trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
FHI is hiring researchers!
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-12-23T22:46:45.016Z

The Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford invites applications for four research positions. We seek outstanding applicants with backgrounds that could include computer science, mathematics, economics, technology policy, and/or philosophy.
The Future of Humanity Institute is a leading research centre in the University of Oxford looking at big-picture questions for human civilization. We seek to focus our work where we can make the greatest positive difference. Our researchers regularly collaborate with governments from around the world and key industry groups working on artificial intelligence. To read more about the institute’s research activities, please see http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/research-areas/.
1. Research Fellow – AI – Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre, Future of Humanity Institute (Vacancy ID# 121242). We are seeking expertise in the technical aspects of AI safety, including a solid understanding of present-day academic and industrial research frontiers, machine learning development, and knowledge of academic and industry stakeholders and groups. The fellow is expected to have the knowledge and skills to advance the state of the art in proposed solutions to the “control problem.” This person should have a technical background, for example, in computer science, mathematics, or statistics. Candidates with a very strong machine learning or mathematics background are encouraged to apply even if they do not have experience with AI safety topics, assuming they are willing to switch to this subfield. Applications are due by Noon 6 January 2016. You can apply for this position through the Oxford recruitment website at http://bit.ly/1M11RbY.
2. Research Fellow – AI Policy – Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre, Future of Humanity Institute (Vacancy ID# 121241). We are looking for someone with expertise relevant to assessing the socio-economic and strategic impacts of future technologies, identifying key issues and potential risks, and rigorously analysing policy options for responding to these challenges. This person might have an economics, political science, social science, or risk analysis background. Applications are due by Noon 6 January 2016. You can apply for this position through the Oxford recruitment website at http://bit...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Holidays & Socialization
by RobinZ — 2015-12-23T22:30:40.139Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Holidays & Socialization

WHEN:
27 December 2015 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center

x-posted from list. Gathering in courtyard from 3:00pm, hard start 3:30pm - until closing (7:00 pm).

We'll be meeting to hang out, socialize, and converse.

(Happy holidays!)

Upcoming meetups:

Jan. 3: Meta Meetup

Jan. 10: Fun & Games

Jan. 17: Economics Discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Holidays & Socialization
Voiceofra is banned
by NancyLebovitz — 2015-12-23T18:29:35.467Z

I've gotten sufficient evidence from support that voiceofra has been doing retributive downvoting. I've banned them without prior notice because I'm not giving them more chances to downvote.

I'm thinking of something like not letting anyone give more than 5 downvotes/week for content which is more than a month old. The numbers and the time period are tentative-- this isn't my ideal rule. This is probably technically possible. However, my impression is that highly specific rules like that are an invitation to gaming the rules.

I would rather just make spiteful down-voting impossible (or maybe make it expensive) rather than trying to find out who's doing it. Admittedly, putting up barriers to downvoting for past comments doesn't solve the problem of people who down-vote everything, but at least people who downvote current material are easier to notice.

Any thoughts about technical solutions to excessive down-voting of past material?
Giving What We Can pledge campaign 2015
by Smaug123 — 2015-12-23T13:57:32.512Z

If you’ve been planning to get around to maybe thinking about Effective Altruism, now is a great time to get consider making a commitment. As part of Giving What We Can's pledge campaign, people are signing the Giving What We Can pledge - to donate 10% of their future income to the charities they believe will do the most good in the world. It is based on the belief that we can make a real difference by thoroughly assessing evidence and contributing some of our resources to address the most pressing global concerns. The pledge is not legally binding, but is a public declaration of a lasting commitment to the cause. For anyone not ready to make the full commitment to taking the pledge, people are also signing up to 'Try Giving' as part of the campaign - where you commit to donate an amount for a finite time.
Last year in a similar event over 80 people took the pledge, which resulted in almost $19,000,000 being pledged to effective charities. To give you an idea of what this could achieve, a recent GiveWell estimate suggests that, if donated today to the Against Malaria Foundation, this amount could be expected to buy and distribute about 3.5 million bednets and avert the loss of almost 6700 lives (though there is much uncertainty around these figures).
If you think the campaign is a good idea and you'd like more people to hear about it, it would be a great help if you invited anyone you think would be interested in the event; also if you supported the campaign on Thunderclap. If you'd like to help out even more, then join our pledge event organisation Facebook group.
Any questions about the pledge, the campaign, or anything related are more than welcome.

