trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Your "shoulds" are not a duty
by So8res — 2015-06-07T03:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/shoulds-are-not-a-duty/

I have a friend who, after reading my last two posts, still struggled to give up her shoulds. She protested that, if she stopped doing things because she should, then she might do the wrong thing. I see this frequently, even among people who claim to be moral relativists: they protest that if they weigh their wants and their shoulds on the same scales, then they might make the wrong choice.

But this notion of "right" vs "wrong" cannot come from outside. There is no stone tablet among the stars that mandates what is right. Moral relativists usually have no trouble remembering that their narrow, short-term desires (for comfort, pleasure, etc.) are internal, but many seem to forget that their wide, long-term desires (flourishing, less suffering, etc.) are also part of them.

Why did my friend worry that, if she stopped forcing herself to follow her shoulds, that she might do the wrong thing? There are no outside authorities punishing people who don't follow their best interests. There are no heavenly gatekeepers rewarding you for doing something other than what's best. The only reason to care about doing what's right is because you want what's right to be done. Why was she afraid that she would fail to follow her own interests, if she stopped using internal force? It's you who wants the right thing done, so if you fear you're not going to do the right things, then bargain with yourself.

Part of the problem, I think, is that she realized that she wants to both (a) do the right thing and (b) avoid all the effort that entails, and she feared that without the tool of internal force, she would be unable to do as much good as she wants to do. This is a valid concern, and following posts will discuss different tools for doing what you want (without resorting to internal force, which I think is unsustainable — remember, expending willpower is a stopgap, not a solution).

But another part of the problem, I think, was a lingering sense of resentment towards the shoulds, for trying to suck fun and enjoyment out of her life.

I see this often. Picture someone who needs to choose between playing video games all day (and losing their job) or getting abused by customers all day (for not all that much money). They conclude that they "should" do the job, and they feel compelled by the should. And then, over and over, I find my friends resenting their shoulds, as if the shoulds came fro...
Measuredly better than measurably worse: tightening methodology reports
by  — 2015-06-06T22:10:18.859Z

Note: there probably are tons of studies more and less 'solid' than these. Heck, there are probably reviews, too, although I'm not sure how to google them. I just haven't seen this point made on LW, and hope it's worthy of discussion.

Standard disclaimers apply.

Related to: http://lesswrong.com/lw/uh/trying_to_try/

A young Jedi Padawan is assigned to a research lab to learn a new technique. His friends give him advice, helpful and a bit confusing, and his Master sends him to the Archives, where knowledge is never lost. He hopes the Archives will have an exhaustive protocol of how to go about 'this thing', too, because there are two ways to gain experience, and one of them is heavier on the error part. The more protocols the better; he'd be able to tailor something to his own specific needs, or just let Decision Theory guide him to the correct answer.

At the end of the day, he reluctantly comes back.

'Well, Padawan, how fared your quest?' his Master asks. 'Are you able to Stain and Count the Chromosomes of Fragaria x Ananassa?'

'Maybe?'

'...Okay, show me what you have.'

The Padawan opens the report of Owen and Miller (A Comparison of Staining Techniques for Somatic Chromosomes of Strawberry, HortScience 28(2):155-156. 1993) and jumps to the Results section.

'See, Master, orange means there's some problem with the Staining: the Chromosomes are too pale to see at all or indistinguishable from the rest. Either way, you cannot Count them.'

'I see. Orange, as a Sith's blade...and green?

'Good intensity, good contrast. Green are the proper ways to Stain.'

'But?'

'You can only do it with α-bromonaphtalene - Farmer's fluid - Alcoholic HCl carmine (or altered carbol fuchsin) or with 8-Hydroxyquinoline - Farmer's fluid - altered carbol fuchsin! Master Yoda told me to pretreat the Roots with p-Dichlorobenzene! I cannot Count Chromosomes if I cannot really see them!'

'We shall meditate upon this. Did Owen and Miller test all combinations extensively, to the point where they showed that p-Dichlorobenzene only ever results in Sithly - that is, unacceptably poor Counts?'

'They don't say anything like that here. No, I don't think they did.'

'See? Victory is still possible. Tinker around with Fixatives and Dyes, and let Decision Theory guide you.'

'But Master, must I tinker with each and every one?'

'Yes. It is deeply unfortunate that as late as 1993, there still were Researchers who pu...
Agent Simulates Predictor using Second-Level Oracles
by orthonormal — 2015-06-06T22:08:37.000Z

Prerequisite: Agents that can predict their Newcomb predictor

(This post is from Benja's backlog of topics that should appear here, which he's deputized me to write up. The original idea was due to Jessica Taylor.)

