trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Recognizing Intelligence
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-17T04:44:46.602Z

Today's post, Recognizing Intelligence was originally published on 07 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Suppose we landed on another planet and found a large metal object that contained wires made of superconductors, and hundreds of tightly matched gears. Would we be able to infer the presence of an optimization process?

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 Back Up and Ask Whether, Not Why, 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.
Meetup : Durham Meetup: Article discussions
by evand — 2012-10-16T23:00:14.776Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham Meetup: Article discussions

WHEN:
25 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Francesca's 706B 9th St Durham, NC 27705

We'll be discussing some articles over coffee and pastries. In particular:

Generalizing From One Example

It's okay to be (at least a little) irrational

A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation

Reading at least some of these in advance is encouraged, but not required. We will summarize and discuss the articles, and in particular how we can apply them in the real world.
Also on the agenda: discussion of rationality goals from the previous meeting, and discussion of future meetup topics.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham Meetup: Article discussions
Meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion group
by evand — 2012-10-16T22:34:31.727Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion group

WHEN:
20 October 2012 11:00:00AM (-0400)

WHERE:
Parker and Otis, 112 S Duke St, Durham NC 27701

We'll be discussing Harry Potter and the Methods of Methods of Rationality, chapters 8-11.

While we encourage everyone to read the chapters in question, please feel free to come even if you haven't. We'll summarize the main points of the chapters as we discuss them.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion group
Looking for alteration suggestions for the official Sequences ebook
by alexvermeer — 2012-10-16T22:32:33.393Z

As you may have heard, the Singularity Institute is in the process of creating an official ebook version of The Sequences (specifically, Eliezer's Major Sequences written between 2006 and 2009).

Now is an opportune time to make any alterations to the contents of the Sequences. We're looking for suggestions about:

Posts to add to the Sequences. E.g., "scope insensitivity" is not currently a part of any sequence, perhaps it should be? Preferably suggest a specific location, or at least a specific sequence where you think the addition would logically go.

Posts to remove from the Sequences. Are there redundant or unnecessary posts? To call the Sequences long is a bit of an understatement.

Alternatives to "The Sequences" as a title, such as "How to be Less Wrong: The Sequences, 2006--2009."

Put separate suggestions in separate comments so that specific changes can be discussed. All suggestions will be reviewed, with final changes made by Eliezer. Next thing you know, you'll be sipping a hot mocha in your favorite chair while reading about Death Spirals on your handy e-reader.

The Sequences that will be present in the ebook:

Map and Territory

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

A Human's Guide to Words

How to Actually Change Your Mind (includes all posts from all its subsequences)

Reductionism (includes all posts from Joy in the Merely Real and Zombies)

Quantum Physics

Metaethics

Fun Theory

The Craft and the Community
Happy Ada Lovelace Day
by palladias — 2012-10-16T21:42:56.998Z

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when STEM enthusiasts highlight the work of modern and historical women scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. If you run a blog, you may want to participate by posting about a woman in a STEM field whom you admire. But I'd love to have people share women scientists/mathematicians/authors in the comments that they think we could all stand to read more about.

Women in STEM fields (living or dead, fiction or nonfictional) that you'd like us to know more about (preferably with a little precis and a link

Books about women in STEM fields that are awesome

Books written by women about STEM subjects that are awesome

Studies about sexism (or ways to combat it) in STEM fields (and anywhere else)

Practical things you or organizations you're with have done to cut down on careless or intentional sexism. (how did you implement it, how did you measure the effects, etc)
[LINK] Willpower Is All In Your Head
by maia — 2012-10-16T16:05:33.084Z

The authors find that ego depletion is lessened if you believe that willpower is not a limited resource. Abstract:

Building cognitive abilities often requires sustained engagement with effortful tasks. We demonstrate that beliefs about willpower–whether willpower is viewed as a limited or non-limited resource–impact sustained learning on a strenuous mental task. As predicted, beliefs about willpower did not affect accuracy or improvement during the initial phases of learning; however, participants who were led to view willpower as non-limited showed greater sustained learning over the full duration of the task. These findings highlight the interactive nature of motivational and cognitive processes: motivational factors can substantially affect people’s ability to recruit their cognitive resources to sustain learning over time.

