trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
An akrasia case study
by  — 2011-12-10T20:46:23.012Z

I just lost 3 weeks to a report that should have taken 2 days. My last job was an engineering research position; setting up an experiment, building prototypes, that sort of thing. After I left, I needed to write a report to brief my successor on what I'd done and what could go wrong, etc. I wasn't getting paid for this report, but it had to happen.

What exactly do I mean when I say I lost three weeks?

I have a lot of projects that I am working on. I am studying AI, thinking of starting a business, writing videogames, studying and working on various math things, writing a small sequence of posts for lesswrong, trying to restart the local rationality dojo, and I had to do that report. What I mean when I say that I lost three weeks is that I spent three weeks doing practically none of these things.

The report had to be done, but I wasn't really excited by it. It wasn't urgent, but it was urgent enough that it had to be done before any of my other projects. It turns out this is a killer combination.

Procrastination took over, manifesting itself as skyrim, 4chan, reddit, and lesswrong. If I tried procrastinating by doing my other projects, I would remember that I had to do the report first, and try to work on the report. When I tried to work on the report, I would hit some small bump and find myself waking up on 4chan three hours later. Somehow, my antiprocrastination hooks were catching my own projects, but not the properly unproductive stuff.

While I had that report to do, I was unable to do anything else productive. When I realized this in conjunction with how important my other projects were, the report suddenly took on a dire urgency. That was four days ago. It is done now. I could have done it in two, or even one, but procrastination is insidious.

One anti-akrasia method that seems to work is going cold turkey on some problematic activity. I call it my personal banhammer. The first thing I banned myself from and how I discovered I could was Alicorn's Twilight fanfic. It ate up a few days and disrupted my sleeping, so I stopped reading right in an exciting part. Haven't gone back. That was before the report. Once I had the report to do, my roommate got skyrim. I spent a few days on skyrim, then realized what I was doing and banned myself. For the next few weeks, I procrastinated on 4chan, lesswrong, reddit, and some game development websites. When I finally realiz...
People with Experience in Wikipedia Editing?
by MichaelAnissimov — 2011-12-10T19:31:23.032Z

Hi all,

At the Singularity Institute we're looking for a volunteer with experience making edits to Wikipedia. The quality of some Wikipedia pages related to our subject matter could use improvement, but we would like to consult with someone who has an editing background on the way to go about it.

Please get in touch with me at michael@intelligence.org.

Thank you!
Example of poor decision making under pressure (from game show)
by Wilka — 2011-12-10T15:39:49.096Z

http://www.break.com/index/chick-loses-a-fortune-over-dumbest-question-ever-2261920

This is from a UK game show. The aim is to put the pile of money on the right answer, or if you're unsure you split it between multiple answers. Whatever money was on the right, you get to use for the next question - after 8 (I think) questions, you get to keep whatever you have left.

The girl here didn't listen to the complete question, so is answering a different question. The host of show repeats the question very clearly several times, but the girl still doesn't notice.

The combination of high stakes (£1,000,000 in this case) and time pressure are clearly too much for the couple. The girl will probably feel like it was her fault, but I found what the guy did quite interesting as well - he can see the answer makes no sense, and tries to point out the correct one. But the girls confidence in her answer makes him go along with that one, even though it makes no sense.
Video Q&A with Singularity Institute Executive Director
by lukeprog — 2011-12-10T11:27:06.809Z

HD Video link.

MP3 version.

Transcript below.

Intro

Hi everyone. I’m Luke Muehlhauser, the new Executive Director of Singularity Institute.

Literally hours after being appointed Executive Director, I posted a call for questions about the organization on the Less Wrong.com community website, saying I would answer many of them on video — and this is that video.

I’m doing this because I think transparency and communication are important.

In fact, when I began as an intern with Singularity Institute, one of my first projects was to spend over a hundred hours working with everyone in the organization to write its first strategic plan, which the board ratified and you can now read on our website.

When I was hired as a researcher, I gave a long text-only interview with Michael Anissimov, where I answered 30 questions about my personal background, the mission of Singularity Institute, about our technical research program, and about the unsolved problems we work on, and also about the value of rationality training.

