trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Genetically Engineered Intelligence
by Jordan — 2010-12-05T10:19:29.237Z

There are a lot of unknowns about the future of intelligence: artificial intelligence, uploading, augmentation, and so on. Most of these technologies are likely a ways off, or at least far enough away to confound predictions. Genetic engineering, however, presents a very near term and well understood possibility for developing greater intelligence.

A recent news story published in South China Morning and discussed on Steve Hsu's blog highlights China's push to understand the genetic underpinnings of intelligence. China is planning to sequence the full genome of 1000 of its brightest kids, in the hopes of locating key genes responsible for higher intelligence. Behind the current project is BGI, which is aiming to be (or already is) the largest DNA sequencing center in the world.

Suppose that intelligence has a large genetic component (reasonable, considering estimates for heritability). Suppose that the current study unveils those components (if not this study, then likely another study soon, perhaps with millions of genomes). Then with some advances in genetic engineering China could quickly raise a huge population of incredibly intelligent people.

Such an endeavor could never be carried out on a large, public scale in the West, but it seems China has fewer qualms.

The timescales here are on the order of 20 years, which are relevant compared to most estimates for AI and WBE. More, genetic engineering human intelligence seems to be on a much more predictable path than other intelligence technologies. For both these reasons I think understanding, discussing, and keeping an eye on this issue is important.

What are the ramifications for

AI research? FAI? In particular relating to enhanced humans speeding further development

Whole Brain Emulation research?

Other technologies that may pose existential risks (nanotech, biotech, etc, especially in light of the fact that it may be China leading the way)?

The potential for recursive feedback? (Smarter scientists engineering smarter scientists. Less worrisome due to timescales)

Of course, there are a host of other interesting questions relating to societal impact, both near and long term. Feel free to discuss these as well.
The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions
by Desrtopa — 2010-12-05T04:58:34.599Z

The trolley problem is one of the more famous thought experiments in moral philosophy, and studies by psychologists and anthropologists suggest that the response distributions to its major permutations remain roughly the same throughout all human cultures. Most people will permit pulling the lever to redirect the trolley so that it will kill one person rather than five, but will balk at pushing one fat person in front of the trolley to save the five if that is the only available option of stopping it.

However, in informal settings, where the dilemma is posed by a peer rather than a teacher or researcher, it has been my observation that there is another major category which accounts for a significant proportion of respondents' answers. Rather than choosing to flip the switch, push the fat man, or remain passive, many people will reject the question outright. They will attack the improbability of the premise, attempt to invent third options, or appeal to their emotional state in the provided scenario ("I would be too panicked to do anything",) or some combination of the above, in order to opt out of answering the question on its own terms.

However, in most cases, these excuses are not their true rejection. Those who tried to find third options or appeal to their emotional state will continue to reject the dilemma even when it is posed in its most inconvenient possible forms, where they have the time to collect themselves and make a reasoned choice, but no possibility of implementing alternative solutions.

Those who appealed to the unlikelihood of the scenario might appear to have the stronger objection; after all, the trolley dilemma is extremely improbable, and more inconvenient permutations of the problem might appear even less probable. However, trolleylike dilemmas are actually quite common in real life, when you take the scenario not as a case where only two options are available, but as a metaphor for any situation where all the available choices have negative repercussions, and attempting to optimize the outcome demands increased complicity in the dilemma. This method of framing the problem also tends not to cause people to reverse their rejections.

Ultimately, when provided with optimally inconvenient and general forms of the dilemma, most of those who rejected the question will continue to make excuses to avoid answering the question on its own term...
A neural correlate of certainty
by PhilGoetz — 2010-12-05T01:44:02.521Z

Adam Kepecs' Eppendorf essay, hosted at science's website (but not printed in the magazine), is about some neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex of rats that appear to represent uncertainty in an odor-recognition task by firing more often, at a rate roughly linearly proportional to the error rate.

The involvement of OFC in decision-making isn't new, but the graphs are nice and quantitative.
A Catalog of Confusions
by sixes_and_sevens — 2010-12-05T01:17:49.434Z

tl;dr - can we categorise confusing events by skills required to deal with them? What are those skills?

I am sometimes haunted by things I read online. It's probably a couple of years since I first read Your Strength as a Rationalist, but over the past month or two I've been reminded of it a surprising number of times in different circumstances. It's led me to wonder whether the idea of being "confused by fiction" can be helpfully broken down into categories, with each of those categories having certain skills that can be worked on to help notice them.

