trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Future of Humanity Institute could make use of your money
by danieldewey — 2014-09-26T22:53:37.931Z

Many people have an incorrect view of the Future of Humanity Institute's funding situation, so this is a brief note to correct that; think of it as a spiritual successor to this post. As John Maxwell puts it, FHI is "one of the three organizations co-sponsoring LW [and] a group within the University of Oxford's philosophy department that tackles important, large-scale problems for humanity like how to go about reducing existential risk." (If you're not familiar with our work, this article is a nice, readable introduction, and our director, Nick Bostrom, wrote Superintelligence.) Though we are a research institute in an ancient and venerable institution, this does not guarantee funding or long-term stability.

Academic research is generally funded through grants, but because the FHI is researching important but unusual problems, and because this research is multi-disciplinary, we've found it difficult to attract funding from the usual grant bodies. This has meant that we’ve had to prioritise a certain number of projects that are not perfect for existential risk reduction, but that allow us to attract funding from interested institutions.

With more assets, we could both liberate our long-term researchers to do more "pure Xrisk" research, and hire or commission new experts when needed to look into particular issues (such as synthetic biology, the future of politics, and the likelihood of recovery after a civilization collapse).

We are not in any immediate funding crunch, nor are we arguing that the FHI would be a better donation target than MIRI, CSER, or the FLI. But any donations would be both gratefully received and put to effective use. If you'd like to, you can donate to FHI here. Thank you!
Assessing oneself
by polymer — 2014-09-26T18:03:39.881Z

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this, but I'm kind of trying to find a turning point in my life.

I've been told repeatedly that I have a talent for math, or science (by qualified people). And I seem to be intelligent enough to understand large parts of math and physics. But I don't know if I'm intelligent enough to make a meaningful contribution to math or physics.

Lately I've been particularly sad, since my score on the quantitative general GRE, and potentially, the Math subject test aren't "outstanding". They are certainly okay (official 78 percentile, unofficial 68 percentile respectively). But that is "barely qualified" for a top 50 math program.

Given that I think these scores are likely correlated with my IQ (they seem to roughly predict my GPA so far 3.5, math and physics major), I worry that I'm getting clues that maybe I should "give up".

This would be painful for me to accept if true, I care very deeply about inference and nature. It would be nice if I could have a job in this, but the standard career path seems to be telling me "maybe?"

When do you throw in the towel? How do you measure your own intelligence? I've already "given up" once before and tried programming, but the average actual problem was too easy relative to the intellectual work (memorizing technical fluuf). And other engineering disciplines seem similar. Is there a compromise somewhere, or do I just need to grow up?

classes:

For what it's worth, the classes I've taken include Real and Complex Analysis, Algebra, Differential geometry, Quantum Mechanics, Mechanics, and others. And most of my GPA is burned by Algebra and 3rd term Quantum specifically. But part of my worry, is that somebody who is going to do well, would never get burned by courses like this. But I'm not really sure. It seems like one should fail sometimes, but rarely standard assessments.

Edit:

Thank you all for your thoughts, you are a very warm community. I'll give more specific thoughts tomorrow. For what it's worth, I'll be 24 next month.

Double Edit:

Thank you all for your thoughts and suggestions. I think I will tentatively work towards an applied Mathematics PHD. It isn't so important that the school you get into is in the top ten, and there will be lots of opportunities to work on a variety of interesting important problems (throughout my life). Plus, after the ...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-09-26T15:57:47.500Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 19th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Bratislava: 29 September 2014 06:00PM
Copenhagen September Social Meetup - Botanisk Have: 27 September 2014 02:30PM
Frankfurt: How to improve your life: 28 September 2014 02:00PM
Moscow Meetup: CBT Reloaded: 28 September 2014 02:00PM
[Perth] Sunday lunch: 21 September 2014 12:00PM
Perth, Australia: Games night: 07 October 2014 06:00PM
Portland Teachable Skills Discussion: 20 September 2014 01:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: Tortoises: 21 September 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Debiasing techniques: 21 September 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Effective Altruism and Politics: 05 October 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Artificial Intelligence: 19 October 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Climate Change: 02 November 2014 03:00PM
Warsaw, next week!: 23 September 2014 06:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 20 September 2025 01:30PM
[Cambridge MA] Passive Investing and Financial Independence: 21 September 2014 03:30PM
[Cambridge MA] Social Skills: 24 September 2014 03:30PM
Canberra: More rationalist fun and games!: 26 September 2014 06:00PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 24 September 2014 06:30PM
Vienna - Superintelligence: 27 September 2014 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks: 21 September 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get you...
Polymath-style attack on the Parliamentary Model for moral uncertainty
by danieldewey — 2014-09-26T13:51:25.342Z

Thanks to ESrogs, Stefan_Schubert, and the Effective Altruism summit for the discussion that led to this post!

