trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
I am Sailor Vulcan!
by Sailor Vulcan — 2018-08-24T17:47:03.858Z

Greetings! I am Sailor Vulcan, champion of justice and reason! In the name of the Moon--uh, I mean...

Hi, I'm Harry. I'm a reader, writer and gamer with a passion for rationality and existential risk prevention.

I sometimes jokingly compare my life to an intelligence explosion. I honestly believe that if there was a contest for most improved person in the world, I'd be in the running for it. When I was a kid I was a screaming, incoherent moron and lunatic. When I got to college I was still a screaming, incoherent moron and lunatic, but significantly less so. The older I've gotten, the more quickly I've improved. Most people, even other rationalists, would probably be shocked by how much I've improved myself within the past couple years, let alone the past four or five years or even the last ten.

I read HPMOR and started reading the sequences towards the end of my sophomore year in college in Spring 2015, and very shortly after that I helped solve a criminal case that had stumped a licensed private investigator, despite having zero experience with detection.

I love reading and writing, and I especially love rational fiction. I'm currently writing an original rational/scifi novelette series called "Earthlings: People of the Dawn", to help promote rationality education, effective altruism and existential risk prevention.

I also have written a bunch of stuff on my blog too, including a rationalist children's story, a second-person rationalist/science fiction monologue, another second-person rationalist monologue, and some rationalist poems among other things.

I've also written quite a few rationalist/transhumanist songs. But since the only instrument I know how to play is my own voice and I don't know standard music notation I end up having to memorize all the tunes and lyrics I write and sing them a Capella style, unfortunately. I've heard a lot of people say things along the lines of that they don't think it's possible to write good rationalist music because they expect it to be super wordy and complicated and cringey, but most of my rationalist/transhumanist songs aren't like that.

Also, I have a communication learning disability, so if I ever say or do anything to make you feel upset or uncomfortable feel free to let me know (although you don't have to, but it would be super help...
LW Update 2018-08-23 – Performance Improvements
by Raemon — 2018-08-24T02:02:30.916Z

Today's deploy includes:

Removed the map of meetups from frontpage since the major Slatestar Everywhere push is wrapping up.
Posts with lots of comments should load faster now
Fixed the bug where the last post in a sequence wouldn't properly navigate to the next post in some cases.
Printing a page now should work more nicely without stylesheet glitches.
Continued refactoring our style management in preparation for EA Forum and AI Alignment Forum theming. In the process, we:

streamlined some of our font sizes
updated our Form styling
made most UI elements sans-serif

In some cases the styling refactor has caused some edge cases and less common sections of the site to not quite render properly, which we apologize for and are continuing to work on.
Welcome to Kansas City SSC Meetup [Edit With Your Details]
by mingyuan — 2018-08-23T18:18:12.223Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Isolating Content can Create Affordances
by Davis_Kingsley — 2018-08-23T08:28:52.961Z

Recently, I've noticed an interesting failure mode in some communities I've observed online.

In this scenario, there would be some kind of content that appealed to certain users, but that many others wanted to avoid seeing and indeed considered undesirable (gossip/drama, angry political arguments, sexually explicit content, etc.). In order to prevent this content from "bleeding into" conversation, administrators would create new channels where this sort of thing could be quarantined away from normal discussion (or repurpose existing channels to sequester this content), thus allowing people who wanted to avoid this sort of content to avoid having to deal with it.

However, at least from my perspective this sometimes had a bit of an ironic effect. Once the "containment area" was established, there was now an obvious affordance for this type of content that did not exist previously. As a result, the quarantined content would actually become much more prevalent in the community - further, in some cases newcomers would join the community looking for one thing, see the quarantine channel, and think something along the lines of "wow, I never knew this was a community for <insert undesirable content here>!"

The net effect of this was that the quarantines often backfired; meant to isolate undesirable or controversial content, they instead made that content more prevalent in the community as a whole, even if people no longer had to encounter it in general channels.

The chief lesson I draw from this is that it can be better to simply forbid unwanted content rather than creating a quarantine for it. If there are truly people coming to your community in large part for something that many would rather not have, you may not want them there; further, there may be those who are driven away by the presence of such content, and insofar as the undesirable content presence increases the latter group may become significantly larger.
Chris Pikula Belongs in the Magic Hall of Fame
by Zvi — 2018-08-22T21:10:00.448Z

Epistemic Status: Fixing old mistakes, appreciating great old deeds.