I'm going to describe two such categories I think I've identified, and invite your criticism, or suggestions of other similar categories. In both cases, I believe there to be some instinct, acquired skill, or some combination thereof that draws it to my attention. I could just be making this up, though, so criticism is also welcome on this front.

Absence of Salient Information

I believe tech support is like a magic trick in reverse. With a magic trick, the magician hides a crucial fact which he then distracts you from. He provides a false narrative of what's going on while confusing the sequence of events, culminating in the impossible, and relies on your own fear of appearing foolish to make you falsely report the conditions of the trick to both yourself and other spectators.

In tech support, you are often presented with an impossible sequence of events; the customer's fear of appearing foolish makes them falsely report the conditions of the fault to both themselves and you, concealing a crucial fact which the rest of the narrative distracts you from. You then have to figure out how it was done.

I recently asked a girl from my dance class out for a drink, and proceeded to receive the most shocking litany of mixed signals I could ever imagine receiving, drink not forthcoming. I boiled it down to three possibilities: either she was interested but incredibly shy, uninterested but just really friendly; or she had a completely different set of standards when it came to signaling romantic interest or lack thereof. I remember thinking how none of these possibilities made sense in context, and was reminded quite specifically of the idea of being more confused by fiction than by reality. It was driving my problem-solvin...
Applied cognitive science: learning from a faux pas
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-12-04T11:15:48.594Z

Cross-posted from my LiveJournal:

Yesterday evening, I pasted to two IRC channels an excerpt of what someone had written. In the context of the original text, that excerpt had seemed to me like harmless if somewhat raunchy humor. What I didn't realize at the time was that by removing the context, the person writing it came off looking like a jerk, and by laughing at it I came off looking as something of a jerk as well.
Two people, both of whom I have known for many years now and whose opinions I value, approached me by private message and pointed out that that may not have been the smartest thing to do. My initial reaction was defensive, but I soon realized that they were right and thanked them for pointing it out to me. Putting on a positive growth mindset, I decided to treat this event as a positive one, as in the future I'd know better.
Later that evening, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, the episode replayed itself in my mind. I learnt long ago that trying to push such replays out of my mind would just make them take longer and make them feel worse. So I settled back to just observing the replay and waiting for it to go away. As I waited, I started thinking about what kind of lower-level neural process this feeling might be a sign of.
Artificial neural networks use what is called a backpropagation algorithm to learn from mistakes. First the network is provided some input, then it computes some value, and then the obtained value is compared to the expected value. The difference between the obtained and expected value is the error, which is then propagated back from the end of the network to the input layer. As the error signal works it way through the network, neural weights are adjusted in such a fashion to produce a different output the next time.
Backprop is known to be biologically unrealistic, but there are more realistic algorithms that work in a roughly similar manner. The human brain seems to be using something called temporal difference learning. As Roko described it: "Your brain propagates the psychological pain 'back to the earliest reliable stimulus for the punishment'. If you fail or are punished sufficiently many times in some problem area, and acting in that area is always preceeded by [doing something], your brain will propagate the psychological pain right back to the moment you first begin to [do that something]".
As I lay there in bed,

...
Efficient Charity
by multifoliaterose — 2010-12-04T10:27:58.909Z

I wrote this article in response to Roko's request for an article about efficient charity. As a disclosure of a possible conflict of interest I'll note that I have served as a volunteer for GiveWell. Last edited 12/06/10.

Charitable giving is widely considered to be virtuous and admirable. If statistical behavior is any guide, most people regard charitable donations to be worthwhile expenditures. In 2001 a full 89% of American households donated money to charity and during 2009 Americans donated $303.75 billion to charity [1].

A heart-breaking fact about modern human experience is that there's little connection between such generosity and positive social impact. The reason why humans evolved charitable tendencies is because such tendencies served as marker to nearby humans that a given individual is a dependable ally. Those who expend their resources to help others are more likely than others to care about people in general and are therefore more likely than others to care about their companions. But one can tell that people care based exclusively on their willingness to make sacrifices independently of whether these sacrifices actually help anybody.

