trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-08-30T17:30:45.296Z

Non-causal models

Non-causal models are quite common in many fields, and can be quite accurate. Here predictions are made, based on (a particular selection of) past trends, and it is assumed that these trends will continue in future. There is no causal explanation offered for the trends under consideration: it's just assumed they will go on as before. Non-causal models are thus particularly useful when the underlying causality is uncertain or contentious. To illustrate the idea, here are three non-causal models in computer development:

Moore's laws about the regular doubling of processing speed/hard disk size/other computer related parameter.

Robin Hanson's model where the development of human brains, hunting, agriculture and the industrial revolution are seen as related stages of accelerations of the underlying economic rate of growth, leading to the conclusion that there will be another surge during the next century (likely caused by whole brain emulations or AI).

Ray Kurzweil's law of time and chaos, leading to his law of accelerating returns. Here the inputs are the accelerating evolution of life on earth, the accelerating 'evolution' of technology, followed by the accelerating growth in the power of computing across many different substrates. This leads to a consequent 'singularity', an explosion of growth, at some point over the coming century.

Before anything else, I should thank Moore, Hanson and Kurzweil for having the courage to publish their models and put them out there where they can be critiqued, mocked or praised. This is a brave step, and puts them a cut above most of us.

That said, though I find the first argument quite convincing, I find have to say I find the other two dubious. Now, I'm not going to claim they're misusing the outside view: if you accuse them of shoving together unrelated processes into a single model, they can equally well accuse you of ignoring the commonalities they have highlighted between these processes. Can we do better than that? There has to be a better guide to the truth that just our own private impressions.

Counterfactual resilience

One thing I'd like to do is test the resilience of the model - how robust are they to change. If model M makes prediction P from trends T and the real outcome will be O, we can test resiliency in two ways. First, we can change the world to change T (and...
[SEQ RERUN] Raised in Technophilia
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-30T04:13:58.655Z

Today's post, Raised in Technophilia was originally published on 17 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When Eliezer was quite young, it took him a very long time to get to the point where he was capable of considering that the dangers of technology might outweigh the benefits.

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 My Best and Worst Mistake, 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.
Benefits of Calorie Restriction Linked To Other Factors
by falenas108 — 2012-08-30T00:27:20.762Z

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11432.html

We report here that a CR regimen implemented in young and older age rhesus monkeys at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) has not improved survival outcomes. Our findings contrast with an ongoing study at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center (WNPRC), which reported improved survival associated with 30% CR initiated in adult rhesus monkeys (7–14 years)5 and a preliminary report with a small number of CR monkeys6. Over the years, both NIA and WNPRC have extensively documented beneficial health effects of CR in these two apparently parallel studies. The implications of the WNPRC findings were important as they extended CR findings beyond the laboratory rodent and to a long-lived primate. Our study suggests a separation between health effects, morbidity and mortality, and similar to what has been shown in rodents7, 8, 9, study design, husbandry and diet composition may strongly affect the life-prolonging effect of CR in a long-lived nonhuman primate.
What Are You Doing for Self-Quantification?
by  — 2012-08-29T18:14:18.773Z

Right now, I am counting steps each day and I logged them on paper everyday, as close to midnight as much as possible. Only yesterday did I achieve my 10,000 steps goal. I have only been doing it since Sunday. This is my fourth day. Yesterday, I started logging my weight (on paper) to see if walking 10,000 steps will help me lose weight. Granted, it's rather manual, but also easy to do. If I try to purchase a pedometer that syncs to your computer automatically, it will costs me 99 USD brand new. Adding wireless output to my weighing scale will cost money too. There are two conditions that could lead me to purchasing sophisticated solutions: I am loaded with money and or I am overwhelmed with data input.

For now, the important thing is that I keep doing it for 30-60 days for habit formations.

What are you doing for self-quantification?
[LINK] A Meta-Inductive Approach to Hume's Problem of Induction
by pragmatist — 2012-08-29T18:10:11.996Z

I just read a paper by Gerhard Schurz proposing an interesting resolution to the problem of induction. Download a PDF here.

