trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Non-existent markets in everything: anecdotes
by KatjaGrace — 2015-10-16T04:48:00.000Z

Careful scientific study is widely considered a better basis for one’s views than anecdote. But anecdotes are more fun, so everyone reads about them anyway. Another virtue of anecdote is its low price. To verify scientifically that vitamin E is good for you might take millions of dollars or literally be impossible. To verify anecdotally that your friend credits vitamin E with some kind of impressive life-altering success requires nothing but a moderate number of epistemically sloppy friends who like to try things. Also some time talking to them. Let’s say a few hundred dollars.

But some free anecdote about your friend’s nutritional revelations is not going to get you far. The really good anecdotes are harder to come by. Here’s a good anecdote:

Bird and Layzell used genetic algorithms to evolve a design for an oscillator, and found that one of the solutions involved repurposing the printed circuit board tracks on the system’s motherboard as a radio, to pick up oscillating signals generated by nearby personal computers.

It vividly makes exactly the point the authors want: AI agents might technically satisfy the tasks they are given, while not doing what their creators expected. It gives the reader a concrete instance of something that might have otherwise seemed unrealistically tied up with control of mythical genies. I have seen this single anecdote used valuably multiple times.

This anecdote was both more expensive than an anecdote about your friend’s success with vitamin E. However it could probably have been much cheaper than a scientific study. It was actually scientific research, but note that the research doesn’t have to be nearly as rigorous or complete for the purpose of making an anecdote about it.

Bird and Layzell were not trying to make an anecdote at all (as far as I know). They were trying to make genetic algorithms that could produce oscillator designs. It was by pure luck that they produced this useful byproduct.

In a different world, the people doing this study would be the ones who knew there was demand for a nice vivid illustration of this particular idea. They would have thought about what would best paint that picture, and thought of this experiment among a few other things. They would carry them out, looking for one which nicely instantiated the desired idea. The next day they might go out and look for a ...
We’ll write you a will for free if you leave a gift to GiveWell’s top charities
by Peter Wildeford — 2015-10-16T03:33:15.176Z

Would you like to leave money in your will to GiveWell’s top rated charities at the time of your passing? If so, Charity Science will you help you write it for free.

To make it as easy as possible for you, we at Charity Science have made a simple form that takes as little as 5 minutes to complete. After that you come out with a ready made will. And don’t worry if you’re not sure what to put in it; it’s easy to change and you can always come back to it later. So give it a shot here. The default option should be to set it up just in case something terrible does happen, that way you always have something ready.

A few more reasons to take the time to write a will include:

Reducing the inheritance tax incurred - leaving money to charity being an excellent way to do so.

Making provisions for your children if you have any, for example by choosing who will take care of them and setting aside funds for this.

Making any other necessary provisions, such as for your pets, or your business, or other responsibilities that you have.

Specifying what sort of funeral you would like, which will spare your family from having to make the decision.

Naming your executors for your will (family members are a standard choice).

But most of all it’s because you have the incredible opportunity to do an epic amount of good.

You can set it up here. After that consider talking to your friends, parents and grandparents to see if they would be interested in doing the same. It’s really important you mention it because the average amount left to charities in a will is in the thousands of dollars so a few words may go a very long way.

If this doesn’t appeal to you then there are other things that you could do. You can always run a fundraiser for Christmas, your Birthday or any event you like.
A first look at the hard problem of corrigibility
by jessicata — 2015-10-15T20:16:46.000Z

Summary: We would like to build corrigible AIs, which do not prevent us from shutting them down or changing their
utility function. While there are some corrigibility solutions (such as utility indifference) that appear to partially work, they do not capture the philosophical intuition behind corrigibility: we want an agent that not only allows us to shut it down, but also desires for us to be able to shut it down if we want to. In this post, we look at a few models of utility function uncertainty and find that they do not solve the corrigibility problem.

Introduction

Eliezer describes the hard problem of corrigibility on Arbital:

On a human, intuitive level, it seems like there's a central idea behind corrigibility that seems simple to us: understand that you're flawed, that your meta-processes might also be flawed, and that there's another cognitive system over there (the programmer) that's less flawed, so you should let that cognitive system correct you even if that doesn't seem like the first-order right thing to do. You shouldn't disassemble that other cognitive system to update your model in a Bayesian fashion on all possible information that other cognitive system contains; you shouldn't model how that other cognitive system might optimally correct you and then carry out the correction yourself; you should just let that other cognitive system modify you, without attempting to manipulate how it modifies you to be a better form of 'correction'.

