trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Epistemic security: example from experimental physics
by Stabilizer — 2012-02-17T00:48:29.934Z

I was reading the introduction to a textbook on electrodynamics (J.D. Jackson), and in there was a description of an experiment designed to measure the exponent of the inverse square force law that governs forces between charges (Coulomb’s law). So, the experiment was designed to detect how close the exponent is to 2, and put error bars on the value of the exponent. The experiment was performed in 1971 and established that if the exponent was not 2, then the error had to be in the 15th or greater decimal place! So far, so good...

So, the experimental design seemed to use all kinds of fancy modern electronic equipment. Here’s what bugged me: they were testing the oldest law in electrodynamics, using all this technology, which was based on over a century of development in the theory of electromagnetism. It reeked of circularity to me. You build an instrument using a set of laws, and you use those instruments to test one of the laws? It’s almost like you use a map to build a territory and use that territory to check the map. What’s going on here?

So, trying to exercise the virtue of scholarship, I went on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and read the article on Experiment in Physics (highly recommended). And I found the resolution in this line:

Instruments create an invariant relationship between their operations and the world...When our theories change, we may conceive of the significance of the instrument and the world with which it is interacting differently, and the datum of an instrument may change in significance, but the datum can nonetheless stay the same, and will typically be expected to do so.

So, it’s like if you use a map of the territory to build a road from A to B, and then you later realize that the map that you used to build the road was wrong. But the road still takes you from from A to B! So it doesn’t matter if you built it with the wrong map, it still works. So in the context of the Coulomb’s law measurement, as long as you’ve secured the input-output characteristics of the fancy equipment you’re using, it doesn’t matter if they were built using a wrong theory. So, there is no circularity in testing the theory which you used to build the instrument, since the instrument is going to follow reality no matter what.

So, experimental physics is very epistemically secure. What a...
[link] 101 Fascinating Brain Blogs
by Curiouskid — 2012-02-16T23:47:16.393Z

A pretty interesting list of psychology blogs. One of my favorite blogs (Mind Hacks) was listed (so the others on the list must be good too. Right?).
Also,

Does anybody know of any good textbooks on applied cognitive psychology?

For memory-Something that would put things like SRS in context with other things like the reasons we forget things, but more in more depth than blog posts? Or do you think that getting a textbook on the subject wouldn't be worthwhile because most of the low-hanging fruits can be grasped through blog posts?
For emotions-Any good/practical introductions to CBT?
Do you think we should start up a book recommendations recurring thread?
Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
by Mass_Driver — 2012-02-16T22:31:53.118Z

Application of: How Much Evidence Does It Take?

(trigger warning: some description of domestic violence)

Summary: I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of one way that the American legal system tries to assess and cope with the unreliability of certain kinds of evidence. After explaining the relevant rules with references to a few recent famous cases and a non-notable case that I'm working on now, I briefly consider whether this part of the evidence code is above or below the sanity waterline, and suggest an incremental improvement.

Recently, I got to the point in my legal career where people are trusting me to write evidentiary briefs, i.e., to argue in front of a judge about what kinds of evidence are reliable enough to be safely presented to a jury. There is an odd division of epistemological labor in the American court system: judges are thought [page 90] to be better than juries at resisting passionate or manipulative oratory, and juries are thought to be better than judges at resisting bribery and (pre-existing) personal hatred. As a result, potentially inflammatory or unreliable evidence is presented first to a judge, who (much like one of Eliezer's Confessors) is supposed to sift the exhibit to see if normal people can handle it without losing their tenuous grip on sanity. If and only if the evidence seems safe for ordinary human consumption, the judge will allow the lawyers to argue about that evidence in front of the jury. Otherwise, the evidence sits in a cardboard box in an unheated warehouse, safely away from the eyes of the jury, until it's time for an appeal.

The Hearsay Rule

By way of a concrete example, one famous recent case featured a recorded 911 call made by a domestic violence victim to the emergency phone operator. The operator asked questions about the location and identity of the person who was accused of beating the caller. The caller answered the questions on tape, explicitly identifying her abuser as Mr. Adrian Martell Davis, and the answers were used first to find and arrest the suspect, and ultimately to convict him. The victim was apparently too intimidated to testify in open court, and so her recorded statement as to the name of her abuser was absolutely necessary to support a conviction -- no recording, no conviction. Under the 400-year-old hearsay rule, recorded testimony typically is not allowed to be presented to a jury...
Counterfactual Coalitions
by Larks — 2012-02-16T21:42:52.639Z

Politics is the mind-killer; our opinions are largely formed on the basis of which tribes we want to affiliate with. What's more, when we first joined a tribe, we probably didn't properly vet the effects it would have on our cognition.

