trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Two questions about CEV that worry me
by cousin_it — 2010-12-23T15:58:37.674Z

Taken from some old comments of mine that never did get a satisfactory answer.

1) One of the justifications for CEV was that extrapolating from an American in the 21st century and from Archimedes of Syracuse should give similar results. This seems to assume that change in human values over time is mostly "progress" rather than drift. Do we have any evidence for that, except saying that our modern values are "good" according to themselves, so whatever historical process led to them must have been "progress"?

2) How can anyone sincerely want to build an AI that fulfills anything except their own current, personal volition? If Eliezer wants the the AI to look at humanity and infer its best wishes for the future, why can't he task it with looking at himself and inferring his best idea to fulfill humanity's wishes? Why must this particular thing be spelled out in a document like CEV and not left to the mysterious magic of "intelligence", and what other such things are there?
Some problems with evidence-based aid
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-12-23T14:12:28.577Z

In Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (Biopolitics, Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century) , there's an essay "Against Global Health?" by Vincanne Adams.

The introduction was a bit of a slog, but I think the point was that if "health" is defined as something which can and should be given to people regardless of what they think in the matter, the results can be presumptuous.

While she may be overly invested in the way things are usually done, she brings up some disquieting points about the ways insisting on double-blind tests can go wrong. For example, she mentions a project to evaluate training in safe infant delivery techniques in Tibet which was scuttled because not enough women were dying to get a good power calculation.

She describes experiments which are done in isolated communities because that's where the researchers can be reasonably sure that the subjects don't have alternative sources of care which would foul up the double-blinding. This does seem like a drunk and lamp post problem. [1] More generally, the concern is that actual care is delayed in the search for perfect information. Admittedly, it's hard to be sure about how to balance searching for information with taking action, but it strikes me as a problem that's worth some thought rather than just assuming that double-blinding is a reliable improvement.

[1] Is there a standard LW term for searching where it's easy to search rather than where the answer is likely to be?
Where in the world is the SIAI house?
by Meni_Rosenfeld — 2010-12-23T12:46:14.101Z

I am under the impression that there used to be a place called the SIAI house in Santa Clara, which housed the SIAI Visiting Fellows Program. However, this post suggests that it has moved\is moving to an unspecified location in Berkeley. My efforts to find additional information were unsuccessful.

So, does such a house still exist? What is its exact current location? Does it welcome random visitors?

I ask this because I plan to be in San Francisco on 9-11 January, 2011 with a lot of free time on Sunday the 9th, which looks like a great opportunity for a visit.
I'm scared.
by Mass_Driver — 2010-12-23T09:05:24.807Z

Recently, I've been ratcheting up my probability estimate of some of Less Wrong's core doctrines (shut up and multiply, beliefs require evidence, brains are not a reliable guide as to whether brains are malfunctioning, the Universe has no fail-safe mechanisms) from "Hmm, this is an intriguing idea" to somewhere in the neighborhood of "This is most likely correct."

This leaves me confused and concerned and afraid. There are two things in particular that are bothering me. On the one hand, I feel obligated to try much harder to identify my real goals and then to do what it takes to actually achieve them -- I have much less faith that just being a nice, thoughtful, hard-working person will result in me having a pleasant life, let alone in me fulfilling anything like my full potential to help others and/or produce great art. On the other hand, I feel a deep sense of pessimism -- I have much less faith that even making an intense, rational effort to succeed will make much of a difference. Rationality has stripped me of some of my traditional sources of confidence that everything will work out OK, but it hasn't provided any new ones -- there is no formula that I can recite to myself to say "Well, as long as I do this, then everything will be fine." Most likely, it won't be fine; but it isn't hopeless, either; possibly there's something I can do to help, and if so I really want to find it. This is frustrating.

This isn't to say that I want to back away from rationalism -- it's not as if pretending to be dumb will help. To whatever extent I become more rational and thus more successful, that's better than nothing. The concern is that it may not ever be better enough for me to register a sense of approval or contentedness. Civilization might collapse; I might get hit by a bus; or I might just claw through some of my biases but not others, make poor choices, and fail to accomplish much of anything.

Has anyone else had experience with a similar type of fear? Does anyone have suggestions as to an appropriate response?
Should criminals be denied cryonics?
by venetian — 2010-12-23T04:23:38.092Z

If someone is sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty, should they also be prohibited from signing up for cryonics? Specifically, I'm referring to people like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_death_row_inmates

I am not talking about providing it for them, just allowing them to sign up for it provided they can somehow get enough money together and allowing a response team into the prison to retrieve the body after the prisoner has died or been executed by lethal injection. I think they should be allowed access to cryonics, because we don't know enough yet about the brain to determine how much of their criminal behavior is due to mental illness/disorder and how much is due to free will. It may be possible to diagnose and cure people like Jeffrey Dahmer in the future before they commit any crimes, or to cure those already in prison such that they won't commit any more crimes.

