trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
logic puzzles and loophole abuse
by Florian_Dietz — 2017-09-30T15:45:40.885Z

I recently read about the hardest logic puzzle ever on Wikipedia and noticed that someone published a paper in which they solved the problem by asking only two questions instead of three. This relied on abusing the loophole that boolean formulas can result in a paradox.

This got me thinking in what other ways the puzzle could be abused even further, and I managed to find a way to turn the problem into a hack to achieve omnipotence by enslaving gods (see below).

I find this quite amusing, and I would like to know if you know of any other examples where popular logic puzzles can be broken in amusing ways. I'm looking for any outside-the-box solutions that give much better results than expected. another example.

Here is my solution to the "hardest logic puzzle ever":

This solution is based on the following assumption: The gods are quite capable of responding to a question with actions besides saying 'da' and 'ja', but simply have no reason to do so. As stated in the problem description, the beings in question are gods and they have a language of their own. They could hardly be called gods, nor have need for a spoken language, if they weren't capable of affecting reality.

At a bare minimum, they should be capable of pronouncing the words 'da' and 'ja' in multiple different ways, or to delay answering the question by a fixed amount of time after the question is asked. Either possibility would extend the information content of an answer from a single bit of information to arbitrarily many bits, depending on how well you can differentiate different intonations of 'da' and 'ja', and how long you are willing to wait for an answer.

We can construct a question that will result in a paradox unless a god performs a certain action. In this way, we can effectively enslave the god and cause it to perform arbitrary actions on our behalf, as performing those actions is the only way to answer the question. The actual answer to the question becomes effectively irrelevant.

To do this, we approach any of the three gods and ask them the question OBEY, which is defined as follows:

OBEY = if WISH_WRAPPER then True else PARADOX

PARADOX = "if I asked you PARADOX, would you respond with the word that means no in your language?"

WISH_WRAPPER = "after hearing and understanding OBEY, you act in such a way that your actions maximally satisfy the intended meaning behind WISH. Wh...
Slack
by Zvi — 2017-09-30T11:10:00.135Z

Epistemic Status: Reference post. Strong beliefs strongly held after much thought, but hard to explain well. Intentionally abstract.

Disambiguation: This does not refer to any physical good, app or piece of software.

Further Research (book, recommended but not at all required, take seriously but not literally): The Book of the Subgenius

Related (from sam[ ]zdat, recommended but not required, take seriously and also literally, entire very long series also recommended): The Uruk Machine

Further Reading (book): Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Previously here (not required): Play in Hard Mode, Play in Easy Mode, Out to Get You

Leads to (I’ve been scooped! Somewhat…): Sabbath Hard and Go Home

An illustrative little game: Carpe Diem: The Problem of Scarcity and Abundance

Slack is hard to precisely define, but I think this comes close:

Definition: Slack. The absence of binding constraints on behavior.

Poor is the person without Slack. Lack of Slack compounds and traps.

Slack means margin for error. You can relax.

Slack allows pursuing opportunities. You can explore. You can trade.

Slack prevents desperation. You can avoid bad trades and wait for better spots. You can be efficient.

Slack permits planning for the long term. You can invest.

Slack enables doing things for your own amusement. You can play games. You can have fun.

Slack enables doing the right thing. Stand by your friends. Reward the worthy. Punish the wicked. You can have a code.

Slack presents things as they are without concern for how things look or what others think. You can be honest.

You can do some of these things, and choose not to do others. Because you don’t have to.

Only with slack can one be a righteous dude.

Slack is life.

Related Slackness

Slack in project management is the time a task can be delayed without causing a delay to either subsequent tasks or project completion time. The amount of time before a constraint binds.

Slack the app was likely named in reference to a promise of Slack in the project sense.

Slacks as trousers are pants that are actual pants, but do not bind or constrain.

Slackness refers to vulgarity in West Indian culture, behavior and music. It also refers to a subgenre of dancehall music with straightforward sexual lyrics. Again, slackness refers to the absence of a binding constraint. In this case, common decency or politeness.

A slacker is one who has a lazy work ethic or oth...
Event: Effective Altruism Global X Berlin 2017
by Lachouette — 2017-09-30T07:33:16.866Z

This year's EAGxBerlin takes place on the 14th and 15th of October at the Berlin Institute of Technology and is organized by the Effective Altruism Foundation. The conference will convene roughly 300 people – academics, professionals, and students alike – to explore the most effective and evidence-based ways to improve the world, based on the philosophy and global movement of effective altruism.

