trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Pay charities for results?
by BenGilbert — 2013-02-08T15:31:27.160Z

Two problems with charity:

1) You usually don't know what your donation achieves. At best, you might know what your money is spent on. You don't know how effective this is at producing the outcomes you care about. Even Givewell, who seem to me to have done more careful work on cost-effectiveness than anyone else, regard their cost-effectiveness estimates as very rough and no more than an indicative starting point for evaluating charities.

2) Charities have low or no financial incentives to be as effective as they can, not least because usually no-one knows how effective they are.

Potential solution:

Instead of donating to charities, pay them for results achieved.

Ideally, you would pay for the final outcomes which you care about, eg paying a certain amount per unit reduction in child mortality, reduced disease prevalence, improved test scores, etc. If this is too difficult, then you could pay for intermediate results, eg number of children vaccinated, number of people protected by bednets, etc. Results could be measured against a control group, some baseline, outcomes in parts of the country where the charity doesn't operate etc. (Comparison with a well-constructed control group would probably be best in most cases).

This isn't really something that an individual donor can do, since it relies on accurate, independent measurement of results and will be most effective when charities know that their funding depends on the results they achieve. To work best, it would have to happen in a co-ordinated way and at a large enough scale that proper measurement is affordable.

Advantages:

1) You only pay if a charity is effective at doing what you want it to do. You have less need to try to understand what a charity does; you can offer the money for the results and leave it to them to find how to produce them.

2) Charities will have financial incentives to be as effective as possible, including finding out how effective they already are and what they could do to be more effective.

3) Effective charities will get more money and be able to expand, ineffective charities will get less money and may have to close down.

4) Lots of information would be produced about what is and is not effective, which could help donors, aid agencies, charities etc make better decisions in future,...
[SEQ RERUN] Failed Utopia #4-2
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-08T06:27:03.490Z

Today's post, Failed Utopia #4-2 was originally published on 21 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A fictional short story illustrating some of the ideas in Interpersonal Entanglement above. (Many commenters seemed to like this story, and some said that the ideas were easier to understand in this form.)

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 Interpersonal Entanglement, 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.
Link: blog on effective altruism
by paulfchristiano — 2013-02-08T06:18:39.018Z

Over the last few months I've started blogging about effective altruism more broadly, rather than focusing on AI risk. I'm still focusing on abstract considerations and methodological issues, but I hope it is of interest to others here. Going forward I intend to cross-post more often to LW, but I thought I would post the backlog here anyway. With luck, I'll also have the opportunity to post more than bi-weekly.

I welcome thoughts, criticisms, etc.
Meetup : First meetup in Frankfurt (Main) 
by Tripitaka — 2013-02-07T20:41:27.791Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First meetup in Frankfurt (Main)

WHEN: 22 February 2013 06:30:27PM (+0100)

WHERE: Café Albatros, Kiesstraße 27, 60486 Frankfurt am Main

This is an attempt to start a regular meetup in Frankfurt (Main). Since its also the first meetup in Frankfurt, we should get to know each other a little bit and maybe discuss what we would want out of a regular meetup.

I will be sitting at a table in the Cafe Albatros from 18 20 to at least 20 00. Of course I will have a LessWrong-sign so there won´t be any confusions. See you soon!

Discussion article for the meetup : First meetup in Frankfurt (Main)
Confusion about Normative Morality
by JMiller — 2013-02-07T20:34:31.303Z

Hi everyone,

If this has been covered before, I apologize for the clutter and ask to be redirected to the appropriate article or post.

I am increasingly confused about normative theories. I've read both Eliezer's and Luke's meta ethics sequences as well as some of nyan's posts, but I felt even more confused afterwards. Further, I happen to be a philosophy student right now, and I'm worried that the ideas presented in my ethics classes are misguided and "conceptually corrupt" that is, the focus seems to be on defining terms over and over again, as opposed to taking account of real effects of moral ideas in the actual world.

