trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Refuting the "iron law of bureaucracy"?
by CronoDAS — 2010-11-04T08:18:04.121Z

Jerry Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" implies that leaders of bureaucratic organizations will seek to maximize the power and influence of the organization at the expense of its stated goals - but is that true in the real world?

Julie Dolan of Macalester College examined surveys of government administrators and found that, surprisingly enough, high-ranking federal bureaucrats tended to prefer less government spending than the general public, even on issues that their own departments are responsible for.

Here is the abstract from her paper, "The budget-minimizing bureaucrat? Empirical evidence from the senior executive service" that was published in the journal Public Administration Review:

In a representative democracy, we assume the populace exerts some control over the actions and outputs of government officials, ensuring they comport with public preferences. However, the growth of the fourth branch of government has created a paradox: Unelected bureaucrats now have the power to affect government decisions (Meier 1993; Rourke 1984; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). In this article, I rely on two competing theories of bureaucratic behavior-representative-bureaucracy theory and Niskanen's budget-maximization theory-to assess how well the top ranks of the federal government represent the demands of the citizenry. Focusing on federal-spending priorities, I assess whether Senior Executive Service (SES) members mirror the attitudes of the populace or are likely to inflate budgets for their own personal gain. Contrary to the popular portrayal of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat (Niskanen 1971), I find these federal administrators prefer less spending than the public on most broad spending categories, even on issues that fall within their own departments' jurisdictions. As such, it may be time to revise our theories about bureaucratic self-interest and spending priorities. [emphasis added]

I was able to read the paper here for free, but I had to register first.

See also: The Case FOR Bureaucracy
An apology
by mwaser — 2010-11-03T19:20:08.179Z

Ohhhhh. WOW! Damn. Now I feel bad.
I have been acting like a bull in a china shop, been an extremely ungracious guest, and have taken longer than I prefer to realize these things.
My deepest apologies.
My only defenses or mitigating circumstances:
1. I really didn't get it
2. My intentions were good
I would like to perform a penance of creating or helping to create a newbie's guide to LessWrong. Doing so will clarify and consolidate my understanding and hopefully provide a useful community resource in recompense for the above and appreciation for those who took the time to write thoughtful comments. Obviously, though, doing so will require more patience and help from the community (particularly since I am certainly aware that I have no idea how to calibrate how much, if anything, you actually want to make too easily accessible) -- so this is a also request for that patience and help (and I'm making the assumption that the request will be answered by the replies ;-).
Thanks.
Control Fraud
by David_Allen — 2010-11-03T19:12:07.646Z

A recent post by Bruce Schneier on control fraud.

Control fraud is a process of optimizing an organization for fraud, utilizing a position of power to suborn controls.

From the abstract of the paper Bruce references:

Individual “control frauds” cause greater losses than all other forms of property crime combined. They are financial super-predators. Control frauds are crimes led by the head of state or CEO that use the nation or company as a fraud vehicle. Waves of “control fraud” can cause economic collapses, damage and discredit key institutions vital to good political governance, and erode trust. The defining element of fraud is deceit – the criminal creates and then betrays trust. Fraud, therefore, is the strongest acid to eat away at trust. Endemic control fraud causes institutions and trust to become friable – to crumble – and produce economic stagnation.

Friendly AI is an important topic on this site, but what about creating friendly organizations such as companies and governments? The damage done by a government wireheaded for fraud can be enormous.

Can the same approaches used to build FAI be used to improve other types of systems?
Amoral Approaches to Morality
by Vaniver — 2010-11-03T08:25:51.143Z

Consider three cases in which someone is asking you about morality: a clever child, your guru (and/or Socrates, if you're more comfortable with that tradition), or an about-to-FOOM AI of indeterminate friendliness. For each of them, you want your thoughts to be as clear as possible- the other entity is clever enough to point out flaws (or powerful enough that your flaws might be deadly), and for none of them can you assume that their prior or posterior morality will be very similar to your own. (As Thomas Sowell puts it, children are barbarians who need to be civilized before it is too late; your guru will seem willing to lead you anywhere, and the AI probably doesn't think the way you do.)

I suggest that all three can be approached in the same way: by attempting to construct an amoral approach to morality. At first impression, this approach gives a significant benefit: circular reasoning is headed off at the pass, because you need to explain morality (as best as you can) to someone who does not understand or feel it.

Interested in what comes next?

