trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Seattle Sequences group: Mysterious Answers 4
by SeekingEternity — 2015-03-13T07:35:08.701Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Sequences group: Mysterious Answers 4

WHEN:
23 March 2015 06:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Paul G. Allen Center, 185 Stevens Way, Seattle, Washington 98195

Location is the UW CSE building, room 503. Paid parking is available on campus (enter via Steven's Way). Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/966274253390417/

This is a normally-weekly meetup to discuss and work through the Sequences while getting to know other aspiring rationalists in the Seattle area. Each session's reading list is posted below, and in the relevant Facebook event. We usually discuss the sequence posts and relevant applied rationality techniques.

Note that this meetup has an unusual two-week gap since the last one, due to conflicts with other events and host availability. We will try to return to a regular schedule following this.

As the name suggests, this meetup will go over the fourth part of the "Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions" sequence. We previously covered the "Map and territory" sequence. All are welcome to join, though, even if they've read all of the sequences already or haven't yet caught up to us.

There are often snacks at the meetup, which typically runs until around 8:30 or 9. After that, many of us go get dinner on the Ave.

Reading list: Start here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_questions/

1.18 Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

1.19 The Futility of Emergence

1.20 Say Not "Complexity"

1.21 Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark

1.22 My Wild and Reckless Youth

1.23 Failing to Learn from History

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Sequences group: Mysterious Answers 4
Request for Intelligence Philosophy Essay Topic Suggestions
by MalcolmOcean — 2015-03-13T04:15:26.209Z

As part of a philosophy course I'm currently taking called Intelligence in Machines, Humans, and Other Animals, I have to write a <3000w essay on a topic related to intelligence. The description is here, but I've copied the important details below. I figured I might as well solicit suggestions for things to research. Realistically, I am likely to optimize the essay more for passing the course than for rigour though, so if you're expecting a very thorough review of something then you may be disappointed. But I suspect that it will still be at least an interesting jumping-off point.

Essay Topics: pick one from A, B, or C

A. Compare intelligence in machines, humans, and other animals with respect to one of the following topics. Feel free to narrow the topic down to some more specific issue, and to consider specific machines, animals, and human capacities.

You must pick a completely different topic from your first essay - I've kept track. For example, if you wrote on one kind of imagery, you can't write on another kind of imagery.

Perception

Imagery

Problem solving

Learning (I did this for my first essay)

Analogy

Emotion

Consciousness

Action

Language

Creativity

The self

How to narrow down the topic

After choosing one of the 11 topics, you can narrow it down to particular aspects and entitites (human, computer, animal).

For example, you could narrow perception down to sound, the computer down to SIRI, and the animal down to dogs.

Imagery could be narrowed down to visual, auditory, etc.

Learning could be narrowed down to supervised or unsupervised, or to teaching.

Analogy could be narrowed down to intelligence test type analogies (A is to B as C is to what?).

Emotion could be narrowed down to empathy.

Etc.

Edited to add: Note that these are pretty squirrellable. E.g. Last time I took "Learning" and used it to talk about (recursive) self-improvement in machines and humans (planning to post this at some point). So feel free to propose something even if you only have a vague notion of how it would fit into one of the categories

One constraint: I need to be able to ask some sort of question and then produce evidence towards either side of it, i.e. it can't just be a review of the topic. But this too can be pretty vague; in my last essay I did "are humans or machines better suited for self-improvement?", concluding "humans for now, ultimate...
For whom should recommendations be effective?
by KatjaGrace — 2015-03-13T03:56:23.000Z

Suppose you are in the business of making charity recommendations to others. You have found two good charities which you might recommend: 1) Help Ugly Children, and 2) Help Cute Children. It turns out ugly children are twice as easy to help, so 1) is the more effective place to send your money.

You are about to recommend HUC when it occurs to you that if you ask other people to help ugly children, some large fraction will probably ignore your advice, conclude that this effectiveness road leads to madness, and continue to support 3) Entertain Affluent Adults, which you believe is much less effective than HUC or HCC. On the other hand, if you recommend Help Cute Children, you think everyone will take it up with passion, and much more good will be done directly as a result.

What do you recommend?
[LINK] Lectures on Self-Control and the myth of Willpower
by joaolkf — 2015-03-13T00:34:39.219Z

Last week Professor Neil Levy, a neuroethicist, gave three lectures on Self-Control at the Oxford Martin School. Roughly, the first lecture targeted philosophical issues, the second empirical issues and the third bridged the two. Neil's summaries and audio are at the bottom. In the next two paragraphs I will briefly summarize the take-home message of the lectures.

