trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Roommate interest and coordination thread
by patrickscottshields — 2012-08-02T09:22:17.211Z

This thread is for the discussion of options for people interested in changing their living environments some time in the next year or so. It's a place to:

Share your situation to get an outside view

Get on the radar of potential roommates

Discuss existing communities or places that may be a good fit

Describe what you're looking for in a living environment

Post your procedure for deciding where to live

Coordinate with others to find compatible roommates

Discuss which factors are relevant to deciding where to live

Post resources or data relevant to deciding where to live

Whether you're graduating from college, moving for a new job, or looking to further optimize your living environment for other reasons, talking with others can help you identify options, catch inaccurate beliefs or poor reasoning, meet potential roommates, and more. Thanks to everyone who contributes!

(This thread has been on my mind for a while. Reading this recent roommate-seeking post inspired me actually write and post it. I'll post my own situation in the comments below.)

To discuss the concept of this thread (rather than participating in the thread's intended discussion), please reply to this comment. Credit goes to the open transactions thread and group rationality diary for some of the style and wording of this post.
Reinforcement Learning: A Non-Standard Introduction (Part 2)
by royf — 2012-08-02T08:17:08.744Z

Followup to: Part 1

In part 1 we modeled the dynamics of an agent and its environment as a turn-based discrete-time process. We now start on the path of narrowing the model, in the ambitious search for an explanation and an algorithm for the behavior of intelligent agents.

The spacecraft is nearing the end of its 9 month journey. In its womb rests a creature of marvelous design. Soon, it will reach its destination, and on the surface of the alien planet will gently land an intelligent agent. Almost immediately the agent will start interacting with its environment, collecting and analyzing samples of air and ground and radiation, and eventually moving about to survey the land and to find energy and interesting stuff to do.

It takes too long, about 14 minutes at the time of landing, for the state of Mars to affect the state of the brains of the people at the NASA mission control. This makes the state of the software of the rover important: it will be the one to decide the rover's actions, to a large degree.

Even after it's landed, the software of the rover can be changed remotely, but not the hardware. This puts some limitations on any brilliant ideas we could have for improving the rover at this late stage of the mission. How can we model these limitations?

Our model so far defined the dynamics of the agent's interaction with its environment through the probabilities:

p(Wt|Wt-1,Mt-1)

q(Mt|Mt-1,Wt)

for the current state of the world (Mars) and the agent (the rover), given their previous state.

At some point the rover will take a sample of the air. Could we choose q to be such that Mt at that time will reflect the oxygen level around the rover? Yes, the rover has hardware that, subsequent to analyzing the sample, will have one of a number of possible states, depending on the oxygen levels. It is wired to the rover's central controller, which can then have its state reflect that of the oxygen analyzer.

At some point the rover will take a sample of the ground. Could we choose q to be such that Mt at that time will reflect Mars' sweetness? Probably not any more than it already does. The rover is probably not equipped with any hardware sensitive to substances perceived by living creatures on Earth as sweet. This was a design choice, guided by the assumption that these organic molecules are extremely unlikely to be found on Mars. ...
[SEQ RERUN] When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-02T05:07:46.592Z

Today's post, When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid was originally published on 16 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Anthropomorphism didn't become obviously wrong until we realized that the tangled neurons inside the brain were performing complex information processing, and that this complexity arose as a result of evolution.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Hot Air Doesn't Disagree, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Russian plan for immortality [link]
by Dr_Manhattan — 2012-08-01T20:49:41.319Z

http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2012/07/human-immortality-could-be-possible-by-2045-say-russian-scientists.html

The nice thing about Russians (I'm from that neighborhood originally) is that they are absolutely crazy and will try just about anything. They also probably have/had second-best science culture behind US (though they suffered significant brain drain as huge numbers of educated Jews left in the last 25 years). They have less regulation and quite a few rich people with ideas. Seems like a worthwhile group to keep in touch with.
Admissions Essay Help?
by OnTheOtherHandle — 2012-08-01T19:19:39.722Z

I need help writing a college application essay that will maximize my chances of getting into a school that the world considers prestigious. (17 years old, preparing to enter 12th grade at a central California high school as of this writing.)