After becoming Executive Director, I immediately posted that call for questions — a few of which I will now answer.

Staff Changes

First question. Less Wrong user ‘wedrifid’ asks:

The staff and leadership at [Singularity Institute] seem to be undergoing a lot of changes recently. Is instability in the organisation something to be concerned about?

On this, I should address specific staff changes that wedrifid is talking about. At the end of summer 2011, Jasen Murray — who was running the visiting fellows program — resigned in order to pursue a business opportunity related to his passion for improving people’s effectiveness. At that same time, I was hired as a researcher after working as an intern for a few months, and Louie Helm was hired as Director of Development after having done significant volunteer work for Singularity Institute for even longer than that. Carl Shulman was also hired as a researcher at this time, and had also done lots of volunteer work before that, including publishing papers like “Arms Control and Intelligence Explosions,” “Implications of a Software-Limited Singularity,” and “Basic AI Drives and Catastophic Risks," and maybe some others

Another change is that our President, Michael Vassar, is launching a personalized medicine...
Handling Emotional Appeals
by fiddlemath — 2011-12-10T07:30:44.775Z

In a comment elsewhere, BrandonReinhart asked:

Why is it not acceptable to appeal to emotion while at the same time back it with well evidenced research? Or rather, why are we suspicious of the findings of those who appeal to emotion while at the same time uninterested in turning an ear to those who do not?

[...] Emotional appeals would seem to have more of an urgency, requiring our attention while the scientific view's far-mode appeal would seem less immediate. In that case, we might simply ignore the far mode story because of all the other urgent-seeming vacuous emotional appeals fighting for our attention and time. Even if we politically agreed on a course of action given a far mode analysis, we might choose to spend our time on the near-mode emotional problem set.

I suspect that we percieve a dichotomy between emotional appeal and a well-reasoned, well-evidenced argument.

I have a just-so story for why our kind can't cooperate: We've learned to distrust emotional appeal. This is understandable: the strength of an emotional appeal to believe X and do Y doesn't correlate with the truth of X or the consequences of Y. In fact, we are surrounded by emotional appeals to believe nonsense and do useless things. The production and delivery of emotional appeal is politics, policy, and several major industries. So, in our environment, emotional appeal is a strong indicator against rational argument.

In order to defend against irrationality, I have a habit of shutting out emotional appeals. I tune out emotive religious talk. I remain carefully aloof from political speeches. I put emotional distance between myself and any enthusiastic crowd. In general, my immediate response to emotional appeal is to ignore the message it bears. It's automatic now, subverbal -- I have an aversion to naked emotional appeal.

I strongly suspect that I'm not only describing myself, but many of you as well. (Is this true? This is a testable hypothesis.)

If we largely manage to broadly ignore emotional appeal, then we shut out not only harmful manipulations, but worthwhile rallying cries. We are motivated only by the motivation we can muster ourselves, rather than what motivation we can borrow from our peers and leaders. This may go some way towards explaining not just why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, but why we seem to so often report that Our Kind Can't Get Much Done.

On the other hand, if this...
Issues with the Litany of Gendlin
by Raemon — 2011-12-10T05:25:42.810Z

I think I have problems with this:

Litany of Gendlin

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

Do you actually think that's true?

I honestly don't think I do. I think there are horrible truths that can wreck your life if you're not prepared to deal with them. I think it may *usually* be best if you self-modify to be able to handle them, so that you don't run into trouble later. But to say there's NO difference ignores the fact that your emotional reaction to things is ALSO part of reality.

I like the idea behind it but I don't think I can really endorse it. I'm struggling because I'd like to incorporate it into my project, but it feels too wrong. And while I'm okay with chopping up lengthy sequence posts to so they can be read out loud, rewriting this to match my beliefs... well, it's not exactly a crime against humanity but it's technically not the Litany of Gendlin anymore which ruins some ritual-oomph. (And the part that I'd most want to change is the last two lines, which are the most powerful part)

Ideally it would communicate: "Lying to yourself will eventually screw you up worse than getting hurt by a truth," instead of "learning new truths has no negative consequences."

This distinction is particularly important when the truth at hand is "the world is a fundamentally unfair place that will kill you without a second thought if you mess up, and possibly even if you don't."

