trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The problem of mankind indestructibility in disastrously unpredictable environment
by kononov — 2010-12-17T11:36:32.114Z

The problem of mankind indestructibility in disastrously unpredictable environment

Concerning development of human race indestructibility roadmap

Kononov Alexandr Anatolievich, PhD (Engineering), senior researcher, Institute of Systems Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, member of Russian Philosophical Society of RAS, kononov@isa.ru

Many discoveries in astronomy and earth sciences, made within the past decades, turned to be the ones of new threats and risks to the existence of humankind on the Earth and in Space. Lending itself readily is a conclusion of that our civilization is existing and evolving in a disastrously unstable environment, which is capable of destroying it any time, and only a fortunate coincidence (luck) allowed our civilization to develop up to the current level. But this “luck” will hardly be everlasting.

Dangers of human race destruction

For several years now the author has maintained an Internet project “Multiverse Dossier” (in Russian) (http://www.mirozdanie.narod.ru) whose several sections carry a big number of scientific papers and messages of the last space discoveries, which suggest a conclusion of a catastrophic character of the processes running in Space, and of unpredictability of impact thereof on life in the part of the Space inhabited by humankind. Not much more predictable are geological processes, many of which may come to be sources of global natural disasters. Indeed, nearly each step in the evolution of civilization brings along new threats and risks to its existence.

Following below are a list of main groups of threats of global catastrophes and several examples of the threats.

Natural:

Disasters resulting from geological processes. Supervolcanos, magnetic pole shift, earth faults and the processes running in deeper strata of the Earth

Disasters resulting from potential instability of Sun. Superpowerful solar flares and bursts, potential instability of reactions providing for solar luminocity and temperature supporting life on the Earth

Disasters resulting from Space effects (asteroids, comets; a possibility of a malicious intrusion of an alien civilization cannot be ruled out either)

Engendered by civilization

Self-destruction. Resulting from the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Environment destruction. As a result of man-made dis

...
"Irrationality in Argument"
by omslin — 2010-12-17T05:46:43.337Z

Here's a poetic blog post by Julian Assange (source). I found the first paragraph relevant:

27 Aug 2007 - Irrationality in Argument

The truth is not found on the page, but is a wayward sprite that bursts forth from the readers mind for reasons of its own. I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all its component propositions and evaluating them until nothing remained. I would approach my rhetorical battles as a logical reductionist, tearing down, atomizing, proving, disproving, discarding falsehoods and reassembling truths until the Truth was pure, golden and unarguable. But then, when truth matters most, when truth is the agent of freedom, I stood before Justice and with truth, lost freedom. Here was something fantastical, unbelievable and impossible, you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom. Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber. Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors. So first, always pick your poetic metaphor, to make the reader want to believe, then the facts, and -- miracle! -- transitivity will descend from heaven, invoked as justification for prejudice.

Often we suffer to read, "But if we believe X then we'll have to...", or "If we believe X it will lead to...". This has no reflection on the veracity of X and so we see that outcomes are treated with more reverence than the Truth. It stings us, but natural selection has spun its ancestral yarns from physically realized outcomes, robustly eschewing the vapor thread of platonism as an abomination against the natural order, fit only for the gossip of monks and the page.

Yet just as we feel all hope is lost and we sink back into the miasma, back to the shadow world of ghosts and gods, a miracle arises; everywhere before the direction of self interest is known, people yearn

...
Singularity Institute pitch and new project plus other organizations in our ecosystem
by MichaelVassar — 2010-12-17T05:09:05.005Z

A week ago I made a pitch for the Singularity Institute to a crowd of interested potential donors, along with a number of leaders of other non-profit organizations with relatively radical and innovative goals. The videos are here, and should be a good introduction to a significant part of the noosphere for people not yet familiar with it.
High Failure-Rate Solutions
by Eneasz — 2010-12-16T23:09:34.694Z

Short interview, doesn't go into too much depth, but makes an interesting point relevant to LW:

"When you’re mitigating a complex problem, you become a bad picker. It’s too complicated, so you can’t separate the ideas that are going to work and the ones that won’t. [...] But if we were gonna use the venture-capital method – if we were willing to admit we weren’t competent pickers and even all the wise men gathering in the Oval Office were not going to be able to pick the winner from the loser – we would have gone in there with 30 ways of plugging up that hole at one time and realized that maybe 29 were gonna fail and one was going to stop the ecological disaster. But that’s not what we did."

http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/archives/2010/2010-Nov-11/a-carmel-visionarys-debut-book-maps-out-how-we-can-save-our-society-from-collapse/1/

Are there any potential solutions other than "create the first GAI and ensure it's provably Friendly" that can be advanced simultaneously?
December 2010 Southern California Meetup
by JenniferRM — 2010-12-16T22:28:29.049Z

A meetup in Southern California will occur on Sunday December 19, 2010. The meetup will start around 3:30PM and run for at least 2 hours and possibly 4 or 5. Anna Salamon and Yvain are very likely to be in attendance, as well as people from the last few meetups who may have projects to talk about, if are people are interested. Bring guests if you like. The location of the meetup will be...

