trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
MIRI Donation Collaboration Station
by Skeptityke — 2014-04-29T14:11:15.791Z

As you may know, on May 6, there will be a large one-day price-matching fundraiser for Bay Area Charities.

The relevant details are right here at MIRI's official website.

And this is the webpage to visit to donate.

For those of you who didn't read the two links above, here's the important information.

On May 6, MIRI is participating in Silicon Valley Gives...

Why is this exciting for supporters of MIRI? Many reasons, but here are a few.

Over $250,000 of matching prizes and funds up for grabs, from sources that normally wouldn't contribute to MIRI:

Two-to-one dollar match up to $50,000 during the midnight hour.

$2,000 dollar prize for the nonprofit that has the most individual gift in an hour, every hour, for 24 hours.

$150 added to a random donation each hour, every hour for 24 hours.

Dollar for Dollar match up to $35,000 during the 7AM hour, and $50,000 during the noon, 6 PM, and 7 PM hours.

Local NBC stations, radio stations, businesses, and Bay Area foundations will be promoting the Silicon Valley Day of Giving on May 6th. So if MIRI is making a splash with our fundraising that day, it's possible we'll draw attention from media and by extension new donors.

Making the most of this opportunity will require some cleverness and a lot of coordination. We are going to need all the help we can get...

If you are interested in supporting MIRI with a large donation during the fundraiser... Get in touch with Malo at malo@intelligence.org

All MIRI supporters have the potential to make a big impact if we can all work together in a coordinated manner. Sign up below (The sign up sheet is on the MIRI announcement page) to receive updates on our strategy leading up to the event, and updates throughout the fundraiser on the best times to give and promote the event.

A group coordination problem? We can do that easily, right?

So, in the comments, feel free to discuss donation strategy, coordinate groups of people, provide positive reinforcement for donors, etc.

With a preliminary scan through the prize list, a viable strategy seems to be to funnel most of the donations in during the first hour (midnight) for the two-to-one matching until the matching limit, and do the the rest of the donations during 6 and 7 PM. The small donors can all coordinate on a few hours where few people will be donating (inconvenient morning hours should work well for thi

...
European Community Weekend 2014 retrospective
by blob — 2014-04-29T14:08:47.844Z

So finally - with two weeks distance to the first European LessWrong Community Weekend - we want to share the organizers’ perception of the event, including a short overview of what went well, what did not and what exceeded our expectations.

First and foremost we thank all the participants and speakers for helping us in making this such a great weekend. We had an incredible time and are very happy everything worked out as well as it did. In our opinion the event was a great success! Meeting everyone was excellent and we look forward to running a similar yet improved event in the future.

One of the awesome things about the event were the group dynamics. The general feeling was that the participants were open and had a generally positive attitude towards each other. Even some people who usually prefer to avoid crowds expressed that it was a safe place to try different things and to improve their social skills.

Two things that strongly supported the pervasive feeling of community and friendship were the extraordinarily high frequency of hugs and the cheerful sentiment of the LessWrong study hall people that spilled over to the Community Weekend participants.

We wanted to encourage hugging by letting people put a “accepting hugs as a form of greeting” sticker on their extended name tags. To our surprise it was adopted by a huge majority and had an immense effect on social interactions by creating an atmosphere of familiarity. One story about this (anonymously shared in the post event survey) reads:

“OMFGWTF Yay Hugs sticker :D The social protocol that cuddly people are generally free to hug each other as much as they want pretty much blew my mind. I got two orders of magnitude more hugs than I usually do, and I loved it.”

The workshop presentations strongly engaged the audience and made us all participants. While this was a great thing in itself the downside was that the time planning for most of the speakers didn’t work out. It cost us a considerable fraction of the planned 30min breaks between talks. The lesson learned: reserve way more time for questions than usual when talking to a LW crowd and actively moderate, too.

A lot of people (including us) noticed that this way the talks took too much of the time meant for discussion and socializing. Building new connections between the LWers of Europe and strengthening existing ones...
The Value of Uncertainty Reduction - references to academic literature appreciated
by Mike Bishop — 2014-04-29T13:51:04.437Z

My intuition (probably widely shared) suggests that uncertainty about the future is stress inducing and reducing uncertainty about the future is helpful because it allows us to plan. So I started trying to invent thought experiments that would begin to help me quantify how much I (and others) value uncertainty reduction... and then I began to get confused. Below I'll share two examples focused on knowledge about the next five years of one's career but similar psychological/philosophical issues would arise in many other contexts.

Thought Experiment #1: the risk of job loss
Imagine the true probability you involuntarily lose your job at some point in the next 5 years is either 0% or 50% and that your current best guess is that you have a 25% chance of losing your job. For a price, an oracle will tell you whether the truth is 0% of 50%. How much will you pay?

