trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
New LW Meetup: Cologne
by FrankAdamek — 2015-03-20T15:52:08.538Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on March 13th. The following week's summary is here.

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

[Basel] Effective Altruism Meetup Switzerland: 21 March 2015 06:00PM
[Cologne] HPMOR wrap party cologne / Cologne LW meetup (restart): 14 March 2015 04:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta HPMOR Wrap Party: 14 March 2015 07:00PM
Bangalore meetup + pi-day wrap party: 14 March 2015 11:00AM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
[Glasgow] LessWrong Scotland: 15 March 2015 03:00PM
Frankfurt Pub Social: 18 March 2015 07:00PM
Israel: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Pi Day Wrap Party: 14 March 2015 08:30PM
[Los Angeles] HPMOR Wrap Party - Los Angeles: 14 March 2015 06:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Effective Altruism for the masses: 15 March 2015 02:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Small concrete actions you could take: 29 March 2015 01:00PM
Pittsburgh HPMoR Wrap Party: 14 March 2015 12:00PM
Prague - setting up: 23 March 2015 07:30PM
Umbc meetup : 24 March 2015 04:56PM

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 - HPMoR Wrap Party: 14 March 2015 05:00PM
Brussels: March meetup (1PM) + Harry Potter MoR Party (6PM): 14 March 2015 01:00PM
Canberra HPMOR Wrap Party!: 15 March 2015 06:00PM
Durham, NC (RTLW) Discussion Meetup: 19 March 2026 06:00PM
Moscow meetup: time perception, communication frameworks, stories, fallacies: 15 March 2015 02:00PM
Seattle Sequences group: Mysterious Answers 4: 23 March 2015 06:30PM
[Sydney] HPMOR Wrap Party! - Sydney Edition: 15 March 2015 06:00PM
Sydney Meetup - March - Bring a Newbie!: 25 March 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Skill Training Part 2: 12 April 2015 05:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 14 March 2015 03:00PM
[Vienna] Effective Altruism Meetup Vienna: 19 March 2015 07:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks: 15 March 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Co...
Meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's
by Vaniver — 2015-03-20T15:12:31.376Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's

WHEN:
09 July 2016 01:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
411 E 43rd St, Austin, TX 78751

The next meetup is July 9th, 2016 at 1:30PM at Quack's 43rd Street Bakery (don't worry, they've also got coffee). We'll likely be inside, to the right. I might have a sign with the LW blog header printed on it. I hope to see you there!

If you have any questions or want to get my phone number to make sure you find us, please send me a private message. I'll notice and respond to those much more quickly than I'll notice comments on this meetup announcement.

We have a Google Group here that we use for announcements (like our weekly group dinner in a private residence), as well as a Facebook Group.

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's
Closest stable alternative preferences
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-03-20T12:41:55.523Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

There's a result that's almost a theorem, which is that an agent that is an expected utility maximiser, is an agent that is stable under self-modification (or the creation of successor sub-agents).

Of course, this needs to be for "reasonable" utility, where no other agent cares about the internal structure of the agent (just its decisions), where the agent is not under any "social" pressure to make itself into something different, where the boundedness of the agent itself doesn't affect its motivations, and where issues of "self-trust" and acausal trade don't affect it in relevant ways, etc...

So quite a lot of caveats, but the result is somewhat stronger in the opposite direction: an agent that is not an expected utility maximiser is under pressure to self-modify itself into one that is. Or, more correctly, into an agent that is isomorphic with an expected utility maximiser (an important distinction).

What is this "pressure" agent are "under"? The known result is that if an agent obeys four simple axioms, then its behaviour must be isomorphic with an expected utility maximiser. If we assume the Completeness axiom (trivial) and Continuity (subtle), then violations of Transitivity or Independence correspond to situations where the agent has been money pumped - lost resources or power for no gain at all. The more likely the agent is to face these situations, the more pressure they're under to behave as an expected utility maximiser, or simply lose out.

Unbounded agents

I have two models for how idealised agents could deal with this sort of pressure. The first, post-hoc, is the unlosing agent I described here. The agent follows whatever preferences it had, but kept track of its past decisions, and whenever it was in a position to violate transitivity or independence in a way that it would suffer from, it makes another decision instead.

Another, pre-hoc, way of dealing with this is to make an "ultra choice" and choose between not decisions, but all possible input output maps (equivalently, between all possible decision algorithms), looking to the expected consequences of each one. This reduces the choices to a single choice, where issues of transitivity or independence need not necessarily apply.