Throughout high school, I resisted being over-scheduled, and basically eschewed all extracurricular activities in favor of having time to think and read. Even when my parents pushed me into things like tennis, dance, or debate clubs (ugh), I was secure in the belief that I could forgo them and rely on my grades and test scores to get me into a college that was good enough to earn a useful engineering degree and find a few interesting friends. (I was right.)

However, my priorities have changed, and I’m starting to really value the extra leverage prestige can bring me. I plan to start a Less Wrong/80,000 Hours club at whatever university I end up attending. I would have access to more intelligent, interested people at Stanford than at, say, UC Irvine. Perhaps more importantly, the club itself would have a better standing in the outside world if it were founded in Stanford. (This in addition to the fact that Stanford already has a world-class Decisions and Ethics Center that may be able to help.)

This is not to say I now regret not being an officer in a dozen useless clubs or participating in endless extracurricular activities. I do, however, regret not doing at least one really impressive, externally-verifiable thing like writing a book. Nothing in my life would make someone say, “Wow, how the hell did she do that?” If admissions officers could scan my brain, they would find a lot that would make them say, “How the hell could she think that?” – but not much of it would be positive.

So my question is, how do I write a personal statement essay, 250-500 words, that will leave an impression in an admissions officer’s mind, without lying or plagiarizing, given that my adolescence was spent thinking and reading, not *doing*? Each university then has 2-4 follow-up prompts (<= 250 words), such as these from Stanford:

Stanford students poss

...
Looking for a roommate in Mountain View
by jsteinhardt — 2012-08-01T19:04:59.872Z

In September I will be moving to Mountain View, CA together with a friend of mine from MIT. It turns out that the quality/cost ratio increases noticeably with the number of people living together, so we are looking for one or more additional roommates. All things being equal, I would much rather live with other rationalists, which is why I'm posting this on LessWrong.

About us

My name is Jacob, and my roommate's name is Jonathan. We both recently graduated from MIT (me with a bachelor's in mathematics, him with a master's in electrical engineering). I am going to graduate school in machine learning at Stanford; Jonathan works at Synaptics (the company that makes touch sensors).

You can find approximately four-month-outdated information about me at my old MIT website. I've been awarded both the Hertz and NSF Fellowships, which means that I have a guaranteed source of income for the next five years regardless of any external factors like my adviser's ability to pay for me. I teach for SPARC (CFAR's high school program) and am very interested in building up the rationalist community in the south bay.

Reasons you should live with us

we both have steady sources of income and are on highly successful career tracks

your behavior is strongly affected by the culture you live in; living with other rationalists will make you more rational

we both value open communication and are difficult to offend, which makes conflict resolution much easier

be at the center of exciting developments: I am working directly on important problems in AI and rationalist outreach, and know an embarrassingly large amount of math / computer science, even by LessWrong standards

I know a lot about sports and strength training, and am happy to help you out if your goal is to become stronger / more athletic

I am also first aid and CPR certified, so you are slightly less likely to die if you live with me

Jonathan is a pretty good cook and would be interested in leading the effort on group dinners and/or teaching some culinary basics.

Jonathan is good at do-it-yourself electronics (sensors, microcontrollers, FPGAs) and is willing to share experience / expertise

we are both willing to participate in house-wide life-hacking experiments (N = 3 is much better than N = 1 for data size)

What we are looking for

interest in building up the rationalist community

steady source of income

you are i

...
August 2012 Media Thread
by RobertLumley — 2012-08-01T18:29:20.591Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

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

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

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you have a thread to add, such as a video game thread or an Anime thread, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Politics Discussion Thread August 2012
by OrphanWilde — 2012-08-01T15:25:52.159Z

In line with the results of the poll here, a thread for discussing politics. Incidentally, folks, I think downvoting the option you disagree with in a poll is generally considered poor form.

