trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
by toner — 2012-01-13T07:55:15.708Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup

WHEN:
20 January 2012 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
see mailing list, Carlton VIC 3053

All welcome! 6:30pm for 7pm, Friday 20th

We'll order takeaway for dinner (something paleo-ish if possible) and I'll get some snacks. BYO drinks and games.

If you have problems getting in, you can call me on 0412 996 288.

No need to RSVP, but if you were to post a comment below saying that you're coming, it might encourage others to attend. (We've typically been getting about 12 people.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup
New SI publications design
by lukeprog — 2012-01-13T03:16:58.847Z

The Singularity Institute's publications are badly and inconsistently formatted.

Our research associate Daniel Dewey has made us a nice-looking LaTeX template for them (example), but we need some help moving them from the original files into LaTeX. If you have a little experience with LaTeX and might be willing to help, please let me know!

luke [at] intelligence.org

Or, in general, please send an email to volunteers+subscribe@intelligence.org to be added to the volunteers email list.

Volunteer project requests go out only a few times a month, so we won't flood your inbox, and you never know: maybe a project sent to that list will be something you are in the mood to do and have the skills to do.
Can the Chain Still Hold You?
by lukeprog — 2012-01-13T01:28:25.336Z

Robert Sapolsky:

Baboons... literally have been the textbook example of a highly aggressive, male-dominated, hierarchical society. Because these animals hunt, because they live in these aggressive troupes on the Savannah... they have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevitably spills over into their social lives.

Scientists have never observed a baboon troupe that wasn't highly aggressive, and they have compelling reasons to think this is simply baboon nature, written into their genes. Inescapable.

Or at least, that was true until the 1980s, when Kenya experienced a tourism boom.

Sapolsky was a grad student, studying his first baboon troupe. A new tourist lodge was built at the edge of the forest where his baboons lived. The owners of the lodge dug a hole behind the lodge and dumped their trash there every morning, after which the males of several baboon troupes — including Sapolsky's — would fight over this pungent bounty.

Before too long, someone noticed the baboons didn't look too good. It turned out they had eaten some infected meat and developed tuberculosis, which kills baboons in weeks. Their hands rotted away, so they hobbled around on their elbows. Half the males in Sapolsky's troupe died.

This had a surprising effect. There was now almost no violence in the troupe. Males often reciprocated when females groomed them, and males even groomed other males. To a baboonologist, this was like watching Mike Tyson suddenly stop swinging in a heavyweight fight to start nuzzling Evander Holyfield. It never happened.

This was interesting, but Sapolsky moved to the other side of the park and began studying other baboons. His first troupe was "scientifically ruined" by such a non-natural event. But really, he was just heartbroken. He never visited.

Six years later, Sapolsky wanted to show his girlfriend where he had studied his first troupe, and found that they were still there, and still surprisingly violence-free. This one troupe had apparently been so transformed by their unusual experience — and the continued availability of easy food — that they were now basically non-violent.

And then it hit him.

Only one of the males now in the troupe had been through the event. All the rest were new, and hadn't been raised in the tribe. The new males had come from the violent, dog-eat-dog world of norm...
Knowledge vs Technology
by PuyaSharif — 2012-01-13T00:50:13.112Z

Here's a little thing I wrote down a couple of years back:

Question: Does the following statements represent three different stages of technological development or does two of them represent the same stage? In some sense it should boil down to how we define the word 'technology', or at least its relation to 'knowledge'.

We don't know how to build a commercially feasible fusion reactor.

We know how to build a commercially feasible fusion reactor, but we haven't built one yet.

He have built one commercially feasible fusion reactor.

The key is how to handle 'know' in the second statement. One could argue that no matter how sure we are on how to construct it (down to every detail), statement three is still superior since we have actually one functioning reactor to show. But at the same time if we would collect all the uncertainties in our models/simulations/calculations etc in a variable u. What happens as u->0 ? Shouldn't the gap between 2 and 3 go to zero? That would mean that enough knowledge about a technology is equivalent to actually possessing the technology.

EDIT: The utility of having a reactor is of course higher than knowing how to construct one, so if we measure technological level as a function of the utility gained from that technology then the resolution is trivial.
The Noddy problem
by Apprentice — 2012-01-12T22:18:39.027Z

An episode of the Noddy animated series has the following plot.

