trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture
by Shmi — 2012-09-07T20:15:26.518Z

This is based on a discussion in #lesswrong a few months back, and I am not sure how to resolve it.

Setup: suppose the world is populated by two groups of people, one just wants to be left alone (labeled Jews), the other group hates the first one with passion and want them dead (labeled Nazis). The second group is otherwise just as "good" as the first one (loves their relatives, their country and is known to be in general quite rational). They just can't help but hate the other guys (this condition is to forestall the objections like "Nazis ought to change their terminal values"). Maybe the shape of Jewish noses just creeps the hell out of them, or something. Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no changing that hatred.

Is it rational to exterminate the Jews to improve the Nazi's quality of life? Well, this seems like a silly question. Of course not! Now, what if there are many more Nazis than Jews? Is there a number large enough where exterminating Jews would be a net positive utility for the world? Umm... Not sure... I'd like to think that probably not, human life is sacred! What if some day their society invents immortality, then every death is like an extremely large (infinite?) negative utility!

Fine then, not exterminating. Just send them all to concentration camps, where they will suffer in misery and probably have a shorter lifespan than they would otherwise. This is not an ideal solutions from the Nazi point of view, but it makes them feel a little bit better. And now the utilities are unquestionably comparable, so if there are billions of Nazis and only a handful of Jews, the overall suffering decreases when the Jews are sent to the camps.

This logic is completely analogous to that in the dust specks vs torture discussions, only my "little XML labels", to quote Eliezer, make it more emotionally charged. Thus, if you are a utilitarian anti-specker, you ought to decide that, barring changing Nazi's terminal value of hating Jews, the rational behavior is to herd the Jews into concentration camps, or possibly even exterminate them, provided there are enough Nazi's in the world who benefit from it.

This is quite a repugnant conclusion, and I don't see a way of fixing it the way the original one is fixed (to paraphrase Eliezer, "only lives worth celebrating are worth creating").

EDIT: Thanks to CronoDAS for pointing out that th...
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Melbourne, NYC, Paris, Pittsburgh, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-09-07T15:06:02.598Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on August 31st, and has been moved to discussion.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Paris Meetup: 01 September 2012 02:00PM
Washigton DC (probably) minicamp meetup: 02 September 2012 03:00AM
Berlin Meetup: 04 September 2012 07:30PM
Pittsburgh: Rationalization Game: 04 September 2012 06:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 01 September 2018 01:30PM
Rational-Humanist Open Mic, NYC September 5th: 05 September 2012 07:00PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 07 September 2012 07:00PM
Meetup: Southwestern Ohio: 09 September 2012 04:00PM
SLC, UT: Free Will and Rationality Checklists: 15 September 2012 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has ...
The REAL SIA doomsday
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-09-07T11:11:49.587Z

Many thanks to Paul Almond for developing the initial form of this argument.

My previous post was somewhat confusing and potentially misleading (and the idea hadn't fully gelled in my mind). But here is a much easier way of seeing what the SIA doomsday really is.

Imagine if your parents had rolled a dice to decide how many children to have. Knowing only this, SIA implies that the dice was more likely to have been a "6" that a "1" (because there is a higher chance of you existing in that case). But, now following the family tradition, you decide to roll a dice for your children. SIA now has no impact: the dice is equally likely to be any number. So SIA predicts high numbers in the past, and no preferences for the future.

This can be generalised into an SIA "doomsday":

Everything else being equal, SIA implies that the population growth rate in your past is likely to be higher than the rate in the future; i.e. it predicts an observed decline, not in population, but in population growth rates.
[SEQ RERUN] My Naturalistic Awakening
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-07T04:10:41.624Z

Today's post, My Naturalistic Awakening was originally published on 25 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Eliezer actually looked back and realized his mistakes when he imagined the idea of an optimization process.

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 Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth, 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: Toward Non-Stupid, Non-Blank-Slatey Polyandry
by Cosmos — 2012-09-06T21:06:28.897Z

http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2012/09/toward-non-stupid-non-blank-slatey.html

The author gives a shout out to Less Wrong as a community with a perpetually skewed gender ratio, which is precisely the conditions under which polyandry appears to thrive.

