trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Logic: the science of algorithm evaluating algorithms
by Christian_Szegedy — 2012-02-22T18:13:18.150Z

"Mathematical logic is the science of algorithm evaluating algorithms."
Do you think that this is an overly generalizing, far fetched proposition or an almost trivial statement? Wait, don't cast your vote before the end of this short essay!
It is hard to dispute that logic is the science of drawing correct conclusions. It studies theoretically falsifiable rules the lead to derivations which are verifiable in a finite amount of mechanical steps, even by machines.
Let's dig a bit deeper by starting to focusing on the "drawing correct conclusions" part, first. It implies the logic deals both with abstract rules: "drawing" and their meaning: "conclusions".

Logic is not just about mindless following of certain rules (that's algebra :P) its conclusions must have truth values that refer to some "model". Take for example De Morgan's law:

not (a and b) = (not a) or (not b).

It can be checked for each four possible substitutions of boolean values: a = false, b = false; a = false, b = true; .... If we agreed upon the standard meaning of the logical not, or and and operators, then we must conclude that the De Morgan's rule is perfect. On the other hand: the similar looking rule

not (a and b) = (not a) and (not b)

can be easily refuted by evaluating for the counterexample a = false, b = true.
Generally: in any useful mathematical system, logical conclusions should work in some interesting model.
However, in general, total verifiability is way too much to ask. As Karl Popper pointed out: often one must be satisfied with falsifiability of scientific statements as a criterion. For example, the following logical rule

not (for each x: F(x)) <=> exists x : not F(x)

is impossible to check for every formula F. Not directly checkable statements include all those where the set of all possible substitutions is (potentially) infinite.
This observation could be formalized by saying that a mapping from abstract to concrete is required. This thinking can be made precise by formalizing further: logicians study the connection between axiom systems and their models.

But wait a minute: is not there something fishy here? How could the process of formalization be formalized? Is not this so kind of circular reasoning? In fact, it is deeply circular on different levels. The most popular way of dealing with this Gordian knot is simply by cutting it using some kind of naive set theory in...
Meetup : Loveland CO (Fort Collins) 3D printer tour
by EvelynM — 2012-02-22T17:27:55.694Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Loveland CO (Fort Collins) 3D printer tour

WHEN:
24 February 2012 02:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
123 SW 12th Street, Loveland CO

Tour a 3D printer fleet (28 printers simultaneously + other random experimental ones).

Lunch to follow at Henry's 234 East 4th Street Loveland, CO 80537

efm (nospace) phone at gmail.com to connect for final details and directions on the day.

Discussion article for the meetup : Loveland CO (Fort Collins) 3D printer tour
[Link] An argument for Low-hanging fruit in Medicine 
by  — 2012-02-22T15:43:24.132Z

Those of us who have found the arguments for stagnation in our near future by Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen pretty convincing, usually look only to the information and computer industries as something that is and perhaps even can keep us afloat. On the excellent West Hunters blog (which he shares with Henry Harpending) Gregory Cochran speculates that there might be room for progress in a seemingly unlikely field.

Low-hanging fruit

In The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen discusses a real problem – a slowdown in technical innovation, with slow economic growth as a consequence.. I think his perspective is limited, since he doesn’t know much about the inward nature of innovation. He is kind enough to make absolutely clear how little he knows by mentioning Tang and Teflon as spinoffs of the space program, which is of course wrong. It is unfair to emphasize this too strongly, since hardly anybody in public life knows jack shit about technology and invention. Try to think of a pundit with a patent.

Anyhow, it strikes me that a certain amount of knowledge may lead to useful insights. In particular, it may help us find low-hanging-fruit, technical innovations that are tasty and relatively easy – the sort of thing that seems obvious after someone thinks of it.

If we look at cases where an innovation or discovery was possible – even easy – for a long time before it was actually developed, we might be able to find patterns that would help us detect the low-hanging fruit dangling right in front of us today.

