trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Could Democritus have predicted intelligence explosion?
by lukeprog — 2012-01-24T08:40:02.012Z

Also see: History of the Friendly AI concept.

The ancient atomists reasoned their way from first principles to materialism and atomic theory before Socrates began his life's work of making people look stupid in the marketplace of Athens. Why didn't they discover natural selection, too? After all, natural selection follows necessarily from heritability, variation, and selection, and the Greeks had plenty of evidence for all three pieces. Natural selection is obvious once you understand it, but it took us a long time to discover it.

I get the same vibe from intelligence explosion. The hypothesis wasn't stated clearly until 1965, but in hindsight it seems obvious. (Michael Vassar once told me that once he became a physicalist he said "Oh! Intelligence explosion!" Except of course he didn't know the term "intelligence explosion." And he was probably exaggerating.)

Intelligence explosion follows from physicalism and scientific progress and not much else. Since materialists had to believe that human intelligence resulted from the operation of mechanical systems located in the human body, they could have realized that scientists would eventually come to understand these systems so long as scientific progress continued. (Herophilos and Erasistratus were already mapping which nerves and veins did what back in the 4th century B.C.)

And once human intelligence is understood, it can be improved upon, and this improvement in intelligence can be used to improve intelligence even further. And the ancient Greeks certainly had good evidence that there was plenty of room above us when it came to intelligence.

The major hang-up for predicting intelligence explosion may have been the the inability to imagine that this intelligence-engineering could leave the limitations of the human skull and move to a speedier, more dependable and scalable substrate. And that's why Good's paper had to wait until the age of the computer.

</ speculation>
[SEQ RERUN] Replace the Symbol with the Substance
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-24T04:54:36.604Z

Today's post, Replace the Symbol with the Substance was originally published on 16 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The existence of a neat little word prevents you from seeing the details of the thing you're trying to think about. What actually goes on in schools once you stop calling it "education"? What's a degree, once you stop calling it a "degree"? If a coin lands "heads", what's its radial orientation? What is "truth", if you can't say "accurate" or "correct" or "represent" or "reflect" or "semantic" or "believe" or "knowledge" or "map" or "real" or any other simple term?

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 Taboo Your Words, 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.
How do I "test it"?
by ahartell — 2012-01-24T04:05:27.743Z

I've read a bunch of times on LessWrong about how important is to test things. It makes sure your beliefs are paying rent and helps you verify your hypotheses. Testing ideas is obviously important to science, and it's about as obvious that testing ideas in everyday life can serve the same purpose. I know all this, and I want to be the type of person that goes out and verifies my beliefs by experiment, but still I can't think of a single time I've done it. I don't think I even recall thinking, about some everyday type of thing, "hmm how could test that?" (apart from trivial trial-error computer related things). Anyway, I was wondering if some of the you could give me some examples of times you've done this. I'm thinking maybe I'll be able to pattern-match the kind of things you guys have done and hopefully recognize in the moment when I'm looking at a testable thought.

Thanks.
How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2012-01-23T23:50:42.497Z

I have a confession to make. My life hasn’t changed all that much since I started reading Less Wrong. Hindsight bias makes it hard to tell, I guess, but I feel like pretty much the same person, or at least the person I would have evolved towards anyway, whether or not I spent those years reading about the Art of rationality.

But I can’t claim to be upset about it either. I can’t say that rationality has undershot my expectations. I didn’t come to Less Wrong expecting, or even wanting, to become the next Bill Gates; I came because I enjoyed reading it, just like I’ve enjoyed reading hundreds of books and websites.

In fact, I can’t claim that I would want my life to be any different. I have goals and I’m meeting them: my grades are good, my social skills are slowly but steadily improving, I get along well with my family, my friends, and my boyfriend. I’m in good shape financially despite making $12 an hour as a lifeguard, and in a year and a half I’ll be making over $50,000 a year as a registered nurse. I write stories, I sing in church, I teach kids how to swim. Compared to many people my age, I'm pretty successful. In general, I’m pretty happy.

Yvain suggested akrasia as a major limiting factor for why rationalists fail to have extraordinarily successful lives. Maybe that’s true for some people; maybe they are some readers and posters on LW who have big, exciting, challenging goals that they consistently fail to reach because they lack motivation and procrastinate. But that isn’t true for me. Though I can’t claim to be totally free of akrasia, it hasn’t gotten much in the way of my goals.

