trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Narrative, self-image, and self-communication
by Academian — 2012-12-19T09:42:16.279Z

Related to: Cached selves, Why you're stuck in a narrative, The curse of identity

Outline: Some back-story, Pondering the mechanics of self-image, The role of narrative, Narrative as a medium for self-communication.

tl;dr: One can have a self-image that causes one to neglect the effects of self-image. And, since we tend to process our self-images somewhat in the context of a narrative identity, if you currently make zero use of narrative in understanding and affecting how you think about yourself, it may be worth adjusting upward. All this seems to have been the case for me, and is probably part of what makes HPMOR valuable.

Some back-story

Starting when I was around 16 and becoming acutely annoyed with essentialism, I prided myself on not being dependent on a story-like image of myself. In fact, to make sure I wasn't, I put a break command in my narrative loop: I drafted a story in my mind about a hero who was able to outwit his foes by being less constrained by narrative than they were, and I identified with him whenever I felt a need-for-narrative coming on. Batman's narrator goes for something like this in the Dark Knight when he <select for spoiler-> abandons his heroic image to take the blame for Harvey Dent's death.

I think this break command was mostly a good thing. It helped me to resolve cognitive dissonance and overcome the limitations of various cached selves, and I ended up mostly focussed on whether my beliefs were accurate and my desires were being fulfilled. So I still figure it's a decent first-order correction to being over-constrained by narrative.

But, I no longer think it's the only decent solution. In fact, understanding the more subtle mechanics of self-image — what affects our self schemas, what they affect, and how — was something I neglected for a long time because I saw self-image as a solved problem. Yes, I developed a cached view of myself as unaffected by self-image constraints. I would have been embarassed to notice such dependencies, so I didn't. The irony, eh?

I'm writing this because I wouldn't be surprised to find others here developing, or having developed, this blind spot...

Pondering the mechanics of self-image

At some point in your life, you may have taken on a job or a project without knowing that after doing it for a month, it would negatively affect your self-image in some way. There m...
LessWrong Survey Results: Do Ethical Theories Affect Behavior?
by Peter Wildeford — 2012-12-19T08:40:47.861Z

Awhile ago, Yvain released the results of the 2012 survey (that I participated in), which contained responses from over 1000 readers. So I uploaded the data into STATA and fooled around looking for cool things.

Mainly, I've heard some people argue that the moral theory you hold has little to no impact on your actual day-to-day behavior. I want to use these survey results to see if this is true -- are consequentialists more likely to donate money than deontologists? Are virtue ethics more likely to be vegetarian? We'll see!

While I can't make any claims to the representativeness of this survey or the external validity of drawing conclusions from its results, at least among the people who did take the survey, ethical theories people endorse seem to have little impact on their actual self-reported behavior.

The Ethical Theories

First, a breakdown of the actual ethical theories people endorse. Respondents were asked to categorize themselves into "accept / lean towards consequentialism", "accept / lean towards deontology", "accept / lean towards virtue ethics", or "other / no answer" (N = 1055):

Consequentialism
63.41%

Deontology
3.98%

Virtue Ethics
14.41%

Other / No Answer
18.20%

(Note that "no answer" are the people who specifically chose to note they had no answer. Other people ignored the question and didn't choose any answer at all, truly having no answer. Those people are not included in this analysis.)

Ethical Theories and Donation

So first up, I want to see if your ethical theory predicts how much money you are willing to donate, if any. Given the famous connection between utilitarianism and arguments like Peter Singer's who suggest you should donate all your money until it really hurts (you give so much money, you yourself become as poor as the people you're trying to help). Certainly consequentialism is not utilitarianism, but I would expect most consequentialists would endorse donation more than deontologists or virtue ethicists where donations aren't as mandatory.

So I took the charity data and dropped all the non-numerical answers, and LessWrongers have donated an average of $445.15 (N = 879, SD = 1167.095, min = 0, max = 9000) to charity over the past year. To get a better proxy for "effective charity", LessWrongers donate $331.05 (N = 884, SD = 4087.303, min = 0, max = 110000) on average to SIAI and CFAR. (I don't kno...
Meetup : Washington, DC Meetup with Special Guest
by maia — 2012-12-19T04:43:35.222Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, DC Meetup with Special Guest

WHEN:
06 January 2013 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

After some of the DC group attended a talk by Robin Hanson, I asked him to come visit a meetup! And even better, he agreed!

Those who didn't come to the talk can hear more about the idea of a future em economy, and what it would likely entail. (Or other ideas about what the future might hold?)

