trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Efficient philanthropy: local vs. global approaches 
by multifoliaterose — 2011-06-16T04:21:21.352Z

Edit: Carl Shulman made some remarks that have caused me to seriously question the soundness of the final section of this post. More on this at the end of the post.

Consider the following two approaches to philanthropy:

The “local” approach (associated with "satisficing") is to consider those philanthropic opportunities that are "close to oneself" in some sense (immediately salient, within one's own communities, in one's domains of expertise). The “global” approach (associated with "maximizing") is to survey the philanthropic landscape, search for the best philanthropic opportunities in absolute terms, and devote oneself to those.

In practice nobody's approach to philanthropy is genuinely entirely global; one is necessarily limited by the fact that the range of possibilities that are salient to oneself is smaller than the total range of possibilities and by the fact that one has limited computational power. But there is nevertheless substantial variation in the degree to which individuals' approaches to philanthropy are global or local.

Here I'll compare the pros and cons of the local approach and the global approach and attempt to arrive at some sort of synthesis of the two.

Disclosure: I volunteer for GiveWell and may work for them in the future.

In favor of the local approach to philanthropy:

1. One problem with the global approach to philanthropy is that it often leads to reasoning about and/or designing approaches to problems in domains that one knows little about. According to a June 2009 GiveWell blog entry:

One of the consistent refrains we’ve seen in aid literature is the importance of local participation/enthusiasm/ownership for aid projects. Many programs have been criticized for being too “top-down” (i.e., imposing outsiders’ designs on local communities), with the implication that more “bottom-up” programs (i.e., getting local people to participate in the design of execution of programs) would be more likely to create real and lasting change.

All else being equal, one has a better chance of succeeding at a philanthropic effort in a domain where one has expertise and familiarity with the relevant issues than one does in a domain where this is not the case. Moreover, the prospect of doing more harm than good are heightened in the latter case.

2. The search time involved in the local appr...
How exactly do you deal with irrational reactions to insects and spiders?
by InquilineKea — 2011-06-16T02:01:38.735Z

Okay, so for several years, I've been doing a fairly good job of excising out most of my irrational beliefs and fears.

The one that remains, however, is my fear of bugs and spiders. I'll SCREAM if I see one, dead or alive. And if there's one in my food, then I'm going to throw the entire plate out.

Is it common for LWers to have irrational reactions to bugs and spiders?

I know that there is "desensitization therapy", as highlighted by a Scientific American Frontiers episode a decade ago (where gradual exposure to the stimulus - a spider) - can desensitize a person with arachnophobia over time. But this can really only happen in controlled settings. In uncontrolled settings, such interaction can give you nightmares.
[SEQ RERUN] Correspondence Bias
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-06-15T21:26:10.537Z

Today's post, Correspondence Bias, was originally published on 25 June 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Correspondence Bias is a tendency to attribute to a person a disposition to behave in a particular way, based on observing an episode in which that person behaves in that way. The data set that gets considered consists only of the observed episode, while the target model is of the person's behavior in general, in many possible episodes, in many different possible contexts that may influence the person's behavior.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 Risk-Free Bonds Aren't, 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.
Out of the closet as a Positive Utilitarian
by diegocaleiro — 2011-06-15T19:52:48.620Z

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

- George Santayana

Edit: It seems as though people who read this were thinking that I was defending Positive Utilitarianism. This is not at all my intention. I am just suggesting that the class exists, and that it should be OK to express oneself as part of it. It is obviously better to be both a positive and a negative utilitarian than just a positive one. If that was not clear, I hope it is now. My point was just that if someone wanted to be sure that she is an utilitarian before doing some action, but was not feeling confortable because she was actually just a positive utilitarian, now that person would feel the relief that someone else felt the same, and could go about trying to make the world a better place without worrying about lone bystander bias.

It is only in unusual occasions that I find myself as compatible with a label. Back in my wild and reckless youth, I have probably encountered only those memes as acceptably labelling me: Transhumanist, Polyamorist, Immortalist, Extrovert.

That was it. No political position, no sexual orientation, no teen affiliation, no ethnicity, no nationality, no soccer team, no dress code. No religion.

There are very few one-word things that I feel like I am.

Then along came Utilitarianism. We were presented by transhumanism, and got along somewhat well, I would check out its origins, who was into it as a philosophy, and we seemed to be thinking in the same general direction.

