trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-08-26T06:21:17.996Z

Or the converse problem - an agent that contains all the aspects of human value, except the valuation of subjective experience. So that the result is a nonsentient optimizer that goes around making genuine discoveries, but the discoveries are not savored and enjoyed, because there is no one there to do so. This, I admit, I don't quite know to be possible. Consciousness does still confuse me to some extent. But a universe with no one to bear witness to it, might as well not be.

- Eliezer Yudkowsky, "Value is Fragile"

I had meant to try to write a long post for LessWrong on consciousness, but I'm getting stuck on it, partly because I'm not sure how well I know my audience here. So instead, I'm writing a short post, with my main purpose being just to informally poll the LessWrong community on one question: how sure are you that whole brain emulations would be conscious?

There's actually a fair amount of philosophical literature about issues in this vicinity; David Chalmers' paper "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis" has a good introduction to the debate in section 9, including some relevant terminology:

Biological theorists of consciousness hold that consciousness is essentially biological and that no nonbiological system can be conscious. Functionalist theorists of consciousness hold that what matters to consciousness is not biological makeup but causal structure and causal role, so that a nonbiological system can be conscious as long as it is organized correctly.

So, on the functionalist view, emulations would be conscious, while on the biological view, they would not be.

Personally, I think there are good arguments for the functionalist view, and the biological view seems problematic: "biological" is a fuzzy, high-level category that doesn't seem like it could be of any fundamental importance. So probably emulations will be conscious--but I'm not too sure of that. Consciousness confuses me a great deal, and seems to confuse other people a great deal, and because of that I'd caution against being too sure of much of anything about consciousness. I'm worried not so much that the biological view will turn out to be right, but that the truth might be some third option no one has thought of, which might or might not entail emulations are conscious.

Uncertainty about whether emulations would be conscious is potentially ...
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
by Mestroyer — 2013-08-26T04:47:20.167Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

WHEN:
01 September 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Illini Union South Lounge 1401 W Green St Urbana, IL 61801

Meetup topic will again be determined by popular consensus at the actual meetup. I will have Zendo, Wits and Wagers (with cards that can be used independently for calibration games), and Pandemic, a cooperative strategy board game. 2PM Sunday in the Illini Union South Lounge seems to have worked for everyone this week, so I chose the same time next week, and this will probably become our permanent place and weekly time. Cross posted on the mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
[LINK] Attention Schema Theory of Consciousness
by ESRogs — 2013-08-25T22:30:01.903Z

I found this theory pretty interesting, and it reminded me of Gary Drescher's explanation of consciousness in Good and Real:

How the light gets out

Consciousness is the ‘hard problem’, the mystery that confounds scientists and philosophers. Has a new theory cracked it?

[...]

Attention requires control. In the modern study of robotics there is something called control theory, and it teaches us that, if a machine such as a brain is to control something, it helps to have an internal model of that thing. Think of a military general with his model armies arrayed on a map: they provide a simple but useful representation — not always perfectly accurate, but close enough to help formulate strategy. Likewise, to control its own state of attention, the brain needs a constantly updated simulation or model of that state. Like the general’s toy armies, the model will be schematic and short on detail. The brain will attribute a property to itself and that property will be a simplified proxy for attention. It won’t be precisely accurate, but it will convey useful information. What exactly is that property? When it is paying attention to thing X, we know that the brain usually attributes an experience of X to itself — the property of being conscious, or aware, of something. Why? Because that attribution helps to keep track of the ever-changing focus of attention.

I call this the ‘attention schema theory’. It has a very simple idea at its heart: that consciousness is a schematic model of one’s state of attention. Early in evolution, perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago, brains evolved a specific set of computations to construct that model. At that point, ‘I am aware of X’ entered their repertoire of possible computations.

