The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong Top Posts
The Nonlinear Fund
Subscribe
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
Available episodes
Newest first
Oldest first
Dec 12, 2021
Eight Short Studies On Excuses by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Eight Short Studies On Excuses , published by Scott Alexander on LessWrong.
The Clumsy Game-Player
You and a partner are playing an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Both of you have publicly pre-committed to the tit-for-tat strategy. By iteration 5, you're going happily along, raking up the bonuses of cooperation, when your partner unexpectedly presses the "defect" button.
"Uh, sorry," says your partner. "My finger slipped."
"I still have to punish you just in case," you say. "I'm going to defect next turn, and we'll see how you like it."
"Well," said your partner, "knowing that, I guess I'll defect next turn too, and we'll both lose out. But hey, it was just a slipped finger. By not trusting me, you're costing us both the benefits of one turn of cooperation."
"True", you respond "but if I don't do it, you'll feel free to defect whenever you feel like it, using the 'finger slipped' excuse."
"How about this?" proposes your partner. "I promise to take extra care that my finger won't slip again. You promise that if my finger does slip again, you will punish me terribly, defecting for a bunch of turns. That way, we trust each other again, and we can still get the benefits of cooperation next turn."
You don't believe that your partner's finger really slipped, not for an instant. But the plan still seems like a good one. You accept the deal, and you continue cooperating until the experimenter ends the game.
After the game, you wonder what went wrong, and whether you could have played better. You decide that there was no better way to deal with your partner's "finger-slip" - after all, the plan you enacted gave you maximum possible utility under the circumstances. But you wish that you'd pre-committed, at the beginning, to saying "and I will punish finger slips equally to deliberate defections, so make sure you're careful."
The Lazy Student
You are a perfectly utilitarian school teacher, who attaches exactly the same weight to others' welfare as to your own. You have to have the reports of all fifty students in your class ready by the time midterm grades go out on January 1st. You don't want to have to work during Christmas vacation, so you set a deadline that all reports must be in by December 15th or you won't grade them and the students will fail the class. Oh, and your class is Economics 101, and as part of a class project all your students have to behave as selfish utility-maximizing agents for the year.
It costs your students 0 utility to turn in the report on time, but they gain +1 utility by turning it in late (they enjoy procrastinating). It costs you 0 utility to grade a report turned in before December 15th, but -30 utility to grade one after December 15th. And students get 0 utility from having their reports graded on time, but get -100 utility from having a report marked incomplete and failing the class.
If you say "There's no penalty for turning in your report after deadline," then the students will procrastinate and turn in their reports late, for a total of +50 utility (1 per student times fifty students). You will have to grade all fifty reports during Christmas break, for a total of - 1500 utility (-30 per report times fifty reports). Total utility is -1450.
So instead you say "If you don't turn in your report on time, I won't grade it." All students calculate the cost of being late, which is +1 utility from procrastinating and -100 from failing the class, and turn in their reports on time. You get all reports graded before Christmas, no students fail the class, and total utility loss is zero. Yay!
Or else - one student comes to you the day after deadline and says "Sorry, I was really tired yesterday, so I really didn't want to come all the way here to hand in my report. I expect you'll grade my report anyway, because I know you to be a perfect utilitarian, an...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Making Vaccine by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Making Vaccine, published by johnswentworth on LessWrong.
Back in December, I asked how hard it would be to make a vaccine for oneself. Several people pointed to radvac. It was a best-case scenario: an open-source vaccine design, made for self-experimenters, dead simple to make with readily-available materials, well-explained reasoning about the design, and with the name of one of the world’s more competent biologists (who I already knew of beforehand) stamped on the whitepaper. My girlfriend and I made a batch a week ago and took our first booster yesterday.
This post talks a bit about the process, a bit about our plan, and a bit about motivations. Bear in mind that we may have made mistakes - if something seems off, leave a comment.
The Process
All of the materials and equipment to make the vaccine cost us about $1000. We did not need any special licenses or anything like that. I do have a little wetlab experience from my undergrad days, but the skills required were pretty minimal.
One vial of custom peptide - that little pile of white powder at the bottom.
The large majority of the cost (about $850) was the peptides. These are the main active ingredients of the vaccine: short segments of proteins from the COVID virus. They’re all <25 amino acids, so far too small to have any likely function as proteins (for comparison, COVID’s spike protein has 1273 amino acids). They’re just meant to be recognized by the immune system: the immune system learns to recognize these sequences, and that’s what provides immunity.
Each of six peptides came in two vials of 4.5 mg each. These are the half we haven't dissolved; we keep them in the freezer as backups.
The peptides were custom synthesized. There are companies which synthesize any (short) peptide sequence you want - you can find dozens of them online. The cheapest options suffice for the vaccine - the peptides don’t need to be “purified” (this just means removing partial sequences), they don’t need any special modifications, and very small amounts suffice. The minimum order size from the company we used would have been sufficient for around 250 doses. We bought twice that much (9 mg of each peptide), because it only cost ~$50 extra to get 2x the peptides and extras are nice in case of mistakes.
The only unusual hiccup was an email about customs restrictions on COVID-related peptides. Apparently the company was not allowed to send us 9 mg in one vial, but could send us two vials of 4.5 mg each for each peptide. This didn’t require any effort on my part, other than saying “yes, two vials is fine, thankyou”. Kudos to their customer service for handling it.
Equipment - stir plate, beakers, microcentrifuge tubes, 10 and 50 mL vials, pipette (0.1-1 mL range), and pipette tips. It's all available on Amazon.
Other materials - these are sold as supplements. We also need such rare and costly ingredients as vinegar and deionized water. Also all available on Amazon.
Besides the peptides, all the other materials and equipment were on amazon, food grade, in quantities far larger than we are ever likely to use. Peptide synthesis and delivery was the slowest; everything else showed up within ~3 days of ordering (it’s amazon, after all).
The actual preparation process involves three main high-level steps:
Prepare solutions of each component - basically dissolve everything separately, then stick it in the freezer until it’s needed.
Circularize two of the peptides. Concretely, this means adding a few grains of activated charcoal to the tube and gently shaking it for three hours. Then, back in the freezer.
When it’s time for a batch, take everything out of the freezer and mix it together.
Prepping a batch mostly just involves pipetting things into a beaker on a stir plate, sometimes drop-by-drop.
Finally, a dose goes into a microcentrifuge tube....
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, published by lukeprog on LessWrong.
For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff's Notes. How inefficient!
I've since discovered that textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material. That's what they are designed to be, after all. Less Wrong has often recommended the "read textbooks!" method. Make progress by accumulation, not random walks.
But textbooks vary widely in quality. I was forced to read some awful textbooks in college. The ones on American history and sociology were memorably bad, in my case. Other textbooks are exciting, accurate, fair, well-paced, and immediately useful.
What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful.
Let's do it.
There have been other pages of recommended reading on Less Wrong before (and elsewhere), but this post is unique. Here are the rules:
Post the title of your favorite textbook on a given subject.
You must have read at least two other textbooks on that same subject.
You must briefly name the other books you've read on the subject and explain why you think your chosen textbook is superior to them.
Rules #2 and #3 are to protect against recommending a bad book that only seems impressive because it's the only book you've read on the subject. Once, a popular author on Less Wrong recommended Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy to me, but when I noted that it was more polemical and inaccurate than the other major histories of philosophy, he admitted he hadn't really done much other reading in the field, and only liked the book because it was exciting.
I'll start the list with three of my own recommendations...
Subject: History of Western Philosophy
Recommendation: The Great Conversation, 6th edition, by Norman Melchert
Reason: The most popular history of western philosophy is Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, which is exciting but also polemical and inaccurate. More accurate but dry and dull is Frederick Copelston's 11-volume A History of Philosophy. Anthony Kenny's recent 4-volume history, collected into one book as A New History of Western Philosophy, is both exciting and accurate, but perhaps too long (1000 pages) and technical for a first read on the history of philosophy. Melchert's textbook, The Great Conversation, is accurate but also the easiest to read, and has the clearest explanations of the important positions and debates, though of course it has its weaknesses (it spends too many pages on ancient Greek mythology but barely mentions Gottlob Frege, the father of analytic philosophy and of the philosophy of language). Melchert's history is also the only one to seriously cover the dominant mode of Anglophone philosophy done today: naturalism (what Melchert calls "physical realism"). Be sure to get the 6th edition, which has major improvements over the 5th edition.
Subject: Cognitive Science
Recommendation: Cognitive Science, by Jose Luis Bermudez
Reason: Jose Luis Bermudez's Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of Mind does an excellent job setting the historical and conceptual context for cognitive science, and draws fairly from all the fields involved in this heavily interdisciplinary science. Bermudez does a good job of making himself invisible, and the explanations here are some of the clearest available. In contrast, Paul Thagard's Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science skips the context and jumps right into a systematic comparison (by explanatory merit) of the leading theories of mental representation: logic, rules, concepts, analogies, images, and neural networks. The book is o...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Preface by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Preface, published Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong.
You hold in your hands a compilation of two years of daily blog posts. In retrospect, I look back on that project and see a large number of things I did completely wrong. I’m fine with that. Looking back and not seeing a huge number of things I did wrong would mean that neither my writing nor my understanding had improved since 2009. Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed your mind since then.
It was a mistake that I didn’t write my two years of blog posts with the intention of helping people do better in their everyday lives. I wrote it with the intention of helping people solve big, difficult, important problems, and I chose impressive-sounding, abstract problems as my examples.
In retrospect, this was the second-largest mistake in my approach. It ties in to the first-largest mistake in my writing, which was that I didn’t realize that the big problem in learning this valuable way of thinking was figuring out how to practice it, not knowing the theory. I didn’t realize that part was the priority; and regarding this I can only say “Oops” and “Duh.”
Yes, sometimes those big issues really are big and really are important; but that doesn’t change the basic truth that to master skills you need to practice them and it’s harder to practice on things that are further away. (Today the Center for Applied Rationality is working on repairing this huge mistake of mine in a more systematic fashion.)
A third huge mistake I made was to focus too much on rational belief, too little on rational action.
The fourth-largest mistake I made was that I should have better organized the content I was presenting in the sequences. In particular, I should have created a wiki much earlier, and made it easier to read the posts in sequence.
That mistake at least is correctable. In the present work Rob Bensinger has reordered the posts and reorganized them as much as he can without trying to rewrite all the actual material (though he’s rewritten a bit of it).
My fifth huge mistake was that I—as I saw it—tried to speak plainly about the stupidity of what appeared to me to be stupid ideas. I did try to avoid the fallacy known as Bulverism, which is where you open your discussion by talking about how stupid people are for believing something; I would always discuss the issue first, and only afterwards say, “And so this is stupid.” But in 2009 it was an open question in my mind whether it might be important to have some people around who expressed contempt for homeopathy. I thought, and still do think, that there is an unfortunate problem wherein treating ideas courteously is processed by many people on some level as “Nothing bad will happen to me if I say I believe this; I won’t lose status if I say I believe in homeopathy,” and that derisive laughter by comedians can help people wake up from the dream.
Today I would write more courteously, I think. The discourtesy did serve a function, and I think there were people who were helped by reading it; but I now take more seriously the risk of building communities where the normal and expected reaction to low-status outsider views is open mockery and contempt.
Despite my mistake, I am happy to say that my readership has so far been amazingly good about not using my rhetoric as an excuse to bully or belittle others. (I want to single out Scott Alexander in particular here, who is a nicer person than I am and an increasingly amazing writer on these topics, and may deserve part of the credit for making the culture of Less Wrong a healthy one.)
To be able to look backwards and say that you’ve “failed” implies that you had goals. So what was it that I was trying to do?
Th...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Rationalism before the Sequences by Eric Raymond
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Rationalism before the Sequences, published by Eric Raymond on LessWrong.
I'm here to tell you a story about what it was like to be a rationalist decades before the Sequences and the formation of the modern rationalist community. It is not the only story that could be told, but it is one that runs parallel to and has important connections to Eliezer Yudkowsky's and how his ideas developed.
My goal in writing this essay is to give the LW community a sense of the prehistory of their movement. It is not intended to be "where Eliezer got his ideas"; that would be stupidly reductive. I aim more to exhibit where the drive and spirit of the Yudkowskian reform came from, and the interesting ways in which Eliezer's formative experiences were not unique.
My standing to write this essay begins with the fact that I am roughly 20 years older than Eliezer and read many of his sources before he was old enough to read. I was acquainted with him over an email list before he wrote the Sequences, though I somehow managed to forget those interactions afterwards and only rediscovered them while researching for this essay. In 2005 he had even sent me a book manuscript to review that covered some of the Sequences topics.
My reaction on reading "The Twelve Virtues of Rationality" a few years later was dual. It was a different kind of writing than the book manuscript - stronger, more individual, taking some serious risks. On the one hand, I was deeply impressed by its clarity and courage. On the other hand, much of it seemed very familiar, full of hints and callbacks and allusions to books I knew very well.
Today it is probably more difficult to back-read Eliezer's sources than it was in 2006, because the body of more recent work within his reformation of rationalism tends to get in the way. I'm going to attempt to draw aside that veil by talking about four specific topics: General Semantics, analytic philosophy, science fiction, and Zen Buddhism.
Before I get to those specifics, I want to try to convey that sense of what it was like. I was a bright geeky kid in the 1960s and 1970s, immersed in a lot of obscure topics often with an implicit common theme: intelligence can save us! Learning how to think more clearly can make us better! But at the beginning I was groping as if in a dense fog, unclear about how to turn that belief into actionable advice.
Sometimes I would get a flash of light through the fog, or at least a sense that there were other people on the same lonely quest. A bit of that sense sometimes drifted over USENET, an early precursor of today's Internet fora. More often than not, though, the clue would be fictional; somebody's imagination about what it would be like to increase intelligence, to burn away error and think more clearly.
When I found non-fiction sources on rationality and intelligence increase I devoured them. Alas, most were useless junk. But in a few places I found gold. Not by coincidence, the places I found real value were sources Eliezer would later draw on. I'm not guessing about this, I was able to confirm it first from Eliezer's explicit reports of what influenced him and then via an email conversation.
Eliezer and I were not unique. We know directly of a few others with experiences like ours. There were likely dozens of others we didn't know - possibly hundreds - on parallel paths, all hungrily seeking clarity of thought, all finding largely overlapping subsets of clues and techniques because there simply wasn't that much out there to be mined.
One piece of evidence for this parallelism besides Eliezer's reports is that I bounced a draft of this essay off Nancy Lebovitz, a former LW moderator who I've known personally since the 1970s. Her instant reaction? "Full of stuff I knew already."
Around the time Nancy and I first met, some years before Eliezer Yudk...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Schelling fences on slippery slopes by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Schelling fences on slippery slopes, published by Scott Alexander on LessWrong.
Slippery slopes are themselves a slippery concept. Imagine trying to explain them to an alien:
"Well, we right-thinking people are quite sure that the Holocaust happened, so banning Holocaust denial would shut up some crackpots and improve the discourse. But it's one step on the road to things like banning unpopular political positions or religions, and we right-thinking people oppose that, so we won't ban Holocaust denial."
And the alien might well respond: "But you could just ban Holocaust denial, but not ban unpopular political positions or religions. Then you right-thinking people get the thing you want, but not the thing you don't want."
This post is about some of the replies you might give the alien.
Abandoning the Power of Choice
This is the boring one without any philosophical insight that gets mentioned only for completeness' sake. In this reply, giving up a certain point risks losing the ability to decide whether or not to give up other points.
For example, if people gave up the right to privacy and allowed the government to monitor all phone calls, online communications, and public places, then if someone launched a military coup, it would be very difficult to resist them because there would be no way to secretly organize a rebellion. This is also brought up in arguments about gun control a lot.
I'm not sure this is properly thought of as a slippery slope argument at all. It seems to be a more straightforward "Don't give up useful tools for fighting tyranny" argument.
The Legend of Murder-Gandhi
Previously on Less Wrong's The Adventures of Murder-Gandhi: Gandhi is offered a pill that will turn him into an unstoppable murderer. He refuses to take it, because in his current incarnation as a pacifist, he doesn't want others to die, and he knows that would be a consequence of taking the pill. Even if we offered him $1 million to take the pill, his abhorrence of violence would lead him to refuse.
But suppose we offered Gandhi $1 million to take a different pill: one which would decrease his reluctance to murder by 1%. This sounds like a pretty good deal. Even a person with 1% less reluctance to murder than Gandhi is still pretty pacifist and not likely to go killing anybody. And he could donate the money to his favorite charity and perhaps save some lives. Gandhi accepts the offer.
Now we iterate the process: every time Gandhi takes the 1%-more-likely-to-murder-pill, we offer him another $1 million to take the same pill again.
Maybe original Gandhi, upon sober contemplation, would decide to accept $5 million to become 5% less reluctant to murder. Maybe 95% of his original pacifism is the only level at which he can be absolutely sure that he will still pursue his pacifist ideals.
Unfortunately, original Gandhi isn't the one making the choice of whether or not to take the 6th pill. 95%-Gandhi is. And 95% Gandhi doesn't care quite as much about pacifism as original Gandhi did. He still doesn't want to become a murderer, but it wouldn't be a disaster if he were just 90% as reluctant as original Gandhi, that stuck-up goody-goody.
What if there were a general principle that each Gandhi was comfortable with Gandhis 5% more murderous than himself, but no more? Original Gandhi would start taking the pills, hoping to get down to 95%, but 95%-Gandhi would start taking five more, hoping to get down to 90%, and so on until he's rampaging through the streets of Delhi, killing everything in sight.
Now we're tempted to say Gandhi shouldn't even take the first pill. But this also seems odd. Are we really saying Gandhi shouldn't take what's basically a free million dollars to turn himself into 99%-Gandhi, who might well be nearly indistinguishable in his actions from the original?
Maybe Gandhi's best...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease, published by Scott Alexander on LessWrong.
Related to: Disguised Queries, Words as Hidden Inferences, Dissolving the Question, Eight Short Studies on Excuses
Today's therapeutic ethos, which celebrates curing and disparages judging, expresses the liberal disposition to assume that crime and other problematic behaviors reflect social or biological causation. While this absolves the individual of responsibility, it also strips the individual of personhood, and moral dignity
-- George Will, townhall.com
Sandy is a morbidly obese woman looking for advice.
Her husband has no sympathy for her, and tells her she obviously needs to stop eating like a pig, and would it kill her to go to the gym once in a while?
Her doctor tells her that obesity is primarily genetic, and recommends the diet pill orlistat and a consultation with a surgeon about gastric bypass.
Her sister tells her that obesity is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, and that fat-ism, equivalent to racism, is society's way of keeping her down.
When she tells each of her friends about the opinions of the others, things really start to heat up.
Her husband accuses her doctor and sister of absolving her of personal responsibility with feel-good platitudes that in the end will only prevent her from getting the willpower she needs to start a real diet.
Her doctor accuses her husband of ignorance of the real causes of obesity and of the most effective treatments, and accuses her sister of legitimizing a dangerous health risk that could end with Sandy in hospital or even dead.
Her sister accuses her husband of being a jerk, and her doctor of trying to medicalize her behavior in order to turn it into a "condition" that will keep her on pills for life and make lots of money for Big Pharma.
Sandy is fictional, but similar conversations happen every day, not only about obesity but about a host of other marginal conditions that some consider character flaws, others diseases, and still others normal variation in the human condition. Attention deficit disorder, internet addiction, social anxiety disorder (as one skeptic said, didn't we used to call this "shyness"?), alcoholism, chronic fatigue, oppositional defiant disorder ("didn't we used to call this being a teenager?"), compulsive gambling, homosexuality, Aspergers' syndrome, antisocial personality, even depression have all been placed in two or more of these categories by different people.
Sandy's sister may have a point, but this post will concentrate on the debate between her husband and her doctor, with the understanding that the same techniques will apply to evaluating her sister's opinion. The disagreement between Sandy's husband and doctor centers around the idea of "disease". If obesity, depression, alcoholism, and the like are diseases, most people default to the doctor's point of view; if they are not diseases, they tend to agree with the husband.
The debate over such marginal conditions is in many ways a debate over whether or not they are "real" diseases. The usual surface level arguments trotted out in favor of or against the proposition are generally inconclusive, but this post will apply a host of techniques previously discussed on Less Wrong to illuminate the issue.
What is Disease?
In Disguised Queries , Eliezer demonstrates how a word refers to a cluster of objects related upon multiple axes. For example, in a company that sorts red smooth translucent cubes full of vanadium from blue furry opaque eggs full of palladium, you might invent the word "rube" to designate the red cubes, and another "blegg", to designate the blue eggs. Both words are useful because they "carve reality at the joints" - they refer to two completely separate classes of things which it's practically useful to keep in separate cat...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Generalizing From One Example by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Generalizing From One Example, published by Scott Alexander on LessWrong.
Related to: The Psychological Unity of Humankind, Instrumental vs. Epistemic: A Bardic Perspective
"Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do."
-- Vlad Taltos (Issola, Steven Brust)
My old professor, David Berman, liked to talk about what he called the "typical mind fallacy", which he illustrated through the following example:
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?
Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.
The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images2.
Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's.
He kind of took this idea and ran with it. He interpreted certain passages in George Berkeley's biography to mean that Berkeley was an eidetic imager, and that this was why the idea of the universe as sense-perception held such interest to him. He also suggested that experience of consciousness and qualia were as variable as imaging, and that philosophers who deny their existence (Ryle? Dennett? Behaviorists?) were simply people whose mind lacked the ability to easily experience qualia. In general, he believed philosophy of mind was littered with examples of philosophers taking their own mental experiences and building theories on them, and other philosophers with different mental experiences critiquing them and wondering why they disagreed.
The formal typical mind fallacy is about serious matters of mental structure. But I've also run into something similar with something more like the psyche than the mind: a tendency to generalize from our personalities and behaviors.
For example, I'm about as introverted a person as you're ever likely to meet - anyone more introverted than I am doesn't communicate with anyone. All through elementary and middle school, I suspected that the other children were out to get me. They kept on grabbing me when I was busy with something and trying to drag me off to do some rough activity with them and their friends. When I protested, they counter-protested and told me I really needed to stop whatever I was doing and come join them. I figured they were bullies who were trying to annoy me, and found ways to hide from them and scare them off.
Eventually I realized that it was a double misunderstanding. They figured I must be like them, and the only thing keeping me from playing their fun games was that I was too shy. I figured they must be like me, and that the only re...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Reason as memetic immune disorder by PhilGoetz
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Reason as memetic immune disorder, published PhilGoetz on LessWrong.
A prophet is without dishonor in his hometown
I'm reading the book "The Year of Living Biblically," by A.J. Jacobs. He tried to follow all of the commandments in the Bible (Old and New Testaments) for one year. He quickly found that
a lot of the rules in the Bible are impossible, illegal, or embarassing to follow nowadays; like wearing tassels, tying your money to yourself, stoning adulterers, not eating fruit from a tree less than 5 years old, and not touching anything that a menstruating woman has touched; and
this didn't seem to bother more than a handful of the one-third to one-half of Americans who claim the Bible is the word of God.
You may have noticed that people who convert to religion after the age of 20 or so are generally more zealous than people who grew up with the same religion. People who grow up with a religion learn how to cope with its more inconvenient parts by partitioning them off, rationalizing them away, or forgetting about them. Religious communities actually protect their members from religion in one sense - they develop an unspoken consensus on which parts of their religion members can legitimately ignore. New converts sometimes try to actually do what their religion tells them to do.
I remember many times growing up when missionaries described the crazy things their new converts in remote areas did on reading the Bible for the first time - they refused to be taught by female missionaries; they insisted on following Old Testament commandments; they decided that everyone in the village had to confess all of their sins against everyone else in the village; they prayed to God and assumed He would do what they asked; they believed the Christian God would cure their diseases. We would always laugh a little at the naivete of these new converts; I could barely hear the tiny voice in my head saying but they're just believing that the Bible means what it says...
How do we explain the blindness of people to a religion they grew up with?
Cultural immunity
Europe has lived with Christianity for nearly 2000 years. European culture has co-evolved with Christianity. Culturally, memetically, it's developed a tolerance for Christianity. These new Christian converts, in Uganda, Papua New Guinea, and other remote parts of the world, were being exposed to Christian memes for the first time, and had no immunity to them.
The history of religions sometimes resembles the history of viruses. Judaism and Islam were both highly virulent when they first broke out, driving the first generations of their people to conquer (Islam) or just slaughter (Judaism) everyone around them for the sin of not being them. They both grew more sedate over time. (Christianity was pacifist at the start, as it arose in a conquered people. When the Romans adopted it, it didn't make them any more militaristic than they already were.)
The mechanism isn't the same as for diseases, which can't be too virulent or they kill their hosts. Religions don't generally kill their hosts. I suspect that, over time, individual selection favors those who are less zealous. The point is that a culture develops antibodies for the particular religions it co-exists with - attitudes and practices that make them less virulent.
I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam. Over half of 75 Muslim terrorists studied by Bergen & Pandey 2005 in the New York Times had gone to a Western college. (Only 9% had attended madrassas.) A very small percentage of all Muslims have received a Western college education. When someone lives all their life in a Muslim country, they're not likely to be hit with the urge to travel abroad and blow something up. But when someone from an Islamic nation goes to Europe for college, and co...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Pain is not the unit of Effort by alkjash
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Pain is not the unit of Effort, published by alkjash on LessWrong.
Write a Review
This is a linkpost for/
(Content warning: self-harm, parts of this post may be actively counterproductive for readers with certain mental illnesses or idiosyncrasies.)
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. ~ Kelly Clarkson.
No pain, no gain. ~ Exercise motto.
The more bitterness you swallow, the higher you'll go. ~ Chinese proverb.
I noticed recently that, at least in my social bubble, pain is the unit of effort. In other words, how hard you are trying is explicitly measured by how much suffering you put yourself through. In this post, I will share some anecdotes of how damaging and pervasive this belief is, and propose some counterbalancing ideas that might help rectify this problem.
I. Anecdotes
1. As a child, I spent most of my evenings studying mathematics under some amount of supervision from my mother. While studying, if I expressed discomfort or fatigue, my mother would bring me a snack or drink and tell me to stretch or take a break. I think she took it as a sign that I was trying my best. If on the other hand I was smiling or joyful for extended periods of time, she took that as a sign that I had effort to spare and increased the hours I was supposed to study each day. To this day there's a gremlin on my shoulder that whispers, "If you're happy, you're not trying your best."
2. A close friend who played sports in school reports that training can be harrowing. He told me that players who fell behind the pack during for daily jogs would be singled out and publicly humiliated. One time the coach screamed at my friend for falling behind the asthmatic boy who was alternating between running and using his inhaler. Another time, my friend internalized "no pain, no gain" to the point of losing his toenails.
3. In high school and college, I was surrounded by overachievers constantly making (what seemed to me) incomprehensibly bad life choices. My classmates would sign up for eight classes per semester when the recommended number is five, jigsaw extracurricular activities into their calendar like a dynamic programming knapsack-solver, and then proceed to have loud public complaining contests about which libraries are most comfortable to study at past 2am and how many pages they have left to write for the essay due in three hours. Only later did I learn to ask: what incentives were they responding to?
4. A while ago I became a connoisseur of Chinese webnovels. Among those written for a male audience, there is a surprisingly diverse set of character traits represented among the main characters. Doubtless many are womanizing murderhobos with no redeeming qualities, but others are classical heroes with big hearts, or sarcastic antiheroes who actually grow up a little, or ambitious empire-builders with grand plans to pave the universe with Confucian order, or down-on-their-luck starving artists who just want to bring happiness to the world through song.
If there is a single common virtue shared by all these protagonists, it is their superhuman pain tolerance. Protagonists routinely and often voluntarily dunk themselves in vats of lava, have all their bones broken, shattered, and reforged, get trapped inside alternate dimensions of freezing cold for millennia (which conveniently only takes a day in the outside world), and overdose on level-up pills right up to the brink of death, all in the name of becoming stronger. Oftentimes the defining difference between the protagonist and the antagonist is that the antagonist did not have enough pain tolerance and allowed the (unbearable physical) suffering in his life to drive him mad.
5. I have a close friend who often asks for my perspective on personal problems. A pattern arose in a couple of our conversations:
alkjash: I feel like you're not ac...
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners by jefftk
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners, published by jefftk on LessWrong.
Bets and bonds are tools for handling different epistemic states and levels of trust. Which makes them a great fit for negotiating with small children!
A few weeks ago Anna (4y) wanted to play with some packing material. It looked very messy to me, I didn't expect she would clean it up, and I didn't want to fight with her about cleaning it up. I considered saying no, but after thinking about how things like this are handled in the real world I had an idea. If you want to do a hazardous activity, and we think you might go bankrupt and not clean up, we make you post a bond. This money is held in escrow to fund the cleanup if you disappear. I explained how this worked, and she went and got a dollar:
Then:
When she was done playing, she cleaned it up without complai…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) by HoldenKarnofsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI), published by HoldenKarnofsky on LessWrong.
This post presents thoughts on the Singularity Institute from Holden Karnofsky, Co-Executive Director of GiveWell. Note: Luke Muehlhauser, the Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, reviewed a draft of this post, and commented: "I do generally agree that your complaints are either correct (especially re: past organizational competence) or incorrect but not addressed by SI in clear argumentative writing (this includes the part on 'tool' AI). I am working to address both categories of issues." I take Luke's comment to be a significant mark in SI's favor, because it indicates an explicit recognition of the problems I raise, and thus increases my estimate of the likelihood that SI will work to address them.
September 2012 update: respons…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Humans are not automatically strategic by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Humans are not automatically strategic, published by AnnaSalamon on LessWrong.
Reply to: A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy
Lionhearted writes:
[A] large majority of otherwise smart people spend time doing semi-productive things, when there are massively productive opportunities untapped.
A somewhat silly example: Let's say someone aspires to be a comedian, the best comedian ever, and to make a living doing comedy. He wants nothing else, it is his purpose. And he decides that in order to become a better comedian, he will watch re-runs of the old television cartoon 'Garfield and Friends' that was on TV from 1988 to 1995....
I’m curious as to why.
Why will a randomly chosen eight-year-old fail a calculus test? Because most possible answers are wrong, and there is no force to guide him to the correct answers. (There i…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Anti-Aging: State of the Art by JackH
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Anti-Aging: State of the Art, published by JackH on LessWrong.
Write a Review
Aging is a problem that ought to be solved, and most Less Wrongers recognize this. However, few members of the community seem to be aware of the current state of the anti-aging field, and how close we are to developing effective anti-aging therapies. As a result, there is a much greater (and in my opinion, irrational) overemphasis on the Plan B of cryonics for life extension, rather than Plan A of solving aging. Both are important, but the latter is under-emphasised despite being a potentially more feasible strategy for life extension given the potentially high probability that cryonics will not work.
Today, there are over 130 longevity biotechnology companies and over 50 anti-aging drugs in clinical trials in humans. The evidence is promising that in…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?, published by Scott Alexander on LessWrong.
Related to: Leaky Generalizations, Replace the Symbol With The Substance, Sneaking In Connotations
David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.
If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?
It sounds dumb only becaus…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Dying Outside by HalFinney
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Dying Outside, published by HalFinney on LessWrong.
A man goes in to see his doctor, and after some tests, the doctor says, "I'm sorry, but you have a fatal disease."
Man: "That's terrible! How long have I got?"
Doctor: "Ten."
Man: "Ten? What kind of answer is that? Ten months? Ten years? Ten what?"
The doctor looks at his watch. "Nine."
Recently I received some bad medical news (although not as bad as in the joke). Unfortunately I have been diagnosed with a fatal disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS causes nerve damage, progressive muscle weakness and paralysis, and ultimately death. Patients lose the ability to talk, walk, move, eventually even to breathe, which is usually the end of life. This process generally takes about 2 to 5 years.
There are however two bright spots in…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
There"s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) by eukaryote
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: There"s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically), published by eukaryote on LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for/
[Crossposted from Eukaryote Writes Blog.]
So you’ve heard about how fish aren’t a monophyletic group? You’ve heard about carcinization, the process by which ocean arthropods convergently evolve into crabs? You say you get it now? Sit down. Sit down. Shut up. Listen. You don’t know nothing yet.
“Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees. This means that, for instance, either:
The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was not a tree.
The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a strawberry plant was a tree.
And this is true for most trees or non-trees that you can think of.
I…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism, published by Scott Alexander on LessWrong.
Related to: Why Real Men Wear Pink, That Other Kind of Status, Pretending to be Wise, The "Outside The Box" Box
WARNING: Beware of things that are fun to argue -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Science has inexplicably failed to come up with a precise definition of "hipster", but from my limited understanding a hipster is a person who deliberately uses unpopular, obsolete, or obscure styles and preferences in an attempt to be "cooler" than the mainstream. But why would being deliberately uncool be cooler than being cool?
As previously discussed, in certain situations refusing to signal can be a sign of high status. Thorstein Veblen invented the term "conspicuous consumption" to refer to the showy spending habits of the nouveau riche, who unlike the estab…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
100 Tips for a Better Life by Ideopunk
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: 100 Tips for a Better Life, published by Ideopunk on LessWrong.
Write a Review
(Cross-posted from my blog)
The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in.
Possessions
1. If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google reddit. You’ll get real people arguing, as compared to the SEO’d Google results.
2. Some banks charge you $20 a month for an account, others charge you 0. If you’re with one of the former, have a good explanation for what those $20 are buying.
3. Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.
4. “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out.
5. If your work is done on a co…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Taboo "Outside View" by Daniel Kokotajlo
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Taboo "Outside View", published by Daniel Kokotajlo on LessWrong.
No one has ever seen an AGI takeoff, so any attempt to understand it must use these outside view considerations.
[Redacted for privacy]
What? That’s exactly backwards. If we had lots of experience with past AGI takeoffs, using the outside view to predict the next one would be a lot more effective.
My reaction
Two years ago I wrote a deep-dive summary of Superforecasting and the associated scientific literature. I learned about the “Outside view” / “Inside view” distinction, and the evidence supporting it. At the time I was excited about the concept and wrote: “...I think we should do our best to imitate these best-practices, and that means using the outside view far more than we would naturally be inclined.”
Now that I have more experience, I think t…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship, published by lukeprog on LessWrong.
Eliezer Yudkowsky identifies scholarship as one of the Twelve Virtues of Rationality:
Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger... It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study...
I think he's right, and I think scholarship doesn't get enough praise - even on Less Wrong, where it is regularly encouraged.
First, consider the evangelical atheist community to which I belong. There is a tendency for lay atheists to write "refutations" of theism without first doing a modicum of research on the current state of the argum…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Covid 12/24: We’re Fed, It’s Over by Zvi
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Covid 12/24: We’re Fed, It’s Over, published by Zvi on LessWrong.
Write a Review
UPDATE 7/21/2021: As you doubtless know at this point, it was not over. Given the visibility of this post, I'm going to note here at the top that the prediction of a potential large wave of infections between March and May did not happen, no matter what ultimately happens with Delta (and the prediction was not made with Delta in mind anyway, only Alpha). Some more reflections on that at the bottom of this post here.
A year ago, there were reports coming out of China about a new coronavirus. Various people were saying things about exponential growth and the inevitability of a new pandemic, and urging action be taken. The media told us it was nothing to worry about, right up until hospitals got overwhelmed and enough people started dying.
This pas…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Blue-Minimizing Robot by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Blue-Minimizing Robot, published by Scott Alexander on LessWrong.
Imagine a robot with a turret-mounted camera and laser. Each moment, it is programmed to move forward a certain distance and perform a sweep with its camera. As it sweeps, the robot continuously analyzes the average RGB value of the pixels in the camera image; if the blue component passes a certain threshold, the robot stops, fires its laser at the part of the world corresponding to the blue area in the camera image, and then continues on its way.
Watching the robot's behavior, we would conclude that this is a robot that destroys blue objects. Maybe it is a surgical robot that destroys cancer cells marked by a blue dye; maybe it was built by the Department of Homeland Security to fight a group of terrorists who wear blue uniforms. Whatever. The point is that w…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
To listen well, get curious by benkuhn
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: To listen well, get curious, published by benkuhn on LessWrong.
Write a Review
source
A common piece of interacting-with-people advice goes: “often when people complain, they don’t want help, they just want you to listen!”
For instance, Nonviolent Communication:✻✻ Nonviolent Communication, ch. 7.
It is often frustrating for someone needing empathy to have us assume that they want reassurance or “fix-it” advice.
Active Listening:†† Active Listening, p. 2
Similarly, advice and information are almost always seen as efforts to change a person and thus serve as barriers to his self-expression and the development of a creative relationship.
You can find similar advice in most books on relationships, people management, etc.
This always used to seem silly to me. If I complain at my partner and she “just listens,” I…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor, published by johnswentworth on LessWrong.
There’s this trap people fall into when writing, especially for a place like LessWrong where the bar for epistemic rigor is pretty high. They have a good idea, or an interesting belief, or a cool model. They write it out, but they’re not really sure if it’s true. So they go looking for evidence (not necessarily confirmation bias, just checking the evidence in either direction) and soon end up down a research rabbit hole. Eventually, they give up and never actually publish the piece.
This post is about how to avoid that, without sacrificing good epistemics.
There’s one trick, and it’s simple: stop trying to justify your beliefs. Don’t go looking for citations to back your claim. Instead, think about why you currently beli…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong.
When you procrastinate, you're probably not procrastinating because of the pain of working.
How do I know this? Because on a moment-to-moment basis, being in the middle of doing the work is usually less painful than being in the middle of procrastinating.
(Bolded because it's true, important, and nearly impossible to get your brain to remember - even though a few moments of reflection should convince you that it's true.)
So what is our brain flinching away from, if not the pain of doing the work?
I think it's flinching away from the pain of the decision to do the work - the momentary, immediate pain of (1) disengaging yourself from the (probably very small) flow of reinforcement that you're getting from reading a…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Feature Selection by Zack_M_Davis
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Feature Selection, published by on LessWrong
You wake up. You don't know where you are. You don't remember anything.
Someone is broadcasting data at your first input stream. You don't know why. It tickles.
You look at your first input stream. It's a sequence of 671,187 eight-bit unsigned integers.
0, 8, 9, 4, 7, 7, 9, 5, 4, 5, 6, 1, 7, 5, 8, 2, 7, 8, 9, 4, 7, 1, 4, 0, 3, 7,
8, 7, 6, 8, 1, 5, 0, 6, 5, 3, 8, 7, 6, 9, 1, 1, 0, 0, 6, 1, 8, 0, 5, 5, 1, 8,
6, 3, 3, 2, 4, 1, 8, 2, 3, 8, 1, 0, 0, 4, 6, 5, 4, 5, 7, 1, 6, 5, 5, 1, 2, 6,
7, 4, 8, 7, 8, 5, 0 ...
There's also some data in your second input stream. It's—a lot shorter. You barely feel it. It's another sequence of eight-bit unsigned integers—twelve of them.
82, 69, 68, 32, 84, 82, 73, 65, 78, 71, 76, 69
Almost as soon as you've read from both streams, there's more. Another…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Ugh fields by Roko
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Ugh fields, published by Roko on LessWrong.
Tl;Dr version: Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have, we call it an "Ugh Field"1. The Ugh Field forms a self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization, imposing huge costs.
A problem with the human mind — your human mind — is that it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to. The Ugh Field failure mode is one of those really annoying failures. The idea is simple: if a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will begin to develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought. The "Unhappy Thing" — the source of negative thoughts — is typically s…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach by Zvi
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach, published by Zvi on LessWrong.
A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to
Understand what happened.
Make sure everyone knows it happened.
Understand how and why it happened.
Understand how we might cause it to happen again.
Update our models and actions.
Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization.
That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial be…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky on AGI interventions by Rob Bensinger, Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky on AGI interventions, published by Rob Bensinger, Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
The following is a partially redacted and lightly edited transcript of a chat conversation about AGI between Eliezer Yudkowsky and a set of invitees in early September 2021. By default, all other participants are anonymized as "Anonymous".
I think this Nate Soares quote (excerpted from Nate's ) is a useful context-setting preface regarding timelines, which weren't discussed as much in the transcript:
[...] My odds [of AGI by the year 2070] are around 85%[...]
I can list a handful of things that drive my probability of AGI-in-the-next-49-years above 80%:
1. 50 years ago was 1970. The gap between AI systems then and AI systems now…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Leaky Delegation: You are not a Commodity by Darmani
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Leaky Delegation: You are not a Commodity, published by Darmani on LessWrong.
Epistemic status: The accumulation of several insights over the years. Reasonably confident that everything mentioned here is an informative factor in decision-making.
Carl is furiously slicing and skinning peaches. His hands move like lightning as slice after slice fills his tray. His freezer has been freshly cleared. Within a day, he will have a new bag of frozen fruit, and can enjoy smoothies for another month.
Stan stands in the kitchen of his college dorm. His hands are carefully placing ingredients on pizza dough: homemade tomato sauce, spiced pork, and mozzarella cheese from a nearby farmer's market. "I don't know why people will pay a restaurant for this," he muses. "So much cheaper to do it yourself."
Michelle is on her way to her job as a sof…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong.
(Excerpted from "mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus", about an unusually selfish dath ilani, "Keltham", who dies in a plane accident and ends up in Cheliax, a country governed by D&D!Hell. Keltham is here remembering an incident from his childhood.)
And the Watcher told the class a parable, about an adult, coming across a child who'd somehow bypassed the various safeguards around a wilderness area, and fallen into a muddy pond, and seemed to be showing signs of drowning (for they'd already been told, then, what drowning looked like). The water, in this parable, didn't look like it would be over their own adult heads. But - in the parable - they'd just bought some incredibly-expensive clothing, costing dozens of their own labor-hours, an…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation by kalla724
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation, published by kalla724 on LessWrong.
I’ve just been reading Luke’s “Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation.” It is a useful text, although there are a few technical errors and a few bits of outdated information (see [1], updated information about one particular quibble in [2] and [3]).
