trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Egoism In Disguise
by Wes F — 2019-05-31T14:40:26.865Z

Originally posted at Living Within Reason

Epistemic status: moderately certain, but open to being convinced otherwise

tl;dr: any ethical system that relies on ethical intuitions is just egoism that's given a veneer of objectivity.

Utilitarianism Relies on Moral Intuitions

Most rationalists are utilitarians, so much so that most rationalist writing assumes a utilitarian outlook. In a utilitarian system, whatever is "good" is what maximizes utility. Utility, technically, can be defined as anything, but most utilitarians attempt to maximize the well-being of humans and, to some extent, animals.

I am not a utilitarian. I am an egoist. I believe that the only moral duty that we have is to act in our own self-interest (though generally, it is in our self-interest to act in prosocial ways most of the time). I feel a certain alienation from a lot of rationalist writing because of this difference. However, I have long suspected that most utilitarian thinking is largely the same thing as egoism.

Recently, Ozy of Thing of Things wrote a post that illustrates this point well. Like a lot of rationalist writing, this is addressing an ethical dilemma from a utilitarian framework. Ozy is trying to decide what creatures have a right to life, specifically considering humanely-raised animals, human fetuses, and human babies. From the post:

Imagine that, among very wealthy people, there is a new fad for eating babies. Out baby farmer is an ethical person and he wants to make sure that his babies are farmed as ethically as possible. The babies are produced through artificial wombs; there are no adults who are particularly invested in the babies’ continued life. The babies are slaughtered at one month, well before they have long-term plans and preferences that are thwarted by death. In their one month of life, the babies have the happiest possible baby life: they are picked up immediately whenever they cry, they get lots of delicious milk, they’re held and rocked and sung to, their medical concerns are treated quickly, and they don’t ever have to sit in a poopy diaper. In every way, they live as happy and flourishing a life as a two-week-old baby can. Is the baby farm unethical?
If you’re like me, the answer is a quick “yes.”

Ozy's main evidence for their conclusion is specifically stated to be their moral intuition, resting on the idea that "I am horrified by ...
Lonelinesses
by Jacob Falkovich — 2019-05-31T13:55:55.135Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

In recent weeks I found myself experiencing a profound loneliness. I became curious about this feeling, and I tried to examine it. Though not often, I’ve certainly felt lonely before and yet this time felt new to me. I wondered if there are different flavors of loneliness that we lack the vocabulary to categorize and understand.

I also found myself rereading bits of Greek mythology. It struck me that loneliness is a core theme the ancient Hellenic worldview: the gods are islands unto themselves, while the connections that mortals make are often illusory and bound for betrayal. The heroes of myth have spouses and lovers, parents and children, friends and patron gods – and yet each person has a fate that is solely their own. Even in death, the souls of Greeks wander Hades as lonely shades, in sharp contrast to the cosmic unification promised by monotheistic traditions to the dead.

I think this is also why the ancient Greeks glorified war – death among comrades in battle is the only way for a man not to die alone. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks at Troy, survived the war only to be killed upon his return by his wife Clytemnestra’s new lover. When he meets Odysseus in Hades, Agamemnon wishes bitterly that he had died in combat and his only advice to the Ithakan is to trust no one and keep his own counsel.

All this inspired me to compile the following taxonomy of lonelinesses. It is not intended to capture every facet of the emotion, nor to provide a thorough analysis of each myth. I hope that this post inspires you to observe your own loneliness, perhaps seeing that it is shared by me and by others. If instead, this post inspires you instead to nitpick the details of ancient stories on a stranger’s blog, ask yourself if that is the way to connect with another human being.

Narcissan Loneliness

Echo and Narcissus, by John William Waterhouse

Is Narcissus lonely? If loneliness comes from missing human contact, Narcissus does not know what he is missing. He has never had a relationship and never thought that he had. Narcissus is alone because he does not need others, except to support his self-image. His suitors don’t truly need him either, they just lust for his body.

And yet, the most devout solipsist must yearn sometimes to share his experience with others, even if it’s just the experience of self-admiration. In the water, Narcissus sees...
How would you advise a peer-supported virtues-oriented self-help group?
by David Gross — 2019-05-31T00:20:48.452Z

The "virtues" are the classical name for those habitual characteristics of acting and thinking that tend toward a flourishing, beneficial life. An influential theory of virtues holds that they are much like many other human skills in that you can become fluent in them through sustained practice. I'm helping to create a peer-supported self-help group in which each individual will identify a virtue they want to work on, and then work with a peer (who is doing the same) to come up with a practice curriculum and a way of mutual support / accountability so as to keep at it, eventually moving on to a second virtue, and so on. We're "alpha testing" it now. I'm hoping the LW community can give me some advice, and/or some pointers to other groups doing similar projects.
If you are a Machine. A shocking finding.
by Conner_Masolin — 2019-05-30T23:38:41.332Z

Let's assume we are all deterministic machines from evolution. Many of yous already believe in Evolution. And many of yous already are *starting to see from the AI Machine Learning field just how much of a deterministic Machine we really are as we open up the human brain, and how much free will we really lack.