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/willpower-its-in-your-head.html?_r=0

Recent study by the authors: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038680

A related, slightly older study by the same authors which reviews several experiments: http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1686.full

(Not sure if the second link is openable for everyone; I have access to most things through my university library.)

The NY Times article seems to be saying that studies showing an increase in willpower after consuming sugar are incorrect in some way. What I'm left wondering is: what if you believe that willpower is unlimited, AND you ingest glucose shortly before doing a difficult task? Would that be even better?
Meetup : Moscow: Biases, Applied Rationality, Visual Thinking
by Yuu — 2012-10-16T13:54:38.675Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Biases, Applied Rationality, Visual Thinking

WHEN:
27 October 2012 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Rossiya, Moscow, ulitsa Ostozhenka 14/2

We will meet at “Subway” restaurant, entrance from Lopukhinskiy pereulok. Look for a table with “LW” banner, I will be there from 16:00 MSK.

Main topics:

Cognitive biases analysis. You can read about some bias and tell us all.

Applied rationality: practice. You can also propose exercises or rationality skill to practice.

Visual information processing and visual thinking.

How to formulate an assignment or problem to make it solvable.

Text analysis, what can we extract from it.

If you are going for the first time, please fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

N. B. Google shows incorrect location, please use Yandex maps.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Biases, Applied Rationality, Visual Thinking
Group rationality diary, 10/15/12
by cata — 2012-10-16T05:29:24.231Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 15th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.
Thinking soberly about the context and consequences of Friendly AI
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-10-16T04:33:52.859Z

The project of Friendly AI would benefit from being approached in a much more down-to-earth way. Discourse about the subject seems to be dominated by a set of possibilities which are given far too much credence:

A single AI will take over the world

A future galactic civilization depends on 21st-century Earth

10n-year lifespans are at stake, n greater than or equal to 3

We might be living in a simulation

Acausal deal-making

Multiverse theory

Add up all of that, and you have a great recipe for enjoyable irrelevance. Negate every single one of those ideas, and you have an alternative set of working assumptions that are still consistent with the idea that Friendly AI matters, and which are much more suited to practical success:

There will always be multiple centers of power

What's at stake is, at most, the future centuries of a solar-system civilization

No assumption that individual humans can survive even for hundreds of years, or that they would want to

Assume that the visible world is the real world

Assume that life and intelligence are about causal interaction

Assume that the single visible world is the only world we affect or have reason to care about

The simplest reason to care about Friendly AI is that we are going to be coexisting with AI, and so we should want it to be something we can live with. I don't see that anything important would be lost by strongly foregrounding the second set of assumptions, and treating the first set of possibilities just as possibilities, rather than as the working hypothesis about reality.

[Earlier posts on related themes: practical FAI, FAI without "outsourcing".]
[SEQ RERUN] Back Up and Ask Whether, Not Why
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-16T04:30:50.665Z

Today's post, Back Up and Ask Whether, Not Why was originally published on 06 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When someone asks you why you're doing "X", don't ask yourself why you're doing "X". Ask yourself whether someone should do "X".

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 Complexity and Intelligence, 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.
Decision theory and "winning"
by lukeprog — 2012-10-16T00:35:17.261Z

With much help from crazy88, I'm still developing my Decision Theory FAQ. Here's the current section on Decision Theory and "Winning". I feel pretty uncertain about it, so I'm posting it here for feedback. (In the FAQ, CDT and EDT and TDT and Newcomblike problems have already been explained.)

One of the primary motivations for developing TDT is a sense that both CDT and EDT fail to reason in a desirable manner in some decision scenarios. However, despite acknowledging that CDT agents end up worse off in Newcomb's Problem, many (and perhaps the majority of) decision theorists are proponents of CDT. On the face of it, this may seem to suggest that these decision theorists aren't interested in developing a decision algorithm that "wins" but rather have some other aim in mind. If so then this might lead us to question the value of developing one-boxing decision algorithms.

