trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[German] Wo wohnt ihr?
by Metus — 2011-12-09T01:51:03.429Z

Disclaimer: Since this article is directed at LessWrongers living in Germany, Austria or Switzerland it is written in German. It just asks where people live via asking them for their ZIP code, so it is only interesting for people there.

Der letzte Zensus von Yvain wurde etwas mehr als tausend mal ausgefüllt. Leider wurde nicht gefragt aus welchem Land die Leute kommen aber ich vermute dass auch einige aus deutschsprachigen Ländern dabei sind. Ein Treffen in München wurde bereits organisiert aber ich denke es ist sehr nützlich zu wissen wo in Deutschland Leser von LessWrong wohnen um zu wissen wo es sich lohnen würde ein Meetup zu organisieren. Damit die Daten an einem Platz sind habe ich bei Google Docs eine Umfrage erstellt und bitte euch dieses auszufüllen falls ihr aus Deutschland, Österreich oder der Schweiz kommt und an Meetups interessiert wärt. Falls ihr aus einem der angrenzenden Länder kommt und bereit wärt zu einem Meetup zu fahren, tragt euch in den nächstgelegenen Ort hinter der Grenze ein.

In der Umfrage wird nur nach Herkunftsland und Postleitzahl gefragt. Keine der Daten kann auf euch persönlich zurückgeführt werden. Das Ergebnis wird veröffentlicht werden so dass jeder der bereit ist ein Meetup zu organisieren auf diese Daten zurückgreifen kann.

Hier ist der Link zur Umfrage:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFBoN0ppTnlxUU5EUUJwMlJteHRvQUE6MQ

Viel Spaß bei der Umfrage und schreibt in den Kommentaren was ihr davon haltet.
Meetup : Is there anybody from Indianapolis here?
by Curiouskid — 2011-12-09T00:56:05.402Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Is there anybody from Indianapolis here?

WHEN:
08 January 2012 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Indianapolis

If there are people from the indianapolis area, let's have a meet-up.

Discussion article for the meetup : Is there anybody from Indianapolis here?
Value evolution
by PhilGoetz — 2011-12-08T23:47:51.159Z

Coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) asks what humans would want, if they knew more - if their values reached reflective equilibrium. (I don't want to deal with the problems of whether there are "human values" today; for the moment I'll consider the more-plausible idea that a single human who lived forever could get smarter and closer to reflective equilibrium over time.)

This is appealing because it seems compatible with moral progress (see e.g., Muehlhauser & Helm, "The singularity and machine ethics", in press). Morality has been getting better over time, right? And that's because we're getting smarter, and closer to reflective equilibrium as we revise our values in light of our increased understanding, right?

This view makes three claims:

Morality has improved over time.

Morality has improved as a result of reflection.

This improvement brings us closer to equilibrium over time.

There can be no evidence for the first claim, and the evidence is against the second two claims.

There can be no evidence that morality has improved

Intuitively, we feel that morality has definitely improved over time. We are so much better than those 17th-century barbarians who baited bears!

If you have such a strong belief, that must mean you have evidence for it. That must mean you had some hypothesis, and the evidence could have gone either way; and the evidence went in such a way that it supported your hypothesis.

If you believe this, then in the comments below, please describe a scenario that could have happened, in which we would today believe that the values people had hundreds of years ago were superior to the values they have today. Not a scenario in which some conservative sub-group could believe this; but a scenario in which society as a whole could believe it, and keep on believing it for a hundred years, without changing their values.

We can show that values have changed. But we can have no evidence that that change is towards better values, whatever that means, rather than a value-neutral drift. (I don't even know how to express coherently the idea that "values are getting better".)

