trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Moscow meet up
by Yuu — 2014-07-04T08:08:12.445Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meet up

WHEN:
06 July 2014 02:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Attention! Time is changed, we gather at 14:00!

We will have:

Chips announcement

Short reports about cognitive biases

Concepts decoupling, report

Chaotic discussion

Search for cognitive biases in prints from Internet

Fallacymania, a game

We gather in the Yandex office, you need the first revolving door under the archway. Here is additional guide how to get there: link.
You can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information.

We start at 14:00 and sometimes finish at night. Please pay attention that we only gather near the entrance and then come inside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meet up
Just for fun: Computer game to illustrate AI takeover concepts?
by kokotajlod — 2014-07-03T19:30:26.241Z

I play Starcraft:BW sometimes with my brothers. One of my brothers is much better than the rest of us combined. This story is typical: In a free-for-all, the rest of us gang up on him, knowing that he is the biggest threat. By sheer numbers we beat him down, but foolishly allow him to escape with a few workers. Despite suffering this massive setback, he rebuilds in hiding and ends up winning due to his ability to tirelessly expand his economy while simultaneously fending off our armies.

This story reminds me of some AI-takeover scenarios. I wonder: Could we make a video game that illustrates many of the core ideas surrounding AGI? For example, a game where the following concepts were (more or less) accurately represented as mechanics:

--AI arms race

--AI friendliness and unfriendliness

--AI boxing

--rogue AI and AI takeover

--AI being awesome at epistemology and science and having amazing predictive power

--Interesting conversations between AI and their captors about whether or not they should be unboxed.

I thought about this for a while, and I think it would be feasible and (for some people at least) fun. I don't foresee myself being able to actually make this game any time soon, but I like thinking about it anyway. Here is a sketch of the main mechanics I envision:

Setting the Stage

This is a turn-based online game with some element of territory control and conventional warfare, designed to be played with at least 7 or so players. I'm imagining an Online Diplomacy variant such as http://www.playdiplomacy.com/ which seems to be pretty easy to make. It would be nice to make it more complicated though, since this is not a board game.

Turns are simultaneous; each round lasts one day on standard settings.

Players indicate their preferences for the kind of game they would like to play, and then get automatically matched with other players of a similar skill level.

Players have accounts, so that we can keep track of how skilled they are, and assign them rough rankings based on their experience and victory ratio.

Rather than recording merely wins and losses, this game keeps track of Victory Points.

All games are anonymous.

Introducing AI

As the game progresses, factions have the ability to build AI which are implemented by bringing in another player from outside the game.

The skill level of the AI player is random, but most likely to be the same as the skill l

...
Separating university education from grading 
by Stefan_Schubert — 2014-07-03T17:23:57.027Z

One of many problems with the contemporary university system is that the same institutions that educate students also give them their degrees and grades. This obviously creates massive incentives for grade inflation and lowering of standards. Giving a thorough education requires hard work not only from students but also from the professors. In the absence of an independent body that tests that the students actually have learnt what they are supposed to have learnt, many professors spend as little time as possible at teaching, giving the students light workloads (something most of them of course happily accept). The faculty/student non-aggression pact is an apt term for this.

To see how absurd this system is, imagine that we would have the same system for drivers' licenses: that the driving schools that train prospective drivers also tested them and issued their drivers' licenses. In such a system, people would most probably chose the most lenient schools, leading to a lowering of standards. For fear of such a lowering of standards, prospective drivers are in many countries (I would guess universally but do not know that for sure) tested by government bodies.

Presumably, the main reason for this is that governments really care about the lowering of drivers' standards. Ensuring that all drivers are appropriately educated (i.e. is seen as very important. By contrast, the governments don't care that much about the lowering of academic standards. If they would, they would long ago have replaced a present grading/certification system with one where students are tested by independent bodies, rather than by the universities themselves.

This is all the more absurd given how much politicians in most countries talk about the importance of education. More often than not they talk about education, especially higher education, as a panacea to cure for all ills. However, if we look at the politicians' actions, rather than at their words, it doesn't seem like they actually do think it's quite as important as they say to ensure that the population is well-educated.

Changing the system for certifying students is important not the least in order to facilitate inventions in higher education. The present system discriminates in favour of traditional campus courses, which are both expensive and fail to teach the students as much as they should. I'm not saying that online co...
Steelmanning Inefficiency
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-07-03T12:17:13.923Z

When considering writing a hypothetical apostasy or steelmanning an opinion I disagreed with, I looked around for something worthwhile, both for me to write and others to read. Yvain/Scott has already steelmanned Time Cube, which cannot be beaten as an intellectual challenge, but probably didn't teach us much of general use (except in interesting dinner parties). I wanted something hard, but potentially instructive.

