trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Kidney Trade: A Dialectic
by Gram_Stone — 2016-11-18T17:19:31.084Z

Related: GiveWell's Increasing the Supply of Organs for Transplantation in the U.S.

(Content warning: organs, organ trade, transplantation. Help me flesh this out! My intention is to present the arguments I've seen in a way that is, at a minimum, non-boring. In particular, moral intuitions conflicting or otherwise are welcome.)

“Now arriving at Objection from Human Dignity,” proclaimed the intercom in a euphonious female voice. Aleph shot Kappa and Lambda a dirty look farewell and disembarked from the train.

Kappa: “Okay, so maybe there’s a possibility that legal organ markets aren’t completely, obviously bad. I can at least quell my sense of disgust for the length of this train ride, if it really might save a lot more lives than what we’re doing right now. But I’m not even close to being convinced that that’s the case.”

Lambda nodded.

Kappa: “First: a clarification. Why kidneys? Why not livers or skin or corneas?”

Lambda: “I’m trying to be conservative. For one, we can eliminate a lot of organs from consideration in the case of live donors because only a few organs can be donated without killing the donor in the process. Not considering tissues, but just organs, this narrows it down to kidneys, livers, and lungs. Liver transplants have … undesirable side effects that complicate-”

Kappa: “Uh, ‘undesirable side effects?’ Like what?”

Lambda: “Er, well it turns out that recovering from a liver donation is excruciatingly painful, and that seems like it might make the whole issue … harder to think about. Anyway, for that reason; and because most organ trade including legal donations is in kidneys; and because most people who die on waitlists are waiting for kidneys; and because letting people sell their organs after they're dead doesn't seem like it would increase the supply that much; for all of these reasons, focusing on kidneys from live donors seems to simplify the analysis without tossing out a whole lot of the original problem. Paying kidney donors looks like it’s a lot closer to being an obvious improvement in hindsight than paying people to donate other organs and tissues. If you wanted to talk about non-kidneys, you would have to go further than I have.”

Kappa: “Okay, so just kidneys the

...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-11-18T16:55:13.657Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on November 18th. The following week's summary is here.

The following 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:

Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
[Moscow] Arrow theorem, LW goals and plans, rational review: 20 November 2016 02:00PM
[Moscow] Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training Game Party: 30 November 2016 07:40PM
Moscow social meetup: Party games!: 04 December 2016 02:00PM
NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox: 17 December 2016 06:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - December 2016: 04 December 2016 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 26 November 2016 03:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 17 December 2016 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Cooking: 20 November 2016 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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 your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are 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: Atlanta, Cambridge...
Group rationality -- bridging the gap in a post-truth world
by rosyatrandom — 2016-11-18T13:44:40.118Z

Everyone on this site obviously has an interest in being, on a personal level, more rational. That's, without need for argument, a good thing. (Although, if you do want to argue that, I can't stop you...)

But...

As a society, we're clearly not very rational, and it's becoming a huge problem. Look at any political articles out there, and you'll see the same thing: angry people partitioned into angry groups, yelling at each other and confirming their own biases. The level of discourse is... low, shall we say.

While the obvious facet of rationality is trying to discern the signal above the noise, there's definitely another side: the art of convincing others. That can swing a little too close to Sophistry and putting the emphasis on personal gain, though. What we really need to do is outreach: promote rationality in the world around us. There's probably no-one reading this who hasn't been in an argument where being more rational and right hasn't helped at all, and maybe even made things worse. We've also all probably been on the other side of that, too. Admit it. But possibly the key word in that is 'argument': it frames the discussion as a confrontation, a fight that needs to be won.

Being the calm, rational person in a fight doesn't always work, though. It only takes one party to want a fight to have one, after all. When there's groups involved, the shouty passionate people tend to dominate, too. And they're currently dominating politics, and so all our lives. That's not a status quo any rationalist would be happy with, I think.

One of the problems with political/economic discussions is that we get polarised into taking absurd blanket positions and being unable to admit limitations or counter-arguments. I'm generally pretty far on the Left of the spectrum, but I will freely admit that the Right has both some very good points and a role to play: what is needed is a good dynamic tension between the two sides to ensure we don't go totally doolally either way. (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis etc.) And the tension is there, but it's certainly not good. We need to be able to point out failure modes to ourselves and others, encourage constructive criticism.

I think we need ways of both cooling the flames (both 1-on-1 and in groups), and strategies for promoting useful discussion.

