trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : San Antonio, TX
by Bryan-san — 2015-07-03T17:10:55.478Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio, TX

WHEN:
12 July 2015 01:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
11255 Huebner Suite #100 San Antonio TX 78230

Coffee and discussion at Aspen's Brew! All are welcome!

New Meetup #2 to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong in San Antonio and meet the local community. Look for the sign that says Less Wrong!

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio, TX
Meetup : Rationality Reading Group (57-61)
by SeekingEternity — 2015-07-03T06:03:18.833Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Reading Group (57-61)

WHEN:
07 July 2015 06:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Paul G. Allen Center (185 Stevens Way, Seattle, WA) Room 503

Reading group for Yudkowsky's "Rationality: AI to Zombies", which is basically an organized and updated version of the Sequences from LW (see http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences).

The group meets to discuss the topics in the book, how to apply and benefit from them, and related topics in areas like cognitive biases, applied rationality, and effective altruism. You can get a copy of the book here: https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/

The reading list for this week is six topics from the "How to actually change your mind" section. These are the same as from last week's meetup, as that didn't really happen. They are (actually 57-61, LW's auto-formatting is screwing it up):

Politics is the Mind-Killer

Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality

Correspondence Bias

Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?

We previously covered the "Map and territory" sequence a few months ago, but please don't feel a need to have read everything up to this point to participate in the group.

Event is also on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1685501021668755/

We're meeting on the 5th floor. If you show up and the door into the room is locked, knock and look around for us elsewhere on the fifth floor if nobody answers. If the doors to the building are locked, try the other ones and don't believe the little red lights; try anyway. If the doors are, in fact, locked, we'll try to have somebody to let people in.

There's usually snacks at the meetup, though feel free to bring something. We usually get dinner afterward, around 9PM or so.

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Reading Group (57-61)
A Federal Judge on Biases in the Criminal Justice System.
by Costanza — 2015-07-03T03:17:50.658Z

A well-known American federal appellate judge, Alex Kozinski, has written a commentary on systemic biases and institutional myths in the criminal justice system.

The basic thrust of his criticism will be familiar to readers of the sequences and rationalists generally. Lots about cognitive biases (but some specific criticisms of fingerprints and DNA evidence as well). Still, it's interesting that a prominent federal judge -- the youngest when appointed, and later chief of the Ninth Circuit -- would treat some sacred cows of the judiciary so ruthlessly.

This is specifically a criticism of U.S. criminal justice, but, ceteris paribus, much of it applies not only to other areas of U.S. law, but to legal practices throughout the world as well.
MIRI needs an Office Manager (aka Force Multiplier)
by alexvermeer — 2015-07-03T01:10:05.742Z

(Cross-posted from MIRI's blog.)

MIRI's looking for a full-time office manager to support our growing team. It’s a big job that requires organization, initiative, technical chops, and superlative communication skills. You’ll develop, improve, and manage the processes and systems that make us a super-effective organization. You’ll obsess over our processes (faster! easier!) and our systems (simplify! simplify!). Essentially, it’s your job to ensure that everyone at MIRI, including you, is able to focus on their work and Get Sh*t Done.

That’s a super-brief intro to what you’ll be working on. But first, you need to know if you’ll even like working here.

A Bit About Us

We’re a research nonprofit working on the critically important problem of superintelligence alignment: how to bring smarter-than-human artificial intelligence into alignment with human values.1 Superintelligence alignment is a burgeoning field, and arguably the most important and under-funded research problem in the world. Experts largely agree that AI is likely to exceed human levels of capability on most cognitive tasks in this century—but it’s not clear when, and we aren’t doing a very good job of preparing for the possibility. Given how disruptive smarter-than-human AI would be, we need to start thinking now about AI’s global impact. Over the past year, a number of leaders in science and industry have voiced their support for prioritizing this endeavor:

Stuart Russell, co-author of the leading textbook on artificial intelligence and a MIRI advisor, gives a compelling argument for doing this work sooner rather than later.

Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, another MIRI research advisor, published Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which details the potential value of smarter-than-human AI systems as well as the potential hazards.

Elon Musk (Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla), Bill Gates (Microsoft co-founder), Stephen Hawking (world-renowned theoretical physicist), and others have publicly stated their concerns about long-term AI risk.

