trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Making intentions concrete - Trigger-Action Planning
by Kaj_Sotala — 2016-12-01T20:34:36.483Z

I'll do it at some point.

I'll answer this message later.

I could try this sometime.

The most common consequence of these thoughts is a lot of procrastination. The person who has them may genuinely intend to do the task, but with the "when" being vague, there's nothing that would propel them into action.

Here are some thoughts the person could have instead:

When I find myself using the words "later" or "at some point", I'll decide on a specific time when I'll actually do it.
If I'm given a task that would take under five minutes, and I'm not in a pressing rush, I'll do it right away.
When I notice that I'm getting stressed out about something that I've left undone, I'll either do it right away or decide when I'll do it.

Picking a specific time or situation to serve as the trigger of the action makes it much more likely that it actually gets done.

Could we apply this more generally? Let's consider these examples:

I'm going to get more exercise.
I'll spend less money on shoes.
I want to be nicer to people.

All of these goals are vague. How will you actually implement them? As long as you don't know, you're also going to miss potential opportunities to act on them.

Let's try again:

When I see stairs, I'll climb them instead of taking the elevator.
When I buy shoes, I'll write down how much money I've spent on shoes this year.
When someone does something that I like, I'll thank them for it.

These are much better. They contain both a concrete action to be taken, and a clear trigger for when to take it.

Turning vague goals into trigger-action plans

Trigger-action plans (TAPs; known as "implementation intentions" in the academic literature) are "when-then" ("if-then", for you programmers) rules used for behavior modification [i]. A meta-analysis covering 94 studies and 8461 subjects [ii] found them to improve people's ability for achieving their goals [iii]. The goals in question included ones such as reducing the amount of fat in one's diet, getting exercise, using vitamin supplements, carrying on with a boring task, determination to work on challenging problems, and calling out racist comments. Many studies also allowed the subjects to set their own, personal goals.

TAPs were found to work both in laboratory and real-life settings. The authors of the meta-analysis estimated the risk of publication bias to be small, as half of the studies included were unpublished ones.

Desig...
December 2016 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2016-12-01T07:41:16.659Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
“San Francisco and so forth”
by KatjaGrace — 2016-12-01T07:00:14.000Z

[Content warning: no interesting insights, just random discussion of my past]

It’s been eight years since I came across America in real life. I liked it immediately and have spent most of my time here since. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise, but my guess is that my life would have been pretty different. At least in terms of friends, projects, living arrangements, leisure activities, romantic experiences, proximity to futuristic meal delivery services, intellectual ideas, transit options and weather. I think probably not in terms of approximate personality, ethical views, general life goals, sexual proclivities and height.

My first trip to America was in part a visit to my first boyfriend, so it is also only a little over eight years since I first tried being in romantic relationships. I also liked that, and have also kept it up most of the time since. Which has also substantially influenced many details of my life. Though probably still not my height or approximate personality.

I was talking to a friend recently about how there seems to be an era in their life which they feel continuous with—back maybe a decade—and an era before that which feels more like it belongs to a different person. A nice and similar person, but someone a bit more like a smaller sibling. I said my experience was about the same, including the sense that there was relatively narrow break between eras, rather than earlier and earlier selves just seeming more and more alien. We speculated a bit about how this works (a week after the end of the previous era, did it feel like I had only been myself for a week? Do other people have a similar experience?)

Now I think there are maybe at least a few distinct eras in my own memory, and perhaps they aren’t as crisp as I thought. But probably one changing of the eras was roughly the year or so in which I came to date people, met many of the (tiny) LessWrong/SingInst/etc community in real life, came to America on holiday then moved here months later, began to hang out with whole crowds of people more similar to me than almost anyone I had known before and talk about things I cared about, finished undergrad, and started working on real projects instead of student essays about globalization or whatever. Probably less important, but adding to the suitability of this as the beginning of an era, I also stopped being a vegetar...
Debating concepts - What is the comparative?
by casebash — 2016-11-30T14:46:23.888Z

In order to get a solid handle on a proposal, it isn't enough to just know what the world will look like if you adopt the proposal. It is also very important to know what the current situation or counter-model is, otherwise the proposal may provide less of a benefit than expected. Before I begin, I'll note that this article is about the comparative, I'll write another article for being comparative later, though probably under the name being responsive since this will be less confusing.