For now, one example. We know that gastric and duodenal ulcer, and most cases of stomach cancer, are caused by an infectious organism, helicobacter pylori. It apparently causes amnesia as well. This organism was first seen in 1875 – nobody paid any attention.

Letulle showed that it induced gastritis in guinea pigs, 1888. Walery Jaworski rediscovered it in 1889, and suspected that it might cause gastric disease. Nobody paid any attention. Krienitz associated it with gastric cancer in 1906. Who cares?

Around 1940, some American researchers rediscovered it, found it more common in ulcerated stomachs, and published their results. Some of them thought that this might be the cause of ulcers – but Palmer, a famous pathologist, couldn’t find it when he looked i

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Self awareness - why is it discussed as so profound?
by Dmytry — 2012-02-22T13:58:28.124Z

Something I find rather odd - why is self-awareness usually discussed as something profoundly mysterious and advanced?

People would generally agree that a dog can be aware of food in the bowl, if the dog has seen or smelled it, or can be unaware of a food bowl otherwise. One would think that a dog can be aware of itself in so much as dog can be aware of anything else in the world, like food in the bowl. There isn't great deal of argument about dog's awareness of food.

Yet the question whenever dog has 'self awareness' quickly turns into debate of opinions and language and shifting definitions of what 'self awareness' is, and irrelevancies such as the question whenever the dog is smart enough to figure out how mirror works well enough to identify a paint blotch on itself1 , or the requests that it be shown beyond all doubt that dog's mind is aware of dog's own mind, which is something that you can deny other humans just as successfully.

I find it rather puzzling.

My first theory is to assume that it is just a case of avoiding the thought due to it's consequences vs the status quo. The status quo is that we, without giving it much thought, decided that self awareness is uniquely human quality, and then carelessly made our morality sound more universal by saying that the self aware entities are entitled to the rights. At same time we don't care too much about other animals.

At this point, having well 'established' notions in our head - which weren't quite rationally established but just sort of happened over the time - we don't so much try to actually think or argue about self awareness as try to define the self awareness so that humans are self aware, and dogs aren't yet the definition sounds general - or try to fight such definitions - depending to our feeling towards dogs.

I think it is a case of general problem with reasoning. When there's established status quo - which has sort of evolved historically - we can have real trouble thinking about it, rather than try to make up some new definitions which sound as if they existed from the start and the status quo was justified by those definitions.

This gets problematic when we have to think about self awareness for other purposes, such as AI.

1: I don't see how the mirror self-recognition test implies anything about self awareness. You pick an animal that grooms itself, you see if that animal can groom itself using the...
[LINK] Shutting down the destructive internal monologue through transcranial direct current stimulation
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-02-22T11:18:59.857Z

Fast track to pure focus

Weisend, who is working on a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency programme to accelerate learning, has been using this form of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to cut the time it takes to train snipers. From the electrodes, a 2-milliamp current will run through the part of my brain associated with object recognition - an important skill when visually combing a scene for assailants.

...

Mysteriously, however, these long-term changes also seem to be preceded by a feeling that emerges as soon as the current is switched on and is markedly similar to the flow state. "The number one thing I hear people say after tDCS is that time passed unduly fast," says Weisend. Their movements also seem to become more automatic; they report calm, focused concentration - and their performance improves immediately.

...

The journalist goes from

I'm close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I'm clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle.

My salvation lies in the fact that my attackers are only a video, projected on screens to the front and sides. It's the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault. But I am failing miserably. In fact, I'm so demoralised that I'm tempted to put down the rifle and leave.

to

I simply begin to take out attacker after attacker. As twenty of them run at me brandishing their guns, I calmly line up my rifle, take a moment to breathe deeply, and pick off the closest one, before tranquilly assessing my next target.

In what seems like next to no time, I hear a voice call out, "Okay, that's it." The lights come up in the simulation room and one of the assistants at Advanced Brain Monitoring, a young woman just out of university, tentatively enters the darkened room.

