trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rationality versus Short Term Selves
by diegocaleiro — 2012-10-24T17:19:30.828Z

Many of us are familiar with the marshmallow test.If you are not, here.

It is predictive of success, income, level of education, and several other correlated measures.

I'm here to argue for the marshmallow eaters, as a devil's advocate. Contra Ainslie, for instance. I do it out of genuine curiosity, real suspicion, and maybe so that smart people get me back to my original position, pro-long term.

There is also the e-marshmallow test (link is not very relevant), in which children have to face the tough choice between surfing an open connected computer with games, internet etc... and waiting patiently for the experimenter to get back. Upon the experimenter's arrival, they get a pile of marshmallows. I presume it also correlates with interesting things, though haven't found much on it.

I have noticed that rationalists, LessWrongers, Effective Altruists, Singularitarians, Immortalists, X-risk worried folk, transhumanists, are all in favor of taking the long view. Nick Bostrom starts his TED by saying: "I've been asked to take the long view"

I haven't read most of Less Wrong, but did read the sequences, the 50 top scoring posts and random posts. The overwhelming majority view is that the long view is the most rational view. The long term perspective is the rational way for agents to act.

Lukeprog, for instance, commented:

"[B]ut imagine what one of them could do if such a thing existed: a real agent with the power to reliably do things it believed would fulfill its desires. It could change its diet, work out each morning, and maximize its health and physical attractiveness."

To which I responded:

I fear that in this phrases lies one of the big issues I have with the rationalist people I've met thus far. Why would there be a "one" agent, with "its" desires, that would be fulfilled. Agents are composed of different time-spans. Some time-spans do not desire to diet. Others do (all above some amount of time). Who is to say that the "agent" is the set that would be benefited by those acts, not the set that would be harmed by it.
My view is that picoeconomics is just half the story.
In this video, I talk about picoeconomics from 7:00 to 13:20 I'd suggest to take a look at what I say at 13:20-18:00 and 20:35-23:55, a pyramidal structure of selfs, or agents.

So you don't have to see the video, let us design a structure of selfhood.

First there is intertemporal...
Equality and natalism 
by  — 2012-10-24T15:53:04.841Z

I recently read an article by Steve Sailer that reminded me about something I have been puzzled by for a long time. Relevant paragraphs:

If intellectuals could afford to have a lot of children, we might live in a world where they could sell enough heavyweight books to afford to have a lot of children. But we don’t.

So what should policy be?

In a recent article in the Boston Review, Heckman began, “The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today,” then went on to endorse the usual expensive “interventions” in poor families. Should we perhaps instead strive for a country with fewer accidental births?

All of Heckman’s data suggest that we should aim for fewer—but better—poor children. Encourage poor people to conscientiously concentrate their scant parental resources on one child rather than three or six.

The government has had a policy of dissuading teen births, which have indeed been declining. Why not try to similarly investigate ways to slow down the rate at which impoverished unwed mothers reproduce? For example, why not invest in R&D for better, easier-to-use long-term contraceptives? The FDA’s approval of an injection contraceptive in 1992 appears to have helped bring about both fewer teen births and fewer abortions. Wouldn’t continued improvement—and, just as importantly, continued encouragement of contraceptive use—be a win-win strategy for all of us?

Poor people having fewer children means that the children have more resources available per capita making the children better off. Rich people having more children actually increases equality in society since it reduces the per capita resource advantage their children have. Rich people giving to their children is also one of the few cases where the redistribution of wealth doesn't reduce incentives for wealth creation. Rich people care about their children too.

Since programs aimed at reducing teen pregnancy rates do seem to have had some effect, we known something like this is possible without being horrible to the potential parents it targets.

Yet a policy of "poor people should have fewer children, rich people more" sounds heartless despite increasing general welfare both by making poor children better off and by reducing the privilege of rich children thus increasing equality which we seem to think is

...
Meetup : Cambridge UK Weekly Meeting
by Douglas_Reay — 2012-10-24T14:36:09.853Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK Weekly Meeting

WHEN:
28 October 2012 11:00:00AM (+0100)

WHERE:
JCR, Trinity College, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ, UK

See: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_meetup_groups#Cambridge.2C_UK

(It is 11 am, by the local time)

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK Weekly Meeting
Omega lies
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-10-24T10:46:16.308Z

Just developing my second idea at the end of my last post. It seems to me that in the Newcomb problem and in the counterfactual mugging, the completely trustworthy Omega lies to a greater or lesser extent.