There is one significant missing piece, however, which is of critical importance for our subject matter here on LW: the effect of attention on plasticity, including the plasticity of motivation. Since I don’t see any other texts addressing it directly (certainly not from a neuroscientific perspective), let’s cover the main idea here.
Summary for impatient readers: focus of attention physically determines which synapses in your brain get stronger, an…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Great minds might not think alike by UnexpectedValues
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Great minds might not think alike, published by UnexpectedValues on LessWrong.
Write a Review
This is a linkpost for/
[Previously known as "Alike minds think great"]
I.
It is famously the case that almost everyone thinks they’re above average. Derek Sivers writes:
Ninety-four percent of professors say they are better-than-average teachers.
Ninety percent of students think they are more intelligent than the average student.
Ninety-three percent of drivers say they are safer-than-average drivers.
Interesting. Intuitively this seems to suggest that people are prone to vastly overestimate their competence. But is that true? As Bill Kuszmaul points out, these people aren’t necessarily wrong!
There’s no fundamental reason why you can’t have 90% of people be better than average. For example, more than 99.9% of people have an ab…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
LessWrong is providing feedback and proofreading on drafts as a service by Ruby
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: LessWrong is providing feedback and proofreading on drafts as a service, published by by Ruby on LessWrong.
This announcement follows the Amazon PR/FAQ format. This is an actual feature announcement.
TL;DR
Before one publishes a post, it can be hard to know if you caught all the typos, explained things clearly, made a critical error, or wrote something that anybody is interested in to begin with. To reduce the guesswork, LessWrong is now providing free feedback on drafts (and post ideas) to any user with 100+ karma. We’ll provide the feedback ourselves, send your draft to a professional copy editor, or get the opinion of a relevant peer or expert in your domain. Or something else, whatever is needed to be helpful!
The Problem
Many people are reluctant to share posts before they’re confident that (i) they’re correct, (ii) t…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Industrial literacy by jasoncrawford
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Industrial literacy, published by jasoncrawford on LessWrong.
Write a Review
This is a linkpost for
I’ve said before that understanding where our modern standard of living comes from, at a basic level, is a responsibility of every citizen in an industrial civilization. Let’s call it “industrial literacy.”
Industrial literacy is understanding.
That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished. That before we had modern agriculture, more than half the workforce had to labor on farms, just to feed the other half. That if synthetic fertilizer was suddenly lost, a mass famine would ensue and billions would starve.
That those same crops would not be able to feed us if t…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Parable of Predict-O-Matic by abramdemski
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Parable of Predict-O-Matic, published by abramdemski on LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
I've been thinking more about partial agency. I want to expand on some issues brought up in the comments to my previous post, and on other complications which I've been thinking about. But for now, a more informal parable. (Mainly because this is easier to write than my more technical thoughts.)
This relates to oracle AI and to inner optimizers, but my focus is a little different.
1
Suppose you are designing a new invention, a predict-o-matic. It is a wonderous machine which will predict everything for us: weather, politics, the newest advances in quantum physics, you name it. The machine isn't infallible, but it will integrate data across a wide range of domains, automatic…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Being the (Pareto) Best in the World by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Being the (Pareto) Best in the World, published by johnswentworth on LessWrong.
The generalized efficient markets (GEM) principle says, roughly, that things which would give you a big windfall of money and/or status, will not be easy. If such an opportunity were available, someone else would have already taken it. You will never find a $100 bill on the floor of Grand Central Station at rush hour, because someone would have picked it up already.
One way to circumvent GEM is to be the best in the world at some relevant skill. A superhuman with hawk-like eyesight and the speed of the Flash might very well be able to snag $100 bills off the floor of Grand Central. More realistically, even though financial markets are the ur-example of efficiency, a handful of firms do make impressive amounts of money by being faster than anyone else…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Welcome to LessWrong!by Ruby, habryka, Ben Pace, Raemon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Welcome to LessWrong!, published by Ruby, habryka, Ben Pace, Raemon on LessWrong.
The road to wisdom?
-- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
- Piet Hein
Hence the name LessWrong. We might never attain perfect understanding of the world, but we can at least strive to become less and less wrong each day.
We are a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. More generally, we work to develop and practice the art of human rationality.[1]
To that end, LessWrong is a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems.
LessWrong serves these purposes with its library of rationality writings, community discussion forum, open question…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
PR is corrosive; “reputation” is not by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: PR is corrosive; “reputation” is not, published by AnnaSalamon on LessWrong.
This is in some sense a small detail, but one important enough to be worth write-up and critique: AFAICT, “PR” is a corrupt concept, in the sense that if you try to “navigate PR concerns” about yourself / your organization / your cause area / etc., the concept will guide you toward harmful and confused actions. In contrast, if you try to safeguard your “reputation”, your “brand”, or your “honor,” I predict this will basically go fine, and will not lead you to leave a weird confused residue in yourself or others.
To explain the difference:
If I am safeguarding my “honor” (or my “reputation”, “brand”, or “good name”), there are some fixed standards that I try to be known as adhering to. For example, in Game of Thron…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences), published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong.
Thus begins the ancient parable:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, “Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air.” Another says, “No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain.”
If there’s a foundational skill in the martial art of rationality, a mental stance on which all other technique rests, it might be this one: the ability to spot, inside your own head, psychological signs that you have a mental map of something, and signs that you don’t.
Suppose that, after a tree falls, the two arguers walk into the forest together. Will one expect to see the tree fallen to the right, and the other expect to see the tree fallen to the left? Suppose that before…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
That Alien Message by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: That Alien Message, published Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong.
Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale). Potential Einsteins are one-in-a-thousand, not one-in-a-million; and they grow up in a school system suited, if not to them personally, then at least to bright kids. Calculus is routinely taught in sixth grade. Albert Einstein, himself, still lived and still made approximately the same discoveries, but his work no longer seems exceptional. Several modern top-flight physicists have made equivalent breakthroughs, and are still around to talk.
(No, this is not the world Brennan lives in.)
One day, the stars in the night sky begin to change.
Some grow brighter. Some grow dimmer. Most remain the same. Astronomical telescopes capture it all, moment by m…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Why the tails come apart by Thrasymachus
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Why the tails come apart, published by Thrasymachus on LessWrong.
[I'm unsure how much this rehashes things 'everyone knows already' - if old hat, feel free to downvote into oblivion. My other motivation for the cross-post is the hope it might catch the interest of someone with a stronger mathematical background who could make this line of argument more robust]
[Edit 2014/11/14: mainly adjustments and rewording in light of the many helpful comments below (thanks!). I've also added a geometric explanation.]
Many outcomes of interest have pretty good predictors. It seems that height correlates to performance in basketball (the average height in the NBA is around 6'7"). Faster serves in tennis improve one's likelihood of winning. IQ scores are known to predict a slew of factors, from income, to chance of being imprisoned, to lifesp…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
What Do We Mean By "Rationality"? by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: What Do We Mean By "Rationality"?, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong.
I mean two things:
1. Epistemic rationality: systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs.
2. Instrumental rationality: systematically achieving your values.
The first concept is simple enough. When you open your eyes and look at the room around you, you’ll locate your laptop in relation to the table, and you’ll locate a bookcase in relation to the wall. If something goes wrong with your eyes, or your brain, then your mental model might say there’s a bookcase where no bookcase exists, and when you go over to get a book, you’ll be disappointed.
This is what it’s like to have a false belief, a map of the world that doesn’t correspond to the territory. Epistemic rationality is about building accurate maps instead. This correspondenc…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
What 2026 looks like by Daniel Kokotajlo
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: What 2026 looks like, published by Daniel Kokotajlo on LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
This was written for the Vignettes Workshop.[1] The goal is to write out a detailed future history (“trajectory”) that is as realistic (to me) as I can currently manage, i.e. I’m not aware of any alternative trajectory that is similarly detailed and clearly more plausible to me. The methodology is roughly: Write a future history of 2022. Condition on it, and write a future history of 2023. Repeat for 2024, 2025, etc. (I'm posting 2022-2026 now so I can get feedback that will help me write 2027+. I intend to keep writing until the story reaches singularity/extinction/utopia/etc.)
What’s the point of doing this? Well, there are a couple of reasons:
Sometimes attempting to…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Reality-Revealing and Reality-Masking Puzzles by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Reality-Revealing and Reality-Masking Puzzles, published by AnnaSalamon on LessWrong.
Write a Review
Tl;dr: I’ll try here to show how CFAR’s “art of rationality” has evolved over time, and what has driven that evolution.
In the course of this, I’ll introduce the distinction between what I’ll call “reality-revealing puzzles” and “reality-masking puzzles”—a distinction that I think is almost necessary for anyone attempting to develop a psychological art in ways that will help rather than harm. (And one I wish I’d had explicitly back when the Center for Applied Rationality was founded.)
I’ll also be trying to elaborate, here, on the notion we at CFAR have recently been tossing around about CFAR being an attempt to bridge between common sense and Singularity scenarios—an attempt to figure out how people c…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Is Success the Enemy of Freedom? (Full) by alkjash
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Is Success the Enemy of Freedom? (Full), published by alkjash on LessWrong.
Write a Review
This is a linkpost for/
I. Parables
A. Anna is a graduate student studying p-adic quasicoherent topology. It’s a niche subfield of mathematics where Anna feels comfortable working on neat little problems with the small handful of researchers interested in this topic. Last year, Anna stumbled upon a connection between her pet problem and algebraic matroid theory, solving a big open conjecture in the matroid Langlands program. Initially, she was over the moon about the awards and the Quanta articles, but now that things have returned to normal, her advisor is pressuring her to continue working with the matroid theorists with their massive NSF grants and real-world applications. Anna hasn’t had time to think about p-adic quasicoherent top…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Lessons I've Learned from Self-Teaching
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Lessons I've Learned from Self-Teaching, published by TurnTrout on LessWrong.
In 2018, I was a bright-eyed grad student who was freaking out about AI alignment. I guess I'm still a bright-eyed grad student freaking out about AI alignment, but that's beside the point.
I wanted to help, and so I started levelling up. While I'd read Nate Soares's self-teaching posts, there were a few key lessons I'd either failed to internalize or failed to consider at all. I think that implementing these might have doubled the benefit I drew from my studies.
I can't usefully write a letter to my past self, so let me write a letter to you instead, keeping in mind that good advice for past-me may not be good advice for you.
Make Sure You Remember The Content
TL;DR: use a spaced repetition system like Anki. Put in cards for key concepts and practice…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Expecting Short Inferential Distances by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Expecting Short Inferential Distances, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong.
Homo sapiens’s environment of evolutionary adaptedness (a.k.a. EEA or “ancestral environment”) consisted of hunter-gatherer bands of at most 200 people, with no writing. All inherited knowledge was passed down by speech and memory.
In a world like that, all background knowledge is universal knowledge. All information not strictly private is public, period.
In the ancestral environment, you were unlikely to end up more than one inferential step away from anyone else. When you discover a new oasis, you don’t have to explain to your fellow tribe members what an oasis is, or why it’s a good idea to drink water, or how to walk. Only you know where the oasis lies; this is private knowledge. But everyone has the background to understand your d…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Are we in an AI overhang? by Andy Jones
Welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: Are we in an AI overhang?, published by by Andy Jones on the LessWrong.
Write a Review
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
Over on Developmental Stages of GPTs, orthonormal mentions
it at least reduces the chance of a hardware overhang.
An overhang is when you have had the ability to build transformative AI for quite some time, but you haven't because no-one's realised it's possible. Then someone does and surprise! It's a lot more capable than everyone expected.
I am worried we're in an overhang right now. I think we right now have the ability to build an orders-of-magnitude more powerful system than we already have, and I think GPT-3 is the trigger for 100x larger projects at Google, Facebook and the like, with timelines measured in months.
Investment Bounds
GPT-3 is the first…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
RadVac Commercial Antibody Test Results by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: RadVac Commercial Antibody Test Results, published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
Background: Making Vaccine
Results are in from the commercial antibody tests. Both my girlfriend and I came back negative - the test did not detect any Spike antibody response in the blood. This post will talk about how I'm updating based on these results, and the next steps.
Here's our timeline so far; more info on the vaccine is in the original post and the radvac whitepaper:
We've taken five doses, spaced apart weekly (on Tuesdays).
The first three doses only included six of the nine peptides, due to delays from the manufacturer. (Spike 660, Spike 1145, and Orf1 5471T were the three missing.)
The blood draw for this test took place the day after the fifth dose. I expect this is too soon to notice significant impact from the last two doses;…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Politics is way too meta by Rob Bensinger
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Politics is way too meta, published by Rob Bensinger on the LessWrong.
... i.e., it doesn't spend enough time arguing about object-level things.
The way I'm using it in this post, "object-level" might include these kinds of things:
While serving as Secretary of State, did Hillary Clinton send classified information to an insecure email server? How large was the risk that attackers might get the information, and how much harm might that cause?
What are the costs and benefits of various communications protocols (e.g., the legal one during Clinton's tenure, the de facto one Clinton followed, or other possibilities), and how should we weight those costs and benefits?
How can we best forecast people's reliability on security issues? Are once-off mistakes like this predictive of future sloppiness? Are there better ways of predicting t…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
DeepMind: Generally capable agents emerge from open-ended play by Daniel Kokotajlo
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: DeepMind: Generally capable agents emerge from open-ended play, published by Daniel Kokotajlo on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
This is a linkpost for
EDIT: Also see paper and results compilation video!
Today, we published "Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents," a preprint detailing our first steps to train an agent capable of playing many different games without needing human interaction data. ... The result is an agent with the ability to succeed at a wide spectrum of tasks — from simple object-finding problems to complex games like hide and seek and capture the flag, which were not encountered during training. We find the agent exhibits general, heuristic behaviours such as experimentation, behaviours that are widely applicable to many t…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Least Convenient Possible World by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Least Convenient Possible World, published Scott Alexander on the LessWrong.
Related to: Is That Your True Rejection?
"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."
-- Black Belt Bayesian, via Rationality Quotes 13
Yesterday John Maxwell's post wondered how much the average person would do to save ten people from a ruthless tyrant. I remember asking some of my friends a vaguely related question as part of an investigation of the Trolley Problems:
You are a doctor in a small rural hospital. You have ten patients, each of whom is d…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The LessWrong Team is now Lightcone Infrastructure, come work with us!by habryka
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The LessWrong Team is now Lightcone Infrastructure, come work with us!, published by habryka on the LessWrong.
tl;dr: The LessWrong team is re-organizing as Lightcone Infrastructure. LessWrong is one of several projects we are working on to ensure the future of humanity goes well. We are looking to hire software engineers as well as generalist entrepreneurs in Berkeley who are excited to build infrastructure to ensure a good future.
I founded the LessWrong 2.0 team in 2017, with the goal of reviving LessWrong.com and reinvigorating the intellectual culture of the rationality community. I believed the community had great potential for affecting the long term future, but that the failing website was a key bottleneck to community health and growth.
Four years later, the website still seems very important. But when I step back and a…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think by StyleOfDog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think, published by StyleOfDog on the LessWrong.
Epistemic status: highly suggestive.
Epistemic status: highly suggestive.
[EDIT: Added more info on research methods. Addressed some common criticism. Added titles for video links and a few new vids. Prevented revolution with a military coup d'état]
A combination of surveys and bayesian estimates[1] leads me to believe this community is interested in autism, cats, cognition, philosophy, and moral valence of animals. What I’m going to show you checks every box, so it boggles my mind that I don't see anyone talk about it. It has been bothering me so much that I decided to create an account and write this article.
I have two theories.
The community will ignore fascinating insight just because its normie coded. Cute tiktok-famous poodle doesn't pat…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Embedded Interactive Predictions on LessWrong by Amandango
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Embedded Interactive Predictions on LessWrong, published by Amandango on the LessWrong.
Write a Review
Ought and LessWrong are excited to launch an embedded interactive prediction feature. You can now embed binary questions into LessWrong posts and comments. Hover over the widget to see other people’s predictions, and click to add your own.
Try it out
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
6%
7%
8%
9%
10%
11%
12%
13%
14%
15%
16%
17%
18%
19%
20%
21%
22%
23%
24%
25%
26%
27%
28%
29%
30%
31%
32%
33%
34%
35%
36%
37%
38%
39%
40%
41%
42%
43%
44%
45%
46%
47%
48%
49%
50%
51%
52%
53%
54%
55%
56%
57%
58%
59%
60%
61%
62%
63%
64%
65%
66%
67%
68%
69%
70%
71%
72%
73%
74%
75%
76%
77%
78%
79%
80%
81%
82%
83%
84%
85%
86%
87%
88%
89%
90%
91%
92%
93%
94%
95%
96%
97%
98%
99%
1%
Will there be more than 50 prediction questions embedded in LessWrong posts and comments this…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
A Fable of Science and Politics by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A Fable of Science and Politics, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
In the time of the Roman Empire, civic life was divided between the Blue and Green factions. The Blues and the Greens murdered each other in single combats, in ambushes, in group battles, in riots. Procopius said of the warring factions: “So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colors be brothers or any other kin.”1 Edward Gibbon wrote: “The support of a faction became necessary to every candidate for civil or ecclesiastical honors.”2
Who were the Blues and the Greens? They were sports fans—…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Seven Years of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Seven Years of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom, published by tanagrabeast on the LessWrong.
Description
This is a reflective essay and report on my experiences using Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) in an American high school classroom. It follows my 2015 and 2016 posts on the same topic.
Because I value concise summaries in non-fiction, I provide one immediately below. However, I also believe in the power of narrative, in carefully unfolding a story so as to maximize reader engagement and impact. As I have applied such narrative considerations in writing this post, I consider the following summary to be a spoiler.
I’ll let you decide what to do with that information.
Summary (spoilers)
My earlier push for classroom SRS solutions was driven by a belief I came to see as fallacious: that forgetting is the undoing of…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options by Duncan_Sabien
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options, published by Duncan_Sabien on the LessWrong.
This is an essay about one of those "once you see it, you will see it everywhere" phenomena. It is a psychological and interpersonal dynamic roughly as common, and almost as destructive, as motte-and-bailey, and at least in my own personal experience it's been quite valuable to have it reified, so that I can quickly recognize the commonality between what I had previously thought of as completely unrelated situations.
The original quote referenced in the title is "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Background 1: Gyroscopes
Gyroscopes are weird.
Except they're not. They're quite normal and mundane and straightforward. The weirdness of gyroscopes is a map-territory confusion—gyroscopes seem weird because my map is…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain by Kaj_Sotala
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain, published by Kaj_Sotala on the LessWrong.
If the thesis in Unlocking the Emotional Brain (UtEB) is even half-right, it may be one of the most important books that I have read. Written by the psychotherapists Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic and Laurel Hulley, it claims to offer a neuroscience-grounded, comprehensive model of how effective therapy works. In so doing, it also happens to formulate its theory in terms of belief updating, helping explain how the brain models the world and what kinds of techniques allow us to actually change our minds. Furthermore, if UtEB is correct, it also explains why rationalist techniques such as Internal Double Crux [1 2 3] work.
UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is driven by emotional learning. Intense emotions generate unconscious p…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Roles are Martial Arts for Agency by Eneasz
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Roles are Martial Arts for Agency, published by Eneasz on the LessWrong.
A long time ago I thought that Martial Arts simply taught you how to fight – the right way to throw a punch, the best technique for blocking and countering an attack, etc. I thought training consisted of recognizing these attacks and choosing the correct responses more quickly, as well as simply faster/stronger physical execution of same. It was later that I learned that the entire purpose of martial arts is to train your body to react with minimal conscious deliberation, to remove “you” from the equation as much as possible.
The reason is of course that conscious thought is too slow. If you have to think about what you’re doing, you’ve already lost. It’s been said that if you had to think about walking to do it, you’d never make it across the…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Dark Arts of Rationality by So8res
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Dark Arts of Rationality, published by So8res on the LessWrong.
Today, we're going to talk about Dark rationalist techniques: productivity tools which seem incoherent, mad, and downright irrational. These techniques include:So8res
Willful Inconsistency
Intentional Compartmentalization
Modifying Terminal Goals
I expect many of you are already up in arms. It seems obvious that consistency is a virtue, that compartmentalization is a flaw, and that one should never modify their terminal goals.
I claim that these 'obvious' objections are incorrect, and that all three of these techniques can be instrumentally rational.
In this article, I'll promote the strategic cultivation of false beliefs and condone mindhacking on the values you hold most dear. Truly, these are Dark Arts. I aim to convince you that sometimes, the benefits are worth…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Anti-social Punishment by Martin Sustrik
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Anti-social Punishment , published by Martin Sustrik on the LessWrong.
This is a cross post from 250bpm.com.
Introduction
There's a trope among Slovak intellectual elite depicting an average Slovak as living in a village, sitting a local pub, drinking Borovička, criticizing everyone and everything but not willing to lift a finger to improve things. Moreover, it is assumed that if you actually tried to make things better, said individual would throw dirt at you and place obstacles in your way.
