trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-09-11T15:47:44.069Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 4th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Rochester LessWrong and Transhumanists: 12 September 2015 01:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Boston Meetup: 06 September 2015 03:30PM
Oslo Lesswrong meetup, September: 27 September 2015 04:00PM
San Antonio Meetup: 13 September 2015 12:30PM
Urbana-Champaign: Quorum for discourse: 06 September 2015 02:00PM

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 - Caffe Medici - Meta: Topics and Goals: 05 September 2015 01:30PM
Durham, NC (RTLW) Discussion Meetup: 17 September 2026 07:00PM
Melbourne September Dojo: Vagueness: 06 September 2015 08:44PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - September: 06 September 2015 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 23 September 2015 06:30PM
Vienna: 26 September 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: What If: 06 September 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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 is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are 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 ir...
"Announcing" the "Longevity for All" Short Movie Prize
by infotropism — 2015-09-11T13:44:31.985Z

The local Belgian/European life-extension non-profit Heales is giving away prizes for whoever can make an interesting short movie about life extension. The first prize is €3000 (around $3386 as of today), other prizes being various gifts. You more or less just need to send a link pointing to the uploaded media along with your contact info to info@heales.org once you're done.

While we're at it you don't need to be European, let alone Belgian to participate, and it doesn't even need to be a short movie anyway. For instance a comic strip would fall within the scope of the rules as specified here : (link to a pdf file)(or see this page on fightaging.org). Also, sure, the deadline is by now supposed to be a fairly short-term September the 21st, 2015, but it is extremely likely this will be extended (this might be a pun).

I'll conclude by suggesting you read the official pdf with rules and explanations if you feel like you care about money or life-extension (who doesn't ?), and remind everyone of what happened last time almost everyone thought they shouldn't grab free contest money that was announced on Lesswrong (hint : few enough people participated that all earned something). The very reason why this one's due date will likely be extended is because (very very) few people have participated so far, after all.

(Ah yes, the only caveat I can think of is that if the product of quality by quantity of submissions is definitely too low (i.e. it's just you on the one hand and on the other hand that one guy who spent 3 minutes drawing some stick figures, and your submission is coming a close second), then the contest may be called off after one or two deadline extensions (also in the aforementioned rules).).
What Exactly Do We Mean By "Rationality"?
by ScottL — 2015-09-11T13:16:32.226Z

In summary, the goal of this post is to start a discussion on the current meaning of 'rationality' as it is defined on less wrong. I am specifically trying to find out:

What people think of the current definition of 'rationality' on less wrong

What people think a better definition of 'rationality' would include. I am not necessarily looking for a perfect definition. I am more looking for a definition that would better highlight the areas that people should look into if they wish to become less wrong.

I think that the description below from the What Do We Mean By 'Rationality' post sums up the current meaning of 'rationality' as it is used on this site:

Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory. The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible. This correspondence is commonly termed "truth" or "accuracy", and we're happy to call it that.

Instrumental rationality: achieving your values. Not necessarily "your values" in the sense of being selfish values or unshared values: "your values" means anything you care about. The art of choosing actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences. On LW we sometimes refer to this as "winning".

...

"X is rational!" is usually just a more strident way of saying "I think X is true" or "I think X is good". So why have an additional word for "rational" as well as "true" and "good"? Because we want to talk about systematic methods for obtaining truth and winning.

The word "rational" has potential pitfalls, but there are plenty of non-borderline cases where "rational" works fine to communicate what one is getting at, likewise "irrational". In these cases we're not afraid to use it.

Now, I think that the definition or description of 'rationality' above is pretty good. In fact, if I wanted to introduce someone to the concept of rationality then I would probably refer to it, but I would explain that it is a working definition. This means that it conveys the general idea and that most of the time this suffices. I have no problems with working definitions. One of my favorite ideas on less wrong is the idea that words and concepts are pointers to areas in concept space. This idea allows you to use working definitions and to not waste your time on semantic...
Meetup : Effective Altruism @ LessWrong Tel Aviv
by Squark — 2015-09-11T07:06:32.196Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Effective Altruism @ LessWrong Tel Aviv

WHEN:
29 September 2015 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Yigal Alon 98, Tel Aviv

We will meet in Google Israel (Electra Tower) on floor 29, as always.

We will have two talks on Effective Altruism: by Uri Katz and myself.

