trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Sneaky Strategies for TDT
by drnickbone — 2012-05-25T16:13:13.741Z

My previous article on problematic problems attracted quite a lot of feedback and comment. One of the questions it posed (2) was whether TDT should do something other than the initial analysis suggests.

I've had a couple of ideas on that, partly in response to the comments. I'm posting some follow-up thoughts in the hope that they might help clarify the original problems. Basically, it seems there are some sneaky things that TDT could try to do, but mostly they are not robust to slightly different variants of the problems. Interestingly, some of these variants look even "fairer", since they contain no mentions of TDT anywhere in the problem statement.

An alternative approach could be that TDT resolves to never let itself be out-performed by any other decision theory, because of evolutionary considerations as discussed here. Even if that requires a large sacrifice of immediate utility (e.g. two-boxing and taking $1000 along with CDT, rather than one-boxing and taking $1 million, but with CDT getting $1,001,000.) I don't currently know what to think about that, except that it makes my head spin; it also sounds like a rather Unfriendly form of AI.

Problem 1: Omega (who experience has shown is always truthful) presents the usual two boxes A and B and announces the following. "Before you entered the room, I ran a simulation of this problem as presented to an agent running TDT. I won't tell you what the agent decided, but I will tell you that if the agent two-boxed then I put nothing in Box B, whereas if the agent one-boxed then I put $1 million in Box B. Regardless of how the simulated agent decided, I put $1000 in Box A. Now please choose your box or boxes."

Consider the following sneaky strategy S, which TDT agents might try to adopt.

"Use every piece of evidence at your disposal to try to decide whether you are the simulated agent. If you can prove you are not the simulated agent, then 2-box; otherwise 1-box".

We could imagine Omega making this strategy very easy for agents, by revealing the full source-code of the simulated agent "C-sim" as well as the full source code of the actual choosing agent "C-act". By "full source code" here, we have to include not just code describing how the agent executes TDT, but also its exact computational state on entry to the room (or simulated room), including a database of existing beliefs and proven the...
Does rationalism affect your dreams?
by DataPacRat — 2012-05-25T14:38:05.494Z

Given how much you have learned of the techniques of rationality, of Bayesian updates and standard of evidence, of curiosity being the first virtue and being willing to update your beliefs... have any of your dreams been affected by them?

The reason I ask; I'm reading the entirely of the Sequences, and am about an eighth of the way through. And I've just woken from a dream whose plot was somewhat unusual. I had noticed some mildly strange animals and/or people, and upon trying to find out what was going on, discovered a small riverside camp of people who fell well outside what I understood to be the realm of human variation. The person I had started investigating with then claimed to be a god, or if I preferred, a vastly powerful and intelligent alien entity, and offered to do something to prove it to me. I remembered that I had once established for myself a standard of evidence for exactly this sort of question - the growth of a new, perfectly functional limb, in a way outside of present medical understanding... and in a few moments, my dream-self was the possesser of a nice, long tail. I had not been expecting that to happen, and noticed I was extremely confused, and deliberately raised my estimate of the probability that I really was talking to a god-like figure by some number of decibans. At the end of the dream, said deity-figure said that he would offer to split us off from his 'main project', on a few conditions - one of which was 'no more clues', since he had given us 'more than enough to figure out what's going on'... ... whereupon I questioned a few things, and immediately woke up.