Noddy needs to go pick up Martha Monkey at the station. But it's such a nice, sunny day that he would prefer to play around outside. He gets an idea to solve this dilemma. He casts a duplication spell on himself and his car and tells the duplicate to go fetch Martha while he goes out to play. Later, Noddy is out having fun when he suddenly spots his duplicate. It turns out that the duplicate also preferred playing outside to doing the errand so he also cast a duplication spell. Then they see another duplicate, and another...
I think this story makes for a nice simple illustration of one of our perennial decision theoretic issues: When making decisions you should take into account that agents identical to yourself will make the same decision in the same situation. A common real-life example of the Noddy problem is when we try to pawn off our dietary problems to our future selves.
Meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 2!
by Kenoubi — 2012-01-12T20:26:38.494Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 2!

WHEN:
15 January 2012 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1324 Wightman St., Pittsburgh, PA 15217

I will be hosting board games on some Sundays. Each event will be announced separately, since the schedule will be a bit irregular; the first event will be this Sunday. I only have 5 games (Bohnanza, Citadels, Acquire, Illuminati, and Hacker), so please bring anything you'd like to play. We can order food and go as late as 19:00. If I get paged I may have to deal with an emergency (from home, using my laptop), but if that doesn't bother you, it doesn't bother me.

Allergy warning: I have a cat. I can put her upstairs on request, but if you have a cat allergy you might want to take some meds. If you decide not to come because you have a severe cat allergy, please tell me.

RSVP here or by sending me a private message (but don't not show up because you didn't RSVP, I just want a rough idea of the number of attendees). Ring the bell, knock, or call or text (412) 657-1395 to get in when you get there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 2!
NonGoogleables
by Thomas — 2012-01-12T13:23:37.330Z

Recently in another topic I mentioned the "two bishops against two knights" chess endgame problem. I claimed it was investigated over two decades ago by a computer program and established that it is a win situation for the two bishops' side. Then I was unable to Google a solid reference for my claim.

I also remember a "Hermes Set Theory". It was something like ZFC, regarded as a valid Set Theory axiom system for 40 years, until a paradox was found inside. Now, I can't Google it out.

And then it was the so called "Baryon number conservation law", which was postulated for a short while in physics. Until it was found that a subatomic decay may in fact in/decrease the number of baryons in the process. I can't Google that one either.

Is that just me, or what?
Q&A with experts on risks from AI #3
by XiXiDu — 2012-01-12T10:45:13.633Z

[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.

Dr. Pei Wang is trying to build general-purpose AI systems, compare them with human intelligence, analyze their theoretical assumptions, and evaluate their potential and limitation. [Curriculum Vitae] [Pei Wang on the Path to Artificial General Intelligence]

Dr. J. Storrs Hall is an independent scientist and author. His most recent book is Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, published by Prometheus Books. It is about the (possibly) imminent development of strong AI, and the desirability, if and when that happens, that such AIs be equipped with a moral sense and conscience. This is an outgrowth of his essay Ethics for Machines. [Homepage]

Professor Paul Cohen is the director of the School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts at the University of Arizona. His research is in artificial intelligence. He wants to model human cognitive development in silico, with robots or softbots in game environments as the "babies" they're trying to raise up. he is particularly interested in the sensorimotor foundations of human language. Several of his projects in the last decade have developed algorithms for sensor-to-symbol kinds of processing in service of learning the meanings of words, most recently, verbs. He also works in what they call Education Informatics, which includes intelligent tutoring systems, data mining and statistical modeling of students' mastery and engagement, assessment technologies, ontologies for representing student data and standards for content, architectures for content delivery, and so on. [Homepage]

The Interview:

Q1: Assuming beneficial political and economic development and that no global catastrophe halts progress, by what year would you assign a 10%/50%/90% chance of the development of artificial intelligence that is roughly as good as humans at science, mathematics, engineering and programming?

Pei Wang: My estimations are, very roughly, 2020/2030/2050, respectively.

Here by "roughly as good as humans" I mean the AI will follow roughly the same principles as human in information processing, though it does not mean that the system will have the same behavior or capability as human, due to the difference in body, experience, motivation, etc.

J. Storrs Hall: 2020 / 2030 / ...
[SEQ RERUN] The Cluster Structure of Thingspace
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-12T08:37:48.368Z

Today's post, The Cluster Structure of Thingspace was originally published on 08 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A verbal definition works well enough in practice to point out the intended cluster of similar things, but you nitpick exceptions.

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 Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity, 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.
Procedural knowledge gap: public key encryption
by Solvent — 2012-01-12T07:35:58.669Z

In the spirit of uncovering procedural knowledge gaps, I'd like to know how to use public key encryption.

Is there some website which generates public and private keys, and lets you encode and decode according to those keys?

I'd love if there was some way I could send my encoded text via IM or email, and just decode it like we do with rot13. Is there some way of doing this?

Currently, I encrypt things using TrueCrypt, but there's no way that I can communicate with people with that without securely establishing a common key beforehand.

