trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Plant Seeds of Rationality
by lukeprog — 2011-03-10T17:51:42.485Z

After his wife died, Elzéard Bouffier decided to cultivate a forest in a desolate, treeless valley. He built small dams along the side of the nearby mountain, thus creating new streams that ran down into the valley. Then, he planted one seed at a time.

After four decades of steady work, the valley throbbed with life. You could hear the buzzing of bees and the tweeting of birds. Thousands of people moved to the valley to enjoy nature at its finest. The government assumed the regrowth was a strange natural phenomenon, and the valley's inhabitants were unaware that their happiness was due to the selfless deeds of one man.

This is The Man Who Planted Trees, a popular inspirational tale.

But it's not just a tale. Abdul Kareem cultivated a forest on a once-desolate stretch of 32 acres along India's West Coast, planting one seed at a time. It took him only twenty years.

Like trees in the ground, rationality does not grow in the mind overnight. Cultivating rationality requires care and persistence, and there are many obstacles. You probably won't bring someone from average (ir)rationality to technical rationality in a fortnight. But you can plant seeds.

You can politely ask rationalist questions when someone says something irrational. Don't forget to smile!

You can write letters to the editor of your local newspaper to correct faulty reasoning.

You can visit random blogs, find an error in reasoning, offer a polite correction, and link back to a few relevant Less Wrong posts.

One person planting seeds of rationality can make a difference, and we can do even better if we organize. An organization called Trees for the Future has helped thousands of families in thousands of villages to plant more than 50 million trees around the world. And when it comes to rationality, we can plant more seeds if we, for example, support the spread of critical thinking classes in schools.

Do you want to collaborate with others to help spread rationality on a mass scale?

You don't even need to figure out how to do it. Just contact leaders who already know what to do, and volunteer your time and energy.

Email the Foundation for Critical Thinking and say, "How can I help?" Email Louie Helm and sign up for the Singularity Institute Volunteer Network.

Change does not happen when people gather to talk about how much they suffer from akrasia. Change happens when lots of ind...
The Limits of Curiosity
by Elizabeth — 2011-03-10T15:20:54.978Z

In principle, I agree with the notion that it is unforgivable to not want to know, and not want to improve your map to match the territory. However, even the most curious person in the world cannot maintain equal curiosity about all things, and even if they could there are limits on time and energy. In general, the things that inspire curiosity are determined by your personal likes, dislikes, and biases, and it is therefore worth considering carefully where these demarcations fall so as not to deprive ourselves of useful information. This is particularly important when it comes to things that inspire not just lack of interest, but aversion, or "anti-curiosity."

However, not all information is useful, and it can be useful to encourage a bias that cuts you off from information that is not particularly useful to you, so as to better allocate your time and energy. It is possible that it could also be useful to fabricate an "I don't want to know" stance about a certain type of information so as to better allocate your time, (for example, ceasing to watch television, and denying curiosity about what is happening on your favorite shows), but I will not discuss or advocate that here, largely because it's all I can do to hold the line against new time wasters.

The difficulty and danger of this method is that it is best accomplished by not thinking about the things you don't want to be curious about, and that can lead to not even realizing you aren't curious about them, so important things may slip through the cracks. For example, I have never smoked a cigarette, and it requires no effort on my part to not be curious about what it is like. That is such a deeply buried aversion that I might never have consciously noticed that lack of curiosity if I had not been writing this article. In this case, lack of curiosity about smoking is beneficial, but it could just as easily have been something that would be useful for me to be curious about, and I might never have noticed.

Analyzing your own areas of anti-curiosity is extremely difficult, both because your brain rebels at thinking about things it habitually doesn't think about, and because you will likely find a lack of rhyme or reason in which things you are anticurious about. Questioning things deeply held enough that you don't think about them is always deeply uncomfortable.

M...
Magic Articles I’ve Written
by Zvi — 2011-03-10T13:30:53.000Z

Update 4/23/2017: I now write for Channel-Fireball. This is a link to my author page.

Posts in the Amonkhet and Kaladesh eras through 4/23/2017:

Decks:

Mardu Planeswalkers

Red Drake

Empty Hand of the Gods

Set Preview:

Amonkhet’s Overlooked Cyclers

Analysis:

Mardu vs. Copycat

Advocacy:

Reflections on the 2017 Magic Online Championship

For other articles, see my author page. I may or may not continue to update this post.