So how can we do this? What can we do?
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Cooking
by RobinZ — 2016-11-18T00:39:06.446Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Cooking

WHEN:
20 November 2016 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Mosaic at Metro Apartments

We will be meeting at the residence of one of the meetup regulars to talk about cooking, and also cook (and then eat). A couple group members have volunteered to demonstrate dishes; so far, the menu includes:

Chickpea patties

Creamy spinach

Bread-machine bread

Anyone who would like to volunteer to demonstrate additional dishes should get in touch with Richard (richardbruns[at]gmail) to make plans.

Directions:

Take the metro to the Prince Georges Plaza metro stop, or park in the metro garage there.

As you come up the metro escalators, you will be facing a traffic circle, and Belcrest Road. Go around the circle, continue, and take a right on the next street (Belcrest Road); the building entrance will be on your right. Call or email Richard Bruns (richardbruns[at]gmail) so he can let you in or send someone to do so, or tailgate behind someone else.

Upcoming meetups:

Nov. 27: no meetup (Thanksgiving)

Dec. 4: Fun & Games

Dec. 11: Game Theory

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Cooking
Meetup : Arrow theorem, LW goals and plans, rational review
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-11-17T19:39:28.043Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Arrow theorem, LW goals and plans, rational review

WHEN:
20 November 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

Note: most our members join meetups via other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a short link to the hackpad document with the schedule here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

Pad with the details about 20.11.2016 meetup.

We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Arrow theorem, LW goals and plans, rational review
Solstices 2016 in UK (Dec 3rd) Seattle/Boston (Dec 10th) and Bay/NYC (Dec 17th)
by Raemon — 2016-11-17T05:29:00.834Z

Winter is coming.

And with it, for the sixth year, rationality-community-folk will be gathering to stare into the abyssal oncoming darkness together. We'll sing songs both silly, sad and beautiful. We'll reflect on our past and future and the fulcrum of history upon which we now stand.
[Note: after some discussion, it was concluded that Solstice is fine to link on Less Wrong branded places, but try not to post about it in forums for other movements or organizations]

There are (roughly) two sorts of Solstice celebrations - small gatherings for 10-50 people, and larger gatherings (once you hit a certain threshold the event qualitatively changes, feeling a bit less intimate but grand and powerful in other ways). This post is a coordination thread to help people interested in participating (or creating!) either of those types of events.

If you're interested in coming to a Solstice, it'd be *super* helpful to the organizer if you RSVP as soon as you can and get tickets if relevant - otherwise there's a lot of ambiguity about how big a space to get, and the organizer may end up on the hook for $1000s of dollars.

You can find an up-to-date list of Solstices that I know about on www.secularsolstice.com. The rationality-community flavored Solstices have the following facebook events:
Cambridge, UK – December 3rd

Boston, MA – December 10th

Seattle, WA – December 10th

Berkeley, CA – December 17th (tickets on Eventbrite)

New York City, NY – December 17th (tickets on Eventbrite)
Rationality Heuristic for Bias Detection: Updating Towards the Net Weight of Evidence
by gwern — 2016-11-17T02:51:19.316Z

Bias tests look for violations of basic universal properties of rational belief such as subadditivity of probabilities or anchoring on randomly-generated numbers. I propose a new one for the temporal consistency of beliefs: agents who believe that the net evidence for a claim c from t1 to t2 is positive or negative must then satisfy the inequalities that P(c, t1)<P(c, t2) & P(c, t1)>P(c, t2), respectively. A failure to update in the direction of the believed net evidence indicates that nonrational reasons are influencing the belief in c; the larger the net evidence without directional updates, the more that nonrational reasons are influencing c. Extended to a population level, this suggests that a heuristic measurement of the nonrational grounds for belief can be conducted using long-term public opinion surveys of important issues combined with contemporary surveys of estimated net evidence since the start of the opinion surveys to compare historical shifts in public opinion on issues with the net evidence on those issues.