Does anyone know how to do this?
AI Challenge: Ants - Post Mortem
by D_Alex — 2012-01-12T07:23:08.593Z

Late last year a LessWrong team was being mooted for the Google AI challenge (http://aichallenge.org/; http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8ay/ai_challenge_ants/). Sadly, after a brief burst of activity, no "official" LessWrong entry appeared (AFAICT, and please let me know if I am mistaken). The best individual effort from this site's regulars (AFAICT) came from lavalamp, who finished around #300.

This is a pity. This was an opportunity to achieve, or at least have a go at, a bunch of worthwhile things, including development of methods of cooperation between site members, gathering positive publicity, and yes, even advancing the understanding of AI related issues.

So - how can things be improved for the next AI challenge (which I think is about 6 months away)?
Meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
by fiddlemath — 2012-01-12T07:14:20.742Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup

WHEN:
16 January 2012 06:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1831 Monroe St., Madison, wi

We'll meet this week, again, at the Barrique's on Monroe. We have so many topics:

With any luck, Ben will scan and post the lecture notes he swiped, on potential problems with Bayesian epistemology. I'll bring my copy of Probability Theory, so it can help defend itself. ;)

Lots of spillover conversation from the reading group meeting, I suspect. In particular, exactly why ought one's beliefs "pay rent in anticipated expreiences"? We discussed this a fair amount, but we never named a direct argument, and none is given in the relevant post.

Also, by popular demand from the reading group, a round of The Resistance is clearly in order.

Finally, I'd like to bat around the idea of "field trips" some more. If anyone has any ideas, leave yourself a note somewhere so you can pull 'em out on Monday.

If you're in the Madison area, be sure to join the Less Wrong Madison mailing list!

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
Ideas for rationalist meetup topics
by alyssavance — 2012-01-12T05:04:03.356Z

(From Zvi Mowshowitz, leader of the New York group, and based on his experience)

Category 1: Discussions - The Base
A: Less Wrong topics. Usually recent posts. Often big hits.
B: Rationalist group planning and organization. Meta-topics. Dealing with group issues on occasion.
C: Spreading Rationality. Discussion of various approaches.
D: Contraband Topics. Discussion of things that I won't include here, but you can guess.
E: How To Do X, or how to do X well. Charity, meeting people, improving skills, relationships, etc.
Category 2: Presentations - Almost Always a Winner
F: Sequences. Andrew Rettek did these for public meetups, went over well I think.
G: Personal Projects: Variance, Geoff Anders's Psychology.
H: General Knowledge: CBT, Starting a Business, Basic Python.
I: Advanced Rationality: Attempted once, successful despite poor execution. Should be explored more.
Category 3: Game Nights
J: Proven Good Games: Illuminati, Poker, Citadels, 7 Wonders, Nomic.
K: Advanced Games: Much demand for general gaming, but not really that rationalist. Proven winners in this group: Vegas Showdown, Power Struggle, Baltimore & Ohio, Tichu, Through the Ages. I can keep going, many good choices. AVOID: Settlers of Catan (personal opinion) and Fluxx (cause you can do better, honestly).
U: Outside Games. Ultimate Frisbee is good.
Category 4: Other Celebrations
L: Karaoke
M: Baraccuda (bring something awesome you love)
N: Contraband Activities (enough said)
O: General Party In or Out / Pot Luck
Category 5: Special Guests
P: Famous Rationalists! If you get Eliezer or Robin or Vassar, you need no other topic. Probably a few others who get there on their own as well, or any generally famous guest.
Category 6: Self-Improvement
Q: Go out and do something to improve social skills.
R: Discuss or map out goals and plans. Set goals. Can be combined with other tasks.
S: Run experiments! For science!
T: Study Hall. Also folds into discussion of self-improvement topics.
Meetup : First Salt Lake City Meetup: 22 January 2012 03:00PM
by adamisom — 2012-01-12T02:11:27.763Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First Salt Lake City Meetup: 22 January 2012 03:00PM

WHEN:
22 January 2012 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
631 West North Temple

Hello and Happy Belated New Year! After the December announcement revealed that there were many residents of Salt Lake City who were also Less Wrongers, it is time for a Meetup!

It will take place next Sunday the 22nd at 3:00 pm.

The venue is Mestizo Coffee House. It's located at 631 West North Temple. I've been there once before and I liked the atmosphere. The 22nd was the first available time I could book the gallery space. The coffee house does not allow outside food or drinks.

While browsing current Meetup announcements, I stumbled across this inspiring account (http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ul/less_wrong_nyc_case_study_of_a_successful/) of a successful meetup. It posed the question: "Do you want a community badly enough to build one yourself?" That reminded me that yes, I think I do. I have quite a large number of ideas for future meetup possibilities already.

