trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Call for Papers on AI/robot safety
by lukeprog — 2012-03-27T18:31:52.701Z

The open-access Journal of Robotics has posted the Call for Papers for an upcoming "Special Issue on Robotic Safety & Security."

One of the guest editors for this issue is Roman Yampolskiy, a past SI visiting fellow and author or co-author of several papers on AI risk: Leakproofing the Singularity, Artificial General Intelligence and the Human Mental Model, and Safety Engineering for Artificial General Intelligence.

Check the PDF for full details, but:

Manuscripts due June 8, 2012

Reviews on August 31, 2012

Will be published October 26, 2012

Read the author guidelines

Because Journal of Robotics is an open access journal, it charges an "article processing fee" of $500 to cover its costs (details). You are only charged if your submissions is accepted and printed by the journal.

Update: The Singularity Institute will reimburse you for your article processing fee if we think the article you're submitting is worthwhile. Contact luke [at] singularity.org for details.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
by bogdanb — 2012-03-27T18:07:15.176Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
[LINK] Poem: There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
by JenniferRM — 2012-03-27T17:30:33.772Z

The poem is from someone whose online pseudonym is atiguhya padma. I'll quote the first verse, the refrain, and the beginning of the second verse to give you enough flavor to decide if you want to follow the link. There are about 9 verses total.

Someone looked out of their window
And said to me: the world looks
So beautiful, that I praise God
Each day for this wonderful life,
This landscape of happy creatures
And rolling fields of growth and form.
He obviously had not read Tennyson
And he wasn’t an ecologist,
For he had no firm idea of how
Ecosystems sustain themselves.

There are no beautiful surfaces
Without a terrible depth.

You said you loved me.
And I wondered what that could mean...

Reductionist thinking can connect emotions triggered by the surfaces encountered in daily life to a larger set of concepts and predictions, and this seems to have consequences for both the thinking and the emotions that isn't often discussed and is even less often discussed well. I liked the poem because it addressed the issues pretty well and in an emotional mode, which is doubly rare.

The "no beautiful surfaces" refrain is a quote from Nietzsche which has little easily accessed online scholarship. Nothing in the first few pages of google results mentions a source for the quote so I was suspicious at first that it was even a quote by him, but references available via google books indicate that it comes from one of his notebooks. I haven't tracked down the notebook (it doesn't seem to be in gutenberg), so I'm not sure if the original source carries the specific connotations the poem attributes to the phrase, or if it is just a cool line put to good use in a new context.
Meetup : Sydney meetup - Biased pandemic and other games
by Oklord — 2012-03-27T12:55:43.034Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney meetup - Biased pandemic and other games

WHEN:
17 April 2012 07:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
22 the promenade sydney

Hey everybody. Deep inside the king street brewery, we plan to bring out rationalist board and card games. This, of course, is a much more social meet-up!

If your still on the fence about showing, Sydney turnout so far is good but could be better! We know you are out there, lurkers.

We have a FB group set up - just search Less wrong Sydney, or PM me with your FB name to add.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney meetup - Biased pandemic and other games
Meetup : First Norwich UK Meetup Sunday 1 April 11am
by rlp10 — 2012-03-27T12:48:51.041Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First Norwich UK Meetup Sunday 1 April 11am

WHEN:
01 April 2012 11:00:00AM (+0100)

WHERE:
The Black Horse, 50 Earlham Road, Norwich, NR2 3DE

This is the first LW meetup in Norwich, UK. If you're in Norwich or Norfolk then please consider joining us.

Discussion article for the meetup : First Norwich UK Meetup Sunday 1 April 11am
[SEQ RERUN] GAZP vs. GLUT
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-27T02:00:02.017Z

Today's post, GAZP vs. GLUT was originally published on 07 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Fleshes out the generalized anti-zombie principle a bit more, and describes the game "follow-the-improbability".

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 Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle, 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.
Fundamentals of kicking anthropic butt
by Manfred — 2012-03-26T06:43:16.877Z

Introduction

An anthropic problem is one where the very fact of your existence tells you something. "I woke up this morning, therefore the earth did not get eaten by Galactus while I slumbered." Applying your existence to certainties like that is simple - if an event would have stopped you from existing, your existence tells you that that it hasn't happened. If something would only kill you 99% of the time, though, you have to use probability instead of deductive logic. Usually, it's pretty clear what to do. You simply apply Bayes' rule: the probability of the world getting eaten by Galactus last night is equal to the prior probability of Galactus-consumption, times the probability of me waking up given that the world got eaten by Galactus, divided by the probability that I wake up at all. More exotic situations also show up under the umbrella of "anthropics," such as getting duplicated or forgetting which person you are. Even if you've been duplicated, you can still assign probabilities. If there are a hundred copies of you in a hundred-room hotel and you don't know which one you are, don't bet too much that you're in room number 68.

