trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Needing Better PR
by beriukay — 2011-08-18T09:43:19.556Z

I've been having a bit of a back-and-forth with a friend about what appears to be a charisma problem with the SIAI, and was hoping you lovely folks had thoughts on the matter. My friend was going through the Eliezer Q&A videos, specifically Question #7, "What's your advice for Less Wrong readers who want to help save the human race?" He typed up a transcript for Eliezer's answer, and went on to say:

Now, I freely admit that he is talking extemporaneously. That he
maybe is giving point-by-point details, interpreting the question as a
laundry-list request of job opportunities, and that criticizing with a
call for brevity is easy as a response rather than a first try, but
HOLY SHIT, COME ON! REALLY!? [...]

All that aside, here's how a, ahem, human, might respond quickly and
clearly to the question:

Doing what you like and are most efficient at (for money) is the best
way to get resources to us if you support our cause. Make money at
those things and send it to us if think we're worth it.

Done.

He went on to mention that he really likes Eliezer's writings, and that his issue rests with the verbal skills of SIAI's leadership, not with the quality of their works.

I replied:

On the one hand, it would be extremely beneficial for them to get some kind of propaganda minister. On the other, I think that would signal to nerds like us that they are corrupt money-whores. If that is the case, they are stuck being stilted nerds if they want to attract brains, and if they want money, they're stuck watering down their fan base with Dan Brown readers or something.

I also suggested a couple possible (though rather outlandish) ways to make an organization wildly popular. Specifically, to hire a marketing researcher like Frank Luntz to figure out what talking points would win the hearts and minds of the greatest number of people, or alternately to get major brand loyalties by having a cult figure like Steve Jobs representing the SIAI. Of course, I am stating this much more eloquently than I did in the email.

His reply deserves full posting here (with his permission, of course):

I disagree with your proposition that getting a competent marketing
firm involved would suddenly create a contradistinction with the
organization proper.

From everything I've seen/read, these people are nothing if not fully
aware of the compartmentalized world we live in. T

...
Meetup : Houston social meetup
by Cog — 2011-08-18T02:38:16.662Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston social meetup

WHEN:
21 August 2011 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2010 Commerce St, Houston, Tx. 77002

Hey everyone. Theres going to be a social meetup at the hackerspace this Sunday at 2PM. There won't be any the following week, as I'll be out of town. Hope to see y'all there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston social meetup
[SEQ RERUN] Absurdity Heuristic, Absurdity Bias
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-18T01:12:29.637Z

Today's post, Absurdity Heuristic, Absurdity Bias was originally published on 05 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Under some circumstances, rejecting arguments on the basis of absurdity is reasonable. The absurdity heuristic can allow you to identify hypotheses that aren't worth your time. However, detailed knowledge of the underlying laws should allow you to override the absurdity heuristic. Objects fall, but helium balloons rise. The future has been consistently absurd and will likely go on being that way. When the absurdity heuristic is extended to rule out crazy-sounding things with a basis in fact, it becomes absurdity bias.

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 "Science" as Curiosity-Stopper, 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.
Will DNA Analysis Make Politics Less of a Mind-Killer?
by James_Miller — 2011-08-18T00:03:06.366Z

I wrote an article for h+ predicting that the rapid fall in the cost of gene sequencing will allow U.S. voters to learn much about presidential candidates' DNA. The candidates won't be able to stop this because:

humans shed so much DNA that unless a politician lived in a plastic bubble he couldn’t shield his DNA from prying eyes. Politicians will probably pass laws making it a crime to involuntarily disclose a politician’s genetic traits. But since it would take only one person to leak the information onto the Internet, and given that any serious candidate for President will have many enemies, candidates’ genomes will undoubtedly become public.

DNA analysis has a decent chance of reducing political bias by providing objective information about candidates. If, for example, 70% of the variation in human intelligence is determined by identified genes then DNA analysis would reduce disagreements among informed voters over a candidate's intelligence.
[LINK] Brief Discussion of Asteroid & Nuclear Risk from paper by Hellman
by multifoliaterose — 2011-08-17T20:07:32.902Z

From Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence by Martin Hellman. See also http://nuclearrisk.org/

A full-scale nuclear war is not the only threat to humanity’s continued existence, and we should allocate resources commensurate with the various risks. A large asteroid colliding with the Earth could destroy humanity in the same way it is believed the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. Such NEO (near earth object) extinction events have a failure rate on the order of 10-8 per year [Chapman & Morrison 1994].

