trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Disability Culture Meets the Transhumanist Condition
by Rubix — 2011-10-28T19:02:32.583Z

With apologies to Ed Regis.

Modern science has caused humankind to develop better cures and patches for once-debilitating conditions; people often survive maladies which would have killed them not long ago. In the wake of this and of a recently changing attitude regarding how cognitively disabled people might see the world, a disability rights movement came into swing in the 1970s. Increasingly, the attitude of disabled people was that it wasn't inherently bad to be disabled; a disability could be an intrinsic part of a person's self-image. Some people in wheelchairs, for instance, want badly to be able to walk - but some do not, and the mainstream attitude has historically not validated those people's experiences. This is where disability culture intersects the transhumanist movement. If it is possible to identify so strongly with a physical disability as to not want any cure, how does that mesh with believing that it is desirable to improve one's mind and body? Is it possible to identify as a happily disabled transhumanist?

This does not intend to suggest that transhumanism is a movement of eugenic warriors; it's hard to imagine anyone suggesting that folks who don't sign up for the "Harmless and easy cure for senescence" shot be sterilized. However, despite the fact that hardly anyone would identify emself as an eugenicist (a fine thing to call yourself once-upon-a-time in America, until the Nazis rendered the term unpopular,) literally eugenic attitudes in society prevail, e.g. the prevalent belief that people with Huntington's disease or schizophrenia who reproduce are cruel for hazarding the inheritance of their condition.

One wonders what disability culture would look like if people who are today in wheelchairs had access to technology that could repair their legs and allow them to walk. I wonder if people with congenital disabilities which would today require a wheelchair would have a choice about being cured, or whether the cure would be implemented in infancy. In 2007, a girl named Ashley who has an unknown brain disorder and cannot communicate or move herself effectively was given a series of radical procedures - hysterectomy, mastectomy and high estrogen doses - intended to make her easier to take care of. Was the literally non-consensual hysterectomy an eugenicist procedure? An immoral one? Was it in the spirit of transhuma...
Weekly LW Meetups: Penn State, Madison WI, Pittsburgh, Melbourne, Canberra, and Cambridge
by FrankAdamek — 2011-10-28T18:13:11.610Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Penn State University: NEW Meetup starting!: 22 October 2011 02:00PM
Madison Monday Meetup: 24 October 2011 06:30AM
Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun!: 25 October 2011 06:00PM
Melbourne practical rationality meetup: 04 November 2011 07:00PM
Canberra Meetup Saturday November 5th: 05 November 2011 11:00AM

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

Cambridge (MA) Saturday meetup: 22 October 2011 02:00PM

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Irvine, London, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles.

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, and have fun!

Despite the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, we've decided to continue posting an overview of upcoming meetups on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Chicago, Helsinki, London, Madison, WI, Melbourne, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.
Sustainability of Human Progress
by Anatoly_Vorobey — 2011-10-28T17:28:23.075Z

John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP and one of the founders of the study of AI, died earlier this week. McCarthy was actually the person who came up with the phrase "Artificial Intelligence", in 1955. I find it likely that one day, not very soon, the first thinking self-aware machines will study their history and honor McCarthy's memory.

Sustainability of Human Progress is a set of pages jmc worked on mainly in the late 90s and early 2000s, I think, though he continued to update them occasionally later. This work isn't as widely known as it ought to be. It may be of interest to the LW crowd, even though McCarthy's underlying assumptions of how the human progress will proceed differ from those popular here.

"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." - John McCarthy
[SEQ RERUN] Evolving to Extinction
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-28T16:45:02.110Z

Today's post, Evolving to Extinction was originally published on 16 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Contrary to a naive view that evolution works for the good of a species, evolution says that genes which outreproduce their alternative alleles increase in frequency within a gene pool. It is entirely possible for genes which "harm" the species to outcompete their alternatives in this way - indeed, it is entirely possible for a species to evolve to extinction.

