trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Don't You Care If It Works? - Part 2
by Jacob Falkovich — 2015-07-30T00:22:52.610Z

Part 2 – Winstrumental

Part 1 is here.

The forgotten fifth virtue

Remember, you can't be wrong unless you take a position. Don't fall into that trap.

-- Scott Adams, Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook

CronoDAS posted this in a reply to my poem, and I dismissed him because my typical mind is typical. I would never make that mistake, so I didn’t think it’s a big deal. But it is. In the comments to part 1 a lot of people are heartily disagreeing with everything I wrote. I admire and respect them. I already made a correction to a part of the post which was wrong. Unfortunately, a lot of people reading this couldn’t disagree if they wanted to, because they don’t have an account. I get that lurking is fun, but if you’re spending hours and hours on LessWrong and not posting anything I think you’re doing yourself a disservice.

In part 1 I speculated a lot about what goes on in Eliezer’s mind, knowing full well that Eliezer could read this and say that I’m wrong and I will have no comeback but pure embarrassment. What kind of foolhardy dunce would risk such a thing? Let me answer with another question: how else could I possibly change my mind? After reading them for a year, I have strong opinions on the goals and lessons of the sequences, and the only way to find out if I’m right or wrong is to open myself up to challenge. Worst case: people agree with me and I get sweet sweet karma. Best case: I become wiser. Am I at risk of sticking to an opinion too long just because I wrote it down? Yes, but I know I have that bias, anything known is something I can adjust for. If I don’t argue I don’t know what I don’t know.

If you want a chance to change your opinions, you have to put them where they can hurt you. Or to use an Umeshism: if you’ve never been proven an idiot on the internet you’re not learning enough from the internet.

Back to Harvard

Why don’t the psychologists at Harvard switch to reviewing nameless CVs? Well, why would they? They are tenured Harvard professors, they already won! There was no bias shown for assessing stellar CVs, only those on the margins. So they’re not missing out on any superstars, at worst they hire some gentleman who would be their 32nd strongest faculty member instead of a lady who would be 29th. W...
Rationality Reading Group: Part F: Politics and Rationality
by Gram_Stone — 2015-07-29T22:22:55.844Z

This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post.

Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This fortnight we discuss Part F: Politics and Rationality (pp. 255-289). This post summarizes each article of the sequence, linking to the original LessWrong post where available.

F. Politics and Rationality

57. Politics is the Mind-Killer - People act funny when they talk about politics. In the ancestral environment, being on the wrong side might get you killed, and being on the correct side might get you sex, food, or let you kill your hated rival. If you must talk about politics (for the purpose of teaching rationality), use examples from the distant past. Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise, it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy. If your topic legitimately relates to attempts to ban evolution in school curricula, then go ahead and talk about it, but don't blame it explicitly on the whole Republican/Democratic/Liberal/Conservative/Nationalist Party.

58. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided - Debates over outcomes with multiple effects will have arguments both for and against, so you must integrate the evidence, not expect the issue to be completely one-sided.

59. The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality - People have an irrational tendency to simplify their assessment of things into how good or bad they are without considering that the things in question may have many distinct and unrelated attributes.

60. Correspondence Bias - Also known as the fundamental attribution error, refers to the tendency to attribute the behavior of others to intrinsic dispositions, while excusing one's own behavior as the result of circumstance.

61. Are Your Enemies Innately Evil? - People want to think that the Enemy is an innately evil mutant. But, usually, the Enemy is acting as you might in their circumstances. They think that they are the hero in their story and that their motives are just. That do...
Meetup : Regular Moscow meetup: effective altruism, debates, hypothesis formulation
by Slava Matyukhin — 2015-07-29T22:21:25.180Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Regular Moscow meetup: effective altruism, debates, hypothesis formulation

WHEN:
02 August 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, Льва Толстого, 16

We're meeting at Yandex, at the Extropolis conference hall.