This post is to test out Polymath-style collaboration on LW. The problem we've chosen to try is formalizing and analyzing Bostrom and Ord's "Parliamentary Model" for dealing with moral uncertainty.

I'll first review the Parliamentary Model, then give some of Polymath's style suggestions, and finally suggest some directions that the conversation could take.

The Parliamentary Model

The Parliamentary Model is an under-specified method of dealing with moral uncertainty, proposed in 2009 by Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord. Reposting Nick's summary from Overcoming Bias:

Suppose that you have a set of mutually exclusive moral theories, and that you assign each of these some probability. Now imagine that each of these theories gets to send some number of delegates to The Parliament. The number of delegates each theory gets to send is proportional to the probability of the theory. Then the delegates bargain with one another for support on various issues; and the Parliament reaches a decision by the delegates voting. What you should do is act according to the decisions of this imaginary Parliament. (Actually, we use an extra trick here: we imagine that the delegates act as if the Parliament's decision were a stochastic variable such that the probability of the Parliament taking action A is proportional to the fraction of votes for A. This has the effect of eliminating the artificial 50% threshold that otherwise gives a majority bloc absolute power. Yet – unbeknownst to the delegates – the Parliament always takes whatever action got the most votes: this way we avoid paying the cost of the randomization!)

The idea here is that moral theories get more influence the more probable they are; yet even a relatively weak theory can still get its way on some issues that the theory think are extremely important by sacrificing its influence on other issues that other theories deem more important. For example, suppose you assign 10% probability to total utilitarianism and 90% to moral egoism (just to illustrate the principle). Then the Parliament would mostly take actions that maximize egoistic satisfaction; however it would make some concessions to utilitarianism on issues that utilitarianism thinks is especially important. In this example, the pe

...
Meetup : West LA—The Worst Argument in the World
by OpenThreadGuy — 2014-09-26T04:24:48.117Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—The Worst Argument in the World

WHEN:
01 October 2014 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Last week, I included a link to the Worst Argument in the World essay, not because it was relevant to last week's topic, but because I thought it was something that people should read. This week, I realized what I should have done instead. The three recommended readings are all rewrites of the same essay, but since the first one is the best, you don't need to read the others unless you didn't understand it or something.

Recommended Reading:

The Worst Argument in the World

Cleaing Up the "Worst Argument" Essay

The Noncentral Fallacy—The Worst Argument in the World

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—The Worst Argument in the World
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Book Swap
by RobinZ — 2014-09-26T03:51:36.741Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Book Swap

WHEN:
28 September 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to lend, borrow, and discuss whatever random books people bring. As usual, folk will congregate in the courtyard between 3:00 and 3:30; the meeting will begin with people taking turns to suggest topics of discussion based on the books they brought, returning to the usual unstructured conversation when people are done discussing books.

A couple notes:

There is no obligation to lend, borrow, or return books at book swap meetups. You are not required to bring any given book, or any books at all; you are not required to lend the books that you do bring; if you wish to lend out a given book, you are not required to lend it out to the first person to ask (or to the next person to ask, or to anyone at all); you are not required to borrow a book that is offered to you; and if you have already borrowed a book, you are not required to return it at this meetup. This is a Schelling point for book swaps, no more.

Books belong to their owners - keep any book you borrow in good condition, and return it in a timely fashion when you finish reading it or when the owner asks for it back.

In the past, the owners of some books have given permission for borrowers to lend them directly to anyone at the meetup who is interested. If you do not have permission from the owner of the book, do not do this.

Upcoming meetups:

Oct. 5: Fun & Games

Oct. 12: TBA

Oct. 19: Mini Talks

Oct. 26: TBA

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Book Swap
Meetup : DC EA meetup / Petrov day dinner
by Benquo — 2014-09-25T22:50:58.150Z

Discussion article for the meetup : DC EA meetup / Petrov day dinner

WHEN:
26 September 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
3001 Veazey Ter NW # 1005, Washington, DC 20008

On this day in 1983, in an unparalleled feat of Effective Altruism, Stanislav Petrov declined to destroy the world: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/

We'll celebrate his achievement by getting together for food, drinks, and not destroying the world.

