trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Link] Cosmological Infancy 
by  — 2013-07-21T11:26:48.315Z

A post by Nick Land who some of you are probably already following either on his blog Outside In or at Urban Future.

There is a ‘problem’ that has been nagging at me for a long time – which is that there hasn’t been a long time. It’s Saturday, with no one around, or getting drunk, or something, so I’ll run it past you. Cosmology seems oddly childish.

An analogy might help. Among all the reasons for super-sophisticated atheistic materialists to deride Abrahamic creationists, the most arithmetically impressive is the whole James Ussher 4004 BC thing. The argument is familiar to everyone: 6,027 years — Ha!

Creationism is a topic for another time. The point for now is just: 13.7 billion years – Ha! Perhaps this cosmological consensus estimate for the age of the universe is true. I’m certainly not going to pit my carefully-rationed expertise in cosmo-physics against it. But it’s a stupidly short amount of time. If this is reality, the joke’s on us. Between Ussher’s mid-17th century estimate and (say) Hawking’s late 20th century one, the difference is just six orders of magnitude. It’s scarcely worth getting out of bed for. Or the crib.

For anyone steeped in Hindu Cosmology – which locates us 1.56 x 10^14 years into the current Age of Brahma – or Lovecraftian metaphysics, with its vaguer but abysmally extended eons, the quantity of elapsed cosmic time, according to the common understanding of our present scientific establishment, is cause for claustrophobia. Looking backward, we are sealed in a small room, with the wall of the original singularity pressed right up against us. (Looking forward, things are quite different, and we will get to that.)

There are at least three ways in which the bizarre youthfulness of the universe might be imagined:

1. Consider first the disconcerting lack of proportion between space and time. The universe contains roughly 100 billion galaxies, each a swirl of 100 billion stars. That makes Sol one of 10^22 stars in the cosmos, but it has lasted for something like a third of the life of the universe. Decompose the solar system and the discrepancy only becomes more extreme. The sun accounts for 99.86% of the system’s mass, and the gas giants incorporate 99% of the remainder, yet the age of the earth is only fractionally less than that

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Meetup : Helsinki Social Meetup
by mikko — 2013-07-21T09:56:46.155Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Social Meetup

WHEN:
25 July 2013 05:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Vilhonkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki

This will be an informal event to chat about topics of interest. We’ll also have the chance to play light board games. You can find us in Kaisla by looking for someone wearing a pink elephant hat. Feel free to come even if you’re not a Less Wrong veteran yet – curiosity is enough!

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Social Meetup
Norbert Wiener's paper "Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation"
by JonahS — 2013-07-21T01:01:16.689Z

In 1960, mathematician Norbert Wiener wrote an article titled Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation. I'm struck by the strong overlap between certain passages from the paper and some of the themes that have been discussed on Less Wrong in connection with AI risk.

Overlapping with Eliezer's blog post The Hidden Complexity of Wishes and Creating Friendly AI 1.0: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures:

Here, however, if the rules for victory in a war game do not correspond to what we actually wish for our country, it is more than likely that such a machine may produce a policy which would win a nominal victory on points at the cost of every interest we have at heart, even that of national survival.

[...]

We all know the fable of the sorcerer's apprentice, in which the boy makes the broom carry water in his master's absence, so that it is on the point of drowning him when his master reappears. [...] Disastrous results are to be expected not merely in the world of fairy tales but in the real world wherever two agencies essentially foreign to each other are coupled in the attempt to achieve a common purpose. If the communication between these two agencies as to the nature of this purpose is incomplete, it must only be expected that the results of this cooperation will be unsatisfactory. If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it, because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete, then we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.

Overlapping with discussion as to whether people will build at Tool AI rather than an Agent AI:

We wish a slave to be intelligent, to be able to assist us in the carrying out of our tasks. However, we also wish him to be subservient. Complete subservience and complete intelligence do not go together.

[...]

It may be seen that the result of a programming technique of automatization is to remove from the mind of the designer and operator an effective understanding of many of the stages by which the machine comes to its conclusions and of what the real-tactical intentions of many of its operations may be. This is highl

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Meetup : Zagreb meetup - July 27th
by IsTheLittleLion — 2013-07-19T16:55:07.508Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Zagreb meetup - July 27th

WHEN:
27 July 2013 07:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Tkalčićeva 36 (Pivnica Mali Medo) in Zagreb, Croatia

A casual meetup, socializing and planning future meetups.