1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.

2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.

3.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.

4.) In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

If anybody thinks the rules should be dropped here, now that we're no longer conducting a test - I already dropped the upvoting/downvoting limits I tried, unsuccessfully, to put in - let me know. The first rule is the only one I think is strictly necessary.

Debiasing attempt: If you haven't yet read Politics is the Mindkiller, you should.
Becoming a gene machine - what should change?
by Delta — 2012-08-01T13:06:17.003Z

Hello everyone,

After being introduced to the fascinating subject of evolutionary theory by Less Wrong and starting reading The Selfish Gene I have been slowly coming to terms with the mind-blowing revelation that I am simply a machine built to ensure the preservation of my genes, and that they are the only part of me that will outlive me. This is a change of huge magnitude, requiring I abandon the usual cached thoughts and perceptions of humanity as somehow special, detached from and above the world and baser matter that built us.

Such a revelation should make me question all my assumptions, permeate my thinking, yet I find myself still thinking much the same ways I did before. I have not fully integrated this information and its implications into my world-view. I have noticed myself changing my mind less often than I think, and hope.

My question to you is therefore, how would you expect a person who had learnt of their status as a "mere" gene machine then reflected and fully integrated the knowledge to think? What new thoughts and habits would they form compared to their old life as an immortal special creature, allegedly made in god's image? What would you expect to change?

I offer the following suggestions of the kinds of change this hypothetical person, let us call them "the subject", would make:

- The subject would have to reformulate their attitude to other non-human life-forms or potential lifeforms. With no divine spark seperating us from other animals or artificial minds, they would experience the freedom to decide what they place in their "tribe" (I'm reminded of Human the piggy in Speaker for the Dead realising he can include other cultures and even alien species in his definition of his "tribe"). Would they show more empathy towards non-sapient animals too? How else would this manifest?

- The subject would become more aware of their own mortality and that of others. This would hopefully result in taking additional care of themselves and others on the basis that each has only one chance to be happy and our indifferent creators will not do so. Regrettably this could go the other way and result in undervaluing life given its brevity and seeing no need for morality.

- The subject would feel additional kinship towards fellow humans, bearing in mind that their fundamental structure is almost exactly the same. They would hopefully have greater difficulty labe...
Thoughts on a possible solution to Pascal's Mugging
by Dolores1984 — 2012-08-01T12:32:23.995Z

For those who aren't familiar, Pascal's Mugging is a simple thought experiment that seems to demonstrate an intuitive flaw in naive expected utility maximization. In the classic version, someone walks up to you on the street, and says, 'Hi, I'm an entity outside your current model of the universe with essentially unlimited capabilities. If you don't give me five dollars, I'm going to use my powers to create 3^^^^3 people, and then torture them to death.' (For those not familiar with Knuth up-arrow notation, see here). The idea being that however small your probability is that the person is telling the truth, they can simply state a number that's grossly larger - and when you shut up and multiply, expected utility calculations say you should give them the five dollars, along with pretty much anything else they ask for.

Intuitively, this is nonsense. However, an AI under construction doesn't have a piece of code that lights up when exposed to nonsense. Not unless we program one in. And formalizing why, exactly, we shouldn't listen to the mugger is not as trivial as it sounds. The actual underlying problem has to do with how we handle arbitrarily small probabilities. There are a number of variations you could construct on the original problem that present the same paradoxical results. There are also a number of simple hacks you could undertake that produce the correct results in this particular case, but these are worrying (not to mention unsatisfying) for a number of reasons.

So, with the background out of the way, let's move on to a potential approach to solving the problem which occurred to me about fifteen minutes ago while I was lying in bed with a bad case of insomnia at about five in the morning. If it winds up being incoherent, I blame sleep deprivation. If not, I take full credit.