My talk's abstract:

Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that applies evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to improve the world. I will give a introductory overview of the ideas of EA and the primary organizations associated with it.

Uri's abstract:

I will discuss my take away from attending EA global this year. One of my objectives going to EAG was to figure out who I should give 10% of my income to this year. In previous years I donated to GiveWell, but I feel that they are well funded and do not need me. Next I considered Effective Animal Evaluators since I am (mostly) a negative utilitarian - I want to elevate as much suffering as possible, and animals beat humans by sheer numbers. I also considers x-risk, and other causes. Along the way I discovered what my motivation for giving was to begin with.
By relating my personal thoughts & story I hope to expose how the average effective altruist thinks and lives.
Finally I will say a few words about Effective Altruism Israel.

Discussion article for the meetup : Effective Altruism @ LessWrong Tel Aviv
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Sorting Hat
by RobinZ — 2015-09-11T02:45:35.108Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Sorting Hat

WHEN:
13 September 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

Crossposted from mailing list. Meeting in courtyard, gathering from 3:00pm, hard start 3:30pm - until closing.

We'll be meeting to discuss what Hogwarts house you think you, other people, or characters from fiction belong to, using this as a guide.

Upcoming Meetups:

Sep 20: Fun and Games

Sep 27: Singing (weather permitting)

Oct. 04: Availability Heuristic

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Sorting Hat
Meetup : LessWrong Sao Paulo meetup at Starbucks
by leohmarruda — 2015-09-10T20:41:29.147Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Sao Paulo meetup at Starbucks

WHEN:
12 September 2015 02:00:00PM (-0300)

WHERE:
Rua Haddock lobo 608, São Paulo, Brazil

Encontro de racionalistas em Sao Paulo, todos os LessWrongers estão convidados!
Se cadastre na lista:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/racionalidade

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Sao Paulo meetup at Starbucks
Film about Stanislav Petrov
by matheist — 2015-09-10T18:43:13.656Z

I searched around but didn't see any mention of this. There's a film being released next week about Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world.
The Man Who Saved the World
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277106/
Due for limited theatrical release in the USA on 18 September 2015.
http://themanwhosavedtheworldmovie.com/#seethemovie
Will show in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Portland.
Previous discussion of Stanislav Petrov:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/
Meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up
by Tuk — 2015-09-09T23:43:34.969Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up

WHEN:
15 September 2015 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
269 Pearl St, Manchester NH 03104

The fourth NH meet-up is Tuesday, 9/15, in Manchester, NH at 7 pm at a private residence. Light refreshments will be provided.

Have you read Rationality: from AI to Zombies, or any of the Sequences on Less Wrong? Maybe you're just a fan of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Come hang out with us and discuss optimization of whatever it is you want to optimize.

You may want to bring a notebook.

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up
Rationality Reading Group: Part I: Seeing with Fresh Eyes
by Gram_Stone — 2015-09-09T23:40:44.725Z

This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post.

Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This fortnight we discuss Part I: Seeing with Fresh Eyes (pp. 365-406). This post summarizes each article of the sequence, linking to the original LessWrong post where available.

I. Seeing with Fresh Eyes

87. Anchoring and Adjustment - Exposure to numbers affects guesses on estimation problems by anchoring your mind to an given estimate, even if it's wildly off base. Be aware of the effect random numbers have on your estimation ability.

88. Priming and Contamination - Contamination by Priming is a problem that relates to the process of implicitly introducing the facts in the attended data set. When you are primed with a concept, the facts related to that concept come to mind easier. As a result, the data set selected by your mind becomes tilted towards the elements related to that concept, even if it has no relation to the question you are trying to answer. Your thinking becomes contaminated, shifted in a particular direction. The data set in your focus of attention becomes less representative of the phenomenon you are trying to model, and more representative of the concepts you were primed with.

89. Do We Believe Everything We're Told - Some experiments on priming suggest that mere exposure to a view is enough to get one to passively accept it, at least until it is specifically rejected.

90. Cached Thoughts - Brains are slow. They need to cache as much as they can. They store answers to questions, so that no new thought is required to answer. Answers copied from others can end up in your head without you ever examining them closely. This makes you say things that you'd never believe if you thought them through. So examine your cached thoughts! Are they true?