Bounded agents

Actual agents will be bounded, unlikely to be able to store and consult their entire history ...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Rationalist Taboo
by RobinZ — 2015-03-20T01:07:34.577Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Rationalist Taboo

WHEN:
22 March 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
The Reynolds Center

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to play Rationalist Taboo on various ideas. As usual, we will congregate between 3:00 to 3:30, begin giving talks at 3:30, and continue as long as people are interested or until closing, whichever comes first.

Rationalist Taboo is an exercise where you take a key word or phrase in a conversation and replace it with its meaning. For example, instead of saying, "That's a completely unfair way to resolve this dispute", you might taboo 'unfair' and say, "That resolution of this dispute gives the one person way more of what they want than the other in a place where there's no just reason we should" - a statement which explains to the person you're addressing what, exactly, would make the resolution 'fair' and why you believe it is not. Our hope with this meetup is to look at a number of examples of this technique to help members see when it may be helpful and how to use it in practice.

WMATA has no major track work scheduled; Orange, Silver, Blue, and Yellow Line trains will run every 18 minutes. The Verizon Center calendar for March 22 has Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey presents Legends shows scheduled for 11:30, 3:30, and 7:30.

Upcoming meetups:

Mar. 29: Singing Meetup (weather permitting; Fun & Games will be fallback topic)

Apr. 5: Fun & Games (bring games, play games, converse, socialize, or any combination thereof)

Apr. 12: Cherry Blossoms (take a walk and look at the cherry blossoms)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Rationalist Taboo
New forum for MIRI research: Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum
by orthonormal — 2015-03-20T00:35:07.071Z

Today, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is launching a new forum for research discussion: the Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum! It's already been seeded with a bunch of new work on MIRI topics from the last few months.

We've covered most of the (what, why, how) subjects on the forum's new welcome post and the How to Contribute page, but this post is an easy place to comment if you have further questions (or if, maths forbid, there are technical issues with the forum instead of on it).

But before that, go ahead and check it out!

(Major thanks to Benja Fallenstein, Alice Monday, and Elliott Jin for their work on the forum code, and to all the contributors so far!)

EDIT 3/22: Jessica Taylor, Benja Fallenstein, and I wrote forum digest posts summarizing and linking to recent work (on the IAFF and elsewhere) on reflective oracle machines, on corrigibility, utility indifference, and related control ideas, and on updateless decision theory and the logic of provability, respectively! These are pretty excellent resources for reading up on those topics, in my biased opinion.
Forum Digest: Updateless Decision Theory
by orthonormal — 2015-03-20T00:22:06.000Z

Summary: This is a quick expository recap, with links, of the posts on this forum on the topic of updateless decision theory, through 3/19/15. Read this if you want to learn more about UDT, or if you're curious about what we've been working on lately!

Introduction

Updateless decision theory (henceforth UDT) is a proposed algorithm for making good decisions in a world that can contain predictions and other echoes of the agent's decision algorithm. It is motivated by a set of Newcomblike problems on which the classical decision theories (evidential decision theory and causal decision theory) have known failure modes. For more context and motivation for UDT, see the MIRI research document Toward Idealized Decision Theory.

Philosophically speaking, UDT looks over all possible strategies (maps from "agent observes X" to "agent does Y"), picks the global strategy that would be best for all copies of UDT in aggregate, and then performs the action that the strategy recommends for an agent in its position. (One explanation for choosing strategies rather than actions is that it defends against blackmail: if you are being blackmailed, then paying up appears to be the better action; but since the strategy of refusing to pay deters all savvy blackmailers, UDT knowably refuses to pay up and thus is rarely blackmailed. Or so the theory goes.)

This leads to some interesting ambiguities, most importantly the counterfactuals about "what would happen" if the deterministic UDT algorithm chose strategy B, when in fact it will end up choosing strategy A. These logical counterfactuals can be confronted straightforwardly in mathematical models by trying to formally prove that if UDT selects strategy S, then the universe is in a state of utility U. But then one faces the problem of spurious counterfactuals ("if the agent chose X then Y would happen", which is only logically valid because we can prove that the agent does not choose X), which lead to further complications.

The Gödel-Löb modal logic GL (also called provability logic) allows us to construct a good heuristic model of UDT in a mathematical universe, using Gödel numbering and quining to capture self-reference, and evaluating counterfactuals via unbounded proof searches (i.e. a halting oracle). This "modal UDT" has some interesting properties: for instance, it is provably optimal on decision problems that "only care what it do

...
Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management
by James_Miller — 2015-03-19T17:57:22.558Z

1. Start investing early in life.

The power of compound interest means you will have much more money at retirement if you start investing early in your career. For example, imagine that at age eighteen you invest $1,000 and earn an 8% return per year. At age seventy you will have $54,706. In contrast, if you make the same investment at age fifty you will have a paltry $4,661 when you turn seventy.