The main concern I have is that there is a rather extensive Metaethics sequence already, and this seems to be very similar to The Moral Void and The Meaning of Right. The benefit of this post, if there is one, seems to be in a different approach to the issue- I think I can get a useful sketch of the issue in one post- and probably a different conclusion. At the moment, I don't buy Eliezer's approach to the Is-Ought gap (Right is a 1-place function... why?), and I think a redefinition of the question may make for somewhat better answers.

(The inspirations for this post, if you're interested in me tackling them directly instead, are criticisms of utilitarianism obliquely raised in a huge tree in the Luminosity discussion thread (the two interesting dimensions are questioning assumptions, and talking about scope errors, of which I suspect scope errors is the more profitable) and the discussion around, as shokwave puts it, the Really Scary Idea.)
META: Meetup Overload
by Spurlock — 2010-11-03T02:01:43.475Z

Does anyone else think we need a better way of dealing with meet-ups? I totally understand that meeting face to face is an (at least arguably) important next-step in the rationalist-community-building project, but the fact is the front page, which was originally for all the most content-rich, accessible, and noteworthy articles is now being filled with blurbs that are irrelevant to 95% of the readership.

I can see why these posts would need to be highly visible if the meetups are going to work at all, but I think we should get the ball rolling on figuring out a better way to handle location-specific posts. For example, mandatory-but-private location setting in your profile (at least to the country, possibly to the state/province/etc for larger areas), which would subscribe you (with opt-out available) to any happenings in that area. That's just the first idea, like I said the idea is just to get the discussion going.
Rationality Quotes: November 2010
by jaimeastorga2000 — 2010-11-02T20:41:33.804Z

A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Voting is not rational (usually.)
by araneae — 2010-11-02T19:34:28.552Z

Today is the midterm elections in the United States, and I am not voting.

For the vast majority of elections, voting is irrational, because the individual's vote is proportionately very small. This means it cannot have an effect on the outcome.

There are, however, conditions which can lead to voting becoming rational, and these are:

The number of voters approaches zero.

The ratio of votes for candidates (in a majority wins, 2 person race) approaches .5

The difficulty of voting becomes vanishingly small.

Incentives are created to make the costs of not voting greater than the cost of voting (for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.)

For me, as for nearly everyone, voting this year is irrational. 1 and 2 are nowhere close to true, and 3 is especially bad for me this year. I forgot to change my address on my voter's registration until yesterday and my polling location is both a) usually overpopulated and filled with long lines and b) farther than I care to go.

Only 3 and 4 are something that we can certainly do something about. The web-based absentee voter system that was tested this fall is a step in that directions, but its subsequent hacking was unsurprising. Is opening our system up to fraud a reasonable trade-off to get more people to vote? Should there be an option to use paper absentee-like ballots even if you are not absent? Should the U.S. go the Australia route?
Oxford (UK) Rationality & AI Risks Discussion Group
by Larks — 2010-11-02T19:10:30.494Z

Alex Flint and I are doing a series of seminar/discussion events in Oxford, to which anyone from LW would be very welcome. Especially as the theme is Rationality & AI Risks!

They're being held at 5pm on Saturday in Exeter College, and will go on throughout November. We had over 10 people last Saturday discussing Heuristics and Biases, and plan to go onto Bayesianism this week. They'll probably last for about an hour, though we may decamp to the pub afterwards to continue discussion.

If you're in the area, you might also be interested in the other events run by the Oxford Transhumanist Society.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5
by NihilCredo — 2010-11-02T18:57:29.702Z

- This thread has run its course. You will find newer threads in the discussion section.

Another discussion thread - the fourth - has reached the (arbitrary?) 500 comments threshold, so it's time for a new thread for Eliezer Yudkowsky's widely-praised Harry Potter fanfic.

Most of the paratext and fan-made resources are listed on Mr. LessWrong's author page. There is also AdeleneDawner's collection of most of the previously-published Author's Notes.

Older threads: one, two, three, four. By tag.

Newer threads are in the Discussion section, starting from Part 6.

Spoiler policy as suggested by Unnamed and approved by Eliezer, me, and at least three other upmodders:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.

It would also be quite sensible and welcome to continue the practice of declaring at the top of your post which chapters you are about to discuss, especially for newly-published ones, so that people who haven't yet seen them can stop reading in time.
Toy model of human values
by xamdam — 2010-11-02T18:28:33.783Z

This is just a summary via analogy where I human values come from, as far as I understand it. The expanded version would be Eli's http://lesswrong.com/lw/l3/thou_art_godshatter/.