In the sudden quiet amid the bodies around me, I was really expecting more assailants, and I'm a bit disappointed when the team begins to remove my electrodes. I look up and wonder if someone wound the clocks forward. Inexplicably, 20 minutes have just passed. "How many did I get?" I

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Draft of Muehlhauser & Salamon, 'Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import'
by lukeprog — 2012-02-22T04:05:33.826Z

Anna Salamon and I have finished a draft of "Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import", under peer review for The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment (forthcoming from Springer).

Your comments are most welcome.

Edit: As of 3/31/2012, the link above now points to a preprint.
[SEQ RERUN] Righting a Wrong Question
by MinibearRex — 2012-02-22T03:57:56.615Z

Today's post, Righting a Wrong Question was originally published on 09 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you are faced with an unanswerable question - a question to which it seems impossible to even imagine an answer - there is a simple trick which can turn the question solvable. Instead of asking, "Why do I have free will?", try asking, "Why do I think I have free will?"

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Wrong Questions, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[Link] H+ article Rationality Training: Call for a Global Approach
by beoShaffer — 2012-02-22T03:21:58.018Z

http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/02/06/rationality-training-call-for-a-global-approach/

Dr.Ziesche calls for more globally accessible rationality training. He seems supportive of existing efforts, especially us, but thinks it would be nice if rationality training was easily accessible to people other than educated westerners.
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup
by EvelynM — 2012-02-22T00:33:57.649Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup

WHEN:
22 February 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
144 North College Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80524

We have a guest from London/Budapest visiting this week. Come discuss intelligence augmentation tools.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup
I believe it's doublethink
by kerspoon — 2012-02-21T22:30:00.668Z

This is my attempt to provide examples and a summarised view of the posts on "Against Doublethink" on the page How To Actually Change Your Mind.

What You Should Believe

Lets assume I am sitting down with my friend John and we each have incomplete and potentially inaccurate maps of a local mountain. When John says "My map has a bridge at grid reference 234567", I should add a note to my map saying "John's map has a bridge at grid reference 234567" *not* actually add the bridge to my map.

The same is true of beliefs. If Sarah tells me "the sky is green" I should, assuming she is not lying, add to my set of beliefs "Sarah believes the sky is green". What happens too often is that we directly add "The sky is green" to our beliefs. It is an overactive optimisation that works in most cases but causes occasional problems.

Taking the analogy a step further we can decide to question John about why he has drawn the bridge on his map. Then, depending on the reason, we can choose to draw the bridge on our map or not.

We can give our beliefs the same treatment. Upon asking Sarah why she believed the sky is green, if she said "someone told me" and couldn't provide further information I wouldn't choose to believe it. If, however, she said "I have seen it for myself" then I may choose to believe it, depending on my priors.

I Believe You Believe

The curious case is when someone says "I believe X". This can be meant a few ways:

I have low confidence in this belief. e.g. "I believe that my friend Bob's eyes are hazel, but I'm not sure".

I have this belief but have reasons to think you wont share it. e.g. "I believe she is attractive".

I have the fact 'I believe the sky is green' in my mental model of the world. e.g. "I believe god exists."

The first case I do not have a problem with. It means your probability density has not yet shown a clear winner but you are giving me the answer that is in the lead at the moment. In this case I should add a note saying "You believes there is a bridge here, you are not very confident in the belief".

I don't have a problem with the second case either. I can have the belief "Angelina Jolie is attractive", someone else not have that belief, and we both be rational. This is because we are using different criteria for attractive. If I were to change it to a consistent definition of attractive it wouldn't be a probl

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[Pile of links] Miscommunication
by Grognor — 2012-02-21T22:02:31.792Z

Humans obviously can't communicate.

