trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
by maia — 2017-03-17T05:31:27.574Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Projects

WHEN:
20 March 2017 06:15:31PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1769 15th St., SF

We’ll be meeting to work on projects!

Near the beginning, we’ll go around and talk about what we’ll be working on, then do a couple of pomodoros quietly. At some point we’ll break into general conversations and socializing.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
I Want To Live In A Baugruppe
by Alicorn — 2017-03-17T01:36:31.723Z

Rationalists like to live in group houses. We are also as a subculture moving more and more into a child-having phase of our lives. These things don't cooperate super well - I live in a four bedroom house because we like having roommates and guests, but if we have three kids and don't make them share we will in a few years have no spare rooms at all. This is frustrating in part because amenable roommates are incredibly useful as alloparents if you value things like "going to the bathroom unaccompanied" and "eating food without being screamed at", neither of which are reasonable "get a friend to drive for ten minutes to spell me" situations. Meanwhile there are also people we like living around who don't want to cohabit with a small child, which is completely reasonable, small children are not for everyone.

For this and other complaints ("househunting sucks", "I can't drive and need private space but want friends accessible", whatever) the ideal solution seems to be somewhere along the spectrum between "a street with a lot of rationalists living on it" (no rationalist-friendly entity controls all those houses and it's easy for minor fluctuations to wreck the intentional community thing) and "a dorm" (sorta hard to get access to those once you're out of college, usually not enough kitchens or space for adult life). There's a name for a thing halfway between those, at least in German - "baugruppe" - buuuuut this would require community or sympathetic-individual control of a space and the money to convert it if it's not already baugruppe-shaped.

Maybe if I complain about this in public a millionaire will step forward or we'll be able to come up with a coherent enough vision to crowdfund it or something. I think there is easily enough demand for a couple of ten-to-twenty-adult baugruppen (one in the east bay and one in the south bay) or even more/larger, if the structures materialized. Here are some bulleted lists.

Desiderata:

Units that it is really easy for people to communicate across and flow between during the day - to my mind this would be ideally to the point where a family who had more kids than fit in their unit could move the older ones into a kid unit with some friends for permanent sleepover, but still easily supervise them. The units can be smaller and more modular the more this desideratum is accomplishe

...
Announcing: The great bridge
by Elo — 2017-03-17T01:11:10.829Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/announcing-the-great-bridge-between-communities/

In the deep dark lurks of the internet, several proactive lesswrong and diaspora leaders have been meeting each day. If we could have cloaks and silly hats; we would.

We have been discussing the great diversification, and noticed some major hubs starting to pop up. The ones that have been working together include:

Lesswrong slack

SlateStarCodex Discord

Reddit/Rational Discord

Lesswrong Discord

Exegesis (unofficial rationalist tumblr)

The ones that we hope to bring together in the future include (on the willingness of those servers):

Lesswrong IRC (led by Gwern)

Slate Star Codex IRC

AGI slack

Transhumanism Discord

Artificial Intelligence Discord

How will this work?

About a year ago, the lesswrong slack tried to bridge across to the lesswrong IRC. That was bad. From that experience we learnt a lot that can go wrong, and have worked out how to avoid those mistakes. So here is the general setup.

Each server currently has it's own set of channels, each with their own style of talking and addressing problems, and sharing details and engaging with each other. We definitely don't want to do anything that will harm those existing cultures. In light of this, taking the main channel from one server and mashing it into the main channel of another server is going to reincarnate into HELL ON EARTH. and generally leave both sides with the sentiment that "<the other side> is wrecking up <our> beautiful paradise". Some servers may have a low volume buzz at all times, other servers may become active for bursts, it's not good to try to marry those things.

Logistics:

Room: Lesswrong-Slack-Open

Bridged to:

exegesis#lwslack_bridge

Discord-Lesswrong#lw_slack_main

R/rational#lw_slack_open

SSC#bridge_slack

I am in <exegesis, D/LW, R/R, SSC> what does this mean?

If you want to peek into the lesswrong slack and see what happens in their #open channel. You can join or unmute your respective channel and listen in, or contribute (two way relay) to their chat. Obviously if everyone does this at once we end up spamming the other chat and probably after a week we cut the bridge off because it didn't work. So while it's favourable to increase the community; be mindful of what goes on across the divid...
Could utility functions be for narrow AI only, and downright antithetical to AGI?
by chaosmage — 2017-03-16T18:24:22.657Z

Could utility functions be for narrow AI only, and downright antithetical to AGI? That's a quite fundamental question and I'm kind of afraid there's an obvious answer that I'm just too uninformed to know about. But I did give this some thought and I can't find the fault in the following argument, so maybe you can?