Let's take a look at a new thought experiment. Let's say someone comes up to you and tells you that they have magic powers, and will make a magic pony fall out of the sky. Let's say that, through some bizarrely specific priors, you decide that the probability that they're telling the truth (and, therefore, the probability that a magic pony is about to fall from the sky) is exactly 1/2^100. That's all well and good.

Now, let's say that later that day, someone c...
Why AGI is extremely likely to come before FAI
by skeptical_lurker — 2012-08-01T10:22:18.849Z

Why AGI is extremely likely to come before FAI

I am using FAI to mean EY's definition of provably friendly AGI implementing CEV. It is possible that the AGI which comes first will not be *provably* friendly, but will never the less turn out to be friendly, although the probability that non-provably friendly AI turns out to be friendly depends on how it is programmed. But this is a subtopic for another article - Part II: what to do if FAI is unlikely to come first.

I realize much of this has been said before.
Complexity of algorithm design:
Intuitively, FAI seems orders of magnitude more complex than AGI. If I decided to start trying to program an AGI tomorrow, I would have ideas on how to start, and maybe even make a minuscule amount of progress. Ben Goertzel even has a (somewhat optimistic) [roadmap](http://opencog.org/roadmap/) for AGI in a decade. Meanwhile, afaik FAI is still stuck at the stage of lob’s theorem.
The fact that EY seems to be focusing on promoting rationality and writing (admittedly awesome) harry potter fanfiction seems to indicate that he doesn’t currently know how to write FAI (and nor does anyone else) otherwise he would be focusing on that now, and instead is planning for the long term.
Computational complexity
CEV requires modelling (and extrapolating) every human mind on the planet, while avoiding the creation of sentient entities. While modelling might be cheaper than ~10^17 flops per human due to short cuts, I doubt it’s going to come cheap. Randomly sampling a subset of humanity to extrapolate from, at least initially, could make this problem less severe, although you will get a poorer estimate of humanities utility function. Furthermore, this can be partially circumvented by saying that the AI follows a specific utility function while bootstrapping to enough computing power to implement CEV, but then you have the problem of allowing it to bootstrap safely. Having to prove friendliness of each step in self-improvement strikes me as something that could also be costly.
Finally, I get the impression that people are considering using Solomonoff induction. It’s uncomputable, and while I realize that there exist approximations, I would imagine that these would be extremely expensive to calculate anything non-trivial. Is there any reason for using SI for FAI more than AGI, e.g. something todo w

...
Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Board game night
by Nisan — 2012-08-01T06:40:27.322Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Board game night

WHEN:
01 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

Hello, all! Tomorrow's meetup will be a board game night at Zendo. Zendo's game library has Robo Rally, Smallworld, Dominion, Ticket to Ride, Settlers, Tigrs & Euphrates and some others. If you have a game (like Zendo!) that you'd like to play, bring it along! The meetup begins at 7pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong or call Nisan at http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png .

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Board game night
[SEQ RERUN] Hot Air Doesn't Disagree
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-01T06:29:38.843Z

Today's post, Hot Air Doesn't Disagree was originally published on 16 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

"Disagreement" between rabbits and foxes is sheer anthropomorphism. Rocks and hot air don't disagree, even though one decreases in elevation and one increases in elevation.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Advice please: Cognitive distortion preventing me from accomplishing anything
by abcd_z — 2012-07-31T23:12:56.298Z

The cognitive distortion is called "catastrophizing", I think.

I'm afraid of unexpected, strongly negative events occurring to me without warning. Nothing specific, just a generalized fear. That fear is crippling me. Worse, there's a part of me that feels that fear is keeping me safe. "If I let go of that fear," it goes, "I would start doing things and then I wouldn't be safe any more."

I haven't filled out a job application in over a week, because doing so would force me out into the world if i got an interview, and into the world consistently if I got the job.