However, the claim that most decision theorists don’t care about finding an algorithm that “wins” mischaracterizes their position. After all, proponents of CDT tend to take the challenge posed by the fact that CDT agents “lose” in Newcomb's problem seriously (in the philosophical literature, it's often referred to as the Why ain'cha rich? problem). A common reaction to this challenge is neatly summarized in Joyce (1999, p. 153-154 ) as a response to a hypothetical question about why, if two-boxing is rational, the CDT agent does not end up as rich as an agent that one-boxes:

Rachel has a perfectly good answer to the "Why ain't you rich?" question. "I am not rich," she will say, "because I am not the kind of person [Omega] thinks will refuse the money. I'm just not like you, Irene [the one-boxer]. Given that I know that I am the type who takes the money, and given that [Omega] knows that I am this type, it was reasonable of me to think that the $1,000,000 was not in [the box]. The $1,000 was the most I was going to get no matter what I did. So the only reasonable thing for me to do was to take it."

Irene may want to press the point here by asking, "But don't you wish you were like me, Rachel?"... Rachael can and should admit that she does wish she were more like Irene... At this point, Irene will exclaim, "You've admitted it! It wasn't so smart to take the money after all." Unfortunately for Irene, her conclusion does not follow from Rachel's premise. Rachel w

...
Singularity Summit 2012, discuss it here
by diegocaleiro — 2012-10-15T23:48:36.533Z

How was it? Which speakers delivered according to expectations?

Which topics were left unresolved?

Were any topics resolved?

Whatever you have to say about it, say it here.

Suggestion: if you are going to comment, mention "I was there" just so we know who was or wasn't.
Problem of Optimal False Information
by Endovior — 2012-10-15T21:42:33.679Z

This is a thought that occured to me on my way to classes today; sharing it for feedback.

Omega appears before you, and after presenting an arbitrary proof that it is, in fact, a completely trustworthy superintelligence of the caliber needed to play these kinds of games, presents you with a choice between two boxes. These boxes do not contain money, they contain information. One box is white and contains a true fact that you do not currently know; the other is black and contains false information that you do not currently believe. Omega advises you that the the true fact is not misleading in any way (ie: not a fact that will cause you to make incorrect assumptions and lower the accuracy of your probability estimates), and is fully supported with enough evidence to both prove to you that it is true, and enable you to independently verify its truth for yourself within a month. The false information is demonstrably false, and is something that you would disbelieve if presented outright, but if you open the box to discover it, a machine inside the box will reprogram your mind such that you will believe it completely, thus leading you to believe other related falsehoods, as you rationalize away discrepancies.

Omega further advises that, within those constraints, the true fact is one that has been optimized to inflict upon you the maximum amount of long-term disutility for a fact in its class, should you now become aware of it, and the false information has been optimized to provide you with the maximum amount of long-term utility for a belief in its class, should you now begin to believe it over the truth. You are required to choose one of the boxes; if you refuse to do so, Omega will kill you outright and try again on another Everett branch. Which box do you choose, and why?

(This example is obviously hypothetical, but for a simple and practical case, consider the use of amnesia-inducing drugs to selectively eliminate traumatic memories; it would be more accurate to still have those memories, taking the time and effort to come to terms with the trauma... but present much greater utility to be without them, and thus without the trauma altogether. Obviously related to the valley of bad rationality, but since there clearly exist most optimal lies and least optimal truths, it'd be useful to know which categ...
A presentation about Cox's Theorem made for my English class
by BT_Uytya — 2012-10-15T19:51:50.285Z

At my English class everybody was supposed to make a short presentation about subject of one's choice. I decided to tell people about Cox's Theorem (heavily based on the introduction in "Probability theory: The Logic Of Science" by E T Jaynes and "Constructing a logic of plausible inference: a guide to Cox's theorem" by Kevin S. Van Horn). Thought someone might find that interesting or useful.