Modern human society is very far removed from our ancestral environment. Technological and social innovations have made it possible for us to influence people on the other side of the globe and potentially to have a profound impact on the long term survival of the human race. The current population of New York is ten times the human population of the entire world in our ancestral environment. In view of these radical changes it should be no surprise that the impact of a typical charitable donation falls staggeringly short of the impact of donation optimized to help people as much as possible.

While this may not be a problem for donors who are unconcerned about their donations helping people, it's a huge problem for donors who want their donations to help people as much as possible and it's a huge problem for the people who lose out on assistance because of inefficiency in the philanthropic world. Picking out charities that have high positive impact per dollar is a task no less difficult than picking good financial investments and one that requires heavy use of critical and quantitative reasoning. Donors who wish for their donations to help people as much as possible should engage in such reasoning and/or rely ...
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
by Mass_Driver — 2010-12-04T09:12:04.436Z

I can think of no better way to spend my karma than on encouraging people to read this 19th century self-help book. It's free and online in full.

The guidelines on what makes an appropriate front-page article be damned, or, if necessary, enforced by official censorship.

Thanks to User:sfb for the quote that led me here, although the decision to post is entirely my own.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm
Sequences in Alternative Formats
by OneWhoFrogs — 2010-12-04T01:40:40.102Z

In the past weeks, there have been a few projects aiming to convert the sequences into more eye-friendly formats than the computer screen. There's no collection of these projects yet, so I'm posting here and in the wiki to get the word out.

Print ready versions by jb55 (GitHub.) Has versions in Markdown, PDF, and ePub. ePubs can be converted to nearly any other format with calibre.

lw2ebook by me (GitHub.) Includes all sequences in ePub and mobi format.

Print ready versions by Jordan. Contains all posts of the sequence in one HTML file.

Some of the sequences can be rather lengthy -- the one on quantum physics is around 118,000 words. I know that there are some people that don't mind reading off LCD screens, but hopefully these tools will prove useful to the rest.
Cambridge Sunday meetup: New time and location
by jimrandomh — 2010-12-04T00:11:27.912Z

The Sunday Cambridge meetups, which happen on the first and third Sunday of each month, are now at 2:00 pm at Cosi, near Kendall Square. As discussed at the last meetup, we've changed the location because the old location was becoming too crowded, and the time to allow the meetup to go on longer before people have to leave.
Are stereotypes ever irrational?
by  — 2010-12-03T23:45:26.814Z

Harvard's undergraduate admission office will tell you "There is no typical Harvard student." This platitude ticks me off. Of course there's such a thing as a typical Harvard student! Harvard students aren't magically exceptions to the laws of probability. Just as a robin is a more typical bird than an ostrich, some Harvard students are especially typical. Let's say (I'm not actually looking at data here) that most Harvard students are rich, most have high SAT scores, most are white, and most are snobbish. Note: I am not a Harvard student. :)

Now, a very typical Harvard student would be rich AND white AND smart AND snobbish. But observe that a given student has a smaller probability of being all of these than of just, say, being rich. If you add enough majority characteristics, eventually the "typical" student will become very rare. Even if there's a 99% probability of having any one of these characteristics, 0.99n ->0 as n goes to infinity. Some Harvard students are typical; but extremely typical Harvard students are rare. If you encountered a random Harvard student, and expected her to have all the majority characteristics of Harvard students, you could very well be wrong.

So far, so obvious. But who would make that mistake?

You, that's who. The conjunction fallacy is the tendency of humans to think specific conditions are more probable than general conditions. People are more likely to believe that a smart, single, politically active woman is a feminist bank teller than just a bank teller. Policy experts (in the 1980's) were more likely to think that the USSR would invade Poland and that the US would break off relations with the USSR, than either one of these events alone. Of course, this is mistaken: the probability of A and B is always less than or equal to the probability of A alone. The reason we make this mistake is the representativeness heuristic: a specific, compelling story that resembles available data is judged as more probable than general (but more likely) data. Judging by this evidence, I'd hypothesize that most people will overestimate the probability of a random Harvard student matching the profile of a "very typical" Harvard student. The conjunction fallacy says something even stronger: the more infor...
Starting point for calculating inferential distance?
by JenniferRM — 2010-12-03T20:20:03.484Z

One of the shiniest ideas I picked up from LW is inferential distance. I say "shiny" because the term, so far as I'm aware, has no clear mathematical or pragmatic definition, no substantive use in peer reviewed science, but was novel to me and appeared to make a lot of stuff about the world suddenly make sense. In my head it is marked as "super neat... but possibly a convenient falsehood". I ran across something yesterday that struck me a beautifully succinct and helpful towards resolving the epistemic status of the concept of "inferential distance".