If you think you can answer this question, please do so. Part of my confusion is that knowing the probability I will lose my job seems certain to affect the probability that I lose my job. If you told me the probability was 50% then I'd do a combination of working overtime and looking for other jobs that should reduce that probability, and if the probability remains 50% then I'm in a much less pleasant situation than I would be in the case that the probability is 50% but only because I'm assuming its a more reasonable 25%.

Thought Experiment #2: uncertainty about future earnings
Imagine your estimate of your total income over the next 10 years is unbiased, and that the random error in your estimate is normally distributed. (Admittedly a normally distributed error term is unrealistic in this problem but bear with me for simplicity). What's a reasonable standard deviation? Let's say 3 years worth of income. How much would you pay to reduce that standard deviation to 1.5 years of income?

Once again, go ahead and to answer this if you can, but I've got myself confused here as well... I'm trying to get at the present value of reducing uncertainty about the future, but in this example it appears I getting an offer to reduce the actual risk of *experiencing* a much lower than expected income at the expense of reducing the chances that I make a much higher than expected income, not just reducing uncertainty.

Any insight into what's going on with my thought experiments would be greatly appreciated. I see some parallels ...
The Control Group Is Out Of Control
by Scott Alexander — 2014-04-29T00:46:27.000Z

I.

Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science.

That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell you much until you give some other people a placebo drug you know doesn’t work – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them recover. That number tells you how many people will recover whether the drug works or not. Unless people on your real drug do significantly better than people on the placebo drug, you haven’t found anything.

On the meta-level, you’re studying some phenomenon and you get some positive findings. That doesn’t tell you much until you take some other researchers who are studying a phenomenon you know doesn’t exist – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them get positive findings. That number tells you how many studies will discover positive results whether the phenomenon is real or not. Unless studies of the real phenomenon do significantly better than studies of the placebo phenomenon, you haven’t found anything.

Trying to set up placebo science would be a logistical nightmare. You’d have to find a phenomenon that definitely doesn’t exist, somehow convince a whole community of scientists across the world that it does, and fund them to study it for a couple of decades without them figuring it out.

Luckily we have a natural experiment in terms of parapsychology – the study of psychic phenomena – which most reasonable people believe don’t exist, but which a community of practicing scientists believes in and publishes papers on all the time.

The results are pretty dismal. Parapsychologists are able to produce experimental evidence for psychic phenomena about as easily as normal scientists are able to produce such evidence for normal, non-psychic phenomena. This suggests the existence of a very large “placebo effect” in science – ie with enough energy focused on a subject, you can always produce “experimental evidence” for it that meets the usual scientific standards. As Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it:

Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standard

...
LessWrong as social catalyst
by JoshuaFox — 2014-04-28T14:10:31.164Z

I'd like to ask everyone: Have LessWrong.com and related online rationalist/transhumanist/Singularitarian communities connected you to people for purposes beyond discussion?

A new job, employee, business partner, cofounder, or professional mentor

A romantic partner

A friend

A PhD adviser

An apartment-mate

A host when you're traveling

Bonus points if an online contact led to an important connection. We already know that face-to-face meetups are a great way to meet people, so I'm curious about connections triggered by online interaction.

I have seen scattered mentions that each of the above has happened, but not enough to get a strong impression of what's going on.

Please answer in comments below. By doing so, you'll be providing social proof that LW and the like can accomplish these things, and so encourage more to happen, increasing happiness in the world.

I added one myself to start.
A brief summary of effective study methods
by Arran_Stirton — 2014-04-28T12:40:57.117Z

EDIT: Reworked and moved to Main following Gunnar_Zarncke's advice.

Related to: Book Review: How Learning Works, Build Small Skills in the Right Order, What are useful skills to learn at university?

This article is organized into three sections focusing on attention, processing and recall respectively. The advice in each section is roughly organised in order of usefulness, although your mileage may vary. It's best to view this as a menu of study techniques rather than an in depth guide.

Just follow at the links provided if you wish to learn more about any point. Links with a lettered superscript[a] generally link to a part of a YouTube video while those with a numbered superscript[1] link to an article. Links without any superscript generally link to another LessWrong page.

Paying Attention

Attention is very important for learning. Where you spend it directly determines which areas of your brain you'll develop while studying and learning new skills.

Split your study up into 25 minute chunks, separated by five minute breaks[a]
Also known as the Pomodoro Technique[b]. This one is simple to implement but tremendously effective. It will protect you from attention burnout, increase your useful study-time, and help prevent distractions from becoming procrastination by setting up a Schelling fence around your breaks.

