trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How to improve the public perception of the SIAI and LW?
by XiXiDu — 2011-03-08T14:48:54.904Z

I was recently thinking about the possibility that someone with a lot of influence might at some point try to damage LessWrong and the SIAI and what preemptive measures one could take to counter it.

If you believe that the SIAI does the most important work in the universe and if you believe that LessWrong serves the purpose of educating people to become more rational and subsequently understand the importance of trying to mitigate risks from AI, then you should care about public relations, you should try to communicate your honesty and well-intentioned motives as effectively as possible.

Public relations are very important because a good reputation is necessary to do the following:

Making people read the Sequences.

Raising money for the SIAI.

Convincing people to take risks from AI seriously.

Allowing the SIAI to influence other AGI researchers.

Mitigating future opposition by politicians and other interest groups.

Being no easy target for criticism.

An attack scenario

First one has to identify characteristics that could potentially be used to cast a damaging light on this community. Here the most obvious possibility seems to be to portray the SIAI, together with LessWrong, as a cult.

After some superficial examination an outsider might conclude the following about this community:

Believing into heaven and hell in the form of a positive or negative Singularity.

Discouraging skepticism while portraying their own standpoint as clear-cut.

Encouraging to take ideas seriously.

Encouraging and signaling strong cooperation and conformity.

Evangelizing by scaring people and telling them to donate money.

Social pressure by employing a reputation system with positive and negative incentive.

Removing themselves from empirical criticism by framing everything as a prediction.

Discrediting mainstream experts while placing themselves a level above them.

Discouraging transparency and openness by referring to the dangers of AI research.

Using scope insensitivity and high-risk to justify action, outweigh low probabilities and disregard opposing evidence.

Most of this might sound wrong to the well-read LessWrong reader. But how would those points be received by mediocre rationalists who don't know what you know, especially if eloquently summarized by a fa...
[link] Why an Intelligence Explosion is Probable
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-03-08T10:58:46.704Z

http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/03/07/why-an-intelligence-explosion-is-probable/

Briefly surveys various proposed main bottlenecks for an intelligence explosion, and argues that none of them is going to be a major one:

Economic growth rate

Investment availability

Gathering of empirical information (experimentation, interacting with an environment)

Software complexity

Hardware demands vs. available hardware

Bandwidth

Lightspeed lags
Chicago Meetup - Sunday March 13
by Airedale — 2011-03-07T16:37:02.357Z

Steven0461 and I will host a meetup this Sunday, March 13, starting at 3 pm, at the Elephant & Castle Pub on 111 West Adams Street. (Note: there’s more than one Elephant & Castle in Chicago, so you may want to check the address even if you think you know the pub.) We'll put up a sign saying "LessWrong." We also have a Google Group where you can sign up to receive information about future meetups even if you can’t make this one. Hope to see both new and familiar faces there!
Bring Back the Sequences?
by Alexandros — 2011-03-07T07:21:32.038Z

Given that

1. Deciding to read and actually reading the sequences is 'work'

2. Reading the latest frontpaged article on LessWrong is 'fun'

3. We frequently have gaps in the posting rate of articles that make it to the front page

4. There are many people who joined this community after the sequences were written and haven't gone through all of them

...would it make sense to start bringing articles from the sequences to the front page, either at a set pace or whenever there is a gap in posting?

I have actually read most of the sequences, but wouldn't mind going through them once again. However, taking it up as a project seems like too much work. By bringing an article to the front page, either with the old comment thread or with a fresh one (plus a reference to the old one), it becomes something that the community is doing. Following things that a group you belong to is doing is fun. But for that to happen, we need to share a common pointer to which article is 'the one we are reading now'. Hence, the front page.

In short, I think if people in this community reading (and re-reading) more of the sequences is something we want, then recycling them through the front page is also a good idea.

If the barrier is implementation modifications needed, I may be able to assist.
Berkeley LW Meet-Up Saturday March 12
by LucasSloan — 2011-03-07T07:14:13.773Z

ETA: Any Late-comers, We did end up in the VLSB.

Hi all, it seems we've reach that time of the month, that time when we get together and be rational in Berkeley. As usual, we'll meet at the Starbucks at 2128 Oxford Street at 7 pm, then move into the atrium in the Valley Life Sciences Building on the Berkeley Campus. There'll be an expedition to get food, so don't feel that you have to eat before hand.