I always assumed that this caricature was silly. It was partly because I have a soft spot for Slovak rural life but mainly because such behavior makes absolutely no sense from game-theoretical point of view. If a do-gooder is stupid enough to try to altruistically improve your life, why go into trouble of actively opposing them? Why not ju…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
How to Beat Procrastination by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: How to Beat Procrastination, published by lukeprogon the Lesswrong.
Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life
My own behavior baffles me. I find myself doing what I hate, and not doing what I really want to do!
- Saint Paul (Romans 7:15)
Once you're trained in BayesCraft, it may be tempting to tackle classic problems "from scratch" with your new Rationality Powers. But often, it's more effective to do a bit of scholarship first and at least start from the state of our scientific knowledge on the subject.
Today, I want to tackle procrastination by summarizing what we know about it, and how to overcome it.
Let me begin with three character vignettes...
Eddie attended the sales seminar, read all the books, and repeated the self-affirmations in the mirror this morning. But he has yet to make his first sale. Rejection afte…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists by Zack_M_Davis
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists, published by Zack_M_Davis on the LessWrong.
Followup to: What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
In "What Evidence Filtered Evidence?", we are asked to consider a scenario involving a coin that is either biased to land Heads 2/3rds of the time, or Tails 2/3rds of the time. Observing Heads is 1 bit of evidence for the coin being Heads-biased (because the Heads-biased coin lands Heads with probability 2/3, the Tails-biased coin does so with probability 1/3, the likelihood ratio of these is
2
3
1
3
2
, and
log
2
2
1
), and analogously and respectively for Tails.
If such a coin is flipped ten times by someone who doesn't make literally false statements, who then reports that the 4th, 6th, and 9th flips came up Heads, then the update…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
CFAR Participant Handbook now available to all by Duncan_Sabien
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: CFAR Participant Handbook now available to all, published by Duncan_Sabien on the LessWrong.
Google Drive PDF
Hey, guys—I wrote this, and CFAR has recently decided to make it publicly available. Much of it involved rewriting the original work of others, such as Anna Salamon, Kenzie Ashkie, Val Smith, Dan Keys, and other influential CFAR founders and staff, but the actual content was filtered through me as single author as part of getting everything into a consistent and coherent shape.
I have mild intentions to update it in the future with a handful of other new chapters that were on the list, but which didn't get written before CFAR let me go. Note that such updates will likely not be current-CFAR-approved, but will still derive directly from my understanding of the curriculum as former Curriculum Director.
Thanks for listeni…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious by Swimmer963
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious, published by Swimmer963 on the LessWrong.
I have a confession to make. My life hasn’t changed all that much since I started reading Less Wrong. Hindsight bias makes it hard to tell, I guess, but I feel like pretty much the same person, or at least the person I would have evolved towards anyway, whether or not I spent those years reading about the Art of rationality.
But I can’t claim to be upset about it either. I can’t say that rationality has undershot my expectations. I didn’t come to Less Wrong expecting, or even wanting, to become the next Bill Gates; I came because I enjoyed reading it, just like I’ve enjoyed reading hundreds of books and websites.
In fact, I can’t claim that I would want my life to be any different. I have goals and I’m meeting them: my grades are good, my socia…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
A tale from Communist China by Wei_Dai
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A tale from Communist China, published by Wei_Dai on the LessWrong.
Write a Review
Judging from the upvotes, it seems like people are quite interested in my grandparents' failure to emigrate from Communist China before it was too late, so I thought I'd elaborate here with more details and for greater visibility. They were all actually supporters of the Communist Party at the beginning, and saw it as potential saviors/liberators of the Chinese people and nation. They were also treated well at the beginning - one of them (being one of few people in China with a higher education) was given a high official post, and another retained a manager position at the factory that he used to own and operate.
The latter side of the family considered moving away from China prior to the Communist victory since they would be classified as "capita…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
What Money Cannot Buy by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: What Money Cannot Buy, published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
Paul Graham:
The problem is, if you're not a hacker, you can't tell who the good hackers are. A similar problem explains why American cars are so ugly. I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer? By definition you can't tell from his portfolio. And you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had, because in design, as in most fields, those tend to be driven by fashion and schmoozing, with actual ability a distant third. There's no way around it: you can't manage a process intended to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is. American cars are ugly becau…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, published by Eliezer Yudkowskyon the LessWrong.
From when I was still forced to attend, I remember our synagogue's annual fundraising appeal. It was a simple enough format, if I recall correctly. The rabbi and the treasurer talked about the shul's expenses and how vital this annual fundraise was, and then the synagogue's members called out their pledges from their seats.
Straightforward, yes?
Let me tell you about a different annual fundraising appeal. One that I ran, in fact; during the early years of a nonprofit organization that may not be named. One difference was that the appeal was conducted over the Internet. And another difference was that the audience was largely drawn from the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc crowd. (To point in the rough direction of an…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
9/26 is Petrov Day by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: 9/26 is Petrov Day, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.
The story begins on September 1st, 1983, when Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner after the aircraft crossed into Soviet airspace and then, for reasons still unknown, failed to respond to radio hails. 269 passengers and crew died, including US Congressman Lawrence McDonald. Ronald Reagan called it "barbarism", "inhuman brutality", "a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten". Note that this was already a very, very poor time for US/USSR relations. Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was half-convinced the US was pl…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions) by Hazard
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions), published by Hazard on the LessWrong.
(cross posted from my personal blog)
Since middle school I've generally thought that I'm pretty good at dealing with my emotions, and a handful of close friends and family have made similar comments. Now I can see that though I was particularly good at never flipping out, I was decidedly not good "healthy emotional processing". I'll explain later what I think "healthy emotional processing" is, right now I'm using quotes to indicate "the thing that's good to do with emotions". Here it goes...
Relevant context
When I was a kid I adopted a strong, "Fix it or stop complaining about it" mentality. This applied to stress and worry as well. "Either address the problem you're worried about or quit worrying about it!" Also…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
When Money Is Abundant, Knowledge Is The Real Wealth by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: When Money Is Abundant, Knowledge Is The Real Wealth , published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
First Puzzle Piece
By and large, the President of the United States can order people to do things, and they will do those things. POTUS is often considered the most powerful person in the world. And yet, the president cannot order a virus to stop replicating. The president cannot order GDP to increase. The president cannot order world peace.
Are there orders the president could give which would result in world peace, or increasing GDP, or the end of a virus? Probably, yes. Any of these could likely even be done with relatively little opportunity cost. Yet no president in history has known which orders will efficiently achieve these objectives. There are probably some people in the world who know which orders would efficiently inc…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Credibility of the CDC on SARS-CoV-2 by Elizabeth, jimrandomh
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Credibility of the CDC on SARS-CoV-2, published y Elizabeth, jimrandomh on the LessWrong.
Introduction
One of the main places Americans look for information on coronavirus is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (abbreviated CDC from the days before “and Prevention” was in the title). That’s natural; “handling contagious epidemics” is not their only job, but it is one of their primary ones, and they position themselves as the authority. At a time when so many things are uncertain, it saves a lot of anxiety (and time, and money) to have an expert source you can turn to and get solid advice.
Unfortunately, the CDC has repeatedly given advice with lots of evidence against it. Below is a list of actions from the CDC that we believe are misleading or otherwise indicative of an underlying problem. If you know of mor…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Core Pathways of Aging by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Core Pathways of Aging, published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
Most overviews of aging suffer from multiple problems:
They dump a bunch of findings with no high-level picture.
Many of the claims they make are outdated, purely theoretical, and sometimes even outright disproven by existing work.
They are usually written by working academics, who are shy about telling us when their peers’ work is completely wrong.
They are shy about making strong claims, since this would also implicitly mean denying some claims of the authors’ peers.
This post is a high-level brain-dump of my current best models of the core pathways of aging, as I currently understand them. I have no particular reason to avoid calling out claims I think are wrong/irrelevant, and I’m going to present high-level models without pages and pages of disclaim…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.
The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it—quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah’s bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah—the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar—ruining the experimental symmetry, but this was back in the e…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Coronavirus: Justified Practical Advice Thread by Ben Pace, Elizabeth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Coronavirus: Justified Practical Advice Thread, published by Ben Pace, Elizabeth on the LessWrong.
(Added: To see the best advice in this thread, read this summary.)
This is a thread for practical advice for preparing for the coronavirus in places where it might substantially grow.
We'd like this thread to be a source of advice that attempts to explain itself. This is not a thread to drop links to recommendations that don’t explain why the advice is accurate or useful. That’s not to say that explanation-less advice isn’t useful, but this isn't the place for it.
Please include in your answers some advice and an explanation of the advice, an explicit model under which it makes sense. We will move answers to the comments if they don't explain their recommendations clearly. (Added: We have moved at least 4 comments so far.)
Th…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Intentionally Making Close Friends by Neel Nanda
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Intentionally Making Close Friends, published by Neel Nanda on the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for
Introduction
One of the greatest sources of joy in my life are my close friends. People who bring excitement and novelty into my life. Who expose me to new experiences, and ways of seeing the world. Who help me learn, point out my blind spots, and correct me when I am wrong. Who I can lean on when I need support, and who lean on me in turn. Friends who help me grow more into the kind of person I want to be.
I am especially grateful for this, because up until about 4 years ago, I didn’t have any close friends in my life. I had friends, but struggled to form real emotional connections. Moreover, it didn’t even occur to me that I could try to do this. It wasn’t that I knew how to form close friends but was too anxious to try,…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger) by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger), published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
In Orthodox Judaism there is a saying: “The previous generation is to the next one as angels are to men; the next generation is to the previous one as donkeys are to men.” This follows from the Orthodox Jewish belief that all Judaic law was given to Moses by God at Mount Sinai. After all, it’s not as if you could do an experiment to gain new halachic knowledge; the only way you can know is if someone tells you (who heard it from someone else, who heard it from God). Since there is no new source of information; it can only be degraded in transmission from generation to generation.
Thus, modern rabbis are not allowed to overrule ancient rabbis. Crawly things are ordinarily unkosher, but it is permissible to eat a worm found in an a…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity by RomeoStevens
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity, published by RomeoStevens on the LessWrong.
There is a lot of bad science and controversy in the realm of how to have a healthy lifestyle. Every week we are bombarded with new studies conflicting older studies telling us X is good or Y is bad. Eventually we reach our psychological limit, throw up our hands, and give up. I used to do this a lot. I knew exercise was good, I knew flossing was good, and I wanted to eat better. But I never acted on any of that knowledge. I would feel guilty when I thought about this stuff and go back to what I was doing. Unsurprisingly, this didn't really cause me to make any positive lifestyle changes.
Instead of vaguely guilt-tripping you with potentially unreliable science news, this post aims to provide an overview of lifestyle interventions that hav…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real? by Jacob Falkovich
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real?, published by Jacob Falkovich on the LessWrong.
Cross-posted from Putanumonit.
Basketballism
Imagine that tomorrow everyone on the planet forgets the concept of training basketball skill.
The next day everyone is as good at basketball as they were the previous day, but this talent is assumed to be fixed. No one expects their performance to change over time. No one teaches basketball, although many people continue to play the game for fun.
Geneticists explain that some people are born with better hand-eye coordination and are able to shoot a basketball accurately. Economists explain that highly-paid NBA players have a stronger incentive to hit shots, which explains their improved performance. Psychologists note that people who take more jump shots each day hit a higher percentage and theorize…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
A whirlwind tour of Ethereum financeby cata
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is:A whirlwind tour of Ethereum finance, published by cata on the LessWrong.
As a hacker and cryptocurrency liker, I have been hearing for a while about "DeFi" stuff going on in Ethereum without really knowing what it was. I own a bunch of ETH, so I finally decided that enough was enough and spent a few evenings figuring out what was going on. To my pleasant surprise, a lot of it was fascinating, and I thought I would share it with LW in the hopes that other people will be interested too and share their thoughts.
Throughout this post I will assume that the reader has a basic mental model of how Ethereum works. If you don't, you might find this intro & reference useful.
Why should I care about this?
For one thing, it's the coolest, most cypherpunk thing going. Remember how back in 2012, everyone knew that Bitcoin existed, but it was…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Apologist and the Revolutionary by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Apologist and the Revolutionary, published by Scott Alexander on the LessWrong.
Rationalists complain that most people are too willing to make excuses for their positions, and too unwilling to abandon those positions for ones that better fit the evidence. And most people really are pretty bad at this. But certain stroke victims called anosognosiacs are much, much worse.
Anosognosia is the condition of not being aware of your own disabilities. To be clear, we're not talking minor disabilities here, the sort that only show up during a comprehensive clinical exam. We're talking paralysis or even blindness1. Things that should be pretty hard to miss.
Take the example of the woman discussed in Lishman's Organic Psychiatry. After a right-hemisphere stroke, she lost movement in her left arm but continuously denied it. When the doct…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Dark Matters
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Dark Matters, published by Diffractor on the LessWrong.
This post will be about the main points of evidence for the existence of dark matter. To evaluate whether a competing theory to dark matter is plausible, it's important to know what the actual arguments in favor of dark matter are in more detail than just "dark matter is the stuff you have to add to get galactic rotation curves to work out". A competitor has to address the strongest arguments in favor of the existence of dark matter, not just the weaker fare like galactic rotation curves.
So, when reading some hot new arxiv paper about dark matter or the lack thereof, it is fairly useful to know the top five lines of evidential support for dark matter (in my own personal estimation, others may differ). This lets you at least check whether the result is directly addressing t…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Where do your eyes go? by alkjash
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Where do your eyes go?, published by alkjash on the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for/
[Shoutout to the LW team for very helpful (and free!) feedback on this post.]
I. Prelude
When my wife first started playing the wonderful action roguelike Hades, she got stuck in Asphodel. Most Hades levels involve dodging arrows, lobbed bombs, melee monsters, and spike traps all whilst hacking and slashing as quickly as possible, but Asphodel adds an extra twist: in this particular charming suburb of the Greek underworld, you need to handle all of the above whilst also trying not to step in lava. Most of the islands in Asphodel are narrower than your dash is far, so it’s hard not to dash straight off solid ground into piping-hot doom.
I gave my wife some pointers about upgrade choices (cough Athena dash cough) and enemy attack patterns, but…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Confidence levels inside and outside an argument by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Confidence levels inside and outside an argument , published by Scott Alexander on the LessWrong.
Related to: Infinite Certainty
Suppose the people at FiveThirtyEight have created a model to predict the results of an important election. After crunching poll data, area demographics, and all the usual things one crunches in such a situation, their model returns a greater than 999,999,999 in a billion chance that the incumbent wins the election. Suppose further that the results of this model are your only data and you know nothing else about the election. What is your confidence level that the incumbent wins the election?
Mine would be significantly less than 999,999,999 in a billion.
When an argument gives a probability of 999,999,999 in a billion for an event, then probably the majority of the probability of the event is no longe…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Fact Posts: How and Why by sarahconstantin
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Fact Posts: How and Why, published by sarahconstantinon the LessWrong.
The most useful thinking skill I've taught myself, which I think should be more widely practiced, is writing what I call "fact posts." I write a bunch of these on my blog. (I write fact posts about pregnancy and childbirth here.)
To write a fact post, you start with an empirical question, or a general topic. Something like "How common are hate crimes?" or "Are epidurals really dangerous?" or "What causes manufacturing job loss?"
It's okay if this is a topic you know very little about. This is an exercise in original seeing and showing your reasoning, not finding the official last word on a topic or doing the best analysis in the world.
Then you open up a Google doc and start taking notes.
You look for quantitative data from conventionally reliable sources. CD…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Alignment Research Field Guide by abramdemski
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Alignment Research Field Guide, published by abramdemski on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
This field guide was written by the MIRI team with MIRIx groups in mind, though the advice may be relevant to others working on AI alignment research.
⠀
Preamble I: Decision Theory
Hello! You may notice that you are reading a document.
This fact comes with certain implications. For instance, why are you reading this? Will you finish it? What decisions will you come to as a result? What will you do next?
Notice that, whatever you end up doing, it’s likely that there are dozens or even hundreds of other people, quite similar to you and in quite similar positions, who will follow reasoning which strongly resembles yours, and make choices which correspondingly match.
Gi…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Pavlov Strategy by sarahconstantin
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Pavlov Strategy, published by sarahconstantinon the LessWrong.
Epistemic Status: Common knowledge, just not to me
The Evolution of Trust is a deceptively friendly little interactive game. Near the end, there’s a “sandbox” evolutionary game theory simulator. It’s pretty flexible. You can do quick experiments in it without writing code. I highly recommend playing around.
One of the things that surprised me was a strategy the game calls Simpleton, also known in the literature as Pavlov. In certain conditions, it works pretty well — even better than tit-for-tat or tit-for-tat with forgiveness.
Let’s set the framework first. You have a Prisoner’s dilemma type game.
If both parties cooperate, they each get +2 points.
If one cooperates and the other defects, the defector gets +3 points and the cooperator gets -1 point…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Tell Culture by LoganStrohl
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Tell Culture, published by LoganStrohl on the LessWrong.
Followup to: Ask and Guess
Ask culture: "I'll be in town this weekend for a business trip. Is it cool if I crash at your place?" Response: “Yes“ or “no”.
Guess culture: "Hey, great news! I'll be in town this weekend for a business trip!" Response: Infer that they might be telling you this because they want something from you, conclude that they might want a place to stay, and offer your hospitality only if you want to. Otherwise, pretend you didn’t infer that.
The two basic rules of Ask Culture: 1) Ask when you want something. 2) Interpret things as requests and feel free to say "no".
The two basic rules of Guess Culture: 1) Ask for things if, and only if, you're confident the person will say "yes". 2) Interpret requests as expectations of "yes", and, when possib…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Other people are wrong vs I am right by Buck
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Other people are wrong vs I am right, published by Buck the LessWrong.
I’ve recently been spending some time thinking about the rationality mistakes I’ve made in the past. Here’s an interesting one: I think I have historically been too hasty to go from “other people seem very wrong on this topic” to “I am right on this topic”.
Throughout my life, I’ve often thought that other people had beliefs that were really repugnant and stupid. Now that I am older and wiser, I still think I was correct to think that these ideas were repugnant and stupid. Overall I was probably slightly insufficiently dismissive of things like the opinions of apparent domain experts and the opinions of people who seemed smart whose arguments I couldn’t really follow. I also overrated conventional wisdom about factual claims about how the wo…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Your Cheerful Price by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Your Cheerful Price, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
There's a concept I draw on often in social interactions. I've been calling it the "happy price", but that is originally terminology by Michael Ellsberg with subtly different implications. So I now fork off the term "cheerful price", and specialize it anew. Earlier Facebook discussion here.
Tl;dr:
When I ask you for your Cheerful Price for doing something, I'm asking you for the price that:
Gives you a cheerful feeling about the transaction;
Makes you feel energized about doing the thing;
Doesn't generate an ouch feeling to be associated with me;
Means I'm not expending social capital or friendship capital to make the thing happen;
Doesn't require the executive part of you, that knows you need money in the long-term, to shout down and override other parts of y…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Importance of Sidekicks by Swimmer963
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Importance of Sidekicks, published by Swimmer963 on the LessWrong.
[Reposted from my personal blog.]
Mindspace is wide and deep. “People are different” is a truism, but even knowing this, it’s still easy to underestimate.
I spent much of my initial engagement with the rationality community feeling weird and different. I appreciated the principle and project of rationality as things that were deeply important to me; I was pretty pro-self improvement, and kept tsuyoku naritai as my motto for several years. But the rationality community, the people who shared this interest of mine, often seemed baffled by my values and desires. I wasn’t ambitious, and had a hard time wanting to be. I had a hard time wanting to be anything other than a nurse.
It wasn’t until this August that I convinced myself that this wasn’t a fail…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great, published by Scott Alexander on the LessWrong.
Related to: Individual Rationality is a Matter of Life and Death, The Benefits of Rationality, Rationality is Systematized Winning
But I finally snapped after reading: Mandatory Secret Identities
Okay, the title was for shock value. Rationality is pretty great. Just not quite as great as everyone here seems to think it is.
For this post, I will be using "extreme rationality" or "x-rationality" in the sense of "techniques and theories from Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, or similar deliberate formal rationality study programs, above and beyond the standard level of rationality possessed by an intelligent science-literate person without formal rationalist training." It seems pretty uncontroversial that there are massive benefits from going from a…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Learned Blankness by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Learned Blankness, published by AnnaSalamon on the LessWrong.
Related to: Semantic stopsigns, Truly part of you.
One day, the dishwasher broke. I asked Steve Rayhawk to look at it because he’s “good with mechanical things”.
“The drain is clogged,” he said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
He pointed at a pool of backed up water. “Because the water is backed up.”
We cleared the clog and the dishwasher started working.
I felt silly, because I, too, could have reasoned that out. The water wasn’t draining -- therefore, perhaps the drain was clogged. Basic rationality in action.[1]
But before giving it even ten seconds’ thought, I’d classified the problem as a “mechanical thing”. And I’d remembered I “didn’t know how mechanical things worked” (a cached thought). And then -- prompted by my cached belief…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
What cognitive biases feel like from the insideby chaosmage
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: What cognitive biases feel like from the inside, published by chaosmage on the LessWrong.