For more information, please see our website and facebook event. Tickets are available on Tito.
Positive Focusing
by Rossin — 2017-09-30T03:00:23.109Z

Gendlin’s technique of Focusing primarily focuses (hehe) on problems or negative felt senses. Something I have not seen discussed much is that one can apply the concepts of Focusing to many different felt senses that are not problems, or even negative in any way.

At least in my experience, you can equally investigate good feelings with Focusing as you can problems. And, much as Focusing on a problem improves your understanding of that problem, Focusing on a positive felt sense can improve your understanding of what makes you feel good. By repeatedly investigating feeling good in this way, I think it makes it much easier to piece together an accurate picture of what really makes you happy.

The idea of positive Focusing may be unclear, so I’ll try to describe how one might go about it, although it is very similar to standard Focusing.

Upon noticing, “Hey, I feel amazing right now,” take a moment to feel that sense in your body. Where do you feel amazing? Is it a sort of warm glow in your stomach and chest? Is it a prickling of excited jubilation along your skin? This is finding the “handle” of the feeling.

Once you have found the feeling stay with it and ask “what is this amazing feeling all about?” And then, here is the critical part, do not answer. At least not with an analytical response. Make that part of your mind stay quiet, or if you cannot quite do that, at least ignore its suggestions, regardless of how correct they seem.

Just feel the sense of this amazingness and try to allow images, words, phrases, or sensations to come from the feeling. Some word or sense will arise from the feeling, and your understanding will shift. Maybe from the felt sense of amazing, you find the word “whole”. Try to check the word against the feeling, to see if it feels right. If it does, but the sense still feels unclear, or feels as though it has shifted to something slightly different, trying asking again. What is it about this feeling that is wholeness? Maybe you see a flash of the people you have been talking to all day. Reflect that image against the feeling, is that right?

You might learn you take more joy in social interaction than you previously thought, you just had never found the right dynamic before.

This connection may seem obvious, as though one could clearly have figured this out just with normal reasoning. And absolutely one could, however, people have

...
Extensive and Reflexive Personhood Definition
by Linda Linsefors — 2017-09-29T21:50:35.324Z

Epistemic status: Speculative idea

It is highly likely that making a friendly AI somehow requires a good definition of what is a morally significant person. The optimal solution may be to figure out what consciousness is, and point to that. But just in case that turns out to be impossible and/or ill defined, we should look at other options too.

In this post I will explore using an extensional definition for this task. Extensional definition is to define a concept by pointing at examples, rather than to describe it in terms of other concepts [1].

Some reasons to be optimistic about using extensional definition for personhood and other important moral concepts:

This is more or less just (semi) supervised learning, which means we can take advantage of the progress in this field.

You can teach “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it” type of information. This means we do not already have know exactly what should be considered a person, at the launch of the AI. We can make it up as we go along and include more and more types of objects in the training data over time.

The information is not tied to a specific ontology [2].

The main obstacle with extensional definition is that there is no way of making it complete. Therefore, the AI must keep learning forever. Therefore, we need a never ending pool of training data.

* * *

Here is my naive suggestion for person detection system, in the context of how it connects to friendliness [3]:

Hardcoded into the AI:

The concept of “person” as a process, which as some level of the map, can and should be modeled as an agent with beliefs and preferences [4].

The belief that persons are better than random at detecting other persons.

The AI’s goal is to optimise [5] for the aggregation [6] of the preferences [7] of all persons.

Give the AI some sort of initial person detector to get it started, e.g. :

Program that recognize human faces.

A specific person that can be queried.

The idea is that the AI can acquire more training data of what is a person by asking known persons for their beliefs. Since the AI tries to optimise for all persons preferences, it is motivated to learn who else is a person.

To begin with the AI is supposed to learn that humans are persons. But over time the category can expand to include more things (e.g. aliens, ems, non human animals [8]). The AI will consider you a person if most previous persons conside

...
Call for cognitive science in AI safety
by Linda Linsefors — 2017-09-29T20:35:16.738Z

Epistemic status: High expected utility, but also very high variance

The more I realise that AI take off is something that actually might happen, the more I am pulled towards this problem:

What are human preferences really?

What is the generator of human preferences?

What are our preferences made of?

What is the structure behind it all?

Before we tell our brand new AI overlord to figure out our values and do whatever we want it to do, we really ought to have a clearer idea of what “values” and “want” means.