One of the best ways to think about what it means to be comparative is that you want to indicate what the two worlds will look like. For example, conscription may provide us with more troops and everyone might agree that troops are important for winning wars, but we also need to look at what the status quo is like. If the country already has enough troops or allies, then the difference in the comparative might not be that significant. When we ignore the comparative, we can often get caught up in a particular frame and fail to realise that the framing is misleading. At first, being able to better win wars might sound like it is really, really important. But when we ask the question of whether or not we need to be better at winning or if we are good enough, we might quickly realise that it doesn't really matter. As can be seen here, there is no need to wait for the other team to bring arguments before you can start being comparative.

Here the first speaker in, This house supports nationalism, provides a good example of being comparative. He explains that he doesn't see the comparative as being some utopian cosmopolitan society, but that people will always choose a particular form of identity. He say that this should be nationalism; not ethno-nationalism, but rather a form of nationalism based on shared values. He argues that this is advantageous since everyone in a nation can opt into this identity and hence it avoids the divisions that occur when people opt into specific identities such as race or gender. The speaker also talks about how nationalism can energise the nation, but if the speaker had only talked about this, then the argument would have been weaker. In this case, thinking about what the world would otherwise look like allows you to make nationalism more attractive since we can see that the alternatives are not particularly compelling.

As another example, cons...
Meetup : Boston Secular Solstice
by jimrandomh — 2016-11-30T04:54:55.035Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston Secular Solstice

WHEN:
09 December 2016 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
MIT Chapel 48 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge

It is tradition, in the community of those who seek to become more rational, to gather one night of each year, and sing. We do this close to the winter solstice, which is the longest, darkest night of the year; and, gathered as a community, we stare into and confront the darkness. This consists of participatory singing and a few short speeches, following an emotional arc from light to darkness and back to light again.

It will be at the MIT Chapel (48 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge) starting at 8 PM and lasting about two hours.

Content notes:

Mild social pressure to sing.

Unflinching discussion of death and outside-view probabilities of failure. (It'll get sad!)

At least one sappy song about love and community.

At most one essay which references the probable non-existence of God (but the primary thesis of which is not about atheism).

Solstice is rated “PG-13”. Children are welcome, if you think it appropriate.

Optionally RSVP via Facebook and/or Meetup.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston Secular Solstice
Terminology is important
by casebash — 2016-11-30T00:37:58.228Z

As rationalists, we like to focus on substance over style. This is a good habit; unfortunately, most of the public will swallow extremely poor reasoning if it is expressed sufficiently confidently and fluently. However, style is also important when it comes to popularising an idea, even if it is within our own community.

In order for terminology to be useful, a few conditions need to be met:

Firstly, the term needs to either be more nuanced or more concise than explaining the same concept in ordinary language. I tend to see it as a bad thing when terms are created just to signal that a person is a member of the in-group.

Secondly, the speaker needs to remember the term. If a term is hard to pronounce or it has a complex name, then the speaker may be unable to use it, even if they would like to be able to.

Lastly, the person who is hearing the term for the first time should be able to connect it its the meaning. If they are constantly having to pause to remember what the term means, then it will be harder for them to figure out your meaning as a whole. In the best case, a person can guess what the term means before it is even explained to them.

I believe that a lot of the value that Less Wrong or the rationalist community has provided is not just new concepts, but the language that allows us to describe them. The better a term scores on each of the above factors, the more the term will be used and the more we can rely on other speakers within the community also adopting the term. This is a key part of what draws people to the rationalist community, being able to have a conversation from a certain baseline that doesn’t end up getting dragged down in the way that would be typical outside of the community. Instead of getting trapped in an argument at the level of the base assumptions, it allows a conversation to go deeper and become more nuanced.

Given all of this, I believe that further developing terminology is a key part of what our project should be. I will begin by writing a series of articles on debating terms which I wish were a part of our common vocabulary. I would like to encourage people to reread old Less Wrong articles and consider whether the concepts have been given a clear and memorable name and if not, to write a new article arguing in favour of this new term. We need to figure out ways of producing more content and a belie...
Meetup : Denver Area LW December Meetup
by PonchoPal — 2016-11-29T23:20:41.987Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area LW December Meetup

WHEN:
06 December 2016 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Darcy's Pub 4955 S Ulster St Ste 103, Denver, Colorado 80237

Assuming winter doesn't hit us hard and ruin the roads.
In the back room if we can get it. There'll probably be a discussion topic posted on the facebook group ahead of time, but conversation is generally free-form and not goal-driven. Come join us!