91. The "Outside the Box" Box - When asked to think creatively there's always a cached thought that you can fall into. To be truly creative you must avoid the cached thought. Think something actually new, not something that you heard was the latest innovation. Striving for novelty for novelty's sake is futile, instead you must aim to be optimal. People who strive to di...
Reducing Catastrophic Risks, A Practical Introduction
by RyanCarey — 2015-09-09T22:39:40.212Z

While thinking about my own next career steps, I've been writing down some of my thoughts about what's in an impactful career.

In the process, I wrote an introductory report on what seem to me to be practical approaches to problems in catastrophic risks. It's intended to complement the analysis that 80,000 Hours provides by thinking about what general roles we ought to perform, rather than analysing specific careers and jobs, and by focusing specifically on existential risks.

I'm happy to receive feedback on it, positive and negative.

Here it is: Reducing Catastrophic Risks, A Practical Introduction.
Mean of quantiles
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-09-09T18:55:46.492Z

In a previous post, I looked at some of the properties of using the median rather than the mean.

Inspired by Househalter's comment, it seems we might be able to take a compromise between median and mean. It seems to me that simply taking the mean of the lower quartile, median, and upper quartile would also have the nice features I described, and would likely be closer to the mean.

Furthermore, there's no reason to stop there. We can take the mean of the n-1 n-quantiles.

Two questions:

As n increases, does this quantity tend to the mean if it exists? (I suspect yes).

For some distributions (eg Cauchy distribution) this quantity will tend to a limit as n increases, even if there is no mean. Is this an effective way of extending means to distributions that don't possess them?

Note the unlike the median approach, for large enough n, this maximiser will pay Pascal's mugger.
Flowsheet Logic and Notecard Logic
by moridinamael — 2015-09-09T16:42:35.321Z

(Disclaimer: The following perspectives are based in my experience with policy debate which is fifteen years out of date. The meta-level point should stand regardless.)

If you are not familiar with U.S. high school debate club ("policy debate" or "cross-examination debate"), here is the gist of it: two teams argue over a topic, and a judge determines who has won.

When we get into the details, there are a lot of problems with the format. Almost everything wrong with policy debate appears in this image:

This is a "flowsheet", and it is used to track threads of argument between the successive epochs of the debate round. The judge and the debators keep their own flowsheets to make sense of what's going on.

I am sure that there is a skillful, positive way of using flowsheets, but I have never seen it used in any way other than the following:

After the Affirmative side lays out their proposal, the Negative throws out a shotgun blast of more-or-less applicable arguments drawn from their giant plastic tote containing pre-prepared arguments. The Affirmative then counters the Negative's arguments using their own set of pre-prepared counter-arguments. Crucially, all of the Negative arguments must be met. Look at the Flowsheet image again, and notice how each "argument" has an arrow which carries it rightward. If any of these arrows make it to the right side of the page - the end of the round - without being addressed, then the judge will typically consider the round to be won by the side who originated that arrow.

So it doesn't actually matter if an argument receives a good counterargument. It only matters that the other team has addressed it appropriately.

Furthermore, merely addressing the argument with ad hoc counterargument is usually not sufficient. If the Negative makes an argument which contains five separate logical fallacies, and the Affirmative points all of these out and then moves on, the judge may not actually consider the Negative argument to have been refuted - because the Affirmative did not cite any Evidence.

Evidence, in policy debate, is a term of art, and it means "something printed out from a reputable media source and taped onto a notecard." You can't say "water is wet" in a policy debate round without backing it up with a notecard quoting a news source corroborating the wetness of water. So, skillfully pointing out those logical fallacies is meaningless ...
How the virtual AI controls itself
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-09-09T14:25:07.117Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

In previous posts, I posited AIs caring only about virtual worlds - in fact, being defined as processes in virtual worlds, similarly to cousin_it's idea. How could this go? We would want the AI to reject offers of outside help - be they ways of modifying its virtual world, or ways of giving it extra resources.

Let V be a virtual world, over which a utility function u is defined. The world accepts a single input string O. Let P be a complete specification of an algorithm, including the virtual machine it is run on, the amount of memory it has access to, and so on.

Fix some threshold T for u (to avoid the the subtle weeds of maximising). Define the statement:

r(P,O,V,T): "P(V) returns O, and either E(u|O)>T or O=∅"

And the string valued program:

Q(V,P,T): "If you can find that there exists a non-empty O such that r(P,O,V,T), return O. Else return ∅."

Here "find" and "E" are where the magic-super-intelligence-stuff happens.