I am looking for two things: first, a guide as to which reductionist moral theories approximate what LW rationalists tend to think are correct. Second, how can I go about my ethics courses without going insane?

Sorry if this seems overly aggressive, I am perhaps wrongfully frustrated right now.

Jeremy
A Little Puzzle about Termination
by  — 2013-02-07T15:07:23.225Z

[Final Update: Back to 'Discussion'; stroked out the initial framing which was misleading.]
[Update: Moved to 'Main'. Also, judging by the comments, it appears that most have misunderstood the puzzle and read way too much into it; user 'Manfred' seems to have got the point.]

[Note: This little puzzle is my first article. Preliminary feedback suggests some of you might enjoy it while others might find it too obvious, hence the cautious submission to 'Discussion'; will move it to 'Main' if, and only if, it's well-received.]

In his recent paper "The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents", Nick Bostrom states:

Even an agent that has an apparently very limited final goal, such as “to make 32 paperclips”, could pursue unlimited resource acquisition if there were no relevant cost to the agent of doing so. For example, even after an expected-utility-maximizing agent had built 32 paperclips, it could use some extra resources to verify that it had indeed successfully built 32 paperclips meeting all the specifications (and, if necessary, to take corrective action). After it had done so, it could run another batch of tests to make doubly sure that no mistake had been made. And then it could run another test, and another. The benefits of subsequent tests would be subject to steeply diminishing returns; however, so long as there were no alternative action with a higher expected utility, the agent would keep testing and re-testing (and keep acquiring more resources to enable these tests).

Let us take it on from here.

It is tempting to say that a machine can never halt after achieving its goal because it cannot know with full certainty whether it has achieved its goal; it will continually verify, possibly to increasing degrees of certainty, whether it has achieved its goal, but never halt as such.

What if, from a naive goal G, the machine's goal were then redefined as "achieve 'G' with 'p' probability" for some p < 1? It appears this also would not work, given the machine would never be fully certain of being p certain of having achieved G. (and so on...)

Yet one can specify a set of conditions for which a program will terminate, so how is the argument above fallacious?

Solution in ROT13: Va beqre gb unyg fhpu na ntrag qbrfa'g arrq gb *xabj* vg'f c pregnva, vg bayl arrqf gb *or* c pregnva; nf gur pbaqvgv...
[SEQ RERUN] Interpersonal Entanglement
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-07T05:19:58.102Z

Today's post, 20 January 2009 was originally published on 20 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Our sympathy with other minds makes our interpersonal relationships one of the most complex aspects of human existence. Romance, in particular, is more complicated than being nice to friends and kin, negotiating with allies, or outsmarting enemies - it contains aspects of all three. Replacing human romance with anything simpler or easier would decrease the peak complexity of the human species - a major step in the wrong direction, it seems to me. This is my problem with proposals to give people perfect, nonsentient sexual/romantic partners, which I usually refer to as "catgirls" ("catboys"). The human species does have a statistical sex problem: evolution has not optimized the average man to make the average woman happy or vice versa. But there are less sad ways to solve this problem than both genders giving up on each other and retreating to catgirls/catboys.

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 Sympathetic Minds, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup :  Bielefeld Meetup, February 20th
by Just_existing — 2013-02-06T23:50:30.835Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bielefeld Meetup, February 20th

WHEN:
20 February 2013 07:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Grill/Bar Verve, Klosterplatz 13, Bielefeld

We are meeting once again in Bielefeld.

The topics of this evening are not yet determined, but will be in the next two weeks, or develop during the meetup.
Highly interesting talk can be expected.

If you live in the area consider dropping by :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Bielefeld Meetup, February 20th
Politics Discussion Thread February 2013
by OrphanWilde — 2013-02-06T21:33:26.934Z

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.

Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.

A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.