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area LW December Meetup
Articles in Main
by Vaniver — 2016-11-29T21:35:17.618Z

Hi all,

We shut off Main back in February to force everything into Discussion, and I still think the Main/Discussion split should be replaced (by better use of the tagging system, or by different subreddits based more about the style of interaction that people are looking for than the content, or so on), but (as mentioned then) we're going to be using Main for posts we want to make sure get into the RSS feed.

This is awkward because everything else is in Discussion, and Main is still a weird visibility zone, where stuff in Main that isn't Promoted is sort of in limbo. There are ways to improve this long-term, but in the short term, it looks like there are some easy options:

1. Open Thread comments linking to new promoted Main posts

2. Linkposts that point to new promoted Main posts

3. Something else?

(As said before, this should hopefully be a temporary measure; if we add promoted posts in Discussion to the site RSS (github issue), then those posts will show up in Discussion and in the RSS and everything is great.)
Recent AI control posts
by paulfchristiano — 2016-11-29T18:53:57.656Z

Over at medium, I’m continuing to write about AI control; here’s a roundup from the last month.

Strategy

Prosaic AI control argues that AI control research should first consider the case where AI involves no “unknown unknowns.”

Handling destructive technology tries to explain the upside of AI control, if we live in a universe where we eventually need to build a singleton anyway.

Hard-core subproblems explains a concept I find helpful for organizing research.

Building blocks of ALBA

Security amplification and reliability amplification are complements to capability amplification. Ensembling for reliability is now implemented in ALBA on github.

Meta-execution is my current leading contender for security and capability amplification. It’s totally unclear how well it can work (some relevant speculation).

Thoughts on reward engineering discusses a bunch of prosaic but important issues when designing reward functions.

Terminology and concepts

Clarifying the distinction between safety, control and alignment.

Benignity may be a useful invariant when designing aligned AI.
My recent posts
by paulfchristiano — 2016-11-29T18:51:09.000Z

Over at medium, I'm continuing to write about AI control; here's a roundup from the last month.

Many of these seem like interesting things to discuss here; would it be better to post each of these as a link when I write it?

#Strategy

Prosaic AI control argues that AI control research should first consider the case where AI involves no "unknown unknowns."

Handling destructive technology tries to explain the upside of AI control, if we live in a universe where we eventually need to build a singleton anyway.

Hard-core subproblems explains a concept I find helpful for organizing research.

#Building blocks of ALBA

Security amplification and reliability amplification are complements to capability amplification. Ensembling for reliability is now implemented in ALBA on github.

Meta-execution is my current leading contender for security and capability amplification. It’s totally unclear how well it can work (some relevant speculation).

Thoughts on reward engineering discusses a bunch of prosaic but important issues when designing reward functions.

Terminology and concepts

Clarifying the distinction between safety, control and alignment.

Benignity may be a useful invariant when designing aligned AI.
Epistemic Effort
by Raemon — 2016-11-29T16:08:41.150Z

Epistemic Effort: Thought seriously for 5 minutes about it. Thought a bit about how to test it empirically. Spelled out my model a little bit. I'm >80% confident this is worth trying and seeing what happens. Spent 45 min writing post.

I've been pleased to see "Epistemic Status" hit a critical mass of adoption - I think it's a good habit for us to have. In addition to letting you know how seriously to take an individual post, it sends a signal about what sort of discussion you want to have, and helps remind other people to think about their own thinking.

I have a suggestion for an evolution of it - "Epistemic Effort" instead of status. Instead of "how confident you are", it's more of a measure of "what steps did you actually take to make sure this was accurate?" with some examples including:

Thought about it musingly
Made a 5 minute timer and thought seriously about possible flaws or refinements
Had a conversation with other people you epistemically respect and who helped refine it
Thought about how to do an empirical test
Thought about how to build a model that would let you make predictions about the thing
Did some kind of empirical test
Did a review of relevant literature
Ran an Randomized Control Trial

[Edit: the intention with these examples is for it to start with things that are fairly easy to do to get people in the habit of thinking about how to think better, but to have it quickly escalate to "empirical tests, hard to fake evidence and exposure to falsifiability"]

A few reasons I think this (most of these reasons are "things that seem likely to me" but which I haven't made any formal effort to test - they come from some background in game design and reading some books on habit formation, most of which weren't very well cited)

People are more likely to put effort into being rational if there's a relatively straightforward, understandable path to do so
People are more likely to put effort into being rational if they see other people doing it
People are more likely to put effort into being rational if they are rewarded (socially or otherwise) for doing so.
It's not obvious that people will get _especially_ socially rewarded for doing something like "Epistemic Effort" (or "Epistemic Status") but there are mild social rewards just for doing somethin

...
Why GiveWell can't recommend MIRI or anything like it
by Bound_up — 2016-11-29T15:29:24.188Z

There's an old joke about a man, head down, slowly walking in circles under the light of a street lamp. It is dark and he has lost his wallet.