About Giving What We Can: GWWC is a meta-charity which researches and evaluates charities on the basis of the impact they have, and also a community with GWWC chapters across the world. It is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism and was co-founded by a LessWronger.
Survey: What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know?
by Academian — 2015-12-23T07:32:52.307Z

Warning: people will be trying to be pessimistic here. Don't read this if you don't want to be reminded of scary outcomes.

Request: if you get an idea that you think might be too scary to post publicly even under the above warning, but you are willing to send it to me in a private message to aid in my personal decision-making, then please do :)

Motivation:

I like cryonics. According to my parents and grandmother, I started talking about building an AI to help with medical research to revive frozen dead people when I was about 10 years old, and my memory agrees. I began experimenting with freeing and unfreezing insects, and figured based on some positive results that it was physically possible to preserve life in a frozen state. Cool!

But now that I'm in middle of convincing some folks I know to sign up for cryonics, I want to do due-diligence on some of the vague, hard-to-verbalize aversions they have to doing it. This way, I can help them plan contingencies for / hedges against those aversions if possible, thereby making cryonics more viable for them, and maybe avoid accidentally persuading people do cryonics when it really isn't right for them (yes, I think that can actually happen).

There's already been a post on far negative outcomes, and another one on why cryonics maybe isn't worth it. But what I really want to do here is conduct an interactive survey to compute which disutilities should be taken most seriously when talking to a new person about cryonics, to avoid accidentally persuading them into making a wrong-for-them decision.

And for that, what I really want to ask is:

What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know of?

Examples:

(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me. She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.

(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.

I think on reflection I'd consider (1) to be around 10x and maybe 100x more likely than (2)*, but depending on your preferenc...
Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December
by Bound_up — 2015-12-23T05:31:34.030Z

The most recent post in December's Stupid Questions article is from the 11th.

I suppose as the article's been pushed further down the list of new articles, it's had less exposure, so here's another one for the rest of December.

Plus I have a few questions, so I'll get it kicked off.

It was said in the last one, and it's good advice, I think:

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
Meetup : MIRIx: Sleeping Beauty discussion 
by agilecaveman — 2015-12-23T04:29:59.965Z

Discussion article for the meetup : MIRIx: Sleeping Beauty discussion

WHEN:
27 December 2015 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
109 15th ave, Seattle, WA

One important question that frequently comes up in considering probabilities and decision making processes is how do we estimate probabilities that are entangled with our own existence, aka, anthropic probabilities. An even broader question is the notion of probability an actually correct philosophical notion in this case or is the notion of a decision, algorithm or utility more fundamental?

I want to actually try and tackle a current unsolved problem (Sleeping Beauty) and attempt to understand it better and see if any progress can be made on it. There are several issues that are brought up here:
a) What is the “correct probability”? Can we make situations in which one is better than another?
b) Do we abandon probability? How do we update on new data in the case?
c) Does considering “self” as algorithm vs “self” as instance make a difference?

Discussion article for the meetup : MIRIx: Sleeping Beauty discussion
Meetup : Donation Decision Day
by agilecaveman — 2015-12-23T04:03:26.349Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Donation Decision Day

WHEN:
26 December 2015 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
425 Harvard Ave E, Seattle, Washington, 98102

Come and work on your personal donation decisions; with a partner or by yourself. Do research, run the numbers, and if you run into trouble, have a 1-on-1 discussion with someone about it.
Facebook event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1529586254029715/

Discussion article for the meetup : Donation Decision Day
Support Promoting Effective Giving 
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2015-12-22T16:04:08.866Z

This is cross-posted from the EA Forum and will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists

Brief Summary

This post describes the work of Intentional Insights to promote EA-style effective giving ideas to a broad audience in order to channel people's giving to effective charities. It does not address the kind of work that Intentional Insights does to promote rationality outside of Effective Altruism, which is a distinct topic, addressed in recent posts (1, 2, 3). InIn sees promoting effective giving as a really important area of our work, one that contributes both to promoting rational thinking and thus raising the sanity waterline, and to what CFAR refers to as "Do-Gooding," meaning making the world a better place and advancing human flourishing.

