trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Does Checkers have simpler rules than Go?
by jefftk — 2013-08-13T02:09:41.984Z

I've seen various contenders for the title of simplest abstract game that's interesting enough that a professional community could reasonably play it full time. While Go probably has the best ratio of interest to complexity, Checkers and Dots and Boxes might be simpler while remaining sufficiently interesting. [1] But is Checkers actually simpler than Go? If so, how much? How would we decide this?

Initially you might approach this by writing out rules. There's an elegant set for Go and I wrote some for Checkers, but English is a very flexible language. Perhaps my rules are underspecified? Perhaps they're overly verbose? It's hard to say.

A more objective test is to write a computer program that implements the rules. It needs to determine whether moves are valid, and identify a winner. The shorter the computer program, the simpler the rules of the game. This only gives you an upper bound on the complexity, because someone could come along and write a shorter one, but in general we expect that shorter programs imply shorter possible programs.

To investigate this, I wrote ones for each of the three games. I wrote them quickly, and they're kind of terse, but they represent the rules as efficiently as I could figure out. The one for Go is based off Tromp's definition of the rules while the other two implement the rules as they are in my head. This probably gives an advantage to Go because those rules had a lot of care go into them, but I'm not sure how much of one.

The programs as written have some excess information, such as comments, vaguely friendly error messages, whitespace, and meaningful variable names. I took a jscompiler-like pass over them to remove as much of this as possible, and making them nearly unreadable in the process. Then I ran them through a lossless compressor, gzip, and computed their sizes:

Checkers: 648 bytes

Dots and Boxes: 505 bytes

Go: 596 bytes

(The programs are on github. If you have suggestions for simplifying them further, send me a pull request.)

[1] Go is the most interesting of the three, and has stood up to centuries of analysis and play, but Dots and Boxes is surprisingly complex (pdf) and there used to be professional Checkers players. (I'm having a remarkably hard time determining if there are still Checkers professionals.)

I also posted this on my blog.
[LINK] Hyperloop officially announced — predictions, anyone?
by MalcolmOcean — 2013-08-12T21:30:53.487Z

I was studying in the LW Study Hall, and during our break someone posted this link to the official hyperloop announcement:

http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf

One member was doubtful it would get past regulations, and another said "tentative p>0.05 that a hyperloop gets made by 2100", which was met with "p>0.05 that uploading people and moving them between bodies will be available by 2100".

It struck me that people might be interested in betting on things like this, or at least having a conversation about it.

A few predictions to start:

Tesla Motors / SpaceX / Elon Musk will create a working hyperloop by 2100.

Tesla Motors / SpaceX / Elon Musk will create a working hyperloop by 2050.

Tesla Motors / SpaceX / Elon Musk will create a working hyperloop by 2030.

More predictions, based on comments:

The cost projections of the hyperloop are underestimates by at least an order of magnitude.

When and if a hyperloop-like transit system is built (or not), the US will not be the first country to build it.

One of the first really big (>5bn$) hyperloops will go across a body of water.

If a hyperloop is created, it will be predominately (>50%) solar-powered.
Update on establishment of Cambridge’s Centre for Study of Existential Risk
by Sean_o_h — 2013-08-12T16:11:23.263Z

Cambridge’s high-profile launch of the Centre for Study of Existential Risk last November received a lot of attention on LessWrong, and a number of people have been enquiring as to what‘s happened since. This post is meant to give a little explanation and update of what’s been going on.

Motivated by a common concern over human activity-related risks to humanity, Lord Martin Rees, Professor Huw Price, and Jaan Tallinn founded the Centre for Study of Existential Risk last year. However, this announcement was made before the establishment of a physical research centre or securement of long-term funding. The last 9 months have been focused on turning an important idea into a reality.

Following the announcement in November, Professor Price contacted us at the Future of Humanity Institute regarding the possibility of collaboration on joint academic funding opportunities; the aim being both to raise the funds for CSER’s research programmes and to support joint work by the FHI and CSER’s researchers on anthropogenic existential risk. We submitted our first grant application in January to the European Research Council – an ambitious project to create “A New Science of Existential Risk” that, if successful, would provide enough funding for CSER’s first research programme - a sizeable programme that will run for five years.

We’ve been successful in the first and second rounds, and we will hear a final round decision at the end of the year. It was also an opportunity for us to get some additional leading academics onto the project – Sir Partha Dasgupta, Professor of Economics at Cambridge and an expert in social choice theory, sustainability and intergenerational ethics, is a co-PI (along with Huw Price, Martin Rees and Nick Bostrom). In addition, a number of prominent academics concerned about technology-related risk – including Stephen Hawking, David Spiegelhalter, George Church and David Chalmers – have joined our advisory board.