Formalizing the hard problem of corrigibility seems like it might be a problem that is hard (hence the name). Preliminary research might talk about some obvious ways that we could model A as believing that B has some form of information that A's preference framework designates as important, and showing what these algorithms actually do and how they fail to solve the hard problem of corrigibility.

The objective of this post is to be some of the preliminary research described in the second paragraph.

Setup

We will assume that the AI exists in the same world as the human. We will
examine various models the AI could use for the human and the true utility
function. None of these models will truly yield a corrigible agent.

1. The human is a logically omniscent Bayesian utility maximizer who knows their utility function

a) The human is a black box

i) The human is aware of the AI

If the AI models the human as a

...
It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue
by Scott Alexander — 2015-10-15T19:46:40.520Z

[Content note: suicide]

Day Zero

It all started with an ignorant white guy.

His name was Alonzo de Pinzon, and he’d been shipwrecked. We heard him yelling for help on the rocks and dragged him in, even though the storm was starting to get really bad. He said that his galleon had gone down, he’d hung on to an oar and was the only survivor. Now he was sitting in our little hunting lodge, shivering and chattering his teeth and asking us questions in the Polynesian traders’ argot which was the only language we all shared.

“How big is this island? How many of you are there?”

Daho answered first. “11.8 miles from the easternmost point to the westernmost point, 3.6 miles from the northernmost to the southernmost. Total area is 14.6 square miles, total coastline is dependent on how deeply you want to go into the fractal nature of the perimeter but under some reasonable assumptions about 32 miles long. Last census said there were 906 people, but that was two years ago, so assuming the 5.1% rate of population growth continues, there should be closer to 1000 now. Everyone else is back at the village, though. The five of us were out hunting and got caught in the storm. We figured we’d stay at this old hunting lodge until it cleared up, since it’s 5.5 miles back to the village and given the terrain and factoring in a delay because of the storm it would probably take at least 9.5 hours to get back.”

Pinzon blinked.

“Problem?” asked Daho.

“But – ” he said. “That is the sort of answer I should expect from a natural philosopher. Not from a savage.”

“Savage?” Calkas hissed. “Really? We rescue you, and the first thing you do is call us savages?”

The sailor looked around, as if anxious. Finally, almost conspiratorially: “But I heard about your island! I heard you eat people!”

Calkas smiled. “Only as a deterrent. Most of the time when European explorers land somewhere, they kill all the men and enslave all the women and convert the children to Christianity. The only places that escape are the ones that get a reputation for eating said European explorers. So we arranged to give ourselves that reputation.”

“And then we had to go through with it a few times in order to make the deterrent credible,” added Bekka, my betrothed. “And you ...
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - November
by luminosity — 2015-10-15T11:53:07.203Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - November

WHEN:
01 November 2015 04:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
10 Shepherd Street, Chippendale

Come join us for November's Rationality Dojo. We've been experimenting with the format recently, to keep things moving along, and fit more material in. If you've been away for a while, now is a perfect chance to come back!

Afterwards we will go for the usual group dinner, for those who can make it.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - November
Meetup : Melbourne Social - October
by Maelin — 2015-10-15T07:05:23.819Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social - October

WHEN:
16 October 2015 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
328 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000

Our October Social Meetup is on as usual, this Friday.

Social Meetups are on the third Friday of every month. They are casual get-togethers where we chat about interesting topics and sometimes play games.

Where? Alchemist's Refuge, 328 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne VIC 3000

When? From 6:30pm until late. Start and finish times are very loose - feel free to show up whenever is convenient

Contact? If you have any questions or issues, call Richard on 0421231789

Dinner? The Refuge has some basic snacks, but there are a lot of good places nearby where you can get food (some also deliver to the Refuge). If you are able to wait, we traditionally go to Stalactites (24 hour Greek restaurant) at around 11pm.

Hope to see you there!

(Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1081018725244618/ )

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social - October
Pascal's Mugging, Finite or Unbounded Resources?
by Irgy — 2015-10-15T04:01:54.393Z

This article addresses Pascal's Mugging, for information about this scenario see here.

I am going to attack the problem by breaking it up into two separate cases, one in which the mugger claims to be from a meta-world with large but finite resources, and one in which the mugger claims to be from a meta-world with unbounded resources. I will demonstrate that in both cases the mugging fails, for different reasons, and argue that much of the appeal of the mugging comes from the conflation of these two cases.