The basic analogy is to chess-playing programs (at least the basic ones from 40 years ago, the art has progressed since then, but not much). The way they work is basically by examining the branching tree of possible moves; since chess is "too big" to solve completely (find the branch that always leads to winning) by present hardware what these programs do is go to a certain depth and then use heuristics to decide whether the end state is good, such as how many pieces are on its side vs. the enemy side, weighed by their "power" (queen is worth more than pawn) and position (center positions are worth more).

The analogy mapping is as follows: the goal of the game is winning, of evolution is survival of a gene fragment (such as human DNA). Explicit encoding of the goal is not computationally feasible or worthwhile (in terms of the goal itself), so values of certain non-terminal states (in terms of the goal) are explicitly given to the program or to a human; the human/program knows no better than these non-terminal values - they are our values - we are Godshatter.

What do you think?
South/Eastern Europe Meeting in Ljubljana/Slovenia
by Thomas — 2010-11-02T18:26:17.877Z

Will be held on November the 5th at 19:00 at Nikola Tesla's Street 30. The place known as The Hekovnik.

We will discuss various topics on this second of many future meetings. Any Slovenian who reads this site is welcome, as any Croat, Austrian, northern Italian or any other currently in the vicinity of Ljubljana.
New Month's Resolutions
by Barry_Cotter — 2010-11-02T16:15:48.766Z

If you have a goal that can be credibly achieved by the end of the month reply to this post. At the end of the month everybody who posted writes up their experiences, lessons in overcoming akrasia etc. as a reply to their original comment or by editing the original.

Whether you want to share the goal before the end of the month is up to you, pros, you are accountable, cons, you may feel a sense of accomplishment just by saying it and not do anything.
Anthropic principles agree on bigger future filters
by XiXiDu — 2010-11-02T10:14:04.000Z

I finished my honours thesis, so this blog is back on. The thesis is downloadable here and also from the blue box in the lower right sidebar. I’ll blog some other interesting bits soon.

My main point was that two popular anthropic reasoning principles, the Self Indication Assumption (SIA) and the Self Sampling Assumption (SSA), as well as Full Non-indexical Conditioning (FNC) basically agree that future filter steps will be larger than we otherwise think, including the many future filter steps that are existential risks.

Figure 1: SIA likes possible worlds with big populations at our stage, which means small past filters, which means big future filters.

SIA says the probability of being in a possible world is proportional to the number of people it contains who you could be. SSA says it’s proportional to the fraction of people (or some other reference class) it contains who you could be. FNC says the probability of being in a possible world is proportional to the chance of anyone in that world having exactly your experiences. That chance is more the larger the population of people like you in relevant ways, so FNC generally gets similar answers to SIA. For a lengthier account of all these, see here.

SIA increases expectations of larger future filter steps because it favours smaller past filter steps. Since there is a minimum total filter size, this means it favours big future steps. This I have explained before. See Figure 1. Radford Neal has demonstrated similar results with FNC.

Figure 2: A larger filter between future stages in our reference class makes the population at our own stage a larger proportion of the total population. This increases the probability under SSA.

SSA can give a variety of results according to reference class choice. Generally it directly increases expectations of both larger future filter steps and smaller past filter steps, but only for those steps between stages of development that are at least partially included in the reference class.

For instance if the reference class includes all human-like things, perhaps it stretches from ourselves to very similar future people who have avoided many existential risks. In this case, SSA increases the chances of large filter steps between these stages, but says little about filter steps before us, or after the future people in our reference class. This is basically the Doomsday A...
What is the group selection debate?
by Academian — 2010-11-02T02:02:11.965Z

Related to Group selection update, The tragegy of group selectionism

tl;dr: In competitive selection processes, selection is a two-place word: there's something being selected (a cause), and something it's being selected for (an effect). The phrase group-level gene selection helps dissolve questions and confusion surrounding the less descriptive phrase "group selection".

(Essential note for new readers on reduction: Reality does not seem to keep track of different "levels of organization" and apply different laws at each level; rather, it seems that the patterns we observe at higher levels are statistical consequences of the laws and initial conditions at the lower levels. This is the "reductionist thesis.")

When I first encountered people debating "whether group selection is real", I couldn't see what there was to possibly debate about. I've since realized the debate is mostly a confusion arising from a cognitive misuse of a two-place "selection" relation.

Causes being selected versus effects they're being selected for.

A gene is an example of a Replicating Cause. (So is a meme; postpone discussion here.) A gene has many effects, one of which is that what we call "copies" of it tend to crop up in reality, through various mechanisms that involve cellular and organismal reproduction.