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 Terminal Values and Instrumental Values, 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.
How to popularize LW ideas: a webcomic?
by Shmi — 2011-10-28T07:28:53.535Z

People have been asking this question here a lot lately (not sure, why, but still). MoR has been by far the most effective ad for LW so far, but this is a one-man effort. I wonder if a web comic drawn by the regulars based on, say, recent posts and comments would be another way to get people interested. Just to set the bar really, really low, here is my quick impression of this post (the idea is stolen from #lesswrong, but the obvious bad pun is mine):
The Pleasures of Rationality
by lukeprog — 2011-10-28T02:35:50.395Z

There are many pleasant benefits of improved rationality:

Winning more often.

Better affective forecasting.

Better self-help skills (e.g., CBT is applied rationality).

I'd like to mention two other benefits of rationality that arise when working with other rationalists, which I've noticed since moving to Berkeley to work with Singularity Institute (first as an intern, then as a staff member).

The first is the comfort of knowing that people you work with agree on literally hundreds of norms and values relevant to decision-making: the laws of logic and probability theory, the recommendations of cognitive science for judgment and decision-making, the values of broad consequentialism and x-risk reduction, etc. When I walk into a decision-making meeting with Eliezer Yudkowsky or Anna Salamon or Louie Helm, I notice I'm more relaxed than when I walk into a meeting with most people. I know that we're operating on Crocker's rules, that we all want to make the decisions that will most reduce existential risk, and that we agree on how we should go about making such a decision.

The second pleasure, related to the first, is the extremely common result of reaching Aumann agreement after initially disagreeing. Having worked closely with Anna on both the rationality minicamp and a forthcoming article on intelligence explosion, we've had many opportunities to Aumann on things. We start by disagreeing on X. Then we reduce knowledge asymmetry about X. Then we share additional arguments for multiple potential conclusions about X. Then we both update from our initial impressions, also taking into account the other's updated opinion. In the end, we almost always agree on a final judgment or decision about X. And it's not that we agree to disagree and just move forward with one of our judgments. We actually both agree on what the most probably correct judgment is. I've had this experience literally hundreds of times with Anna alone.

Being more rational is a pleasure. Being rational in the company of other rationalists is even better. Forget not the good news of situationist psychology.
Best Intro to LW article for transhumanists
by Larks — 2011-10-28T02:30:35.471Z

Summary: if you could show a page of LW to a random student who was interested in science, but couldn't otherwise communicate with them, which page would you choose?

The Oxford University Transhumanist Society is a student society who arrange speakers on transhumanist topics - ranging from cognitive enhancement to AI to longevity to high-impact careers to Xrisk to brain-machine interfaces. The audience is a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students, mostly scientists, who are interested in the future of science and technology, but by no means self-describe as transhumanists.

This week we're finally getting organised and producing membership cards. We intend to put a URL in a QR code on them, because people expect cool techy stuff from the Transhumanist society. It'd be nice if the link was something slightly more imaginative than just H+ or the facebook page. Naturally, I thought it should point to LW; but where specifically? The About page, a very good article from the Sequences, something from Eliezer's website, MoR...? A well chosen page, showcasing what LW has to offer, could well draw someone into LW.

Suggestions welcome. One article (or very similar set of articles) per top-level comment please, so people can upvote suggestions in a targetted manner.
Meetup : Austin, TX
by Vaniver — 2011-10-28T02:14:59.904Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX

WHEN:
29 October 2011 01:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2222B Guadalupe St Austin, Texas 78705

While the Austin Bayesian Conspiracy now exists as a UT student organization, there's a $5 fee to reserve a room on the weekends. For this week, we'll still be at Caffe Medici.

SilasBarta will be celebrating his birthday this Saturday, and so there will be extra rationalist fun after the meetup ends!

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX
Review of Kahneman, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' (2011)
by lukeprog — 2011-10-28T01:59:23.204Z

Thinking, Fast and Slow is Kahneman's first book for a general audience, and a summary of his far-reaching and important work. Over the course of about 400 pages (this does not include the appendices, notes, or index), Kahneman explains his current views on: System 1 vs. System 2 thinking, heuristics and biases, overconfidence, decision making under uncertainty, the differences between the experiencing self and remembering self, and the implications of combining all this knowledge.

In short: If you care about improving your thinking and decision making, and thus you care about the cognitive science of rationality, then you are likely to enjoy — and benefit from — this book. And if you know people who won't read the Core Sequences, getting them to read Thinking, Fast and Slow will take them 30% of the way.