(Note to those who do not play Magic: While this is nominally about Magic, I find these points to be of general interest, and wrote the post with that in mind.)

Chris Pikula belongs in the Magic Hall of Fame. Vote for him.

His results, while better than they look, fall short. I do worry about the precedent that will set. But it doesn’t matter. He belongs in the Hall. Vote for him.

Why? Because he did something for the game that needs to be honored and remembered as much as possible. Something that is more important than we realize, and which we need to keep fighting for. Something the world needs more than anything.

All groups, and all people, must decide who to reward, honor and ally with, and who to ignore, shame and oppose.

The default state of the world, the default state of any group, or culture, or industry or profession, is to want to choose strong allies, with high status, so they can help us. We reward what we believe succeeds and can help us. Knowing this, we all strive to emulate and signal these same characteristics, and to judge others as we observe them being judged.

This allows for multiple equilibria.

In the good equilibrium, good behavior like being nice, honoring your commitments, helping others and contributing to the community is recognized and rewarded. Bad behavior like cheating, lying, backstabbing and bullying is punished. Since good behavior is rewarded, (almost) everyone strives to exhibit good behavior. Bad behavior is seen not only as wrong, but also as stupid and weak. The system is (hopefully) stable, as reinforcing this good behavior is also good behavior and rewarded, while failing to do so or undermining it is also bad behavior and punished.

In the bad equilibrium, good behavior like being nice, honoring your commitments, helping others and contributing to the community is recognized and punished. Bad behavior like cheating, lying, backstabbing and bullying is rewarded. Since bad behavior is rewarded, (almost) everyone strives to exhibit bad behavior. Good behavior is seen as stupid and weak. It therefore also gets thought of as wrong. To succeed, one must not only engage in bad behavior, but make others believe that you do so, while nominally pretending to authorities and/or the naïve public that you’re not doing that. The system is again stable. If you don’t exhibi...
Decision Theory with F@#!ed-Up Reference Classes
by Chris_Leong — 2018-08-22T10:10:52.170Z

Before we can answer the question of what ought you do, we need to identify exactly what agents are referred to by you. In some problems, you refers to only a single, easily identifiable agent with actions providing deterministic results, but in other problems many agents will experience positions that are completely indistinguishable. Even then, we can normally identify a fixed set of agents who are possibly you and average over them. However, there do exist a set of problems where this set of indistinguishable agents depends on the decision that you make, at which point it becomes rather unclear who exactly you are trying to optimise over. We will say that these problems have Decision-Inconsistent Reference Classes.

While this may seem like merely a niche issue, given the butterfly effect and a sufficiently long timeline with the possibility of simulations, it is almost guaranteed that any decision will change the reference class. So understanding how to resolve these issues is more important than it might first appear. More importantly, if I am correct, Imperfect Parfit's Hitchhiker doesn't have a real answer and UDT would require some rather significant modifications.

(This post is based upon the material in this comment, which I said that I was planning on developing into a full post. It contains some substantial corrections and additions)

Motivation

My exploration of this area is mostly motivated by Imperfect Parfit's Hitchhiker. Here we define this as Parfit's Hitchhiker with a driver that always detects when you are telling the truth about paying, but 1% of the time picks you up independently of whether you are or aren't being truthful. We'll also imagine that those agents who arrive in town discover a week after their decision whether or not they were in the group who would have been picked up independent of their decision.

Solving this problem involves challenges that aren't present in the version with perfect predictors. After all, once we've defined a notion of counterfactuals for perfect predictors, (harder than it looks!), it's clear that defecting against these predictors is a losing strategy. There is no (inside-view) downside to committing to taking a sub-optimal action given an input that ought to be impossible. However, as soon as the predictors have even an arbitrarily small amount of imperfection,...
Large Research Report on Attitudes to Genetic Technologies
by ole.koksvik — 2018-08-22T04:20:19.296Z
Link: https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/genetic-technologies/

Dear All,

The Royal Society has commissioned a large 'dialogue' research report on people's attitudes to Genetic Technologies. This is significant, as CRISPR-Cas9 is a potential high-impact intervention: it's cheap, and can produce heredetary changes.