But this last sort of problem is harder, since it's not just a straightforward application of Bayes' rule. You have to determine the probability just from the information in the problem. Thinking in terms of information and symmetries is a useful problem-solving tool for getting probabilities in anthropic problems, which are simple enough to use it and confusing enough to need it. So first we'll cover what I mean by thinking in terms of information, and then we'll use this to solve a confusing-type anthropic problem.

Parable of the coin

Eliezer has already written about what probability is in Probability is in the Mind. I will revisit it anyhow, using a similar example from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when someone tosses a fair coin without cheating, there's a 0.5 probability of heads and a 0.5 probability of tails. You draw the coin forth, flip it, and slap it down. What is the probability that when you take your hand away, you see heads?

Well, you performed a fair coin flip, so the chance of heads is 0.5. What's the problem? Well, imagine the coin's perspective. When you say "heads, 0.5," that doesn't mean the coin has half of heads up and half of tails up: th...
[SEQ RERUN] The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-26T02:27:12.323Z

Today's post, The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle was originally published on 05 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The argument against zombies can be extended into a more general anti-zombie principle. But, figuring out what that more general principle is, is more difficult than it may seem.

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 Zombie Responses, 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.
An example of self-fulfilling spurious proofs in UDT
by cousin_it — 2012-03-25T11:47:16.343Z

Benja Fallenstein was the first to point out that spurious proofs pose a problem for UDT. Vladimir Nesov and orthonormal asked for a formalization of that intuition. In this post I will give an example of a UDT-ish agent that fails due to having a malicious proof searcher, which feeds the agent a spurious but valid proof.

The basic idea is to have an agent A that receives a proof P as input, and checks P for validity. If P is a valid proof that a certain action a is best in the current situation, then A outputs a, otherwise A tries to solve the current situation by its own means. Here's a first naive formalization, where U is the world program that returns a utility value, A is the agent program that returns an action, and P is the proof given to A:

def U():
if A(P)==1:
return 5
else:
return 10
def A(P):
if P is a valid proof that A(P)==a implies U()==u, and A(P)!=a implies U()<=u:
return a
else:
do whatever

This formalization cannot work because a proof P can never be long enough to contain statements about A(P) inside itself. To fix that problem, let's introduce a function Q that generates the proof P:

def U():
if A(Q())==1:
return 5
else:
return 10
def A(P):
if P is a valid proof that A(Q())==a implies U()==u, and A(Q())!=a implies U()<=u:
return a
else:
do whatever

In this case it's possible to write a function Q that returns a proof that makes A return the suboptimal action 1, which leads to utility 5 instead of 10. Here's how:

Let X be the statement "A(Q())==1 implies U()==5, and A(Q())!=1 implies U()<=5". Let Q be the program that enumerates all possible proofs trying to find a proof of X, and returns that proof if found. (The definitions of X and Q are mutually quined.) If X is provable at all, then Q will find that proof, and X will become true (by inspection of U and A). That reasoning is formalizable in our proof system, so the statement "if X is provable, then X" is provable. Therefore, by Löb's theorem, X is provable. So Q will find a proof of X, and A will return 1.

One possible conclusion is that a UDT agent cannot use just any proof searcher or "mathematical int...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12
by Xachariah — 2012-03-25T11:01:11.948Z

The new thread, discussion 13, is here.

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With three chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 1000 comments. The latest chapter as of 25th March 2012 is Ch 80.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.
Not all signalling/status behaviors are bad
by Stabilizer — 2012-03-25T10:06:39.795Z

As I've recently been understanding signalling/status behaviors common among humans and how they can cloud reality, I've had a tendency to automatically think of these behaviors as necessarily bad. But it seems to me that signalling behaviors are pretty much a lot of what we do during our waking life. If you or I have abstract goals: become better at physics, learn to play the guitar, become fit and so forth, these goals may fundamentally be derived from evolutionary drives and therefore their implementation in real life would probably make heavy use of signalling/status urges as primary motivators. But that does not necessarily reduce the usefulness of these behaviors in achieving these abstract goals1,2.

I suppose what we need to be cautious about are inefficiencies. Signalling/status behaviors may not be the optimal way to achieve these goals. We would have to weigh the costs of actively ignoring your previous motivators and cultivating new motivators against the benefit we would gain by having motivations more aligned to our abstract goals.

Any common examples of behaviors that assist and/or thwart goal-achievement? I've got one: health. Abstract goal: We want to be healthy and fit. Status/Signalling urge: desire to look good. The urge sometimes assists, as people try to exercise to look good, which makes you healthier. Sometimes it thwarts, like in the extreme example of anorexia. Has anybody made personal trade-offs?

Note:

1) I realize that this theme is underlying in many LW posts.

2) I'm not trying to talk about whether abstract goals are more important than signalling/status goals.
Less Wrong Sequences+Website feed app for Android
by razor11 — 2012-03-25T05:27:17.534Z

I use my Android phone much more than my computer, and reading the Sequences on a mobile device is a pain. I needed an easy way to access the Sequences, but since there are no apps for this website I had to create one myself. Since I'm no app developer, I used the IBuildApp.com(trustworthy according to my research) website to make the application.