One illustration of this is the apparently contingent nature of actual political coalitions, and the prima facie plausibility of others. For example,

In the real world, animal rights activists tend to be pro-choice.

But animal rights & fetus rights seems just as plausible coalition - an expanding sphere of moral worth.

This suggests a de-biasing technique; inventing plausible alternative coalitions of ideas. When considering the counterfactual political argument, each side will have some red positions and some green positions, so hopefully your brain will be forced to evaluate it in a more rational manner.

Obviously, political issues are not all orthogonal; there is mutual information, and you don't want to ignore it. The idea isn't to decide your belief on every issue independently. If taxes on beer, cider and wine are a good idea, taxes on spirits are probably a good idea too. However, I think this is reflected in the "plausible coalitions" game; the most plausible reason I could think of for the political divide to fall between these is lobbying on behalf of distilleries, suggesting that these form a natural cluster in policy-space.

In case the idea can be more clearly grokked by examples, I'll post some in the comments.
Possible Implications of the neural retrotransposons to the future
by  — 2012-02-16T21:05:25.838Z

Retrotransposons are small bits of genetic code than can copy themselves into other bits of the dna strand

They have been found to be active in brains, with different amounts of activity in different brain sections. The highest being in the hippocampus (an important region for long-term memory). Also they were active in coding regions.

"Overall, L1, Alu, and, to a more limited extent, SVA mobilization produced a large number of insertions that affected protein-coding genes,"

This means that they are more likely to have some large effect, than if they were just in junk dna.

One form of autism is linked to a malfunctioning of retrotransposons. So it can have a drastic affect.

It makes a certain amount of sense. If there is information in the brain that needs to to be stored, but not directly in neural firing rates, why not store it in the DNA of neuron? There is lots of error correcting data storage there and the genome has lots of tools for manipulating itself. Time will tell if it is very important or not.

If it is important, what are the implications for the future?

Cryo is harder, scanning the genome is a lot harder than just doing some spectroscopy. but since we assume a certain amount of sufficiently advanced technology and don't have a timeline, our plans aren't impinged upon.

The em scenario seems like it will take longer to happen or may have some gotchas. Being able to scan the genetic code of each neuron would require some serious breakthroughs in scanning technolgies.

To naively emulate the genetic code changes would take immense amounts of bandwidth and to crack things like the protein folding problem (for how the changes in ). Just for storage I think we might need on the order of 500 exabits to store the dna sequence for each neuron. You'ld need to update them as well, which is going to take lots of memory bandwidth. This is not to mention chemical emulation.

I think naive emulation of the brain is off the table before AI. We may well be able to do better with shortcuts in terms of ability. But there might be questions of whether the copy is "you" if short cuts are taken. Also if we understand the brain, we don't need to make copies of people, we could just create AIs that do the same thing.

Some even more blue sky speculation. If the changes in the genetic code are to do with changing how we learn, then it still might be possible to scan a brain at lo...
Tel Aviv Self-Improvement Meetup Group
by Meni_Rosenfeld — 2012-02-16T15:37:33.551Z

I have started the Tel Aviv Self-Improvement Meetup Group. It is not about rationality or LessWrong per se, but it is heavily influenced by rationality dojos and LW posts in the applied rationality, personal optimization and anti-akrasia cluster. As the description says, it is

A group of people helping each other apply rationality to our everyday lives, in order to improve our skills, make the best decisions, become productive and achieve our goals.

If you're interested and in the area, you're welcome to join. If you have any comments or suggestions, based perhaps on experience with similar groups, please share.
The mathematics of reduced impact: help needed
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-02-16T14:23:14.809Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Thanks for help from Paul Christiano

If clippy, the paper-clip maximising AI, goes out of control, it would fill the universe with paper clips (or with better and better ways of counting the paper-clips it already has). If I sit down to a game with Deep Blue, then I know little about what will happen in the game, but I know it will end with me losing.