The phenomena of agent-simulates-predictor or agent-trusts-predictor, where one has stronger axioms and the other has stronger powers of deduction, can be done at various levels of the tradeoff between realistic examples and tractable proofs. In the previous post, I considered the version that uses a bounded proof search on one hand, and a halting oracle on the other. There's a finite version where one process uses a bounded proof search with a much higher bound than the other process. But in this post, I'll discuss the clean infinite version where we pit a halting oracle against an oracle for the next level of the arithmetical hierarchy of Peano Arithmetic.

Here, we'll use two different formal systems built on Peano Arithmetic.

A Π1 statement of PA is any statement of the form ∀nϕ(n), where ϕ(⋅) uses only bounded quantifiers. (For example, the claim that PA is consistent is a Π1 sentence, asserting that every natural number is not the Gödel number of a proof of a contradiction.)

PA+Π1 is PA plus the (non-decidable in PA) axioms consisting of every Π1 statement which is true in the standard model of PA. We can think of it as a formal system which can make a call in finite time to a standard halting oracle.

(Note that there's a different meaning of Π1 for ZFC, involving the analogous definitions for set theory. In order to avoid that ambiguity, we could instead just use the formal system PA+Sound(PA), which is PA plus the axiom schema ∀→n□PAφ(→n)→φ(→n) for every φ. However, in that case we'd need to go through a proof that PA+Sound(PA) also knows that PA+Π1 is sound.)

We'll have the exact same results as in the last post, so we'll prove the analogous lemma, showing that the stronger axiom system (here, ZFC) can prove that statements of a certain type hold if and only if they are provable by an oracle with weaker axioms but stronger computation (here, PA+Π1)

Lemma: Let φ be a propositional combination of Π1 statements. Then ZFC⊢φ↔□PA+Π1φ.

Proof: First, we note that ZFC⊢□PA+Π1φ→φ for any φ, because ZFC knows about models of PA+Π1, and thus knows it is sound.

Now we show that if φ is a propositional combination of Π1 statements, then ZFC⊢φ→□PA+Π1φ. Express φ in

...
Meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Social & Board Games
by JoshuaFox — 2015-06-06T18:32:25.381Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Social & Board Games

WHEN:
09 June 2015 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv

June 9 at 19:00 we're going to have a social meetup! It's going to be a game night full of people talking about physics, friendly AI, and how to effectively save the world. Please bring any games you'd like to play.

The Israeli LessWrong community meets every two weeks, alternating between lectures and social/gaming nights.

Meet at Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv: The 29th floor (not the Google Campus floor). We'll then move to a room.

Contact: If you can't find us, call Anatoly, who is graciously hosting us, at 054-245-1060; or Joshua at 054-569-1165.

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Social & Board Games
[link] Baidu cheats in an AI contest in order to gain a 0.24% advantage
by Wei Dai — 2015-06-06T06:39:44.990Z

Some of you may already have seen this story, since it's several days old, but MIT Technology Review seems to have the best explanation of what happened: Why and How Baidu Cheated an Artificial Intelligence Test

Such is the success of deep learning on this particular test that even a small advantage could make a difference. Baidu had reported it achieved an error rate of only 4.58 percent, beating the previous best of 4.82 percent, reported by Google in March. In fact, some experts have noted that the small margins of victory in the race to get better on this particular test make it increasingly meaningless. That Baidu and others continue to trumpet their results all the same - and may even be willing to break the rules - suggest that being the best at machine learning matters to them very much indeed.

(In case you didn't know, Baidu is the largest search engine in China, with a market cap of $72B, compared to Google's $370B.)

The problem I see here is that the mainstream AI / machine learning community measures progress mainly by this kind of contest. Researchers are incentivized to use whatever method they can find or invent to gain a few tenths of a percent in some contest, which allows them to claim progress at an AI task and publish a paper. Even as the AI safety / control / Friendliness field gets more attention and funding, it seems easy to foresee a future where mainstream AI researchers continue to ignore such work because it does not contribute to the tenths of a percent that they are seeking but instead can only hinder their efforts. What can be done to change this?
Agency is bugs and uncertainty
by Shmi — 2015-06-06T04:53:19.307Z

(Epistemic status: often discussed in bits in pieces, haven't seen it summarized in one place anywhere.)

Do you feel that your computer sometimes has a mind of its own? "I have no idea why it is doing that!" Do you feel that, the more you understand and predict someone's action, the less intelligent and more "mechanical" they appear?

My guess is that, in many cases, agency (as in, the capacity to act and make choices) is a manifestation of the observer's inability to explain and predict the agent's actions. To Omega in the Newcomb's problem humans are just automatons without a hint of agency. To a game player some NPCs appear stupid and others smart, and the more you play and the more you can predict the NPCs, the less agenty they appear to you.

