trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[link] I Was Wrong, and So Are You 
by  — 2011-11-09T16:25:00.975Z

A article in the Atlantic, linked to by someone on the unofficial LW IRC channel caught my eye. Nothing all that new for LessWrong readers, but still it is good to see any mention of such biases in mainstream media.

I Was Wrong, and So Are You

A libertarian economist retracts a swipe at the left—after discovering that our political leanings leave us more biased than we think.

...

You may have noticed that several of the statements we analyzed implicitly challenge positions held by the left, while none specifically challenges conservative or libertarian positions. A great deal of research shows that people are more likely to heed information that supports their prior positions, and discard or discount contrary information. Suppose that on some public issue, Anne favors position A, and Burt favors position B. Anne is more likely than Burt to agree with statements that support A, and to disagree with statements that support B, because doing so simplifies her case for favoring A. Otherwise, she would have to make a concession to the opposing side. Psychologists would count this tendency as a manifestation of “myside bias,” or “confirmation bias.”

Buturovic and I openly acknowledged that the set of eight statements was biased. But these were the statements we had available to us. And as we explained in the paper, some of them—including those on professional licensing, standard of living, monopoly, and trade—did not appear to fit neatly into a partisan debate. Yet even on those, respondents on the left fared worst. What’s more, in separate research, Buturovic found that the respondents themselves either had difficulty classifying some of the statements on an ideological scale, or simply believed those statements were not, prima facie, ideological. So while we thought the results were probably exaggerated because of the bias in the survey, we nonetheless felt that they were telling.

Buturovic and I largely refrained from replying to the criticism (much of which focused on myside bias) that followed publication of the article. Instead, we planned a second survey that would balance the first one by including questions that would challenge conservative and/or libertarian positions.

...

Buturovic began putting all 17 questions to a new group of respondents last December. I eagerly awaited the results, hoping that the conserv

...
What visionary project would you fund?
by Richard_Kennaway — 2011-11-09T12:38:30.910Z

I have just received a survey questionnaire regarding future directions in EU (European Union) research funding, and thought it would be interesting to see how LessWrong would answer the main question:

Imagine that EU funding is available for one ambitious, visionary project extending beyond 2020.

What kind of research challenges should such a project address in your area?

What would be the most urgent research tasks?
Why would an AI try to figure out its goals?
by cousin_it — 2011-11-09T10:08:00.548Z

"So how can it ensure that future self-modiﬁcations will accomplish its current objectives? For one thing, it has to make those objectives clear to itself. If its objectives are only implicit in the structure of a complex circuit or program, then future modiﬁcations are unlikely to preserve them. Systems will therefore be motivated to reﬂect on their goals and to make them explicit." -- Stephen M. Omohundro, The Basic AI Drives

This AI becomes able to improve itself in a haphazard way, makes various changes that are net improvements but may introduce value drift, and then gets smart enough to do guaranteed self-improvement, at which point its values freeze (forever). -- Eliezer Yudkowsky, What I Think, If Not Why

I have stopped understanding why these quotes are correct. Help!

More specifically, if you design an AI using "shallow insights" without an explicit goal-directed architecture - some program that "just happens" to make intelligent decisions that can be viewed by us as fulfilling certain goals - then it has no particular reason to stabilize its goals. Isn't that anthropomorphizing? We humans don't exhibit a lot of goal-directed behavior, but we do have a verbal concept of "goals", so the verbal phantom of "figuring out our true goals" sounds meaningful to us. But why would AIs behave the same way if they don't think verbally? It looks more likely to me that an AI that acts semi-haphazardly may well continue doing so even after amassing a lot of computing power. Or is there some more compelling argument that I'm missing?
[SEQ RERUN] Evaluability (And Cheap Holiday Shopping)
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-09T02:59:52.728Z

Today's post, Evaluability (And Cheap Holiday Shopping) was originally published on 28 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It's difficult for humans to evaluate an option except in comparison to other options. Poor decisions result when a poor category for comparison is used. Includes an application for cheap gift-shopping.