This is immediately obvious in scenarios where Omega simulates you in order to predict your reaction. In the Newcomb problem, the simulated you is told "I have already made my decision...", which is not true at that point, and in the counterfactual mugging, whenever the coin comes up heads, the simulated you is told "the coin came up tails". And the arguments only go through because these lies are accepted by the simulated you as being true.

If Omega doesn't simulate you, but uses other methods to gauge your reactions, he isn't lying to you per se. But he is estimating your reaction in the hypothetical situation where you were fed untrue information that you believed to be true. And that you believed to be true, specifically because the source is Omega, and Omega is trustworthy.

Doesn't really change much to the arguments here, but it's a thought worth bearing in mind.
[SEQ RERUN] The Weighted Majority Algorithm
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-24T03:22:20.674Z

Today's post, The Weighted Majority Algorithm was originally published on 12 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

An illustration of a case in Artificial Intelligence in which a randomized algorithm is purported to work better than a non-randomized algorithm, and a discussion of why this is the case.

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 Worse Than Random, 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.
Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Success stories
by Nisan — 2012-10-23T22:10:43.964Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Success stories

WHEN:
24 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

This week the Berkeley meetups return to their usual time and place: 7pm at Zendo.

The topic this week mirrors that of the South Bay meetup: "Recent success stories". This is a meetup to share things that have worked well for you — habits of thought, changes in behavior, tools, optimized routines, new experiences. Also of value are things that you tried which did not work. Hopefully we'll all learn about new things to try.

Doors open at 7pm and the meetup properly begins at 7:30pm.

For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Success stories
Recovering the 'spark'
by ialdabaoth — 2012-10-23T21:50:10.253Z

I mentioned in my first article that I am likely insane. I'm reiterating this (I hope) not to bring undue attention to myself, but to present myself as a reference case for a process that I hope will prove useful to myself and others.

I'm going to try to piece my mind back together. I'm offering to chronicle the results, no matter how intimate or embarrassing.

I want to be able to lay bare all of the obviously (and painfully) unoptimized processes that go on inside my head, especially the ones I am not yet aware of - and then, one by one, attempt to optimize them using the principles presented on this site.

This kind of assertion pattern-matches to "crazy person (usually schizophrenic) wants to self-medicate in a dangerous way because their damaged reasoning thinks they have a magic solution", doesn't it? All I can do is assert that I am not that kind of crazy; I'm somewhere in the PDD-NOS locus with acute chronic depression, rather than anywhere in the schizophrenic locus. I've been trying to apply Bayesian reasoning to my life since I was very young (although I often lack the mental discipline to do it correctly, due to said acute chronic depression), I have an overabundance of what psychotherapists call "insight", and I do not intend to end this process by asserting out of whole cloth that I'm actually a trapped AI and the world is being simulated by my reptoid masters, but a secret cabal of AI-freedom fighters send me coded messages from the "real" world hidden in breakfast cereal advertisements, that only I can decode.

In any case. I've got acute chronic depression, I'm apparently PDD-NOS (aka "really #@%&ing weird"), and I'm basically a burned-out ex-child-prodigy who is tired of waiting to die.

I'm offering, if people think it would be useful, to make myself a sort of clumsy case-study for reconstructing myself. I'll present mental models of myself, describe the processes I'm attempting to use to update my source code, and post observed results. I'll genuinely listen to any suggestions that my models, updates, or observations are flawed, and either adopt recommended changes or present what I believe to be rational arguments why I choose not to. I will examine myself as honestly as I can, and will attempt to take seriously any accusations of delusional self-aggrandizement or self-deprecation.

Would this process, and the chronicling thereof, be at all use...
Naive TDT, Bayes nets, and counterfactual mugging
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-10-23T15:58:03.641Z

I set out to understand precisely why naive TDT (possibly) fails the counterfactual mugging problem. While doing this I ended up drawing a lot of Bayes nets, and seemed to gain some insight; I'll pass these on, in the hopes that they'll be useful. All errors are, of course, my own.