Large but finite resources

In this case, the mugger claims to be from a world with a bounded number of resources, but still large enough to torture n, e.g. n=3^^^^3, people. I will argue that the prior for such a world should be of the order of 1/n or lower, and in particular not 1/complexity(n). With a prior of 1/n or less, the mugging fails, because no matter how large a number the mugger claims, the likelihood of their claim being true decreases proportionally. Thus there need be no value for which the claim is more worrisome than implausible.
We're faced with uncertainty because the world the mugger claims to be from is outside our universe. We have no information on which to base our estimate of its size, other than that it is substantially bigger than our universe (at least in the case of a matrix-like simulating world this is necessary). However, that ignorance is also our strength, because a prior distribution in the face of ignorance of a scale exists, and that prior is 1/n.
The first reason not to use a complexity prior is that there is simply no reason to use one. What reason is there that a world with a particular finite number of resources would be more likely to be a computable size? If you were to guess the size of our universe, certainly you might round the number to the nearest power of 10, but not because you think a round number is more likely to be correct. A world of difficult to describe size is just as likely to exist as a world with a similar but easily describable size.
A critical point here is that the complexity of the world itself of size n is proportional to n, not complexity(n). In order for a computer program to model the behaviour of a world of size n, it does not suffice to just generate the number n itself. It needs to model the behaviour of every single one of those n elements that make up the world. Such a program would need ...
A very long list of sleep maintenance suggestions
by Elo — 2015-10-15T03:29:05.776Z

Leading up to this year's Australia megameetup, in the interest of improving people's lives in the most valuable way possible, I was hoping to include a session on sleep, sleep quality and sleep maintenance. With that in mind I put together A very long list of sleep maintenance suggestions.

Some of the most important take-aways:

Do you think you get {good sleep/enough sleep}?
- If no then fix it. This single thing will improve your life drastically. (also don't lie to yourself about this, research shows that people who are sleep deprived are bad at predicting how sleep deprived they are, if you are unsure; probably err on the side of caution. As a measure - if you turned off your alarms - would you be able to get out of bed at the same time every day?)

"I do this weird thing with my sleep but it works well for me, is that a problem?"
- not really. if it works - keep doing it. if it works most of the time but falls apart every Monday, then maybe its time to consider a different plan.

Uberman, and other polyphasic sleep cycles?
- depends if it works for you. Don't force yourself to do it if it, don't expect it to work for you. Feel free to try it; lifestyle is also relevant in considering this sleep implementation, (if you have a 9-5 job you certainly can't make it work, if you have a flexible life then maybe)

Also living a healthy lifestyle will make a big difference.

Some good highlights from the list:

limit caffeine, especially to earlier in the day

avoid using alcohol as a nightcap - it disrupts sleep maintenance

Avoid heavy meals and heavy exercise within 3 hours of bedtime

use bedroom for sleep and sex only

have sleep in your schedule (go to bed and get up at the same time every day, even on weekends)

decrease brightness of home lighting ~1-2 hours before bed

avoid electronics ~1-2 hours before bed

reduce light and noise (via earplugs / white noise) in bedroom as much as possible while sleeping

If you tend to sleep in a lot if you don't set an alarm, you are not getting enough sleep on average - go to bed earlier, consistently.

If your alarm keeps going off in the middle of REM sleep, move your bedtime about 45 minutes in either direction - REM sleep occurrs in 1.5 hour increments.

Use melatonin.

avoid smoking.

The list is best formatted here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/...
Vegetarianism Ideological Turing Test Results
by Raelifin — 2015-10-14T00:34:33.898Z

Back in August I ran a Caplan Test (or more commonly an "Ideological Turing Test") both on Less Wrong and in my local rationality meetup. The topic was diet, specifically: Vegetarian or Omnivore?

If you're not familiar with Caplan Tests, I suggest reading Palladias' post on the subject or reading Wikipedia. The test I ran was pretty standard; thirteen blurbs were presented to the judges, selected by the toss of a coin to either be from a vegetarian or from an omnivore, and also randomly selected to be genuine or an impostor trying to pass themselves off as the alternative. My main contribution, which I haven't seen in previous tests, was using credence/probability instead of a simple "I think they're X".

I originally chose vegetarianism because I felt like it's an issue which splits our community (and particularly my local community) pretty well. A third of test participants were vegetarians, and according to the 2014 census, only 56% of LWers identify as omnivores.