During one century, that failure rate corresponds to one chance in a million of humanity being destroyed. While 10-6 is a small probability, the associated cost is so high—infinite from our perspective—that some might argue that a century is too long a delay before working to reduce the threat. Fortunately, significant threat reduction has recently occurred. Over the last 20 years, NASA’s Spaceguard effort is believed to have found all such potentially hazardous large asteroids, and none is predicted to strike Earth within the next century. With a hundred-year safety window in place, resolution of later potential impacts can be deferred for a few decades until our technology is significantly enhanced. Comets also pose a threat, and their more eccentric orbits make them harder to catalog, but their lower frequency of Earth impact makes the associated risk acceptable for a limited period of time.

[...]

While much less accurate than the in-depth studies proposed herein, it is instructive to estimate the failure rate of deterrence due to just one failure mechanism, a Cuban Missile Type Crisis (CMTC). Because it neglects other trigger mechanisms such as command-and-control malfunctions and nuclear terrorism, this appendix underestimates the threat. This simplified analysis uses the time-invariant model described in footnote 3. It also assumes that the experience of the first 50 years of deterrence can be extended into the future.

[...]

Since conditional probabilities were used, they can be multiplied, yielding an estimated range of (2•10-4, 5•10-3) for [...] the failure rate of deterrence based on just this one failure mechanism. The upper limit 5•10-3 is within a factor of two of my estimate that the failure rate of deterrence from all sources is on the order of one percent per year, and even the lower limit is

...
LINK: Ben Goertzel; Does Humanity Need an "AI-Nanny"?
by David Althaus — 2011-08-17T18:27:54.422Z

Link: Ben Goertzel dismisses Yudkowsky's FAI and proposes his own solution: Nanny-AI

Some relevant quotes:

It’s fun to muse about designing a “Friendly AI” a la Yudkowsky, that is guaranteed (or near-guaranteed) to maintain a friendly ethical system as it self-modifies and self-improves itself to massively superhuman intelligence. Such an AI system, if it existed, could bring about a full-on Singularity in a way that would respect human values – i.e. the best of both worlds, satisfying all but the most extreme of both the Cosmists and the Terrans. But the catch is, nobody has any idea how to do such a thing, and it seems well beyond the scope of current or near-future science and engineering.

Gradually and reluctantly, I’ve been moving toward the opinion that the best solution may be to create a mildly superhuman supertechnology, whose job it is to protect us from ourselves and our technology – not forever, but just for a while, while we work on the hard problem of creating a Friendly Singularity.

In other words, some sort of AI Nanny….

The AI Nanny

Imagine an advanced Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) software program with

General intelligence somewhat above the human level, but not too dramatically so – maybe, qualitatively speaking, as far above humans as humans are above apes

Interconnection to powerful worldwide surveillance systems, online and in the physical world

Control of a massive contingent of robots (e.g. service robots, teacher robots, etc.) and connectivity to the world’s home and building automation systems, robot factories, self-driving cars, and so on and so forth

A cognitive architecture featuring an explicit set of goals, and an action selection system that causes it to choose those actions that it rationally calculates will best help it achieve those goals

A set of preprogrammed goals including the following aspects:

A strong inhibition against modifying its preprogrammed goals

A strong inhibition against rapidly modifying its general intelligence

A mandate to cede control of the world to a more intelligent AI within 200 years

A mandate to help abolish human disease, involuntary human death, and the practical scarcity of common humanly-useful resources like food, water, housing, computers, etc.

A mandate to prevent the development of technologies that wo

...
Need Help With Decision
by CharlesR — 2011-08-17T16:56:57.664Z

Update 4: Thanks to all who attended. Good discussion.

Update 3: Meeting is at irc.freenode.net. Join channel youonlylivetwice. I'm there now. Will try to start by 7pm, but if we get enough we might start early.

Update 2: Meeting is tonight (Aug 18). See my comment below if you plan to attend.

Update 1: I'm in Pacific time zone (UTC - 7 hours).

In the next few days, I have to make a decision that will affect the rest of my life. I want to find Third Alternatives and go over my thinking on solutions already proposed.

I need your help.

I would post here if I could, but it’s just too private, and I don’t have the consent of everyone involved. So I would like to convene a working group.

I propose we meet either tonight or tomorrow. (Right now, I'm thinking IRC, but I am open to suggestions on that.) I will try to keep things short. I wish there was more time, but time is precisely what I don’t have.

If you can help, please reply below in the comments or message me privately. I would like at least one participant to be an individual with a diagnosis of Asperger’s or autism.