Discuss. :)
Decision Theories, Part 3.75: Hang On, I Think This Works After All
by orthonormal — 2012-09-06T16:23:37.670Z

Followup to: Decision Theories, Part 3.5: Halt, Melt and Catch Fire, Decision Theories: A Semi-Formal Analysis, Part III

The thing about dead mathematical proofs is that it's practically always worth looting the corpse; sometimes you even find there's still a pulse! That appears to be the case with my recent post lamenting the demise of the TDT-like "Masquerade" algorithm. I think I've got a rigorous proof this time, but I'd like other opinions before I declare that the rumors of Masquerade's demise were greatly exaggerated...

To recap quickly, I've been trying to construct an algorithm that, given the payoff matrix of a game and the source code of its opponent, does some deductions and then outputs a move. I want this algorithm to do the commonsense right things (defect against both DefectBot and CooperateBot, and mutually cooperate against both FairBot and itself), and I want it to do so for simple and general reasons (that is, no gerrymandering of actions against particular opponents, and in particular no fair trying to "recognize itself", since there can be variants of any algorithm that are functionally identical but not provably so within either's powers of deduction). I'd also like it to be "un-exploitable" in a certain sense: it has a default move (which is one of its Nash equilibria), and no opponent can profit against the algorithm by forcing it below that default payoff. If the opponent does as well or better in expected value than it would by playing that Nash equilibrium, then so too does my algorithm.

The revised Masquerade algorithm does indeed have these properties.

In essence, there are two emendations that I needed: firstly, since some possible pairs of masks (like FairBot and AntiFairBot) can't knowingly settle on a fixed point, there's no way to determine what they do without a deductive capacity that strictly exceeds the weaker of them. That's a bad feature to have, so we'll just have to exclude potentially troublemaking masks from Masquerade's analysis. (In the special case of Prisoner's Dilemma I know that including DefectBot and FairBot will suffice; I've got what looks like a good solution in general, as well.)

The second emendation is that FairBot needs to alternate between trying harder to prove its opponent cooperates, and trying harder to prove its opponent defects. (There needs to be an asymmetry, like cooperation proofs going first,...
SIA doomsday
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-09-06T16:01:06.576Z

Edit: the argument is presented more clearly in a subsequent post.

Many thanks to Paul Almond for developing the initial form of this argument.

It is well known in these circles that the self-sampling assumption (SSA) leads to the doomsday argument. The self-indication assumption (SIA) was developed to counter the doomsday argument. This is a old debate; but what is interesting is that SIA has its own doomsday argument - of a rather interesting and different form.

To see this, let's model the population of a planet somewhat like Earth. From century to century, the planet's population can increase, decrease or stay the same with equal probability. If it increase, it will increase by one billion two thirds of the time, and by two billion one third of the time - and the same for decreases (if it overshoots zero, it stops at zero). Hence, each year, the probability of population change is:

Pop level change

+2 Billion
+1 Billion
+0 Billion
-1 Billion
-2 Billion

Probability

1/9

2/9

3/9

2/9

1/9

During the century of the Three Lice, there were 3 billion people on the planet. Two centuries later, during the century of the Anchovy, there will still be 3 billion people on the planet. If you were alive on this planet during the intermediate century (the century of the Fruitbat), and knew those two facts, what would your estimate be for the current population?

From the outside, this is easy. The most likely answer if that there is still 3 billion in the intermediate century, which happens with probability 9/19 (= (3/9)*(3/9), renormalised). But there can also be 4 or 2 billion, with probabilities 4/19 each, or 5 or 1 billion, with probabilities 1/19 each. The expected population is 3 billion, as expected.

Now let's hit this with SIA. This weighs the populations by their sizes, changing the probabilities to 5/57, 16/57, 27/57, 8/57and 1/57, for populations of five, four, three, two and one billion respectively. Larger populations are hence more likely; the expected population is about 3.28 billion.

(For those of you curious about what SSA says, that depends on the reference class. For the reference class of people alive during the century of the Fruitbat, it gives the same answer as the outside answer. As the reference class increases, it moves closer to SIA.)