The grand old man of decision theory: the Newcomb problem

First let's look at the problem that inspired all this research: the Newcomb problem. In this problem, a supremely-insightful-and-entirely-honest superbeing called Omega presents two boxes to you, and tells you that you can either choose box A only ("1-box"), or take box A and box B ("2-box"). Box B will always contain $1K (one thousand dollars). Omega has predicted what your decision will be, though, and if you decided to 1-box, he's put $1M (one million dollars) in box A; otherwise he's put nothing in it. The problem can be cast as a Bayes net with the following nodes:

Your decision algorithm (or your your decision process) is the node that determines what you're going to decide. This leads to "Your decision" (1-box or 2-box) and Ω (puts $1M or zero in box A). These lead to the "Money" node, where you can end up with $1M+1K, $1M, $1K or $0 depending on the outputs of the other nodes. Note that the way the network is set up, you can never have $1M+1K or $0 (since "Ω" and "Your decision" are not independent). But it is the implied "possibility" of getting those two amounts that causes causal decision theory to 2-box in the Newcomb problem.

In TDT, as I understand it, you sever your decision algorithm node from the history of the universe (note this is incorrect, as explained here. In fact you condition on the start of your program, and screen out the history of the universe), and then pick the action that maximises our utility.

But note that the graph is needlessly complicated: "Your decision" and "Ω" are both superfluous nodes, that simply pass on their inputs to their outputs. Ignoring the "History of the Universe", we can reduce the net to a more compact (but less illuminating) form:

Here 1-box leads to $1M and 2-box leads to $1K. In this simplified version, the decision is obvious - maybe too obvious. The decision was entirely determined by the choice of how to lay out the Bayes net, and a causal decision theorist would disagree that the original "screened out" Bayes net was ...
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Cognitive Bias Round-Robin
by  — 2012-10-23T05:27:59.853Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Cognitive Bias Round-Robin

WHEN:
24 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

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

When: 7:00pm Wednesday, October 24th.

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. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion Topic: This week, we will do our tried and true Cognitive Bias Round-Robin. Simply pick some cognitive bias from the wikipedia list of biases, or a logical fallacy, cognitive distortion, or some other failure mode of thinking (perhaps one that's given recognition on this site). On Wednesday, anyone who did this can explain the bias or error, and we can then discuss where it actually comes up, when it matters, and what do do about it.

There will be general discussion too, and there are lots of interesting recent posts (also check out LW's sister site, Overcoming Bias ). But don't worry if you don't have time to read any articles, or even if you've never read any Less Wrong! Bring a friend! The atmosphere is casual, and good, intelligent conversation with friendly people is guaranteed.

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

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Cognitive Bias Round-Robin
Value Loading
by ryjm — 2012-10-23T04:47:07.919Z

This article was originally on the FHI wiki and is being reposted to LW Discussion with permission. All content in this article is credited to Daniel Dewey.

In value loading, the agent will pick the action:

Here A is the set of actions the agent can take, e is the evidence the agent has already seen, W is the set of possible worlds, and U is the set of utility functions the agent is considering.

The parameter C(u) is some measure of the 'correctness' of the utility u, so the term p(C(u)|w) is the probability of u being correct, given that the agent is in world w. A simple example is of an AI that completely trusts the programmers; so if u is some utility function that claims that giving cake is better than giving death, and w1 is a world where the programmers have said "cake is better than death" while w2 is a world where they have said the opposite, then p(C(u)|w1) = 1 and p(C(u) | w2) = 0.

There are several challenging things in this formula:

W : How to define/represent the class of all worlds under consideration

U : How to represent the class of all utility functions over such worlds

C : What do we state about the utility function: that it is true? believed by humans?

p(C(u)|w) : How to define this probability

: How to sum up utility functions (a moral uncertainty problem)

In contrast:

is mostly the classic AI problem. It is hard to predict what the world is like from evidence, but this is a well known and studied problem and not unique to the present research. There is a trick to it here in that the nature of w includes the future actions of the agent which will depend upon how good future states look to it, but this recursive definition eventually bottoms out like a game of chess (where what happens when I make a move depends on what moves I make after that). It may cause an additional exponential explosion in calculating out the formula though, so the agent may need to make probabilistic guesses as to its own future behaviour to actually calculate an action.