Hundreds of AI researchers and engineers recently signed an open letter advocating for more research into robust and beneficial artificial intelligence. A number of MIRI publications are cited in the corresponding Research Priorities document.

People are starting to discuss these issues ...
Wizards Implements Ochlocracy
by Zvi — 2015-07-02T23:14:29.000Z

Today, a player who recently made the Top 8 at a Grand Prix was banned for life from tournament Magic: The Gathering. His account on Magic Online was seized, and he will be given a check for what Wizards thinks that account was worth.

Wizards does not discuss the reasons for bans, but in this case everyone knows the reason: Then years ago, when he was 19, this person entered a guilty plea for aggravated sexual assault. He served three months in prison, and now does dozens of hours per week of community service, has married and is applying for admission to the bar.

This man, for the past ten years, has as far as we know committed no crime, violated no rules of Magic or its tournaments (other than accidental minor rules violations), done nothing wrong on any front.

Other than, it seems, his failure to die in a fire, which bugs the hell out of a certain group of people. These people, including one Drew Levin, took to Twitter and Reddit to demand that Something Be Done about this Rapist In Our Midst, when he had the audacity to actually do well in a tournament and come to the Twitter Mob’s attention.

In response to a quite small number of outspoken people, a person has been entirely purged from the game. No rule has been established that convicted felons, or sex offenders, or violent offenders, or those who inflict rare diseases on cute puppies (in order, of course, to soak up all the charity dollars as inefficiently as possible, thus denying those in need their Malaria nets and microloans!), will not be welcome at Wizards events.

Wizards statement on the matter was this:

“We work hard to make sure all players feel welcomed, included and safe at our events so that they can have fun playing Magic. We don’t generally comment on individuals or provide position statements in the abstract, but we take action to address player issues and community concerns when we feel it is necessary.”

In other words, Wizards has become an Ochlocracy: Mob rule, and that mob is an internet Twitter mob, which doesn’t even have the decency and costly signaling power to show up in person and procure a decent supply of physical pitchforks.

Whereas it turns out that the actual vast majority of the community does not see it this way. In response, the community is currently making it very clear that this effort to making everyone feel welcome is actually making us feel quit...
The Unfriendly Superintelligence next door
by jacob_cannell — 2015-07-02T18:46:22.116Z

Markets are powerful decentralized optimization engines - it is known. Liberals see the free market as a kind of optimizer run amuck, a dangerous superintelligence with simple non-human values that must be checked and constrained by the government - the friendly SI. Conservatives just reverse the narrative roles.

In some domains, where the incentive structure aligns with human values, the market works well. In our current framework, the market works best for producing gadgets. It does not work so well for pricing intangible information, and most specifically it is broken when it comes to health.

We treat health as just another gadget problem: something to be solved by pills. Health is really a problem of knowledge; it is a computational prediction problem. Drugs are useful only to the extent that you can package the results of new knowledge into a pill and patent it. If you can't patent it, you can't profit from it.

So the market is constrained to solve human health by coming up with new patentable designs for mass-producible physical objects which go into human bodies. Why did we add that constraint - thou should solve health, but thou shalt only use pills? (Ok technically the solutions don't have to be ingestible, but that's a detail.)

The gadget model works for gadgets because we know how gadgets work - we built them, after all. The central problem with health is that we do not completely understand how the human body works - we did not build it. Thus we should be using the market to figure out how the body works - completely - and arguably we should be allocating trillions of dollars towards that problem.

The market optimizer analogy runs deeper when we consider the complexity of instilling values into a market. Lawmakers cannot program the market with goals directly, so instead they attempt to engineer desireable behavior by ever more layers and layers of constraints. Lawmakers are deontologists.

As an example, consider the regulations on drug advertising. Big pharma is unsafe - its profit function does not encode anything like "maximize human health and happiness" (which of course itself is an oversimplification). If allowed to its own devices, there are strong incentives to sell subtly addictive drugs, to create elaborate hyped false advertising campaigns, etc. Thus al...
A Roadmap: How to Survive the End of the Universe
by turchin — 2015-07-02T11:01:04.704Z

In a sense, this plan needs to be perceived with irony because it is almost irrelevant: we have very small chances of surviving even next 1000 years and if we do, we have a lot of things to do before it becomes reality. And even afterwards, our successors will have completely different plans.