Focus on one task at a time[1]
Multitasking is one of the worst things you can do while studying, it can reduce your productivity by up to 40% and divides your attention up unnecessarily which will impair your ability absorb new information. If social media and the internet is of a particular distraction to you, tools such as Stay Focused can help you stay on track.

Set up your study environment[a]
Exploit situational psychology by making your environment more conducive to study; identify cues that cause you to procrastinate, remove them if possible, and set up cues for studying. Mentioned in the video, a 'study lamp' can make an effective cue providing it is only ever used for studying. Additionally joining a study group can be an effective way to do this (a good example being the LessWrong Study Hall).

Choose the right music[2]
There are a few rules of thumb to follow here. Avoid listening to music while trying to absorb new information, though if your aural environment is particularly distracting then music without lyrics or white noise can be useful. Do

...
[LINK] The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-04-28T09:41:40.218Z

The Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence has - finally! - published our paper "The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions – and what they mean for the future":

Predicting the development of artificial intelligence (AI) is a difficult project – but a vital one, according to some analysts. AI predictions are already abound: but are they reliable? This paper starts by proposing a decomposition schema for classifying them. Then it constructs a variety of theoretical tools for analysing, judging and improving them. These tools are demonstrated by careful analysis of five famous AI predictions: the initial Dartmouth conference, Dreyfus's criticism of AI, Searle's Chinese room paper, Kurzweil's predictions in the Age of Spiritual Machines, and Omohundro's ‘AI drives’ paper. These case studies illustrate several important principles, such as the general overconfidence of experts, the superiority of models over expert judgement and the need for greater uncertainty in all types of predictions. The general reliability of expert judgement in AI timeline predictions is shown to be poor, a result that fits in with previous studies of expert competence.

The paper was written by me (Stuart Armstrong), Kaj Sotala and Seán S. Ó hÉigeartaigh, and is similar to the series of Less Wrong posts starting here and here.
Request for concrete AI takeover mechanisms
by KatjaGrace — 2014-04-28T01:04:52.691Z

Any scenario where advanced AI takes over the world requires some mechanism for an AI to leverage its position as ethereal resident of a computer somewhere into command over a lot of physical resources.

One classic story of how this could happen, from Eliezer:

Crack the protein folding problem, to the extent of being able to generate DNA strings whose folded peptide sequences fill specific functional roles in a complex chemical interaction.

Email sets of DNA strings to one or more online laboratories which oﬀer DNA synthesis, peptide sequencing, and FedEx delivery. (Many labs currently oﬀer this service, and some boast of 72-hour turnaround times.)

Find at least one human connected to the Internet who can be paid, blackmailed, or fooled by the right background story, into receiving FedExed vials and mixing them in a specified environment.

The synthesized proteins form a very primitive “wet” nanosystem which, ribosomelike, is capable of accepting external instructions; perhaps patterned acoustic vibrations delivered by a speaker attached to the beaker.

Use the extremely primitive nanosystem to build more sophisticated systems, which construct still more sophisticated systems, bootstrapping to molecular nanotechnology—or beyond.

You can do a lot of reasoning about AI takeover without any particular picture of how the world gets taken over. Nonetheless it would be nice to have an understanding of these possible routes. For preparation purposes, and also because a concrete, plausible pictures of doom are probably more motivating grounds for concern than abstract arguments.

So MIRI is interested in making a better list of possible concrete routes to AI taking over the world. And for this, we ask your assistance.

What are some other concrete AI takeover mechanisms? If an AI did not have a solution to the protein folding problem, and a DNA synthesis lab to write off to, what else might it do?

We would like suggestions that take an AI from being on an internet-connected computer to controlling substantial physical resources, or having substantial manufacturing ability.

We would especially like suggestions which are plausible given technology that normal scientists would expect in the next 15 years. So limited involvement of advanced nanotechnology and quantum computers would be appreciated.

We welcome partial suggestions, e.g. 'you can take c...
Meetup : Durham: Ugh Fields Followup
by evand — 2014-04-28T00:32:15.869Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Ugh Fields Followup

WHEN:
01 May 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
420 W Geer St, Durham, NC 27701

We will meet at Cocoa Cinnamon to follow up on our previous discussion about Ugh Fields.

Do you have any nagging questions you didn't ask at the last meetup? Thoughts or insights that occurred after you left? Have you made progress on any of your personal Ugh Fields, either in identifying them or combating them?

Join us to talk about it!