Detailed directions: when you enter, go up the stairs and watch for a LW sign.

If you are on facebook, you can find us in this group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/165350706979610/

This is the facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/529193467127751/

Discussion article for the meetup : Zagreb meetup - July 27th
Meetup : Washington DC Megametup debriefing/planning meetup
by rocurley — 2013-07-19T16:33:39.053Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Megametup debriefing/planning meetup

WHEN:
21 July 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA (courtyard)

We'll be meeting to talk about the megameetup last week, and plan what to do in the future.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Megametup debriefing/planning meetup
Even with default points, systems remain exploitable
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-19T16:24:20.796Z

Still exploitable, even with defaults

A while ago, I posted a brief picture-proof of the fact that whatever bargaining system you use to reach deals, they are all exploitable, in some situations, by liars (as long as the outcome is Pareto and a few other assumptions).

That included any system with an internally assigned default point. The picture proofs work no matter how you calculate the bargaining outcome: if you use the utility value data to assign a default point, before picking the Nash bargaining equilibrium, then the whole process is susceptible to exploitation by lying.

Is the same thing true for externally assigned default points (i.e. default points that come from outside the data, and are not a mere function of everyone's preferences and the available outcomes)? A moment's thought shows that this is the case. The picture proofs never used translations, or scaling, or anything that would shift an external default point. So having an externally assigned default point does not solve the problem of lying.

But "any Pareto bargaining system is exploitable by lying" is an existence proof: in at least one circumstance, one player may be able to derive a non-zero benefit by lying about their utility function. This doesn't give an impression of the scale of the problem.

The scale of the problem

The problem is very severe, for the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS), the Kalai-Smorodinsky Bargaining Solution (KSBS) and my Mutual Worth Bargaining Solution (MWBS). Essentially, it's as bad as it can get.

For KSBS and NBS, let's call an outcome admissible if it's Pareto-better than the default. For the MWBS, call an outcome admissible if the combined utility values it more than the default point (as we've seen, this needn't be an improvement for both players). In all three approaches, the bargaining solution must be admissible.

Then the dismal result is:

Let O be any admissible pure outcome. Then either player can lie, if they know everyone's preferences, to force the bargaining solution to pick O.

The proof is nearly derisively brief: the player simply needs to reduce their declared utility on every other admissible pure outcome, until these are no longer admissible. Then O would be the only outcome available to the bargaining solution.

There are some extra subtleties (this section may be skipped by those not interested; the essence of the argument is above). For both ...
New LW Meetup: Zagreb
by FrankAdamek — 2013-07-19T15:36:35.840Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on July 12th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Zagreb LW meetup: 13 July 2013 03:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta: Intro to Meditation: 13 July 2013 06:00PM
Brussels meetup with HEALES: 13 July 2013 01:00PM
Buffalo LW - Biased Boardgaming: 18 July 2013 06:00PM
Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 77-78: 13 July 2013 12:30PM
Helsinki LW meetup: 20 July 2013 02:00PM
[Moscow] The Meet up: 21 July 2013 04:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 13 July 2019 01:30PM
[Columbus OH] Upcoming Workshop Topics: 15 July 2013 11:52PM
[Vienna] LW Vienna Meetup #4: 13 July 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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, build community, 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, Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), ...
Consumption Smoothing and Hedonic Adaptation
by jefftk — 2013-07-19T14:41:47.699Z

Because earning capacity increases with age but enjoyment of spending decreases with additional money, standard economic theory predicts people will smooth their spending by borrowing to live beyond their means when young and paying it back when they're older. The idea is that you have some lifetime spending to split among all your future selves, so instead of having you-at-50 enjoy $45K/year of self-spending while you-at-25 struggles with just $20K/year, you should each spend $30K/year. [1] In practice, however, we mostly don't see people doing this, and I think that's actually very reasonable.

We can approximate your earnings over the course of your life by looking at how much everyone makes now, broken down by age:

(source)

We see incoming rising sharply with age in the 20s, slower in the 30s, plateauing through the 40s and 50s, and then declining with retirement. Add to this a small amount of growth in real wages over time, about 8% over the last 40 years, and we can see that people in their 20s earn significantly less than they expect to be earning over most of their life.