Please fill this form OR join this FB event if you're planning to visit.

The planned activities include:

The talk about effective altruism (by me).

Maris will organize the game on hypothesis formulation training.

Debates! We'll use Karl Popper protocol yet again. We haven't settled on the topic yet, but we'll do so by Friday.

Alexander230 will organize the "guess 3/2 of the median" game.

Detailed schedule. (or, at least, it'll be more detailed than this post by Sunday...)

Information for the newcomers:

Here's the document explaining how to get to our meetups and what to expect. If you have any questions, or if you don't speak Russian and can't read the link, shoot me a PM.

Discussion article for the meetup : Regular Moscow meetup: effective altruism, debates, hypothesis formulation
Don't You Care If It Works? - Part 1
by Jacob Falkovich — 2015-07-29T14:32:14.045Z

Part 1 - Epistemic

Prologue - other people

Psychologists at Harvard showed that most people have implicit biases about several groups. Some other Harvard psychologists were subjects of this study proving that psychologists undervalue CVs with female names. All Harvard psychologists have probably heard about the effect of black names on resumes since even we have. Surely every psychology department in this country starting with Harvard will only review CVs with the names removed? Fat chance.

Caveat lector et scriptor

A couple weeks ago I wrote a poem that makes aspiring rationalists feel better about themselves. Today I'm going to undo that. Disclaimers: This is written with my charity meter set to 5%. Every other paragraph is generalizing from anecdotes and typical-mind-fallacying. A lot of the points I make were made before and better. You should really close this tab and read those other links instead, I won't judge you. I'm not going to write in an academic style with a bibliography at the end, I'm going to write in the sarcastic style my blog would have if I weren't too lazy to start one. I'm also not trying to prove any strong empirical claims, this is BYOE: bring your own evidence. Imagine every sentence starting with "I could be totally wrong" if it makes it more digestible. Inasmuch as any accusations in this post are applicable, they apply to me as well. My goal is to get you worried, because I'm worried. If you read this and you're not worried, you should be. If you are, good!

Disagree to disagree

Edit: in the next paragraph, "Bob" was originally an investment advisor. My thanks to 2irons and Eliezer who pointed out why this is literally the worst example of a job I could give to argue my point.

Is 149 a prime? Take as long as you need to convince yourself (by math or by Google) that it is. Is it unreasonable to have 99.9...% confidence with quite a few nines (and an occasional 7) in there? Now let's say that you have a tax accountant, Bob, a decent guy that seems to be doing a decent job filing your taxes. You start chatting with Bob and he reveals that he's pretty sure that 149 isn't a prime. He doesn't know two numbers whose product is 149, it just feels unprimely to him. You try to reason with him, but he just chides you for being so arrogant in your confidence: can't you just agree to disagree on this one? It's not like either of ...
Infinite Modal Combat: some observations
by János Kramár — 2015-07-29T04:05:14.000Z

These notes are from discussions with Kuba Stechly at the Summer Fellows Program, on the topic of infinite modal combat, previously discussed here. In that post, Victoria proved that non-wellfounded infinite modal
agents called ProcrastinationBots cooperate with each other.

We extend these results to a more general case and then show how the
most general case breaks. We also show that there exist polynomial time
computable bots that are not equivalent to standard bots.

The Trivial Case

Suppose we build an infinite family of modal agents
InfiniTeamBot1,InfiniTeamBot2,… with
InfiniTeamBoti(X):=Ψ(X,InfiniTeamBotai1,InfiniTeamBotai2,…,InfiniTeamBotaik),
where Ψ is a fully modalized formula (Ψ may also refer to
other modal agents); for example, the ProcrastinationBotNs
from the earlier post are of this form. Can the results of modal combat
with such agents be computed?

For comparison, consider
InfiniTeamBot0(X):=Ψ(X,InfiniTeamBot0,…,InfiniTeamBot0),
which is a finite modal agent.