So I decided to steelman one of the anti-sacred cows (sacred anti-cows?) of this community, namely inefficiency. It was interesting to find that it was a little easier than I thought; there are a lot of arguments already out there (though they generally don't come out explicitly in favour of "inefficiency"), it was a question of collecting them, stretching them beyond their domains of validity, and adding a few rhetorical tricks.

The strongest argument

Let's start strong: efficiency is the single most dangerous thing in the entire universe. Then we can work down from that:

A superintelligent AI could go out of control and optimise the universe in ways that are contrary to human survival. Some people are very worried about this; you may have encountered them at some point. One big problem seems to be that there is no such thing as a "reduced impact AI": if we give a superintelligent AI a seemingly innocuous goal such as "create more paperclips", then it would turn the entire universe into paperclips. Even if it had a more limited goal such as "create X paperclips", then it would turn the entire universe into redundant paperclips, methods for counting the paperclips it has, or methods for defending the paperclips it has - all because these massive transformations allow it to squeeze just a little bit more expected utility from the universe.

The problem is one of efficiency: of always choosing the maximal outcome. The problem would go away if the AI could be content with almost accomplishing its goal, or of being almost certain that its goal was accomplished. Under those circumstances, "create more paperclips" could be a viable goal. It's only because a self-modifying AI drives towards efficiency, that we have the problem in the first place. If the AI accepted being inefficient in its actions, even a little bit, the world would be much safer.

So the first strike against efficiency is that it's the most likely thing to...
[moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-07-03T12:04:26.087Z

As previously discussed, on June 6th I received a message from jackk, a Trike Admin. He reported that the user Jiro had asked Trike to carry out an investigation to the retributive downvoting that Jiro had been subjected to. The investigation revealed that the user Eugine_Nier had downvoted over half of Jiro's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes.

I asked the community's guidance on dealing with the issue, and while the matter was being discussed, I also reviewed previous discussions about mass downvoting and looked for other people who mentioned being the victims of it. I asked Jack to compile reports on several other users who mentioned having been mass-downvoted, and it turned out that Eugine was also overwhelmingly the biggest downvoter of users David_Gerard, daenarys, falenas108, ialdabaoth, shminux, and Tenoke. As this discussion was going on, it turned out that user Ander had also been targeted by Eugine.

I sent two messages to Eugine, requesting an explanation. I received a response today. Eugine admitted his guilt, expressing the opinion that LW's karma system was failing to carry out its purpose of keeping out weak material and that he was engaged in a "weeding" of users who he did not think displayed sufficient rationality.

Needless to say, it is not the place of individual users to unilaterally decide that someone else should be "weeded" out of the community. The Less Wrong content deletion policy contains this clause:

Harrassment of individual users.

If we determine that you're e.g. following a particular user around and leaving insulting comments to them, we reserve the right to delete those comments. (This has happened extremely rarely.)

Although the wording does not explicitly mention downvoting, harassment by downvoting is still harassment. Several users have indicated that they have experienced considerable emotional anguish from the harassment, and have in some cases been discouraged from using Less Wrong at all. This is not a desirable state of affairs, to say the least.

I was originally given my moderator powers on a rather ad-hoc basis, with someone awarding mod privileges to the ten users with the highest karma at the time. The original purpose for that appointment was just to delete spam. Nonetheless, since retributive downvoting has been a clear problem for the community, I asked the community for guidance on dealing with the...
Terminology Thread (or "name that pattern")
by sixes_and_sevens — 2014-07-03T11:47:01.749Z

I think there's widespread assent on LW that the sequences were pretty awesome. Not only do they elucidate upon a lot of useful concepts, but they provide useful shorthand terms for those concepts which help in thinking and talking about them. When I see a word or phrase in a sentence which, rather than doing any semantic work, simply evokes a positive association to the reader, I have the useful handle of "applause light" for it. I don't have to think "oh, there's one of those...you know...things where a word isn't doing any semantic work but just evokes a positive association the reader". This is a common enough pattern that having the term "applause light" is tremendously convenient.

I would like this thread to be a location where people propose such patterns in comments, and respondents determine (a) whether this pattern actually exists and / or is useful; (b) whether there is already a term or sufficiently-related concept that adequately describes it; and (c) what a useful / pragmatic / catchy term might be for it, if none exists already.

I would like to propose some rules suggested formatting to make this go more smoothly.