Eliezer Yudkowsky says that when AGI exists, it will have a utility function. For a long time I didn't understand why, but he gives an explanation in AI Alignment: Why It's Hard, and Where to Start. You can look it up there, but the gist of the argument I got from it is:

(explicit) If an agent's decisions are incoherent, the agent is behaving foolishly.

Example 1: If an agent's preferences aren't ordered, the agent prefers A to B, B to C but also C to A, it behaves foolishly.

Example 2: If an agent allocates resources incoherently, it behaves foolishly.

Example 3: If an agent's preferences depend on the probability of the choice even having to be made, it behaves foolishly.

(implicit) An AGI shouldn't behave foolishly, so its decisions have to be coherent.

(explicit) Making coherent decisions is the same thing as having a utility function.

I accept that if all of these were true, AGI should have a utility function. I also accept points 1 and 3. I doubt point 2.

Before I get to why, I should state my suspicion why discussions of AGI really focus on utility functions so much. Utility functions are fundamental to many problems of narrow AI. If you're trying to win a game, or to provide a service using scarce computational resources, a well-designed utility function is exactly what you need. Utility functions are essential in narrow AI, so it seems reasonable to assume they should be essential in AGI because... we don't know what AGI will look like but it sounds similar to narrow AI, right?

So that's my motivation. I hope to point out that maybe we're confused about AGI because we took a wrong turn way back when we decided it should have a utility function. But I'm aware it is more likely I'm just too dumb to see the wisdom of that decision.

The reasons for my doubt are the following.

Humans don't have a utility function and make very incoherent decisions. Humans are also the most intelligent organisms on the planet. In fact, it seems to me that the less intelligent an organism is, the easier its behavior can be approximated with model that has a utili

...
A Problem for the Simulation Hypothesis
by philosophytorres — 2017-03-16T16:02:19.068Z

I've posted about this once before, but here's a more developed version of the idea. Does this pose a serious problem for the simulation hypothesis, or does it merely complicate the idea?

1. Which room am I in?

Imagine two rooms, A and B. At a timeslice t2, there are exactly 1000 people in room B and only 1 person in room A. Neither room contains any clues as to which it is; i.e., no one can see anyone else in room B. If you were placed in one of these rooms with only the information above, which would you guess that you were in? The correct answer appears to be room B. After all, if everyone were to bet that they are in room B, almost everyone would win, whereas if everyone were to bet that they are in room A, almost everyone would lose.

Now imagine that you are told that during a time segment t1 to t2, a total of 100 trillion people had sojourned in room A and only 1 billion in room B. How does this extra information influence your response? The question posed above is not which room you are likely to have been in, all things considered, but which room you are currently in at t2. Insofar as betting odds guide rational belief, it still follows that if everyone at t2 were to bet that they are in room A, almost everyone would lose. This differs from what appears to be the correct conclusion if one reasons across time, from t1 to t2. Thus, we can imagine that at some future moment t3 everyone who ever sojourned in either room A or B is herded into another room C and then asked whether their journeys from t1 to t3 took them through room A or B. In this case, most people would win the bet if they were to point at room A rather than room B.

Let’s complicate this situation. Since more people in total pass through room A than room B, imagine that people are swapped in and out of room A faster than room B. Once in either room, a blindfold is removed and the occupant is asked which room they are in. After they answer, the blindfold is put back on. Thus, there are more total instances of removing blindfolds in room A than room B between t1 and t2. Should this fact change your mind about where you are at exactly t2? Surely one could argue that the directly relevant information is that pertaining to each individual timeslice, rather than the historical details of occupants being swapped in and out of rooms. After all, the bet is being made at a particular timeslic...
In support of Yak Shaving
by Elo — 2017-03-16T05:31:26.110Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/in-support-of-yak-shaving/

Part 2: http://bearlamp.com.au/yak-shaving-2/

Yak shaving is heralded as pretty much "the devil" of trying to get things done. The anti-yak shaving movement will identify this problem as being one of focus. The moral of the story they give is "don't yak shave".