- Princeton neuroscientist, Michael Graziano, writing in Aeon Magazine.
Reality is weirdly normal
by Rob Bensinger — 2013-08-25T19:29:42.541Z

Related to: When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid, Reductionism, How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3

"Reality is normal." That is: Surprise, confusion, and mystery are features of maps, not of territories. If you would think like reality, cultivate outrage at yourself for failing to intuit the data, not resentment at the data for being counter-intuitive.

"Not one unusual thing has ever happened." That is: Ours is a tight-knit and monochrome country. The cosmos is simple, tidy, lawful. "[T]here is no surprise from a causal viewpoint — no disruption of the physical order of the universe."

"It all adds up to normality." That is: Whatever is true of fundamental reality does not exist in a separate universe from our everyday activities. It composes those activities. The perfected description of our universe must in principle allow us to reproduce the appearances we started with.

These maxims are remedies to magical mereology, anthropocentrism, and all manner of philosophical panic. But reading too much (or too little) into them can lead seekers from the Path. For instance, they may be wrongly taken to mean that the world is obliged to validate our initial impressions or our untrained intuitions. As a further corrective, I suggest: Reality is weirdly normal. It's "normal" in odd ways, by strange means, in surprising senses.

At the risk of vivisecting poetry, and maybe of stating the obvious, I'll point out that the maxims mean different things by "normal". In the first two, what's "normal" or "usual" is the universe taken on its own terms — the cosmos as it sees itself, or as an ideally calibrated demon would see it. In the third maxim, what's "normal" is the universe humanity perceives — though this still doesn't identify normality with what's believed or expected. Actually, it will take some philosophical work to articulate just what Egan's "normality" should amount to. I'll start with Copernicanism and reductionism, and then I'll revisit that question.

Everything is usual. Very nearly nothing is familiar.

Spell 1: Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened. And intelligence explosion sounds... well, 'unusual' is the mildest word that comes to mind. So it won't happen.

Counterspell: Reality is weirdly normal. It's not the ki

...
To what degree do you model people as agents?
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2013-08-25T19:29:33.808Z

The idea for this post came out of a conversation during one of the Less Wrong Ottawa events. A joke about being solipsist turned into a genuine question–if you wanted to assume that people were figments of your imagination, how much of a problem would this be? (Being told "you would be problematic if I were a solipsist" is a surprising compliment.)

You can rephrase the question as "do you model people as agents versus complex systems?" or "do you model people as PCs versus NPCs?" (To me these seem like a reframing of the same question, with a different connotation/focus; to other people they might seem like different questions entirely). Almost everyone at the table immediately recognized what we were talking about and agreed that modelling some people as agents and some people as complex systems was a thing they did. However, pretty much everything else varied–how much they modelled people as agents overall, how much it varied in between different people they knew, and how much this impacted the moral value that they assigned to other people. I suspect that another variable is "how much you model yourself as an agent"; this probably varies between people and impacts how they model others.

What does it mean to model someone as an agent?

The conversation didn't go here in huge amounts of detail, but I expect that due to typical mind fallacy, it's a fascinating discussion to have–that the distinctions that seem clear and self-evident to me probably aren't what other people use at all. I'll explain mine here.

1. Reliability and responsibility. Agenty people are people I feel I can rely on, who I trust to take heroic responsibility. If I have an unsolved problem and no idea what to do, I can go to them in tears and say "fix this please!" And they will do it. They'll pull out a solution that surprises me and that works. If the first solution doesn't work, they will keep trying.

In this sense, I model my parents strongly as agents–I have close to 100% confidence that they will do whatever it takes to solve a problem for me. There are other people who I trust to execute a pre-defined solution for me, once I've thought of it, like "could you do me a huge favour and drive me to the bike shop tomorrow at noon?" but whom I wouldn't go to with "AAAAH my bike is broken, help!" There are other people who I wouldn't ask...
Transparency in safety-critical systems
by lukeprog — 2013-08-25T18:52:07.757Z

I've just posted an analysis to MIRI's blog called Transparency in Safety-Critical Systems. Its aim is to explain a common view about transparency and system reliability, and then open a dialogue about which parts of that view are wrong, or don't apply well to AGI.