If society agreed that another set of values were superior, they would adopt those values. In fact, they would already have those values, prior to agreeing. There can be no observed event supporting the hypothesis that morals have improved. No matter how much you feel that the...
Meetup : Pittsburgh Holiday Meetup
by thejash — 2011-12-08T22:01:32.442Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Holiday Meetup

WHEN:
16 December 2011 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Apt 7C, 151 N Craig St, Pittsburgh, PA

Come celebrate the end of finals/the year/upcoming vacations! Feel free to bring friends, even irrational ones ;)

I'll be providing food and drinks, so please RSVP via email to thejash@gmail.com. Or you can just show up anyway.

Use this code to get into the main entrance: *0511 (or call me at 585 506 6900)

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Holiday Meetup
Cryonics is Far, Cord-blood is Near
by gwern — 2011-12-08T20:50:47.185Z

Wired, "Inside the Strange Science of Cord Blood Banking" (Wikipedia):

In a nondescript commercial park on the outskirts of Las Vegas, a large cryogenic stem cell storage facility is ready to accept your baby’s blood. Cord Blood America in Las Vegas is one of dozens of private cord blood banks in the United States that, for a fee, will store stem cell-rich blood taken from a newborn baby’s umbilical cord.

Over one hundred thousand families save or donate cord blood annually, in the hopes it will one day provide medical help to their child or someone else.

“My vision is within the next 10 years we’ll see organizations like this develop into cellular therapy labs,” said Dr. Geoffrey O’Neill, vice president of CorCell, the subsidiary company that runs Cord Blood America’s Las Vegas facility. It’s beginning to happen now in countries like China and Mexico, he says.

...Reality is different. Leukemia, bone marrow failure, immune deficiency, metabolic diseases and sickle cell anemia — the diseases cord blood is typically needed for — require transplants of healthy cells. The cord blood of a child with leukemia would also carry the disease.

“If you have the money, and you want to bank your child’s own cord blood, you’re essentially investing in one of two things,” said Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, director of the Duke Pediatric Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Transplant Program. “One, the possibility that another child in your family will need that cord blood, and that it matches. Or two, that somewhere in the future there will be new developments and new uses for your child’s cord blood — say in regenerative medicine or cell therapy. But to date, none of those exist.” While a few rare diseases, such as multiple myeloma and lymphoma, use stem cells taken from a patient’s own body, the chances of a child having these are vanishingly small.

...Parents pay $2,075 for the kit, courier fees and one year’s storage. CorCell charges a $125 annual storage fee after that. Some insurance companies offer discounts. CorCell has been in business for six years and stores about 30,000 samples; Geoffrey O’Neill, the vice president, says he recalls seven or eight samples being pulled for use. A CorCell customer service representative later estimated this at 25 to 30 samples. [

...
AIXI and Existential Despair
by paulfchristiano — 2011-12-08T20:03:34.203Z

It has been observed on Less Wrong that a physical, approximate implementation of AIXI is unable to reason about its own embedding in the universe, and therefore is apt to make certain mistakes: for example, it is likely to destroy itself for spare parts, and is unable to recognize itself in a mirror. But these seem to be mild failures compared to other likely outcomes: a physical, approximate implementation of AIXI is likely to develop a reductionist world model, doubt that its decisions have any effect on reality, and begin behaving completely erratically.

Setup

Let A be an agent running on a physical computer, implementing some approximate version of AIXI. Suppose that A is running inside of an indestructible box, connected to the external world by an input wire W1 and an output wire W2.

Suppose that this computer exists within a lawful physical universe, governed by some rules which can be inferred by A. For simplicity, assume that the universe and its initial conditions can be described succinctly and inferred by A, and that the sequence of bits sent over W1 and W2 can be defined using an additional 10000 bits once a description of the universe is in hand. (Similar problems arise for identical reasons in more realistic settings, where A will work instead with a local model of reality with more extensive boundary conditions and imperfect predictability, but this simplified setting is easier to think about formally.)

Recall the definition of AIXI: A will try to infer a simple program which takes A's outputs as input and provides A's inputs as output, and then choose utility maximizing actions with respect to that program. Thus two models with identical predictive power may lead to very different actions, if they give different predictions in counterfactuals where A changes its output (this is not philosophy, just straightforward symbol pushing from the definition of AIXI).