Over the three lectures, he offered a new approach to self-control. He argues that will-power is of little relevance to self-control, that the self-control character-trait which correlates with success is not will-power and that relying on will-power alone leads to low levels of self-control. He defends that self-control is mainly the ability of self-management, of managing the environment so that temptations become more costly, less salient or inaccessible - he mentions Facebook nanny, Beeminder, commitment devices and so on. Self-management is the ability of not having to use will-power. Will-power is only relevant insofar as it enables these techniques to be deployed, but once in place the techniques themselves consist in avoiding to use will-power altogether. Will-power is an extremely scarce resource, and we should use the little we have so we don't have to depend on it anymore. He cites numerous evidence in support for his view. To mention a few, people with high self-control character-trait are less able to resist temptations, exert less effortful self-control, but are nonetheless more likely to pick environments with few temptations/distractions and better at developing techniques to ignore temptations (e.g. little children sung, slept, etc.). He contends that glucose role in increasing self-control is exerted by signalling high short-term resource availability, a stable environment, and thus low opportunity costs - but he doesn't expect this effect to hold in the long-term. He predicts that unconscious signals of a stable environment will increase self-control, which helps explains why high social-economic status correlates strongly with self-control. Neil has a blog post discussing how the myth that willpower equals Self-Control prevents the prescription of policies that would use these managerial techniques to increase people's Self-Control. By the end, he hinted his view could perhaps be seen as the extended will view, mirroring the extended mind view.

I believe the first lecture is...
Recovering the past
by NancyLebovitz — 2015-03-12T19:25:16.971Z

One of the themes of current scientific progress is getting more and more information out of tiny amounts of data. Who'd have thought that we could learn so much of distant and recent biological history from DNA, and so much about distant planets, stars, galaxies, and the cosmos from tiny differences in very small amounts of light?
Pratchett's death puts an extra edge on the question-- to what extent can people be re-created from what they've left behind them, especially if they've written novels which include a lot of their personality?
Any thoughts about theoretical limits of how much can be figured out from small amounts of data?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 120
by Gondolinian — 2015-03-12T19:03:12.180Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 120.

Plans for next chapter release:

The next update will be on March 13th, 2015 at 12PM Pacific (7PM UTC).

There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

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.
[LINK] Terry Pratchett is dead
by Baughn — 2015-03-12T17:46:55.269Z

BBC article

I'm sure I'm not the only one who greatly admired him. The theme of his stories was progress; they were set in a fantasy world, it's true, but one that was frequently a direct analogy to our own past, and where the golden age was always right now. The recent books made this ever more obvious.

We have lost a great man today, but it's the way he died that makes me uncomfortable. Terry Pratchett had early-onset Alzheimer's, and while I doubt it would have mattered, he couldn't have chosen cryonics even if he wanted to. He campaigned for voluntary euthanasia in cases like his. I will refrain from speculating on whether his unexpected death was wholly natural; whether it was or wasn't, I can't see this having a better outcome. In short...

There is, for each of us, a one-ninth chance of developing Alzheimer's if we live long enough. Many of us may have relatives that are already showing signs, and in the current regime these relatives cannot be cryonically stored even if they wish to try; by the time they die, there will be little purpose in doing so. For cryonics to help for neurodegenerative disorders, it needs to be applied before they become fatal.

Is there anything we can do to change that? Are there countries in which that generalisation is false?
Anti-Pascaline agents
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-03-12T16:32:40.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Pascal's wager-like situations come up occasionally with expected utility, making some decisions very tricky. It means that events of the tiniest of probability could dominate the whole decision - intuitively unobvious, and a big negative for a bounded agent - and that expected utility calculations may fail to converge.

There are various principled approaches to resolving the problem, but how about an unprincipled approach? We could try and bound utility functions, but the heart of the problem is not high utility, but hight utility combined with low probability. Moreover, this has to behave sensibly with respect to updating.

The agent design

Consider a UDT-ish agent A looking at input-output maps {M} (ie algorithms that could determine every single possible decision of the agent in the future). We allow probabilistic/mixed output maps as well (hence A has access to a source of randomness). Let u be a utility function, and set 0 < ε << 1 to be the precision. Roughly, we'll be discarding the highest (and lowest) utilities that are below probability ε. There is no fundamental reason that the same ε should be used for highest and lowest utilities, but we'll keep it that way for the moment.

The agent is going to make an "ultra-choice" among the various maps M (ie fixing its future decision policy), using u and ε to do so. For any M, designate by A(M) the decision of the agent to use M for its decisions.