The FHI regards establishment of CSER as of the highest priority for a number of reasons including:

1) The value of the research the Centre will engage in

2) The reputational boost to the field of Existential Risk gained by the establishment of high-profile research centre in Cambridge.

3) The impact on policy and public perception that academic heavy-hit

...
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
by Maelin — 2013-08-12T10:02:32.355Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup

WHEN:
16 August 2013 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
5/52 Leicester Street, Carlton 3053

Melbourne's regular monthly Social Meetup will be running as normal on Friday evening this week. All welcome from 6:30pm, feel free to arrive later if that is easier for you.

Our social meetups are friendly, informal events where we chat about topics of interest and often play board games. Sometimes we will also play parlour games like Mafia (a.k.a. Werewolf) or Resistance. We usually order some sort of take-away dinner for any that wish to partake.

Please ring the number 5 button when you arrive in the foyer and we'll buzz you up. If you get lost or have any problems, feel free to call me (Richard) on 0421231789.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
What Bayesianism taught me
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2013-08-12T06:59:48.120Z

David Chapman criticizes "pop Bayesianism" as just common-sense rationality dressed up as intimidating math[1]:

Bayesianism boils down to “don’t be so sure of your beliefs; be less sure when you see contradictory evidence.”

Now that is just common sense. Why does anyone need to be told this? And how does [Bayes'] formula help?

[...]

The leaders of the movement presumably do understand probability. But I’m wondering whether they simply use Bayes’ formula to intimidate lesser minds into accepting “don’t be so sure of your beliefs.” (In which case, Bayesianism is not about Bayes’ Rule, after all.)

I don’t think I’d approve of that. “Don’t be so sure” is a valuable lesson, but I’d rather teach it in a way people can understand, rather than by invoking a Holy Mystery.

What does Bayes's formula have to teach us about how to do epistemology, beyond obvious things like "never be absolutely certain; update your credences when you see new evidence"?

I list below some of the specific things that I learned from Bayesianism. Some of these are examples of mistakes I'd made that Bayesianism corrected. Others are things that I just hadn't thought about explicitly before encountering Bayesianism, but which now seem important to me.

I'm interested in hearing what other people here would put on their own lists of things Bayesianism taught them. (Different people would make different lists, depending on how they had already thought about epistemology when they first encountered "pop Bayesianism".)

I'm interested especially in those lessons that you think followed more-or-less directly from taking Bayesianism seriously as a normative epistemology (plus maybe the idea of making decisions based on expected utility). The LW memeplex contains many other valuable lessons (e.g., avoid the mind-projection fallacy, be mindful of inferential gaps, the MW interpretation of QM has a lot going for it, decision theory should take into account "logical causation", etc.). However, these seem further afield or more speculative than what I think of as "bare-bones Bayesianism".

So, without further ado, here are some things that Bayesianism taught me.

Banish talk like "There is absolutely no evidence for that belief". P(E | H) > P(E) if and only if P(H | E) > P(H). The fact that there are myths about Zeus is

...
Meetup : Washington DC Lojban meetup
by rocurley — 2013-08-12T03:14:28.601Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Lojban meetup

WHEN:
18 August 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery courtyard, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to learn Lojban!

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Lojban meetup
Common sense as a prior
by Nick_Beckstead — 2013-08-11T18:18:11.494Z

Introduction

[I have edited the introduction of this post for increased clarity.]

This post is my attempt to answer the question, "How should we take account of the distribution of opinion and epistemic standards in the world?" By “epistemic standards,” I roughly mean a person’s way of processing evidence to arrive at conclusions. If people were good Bayesians, their epistemic standards would correspond to their fundamental prior probability distributions. At a first pass, my answer to this questions is:

Main Recommendation: Believe what you think a broad coalition of trustworthy people would believe if they were trying to have accurate views and they had access to your evidence.

The rest of the post can be seen as an attempt to spell this out more precisely and to explain, in practical terms, how to follow the recommendation. Note that there are therefore two broad ways to disagree with the post: you might disagree with the main recommendation, or the guidelines for following main recommendation.