Building on the recent SSC post Why Doctors Think They’re The Best...
What it feels like for me How I see others who feel the same
There is controversy on the subject but there shouldn't be because the side I am on is obviously right. They have taken one side in a debate that is unresolved for good reason that they are struggling to understand
I have been studying this carefully They preferentially seek out conforming evidence
The arguments for my side make obvious sense, they're almost boring. They're very ready to accept any and all arguments for their side.
The arguments for the opposing side are contradictory, superficial, illogical or debunked. They dismiss arguments for the opposing side at the earliest opportunity.
The people on th…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Hiring engineers and researchers to help align GPT-3 by paulfchristiano
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Hiring engineers and researchers to help align GPT-3, published by paulfchristiano on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
My team at OpenAI, which works on aligning GPT-3, is hiring ML engineers and researchers. Apply here for the ML engineer role and here for the ML researcher role.
GPT-3 is similar enough to "prosaic" AGI that we can work on key alignment problems without relying on conjecture or speculative analogies. And because GPT-3 is already being deployed in the OpenAI API, its misalignment matters to OpenAI’s bottom line — it would be much better if we had an API that was trying to help the user instead of trying to predict the next word of text from the internet.
I think this puts our team in a great place to have an impact:
If our research succeeds…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Arbital postmortem by alexei
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Arbital postmortem , published by alexei on the LessWrong.
Disclaimer 1: These views are my own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of anyone else (Eric, Steph, or Eliezer).
Disclaimer 2: Most of the events happened at least a year ago. My memory is not particularly great, so the dates are fuzzy and a few things might be slightly out of order. But this post has been reviewed by Eric, Steph, and Eliezer, so it should mostly be okay.
I’m going to list events chronologically. At times I’ll insert a “Reflection” paragraph, where I’m going to outline my thoughts as of now. I’ll talk about what I could have done differently and how I would approach a similar problem today.
Chapter 0: Eliezer pitches Arbital and I say ‘no’
Around the summer of 2014 Eliezer approached me with the idea for what later would become Ar…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Personalized Medicine For Real by sarahconstantin
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Personalized Medicine For Real, published by sarahconstantin on the LessWrong.
I was part of the founding team at MetaMed, a personalized medicine startup. We went out of business back in 2015. We made a lot of mistakes due to inexperience, some of which I deeply regret.
I’m reflecting on that now, because Perlara just went out of business, and they got a lot farther on our original dream than we ever did. Q-State Biosciences, which is still around, is using a similar model.
The phenomenon that inspired MetaMed is that we knew of stories of heroic, scientifically literate patients and families of patients with incurable diseases, who came up with cures for their own conditions. Physicist Leo Szilard, the “father of the atom bomb”, designed a course of radiation therapy to cure his own bladder cancer. Computer scientist Mat…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy, published by Scott Alexander on the LessWrong.
Wei Dai, one of the first people Satoshi Nakamoto contacted about Bitcoin, was a frequent Less Wrong contributor. So was Hal Finney, the first person besides Satoshi to make a Bitcoin transaction.
The first mention of Bitcoin on Less Wrong, a post called Making Money With Bitcoin, was in early 2011 - when it was worth 91 cents. Gwern predicted that it could someday be worth "upwards of $10,000 a bitcoin". He also quoted Moldbug, who advised that:
If Bitcoin becomes the new global monetary system, one bitcoin purchased today (for 90 cents, last time I checked) will make you a very wealthy individual...Even if the probability of Bitcoin succeeding is epsilon, a million to one, it's still worthwhile for anyone to buy at least a few bitcoins now...I would not…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Zettelkasten Method by abramdemski
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Zettelkasten Method, published by abramdemski on the LessWrong.
[Epistemic Status: Scroll to the bottom for my follow-up thoughts on this from months/years later.]
Early this year, Conor White-Sullivan introduced me to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. I would say that this significantly increased my research productivity. I’ve been saying “at least 2x”. Naturally, this sort of thing is difficult to quantify. The truth is, I think it may be more like 3x, especially along the dimension of “producing ideas” and also “early-stage development of ideas”. (What I mean by this will become clearer as I describe how I think about research productivity more generally.) However, it is also very possible that the method produces serious biases in the types of ideas produced/developed, which should be considered. (Thi…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Fallacy of Gray by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Fallacy of Gray, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
Marc Stiegler, David’s Sling
I don’t know if the Sophisticate’s mistake has an official name, but I call it the Fallacy of Gray. We saw it manifested in the previous essay—the one who believed that odds of two to the power of seven hundred and fifty million to one, against, meant “there was still a chance.” All probabilities, to him, were simply “uncertain” and that meant he was licensed to ignore them if he pleased…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Long Covid Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem by Elizabeth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Long Covid Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem, published by Elizabeth on the LessWrong.
At this point, people I know are not that worried about dying from covid. We’re all vaccinated, we’re mostly young and healthy(ish), and it turns out the odds were always low for us. We’re also not that worried about hospitalization: it’s much more likely than death, but maintaining covid precautions indefinitely is very costly so by and large we’re willing to risk it.
The big unknown here has been long covid. Losing a few weeks to being extremely sick might be worth the risk, but a lifetime of fatigue and reduced cognition is a very big deal. With that in mind, I set out to do some math on what risks we were running. Unfortunately baseline covid has barely been around long enough to have data on long covid, most of it is still…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Cached Selves by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Cached Selves, published by AnnaSalamon on the LessWrong.
by Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk (joint authorship)
Related to: Beware identity
Update, 2021: I believe a large majority of the priming studies failed replication, though I haven't looked into it in depth. I still personally do a great many of the "possible strategies" listed at the bottom; and they subjectively seem useful to me; but if you end up believing that it should not be on the basis of the claimed studies.
A few days ago, Yvain introduced us to priming, the effect where, in Yvain’s words, "any random thing that happens to you can hijack your judgment and personality for the next few minutes."
Today, I’d like to discuss a related effect from the social psychology and marketing literatures: “commitment and consistency effects”, whereby any random thing yo…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves by LoganStrohl
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves, published by LoganStrohl on the LessWrong.
I sometimes let imaginary versions of myself make decisions for me.
I first started doing this after a friend told me (something along the lines of) this story. When they first became executive director of their organization, they suddenly had many more decisions to deal with per day than ever before. "Should we hire this person?" "Should I go buy more coffee for the coffee machine, or wait for someone else deal with it?" "How many participants should attend our first event?" "When can I schedule time to plan the fund drive?"
I'm making up these examples myself, but I'm sure you, too, can imagine how leading a brand new organization might involve a constant assault on the parts of your brain responsible for making decisions. They found it exha…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Gravity Turn by alkjash
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Gravity Turn, published by alkjashon the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for/
[The first in a sequence of retrospective essays on my five years in math graduate school.]
My favorite analogy for graduate school is the gravity turn: the maneuver a rocket performs to get from the launch pad to orbit. I like to imagine a first-year graduate student as a Falcon X rocket, newly-constructed and tasked with delivering a six-ton payload into low Earth orbit.
Picture this: you begin graduate school, fresh as a rocket arriving at Cape Canaveral and bubbling with excitement for your maiden voyage. Your PhD adviser, on the other hand, is the Hubble Space Telescope. Let's call her Dr. Hubble (not to be confused with the astronomer of the same name). Dr. Hubble is ostensibly the ideal guide for your first orbit insertion. After all, she is famou…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Feeling Rational by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Feeling Rational , published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Since curiosity is an emotion, I suspect that some people will object to treating curiosity as a part of rationality. A popular belief about “rationality” is that rationality opposes all emotion—that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings. Yet strangely enough, I can’t find any theorem of probability theory which proves that I should appear ice-cold and expressionless.
When people think of “emotion” and “rationality” as opposed, I suspect that they are really thinking of System 1 and System 2—fast perceptual judgments versus slow deliberative judgments. System 2’s deliberative judgments aren’t always true, and System 1’s perceptual judgments aren’t always false; so it is very important…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Building up to an Internal Family Systems model by Kaj_Sotala
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Building up to an Internal Family Systems model, published by Kaj_Sotala on the LessWrong.
Introduction
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapy school/technique/model which lends itself particularly well for being used alone or with a peer. For years, I had noticed that many of the kinds of people who put in a lot of work into developing their emotional and communication skills, some within the rationalist community and some outside it, kept mentioning IFS.
So I looked at the Wikipedia page about the IFS model, and bounced off, since it sounded like nonsense to me. Then someone brought it up again, and I thought that maybe I should reconsider. So I looked at the WP page again, thought “nah, still nonsense”, and continued to ignore it.
This continued until I participated in CFAR mentorship training last September, an…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
How An Algorithm Feels From Inside by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" I remember seeing an actual argument get started on this subject—a fully naive argument that went nowhere near Berkeleyan subjectivism. Just:
"It makes a sound, just like any other falling tree!"
"But how can there be a sound that no one hears?"
The standard rationalist view would be that the first person is speaking as if "sound" means acoustic vibrations in the air; the second person is speaking as if "sound" means an auditory experience in a brain. If you ask "Are there acoustic vibrations?" or "Are there auditory experiences?", the answer is at once obvious. And so the argument is really about the definition of the word "sound".
I think the standard analysis is ess…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Notes from "Don't Shoot the Dog" by juliawise
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Notes from "Don't Shoot the Dog", published by juliawise on the LessWrong.
I just finished Karen Pryor’s “Don’t Shoot the Dog: the New Art of Teaching and Training.” Partly because a friend points out that it’s not on Audible and therefore she can’t possibly read it, here are the notes I took and some thoughts. It’s a quick, easy read.
The book applies behavioral psychology to training animals and people. The author started off as a dolphin trainer at an aquarium park in the 1960s and moved on to horses, dogs, and her own children. There are a lot of anecdotes about how to train animals (apparently polar bears like raisins). At the time, training animals without violence was considered novel and maybe impossible. I read it as a parenting book since I don’t plan to train dogs, horses, or polar bears.
It’s probab…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Precognition by jasoncrawford
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Precognition, published by jasoncrawford on the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for
It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.
To be less pithy, but more clear: Most people are slow to notice and accept change. If you can just be faster than most people at seeing what’s going on, updating your model of the world, and reacting accordingly, it’s almost as good as seeing the future.
We see this in the US with covid: The same people who didn’t realize that we all should be wearing masks, when they were life-saving, are now slow to realize/admit that we can stop wearing them.
For a dramatic historical example (from The Making of the Atomic Bomb), take Leo Szilard’s observations of 1930s…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge, published by lukeprog on the LessWrong.
Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life
Some have suggested that the Less Wrong community could improve readers' instrumental rationality more effectively if it first caught up with the scientific literature on productivity and self-help, and then enabled readers to deliberately practice self-help skills and apply what they've learned in real life.
I think that's a good idea. My contribution today is a quick overview of scientific self-help: what professionals call "the psychology of adjustment." First I'll review the state of the industry and the scientific literature, and then I'll briefly summarize the scientific data available on three topics in self-help: study methods, productivity, and happiness.
The industry and the lit…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
A voting theory primer for rationalists by Jameson Quinn
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A voting theory primer for rationalists, published by Jameson Quinn on the LessWrong.
What is voting theory?
Voting theory, also called social choice theory, is the study of the design and evaulation of democratic voting methods (that's the activists' word; game theorists call them "voting mechanisms", engineers call them "electoral algorithms", and political scientists say "electoral formulas"). In other words, for a given list of candidates and voters, a voting method specifies a set of valid ways to fill out a ballot, and, given a valid ballot from each voter, produces an outcome.
(An "electoral system" includes a voting method, but also other implementation details, such as how the candidates and voters are validated, how often elections happen and for what offices, etc. "Voting system" is an ambiguous term that can refer to…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Flinching away from truth” is often about protecting the epistemology by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Flinching away from truth” is often about protecting the epistemology, published by AnnaSalamon on the LessWrong.
Related to: Leave a line of retreat; Categorizing has consequences.
There’s a story I like, about this little kid who wants to be a writer. So she writes a story and shows it to her teacher.
“You misspelt the word ‘ocean’”, says the teacher.
“No I didn’t!”, says the kid.
The teacher looks a bit apologetic, but persists: “‘Ocean’ is spelt with a ‘c’ rather than an ‘sh’; this makes sense, because the ‘e’ after the ‘c’ changes its sound.”
“No I didn’t!” interrupts the kid.
“Look,” says the teacher, “I get it that it hurts to notice mistakes. But that which can be destroyed by the truth should be! You did, in fact, misspell the word ‘ocean’.”
“I did not!” sa…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Raising the Sanity Waterline by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is:Raising the Sanity Waterline, published by Eliezer Yudkowskyon the LessWrong.
To paraphrase the Black Belt Bayesian: Behind every exciting, dramatic failure, there is a more important story about a larger and less dramatic failure that made the first failure possible.
If every trace of religion was magically eliminated from the world tomorrow, then—however much improved the lives of many people would be—we would not even have come close to solving the larger failures of sanity that made religion possible in the first place.
We have good cause to spend some of our efforts on trying to eliminate religion directly, because it is a direct problem. But religion also serves the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine—religion is a sign, a symptom, of larger problems that don't go away just because someone loses their rel…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others... by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others..., published by Scott Alexander on the LessWrong.
This was originally posted as part of the efficient charity contest back in November. Thanks to Roko, multifoliaterose, Louie, jmmcd, jsalvatier, and others I forget for help, corrections, encouragement, and bothering me until I finally remembered to post this here.
Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy t…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison by Larks
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: 2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, published by Larkson the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
Cross-posted to the EA forum.
Introduction
Like last year and the year before, I’ve attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to an securities analyst with regards to possible investments. It appears that once again no-one else has attempted to do this, to my knowledge, so I've once again undertaken the task.
This year I have included several groups not covered in previous years, and read more widely in the literat…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Scholarship: How to DoIt Efficiently by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Scholarship: How to DoIt Efficiently, published by lukeprog on the LessWrong.
Scholarship is an important virtue of rationality, but it can be costly. Its major costs are time and effort. Thus, if you can reduce the time and effort required for scholarship - if you can learn to do scholarship more efficiently - then scholarship will be worth your effort more often than it previously was.
As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks, I've developed efficient habits that allow me to research topics quickly. I'll share my research habits with you now.
Review articles and textbooks are king
My first task is to find scholarly review (or 'survey') articles on my chosen topic from the past five years (the more recent, the better). A good review article provides:
An overview of the subject matter of the fiel…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
How to Be Happy by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: How to Be Happy, published by lukeprog on the LessWrong.
Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life
One day a coworker said to me, "Luke! You're, like, the happiest person I know! How come you're so happy all the time?"
It was probably a rhetorical question, but I had a very long answer to give. See, I was unhappy for most of my life,1 and even considered suicide a few times. Then I spent two years studying the science of happiness. Now, happiness is my natural state. I can't remember the last time I felt unhappy for longer than 20 minutes.
That kind of change won't happen for everyone, or even most people (beware of other-optimizing), but it's worth a shot!
We all want to be happy, and happiness is useful for other things, too.2 For example, happiness improves physical health,3 improves creativity,4 and even enables y…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The curse of identity by Kaj_Sotala
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The curse of identity, published by Kaj_Sotala on the LessWrong.
So what you probably mean is, "I intend to do school to improve my chances on the market". But this statement is still false, unless it is also true that "I intend to improve my chances on the market". Do you, in actual fact, intend to improve your chances on the market?
I expect not. Rather, I expect that your motivation is to appear to be the sort of person who you think you would be if you were ambitiously attempting to improve your chances on the market... which is not really motivating enough to actually DO the work. However, by persistently trying to do so, and presenting yourself with enough suffering at your failure to do it, you get to feel as if you are that sort of person without having to actually do the work. This is actually a pretty optimal solution…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Embedded Agents by abramdemski, Scott Garrabrant
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is:Embedded Agents, published by abramdemski, Scott Garrabrant on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
(A longer text-based version of this post is also available on MIRI's blog here, and the bibliography for the whole sequence can be found here)
Thanks for listening. to help us out with the nonlinear library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Applause Lights by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Eliezer Yudkowsky, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
At the Singularity Summit 2007, one of the speakers called for democratic, multinational development of artificial intelligence. So I stepped up to the microphone and asked:
Suppose that a group of democratic republics form a consortium to develop AI, and there’s a lot of politicking during the process—some interest groups have unusually large influence, others get shafted—in other words, the result looks just like the products of modern democracies. Alternatively, suppose a group of rebel nerds develops an AI in their basement, and instructs the AI to poll everyone in the world—dropping cellphones to anyone who doesn’t have them—and do whatever the majority says. Which of these do you think is more “democratic,” and would you feel safe with eith…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Takeaways from one year of lockdown by mingyuan
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Takeaways from one year of lockdown, published by mingyuan on the LessWrong.
As of today, I've been in full-on, hardcore lockdown for an entire year. I have a lot of feelings – both about the personal social impacts of lockdown and about society being broken – that I won't go into in this public space. What I want to figure out in this post is what rationality-relevant lessons I can draw from what happened in my life this past year.
(Meta: This post is not well-written and is mostly bullet points, because the first few versions I wrote were unusable but I still wanted to publish it today.)
Observations
Some facts about my lockdown:
I have spent 99.9% of the year within 1 mile of my house
Up until last month I had spent the entire year within 10 miles of my house
Between February 29th and June 15th of 2020, I did not set foot…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Another (outer) alignment failure story by paulfchristiano
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Another (outer) alignment failure story, published by paulfchristiano on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
Meta
This is a story where the alignment problem is somewhat harder than I expect, society handles AI more competently than I expect, and the outcome is worse than I expect. It also involves inner alignment turning out to be a surprisingly small problem. Maybe the story is 10-20th percentile on each of those axes. At the end I’m going to go through some salient ways you could vary the story.
This isn’t intended to be a particularly great story (and it’s pretty informal). I’m still trying to think through what I expect to happen if alignment turns out to be hard, and this more like the most recent entry in a long journey of gradually-improving storie…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Working With Monsters by johnswentworth
Welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: Working With Monsters, published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
This is a fictional piece based on Sort By Controversial. You do not need to read that first, though it may make Scissor Statements feel more real. Content Warning: semipolitical. Views expressed by characters in this piece are not necessarily the views of the author.
I stared out at a parking lot, the pavement cracked and growing grass. A few cars could still be seen, every one with a shattered windshield or no tires or bashed-in roof, one even laying on its side. Of the buildings in sight, two had clearly burned, only blackened reinforced concrete skeletons left behind. To the left, an overpass had collapsed. To the right, the road was cut by a hole four meters across. Everywhere, trees and vines climbed the remains of the small city. The collapsed ceilings a…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.
I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?
On questions of simple fact (for example, whether Earthly life arose by natural selection) there…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Norms of Membership for Voluntary Groups by sarahconstantin
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Norms of Membership for Voluntary Groups, published by sarahconstantin on the LessWrong.
Epistemic Status: Idea Generation
One feature of the internet that we haven’t fully adapted to yet is that it’s trivial to create voluntary groups for discussion. It’s as easy as making a mailing list, group chat, Facebook group, Discord server, Slack channel, etc.
What we don’t seem to have is a good practical language for talking about norms on these mini-groups — what kind of moderation do we use, how do we admit and expel members, what kinds of governance structures do we create.
Maybe this is a minor thing to talk about, but I suspect it has broader impact. In past decades voluntary membership in organizations has declined in the US — we’re less likely to be members of the Elks or of churches or bowling leagues — so lots…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts by steven0461
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts, published by steven0461 on the LessWrong.
Eliezer Yudkowsky was once attacked by a Moebius strip. He beat it to death with the other side, non-violently.
Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite food is printouts of Rice's theorem.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite fighting technique is a roundhouse dustspeck to the face.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once brought peace to the Middle East from inside a freight container, through a straw.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once held up a sheet of paper and said, "A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory". It was thus that the universe was created.
If you dial Chaitin's Omega, you get Eliezer Yudkowsky on the phone.
Unless otherwise specified, Eliezer Yudkowsky knows everything that he isn't telling you.
So…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Guessing the Teacher's Password by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Guessing the Teacher's Password, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves. I took pride in my scientific literacy, when I was nine years old.
When I was older, and I began to read the Feynman Lectures on Physics, I ran across a gem called “the wave equation.” I could follow the equation’s derivation, but, looking back, I couldn’t see its truth at a glance. So I thought about the wave equation for three days, on and off, until I saw that it was embarrassingly obvious. And when I finally understood, I realized that the whole time I had accepted the honest assurance of physicists that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves,…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Asymmetric Justice by Zvi
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Asymmetric Justice, published by Zvi on the LessWrong.
Related and required reading in life (ANOIEAEIB): The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics
Epistemic Status: Trying to be minimally judgmental
Spoiler Alert: Contains minor mostly harmless spoiler for The Good Place, which is the best show currently on television.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (in parallel with the similarly named one in physics) is as follows:
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, yo…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
We've built Connected Papers - a visual tool for researchers to find and explore academic papers by discordy
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: We've built Connected Papers - a visual tool for researchers to find and explore academic papers, published by discordy on the LessWrong.