Many people who haven't saved for retirement panic upon reaching middle age. So if you are young don't think that saving today will help you only when you retire, but know that such savings will give you greater peace of mind when you turn forty.

When evaluating potential marriage partners give bonus points to those who have a history of saving. Do this not because you want to marry into wealth, but because you should want to marry someone who has discipline, intelligence and foresight.

2. Maintain a diversified portfolio.

By purchasing many different types of investments you reduce your financial risk. Even a single seemingly stable stock can easily fall by 70% in a single year. In contrast, a broad investment portfolio is extremely unlikely to decline in value by such a gigantic amount unless something truly horrible happens to the entire world's economy. As the saying goes, "don't put all of your eggs in one basket."

3. Consider buying an index fund.

Index funds provide cheap and easy ways to acquire a diversified stock portfolio. An index fund is a mutual fund that invests in every stock in its index. So, for example, an S&P 500 index fund will purchase all 500 stocks in the S&P 500 index, which consists of the 500 largest publicly traded stocks in the United States.

4. Don't forget about foreign stocks.

To achieve optimal portfolio diversification you need to invest in foreign stocks. The bigger a nation's economy, the more money you should put in its stock market. You can buy index funds that invest in foreign stocks. By investing in diverse foreign securities from many nations you will probably reduce the chance that your portfolio will suffer a sudden huge decline.

5. Don't try to out-guess the market.

Ordinary inve...
Good forum for investing?
by roland — 2015-03-19T17:16:00.579Z

Hello I'm looking for the LW on investing advice. Any suggestions? Thanks.

EDIT:

Several commenters gave the standard advice of "buy index funds". If you bought into the Nikkei between 87 and 94 you would have made a loss or very little gains until now(30 years later). So I would appreciate some more in depth discussion regarding when is it good to invest into index funds? If you search in reddit/r/investing you will find more nuanced point of views.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EN225+Interactive#%7B%22range%22%3A%22max%22%2C%22scale%22%3A%22linear%22%7D

In general index funds will reflect the underlying economy, in the case of the US it was a growing economy for the most part of the 20th century, so the index fund would be good advice in that time period. I have a hard time believing that it is still good advice now, when the economy is retracting or stagnating.

TLDR: reddit/r/investing has more nuanced discussions.
Meetup : Boston: Unconference
by Anders_H — 2015-03-19T16:58:45.803Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston: Unconference

WHEN:
05 April 2015 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
98 elm street somerville

It's an Unconference! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference
There will be short discussions on a variety of topics, as decided by attendees at the beginning of the meetup. Think about what topics you would like to discuss or talk about!
Exact format TBD. Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups start at 3:30pm on the 1st and 3rd Sunday at the Citadel in Porter Sq, at 98 Elm St, apt 1, Somerville. We also have last Wednesday meetups at the Citadel at 7pm.
Our default schedule is as follows:
—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation. This starts at 3:30; before then, Citadel residents will be busy. Looking forward to seeing you at 3:30! —Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 4pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes. —Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups. —Phase 4: Dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston: Unconference
Why do all the considerations point the same way?
by KatjaGrace — 2015-03-19T06:17:00.000Z

Suppose you have a lot of reasons to believe a thing, and no good reasons to not believe it. Should this make you more or less likely to believe it, relative to a case where the considerations are a bit more mixed?

At first glance, it appears you should believe it more, since things with lots of good reasons for them and no reasons against them tend to be true.

However often when people have many reasons for a thing and no reasons against it, it is because they have been collecting them, probably unintentionally. Humans seem to do this when they have a belief they care about.

For instance, when I was younger I could have told you fifteen reasons that logging old growth forests in Tasmania was harmful. They were more economically valuable as a tourism attraction, and the logging was perpetuating corruption, and the forests harbored endangered species, and so on. Somehow, coincidentally, at least almost all the considerations aligned.

For another instance, vegetarians often think that vegetarianism is very easy, and healthy, and moral, and good for the environment, and more enjoyable. Meat eaters often think that vegetarianism is inconvenient, and unhealthy, and not morally important, and worse for the environment in certain ways, and unpleasant. It’s even less likely that all the considerations align, but in random different directions depending on who does the set of unbiased analyses. I think here both groups are aware of some people on the other side doing this.

This seems common enough that if you find yourself with a collection of considerations all pointing in one direction, you should be somewhat worried.

On the other hand, often you have lots of aligned reasons because there is some fundamental reason behind them all. For instance, if you can’t prove a statement in math, because every different way you can think of to try to prove it fails, this may be because it is false. Here you expect to get entirely evidence pointing in one direction.