The rough idea is to try find a group of people whose are trustworthy by clear and generally accepted indicators, and then use an impartial combination of the reasoning standards that they use when they are trying to have accurate views. I call this impartial combination elite common sense. I recommend using elite common sense as a prior in two senses. First, if you have no unusual information about a question, you should start with the same opinions as the broad coalition of trustworthy people would have. But their opinions are not the last word, and as you get more evidence, it can be reasonable to disagree. Second, a complete prior probability distribution specifies, for any possible set of evidence, what posterior probabilities you should have. In this deeper sense, I am not just recommending that you start with the same opinions as elite common sense, but also you update in ways that elite common sense would agree are the right ways to update. In practice, we can’t specify the prior probability distribution of elite common sense or calculate the updates, so the framework is most useful from a conceptual perspective. It might also be useful to consider the output of this framework as one model in a larger model combination.

I am aware of two relatively close intellectual relatives to my framework: what philosophers c...
New Monthly Thread: Bragging
by Joshua_Blaine — 2013-08-11T17:50:54.944Z

In an attempt to encourage more people to actually do awesome things (a la instrumental rationality), I am proposing a new monthly thread (can be changed to bi-weekly, should that be demanded). Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of you self as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread.This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesomest thing they've done all month. not will do. not are working on. have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?
The Rebuttal Repository
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-08-11T06:59:21.424Z

Since repositories are popular and useful, I thought it would be good to have one where we pair common bad/incorrect/flawed/misleanding/incomplete ideas with high-quality articles that explain why those ideas are bad/incorrect/flawed/misleading/incomplete.

Examples:

Myers-Briggs as a theory of personality. -> Richard Batty's "The Myers-Briggs type Indicator: A Popular But Flawed Way of Understanding Your Personality" from 80000 Hours.

Microfinance -> Ben Todd's "Is Microfinance Mostly Hype?" and GiveWell's "6 Myths About Microfinance Charity Donors Can Do Without".

Zizek's talk on charity "First as Tragedy, then as Farce" (or the idea that charity is bad because it undermines political change) -> Jeff Kaufman's "Good Charity as Neither Tragedy or Farce".

The idea that the AI will be benevolent/Friendly by default. -> Luke and Louie's "Intelligence Explosion and Machine Ethics".

etc.
Meetup : Helsinki Meetup
by mikko — 2013-08-10T22:20:27.659Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup

WHEN:
18 August 2013 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Vilhonkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki

The theme of this meetup will be applied rationality. We’ll go through some CFAR materials, and we’ll try a few rationality exercises. The location is still uncertain, but will be updated as soon as possible.

Updated! We’ll meet in Kaisla.

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup
Proposal: periodic repost of the Best Learning resources
by Dr_Manhattan — 2013-08-10T16:21:19.138Z

One of the biggest benefits of LW for me, aside from specific discussions, has been finding high-quality learning resources. Since knowledge is pretty much the biggest power humans have and many of us spend a lot of time learning, learning more efficiently is extremely important - a good textbook vs. a bad one can cost a lot of time and quite probably make some of the area inaccessible.

We've had a number of threads in that direction, e.g. this

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/g9l/course_recommendations_for_friendliness/

plus crumbs in the monthly media threads.

The proposal is to have these discussions periodically, especially with the great influx of top-notch full online courses from the best schools via coursera, edx, udacity, etc. After that we can wikify some of the more stable recommendations and link the wiki back to the discussions.
Please use this thread for meta-discussion, not specific recommendations. The big questions are should we have this periodically yes/no, what the period should be, at least initially and other helpful suggestions.
Who are some of the best writers in history?
by Crux — 2013-08-10T09:04:14.531Z

We currently have a thread in progress concerning the greatest philosophers in history. This reminded me of a question I've been considering for a while.

Recently I realized that although I've spent a massive percentage of my time for the past few years reading, it's almost always been non-fiction, for example posts on Less Wrong, or posts on other forums or blogs, or old treatises on economics or philosophy. Although I feel as if I've stumbled onto some of the absolute best sources of insight the history of civilization has to offer, and some of the most brilliant thinkers to have ever walked the planet, it strikes me that the main optimization criteria that led to the popularity of most of these pieces of writing and most of these thinkers, and thus the reason they were visible enough for me to run into them, has been a matter not necessarily of the quality of writing style, but instead a matter of the level of insight perceived by whatever critical mass of people brought it to the forefront.

In other words, I've mostly ran into articles and books that have garnered their level of fame not by the eloquence of their prose, but instead by the insight contained within. I've ran into plenty of famous, highly insightful thinkers who just aren't very good at writing. They became famous for another reason: the ideas they brought to the table, however incompetently. This is in utter contrast to another section of the history of writing: what we call "fiction", and in some cases "poetry". Although fiction writers or poets are generally expected to bring some sort of insight to the table, or even a lot of insight, this certainly isn't the overwhelming criterion determining their fame. Most of the scientists who have become famous for their work have been at least decent at writing, or nobody would have been able to get through their stuff (though there are exceptions). In the same way, the great fiction books of history certainly have insight; it's just often not what carries them to success.