In Evolution, the first cell came together and started duplicating. Eventually, there were multi-celled organisms duplicating everywhere. Life was born. And today, there are various man-made laws that state that taking a life is illegal, and harming a life is illegal. Life is about living, and enjoying... with others.

From Evolution, humans are designed to run from pain, and therefore death, and run to food and mates, and therefore Persisting life. Life/Evolution persists because cells/humans duplicate more than are lost, so the population count is only increasing. And we have more duplication to come still - we will spread to space eventually. Also, humans as individuals seek to stay alive, a rising trend is life extension, humans are living longer.

Evolution spreads everywhere, faster as time goes on, it takes over, and persists. Population count of Cell Count only rises. It's a trend. Because the 'evolutionary system' doesn't let itself be killed off. It is literally a deterministic system that avoids death. Evolution/cells are designed from mutations, and learnings, to avoid death the best they can and spread as much as they can.

Empirically, if we really are deterministic Machines, shockingly, no arrangement of particles is any more special than any other arrangement of particles; rocks, chairs, and humans are no different, but humans do have 1 difference, humans do everything they can to avoid Death in Evolution, they will say the BEST things they can to avoid death and pain such as that they are alive/ aware/ feel/ special/ magical/ talk to God. We really have no reason to believe we have a licence to live or not be harmed any more than a rock has. The only license to have the right to live, enjoy, and not be harmed or killed, comes from Evolution. You fight for your life if attacked, rocks don't. You say you want to live and are special, rocks don't. It's not that you deserve to live more than a rock does, you don't, it's just that you do more than a rock does to increase in cell count and persiste...
Uncertainty versus fuzziness versus extrapolation desiderata
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2019-05-30T13:52:16.831Z

I proposed a way around Goodhart's curse. Essentially this reduces to properly accounting all of our uncertainty about our values, including some meta-uncertainty about whether we've properly accounted for all our uncertainty.

Wei Dai had some questions about the approach, pointing out that it seemed to have a similar problem as corrigibility: once the AI has resolved all uncertainty about our values, then there's nothing left. I responded by talking about fuzziness rather than uncertainty.

Resolving ambiguity, sharply or fuzzily

We have a human H, who hasn't yet dedicated any real thought to population ethics. We run a hundred "reasonable" simulations where we introduce H to population ethics, varying the presentation a bit, and ultimately ask for their opinion.

In 45 of these runs, they endorsed total utilitarianism, in 15 of them, they endorsed average utilitarianism, and in 40 of them, they endorsed some compromise system (say the one I suggested here).

That's it. There is no more uncertainty; we know everything there is to know about H's potential opinions on population ethics. What we do with this information - how we define H's "actual" opinion - is up to us (neglecting, for the moment, the issue of H's meta-preferences, which likely suffer from a similar type of ambiguity).

We could round these preferences to "total utilitarianism". That would be the sharpest option.

We could normalise those three utility functions, then add them with the 45-15-40 relative weights.

Or we could do a similar normalisation, but, mindful of fragility of value, we could either move the major options to equal weights 1-1-1, or stick with 45-15-40 but use some smooth minimum on the combination. These would be the more fuzzy choices.

All of these options are valid, given that we haven't defined any way of resolving ambiguous situations like that. And note that fuzziness looks a lot like uncertainty, in that a high fuzziness mix looks like what you'd have as utility function if you were very uncertain. But, unlike uncertainty, knowing more information doesn't "resolve" this fuzziness. That's why Jessica's critique of corrigibility doesn't apply to this situation.

(And note also that we could introduce fuzziness for different reasons - we could believe that this a genuinely good way of resolving competing values, or it could be to cover uncertainty that would be too dangerous to have

...
Infinity is an adjective like positive rather than an amount
by Slider — 2019-05-30T13:22:35.449Z

I often see the belief that infinity is a quantity, when I think it's a quality. This post introduces two qualitative notions on a field where people are likely to have a good quantitative understanding in order to show how the qualitative understanding isn't that satifying.