SIA doomsday

So SIA tells us that we should expect a spike during the current century - and hence a ...
Meetup : Less Wrong Sydney: 17th September: MInd Games
by Oklord — 2012-09-06T15:34:03.188Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Sydney: 17th September: MInd Games

WHEN:
17 September 2012 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
77 Liverpool Street, Sydney, Australia, Level 2

As suggested earlier- mind games for all!

We'll be attempting some basic social games, as inspired by http://lesswrong.com/lw/58/build_skills_in_the_right_order/ - simple stuff, like holding eye contact for absurd periods without staring down, and simple enunciation games.

Also, Rejection therapy! I personally expect everyone here to ask to join a strangers board game. Extra points for success!

You need only bring enthusiasm and preparation for awkwardness. Also the desserts here are pretty decent...

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Sydney: 17th September: MInd Games
[SEQ RERUN] Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-06T04:45:11.925Z

Today's post, Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth was originally published on 24 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When Eliezer started to consider the possibility of Friendly AI as a contingency plan, he permitted himself a line of retreat. He was now able to slowly start to reconsider positions in his metaethics, and move gradually towards better ideas.

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 That Tiny Note of Discord, 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 : Predictions Chi September 15 (September 8 -- cancelled)
by Nic_Smith — 2012-09-06T02:29:29.170Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Predictions Chi September 15 (September 8 -- cancelled)

WHEN:
15 September 2012 01:05:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1 S. Franklin St, Chicago, IL

Bring your extrapolations, intuitions, wild guesses, and most importantly some sort of device to access Predictionbook to the next Chicago Less Wrong meetup on September 15th! We will be making and sharing predictions and our confidence in them.

Also:

The Meetup is in a different location than usual. We will be meeting at Argo Tea at the intersection of Franklin and Madison at 1pm. This is very roughly two blocks east of Ogilvie and Union Station and just west of the Washington/Wells L.

The September 8th Meetup was cancelled.

Discussion article for the meetup : Predictions Chi September 15 (September 8 -- cancelled)
Cleaning up the "Worst Argument" essay
by Scott Alexander — 2012-09-06T00:09:45.564Z

There was a lot of controversy over the Worst Argument essay, which surprised me because the basic point seems hard to argue with. I'd like to change it in response to feedback, with the new title "Guilt by Association". Below is the rough draft for the new version, minus a few links and other finishing touches. Please let me know whether you think it is better or worse than the original, and what specific further changes you think that it needs.

David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.

If he can unilaterally declare a worst argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be Guilt By Association: "If we can apply a word to something, we must judge it the same as we judge more prototypical instances of that word."
Well, it sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?
Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"
Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.
But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is Guilt by Association. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. We don't like criminals precisely because we don't like greed and preying on innocents and weakening the fabric of society.
The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share any of the features that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King. The force of the opponent's argument comes solely from the category "criminal" associating King with people who are bad. It totally fails to prove King was bad himself.

This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this format. Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A...
LessWrong Wiki as Anki deck
by mapnoterritory — 2012-09-05T21:11:06.174Z

I've ported the Less Wrong Wiki into an Anki deck. I hope this will be useful for new members as an alternative way to get acquainted with many interesting LessWrong concepts (Newcomb's problem? Superexponential conceptspace?).

A disclaimer: this an automatized scrape and therefore it might not always look great. In particular lot's of cards don't really conform the "simple and specific" rules for spaced repetition cards (see e.g. http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm) - the deck it is thus not meant for memorizing the definitions, but rather for reading/browsing/recognizing the concepts. Nonetheless, I hope this still will be useful for some of us (certainly for me).

I did a semi-automatic sanitization of the cards, but if you find some bogus ones (or any other problem) please let me know and I'll fix it.

The scraped Wiki version is from 01/09/2012 and there are currently 628 cards. There are "forward" format cards (name front, description back) and also "reverse" cards (in cloze format where it was possible, i.e. where the concept name comes up in the description text).

The deck is here:

https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B6GcntZeZpBHVjRkVUE2Uko2Vk0/edit

The link also contains a .txt version of the cards (tab separated) which might be used to import to other repetition software than Anki.