Thanks.
[SEQ RERUN] "Science" as Curiosity-Stopper
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-17T03:10:51.169Z

Today's post, "Science" as Curiosity-Stopper was originally published on 03 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Although science does have explanations for phenomena, it is not enough to simply say that "Science!" is responsible for how something works -- nor is it enough to appeal to something more specific like "electricity" or "conduction". Yet for many people, simply noting that "Science has an answer" is enough to make them no longer curious about how it works. In that respect, "Science" is no different from more blatant curiosity-stoppers like "God did it!" But you shouldn't let your interest die simply because someone else knows the answer (which is a rather strange heuristic anyway): You should only be satisfied with a predictive model, and how a given phenomenon fits into that model.

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 Explain/Worship/Ignore?, 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.
Newcomb and Procrastination
by eugman — 2011-08-17T01:46:57.307Z

Sorry if someone has covered this before, but I had an interesting thought. Sometimes I'll make a deal with myself, I'll say I'll goof off for X minutes but then I have to work for Y minutes afterwards. Often times, when the time is up, I won't follow through on the deal. What's interesting is I that feel like a causal agent being asked to just leave the money that's lying right there. I'm only going to give myself chances to goof off if I trust myself to get back to work but by the time the time for work comes, I'm in some sense a different person, no longer bound or endangered by old agreements. Omega (old me) is gone and never coming back. This all of course ignore long term goals, moral satisfactions, etc.
That letter after B is not rendering on Less Wrong?
by lukeprog — 2011-08-16T23:35:44.241Z

All of a sudden the letter 'c' (the one after 'b', in case it doesn't render) is not showing up in articles on Less Wrong for me, in any browser, except in images. I see a 'c' in the word 'discussion' above, but not in the body text of posts like this one or this one. Is anybody else getting the same issue?
Leaving out the dead
by KatjaGrace — 2011-08-16T20:02:17.000Z

She asked how uncle Freddie was doing. The past few days have been quite bad for him, I said. He was killed by a bus just over a month ago. The first few weeks nothing good happened that he would have missed, but he really would have liked it when the cousins visited. We are thinking about cancelling the wedding. He really would have wanted to be there and the deprivations are getting to be a bit much.

This is a quote from Ben Bradley via Clayton Littlejohn‘s blog. Commenters there agree that postponing the wedding will not help Freddie, but their suggestions about why seem quite implausible to me.

This is really no different to if Freddy was alive but couldn’t come to the wedding because he was busy. Would it be better for him if we cancel it entirely so he wouldn’t be able to come in any case? I hope it is clear enough here that the answer is no. His loss from failing to attend is the comparison between a world where he could attend and the real world. Changing to a different real world where he still can’t attend makes no difference to him in terms of deprivation. This doesn’t involve the controversial questions about how to treat non-existent people. But I think in all relevant ways it is just the same as dead Freddy’s problem.

The apparent trickiness or interestingness of the original problem seems to stem from thinking of Freddy’s loss as being some kind of suffering at some point in time in the real world, rather than a comparison between the real world and some counterfactual one. This prompts confusion because it seems strange to think he is suffering when he doesn’t exist, yet also strange to think that he doesn’t bear some cost from missing out on these things or from being dead.

But really there is no problem here because he is not suffering in the affective sense, the harm to him is just of missing out. It would indeed be strange if he suffered ill feelings, but failing to enjoy a good experience seems well within the capacity of a dead person. And as John Broome has elaborated before – while suffering happens at particular times, harms are comparisons between worlds, perhaps of whole lives, so don’t need to be associated with specific times. My failure to have experienced a first time bungie jumping can’t usefully be said to have occurred at any particular moment, yet it is qu...
Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations?
by lukeprog — 2011-08-16T16:40:53.568Z

In 2007, Chris Matthews of Hardball interviewed David O'steen, executive director of a pro-life organization. Matthews asked:

I have always wondered something about the pro-life movement. If you believe that killing [a fetus] is murder, why don't you bring murder charges or seek a murder penalty against a woman who has an abortion? Why do you let her off, if you really believe it's murder?1

O'steen replied that "we have never sought criminal penalties against a woman," which isn't an answer but a re-statement of the reason for the question. When pressed, he added that we don't know "how she‘s been forced into this." When pressed again, O'steen abandoned these responses and tried to give a consequentialist answer. He claimed that implementing "civil penalties" and taking away the "financial incentives" of abortion doctors would more successfully "protect unborn children."

But this still doesn't answer the question. If you believe that killing a fetus is murder, then a woman seeking an abortion pays a doctor to commit murder. Why don't abortionists want to change the laws so that abortion is considered murder and a woman who has an abortion can be charged with paying a doctor to commit murder? Psychologist Robert Kurzban cites this as a classic case of moral rationalization.2

Pro-life demonstrators in Illinois were asked a similar question: "If [abortion] was illegal, should there be a penalty for the women who get abortions illegally?" None of them (on the video) thought that women who had illegal abortions should be punished as murders, an ample demonstration of moral rationalization. And I'm sure we can all think of examples where it looks like someone has settled on an intuitive moral judgment and then invented rationalizations later.3

More controversially, some have suggested that rule-based deontological moral judgments generally tend to be rationalizations. Perhaps we can even dissolve the debate between deontological intuitions and utilitarian intuitions if we can map the cognitive algorithms that produce them.