If we look at these agents in GL’s Kripke frames, we find that
InfiniTeamBoti(X)=InfiniTeamBot0(X) and
X(InfiniTeamBoti)=X(InfiniTeamBot0) in every
frame, which suggests the bots are just equivalent to
InfiniTeamBot0. To show that the bots are is true, we can
use Löb’s Theorem in PA: if we had
□(∀i(InfiniTeamBoti(X)↔InfiniTeamBot0(X)∧X(InfiniTeamBoti)↔X(InfiniTeamBot0)))
then PA could prove
∀i(InfiniTeamBoti(X)↔InfiniTeamBot0(X)∧X(InfiniTeamBoti)↔X(InfiniTeamBot0)),
so Löb’s Theorem implies all of these bots are equivalent to
InfiniTeamBot0.

(We’re eliding the way the bots are actually specified in PA; the fixed
point construction in the previous post can be extended to our setting.)

Some Impossibility Results

We wish to extend to allow other, more interesting bots. However, if we
allow arbitrary infinite bots, then we run into some issues. We now
prove some impossibility results to start delineating the edge beyond
which bots are not easily computable.

def CollatzBot_N(X):
if N == 1:
return C
if N is even and [] X(CollatzBot_{N/2})=D:
return D
if N is odd and [] X(CollatzBot_{3N+1})=D:
return D
return C

def ProveCollatzBot_N(X):
if []CollatzBot_N(X) = C:
if []ProveCollatzBot_{N+1}(X) = C:
return C
return D

ProveCollatzBot1 only cooperates with itself if it can prove the
Collatz conjecture is true. Since we don’t know the answer to whether it
is or is not

...
State-Space of Background Assumptions 
by algekalipso — 2015-07-29T00:22:37.952Z

[Update]: I received 720+ responses to the survey. Thanks everyone who helped! I have also concluded the statistical analysis (factor analysis, mediation analysis, clustering and prediction). I have not, however, done the writeup. This may take some time since I just started working. It will be done :) I just wanted to let people know this is the current stage.

Hello everyone!

My name is Andrés Gómez Emilsson, and I'm the former president of the Stanford Transhumanist Association. I just graduated from Stanford with a masters in computational psychology (my undergraduate degree was in Symbolic Systems, the major with the highest LessWronger density at Stanford and possibly of all universities).

I have a request for the LessWrong community: I would like as many of you as possible to fill out this questionnaire I created to help us understand what causes the diversity of values in transhumanism. The purpose of this questionnaire is twofold:

Characterize the state-space of background assumptions about consciousness

Evaluate the influence of beliefs about consciousness, as well as personality and activities, in the acquisition of memetic affiliations

The first part is not specific to transhumanism, and it will be useful whether or not the second is fruitful. What do I mean by the state-space of background assumptions? The best way to get a sense of what this would look like is to see the results of a previous study I conducted: State-space of drug effects. There I asked participants to "rate the effects of a drug they have taken" by selecting the degree to which certain phrases describe the effects of the drug. I then conducted factor analysis on the dataset and extracted 6 meaningful factors accounting for more than 50% of the variance. Finally, I mapped the centroid of the responses of each drug in the state-space defined, so that people could visually compare the relative position of all of the substances in a normalized 6-dimensional space.

I don't know what the state-space of background assumptions about consciousness looks like, but hopefully the analysis of the responses to this survey will reveal them.

The second part is specific to transhumanism, and I think it should concerns us all. To the extent that we are participating in the historical debate about how the future of humanity should be...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Optical Illusions
by RobinZ — 2015-07-28T22:13:32.370Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Optical Illusions

WHEN:
02 August 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

Crossposted from the mailing list:

We will be congregating in the courtyard between 3:00 to 3:30 p.m.; the meetup runs from 3:30 p.m. until closing.

We'll be meeting to talk, hang out, and ostensibly share and discuss optical illusions! So think of examples and bring them if you can.