Then, for any map M, set max(M) to be the lowest number s.t P(u ≥ max(M)|A(M)) ≤ ε. In other words, if the agent decides to use M as its decision policy, this is the maximum utility that can be achieved if we ignore the highest valued ε of the probability distribution. Similarly, set min(M) to be the highest number s.t. P(u ≤ min(M)|M) ≤ ε.

Then define the utility function uMε, which is simply u, bounded between max(M) and min(M). Now calculate the expected value of uMε given A(M), call this Eε(u|A(M)).

The agent then chooses the M that maximises Eε(u|A(M)). Call this the ε-precision u-maximising algorithm.

Stability of the design

The above decision process is stable, in that there is a single ultra-choice to be made, and clear criteria for making that ultra-choice. Realistic and bounded agents, however, cannot calculate all the M in sufficient detail to get a reasonable outcome. So we can ask whether the design i

...
Anti-Pascaline agent
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-03-12T14:17:24.201Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Pascal's wager-like situations come up occasionally with expected utility, making some decisions very tricky. It means that events of the tiniest of probability could dominate the whole decision - intuitively unobvious, and a big negative for a bounded agent - and that expected utility calculations may fail to converge.

There are various principled approaches to resolving the problem, but how about an unprincipled approach? We could try and bound utility functions, but the heart of the problem is not high utility, but hight utility combined with low probability. Moreover, this has to behave sensibly with respect to updating.

The agent design

Consider a UDT-ish agent A looking at input-output maps {M} (ie algorithms that could determine every single possible decision of the agent in the future). We allow probabilistic/mixed output maps as well (hence A has access to a source of randomness). Let u be a utility function, and set 0 < ε << 1 to be the precision. Roughly, we'll be discarding the highest (and lowest) utilities that are below probability ε. There is no fundamental reason that the same ε should be used for highest and lowest utilities, but we'll keep it that way for the moment.

The agent is going to make an "ultra-choice" among the various maps M (ie fixing its future decision policy), using u and ε to do so. For any M, designate by A(M) the decision of the agent to use M for its decisions.

Then, for any map M, set max(M) to be the lowest number s.t P(u ≥ max(M)|A(M)) ≤ ε. In other words, if the agent decides to use M as its decision policy, this is the maximum utility that can be achieved if we ignore the highest valued ε of the probability distribution. Similarly, set min(M) to be the highest number s.t. P(u ≤ min(M)|A(M)) ≤ ε.

Then define the utility function uMε, which is simply u, bounded between max(M) and min(M). Now calculate the expected value of uMε given A(M), call this Eε(u|A(M)).

The agent then chooses the M that maximises Eε(u|A(M)). Call this the ε-precision u-maximising algorithm.

Stability of the design

The above decision process is stable, in that there is a single ultra-choice to be made, and clear criteria for making that ultra-choice. Realistic and bou...
Succeess depends on finding a balance between "geek" and "jock"
by  — 2015-03-12T12:50:39.303Z

Summary: title + LW seems to be already coming from a culture like that, I just want to make it conscious. Also, it is true for individuals and true for groups like nations.
Why too much "jock" is bad
Anti-intellectualism, black-and-white tribalism, impulsivity etc. Social experiment: if you know smart people in/from Latin America ask them about what they dislike there, I think they will tell things along the lines of too much machismo in the culture not being a good environment for intellectualism.
Why too much "geek" is bad
It turns people and cultures into "Markos Sophisticus".
I was shaped largely by "Sophisticos". Too much Vienna and too much Budapest in me, thankfully some Birmingham in me too (Anglo cultures healthily tend away from this) but not enough. It was kind of shocking or me to see LW using intelligence not for intellectual masturbation but for solving problems, getting things done, making actionable things and actioning on them.
This has a bit of a "jock" in it, a bit of that attitude that: problem? Hit it over the head with a suitable club. Problem solved. Next problem. This "checkmark-checkmark-checkmark" attitude.

All this challenging real world problems head-on is a bit of a "jock" thing but you probably don't realize it if you are socialized to Silicon Valley, Paul Graham kinds of cultures. In these cases all you notice is that you are smarter, geekier than the "jocks" around you. But actually you are "jockier" than some of the more "geekier" cultures around the world e.g. the kind of "Sophisticos" attitudes that are all too common here in the Mitteleuropa - read some Stefan Zweig. Or rather not, he will bore you to death, you may as well take my word for it that I was shaped into using intelligence as simply something to bask in it, in my sophisticatedness, and not for making the world or my life better. It was a very novel idea for me that ideas should be actionable. I think there is also a power problem : things that needed to be actioned were usually prescribed by others and usually not by very smart people.
I mean I know a lot of "Sophisticus" people who would dislike that above mentioned essay. Darwin i.e. dying if you are a wrong as an argument, nature being cruel? "How impossibly crude and barbarous to reason like that in a debate between intellectuals!" That kind of stuff. The "it is a tough world out there" message of th...
Creating a satisficer
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-03-12T11:31:01.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This is a potential design for a safe-ish satisficer, based on the ideas presented here. The two key ideas are that a satisficer S(u) with utility u:

#. Would not effectively aid M(u), a u-maximiser.
#. Would not effectively resist M(-u), a u-minimizer.