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 The Affect Heuristic, 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.
Science of human dominance?
by Mercurial — 2011-11-08T22:30:47.029Z

I'm trying to do some research related to human dominance including social signaling and how dominance is both successfully and unsuccessfully challenged. Ideally I'd like to find what the common factors are rather than having it be too particular to one community or another. Unfortunately everything I can find on the topic is either about dominance behavior of other primates or is ad-hoc self-help advice by self-proclaimed gurus of social power.

Can anyone point me in the direction of the science of human dominance behavior?
Low legibility of Cognitive Reflection Test dramatically improves performance?
by uzalud — 2011-11-08T09:46:02.546Z

I'm reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and I've stopped on this:

90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font.

This seems like an important finding, but I can't find references in the book (Kindle) or on the Web. Does anybody know any real evidence for this claim? EDIT: I found the original paper

Do you think that people could behave rationally with such a simple intervention?

simple intro to CRT

EDIT: fixed spelling in title
Query the LessWrong Hivemind
by D_Malik — 2011-11-08T09:37:41.875Z

Often, there are questions you want to know the answers to. You want other people's opinions, because knowing the answer isn't worth the time you'd have to spend to find it, or you're unsure whether your answer is right.

LW seems like a good place to ask these questions because the people here are pretty rational. So, in this thread: You post a top-level comment with some question. Other people reply to your comment with their answers. You upvote answers that you agree with and questions whose answers you'd like to know.

A few (mostly obvious) guidelines:

For questions:

Your question should probably be in one of the following forms:

Asking for the probability some proposition is true.

Asking for a confidence interval.

Be specific. Don't ask when the singularity will happen unless you define 'singularity' to reasonable precision.

If you have several questions, post each separately, unless they're strongly related.

For answers:

Give what the question asks for, be it a probability or a confidence interval or something else. Try to give numbers.

Give some indication of how good your map is, i.e why is your answer that? If you want, give links.

If you think you know the answer to your own question, you can post it.

If you want to, give more information. For instance, if someone asks whether it's a good idea to brush their teeth, you can include info about flossing.

If you've researched something well but don't feel like typing up a long justification of your opinions, that's fine. Rather give your opinion without detailed arguments than give nothing at all. You can always flesh your answer out later, or never.

This thread is primarily for getting the hivemind's opinions on things, not for debating probabilities of propositions. Debating is also okay, though, especially since it will help question-posters to make up their minds.

Don't be too squeamish about breaking the question-answer format.

This is a followup to my comment in the open thread.
[SEQ RERUN] The Affect Heuristic
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-08T03:10:34.668Z

Today's post, The Affect Heuristic was originally published on 27 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Positive and negative emotional impressions exert a greater effect on many decisions than does rational analysis.

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 Purpose and Pragmatism, 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.
LW November Diplomacy
by Vaniver — 2011-11-08T01:41:18.679Z

The LW September Diplomacy game has come to an end. Congratulations to Prismattic, prase, and GuySrinivasan! It's time to see if we can start up another game.

If you would like to get in on a Diplomacy game with other LW users, please respond with a comment expressing your desire (between 1 and 0) to play in a game based on its turn length: 24, 36, 48, or 72 hours. (You don't need to make 0s explicit.) For example, if you can't play in a 24 hour game, could play in a 36 hour game or 72 hour game, but really want to play in a 48 hour game, then you might comment with something like "(0, .8, 1, .6)" or "24: 1; 36: .8; 72: .6". Please express your interest by midnight on 11/13 so we can get any games started on the 14th.

If November isn't a good month for you, but you'd like to make sure I make another Diplomacy thread in December, leave a comment to that effect.
Any thoughts on how to locate job opportunities in Europe for US Citizen?
by  — 2011-11-07T23:39:30.527Z

I am a graduate student in the U.S. nearing the completion of my master's degree in applied mathematics. I am looking for jobs at the master's degree level that involve working on large data sets, doing machine learning, scientific computing, etc. I don't want to be a software developer per se, but I don't mind doing software development among other scientific tasks.