In non-fiction, the top contenders are usually there for their insight, though their writing is usually at least decent. And in fiction and poetry, the top contenders are usually there for their eloquence and writing style, though their insight is usually at least decent. There's at least one exception I can think of, where this person seems to be civilization class in both insigh...
Effective Rationality Training Online
by Brendon_Wong — 2013-08-10T01:58:14.667Z

Article Prerequisite: Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality

Introduction

The goal of this post is to explore the idea of rationality training, feedback and ideas are greatly appreciated.

Less Wrong’s stated mission is to help people become more rational, and it has made progress toward that goal. Members read and discuss useful ideas on the internet, get instant feedback because of the voting system, and schedule meetups with other members. Less Wrong also helps attract more people to rationality.

Less Wrong helps with sharing ideas, but it fails to help people put elements of epistemic and instrumental rationality into practice. This is a serious problem, but it would be hard to fix without altering the core functionality of Less Wrong.

Having separate websites for reading and discussing ideas and then actually using those ideas would improve the real world performance of the Less Wrong community while maintaining the idea discussion, “marketing”, and other benefits of the Less Wrong website.

How to create a useful website for self improvement

1. Knowledge Management

When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised. A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised. Each wiki post would have a description, benefits of the topic described, resources to learn the topic, user submitted resources to learn the topic, and reviews of each resource. Posts would be organized hierarchically and voted on for usefulness to help readers effectively improve what they are looking for. Users could share self-improvement plans to help others improve effectiveness in general or in a specific topic as quickly as possible.

2. Effective Learning

Resources to learn topics should be arranged or written for effective skill acquisition, and there may be different resource categories like exercises for deliberate practice or active recall questions for spaced repetition.

3. Quality Contributors

Contributors would, at the very least, need to be familiar with how to write articles that supported the skill acquisition process agreed upon by the entire community. Required writing and research skills would produce higher quality work. I am not sure if being a rationalist would improve the quality of articles.

Problems

1. Difficult req...
Interesting new Pew Research study on American opinions about radical life extension
by  — 2013-08-09T17:26:03.598Z

This new study by Pew Research on American opinions about radical life extension turned up some interesting results:

Asked whether they, personally, would choose to undergo medical treatments to slow the aging process and live to be 120 or more, a majority of U.S. adults (56%) say no. But roughly two-thirds (68%) think that most other people would.

Asked about the consequences for society if new medical treatments could slow the aging process and allow the average person to live decades longer, to at least 120 years old, about half of U.S. adults (51%) say the treatments would be a bad thing for society, while 41% say they would be a good thing.

An overwhelming majority believes that everyone should be able to get these treatments if they want them (79%). But two-thirds think that in practice, only wealthy people would have access to the treatments... About two-thirds agree that longer life expectancies would strain our natural resources and that medical scientists would offer the treatment before they fully understood how it affects people's health. And about six-in-ten (58%) say these treatments would be fundamentally unnatural.

About two-thirds of adults (63%) say medical advances that prolong life are generally good because they allow people to live longer, while about three-in-ten (32%) say medical advances are bad because they interfere with the natural cycle of life.

The survey contains a number of null findings that may be surprising. It turns out, for example, that many standard measures of religious beliefs and practices, including belief in God and frequency of attendance at religious services, are related to views on radical life extension only weakly, if at all. Nor is there a strong relationship in the survey between the gender, education or political party identification of respondents and what they say about longer human life spans... At least one question that deals directly with death, however, is correlated with views on radical life extension. People who oppose the death penalty are more inclined to say that longer life spans would be good for society.

I also find the demographic splits on page 3 to be surprising. On the question of whether treatments to extend life by decades would be a good thing for society, whites are significantly less likely to agree: 36% of whites agree whereas 48% of Hispanics and 56% of blacks do. There is a n...
Meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area: "Rationality is hard! Let's do math" (Utility Functions/Prospect Theory)
by therufs — 2013-08-09T17:18:08.287Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area: "Rationality is hard! Let's do math" (Utility Functions/Prospect Theory)

WHEN:
15 August 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
420 West Geer St., Durham NC 27701

Next Thursday's meetup topics will be utility functions & prospect theory! Suggested reading and more detailed schedule forthcoming.

Basic schedule:
7:00 meet at Cocoa Cinnamon; chat & obtain beverages

7:30 discuss!

9:30 ish adjourn to Fullsteam for further beverages

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area: "Rationality is hard! Let's do math" (Utility Functions/Prospect Theory)