master, who was a poet, and so an honourable man, answered them all, not to the limit of his patience, for it was limitless, but to the limit of his ability.

"Why do you live on the bank of a river?" was one of these questions. "Because a poem is a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water that poetry is revealed to the mind."

"How long have you been here?" was the next query. "Seven years," the poet answered.

"It is a long time," said wondering Fionn.

"I would wait twice as long for a poem," said the inveterate bard.

"Have you caught good poems?" Fionn asked him.

"The poems I am fit for," said the mild master. "No person can get more than that, for a man's readiness is his limit."

"Would you have got as good poems by the Shannon or the Suir or by sweet Ana Life'?"

"They are good rivers," was the answer. "They all belong to good gods."

"But why did you choose this river out of all the rivers?"

Finegas beamed on his pupil.

"I would tell you anything," said he, "and I will tell you that."

Fionn sat at the kindly man's feet, his hands absent among tall grasses, and listening with all his ears. "A prophecy was made to me," Finegas began. "A man of knowledge foretold that I should catch the Salmon of Knowledge in the Boyne Water."

"And then?" said Fionn eagerly.

"Then I would have All Knowledge."

"And after that?" the boy insisted.

"What should there be after that?" the poet retorted.

"I mean, what would you do with All Knowledge?"

"A weighty question," said Finegas smilingly. "I could answer it if I had...
Deciphering China's AI Dream
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2018-03-18T03:26:13.471Z
Link: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering-chinas-ai-dream/

This report examines the intersection of two subjects, China and artificial intelligence, both of which are already difficult enough to comprehend on their own. It provides context for China’s AI strategy with respect to past science and technology plans, and it also connects the consistent and new features of China’s AI approach to the drivers of AI development (e.g. hardware, data, and talented scientists). In addition, it benchmarks China’s current AI capabilities by developing a novel index to measure any country’s AI potential and highlights the potential implications of China’s AI dream for issues of AI safety, national security, economic development, and social governance.

The author, Jeffrey Ding, writes, “The hope is that this report can serve as a foundational document for further policy discussion and research on the topic of China’s approach to AI.” The report draws from the author’s translations of Chinese texts on AI policy, a compilation of metrics on China’s AI capabilities compared to other countries, and conversations with those who have consulted with Chinese companies and institutions involved in shaping the AI scene.