The standard model of people is that spending money makes you happier, and the first dollar goes farther than the last:

Add temporal discounting and that you can enjoy durable goods for longer if you buy them earlier and we should expect to see people borrowing heavily in their 20s and paying it back as they get older, but we mostly don't. We do see this some with buying houses, but in most other ways the typical 50 year-old is much less frugal than the typical 25 year-old. When we see young people living on borrowed money to support a lifestyle they would expect to enjoy later in life, we generally mock them. [2]

One response is to say that people are behaving foolishly and should borrow more. Why live thrifty in your 20s but not in your 40s? Either you should continue your thriftiness into your 40s, spend more in your 20s, or some combination of both. But this misses something important about human psychology: decreases in our standard of living are much more painful than increases are pleasant.

If you're earning a relatively small amount and living cheaply, and then earn more money and start living less frugally, this probably makes you happier. But if then something happens and you need to go back to living on less you'll probably be much less happy than you were the first time....
[Link] My talk about the Future
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-19T13:02:19.180Z

I recently gave a talk at the IARU Summer School on the Ethics of Technology.

In it, I touched on many of the research themes of the FHI: the accuracy of predictions, the limitations and biases of predictors, the huge risks that humanity may face, the huge benefits that we may gain, and the various ethical challenges that we'll face in the future.

Nothing really new for anyone who's familiar with our work, but some may enjoy perusing it.
Meetup : Melbourne Excursion: Comfort Zone Expansion
by BraydenM — 2013-07-19T08:43:00.898Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Excursion: Comfort Zone Expansion

WHEN:
20 July 2013 10:30:00AM (+1000)

WHERE:
5 / 52 Leicester St, Carlton 3053

Comfort Zone Expansion, or COZE, is a technique pioneered by CFAR that aims to get participants to better understand themselves by having an opportunity to get outside their comfort zone in a controlled environment.

COZE participants regularly report significantly increased social benefits following the training and practice sessions, and personally it has lead to a life improvement for myself.

I am planning to run a workshop this month to give everyone a chance to learn a little which hopefully becomes a powerful technique you can call upon when required.

We will be meeting in the city at Ben's house on Saturday Morning for a training workshop, finishing in the early afternoon following a practical excursion to the Queen Victoria Market.

The excursion activity suggestions are tailored for people of all confidence levels, and feeling reluctant is normal. If you want to talk first then I will be at the monthly social event tonight, or on facebook or mobile.

The plan is as follows:
10:30am - 11:30am
Meet at Ben's House for the workshop session. We will cover the theory behind the point of comfort zones and when to consider the value in moving outside them. Go over the material on playfulness cultivation and vulnerability investigation. Cover the concepts of stress, including Sympathetic Nervous System activation, and techniques for understanding and controlling your state of stress. Discuss previous experiences with COZE and benefits that have been observed. Run through possible things that you might be valuable trying at the COZE excursion, and what you should be paying attention to in terms of your state of mind and body.

11:30am-12:00pm
Improv Games!
Practice things you are uncomfortable with in a controlled environment with friends. We will be playing some 'whos line is it anyway' style games together. Use this as a trial run to re-enforce the concepts from the morning workshop session.

12:00pm-12:30pm
Final discussion and COZE safety talk in preparation for the excursion.

1:00pm-2:15pm
Break off in partners for the walk to Queen Victoria Market. Separate individually for the exercise itself, and regroup after the time period has

...
Meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area: Value of Information/Curiosity
by therufs — 2013-07-19T04:55:32.531Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area: Value of Information/Curiosity

WHEN:
01 August 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
420 WEST Geer St., Durham NC 27701

Meet at Cocoa Cinnamon for discussion and activities on Value of Information and how to apply curiosity in a useful way.

Approximate schedule:

7:00 Introductions, get beverages, general chit chat

7:30 Value of Information: theory, math, and a couple practice problems

8:00 Get Curious! We'll pick a potentially fun / interesting topic and practice getting curious about it.

8:30 When is curiousity useful? Heuristics for when to apply the skills we've practiced

9:00 Meetup closing, precommitments for next meetup, etc.

9:15 or 9:30: migrate to Fullsteam for beers and socializing for those who wish

Specific suggested readings to be posted later, but any of the top returns for a LW search on "value of information" may prove useful.

Join the mailing list for possible pre-meetup discussion and to be informed of upcoming meetups: http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw

Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area: Value of Information/Curiosity
Meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong: The Math of Bayes' Theorem
by Nova_Division — 2013-07-19T00:25:07.872Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong: The Math of Bayes' Theorem

WHEN:
21 July 2013 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2388 Lawrenceville Hwy. Apt L. Decatur, GA 30033

Agenda:

Introductions, and meet and greet for new members.