Kahneman leaps deftly between demonstration ("try this word problem, notice what your brain does"), theory, and research stories. He covers dozens of issues likely to familiar to veteran LWers, and perhaps a dozen more that have never been discussed on Less Wrong: availability cascades, causal stereotyping, illusion of validity, the stuff on expert intuition from chapter 22, duration neglect, the peak-end effect, affective forecasting and "miswanting,"

Each chapter ends with snippets of fictional dialogue, showing what it would like to use the concepts introduced in that chapter in everyday speech. What is remarkable is how much these snippets sound like things I hear in daily conversations at Singularity Institute. For example:

"What came quickly to my mind was an intuition from System 1. I’ll have to start over and search my memory deliberately."

"She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by is the halo effect from a good presentation."

"Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?"

"This start-up looks as if it could not fail, but the base rate of success in the industry is extremely low. How do we know this case is different?"

"Let's reframe the problem by changing the reference point. Imagine we did not own it; how much would we think it is worth?"

Other dialogue snippets from Kahneman's book are considered so obvious within Singularity Institute that sentences similar to Kahneman's snippets are often half-spoken before somebo...
Gerald Jay Sussman talk on new ideas about modeling computation
by cata — 2011-10-28T01:29:53.640Z

This is a bit-over-an-hour-long talk with slides that I found extremely interesting from this year's Strange Loop conference, and I thought I would share it with any programmers in the audience here that hadn't seen it.

It's about Sussman's ideas about the potential of modeling computation with sophisticated constraint-propagation/dataflow-esque constructs that have some really interesting properties, and might be of interest to anyone thinking about how an AI might create and maintain Bayesian beliefs.

It would be accessible to anyone who can read a little Lisp, and I strongly recommend it unless this is all old hat to you already.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute

Unfortunately, I don't see a transcript yet. But here's a brief timeline I of the video I jotted down, in case you want to skip early parts of it and get to a piece that interests you:

0:00 - 10:40: Preface discussing the extreme flexibility and low latency of biological systems as opposed to human-designed systems. Programmers naturally design systems with very rigid constraints, but few natural systems are like this. Sussman feels that flexibility, not efficiency or correctness, is the central problem holding back human programmers. Example of Kanizsa's "triangle" figure-ground illusion where humans immediately see the shape of a triangle between other shapes.

10:40 - 23:45: Recap of the existing capability for compile-time flexibility in static languages and Lisp; gives an example of doing symbolic algebra in Lisp and building Lisp system for solving problems in classical mechanics. Suggests that the most powerful flexibility we have is to define new operators at runtime and redefine operators to operate on data in new ways at runtime. There is a direct tradeoff between this kind of flexibility and the ability to prove programs correct.

23:45 - 25:30: Sussman says that future computers are inevitably going to have to operate on a hugely parallel architecture where individual processors are plentiful and cheap. A solution to the flexibility problem needs to be highly parallel.

25:30 - 28:10: Discusses his experience teaching EE to students at MIT. Explains how strong engineers do network analysis on electrical circuits: They take some assumptions about parts of the circuit and scientific models to gradually conclude mor...
5 Second Level: Substituting the Question
by malthrin — 2011-10-28T00:20:06.270Z

I picked this up in the new Kahneman book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. He describes a common characteristic of reasoning heuristics: rather than answer a difficult question, they substitute a simpler question with a more readily available answer. This is a common failure mode.

Later that evening, my wife made a comment about an article she was reading on diagnosing depression. I immediately thought, "I'm pretty sure I've never been depressed." The speed of my response was a red flag. Did I really just scan the past 10 years of my adult life for depression symptoms? Or did I answer an easier question: "Am I depressed right now?" With a mouth full of delicious toast, the available answer was, "I feel great!"

I think this technique is a good fit for the 5 Second Level, though it may need a name that indicates what to do rather than what to avoid doing. Hug the Query is close, but taken. The cover blurb for the skill is: take notice when you easily and swiftly answer a question, and double-check that you actually answered it.

Here are a some more examples from the book:

Target question: How much would I contribute to save an endangered species?
Heuristic question: How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?

Target question: How happy are you with your life these days?
Heuristic question: What is my mood right now?