We may also discuss issues of interest to contemporary economics, including prediction markets.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, DC Meetup with Special Guest
Notes on Psychopathy
by gwern — 2012-12-19T04:02:49.448Z

This is some old work I did for SI. See also Notes on the Psychology of Power.

Deviant but not necessarily diseased or dysfunctional minds can demonstrate resistance to all treatment and attempts to change their mind (think No Universally Compelling Arguments; the premier example are probably psychopaths - no drug treatments are at all useful nor are there any therapies with solid evidence of even marginal effectiveness (one widely cited chapter, “Treatment of psychopathy: A review of empirical findings”, concludes that some attempted therapies merely made them more effective manipulators! We’ll look at that later.) While some psychopath traits bear resemblance to general characteristic of the powerful, they’re still a pretty unique group and worth looking at.

The main focus of my excerpts is on whether they are treatable, their effectiveness, possible evolutionary bases, and what other issues they have or don’t have which might lead one to not simply write them off as “broken” and of no relevance to AI.

(For example, if we were to discover that psychopaths were healthy human beings who were not universally mentally retarded or ineffective in gaining wealth/power and were destructive and amoral, despite being completely human and often socialized normally, then what does this say about the fragility of human values and how likely an AI will just be nice to us?)

As usual in my 'notes' articles, the following is a series of excerpts and citations; if any interest you, leave a comment and I will try to jailbreak a copy for you or failing that, post a request on the research help page.

1 Psychopathy

The Psychopath: Emotion and the brain, Blair et al 2005:

There are now a relatively large number of studies indicating that individuals with psychopathy reoffend at higher rates than non-psychopathic individuals. For example, in an early study, the PCL-R was administered to 231 offenders prior to release from prisons (Hart et al., 1988). Within 3 years, 25% of non-psychopathic individuals had been re-incarcerated. In sharp contrast, 80% of the individuals with psychopathy had breached the terms of their release. In another study Serin and Amos (1995) followed 299 offenders, and within 3 years, 65% of individuals with psychopathy versus only 25% of the non-psychopathic individuals were convicted of a new offence. Such results

...
Meetup : Montpellier: Tentative first meetup
by Roxolan — 2012-12-18T20:39:05.260Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montpellier: Tentative first meetup

WHEN: 03 January 2013 03:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE: Bagel House, 6 Rue Loys, Montpellier, France

I'm going to be in Montpellier for the holidays and I noticed that there isn't a single LW group in France. So this is a one-shot experimental meetup. I'll be there with a sign and a book, hoping for interesting people in the area to drop by.

The location is the best I could find through internet search, since I don't know the city all that well. It's open to suggestions.

The meetup could be held in French if everyone who comes is fluent.
Bounding the impact of AGI
by Louie — 2012-12-18T19:47:32.327Z

For those of you interested, András Kornai's paper "Bounding the impact of AGI" from this year's AGI-Impacts conference at Oxford had a few interesting ideas (which I've excerpted below).

Summary:

Acceptable risk tolerances for AGI design can be determined using standard safety engineering techniques from other fields

Mathematical proof is the only available tool to secure the tolerances required to prevent intolerable increases in xrisk

Automated theorem proving will be required so that the proof can reasonably be checked by multiple human minds

Safety engineering

Since the original approach of Yudkowsky (2006) to friendly AI, which sought mathematical guarantees of friendliness, was met with considerable skepticism, we revisit the issue of why such guarantees are essential. In designing radioactive equipment, a reasonable guideline is to limit emissions to several orders of magnitude below the natural background radiation level, so that human-caused dangers are lost in the noise compared to the pre-existing threat we must live with anyway. In the full paper, we take the “big five” extinction events that occurred within the past half billion years as background, and argue that we need to design systems with a failure rate below 10−63 per logical operation.

What needs to be emphasized in the face of this requirement is that the very best physical measurements have only one part in 1017 precision, not to speak of social and psychological phenomena where our understanding is considerably weaker. What this means is that guarantees of the requisite sort can only be expected from mathematics, where our measurement precision is already considerably better.

How reliable is mathematics?