While surfing the language log archives I ran across a mailbox response to correspondence about comparative communication efficiency. The author, Mark Liberman, was interested in calculating the amount of information in text and was surprised to find that something about the texts, or the subjects, or his calculation lead to estimating different amounts of information in different translations of the same text (with English requiring 20%-40% more bits than Chinese to say the things in his example text).

Mr. Liberman was helped by Bob Moore who, among other things, noted:

...why should we expect two languages to use the same number of bits to convey the same thoughts? I believe that when we speak or write we always simplify the complexity of what is actually in our heads, and different languages might implicitly do this more than others. Applying Shannon's source/channel model, suppose that when we have a thought T that we want to convey with an utterance U, we act as if our hearer has a prior P(T) over the possible thoughts we may be conveying and estimates a probability P(U|T) that we will have used U to express T. As you well know, according to Shannon, the hearer should find the T that maximizes P(U|T)*P(T) in order to decide what we meant. But the amount of effort that the speaker puts into U will determine the probability that the hearer will get the message T correctly. If the speaker thinks the prior on T is high, then he may choose a shorter U that has a less peaked probability of only coming from T. If I say to my wife "I got it," I can get by with this short cryptic message, if I think there is a very high probability that she will know what "it" is, but I am taking a risk.
My conjecture is that the acceptable trade-off between linguistic effort and risk of being misunderstood is

...
Longterm/Difficult to measure charities
by Raemon — 2010-12-03T18:47:22.335Z

I'm not sure if this necessarily warrants a new discussion, or if there's an existing article/thread that addresses this topic.

There's a lot of discussion recently about charity, and how to give effectively. I've been looking over givewell.org and it definitely is the single most important thing I've found on lesswrong. But one discouraging thing is that by focusing on easy to measure charities, there's not a lot of info on charities that are trying to accomplish long term less measurable goals. The best charity there that matches my priorities was an educational agency in India that put a lot of emphasis on self improvement.

My *think* my ideal charity would be something similar to Heifer International, but which also focuses on reproductive health and/or women's rights. Feeding people fish for a day means you just need to feed them again tomorrow, and if they have a bunch of kids you haven't necessarily accomplished anything. From what I've read, in places where the standard of living improves and women get more equality, overpopulation becomes less of an issue. So it seems to me that addressing those issues together in particular regions would produce sustainable longterm benefit. But Givewell doesn't seem to have a lot of information on those types of charities.
Two publicity ideas
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-12-03T15:41:47.163Z

Here's the easy idea-- how about a brochure about LW and SIAI? I was just at a couple of science fiction conventions, and it occurred to me that if there were a brochure, I could have printed it out and put it on the freebie table.

The hard idea is Sesame Street for rationalism-- entertaining video that dramatizes rationality. This would require money and possibly talents which aren't currently in the community, but I think a good bit of rationality could be dramatized, and it would be a big win for raising the rationality waterline.
Aieee! The stupid! it burns!
by Richard_Kennaway — 2010-12-03T14:53:47.932Z

Last Wednesday (2010 Dec 01), BBC Radio 4 broadcast a studio discussion on the question: "should we actively try to extend life itself?" The programme can be listened to from the BBC here for one week from broadcast, and is also being repeated tomorrow (Saturday Dec 04) at 22:15 BST. (ETA: not BST, GMT.)

All of the dreadful arguments for why death is good came out. For uninteresting reasons I missed a few minutes here and there, but in what I heard, not one of the speakers on any side of the question said anything like, "This is a no-brainer! Death is evil. Disease is evil. The less of both we have, the better. There is nothing good about death, at all, and all the arguments to the contrary are moral imbecility."

Instead, I heard people saying that work on life extension is disrespectful to the old, that to prolong life would be like prolonging an opera, which has a certain natural size and shape, that the old are wise, so if we make them physically young then old people won't be old, so they won't be wise. Whatever cockeyed argument you can construct by scattering into a Deeply Wise template the words "old", "young", "wise", "decrepit", "healthy", "natural", "unnatural", "boredom", "inevitable", "denial", I heard worse.

If I can bear to listen again to the whole thing just to check I didn't miss anything important, I may write something on their discussion board.