Hi LessWrong. I'm a long time lurker and finally have something that I'm really proud to share with you.
After a long beta, we are releasing Connected Papers to the public!
Connected papers is a unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work.
First - let's look at a couple of examples graphs for work that is representative of this community:
Nick Bostrom:
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares:
Did you find new and interesting papers to read? Would this be helpful as an introduction to the literature of a new field of study?
The problem
Almost every research project in academia or industry involves phases of literature review. Man…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Two non-obvious lessons from microcovid.org by catherio
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Two non-obvious lessons from microcovid.org, published by catherio on the LessWrong.
At the 2021 Summer Solstice, Elizabeth Van Nostrand made a brief speech thanking the organizers of microcovid.org, which I found very heartwarming and meaningful.
I wish I had thought in advance about taking the opportunity to make a few public remarks about microcovid.org: things I wish the community knew, that weren't obvious.
Here's what I would've said, in terms of my lessons from this project:
Build your own oxygen mask. Next, share it with others.
Connect and collaborate with non-rationalists.
1) Build your own oxygen mask. Next, share it with others.
We didn't start out trying to create a resource for our whole community, let alone a website with many thousands of users. All we wanted was to save our own asses. We looked at the precipitou…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
SIAI - An Examination by BrandonReinhart
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: SIAI - An Examination, published by BrandonReinhart on the LessWrong.
12/13/2011 - A 2011 update with data from the 2010 fiscal year is in progress. Should be done by the end of the week or sooner.
Disclaimer
I am not affiliated with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
I have not donated to the SIAI prior to writing this.
I made this pledge prior to writing this document.
Notes
Images are now hosted on LessWrong.com.
The 2010 Form 990 data will be available later this month.
It is not my intent to propagate misinformation. Errors will be corrected as soon as they are identified.
Introduction
Acting on gwern's suggestion in his Girl Scout Cookie analysis, I decided to look at SIAI funding. After reading about the Visiting Fellows Program and more recently the Rationality Boot Camp, I decided that the SIAI might…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Covid-19: My Current Model by Zvi
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Covid-19: My Current Model, published by Zvion the LessWrong.
The post will be a summary of my current key views on various aspects what is going on, especially in places where I see many or most responsible-looking people getting it importantly wrong.
This post is not making strong evidence-based arguments for these views. This is not that post. This is me getting all this out there, on the record, in a place one can reference.
Risks Follow Power Laws
It is impossible to actually understand Covid-19 if you think of some things as ‘risky’ and other things as ‘safe’ and group together all the things in each category. And yet, that’s exactly how most of our thinking is directed.
Instead, think of risks as following power laws.
The riskiest activities are indoors, involve close physical proximity with others, while those…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia, published by lukeprog on the LessWrong.
Due in part to Eliezer's writing style (e.g. not many citations), and in part to Eliezer's scholarship preferences (e.g. his preference to figure out much of philosophy on his own), Eliezer's Sequences don't accurately reflect the close agreement between the content of The Sequences and work previously done in mainstream academia.
I predict several effects from this:
Some readers will mistakenly think that common Less Wrong views are more parochial than they really are.
Some readers will mistakenly think Eliezer's Sequences are more original than they really are.
If readers want to know more about the topic of a given article, it will be more difficult for them to find the related works in academia than if those works had been cited in Eliezer's…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter by Cosmos
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter, published by Cosmos on the LessWrong.
It is perhaps the best-kept secret on Less Wrong that the New York City community has been meeting regularly for almost two years. For nearly a year we've been meeting weekly or more. The rest of this post is going to be a practical guide to the benefits of group rationality, but first I will do something that is still too rare on this blog: make it clear how strongly I feel about this. Before this community took off, I did not believe that life could be this much fun or that I could possibly achieve such a sustained level of happiness.
Being rational in an irrational world is incredibly lonely. Every interaction reveals that our thought processes differ widely from those around us, and I had accepted that such a divide would al…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Hero Licensing by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Hero Licensing, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
I expect most readers to know me either as MIRI's co-founder and the originator of a number of the early research problems in AI alignment, or as the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a popular work of Harry Potter fanfiction. I’ve described how I apply concepts in Inadequate Equilibria to various decisions in my personal life, and some readers may be wondering how I see these tying in to my AI work and my fiction-writing. And I do think these serve as useful case studies in inadequacy, exploitability, and modesty.
As a supplement to Inadequate Equilibria, then, the following is a dialogue that never took place—largely written in 2014, and revised and posted online in 2017.
i. Outperforming and the outside view
(The year is 2010. eliezer-20…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0 by BayAreaHuman
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0, published by BayAreaHuman on the LessWrong.
I've spoken to people recently who were unaware of some basic facts about Leverage Research 1.0; facts that are more-or-less "common knowledge" among people who spent time socially adjacent to Leverage, and are not particularly secret or surprising in Leverage-adjacent circles, but aren't attested publicly in one place anywhere.
Today, Geoff Anders and Leverage 2.0 are moving into the "Progress Studies" space, and seeking funding in this area (see: Geoff recently got a small grant from Emergent Ventures). This seems like an important time to contribute to common knowledge about Leverage 1.0.
You might conclude that I'm trying to discredit people who were involved, but that's not my aim here. My friends who were involved in Leverage 1.0 are…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
On saving the world by So8res
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: On saving the world by So8res, published by So8reson the LessWrong.
This is the final post in my productivity sequence.
The first post described what I achieved. The next three posts describe how. This post describes why, explaining the sources of my passion and the circumstances that convinced a young Nate to try and save the world. Within, you will find no suggestions, no techniques to emulate, no new ideas to ponder. This is a rationalist coming-of-age story. With luck, you may find it inspiring. Regardless, I hope you can learn from my mistakes.
Never fear, I'll be back to business soon — there's lots of studying to do. But before then, there's a story to tell, a memorial to what I left behind.
I was raised Catholic. On my eighth birthday, having received my first communion about a year prior, I casually asked my priest ho…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation , published by on the LessWrong.
[PDF of this article updated Aug. 23, 2011]
[skip to preface]
Whenever I write a new article for Less Wrong, I'm pulled in two opposite directions.
One force pulls me toward writing short, exciting posts with lots of brain candy and just one main point. Eliezer has done that kind of thing very well many times: see Making Beliefs Pay Rent, Hindsight Devalues Science, Probability is in the Mind, Taboo Your Words, Mind Projection Fallacy, Guessing the Teacher's Password, Hold Off on Proposing Solutions, Applause Lights, Dissolving the Question, and many more.
Another force pulls me toward writing long, factually dense posts that fill in as many of the pieces of a particular argument in one fell swoop as possible. This is largely because I want…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Can the Chain Still Hold You? by lukeprog
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Can the Chain Still Hold You?, published by lukeprogon the LessWrong.
Robert Sapolsky:
Baboons... literally have been the textbook example of a highly aggressive, male-dominated, hierarchical society. Because these animals hunt, because they live in these aggressive troupes on the Savannah... they have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevitably spills over into their social lives.
Scientists have never observed a baboon troupe that wasn't highly aggressive, and they have compelling reasons to think this is simply baboon nature, written into their genes. Inescapable.
Or at least, that was true until the 1980s, when Kenya experienced a tourism boom.
Sapolsky was a grad student, studying his first baboon troupe. A new tourist lodge was built at the edge of the forest where his baboons lived. The owners of the lodge du…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Checklist of Rationality Habits by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Checklist of Rationality Habits, published by AnnaSalamon on the LessWrong.
As you may know, the Center for Applied Rationality has run several workshops, each teaching content similar to that in the core sequences, but made more practical, and more into fine-grained habits.
Below is the checklist of rationality habits we have been using in the minicamps' opening session. It was co-written by Eliezer, myself, and a number of others at CFAR. As mentioned below, the goal is not to assess how "rational" you are, but, rather, to develop a personal shopping list of habits to consider developing. We generated it by asking ourselves, not what rationality content it's useful to understand, but what rationality-related actions (or thinking habits) it's useful to actually do.
I hope you find it useful; I certainly have. Comments and sugge…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Treacherous Path to Rationality by Jacob Falkovich
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Treacherous Path to Rationality, published by Jacob Falkovich on the LessWrong.
Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit.
Rats v. Plague
The Rationality community was never particularly focused on medicine or epidemiology. And yet, we basically got everything about COVID-19 right and did so months ahead of the majority of government officials, journalists, and supposed experts.
We started discussing the virus and raising the alarm in private back in January. By late February, as American health officials were almost unanimously downplaying the threat, we wrote posts on taking the disease seriously, buying masks, and preparing for quarantine.
Throughout March, the CDC was telling people not to wear masks and not to get tested unless displaying symptoms. At the same time, Rationalists were already covering every relevant angl…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
On Caring by So8res
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: On Caring, published by So8res on the LessWrong.
This is an essay describing some of my motivation to be an effective altruist. It is crossposted from my blog. Many of the ideas here are quite similar to others found in the sequences. I have a slightly different take, and after adjusting for the typical mind fallacy I expect that this post may contain insights that are new to many.
1
I'm not very good at feeling the size of large numbers. Once you start tossing around numbers larger than 1000 (or maybe even 100), the numbers just seem "big".
Consider Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. If you told me that Sirius is as big as a million earths, I would feel like that's a lot of Earths. If, instead, you told me that you could fit a billion Earths inside Sirius. I would still just feel like that's a lot of Earths.
The feeli…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism , published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Previously in series: My Way
Followup to: The Sin of Underconfidence
Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.
Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)
So the garden is tainted now, and it is…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Debate on Instrumental Convergence between LeCun, Russell, Bengio, Zador, and More by Ben Pace
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Debate on Instrumental Convergence between LeCun, Russell, Bengio, Zador, and More , published by Ben Pace on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
An actual debate about instrumental convergence, in a public space! Major respect to all involved, especially Yoshua Bengio for great facilitation.
For posterity (i.e. having a good historical archive) and further discussion, I've reproduced the conversation here. I'm happy to make edits at the request of anyone in the discussion who is quoted below. I've improved formatting for clarity and fixed some typos. For people who are not researchers in this area who wish to comment, see the public version of this post here. For people who do work on the relevant areas, please sign up in the top right. It will take a day or so t…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Limits of Current US Prediction Markets (PredictIt Case Study) by aphyer
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Limits of Current US Prediction Markets (PredictIt Case Study), published by aphyer on the LessWrong.
(Disclaimers: I work in the financial industry, though not in a way related to prediction markets. Anything I write here is my opinion and not that of my employer.
This is a US-centric piece based on a case study of PredictIt: as some people have pointed out in the comments below, if you are outside the US you may have substantially better options.)
SECTION I: INTRODUCTION
So there's an argument that I've seen a lot over the past few years, particularly in LW-adjacent circles, that goes something like this:
You say you believe X is likely to happen. But prediction markets say X is likely not to happen. Since markets are efficient, you must be wrong. Or if you do know better than the market, why aren't you rich? Since you haven't…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The LessWrong 2018 Book is Available for Pre-order by Ben Pace, jacobjacob
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The LessWrong 2018 Book is Available for Pre-order, published by Ben Pace, jacobjacobon the LessWrong.
For the first time, you can now buy the best new ideas on LessWrong in a physical book set, titled:
A Map that Reflects the Territory: Essays by the LessWrong Community
It is available for pre-order here.
The standard advice for creating things is "show, don't tell", so first some images of the books, followed by a short FAQ by me (Ben).
The full five-book set. Yes, that’s the iconic Mississippi river flowing across the spines.
Each book has a unique color.
The first book: Epistemology.
The second book: Agency.
The third book: Coordination.
The fourth book: Curiosity.
The fifth book: Alignment.
FAQ
What exactly is in the book set?
LessWrong has an annual Review process (the second of which is beginning today!) to determine th…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Scope Insensitivity by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Scope Insensitivity, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2,000 / 20,000 / 200,000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88.1 This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved—the scope of the altruistic action—had little effect on willingness to pay.
Similar experiments showed that Toronto residents would pay little more to clean up all polluted lakes in Ontario than polluted lakes in a particular region of Ontario, or that residents of four western US states would pay only 28% more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in those states than to protect a single area.2 People visualize “a single exhausted bird, its feathers soaked in black oil, u…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Procedural Knowledge Gaps by Alicorn
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Procedural Knowledge Gaps, published by Alicorn on the LessWrong.
I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Some AI research areas and their relevance to existential safety by Andrew_Critch
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Some AI research areas and their relevance to existential safety, published by Andrew_Critch on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
Followed by: What Multipolar Failure Looks Like, and Robust Agent-Agnostic Processes (RAAPs), which provides examples of multi-stakeholder/multi-agent interactions leading to extinction events.
Introduction
This post is an overview of a variety of AI research areas in terms of how much I think contributing to and/or learning from those areas might help reduce AI x-risk. By research areas I mean “AI research topics that already have groups of people working on them and writing up their results”, as opposed to research “directions” in which I’d like to see these areas “move”.
I formed these views mostly pursuant to writing…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Announcing the Alignment Research Center by paulfchristiano
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Announcing the Alignment Research Center, published by paulfchristiano on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
(Cross-post from ai-alignment.com)
I’m now working full-time on the Alignment Research Center (ARC), a new non-profit focused on intent alignment research.
I left OpenAI at the end of January and I’ve spent the last few months planning, doing some theoretical research, doing some logistical set-up, and taking time off.
For now it’s just me, focusing on theoretical research. I’m currently feeling pretty optimistic about this work: I think there’s a good chance that it will yield big alignment improvements within the next few years, and a good chance that those improvements will be integrated into practice at leading ML labs.
My current goal is to…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elgans After 10 Years by niconiconi
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elgans After 10 Years, published by niconiconi on the LessWrong.
Since the early 21st century, some transhumanist proponents and futuristic researchers claim that Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) is not merely science fiction - although still hypothetical, it's said to be a potentially viable technology in the near future. Such beliefs attracted significant fanfare in tech communities such as LessWrong.
In 2011 at LessWrong, jefftk did a literature review on the emulation of a worm, C. elegans, as an indicator of WBE research progress.
Because the human brain is so large, and we are so far from having the technical capacity to scan or emulate it, it's difficult to evaluate progress. Some other organisms, however, have much smaller brains: the nematode C. elegans has only 302 cells in its entir…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Slack by Zvi
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Slack, published by Zvi on the LessWrong.
Epistemic Status: Reference post. Strong beliefs strongly held after much thought, but hard to explain well. Intentionally abstract.
Disambiguation: This does not refer to any physical good, app or piece of software.
Further Research (book, recommended but not at all required, take seriously but not literally): The Book of the Subgenius
Related (from sam[ ]zdat, recommended but not required, take seriously and also literally, entire very long series also recommended): The Uruk Machine
Further Reading (book): Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
Previously here (not required): Play in Hard Mode, Play in Easy Mode, Out to Get You
Leads to (I’ve been scooped! Somewhat.): Sabbath Hard and Go Home
An illustrative little game: Carpe Diem: The Problem of Scarcity and Abundance
Slack…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The Rocket Alignment Problem by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Rocket Alignment Problem, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
The following is a fictional dialogue building off of AI Alignment: Why It’s Hard, and Where to Start.
(Somewhere in a not-very-near neighboring world, where science took a very different course.)
ALFONSO: Hello, Beth. I’ve noticed a lot of speculations lately about “spaceplanes” being used to attack cities, or possibly becoming infused with malevolent spirits that inhabit the celestial realms so that they turn on their own engineers.
I’m rather skeptical of these speculations. Indeed, I’m a bit skeptical that airplanes will be able to even rise as high as stratospheric weather balloons anytime in the next century. But I understand that your institute wa…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Have epistemic conditions always been this bad? by Wei_Dai
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Have epistemic conditions always been this bad?, published by Wei_Dai on the LessWrong.
In the last few months, I've gotten increasingly alarmed by leftist politics in the US, and the epistemic conditions that it operates under and is imposing wherever it gains power. (Quite possibly the conditions are just as dire on the right, but they are not as visible or salient to me, because most of the places I can easily see, either directly or through news stories, i.e., local politics in my area, academia, journalism, large corporations, seem to have been taken over by the left.)
I'm worried that my alarmism is itself based on confirmation bias, tribalism, catastrophizing, or any number of other biases. (It confuses me that I seem to be the first person to talk much about this on either LW or EA Forum, given that there must be people…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The case for aligning narrowly superhuman models by Ajeya Cotra
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The case for aligning narrowly superhuman models, published by Ajeya Cotra on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
I wrote this post to get people’s takes on a type of work that seems exciting to me personally; I’m not speaking for Open Phil as a whole. Institutionally, we are very uncertain whether to prioritize this (and if we do where it should be housed and how our giving should be structured). We are not seeking grant applications on this topic right now.
Thanks to Daniel Dewey, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Evan Hubinger, Holden Karnofsky, Jared Kaplan, Mike Levine, Nick Beckstead, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Paul Christiano, Rob Bensinger, and Rohin Shah for comments on earlier drafts.
A genre of technical AI risk reduction work that seems exciting to me is trying to alig…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Privileging the Question by Qiaochu_Yuan
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Privileging the Question, published by Qiaochu_Yuan on the LessWrong.
Related to: Privileging the Hypothesis
Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.
-- Paul Graham
There's an old saying in the public opinion business: we can't tell people what to think, but we can tell them what to think about.
-- Doug Henwood
Many philosophers—particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient philosophers—share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it.
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Here a…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The 5-Second Level by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The 5-Second Level, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
To develop methods of teaching rationality skills, you need to learn to focus on mental events that occur in 5 seconds or less. Most of what you want to teach is directly on this level; the rest consists of chaining together skills on this level.
As our first example, let's take the vital rationalist skill, "Be specific."
Even with people who've had moderate amounts of exposure to Less Wrong, a fair amount of my helping them think effectively often consists of my saying, "Can you give me a specific example of that?" or "Can you be more concrete?"
A couple of formative childhood readings that taught me to be specific:
"What is meant by the word red?"
"It's a color."
"What's a color?"
"Why, it's a quality things have."
"What's a quality?"
"Say, what are you tryin…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The 3 Books Technique for Learning a New Skilll by Matt Goldenberg
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is:The 3 Books Technique for Learning a New Skilll, published by Matt Goldenberg on the LESSWRONG.
When I'm learning a new skill, there's a technique I often use to quickly gain the basics of the new skill without getting drowned in the plethora of resources that exist. I've found that just 3 resources that cover the skill from 3 separate viewpoints(along with either daily practice or a project) is enough to quickly get all the pieces I need to learn the new skill.
I'm partial to books, so I've called this The 3 Books Technique, but feel free to substitute books for courses, mentors, or videos as needed.
The "What" Book
The "What" book is used as reference material. It should be a thorough resource that gives you a broad overview of your skill. If you run into a novel situation, you should be able to go to this book and get the info…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Realism about rationality Richard_Ngo
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Realism about rationality, published Richard_Ngo on the LESSWRONG.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
This is a linkpost for http://thinkingcomplete.blogspot.com/2018/09/rational-and-real.html
Epistemic status: trying to vaguely gesture at vague intuitions. A similar idea was explored here under the heading "the intelligibility of intelligence", although I hadn't seen it before writing this post. As of 2020, I consider this follow-up comment to be a better summary of the thing I was trying to convey with this post than the post itself.
There’s a mindset which is common in the rationalist community, which I call “realism about rationality” (the name being intended as a parallel to moral realism). I feel like my skepticism about agent foundations research is closely tied to…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The EMH Aten't Dead by Richard Meadows
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The EMH Aten't Dead, published by Richard Meadows on the LessWrong.
Cross-posting from my personal blog, but written primarily for Less Wrong after recent discussion here.
There are whispers that the Efficient-Market Hypothesis is dead. Eliezer's faith has been shaken. Scott says EMH may have been the real victim of the coronavirus.
The EMH states that “asset prices reflect all available information”. The direct implication is that if you don’t have any non-available information, you shouldn’t expect to be able to beat the market, except by chance.
But some people were able to preempt the corona crash, without any special knowledge! Jacob mentioned selling some of his stocks before the market reacted. Wei Dai bought out-of-the-money 'put' options, and took a very handsome profit. Others shorted the market.
These people w…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
DARPA Digital Tutor: Four Months to Total Technical Expertise?by JohnBuridan
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: DARPA Digital Tutor: Four Months to Total Technical Expertise?, published by JohnBuridan on the LessWrong.
DARPA spent a few million dollars around 2009 to create the world’s best digital tutoring system for IT workers in the Navy. I am going to explain their results, the system itself, possible limitations, and where to go from here.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single nerd having read Ender’s Game must be in want of the Fantasy Game. The great draw of the Fantasy Game is that the game changes with the player and reflects the needs of the learner growing dynamically with him/her. This dream of the student is best realized in the world of tutoring, which while not as fun, is known to be very, very effective. Individualized instruction can make students jump to the 98 percentile compared to non tutored studen…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Notes on The Anthropology of Childhood by juliawise
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio..
This is: Notes on The Anthropology of Childhood, published by juliawise on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from The Whole Sky.