Once we had some problems with regards to vehicles. We call those the trolley problems.

From then on I slowly met many transhumanists (keep in mind that I live in Brazil), and in general would identify instantaneously. That did not happen with utilitarians. There was something to utilitarianism that just didn't work for me.

Yesterday, I finally had the sudden realization. It was negative utilitarianism. Everyone these days is a negative utilitarian. They may have come from many realms into utilitarianism (preference or hedonistic, doesn't matter) but eventually they notice that suffering is really really bad and start to think that they ought to do something about it. Some set course towards diminishing it, and I wish them Godspeed. Yet I could not acquiesce in their beliefs, rejoice in their conquests, celebrate their pursuals.

It is arguable, and has b

...
Q&A with Jürgen Schmidhuber on risks from AI
by XiXiDu — 2011-06-15T15:51:25.628Z

[Click here to see a list of all interviews]

I am emailing experts in order to raise and estimate the academic awareness and perception of risks from AI.

Below you will find some thoughts on the topic by Jürgen Schmidhuber, a computer scientist and AI researcher who wants to build an optimal scientist and then retire.

The Interview:

Q: What probability do you assign to the possibility of us being wiped out by badly done AI?

Jürgen Schmidhuber: Low for the next few months.

Q: What probability do you assign to the possibility of a human level AI, respectively sub-human level AI, to self-modify its way up to massive superhuman intelligence within a matter of hours or days?

Jürgen Schmidhuber: High for the next few decades, mostly because some of our own work seems to be almost there:

Gödel machine: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html

Universal AI: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html

Creative machines that create and solve their own problems [4,5] to improve their knowledge about how the world works: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html

Q: Is it important to figure out how to make AI provably friendly to us and our values (non-dangerous), before attempting to solve artificial general intelligence?

Jürgen Schmidhuber: From a paper of mine:

All attempts at making sure there will be only provably friendly AIs seem doomed. Once somebody posts the recipe for practically feasible self-improving Goedel machines or AIs in form of code into which one can plug arbitrary utility functions, many users will equip such AIs with many different goals, often at least partially conflicting with those of humans. The laws of physics and the availability of physical resources will eventually determine which utility functions will help their AIs more than others to multiply and become dominant in competition with AIs driven by different utility functions. Which values are "good"? The survivors will define this in hindsight, since only survivors promote their values.

Q: What is the current level of awareness of possible risks from AI within the artificial intelligence community, relative to the ideal level?

Jürgen Schmidhuber: Some are interested in this, but most don't think it's relevant right now.

Q: How do risks from AI compare to other existential risks, e.g. advanced nanotechnology?

Jürgen Schmidhuber: I guess AI risks a...
Induction, Deduction, and the Collatz Conjecture: the Decidedly Undecidable Propositions.
by Ronny Fernandez — 2011-06-15T15:21:00.080Z

The question I want to ask is "is there a proof for every statement about the natural numbers that seems to be inductively verifiable, but is a general recursive decision problem, provided your sample is large enough?" Simply, if we define a binary property 'P' that can only be tested by algorithms that might not halt, and show, say by computation, that every natural number up to some arbitrarily large number 'N' has the property P, does that mean that there must be a generalized deductive proof that for all natural numbers P holds?

How big can N get before there must be a deductive proof that P holds for all natural numbers? What if N was larger than Graham's number[1]? What if we showed thousands of years from now--using computers that are unimaginably strong by today's standards--that every number less than or equal to the number you get when you put Graham's number as both of the inputs to the Ackermann function[2] has a property P. But they still have no generalized deductive proof that all numbers have P, is that enough for these future number theorists to state that it is a scientific fact that all natural numbers have the property P?

It may seem impossible for such a disagreement to come up between induction and deduction, but we are already at a similar (though admittedly less dramatic) impasse. The disagreement centers around the Collatz conjecture, which states that every number is a Collatz number. To test if some number n is a Collatz number, if n is even, divide it by 2 to get n / 2, if n is odd multiply it by 3 and add 1 to obtain 3n + 1, and repeat this process with the new number thus obtained, indefinitely, if you eventually reach the cycle 4, 2, 1, then n is a Collatz number. Every number up to 20 × 2^58 has been shown to be a Collatz number[3], and it has been shown that there are no cycles with a smaller period than 35400[4], yet there is still no deductive proof of the Collatz conjecture[5]. In fact, one method of generalized proof has already been shown to be undecidable[6]. If it was shown that no general proof could ever be found, but all numbers up to the unimaginably large ones described above were shown to be Collatz numbers, what epistemological status should we grant the conjecture?