Originally posted in MIT's media lab with the description:

Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.

But I prefer the story by Seth Godin:

"I want to wax the car today."

"Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I'll need to buy a new one at Home Depot."

"But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls."

"But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor's EZPass..."

"Bob won't lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though."

"And we haven't returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it."

And the next thing you know, you're at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.

I disagree with the conclusion to not yak shave, and here's why.

The problem here is that you didn't wax the car because you spent all day shaving yaks (see also "there's a hole in my bucket"). In a startup that translates to not doing the tasks that get customers - the tasks which get money and actually make an impact, say "playing with the UI". It's easy to see why such anti-yak shaving sentiment would exist (see also: bikeshedding, rearranging deck chairs on the titanic, hamming questions). You can spend a whole day doing a whole lot of nothings; getting to bed and wonder what you actually accomplished that day (hint: a whole lot of running in circles).

Or at least that's what it looks like on the surface. But let's look a little deeper into what the problems and barriers are in the classic scenario.

Want to wax car

Broken hose

Hardware store is far away

No EZpass for tolls

Neighbour won't lend the pass until pillow is returned

Broken mooshi pillow

Have to go get yak hair.

So it's not just one problem, but a series of probl...
Open Questions in Life-Planning
by Ben Pace — 2017-03-16T00:02:00.000Z

There are several questions I have not worked through to my satisfaction and incorporated into the models that preceded, and so I list them here.

Who were the most Competent/Agentic folk in history, who had the most Positive Impact, and what were the key variables in allowing them to do so?
What is the role of individuals versus groups versus institutions?
And how do you make long lasting institutions with good epistemic practices?
How big a variable is the social environment you’re in? Even if building institutions is unimportant, is a social environment that strongly supports self-directed work a significant variable?
When do you stop working on skilling-up, and focus on direct work?
What are the novel model-building and strategic heuristics used by the most agentic individuals, and how can one practice them?
Is competence a scalar variable with many different domains of expertise, or is it multivariate with one single domain of expertise (the world)?

Brief thoughts on each of them:

It seems on a cursory glance, that the most competent people generally have strong technical abilities in their youth, and otherwise have very novel model building heuristics. Trying to replicate a bunch of these might prove useful.
Being able to bring the best people to you and get them to work in coordination to a single goal seems potentially a very significant ability.
Start by learning how to build organisations in general. Look at YC's stuff.
Probably important.
Unknown.
Read books by the top people, and also discuss this with other people trying to work on it too (e.g. CFAR).
I'm currently reading IQ and Human Intelligence (2nd edition) to get a better handle on this.
An early stage project generation model
by Ben Pace — 2017-03-16T00:01:00.000Z

Here is how I see many people connected to Effective Altruism making their life plan decisions:

Well, I don't know what the most important problem is. For example, reducing factory farming seems important, as does alleviating global poverty, but then certain global catastrophes seem potentially awful too, such as novel bioweapons or advanced artificial intelligence. I'm hardly an expert in the ways of the world, so I'll conservatively choose a career that seems like it could be useful in lots of places - maybe a grant writer, or a data scientist - and then I'll be able to pivot later when I've read all of the research output by the FHI, OpenPhil and CEA's research departments and thought about it some more on my own.

Alternatively, I see some people making a similar mistake, but with slightly more of the virtue of not-being-risk-averse:

I'm currently very uncertain about the most important problem, but I think I associate 5% more probability on the importance of AI relative to each other possibility. I know that what you normally do in this career path next is PhD in Artificial Intelligence, so I'll do that. Sure, in 10 years when I'm (fingers crossed) an associate professor, I might turn out to have been wrong, but if everyone trusts their beliefs, then we'll have some people turning out to be experts in the truly important fields.

The first way to improve on these, is to make plans that give you information about your best guess with much faster feedback loops.