Before you see the results of the test, please take a moment to say aloud how well you think you can do at predicting whether someone participating in the test was genuine or a fake.

.

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If you think you can do better than chance you're probably fooling yourself. If you think you can do significantly better than chance you're almost certainly wrong. Here are some statistics to back that claim up.

I got 53 people to judge the test. 43 were from LessWrong, and 10 were from my local group. Averaging across the entire group, 51.1% of judgments were correct. If my Chi^2 math is correct, the p-value for the null hypothesis is 57% on this data. (Note that this includes people who judged an entry as 50%. If we don't include those folks the success rate drops to 49.4%.)

In retrospect, this seemed rather obvious to me. Vegetarians aren't significantly different from omnivores. Unlike a religion or a political party there aren't many cultural centerpieces to diet. Vegetarian judges did no better than omnivore judges, even when judging vegetarian entries. In other words, in this instance the minority doesn't possess any special powers for detecting other members of the in-group. This test shows null results; the thing that distinguishes vegetarians from omnivores is not familiarity with the other sides' arguments or culture, at least not to the degree that we can distinguish at a glance.

More interesting, ...
[Link] Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom Speak About AI Risk at UN International Security Event
by Gram_Stone — 2015-10-13T23:25:26.811Z

http://webtv.un.org/watch/chemical-biological-radiological-and-nuclear-cbrn-national-action-plans-rising-to-the-challenges-of-international-security-and-the-emergence-of-artificial-intelligence/4542739995001

Exactly what it says on the tin. It starts around 1:50:00. I had trouble buffering for some reason, and I couldn't find it on YouTube.

EDIT: It's on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9N_Fsbngh8
Stupid questions thread, October 2015
by philh — 2015-10-13T19:39:52.114Z

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Trustworthy answers via indifference
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-10-13T16:34:56.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

It would be useful to have a mechanism for getting an AI to provide an honest answer to a specific question. This post presents such a mechanism.

The question is: what is the impact of X/¬X on the expected utility of a utility function v? Here X/¬X is some well-defined binary outcome. Formally, for a constant c (positive or negative), we want to query the AI as to whether Q(v,X,c) is true, where

Q(v,X,c) = {E(v|X) - E(v|¬X) > c}.

How can we do that? Well, for a start, let M(u) be a u-maximising agent. We'll assume we can feed M() any utility function to maximise. We'll further assume that M() is boxed, that it has a single output bit Y (or ¬Y), and that we have cut any acausal trade possibilities. We'll add another binary process Z, which, if Z=1, erases the bit from Y before we can see it. In actual fact, P(Z=0)≈1.

The remaining assumptions are on the operations we can perform on v (without needing any further understanding of v). We replace v by v#, defined in the following way. First of all, we make v# indifferent to worlds in which X≠Y or Z=0 (note: there are subtleties to defining indifference to events that are partially under the AI's control; I will address these in a later post). Therefore any v# maximiser will behave as if it lived in a world where X=Y (its output and the outcome of X were the same) and Z=1 (its output was erased and never read). Then we add a special, one-off penalty of -c for outputting Y=1 (there is no effect for outputting Y=0). This defines v#, and we give our boxed AI v# to maximise.

So, how will M(v#) behave? Because it acts as if X=Y with certainty, it behaves as if it can determine the value of X by outputting Y. Because it acts as if Z=0 with certainty, it behaves as if the output of Y is never read, so it can determine the value of X without affecting anything else about the universe. It will now behave as if it was a v maximiser with control over X. So if it outputs ¬Y, it expects to get utility E(v|¬X). If it outputs Y, it expects to get utility E(v|X)-c (because of the -c penalty).

Therefore (ignoring ties) M(v#) will output Y iff it estimates Q(v,X,c) to be true. And, since in actual fact Z=0 almost certainly, we get to see its output, hence its conclusion. Voila!

Note: the advantage of this method is to allow us to get the truth out of an AI, without knowing how to define "

...
Meetup : Socializing and board games
by Anatoly_Vorobey — 2015-10-13T13:28:44.414Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Socializing and board games

WHEN:
13 October 2015 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv, Israel

We're going to have a board game/socializing event. We haven't had them in a while because too many Tuesdays were killed by the holiday season. Now they're back!

Meet at Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv: The 29th floor (not the Google Campus floor). We'll then move to a room.

Contact: If you can't find us, call Anatoly, who is hosting the meetup, at 054-245-1060.

Discussion article for the meetup : Socializing and board games