The period since World War II has brought incredible advances in mathematics, such as the Four Color Theorem (Appel and Haken 1976), Fermat’s Last Theorem (Wiles 1995), the classiﬁcation of ﬁnite simple groups (Gorenstein 1982, Aschbacher 2004), and the Poincare conjecture (Perelman 1994). While the community of mathematicians is entirely convinced of the correctness of these results, few individual mathematicians are, as the complexity of the proofs, both in terms of knowledge assumed from various branches of mathematics and in terms of the length of the deductive chain, is generally beyond our ken. Inste

...
Meetup : Durham LW discussion
by evand — 2012-12-18T18:38:13.094Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham LW discussion

WHEN:
20 December 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)

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

Regular Thursday discussion meetup. Topic TBD, to be decided on the email list or possibly at the meetup.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham LW discussion
Ontological Crisis in Humans
by Wei Dai — 2012-12-18T17:32:39.150Z

Imagine a robot that was designed to find and collect spare change around its owner's house. It had a world model where macroscopic everyday objects are ontologically primitive and ruled by high-school-like physics and (for humans and their pets) rudimentary psychology and animal behavior. Its goals were expressed as a utility function over this world model, which was sufficient for its designed purpose. All went well until one day, a prankster decided to "upgrade" the robot's world model to be based on modern particle physics. This unfortunately caused the robot's utility function to instantly throw a domain error exception (since its inputs are no longer the expected list of macroscopic objects and associated properties like shape and color), thus crashing the controlling AI.

According to Peter de Blanc, who used the phrase "ontological crisis" to describe this kind of problem,

Human beings also confront ontological crises. We should find out what cognitive algorithms humans use to solve the same problems described in this paper. If we wish to build agents that maximize human values, this may be aided by knowing how humans re-interpret their values in new ontologies.

I recently realized that a couple of problems that I've been thinking over (the nature of selfishness and the nature of pain/pleasure/suffering/happiness) can be considered instances of ontological crises in humans (although I'm not so sure we necessarily have the cognitive algorithms to solve them). I started thinking in this direction after writing this comment:

This formulation or variant of TDT requires that before a decision problem is handed to it, the world is divided into the agent itself (X), other agents (Y), and "dumb matter" (G). I think this is misguided, since the world doesn't really divide cleanly into these 3 parts.

What struck me is that even though the world doesn't divide cleanly into these 3 parts, our models of the world actually do. In the world models that we humans use on a day to day basis, and over which our utility functions seem to be defined (to the extent that we can be said to have utility functions at all), we do take the Self, Other People, and various Dumb Matter to be ontologically primitive entities. Our world models, like the coin collecting robot's, consist of these macroscopic objects ruled by a hodgepodge ...
Matrix and Inspirational religious fiction
by  — 2012-12-18T16:38:36.380Z

Preface
This post is entirely intended to be inspirational and entertaining. Which though is no excuse for the logical flaws in it. None of this is particularly plausible nor am I trying to support religion in some weird way, anyway I hope anyone doesn't find this offensive, but I don't think this is the most sensitive website around religious subjects anyway, so.

Religion Sci-fi in style of Dr. Emmet Brown
Suppose that mankind succesfully produces a Friendly AI in the future and also adopts some ethical doctrine that cares about people, goes on making technological advancements and prolonging the lives and subjective experiences of humans, or something else along those lines. Then also suppose that humans learn how to travel back in time. It would present an ethical dilemma of what do about all those lost beings that died long ago. Considering there had been a finite number of such cases, it would be plausible to consume a finite amount of resources to bend the future of humanity backwards in time, or travel back in time, to fetch all those people just before they perish and allow them to join the eudaimonic future society of humans.
Now consider the possibility that the vast majority of futures for mankind do not contain these outcomes where a Friendly Ai is succesfully established where people care about people and have not succesfully established any flexible, sophisticated or complex morality at all. And in those futures where humanity achieved all those things, it could be seen as a problem, that some futures had consisted of such tragic waste. So we decide to alter the past futures of humanity, and travel backwards in time - yet again, and establish religion, appear on the mountain of Sinai, give out the 10 commandments, and speak of this being superior to humans that takes care of everybody. Which would be the friendly AI, a bostromian singleton, or similar. However they would not do this just to steer the possible future outcomes of humanity away from unwanted futures, but also to create a new parallel future, to see if the course of recursive moral advancements would take an entirely different form after injecting similar goals or ideals prior to the development of the Friendly AI - that is 'God' (I'd prefer Mother over Father though) in heaven - the future society.

The Matrix movie, Reductionism and Mathematical Universe Hypothe...
Caring about what happens after you die
by DataPacRat — 2012-12-18T15:13:33.311Z

More than once, I've had a conversation roughly similar to the following:

Me: "I want to live forever, of course; but even if I don't, I'd still like for some sort of sapience to keep on living."

Someone else: "Yeah, so? You'll be dead, so how/why should you care?"