...at the IHOP across from John Wayne Airport, about a mile from UC Irvine.

For those interested in carpooling: (1) driver needed in Santa Barbara (please comment if you can make it!), (2) driver available in San Diego, (3) driver available in Lake Forest, (4) driver available in Torrance., (5) driver available in Huntington Beach.

The format for past meetups has varied based on the number of attendees and their interests, at various points we have either tried or considered: paranoid debating, small group "dinner party conversations", structured rationality exercises, large discussions with people sharing personal experiences with sleep and "nutraceutical" interventions for intelligence augmentation, and specialized subprojects to develop tools for quantitatively estimating the value of things like cryonics or existential risk interventions.

Apologies for the short notice. I was trying to call and email around to see what people's winter holiday schedules were like and wasn't sure if this would come together. Based on one-on-one conversations I think we'll have pretty good turnout and interesting stuff to talk about!
What do you mean by rationalism?
by Marius — 2010-12-16T19:27:11.084Z

I've been lurking here a bit, and am trying to understand what people here mean by rationalism. Many articles here seem to refer to discussion participants as rationalist while meaning very seemingly-different things, including intelligent, socially awkward, well-educated, and unencumbered by education. I'm trying to make a little more sense of the word/concept.

Surely it does not refer to rationalist in the empiricism/rationalism divide, because it doesn't seem to be used in quite that way.
Does anti-discrimination look like discrimination?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-12-16T17:29:31.000Z

By my reckoning, affirmative action should often make organizations look more biased in the direction they seek to correct, rather than less.

Imagine two groups of people in roughly equal numbers, type A and type B. It is thought by many that B people are unfairly discriminated against in employment. The management of organisation X believe this, so they create a policy to ensure new employees include roughly equally many As and Bs.

The effects of this policy include:

a large benefit to many Bs previously near the threshold for being employed

a small cost to all type Bs working at X, who will to varying degrees be suspected more of not meriting their position.

a large cost to many As previously near the threshold for being employed

a small benefit to all As working at X, who will to varying degrees be suspected of more than meriting their position.

Look at the effects on type Bs. Those well clear of the threshold have a net cost, while those near enough to it have a net benefit. This should in decrease the motivation of those well above the threshold to work at X and increase the motivation of those of lower ability to try. This should decrease the average quality of type B employees at X, even before accounting for the new influx of lower quality candidates. At the same time the opposite should happen with type As.

Now suppose the only quota at X is in hiring. Promotions have no similar adjustment. On top of whatever discrimination exists against Bs, there should now be even fewer Bs promoted, because they are on average lower quality at X, due to the affirmative action in hiring. Relative to less concerned organisations, X should end up with a greater proportion of As at the top of the organization.

Is this what really happens? If not, why not?
Expansion of "Cached thought" wiki entry
by Davorak — 2010-12-16T07:27:07.332Z

"Cached Thought" wiki entry has been copied below for you connivance.

A cached thought is an answer that was arrived at by recalling the old conclusion, rather than performing the reasoning from scratch. Cached thoughts can result in the maintenance of a position when evidence should force an update. Cached thoughts can also result in a lack of creative approaches to problem-solving if one repeats the same cached thoughts rather than constructing a new approach.

What is generally called common sense is more or less a collection of cached thoughts.

The above entry focuses only on the negative sides of cached thought. Probably because it can be a large barrier to rationality. In order overcome this barrier, and/or help others overcome it, it is necessary to understand why "cached thoughts" have been historically valuable to our ancestors and in what fashions it is valuable today.

'''Cached thought''' also allow for complex problems to be handled with a relatively small number of simple components. These problem components when put together only approximate the actual problem, because they are slightly flawed '''cached thoughts.''' Valid conclusions can be reached more quickly with these slightly flawed cached thoughts then without. The aforementioned conclusions should be recheck without using '''cached thoughts''' if a high probability of correctness is necessary or if the '''cached thoughts''' are more then slightly flawed.