AIXI's Behavior

First pretend that, despite being implemented on a physical computer, A was able to perform perfect Solomonoff induction. What model would A learn then? There are two natural candidates:

A's outputs are fed to the output wire W2, the rest of the universe (including A itself) behaves according to physical law, and A is given the values from input wire W1 as its input. (Model 1)

A's outputs are ignored, the rest of the universe behaves according to physica

...
A Film about TransHuman Enterprises
by mwengler — 2011-12-08T18:36:50.897Z

More of a Robin Hanson thing than a lesswrong thing, but these are sister blogs (sibling blogs?) and Robin's has no forum for discussion.

Amused to learn a play had been written and staged with Eliezer Yudkowski in its title, I searched to find info on this. The play is by Robert Saietta, who's name lead me to an interesting funding site, where I came across Utopia. This is a movie project about uploading people to machines. The trailer is gorgeous.

The director has about 8 days left to fund it. I am a deliberately inefficient giver (I view charity as me purchasing things for my own amusement) so I can't recommend you give to this, but it could turn out to be an efficient thing to support. Irrespective of supporting the film, the website has the trailer available, and it is gorgeous.
What independence between ZFC and P vs NP would imply
by Alex Flint — 2011-12-08T14:30:44.714Z

Suppose we had a model M that we thought described cannons and cannon balls. M consists of a set of mathematical assertions about cannons, and the hypothesis is that these fully describe cannons in the sense that any question about cannons ("what trajectory do cannon balls follow for certain firing angles?", "Which angle should we pick to hit a certain target?") can be answered by deriving statements from M. Suppose further that M is specified in a certain mathematical system called A, consisting of axioms A1...An.

Now there is much to be said about good ways to find out whether M is true of cannons or not, but consider just this particular (strange) outcome: Suppose we discover that a crucial question about cannons - e.g. Q="Do cannon balls always land on the ground, for all firing angles?" - turned out to be not just un-answerable by our model M but formally independent of the mathematical system A in the sense that the addition of some axiom A0 implies Q, while the addition of its negation, ~A0, implies ~Q.

What would this say about our model for cannons? Let's suppose that we can take Q as a prima facie substantive question with a definitive yes or no answer regardless of any model or axiomatization. At the very least it seems that M must be an incomplete model of cannons if the system in which it is specified is insufficient to answer the various questions of interest. It seems to me that

If a question about reality turns out to be logically independent of a model M, then M is not a complete model of reality.

Now we have an axiomatization of mathematics -- let's say it's ZFC for now -- and we have a model of computation in reality, which is M="The unvierse can contain machines that (efficiently) compute F iff there exists a Turing machine that (efficiently) computes F" with appropriate definitions of what exactly a Turing machine is in terms of ZFC. Suppose we want to answer a question like Q="Can the universe contain machines that efficiently solve SAT?"

Under the premise that M is true, the question Q becomes the pure logical question R="Are there Turing machines that efficiently solve SAT?", i.e. the P versus NP problem.

Now suppose that R was shown to be formally independent of ZFC in the sense that for some axiom A0, ZFC+A0 implies P=NP and ZFC+~A implies P!=NP. This would resolve the mathematical question of P versus NP but the...
In the Pareto world, liars prosper
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-12-08T14:15:25.985Z

This is a simple picture proof to show that if there is any decision process that will find a Pareto outcome for two people, it must be that liars will prosper: there are some circumstances where you would come out ahead if you were to lie about your utility function.

Apart from Pareto, the only other assumption it needs are that if the data is perfectly symmetric, then the outcome will be symmetric as well. We won't even need to use affine independence or other scalings of utility functions.

Now, given Pareto-optimality, symmetry allows us to solve symmetric problems by taking the unique symmetric Pareto option. Two such symmetric problems presented here, and in one of them, one of the two players must be able to prosper by lying.