I don't recall having a dream of anything like that sort before - and I dream in understandable narrative plots so often that I sometimes dream sequels. So I'm curious; is this a normal sort of thing that happens to LessWrongians?
Weekly LW Meetups: Berkeley, Brussels, Cambridge MA, Garden Grove CA, Moscow, Pittsburgh, Sydney, Vancouver, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-05-25T14:26:06.591Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Pittsburgh: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: 18 May 2012 06:00PM
Vancouver Minicamp Report-Back: 18 May 2012 05:00PM
Brussels meetup: 19 May 2012 12:00PM
Moscow meetup: general rationality: 20 May 2012 05:00PM
DC Meetup: 20 May 2012 03:00PM
Less Wrong Sydney - Bayes and Fun Theory: 21 May 2012 06:00PM
Garden grove meetup: 22 May 2012 07:18PM
Second Copenhagen meetup: 26 May 2012 05:00PM
First Berlin meetup: 05 June 2012 07:30PM
Phoenix, Arizona: 15 June 2012 07:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Cambridge, MA Third Sunday Meetup: 20 May 2012 02:20PM
Small Berkeley Meetup: 23 May 2012 07:00PM
NO Chicago Meetup 5/19: 26 May 2012 01:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list t...
Another Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament?
by Andreas_Giger — 2012-05-25T14:16:30.529Z

Last year, there was a lot of interest in the IPD tournament with people asking for regular events of this sort and developing new strategies (like Afterparty) within hours after the results were published and also expressing interest in re-running the tournament with new rules that allowed for submitted strategies to evolve or read their opponent's source code. I noticed that many of the submitted strategies performed poorly because of a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics, so I wrote a comprehensive article on IPD math that sparked some interesting comments.

And then the whole thing was never spoken of again.

So now I'd like to know: How many LWers would commit to competing in another tournament of this kind, and would someone be interested in hosting it?
How to measure optimisation power
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-05-25T11:07:47.275Z

As every school child knows, an advanced AI can be seen as an optimisation process - something that hits a very narrow target in the space of possibilities. The Less Wrong wiki entry proposes some measure of optimisation power:

One way to think mathematically about optimization, like evidence, is in information-theoretic bits. We take the base-two logarithm of the reciprocal of the probability of the result. A one-in-a-million solution (a solution so good relative to your preference ordering that it would take a million random tries to find something that good or better) can be said to have log2(1,000,000) = 19.9 bits of optimization.

This doesn't seem a fully rigorous definition - what exactly is meant by a million random tries? Also, it measures how hard it would be to come up with that solution, but not how good that solution is. An AI that comes up with a solution that is ten thousand bits more complicated to find, but that is only a tiny bit better than the human solution, is not one to fear.

Other potential measurements could be taking any of the metrics I suggested in the reduced impact post, but used in reverse: to measure large deviations from the status quo, not small ones.

Anyway, before I reinvent the coloured wheel, I just wanted to check whether there was a fully defined agreed upon measure of optimisation power.
Timeline tools?
by Chriswaterguy — 2012-05-25T08:47:53.559Z

What would be useful to me now is a tool to help order, visualize and prioritize tasks for a larger project. I'm organizing a fundraising campaign for the non-profit I work with, and there are lots of tasks and some dependencies.

I'm trying some Excel spreadsheet templates for starters - the ones linked at the end of that post seem useful. (Downloading didn't work in Firefox for some reason, but did in Chrome.) Unsure whether to go with Gantt or Critical Path but I'll try Critical Path first.

I'm curious to know what works for you. A clear and simple tool is what I need, not something that takes significant mental energy and organizations skills just to use it. Doesn't have to be a spreadsheet, but a spreadsheet is my initial preference as it should be easy, and OS-independent (maybe even doable in the cloud).

Guidance is appreciated.
[SEQ RERUN] Principles of Disagreement
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-25T04:29:28.796Z

Today's post, Principles of Disagreement was originally published on 02 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You do have to pay attention to other people's authority a fair amount of the time. But above all, try to get the actual right answer. Clever tricks are only valuable if they help you learn what the truth actually is. If a clever argument doesn't actually work, don't use it.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Rhythm of Disagreement, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : Pittsburgh: Making Beliefs Pay Rent
by KatjaGrace — 2012-05-25T03:04:32.051Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Making Beliefs Pay Rent

WHEN:
01 June 2012 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Eatunique, S. Craig St, Pittsburgh, PA

If you really want to prepare, read the (short) post here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/

Bring your thoughts, criticisms, and any beliefs that are overdue.