This post first shares the methods InIn uses to promote effective giving, describes the outcomes of InIn's work, presents various collaborations with other organizations, describes InIn's financials, and shares its plans for the future, within the sphere of EA. The post is explicitly a request for support, and makes a case for how by contributing your time and talents, and/or your money, to InIn as an EA meta-charity you can make a bigger difference in the world to advance human flourishing than by contributing to a GiveWell-recommended direct-action charity. The point of doing so is that an EA you should not contribute your resources to InIn as a meta-charity if you don't think that by doing so you can do more good for the world than by contributing to a GiveWell-recommended direct-action charity.

Full post

Introduction

Intentional Insights aims to spread EA-themed effective giving ideas to a broad audience, and channel the giving activities of non-EAs into effective charities endorsed by GiveWell. In other words, by contributing time and money to Intentional Insights, EAs can get the outcome of non-EAs giving to effective charities, multiplying the impact of their support to effective charities manifold. Moreover, you can support InIn with time as well as with money, while GiveWell-endorsed charities are generally best supported with money.

Methods

How does InIn promote effective giving? We use modern content marketing strategies and speak to people’s hearts as well as their heads. We distinguish promoting effective giving and individual EA organizations from promoting EA as a movem...
Deadly sins of software estimation
by NancyLebovitz — 2015-12-22T13:38:39.542Z

This is so remarkably sensible I think it deserves its own article.

It's a pdf of the slides from a lecture, and should help with the planning fallacy.

A few highlights: Distinguish between targets and estimates. Don't make estimates before you know very much about the project. Estimates are probability statements. Best assumption is that a new tool or method will lead to productivity loss.
In favour of total utilitarianism over average
by casebash — 2015-12-22T05:07:02.767Z

While it may be intuitive to reduce population ethics to a single lottery, this is incorrect; instead, it can only be reduced to n repeated lotteries, where n is the number of people...

This post will argue that within the framework of hedonic utilitarianism, total utilitarianism should be preferenced over average utilitarianism. Preference utilitarianism will be left to future work. We will imagine collections of single experience people (SEPs) who only have a single experience that gains or loses them a certain amount of utility

Both average and total utilitarianism begin with an axiom that seem obviously true. For total utilitarianism this axiom is: "It is good for a SEP with positive utility to occur if it doesn't affect anything else". This seems to be one of the most basic assumptions that one could choose to start with - it's practically equivalent to "It is good when good things occur". However, if it is true, then average utilitarianism is false, as a positive, but low utility SEP may bring the average utility down. It also leads to the sadistic conclusion, that if a large number of SEPs involve negative utility, we should add a SEP who suffers less over adding no-one. Total utilitarianism does lead to the repugnant conclusion, but contrary to perceptions, near zero, but still positive utility is not a state of terrible suffering like most people imagine. Instead it is a state where life is good and worth living on the whole.

On the other hand, average utilitarianism starts from its own "obviously true" axiom, that we should maximise the average expected utility for each person independent of the total utility. We note that average utilitarianism depends on a statement about aggregations (expected utility), while total utilitarianism depends on a statement about an individual occurrence that doesn't interact with any other SEPs. Given the complexities with aggregating utility, we should be more inclined towards trusting the statement about individual occurrences, then the one about a complex aggregate. This is far from conclusive, but I still believe that this is a useful exercise.

So why is average utilitarianism flawed? The strongest argument for average utilitarianism is the aforementioned "obviously true" assumption that we should maximise expected utility. Accepting this assumption would reduce the situation as follows:

Original situation...
In defense of philosophy
by casebash — 2015-12-22T01:53:37.945Z

LukeProg considers philosophy a diseased discipline. Firstly, he points out that continental and postmodern philosophy generally fail at being clear or rigourous. The problem with this objection, is that all groups have subgroups that are kind of crazy. Even the Rationalsphere has the reactionaries. That said, I would disagree with the notion that all continental philosophy lacks value. Some of Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's ideas are very interesting. There is a lot of unnecessarily complicated continental philosophy with very little substance, so I would agree with mainly focusing on analytical philosophy, but I haven't really read enough continental philosophy to comment on the proportion of interesting content to pointless dribble. I also agree that philosophy spends too much time looking back into the past; while some basic knowledge of the history of philosophy is important and history of philosophy of subjects should be available for those who are interested in it, philosophy should focus on the most convincing material for the most interesting and contentious questions.

