trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
SRG 4: Biological Cognition, BCIs, Organizations
by KatjaGrace — 2014-10-07T01:00:29.300Z

This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.

Welcome. This week we finish chapter 2 with three more routes to superintelligence: enhancement of biological cognition, brain-computer interfaces, and well-organized networks of intelligent agents. This corresponds to the fourth section in the reading guide, Biological Cognition, BCIs, Organizations.

This post summarizes the section, and offers a few relevant notes, and ideas for further investigation. My own thoughts and questions for discussion are in the comments.

There is no need to proceed in order through this post, or to look at everything. Feel free to jump straight to the discussion. Where applicable and I remember, page numbers indicate the rough part of the chapter that is most related (not necessarily that the chapter is being cited for the specific claim).

Reading: “Biological Cognition” and the rest of Chapter 2 (p36-51)

Summary

Biological intelligence

Modest gains to intelligence are available with current interventions such as nutrition.

Genetic technologies might produce a population whose average is smarter than anyone who has have ever lived.

Some particularly interesting possibilities are 'iterated embryo selection' where many rounds of selection take place in a single generation, and 'spell-checking' where the genetic mutations which are ubiquitous in current human genomes are removed.

Brain-computer interfaces

It is sometimes suggested that machines interfacing closely with the human brain will greatly enhance human cognition. For instance implants that allow perfect recall and fast arithmetic. (p44-45)

Brain-computer interfaces seem unlikely to produce superintelligence (p51) This is because they have substantial health risks, because our existing systems for getting information in and out of our brains are hard to compete with, and because our brains are probably bottlenecked in other ways anyway. (p45-6)

'Downloading' directly from one brain to another seems infeasible because each brain represents concepts idiosyncratically, without a standard format. (p46-7)

Networks and organizations

A large connected system of people (

...
Link: Industrial standards will deal with robot ethics
by polymathwannabe — 2014-10-06T23:13:45.546Z

"The ISO’s update will, for instance, include guidance on the maximum force with which a robot may strike a human it is working with."

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531356/should-industrial-robots-be-able-to-hurt-their-human-coworkers/
Open thread, Oct. 6 - Oct. 12, 2014
by MrMind — 2014-10-06T08:16:11.349Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Meetup : Denver Area Meetup
by TheStevenator — 2014-10-06T04:11:14.254Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area Meetup

WHEN:
15 October 2014 06:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1417 S Broadway, Denver, CO 80210

First time meet up. The date and location are open for revision if anyone would prefer. All conversation topics are welcome. Unless there are unexpected time conflicts, the man behind the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Podcast will be attending.

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area Meetup
Meetup : London Social - October 12th - Productivity Show & Tell
by sixes_and_sevens — 2014-10-05T22:26:03.750Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - October 12th - Productivity Show & Tell

WHEN:
12 October 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Holborn, London

The next London meetup will be Sunday, October 12th from 2pm. We'll have the soft topic of productivity enhancement. Bring your experiences, tips, tricks, abortive efforts, apps, subcontracted labour and tales of woe. If you've got anything in particular you'd like to talk about, or put to the group, we'd love to hear about it.

The venue is the Shakespeare's Head near Holborn tube station. We'll generally have some sign attesting to the group's identity, and usually try to get one of the large circular tables near the back of the pub.

About London LessWrong:

We're currently running meetups every other Sunday, and tend to get between 5 and 15 attendees. Most of our meetups default to unstructured social discussion on LessWrongy subjects, though we occasionally have special topics, events or activities. Sometimes we play games.

We have a Google Group and a Facebook group where we plan and discuss stuff. We would be extraordinarily pleased if you joined them.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - October 12th - Productivity Show & Tell
A possible tax efficient swap mechanism for charity
by blogospheroid — 2014-10-05T12:21:20.307Z

I had an idea a while ago, which sounded simple to me, but searching with certain keywords did not yield appropriate results, so am presenting it for discussion to LW . Please inform me if something like this is already in existence. Please inform if I need to cross post it on effective altruism forum also, or they share enough users with LW and it need not be repeated.

Introduction

Two persons A, B living in different tax jurisdictions I and J respectively, want to contribute to organizations M and N qualifying for tax exemption in the other person's jurisdiction. i.e. M qualifies in J and N qualifies in I. For the purpose of this demo, lets consider they intend to contribute the same amounts.