As cryonics gets more and more popular, this will become an issue, especially when the first death row inmate wants to sign up for it.
Motivating Optimization Processes
by paulfchristiano — 2010-12-22T23:36:38.463Z

Related to: Shut up and do the Impossible! The Hidden Complexity of Wishes. What can you do with an Unfriendly AI?

Suppose you find yourself in the following situation. There is a process, call it X, in a box. It knows a lot about the current state of the universe, but it can influence the rest of the world only through a single channel, through which it sends a single bit exactly once (at a predetermined time). If it sends 1 (cooperates), then nothing happens---humanity is free to go about its business. If it sends 0 (defects), then in one month a powerful uFAI is released which can take over the universe.
The question is, when can we count on X to cooperate? If X is friendly, then it seems like it should cooperate. Is designing an AGI which can be incentivized to cooperate any easier than designing a completely friendly AGI? It might be easier for two reasons. First, the AI just needs to prefer human survival without intervention to a particular catastrophic intervention. We don't need to guarantee that its favorite outcome isn't catastrophic in some other way. Second, the humans have some time to punish or reward the AI based on its behavior. In general, lets call a process X slightly friendly if it can be incentivized to cooperate in reasonable instantiations of this hypothetical (ie, reasonable worlds satisfying the properties I have laid out).
I ask this question because it seems much simpler to think about than friendliness (or AI boxing) but still confuses me badly---this post has no hope of answering this question, just clarifying some issues surrounding it. If it turns out that the design of slightly friendly AIs is no easier than the design of friendly AIs, then we have conclusive evidence that boxing an AI is not helpful for obtaining friendliness. If it turns out that the design of slightly friendly AIs is significantly easier, then this is a good first step towards resolving the legitimate objections raised in response to my previous post. (Eventually if we want to implement a scheme like the one I proposed we will need to get stronger guarantees. I think this is the right first step, since it is the easiest simplification I don't know how to do.)

Question 1: Is a paperclipper slightly friendly?
Answer: Almost certainly not. We can try to incentivize the paperc...
Quantum Joint Configuration article: need help from physicists
by mwengler — 2010-12-22T18:32:15.888Z

EDIT: 1:19 PM PST 22 December 2010 I completed this post. I didn't realize an uncompleted version was already posted earlier.

I wanted to read the quantum sequence because I've been intrigued by the nature of measurement throughout my physics career. I was happy to see that articles such as joint configuration use beams of photons and half and fully silvered mirrors to make its points. I spent years in graduate school working with a two-path interferometer with one moving mirror which we used to make spectrometric measurements on materials and detectors. I studied the quantization of the electromagnetic field, reading and rereading books such as Yariv's Quantum Electronics and Marcuse's Principles of Quantum Electronics. I developed with my friend David Woody a photodetector ttheory of extremely sensitive heterodyne mixers which explained the mysterious noise floor of these devices in terms of the shot noise from detecting the stream of photons which are the "Local Oscillator" of that mixer.

My point being that I AM a physicist, and I am even a physicist who has worked with the kinds of configurations shown in this blog post, both experimentally and theoretically. I did all this work 20 years ago and have been away from any kind of Quantum optics stuff for 15 years, but I don't think that is what is holding me back here.

So when I read and reread the joint configuration blog post, I am concerned that it makes absolutely no sense to me. I am hoping that someone out there DOES understand this article and can help me understand it. Someone who understands the more traditional kinds of interferometer configurations such as that described for example here and could help put this joint configuration blog post in terms that relate it to this more usual interferometer situation.

I'd be happy to be referred to this discussion if it has already taken place somewhere. Or I'd be happy to try it in comments to this discussion post. Or I'd be happy to talk to someone on the phone or in primate email, if you are that person email me at mwengler at gmail dot com.

To give you an idea of the kinds of things I think would help:

1) How might you build that experiment? Two photons coming in from right angles could be two radio sources at the same frequency...
Many of us *are* hit with a baseball once a month. 
by Alexandros — 2010-12-22T17:56:02.982Z

Watching the video of Eliezer's Singularity Summit 2010 talk, I thought once more about the 'baseball' argument. Here's a text version from How to Seem (and Be) Deep:

[...] given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

And then it dawned on me. Roughly half of human kind, women, are inflicted with a painful experience about once a month for a large period of their lives.

So, if the hypothesis was correct, we would expect to have deep-sounding memes about why this was a good thing floating around. Not one to disappoint, the internet has indeed produced at least two such lists, linked here for your reading pleasure. However, neither of these lists claim that the benefits outweigh the costs, nor do they make any deep-sounding arguments about why this is in fact a good thing overall. Whether or not they are supported by the evidence, the benefits mentioned are relatively practical. What's more, you don't hear these going around a lot (as far as I know, which, admittedly, is not very far).