Is this an appropriate expansion of the wiki entry? The words are drawn from my observation of the world. How else should the above wiki entry be expanded?
Confidence levels inside and outside an argument
by Scott Alexander — 2010-12-16T03:06:07.660Z

Related to: Infinite Certainty

Suppose the people at FiveThirtyEight have created a model to predict the results of an important election. After crunching poll data, area demographics, and all the usual things one crunches in such a situation, their model returns a greater than 999,999,999 in a billion chance that the incumbent wins the election. Suppose further that the results of this model are your only data and you know nothing else about the election. What is your confidence level that the incumbent wins the election?
Mine would be significantly less than 999,999,999 in a billion.

When an argument gives a probability of 999,999,999 in a billion for an event, then probably the majority of the probability of the event is no longer in "But that still leaves a one in a billion chance, right?". The majority of the probability is in "That argument is flawed". Even if you have no particular reason to believe the argument is flawed, the background chance of an argument being flawed is still greater than one in a billion.

More than one in a billion times a political scientist writes a model, ey will get completely confused and write something with no relation to reality. More than one in a billion times a programmer writes a program to crunch political statistics, there will be a bug that completely invalidates the results. More than one in a billion times a staffer at a website publishes the results of a political calculation online, ey will accidentally switch which candidate goes with which chance of winning.
So one must distinguish between levels of confidence internal and external to a specific model or argument. Here the model's internal level of confidence is 999,999,999/billion. But my external level of confidence should be lower, even if the model is my only evidence, by an amount proportional to my trust in the model.

Is That Really True?

One might be tempted to respond "But there's an equal chance that the false model is too high, versus that it is too low." Maybe there was a bug in the computer program, but it prevented it from giving the incumbent's real chances of 999,999,999,999 out of a trillion.
The prior probability of a candidate winning an election is 50%1. We need information to push us away from this probability in either direction. To push significantly away from this probability, we need strong information. Any weakness in the information weakens...
Varying amounts of subjective experience
by DanielLC — 2010-12-16T03:02:15.107Z

It has been suggested that animals have less subjective experience than people. For example, it would be possible to have an animal that counts as half a human for the purposes of morality. This is an argument as to why that may be the case.

If you're moving away from Earth at 87% of the speed of light, time dilation would make it look like time on Earth is passing half as fast. From your point of reference, everyone will live twice as long. This obviously won't change the number of life years they live. You can't double the amount of good in the world just by moving at 87% the speed of light. It's possible that there's just a preferred point of reference, and everything is based on people's speed relative to that, but I doubt it.

No consider if their brains were slowed down a different way. Suppose you uploaded someone, and made the simulation run at half speed. Would they experience a life twice as long? This seems to be just slowing it down a different way. I doubt it would change the total amount experienced.

If that's true, it means that sentience isn't something you either have or don't have. There can be varying amounts of it. Also, someone whose brain has been slowed down would be less intelligent by most measures, so this is some evidence that subjective experience correlates with intelligence.

Edit: replaced "sentience" with the more accurate "subjective experience".
Link: My something-like-Friendliness-research blog
by Will_Newsome — 2010-12-16T01:12:59.097Z

If you want to know what that something-like-Friendliness is, you can read the blog! You can find it here: http://willnewsome.wordpress.com/ (About page here: http://willnewsome.wordpress.com/about/ )

Anyone who's bothered to notice the trend of my posts and comments to Less Wrong has probably noticed that I aim to be as metacontrarian and contentious as possible. Other times I run small social experiments. Sometimes this is interesting, sometimes it's probably just frustrating, but I do hope it's at least thought-provoking. With my blog I'm trying to showcase interesting ideas more than bring up counterintuitive alternatives, so perhaps those who don't generally like my posts/comments will still find my blog tolerable. It's also about something that I take more seriously than other rationality-related topics, that is, building an AI that does what we want it to do.

The names of of the posts I've put up already: "What are humans?", "Are evolved drives satiable?", "Why extrapolate?", and "Gene/meme/teme sanity equilibria".

I hope to get a new post out every few days, but honestly I have no idea if I'll succeed in that. At the very least I have a few weeks' worth of cached ideas to post, and I'll continue studying related things in the meantime.

I'd really like anyone else who has a blog about anything mildly related to rationality to post a link in their own discussion post. Currently I only know to follow Vladimir Nesov and Luke Grecki (whose blogs are linked to from mine), and my RSS feed has room for many more.
(Some) Singularity Summit 2010 videos now up
by ata — 2010-12-15T19:43:11.447Z

Videos of some of the talks and panel discussions (currently eight twelve of them) from this year's Singularity Summit are now online.