I'll be bringing Opt, a children's book of optical illusions. And maybe more. Like the internet which has ALL THE OPTICAL ILLUSIONS.

Upcoming Meetups:

Aug 9: Fun & Games

Aug 16: Mini Talks

Aug 23: Plant & Animal Breeding

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Optical Illusions
Immortality Roadmap
by turchin — 2015-07-28T21:27:19.568Z

Added: Direct link on pdf: http://immortality-roadmap.com/IMMORTEN.pdf

A lot of people value indefinite life extension, but most have their own preferred method of achieving it. The goal of this map is to present all known ways of radical life extension in an orderly and useful way.

A rational person could choose to implement all of these plans or to concentrate only on one of them, depending on his available resources, age and situation. Such actions may be personal or social; both are necessary.

The roadmap consists of several plans; each of them acts as insurance in the case of failure of the previous plan. (The roadmap has a similar structure to the "Plan of action to prevent human extinction risks".) The first two plans contain two rows, one of which represents personal actions or medical procedures, and the other represents any collective activity required.

Plan A. The most obvious way to reach immortality is to survive until the creation of Friendly AI; in that case if you are young enough and optimistic enough, you can simply do nothing – or just fund MIRI. However, if you are older, you have to jump from one method of life extension to the next as they become available. So plan A is a relay race of life extension methods, until the problem of death is solved.

This plan includes actions to defeat aging, to grow and replace diseased organs with new bioengineered ones, to get a nanotech body and in the end to be scanned into a computer. It is an optimized sequence of events, and depends on two things – your personal actions (such as regular medical checkups), and collective actions such as civil activism and scientific research funding.

Plan B. However, if Plan A fails, i.e. if you die before the creation of superintelligence, there is Plan B, which is cryonics. Some simple steps can be taken now, such as calling your nearest cryocompany about a contract.

Plan C. Unfortunately, cryonics could also fail, and in that case Plan C is invoked. Of course it is much worse – less reliable and less proven. Plan C is so-called digital immortality, where one could be returned to life based on existing recorded information about that person. It is not a particularly good plan, because we are not sure how to solve the identity problem which will arise, and we don’t know if the collected amount of information would be enough. But ...
Meetup : Bi-weekly Frankfurt Meetup
by Janko — 2015-07-28T18:53:54.072Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bi-weekly Frankfurt Meetup

WHEN:
01 January 2019 07:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Frankfurt/Main

This is a long term meetup announcement for Frankfurt. We're not sure we'll actually meet on the date given here, but there'll definitely be meetups (usually bi-weekly) in the meantime.

Please join our mailing list for details.

We decided to focus more on the core ideas of lesswrong by going through Eliezer's book Rationality: From AI to Zombies. The planned chapters for the next meetup can be found in the mailing list. It will be an open discussion rather than a presentation. I encourage you to have a look at a few of the linked posts beforehand. :-)

Other topics are:

short summaries of interesting books anyone of us had read

Some games like Zendo

hope to see you

Janko

Discussion article for the meetup : Bi-weekly Frankfurt Meetup
The Dice Room, Human Extinction, and Consistency of Bayesian Probability Theory
by ksvanhorn — 2015-07-28T16:27:03.328Z

I'm sure that many of you here have read Quantum Computing Since Democritus. In the chapter on the anthropic principle the author presents the Dice Room scenario as a metaphor for human extinction. The Dice Room scenario is this:

1. You are in a world with a very, very large population (potentially unbounded.)

2. There is a madman who kidnaps 10 people and puts them in a room.

3. The madman rolls two dice. If they come up snake eyes (both ones) then he murders everyone.

4. Otherwise he releases everyone, then goes out and kidnaps 10 times as many people as before, and returns to step 3.

The question is this: if you are one of the people kidnapped at some point, what is your probability of dying? Assume you don't know how many rounds of kidnappings have preceded yours.