A friend of yours tells you he’s worried he saw a snake on his driveway yesterday which he thinks may be a poisonous coral snake rather than a harmless snake; he gives it 50-50 chance - it looked a lot like a coral snake, but he didn’t think this state had any poisonous snakes. You see him the next day and ask him about the snake. “Terrible news!” he says. “I looked it up on Wikipedia, and turns out, this state does have poisonous snakes, coral snakes even.” How unfortunate. So what probability does he think it is a coral snake? His probability must have gone up, after all. “Oh, 50-50.” What? Is he sure about that? “Sure I’m sure. I still wonder if it was a coral snake or not…” Your friend is fond of gambling, so you know he has not misspoken; he knows what a probability is. You politely end the conversation and conclude that while you have little idea if it was a coral snake or not, you do know your friend is fundamentally not thinking straight on the issue of snakes: he understood that he found net evidence for the snake being a coral snake, but somehow did not update his beliefs in the right direction. Whatever his thinking process, it is non-rational; perhaps he has herpetophobia and is in denial, or has some reason to lie about this.

It can be hard to ...
Flip Flops, part 1 of ∞
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-11-16T22:53:45.000Z

When they change their minds it’s called “flip flopping”, when we do it it’s called “updating on evidence”.

As a rationalist, it bugs me to no end that changing one’s mind is considered a sin for politicians when it should count as a great virtue for everyone. I don’t know if it helped or hurt Hillary Clinton’s election chances, but it was painful to watch her pretend to have always supported gay marriage when she and her husband clearly opposed it in the early nineties. Would anyone have held it against her if she said that she spent a decade listening to LGBTQ folk describe their struggles and they changed her mind? I have seen people in my life update their attitude on gay rights and admired them for it, I would be proud to support a politician who did that.

Since I’m utterly unelectable as it stands I can admit freely: I change my mind all the time. Almost certainly, I don’t do it often enough. To encourage this process, the least I can do is get a blog post out of it whenever I flip flop. Here’s part 1, with many more hopefully to come.

Flip Flop #1 – I no longer believe that the FDA harms more lives than it saves

So put your matches away until further investigation. A lot of commenters on “EpiPenomenon” and on Reddit disparaged me for being a “101 economist” naively applying simplistic models to complex subjects. These comments did absolutely nothing to convince me. They neither offered a better model, nor told me something I did not know about drugs, nor refuted Economics 101 – that incentives drive decisions. Ultimately, these are genetic arguments – attacking the presumed source of my belief (a blind faith in markets) instead of the arguments themselves (that the FDA is incentivized to err strongly on the side of approving too few drugs too late).

What changed my mind was my mom, a chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry, who explained in detail the rules the FDA plays by and how they go about their job. In particular:

The FDA has fast track programs with hard approval deadlines for important breakthrough drugs.

The FDA relies on a global network of independent testing laboratories, which are subject to audit. These audits include FDA people physically looking over people’s shoulders and nitpicking their procedures. This net

...
Meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training Game Party
by Alexander230 — 2016-11-16T04:58:39.485Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training Game Party

WHEN:
30 November 2016 07:40:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2

Welcome to Moscow LW community makeshift games! In that games, some rationality skills are involved, so you can practise while you playing!

FallacyMania: it is a game where you guess logical fallacies in arguments, or practise using logical fallacies yourself (depending on team in which you will be).

Details about the game: http://goo.gl/BtRVhB

Tower of Chaos: funny game with guessing the rules of human placement on a Twister mat.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/u9qgc3

Training Game Party: funny game with guessing the action by positive reinforcing sound made by other players.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/SeY0Ea

Come to antikafe "Kocherga", ul.B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2. The map is here: http://kocherga-club.ru/#contacts . Nearest metro station is Kievskaya. If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Games begin at 19:40, the length is 3.5 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training Game Party
Unifying stuff is hard
by KatjaGrace — 2016-11-16T01:54:42.000Z

Grognor draws the following picture, and says that we are much more likely to err by treating two things as one than by treating one things as two, because our limited mental faculties make one thing much easier to deal with than two. He praises making distinctions as harder and more important.

The point I want to press upon you is that the situations in the top row are easier or more likely than the situations in the bottom row, due to working memory constraints. An ontology with fewer objects in it is easier to understand, so it’s relatively easy for humans to correctly identify that what they thought was two things is actually one thing, and correspondingly, to mistakenly conflate two things into one. Mutatis mutandis, it’s hard for people to notice subtle distinctions. And likewise people have low propensity to mistakenly think that one thing is two things.

I’m not convinced.

For one thing, seeing two superficially dissimilar things as the same in a useful way requires dealing with large spaces of things and characteristics. So I don’t think the difference between one and two items in the question should be a deciding factor in how computationally hard the problem is for a brain. Figuring out how a raven is like a writing desk is way harder than imagining a raven and also a writing desk.