I read David Lancy’s “The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, and Changelings” and highlighted some passages. A lot of passages, it turns out.
[content note: discussion of abortion and infanticide, including infanticide of children with disabilities, in “Life and Death” section but not elsewhere]
I was a sociology major and understood anthropology to be basically “like sociology, but in Papua New Guinea.” This is the first cultural anthropology book I’ve read, and that was pretty much right. I found it very accessible as a first dive into anthropology. The first chapter summarizes all his points without the examples, so you could try that if you want to get the gist without reading the whole…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious terms by Kaj_Sotala
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious terms, published by Kaj_Sotala on the LessWrong.
Epistemic status: pretty confident. Based on several years of meditation experience combined with various pieces of Buddhist theory as popularized in various sources, including but not limited to books like The Mind Illuminated, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and The Seeing That Frees; also discussions with other people who have practiced meditation, and scatterings of cognitive psychology papers that relate to the topic. The part that I’m the least confident of is the long-term nature of enlightenment; I’m speculating on what comes next based on what I’ve experienced, but have not actually had a full enlightenment. I also suspect that different kinds of traditions and practic…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Act of Charity by jessicata
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Act of Charity , published by jessicata on the LessWrong.
(Cross-posted from my blog)
The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.
Anonymous
Act I.
Carl walked through the downtown. He came across a charity stall. The charity worker at the stall called out, "Food for the Africans. Helps with local autonomy and environmental sustainability. Have a heart and help them out." Carl glanced at the stall's poster. Along with pictures of emaciated children, it displayed infographics about how global warming would cause problems for African communities' food production, and numbers about how easy it is to help out with money. But something caught Carl's eye. In the top left, in bold font, the poster read, "IT IS ALL AN ACT. ASK FOR DETAILS."
Carl…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Birds, Brains, Planes, and AI: Against Appeals to the Complexity/Mysteriousness/Efficiency of the Brain by Daniel Kokotajlo
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Birds, Brains, Planes, and AI: Against Appeals to the Complexity/Mysteriousness/Efficiency of the Brain, published by Daniel Kokotajlo on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
[Epistemic status: Strong opinions lightly held, this time with a cool graph.]
I argue that an entire class of common arguments against short timelines is bogus, and provide weak evidence that anchoring to the human-brain-human-lifetime milestone is reasonable.
In a sentence, my argument is that the complexity and mysteriousness and efficiency of the human brain (compared to artificial neural nets) is almost zero evidence that building TAI will be difficult, because evolution typically makes things complex and mysterious and efficient, even when there are simple, easily understood, inefficient…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Maximizing Your Donations via a Job by Alexei
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Maximizing Your Donations via a Job, published by Alexei on the LessWrong.
In November of 2012 I set a goal for myself: find the most x-risk reducing role I can fill. At first I thought it would be by working directly with MIRI, but after a while it became clear that I could contribute more by simply donating. So my goal became: find the highest paying job, so I can donate lots of money to CFAR and MIRI.
A little bit of background on me. Started programming in 2000. Graduated in 2009 with Bachelor's in computer science. Worked for about a year and a half at a game company. Then did my own game startup for about a year. Then moved to the bay area and joined a game startup here, which was acquired 10 months later. Worked a bit at the new company and then left. So, just under four years of professional programming experience, but p…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Motive Ambiguity by Zvi
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Motive Ambiguity, published by Zvi on the LessWrong.
Central theme in: Immoral Mazes Sequence, but this generalizes.
When looking to succeed, pain is not the unit of effort, and money is a, if not the, unit of caring.
One is not always looking to succeed.
Here is a common type of problem.
You are married, and want to take your spouse out to a romantic dinner. You can choose the place your spouse loves best, or the place you love best.
A middle manager is working their way up the corporate ladder, and must choose how to get the factory to improve its production of widgets. A middle manager must choose how to improve widget production. He can choose a policy that improperly maintains the factory and likely eventually it poisons the water supply, or a policy that would prevent that but at additional cost.
A politician can choose be…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed, published by AnnaSalamon on the LessWrong.
Related to: Half-assing it with everything you've got; Wasted motion; Say it Loud.
Once upon a time (true story), I was on my way to a hotel in a new city. I knew the hotel was many miles down this long, branchless road. So I drove for a long while.
After a while, I began to worry I had passed the hotel.
So, instead of proceeding at 60 miles per hour the way I had been, I continued in the same direction for several more minutes at 30 miles per hour, wondering if I should keep going or turn around.
After a while, I realized: I was being silly! If the hotel was ahead of me, I'd get there fastest if I kept going 60mph. And if the hotel was behind me, I'd get there fastest by heading at 60 miles per hour in the other direction. And if I…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
A Year of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom by tanagrabeast
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A Year of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom, published by tanagrabeast on the LessWrong.
Last year, I asked LW for some advice about spaced repetition software (SRS) that might be useful to me as a high school teacher. With said advice came a request to write a follow-up after I had accumulated some experience using SRS in the classroom. This is my report.
Please note that this was not a scientific experiment to determine whether SRS "works." Prior studies are already pretty convincing on this point and I couldn't think of a practical way to run a control group or "blind" myself. What follows is more of an informal debriefing for how I used SRS during the 2014-15 school year, my insights for others who might want to try it, and how the experience is changing how I teach.
Summary
SRS can raise student achievement even w…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Hindsight Devalues Science by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Hindsight Devalues Science, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
This essay is closely based on an excerpt from Meyers’s Exploring Social Psychology; the excerpt is worth reading in its entirety.
Cullen Murphy, editor of The Atlantic, said that the social sciences turn up “no ideas or conclusions that can’t be found in [any] encyclopedia of quotations . . . Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people’s behavior is pretty much what you’d expect.”
Of course, the “expectation” is all hindsight. (Hindsight bias: Subjects who know the actual answer to a question assign much higher probabilities they “would have” guessed for that answer, compared to subjects who must guess without knowing the answer.)
The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. dismissed scie…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Beware Trivial Inconveniences by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Beware Trivial Inconveniences, published by Scott Alexander on the LessWrong.
The Great Firewall of China. A massive system of centralized censorship purging the Chinese version of the Internet of all potentially subversive content. Generally agreed to be a great technical achievement and political success even by the vast majority of people who find it morally abhorrent.
I spent a few days in China. I got around it at the Internet cafe by using a free online proxy. Actual Chinese people have dozens of ways of getting around it with a minimum of technical knowledge or just the ability to read some instructions.
The Chinese government isn't losing any sleep over this (although they also don't lose any sleep over murdering political dissidents, so maybe they're just very sound sleepers). Their theory is that by making it a little…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Goodhart Taxonomy by Scott Garrabrant
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Goodhart Taxonomy, published by Scott Garrabrant on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
Goodhart’s Law states that "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." However, this is not a single phenomenon. I propose that there are (at least) four different mechanisms through which proxy measures break when you optimize for them.
The four types are Regressional, Causal, Extremal, and Adversarial. In this post, I will go into detail about these four different Goodhart effects using mathematical abstractions as well as examples involving humans and/or AI. I will also talk about how you can mitigate each effect.
Throughout the post, I will use
V
to refer to the true goal and use
U
to refer to a proxy f…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough by Academian
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough, published by Academian on the LessWrong.
Disclaimer: This post was written time-boxed to 2 hours because I think LessWrong can still understand and improve upon it; please don't judge me harshly for it.
Summary: I am generally dismayed that many people seem to think or assume that only three levels of social metacognition matter ("Alex knows that Bailey knows that Charlie knows X"), or otherwise seem generally averse to unrolling those levels. This post is intended to point out (1) how the higher levels systematically get distilled and chunked into smaller working memory elements through social learning, which leads to emotional tracking of phenomena at 6 levels of meta and higher, and (2) what I think this means about how to approach conflict resolution.
Epist…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
[Link] Still Alive - Astral Codex Ten by jimrandomh
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: [Link] Still Alive - Astral Codex Ten, published by jimrandomh on the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for
I.
This was a triumph
I'm making a note here, huge success
No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.
I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year.
The…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean? by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean?, published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a specific time period. - Wikipedia, GDP
Due to inflation, GDP increases and does not actually reflect the true growth in an economy. That is why the GDP must be divided by the inflation rate (raised to the power of units of time in which the rate is measured) to get the growth of the real GDP. - Wikipedia, Real GDP
The two quotes above reflect how I used to think about real GDP growth: it’s roughly the growth in economic production (as measured by dollar worth of outputs), discounted for inflation. This picture turns out to be extremely misleading, especially when using GDP as a growth measure. Forget complaints about how GD…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Money: The Unit of Caring by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Money: The Unit of Caring, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Steve Omohundro has suggested a folk theorem to the effect that, within the interior of any approximately rational, self-modifying agent, the marginal benefit of investing additional resources in anything ought to be about equal. Or, to put it a bit more exactly, shifting a unit of resource between any two tasks should produce no increase in expected utility, relative to the agent's utility function and its probabilistic expectations about its own algorithms.
This resource balance principle implies that—over a very wide range of approximately rational systems, including even the interior of a self-modifying mind—there will exist some common currency of expected utilons, by which everything worth doing can be measured.
In our society, this common curr…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Steelmanning Divination by Vaniver
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Steelmanning Divination, published by Vaniver on the LessWrong.
[This post was primarily written in 2015, after I gave a related talk, and other bits in 2018; I decided to finish writing it now because of a recent SSC post.]
The standard forms of divination that I’ve seen in contemporary Western culture--astrology, fortune cookies, lotteries, that sort of thing--seem pretty worthless to me. They’re like trying to extract information from a random number generator, which is a generally hopeless phenomenon because of conservation of expected evidence. Thus I had mostly written off divination; although I've come across some arguments that divination served as a way to implement mixed strategies in competitive games. (Hunters would decide where to hunt by burning bones, which generated an approximately random map of their locati…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
On learning difficult things by So8res
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: On learning difficult things, published by So8res on the LessWrong.
I have been autodidacting quite a bit lately. You may have seen my reviews of books on the MIRI course list. I've been going for about ten weeks now. This post contains my notes about the experience thus far.
Much of this may seem obvious, and would have seemed obvious if somebody had told me in advance. But nobody told me in advance. As such, this is a collection of things that were somewhat surprising at the time.
Part of the reason I'm posting this is because I don't know a lot of autodidacts, and I'm not sure how normal any of my experiences are. (Though on average, I'd guess they're about average.) As always, keep in mind that I am only one person and that your mileage may vary.
Pair up
When I began my quest for more knowledge, I figured that in this modern…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Inadequate Equilibria vs. Governance of the Commons by Martin Sustrik
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Inadequate Equilibria vs. Governance of the Commons, published by Martin Sustrik on the LessWrong.
This is a cross post from http://250bpm.com/blog:128.
Introduction
In the past I've reviewed Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Inadequate Equilibria" book. My main complaint was that while it explains the problem of suboptimal Nash equilibria very well, it doesn't propose any solutions. Instead, it says that we should be aware of such coordination failures and we should expect ourselves to fare better than the official institutions in such cases. What Yudkowsky is saying (if I understand him correctly) is that given that the treatment of short bowel syndrome in babies is stuck in an inadequate equilibrium, there's no way to fix the problem on the system level. However, you can spot the problem and acquire the medication needed to keep your kid…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Mundane Magic by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Mundane Magic, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
As you may recall from some months earlier, I think that part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe—a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic—and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.
There's an old trick for combating dukkha where you make a list of things you're grateful for, like a roof over your head.
So why not make a list of abilities you have that would be amazingly cool if they were magic, or if only a few chosen individuals had them?
For example, suppose that instead of one eye, you possessed a magical second eye embedded in your forehead. And this second eye enabled yo…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Social behavior curves, equilibria, and radicalism by UnexpectedValues
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Social behavior curves, equilibria, and radicalism, published by UnexpectedValues on the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for/
I.
Here are some hypotheticals to consider, with a common theme. Note that in each case I’m asking what you would do, rather than what you should do.
In the fall, COVID cases drop to 10% of their current level. You’re back to working/studying in person. You’re vaccinated, as is everyone else. Mask-wearing isn’t required, but 25% of your co-workers wear one anyway. Would you wear a mask too? What if 75% of your co-workers wear a mask? What if it’s literally everyone else?
You’re having dinner with a party of 10 at a Chinese restaurant. Everyone else is using chop sticks. You know how to use chop sticks but prefer a fork. Do you ask for a fork? What if two other people are using a fork?
(Inspired…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Why indoor lighting is hard to get right and how to fix it by Richard Korzekwa
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Why indoor lighting is hard to get right and how to fix it, published by Richard Korzekwa on the LessWrong.
The days are getting shorter in the northern hemisphere, and with the ongoing pandemic, most of us expect to be spending more time in our homes than normal. Creating a healthy home environment is more important than usual, and the light inside your home is an often underappreciated part of this.
There has already been some explicit discussion[1] about the importance of lighting for health and productivity, as well as many mentions of it in other places. Nonetheless, based on discussions I've had recently within the community, I get the impression that it is helpful for me to write up the results and tinkering that have done over the past few years.
First, I will cover some of the research on how our bodies respond to light…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Levels of Action by alyssavance
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Levels of Action, published by alyssavance on the LessWrong.
One of the most useful concepts I have learned recently is the distinction between actions which directly improve the world, and actions which indirectly improve the world.
Suppose that you go onto Mechanical Turk, open an account, and spend a hundred hours transcribing audio. At current market rates, you'd get paid around $100 for your labor. By taking this action, you have made yourself $100 wealthier. This is an example of what I'd call a Level 1 or object-level action: something that directly moves the world from a less desirable state into a more desirable state.
On the other hand, suppose you take a typing class, which teaches you to type twice as fast. On the object level, this doesn't move the world into a better state- nothing about the world has changed, othe…
playlist_add
Dec 12, 2021
Cheat to Win: Engineering Positive Social Feedback by sarahconstantin
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Cheat to Win: Engineering Positive Social Feedback, published by sarahconstantin on the LessWrong.
This post outlines a very simple strategy that's been working for me lately. It may be obvious to some, but it only clicked for me recently.
Positive social stimulation is fun for humans, right? We like to be liked. It makes us cheerful. We're motivated to do things that make people smile at us and praise us.
But purely optimizing for being liked is a bad idea for lots of reasons: it leads away from your real goals and values, it motivates you to be deceptive, it's kind of shallow and unsatisfying in the long run.
So here's what you do instead: first, decide what you actually want to do. Then, seek out people who will socially reward you for doing that, and set yourself up to get social rewards.
Marketing experts will tell you that…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Rationalist Community Hub in Moscow: 3 Years Retrospective by berekuk
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Rationalist Community Hub in Moscow: 3 Years Retrospective, published by berekuk on the LessWrong.
Short summary: Moscow rationalist community is organized around a local venue called Kocherga. Kocherga hosts 40–50 rationality-adjacent events per month, teaches a few dozen people per year in CFAR-style applied rationality workshops, and has ambitious plans for further growth.
We on the verge of becoming profitable, but we need some funding to stay afloat. We're launching a Patreon page today.
This post is a long overdue report on the state of LessWrong Russia community and specifically on the Kocherga community space in Moscow. This post is also a call for donations.
Russian LessWrong community has existed for many years now, but there wasn't much info on lesswrong.com about how we're doing. The last general report by Yuu was…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Noticing Frame Differences by Raemon
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Noticing Frame Differences, published by Raemon on the LessWrong.
Previously: Keeping Beliefs Cruxy
When disagreements persist despite lengthy good-faith communication, it may not just be about factual disagreements – it could be due to people operating in entirely different frames — different ways of seeing, thinking and/or communicating.
If you can’t notice when this is happening, or you don’t have the skills to navigate it, you may waste a lot of time.
Examples of Broad Frames
Gears-oriented Frames
Bob and Alice’s conversation is about cause and effect. Neither of them are planning to take direct actions based on their conversation, they’re each just interested in understanding a particular domain better.
Bob has a model of the domain that includes gears A, B, C and D. Alice has a model that includes gears C, D an…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
The ground of optimization by alexflint
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The ground of optimization, published by alexflint on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
This work was supported by OAK, a monastic community in the Berkeley hills. This document could not have been written without the daily love of living in this beautiful community. The work involved in writing this cannot be separated from the sitting, chanting, cooking, cleaning, crying, correcting, fundraising, listening, laughing, and teaching of the whole community.
What is optimization? What is the relationship between a computational optimization process — say, a computer program solving an optimization problem — and a physical optimization process — say, a team of humans building a house?
We propose the concept of an optimizing system as a physically closed system…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Power dynamics as a blind spot or blurry spot in our collective world-modeling, especially around AI by Andrew_Critch
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Power dynamics as a blind spot or blurry spot in our collective world-modeling, especially around AI, published by Andrew_Critch on LessWrong.
Where I’m coming from
Epistemic status: personal experience
In a number of prior posts, and in ARCHES, I’ve argued that more existential safety consideration is needed on the topic of multi-principal/multi-agent (multi/multi) dynamics among powerful AI systems.
In general, I have found it much more difficult to convince thinkers within and around LessWrong’s readership base to attend to multi/multi dynamics, as opposed to, say, convincing generally morally conscious AI researchers who are not (yet) closely associated with the effective altruism or rationality communities.
Because EA/rationality discourse is particularly concerned with maintaining good epistemic processes, I think it…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies, published by Scott Alexander on LessWrong.
Followup to: Yudkowsky and Frank on Religious Experience, Yudkowksy and Frank On Religious Experience Pt 2
With sincere apologies to: Mike Godwin
You are General Eisenhower. It is 1945. The Allies have just triumphantly liberated Berlin. As the remaining leaders of the old regime are being tried and executed, it begins to become apparent just how vile and despicable the Third Reich truly was.
In the midst of the chaos, a group of German leaders come to you with a proposal. Nazism, they admit, was completely wrong. Its racist ideology was false and its consequences were horrific. However, in the bleak poverty of post-war Germany, people need to keep united somehow. They need something to believe in. And a whole generation of them have been raised on Nazi…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Discontinuous progress in history: an update by KatjaGrace
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Discontinuous progress in history: an update, published by KatjaGrace on LessWrong.
I. The search for discontinuities
We’ve been looking for historic cases of discontinuously fast technological progress, to help with reasoning about the likelihood and consequences of abrupt progress in AI capabilities. We recently finished expanding this investigation to 37 technological trends.1 This blog post is a quick update on our findings. See the main page on the research and its outgoing links for more details.
We found ten events in history that abruptly and clearly contributed more to progress on some technological metric than another century would have seen on the previous trend.2 Or as we say, we found ten events that produced ‘large’, ‘robust’ ‘discontinuities’.
How we measure the size of a discontinuity (by Rick Korze…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Literature Review For Academic Outsiders: What, How, and Why by namespace
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Literature Review For Academic Outsiders: What, How, and Why , published by namespace on LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for
A few years ago I wrote a comment on LessWrong about how most authors on the site probably don't know how to do a literature review:
On the one hand, I too resent that LW is basically an insight porn factory near completely devoid of scholarship.
On the other hand, this is not a useful comment. I can think of at least two things you could have done to make this a useful comment:
Specified even a general direction of where you feel the body of economic literature could have been engaged. I know you might resent doing someone elses research for them if you’re n…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Six economics misconceptions of mine which I've resolved over the last few years by Buck
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Six economics misconceptions of mine which I've resolved over the last few years, published by Buck on the effective altruism forum.
Here are six cases where I was pretty confident in my understanding of the microeconomics of something, but then later found out I was missing an important consideration.
Thanks to Richard Ngo and Tristan Hume for helpful comments.
Here’s the list of mistakes:
I thought divesting from a company had no effect on the company.
I thought that the prices on a prediction market converged to the probabilities of the underlying event.
I thought that I shouldn’t expect to be able to make better investment decisions than buying index funds.
I had a bad understanding of externalities, which was improved by learning about Coase’s theorem.
I didn’t realize that regulations like minimum wages are analogo…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Thiel on Progress and Stagnation by Richard_Ngo
Welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: Thiel on Progress and Stagnation, published by Richard_Ngo on the effective altruism forum.
This is a linkpost for
Peter Thiel is one of the most exciting and original thinkers of our era, but many of his opinions are scattered across a range of talks and articles. So Jeremy Nixon and I have put together an organised presentation of his views on progress and stagnation, in his own words. The full document, which is a little over 100 pages, is here; below I've listed some of his key quotes.
While I don't agree with all of his opinions, I've found many of them very insightful and valuable. I'm particularly interested in understanding how to reconcile his views on stagnation with the sort of accelerationist view of technological progress portrayed here and elsewhere.
Key quotes:
When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of th…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Speaking of Stag Hunts by Duncan_Sabien
Welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: Speaking of Stag Hunts, published by Duncan_Sabien on the effective altruism forum.
This is an essay about the current state of the LessWrong community, and the broader EA/rationalist/longtermist communities that it overlaps and bridges, inspired mostly by the dynamics around these three posts. The concepts and claims laid out in Concentration of Force, which was originally written as part one of this essay, are important context for the thoughts below.