Original Post:

Star City Games continues to be my location of choice for Magic articles. It took a while to get these posted, but nothing too relevant seems to have happened in the meantime. Links to them seems like as a good a placeholder to put here as any.

Links to my articles from PT Paris:

Part 1: The Army You Have

Part 2: Hawkward Deck Guide
[Video] AI Box Experiment on BBC's "Look Around You"
by ata — 2011-03-10T06:36:42.423Z

I recently discovered that "Look Around You", a BBC TWO educational science-themed series from the 1980s1, had on its "Computers" episode a live-action AI Box Experiment, in which Bournemouth, what was at the time Britain's most advanced computer, was assigned to physically escape from a steel cage. For your convenience, I've excerpted the relevant clips from the episode. Watch and see how it turns out!

Link: http://www.youtube.com/v/WCEm96kA5hY

1 Note: The above description is a lie.
Agreement on anthropics
by KatjaGrace — 2011-03-10T04:38:56.000Z

Aumann’s agreement theorem says that Bayesians with common priors who know one another’s posteriors must agree. There’s no apparent reason this shouldn’t apply to posteriors arrived at using indexical information. This does not mean that you and I should both believe we are as likely to be the author of this blog, but that we should agree on the chances that I am.

The Self-Sampling Assumption (SSA) does not allow for this agreement between people with different reference classes, as I shall demonstrate. Consider the figure below. Suppose A people and B people both begin with an equal prior over the two worlds. Everyone knows their type (A or B), but other than that they do not know their location. For instance an A person may be in any of eight places, as far as they know. A people consider their reference class to be A people only. B people consider their reference class to be B people only. The people who are standing next to each other in the diagram meet and exchange their knowledge. For instance an A person meeting a B person will learn that the B person is a B person, and that they don’t know anything much else.

When A people meet B people, they both come to know what the other person’s posterior is. For instance an A person who meets a B person knows that the B person doesn’t know anything except that they are a B person who met an A person. From this the A person can work out the B person’s posterior over which world they are in.

Suppose everyone uses SSA. When an A person and a B person meet, the A people come to think they are four times as likely to be in World 1. This is because in world two, only a quarter of A people meet a B person, whereas in world 1 they all do. The B people they meet cannot agree – in either world they expected to talk with an A person, and for that A person to be pretty sure they are in world 1. So despite knowing one another’s posteriors and having common priors over which world exists, the A and B people who meet must disagree. Not only on one another’s locations within the world, but over which world they are in*.

An example of this would be a husband and wife celebrating their wedding in a Chinese town with poor census data and an ongoing gender gap. The husband exclaims ‘wow, I am a husband! The disparity between gender populations in this town is probably smaller than I th...
[Link] Your genes, your rights – FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren not a fan
by  — 2011-03-09T22:17:19.993Z

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/your-genes-your-rights-fdas-jeffrey-shuren-not-a-fan/

I find myself basically agreeing with Razib.

Yes there is generally incompetence and avoidable irrationality associated with the most likley way this will be regulated. But I find myself fearing something else even more. I'm scared of busybody policy advisor's or "well meaning" individuals who will choose to hide or misrepresent data purposefully to either:

promote their own values

try and appease a popular "moral panic" (I think we will see at least one or two as uncomfortable new discoveries about the role of genetics are made or as old ones are made too blindingly obvious to ignore).

Thoughts?
College Selection Advice
by atucker — 2011-03-09T22:13:54.783Z

I, and a lot of other people my age, are currently facing a pretty big life decision -- where to go to college. Since this is probably going to have a pretty big impact on my life, I'd like to get some more information on this.

Seeing as a lot of people here have probably made this choice already, gone through with some of the consequences of it, and are rational, I decided to ask here.

My current considerations are:

Academic rigor

Money (i.e. if a school gives me a full ride, should I go there rather than plunk down $250k over 4 years)

Ability to do undergrad research

Flexibility

Likelihood to meet cool people

Novelty (this one's a lot weaker though)

My current situation is:

Accepted to MIT, University of Southern California, University of Maryland, Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd, Harvard, and CMU

Getting some form of scholarships at USC and UMD, amount TBD

Not likely to receive that much need-based financial aid

Probably going to start in Engineering, might double major with Comp Sci, Statistics, or maybe Math. If I go to CMU, probably Engineering and Public Policy

I also like and am competent in Economics, History, and English (though, definitely not getting a degree in the last 2)

Maryland is my home state, and I would know a lot of people at UMD

So if you have any advice, for me or in general, I'd love to hear it. If you have any questions yourself, feel free to ask them.
Better late than never: Toronto meetup March 10
by Skatche — 2011-03-09T21:27:33.301Z

Sorry for not posting this sooner - I thought I already had. Well, hopefully we'll get at least a few new faces nonetheless.