There is one important exception: there are suggestions that collider experiments may lead to a vacuum phase transition, which begins at one point and spreads across the visible universe. Then we can destroy ourselves and our universe in this century, but it would happen so quickly that we will not have time to notice it. (The term "universe" hereafter refers to the observable universe that is the three-dimensional world around us, resulting from the Big Bang.)

We can also solve this problem in next century if we create superintelligence.

The purpose of this plan is to show that actual immortality is possible: that we have an opportunity to live not just billions and trillions of years, but an unlimited duration. My hope is that the plan will encourage us to invest more in life extension and prevention of global catastrophic risks. Our life could be eternal and thus have meaning forever.

Anyway, the end of the observable universe is not an absolute end: it's just one more problem on which the future human race will be able to work. And even at the negligible level of knowledge about the universe that we have today, we are still able to offer more than 50 ideas on how to prevent its end.

In fact, to assemble and come up with these 50 ideas I spent about 200 working hours, and if I had spent more time on it, I'm sure I would have found many new ideas. In the distant future we can find more ideas; choose the best of them; prove them, and prepare for their implementation.

First of all, we need to understand exactly what kind end to the universe we should expect in the natural course of things. There are many hypotheses on this subject, which can be divided into two large groups:

1. The universe is expected to have a relatively quick and abrupt end, known as the Big Crunch or Big Rip (accelerating expansion of the universe causes it to break apar

...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
by rocurley — 2015-07-02T05:46:00.541Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks

WHEN:
06 July 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We*'ll be meeting to give/listen to short talks!

*We is used losely here: I will not actually be there. To get in, call Jacob instead at 978-460-3399.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
Harper’s Fishing Nets: a review of Plato’s Camera by Paul Churchland
by  — 2015-07-02T02:19:46.003Z

Harper’s Fishing Nets: a review of Plato’s Camera by Paul Churchland

Eli Sennesh

July 1, 2015

Abstract

Paul Churchland published Plato’s Camera to defend the thesis that abstract objects and properties are both real and natural, consisting in learned mental representations of the timeless, abstract features of the mind’s environment. He holds that the brain learns, without supervision, high-dimensional maps of objective feature domains – which he calls Domain-Portrayal Semantics. He further elaborates that homomorphisms between these high-dimensional maps allow the brain to occasionally repurpose a higher-quality map to understand a completely different domain, reducing the latter to the former. He finally adds a Map-Portrayal Semantics of language to his Domain-Portrayal Semantics of thought by considering the linguistic, cultural, educational dimensions of human learning.

Part I
Introduction

Surely the title of this review already sounds like some terrible joke is about to be perpetrated, but in fact it merely indicates a philosophical difference between myself and Paul Churchland. Churchland wrote Plato’s Camera[3] not merely to explain a view on philosophy of mind to laypeople and other philosophers, but with the specific goal of defending Platonism about abstract, universal properties and objects (such as those used in mathematics) by naturalizing it. The contrast between such naturalist philosophers as Churchland, Dennett, Flanegan, and Railton and non-naturalist or weakly naturalist philosophy lies precisely in this fact: the latter consider many abstract or intuitive concepts to necessarily form their own part of reality, amenable strictly to philosophical investigation, while the former seek and demand a conscilience of causal explanation for what’s going on in our lives. The results are a breath of fresh air to read.

A great benefit of reading strongly naturalistic philosophy and philosophers is that, over the effort of researching a philosophical position, they tend to absorb so much scientific material that they can’t help but achieve a degree of insight and accuracy in their core thesis – even when getting almost all the details wrong! So it is with Plato’s Camera: reading in 2015 a book published in 2012, that mostly does not cite any scientific research from the past f

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Rationality Reading Group: Part D: Mysterious Answers
by Gram_Stone — 2015-07-02T01:55:42.756Z

This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post.

Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This week we discuss Part D: Mysterious Answers (pp. 117-191). This post summarizes each article of the sequence, linking to the original LessWrong post where available.

D. Mysterious Answers

30. Fake Explanations - People think that fake explanations use words like "magic," while real explanations use scientific words like "heat conduction." But being a real explanation isn't a matter of literary genre. Scientific-sounding words aren't enough. Real explanations constrain anticipation. Ideally, you could explain only the observations that actually happened. Fake explanations could just as well "explain" the opposite of what you observed.