However, there are some assumptions that go too deep to be accessed by introspection, or even by LW meetup discussions. Sometimes you don't even realize they’re assumptions until you meet someone who assumes the opposite, and try to figure out why they make you so defensive. At the community meetup I described in my last post, a number of people asked me why I wasn’t studying physics, since I was obviously passionate about it. Trust me, I had plenty of good justifications for them–it’s a question I’ve been asked many times–but the question itself shouldn’t have made me feel a

...
Meetup : Houston Meetup - 1/29
by Cog — 2012-01-23T23:21:33.203Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Meetup - 1/29

WHEN:
29 January 2012 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2010 Commerce Street, Houston, Tx.77002

The Houston LW meetup will have our next meeting this coming Sunday at 2:00 PM. We will be discussing the first two chapters of E.T. Jaynes "The Logic of Science", available here:

http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf

The first two chapters are relatively easy for those with some experience in formal logic, but we will make sure everyone understands the basics. We will also be going over the following sequences in the discussion, if time permits:

How An Algorithm Feels From Inside (http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/)

Feel the Meaning (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nq/feel_the_meaning/)

Replace the Symbol with the Substance (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nv/replace_the_symbol_with_the_substance/)

As always, pizza is an option if we feel like it. Bacon, eggs and other snacks are often produced in the hackerspace kitchen during this time, but those are communal products, so bring some cash for the tip jar if you partake.

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Meetup - 1/29
Meetup : Need more people for Vancouver meetup
by  — 2012-01-23T23:04:52.936Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Need more people for Vancouver meetup

WHEN: 28 January 2012 03:03:49PM (-0800)

WHERE: vancouver (Location TBD)

Vancouver LessWrong meetup has been puttering along in a barely alive state. We need more people to make it more stable and fun.

We don't have a good venue, we've been surfing between empty rooms at langara, coffee shops, and people's houses. We have been meeting regularly every sunday, tho we may change the day soon. We hope that with more people with more resources, it will be easier to find a good venue.

We've been mostly sharing math skills and talking about the usual LW stuff. If you haven't come out before, it's quite surprising how much more productive a realtime face-to-face conversation is for exploring your favorite rationality topics.

If you are from Vancouver, or nearby and interested, add yourself to the list, and try to come out. Seriously!!!

Discussion article for the meetup : Need more people for Vancouver meetup
Tell LessWrong about your charitable donations
by ChrisHallquist — 2012-01-23T21:35:16.646Z

When I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, I received a monthly living stipend of roughly $1,600. I decided to commit to giving ~10% of it to charity, and I had read in Peter Singer's book The Life You Can Save that one of the most efficient charities out there was Population Services International (PSI). Singer reported that GiveWell, a leading charity rating organization, had estimated that PSI's efforts saved lives at a cost of $650-$1000 each (pp. 88-89). So, I set up a recurring monthly donation of $160 to PSI, and kept it up for 15 months, for a total donation of $2,400.
I've been meaning to post the above information publicly for awhile, but was pushed over the edge by reading one of Eliezer's posts from a couple years back, Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate:

Let me tell you about a different annual fundraising appeal. One that I ran, in fact; during the early years of a nonprofit organization that may not be named. One difference was that the appeal was conducted over the Internet. And another difference was that the audience was largely drawn from the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc crowd. (To point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace. If you understood the phrase "empirical cluster in personspace" then you know who I'm talking about.)

I crafted the fundraising appeal with care. By my nature I'm too proud to ask other people for help; but I've gotten over around 60% of that reluctance over the years. The nonprofit needed money and was growing too slowly, so I put some force and poetry into that year's annual appeal. I sent it out to several mailing lists that covered most of our potential support base.

And almost immediately, people started posting to the mailing lists about why they weren't going to donate. Some of them raised basic questions about the nonprofit's philosophy and mission. Others talked about their brilliant ideas for all the other sources that the nonprofit could get funding from, instead of them. (They didn't volunteer to contact any of those sources themselves, they just had ideas for how we could do it.)

Now you might say, "Well, maybe your mission and philosophy did have basic problems - you wouldn't want to censor that discussion, would you?"

Hold on to that thought.