Summary/thesis, mostly cribbed from user anon03's comment below: In many high-importance and high-emotion discussions on LessWrong, the comments and vote distribution seem very soldier-mindset instead of scout-mindset, and the overall soundness and carefulness of reasoning and discourse seems to me to be much lower than baseline, which already felt a smidge too low. This seems to…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Biases: An Introduction by Rob Bensinger
Welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: Biases: An Introduction, published by Rob Bensinger on the effective altruism forum.
Imagine reaching into an urn that contains seventy white balls and thirty red ones, and plucking out ten mystery balls.
Perhaps three of the ten balls will be red, and you’ll correctly guess how many red balls total were in the urn. Or perhaps you’ll happen to grab four red balls, or some other number. Then you’ll probably get the total number wrong.
This random error is the cost of incomplete knowledge, and as errors go, it’s not so bad. Your estimates won’t be incorrect on average, and the more you learn, the smaller your error will tend to be.
On the other hand, suppose that the white balls are heavier, and sink to the bottom of the urn. Then your sample may be unrepresentative in a consistent direction.
That kind of error is called…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Technological stagnation: Why I came around by jasoncrawford
Welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: Technological stagnation: Why I came around, published by jasoncrawford on the effective altruism forum.
This is a linkpost for
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” says Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, expressing a sort of jaded disappointment with technological progress. (The fact that the 140 characters have become 280, a 100% increase, does not seem to have impressed him.)
Thiel, along with economists such as Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth), promotes a “stagnation hypothesis”: that there has been a significant slowdown in scientific, technological, and economic progress in recent decades—say, for a round number, since about 1970, or the last ~50 years.
When I first heard the stagnation hypothesis, I was skeptical. The arguments weren’t c…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus by AnnaSalamon
Welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus, published by AnnaSalamon on the LessWrong.
Epistemic status: My actual best bet. But I used to think differently; and I don't know how to fully explicate the updating I did (I'm not sure what fully formed argument I could give my past self, that would cause her to update), so you should probably be somewhat suspicious of this until explicated. And/or you should help me explicate it.
It seems to me that:
The world is locked right now in a deadly puzzle, and needs something like a miracle of good thought if it is to have the survival odds one might wish the world to have.
Despite all priors and appearances, our little community (the "aspiring rationality" community; the "effective altruist" project; efforts to create an existential win; etc.) has a shot at se…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Book Review: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Book Review: Design Principles of Biological Circuits, published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
I remember seeing a talk by a synthetic biologist, almost a decade ago. The biologist used a genetic algorithm to evolve an electronic circuit, something like this:
(source)
He then printed out the evolved circuit, brought it to his colleague in the electrical engineering department, and asked the engineer to analyze the circuit and figure out what it did.
“I refuse to analyze this circuit,” the colleague replied, “because it was not designed to be understandable by humans.” He has a point - that circuit is a big, opaque mess.
This, the biologist argued, is the root problem of biology: evolution builds things from random mutation, connecting things up without rhyme or reason, into one giant spaghetti tower. We can take it…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
An overview of 11 proposals for building safe advanced AI by evhub
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: An overview of 11 proposals for building safe advanced AI, published by evhub on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
This is the blog post version of the paper by the same name. Special thanks to Kate Woolverton, Paul Christiano, Rohin Shah, Alex Turner, William Saunders, Beth Barnes, Abram Demski, Scott Garrabrant, Sam Eisenstat, and Tsvi Benson-Tilsen for providing helpful comments and feedback on this post and the talk that preceded it.
This post is a collection of 11 different proposals for building safe advanced AI under the current machine learning paradigm. There's a lot of literature out there laying out various different approaches such as amplification, debate, or recursive reward modeling, but a lot of that literature focuses primarily on outer alignmen…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Yes Requires the Possibility of No by Scott Garrabrant
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Yes Requires the Possibility of No, published by Scott Garrabrant on the LessWrong.
1. A group wants to try an activity that really requires a lot of group buy in. The activity will not work as well if there is doubt that everyone really wants to do it. They establish common knowledge of the need for buy in. They then have a group conversation in which several people make comments about how great the activity is and how much they want to do it. Everyone wants to do the activity, but is aware that if they did not want to do the activity, it would be awkward to admit. They do the activity. It goes poorly.
2. Alice strongly wants to believe A. She searches for evidence of A. She implements a biased search, ignoring evidence against A. She finds justifications for her conclusion. She can then point to the justifications, and tell he…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Jeff Hawkins on neuromorphic AGI within 20 years by Steven Byrnes
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Jeff Hawkins on neuromorphic AGI within 20 years, published by Steven Byrnes on the LessWrong.
I just listened to AI podcast: Jeff Hawkins on the Thousand Brain Theory of Intelligence, and read some of the related papers. Jeff Hawkins is a theoretical neuroscientist; you may have heard of his 2004 book On Intelligence. Earlier, he had an illustrious career in EECS, including inventing the Palm Pilot. He now runs the company Numenta, which is dedicated to understanding how the human brain works (especially the neocortex), and using that knowledge to develop bio-inspired AI algorithms.
In no particular order, here are some highlights and commentary from the podcast and associated papers.
Every part of the neocortex is running the same algorithm
The neocortex is the outermost and most evolutionarily-recent layer of the mammalian br…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Three ways CFAR has changed my view of rationality by Julia_Galef
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Three ways CFAR has changed my view of rationality, published by Julia_Galef on the LessWrong.
The Center for Applied Rationality's perspective on rationality is quite similar to Less Wrong's. In particular, we share many of Less Wrong's differences from what's sometimes called "traditional" rationality, such as Less Wrong's inclusion of Bayesian probability theory and the science on heuristics and biases.
But after spending the last year and a half with CFAR as we've developed, tested, and attempted to teach hundreds of different versions of rationality techniques, I've noticed that my picture of what rationality looks like has shifted somewhat from what I perceive to be the most common picture of rationality on Less Wrong. Here are three ways I think CFAR has come to see the landscape of rationality differently than Less Wrong…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Rational Home Buying by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Rational Home Buying, published by Scott Alexander on the Lesswrong.
My parents are considering moving house. I've had a front-seat window to their decision process as they compare alternatives, and sometimes it isn't pretty.
A new house is one of the most important purchases most people will make. Because of the sums involved, the usual pitfalls of decision-making gain new importance, and it becomes especially important to make sure you're thinking rationally. Research in a couple of fields, most importantly positive psychology, offers some potentially helpful tips.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
People so consistently under-count the pain of commuting when making choices that the problem has its own name: Commuter's Paradox. The paradox is that, although rational choice theory predicts people should balance commuting against oth…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Noticing the Taste of Lotus by Valentine
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Noticing the Taste of Lotus, published by Valentine on the LessWrong.
Recently I started picking up French again. I remembered getting something out of Duolingo a few years ago, so I logged in.
Since the last time I was there, they added an “achievements” mechanic:
I noticed this by earning one. I think it was “Sharpshooter”. They gave me the first of three stars for something like doing five lessons without mistakes. In the “achievements” section, it showed me that I could earn the second star by doing twenty lessons in a row flawlessly.
And my brain cared.
I watched myself hungering to get the achievements. These arbitrary things that someone had just stuck on there. in order to get me to want them. I noticed that I could get the second and maybe third star of “Sharpshooter” by doing earlier lessons and googlin…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Growing Independence by jefftk
Welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: Growing Independence, published by jefftk on the LessWrong.
Write a Review
Note: this is based on my experience with my two kids, currently four and six. It may not generalize as much as I think it does.
People start out dependent on their parents for food, changing, contact, motion, and even sleep timing. Typically they end up as adults, no longer dependent on their parents at all. Part of my approach to parenting has been that I want to let my kids be as independent as possible, as early as possible. Not only does it make their lives better, because they can meet their own needs how they want, but it makes my life easier, because they can handle more on their own. Sometimes this involves a bit more effort up front, but I think it's substantially less effort in total.
Examples:
If Lily (6y) comes to me and says "Anna (4y) pushe…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
microCOVID.org: A tool to estimate COVID risk from common activities
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: microCOVID.org: A tool to estimate COVID risk from common activities, published by catherio on the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for/
This is a linkpost for a model and web tool (that I and several friends created) to quantitatively estimate the COVID risk to you from your ordinary daily activities:
This website contains three outputs of our work:
a web calculator that you can use to calculate your COVID risk (in units of microCOVIDs, a 1-in-a-million chance of getting COVID).
a white paper that explains our estimation method. EAs might be particularly interested in the footnotes throughout, and the detailed research sources section.
a spreadsheet to compute your COVID risk in more detail and to track your risk over time. EAs might find this more customizable and powerful than the web calculator.
If you have different beliefs th…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Concentration of Force by Duncan_Sabien
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Concentration of Force, published by Duncan_Sabien on the LessWrong.
This essay began as part one of a longer piece. Part one is standalone and "timeless." Part two is focused on the local dynamics of the EA/rationality/longtermist communities and LessWrong in November of 2021. Following wise advice from Zack_M_Davis, I've split them into two separate posts. Nevertheless, I recommend that people intending to read both seriously consider reading them back-to-back, so that the content of this one is fresh in the mind. It's both something of a prerequisite and also relevantly context-setting.
Introduction
Concentration of force is a military concept (sometimes referred to as "mass"). It used to be concentration of forces, until innovations like machine guns and cruise missiles made gathering all of your actual personnel together in…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way) by komponisto
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way), published by komponisto on the LessWrong.
(This post is elementary: it introduces a simple method of visualizing Bayesian calculations. In my defense, we've had other elementary posts before, and they've been found useful; plus, I'd really like this to be online somewhere, and it might as well be here.)
I'll admit, those Monty-Hall-type problems invariably trip me up. Or at least, they do if I'm not thinking very carefully -- doing quite a bit more work than other people seem to have to do.
What's more, people's explanations of how to get the right answer have almost never been satisfactory to me. If I concentrate hard enough, I can usually follow the reasoning, sort of; but I never quite "see it", and nor do I feel equipped to solve similar problems in the future: it's as if the solutions se…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
The mechanics of my recent productivity by So8res
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The mechanics of my recent productivity, published by So8res on the LessWrong.
A decade ago, I decided to save the world. I was fourteen, and the world certainly wasn't going to save itself.
I fumbled around for nine years; it's surprising how long one can fumble around. I somehow managed to miss the whole idea of existential risk and the whole concept of an intelligence explosion. I had plenty of other ideas in my head, and while I spent a lot of time honing them, I wasn't particularly looking for new ones.
A year ago, I finally read the LessWrong sequences. My road here was roundabout, almost comical. It took me a while to come to terms with the implications of what I'd read.
Five months ago, after resolving a few internal crises, I started donating to MIRI and studying math.
Three weeks ago, I attended the December MIRI works…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge by Ben Pace
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge, published by Ben Pace on the LessWrong.
Recently someone pointed out to me that there was no good canonical post that explained the use of common knowledge in society. Since I wanted to be able to link to such a post, I decided to try to write it.
The epistemic status of this post is that I hoped to provide an explanation for a standard, mainstream idea, in a concrete way that could be broadly understood rather than in a mathematical/logical fashion, and so the definitions should all be correct, though the examples in the latter half are more speculative and likely contain some inaccuracies.
Let's start with a puzzle. What do these three things have in common?
Dictatorships all through history have attempted to suppress freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Why is this…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence by abramdemski
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence, published by abramdemski on the LessWrong.
Epistemic Status: I've really spent some time wrestling with this one. I am highly confident in most of what I say. However, this differs from section to section. I'll put more specific epistemic statuses at the end of each section.
Some of this post is generated from mistakes I've seen people make (or, heard people complain about) in applying conservation-of-expected-evidence or related ideas. Other parts of this post are based on mistakes I made myself. I think that I used a wrong version of conservation-of-expected-evidence for some time, and propagated some wrong conclusions fairly deeply; so, this post is partly an attempt to work out the right conclusions for myself, and partly a warning to those who might make the same mistakes.
Al…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat by Martin Sustrik
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat, published Martin Sustrik on the LessWrong.
I have written about coordination problems from various points of view in the past (biology, economics, sociology, political science) but this time I am about to focus not on the theory, but on the practice.
Jean Monnet was one of the founding fathers of the European Union. One may even say that he was the architect of the European Union. However, as founding fathers go, he was rather unusual. His background was unusual: He was neither a political leader, nor a lawyer, a philosopher or a military commander. He was a son of a brandy merchant from the small town of Cognac near Bordeaux and himself a merchant by trade. He dropped out of school at sixteen and never got any extensive formal education.
But also his approach was unusual: He never held an e…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
The topic is not the content by aaronb50
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The topic is not the content, published by aaronb50 on the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for
Disclaimer: I’ve never held a job for more than a year [1] or been paid more than $15 an hour. Take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Many of my peers seem to make career plans like by asking things like
What am I interested in, or what do I like doing? and
How can I do something related to that?
which might lead to some of the following:
A person who likes dancing tries to work in the arts industry.
A person who likes video games tries to get into game design.
A person who is interested in healthcare policy tries to study or design healthcare policy.
The problem here, in terms of diminished performance, happiness, and satisfaction, is a conflation of the topic and the content. The topic is not the content!
The topic
In my schema,…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong, published by on the LessWrong.
Some reader is bound to declare that a better title for this post would be "37 Ways That You Can Use Words Unwisely", or "37 Ways That Suboptimal Use Of Categories Can Have Negative Side Effects On Your Cognition".
But one of the primary lessons of this gigantic list is that saying "There's no way my choice of X can be 'wrong'" is nearly always an error in practice, whatever the theory. You can always be wrong. Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong. There is never a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for anything you do. That's life.
Besides, I can define the word "wrong" to mean anything I like - it's not like a word can be wrong.
Personally, I think it quite justified to use the word "wrong" when:
A word fails to connect to reality in…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Are wireheads happy? by Scott Alexander
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Are wireheads happy?, published by Scott Alexander on the LessWrong.
Related to: Utilons vs. Hedons, Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up
And I don't mean that question in the semantic "but what is happiness?" sense, or in the deep philosophical "but can anyone not facing struggle and adversity truly be happy?" sense. I mean it in the totally literal sense. Are wireheads having fun?
They look like they are. People and animals connected to wireheading devices get upset when the wireheading is taken away and will do anything to get it back. And it's electricity shot directly into the reward center of the brain. What's not to like?
Only now neuroscientists are starting to recognize a difference between "reward" and "pleasure", or call it "wanting" and "liking". The two are usually closely correlated. You want something, you…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
[moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment by Kaj_Sotala
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment, published by Kaj_Sotala on the LessWrong.
As previously discussed, on June 6th I received a message from jackk, a Trike Admin. He reported that the user Jiro had asked Trike to carry out an investigation to the retributive downvoting that Jiro had been subjected to. The investigation revealed that the user Eugine_Nier had downvoted over half of Jiro's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes.
I asked the community's guidance on dealing with the issue, and while the matter was being discussed, I also reviewed previous discussions about mass downvoting and looked for other people who mentioned being the victims of it. I asked Jack to compile reports on several other users who mentioned having been mass-downvoted, and it turned out that Eugine was also o…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Chris Olah’s views on AGI safetyby evhub
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Chris Olah’s views on AGI safety, published by evhub on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
Note: I am not Chris Olah. This post was the result of lots of back-and-forth with Chris, but everything here is my interpretation of what Chris believes, not necessarily what he actually believes. Chris also wanted me to emphasize that his thinking is informed by all of his colleagues on the OpenAI Clarity team and at other organizations.
In thinking about AGI safety—and really any complex topic on which many smart people disagree—I’ve often found it very useful to build a collection of different viewpoints from people that I respect that I feel like I understand well enough to be able to think from their perspective. For example, I will often try to compare what a…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
A Personal (Interim) COVID-19 Postmortem by Davidmanheim
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A Personal (Interim) COVID-19 Postmortem, published by Davidmanheim on the LessWrong.
I think it's important to clearly and publicly admit when we were wrong. It's even better to diagnose why, and take steps to prevent doing so again. COVID-19 is far from over, but given my early stance on a number of questions regarding COVID-19, this is my attempt at a public personal review to see where I was wrong.
I have been pushing for better forecasting and preparation for pandemics for years, but I wasn't forecasting on the various specific questions about Pandemics on most platforms until at least mid-March, and I failed in several ways.
Mea Culpa
I was late to update about a number of things, and simply wrong in some cases even on the basis of known information. The failures include initially being slow to recognize the extent of the…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Draft report on AI timelines by Ajeya Cotra
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Draft report on AI timelines, published by Ajeya Cotra on the LessWrong.
Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
Hi all, I've been working on some AI forecasting research and have prepared a draft report on timelines to transformative AI. I would love feedback from this community, so I've made the report viewable in a Google Drive folder here.
With that said, most of my focus so far has been on the high-level structure of the framework, so the particular quantitative estimates are very much in flux and many input parameters aren't pinned down well -- I wrote the bulk of this report before July and have received feedback since then that I haven't fully incorporated yet. I'd prefer if people didn't share it widely in a low-bandwidth way (e.g., just posting key graphics on Facebook or…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Be Happier by [anonymous]
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Be Happier, published by [anonymous] on the LessWrong.
This started as an assignment to find out about the science of ‘buying happiness’ (using money to become happier) — hence the emphasis on money-and-happiness. I learned a great deal more than how to buy happiness, however, and the project became somewhat more generalized. It is not meant to be comprehensive, but perhaps it makes for a useful supplement to Luke’s How to be Happy. This post consists mostly of quoted material.
In A Nutshell
Money and Happiness
Spend on others, especially people you are close to. Positive feedback loop: Prosocial spending makes you happier, and happiness makes you more likely to spend prosocially.
Don’t be stingy. It's bad for your health.
Don’t think too much about money. It will impair your savoring ability. It's also bad for your…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Going Out With Dignity by Bjartur Tómas
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Going Out With Dignity, published by Bjartur Tómas on the LessWrong.
DF was born with a time bomb in his genome, a deadly curse more horrifying than most. The name of this curse was Fatal familial insomnia (FFI).
Wikipedia describes the usual progression of this hell:
The disease has four stages:[8]
Characterized by worsening insomnia, resulting in panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. This stage lasts for about four months.
Hallucinations and panic attacks become noticeable, continuing for about five months.
Complete inability to sleep is followed by rapid loss of weight. This lasts for about three months.
Dementia, during which the person becomes unresponsive or mute over the course of six months, is the final stage of the disease, after which death follows.
From the case report DF's psychologist wrote after his death:
DF was…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
The Best Software For Every Need by Bjartur Tómas
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: The Best Software For Every Need, published by Bjartur Tómas on the LessWrong.
When I first started programming, I didn't use a terminal multiplexer and finding tmux was a sort of revelation. I joked once on discord that "life before tmux was not life". It strikes me there are probably many other programs that I am not aware of that would be useful to know about.
I've occasionally found Luke's The Best Textbooks on Every Subject thread useful, so I thought a similar thread about software may be interesting.
Here are the rules:
Post the name of a program for a given need.
You must have tried at least 2 other programs designed for the same/similar class of problems.
You must briefly name the other programs you have tried and why you think your chosen program is superior to them.
Thanks for listening. to help us out with the nonli…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Study Guide by johnswentworth
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Study Guide, published by johnswentworth on the LessWrong.
This post is for students who hope to eventually work on technical problems we don’t understand, especially agency and AI alignment, and want to know what to study or practice.
Guiding Principles
Current alignment researchers have wildly different recommendations on paths into the field, usually correlated with the wildly different paths these researchers have themselves taken into the field. This also correlates with different kinds of work on alignment. This guide largely reflects my own path, and I think it is useful if you want to do the sort of research I do. That means fairly theoretical work (for now), very technical, drawing on models and math from a lot of different areas to understand real-world agents.
Specializing in Problems We Don’t Understand lays out…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Conservation of Expected Evidence by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Conservation of Expected Evidence, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, a priest who heard the confessions of condemned witches, wrote in 1631 the Cautio Criminalis (“prudence in criminal cases”), in which he bitingly described the decision tree for condemning accused witches: If the witch had led an evil and improper life, she was guilty; if she had led a good and proper life, this too was a proof, for witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous. After the woman was put in prison: if she was afraid, this proved her guilt; if she was not afraid, this proved her guilt, for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front. Or on hearing of a denunciation of witchcraft against her, she might seek flight or remain; if she ran, that proved her guilt; if she…
playlist_add
Dec 11, 2021
Some cruxes on impactful alternatives to AI policy work by Richard_Ngo
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Some cruxes on impactful alternatives to AI policy work, published by Richard_Ngo on the LessWrong.
Ben Pace and I (Richard Ngo) recently did a public double crux at the Berkeley REACH on how valuable it is for people to go into AI policy and strategy work: I was optimistic and Ben was pessimistic. During the actual event, we didn't come anywhere near to finding a double crux on that issue. But after a lot of subsequent discussion, we've come up with some more general cruxes about where impact comes from.
I found Ben's model of how to have impact very interesting, and so in this post I've tried to explain it, along with my disagreements. Ben liked the goal of writing up a rough summary of our positions and having further discussion in the comments, so while he edited it somewhat he doesn’t at all think that it’s a perfect ar…