Here's the abstract:

This article suggests a ‘best alternative’ justification of induction (in the sense of Reichenbach) which is based on meta‐induction. The meta‐inductivist applies the principle of induction to all competing prediction methods which are accessible to her. It is demonstrated, and illustrated by computer simulations, that there exist meta‐inductivistic prediction strategies whose success is approximately optimal among all accessible prediction methods in arbitrary possible worlds, and which dominate the success of every noninductive prediction strategy. The proposed justification of meta‐induction is mathematically analytical. It implies, however, an a posteriori justification of object‐induction based on the experiences in our world.

Here's Schurz's description of meta-inductivism:

The meta‐inductivist (MI) applies the inductive method at the level of competing prediction methods. More precisely, the meta‐inductivist bases her predictions on the predictions and the observed success rates of the other (non‐MI) players and tries to derive therefrom an ‘optimal’ prediction. The simplest type of MI predicts what the presently best prediction method predicts, but one can construct much more refined kinds of meta‐inductivistic prediction strategies.

One should expect that for meta‐induction the chances of demonstrating optimality are much better than for object‐induction. The crucial question of this article will be: is it possible to design a version of meta‐induction which can be proved to be an (approximately) optimal prediction method? The significance of this question for the problem of induction is this: if the answer is positive, then at least meta‐induction would have a rational and noncircular justification based on a mathematical‐analytic argument. But this analytic justification of meta‐induction would at the same time yield an a posteriori justification of object‐induction in the real world: for we know by experience that in the real world, noninductive prediction strategies have not been successful so far, hence it would be meta‐inductively justified to favor object‐inductivistic strategies.

Here's the conclusion:

While one‐favorite meta‐inductive strategies are optimal only under ce

...
[SEQ RERUN] My Best and Worst Mistake
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-29T16:50:03.960Z

Today's post, My Best and Worst Mistake was originally published on 16 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When Eliezer went into his death spiral around intelligence, he would up making a lot of mistakes that later became very useful.

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 My Childhood Death Spiral, 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.
What's the Value of Information?
by johnlawrenceaspden — 2012-08-29T16:20:59.210Z

I posted this problem to my own blog the other day. When I posted it, I thought it looked very easy, more fiddly than difficult:

The eccentric millionaire Oswald Mega walks into a bar and he says:

"This morning, I was showing my newborn about Dungeons and Dragons. We took a couple of six sided dice and rolled them, and wrote the results, which are just numbers from 2 to 12, on a piece of paper with 2D6 written at the top.

Then we took a twelve sided dice, and we wrote 1D12 at the top of a piece of paper, and then we rolled it lots and wrote down the results, numbers between 1 and 12, on the paper.

How she laughed at the difference in the patterns! Truly fatherhood is a joy.

Now, I've brought one of the pieces of paper with me, and if you can tell me which one it is, I'll give you £1000.

How much would you be willing to pay me to know the value of the first result on the sheet?"

I reasoned thus:

There's no reason that you should have any opinion on which piece of paper he's brought. So you start off thinking 50:50, and that leads you to believe that he's effectively just given you £500.

If he tells you a number, then your belief will change. Say he tells you 1, then you know that he's brought the 1D12 results, and so you're now able to tell him that, and collect your £1000.

If he tells you 7, then that's twice as likely to be the 2D6 talking as the D12, and you should shift your prior to 1:3.

If you've got a prior of 1:3, then your guess (that it's the 2D6) is now worth £750, on average.

So when you get a new number, your prior shifts, the bet changes value. Average over all the cases and that's what you'll pay to know the first number.

Using this reckoning, I thought the answer to the puzzle was £125.

But now I'm not so sure, because the same reasoning tells you that if, for whatever reason, you start out 9:1 in favour of the 1D12, then the value of the new information is zero. (Because whatever the new information is, it won't be enough to change your mind).