I want to make a special plea to the lurkers on lesswrong to come, I promise no one will think poorly of you if you're still in High School, aren't a member of Mensa, or haven't read the sequences. This is a social event where we get together with people who like rationality, not a way for the shadowy cabal of beisutsukai to puzzle out the secret of quantum gravity. Even if you only just linked here from Methods of Rationality, I and everyone else here wants to get to know you.

Hope to see you all there!
Lifeism, Anti-Deathism, and Some Other Terminal-Values Rambling
by Pavitra — 2011-03-07T04:35:49.416Z

(Apologies to RSS users: apparently there's no draft button, but only "publish" and "publish-and-go-back-to-the-edit-screen", misleadingly labeled.)

You have a button. If you press it, a happy, fulfilled person will be created in a sealed box, and then be painlessly garbage-collected fifteen minutes later. If asked, they would say that they're glad to have existed in spite of their mortality. Because they're sealed in a box, they will leave behind no bereaved friends or family. In short, this takes place in Magic Thought Experiment Land where externalities don't exist. Your choice is between creating a fifteen-minute-long happy life or not.

Do you push the button?

I suspect Eliezer would not, because it would increase the death-count of the universe by one. I would, because it would increase the life-count of the universe by fifteen minutes.

Actually, that's an oversimplification of my position. I actually believe that the important part of any algorithm is its output, additional copies matter not at all, the net utility of the existence of a group of entities-whose-existence-constitutes-utility is equal to the maximum of the individual utilities, and the (terminal) utility of the existence of a particular computation is bounded below at zero. I would submit a large number of copies of myself to slavery and/or torture to gain moderate benefits to my primary copy.

(What happens to the last copy of me, of course, does affect the question of "what computation occurs or not". I would subject N out of N+1 copies of myself to torture, but not N out of N. Also, I would hesitate to torture copies of other people, on the grounds that there's a conflict of interest and I can't trust myself to reason honestly. I might feel differently after I'd been using my own fork-slaves for a while.)

So the real value of pushing the button would be my warm fuzzies, which breaks the no-externalities assumption, so I'm indifferent.

But nevertheless, even knowing about the heat death of the universe, knowing that anyone born must inevitably die, I do not consider it immoral to create a person, even if we assume all else equal.
Positive Thinking
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-03-07T01:03:12.097Z

If I were to take all of my friends and divide them into two groups, there are plenty of criteria I could choose, but probably the most relevant slice would be between my friends who believe in God, and my friends who don’t.

Many in the believer group know each other as well. The evangelical Christian community in my city is fairly tight-knit. Every once in a while I’ll meet someone new, I’ll mention offhand something about church, it’ll become the topic of conversation, and suddenly we discover that we share a dozen mutual friends.

My non-believer friends come from all walks of life. My old friends from high school fit in this category; so do many of the friends I’ve met through university or part-time jobs. There’s no tight-knit community here. I wouldn’t describe many of them as rationalists, particularly, but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.

Something about this bothers me. Maybe it’s because I find it so refreshing to be with a group of people who are relentlessly positive about life, who constantly remind one another to be positive, and who offer concrete help rather than judgement. Once, when another of our friends couldn’t pay her rent, my Christian friend and I got up at four, took out five hundred dollars in cash at a convenience store, and biked to her house to leave it anonymously in her mailbox before I left for my six am shift at work. The high lasted all day. I can’t think of any other community where this would happen, where it would even be socially acceptable.

I met people at church who had survived the worst circumstances; they had been abused, they had been addicts, they had been homeless. But aside from the concrete help they’d found at church, they’d found some kind of hope as well. They believed that they could succeed. I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life, and I’ve never had reason to doubt that I would succeed, or that people would be there to help me if I ever failed. But for people who’ve only seen evidence that they will fail and be stepped on, the benefits of being told that God loves them unconditionally seem to be non-trivial.

Now to contrast with my non-religious friends; this isn’t universally true, but

...
LW is to rationality as AIXI is to intelligence
by XiXiDu — 2011-03-06T20:24:27.846Z

Apparently LW does a great job on refining rationality and dissolving confusions. But is it helpful when it comes to anything apart from designing Friendly AI, apart from a purely academic treatment of rationality? I'm currently unable to benefit from what I have so far read on LW, it actually made me even more unproductive, to an extent that I get nothing done anymore. Let me explain...