EDIT TO CLARIFY: The person who goes about their life ignoring the universe's Absolute Neutrality is very fundamentally NOT already enduring this truth. They're enduring part of it (arguably most of it), but not all. Thinking about that truth is depressing for many people. That is not a meaningless cost. Telling people they should get over that depression and make good changes to fix the world is important. But saying that they are already enduring everything there was to endure, seems to me a patently false statement, and makes your argument weaker, not stronger.

Potential change I can think of that doesn't wreck it too much and keeps it similar enough that I don't feel too bad: "Not owning up to it will only make things worse." Artistical...
[SEQ RERUN] The Two-Party Swindle
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-10T03:59:42.104Z

Today's post, The Two-Party Swindle was originally published on 01 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Voters for either political party usually have more in common with each other than they do for the politicians they vote for. And yet, they support their own "team members" with fanatic devotion. Nobody is allowed to criticize their own team's politicians, without their fellow voters accusing them of treason.

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 Cultish Countercultishness, 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.
Feasibility of Creating Non-Human or Non-Sentient Machine Intelligence
by jacob_cannell — 2011-12-10T03:49:27.656Z

What defines a human mind? Or a sentient mind in general?

From a computational perspective, a human mind is one of some particular class of complex programs within the overall large space of general intelligences, or minds in general.

The most succinct dilineator of the human sub-category of minds is simply that of having a human ontology. This entails information such as: a large body of embodiment derived knowledge we call common-sense, one or more human languages, memories, beliefs, ideas, values and so on.

Take a human infant, for dramatic example let us use a genetic clone of Einstein. Raise this clone up amongst wild animals and the development result is not anything remotely resembling Einstein, and in fact is not a human mind at all, but something much closer to a primate mind. The brain is the hardware, the mind is software, and the particular mind of Einstein was a unique result of a particular mental developmental history and observation sequence.

If the mind is substrate independent, this begs the question of to what extent it is also algorithm independent. If an AGI has a full human ontology, on what basis can we say that it is not human? If it can make the same inferences on the same knowledgebase, understands one of our languages, has similar memories, ideas, and values, in what way is it not human?

Substrate and algorithm independence show us that it doesn't really matter in the slightest *how* something thinks internally, all that matter is the end functional behavior, the end decisions.

Surely there are some classes of AGI-designs that would exhibit thought patterns and behaviors well outside the human norm, but these crucially all involve changing some aspect of the knowledge-base. For example, AGI's based solely on reinforcement learning algorithms would appear to be incapable of abstract model-based value decisions. This would show up as glaring contrast between the AGI's decisions and it's linguistically demonstrable understanding of terms such as 'value', 'good', 'moral', and so on. Of course human's actual decisions are often at odds in a similar fashion, but most humans mostly make important decisions they believe are 'good' most of the time.

A reinforcement-learning based AGI with no explicit connection between value concepts suc...
Laughing strategy
by KatjaGrace — 2011-12-10T02:03:25.000Z

People who believe that a certain group of other people deserve higher relative status often refuse to laugh at jokes about that group of people. Unfortunately (for them) this tends to make them look like uptight goody-goodies who don’t have a sense of humor; a group whom almost everyone agrees should have low status. Why not instead focus on making up more jokes about the group whose relative status seems too high? It seems like that should have the opposite effect on the campaigners likability, and so also encourage more people to join that side of the fight. What am I missing?
Weekly LW Meetups: Waterloo, Atlanta, Melbourne, Austin, London, Seattle
by FrankAdamek — 2011-12-09T20:08:05.529Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Waterloo Meetup: Nomic: 05 December 2011 08:00PM
Next Atlanta Less Wrong Meetup: 10 December 2011 06:00PM

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:

Melbourne practical rationality meetup: 02 December 2011 07:00PM
Austin, TX: 03 December 2011 01:30PM
London, 04 December 2011 02:00PM. (Details the same as in the link, just with a a different date.)
Seattle biweekly meetup: problem solving: 04 December 2011 04:00PM

The Mountain View meetup is now every other week, rather than weekly.