-Peter de Blanc

Miscommunication is something we talk about Less Wrong a lot, what with the illusion of transparency, the double illusion of transparency, and the 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong sequence and better disagreement and levels of communication and mental metadata and this (not to mention Robin Hanson's Disagreement is Near/Far Bias). I thought about writing a new top-level post about it with some of the links I've found, but I figure they say all I could have said.

Here you go:

The Curse of Knowledge at Measure of Doubt (mostly a rephrasing of what we know from the above posts).

Seven Causes of Disagreement at Spencer Greenberg's blog.

4 Reasons Humans Will Never Understand Each Other at Cracked.

Wiio's Laws. This is the big one. This is the one that says it all. Do read them. Apparently, this doesn't happen to everyone, but after reading that page I started seeing Wiio's laws everywhere.
I’m an Artist. How Can an Artist Help? 
by MichaelVassar — 2012-02-21T18:23:44.790Z

I get asked that a lot, and increasingly I wonder; does the person asking think I’m a non-profit president? Do they imagine that when I was a kid, people asked me “what do you want to be when I grew up” and I said “I want to help people, so I’d like to run the United Way” and that the Singularity Institute is a logical step on that career path? Do they think that when I was growing up people told me “You’re really good at business networking, so you should be part of the Bay Area tech scene” the way scientists get told “You’re really smart, so you should be a scientist”? I think they sort-of do.

So anyway, Eliezer, representing the Singularity Institute, has traditionally told such people, to a first approximation, “sorry, an artist can’t help us”, and I’m writing this to try to elaborate on that statement a little. I’d like to tell the artists out there that they aren’t alone. Here goes.

“sorry, an artist can’t help us”

“sorry, a scientist can’t help us”

“sorry, an business-person can’t help us”

“sorry, an politician can’t help us”

“sorry, a hacker can’t help us”

It turns out that only a human can help us, because only they have general intelligence, so they can do anything. When people identify with labels, they don’t primarily gain the ability to use the skills they have that they associate with those labels. Rather, they loose the ability to freely use other skills, or generally, to behave non-stereotypically, as doing so would move them away from the central tendency in thing-space identified by those labels and thus make them a less good member of their category.

If you’re looking for a cause to fill in on an identity check-list, one of a list of socially proscribed things that people should be able to say about themselves in order to be ‘balanced’ or ‘interesting’, well sorry, ‘effective’ just isn’t on that list. We’re happy to take your donations, because ‘big-picture futurist visionary’ is on the list and ‘caring’ about SIAI the way people ‘care’ about the poor when they donate to Unicef is the best av...
Existential Risk Reduction Career Network
by FrankAdamek — 2012-02-21T14:07:59.514Z

Interested in donating to existential risk reduction efforts? Would you like to exchange career information with like-minded others? Then you should consider the Existential Risk Reduction Career Network! ("X Risk Network" for those short on time.) From the front page of the website:

"This network is for anyone interested in donating substantial amounts (relative to income) to non-profit organizations focused on the reduction of existential risk, such as SIAI, FHI, and the Lifeboat Foundation. [...] We are a community of people assisting each other to increase our resources available for contribution. Members discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different careers, network, share advice on job applications and career advancement, assist others with finding interviews, and occasionally look for qualified individuals to hire from within the network."

For more details, including on the process of requesting invitations, head on over to the front page at http://www.xrisknetwork.org/

Keep in mind that the network is for students as well, not just those currently on the job market. The network also has discussion of long term job strategy, school admissions, and intern possibilities.
[link] How habits control our behavior, and how to modify them
by Kaj_Sotala — 2012-02-21T07:23:47.710Z

The New York Times just recently ran an article titled "How Companies Learn Your Secrets", which was partially discussing data mining and partially discussing habits. I thought the bits on habits seemed to offer many valuable insights on how to improve our behavior, excerpts:

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain ﬁgure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.
Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately ﬁght a habit — unless you ﬁnd new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically. [...]

Luckily, simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them d

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