So why aren't these memes philosophised about? Perhaps the ick factor? Maybe the fact that having the other half of the population going around and having perfectly normal lives without any obvious drawbacks acts as a sanity test?

In any case, since this is a counter-argument that may eventually get raised, and since I didn't want to suppress it in favour of a soldier fighting on our side, I thought I'd type this up and feed it to the LessWrong hivemind for better or worse.
The blind god's computer language
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-12-22T14:52:09.336Z

http://crisper.livejournal.com/316634.html#cutid1

They have no compiler, only an accretor that gloms additional code onto the existing binary. I use the word binary loosely; it is not uncommon for them to "improve" fundamentally flawed data structures by moving to a larger base notation - to trinary, then quadrary, etc. At this point, some of their products are in base 17.

They never go back to fix bugs where they occur. They write new code to workaround the earlier failure case. I asked why they don't go back and just fix the bug where it happens. I was told "We can't go back and change it. That code's already done!" Their solution for insuring that failing code will be able to get to its workaround is the GOTO statement. GOTO is sprinkled liberally around other code, pointing to functions and routines that do not exist yet. If, down the road, it is discovered that the old code has a bug, they find out which GOTOs exist in that code that do not point to anything yet, pick one, and write the workaround there.

I could go on, but I am being told that we need to celebrate the successful compilation (by which I mean accretion) of a particularly complex workaround for a bug that has been known about for two years.
Newtonmas Meetup, 12/25/2010
by Kevin — 2010-12-22T06:27:22.566Z

There's a Less Wrong meetup at my house in Berkeley this Saturday, the 25th of December, at 6PM. Celebrate the winter season, the Solstice, and the birth of Sir Isaac Newton among friendly aspiring rationalists, including Eliezer and other SIAI staff and volunteers.

I will cook for everyone in the style I call "paleolithic gourmet" which is cooked meat and raw produce.

I'd like to satisfy everyone's preferences as reasonably as I possibly can without getting vastly more food than will be eaten.

Default menu:

Steak
Lamb Burgers
Bacon
Salad of Berkeley Bowl produce and parmesan
Grilled Portabello and chanterelle mushrooms
Cheese selection
Pita + hummus
Cookies

Feel free to bring a potluck dessert or if you like, an alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage.

The food is free, but if you can afford to, in the spirit of Newtonmas, I suggest a $10 or $15 or $500 donation to SIAI (which will be matched). Please don't not come because you prefer not to pay; no one will be excluded from food or shunned for not paying. I really mean that. Consider the donation not an admission fee and more of a gentle nudge and reminder that optimal philanthropy starts around $10 and that you should positively associate giving money with the fuzzies of eating delicious food.

Please post here if you plan on attending and RSVP on Facebook. You can also post here or PM me with your thoughts on the menu and tell me what you want to eat the most of. I wasn't planning on cooking fish or chicken but can do so if people let me know they want fish or chicken or something else (like a carbohydrate).

My address is 1622 Martin Luther King Jr Way Apt A, Berkeley CA. It's the ground floor apartment around the side, not the upstairs one.
The 9 Circles of Scientific Hell
by wedrifid — 2010-12-22T02:59:02.736Z

Neuroskeptic is my favorite blog on neuroscience. Don't be deceived by the 'skeptic' in the name, the coverage is well balanced and overall quite positive. He recently interrupted his regular scheduling with a light piece on the circles of scientific hell. Definitely worth a look. I'm not too sure about the order of the various sins. I'd be tempted to put "p-value fishing" way down the list!

An excerpt:

Second Circle: Overselling
"This circle is reserved for those who exaggerated the importantance of their work in order to get grants or write better papers. Sinners are trapped in a huge pit, neck-deep in horrible sludge. Each sinner is provided with the single rung of a ladder, labelled 'The Way Out - Scientists Crack Problem of Second Circle of Hell"

Makes me want to want to break out into a chorus of "Let the Punishment Fit the Crime"!
Theory and practice of meditation
by Craig_Heldreth — 2010-12-22T01:23:48.124Z

This is a (slightly revised) concatenation of three of my blog posts which I wrote after reading:

Understanding vipassana meditation by Luke Grecki in October 2010. The originals may be seen here (part I), here (part II) and here (part III).

I posted some comments myself in the original thread, but after giving it some thought I have decided to write a little more systematically on the topic.
There are three parts: one theory part and one part each on descriptions of the two techniques in my current practice.