Eatunique serves salads, wraps, sandwiches, drinks, and that kind of thing. Call 412-304-6258 if you can't find us.

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Making Beliefs Pay Rent
A digitized belief network?
by avichapman — 2012-05-25T01:27:29.789Z

Hello to all,

Like the rest of you, I'm an aspiring rationalist. I'm also a software engineer. I design software solutions automatically. It's the first place my mind goes when thinking about a problem.

Today's problem is the fact that our beliefs all rest on beliefs that rest on beliefs. Each one has a <100% probability of being correct. Thus, each belief built on it has an even smaller chance of being correct.

When we discover a belief is false (or less dramatically, revise its probability of being true), it propagates to all other beliefs that are wholly or partially based on it. This is an imperfect process and can take a long time (less in rationalists, but still limited by our speed of thought and inefficiency in recall).

I think that software can help with this. If a dedicated rationalist spent a large amount of time committing each belief of theirs to a database (including a rational assessment of its probability overall and given that all other beliefs that it rests on are true) as well as which other beliefs their beliefs rest on, you would eventually have a picture of your belief network. The software could then alert you to contradictions between your estimate of a belief's probability of being true and its estimate based on the truth estimate of the beliefs that it rests on. It could also find cyclical beliefs and other inconsistencies. Plus, when you update a belief based on new evidence, it can spit out a list of beliefs that should be reconsidered.

Obviously, this would only work if you are brutally honest about what you believe and fairly accurate about your assessments of truth probabilities. But I think this would be an awesome tool.

Does anyone know of an effort to build such a tool? If not, would anyone be interested in helping me design and build such a tool? I've only been reading LessWrong for a little while now, so there's probably a bunch of stuff that I haven't considered in the design of such a tool.

Your's rationally,
Avi
Book Summary: Willpower by Baumeister, Tierney
by Dorikka — 2012-05-24T23:34:25.446Z

I recently read this book. I've tried to summarize the main points below -- you can read my notes here (MSWord doc). You might also find Derek Sivers' notes useful, which can be found here.

NOTE: The general model of willpower (as a finite resource consumed with use) used in this book does not seem to represent a scientific consensus -- see the comments for more detail.

General Claims

Glucose acts as willpower fuel. As willpower levels drop, so do glucose levels. Willpower can be restored by raising your blood sugar. (pp. 44-48)

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it, and you use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks. (p. 35)

Willpower depletion amplifies emotions, desires, and cravings[i]. (pp. 30-31)

Willpower Depletion

Controlling emotional reactions depletes willpower. (p. 25)

Attempting to control thoughts (say, trying not to think of a white bear) depletes willpower. (pp. 26-27)

Chronic pain causes ongoing willpower depletion. (p. 36)

Being sick depletes glucose, which negatively affects willpower. Related note: Driving a car with a bad cold has been found to be even more dangerous than driving when mildly intoxicated. (pp. 59-60)

Making decisions (even trivial ones) costs willpower, and making decisions for other people costs less than making them for yourself. Making decisions that you enjoy costs less willpower than those which you do not. (pp. 94-95)

Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one’s mind – this is called the Zeigarnik effect. Completing the task (or making a plan to do so, the more specific the better) will cause your unconscious to stop nagging you with reminders.[ii] (p. 81)

Restoring Willpower

Eating foods like white bread, potatoes, white rice, and sugary snacks produce boom-and-bust cycles because they are converted into glucose so quickly. Foods which are converted more slowly (providing fuel more steadily) include most veggies, nuts (like peanuts and cashews), many raw fruits (like apples, blueberries, and pears), cheese, fish, meat, and olive oil. (These foods are said to have a low glycemic index.) (pp. 59-60)

Sleep helps to resto

...
[LINK] How to develop a photographic memory
by RobertLumley — 2012-05-24T20:52:11.270Z

Article can be found here.