As a metaphor for human extinction, think of the population of this world as being all humans who ever have or ever may live, each batch of kidnap victims as a generation of humanity, and rolling snake eyes as an extinction event.
The book gives two arguments, which are both purported to be examples of Bayesian reasoning:

1. The "proximate risk" argument says that your probability of dying is just the prior probability that the madman rolls snake eyes for your batch of kidnap victims -- 1/36.

2. The "proportion murdered" argument says that about 9/10 of all people who ever go into the Dice Room die, so your probability of dying is about 9/10.

Obviously this is a problem. Different decompositions of a problem should give the same answer, as long as they're based on the same information.
I claim that the "proportion murdered" argument is wrong. Here's why. Let pi(t) be the prior probability that you are in batch t of kidnap victims. The proportion murdered argument relies on the property that pi(t) increases exponentially with t: pi(t+1) = 10 * pi(t). If the madman murders at step t, then your probability of being in batch t is
pi(t) / SUM(u: 1 <= u <= t: pi(u))
and, if pi(u+1) = 10 * pi(u) for all u < t, then this does indeed work out to about 9/10. But the values pi(t) must sum to 1; thus they cannot increase indefinitely, and in fact it must be that pi(t) -> 0 as t -> infinity. This is where the "proportion murdered" argument falls apart.
For a more detailed analysis, take a look at

http://bayesium.com/doomsday-and-the-dice-room-murders/

This forum has a lot of very smart peop...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
by rocurley — 2015-07-28T04:23:33.520Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks

WHEN:
03 August 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We'll be meeting to give/listen to short talks. Planning isn't necessary: these are not expected to be polished.

I can be reached at 301-458-0764 if you need help getting in. As always, feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
Meetup : Canberra: Guilt
by DanielFilan — 2015-07-27T09:39:18.923Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Guilt

WHEN:
08 August 2015 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
70/10 Thynne St, Bruce, ACT

What's guilt good for? How can we use it, or get rid of it if we don't find it useful? Nate Soares, blogging at Minding Our Way, is writing a series of blog posts on this issue. In this meetup, we will discuss the articles starting at Working yourself ragged is not a virtue, until the end of the series, or the last post in the series to be published before the meetup, whichever happens first. We will be discussing these posts over vegan snacks.
General meetup info:
* If you use Facebook, please join our group.
* Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late.

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Guilt
Open Thread, Jul. 27 - Aug 02, 2015
by MrMind — 2015-07-27T07:16:38.332Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Meetup : Rationality Reading Group (65-70)
by SeekingEternity — 2015-07-27T05:30:23.767Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Reading Group (65-70)

WHEN:
27 July 2015 06:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Paul G. Allen Center (185 Stevens Way, Seattle, WA) Room 503

Reading group for Yudkowsky's "Rationality: AI to Zombies", which is basically an organized and updated version of the Sequences from LW (see http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences).

The group meets to discuss the topics in the book, how to apply and benefit from them, and related topics in areas like cognitive biases, applied rationality, and effective altruism. You can get a copy of the book here: https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/

The reading list for this week is two topics from the "Politics and Rationality" section, and four topics from the "Against Rationalization" section, both from Book II, "How To Actually Change Your Mind". They are (actually 65-70, LW's auto-formatting is screwing it up):

Rationality and the English Language

Human Evil and Muddled Thinking

Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

Update Yourself Incrementally

One Argument Against An Army

The Bottom Line

We previously covered the "Map and territory" sequence a few months ago, but please don't feel a need to have read everything up to this point to participate in the group.

Event is also on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1460283954292194/

We're meeting on the 5th floor. If you show up and the door into the room is locked, knock and look around for us elsewhere on the fifth floor if nobody answers. If the doors to the building are locked, try the other ones and don't believe the little red lights; try anyway. If the doors are, in fact, locked, we'll try to have somebody to let people in.

There's usually snacks at the meetup, though feel free to bring something. We usually get dinner afterward, around 9PM or so.

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Reading Group (65-70)