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Consider two kinds of mental judgments.
- Beliefs are judgments of truths. (Ex. "I believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4." "I am 85% confident that Mozambique is located in Africa.")
- Preferences are things people like or don't like. The existance or nonexistance of a preference is a fact.
What, then is an opinion?
"judgment or belief not founded on certainty or proof" — dictionary.com
To form a belief without proof or uncertainty is a recipe for overconfidence. The more opinions you have the more likely you are to be wrong. More importantly, opinions undermine your error correction system. You can'
... (Read more)I.
First we have False Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility In Data Collection And Analysis Allows Presenting Anything As Significant (h/t Jonas Vollmer).
The message is hardly unique: there are lots of tricks unscrupulous or desperate scientists can use to artificially nudge results to the 5% significance level. The clarity of the presentation is unique. They start by discussing four particular tricks:
1. Measure multiple dependent variables, then report the ones that are significant. For example, if you’re measuring whether treatment for a certain psychiatric disorder improves lif... (Read more)
I'm curious about the remaining 3% of people in the 97% program, who apparently both managed to smuggle some booze into rehab, and then admitted this to the staff while they were checking out. Lizardman's constant?
I often notice that in many (not all) discussions about utility functions, one side is "for" their relevance, while others tend to be "against" their usefulness, without explicitly saying what they mean. I don't think this is causing any deep confusions among researchers here, but I'd still like to take a stab at disambiguating some of this, if nothing else for my own sake. Here are some distinct (albeit related) ways that utility functions can come up in AI safety, in terms of what assumptions/hypotheses they give rise to:
AGI utility hypothesis: The first AGI wil... (Read more)
In particular, the coherence arguments and other pressures that move agents toward VNM seem to roughly scale with capabilities.
One nit I keep picking whenever it comes up: VNM is not really a coherence theorem. The VNM utility theorem operates from four axioms, and only two of those four are relevant to coherence. The main problem is that the axioms relevant to coherence (acyclicity and completeness) do not say anything at all about probability and the role that it plays - the "expected" part of "expected utility" does not arise from a ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
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We successfully shipped Link Previews in September. Now when you hover of an embedded link you get a pop-up, for internal links to LessWrong posts you get a preview. See the full announcement here.
Improvements to the Community Ma... (Read more)
Thanks!
I've noticed a sort of tradeoff in how I use planning/todo systems (having experimented with several such systems recently). This mainly applies to planning things with no immediate deadline, where it's more about how to split a large amount of available time between a large number of tasks, rather than about remembering which things to do when. For instance, think of a personal reading list - there is no hurry to read any particular things on it, but you do want to be spending your reading time effectively.
On one extreme, I make a commitment to myself to
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postI am a PhD student currently conducting research on political polarization and persuasion. I am running an experiment that requires a database of trivia questions which conservatives are likely to get correct, and liberals are likely to get wrong (and vice versa). Our pilot testing has shown, for example, Democrats (but not Republicans) tend to overestimate the percentage of gun deaths that involve assault-style rifles, while Republicans (but not Democrats) tend overestimate the proportion of illegal immigrants who commit violent crimes. Similarly, Democrats (but not Republicans) ... (Read more)
This is a good idea. Will work on this now. Thanks! For "Knowledge Desert" questions (non-political questions where only one party will have a strong hunch about), I looked at patterns of co-following activity on Twitter and Reddit. So, for example, people who followed conservative Senators/Representatives on Twitter also tended to follow certain kinds of sports (e.g. baseball and UFC), and certain kinds of restaurants (e.g. Bob Evan's Steakhouse and Cracker Barrel). Similarly, people who subscribed to /r/TheDonald also followed stereoty... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
These existential crises also muddle our impact algorithm. This isn't what you'd see if impact were primarily about the world state.
Appendix: We Asked a Wrong Question
How did we go wrong?
When you are faced with an unanswerable question—a question to which it seems impossible to even imagine an answer—there is a simple trick that can turn the question solvable.
Asking “Why do I have free will?” or “Do I have free will?” sends you off thinking about tiny details of the laws of physics, so distant from the macroscopi... (Read more)
I really like this line of thinking.
Thanks! I've really liked yours, too.
I don't think that the real core values are affected during most ontological crises. I suspect that the real core values are things like feeling loved vs. despised, safe vs. threatened, competent vs. useless, etc. Crucially, what is optimized for is a feeling, not an external state.
Of course, the subsystems which compute where we feel on those axes need to take external data as input. I don't have a very good model of how exactly they work, but I'm guessing that their internal mode
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postHurrah! Success! I didn't know what to expect, and am pleasantly surprised to find the Frontpage is still intact. My thanks to everyone who took part, to everyone who commented on yesterday's post, and to everyone who didn't unilaterally blow up the site.
Launch Attempts Results
I said I would share usernames and codes of all attempts to launch the codes. Others on the team told me this seemed like a bad idea in many ways, and on reflection I agree - I think many people were not aware they were signing up for being publicly named and shamed, and I think it's good that people ... (Read more)
I clicked the button :( But, I clicked it because the first thing I saw on the page was a big shiny button and hadn't been on the site in a few day and didn't know what it would do. I would not have entered codes if I'd had them. Maybe give a more noticeable warning next to the button next time? Maybe something like "Warning, pressing this button will..." in red text.