I am considering trying this, and I'm wondering if anyone on LW has tried this or something similar. This seems like it could work, but it also seems like it could be hokum. A simple search for "how to develop a photographic memory" returns any number of methods. If this works with the success rate that they imply, this seems like tremendously low hanging fruit.
How do you find good scholarly criticism of a book?
by Emile — 2012-05-24T10:51:38.884Z

When I read a book with new and interesting ideas, I usually want to know if there are major flaws that any knowledgeable scholar in the field would point out immediately (Two recent examples are Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature", and Harriss's "The Nurture Assumption")

I usually:

Look at reviews on Amazon (especially the negative ones)

Google with keywords like "criticism, "review", "problem", (and whatever major issues I seem to have run in) etc.

Search Google Scholar for the same thing

Ask in some communities (LessWrong, reddit AskHistorians) if anybody read it

One problem is that I end up spending a lot of time reading stuff of no interest - either reviewers explaining the book to people who haven't read it (and sometimes even misrepresenting it's arguments, or framing them in terms of their pet controversy), or bloggers/posters who haven't read the book so go off a summary and come up with arguments that are already well-addressed in it.

So, what tips and strategies do you have for finding solid scholarly criticism ?
Wasted life
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-05-24T10:21:18.504Z

It's just occurred to me that, giving all the cheerful risk stuff I work with, one of the most optimistic things people could say to me would be:

"You've wasted your life. Nothing of what you've done is relevant or useful."

That would make me very happy. Of course, that only works if it's credible.
Resurrection through simulation: questions of feasibility, desirability and some implications
by jacob_cannell — 2012-05-24T07:22:20.480Z

Could a future superintelligence bring back the already dead? This discussion has come up a while back (and see the somewhat related); I'd like to resurrect the topic because ... it's potentially quite important.

Algorithmic resurrection is a possibility if we accept the same computational patternist view of identity that suggests cryonics and uploading will work. I see this as the only consistent view of my observations, but if you don't buy this argument/belief set then the rest may not be relevant.

The general implementation idea is to run a forward simulation over some portion of earth's history, constrained to enforce compliance with all recovered historical evidence. The historical evidence would consist mainly of all the scanned brains and the future internet.

The thesis is that to the extent that you can retrace historical reality complete with simulated historical people and their thoughts, memories, and emotions, to this same extent you actually recreate/resurrect the historical people.

So the questions are: is it feasible? is it desirable/ethical/utility-efficient? And finally, why may this matter?

Simulation Feasibility

A few decades ago pong was a technical achievement, now we have avatar. The trajectory seems to suggest we are on track to photorealistic simulations fairly soon (decades). Offline graphics for film arguably are already photoreal, real-time rendering is close behind, and the biggest remaining problem is the uncanny valley, which really is just the AI problem by another name. Once we solve that (which we are assuming), the Matrix follows. Superintelligences could help.

There are some general theorems in computer graphics that suggest that simulating an observer optimized world requires resources only in proportion to the observational power of the observers. Video game and film renderers in fact already rely heavily on this strategy.

Criticism from Chaos: We can't even simulate the weather more than a few weeks in advance.

Response: Simulating the exact future state of specific chaotic systems may be hard, but simulating chaotic systems in general is not. In this case we are not simulating the future state, but the past. We already know something of the past state of the system, to some level of detail, and we can simulate the likely (or multiple...
[SEQ RERUN] The Rhythm of Disagreement
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-24T01:06:42.464Z

Today's post, The Rhythm of Disagreement was originally published on 01 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A discussion of a number of disagreements Eliezer Yudkowsky has been in, with a few comments on rational disagreement.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was A Premature Word on AI, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[SEQ RERUN] A Premature Word on AI
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-23T02:08:04.824Z

Today's post, A Premature Word on AI was originally published on 31 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A response to opinions expressed by Robin Hanson, Roger Schank, and others, and arguing against the notion that producing a friendly general artificial intelligence is an insurmountable problem.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Class Project, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.