Also, this argument doesn’t distinguish between the upfront costs of seeing one thing as two or two things as one, and the long term costs. I think there are a very large class of things where there is a substantial upfront mental effort to see two things as the same, so we don’t. You can’t just go around mistaking a field of emus for a corporate office. However if you put careful thought into it, you might find that both represent a similar game theoretic situation. And once that has been noticed, it is relatively cheap to notice again in future. If it is true that seeing two things as one is less mentally taxing than seeing them as two, then those who originally make it easy to see two disparate things as one should get credit for making this easier for others later.

Also, I think it is often much more valuable to see two things as analogous that were not than it is to distinguish two things. Distinguishing things usually means deciding that the way you were treating both of them is not quite applicable to both, and you should tr...
An algorithm with preferences: from zero to one variable
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-11-15T15:14:01.313Z

A simple way of thinking that I feel clarifies a lot of issues (related to Blue-Minimizing Robot):

Suppose you have an entity H that follows algorithm alH . Then define:

What H does is its actions/outputs in the environment.

What H is is alH .

What H wants is an interpretation of what H does (and possibly what it is), in order to construct a utility function or reward function corresponding with its preferences.

The interpretation part of wants is crucial, but it is often obscured in practice in value learning. That's because we often start with things like `H is a boundedly rational agent that maximises u...', or we lay out the agent in such a way that that's clearly the case.

What we're doing there is writing the entity as alH(u) --- an algorithm with a special variable u that tracks what the entity wants. In the case of cooperative inverse reinforcement learning, this is explicit, as the human's values are given by a θ, known to the human. Thus the human's true algorithm is alH(.), the human observes θ, meaning that θ is an objective fact about the universe. And then the human follows alH(θ).

Note here that knowing what the human is in the one-variable sense (i.e. knowing alH(.)) helps with the correct deduction about what they want, while simply knowing the joint alH(θ) does not.

In contrast an interpretation starts with a zero-variable algorithm, and attempts to construct a one-variable one. There for, given alH it constructs (one or more) alHi(.) and ui such that

alH = alHi(ui).

This illustrates the crucial role of interpretation, especially if alH is highly complex.
Online Learning 3: Adversarial bandit learning with catastrophes
by RyanCarey — 2016-11-14T22:58:01.000Z

Note: This describes an idea of Jessica Taylor’s.

In order to better understand how machine learning systems might avoid catastrophic behavior, we are interested in modeling this as an adversarial learning problem.

A major challenge with efficiently learning to avoid catastrophes is that the utility (or loss) function can take extremely negative values. This causes problems for standard online learning models, which often incur regret proportional to the difference between the maximum and minimum achievable utility.

In our last post, we explored how exploration-only bandit algorithms can be adapted to efficiently learn to avoid catastrophic actions. That model was oversimplified in a couple of ways. First, it provided a fixed distribution of examples to the learner. Second, it cleanly divides the learning process into an exploration phase, in which the learner can make many mistakes, and a subsequent deployment phase, in which the learner must select some near-optimal, non-catastrophic arm. In this post, we relax both of these assumptions. We use a learner that responds to a changing, adversarially-selected stream of examples. We do continue to allow the learner some exploration steps but the learner must choose when to use these to avoid catastrophic consequences. We don't achieve tight bounds, but we demonstrate that bandit learning systems can at least achieve sublinear regret using a sublinear number of exploration steps in an adversarial context. Similarly to our last post, we assume that the learner's beliefs about risks of catastrophe contain some grain of truth. Specifically, in this post, the learner has access to some overestimates of how frequently it should check for catastrophes, and sum of these estimates is not too high by more than a constant factor. We also assume the existence of some arm that has no risk of catastrophe.

The proofs in this post are somewhat long, and may be substantially changed with future work, so some readers may want to just read "Setup", "Defining the agent's performance", "A proposed learning model" and "Discussion".

Setup

Our model relies on some definitions:

Let I={I1,I2,...,IK} be a set of bandit arms.

Let Rt:I↦[0,1] be the intrinsic reward function selected at time step t.

Let Ct:I↦[0,1] be the intrinsic catastrophic risk function at time step t. We assume that there is some bandit arm that always avoids catastroph

...
Open thread, Nov. 14 - Nov. 20, 2016
by MrMind — 2016-11-14T07:51:02.217Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.