Food and drinks will be provided, though please feel free to help.

Ben Hoffman will give a brief talks about the test run of the project to comment on proposed regulations. Most of the night will be free discussion on anything we want.

Schedule:

7:00 - 7:30 PM Arrive
7:30 - 8:00 PM Talk on DC EA projects
8:00 - 9:00 PM Dinner, drinks, discussion
9:00 - 9:30 PM Petrov day ritual
9:30 - Late: Free discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : DC EA meetup / Petrov day dinner
Logics for Mind-Building Should Have Computational Meaning
by  — 2014-09-25T21:17:22.131Z

The Workshop

Late in July I organized and held MIRIx Tel-Aviv with the goal of investigating the currently-open (to my knowledge) Friendly AI problem called "logical probability": the issue of assigning probabilities to formulas in a first-order proof system, in order to use the reflective consistency of the probability predicate to get past the Loebian Obstacle to building a self-modifying reasoning agent that will trust itself and its successors. Vadim Kosoy, Benjamin and Joshua Fox, and myself met at the Tel-Aviv Makers' Insurgence for six hours, and each presented our ideas. I spent most of it sneezing due to my allergies to TAMI's resident cats.

My idea was to go with the proof-theoretic semantics of logic and attack computational construction of logical probability via the Curry-Howard Isomorphism between programs and proofs: this yields a rather direct translation between computational constructions of logical probability and the learning/construction of an optimal function from sensory inputs to actions required by Updateless Decision Theory.

The best I can give as a mathematical result is as follows:

The capital is a set of hypotheses/axioms/assumptions, and the English letters are metasyntactic variables (like "foo" and "bar" in programming lessons). The lower-case letters denote proofs/programs, and the upper-case letters denote propositions/types. The turnstile just means "deduces": the judgement can be read here as "an agent whose set of beliefs is denoted will believe that the evidence a proves the proposition A." The performs a "reversed" substitution, with the result reading: "for all y proving/of-type B, substitute x for y in a". This means that we algorithmically build a new proof/construction/program from a in which any and all constructions proving the proposition B are replaced with the logically-equivalent hypothesis x, which we have added to our hypothesis-set .

Thus the first equation reads, "the probability of a proving A conditioned on b proving B equals the probability of a proving A when we assume the truth of B as a hypothesis." The second equation then uses this definition of conditional probability to give the normal Product Rule of probabilities for the logical product (the operator), defined proof-theoretically. I strongly believe I could give a similar eq...
Meetup : London social meetup
by philh — 2014-09-25T16:35:18.705Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup

WHEN:
28 September 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Holborn, WC2B 6BG

The next LW London meetup will be on September 28th. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.

I likely won't be there myself this week, but if you have trouble finding us, you can contact Leon on 07860466862.

About London LessWrong:

We run this meetup approximately every other week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....

Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.

Related discussion happens on both our google group and our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup
What's the right way to think about how much to give to charity?
by irrational — 2014-09-24T21:42:55.066Z

I'd like to hear from people about a process they use to decide how much to give to charity. Personally, I have very high income, and while we donate significant money in absolute terms, in relative terms the amount is <1% of our post-tax income. It seems to me that it's too little, but I have no moral intuition as to what the right amount is.

I have a good intuition on how to allocate the money, so that's not a problem.

Background: I have a wife and two kids, one with significant health issues (i.e. medical bills - possibly for life), most money we spend goes to private school tuition x 2, the above mentioned medical bills, mortgage, and miscellaneous life expenses. And we max out retirement savings.

If you have some sort of quantitative system where you figure out how much to spend on charity, please share. If you just use vague feelings, and you think there can be no reasonable quantitative system, please tell me that as well.

Update: as suggested in the comments, I'll make it more explicit: please also share how you determine how much to give.
Newcomblike problems are the norm
by So8res — 2014-09-24T18:41:56.356Z

This is crossposted from my blog. In this post, I discuss how Newcomblike situations are common among humans in the real world. The intended audience of my blog is wider than the readerbase of LW, so the tone might seem a bit off. Nevertheless, the points made here are likely new to many.