The deck can be supplemented e.g. by the "List of Cognitive Biases and Fallacies" and "42 Logical Fallacies" decks as well as other decks mentioned on the spaced repetition wiki page.
Debugging the Quantum Physics Sequence 
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-09-05T15:55:53.054Z

This article should really be called "Patching the argumentative flaw in the Sequences created by the Quantum Physics Sequence".

There's only one big thing wrong with that Sequence: the central factual claim is wrong. I don't mean the claim that the Many Worlds interpretation is correct; I mean the claim that the Many Worlds interpretation is obviously correct. I don't agree with the ontological claim either, but I especially don't agree with the epistemological claim. It's a strawman which reduces the quantum debate to Everett versus Bohr - well, it's not really Bohr, since Bohr didn't believe wavefunctions were physical entities. Everett versus Collapse, then.

I've complained about this from the beginning, simply because I've also studied the topic and profoundly disagree with Eliezer's assessment. What I would like to see discussed on this occasion is not the physics, but rather how to patch the arguments in the Sequences that depend on this wrong sub-argument. To my eyes, this is a highly visible flaw, but it's not a deep one. It's a detail, a bug. Surely it affects nothing of substance.

However, before I proceed, I'd better back up my criticism. So: consider the existence of single-world retrocausal interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as John Cramer's transactional interpretation, which is descended from Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. There are no superpositions, only causal chains running forward in time and backward in time. The calculus of complex-valued probability amplitudes is supposed to arise from this.

The existence of the retrocausal tradition already shows that the debate has been represented incorrectly; it should at least be Everett versus Bohr versus Cramer. I would also argue that when you look at the details, many-worlds has no discernible edge over single-world retrocausality:

Relativity isn't an issue for the transactional interpretation: causality forwards and causality backwards are both local, it's the existence of loops in time which create the appearance of nonlocality.

Retrocausal interpretations don't have an exact derivation of the Born rule, but neither does many-worlds.

Many-worlds finds hope of such a derivation in a property of the quantum formalism: the resemblance of density matrix entries to probabilities. But single-world retrocausality finds such hope too: the Born probabilities can be obtained from the produc

...
Cryonics: Can I Take Door No. 3?
by Chris_Roberts — 2012-09-05T15:49:21.589Z

If you don't believe in an afterlife, then it seems you currently have two choices: cryonics or permanent death. Now, I don't believe that cryonics is pseudoscience, but it's still pretty poor odds (Robin Hanson uses an estimate of 5% here). Unfortunately, the alternative offers a chance of zero. I see five main concerns with current cryonic technology:

There is no proven revival technology, thus no estimate of costs

Potential damage done during vitrification which must be overcome

Because it cannot be legally done before death, potential decay between legal death and vitrification

Requires active maintenance at very low temperature

No guarantee that future societies will be willing to revive

So I wonder if we can do better.

I recall reading of juvenile forms of amphibians in desert environments that could survive for decades of drought in a dormant form, reviving when water returned. One specimen had sat on a shelf in a research office for over a century (in Arizona, if I recall correctly) and was successfully revived. Note: no particular efforts were made to maintain this specimen: the dry local climate was sufficient. It was suggested at the time that this could make an alternative method of preserving organs. Now the advantages of this approach (which I refer to flippantly as "dryonics") is:

Proven, inexpensive revival technology

Apparently the process does not cause damage itself

Proven revival technique may overcome legal obstacles of applying before legal death

Requires passive maintenance at low humidity (deserts would be ideal)

Presumably lower cost makes future revival more likely (still no guarantee, but that is a post in itself)

There is one big disadvantage of this approach, of course: no one knows how to do it (it's not entirely clear how the juvenile amphibians do it) or even if it would be possible in larger, more complex organisms. And, so far as I know, no one is working on it. But it would seem to offer a much better prospect than our current options, so I would suggest it worth investigating.

I am not a biologist, and I'm not sure where one would start developing such a technology. I frankly admit that I am sharing this in the hope that someone who does have an idea will run with it. If anyone knows of any work on these lines, or has an idea...