Target question: How popular will the President be six months from now?
Heuristic question: How popular is the President right now?

Target question: How should financial advisers who prey on the elderly be punished?
Heuristic question: How much anger do I feel when I think of financial predators?

Target question: This woman is running for the primary. How far will she go in politics?
Heuristic question: Does this woman look like a political winner?
Conversation as social grooming – a rationality problem?
by  — 2011-10-27T22:07:17.592Z

Summary: the evolved social communication style of humans is not optimised for problem-solving. People of average intelligence generally fail to notice this, therefore they habitually fail to make full use of their faculties of precise thinking, and privilege conversation at the expense of less natural but effective means of problem-solving such as books, the internet and humans outside their social group.

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical upper limit to the number of other people with whom an average human can maintain stable social relationships, given the limitations of human brain power in facilitating these relationships. The number is extrapolated from a regression of mean group size in other primates and the neocortex volume of these primates; the human average neocortex volume is input, and out pops Dunbar’s number which is given to be ~150 (although the error bars are rather wide).

Other primates, with their relatively small social group sizes, maintain their social relationships by physically grooming one another. However, the large potential social group size of humans renders physical grooming impractical because it would be so time consuming.

From the wikipedia article on Dunbar’s number:

Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, proposes furthermore that language may have arisen as a "cheap" means of social grooming, allowing early humans to efficiently maintain social cohesion. Without language, Dunbar speculates, humans would have to expend nearly half their time on social grooming, which would have made productive, cooperative effort nearly impossible. Language may have allowed societies to remain cohesive, while reducing the need for physical and social intimacy.

This certainly seems to be the case – humans use conversation to maintain their social relationships, rather than picking insects and dead skin off each other (if only we could claim to be so much more advanced than our primate cousins in every respect).

The relevance of this to rationality, as I see it, is that to the extent that human conversation is not optimised for efficient exchange of information and problem solving, social conversation is a sub-optimal means of obtaining help from other people. Presumably, our natural mode of conversation with social companions is a compromise between conversation as instrumental means of solving pro...
Rational to distrust your own rationality?
by PuyaSharif — 2011-10-27T22:03:20.216Z

There are a number of experiments that throughout the years has shown that expected utility theory EUT fails to predict actual observed behavior of people in decision situations. Take for example Allais paradox. Whether or not an average human being can be considered a rational agent has been under debate for a long time, and critics of EUT points out the inconsistency between theory and observation and concludes that theory is flawed. I will begin from Allais paradox, but the aim of this discussion is actually to reach something much broader. Asking if it should be included in a chain of reasoning, the distrust in the ability to reason.

From Wikipedia:

The Allais paradox arises when comparing participants' choices in two different experiments, each of which consists of a choice between two gambles, A and B. The payoffs for each gamble in each experiment are as follows:

Experiment 1
Experiment 2

Gamble 1A
Gamble 1B
Gamble 2A
Gamble 2B

Winnings
Chance
Winnings
Chance
Winnings
Chance
Winnings
Chance

$1 million
100%
$1 million
89%
Nothing
89%
Nothing
90%

Nothing
1%
$1 million
11%

$5 million
10%
$5 million
10%

Several studies involving hypothetical and small monetary payoffs, and recently involving health outcomes, have supported the assertion that when presented with a choice between 1A and 1B, most people would choose 1A. Likewise, when presented with a choice between 2A and 2B, most people would choose 2B. Allais further asserted that it was reasonable to choose 1A alone or 2B alone.

However, that the same person (who chose 1A alone or 2B alone) would choose both 1A and 2B together is inconsistent with expected utility theory. According to expected utility theory, the person should choose either 1A and 2A or 1B and 2B.

I would say that there is a difference between E1 and E2 that EUT does not take into account. That is that in E1 understanding 1B is a more complex computational task than understanding 1A while in E2 understanding 2A and 2B is more equal. There could therefore exist a bunch of semi-rational people out there that have difficulties in understanding the details of 1B and therefore assign a certain level of uncertainty to their own "calculations". 1A involves no calculations; they are sure to receive 1 000 000! This uncertainty then makes it rational to choose the alternative they are more comfortable in. Whereas in E2 the task ...