They "swap" their charities and produce receipts to the effect from the respective organizations.i.e. A contributes to N and B contributes to M.

This helps them gain 10% to 20% more money when compared to contributing to their preferred charities which do not qualify.

So, the idea is to create a website where people can post such an intent, to contribute to cross-national charities and can reliably present receipts that will be acceptable to all concerned.

The main uses i envisage for such swaps would be science supporters in the developing world wanting to contribute to research happening in the developed world swapping with EA's wanting to gain a bigger bang for their buck in the developing world. This potentially reduces the need for a lot of charities to seek out tax exemption in multiple jurisdictions.

Avenues for further research

Question on the basic idea

Do both charities have to be acceptable to both donors or are neutral and maybe even "hostile" swaps possible? How much does that complicate matters

A certain cut of the proceeds seems to be the simplest for the website to operate, but will it be acceptable to the users?

Might this be construed as being illegal in certain jurisdictions, after all, it is a tax avoidance scheme, to be honest.

Logistics questions

The 1:1:1:1 case for person to jurisdictions to causes to "the time of swap" is the simplest. There are many possible complications which can allow more charity to be funneled, but require the website hosts to be exposed to non-trivial amounts of risk. Example in one exchange, more dollars are offered for charity than euro-equivalents while in another swap, more

...
Meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
by AnnaLeptikon — 2014-10-05T11:51:23.875Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna

WHEN:
18 October 2014 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Kaisermühlenstraße 24/2, 1220 Wien, meeting room behind the building

location: When arriving by U2 or Schnellbahn train: take the exit towards Kaisermühlenstraße, cross the street, step through the (very modern looking) building (on Erich Fried Weg) and go right, along the backside of the building until you get to the meeting room (it has a glass front so it should be hard to miss). Important: Google maps doesn't recognise the address, so what is being displayed here is nonsense.

topics: probably three big topics, the first two are not defined yet, the third will be group goal-setting

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
[Link] Animated Video - The Useful Idea of Truth (Part 1/3)
by Joshua_Blaine — 2014-10-04T23:05:48.423Z

I have taken this well received post by Eliezer, and remade the first third of it into a short and quickly paced youtube video here: http://youtu.be/L2dNANRIALs

The goals of this post are re-introducing the lessons explored in the original (for anyone not yet familiar with them), as well as asking the question of whether this format is actually suited for the lessons LessWrong tries to teach. What are your thoughts?
Meetup : Bratislava
by Viliam_Bur — 2014-10-04T15:14:52.627Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

WHEN:
20 October 2014 06:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Bistro The Peach, Mariánska 3, Bratislava

Stretávame sa opäť v bistre; majiteľ je ochotný kvôli nám na jeden večer urobiť bistro nefajčiarske.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava
Introducing Effective Altruist Profiles
by tog — 2014-10-03T23:01:48.913Z

We’re excited to announce EA Profiles, a new community platform for effective altruists. There are already hundreds of profiles for you to browse from members of the community such as Peter Singer and Jeff Kaufman, full of interesting information like people’s favoured causes and charities, and the actions they’re taking to make the world a better place. And you can create your own right now!

The Profiles should serve as a virtual “Who’s Who” of EA - a place to see information about those who identify with effective altruism, and share what we’re doing to inspire and motivate others. They enable applications such as a map of EAs and a cause-neutral registry of past and planned donations, which we'll cover in a separate announcement.

Your EA Profile provides a natural, standard way to share your identification with the ideas of effective altruism and the ways in which you and people you know can do enormous amounts of good, from spreading these ideas to donating to highly efficient charities. We know that people can be slow or cautious about sharing this, but for familiar reasons think that doing so is highly valuable, spreading and normalising a focus on effectiveness and high impact donations. And making a Profile is a great excuse to do so: you’re sharing this information because we asked for it! You can then point people to it, potentially triggering interesting conversations with friends who might like to hear about the ways they can do the most good.

Many of the Profiles come from answers which people opted to make public in the first annual survey of effective altruists this year (still open if you haven’t taken it yet - it provides another way to create a full or partial Profile). Peter Hurford is currently working on analysing the survey results and will share them and the raw data from the survey soon, but for now the EA Profiles provide some of the most interesting results: public information on the inspiring actions that individuals are taking.