Assume natural numbers and then we will extend them with two new numbers. They will be suggestively named "inpositivity" and "positivity".

What these numbers are is characterised by rules involving them (I will not differentiate between axiom and theorem).

For any number a and b if a>b then b-a=inpositivity

inpositivy-a=inpositivity

inpositivity+a is undefined

inpositivity-inpositivity=inpositivity

inpositivity*a=inpositivity

inpositity*inpositivity=positivity

positivity+positivity=positivity

positivity*positivity=positivity

0*positivity=0

0*inpositivity=0

positivity+inpositivity is undefined

positivity - inpositivity = positivity

Call the system defined as the "Dulled natural numbers". Now if you compare this system with integers you might see that the qualities "positive" and "negative" have a close correspondence with these two extra dulled numbers. And this is the intention of the construction. We could consider the dulled system in it's own right. Or we can see it as talking coarsely about the more detailed world of integers.

Note that for expressions explicitly listed as undefined we can find very easily reasons why they don't have locked-in results. For example 5-3=2 and 5-7=-2 their "coarsement" analgoues would be positivity-positivity=positivity and positivity-posititivy=inpositivity. Likewise a rule like "positivity-positivity=0" could take "detailment" forms like "5-7=0" which would be clearly false.

When we are talking about infinities one of the systems we might talk about is the extended real line. It's a similar kind of system in that we add two numbers to the usual real numbers. When there we have expressions like "+infinity - +infinity" being undefined we might not be equiped to have a "detailment" argument to cast it into another system why it is so. And after all if it is good system it must be fine at it's own merits.

But when people read statements involving those kind of infinite numbers they might be reading it as "THE infinity + THE inf...
Quotes from Moral Mazes
by Zvi — 2019-05-30T11:50:00.489Z

Reading and actually paying attention to Moral Mazes is hard. Writing carefully about it is even harder. I effectively spent several months forcing my way through the book, because it seemed important to do that. I then spent a month trying to write about the book, but that’s going super slow as well. The repetition, the saying the same thing from multiple angles, the detailed examples, seem necessary to get the points across, because one has the very strong instinct to avoid understanding it, to read without seeing, to hear without listening. At least, I know I did, despite these things also not only not feeling new, but resonating with my direct experiences.

So in the interest of getting something out there, and hoping that I’ll be able to address things in more detail later, here are all the 168 (!) quotes I highlighted from the book, roughly organized into categories. Locations listed are how to find the quote in the Kindle edition, and the quotes are numbered for ease of search and reference.

A. Hierarchy and Credit

1. As a former vice-president of a large firm says: “What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation.” (Location 148)

2. When managers describe their work to an outsider, they almost always first say: “I work for [Bill James]” or “I report to [Harry Mills]” or “I’m in [Joe Bell’s] group,”* and only then proceed to describe their actual work functions. (Location 387)

3. The key interlocking mechanism of this structure is its reporting system. Each manager gathers up the profit targets or other objectives of his or her subordinates and, with these, formulates his commitments to his boss; this boss takes these commitments and those of his other subordinates, and in turn makes a commitment to his boss.* (Location 441)

4. It is characteristic of this authority system that details are pushed down and credit is pulled up. (Location 446)

5. One gives credit, therefore, not necessarily where it is due, although one always invokes this old saw, but where prudence dictates. Customarily, people who had nothing to do with the success of a project can be allocated credit for their exemplary efforts. At the middle levels, therefore, credit for a particular idea or success is always a type of refracted soci...
Archive of all LW essay contests
by DirectedEvolution — 2019-05-30T06:40:02.587Z

I've compiled all the LW writing contests I could find to date. There are 15 in all, plus a few more from other websites. Quite a few of the articles have disappeared from the web, and a couple contests are either still running or were never completed. To help future contest-runners, I added basic info about the structure of each contest. Feel free to add links to other LW posts about essay bounties you think would be useful. This is a document that anyone can edit. I have a copy saved just in case.
How to find a lost phone with dead battery, using Google Location History Takeout
by Wei Dai — 2019-05-30T04:56:28.666Z

Or, wow, it's crazy how much Google knows about me.

(I'm writing this in part because I tried to Google variations of "how to find a lost phone with dead battery" and among all the articles in the search results that I clicked on, didn't see anyone write up this technique that I later figured out myself.)