A less clear case is whether exercise is good. It seems there are lots of different good reasons to exercise. But all of them go through you being healthy, so this is not so surprising — you will look better, you will feel better, you will live for longer, you will be more sane and happy.

Some situations are more conducive to evidence all pointing one way, or coming out in different directions. If the question ...
Meetup : London Newcomers-Are-Especially-Welcome Meetup, March 29th
by sixes_and_sevens — 2015-03-18T23:02:20.797Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Newcomers-Are-Especially-Welcome Meetup, March 29th

WHEN:
29 March 2015 01:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Holborn, London

We recently had an HP:MoR wrap party in London which had a lot of attendees we'd never met before, with varying degrees of familiarity with Less Wrong. The next London Less Wrong meetup will therefore officially be the Newcomers Are Especially Welcome Meetup. If you live in or near London, and you've thought about coming to the Less Wrong meetups but have never gotten round to it, you should definitely come to this one. We would love to meet you.

The venue is the Shakespeare's Head near Holborn tube station, from 2pm. We'll normally have some sign attesting to the group's identity, and usually try to get one of the large circular tables near the back of the pub. If you get lost, ring or text 07887 718458.

About London LessWrong:

We're currently running meetups every other Sunday, and tend to get between 5 and 15 attendees. Most of our meetups default to unstructured social discussion on LessWrongy subjects, though we occasionally have special topics, events or activities. Sometimes we play games.

We have a Google Group and a Facebook group where we plan and discuss stuff. We would be extraordinarily pleased if you joined them.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Newcomers-Are-Especially-Welcome Meetup, March 29th
Meetup : Moscow LW lecture centre meetup
by Alexander230 — 2015-03-18T21:10:01.805Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW lecture centre meetup

WHEN:
22 March 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Strelbishensky per., 10

Welcome to the next open lecture centre meetup!

Our plan:

"Investigation of a belief" excercise ( https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/--cmNMJhG0OIx ).

Fallacymania game ( https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/Fallacymania--neGfMe9MFjH ).

Meetup schedule is in hackpad: https://lw-msk-lect.hackpad.com/-22--12nnyRVeCwz

Come to Strelbishensky per., 10, ap.60. 3rd porch, door code 60B3112, 5th floor. Nearest metro station is Vystavochnaya. If you are lost, call Sasha at 8-905-527-30-82. Meetup begins at 14:00, the length is 2 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW lecture centre meetup
Best Explainers on Different Subjects
by JMiller — 2015-03-18T20:32:55.958Z

There are many recommended reading threads on lesswrong. Some examples include: Math, Textbooks and Rationality.

I am looking to compile another such thread, this time aimed at "exceptional explainers" and their works. For example, I find Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter to be one such book.

Please list out other authors and books which you think are wonderfully written, in such a way that maximizes communication and explanation to laypeople in the given field. For example:

Physics: Richard Feynman - QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

Thank you,

Jeremy
Single-bit reflective oracles are enough
by Benya_Fallenstein — 2015-03-17T23:00:24.000Z

The latest version on this forum of the reflective oracle formalism uses multibit oracles. These oracles are defined on probabilistic oracle machines with advance-only output tapes, and answer queries of the form, "Does machine M, when run on this same oracle, produce output starting with the bitstring →x with probability at least p?" (If M sometimes goes into an infinite loop after outputting some prefix of →x, the oracle behaves as if M outputs additional bits according to some arbitrary but fixed probability distribution; see the above post for details.)

The reason for using multibit oracles was that we wanted to define versions of Solomonoff induction and AIXI, and these need to deal with hypotheses (environments) that produce infinite amounts of output, not just single bits. However, when we recently wrote up the details of this, we realized that there was a simple way to define these in a way that doesn't need more than a single-bit oracle! (We'll publish a draft papers with the details soon; in the meantime, the single-bit formalism we use can be obtained by taking the multibit oracles from the post linked above, and only querying them about single bits of output.)

How does this work? Consider Solomonoff induction. The trick is to consider a hypothesis to be a probabilistic oracle machine which takes all the bits outputted so far as input, and outputs only the next bit. This way, we only need to apply the single-bit oracle in the most straightforward possible way in order to get the conditional probability of the next bit! (And if we can get the conditional probabilities, we can of course easily compute the unconditional probabilities of any finite bitstring.)

The way we discovered this was by mulling the best way to go from reflective Solomonoff induction to reflective AIXI. With the above formalism, it's easy: An environment is a machine which takes as input the entire history so far (i.e., sequence of observations and actions), and a prefix of the bitstring representing the next observation, and which outputs the next bit of that observation. With this definition, again, we can easily compute the conditional probabilities.

Details to follow in the paper drafts, which I hope we'll have online within the next week.