Note that randomness is not the same as uncertainty, since if you can predict that someone or something behaves randomly, it is still a prediction. What I mean is more of a Knightian uncertainty, where one fails to make a useful prediction at all. Something like a tornado may appear to intentionally go after you if you fail to predict where it will be going and you have trouble escaping.

If you are a user of a computer program, and it does not behave as you expect it to, you often get a feeling of there being a hostile intelligence opposing you, occasionally resulting in an aggressive behavior toward it, usually with verbal violence, though occasionally getting physical, the way we would confront an actual enemy. On the other hand, if you are the programmer who wrote the code in question, you think of the misbehavior as bugs, not intentional hostility, and treat the code by debugging or documenting. Mostly. Sometimes I personalize especially nasty bugs.

I was told by a nurse that this is also how they are taught to treat difficult patients: you don't get upset at someone's misbehavior and instead treat them not as an agent, but more like an algorithm in need of debugging. Parents of young children are also advised to take this approach.

This seems to also apply to self-analysis, though to a lesser degree. If you know yourself well, and can predict what you would do in a specific situation, you may feel that your response is mechanistic or automatic and not agenty or intelligent. Or maybe not. I am not sure. I think if I had the capacity for full introspection, not just the surface level understanding of my thoughts a...
Against Tulip Subsidies
by Scott Alexander — 2015-06-06T04:19:14.000Z

I.

Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered to be living in sin; no other form of proposal is appropriate or accepted.

One day, a Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. He explains that his homeland also has a quaint custom involving tulips: they speculate on them, bidding the price up to stratospheric levels. Why, in the Netherlands, a tulip can go for ten times more than the average worker earns in a year! The trader is pleased to find a new source of bulbs, and offers the people of the kingdom a few guilders per tulip, which they happily accept.

Soon other Dutch traders show up and start a bidding war. The price of tulips goes up, and up, and up; first dozens of guilders, then hundreds. Tulip-growers make a fortune, but everyone else is less pleased. Suitors wishing to give a token of their love find themselves having to invest their entire life savings – with no guarantee that the woman will even say yes! Soon, some of the poorest people are locked out of marriage and family-raising entirely.

Some of the members of Parliament are outraged. Marriage is, they say, a human right, and to see it forcibly denied the poor by foreign speculators is nothing less than an abomination. They demand that the King provide every man enough money to guarantee he can buy a tulip. Some objections are raised: won’t it deplete the Treasury? Are we obligated to buy everyone a beautiful flawless bulb, or just the sickliest, grungiest plant that will technically satisfy the requirements of the ritual? If some man continuously proposes to women who reject him, are we obligated to pay for a new bulb each time, subsidizing his stupidity?

The pro-subsidy faction declares that the people asking these question are well-off, and can probably afford tulips of their own, and so from their place of privilege they are trying to raise pointless objections to other people being able to obtain the connubial happiness they themselves enjoy. After the doubters are tarred and feathered and thrown in the river, Parliament votes that the public purse pay for as many tulips as the poor need, whatever the price.

A few years later, another Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. Everyone asks if he is there to buy tulips, and he says no,...
Palatable presentation of rationality to the layperson
by Bound_up — 2015-06-06T01:47:16.895Z

I was recently reminded of two pieces of cached wisdom about wisdom itself.

First, that "Wisdom is not knowledge, but the application of knowledge."

And "The wise learn from others what the foolish learn from experience, or not at all."

Upon the mention of the first, I was immediately reminded of the essence of rationality, further expounded on by the second. My thoughts then jumped to the negative reactions I have become accustomed to from those who hear me refer frequently to "rationality." My salient dedication to the idea evoked in their minds such as to induce the intonation of all the cliched wisdom against the "cold" thinking of those with whom I had (in their minds) associated myself, the Spocks of the world.

And here was a potential alternative. I may be able to communicate to their minds more nearly what I mean by "rationality" by using the word "wisdom" in its place. I suspect the term will seem them more palatable, even noble.
And when I explain all those things which once led them to begrudgingly ration out a measure of respect for rationality, the result shall be rather to confirm in their minds the power, pleasure, and purpose of the pursuit of wisdom.

And so I intend to frame my purposes in that light. Here's hoping...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-06-05T15:06:30.613Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on May 29th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Ann Arbor, MI Discussion Meetup 6/13: 13 June 2015 01:30PM
Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Oslo Meetup at Bitraf.: 29 May 2015 05:30PM
[Prague] Rationality meetup in Prague #3: 30 June 2015 06:30PM
[Utrecht] 'The Most Good Good You Can Do' (Effective Altruism meetup): 31 May 2015 02:00PM
Warsaw: Newcomb's Problem & Decision Theories: 30 May 2015 06:30PM