For comparison, I used to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as an assistant radar analyst. It was a very very good mix of theoretical work, algorithmic development, and plain software development. I'm looking for similar institutions in Europe that are looking to hire full-time employees at the master's degree level. I've considered CERN (and may still apply there) but it appears to be either too much purely experimental physics or plain software development for me.

How do I locate these kinds of institutions, and what processes should I undertake to find such a job in Europe? What kinds of things should I look for in terms of job security, visa issues (I am only a US citizen), etc? I have worked for an extended time in Paris once before and loved living there (it was as a visiting research assistant as part of my current grad program). I'm looking to replicate that experience but in a full-time, non-student position.
Note: I've already done the standard many hours of Googling to find obvious job search web pages and this has proved extremely unsuccessful. My university career services office also said they do not support overseas job searching beyond whatever is listed in their web recruiting interface. All of the jobs that are overseas in that interface are banking-related, which is a field I want to avoid.
SI and Social Business
by Nick_Roy — 2011-11-07T23:25:53.204Z

I asked this question for the Q&A:

Non-profit organizations like SI need robust, sustainable resource strategies. Donations and grants are not reliable. According to my university Social Entrepreneurship course, social businesses are the best resource strategy available. The Singularity Summit is a profitable and expanding example of a social business. Is SI planning on creating more social businesses (either related or unrelated to the organization's mission) to address long-term funding needs?

I also recently asked this of Luke for his feedback post before the Q&A was up, and he mentioned in his response that SI is continuing to grow the Summit brand in a multifarious manner. Luke also asked me for additional social business ideas, citing a lack of staff working on the issue.

Less Wrong's collective intelligence trumps my own, so I'm fielding it to you. I do have a few ideas, but I'll hold off on proposing solutions at first. I find that this is a fascinating and difficult thought experiment in addition to its usefulness both for SI and as practice in recognizing opportunities.

Edited to add: I posted my own ideas concerning SI and social business in the comments. What are yours? Also, addressing some valid points made in the comments, what are some other innovative ways to fund SI?
SI and Social Business
by Nick_Roy — 2011-11-07T23:08:29.433Z

I asked this question for the Q&A:

Non-profit organizations like SI need robust, sustainable resource strategies. Donations and grants are not reliable. According to my university Social Entrepreneurship course, social businesses are the best resource strategy available. The Singularity Summit is a profitable and expanding example of a social business. Is SI planning on creating more social businesses (either related or unrelated to the organization's mission) to address long-term funding needs?

I also recently asked this of Luke for his feedback post before the Q&A was up, and he mentioned in his response that SI is continuing to grow the Summit brand in a multifarious manner. Luke also asked me for additional social business ideas, citing a lack of staff working on the issue.

Less Wrong's collective intelligence trumps my own, so I'm fielding it to you. I do have a few ideas, but I'll hold off on proposing solutions at first. I find that this is a fascinating and difficult thought experiment in addition to its usefulness both for SI and as practice in recognizing opportunities.
SI and Social Business
by Nick_Roy — 2011-11-07T23:05:21.928Z

I asked this question for the [Q&A](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8c3/qa_with_new_executive_director_of_singularity/):

>Non-profit organizations like SI need robust, sustainable resource strategies. Donations and grants are not reliable. According to my university Social Entrepreneurship course, social businesses are the best resource strategy available. The Singularity Summit is a profitable and expanding example of a social business. Is SI planning on creating more social businesses (either related or unrelated to the organization's mission) to address long-term funding needs?

I also recently asked this of [Luke](http://lesswrong.com/user/lukeprog/) for his [feedback post](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8bt/tell_me_what_you_think_of_me/) before the Q&A was up, and he mentioned in his response that SI is continuing to grow the Summit brand in a multifarious manner. Luke also asked me for additional social business ideas, citing a lack of staff working on the issue.