Because people were donat

...
[LINK] Neuroscientists Find That Status within Groups Can Affect IQ
by cafesofie — 2012-01-23T19:52:34.141Z

http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13492

To investigate the impact of social context on IQ, the researchers divided a pool of 70 subjects into groups of five and gave each individual a computer-based IQ test. After each question, an on-screen ranking showed the subjects how well they were performing relative to others in their group and how well one other person in the group was faring. All of the subjects had previously taken a paper-and-pencil IQ test, and were matched with the rest of the group so that they would each be expected to perform similarly on an IQ test.

At the outset, all of the subjects did worse than expected on this "ranked group IQ task." But some of the subjects, dubbed High Performers, were able to improve over the course of the test while others, called Low Performers, continued to perform below their expected level. By the end of the computer-based test, the scores of the Low Performers dropped an average of 17.4 points compared to their performance on the paper-and-pencil test.

"What we found was that sensitivity to the social feedback of the rankings profoundly altered some people's ability to express their cognitive capacity," Quartz says. "So we get this really quite dramatic downward spiraling of one group purely because of their sensitivity to this social feedback." Since so much of our learning—from the classroom to the work team—is socially situated, this study suggests that individual differences in social sensitivity may play an important role in shaping human intelligence over time.
Meetup : West LA Meetup 01-25-2012
by  — 2012-01-23T19:45:51.482Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 01-25-2012

WHEN:
25 January 2012 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, January 25th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion Topic: This week is about checklists. Our tentative goal for the evening is to make a rationality checklist to consider before making big decisions. If you have a chance, try to think of some good examples of bad decisions, and good decisions made under uncertainty. You may find some inspiration browsing Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases. Also see the original source of inspiration for this meeting, Charlie Munger's checklists.

This is also a good time to browse recent posts, as they also make for good discussion!

Whether you're a regular reader or totally new, here for the theoretical musings or the practical things, come by and say hello! The conversation is largely unstructured and casual, and the people are awesome. If we have a large group, we may also play a game!

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 01-25-2012
The Human's Hidden Utility Function (Maybe)
by lukeprog — 2012-01-23T19:39:42.722Z

Suppose it turned out that humans violate the axioms of VNM rationality (and therefore don't act like they have utility functions) because there are three valuation systems in the brain that make conflicting valuations, and all three systems contribute to choice. And suppose that upon reflection we would clearly reject the outputs of two of these systems, whereas the third system looks something more like a utility function we might be able to use in CEV.

What I just described is part of the leading theory of choice in the human brain.

Recall that human choices are made when certain populations of neurons encode expected subjective value (in their firing rates) for each option in the choice set, with the final choice being made by an argmax or reservation price mechanism.

Today's news is that our best current theory of human choices says that at least three different systems compute "values" that are then fed into the final choice circuit:

The model-based system "uses experience in the environment to learn a model of the transition distribution, outcomes and motivationally-sensitive utilities." (See Sutton & Barto 1998 for the meanings of these terms in reinforcement learning theory.) The model-based system also "infers choices by... building and evaluating the search decision tree to work out the optimal course of action." In short, the model-based system is responsible for goal-directed behavior. However, making all choices with a goal-directed system using something like a utility function would be computationally prohibitive (Daw et al. 2005), so many animals (including humans) first evolved much simpler methods for calculating the subjective values of options (see below).

The model-free system also learns a model of the transition distribution and outcomes from experience, but "it does so by caching and then recalling the results of experience rather than building and searching the tree of possibilities. Thus, the model-free controller does not even represent the outcomes... that underlie the utilities, and is therefore not in any position to change the estimate of its values if the motivational state changes. Consider, for instance, the case that after a subject has been taught to press a lever to get some cheese, the cheese is poisoned, so it is no longer worth eating. The model-free system would learn the utility of pressing the lever, but

...
How would you talk a stranger off the ledge?
by MoreOn — 2012-01-23T14:52:05.813Z

Last month, two people far at the periphery of my social circles have threatened suicide. Seems like a sign for me to learn some ledge-fu.

I reviewed the stuff I'd learned back in high school ("Listen." "Be supportive." "Don't argue." "Etc etc etc.") I have trouble believing that this would work outside of movieland, especially on strangers. More so, in person I'm an awkward, fidgeting introvert---the impact of everything I say is thus diminished, and I sound very insincere or clinical, like I'm following a bad movie script, when I say anything like, "You are not alone in this. I’m here for you." or "How can I best support you right now?" I doubt that this would sound any better in writing.