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 - Caffe Medici - Wiki Editing: 30 May 2015 01:30PM
Boston: Making space in Interpersonal Interactions: 07 June 2015 03:30PM
Boston: Trigger action planning: 21 June 2015 03:30PM
Canberra: More Zendo!: 13 June 2015 06:00PM
[Melbourne] June Rationality Dojo: Logical fallacies & dojo structure discussion: 07 June 2015 03:30PM
Moscow: epistemology, framing, new project announcement: 31 May 2015 02:00PM
Moscow LW lecture centre meetup: 07 June 2015 03:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Intuitive Bayes: 07 June 2015 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - June: 24 June 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - July: 22 July 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - August: 26 August 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 23 September 2015 06:30PM
Vienna: 20 June 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Wise Sayings: 31 May 2015 03:00PM

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, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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 p...
Meetup : LessWrong Scotland
by cjb230 — 2015-06-05T11:31:49.998Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Scotland

WHEN:
28 June 2015 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Biblos, 1 Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1HR

The location may change if someone suggests another place, but it will be within a few minutes walk of Waverley station.

This time we'll be discussing the next section of the Rationality book. It's section C, Noticing Confusion.

This time I will do something on Fermi estimation, since I have to deliver a talk on it before the meeting! However, I'm not sure if it will be as good as our discussion on the length of a piece of string last time!

As usual, please pass this on to anyone who might be interested.

===========

This post is effectively a mirror. The definitive version is here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/873290099409748/

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Scotland
The lymphatic system is found to connect to the Central Nervous System
by ChristianKl — 2015-06-05T09:32:51.827Z

Kipnis et al found a new part of the lymphatic system. It goes into the brain.

The fact that we still get surprised by new elements of the brain suggests that there quite a lot we still don't know about the brain and uploading might be harder than previously believed.

Given that these vessels were hard to find, it will be interesting to see whether other hard to find vessels will be discovered in the coming years.

Besides their Nature article Structural and functional features of central nervous system lymphatic vessels, there a good article on NeuroscientistNews titled Missing link found between brain, immune system -- with major disease implications.
SSC Discussion: No Time Like The Present For AI Safety Work
by tog — 2015-06-05T02:34:28.645Z

(Continuing the posting of select posts from Slate Star Codex for comment here, for the reasons discussed in this thread, and as Scott Alexander gave me - and anyone else - permission to do with some exceptions.)

Scott recently wrote a post called No Time Like The Present For AI Safety Work. It makes the argument for the importance of organisations like MIRI thus, and explores the last two premises:

1. If humanity doesn’t blow itself up, eventually we will create human-level AI.

2. If humanity creates human-level AI, technological progress will continue and eventually reach far-above-human-level AI

3. If far-above-human-level AI comes into existence, eventually it will so overpower humanity that our existence will depend on its goals being aligned with ours

4. It is possible to do useful research now which will improve our chances of getting the AI goal alignment problem right

5. Given that we can start research now we probably should, since leaving it until there is a clear and present need for it is unwise

I placed very high confidence (>95%) on each of the first three statements – they’re just saying that if trends continue moving towards a certain direction without stopping, eventually they’ll get there. I had lower confidence (around 50%) on the last two statements.

Commenters tended to agree with this assessment; nobody wanted to seriously challenge any of 1-3, but a lot of people said they just didn’t think there was any point in worrying about AI now. We ended up in an extended analogy about illegal computer hacking. It’s a big problem that we’ve never been able to fully address – but if Alan Turing had gotten it into his head to try to solve it in 1945, his ideas might have been along the lines of “Place your punch cards in a locked box where German spies can’t read them.” Wouldn’t trying to solve AI risk in 2015 end in something equally cringeworthy?

As always, it's worth reading the whole thing, but I'd be interested in the thoughts of the LessWrong community specifically.
[Link]: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
by turchin — 2015-06-04T20:47:09.075Z

Latest AI success implies that strong AI may be near.

"There's something magical about Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). I still remember when I trained my first recurrent network for Image Captioning. Within a few dozen minutes of training my first baby model (with rather arbitrarily-chosen hyperparameters) started to generate very nice looking descriptions of images that were on the edge of making sense. Sometimes the ratio of how simple your model is to the quality of the results you get out of it blows past your expectations, and this was one of those times. What made this result so shocking at the time was that the common wisdom was that RNNs were supposed to be difficult to train (with more experience I've in fact reached the opposite conclusion). Fast forward about a year: I'm training RNNs all the time and I've witnessed their power and robustness many times, and yet their magical outputs still find ways of amusing me. This post is about sharing some of that magic with you.

We'll train RNNs to generate text character by character and ponder the question "how is that even possible?"

By the way, together with this post I am also releasing code on Github that allows you to train character-level language models based on multi-layer LSTMs. You give it a large chunk of text and it will learn to generate text like it one character at a time. You can also use it to reproduce my experiments below. But we're getting ahead of ourselves; What are RNNs anyway?"

https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

Edited: formating