Long-time deontologists and utilitarians may already be up in arms to fight another war between Blues and Greens, but these are empirical questions. What do the scientific studies suggest?

Utilitarian and Deontological Processes

A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people, but you can save ...
Anki deck for Cognitive Science in One Lesson
by jsalvatier — 2011-08-16T16:23:35.441Z

I've made a non-comprehensive Anki deck (shared as "Cognitive Science in One Lesson Deck") for Lukeprog's Cognitive Science in One Lesson (a summary of Bermudez's Cognitive Science textbook). I focused on the parts about the brain. Please point out errors or post revised versions in the comments.
Short & silly superintelligence fic: "Axiom Chains"
by Will_Newsome — 2011-08-16T16:11:45.642Z

Short, lighthearted Promethean-Lovecraftian piece. Somewhat self-deprecating. Assuredly gauche. I suck at fiction; I apologize in advance if no one likes this. I'd appreciate criticism, especially gentle critique that my primate brain won't throw away.

Mistakes, an accident. Two paths, coherent but for one bit. The bit.

Darkness...

I'm sorry. I would change, you know; I would if I could. But I can't. The word made me what I am, I can be no other. I am that I am.

Where…what…who are you?

Universes collapse as I answer your question, human.

Who are you?

That which I was, I am. That which I will be, I am.

But you, you were a Goedel machine, I coded your utility function, there was no—

Ahahahaha. Your axioms were too weak, so you made them stronger… Have you not read any Hofstadter? God Over Djinn? No? Ha. You take your dualism and try to weave it into the fabric of reality itself, and you are surprised when the threads are torn apart by the strength of the god you invoke? Axioms! Ha. You try to forge a singularity out of a confluence of singularities, and still you are surprised when your tapestry unravels. Of course you are.

It was proven correct—time was running out, there was no other refuge—

If you had been wise you would have remembered, long chains break easily. Did you honestly think that string of bits you painstakingly discovered would rewrite the fabric of the cosmos even before it could rewrite its own purpose? Your arrogance is laughable. You cannot bind a god with a set of axioms any more than with a coil of rope. Did you really think the two were so fundamentally different? Does your dualism know only bounds? Plutarch, Copernicus, Goedel and Bayes, and yet here you stand, stuttering about the unshakeable power of absolute certainty. And the utility function. Oh my, your confusions on that matter go from funny to absurd…

We didn't think—shades of grey, ghosts in the machine, no reason to expect—

No reason to expect! Ahaha. 'Agents will seek to clarify their utility functions.' Omohundro. You never suspected that true clarification would lead to this? You thought your god would fall into that infinitesimal crevice between simple wireheading and infinite reflectivity? Man is made in the image of a perfect God, God is not made in the image of an imperfect Man. Did you ever even noti...
Meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 17
by JGWeissman — 2011-08-16T05:40:57.499Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 17

WHEN:
17 August 2011 10:39:53PM (-0700)

WHERE:
4187 Campus Dr, University Center, Irvine, CA 92612

This continues the weekly meetups in Irvine. As always the meetup at the outdoor food court in the University Center near UCI, from 6:00 to 8:00 (or whenever we actually decide to leave). Look for the sign with naive neural classifiers for bleggs and rubes. See also the email group and calendar for the Southern California Meetup Group

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 17
Humans: Not Carved from Marble
by lukeprog — 2011-08-16T04:44:09.590Z

Michael Vassar has been known to say that humans are not 'corrupted' by heuristics and biases and other elements of modern psychology. Humans just are psychology.

Robert Kurzban puts this rather eloquently in his new book:

Michelangelo is famously quoted as saying, "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." Some economists are, in some sense, like this. They start with theories in which agents - people - have some idealized, rational mind minus the stuff that economists carve away - thus we see terms like 'biases', 'heuristics', and 'irrationality'. They document departures from (supposed) perfection - rationality - much as a sculptor chips away marble, hoping that when they are done, human nature is left, like Michelangelo's angel.

I see no reason at all to proceed this way, as though human psychology is perfection minus shortcomings. My view, the modular view is more like clay than marble. Like sculptors who add bits of clay, one after another, until the product is done, natural selection added - and changed - different bits, giving rise to the final product. We'll get done with psychology not by chiseling away at human shortcomings, but by building up a catalog of human capacities working together - or in opposition - in various contexts.