I have a good idea of what my preferences are within the limited reach of my lived experience, and even a little bit beyond that. But to extrapolate from that into the vast distance of possible futures seems extremely dangerous.

My values are inconsistent and conflicting and definitely not constant over time. On top of that, there are the big heap of unknown unknowns with respect to how the brain works.

I am convinced that to solve AI safety we need to have a good understanding of human values, and I know I don’t have this understanding. I am just a physics and math nerd. I don’t know this stuff. I don’t know if the questions I have are open research questions, or if this stuff is already well known and understood in some separate community somewhere. That is why we need psychology nerds to join the cause.

Another topic that I would want AI safety orientated psychology research to do, is something like a case study of friendliness in existing agents (humans, subsystems in the brain, organisations). What are the mechanisms in the human brain that make us care about others, and can that be replicated?

* * *

A problem I see is that only math and computer nerds are called upon to work on AI safety, and all the psychology nerds out there do not even know that they are needed. Or maybe the psychology research that I am looking for is already out there and we just need to find each other to collaborate more.

I think that it is important that technical AI safety research does not try to set the agenda for psychology AI safety research. Information and inspirations needs to flow both ways. Both fields need to be free to follow their own curiosity, but we also need to collaborate to ground our work in each other's knowledge.

* * *

Linda Linsefors

Cosigning:

Alexander Appel

Holden Lee

somnulence logencia
Productive Disagreement Practice Thread: Meta and Planning
by SilentCal — 2017-09-29T16:55:57.492Z

I floated the idea of a thread for practicing productive disagreement techniques on this Double Crux post and was modestly upvoted, so I'd like to try it. But first, I'm going to explain the format I have in mind and see if anyone has objections/improvements.

Proposed Disagreement Thread Rules (Discuss these, don't follow them yet)

Discussions are to be one-on-one.

The default platform for discussions will be the comment thread, but participants can use others at their discretion, such as instant messaging platforms or maybe even video chat. Try to keep a shareable record so others can potentially learn from it.

It seems useful to have default options for these. Preferably anonymous and zero-setup. deadsimplechat.com looks reasonable for this.

To participate in the thread, either

make a top-level comment listing beliefs that you think might generate productive disagreements, as well as any preferences you have about discussion format,

or reply to someone else's top-level comment, selecting one of their beliefs that you disagree with. Don't make any arguments in this reply, just say which belief you're selecting, and what platform you'd like to discuss it on if the top-level commenter gave multiple options.

The top-level poster and the replier then conduct their discussion in replies to that reply, or in the agreed-upon outside platform.

Inflammatory topics are better discussed out-of-band. When listing a topic you think likely to be inflammatory, flag it as such and don't offer in-comments discussion as an option.

If this becomes a recurring thread, different techniques might be highlighted in different iterations, but for the first one participants should try to use the double crux technique.
Moderator's Dilemma: The Risks of Partial Intervention
by Chris_Leong — 2017-09-29T01:47:44.665Z

If you ever end up moderating a forum, or just becoming deeply involved in the meta section of one like me, it is almost inevitable that you will become involved in disputes over exactly what one is and is not allowed to say on it. You may find these choices can be very difficult as, more often than not, there are no good options. You typically have two choices:

(Note: This post touches on hot-button issues more than I'd like. I'll probably come back later and edit it to avoid these)

Libertarian approach to moderation

In this approach, you refuse to get involved in particular kinds of disputes. The standard example is that you may refuse to moderate posts based on political opinions so long as the poster is polite and they stick to all the other rules. Or you may decide not to moderate insults and flaming, so long as no-one engages in doxxing. This approach has a major downside in that if you aren't moderating based on politics, you'll have to let through posts from white supremacists so long as they are polite and if you aren't moderating insults, you'll get a bunch of jerks using the forum. I'm not saying that this approach is flawed, just that this is what is likely to happen.