But can that really be true? Because that implies that if Omega keeps making you the same offer for £1, then you should keep turning it down.

But if he told you a hundred numbers, you'd be damned sure which piece of paper he'd brought. So surely they have some value over £1?

But maybe you say: "Well, you can't put a value on the information unless you...
Is felt preference a useful indicator? (A ramble)
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-08-29T16:07:21.086Z

I posted recently that "I tend to assume that things people hate are bad for them. CR may be an exception, but it's plausible that evolution would usually select for warnings that one is hurting oneself."

I think this points at an interesting question. If you know that people like a behavior, or dislike it, or love it, or hate it, does this tell you anything about whether the behavior is useful?

I expect that most people reading this question have a handy list-- one that comes quickly to mind-- of things which are good for people but that they resist. There's a tremendous amount in the culture (and perhaps more from somewhat different angles at LW) about people's reflexive preferences being wrong.

However, there's a lot where people's preferences are assumed to be in line with what's good for them that doesn't get much attention. I believe this is because there's a fascination with the drama of self-denial, but that might be a topic for a different post.

For example, people hate long commutes. I've never heard anyone say that long commutes are good for people.

People generally dislike being low on sleep.

Rather few modern people think that liking sex is a problem in itself. (Note a cultural shift-- anxiety about pleasure has been moved from sex to food.)

Nobody says that human contact is bad, even though many people like it.

And there's no cultural consensus that hating spam is bad, even though hating spam is a spontaneous response.

It's implausible that evolutionarily developed pleasure and pain should be completely out of line with well-being. On the other hand, it's a noisy signal. Should it be taken at all seriously?
Expected utility and utility after time
by Metus — 2012-08-29T13:10:59.110Z

So I have a conundrum. Imagine that Omega comes to you and offers you two choices:

First choice: You get a moment of moderate pain, let's say a slap and then another slap, so that your face hurts for a couple of minutes with some anguish. Now after that pain has faded and you still have the memory of it, Omega measures your discomfort and gives you exactly the amount of money that gives enough joy to compensate the pain and then a cent. By construction, the utility of this choice is one cent.

Second choice: Omega inflicts on you hell for a finite amount of time. Your worst fears all come true, you are unable to distinguish between reality and this hell, the most painful sensations you will experience. After this finite amount of time is over, Omega deletes all memory of it and gives you essentially unlimited monetary funds but still, this experience does not quite compensate for the previously experienced hell if you would remember it. By construction, the expected value of this choice is negative.[1]

If we go by expected value, the first choice is obviously better. Of course Omega forces you to take one choice or you will just get hell forever, we want our thought experiment to work. But if we go by the decision procedure to choose the option in which our future self will feel best, the second choice seems better. I have not yet found a satisfying solution to this apparent paradox. Essentially, how does a rational actor deal with discomfort to get to a pleasurable experience?

[1] I realize that this might be a weak point of my argument. Do we just simply add up positive and negative utilons to get our expected value? Or do we already take into consideration the process of forgetting the pain? Maybe therein lies a solution to this paradox.
Rigorous academic arguments on whether AIs can replace all human workers?
by ChrisHallquist — 2012-08-29T07:30:55.073Z

I believe that it will one day be possible for AIs to do all work currently done by humans. Probably most people at LessWrong believe this too, and thanks to science fiction I wouldn't be surprised if most people in the United States and Europe believed it too.

But it's interesting to think about why we should believe this, and when I ask myself that question, I can come up with arguments, but I have a hard time thinking of examples of the arguments being made in a rigorous way in the academic literature. This is surprising because it's a question with real practical import for humanity's future.