When: Thursday, March 10th at 8:00PM
Where: The Duke of York Pub at 39 Prince Arthur Ave

The last meetup was a smashing success - everyone seemed to have had a good time. So we will be reconvening, tomorrow and perhaps biweekly from now on. Please RSVP if you're coming, in case I need to change the reservation. And, incidentally, the reservation is under the name "Less Wrong", in case you're the first to show up.

See you all tomorrow!
How SIAI could publish in mainstream cognitive science journals
by lukeprog — 2011-03-09T21:17:32.965Z

Newest edit: I just realized that by "philosophy journals" in the original post I really meant "cognitive science" journals. (I made the mistake because for me, philosophy basically just is cognitive science.) So please the read the below in terms of cognitive science journals, not just philosophy journals.

First edit: Some people apparently read this as an "ultimatum" for SIAI, which was not the intent at all. It's merely an argument for why I think SIAI could benefit from publishing in mainstream journals, and then some advice on how to do it. I'm making recommendations, not "demands" - how silly would that be? Also, it's not like I'm saying SIAI should do a bunch of stuff, and I'm then walking away. For example, I'm actively writing a journal-grade paper on Friendly AI, putting it in the context of existing literature on the subject. And I'd love to do more.

Also, I suspect that many at SIAI already want to be publishing in mainstream philosophy journals. The problem is that it requires a fair amount of resources and know-how to do so (as the below post shows), and that takes time. It doesn't appear that SIAI has anyone whose primary training is in philosophy, because they've (wisely) invested their resources in, you know, math geniuses and people who can bring in funds and so on. Anyhoo...

After reading about 80% of the literature in the field of machine ethics, I've realized that the field hasn't quite caught up to where Yudkowsky's thinking was (on the most important issues) circa 2001.*

One cause of this may be the fact that unlike almost every other 10-year research institute or university research program on the planet, SIAI has no publications in established peer-reviewed journals. This fact has at least two effects: (1) SIAI's researchers are able to work more quickly on these problems when they are not spending their time reading hundreds of mostly useless papers from the mainstream literature, and then composing arduously crafted papers that conform to the style and expectations of the mainstream community, citing all the right literature. And: (2) the mainstream community has not caught up with SIAI's advances because SIAI has not shared them with anyone - at least not in their language, in their journals, to their expectations of clarity and style.

However, I suspect that SIAI may now want to devote some resources doing what m...
Eliezer passes 100,000 karma points
by lukeprog — 2011-03-09T19:59:45.845Z

Eliezer Yudkowsky has passed an arbitrary milestone: 100,000 karma points on Less Wrong. Allow me just a moment to celebrate this like we celebrate other arbitrary milestones, like birthdays.

I think that Eliezer's karma score vastly under-rates his relative contribution to this site. For example, his score is only about 13x my own score, but I think it's obvious he has contributed far more than 13x as much value to this community as I have.

This is probably due to the fact that good posts today get far more upvotes than earlier good posts, when I suspect the community was smaller. For example, my rather simple and insignificant post Secure Your Beliefs received 34 upvotes, which is more than almost any of Eliezer's epic and brilliant posts of the past have received, for example Terminal Values and Instrumental Values.

So at this arbitrary milestone, I'd just like to say a quick word to Eliezer:

Thanks.

You've done a lot.

Okay, that's all! I hope this doesn't come across as "sucking up to the Dear Leader," but instead as the sincere appreciation it is. There is a good reason I list Eliezer as one of my heroes-even-though-we-shouldn't-have-'heroes' over here.
Ben Goertzel on Charity
by XiXiDu — 2011-03-09T16:37:41.414Z

Artificial general intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel answered my question on charitable giving and gave his permission to publish it here. I think the opinion of highly educated experts who have read most of the available material is important to estimate the public and academic perception of risks from AI and the effectiveness with which the risks are communicated by LessWrong and the SIAI.