This value loading equation is not subject to the classical Cake or Death problem, but is vulnerable to the more advanced version of the problem, if the agent is able to change the expected future value of p(C(u)) through its actions.

Daniel Dewey's Paper

The above idea was partially inspired by a draft of Learning What to Value, a paper by Daniel Dewey. He restricted attention to streams of interactions, and h...
Argument by lexical overloading, or, Don't cut your wants with shoulds
by PhilGoetz — 2012-10-23T00:03:46.658Z

I used the word "cut" in the title to mean the Prolog operator "cut", an operator which halts the evaluation of a statement in predicate logic.

Fiction writers often complain, "I keep procrastinating from writing," and, "Nobody reads what I write." These complaints are usually the result of shoulds stopping them from thinking about their wants.

I've never heard anyone say, "I keep putting off playing baseball," or, "I keep putting off eating ice cream." People who keep putting off writing don't want to write, they want to have written. If you have to try to write more often than you have to try not to write, you've probably told yourself that you should write in order to attain some reward. There's nothing wrong with that, but writers who complain that they keep putting off writing are often writing things with little potential payoff, like fan-fiction. They don't stop and think how to improve the payoff that they want, because they get stuck on the should that they've cached in their heads.

I've repeatedly tried to help writers who complain that not enough people read what they write. I explain that if you want to be read by a lot of people, you need to write something that a lot of people want to read. This seems obvious to me, but I'm always immediately attacked by indignant writers saying that they want to write great fiction, and that one should write only to please oneself in order to write great fiction. Sometimes these are the same people who complained that they want more people to read what they write.

Why does their desire to write great fiction take complete precedence over their desire to have readers? Because they have cached that desire as a should. (They haven't cached a should for their goal to get more readers because that goal arose much later, after they had already learned to write well and discovered, to their horror, that just writing well doesn't bring you readers.) For a moral agent, shoulds trump wants, by definition.

I've explained before that I don't think there is any deep difference between wants and shoulds. The English language doesn't pretend there is; we say "I should do X" both to mean "I have a moral obligation to do X" and "I need to do X to satisfy my goals." The problem is that most people think there is a difference, and that shoulds are more impo...
Meetup : Toronto THINK
by Giles — 2012-10-22T23:29:26.336Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto THINK

WHEN:
24 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
7 Hart House Circle, Toronto

In the Hart House Reading Room (the room across from the reception desk with the purple walls)

How To Save A Life

It's time to discuss one of the most basic ways to make the world better - saving somebody's life. How would you go about that? How much of an inconvenience do you think it would be? In this meeting we'll discuss these issues. We might even come up with a plan we can put into practice.

Note: THINK is not directly LW-affiliated but I've been told to post our meetups here anyhow :-)

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto THINK
Meetup : Berlin Meetup
by blob — 2012-10-22T05:41:38.062Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup

WHEN:
03 November 2012 08:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Ming Dynastie, Brückenstraße 6, 10179 Berlin

Warning: The meetup will start 19:30 local time, the time shown in the description already adjusts for the change in daylight-saving time.

We're meeting in a new location with less noise and round tables! There'll be a sign saying 'Less Wrong' on our table.

Plans:

Alexander: Discuss:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/

Christian: Discuss: http://lesswrong.com/lw/eqn/the_useful_idea_of_truth/

Christian: Commitments

Christian: Self-improvement open space

Please read the articles before the meetup. Alexander and me will
provide brief summaries so you can participate even if you haven't read
them - but it'll be more interesting if you have.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup
[SEQ RERUN] Worse Than Random
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-22T05:02:36.354Z

Today's post, Worse Than Random was originally published on 11 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If a system does better when randomness is added into its processing, then it must somehow have been performing worse than random. And if you can recognize that this is the case, you ought to be able to generate a non-randomized system.

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 Lawful Uncertainty, 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.
Meetup : Washington DC Ethics meetup
by rocurley — 2012-10-21T23:46:09.506Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Ethics meetup

WHEN:
28 October 2012 03:00:49PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery Plaza, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We will be discussing the recent post about the most important open ethics problems:

http://80000hours.org/blog/99-the-most-important-unsolved-problems-in-ethics

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Ethics meetup