The "common view" (not universal by any means) explained in the post is, roughly:

Black box testing can provide some confidence that a system will behave as intended, but if a system is built such that it is transparent to human inspection, then additional methods of reliability verification are available. Unfortunately, many of AI’s most useful methods are among its least transparent. Logic-based systems are typically more transparent than statistical methods, but statistical methods are more widely used. There are exceptions to this general rule, and some people are working to make statistical methods more transparent.

Three caveats / open problems listed at the end of the post are:

How does the transparency of a method change with scale? A 200-rules logical AI might be more transparent than a 200-node Bayes net, but what if we’re comparing 100,000 rules vs. 100,000 nodes? At least we can query the Bayes net to ask “what it believes about X,” whereas we can’t necessarily do so with the logic-based system.

Do the categories above really “carve reality at its joints” with respect to transparency? Does a system’s status as a logic-based system or a Bayes net reliably predict its transparency, given that in principle we can use either one to express a probabilistic model of the world?

How much of a system’s transparency is “intrinsic” to the system, and how much of it depends on the quality of the user interface used to inspect it? How much of a “transparency boost” can different kinds of systems get from excellently designed user interfaces?

The MIRI blog has only recently begun to regularly host substantive, non-news content, so it doesn't get much commenting action yet. Thus, I figured I'd post here and try to start a dialogue. Comment away!
The 50 Shades of Grey Book Club
by PhilGoetz — 2013-08-24T20:55:47.307Z

I think it would be a useful rationality exercise to take something that millions of people love, that you have contempt for, and sincerely try to appreciate it. The purpose would be to get practice imagining a different point of view, and to see whether you're able to do so.

50 Shades of Grey might not be the best choice for this exercise. I haven't read it. Maybe a better choice would be The da Vinci Code, NASCAR, or professional wrestling. But a book has a definite length that you have to get through to be allowed to say that you honestly tried.

The idea is to start a thread for people to discuss 50 Shades, or something else perceived as trashy, and try--not to find what you might like in it, but to get inside someone else's head and imagine why they might like it. (Of course it could backfire, and leave you less open-minded than before, if you always conclude that your contempt was simply right in the first place.)

I think the biggest problem is that if people succeed at finding something to appreciate in it, they would feel terribly embarrassed to say so. So this can be done with alternate accounts.

Anyone interested? What do you hold in contempt that you might be willing to take a closer look at?
Obvious points
by KatjaGrace — 2013-08-24T18:56:21.000Z

As mentioned previously, pointing out obvious things seems embarrassing to me. However, it also often seems very valuable. That might seem obvious to you. Even so, this post will elaborate on this obvious point.

The set of things an intellectual would like to claim are obvious will tend to be much larger than the set that is reliably casually inferable by a random person with three minutes to devote to the issue. It is probably even much larger than the set of things reliably inferable by that intellectual earlier in their life. Many questions have obvious answers, while the questions themselves are not obvious. Many questions are obviously important once you notice them, but were not salient beforehand. Many points are obvious intellectually, yet not automatically integrated into one’s worldview and actions. And arguably, the more important and true and valuable a point, the more likely it is to look obvious once you know it.

I sometimes think of considerations that are so obvious to me now that I can barely articulate the converse, yet which it seems I must have been unaware of when younger. In general, if something is too incoherent to articulate, this seems like a strong mark against its appropriateness as a focus of discussion. It’s falsity is probably obvious. So I’m not very inclined to write blog posts about such topics. Yet it would usually have been very valuable for my younger self to read such a post – I’d guess more than hundreds of times as valuable as it is costly for me to write such posts, which is much worse again than the cost to more knowledgeable readers of seeing a discussion of something they already knew. And unless I am unusually dense (in which case my blogging strategy seems unimportant), others probably make similar errors to the ones I seem to have made. So it seems probably socially beneficial to write posts about points as obvious as those.