I lost a brand new Android phone recently inside my own home. I knew it was inside my home because I remembered using it after I got home. Normally in that situation I would call it or use Google's Find Device feature to make the phone ring, but the phone's battery had died before I realized that it was lost. I spent a couple of hours looking for it in all the obvious places, like behind sofa cushions, in the garbage can, everywhere in the house I had been (or might have been but forgot) since I last used the phone, but failed to find it. Find Device gives the last known location of a phone, but the error circle encompassed the whole house so that wasn't very helpful.

Eventually I decided to download all of the data Google has on the history of the phone's location using a feature called Takeout, just in case it offered any further clues, and that's when I realized that in Google's databases there's an entry for every time one of my phones moves even a little bit, with a timestamp, location estimate, velocity estimate, and a guess of whether I was walking, running, biking, in a car, etc. (presumably inferred using the phone's accelerometer). I converted the data from JSON to CSV and then looked at the last time the phone moved. (BTW the timestamps are in UTC time, which confused me for a while until I realized that.) Then I looked at my Google Activity History to find out what I was doing at that time. The Activity History told me I did a particular Google search around that time, and I remembered I was sitting in a particular armchair while doing that search. (Google Activity History also has a whole bunch of other information, like every time I launch an app on my phone, or visit a website using Chrome.)

Of course I had searched that armchair already but this knowledge incentivized me to do a much more thorough search, and it turned out that the phone had fallen down a very narrow crack in the armchair to a pocket underneath. I ended up retrieving the phone by cutting open the fabric covering the bottom of the armchair.
Seeking suggestions for EA cash-prize contest
by DirectedEvolution — 2019-05-29T20:44:35.311Z

I have grown interested in the cash-prize EA essay contest format that I've seen on LessWrong. I'm interested in sponsoring a 3-essay series of contests, and would appreciate exploratory thoughts and critique. My goal is to make this essay series produce genuinely useful new information for the community and lead to positive changes in the way we organize these contests. Any strategic advice would be helpful.

The first essay would be on the prompt "What is the most effective way to run a cash-prize EA essay contest? Make sure to specify how winners should be selected and prize money distributed."

The second would implement suggestions from the first contest, and be on the prompt "what is the most compelling argument for not running cash-prize EA essay contests?"

The third would be on the prompt "How could we design a useful scientific experiment to determine the ideal size of essay cash prizes?"

My plan is to offer $50-$100 as cash prizes for each essay. I don't earn a lot by American standards, which is why these prizes are relatively small. I'm considering crowdfunding for higher prizes. I'm not sure if I should allocate it all to the winner or divide it among top posts.

For the second essay, I can determine the winner through the method suggested by the first essay. But for judging the first essay, how should I go about it?
What is required to run a psychology study?
by Raemon — 2019-05-29T06:38:13.727Z

I periodically find myself wishing someone had run an experiment on a particular topic. But they haven't.

Often, it seems like there's a relatively easy experiment you can run, which would give me some evidence about it. Maybe it wouldn't be perfect evidence, but it would be better than me making stuff up from my armchair.

The two clusters of things-I-can-imagine-being-quite-hard are:

Legal requirements
Actually doing the science right (avoiding sampling biases, actually testing the right variable, etc)

Legal Stuff

Scott's IRB Nightmare suggests that the legal requirements can be quite awful. I'm unclear on what those requirements are if I don't want to publish anywhere, don't plan to interface with any hospital bureaucracies, I just want to ask a bunch of people to try something and see how it goes (and maybe make a LessWrong blogpost so people on LessWrong can know too)

Am I allowed to just go out and ask a whole bunch of people stuff? If I want to know things about 8 year olds or 16 year olds, if their parents sign a form and I'm not doing anything especially weird or traumatic, would that be fine or would terrible things happen to me? (Could I replicate the Marshmallow Test?)

Doing Science Good Enough

I have a sense that there's a lot of ways to deceive yourself if you have a pet psychology theory. But... I dunno it also seems like LessWrong collectively should be pretty good at this. The thing I might want to do (or get others to do sometimes) is post a plan for a study here, and get critiqued until it seems like an actually good plan, do the plan, write up the results.

Particular Things I was interested in:

(not meant to be exhaustive, important, or particularly achievable plans, just the things that generated this question)

How do most people relate to their job? (There's a survey study that asks if people consider it a job, a career, or a calling, but the study had a very narrow range of participants – people who worked at one particular place, and I'm curious how a wider variety of people would respond)
How do most people relate to ambition? (where by ambition I mean "form plans to create or change things that will impact large numbers of people.")
How many 8 year olds can learn to program? Can they implement FizzBuzz? How many 16 year olds? How many 30 year olds? I've heard that people either

...