So satisficers make poor allies and weak enemies.

The design, the designer and the verifier

Let M(u-v) be an agent that maximises u and minimises v. Let's assume that M(u-v) is currently unaware as to what u and v are (though it knows that the upper bound of u is easy to approach). It can interact with the outside environment in one way only: by creating a satisficer S(). S() will then be fed u to become S(u).

However, the design for S(u) will first be sent to M(εu+v), for some unknown small ε. Note that M(εu+v) is a v-maximiser, so it disagrees with M(u-v) except for u. M(εu+v) is a (hypothetical) agent that will be (counterfactually) released at some unspecified later date. Currently, it will be fed the whole reasoning history of M(u+v), and will make a single decision only: where S(u) is to be built or not.

So it seems that S(u) must;

#. Set u close to its maximal value (as this is "easy to approach").
#. Not increase v to any significant extent (or else M(u-v) would not design it).
#. Not decrease v to any significant extent (or else M(εu+v) would veto it).
#. Since v is unknown to M(u-v) and and resources are finite, this should serve as a general reduced impact requirement for S(u) (we may have to use something like a soft minimum across all v, rather than an expectation across all v, to avoid certain edge casess).
#. Since is u unknown to M(u-v), S() would serve as a general satisficing agent for any utility functions whose upper bounds are easy to approach (remember that we can take an arbitrary utility function and arbitrarily bound it at some number).

For the moment, this does seems like it would produce a successful satisficer...
Have I just destroyed the acausal trade network?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-03-12T11:18:20.525Z

An amusing thought occurred to me: acausal trade works best when you expect that there are going to be a lot of quite predictable acausal traders out there.

However, I've suggested a patch that seems to be able to shut down acausal trade for particular agents. Before doing that, I was under the vague impression that all agents might self-modify to being acausal traders. But the patch means there might be far fewer of these than I thought, that generic agents need not become acausal traders.

That means that, even if we remain acausal traders, we now expect there are fewer agents to trade with - and since our expectations/models are what powers acausal trade (at our end), this means that we might be having less acausal trade (especially when you add the fact that other acausal traders out there will be expecting and offering less acausal trade as well).

Did I just slap massive tariffs over the whole acausal trade network?
Half-assing it with everything you've got
by So8res — 2015-03-12T07:00:00.000Z
Link: http://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got/

I hang out around a lot of effective altruists. Many of them are motivated primarily by something like guilt (for having great resource and opportunity while others suffer) or shame (for not helping enough). Hell, many of my non-EA friends are primarily motivated by guilt or shame.

I'm not going to criticize guilt/shame motivation: I have this policy where, when somebody puts large amounts of effort or money towards making the world a better place, I try really hard not to condemn their motives. Guilt and shame may be fine tools for jarring people out of complacence. However, I worry that guilt and shame are unhealthy long-term motivators. In many of my friends, guilt and shame tend to induce akrasia, reduce productivity, and drain motivation. So over the next few weeks, I'll be writing a series of posts about removing guilt/shame motivation and replacing it with something stronger.

1

Say you're a college student, and you have a paper due. The quality of the paper will depend upon the amount of effort you put in. We'll say that you know the project pretty well: you can get an A with only moderate effort, and with significant effort you could produce something much better than the usual A-grade paper.

The education environment implicitly attempts to convince students that their preferences point ever rightward along this line. Parents and teachers say things like "you should put in your best effort," and they heap shame upon people who don't strive to push ever rightward along the quality line.

People generally react to this coercion in one of two ways. The first group (the "slackers") rejects the implication that quality=preferences. These are the people who don't care about the class, who complain constantly about the useless pointless work they have to do, who half-ass the assignment and turn in something that either barely passes or fails entirely. Slackers tend to resent the authority forcing them to write the paper.

The second group (the "tryers") are the ones who accept the premise that quality=preferences, and strive ever rightwards on the quality line. Tryers include people of all ability levels: some struggle as hard as they can just to get a C, others flaunt their ability to produce masterpieces. Some try to curry favor with the teacher, others are perfectionists who simply can't allow themselves to turn in anything less than their best effort. Some of t...