(ETA: feel free to ignore this and post however you like, though)

When proposing a pattern, include a description of the general case as well as at least one motivating example. This is useful for establishing what you think the general pattern is, and why you think it matters. For instance:

General Case:

When someone uses a term without any thought to what that term means in context, but to elicit a positive association in their audience.

Motivating Example:

I was at a conference where someone said AI development should be "more democratic". I didn't understand what they meant in context, and upon quizzing them, it turned out that they didn't either. It seems to me that they just used the word "democratic" as decoration to make the audience attach positive feelings to what they were saying.

When I think about it, this seems like quite a common rhetorical device.

When responding to a pattern, please specify whether your response is:

(a) wrangling with the definition, usefulness or existence of the pattern

(b) making a claim that a term or sufficiently-related concept exists that adequately describes it

(c) suggesting a completely fresh, hitherto-uncoined name for it

(d) other

(ETA: or don't, of you don't want to)

Obviou...
Moderators, please wake up and start protecting this community!
by Viliam_Bur — 2014-07-03T09:13:50.117Z

We have a person systematically abusing the voting mechanisms of this website. Old users are annoyed. New users are driven away. There are whole threads created by people complaining about this abuse, but without moderator powers, there is nothing we can do. So we just complain endlessly and become more and more frustrated.

This is already going on for months.

"The garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in." -- Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

Unless this problem is solved by someone responsible, I promise I will not write here a single comment or article, until August 31st 2014, as an expression of solidarity with the victims of mass downvoting, and disagreement with the inaction of moderators. (Meetup announcements are an exception to this.)

Feel free to join this pledge.
How Common Are Science Failures?
by Scott Alexander — 2014-07-03T01:36:31.000Z

After a brief spurt of debate over the claim that “97% of relevant published papers support anthropogenic climate change”, I think the picture has mostly settled to an agreement that – although we can contest the methodology of that particular study – there are multiple lines of evidence that the number is somewhere in the nineties.

So if any doubt at all is to remain about climate change, it has to come from the worry that sometimes entire scientific fields can get things near-unanimously wrong, especially for political or conformity-related reasons.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if we are not climatologists ourselves, our prior on climate change should be based upon how frequently entire scientific fields get things terribly wrong for political or conformity-related reasons.

Skeptics mock the claim that science was wrong before, but skeptics mock everything. A better plan might be to try to quantify the frequency of scientific failures so we can see how good (or bad) the chances are for any given field.

Before we investigate, we should define our reference class properly. I think a scientific mistake only counts as a reason for doubting climate change (or any other commonly-accepted scientific paradigm) if:

1. It was made sometime in the recent past. Aristotle was wrong about all sorts of things, and so were those doctors who thought everything had to do with black bile, but the scientific community back then was a lot less rigorous than our own. Let’s say it counts if it’s after 1900.

2. It was part of a really important theory, one of the fundamental paradigms of an entire field. I’m sure some tiny group of biologists have been wrong about how many chromosomes a shrew has, but that’s probably an easier mistake to wander into than all of climatology screwing up simultaneously.

3. It was a stubborn resistance to the truth, rather than just a failure to have come up with the correct theory immediately. People were geocentrists before they were heliocentrists, but this wasn’t because the field of astronomy became overly politicized and self-assured, it was because (aside from one ancient Greek guy nobody really read) heliocentrism wasn’t invented until the 1500s, and after that it took people a couple of generations to catch on. In the same way, Newton’s theory of gravity wasn’t q...
Futures studies: the field and the associated community
by VipulNaik — 2014-07-02T23:47:29.810Z

Note: This post is part of my series of posts on forecasting and related topics, related to my contract work for MIRI. While I think the post would interest a sufficiently large fraction of the LessWrong readership for it to be worth posting, it's not of as much general interest as some of my other recent posts. I do expect some of the information in the post to be new and useful to people who have hitherto associated futurology primarily with a few big names such as Ray Kurzweil, or are unaware of the distinction between the academic communities devoted to forecasting and futures studies.

This post is part of documentation of work I'm doing for MIRI on forecasting in various domains. This particular post is on the topic of futures studies, also known as futurology (Wikipedia). Futures studies is basically the study of the future, or rather, of possibilities for the future. I'd originally thought that the term would be futurism, but that term is used for an art movement.

What is futures studies, and how does it relate to forecasting?

Futures studies can crudely be thought of as forecasting the future, but while forecasting is an important component, futures studies often has the goal of guiding or shaping the future. It's called futures studies rather than future studies because it's the study of possible futures, how to cope with them, and possibly, how to bring them about (see, for instance, the futures techniques called backcasting and causal layered analysis).