Less Wrong's collective intelligence trumps my own, so I'm fielding it to you. I do have a few ideas, but I'll [hold off on proposing solutions](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ka/hold_off_on_proposing_solutions/) at first. I find that this is a fascinating and difficult thought experiment in addition to its usefulness both for SI and as practice in recognizing opportunities.
Meetup : Ottawa Meetup - Computational Complexity
by XFrequentist — 2011-11-07T19:00:17.009Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Meetup - Computational Complexity

WHEN:
07 November 2011 07:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Elgin & Gladstone, Ottawa Ontario Canada

Today, we'll discuss the first three chapters of Scott Aaronson's Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity.

There is also a high probability of playing some Set.

Join our Google Group for specifics!

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Meetup - Computational Complexity
Singularity Institute mentioned on Franco-German TV
by XiXiDu — 2011-11-07T14:14:15.721Z

The following is a clipping of a documentary about transhumanism that I recorded when it aired on Arte, September 22 2011.

At the beginning and end of the video Luke Muehlhauser and Michael Anissimov give a short commentary.

Download here: German, French (ask for HD download link). Should play with VLC player.

Sadly, the people who produced the show seemed to be somewhat confused about the agenda of the Singularity Institute. At one point they seem to be saying that the SIAI believes into "the good in the machines", adding "how naive!", while the next sentence talks about how the SIAI tries to figure out how to make machines respect humans.

Here is the original part of the clip that I am talking about:

In San Francisco glaubt eine Vereinigung ehrenamtlicher junger Wissenschaftler dennoch an das Gute im Roboter. Wie naiv! Hier im Singularity Institute, dass Kontakte zu den großen Unis wie Oxford hat, zerbricht man sich den Kopf darüber, wie man zukünftigen Formen künstlicher Intelligenz beibringt, den Menschen zu respektieren.
Die Forscher kombinieren Daten aus Informatik und psychologischen Studien. Ihr Ziel: Eine Not-to-do-Liste, die jedes Unternehmen bekommt, das an künstlicher Intelligenz arbeitet.

My translation:

In San Francisco however, a society of young voluntary scientists believes in the good in robots. How naive! Here at the Singularity Institute, which has a connection to big universities like Oxford, they think about how to teach future artificial intelligences to respect humans.

I am a native German speaker by the way, maybe someone else who speaks German can make more sense of it (and is willing to translate the whole clip).
Q&A with new Executive Director of Singularity Institute
by lukeprog — 2011-11-07T04:58:05.074Z

Today I was appointed the new Executive Director of Singularity Institute.

Because I care about transparency, one of my first projects as an intern was to begin work on the organization's first Strategic Plan. I researched how to write a strategic plan, tracked down the strategic plans of similar organizations, and met with each staff member, progressively iterating the document until it was something everyone could get behind.

I quickly learned why there isn't more of this kind of thing: transparency is a lot of work! 100+ hours of work later, plus dozens of hours from others, and the strategic plan was finally finished and ratified by the board. It doesn't accomplish much by itself, but it's one important stepping stone in building an organization that is more productive, more trusted, and more likely to help solve the world's biggest problems.

I spent two months as a researcher, and was then appointed Executive Director.

In further pursuit of transparency, I'd like to answer (on video) submitted questions from the Less Wrong community just as Eliezer did two years ago.

The Rules

1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).

2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed into one paragraph, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).

3) I will generally answer the top-voted questions, but will skip some of them. I will tend to select questions about Singularity Institute as an organization, not about the technical details of some bit of research. You can read some of the details of the Friendly AI research program in my interview with Michael Anissimov.

4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.

5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for 7 days, at which time I will decide which questions to begin recording video responses for.

I might respond to certain questions within the comments thread and not on video; for example, when there is a one-word answer.
[SEQ RERUN] Purpose and Pragmatism
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-07T03:38:09.383Z

Today's post, Purpose and Pragmatism was originally published on 26 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It is easier to get trapped in a mistake of cognition if you have no practical purpose for your thoughts. Although pragmatic usefulness is not the same thing as truth, there is a deep connection between the two.

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 Lost Purposes, 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.