Part I, a theory

I have been meditating daily for over thirteen years and did it sporadically for fifteen years or so prior to that. My menu of tried protocols is wide: vipassana, zen, transcendental, Gurdjieff self-remembering, Jung active-imagination, Erickson self-hypnosis, Loyola spiritual exercises, and probably a couple others I have totally forgotten about. The common thread through all of these techniques is mental health benefit, or spiritual benefit, or stress relief through calming mental processes. It is a purging of obsession and compulsion and anxiety and worry. Don Juan advises Carlos Castaneda the way to become a sorcerer is to learn to make one's mind perfectly still. (Castaneda's regimen may be the only one that I have heard about that I have not tried--I have seen people under the influence of deliriants and that is definitely not for me.)
There is modern scientific research in support of this, most notably in the work of the psychologist Albert Ellis and the psychiatrist Aaron Beck. Their therapy techniques are based upon the idea that our problems of mental life are twofold: first there are the human stressors which plague all of us to one extent or another--family problems, relationship problems, money problems, diseases--what Zorba called the full catastrophe; second there is the stuff which we tell ourselves on top of these typical and normal human stressors.
"This always happens to me."
"Nobody loves me."
"I am a freak; I am a loser; &c."
We could make a very long list. Ellis and Beck say you may be unable to eliminate the family problems and whatnot at the source of your grief, but you surely can quit telling yourself the exaggerated and goofy crap you pile up on top of it. Their experience (and a large amount of subsequent clinical experience) is that modifying the self-descriptions will benefit mental health. This can involve work,...
Using rot13 too much doesn't work
by  — 2010-12-21T22:55:35.522Z

Orpnhfr V guvax zbfg crbcyr urer jvyy whfg riraghnyyl cvpx hc ubj gb ernq vg. Captializations of I where the first hint I consistently got, and I've found that nsgre rkcbfher gb n srj qbmra fubeg grkgf (naq xabjvat jung ebg13 zrnaf) V'ir ortha ernqvat gur qnza guvat whfg yvxr beqvanel grkg.
Dutch book question
by  — 2010-12-21T21:39:53.684Z

I'm following Jack's Dutch book discussion with interest and would like to know about the computational complexity of constructing a Dutch book. If I give you a finite table of probabilities, is there a polynomial time algorithm that will verify that it is or is not Dutch bookable? Or: help me make this question better-posed.

It reminds me of Boolean satisfiability, which is known to be NP complete, but maybe the similarity is superficial.
Is technological change accelerating?
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-12-21T20:25:07.210Z

Eliezer said in a speech at the Singularity Summit that he's agnostic about whether technological change is accelerating, and mentions Michael Vassar and Peter Thiel as skeptical.

I'd vaguely assumed that it was accelerating, but when I thought about it a little, it seemed like a miserably difficult thing to measure. Moore's law just tracks The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit.

Technology is a vaguer thing. Cell phones are an improvement (or at least most people get them) in well-off countries that have landlines, but they're a much bigger change in regions where cell phones are the first phones available. There a jump from a cell phone that's just a phone/answering machine/clock to a smartphone, but how do you compare that jump to getting home computers?

Do you have a way of measuring whether technological change is accelerating? If so, what velocity and acceleration do you see?
Iterated Sleeping Beauty and Copied Minds
by lucidfox — 2010-12-21T07:21:10.299Z

Before I move on to a summation post listing the various raised thought experiments and paradoxes related to mind copying, I would like to cast attention to a particular moment regarding the notion of "subjective probability".

In my earlier discussion post on the subjective experience of a forked person, I compared the scenario where one copy is awakened in the future to the Sleeping Beauty thought experiment. And really, it describes any such process, because there will inevitably be a time gap, however short, between the time of fork and the copy's subjective awakening: no copy mechanism can be instant.

In the traditional Sleeping Beauty scenario, there are two parties: Beauty and the Experimenter. The Experimenter has access to a sleep-inducing drug that also resets Beauty's memory to the state at t=0. Suppose Beauty is put to sleep at t=0, and then a fair coin is tossed. If the coin comes heads, Beauty is woken up at t=1, permanently. If the coin comes tails, Beauty is woken up at t=1, questioned, memory-wiped, and then woken up again at t=2, this time permanently.

In this experiment, intuitively, Beauty's subjective anticipation of the coin coming tails, without access to any information other than the conditions of the experiment, should be 2/3. I won't be arguing here whether this particular answer is right or wrong: the discussion has been raised many times before, and on Less Wrong as well. I'd like to point out one property of the experiment that differentiates it from other probability-related tasks: erasure of information, which renders the whole experiment a non-experiment.

In Bayesian theory, the (prior) probability of an outcome is the measure of our anticipation of it to the best of our knowledge. Bayesians think of experiments as a way to get new information, and update their probabilities based on the information gained. However, in the Sleeping Beauty experiment, Beauty gains no new information from waking up at any time, in any outcome. She has the exact same mind-state at any point of awakening that she had at t=0, and is for all intents and purposes the exact same person at any such point. As such, we can ask Beauty, "If we perform the experiment, what is your anticipation of waking up in the branch where the coin landed tails?", and she can give the same answer without actually performing the experiment.

So how does it map to the ...