Another difference between forecasting and futures studies is that while forecasting is typically done for specific timeframes, futures studies can be more amorphous: it can involve imagining and describing things that might exist in the future, without assigning either an expected time of arrival or a probability of realization. Futures studies can operate over time horizons ranging from 1-2 years to the very longest horizons of centuries that I discussed in a previous post. In general, the focus is not on getting the dates or probabilities right, but rather on describing what's possible.

Clearly, it's harder to evaluate the quality of work in futures studies compared to work in forecasting. With forecasting, the quality of forecasts can be judged by looking at the accuracy, bias, and utility to planners. Futures studies does not generally involve clear, falsifiable predictions. Thus, anybody can ponti...
Scenario planning, its utility, and its relationship with forecasting
by VipulNaik — 2014-07-02T02:32:25.167Z

Note: This post is part of my series of posts on forecasting and related topics, related to my contract work for MIRI. While I think the post would interest a sufficiently large fraction of the LessWrong readership for it to be worth posting, it's not of as much general interest as some of my other recent posts. If business strategy and planning don't interest you as topics, this post may not be for you.

I've been reviewing forecasting and related domains as part of contract work for MIRI. One of the related domains I'm looking at is scenario planning (Wikipedia), also known as scenario thinking or scenario analysis. To understand scenario planning, I read the book The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz (Amazon) (a fairly interesting read, though whether you consider it value-for-money depends on whether strategy planning and thinking about the future as a whole interest you) and his follow-up book Learnings from the Long View (Amazon). I also skimmed Scenario Planning in Organizations by Thomas J. Chermack (Amazon), which is somewhat drier but is more useful for people who have some understanding of scenario planning and want to implement it in full.

In this post, I discuss some aspects of scenario planning, but the post is not intended to be a standalone summary of scenario planning. For that purpose, I recommend reading the overviews of scenario planning listed below. In this post, I'll look at examples of scenario planning in diverse domains, and I'll consider the relationship between scenario planning and the more conventional, quantitative approach to forecasting.

Overviews of scenario planning

Wikipedia page

Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking by Paul J. H. Schoemaker.

The origins and evolution of scenario techniques in long range business planning by Bradfield et al.

For longer overviews, consider the books listed above.

Key people

Herman Kahn (Wikipedia): He pioneered the use of scenario planning in the United States military and at the RAND Corporation, and he founded the Hudson Institute.

Pierre Wack (Wikipedia): He spearheaded the use of scenario planning by Royal Dutch Shell in the early 1970s. This is claimed to have helped the company cope better with the OPEC oil shock and environmentalism than its competitors did. Shell was the first private company to use scenario planning in a big, systematic way.

Arie de Geus (Wikipedia):

...
Downvote stalkers: Driving members away from the LessWrong community?
by Ander — 2014-07-02T00:40:26.138Z

Last month I saw this post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kbc/meta_the_decline_of_discussion_now_with_charts/ addressing whether the discussion on LessWrong was in decline. As a relatively new user who had only just started to post comments, my reaction was: “I hope that LessWrong isn’t in decline, because the sequences are amazing, and I really like this community. I should try to write a couple articles myself and post them! Maybe I could do an analysis/summary of certain sequences posts, and discuss how they had helped me to change my mind”. I started working on writing an article.

Then I logged into LessWrong and saw that my Karma value was roughly half of what it had been the day before. Previously I hadn’t really cared much about Karma, aside from whatever micro-utilons of happiness it provided to see that the number slowly grew because people generally liked my comments. Or at least, I thought I didn’t really care, until my lizard brain reflexes reacted to what it perceived as an assault on my person.

Had I posted something terrible and unpopular that had been massively downvoted during the several days since my previous login? No, in fact my ‘past 30 days’ Karma was still positive. Rather, it appeared that everything I had ever posted to LessWrong now had a -1 on it instead of a 0. Of course, my loss probably pales in comparison to that of other, more prolific posters who I have seen report this behavior.

So what controversial subject must I have commented on in order to trigger this assault? Well, let’s see, in the past week I had asked if anyone had any opinions of good software engineer interview questions I could ask a candidate. I posted in http://lesswrong.com/lw/kex/happiness_and_children/ that I was happy to not have children, and finally, here in what appears to me to be by far the most promising candidate:http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/keu/separating_the_roles_of_theory_and_direct/ I replied to a comment about global warming data, stating that I routinely saw headlines about data

...