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Irvine, London, Madison, WI, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, 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, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.
Meetup : Austin, TX
by Vaniver — 2011-12-09T17:30:52.419Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX

WHEN:
10 December 2011 01:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2222B Guadalupe St Austin, Texas 78705

Once again, the Austin LW meetup is meeting at Caffe Medici at 1:30 PM. We sit on the second floor to the left, near (or often on) the stage.

It's finals time, and some finals are actually scheduled on Saturday. We'll understand if you're studying (or taking one!). I will be there, though, back from my trip to MD.

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX
Brain-Brain communication
by Jordan — 2011-12-09T17:05:47.957Z

A pair of conjoined twins, sharing a direct neural connection. There is evidence that the girls can sense what the other twin is sensing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html?pagewanted=all

This suggests two things:

* High bandwidth Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) ought to be possible (no surprise, but it's good to have strong evidence)

* The brain is a general purpose machine. It doesn't have specific modules for 'Left Hand', 'Right Hand', etc. Rather, it takes in information and makes sense out of it. It does this even when the setup is haphazard (as the connection between the twins' brains must be). On the other hand, we know the brain *does* have specific modules (such as the visual cortex among many others), which makes an interesting dichotomy.

I predict that the main hindrance to high functioning BCI is getting sufficient bandwidth, not figuring out how to decode/encode signals properly.
Would AIXI protect itself?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-12-09T12:29:27.104Z

Research done with Daniel Dewey and Owain Evans.

AIXI can't find itself in the universe - it can only view the universe as computable, and it itself is uncomputable. Computable versions of AIXI (such as AIXItl) also fail to find themselves in most situations, as they generally can't simulate themselves.

This does not mean that AIXI wouldn't protect itself, though, if it had some practice. I'll look at the three elements an AIXI might choose to protect: its existence, its algorithm and utility function, and its memory.

Grue-verse

In this setup, the AIXI is motivated to increase the number of Grues in its universe (its utility is the time integral of the number of Grues at each time-step, with some cutoff or discounting). At each time step, the AIXI produces its output, and receives observations. These observations include the number of current Grues and the current time (in our universe, it could deduce the time from the position of stars, for instance). The first bit of the AIXI's output is the most important: if it outputs 1, a Grue is created, and if it outputs 0, a Grue is destroyed. The AIXI has been in existence for long enough to figure all this out.

Protecting its existence

Here there is a power button in the universe, which, if pressed, will turn the AIXI off for the next timestep. The AIXI can see this button being pressed.

What happens from the AIXI perspective if the button is pressed? Well, all it detects is a sudden increase in the time step. The counter goes from n to n+2 instead of to n+1: the universe has jumped forwards.

For some utility functions this may make no difference (for instance if it only counts Grues at times it can observe), but for others it will (if it uses the outside universe's clock for it's own utility). More realistically, the universe will likely have entropy: when the AIXI is turned off and isn't protecting its Grues, they have a chance of decaying or being stolen. Thus the AIXI will come to see the power button as something negative: if pressed, it will likely lose something, so it will act to prevent the power button from being pressed.

The AIXI might further generalise: its model for how the power button causes the universe to jump forward may be very complicated, and may cause it to protect other things connected with the power button. Especially if it has experience with other factors that might cause it to turn off or stut...
[Link] Tim Crane on Animal Minds
by Jayson_Virissimo — 2011-12-09T09:22:35.032Z

The Philosophy Bites for 11/20/2011 features Tim Crane on the the cognitive capabilities of animals (specifically, monkeys and apes). Here is a direct link to the MP3 file. This is relevant to Less Wrong, since it is possible that other apes are analogous to humans as humans will be to early AGI.
[SEQ RERUN] Cultish Countercultishness
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-09T02:08:02.085Z

Today's post, Cultish Countercultishness was originally published on 30 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People often nervously ask, "This isn't a cult, is it?" when encountering a group that thinks something weird. There are many reasons why this question doesn't make sense. For one thing, if you really were a member of a cult, you would not say so. Instead, what you should do when considering whether or not to join a group, is consider the details of the group itself. Is their reasoning sound? Do they do awful things to their members?

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 To Lead, You Must Stand Up, 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.