If you’re interested in building up this project, or working on other similar projects, consider looking into .impact, a coordinated volunteer force working on potentially high-impact projects like this one.
AI: is research like board games or seeing?
by KatjaGrace — 2014-10-03T20:34:44.000Z

‘The computer scientist Donald Knuth was struck that “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’ – that, somehow, is so much harder!”‘

– Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, p14

There are some activities we think of as involving substantial thinking that we haven’t tried to automate much, presumably because they require some of the ‘not thinking’ skills as precursors. For instance, theorizing about the world, making up grand schemes, winning political struggles, and starting successful companies. If we had successfully automated the ‘without thinking’ tasks like vision and common sense, do you think these remaining kinds of thinking tasks would come easily to AI – like chess in a new domain – or be hard like the ‘without thinking’ tasks?

Sebastian Hagen points out that we haven’t automated math, programming, or debugging, and these seem much like research and don’t require complicated interfacing with the world at least.

Crossposted from Superintelligence Reading Group.
New LW Meetups: Prague, Hasselt
by FrankAdamek — 2014-10-03T15:51:31.359Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 26th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Czech's first Meetup Prague: 26 September 2014 07:30PM
Hasselt Meetup: Brussels moves to Hasselt this month!: 11 October 2014 01:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta September Meetup - Self Awareness: 27 September 2014 07:00PM
Bratislava: 29 September 2014 06:00PM
Copenhagen September Social Meetup - Botanisk Have: 27 September 2014 02:30PM
Frankfurt: How to improve your life: 28 September 2014 02:00PM
Houston, TX: 18 October 2014 02:00PM
Perth, Australia: Games night: 07 October 2014 06:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: The Steep Approach to Crazytown: 28 September 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Effective Altruism and Politics: 05 October 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Artificial Intelligence: 19 October 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Climate Change: 02 November 2014 03:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 27 September 2025 01:30PM
London social meetup: 28 September 2014 02:00PM
Moscow Meetup: Unusual as usual: 28 September 2014 02:00PM
Vienna - Superintelligence: 27 September 2014 03:00PM
Washington DC EA meetup / Petrov day dinner: 26 September 2014 07:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Book Swap: 28 September 2014 03:00PM
West LA—The Worst Argument in the World: 01 October 2014 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening i...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2014-10-03T01:24:11.921Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games

WHEN:
05 October 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

(Note: Feel free to send an email to the Google Group - lesswrong-dc - if you have a game you wish to play. This is especially useful for games that take 3+ hours, as you would want to start playing by 3:30.)

Upcoming meetups:

Oct. 12: To-Do List Hacking

Oct. 19: Mini Talks

Oct. 26: TBA

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
[MIRIx Cambridge MA] Limiting resource allocation with bounded utility functions and conceptual uncertainty
by Vika — 2014-10-02T22:48:37.564Z

This is a result from the first MIRIx Cambridge workshop (coauthored with Janos and Jim).

One potential problem with bounded utility functions is: what happens when the bound is nearly reached? A bounded utility maximizer will get progressively more and more risk averse as it gets closer to its bound. We decided to investigate what risks it might fear. We used a toy model with a bounded-utility chocolate maximizer, and considered what happens to its resource allocation in the limit as resources go to infinity.

We use "chocolate maximizer'' as conceptual shorthand meaning an agent that we model as though it has a single simple value with a positive long-run marginal resource cost, but only as a simplifying assumption. This is as opposed to a paperclip maximizer, where the inappropriate simplicity is implied to be part of the world, not just part of the model.

Conceptual uncertainty

We found that if a bounded utility function approaches its bound too fast, this has surprising pathological results when mixed with logical uncertainty. Consider a bounded-utility chocolate maximizer, with philosophical uncertainty about what chocolate is. It has a central concept of chocolate , and there are classes of mutated versions of the concept of chocolate at varying distances from the central concept, such that the probability that the true chocolate is in class is proportional to (i.e. following a power law).

Suppose also that utility is bounded using a sigmoid function , where x is the amount of chocolate produced. In the limit as resources go to infinity, what fraction of those resources will be spent on the central class ? That depends which sigmoid function is used, and in particular, how quickly it approaches the utility bound.

Example 1: exponential sigmoid

Suppose we allocate resources to class , with for total resource r. Let .

Then the optimal resource allocation is

Using Lagrange multipliers, we obtain for all i,

Then,

Thus, the resources will be evenly distributed among all the classes as r increases. This is bad, because the resource fraction for the central class goes to 0 as we increase the number of classes.