The agenda will first and foremost be to meet each other. We'll also discuss future meetups, both logistics and possibilities. We could also start with a short discussion near the end about some Less Wrong topic: leave a comment as to what you think that should be.

Just to clarify: the December announcement was just to gather information and in no way means that there aren't LWers in SLC determined to have a meetup. There are plenty and we will have a meet up.

That is all.

Discussion article for the meetup : First Salt Lake City Meetup: 22 January 2012 03:00PM
What jobs are safe in an automated future?
by PuyaSharif — 2012-01-11T20:48:53.950Z

The trends are clear, more and more work that was previously done by humans are being shifted to automated systems. Factories with thousands of workers has been replaced by highly efficient facilities containing industrial robots and a few human operators, bank tellers by online banking, most parts of any logistics chain by different types of automatic sorting, moving, and sending mechanisms. Offices are run by less and less people as we're handling and processing fewer and fewer physical documents. In any area less people than before are needed to do the same work as before. The world is becoming automated.

These developments are not only here to stay - they are accelerating. Most of what is done by humans today could easily be done by computers in a near future. I would personally guess that most professions existing today could be replaced by affordable automated equivalents within 30 years. My question is: What jobs will be the last ones to go, and why?

Often education is pointed out as safe bet to ensure being needed in the future, and while that is true its not the whole story. First of all, in basically all parts of the world the fraction of the population with an academic degree is growing fast. Higher education will probably not be as good as a differentiator in the future. Second, while degrees in the fields hot in the future is hot in the future there is no guarantee that the degrees hot today will be of any use later on. Third, there is a misconception that highly theoretical tasks done by skilled experts will be among the last to go. But due to their theoretical nature such tasks are fairly easy represent virtually.

Of course as we progress technologically new doors are opening and the hottest job year 2030 might not even exist today. Any suggestions?
Bill Gates asks HS students "What are most important choices the world faces"?
by Dr_Manhattan — 2012-01-11T20:34:11.272Z

http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/01/Do-You-Have-a-WorldChanging-Idea?WT.mc_id=1_11_2012_studentannualletter_fb&WT.tsrc=Facebook
Meetup : Fort Collins Meetup
by EvelynM — 2012-01-11T17:15:16.280Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins Meetup

WHEN:
25 January 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
144 North College Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80524

The last meetup before our 3D printer field trip.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins Meetup
Meetup : Fort Collins Meetup
by EvelynM — 2012-01-11T17:14:10.454Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins Meetup

WHEN:
18 January 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
144 North College Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80524

We continue to gain in numbers and in friendship. Would you be interested in meeting accomplished, interesting people to talk about Less Wrong-ish topics?

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins Meetup
On accepting an argument if you have limited computational power.
by Dmytry — 2012-01-11T17:07:07.250Z

It would seem rational to accept any argument that is not fallacious; but this leads to consideration of problems such as Pascal's mugging and other exploits.

I've had a realization of a subconscious triviality: for me to accept an argument as true, it is not enough that I find no error in it. The argument must also be so structured that I would expect to have found an error if it was invalid (or I myself must make such structured version first). That's how mathematical proofs work - they are so structured that finding an error requires little computational power (only knowledge of rules and reliability); in the extreme case an entirely unintelligent machine can check a proof.

In light of this I propose that those who want to make a persuasive argument should try to structure the argument so it'd be easy to find flaws in it. This also goes for the thought experiments and hypothetical situations. Those seem rather often to be constructed with entirely opposite goal in mind - to obstruct the verification process or to try to prevent the reader from trying to find flaws.

Something else tangentially related to the arguments. The faulty models are the prime cause of decision errors; yet the faulty models are the staple of thought experiment; nobody raises an eyebrow as all models are ultimately imperfect.

However, to accept an argument based on imperfect model one must be capable of correctly propagating the error and estimating the error in the final conclusion, as a faulty model may be so constructed as to itself differ non substantially from the reality but in such a way that the difference diverges massively along the chain of reasoning. My example of this is the Trolley Problems. The faults of original model are nothing out of ordinary; simplified assumptions of the real world, perfect information, etc. Normally you can have those faults in model and still arrive at reasonably close outcome. The end result is throwing of fat people onto tracks, cutting up of travellers for organs, and similar behaviours which we intuitively know we could live a fair lot better without. How that happens? In real world the strongly asymmetrical relations of form 'death of 1 person saves 10 people' are very rare (as an emergent property of complexity of the real world that is lacking in the imaginary worlds of trolley problems), while the decision errors are not nearly so rare, so ...