When facing a (general or narrow) superintelligent AI, the most relevant piece of information is what the AI's goals are. That's the general problem: there is no such thing as 'reduced impact' for such an AI. It doesn't matter who the next president of the United States is, if an AI wants to tile the universe with little smiley faces. But reduced impact is something we would dearly want to have - it gives us time to correct errors, perfect security systems, maybe even bootstrap our way to friendly AI from a non-friendly initial design. The most obvious path to coding reduced impact is to build a satisficer rather than a maximiser - but that proved unlikely to work.

But that ruthless maximising aspect of AIs may give us a way of quantifying 'reduced impact' - and hence including it in AI design. The central point being:

"When facing a (non-reduced impact) superintelligent AI, the AI's motivation is the most important fact we know."

Hence, conversely:

"If an AI has reduced impact, then knowing its motivation isn't particularly important. And a counterfactual world where the AI didn't exist, would not be very different from the one in which it does."

In this post, I'll be presenting some potential paths to formalising this intuition into something computable, giving us a numerical measure of impact that can be included in the AI's motivation to push it towards reduced impact. I'm putting this post up mainly to get help: does anyone know of already developed mathematical or computational tools that can be used to put these approaches on a rigorous footing?

Counterfactuals

To define a counterfactual, we can use a variant of my favourite "send the effect through a stochastic event that has a small probability of undoing it". Let's start by imagining there is an initial (super-intelligent) AI, the master, that gets one action only: to produce the source code for another AI, the disciple, that will then go out into the world and do stuff. The source code is ...
[LINK] Computer program that aces 'guess next' in IQ test
by Dmytry — 2012-02-16T09:01:23.172Z

From

http://astrobio.net/pressrelease/4569/computers-that-think-like-humans

The group is therefore using a psychological model of human patterns in their computer programmes. They have integrated a mathematical model that models human-like problem solving. The programme that solves progressive matrices scores IQ 100 and has the unique ability of being able to solve the problems without having access to any response alternatives. The group has improved the programme that specialises in number sequences to the point where it is now able to ace the tests, implying an IQ of at least 150.

'Our programmes are beating the conventional math programmes because we are combining mathematics and psychology. Our method can potentially be used to identify patterns in any data with a psychological component, such as financial data. But it is not as good at finding patterns in more science-type data, such as weather data, since then the human psyche is not involved,' says Strannegård.

That's an awesome study.

I always thought the variations of continue series test (progressive matrices, number sequences, word A is to word B as word C is to ?? etc) are very culturally biased. You solve those best and easiest by sharing with the test maker the learning environment (and for visual ones, sharing visual environment), as well as sharing neural architecture. That lets you pick same choice as the test maker [edit: and do so easily and naturally]. And this research provides very good demonstration.

Of course there will be a correlation of ability to guess the same or secondguess the test maker with intelligence, but so does e.g. height correlate with intelligence (via effect of nutrition on both); perhaps we should add 'what is your height' question to IQ test and then let some giant robot score a genius.

Note: one might think of sequence guessing as task of minimizing Kolmogorov complexity. That's not quite so, sequences are too short, shorter than the generators. Consider sequence 2,3,5,7,11,? . Obviously the answer on IQ test would be 13 (primes). Good luck writing primes generating program that is simpler than this sequence itself, though [edit: i mean, simpler than a program which just prints those numbers followed by whatever garbage. Unless you have a language where 'print primes' is a basic command]. (and of course the length of program will be very depende...
Empiricism in Gameplay
by ac3raven — 2012-02-16T06:37:38.193Z

This article relates to a game, being developed by Shiny Ogre Games, based on "The Twelves Virtues of Rationality" by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

The sixth virtue is empiricism. The roots of knowledge are in observation and its fruit is prediction. What tree grows without roots? What tree nourishes us without fruit? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, “Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air.” Another says, “No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain.” Though they argue, one saying “Yes”, and one saying “No”, the two do not anticipate any different experience of the forest. Do not ask which beliefs to profess, but which experiences to anticipate. Always know which difference of experience you argue about. Do not let the argument wander and become about something else, such as someone’s virtue as a rationalist. Jerry Cleaver said: “What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It’s overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball.” Do not be blinded by words. When words are subtracted, anticipation remains. --The Twelve Virtues of Rationality, EliezerYudkowsky

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. --Wikipedia

We can write whole books about empiricism, describing what it is, why it's useful, and how it works. We can use an innumerable amount of words to describe the nuanced techniques involved in thinking empirically about a problem. Words are certainly valuable for describing things, but can gameplay describe a thing more effectively?