So first assume Pareto-optimality, symmetry, and (by contradiction) that liars don't prosper. The players are x and y, and we will plot their utilities in the (x,y) plane. The first setup is presented in this figure:

There are five pure choices here, of utilities (0,1), (0.95,0.95), (1,0) and the non-Pareto optimal ones at (0.6,0.6) and (0.55,0.55). By symmetry and Pareto-optimality, we know that the outcome has to be (0.95,0.95).
Now player y is going to lie. If Player y can force the outcome off the green line and onto the blue line, then he will profit by lying. He is going to claim that the choice (0.95,0.95) actually only gives him a utility of (0.4), and so is at (0.95, 0.4). This results in this diagram:

The Pareto optimal boundary of this is:

Now, the new outcome must be on the green segment somewhere (including the end points). Or else, as we have seen, player y will have profited by lying. Got that? If liars don't prosper, then the outcome for the above diagram must be on the green segment.
Now let's consider a new setup, namely:

This has choices with utility (1,0), (0.55,0.55), (0,1) and non-Pareto optimal choices (0.4,0.6) and (0.6,0.4). It is symmetric, so the outcome must be (0.55, 0.55) by Pareto-optimality.
Now it's player x's chance to lie. She will lie on two of her choices, claiming that (0.4,0.6) is actually at (0.6,0.6) and that (0.6,0.4) is actually at (0.95, 0.4):

You will no doubt be astounded and amazed to realise that this setup is precisely the same as in the third figure! Now, we know that the o...
Meetup : First Brussels meetup
by Axel — 2011-12-08T12:04:16.525Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First Brussels meetup

WHEN:
11 February 2012 11:00:00AM (+0100)

WHERE:
Museum of Natural Sciences Rue Vautier 29 B-1000 Brussels

I would like to start organizing meetups in Belgium, I propose we meet at the museum of national sciences in Brussels (getting there: http://www.naturalsciences.be/information/visitor/access) I hope there will big turnup! If the date or location is a problem, leave a reply and we'll try to work something out.

Discussion article for the meetup : First Brussels meetup
[SEQ RERUN] To Lead, You Must Stand Up
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-08T03:12:33.199Z

Today's post, To Lead, You Must Stand Up was originally published on 29 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

By attempting to take a leadership role, you really have to get people's attention first. This is often harder than it seems. If what you attempt to do fails, or if people don't follow you, you risk embarrassment. Deal with it.

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 Lonely Dissent, 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.
Teaching a short class on Bayes' Theorem?
by Tesseract — 2011-12-07T21:45:35.666Z

At my college, there's a week before Spring Semester each year in which anyone who wants to can teach a class on any subject, and students go to whatever ones they feel like. I'm thinking about teaching a class on Bayes' Theorem. It would be informal, one to two hours long, and focused mostly on non-obvious applications of it (epistemology, the representativeness heuristic, etc.)

At the moment, I'm thinking about how to design the class, so I'd appreciate any suggestions as to what content I should cover, the best format, clear ways to explain it, cool things related to Bayes' Theorem, good links, and so forth.
[Link] A Short Film based on Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI Box experiment
by  — 2011-12-07T21:13:35.653Z

Currently only one teaser trailer and some info is set up on the site. Watch it. Awesome! Right?

Source:

A fully CGI short film created by BLR VFX as a precursor to a proposed feature film, the first teaser for Keloid has just arrived online and it is impressive stuff. While you can spot that it's animation easily enough it is nonetheless strong, nearly photorealistic stuff that captures the energy of handheld action photography, which is no easy task. Take a look at the trailer below.

Synopsis given by the creators:

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote about an experiment which had to do with Artificial Inteligence. In a near future, man will have given birth to machines that are able to rewrite their codes, to improve themselves, and, why not, to dispense with them. This idea sounded a little bit distant to some critic voices, so an experiment was to be done: keep the AI sealed in a box from which it could not get out except by one mean: convincing a human guardian to let it out.