I suppose I could split my question into two related ones: what would you say to a person threatening to commit suicide, 1. in person, and 2. in an email?

I'm looking for out-of-the-box ideas that don't rely on charisma or compassion shining through. Personally, if I ever need to talk myself out of suicidal thoughts, I apply the "bum comparison principle": if my life is so crummy that I'm willing to commit suicide, then I should be willing to just walk out on everything I value and drift off in a random direction, survive by dine-and-dashing out of cheap restaurants and wash dishes if I get caught, maybe take odd jobs or hitchhike or gather roots and berries or blog from public libraries. I don't see this possibility in a negative light, and yet I still haven't done it. To me, it means that however bad my life may seem, I'm still too attached to it to walk out; therefore, suicide isn't on the menu.

People have different reasons to want suicide, and I understand that what works for me with my first world problems probably won't work for a person who is in too much physical pain from an incurable disease. To the best of my knowledge, the two people I mentioned earlier are both unskilled laborers who had lost their jobs, one of them so long ago that he's no longer eligible for unemployment benefits. I don't think I'll meet these particular people again, but I'd appreciate everyone's thoughts on what I could've said if my brain hadn't frozen.
Meetup : Melbourne practical rationality meetup
by matt — 2012-01-23T11:40:47.432Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne practical rationality meetup

WHEN:
03 February 2012 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
55 Walsh St, West Melbourne, Australia

Practical rationality, as distinct from the social and rationality outreach meetups. Look for a social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Discussion:

http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=6a317

This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month.

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne practical rationality meetup
Meetup : Waterloo Meetup
by jpulgarin — 2012-01-23T05:49:54.931Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Waterloo Meetup

WHEN:
30 January 2012 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
4 King St N Waterloo

Location: Symposium Cafe

I plan to keep organizing these meetups on a weekly basis, so this should be the last irregularly scheduled meetup.

The reservation is under "Julian Pulgarin", and if I am confident enough, there will be a large sign featuring this picture on it. My phone number is 519-781-1573.

I propose we go through the sunk cost exercise booklets, and agree on a regular time and place for weekly meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Waterloo Meetup
Meetup : Salt Lake City LW Meetup #2 Logistics
by adamisom — 2012-01-23T04:47:52.636Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City LW Meetup #2 Logistics

WHEN:
04 February 2012 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Downtown central Salt Lake City (near the library)

Update: see lesswrong.com/meetups for info on the next Meetup

Note: this announcement is to gather information on your availability to schedule the best time possible for the 2nd meetup Less Wrong's second Salt Lake City meetup is tentatively scheduled for Saturday the 4th at 3:00 pm at a cafe or coffeehouse. I say tentative because I am asking those interested to vote on the matter, giving up to three preferences, in order, for the time. It would also be nice to indicate the days or times that you will definitely not be able to attend. Email your preferences to me at isom.adam@gmail.com and/or leave them in the comments. Here are the options: A. Saturday at 3 pm B. Saturday at 7 pm C. Monday (6th) at 6 pm D. Thursday (2nd) at 6 pm E. Sunday at 3 pm (again) F. Other (please indicate) Feel free to suggest a place too; otherwise the venue will likely be near the SLC public library. The agenda includes a presentation by ksvanhorn on basic Bayesian probability theory, followed by discussion. There will also be a brief presentation of something on instrumental rationality, followed by discussion, and possibly the formation of a subgroup with its focus. Edit: There seems to be persistent interest in discussing Mormonism. If any LWer in Salt Lake City would like to prepare a brief presentation that could get us discussing it, let me know and I'll probably plan that for Meetup #3. The cutoff for emailing me your preferences is Jan 31.

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City LW Meetup #2 Logistics
[SEQ RERUN] Taboo Your Words
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-23T04:41:41.989Z

Today's post, Taboo Your Words was originally published on 15 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If Albert and Barry aren't allowed to use the word "sound", then Albert will have to say "A tree falling in a deserted forest generates acoustic vibrations", and Barry will say "A tree falling in a deserted forest generates no auditory experiences". When a word poses a problem, the simplest solution is to eliminate the word and its synonyms.

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 Empty Labels, 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.