We'll meet around 7, and start topical discussion around 7:30; hopefully this will give everyone time to get coffee and such. We'll adjourn around 9, probably to Fullsteam.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Ugh Fields Followup
Meetup : Houston, TX
by  — 2014-04-27T22:44:08.085Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston, TX

WHEN:
18 October 2014 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
6100 Main St, Houston, TX 77005

On Saturday, October 18th we will be meeting at the Salento in the Brochstein Pavilion at Rice University at 2:00PM. Look for the Less Wrong sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston, TX
Why don't you attend your local LessWrong meetup? / General meetup feedback
by philh — 2014-04-27T22:17:01.129Z

It's fairly common for a LessWrong meetup group to get people attending for a week or two, and then never showing up again. Most of the time, there may not be a very interesting reason for that. But if someone did have a bad experience at a meetup, this would be valuable information that they'd be unlikely to volunteer to the organizers.

Thus, I've created a form to collect meetup feedback. The primary purpose is: if you have a local LessWrong meetup that you don't currently attend, we'd like to know why. However, any other feedback is also appreciated: good feedback, bad-but-not-dealbreaking feedback, and feedback from people who do currently attend. "Currently" is left up to your own interpretation.

Please fill in the form now. It should only take a couple of minutes. There are three short-answer questions and three longer ones, but all questions are optional. Better to give a quick response now than to indefinitely postpone writing a longer one.

I intend to publish the responses, both raw and with some appropriate-seeming amount of aggregation. But I'm going to strip out the "where is your meetup" field from the public data. This is so that you can give feedback to a group without worrying about embarrassing them publicly. I'll tell the organizers which responses applied to them, so that the feedback still reaches the right place. If you identify the meetup in a long-form response, I won't strip that out. I'll also strip out the "anonymous identifier" field, naturally.

If you do currently attend a meetup, but want to give feedback anyway, please do also fill in the form.

If you think your answer seems boring, don't let that stop you: for example, we'd like to know relative numbers of "came once, had a bad time" versus "came once, but it's usually not convenient", and we can't do that if the second group don't reply.

Once again: please fill in the form now! If you comment that you have done so, I will reward you with an upvote.
Should I take an academic class on rationality?
by aarongertler — 2014-04-27T21:54:15.336Z

This would count toward my major, and if I weren't going to take it, the likely replacement would be a course in experimental/"folk" philosophy. But I'd also like to hear your thoughts on the virtues of academic rationality courses in general.

(The main counterargument, I'd imagine, is that the Sequences cover most of the same material in a more fluid and comprehensible fashion.)

Here is the syllabus: http://www.yale.edu/darwall/PHIL+333+Syllabus.pdf

Other information: I sampled one lecture for the course last year. It was a noncommital discussion of Newcomb's problem, which I found somewhat interesting despite having read most of the LW material on the subject.

When I asked what Omega would do if we activated a random number generator with a 50.01% chance of one-boxing us, the professors didn't dismiss the question as irrelevant, but they also didn't offer any particular answer.

I help run a rationality meetup at Yale, and this seems like a good place to meet interested students. On the other hand, I could just as easily leave flyers around before the class begins.

Related question: Could someone quickly sum up what might be meant by the "feminist critique" of rationality, as would be discussed in the course? I've read a few abstracts, but I'm still not sure I know the most important points of these critiques.
Meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Existential Risk and AI discussion
by SoftFlare — 2014-04-27T12:37:31.416Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Existential Risk and AI discussion

WHEN:
30 April 2014 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Google Tel Aviv

* NOTE - Meetup date was moved to Wednesday, April 30th *

We're going to have a meetup on Wednesday, April 30th at Google Israel's offices, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon st., Tel Aviv.

This time will be a discussion of General Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risk - subjects that are both core to LessWrong and some would say important for the sake of the future of humanity. Like the successful productivity hacks session we will have multiple speakers talking about various aspects of artificial intelligence explosion, decision theories, and existential risk.

Examples of subjects we will be talking about: One-Boxing vs Two-Boxing, Resurrection after a friendly singularity, Constructing friendly utility functions, X-Risk and the chances of FOOM... We will also be talking to explore and learn from each-other about AI.
This meetup will assume previous knowledge of LW writings and discussion about AI and X-Risk, but even if you don't know a lot about it and are simply interested you should come.

We'll start the meetup at 19:00, and we'll go on as much as we like to. (We've had great success with the earlier hour last meetup and so we're continuing on the trend)

Please come on time, as we will begin the discussions and talks close to when we start. But, if you can only come later, thats totally ok!

We'll meet at the 29th floor of the building (Note: Not the 26th where Google Campus is). If you arrive and cant find your way around, call Anatoly who is graciously hosting us at 054-245-1060.

Note that we are trying a transition to a meet once every two weeks. This is to allow people who cant make it to a meetup to not have to wait a whole month to meet again, and because we'd like to have both subject based and social meetups and doing one meetup a month would make that hard.

If you have any question feel free to email me at hochbergg@gmail.com or call me at 054-533-0678.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Existential Risk and AI discussion