To my knowledge this is one of the deepest pieces of research ever conducted on this issue, and I think it might merit reading large sections of it, for those that are interested in the area.

For those just somewhat interested I recommend downloading the Appendices, and looking, in particular, at Appendix 8, which contains quantitative data. With n=2,061, this is a large survey.

You might jump directly to Q12, on p. 64, where respondents are asked the extent to which various developments would be positive or negative for society, or maybe to Q13, on p. 65, where they are asked "To what extent do you agree that genetic technologies such as genome sequencing and editing should be used in humans **for prolonging life** beyond current life expectancies" (emphasis mine).

54% agree either strongly or to some extent; that was surprising to me.

Q15, p. 66, ask about *enhancing abilities*, e.g. intelligence, and there **only 32% agree** strongly or to some extent; **60%** disagree.

And there's many other interesting questions.

A 2015 survey from France is here: https://www.ifop.com/publication/les-francais-et-la-technique-du-crispr-cas9/
Welcome to Boulder SSC Meetup [Edit With Your Details]
by corticalcircuitry — 2018-08-22T03:37:50.665Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Four kinds of problems
by Bird Concept — 2018-08-21T23:01:51.339Z

I think there are four natural kinds of problems, and learning to identify them helped me see clearly what’s bad with philosophy, good with start-ups, and many things in-between.

Consider these examples:

Make it so that bank transfers to Africa do not take weeks and require visiting physical offices, in order to make it easier for immigrants to send money back home to their poor families.
Prove that the external world exists and you’re not being fooled by an evil demon, in order to use that epistemic foundation to derive a theory of how the world works.
Develop a synthetic biology safety protocol, in order to ensure your lab does not accidentally leak a dangerous pathogen.
Build a spaceship that travels faster than the speed of light, in order to harvest resources from outside our light cone.

These examples all consist in problems that are encountered as part of work on larger projects. We can classify them by asking how we should respond when they arise, as follows:

1. is a problem to be solved. In this particular example, it turns out global remittances are several times larger than the combined foreign aid budgets of the Western world. Building a service avoiding the huge fees charged by e.g. Western Union is a very promising way of helping the global poor.

2. is a problem to be gotten over. You probably won’t find a solution of the kind philosophers usually demand. But, evidently, you don’t have to in order to make meaningful epistemic progress, such as deriving General Relativity or inventing vaccines.

3. is a crucial consideration -- a problem so important that it might force you to drop the entire project that spawned it, in order to just focus on solving this particular problem. Upon discovering that there is a non-trivial risk of tens of millions of people dying in a natural or engineered pandemic within our lifetimes, and then realising how woefully underprepared our health care systems are for this, publishing yet another paper suddenly appears less important.

4. is a defeating problem. Solving it is impossible. If a solution forms a crucial part of a project, then the problem is going to bring that project with it into the grave. If whatever we want to spend our time doing, if it requires resources from outside our light cone, we should give it up.

With this categorisation in mind, we can understand some good and bad ways of thinking about proble...
Jobs Inside the API
by Jacob Falkovich — 2018-08-21T21:45:08.671Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.com

I promised that my last post will go up as I am flying over the Pacific Ocean. Then I tweeted that I was looking forward to experiencing a 90-minute Sunday while flying overnight across the International Date Line. The gods did not approve of my hubris, and as the post went up on Sunday morning I woke up at a cheap hotel on the outskirts of Denver, sans my luggage

I have since made it to Singapore and Thailand, but that travel journal will have to wait. This post is about Saturday night at the Denver airport, and about the future of humanity.

Seriousness meter: three beers.

I booked a flight to Singapore through Denver and LA because I like breaking up extra-long flights into two overnight legs. I can save on hotels by sleeping on the plane, and I get to spend a day in a city I’ve never been in.

Denver welcomed me with perfect weather, transit that runs on time, and wild jackrabbits. My flight to LA was leaving at 7 pm, so after spending the day walking around I sat down at a tap house to try a Colorado craft beer before I left.

As soon as my brew arrived, so did a text from United Airlines: the flight is delayed by an hour, leaving me with an hour and a half to make the connection at LAX. No problem, I thought, and ordered another pint. With the beer came a second text: another delay of an hour.