The only prominent example I can think of is an argument against based on Godel's theorem and similar math, what Turing called "The Mathematical Objection" and which has more recently been championed by Roger Penrose. But can anyone think of others?
Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Cannabis, Decision-Making, And A Chance To Change Your Mind
by Nisan — 2012-08-29T03:50:23.867Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Cannabis, Decision-Making, And A Chance To Change Your Mind

WHEN:
29 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

The discussion topic for this Wednesday is a new article in PNAS that's been in the news. It's called "Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife":

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/08/22/1206820109

If you were a perfect Bayesian reasoner, your beliefs about marijuana would have changed, if only very slightly, after reading the previous paragraph. And, upon reading the article, your beliefs would change again, in some direction. We humans don't do this perfectly, and we have to take care.

It's no secret that many LessWrongers use marijuana recreationally. Until now, we have known it as a relatively harmless psychoactive substance. Now is your chance to practice individual and group truth-seeking by tackling a new piece of evidence. It might also be a chance to rethink your drug use choices. You don't know in advance how your beliefs and decisions will change (otherwise you may as well change them now). But, as Jeffreyssai might say, if you know in advance that your beliefs and decisions won't change, no matter what the evidence is, then we might as well not bother learning.

Doors open at 7pm and discussion officially starts at 7:30pm. I'd like the discussion to begin with a discussion of values — answers to questions of the form "Would I smoke weed if I knew it would permanently decrease my IQ by 8 points?" Then we can talk about the evidence that the article provides, subject to the interests of the participants.

One more thing: Please do not claim to use or buy marijuana on the internet or identify people who do. This is a public medium and doing stuff with marijuana is a violation of federal law.

For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Cannabis, Decision-Making, And A Chance To Change Your Mind
A model of UDT with a concrete prior over logical statements
by Benya — 2012-08-28T21:45:18.416Z

I've been having difficulties with constructing a toy scenario for AI self-modification more interesting than Quirrell's game, because you really want to do expected utility maximization of some sort, but currently our best-specified decision theories search through the theorems of one particular proof system and "break down and cry" if they can't find one that tells them what their utility will be if they choose a particular option. This is fine if the problems are simple enough that we always find the theorems we need, but the AI rewrite problem is precisely about skirting that edge. It seems natural to want to choose some probability distribution over the possibilities that you can't rule out, and then do expected utility maximization (because if you don't maximize EU over some prior, it seems likely that someone could Dutch-book you); indeed, Wei Dai's original UDT has a "mathematical intuition module" black box which this would be an implementation of. But how do you assign probabilities to logical statements? What consistency conditions do you ask for? What are the "impossible possible worlds" that make up your probability space?

Recently, Wei Dai suggested that logical uncertainty might help avoid the Löbian problems with AI self-modification, and although I'm sceptical about this idea, the discussion pushed me into trying to confront the logical uncertainty problem head-on; then, reading Haim Gaifman's paper "Reasoning with limited resources and assigning probabilities to logical statements" (which Luke linked from So you want to save the world) made something click. I want to present a simple suggestion for a concrete definition of "impossible possible world", for a prior over them, and for an UDT algorithm based on that. I'm not sure whether the concrete prior is useful—the main point in giving it is to have a concrete example we can try to prove things about—but the definition of logical possible worlds looks like a promising theoretical tool to me.

*

Let S be the set of sentences of Peano Arithmetic less than 3^^^3 symbols long, and let Pow(S) := the set of all subsets of S. We interpret elements X of Pow(S) as "logical worlds", in which the sentences in X are true and the sentences in (S \ X) are false. Each world X can be represented by a single sentence sX, which is the conjunction of the sentences ({x | x in X} union {not y | y...
Meetup : Pittsburgh: Rationalization Game
by KatjaGrace — 2012-08-28T19:13:52.611Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Rationalization Game

WHEN:
04 September 2012 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
EatUnique, Craig St, Pittsburgh

Join us for dinner or a snack while we familiarize ourselves with the making up of justifications.

Call 412-304-6258 if you can't find us.

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Rationalization Game
[SEQ RERUN] My Childhood Death Spiral
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-28T09:47:59.458Z

Today's post, My Childhood Death Spiral was originally published on 15 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When Eliezer was a child, he went into a happy death spiral around the concept of intelligence.

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 Optimization, 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.