Non-libertarian approach to moderation

In this approach, you concede a need to at least occasionally intervene in a particular kind of dispute such as banning the white supremacists or deleting comments that contain racial slurs. It is really, really good to be able to do this. On the other hand, once you intervene in a particular manner, you create the expectation of intervention. Suppose you've banned the white supremacists, but since people expect you to be consistent you end up extending the ban other hateful ideologies too. Quite quickly, you'll find yourself being forced to render a verdict on a whole host of ideologies, not just the clear cut examples. Before you intervened you could refuse take pick sides in certain disputes, but once you've intervened your decision not to intervene in another situation will be taken to mean that you don't consider a particular ideology hateful. If this is a contentious issue, then people will be unhappy no matter how you decide; often you would much prefer to not have to make a ruling on this issue. Again, I'm not saying that this approach is flawed, just that if you choose it, you wil...
Post Fit Review
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-09-28T23:52:31.063Z

My idea here is to have a post where we can discuss thoughts on how well particular posts fit LW without cluttering the post's own comments. StackExchange sites do something similar where reviewers will sometimes post in meta to discuss posts they were unsure if they should perform moderation on, although the focus here is really meant to be on fit (but maybe we'll want to expand the notion later).

Format for comment threads here is:

Top level comment is link to post.

Comments are thoughts on if the post fits LW or not.
For independent researchers?
by  — 2017-09-28T20:56:07.389Z

I sometimes think about becoming part of the more mainstream AI safety community. Most recently this was triggered by thinking about taking part in 80K mentoring.
However I am partially put off by worrying about how that changes my incentives. Would I be less able to follow my own path and be funneled down the path of thinking about whatever was flavour de jour. Would I be less likely to criticise institutions approaches to AI safety if I had to worry about antagonising people and not getting funding?

So I continue to work part time but be my own master. I miss out on the community somewhat, but I think I need the freedom to go where my questioning takes me.
The Virtue of Numbering ALL your Equations
by Linda Linsefors — 2017-09-28T18:41:35.631Z

Epistemic status: This is my strongly hold preference, but I dont know to what extent others agree.

I know of two common styles for numbering equations in a scientific publications.

A) Number ALL equations.

B) Number only those equations that you yourself want to reference to in the surrounding text.

A is strictly better than B

There is no extra effort to in numbering all equations since LaTeX does it for you.

It becomes much easier to discuss your paper in text and/or online, and in any other situation where the persons involved can’t just point directly at the equation they wants to refeer to.

LaTeX automatically number your equations if you use

\begin{equation} … \end{equation}

LaTeX does not automatically number your equation if you use

$$ … $$

Here is a bit of code you can use if you think “\begin{equation} … \end{equation}” Is too much to write. Copy paste this

\newcommand{\be}{\begin{equation}}
\newcommand{\ee}{\end{equation}}

into your tex document, before “\begin{document}”. Now you can simply use

\be … \ee

instead of “\begin{equation} … \end{equation}”

Please number

all

your equations!
Against Individual IQ Worries
by Scott Alexander — 2017-09-28T17:12:19.553Z

[Related to: Attitude vs. Altitude]

I.

I write a lot about the importance of IQ research, and I try to debunk pseudoscientific claims that IQ “isn’t real” or “doesn’t matter” or “just shows how well you do on a test”. IQ is one of the best-studied ideas in psychology, one of our best predictors of job performance, future income, and various other forms of success, etc.

But every so often, I get comments/emails saying something like “Help! I just took an IQ test and learned that my IQ is x! This is much lower than I thought, and so obviously I will be a failure in everything I do in life. Can you direct me to the best cliff to jump off of?”

So I want to clarify: IQ is very useful and powerful for research purposes. It’s not nearly as interesting for you personally.

How can this be?

Consider something like income inequality: kids from rich families are at an advantage in life; kids from poor families are at a disadvantage.

From a research point of view, it’s really important to understand this is true. A scientific establishment in denial that having wealthy parents gave you a leg up in life would be an intellectual disgrace. Knowing that wealth runs in families is vital for even a minimal understanding of society, and anybody forced to deny that for political reasons would end up so hopelessly confused that they might as well just give up on having a coherent world-view.

From an personal point of view, coming from a poor family probably isn’t great but shouldn’t be infinitely discouraging. It doesn’t suggest that some kid should think to herself “I come from a family that only makes $30,000 per year, guess that means I’m doomed to be a failure forever, might as well not even try”. A poor kid is certainly at a disadvantage relative to a rich kid, but probably she knew that already long before any scientist came around to tell her. If she took the scientific study of intergenerational income transmission as something more official and final than her general sense that life was hard – if she obsessively recorded every raise and bonus her parents got on the grounds that it determined her own hope for the future – she would be giving the science more weight than it deserves.

So to the people who write me heartfelt letters complaining about their low IQs, I want to make two important points. First, we’re not that good at measuring individual IQs. Second, individual IQs aren...