If writing obvious things is costly to the author, does it matter much that it is socially beneficial? It makes more difference than you might suppose: if the author endorses writing socially beneficial obvious things, then when others see the author writing obvious things, they should less infer that the author thought the point was non-obvious (as long as endorsing this coincides at all with writing things that seem obvious, which appears plausible). On that note...
How Efficient is the Charitable Market?
by lukeprog — 2013-08-24T05:57:48.169Z

When I talk about the poor distribution of funds in charity, people in the effective altruism movement sometimes say, "Didn't Holden Karnofsky show that charity is an efficient market in his post Broad Market Efficiency?"

My reply is "No. Holden never said, and doesn't believe, that charity is an efficient market."

What is an efficient market?

An efficient market is one in which "one cannot consistently achieve returns in excess of average market returns... given the information available at the time the investment is made." (Details here.)

Of course, market efficiency is a spectrum, not a yes/no question. As Holden writes, "The most efficient markets can be consistently beaten only by the most talented/dedicated players, while the least efficient [markets] can be beaten with fairly little in the way of talent and dedication."

Moreover, market efficiency is multi-dimensional. Any particular market may be efficient in some ways, and in some domains, while highly inefficient in other ways and other domains.

Charity as an inefficient market

Financial markets are relatively efficient. It's rare for players to consistently beat the market by a large margin. You can beat the average by investing in a low-fee index fund, but not by a lot, and it's hard to beat hedge funds.

Philanthropic markets appear to be less efficient than financial markets in many ways. In charity, one can consistently beat the market by a wide margin simply by giving to GiveWell's recommended charities, which achieve far greater returns (in social value) per marginal dollar than the average charity does. However, Holden points out that it has been surprisingly difficult for GiveWell to find ways to beat well-run large foundations like the Gates Foundation's work in global health.

Why should we expect charity to be less efficient than financial markets?

For one thing, most people giving to charity don't even seem to care what returns (in social value) they're getting with their investments. That's why, when proto-GiveWell initially contacted a bunch of charities to ask for evidence of positive impact, some of those charities reported that nobody who gave them money had ever asked that question before. And when charities sent proto-GiveWell their internal reports about effectiveness, they were so inadequate that they "led [proto-GiveWell] to understand that the charities themselves did not kno...
Meetup : West LA—Nothing in Particular
by OpenThreadGuy — 2013-08-23T21:29:58.530Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Nothing in Particular

WHEN:
28 August 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA

How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours, or for longer if you apply some advanced trickery.

Discussion: We will talk about whatever. No topic will be enforced. No presentation will be given. No one will be "playing host", and no games will be played.

Recommended reading:

The Less Wrong Sequences

Wiio's Laws

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

The Strategy of Conflict

How to Win Friends and Influence People

The Road to Reality

The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible. In fact, due to the Zen nature of this week's topic, it is unlikely that anyone will even be able to identify us as a Less Wrong meetup.

There will definitely not be a whiteboard.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Nothing in Particular
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-08-23T15:38:23.693Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on August 16th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Saskatoon's First Meetup!: 17 August 2013 01:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta LessWrong: Games Night: 24 August 2013 06:00PM
Bratislava Meetup VI.: 19 August 2013 06:00PM
Brussels meetup: 17 August 2013 01:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 18 August 2013 02:00PM
LessWrong Israel September meetup: 12 September 2013 08:00PM
[Lyon] Picnic au Parc de la Tête d'Or: 17 August 2013 12:30PM
Moscow: The Sunday Meetup: 18 August 2013 04:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 17 August 2019 01:30PM
London Social - The Unwelcome but Probable Decline and Fall of Direct Sunlight: 18 August 2013 02:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 17 August 2013 03:00PM
Washington DC Lojban meetup: 18 August 2013 03:00PM
[Washington DC] Robin Hanson visits to talk about prediction markets: 08 September 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 che...