For example, suppose a particular human gene X causes cells containing it to immediately reproduce without bound, i.e. the gene is "cancerous". One effect is that there will soon be many more cells with that gene, hence more copies of the gene. Another effect is that the human organism containing it is liable to die without passing it on, hence fewer copies of the gene (once the dead organism starts to decay). If that's what happens, the gene itself can be considered unfit: all things considered, its various effects eventually lead it to stop existing.

(An individual in the next generation can still "get cancer", though, if a mutation in one produces a new cancerous gene, Y. This is what happens in reality.)

Thus, cancers are examples of where higher-complexity mechanisms trump lower complexity-mechanisms: organism-level gene selection versus cellular-level gene selection. Note that the Replicating Cause being selected is always the gene, but it is being selected for its net effects occurring on various levels.

So what's left to debate about?

There is no debating that genes ar...
Group selection update
by PhilGoetz — 2010-11-01T16:51:36.926Z

Group selection might seem like an odd topic for a LessWrong post. Yet a google seach for "group selection" site:lesswrong.com turns up 345 results.

Just the power and generality of the concept of evolution is enough to justify posts on it here. In addition, the impact group selection could have on the analysis of social structure, government, politics, and the architecture of self-modifying artificial intelligences is hard to over-estimate. David Sloan Wilson wrote that "group selection is arguably the single most important concept for understanding the nature of politics from an evolutionary perspective." (You should read his complete article here - it's a much more thorough debunking of the debunking of group selection than this post, although I'm not convinced his interpretation of kin selection is sensible.) And I will argue that it has particular relevance to the study of rationality.

Eliezer's earlier post The Tragedy of Group Selectionism dismisses group selection, based on a mathematical model by Henry Harpending and Alan Rogers. That model is, however, fatally flawed: It studies the fixation of altruistic vs. selfish genes within groups of fixed size. The groups never go extinct. But group selection happens when groups are selected against. The math used to argue against group selection assumes from the outset that group selection does not occur. (This is also true of Maynard Smith's famous haystack model.)

(That post is still valuable; its main purpose is to argue that math trumps wishes and aesthetics. Empirical data, however, trumps mathematical models.)

Nitpicking digression on definitions

"Group selection" is one of those tricky phrases that doesn't mean what it means. Denotationally, group selectiond means selection at the level of a group. Connotationally, though, group selectionc means selection for altruistic genes at the level of a group. This is because, historically, group selection was posited to explain genetic adaptations that are hard to explain using individual selection.

group selectionn, selection at the group level for traits that are neutral or harmful at the level of the individual, or that don't even exist within the individual genome, should also be considered. group selectionc is a subset of group selectionn is a subset of grou...
What I would like the SIAI to publish
by XiXiDu — 2010-11-01T14:07:42.563Z

Major update here.

Related to: Should I believe what the SIAI claims?

Reply to: Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It)

... pointing out that something scary is possible, is a very different thing from having an argument that it’s likely. — Ben Goertzel

What I ask for:

I want the SIAI or someone who is convinced of the Scary Idea1 to state concisely and mathematically (and with possible extensive references if necessary) the decision procedure that led they to make the development of friendly artificial intelligence their top priority. I want them to state the numbers of their subjective probability distributions2 and exemplify their chain of reasoning, how they came up with those numbers and not others by way of sober calculations.

The paper should also account for the following uncertainties:

Comparison with other existential risks and how catastrophic risks from artificial intelligence outweigh them.

Potential negative consequences3 of slowing down research on artificial intelligence (a risks and benefits analysis).

The likelihood of a gradual and controllable development versus the likelihood of an intelligence explosion.

The likelihood of unfriendly AI4 versus friendly and respectively abulic5 AI.

The ability of superhuman intelligence and cognitive flexibility as characteristics alone to constitute a serious risk given the absence of enabling technologies like advanced nanotechnology.

The feasibility of “provably non-dangerous AGI”.

The disagreement of the overwhelming majority of scientists working on artificial intelligence.

That some people who are aware of the SIAI’s perspective do not accept it (e.g. Robin Hanson, Ben Goertzel, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil and Greg Egan).

Possible conclusions that can be drawn from the Fermi paradox6 regarding risks associated with superhuman AI versus other potential risks ahead.

Further I would like the paper to include and lay out a formal and systematic summary of what the SIAI expects researchers who work on artificial general intelligence to do and why they should do so. I would like to see a clear logical argument for why people working on artificial general intelligence should listen to what the SIAI has to say.

Examples:

Here are are two examples of what I'm looking for:

Am I A Sim?

Asteroid Deflection as a Public Good

The first example...