31. Guessing the Teacher's Password - In schools, "education" often consists of having students memorize answers to specific questions (i.e., the "teacher's password"), rather than learning a predictive model that says what is and isn't likely to happen. Thus, students incorrectly learn to guess at passwords in the face of strange observations rather than admit their confusion. Don't do that: any explanation you give should have a predictive model behind it. If your explanation lacks such a model, start from a recognition of your own confusion and surprise at seeing the result.

32. Science as Attire - You don't understand the phrase "because of evolution" unless it constrains your anticipations. Otherwise, you are using it as attire to identify yourself with the "scientific" tribe. Similarly, it isn't scientific to reject strongly superhuman AI only because it sounds like science fiction. A scientific rejection would require a theoretical model that bounds possible intelligences. If your proud beliefs don't constrain anticipation, they are probably just passwords or attire.

33. Fake Causality - It is very easy for a human being to think that a theory predicts a phenomenon, when in fact is was fitted to a phenomenon. Properly designed reasoning systems (GAIs) would be able to avoid this mistake with our knowledge of probability theory, but humans have to write down a prediction in advance in order to ensure that our reasoning about causalit...
July 2015 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2015-07-01T21:15:10.920Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. 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 post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Analogical Reasoning and Creativity
by jacob_cannell — 2015-07-01T20:38:38.658Z

This article explores analogism and creativity, starting with a detailed investigation into IQ-test style analogy problems and how both the brain and some new artificial neural networks solve them. Next we analyze concept map formation in the cortex and the role of the hippocampal complex in establishing novel semantic connections: the neural basis of creative insights. From there we move into learning strategies, and finally conclude with speculations on how a grounded understanding of analogical creative reasoning could be applied towards advancing the art of rationality.

Introduction

Under the Hood

Conceptual Abstractions and Cortical Maps

The Hippocampal Association Engine

Cultivate memetic heterogeneity and heterozygosity

Construct and maintain clean conceptual taxonomies

Conclusion

Introduction

The computer is like a bicycle for the mind.

-- Steve Jobs

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for the birds of the sky.

-- Jesus

Sigmoidal neural networks are like multi-layered logistic regression.

-- various

The threat of superintelligence is like a tribe of sparrows who find a large egg to hatch and raise. It grows up into a great owl which devours them all.

-- Nick Bostrom (see this video)

Analogical reasoning is one of the key foundational mechanisms underlying human intelligence, and perhaps a key missing ingredient in machine intelligence. For some - such as Douglas Hofstadter - analogy is the essence of cognition itself.[1]

Steve Job's bicycle analogy is clever because it encapsulates the whole cybernetic idea of computers as extensions of the nervous system into a single memorable sentence using everyday terms.

A large chunk of Jesus's known sayings are parables about the 'Kingdom of Heaven': a complex enigmatic concept that he explains indirectly through various analogies, of which the mustard seed is perhaps the most memorable. It conveys the notions of exponential/sigmoidal growth of ideas and social movements (see also the Parable of the Leaven), while also hinting at greater future purpose.

In a number of fields, including the technical, analogical reasoning is key to creativity: most new insights come from establishing mappings between or with concepts from othe

...
Stupid Questions July 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-07-01T19:13:32.373Z

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Social & Board Games
by DanArmak — 2015-07-01T17:53:21.516Z

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

WHEN:
07 July 2015 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv

Next Tuesday 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] FLI's recommended project grants for AI safety research announced
by Kaj_Sotala — 2015-07-01T15:27:17.994Z

http://futureoflife.org/misc/2015awardees

You may recognize several familiar names there, such as Paul Christiano, Benja Fallenstein, Katja Grace, Nick Bostrom, Anna Salamon, Jacob Steinhardt, Stuart Russell... and me. (the $20,000 for my project was the smallest grant that they gave out, but hey, I'm definitely not complaining. ^^)
Directly advertising existential risk
by Arbitrary — 2015-07-01T12:45:50.802Z

Has anyone tried advertising existential risk?

Bostroms "End of Humanity" talk for instance.

It costs about 0.2 $ per view for a video ad on YouTube, so if 0.2% of viewers give an average of 100 $ it would break even. Hopefully people would give more than that.

You can target ads to groups likely to give much by the way, like the highly educated.

I posted this suggestion in the open thread as well, before I had the karma to make a thread. That okay?