Make sure that you have speaker notes visible.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwJocL_GupTsNnMtdWFLT3RYWGs/edit
[SEQ RERUN] Complexity and Intelligence
by Manfred — 2012-10-15T14:51:33.293Z

Today's post, Complexity and Intelligence was originally published on 03 November 2008. A summary:

One of the Godel-inspired challenges to the idea of self-improving minds is based on the notion of "complexity". But everyday usage and technical usage differ in some really important ways.

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 Building Something Smarter, 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.
Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health
by ialdabaoth — 2012-10-14T09:11:25.757Z

My name is Brent, and I'm probably insane.

I can perform various experimental tests to verify that I do not perform primate pack-bonding rituals correctly, which is about half of what we mean by "insane". This concerns me simply from a utilitarian perspective (separation from pack makes ego-depletion problems harder; it makes resources harder to come by; and it simply sucks to experience "from the inside"), but these are not the things that concern me most.

The thing that concerns me most is this:

What if the very tools that I use to make decisions are flawed?

I stumbled upon Bayesian techniques as a young child; I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to perform a lot of self-guided artificial intelligence "research" in Junior High and High School, due to growing up in a time and place when computers were utterly mysterious, so no one could really tell me what I was "supposed" to be doing with them - so I started making simple video games, had no opponents to play them against due to the aforementioned failures to correctly perform pack-bonding rituals, decided to create my own, became dissatisfied with the quality of my opponents, and suddenly found myself chewing on Hopfstaedter and Wiener and Minsky.

I'm filling in that bit of detail to explain that I have been attempting to operate as a rational intelligence for quite some time, so I believe that I've become very familiar with the kinds of "bugs" that I will tend to exhibit.

I've spent a very long time attempting to correct for my cognitive biases, edit out tendencies to seek comfortable-but-misleading inputs, and otherwise "force" myself to be rational, and often, the result is that my "will" will crack under the strain. My entire utility-table will suddenly flip on its head, and attempt to maximize my own self-destruction rather than allow me to continue to torture it with endlessly recursive, unsolvable problems that all tend to boil down to "you do not have sufficient social power, and humans are savage and cruel no matter how much you care about them."

Most of my energy is spent attempting to maintain positive, rational, long-term goals in the face of some kind of regedit-hack of my utility table itself, coming from somewhere in my subconscious that I can't seem to gain write-access to.

Clearly, the transhumanist solution would be to identify the underlying physical storage where the bug is occurri...
The basic argument for the feasibility of transhumanism
by ChrisHallquist — 2012-10-14T08:04:08.557Z

Eliezer sometimes talks about how animals on earth are but a tiny dot in the "mind design space." For example, in "Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk," he writes:

The term “Artificial Intelligence” refers to a vastly greater space of possibilities than does the term “Homo sapiens.” When we talk about “AIs” we are really talking about minds-in-general, or optimization processes in general. Imagine a map of mind design space. In one corner, a tiny little circle contains all humans; within a larger tiny circle containing all biological life; and all the rest of the huge map is the space of minds-ingeneral. The entire map floats in a still vaster space, the space of optimization processes. Natural selection creates complex functional machinery without mindfulness; evolution lies inside the space of optimization processes but outside the circle of minds.

Though Eliezer doesn't stress this point, this argument applies as much to biotechnology as Artificial Intelligence. You could say, paralleling Eliezer, that when we talk about "biotechnology" we are really talking about living things in general, because life on Earth represents just a tiny subset of all life that could have evolved anywhere in the universe. Biotechnology may allow to create some of that life that could have evolved but didn't. Extending the point, there's probably an even vaster space of life that's recognizably life but couldn't have evolved, because it exists in a tiny island of life not connected to other possible life by a chain of small, beneficial mutations, and therefore is effectively impossible to reach without the conscious planning of a bioengineer.

The argument can further be extended to nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is like life in that they both involve doing interesting things with complex arrangements of matter on a very small scale, it's just that visions of nanotechnology tend to involve things which don't otherwise look very much like life at all. So we've got this huge space of "doing interesting this with complex arrangements of matter on a very small scale," of which existing life on earth is a tiny, tiny fraction, and in which "Artificial Intelligence," "biotechnology," and so on represent much large subsets.

Generalized in this way, this argument seems to me to be an e...