You have to know that I'm still in the process of acquiring a basic education. If I say basic, I mean basic. Since I got almost no formal education, what I do know (or know about) is largely on a very low level, yet I am plagued by problems that are themselves on a level that require the intellect and education of the folks here on LW. The problem with that is that I'm yet lacking most of the skills, tools and requisite know-how while the problems in question concern me as well. This often causes me to get stuck, I can't decide what to do. It also doesn't help much that I am the kind of person who is troubled by problems others probably don't even think about. An example from when I was much younger (around the age of 13) is when I was troubled by the fact that I could accidentally squash insects when walking over grass in our garden. Since I have never been a prodigy, far from it, it was kind of an unsolvable problem at that time, especially since I am unable to concentrate for very long and other similar problems are accumulating in my mind all the time. So what happened? After a time of paralysis and distress, as it happens often, I simply became reluctant and unwilling, angry at the world. I decided that it is not my fault that the world is designed like that and that I am not smart enough to solve the problem and do what is right. I finally managed to ignore it. But this happens all the time and the result is never satisfactory. This process too often ends in simply ignoring the problem or becoming unwilling to do anything at all. What I'm doing is not effective it seems, it already stole years of my life in which I could have learnt mathematics or other important things or done what I would have liked to do. You might wonder, shouldn't this insight cause me to ignore subsequent problems and just learn something or do what I want to do, do something that is more effective? Nope, it is exactly the kind of mantra that LW teaches that always ma...
Katla on death as entertainment
by KatjaGrace — 2011-03-06T13:30:59.000Z

I’m rather busy this week, so here you have a guest post from my mildly irate, judgemental and intellectually careless friend Katla. NB. We are only friends because we grew up in the same town.

***

As a creature, I have a nicely developed fear of death. I don’t like thinking about death at all. Just the sight of a graveyard, or the ‘deaths’ section of the newspaper, or a living creature that will one day die often plunges my brain into jittery superstition. Like most people, I would probably risk my life to avoid thinking about the fact that my life is at risk. But all this careful aversion and ignorance is wasted when in the middle of my escapism in fiction I come face to face with the death of a fictional colleague. And a small helpless boy, and six friends. And my wife, and a country. And seven gazillion aliens.

For some reason people are dying all over the place in fiction. It’s as if nothing really matters enough in a story unless someone is dead over it. Why?

Most people are with me on the avoiding thinking about death front, in real life. We go to all this trouble to euphemise about it. We hire doctors to make and take responsibility for decisions relating to it. We avoid discovering whether we are at risk for it. We hate it when people we know die. We make up ridiculous stories about how nobody actually ever dies, but have just been taken to a new home. When death happens we cover it in a veil of official meaningfulness, and have a big ceremony, hoping to convince ourselves that it is a proper and meaningful symbolic event, not the disgusting and horrifying conversion of a person into a corpse. We much prefer to keep our minds on meaning and legacies than to remember there is a dead body lying around. We avoid actually planning this in advance though, because it doesn’t bear thinking about. And so on.

Yet scrolling through the channels it seems most movies have death as a plot element important enough to mention in the blurb. When a stoic government official in post-war Japan learns he has terminal cancer, he suddenly realizes he’s squandered his life on meaningless red tape…this stunning emotional drama recounts the events surrounding Joan of Arc’s 1431 heresy trial, burning at the stake and subsequent martyrdom…An easily spooked guy, Columbus joins forces with wild man Tallahassee to fight for survival in

...
NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life [link]
by Kevin — 2011-03-06T10:22:48.419Z

http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/aliens-riding-meteorites-arsenic-redux-or-something-new/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2293643
Perhaps the first detailed plan to program a general moral code into a particular model of AGI
by lukeprog — 2011-03-06T06:41:25.119Z

Wallach, Franklin, & Allen, "A Conceptual and Computational Model of Moral Decision Making in Human and Artificial Agents."