I've tried describing how it's the me-of-the-present who's caring about which sort of future comes to pass, but I haven't been able to do so in a way that doesn't fall flat. Might you have any thoughts on how to better frame this idea?
That Thing That Happened
by  — 2012-12-18T12:29:12.642Z

I am emotionally excited and/or deeply hurt by what st_rev wrote recently. You better take me seriously because you've spent a lot of time reading my posts already and feel invested in our common tribe. Anecdote about how people are tribal thinkers.

That thing that happened shows that everything I was already advocating for is correct and necessary. Indeed it is time for everyone to put their differences aside and come together to carry out my recommended course of action. If you continue to deny what both you and I know in our hearts to be correct, you want everyone to die and I am defriending you.

I don't even know where to begin. This is what blueist ideology has been workign towards for decades if not millennia, but to see it written here is hard to stomach even for one as used to the depravity caused by such delusions as I am. The lack of socially admired virtues among its adherents is frightening. Here I introduce an elaborate explanation of how blueist domination is not just completely obvious and a constant thorn in the side of all who wish more goodness but is achieved by the most questionable means often citing a particular blogger or public intellectual who I read in order to show how smart I am and because people I admire read him too. Followed by an appeal to the plot of a movie. Anecdote from my personal life. If you are familiar with the obscure work of an academic taken out of context and this does not convince you then you are clearly an intolerant sexual deviant engaging in motivated cognition.

Consider well: do you want to be on the wrong side of history? If you persist, millions or billions of people you will never meet will be simultaneously mystified and appalled that an issue so obvious caused such needless contention. They will argue whether you were motivated more by stupidity, malice, raw interest, or if you were a helpless victim of the times in which you lived. Characters in fiction set in your era will inevitably be on (or at worst, join) the right side unless they are unredeemable villains. (Including historical figures who were on the other side, lest they lose all audience sympathy.).
Remember: it's much more important what hypothetical future people will consider right than what you or current people you respect do. And you and I both know they'll agree with me.

While sympathetic to this criticism I must signal my world-we...
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Dark Arts
by APXAS — 2012-12-18T08:12:37.103Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Dark Arts

WHEN:
19 December 2012 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm Wednesday, December 19th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion Topic: This week, we'll discuss the Dark Arts including (but not limited to) what the constitutes Dark Arts, how to realize when they might be employed aganst you, and we'll also discuss ways to counter them.

There will be general discussion too, and there are lots of interesting recent posts (also check out LW's sister site, Overcoming Bias ). But don't worry if you don't have time to read any articles, or even if you've never read any Less Wrong! Bring a friend! The atmosphere is casual, and good, intelligent conversation with friendly people is guaranteed.

We can be identified by a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Dark Arts
[SEQ RERUN] True Sources of Disagreement
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-18T04:16:56.345Z

Today's post, True Sources of Disagreement was originally published on 08 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Yudkowsky's guesses about what the key sticking points in the AI FOOM debate are.

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 Wrapping Up, 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.
More Cryonics Probability Estimates
by jefftk — 2012-12-17T20:59:49.000Z

There are a lot of steps that all need to go correctly for cryonics to work. People who had gone through the potential problems, assigning probabilities, had come up with odds of success between 1:4 and 1:435. About a year ago I went through and collected estimates, finding other people's and making my own. I've been maintaining these in a googledoc.

Yesterday, on the bus back from the NYC mega-meetup with a group of people from the Cambridge LessWrong meetup, I got more people to give estimates for these probabilities. We started with my potential problems, I explained the model and how independence works in it [1]. For each question everyone decided on their own answer and then we went around and shared our answers (to reduce anchoring). Because there's still going to be some people adjusting to others based on their answers I tried to randomize the order in which I asked people their estimates. My notes are here. [2]

The questions were:

You die suddenly or in a circumstance where you would not be able to be frozen in time.

You die of something where the brain is degraded at death.

You die in a hospital that refuses access to you by the cryonics people.

After death your relatives reject your wishes and don't let the cryonics people freeze you.

Some law is passed that prohibits cryonics before you die.

The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you.

Not all of what makes you you is encoded in the physical state of the brain (or whatever you would have preserved).

The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything (even when perfectly executed).

All people die (existential risks).

Society falls apart (global catastrophic non-existential risks).

Some time after you die cryonics is outlawed.

All cryonics companies go out of business.

The cryonics company you chose goes out of business.

Your cryonics company screws something up and you are defrosted.

It is impossible to extract all the information preserved in the frozen brain.

The technology is never developed to extract the information.

No one is interested in your brain's information.

It is too expensive to extract your brain's information.

Reviving people in simulation is impossible.

The technology is never developed to run people in simulation.

Running people in simulation is outlawed.

No one is interested running you in simulation.

It is too expensive to run you i

...