Mini-presentation: The math of Bayes' theorem

Discussions. We’ll start with a large group discussion and break into smaller groups as needed.

Games!

(Please contact me if you have allergies to cats, as our meeting space has two of the most adorable cats you’ve ever seen.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong: The Math of Bayes' Theorem
Does anchoring on deadlines cause procrastination?
by alex_zag_al — 2013-07-18T19:12:26.412Z

The phenomenon of anchoring seems to predict that deadlines will cause you to start a project near the deadline.

In more detail:

Any number you consider as an answer to a question will become an anchor and draw your answer towards it. Since you consider a deadline as a time to finish a project, your decision about when you should actually finish the project will be drawn towards it.

That'll make you start the project later, even though you know consciously that planning to finish a project near the deadline is a bad idea.

It's analogous to an example from Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow—people buy more cans when there's a sign telling them that they can only buy 10.

So, what I'm predicting is that anything that prevents anchoring will reduce procrastination when there's a deadline. Consciously deciding when you plan to finish by adjusting from a much earlier time, maybe?

EDIT: Brendon_Wong points out that "procrastination" really refers to putting things off, which has an emotional cause. I think he's right. What I'm talking about isn't really a procrastination, then, but bad planning.
The idiot savant AI isn't an idiot
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-18T15:43:45.311Z

A stub on a point that's come up recently.

If I owned a paperclip factory, and casually told my foreman to improve efficiency while I'm away, and he planned a takeover of the country, aiming to devote its entire economy to paperclip manufacturing (apart from the armament factories he needed to invade neighbouring countries and steal their iron mines)... then I'd conclude that my foreman was an idiot (or being wilfully idiotic). He obviously had no idea what I meant. And if he misunderstood me so egregiously, he's certainly not a threat: he's unlikely to reason his way out of a paper bag, let alone to any position of power.

If I owned a paperclip factory, and casually programmed my superintelligent AI to improve efficiency while I'm away, and it planned a takeover of the country... then I can't conclude that the AI is an idiot. It is following its programming. Unlike a human that behaved the same way, it probably knows exactly what I meant to program in. It just doesn't care: it follows its programming, not its knowledge about what its programming is "meant" to be (unless we've successfully programmed in "do what I mean", which is basically the whole of the challenge). We can't therefore conclude that it's incompetent, unable to understand human reasoning, or likely to fail.

We can't reason by analogy with humans. When AIs behave like idiot savants with respect to their motivations, we can't deduce that they're idiots.
Valuable economics knowledge available, ironically, for free
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-18T11:30:34.829Z

I took an economics course recently. And by "took a course" I mean followed a series of online lectures. I can strongly recommend doing so, especially if you already think you have an intuitive grasp of economics.

I was in that situation. I knew about incentives, and revealed preferences. I understood that supply and demand curves crossed. I grasped some of the monetarist arguments about the lack of long run tradeoffs between inflation and employment. I could talk about Keynesian stimulus and sticky prices/wages. I understood bank runs. Externalities were obvious, public goods a bit less so. I even knew quite a lot about banks and the money supply.

I had it pretty good, I thought. And yet when I followed basic economics lecture, I learnt a lot. The models and concepts suddenly fit together. I understood concepts that I only thought I had understood before. Economists do know their stuff, their models and concepts are informative - more so than I ever expected.

So, bearing in mind that economics is a social science whose conclusions are not nearly as rigorous as its models, I can recommend to anyone on Less Wrong who's interested to follow a lecture series or take a course.

The lecture series I followed was this one, by Professor Kenneth E. Train (the first lecture can be skipped). The most useful potential insight of all was in a brief throw-away comment in lecture 22: many economist think that the unemployment rate is determined entirely by macro-economic policy (and probably by the business cycle). So all the articles you might read about new industries "creating" jobs, or about some people becoming unemployable because of the "loss" of certain types of jobs: according to some some economists, all these articles are wrong. These trends affect who is employed versus unemployed, and conditions and wages, but not the unemployment rate across the business cycle. An interesting idea, worth thinking about.

Here are some brief notes on each lecture (useful for revision):

Lecture 01 is a general introduction, touching upon scarcity and opportunity costs, and setting up class stuff. Can be skipped.

Lecture 02 introduces demand and supply curves, emphasising their hypothetical nature, and showing how the crossing of supply and demand act as an attractor. Illustrates by showing the idiocy of the war on drugs.

Lecture 03 looks at elasticity of demand/supply and the conseq

...