I finished the beer. I looked at the menu – there was still a stout I wanted to try. I looked at the updated flight arrival time in LAX – 35 minutes to make the connection. Quite out of character, I decided not to tempt fate again and ordered the bill instead of the stout. As soon as I left the bar came a text with the final delay: my flight from Denver will now be arriving at LAX after the connection to Singapore is departing.

I shrugged, went back inside, drank the stout, and headed to the airport.

Everyone has read the article about bullshit jobs, especially those of us with bullshit jobs, which according to the article is everyone.

While the article makes a strong case, I think that it is somewhat overstated. The modern economy has too many moving pieces for anyone to track, including the pieces themselves. It takes thousands and thousands of people to make a pencil, and many of them are intermediaries, service providers, etc. The lady doing corporate finance for the insurance shop that allows the transportation company to buy a fleet of ...
[Feature Idea] Epistemic Status
by Raemon — 2018-08-21T20:22:45.687Z

Epistemic Status: My best guess (but, epistemic effort was "talked to like 2-3 people about it and it felt good to each of us")

I've been thinking about a number of issues relating to "what are the standards supposed to be on LessWrong, anyway?", with an understanding that there are different stages of idea development. I'd like the site to have a (valid) reputation for being epistemically sound. I also think that often in the early stages of idea-formation, it's important to be in a looser, playful brainstormy mindset.

A possibility is to actually make Epistemic Status a formal field in the Post submission form. In theory people can just do this fine without special fields, but having it be an official part of the site helps steer the culture of the site.

I'm currently imagining two fields: an freeform text field that people can write whatever they want into, and a multiple-choice field with a few specific options, most likely being:

Empty (both for backwards compatibility and for posts that for whatever reason don't neatly fit into the epistemic status framework)
Exploratory (for brainstorming, off-the-cuff or other early stage idea generation. Correspondingly, critiques of these posts should lend themselves to a more playful/brainstormy atmosphere)
My Best Guess (for when you're pretty sure the idea is actually good and are now ready for serious critique)
Authoritative (for when you are making a strong or clear-cut claim that you are confident is well backed by legible evidence)

The main cost of this is that every additional UI element comes with some complexity, and small bits of complexity can add up over time. But I think this would be good both for shaping how people approach writing on LessWrong, as well as commenting.
Book Review: AI Safety and Security
by Michaël Trazzi — 2018-08-21T10:23:24.165Z

I just read Roman Yampolskiy's new 500-pages-multi-author anthology: Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security to get a comprehensive view of the field. Here is my attempt at reviewing the book while explaining the main points of those 28 independent chapters.

General Comments about the Book

The first part, Concerns of Luminaries, is made of 11 of the most influential articles related to future AI progress, presented in chronological order. Reading this part felt like navigating through history, chatting with Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil.

The second part, Responses of Scholars, is comprised of 17 chapters written by academics specifically for this book. Each chapter addresses AI Safety and Security from a different perspective, from Robotics/Computer security to Value Alignment/Ethics.

Part I - Concerns of Luminaries

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us (Bill Joy, Wired Magazine, 2000)

The book starts with the influential essay written by Bill Joy at the beginning of the century. The author, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, author of vi and core contributor of BSD Unix, recounts a decisive talk he had with Ray Kurzweil in 1998 that changed his perspective on the future of the technology.

In particular, Joy compares Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics (GNR) in the 21st century with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) last century, being mainly concerned with Nanotechnology and Robotics (where robotics encompasses both actual robotics but also AI.

The author's knowledge about nanotechnology comes from Feynman's talk There is plenty of room at the bottom and Drexler's Engines of Creation (1986). Joy believed nanotechnology didn't work, until he discovered that nanoscale molecular electronics was becoming practical. This raised his awareness about Knowledge-Based Mass Destruction amplified by self-replication in nanotechnologies.

My comments: this article was not much about AI, but gave a general overview of the concerns with future technology. I really enjoyed this essay on GNR by someone who contributed this much to technological progress.

The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of GNR (Ray Kurzweil, 2005)

It's one of the only chapter in The Singularity is Near that addresses existential risk.

Responding to Bill Joy's article, Kurzweil presents several ways to build defensive technology to avoid existential risk: to prevent out-of-contr...