It has been made clear by the history of mathematics that a lack of small counterexamples to a conjecture of the form "for all ...
Research Triangle, NC, Meetup - Saturday, June 18th, 2 p.m.
by hwc — 2011-06-15T11:36:52.863Z

Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup #4:

Saturday, June 18th, 2 p.m.
Morrisville Outlet Mall Food Court
1001 Airport Boulevard, Morrisville, NC
(map link)

Agenda:

(Bring one or two topics of discussion from the following categories)

Instrumental rationality — everyone picks *one* goal they've failed to make progress on on the past month. We spend five minutes apiece brainstorming ways to fix that.

Unconfusing ourselves — everyone brings an easy or hard question related to something from the Less Wrong material. My question is: “What, exactly, is timeless decision theory? How does it it differ from other decision theories? How does it depend on thinking of time as timeless?”

About RTLW:

We have a mailing list! It only takes a minute to join!

Questions? Contact hwc or curiousepic.

Next meetup: Wednesday, July 6, 7 p.m., location to be determined.
Trial and error in policy making
by DavidAgain — 2011-06-15T10:39:10.812Z

I’m working in government in the UK, and interested in rationality in policy making: at the individual level, but also how we can build systems (in terms of requirements during policy creation, creation of independent bodies, incentive structures for officials/ministers…) that encourage more rational policies. This is the context for the stuff below.

I recently went to a talk on the use of trial and error in policy making. It was hosted by the Institute for Government (a non-political think tank advising ministers and civil servants on good government), and included the Undercover Economist, Tim Harford. Details including a recording can be found here: http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/our-events/105/government-by-trial-and-error-a-discussion-with-tim-harford

Ben Goldacre was also attending in the audience, and has written about this: http://www.badscience.net/2011/05/we-should-so-blatantly-do-more-randomised-trials-on-policy/

The basic message of the talk was that much of policy could benefit from being trialled more effectively, whether in the form of formalised, controlled trials: following the medical example inasmuch as that is practically possible. This approach seems to be being seriously considered by this government in several areas: one example of how it might work in theory can be found here: http://www.straightstatistics.org/article/what-works-criminal-justice-time-find-out

Of course, the reality is often messier, and ministers are looking for both swifter results and more security. Other forms of ‘experimentation’ involve devolving power to local councils (Localism Bill) or schools (Free Schools) etc. In these cases there aren’t the same formal comparison methods but you at least get lots of ideas and some ability to judge which ones have gone well. An underlying issue is the quality of assessments: a policy that has clear criteria for appraisal built into its design will be much easier to judge, whereas one that is simply acted upon and studied later might suffer from poor evidence and be more open to being interpreted in line with preconcieved or desired outcomes.

A

...
The Phobia or the Trauma: The Probem of the Chcken or the Egg in Moral Reasoning.
by analyticsophy — 2011-06-15T04:16:17.219Z

Introduction:

Today there is an almost universal prejudice against individuals with a certain sexual orientation. I am not talking about common homophobia; the prejudice I would like to bring to your attention is so rarely considered a prejudice that it has no particular name. Though the following words will most likely be met with harsh criticism, the prejudice referenced above is the prejudice that almost all of us have against pedophiles. At first thought, it may seem that having a phobia of pedophiles is no more a prejudice for a mother, than having a fear of lions is a prejudice for a mother chimpanzee, but I hope at least to show that the issue is not so clear.

This text does not at any point argue that pedophiles are regular people like you and I, they may well not be. If the hypothesis to be presented is true, however, it follows that the trauma children experience when molested would not happen if we didn't hold the moral judgments towards pedophiles that we do. If this is true then the best thing for us to do as a species for our children is, paradoxically, to stop making the moral judgements we make towards pedophiles. Of course, intuition would have us believe that we hold those moral judgements towards pedophiles precisely because of how traumatic a molestation is for children; this is an attempt to show that that causal interaction goes both ways and forms a loop.

This isn't a defense of pedophilia, nor is it a suggestion that we should stop morally judging pedophiles as a culture, it's an analysis of how circularity can enter the domain of social morality undetected and spread rapidly. We will take a memetic approach to figuring this out, and always ask "how it is useful for the meme to have such and such property?" rather than "how is it useful for us to have a belief with such and such property?".