In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.
Meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-01]
by Sohum — 2013-02-06T21:28:10.936Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-01]

WHEN:
10 February 2013 11:00:00AM (+0000)

WHERE:
Trinity JCR, Cambridge, UK

Meetup! This week, we'll be doing a reading group session of the Shiny New Sequence, Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 For Beginners. These are explicitly designed as introductory posts, so dive right in with us if you're new!

We'll be covering The Useful Idea of Truth and Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms, this week. If you're feeling explicitly keen, read ahead to the two minor posts; I don't think we'll explicitly have a session talking about those, but they're good to read anyway.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-01]
Meetup : Moscow: Rationality in our daily life
by Yuu — 2013-02-06T17:09:56.858Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Rationality in our daily life

WHEN:
17 February 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. I will be there at 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:15, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Challenge each other's beliefs, improved version of the new exercise.

Rationality in examples from motion pictures and books.

Value of information in our life, how can we measure it.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with photos.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Rationality in our daily life
[Link] Social Psychology & Priming: Art Wears Off
by GLaDOS — 2013-02-06T10:08:31.413Z

Related to: Power of Suggestion

Social Psychology & Priming: Art Wears Off

by Steve Sailer

One of the most popular social psychology studies of the Malcolm Gladwell Era has been Yale professor John Bargh's paper on how you can "prime" students to walk more slowly by first having them do word puzzles that contain a hidden theme of old age by the inclusion of words like "wrinkle" and "bingo." The primed subjects then took one second longer on average to walk down the hall than the unprimed control group. Isn't that amazing! (Here's Gladwell's description of Bargh's famous experiment in his 2005 bestseller Blink.)

This finding has electrified the Airport Book industry for years: Science proves you can manipulate people into doing what you want them to! Why you'd want college students to walk slower is unexplained, but that's not the point. The point is that Science proves that people are manipulable.

Now, a large fraction of the buyers of Airport Books like Blink are marketing and advertising professionals, who are paid handsomely to manipulate people, and to manipulate them into not just walking slower, but into shelling out real money to buy the clients' products.

Moreover, everybody notices that entertainment can prime you in various ways. For instance, well-made movies prime how I walk down the street afterwards. For two nights after seeing the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, I walked the quiet streets swiveling my head, half-certain that an unstoppable killing machine was tailing me. When I came out of Christopher Nolan's amnesia thriller Memento, I was convinced I'd never remember where I parked my car. (As it turned out, I quickly found my car. Why? Because I needed to. But it was fun for thirty seconds to act like, and maybe even believe, that the movie had primed me into amnesia.)

Now, you could say, "That's art, not marketing," but the distinction isn't that obvious to talented directors. Not surprisingly, directors between feature projects often tide themselves over directing commercials. For example, Ridley Scott made Blade Runner in 1982 and then the landmark 1984 ad introducing the Apple Mac at the 1984 Super Bowl.

So, in an industry in which it's possible, if you have a big enough budget, to hire Sir Ridley to direct your next TV commercial, why the fascination with Bargh's dopey little experiment?

One reason is that there's a lot of uncert

...
[Link] Power of Suggestion
by GLaDOS — 2013-02-06T10:04:49.772Z

Related: Social Psychology & Priming: Art Wears Off

I recommend reading the piece, but below are some excerpts and commentary.

Power of Suggestion

By Tom Bartlett

...

Along with personal upheaval, including a lengthy child-custody battle, [Yale social psychologist John Bargh] has coped with what amounts to an assault on his life's work, the research that pushed him into prominence, the studies that Malcolm Gladwell called "fascinating" and Daniel Kahneman deemed "classic."

What was once widely praised is now being pilloried in some quarters as emblematic of the shoddiness and shallowness of social psychology. When Bargh responded to one such salvo with a couple of sarcastic blog posts, he was ridiculed as going on a "one-man rampage." He took the posts down and regrets writing them, but his frustration and sadness at how he's been treated remain.