Consider this alternative plan for figuring out what to do next:

Gun to my head, I think global catastrophes through novel tech are probably the most likely events that will be pivotal in the long run future of humanity. I don't want to have to wait a decade to find out if I was right about this though, so I'm going to do two things.
Firstly, I'll talk to a few experts in synthetic biology, nuclear warfare and artificial intelligence, to ask if my basic assumptions are broadly correct. Secondly, if that hans't changed my assessment of the world too much, I'll ask them what ambitious projects in the field someone in my position could work on that last 6-24 months that I could do, that would teach me a bunch about how the field works. I'll pick the best sounding project I come up with, and then see how much I've learned once...
An early stage prioritisation model
by Ben Pace — 2017-03-16T00:00:00.000Z

What do you care about in this world? I claim that this doesn't matter much, due to convergent instrumental goals of rational agents (for a more technical account, see here). For any set of values humans are likely to have, there are a set of instrumental goals that will be necessary for achieving them. I don't need to know whether I want there to be a revolution in the arts, or whether society should have three genders or none, to be able to claim more broadly that to get there we will need things such as "not being extinct" and "there existing scientific and technological progress in society".

Figuring out which pivotal events are going to occur in your future light cone, and getting into a position to effect positive change on them, is the main goal.

Early on in life, you should not expect to have good answers to these questions, so following some convergent instrumental strategies of your own would be well advised.

Suppose we discretise your life; say you have ~3 periods per year of Deep Work, where you can make significant progress on a project. That's 60 tokens of project-time in your first 20 years. Then how to spend these token? Which projects will teach you about the world, and which will give you the ability to change the world once you've picked more concrete goals?

What to optimise for?

Recently, I was at a conference, and I met a researcher from the human brain project. I asked this researcher about what they were working on, and they explained that they were working on a five year project. I don't recall the specifics of it, but I do recall asking them "When will you know whether this was a good project to work on?"They replied that they would find out in five years, when the project either failed or succeeded. I probed further: "And then will you have enough information to tell whether you made a good choice, as opposed to, for example, just having good luck?" and they replied that they had no way of knowing whether it was a good project to work on.

I think it's important to consider this a failure to plan well. This researcher, in five years time, will have learned nothing about how to choose research projects, and will be in no better a position to evaluate their future projects, toward whatever aims they have.

So the first step, is that you should always be testing a hypothesis....
Threat erosion
by Benquo — 2017-03-15T23:32:30.000Z
Link: https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/threat-erosion/

Often groups of people behave in consistent ways for a long time because they share a belief that the consistent way everyone is behaving will cause things to be bad for any individual who deviates from it.

For instance, there is a line in the sandwich shop. From a perspective so naive to our ubiquitous norms that it is hard to imagine, you might wonder why the person standing at the back does so, when the shopkeeper is much more likely to get sandwiches for people at the front. The reason of course is that if he were to position himself in the ample physical space between the person at the front and the shopkeeper, there would be some kind of uproar. Not only would the person at the front be angry, but everyone in the line would back them up, and the shopkeeper probably wouldn’t even grant a sandwich to the line-jumper.

So key to our ubiquitous tendency to stand peacefully in line is the fact that our common behavior is ‘stand in line and get angry with anyone who jumps it’ not just ‘stand in line’ which would be immediately exploited until the norm upholder gave up or died of starvation.

An interesting thing about this extra clause is that it is about our hypothetical behavior in circumstances that rarely happen. If our norms work well enough, we might go for years all peacefully standing in line, without anyone ever trying to push in at the front, because why would they?

An upshot is that if serious norm violations are rare, people might become pragmatically ill-equipped to respond to them. They might forget how to, or they might stop having the right resources to do so, physical or institutional. Or if generations are passing with no violations, the new generation might just fail to ever learn that they are meant to respond to violations, or learn what that would look like, since they never observe it. And maybe nobody notices any of this until norms are being violated and they find they have no response.

For instance, suppose that occasionally people sort of wander toward the front of the line in ambiguous circumstances, hoping to evade punishment by feigning innocent confusion. And those in the line always loudly point out the ‘error’ and the room scowls and the person is virtually always scared into getting in line. But one day someone just blatantly walks up to the front of the line. People point out the ‘error’ but the person says it is not an error...
Meetup : MIRIx workshop on Logical Induction
by Marko — 2017-03-15T17:54:44.590Z

Discussion article for the meetup : MIRIx workshop on Logical Induction

WHEN:
01 April 2017 08:30:00AM (+0100)

WHERE:
Universität Zürich Irchel, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland

In the first MIRIx Zurich workshop, we study Logical Induction, based on the paper

https://intelligence.org/files/LogicalInduction.pdf

I will give a non-technical introduction to the main ideas, then we study the mathematical concepts needed to understand Logical Induction in detail. If we progress quickly, we may have time to get started on some original research too.

Discussion article for the meetup : MIRIx workshop on Logical Induction