Our brains are pattern-seeking machines. We like figuring things out, it's a survival mechanism. Our brains release endorphins when we decode the noise of our environment.

Try to find the threat.

Games more or less consist of a series of interesting challenges (or patterns), with mechanics that allow the player to figure out the challenges (or decode the noise). Decoding noise is what our brains do all the time, when we find patterns in the noise, we cache those for later reference. We do this because it is fun.

You decoded the noise of "face" a long time ago, and now you've "chunked" it, so

...
[SEQ RERUN] Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
by MinibearRex — 2012-02-16T06:19:28.976Z

Today's post, Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles was originally published on 01 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You think that words are like tiny little LISP symbols in your mind, rather than words being labels that act as handles to direct complex mental paintbrushes that can paint detailed pictures in your sensory workspace.

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 Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes, 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.
Problem posting
by diegocaleiro — 2012-02-16T04:05:08.913Z

I'm experiencing a problem trying to post a text to the topic session of LessWrong discussion.

When I write a small text (like this one) it works fine.

When I copy part of the text I intend to publish, and try submitting, still fine.

But if I copy most of it, or the entire thing, when I click submit the red sign saying "submitting" appears for a few seconds, then disappears, and nothing happens.

Does anyone know what happened or how to solve it?
test 5 Ignore
by diegocaleiro — 2012-02-16T04:02:21.255Z

<!--	@page { margin: 2cm }	P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }	A:link { so-language: zxx }	-->

Troubles with CEV

1) Stumbling on People, Detecting the Things CEV Will Extrapolate:

Concepts on which CEV relies that may be ill-defined, not having a stable consistent structure in thingspace.
test3
by diegocaleiro — 2012-02-16T03:49:56.863Z

<!--	@page { margin: 2cm }	P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }	-->

The CEV Sequence Summary: The CEV sequence consists of three posts tackling important aspects of CEV. It covers conceptual, practical and computational problems of CEV's current form. On What Selves Are draws on analytic philosophy methods in order to clarify the concept of Self, which is necessary in order to understand whose volition is going to be extrapolated by a machine that implements the CEV procedure. Troubles with CEV part1 and Troubles with CEV part2 on the other hand describe several issues that will be faced by the CEV project if it is actually going to be implemented. Those issues are not of conceptual nature. Many of the objections shown come from scattered discussions found on the web. Finally, six alternatives to CEV are considered.

Troubles with CEV Summary: Starting with a summary of CEV, we proceed to show several objections to CEV. First, specific objections to the use of Coherence, Extrapolation, and Volition. Here Part1 ends. Then, in Part2, we continue with objections related to the end product of performing a CEV, and finally, problems relating to the implementation of CEV. We then go on with a praise of CEV, pointing out particular strengths of the idea. We end by showing six alternatives to CEV that have been proposed, and considering their vices and virtues.

Meta: I think Troubles With CEV Part1 and Part2 should be posted to Main. So on the comment section of Part2, I put a place to vote for or against this upgrade.

Troubles with CEV Part1

Summary of CEV

To begin with, let us remember the most important slices of Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV).

“Friendly AI requires:

Solving the technical problems required to maintain a well-specified abstract invariant in a self-modifying goal system. (Interestingly, this problem is relatively straightforward from a theoretical standpoint.)

Choosing something nice to do with the AI. This is about midway in theoretical hairiness between problems 1 and 3.

Designing a framework for an abstract invariant that doesn't automatically wipe out the human species. This is the hard part.

But right now the question is whether the human species can field a non-pathetic force in defense of six billion lives and futures.”
“Friendliness is the easiest part of the problem to explain - th

...
Troubles With CEV Part1 - CEV Sequence
by diegocaleiro — 2012-02-16T03:49:08.772Z

<!--	@page { margin: 2cm }	P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }	A:link { so-language: zxx }	-->

The CEV Sequence Summary: The CEV sequence consists of three posts tackling important aspects of CEV. It covers conceptual, practical and computational problems of CEV's current form. On What Selves Are draws on analytic philosophy methods in order to clarify the concept of Self, which is necessary in order to understand whose volition is going to be extrapolated by a machine that implements the CEV procedure. Troubles with CEV part1 and Troubles with CEV part2 on the other hand describe several issues that will be faced by the CEV project if it is actually going to be implemented. Those issues are not of conceptual nature. Many of the objections shown come from scattered discussions found on the web. Finally, six alternatives to CEV are considered.