Psychology may be simultaneously at the highest and lowest point in its history. Right now its niftiest findings are routinely simplified and repackaged for a mass audience; if you wish to publish a best seller sans bloodsucking or light bondage, you would be well advised to match a few dozen psychological papers with relatable anecdotes and a grabby, one-word title. That isn't true across the board. ... But a social psychologist with a sexy theory has star potential. In the last decade or so, researchers have made astonishing discoveries about the role of consciousness, the reasons for human behavior, the motivations for why we do what we do. This stuff is anything but incremental.

At the same time, psychology has been beset with scandal and doubt. Formerly high-flying researchers like Diederik Stapel, Marc Hauser, and Dirk Smeesters saw their careers implode after allegations that they had cooked their results and managed to slip them past the supposedly watchful eyes of peer reviewers.

Psychology isn't the only field with fakers, but it has its share. Plus there's the so-called file-drawer problem, that is, the tendency for researchers to publish their singular successes and ignore their multiple failures, making a fluke look like a breakthrough. Fairly or not, social psychologists are perceived to be less rigorous in their methods, generally not replicating their own or one another's work, instead pressing on toward the next headline-making outcome.

Much of the criticism has been directed at priming. The definiti

...
How to offend a rationalist (who hasn't thought about it yet): a life lesson
by mszegedy — 2013-02-06T07:22:48.146Z

Usually, I don't get offended at things that people say to me, because I can see at what points in their argument we differ, and what sort of counterargument I could make to that. I can't get mad at people for having beliefs I think are wrong, since I myself regularly have beliefs that I later realize were wrong. I can't get mad at the idea, either, since either it's a thing that's right, or wrong, and if it's wrong, I have the power to say why. And if it turns out I'm wrong, so be it, I'll adopt new, right beliefs. And so I never got offended about anything.

Until one day.

One day, I encountered a belief that should have been easy to refute. Or, rather, easy to dissect, and see whether there was anything wrong with it, and if there was, formulate a counterargument. But for seemingly no reason at all, it frustrated me to great, great, lengths. My experience was as follows:

I was asking the opinion of a socially progressive friend on what they feel are the founding axioms of social justice, because I was having trouble thinking of them on my own. (They can be derived from any set of fundamental axioms that govern morality, but I wanted something that you could specifically use to describe who is being oppressed, and why.) They seemed to be having trouble understanding what I was saying, and it was hard to get an opinion out of them. They also got angry at me for dismissing Tumblr as a legitmate source of social justice. But eventually we got to the heart of the matter, and I discovered a basic disconnecf between us: they asked, "Wait, you're seriously applying a math thing to social justice?" And I pondered that for a moment and explained that it isn't restricted to math at all, and an axiom in this context can be any belief that you use to base your beliefs on. However, then the true problem came to light (after a comparison of me to misguided 18th-century philosophes): "Sorry if it offends you, I just don't think in general that you should apply this stuff to society. Like... no."

And that did it. For the rest of the day, I wreaked physical havoc, and emotionally alienated everyone I interacted with. I even seriously contemplated suicide. I wasn't angry at my friend in particular for having said that. For the first time, I was angry at an idea: that belief systems about certain things should not be internally consistent, should not follow logical...
[SEQ RERUN] Sympathetic Minds
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-06T05:59:32.113Z

Today's post, Sympathetic Minds was originally published on 19 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Mirror neurons are neurons that fire both when performing an action oneself, and watching someone else perform the same action - for example, a neuron that fires when you raise your hand or watch someone else raise theirs. We predictively model other minds by putting ourselves in their shoes, which is empathy. But some of our desire to help relatives and friends, or be concerned with the feelings of allies, is expressed as sympathy, feeling what (we believe) they feel. Like "boredom", the human form of sympathy would not be expected to arise in an arbitrary expected-utility-maximizing AI. Most such agents would regard any agents in its environment as a special case of complex systems to be modeled or optimized; it would not feel what they feel.

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 In Praise of Boredom, 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.