I will apologize here and now for the graphic nature of this text's subject. But know that part of what I claim is that the reason the following considerations are so rarely even heard is precisely because of their graphic nature. Nowhere in this text is there an argument that can even be loosely interpreted as a defense of individual acts of pedophilia, but the reader may well conclude that in the end, less children would have been seriously hurt if we had refrained from involving our moral attitudes in our dealings with pedophiles.

Inherently Traumat...
The argumentative theory of reasoning
by PhilGoetz — 2011-06-15T01:26:46.686Z

An article in today's New York Times summarizes the "argumentative theory of reasoning", which says that "biases" in reasoning are adaptive because they help persuade other people to adopt your opinion.

I don't think this makes sense. If we evolved biases as argumentative tricks to win others over despite not having the facts on our side, we should also have evolved the ability to see through those tricks.
Dissolving the Question of Life
by falenas108 — 2011-06-14T20:17:27.787Z

Recently, Hank Green posted a video discussing the definition of life. He offered two definitions; that life acts in a manner to achieve a goal, and that life continuously decreases internal entropy.

There are problems with these definitions. The first definition includes every machine that has a function. The second one includes, for example, a machine that constantly reshapes parts of its body into a paperclip.

Other definitions of life are equally confusing, doing things like excluding viruses because they use other cells to reproduce, despite meeting the intuitive meaning we have for life.

So, dissolve "life." Why do we care if something is alive? To decide if its life has value. Hank dances around the issue, showing that life has no inherent value by using mouthwash to kill billions of bacteria in his mouth. But, he doesn't take this to its conclusion. It doesn't matter if something is alive or not. We won't suddenly care about the well being of viruses if a new definition of life comes along tomorrow pronouncing viruses to be living. What we value is sentience.

Bugs are extremely low on the sentience scale, so we feel free to kill them. Animals that are higher on the scale, such as cats, have laws preventing any sort of mistreatment.

tl;dr: Life is an ambiguous term, use sentience to describe a being's value.
New York Times on Arguments and Evolution [link]
by Nic_Smith — 2011-06-14T18:12:17.383Z

I saw this in the Facebook "what's popular" box, so it's apparently being heavily read and forwarded. There's nothing earthshattering for long-time LessWrong readers, but it's a bit interesting and not too bad a condensation of the topic:

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth. -- Cohen, Patricia "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth"

A glance at the comments [at the Times], however, seems to indicate that most people are misinterpreting this, and at least one person has said flatly that it's the reason his political opponents don't agree with him.

ETA: Oops, I forgot the most import thing. The article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html
Influence = Manipulation
by Barry_Cotter — 2011-06-14T17:47:05.690Z

Influence and manipulation are both attempts to alter the actions or propensity to act of another agent. The only difference between the two that can generally relied upon is that the one who calls it manipulation finds it distasteful or immoral. If you disagree I invite you to find a general principle cleanly dividing the following examples into manipulation and influence; all the better if it can be made uncontroversial.

A woman telling her long-term boyfriend that they're not getting married before he gets his doctorate.

A man teasing a friend.

A man teasing a female friend.

A man teasing a female friend, flirting.

A man teasing a female friend, flirting with intent.

A man teasing a woman he met ten minutes ago, flirting with intent.

A woman encouraging her son to become a teacher because the job security is good.

A woman encouraging her son to become a lawyer because he'll be better able to support her in her old age.

I'm not denying that manipulation and influence can be usefully distinguished. I do not believe they can but I haven't spent the last month thinking about it on and off. There might exist a Schelling point dividing bidirectional communication into socially acceptable influence and unacceptable manipulation, a lawyerly thing, useful but without any defensible reason to be there exactly but that it must be somewhere and we have come to an agreement that here will do. If you believe that there is a point that actually is pragmatically better than another by a real margin, please state it, and defend your proposition.
[SEQ RERUN] Risk-Free Bonds Aren't
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-06-14T16:14:21.637Z

Today's post, Risk-Free Bonds Aren't, was originally published on 22 June 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are no risk-free investments. Even US treasury bills would fail under a number of plausible "black swan" scenarios. Nassim Taleb's own investment strategy doesn't seem to take sufficient account of such possibilities. Risk management is always a good idea.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 http://lesswrong.com/lw/hx/one_life_against_the_world/, 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.