That said, there is still a lot of value in the study of philosophy. A good first year philosophy course will provide students with an introduction to utilitarianism (through the trolley problem), libertarianism, the free-will debate, materialism vs dualism, Hume's Is-Ought distinction, Hume's critique of induction, Descartes radical skepticism (which is valuable until he tries to use the ontological argument), Occam's razor, Karl Popper's criterion of falsifiability, Rawl's original position, the Ship of Theseus, the Socratic method, stoicism (valuable in moderation) and Epicurius (his egoistic theory of philosophy is quite bad, but some of his thoughts on how to live a happy life are quite interesting). There will also be discussion of moral relativism, including critiques which should hopefully help some students see why complete, normative moral relativism is very philosophically unsatisfying. Contrarily to LukeProg, knowledge of the Gettier Problem improves one's epistemology because it shows that knowledge equals justified true belief is not a viable stance.

Unlike Less Wrong, the philosophers who run philosophy courses have to be able to argue that their courses are non-ideological, so it is necessary for them to include material that they may perceive to flawe

...
Meetup : San Antonio Meetup: CFAR Techniques
by Bryan-san — 2015-12-21T18:33:06.445Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup: CFAR Techniques

WHEN:
27 December 2015 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
12651 Vance Jackson Rd #118, San Antonio, TX 78230

Bubble tea, frozen yogurt, and discussion at Yumi Berry! All are welcome!

New Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong and meet the local community. Look for the sign that says Less Wrong!

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup: CFAR Techniques
Global catastrophic risks connected with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy
by turchin — 2015-12-21T12:20:42.309Z

I created new map: The map of global catastrophic risks connected with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

The map is interactive: if you press on the icons on the first page you will get detailed explanation of the topic. But it works only in pdf.

I hope it will make the map more readable but also will help to preserve all detailed information

You could download pdf with working links here: http://immortality-roadmap.com/nukerisk3bookmarks.pdf

Or you may read a presentation here: http://www.slideshare.net/avturchin/global-catastrophic-risks-connected-with-nuclear-weapons-and-energy

Old school map full of text is here: http://immortality-roadmap.com/nukerisk2.pdf

I would like to get a feedback about this new map type: Is it helping readability and understanding? Does it look more rational and convincing?

I include here jpg-screenshorts of the pdf, but working links are only in pdf.
Open thread, Dec. 21 - Dec. 27, 2015
by MrMind — 2015-12-21T07:56:58.570Z

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.
Modal Chicken
by Gram_Stone — 2015-12-20T22:10:58.472Z

I thought it might be good fun to try doing modal chicken. This is my first time getting into the dirty technical details of MIRI's research, so do tolerate and point out misunderstandings.

Chicken is a game where two drivers drive towards each other on a collision course: one must swerve, or both die in the crash, but if one driver swerves and the other does not, the one who swerved will be called a "chicken," and lose social status. Chicken differs from the Prisoner's Dilemma in that the sucker's payoff is preferable to the punishment payoff, as opposed to the converse. (If your opponent defects, it is more preferable to defect than to cooperate. If your opponent doesn't swerve, it is more preferable to swerve than not to swerve.) That is, Chicken is an anti-coordination game: a game in which it is mutually beneficial for the players to play different strategies. We define the payoff matrix as follows:

In the game of Chicken, we want to define agents that always swerve against themselves, and that only swerve if their opponents don't swerve against them. Let's try defining some modal agents with these properties.

As usual, the agents herein are defined as modal formulas in Godel-Lob provability logic. In particular, our ''agents'' will be formulas in Peano Arithmetic, and our criterion for action will be the existence of a finite proof in the tower of formal systems PA+n, where PA is Peano Arithmetic, and PA+(n+1) is the formal system whose axioms are the axioms of PA+n, plus the axiom that PA+n is consistent.

Fix a particular Godel numbering scheme, and let and each denote well-formed formulas with one free variable. Then let denote the formula where we replace each instance of the free variable in with the Godel number of . If such a formula holds in the standard model of Peano Arithmetic, we interpret that as swerving against ; if its negation holds, we interpret that as not swerving against . In particular, we will prove theorems in PA+n to establish whether the agents we discuss swerve or don't swerve against one another. Thus we can regard such formulas of arithmetic as decision-theoretic agents, and we will use ''source code'' to refer to their Godel numbers. and will be used interchangeably with and .

Some very simple agents are worth defining first, like SwerveBot, the modal agent that always swerves:

Definition 1 (SwerveBot)....