Now, it seems to me that Q(V,Q,T) is the program we are looking for. It is uninterested in offers to modify the virtual world, because E(u|O)>T is defined over the unmodified virtual world. We can set it up so that the first thing it proves is something like "If I (ie Q) prove E(u|O)>T, then r(Q,O,V,T)." If we offer it more computing resources, it can no longer make use of that assumption, because "I" will no longer be Q.

Does this seem like a possible way of phrasing the self-containing requirements? For the moment, this seems to make it reject small offers of extra resources, and be indifferent to large offers.
Doomsday argument for Anthropic Decision Theory
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-09-09T12:37:43.675Z

tl;dr: there is no real Doomsday argument in ADT. Average utilitarians over-discount the future compared with total utilitarians, but ADT can either increase or decrease this effect. The SIA Doomsaday argument can also be constructed, but this is simply a consequence of total utilitarian preferences, not of increased probability of doom.

I've been having a lot of trouble formulating a proper version of the doomsday argument for Anthropic Decision Theory (ADT). ADT mimics SIA-like decisions (for total utilitarians, those with a population independent utility function, and certain types of selfish agents), and SSA-like decisions (for average utilitarians, and a different type of selfish agent). So all paradoxes of SIA and SSA should be formulatable in it. And that is indeed the case for the presumptuous philosopher and the Adam and Eve paradox. But I haven't found a good formulation of the Doomsday argument.

And I think I know why now. It's because the Doomsday argument-like effects come from the preferences of those average utilitarian agents. Adding anthropic effects does not make the Doomsday argument stronger! It's a non-anthropic effect of those preferences. ADT may allow certain selfish agents to make acausal contracts that make them behave like average utilitarian agents, but it doesn't add any additional effect.

Doomsday decisions

Since ADT is based on decisions, rather than probabilities, we need to formulate the Doomsday argument in decision form. The most obvious method is a decision that affects the chances of survival of future generations.

But those decisions are dominated by whether the agent desires future generations or not! Future generations of high average happiness are desired, those of lower average happiness are undesirable. This effect dominates the decisions of average utilitarians, making it hard to formulate a decision that addresses 'risk of doom' in isolation. There is one way of doing this, though: looking at how agents discount the future.

Discounting the future

Consider the following simple model. If humanity survives for n generations, there will have been a total of Gqn humans who ever lived, for some G (obviously q>1). At each generation, there is an independent probability p of extinction, and pq < 1 (so the expected population is finite). At each generation, there is an (independent) choice of consuming a res...
FAI and the Information Theory of Pleasure
by johnsonmx — 2015-09-08T21:16:02.863Z

Previously, I talked about the mystery of pain and pleasure, and how little we know about what sorts of arrangements of particles intrinsically produce them.

Up now: should FAI researchers care about this topic? Is research into the information theory of pain and pleasure relevant for FAI? I believe so! Here are the top reasons I came up with while thinking about this topic.

An important caveat: much depends on whether pain and pleasure (collectively, 'valence') are simple or complex properties of conscious systems. If they’re on the complex end of the spectrum, many points on this list may not be terribly relevant for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, if they have a relatively small “kolmogorov complexity” (e.g., if a ‘hashing function’ to derive valence could fit on a t-shirt), crisp knowledge of valence may be possible sooner rather than later, and could have some immediate relevance to current FAI research directions.

Additional caveats: it’s important to note that none of these ideas are grand, sweeping panaceas, or are intended to address deep metaphysical questions, or aim to reinvent the wheel- instead, they’re intended to help resolve empirical ambiguities and modestly enlarge the current FAI toolbox.

1. Valence research could simplify the Value Problem and the Value Loading Problem. If pleasure/happiness is an important core part of what humanity values, or should value, having the exact information-theoretic definition of it on-hand could directly and drastically simplify the problems of what to maximize, and how to load this value into an AGI.

2. Valence research could form the basis for a well-defined ‘sanity check’ on AGI behavior. Even if pleasure isn’t a core terminal value for humans, it could still be used as a useful indirect heuristic for detecting value destruction. I.e., if we’re considering having an AGI carry out some intervention, we could ask it what the expected effect is on whatever pattern precisely corresponds to pleasure/happiness. If there’s be a lot less of that pattern, the intervention is probably a bad idea.

3. Valence research could help us be humane to AGIs and WBEs. There’s going to be a lot of experimentation involving intelligent systems, and although many of these systems won’t be &l...