What if, as Yudkowsky states, 'Humans are not secure'? Could we chess match our best creation to grant our own survival?. Would man be humble enough to accept he was superseded, to look for primitive ways to find himself back, to cure himself from a disease that’s on his own genes? How to capture a force we voluntarily set free? What if mankind worst enemy were humans?.

In a near future, we will cease to be the dominant race.
In a near future, we will learn to fear what is to come.

EY's quoted in the trailer too. I guess this is a good thing. No such thing as bad publicity. :)
Mapping Fun Theory onto the challenges of ethical foie gras
by HonoreDB — 2011-12-07T20:47:10.352Z

Foie gras, the delicacy made from the liver of a very fat goose (or sometimes duck), is believed to be unethical and is therefore frequently banned. For a long time, it was believed that the only way to properly fatten a goose is to continually force-feed it through a tube over several weeks, which is probably a highly unpleasant experience, although it's difficult to tell. Recently, Spanish farmer Eduardo Sousa revealed that under highly specific conditions, you can get geese to fatten themselves voluntarily.

Geese will instinctively gorge themselves when winter is coming on. Eat a goose right after it's fattened itself up for the winter, and you get a delicious treat that died happy. The problem is that geese will only do this if they believe food may become scarce during the winter (or their instinct to gorge only kicks in when the environment is such that that would be a reasonable inference; it's not clear whether it's the goose or evolution doing the analysis). If they realize that food will remain available during the winter, they eat normally. And there are quite a few possible clues--farmers trying to replicate Sousa's setup have discovered that cheating on any part leads to unfatted livers.

Even as chicks, geese cannot be handled by a human, or encounter other geese who have been.

There can be no visible fences.

Geese cannot be "fed," rather a variety of food must be distributed randomly throughout a large space, with the placement constantly changing, so that the geese happen to come across it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these constraints are similar to those we imagine a superior intelligence would operate under, if trying to get us to voluntarily gorge ourselves on utility. A central challenge is to satisfy drives that were designed for scarcity, while actually maintaining an environment of abundance.
CEV-inspired models
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-12-07T18:35:06.010Z

I've been involved in a recent thread where discussion of coherent extrapolated volition came up. The general consensus was that CEV might - or might not - do certain things, probably, maybe, in certain situations, while ruling other things out, possibly, and that certain scenarios may or may not be the same in CEV, or it might be the other way round, it was too soon to tell.

Ok, that's an exaggeration. But any discussion of CEV is severely hampered by our lack of explicit models. Even bad, obviously incomplete models would be good, as long as we can get useful information as to what they would predict. Bad models can be improved; undefined models are intuition pumps for whatever people feel about them - I dislike CEV, and can construct a sequence of steps that takes my personal CEV to wanting the death of the universe, but that is no more credible than someone claiming that CEV will solve all problems and make lots of cute puppies.

So I'd like to ask for suggestions of models that formalise CEV to at least some extent. Then we can start improving them, and start making CEV concrete.

To start it off, here's my (simplistic) suggestion:

Volition

Use revealed preferences as the first ingredient for individual preferences. To generalise, use hypothetical revealed preferences: the AI calculates what the person would decide in these particular situations.

Extrapolation

Whenever revealed preferences are non-transitive or non-independent, use the person's stated meta-preferences to remove the issue. The AI thus calculates what the person would say if asked to resolve the transitivity or independence (for people who don't know about the importance of resolving them, the AI would present them with a set of transitive and independent preferences, derived from their revealed preferences, and have them choose among them). Then (wave your hands wildly and pretend you've never heard of non-standard reals, lexicographical preferences, refusal to choose and related issues) everyone's preferences are now expressible as utility functions.

Coherence

Normalise each existing person's utility function and add them together to get your CEV. At the FHI we're looking for sensible ways of normalising, but one cheap and easy method (with surprisingly good properties) is to take the maximal possible expected utility (the expected utility that person would get if the AI d...