Fun experiment
This the first in a sequence of posts about “operations”.
Acknowledgements to Malo Bourgon, Ray Arnold, Michelle Hutchinson, and Ruby for their feedback on this post.
My ops background
Several years ago, I decided to focus on operations work for my career. From 2017 to 2019 I was one of the operations staff at the Center for Effective Altruism, initially as the operations manager and later as the the Finance Lead. Prior to that, I was a volunteer logistics lead at approximately 10 CFAR workshops; I also ran ops for SPARC twice, and for a five day AI-safety retreat. I also attribute... (Read more)
This is, unfortunately, kind of true in practice. (Although, ideally, is and will become a bit less true at major EA orgs - CEA was pretty good on this dimension and I never felt like people saw me as less intelligent, although that could be because it's less a part of my identity so I didn't notice).
I do think that ops work, especially the finance & accounting aspects, is pretty G-loaded, and that people wrongly perceive this as not the case. Anyway, I hope to discuss all of this more in a later post about the personal fit aspect.
Hello friends,
We'll explore Part 2 of our exploration of the Uruk Series by looking at the relationships between narcissism, social invasion, and democracy, as brought about from sam[]zdat's Uruk Series: https://samzdat.com/the-uruk-series
Whereas Part 1 was more focused in concept acquisition, Part 2 is more focused on retrieving insights from these concepts.
Take home booklets will be distributed to all :)
Format: We meet and start hanging out at 6:00pm. At around 6:45pm, we'll do a (very) short recap of what these events are about, and then start going through the text together,... (Read more)
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 conve... (Read more)
So the connection is "The straightforward way to increase epistemological competence is to talk about beliefs in detail. In introspection it is hard to apply this method because details can't be effectively shared to get an understanding". It seems to me it is not about gear-frames being special but that frames have preconditions to get them to work and an area that allows/permits a lot of frames makes it hard to hit any frames prequisities.
I see two main routes:
Do what I currently do, but faster.
Figure out how to do something else.
The former doesn't seem very promising: I've been playing around with whistling for decades and I suspect I'm pretty close to a local maximu... (Read more)
I can get sharp and rapid changes in my whistle by changing the way air flows across the lateral part of my tongue. In my normal whistling posture, that part of my tongue does something like what it does during a particularly hard /ɹ/ sound: it basically presses into the top molars. During fast whistling (and arpeggios), one side moves to let air pass more like what that part does during an /l/ sound. The rest of the tongue seems to move a tiny bit forward and up to accomplish this change. The end result is a very fast "flipping" feeling between notes and
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postI frequently hear the advice that it's better to sleep on the back and worthwhile to learn to sleep on your back. Are there any studies that backup that advice. Otherwise are there other good arguments? Personal experience is also welcome.
It seems like this particular video basically says:
- "Snoring is really bad and side-sleepers snore less." It seems that actually monitoring whether one snores via an app and them optimizing based on the answer is
- Hunter gatherers sleep mostly on the side. Other great apes also sleep more on the side.
- An argument about the waste clearing the body working better on the side (I don't know how strong his case is on that point)
In total it says there's no strong evidence but the evidence they reviewed point to side sleeping being better
This is the monthly Cambridge, MA LessWrong / Slate Star Codex meetup.
Note: The meetup is in apartment 2 (the address box here won't let me include the apartment number).
The history of nuclear strategic bombing
Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine brought my attention to a horrifying fact about early US nuclear targeting policy. In 1961, the US had only one nuclear war plan, and it called for the destruction of every major Soviet city and military target. That is not surprising. However, the plan also called for the destruction of every major Chinese city and military target, even if China had not provoked the United States. In other words, the US nuclear war plan called for the destruction of the major population centers of the most populous country i... (Read more)
I didn't want to go into arguments about whether WWII strategic bombing was effective because it's a point historians have argued amount a fair bit and I wanted to focus on the nuclear targeting question. I do think it's an interesting / important question. I believe the original justification, at least for Britain and the United States, was to destroy the industrial capacity of the nation. The Norden bombsight was hoped to enable more targeting bombing. Then air defenses proved too powerful for day bombing, so the British and American air f... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
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The Open Thread sequence is here.
That sounds quite interesting to me.
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I do, however, believe that the single step cooperate-defect game which they use to come up with their factors seems like a very simple model for what will be a very complex system of interactions. For example, AI development will take place over time, and it is likely that the same companies will continue to interact with one another. Iterated games have very different dynamics, and I hope that future work will explore how this would affect their current recommendations, and whether it would yield new approaches to incentivizing cooperation.
It may be diff... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
The grant round we announced a month ago for the new Survival and Flourishing Fund is closing in 3 days. We haven't gotten that many applications, so I would recommend applying.
From the original announcement post:
The plan is to make a total of $1MM-$2MM in grants to organizations working on the long term flourishing and survival of humanity.
At this point in time SFF can only make grants to charities and not individuals, so if you have a project or organization that you want to ge... (Read more)
So I usually use the word "opinion" to mean "belief".