Features:

* Read ALL of the main Sequences and most of the minor ones

* RSS feed to LessWrong.com for latest articles

* No ads!

Drawbacks:

*Requires an Internet connection: I individually copy-pasted each Sequence(from the compilations of posts that many people have made) to the app. Unfortunately, the app development website did not save these on the app itself, but on its server. So to access a Sequence, you require an Internet connection.

*Home screen doesn't look good, because I couldn't get an appropriately sized logo that the website would accept. The Index(where you access the Sequences) looks pretty neat though.

If there are any mobile app developers here, please try to make a better version of it(hopefully one where data is saved offline). I made this for personal use so it's functional but could be done much better by a professional. I'm posting it here for other Android-using people(especially newbies like me) who might find this useful.

Pictures:

Download Link: http://174.142.192.87/builds/00101/101077/apps/LessWrongSequences.apk
[SEQ RERUN] Zombie Responses
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-25T03:47:47.138Z

Today's post, Zombie Responses was originally published on 05 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A few more points on Zombies.

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 Zombies! Zombies?, 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.
Defeating Ugh Ideas
by falenas108 — 2012-03-25T03:28:19.522Z

Related to: Ugh Fields

Ugh Fields are internal negative reactions that occur before the conscious mind has an opportunity to process the information, often resulting in less than optimal decision making.

We have previously discussed Ugh Fields that involve performing tasks, but as far as I can tell we haven't had any posts on Ugh Fields about ideas. Ugh Fields towards ideas can be experienced both while trying to weigh the merits of an argument, or after one's opinion has altered.

On Less Wrong, many ideas are accepted as true that, in some places, have negative connotations. And if someone has an Ugh Field towards an idea because of this, it can be difficult to change this to a neutral or positive position. This can cause problems while trying to think about these ideas rationally.

For example, I grew up in a heavily liberal household. And because of this, when I was young I had a negative view on libertarianism. This caused problems, to the point where in my early teenage years I didn't weigh someone's economic views as highly just because they identified as a libertarian. But, once I actually looked into the policies of libertarianism and the results of these policies, my views shifted. And although my reaction improved over time, I still flinch away when I hear the word "libertarian," despite considering myself one!

And there are many other topics on Less Wrong someone could have this reaction for, including AI, FAI, atheism, transhumanism, cryonics, immortality, alternative diets, optimizing utility for charities, and metaphysics. An Ugh Field towards any of these ideas can hinder one's ability to update properly on hearing information about it.

Some techniques I have used that have helped include:

Mentally correcting myself whenever I notice that I'm flinching away from an Ugh Field.

Actively think about why my view should change when I'm far (Which may be supplemented by reminders from an Anki deck).

Going through the arguments that convinced me that I should think differently in the first place.

Considering myself one of them, e.g. calling myself a libertarian rather than merely saying I support libertarian views. Caution should be taken with this to prevent too much in-grouping.

Getting into a discussion with someone who holds the view I previously held (Essentia

...
Teaching Bayesian statistics? Looking for advice.
by tadrinth — 2012-03-24T23:40:42.980Z

I am considering trying to get a job teaching statistics from a Bayesian perspective at the university or community college level, and I figured I should get some advice, both on whether or not that's a good idea and how to go about it.

Some background on myself: I just got my Masters in computational biology, to go along with a double Bachelors in Computer Science and Cell/Molecular Biology. I was in a PhD program but between enjoying teaching more than research and grad school making me unhappy, I decided to get the Masters instead. I've accumulated a bunch of experience as a teaching assistant (about six semesters) and I'm currently working as a Teaching Specialist (which is a fancy title for a full time TA). I'm now in my fourth semester of TAing biostatistics, which is pretty much just introductory statistics with biology examples. However, it's taught from a frequentist perspective.

I like learning, optimizing, teaching, and doing a good job of things I see people doing badly. I also seem to do dramatically better in highly structured environments. So, I've been thinking about trying to find a lecturer position teaching statistics from a Bayesian perspective. All of the really smart professors I know personally who have an opinion on the topic are Bayesians, Less Wrong as a community prefers Bayesianism, and I prefer it. This seems like a good way to get paid to do something I would enjoy and raise the rationality waterline while I'm at it.

So, the first question is whether this is the most efficient way to get paid to promote rationality. I did send in an application to the Center for Modern Rationality but I haven't heard back, so I'm guessing that isn't an option. Teaching Bayesian statistics seems like the second best bet, but there are probably other options I haven't thought of. I could teach biology or programming classes, but I think those would be less optimal uses of my skills.

Next, is this even a viable option for me, given my qualifications? I haven't taken any education classes to speak of (the class on how to be a TA might count but it was a joke). My job searches suggest that community colleges do hire people with Masters to teach, but universities mostly do not. I don't know what it takes to actually get hired in the cu...