EDITED: Addendum on asymptotics

Since we have both r and n going to infinity, we can specify their relationship more precisely. We assume that n is the highest number of classes that are assigned nonnegative resources for a given value of r:

Th...
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Noticing.
by Manfred — 2014-10-02T20:33:00.781Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Noticing.

WHEN:
05 October 2014 05:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
206 S. Cedar St., Urbana, IL, 61801

Let's work on noticing things. Homework before this meetup: work on noticing when you're rationalizing, and do some physical act like standing up, or snapping your fingers, or writing down what you were rationalizing about.

This may be a bit ambitious, but that's what we can work on at the meetup.

Some reading material: 1 2

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Noticing.
Meetup : Meta Meetup
by Anders_H — 2014-10-02T16:49:44.048Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meta Meetup

WHEN:
05 October 2014 03:30:20AM (-0400)

WHERE:
98 Elm Street Somerville

We'll spend the first part of the meeting discussing the topics we'd like to see more of at future meetups. For the second part of the meetup, we'll socialize and get to know each other better. Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups start at 3:30pm, and have an alternating location:

1st Sunday meetups are at Citadel in Porter Sq, at 98 Elm St, apt 1, Somerville.

3rd Sunday meetups are in MIT's building 66 at 25 Ames St, room 156. Room number subject to change based on availability; signs will be posted with the actual room number. (We also have last Wednesday meetups at Citadel at 7pm.)

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 4pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

—Phase 4: Dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Meta Meetup
Meetup : Canberra: Contrarianism
by DanielFilan — 2014-10-02T11:53:37.350Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Contrarianism

WHEN:
11 October 2014 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
108 North Road, Acton, ACT

Share your LW-contrarian opinions! That is, (ideally) come prepared with some opinions you have that most other people at the meetup might not, and reasons why your opinion is true. Examples might include:

-We should return to feudal societal structure.

-Dualism is the true theory of consciousness.

-We don't have to worry about unfriendly AI.

-Eating non-human animals is perfectly OK/insect suffering is the most important moral problem (depends on who you want to chat with).

Come and enjoy the discussion! As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

If you use Facebook, please join our group.

Structured meetups are held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Contrarianism
Meetup : Yale rationality group meeting.
by Lambda — 2014-10-02T04:39:10.803Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Yale rationality group meeting.

WHEN:
05 October 2014 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Seminar room K22, Jonathan Edwards College, 68 High Street New Haven, CT 06511

The Yale rationality group will be holding a meeting this Sunday, October 5 at 2 pm in JE seminar room K22. The meeting should last roughly an hour (at most two). Tentative agenda: we'll be (re)introducing ourselves to each other, discussing some organizational matters, and doing some group exercises on goals and getting stuff done. All are welcome.

Discussion article for the meetup : Yale rationality group meeting.
Upcoming CFAR events: Lower-cost bay area intro workshop; EU workshops; and others
by AnnaSalamon — 2014-10-02T00:08:44.071Z

For anyone who's interested:

CFAR is trying out an experimental, lower-cost, 1.5-day introductory workshop Oct 25-26 in the bay area. It is meant to provide an easier point of entry into our rationality training. If you've been thinking about coming to a CFAR workshop but have had trouble setting aside 4 days and $3900, you might consider trying this out. (Or, if you have a friend or family member in that situaiton, you might suggest this to them.) It's a beta test, so no guarantees as to the outcome -- but I suspect it'll be both useful, and a lot of fun.

We are also finally making it to Europe. We'll be running two workshops in the UK this November, both of which have both space and financial aid still available.

We're also still running our standard workshops: Jan 16-19 in Berkeley, and April 23-26 in Boston, MA. (We're experimenting, also, with using alumni "TA's" to increase the amount of 1-on-1 informal instruction while simultaneously increasing workshop size, in an effort to scale our impact.)

Finally, we're actually running a bunch of events lately for alumni of our 4-day workshops (a weekly rationality dojo; a bimonthly colloquium; a yearly alumni reunion; and various for-alumni workshops); which is perhaps less exciting if you aren't yet an alumnus, but which I'm very excited about because it suggests that we'll have a larger community of people doing serious practice, and thereby pushing the boundaries of the art of rationality.

If anyone wishes to discuss any of these events, or CFAR's strategy as a whole, I'd be glad to talk; you can book me here.

Cheers!