Michael Vassar:
The Darwinian Method

Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism

Demis Hassabis:
Combining systems neuroscience and machine learning: a new approach to AGI

Shane Legg:
Universal measures of intelligence

Debate: Terry Sejnowski and Dennis Bray
Will we soon realistically emulate biological systems?

Jose Cordeiro:
The Future of Energy and the Energy of the Future

Panel: John Tooby, Ben Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Shane Legg
Narrow and General Intelligence

Ray Kurzweil:
The Mind and How to Build One

Gregory Stock:
Evolution of Post-Human Intelligence

Ramez Naam:
The Digital Biome

Ben Goertzel:
AI Against Aging

Dennis Bray:
What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't
Bullying the Integers
by sixes_and_sevens — 2010-12-15T17:40:34.442Z

So, the FBI allegedly arranged for a number of backdoors to be built into the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. I don't really know how credible this claim is, but it sparked a discussion in my office about digital security, and encryption in general. One of my colleagues said something to the effect of it only being a matter of time before they found a way to easily break RSA.

It was at about this moment that time stopped.

I responded with something I thought was quite lucid, but there's only so much lay interest that can be held in a sentence that includes the phrases "fact about all integers" and "solvable in polynomial time". The basic thrust of my argument was that it wasn't something he could just decide an answer to, but I don't think he'll be walking away any the more enlightened.

This got me wondering: do arguments that sit on cast-iron facts (or lack thereof) about number theory feel any different when you're making them, compared to arguments that sit on facts about the world you're just extremely confident about?

If I have a discussion with someone about taxation it has no more consequence than a discussion about cryptography, but the tax discussion feels more urgent. Someone walking around with wonky ideas about fiscal policy seems more distressing than someone walking around with wonky ideas about modular arithmetic. Modular arithmetic can look after itself, but fiscal policy is somehow more vulnerable to bad ideas.

Do your arguments feel different?
Disruption of the right temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments
by Kevin — 2010-12-15T14:44:05.499Z

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/15/6753.full

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8593748.stm

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007859
Why focus on making robots nice?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-12-15T05:37:09.000Z

From Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson in Scientific American:

Today’s robots…face a host of ethical quandaries that push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, or AI, even in quite ordinary situations.

Imagine being a resident in an assisted-living facility…you ask the robot assistant in the dayroom for the remote …But another resident also wants the remote …The robot decides to hand the remote to her. …This anecdote is an example of an ordinary act of ethical decision making, but for a machine, it is a surprisingly tough feat to pull off.

We believe that the solution is to design robots able to apply ethical principles to new and unanticipated situations… for them to be welcome among us their actions should be perceived as fair, correct or simply kind. Their inventors, then, had better take the ethical ramifications of their programming into account…

It seems there are a lot of articles focussing on the problem that some of the small decisions robots will make will be ‘ethical’. There are also many fearing that robots may want to do particularly unethical things, such as shoot people.

Working out how to make a robot behave ‘ethically’ in this narrow sense (arguably all behaviour has an ethical dimension) is an odd problem to set apart from the myriad other problems of making a robot behave usefully. Ethics doesn’t appear to pose unique technical problems. The aforementioned scenario is similar to ‘non-ethical’ problems of making a robot prioritise its behaviour. On the other hand, teaching a robot when to give a remote control to a certain woman is not especially generalisable to other ethical issues such as teaching it which sexual connotations it may use in front of children, except in sharing methods so broad as to also include many more non-ethical behaviours.

The authors suggests that robots will follow a few simple absolute ethical rules like Asimov’s. Perhaps this could unite ethical problems as worth considering together. However if robots are given such rules, they will presumably also be following big absolute rules for other things. For instance if ‘ethics’ is so narrowly defined as to include only choices such as when to kill people and how to be fair, there will presumably be other rules about the overall goals when not contemplating murder. These would matter much more...
Introduction to Game Theory (Links)
by jaimeastorga2000 — 2010-12-15T02:14:00.202Z

Reading the What topics would you like to see more of on LessWrong? thread gave me the impression that many people here would appreciate introductory material to several of the topics that are often discussed in lesswrong. I have therefore decided to link in the direction of the ECON 159 course lectures at Open Yale courses and YouTube and to the Game Theory 101 video series in hopes that people will find them useful.