Abstract:

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in general, comprehensive models of human cognition. Such models aim to explain higher-order cognitive faculties, such as deliberation and planning. Given a computational representation, the validity of these models can be tested in computer simulations such as software agents or embodied robots. The push to implement computational models of this kind has created the field of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Moral decision making is arguably one of the most challenging tasks for computational approaches to higher-order cognition. The need for increasingly autonomous artificial agents to factor moral considerations into their choices and actions has given rise to another new field of inquiry variously known as Machine Morality, Machine Ethics, Roboethics, or Friendly AI. In this study, we discuss how LIDA, an AGI model of human cognition, can be adapted to model both affective and rational features of moral decision making. Using the LIDA model, we will demonstrate how moral decisions can be made in many domains using the same mechanisms that enable general decision making. Comprehensive models of human cognition typically aim for compatibility with recent research in the cognitive and neural sciences. Global workspace theory, proposed by the neuropsychologist Bernard Baars (1988), is a highly regarded model of human cognition that is currently being computationally instantiated in several software implementations. LIDA (Franklin, Baars, Ramamurthy, & Ventura, 2005) is one such computational implementation. LIDA is both a set of computational tools and an underlying model of human cognition, which provides mechanisms that are capable of explaining how an agent’s selection of its next action arises from bottom-up collection of sensory data and top-down processes for making sense of its current situation. We will describe how the LIDA model helps integrate emotions into the human decision-making process, and we will elucidate a process whereby an agent can work through an ethical problem to reach a solution that takes account of ethically relevant factors.

I suspect this is of much interest to many Less Wrong readers.

PDF.
Blues, Greens and abortion
by Snowyowl — 2011-03-05T19:15:05.257Z

Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.

Wait... that sounds off.

I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.

If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.

This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.
A Transhumanist Poem
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-03-05T09:16:06.063Z

**Note: I'm not a poet. I hardly ever write poetry, and when I do, it's usually because I've stayed up all night. However, this seemed like a very appropriate poem for Less Wrong. Not sure if it's appropriate as a top-level post. Someone please tell me if not.**

Imagine

The first man

Who held a stick in rough hands

And drew lines on a cold stone wall

Imagine when the others looked

When they said, I see the antelope

I see it.

Later on their children's children

Would build temples, and sing songs

To their many-faced gods.

Stone idols, empty staring eyes

Offerings laid on a cold stone altar

And left to rot.

Yet later still there would be steamships

And trains, and numbers to measure the stars

Small suns ignited in the desert

One man's first step on an airless plain

Now we look backwards

At the ones who came before us

Who lived, and swiftly died.

The first man's flesh is in all of us now

And for his and his children's sake

We imagine a world with no more death

And we see ourselves reflected

In the silicon eyes

Of our final creation
Using the Karma system to call for a show of hands - profitable?
by  — 2011-03-05T08:35:06.429Z

Not saying its a efficient use of time for the Karma hoarder, but I do wonder if it generally is a reliable way to gain karma. We sometimes see a call for a show of hands here where a comment is up voted by those that agree and a later comment is down voted for balance.
This is purely anecdotal but it seems to me most of the time down-votes don't balance out the up-votes. Does anyone else have this experience? This seems a question we can answer approximately by having a bot mine the text of the archives. I feel that making the bot would be made easier if we had as many samples of such use of the Karma system as possible. However if I'm the only one with this observation or if those with this observation are in the minority its probably not worth the effort (at least for someone with my skill set) .

Some LWers may be relying on others who don't agree with the motion but want to be "fair" when it comes to Karma to down vote the balance. Perhaps there are just fewever people who don't agree with the motion but down vote the balance post, because it contributes to enforcing norms of how they think the Karma system should be used, than there are people who agree with the motion but don't down vote.

As to explanations, off the top of my head:

Selection bias.

Trivial inconvenience to access the down voted balance

A fraction of posters simply forgets to down-vote

Some posters might up-vote unthinkingly because they like the suggestion not because they agree with the motion.

People don't see a problem with a slightly positive imbalance if they think asking for the call was a good idea. If they think its a bad idea they are due to LW norms farm less likley to down-vote. Especially if this particular pair of posts is balanced.

Edit:

It appears I was ignorant of the implicitly accepted social convention that bascially amounts to downvoting the balance being optional for those who don't want to reward the person making taking the poll (or perhaps don't want to reward him beyond the current imbalance).

I'm still interested in what factors do or don't play a role in up and down voting such pairs of posts and how they compare to other form of participating Karma-wise.