1

Last time we looked at Newcomblike problems, which cause trouble for Causal Decision Theory (CDT), the standard decision theory used in economics, statistics, narrow AI, and many other academic fields.

These Newcomblike problems may seem like strange edge case scenarios. In the Token Trade, a deterministic agent faces a perfect copy of themself, guaranteed to take the same action as they do. In Newcomb's original problem there is a perfect predictor Ω which knows exactly what the agent will do.

Both of these examples involve some form of "mind-reading" and assume that the agent can be perfectly copied or perfectly predicted. In a chaotic universe, these scenarios may seem unrealistic and even downright crazy. What does it matter that CDT fails when there are perfect mind-readers? There aren't perfect mind-readers. Why do we care?

The reason that we care is this: Newcomblike problems are the norm. Most problems that humans face in real life are "Newcomblike".

These problems aren't limited to the domain of perfect mind-readers; rather, problems with perfect mind-readers are the domain where these problems are easiest to see. However, they arise naturally whenever an agent is in a situation where others have knowledge about its decision process via some mechanism that is not under its direct control.

2

Consider a CDT agent in a mirror token trade.

It knows that it and the opponent are generated from the same template, but it also knows that the opponent is causally distinct from it by the time it makes its choice. So it argues

Either agents spawned from my template give their tokens away, or they keep their tokens. If agents spawned from my template give their tokens away, then I better keep mine so that I can take advantage of the opponent. If, instead, agents spawned from my template keep their tokens, then I had better keep mine, or otherwise I won't win any money at all.

It has failed, here, to notice that it can't choose separately from "agents spawned from my template" because it is spawned from its template. (That's not to say that it doesn't get to choose what to do. Ra...
Simulation argument meets decision theory
by pallas — 2014-09-24T10:47:39.562Z

Person X stands in front of a sophisticated computer playing the decision game Y which allows for the following options: either press the button "sim" or "not sim". If she presses "sim", the computer will simulate X*_1, X*_2, ..., X*_1000 which are a thousand identical copies of X. All of them will face the game Y* which - from the standpoint of each X* - is indistinguishable from Y. But the simulated computers in the games Y* don't run simulations. Additionally, we know that if X presses "sim" she receives a utility of 1, but "not sim" would only lead to 0.9. If X*_i (for i=1,2,3..1000) presses "sim" she receives 0.2, with "not sim" 0.1. For each agent it is true that she does not gain anything from the utility of another agent despite the fact she and the other agents are identical! Since all the agents are identical egoists facing the apparently same situation, all of them will take the same action.

Now the game starts. We face a computer and know all the above. We don't know whether we are X or any of the X*'s, should we now press "sim" or "not sim"?

EDIT: It seems to me that "identical" agents with "independent" utility functions were a clumsy set up for the above question, especially since one can interpret it as a contradiction. Hence, it might be better to switch to identical egoists whereas each agent only cares about her receiving money (linear monetary value function). If X presses "sim" she will be given 10$ (else 9$) in the end of the game; each X* who presses "sim" receives 2$ (else 1$), respectively. Each agent in the game wants to maximize the expected monetary value they themselves will hold in their own hand after the game. So, intrinsically, they don't care how much money the other copies make.
To spice things up: What if the simulation will only happen a year later? Are we then able to "choose" which year it is?
Meetup : Hasselt Meetup: Brussels moves to Hasselt this month!
by Axel — 2014-09-24T08:34:04.056Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Hasselt Meetup: Brussels moves to Hasselt this month!

WHEN:
11 October 2014 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
STATIONSPLEIN 2 3500 Hasselt

Hello, everyone! This is the first LW meetup in Hasselt. Normally we meet in Brussels but we're changing it up this month to see if we get some new people. If you live in Limburg (or anywhere else, really) and thought Brussels was to far to make every month, come and have a look.
This is just a once off to see what happens, we'll be meeting in Brussels again next month.
We'll be meeting at 1pm at the Stationsbuffet cafe which is in the same building as the train station itself, you can't miss it. Depending on the weather we might go somewhere else after but we'll stay there at least until 2pm to make sure everyone interested has time to arrive. If you want to arrive later then that, send me a message and we'll work something out.
Hope to see you all there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Hasselt Meetup: Brussels moves to Hasselt this month!