A passerby offers his assistance and asks what they're looking for. A second does the same.

Finally, this second helper asks "Is this where you lost it?"

"No," comes the reply.

"Then why are you looking over here?"

"Because this is where the light is!"

The tendency to look for answers where they can be measured or found may also be present in psychological research on rats. We don't really look at rats for psychological insight because we think that's where the psychological insights are, that's just the only place we can look! (Note, I know looking at rats is better than nothing, and we don't only look at rats).

Likewise, GiveWell. They've released their new list of seven charities they recommend donating to. Six are efforts to increase health in a cheap way, and the last is direct money transfers to help people break out of poverty traps. In theory, these are the most cost-efficient producers of good in the world.

Except, not really. Technological research, especially AI, or perhaps effective educational reform, or improving the scientific community's norms might very well be vastly more fruitful fields.

I don't think these are all missing from GiveWell's list only because they don't measure up, but because, by GiveWell's metrics, they can't be measured at all! GiveWell has provided, perhaps, the best of the charities that can be easily measured.

What if the best charities aren't easily measurable? Well, then they won't just not be on the list, they can't be on the list.
If Atheists Had Faith
by Bound_up — 2016-11-29T15:13:00.715Z

I posted this as just a link and found to my surprise that it was misunderstood(people have said they thought it was anti-atheism) and downvoted to oblivion.

I'm risking it again, with an explanation this time, though.

https://atheistkit.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/if-atheists-had-faith/

The point is that a theist's accusation of an atheist's "faith" is just that, an accusation. They imply that, on some level, they KNOW that faith doesn't work.

In this dialogue, by going along with it, the atheist gets the theist to lay all the epistemological groundwork for reason, science, no "separate magisteria,"and so on, at which point, the theist's position is vulnerable to a straightforward analysis of the evidence.

I think this is more realistic than you might think. If you told theists that your atheism was faith-based, they really would start thinking about and presenting reasons why faith shouldn't overpower reason and evidence, and then you could win based on reason and evidence (hence Dawkins stepping in to do so at the end of the dialogue).
How can people write good LW articles?
by abramdemski — 2016-11-29T10:40:27.958Z

A comment by AnnaSalamon on her recent article:

good intellectual content

Yes. I wonder if there are somehow spreadable habits of thinking (or of "reading while digesting/synethesizing/blog posting", or ...) that could themselves be written up, in order to create more ability from more folks to add good content.

Probably too meta / too clever an idea, but may be worth some individual brainstorms?

I wouldn't presume to write "How To Write Good LessWrong Articles", but perhaps I'm up to the task of starting a thread on it.

To the point: feel encouraged to skip my thoughts and comment with your own ideas.

The thoughts I ended up writing are, perhaps, more of an argument that it's still possible to write good new articles and only a little on how to do so:

Several people have suggested to me that perhaps the reason LessWrong has gone mostly silent these days is that there's only so much to be said on the subject of rationality, and the important things have been thoroughly covered. I think this is easily seen to be false, if you go and look at the mountain of literature related to subjects in the sequences. There is a lot left to be sifted through, synthesized, and explained clearly. Really, there are a lot of things which have only been dealt with in a fairly shallow way on LessWrong and could be given a more thorough treatment. A reasonable algorithm is to dive into academic papers on a subject of interest and write summaries of what you find. I expect there are a lot of interesting things to be uncovered in the existing literature on cognitive biases, economics, game theory, mechanism design, artificial intelligence, algorithms, operations research, public policy, and so on -- and that this community would have an interesting spin on those things.

Moreover, I think that "rationality isn't solved" (simply put). Perhaps you can read a bunch of stuff on here and think that all the answers have been laid out -- you form rational beliefs in accord with the laws of probability theory, and make rational decisions by choosing the policy with maximum expected utility; what else is there to know? Or maybe you admit that there are some holes in that story, like the details of TDT vs UDT and the question of logical uncertainty and so on; but you can't do anything meaningful about that. To such an attitude, I would say: do you know how to put it all into practice? Do ...