Alexander Kruel asked:

What would you do with $100,000 if it were given to you on the condition that you donate it to a charity of your choice?

Ben Goertzel replied:

Unsurprisingly, my answer is that I would donate the $100,000 to the OpenCog project which I co-founded and with which I'm currently heavily involved. This doesn't mean that I think OpenCog should get 100% of everybody's funding; but given my own state of knowledge, I'm very clearly aware that OpenCog could make great use of $100K for research working toward beneficial AGI and a positive Singularity. If I had $100M rather than $100K to give away, I would have to do more research into which other charities were most deserving, rather than giving it all to OpenCog!

What can one learn from this?

The SIAI is not the only option to work towards a positive Singularity

The SIAI should try to cooperate more closely with other AGI projects to potentially have a positive impact.

I'm planning to contact and ask various experts, who are aware of risks from AI, the same question.
John Baez on Charity
by XiXiDu — 2011-03-09T13:39:37.730Z

Mathematician and climate activist John Baez finally commented on charitable giving. I think the opinion of highly educated experts who are not closely associated with LessWrong or the SIAI but have read most of the available material is important to estimate the public and academic perception of risks from AI and the effectiveness with which the risks are communicated by LessWrong and the SIAI.

Desertopa asked:

[...] if I asked what you would do with $100,000 if it were given to you on the condition that you donate it to a charity of your choice?

John Baez replied:

[...] it’s good that you added the clause “on the condition that you donate it to a charity of your own choice”, because I was all ready with the answer in case you left that out: I’d have said “I’ll save the money for my retirement”. Given the shaky state of California’s economy, I don’t trust the U.C. pension system very much anymore.

Since I haven’t ever been in the position to donate lots of money to a charity, I haven’t thought much about your question. I want to tackle it when I rewrite my will, but I haven’t yet. So, I don’t have an answer ready.

If you held a gun against my head and forced me to answer without further thought, I’d probably say Médecins Sans Frontières, because I’m pretty risk-averse. They seem to accomplish what they set out to accomplish, they seem financially transparent, and I think it’s pretty easy to argue that they’re doing something good (as opposed to squandering money, or doing something actively bad).

Of course, anyone associated with Less Wrong would ask if I’m really maximizing expected utility. Couldn’t a contribution to some place like the Singularity Institute of Artificial Intelligence, despite a lower chance of doing good, actually have a chance to do so much more good that it’d pay to send the cash there instead?

And I’d have to say:

1) Yes, there probably are such places, but it would take me a while to find the one that I trusted, and I haven’t put in the work. When you’re risk-averse and limited in the time you have to make decisions, you tend to put off weighing options that have a very low chance of success but a very high return if they succeed. This is sensible so I don’t feel bad about it

...
Lokhorst, 'Computational Meta-ethics' (2011)
by lukeprog — 2011-03-09T07:13:47.021Z

Besides Yudkowsky and Goertzel, the only person I know of doing serious computational meta-ethics is Dutch philosopher and computer scientist Gert-Jan Lokhorst. He has a paper forthcoming in Minds and Machines called "Computational Meta-Ethics: Towards the Meta-Ethical Robot." I suspect it wil be of interest to some.

His paper also mentions some work in formal epistemology on computational metaphysics and computational meta-modal logic. Ah, the pleasures of scholarship! (You're all tired of me harping on about scholarship, right?)
Less Wrong at Burning Man 2011
by Kevin — 2011-03-09T01:17:00.485Z

Plans are in the works for a LW/Singularity themed Burning Man camp. Last year was a tremendous success, with only one casualty. This year we will have an actual theme camp on the map.

We are at the point in the planning where we need an approximate estimate of number of people. If you want to camp with us or might want to camp with us, let us know. All are welcomed.
Why not just write failsafe rules into the superintelligent machine?
by lukeprog — 2011-03-08T21:07:13.936Z

Many people think you can solve the Friendly AI problem just by writing certain failsafe rules into the superintelligent machine's programming, like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. I thought the rebuttal to this was in "Basic AI Drives" or one of Yudkowsky's major articles, but after skimming them, I haven't found it. Where are the arguments concerning this suggestion?
How best to show dying is bad
by Zvi — 2011-03-08T15:18:33.538Z

I've been trying to convince my father to support the cause, and ran into resistance on a front that I didn't expect. It's hard to tell how much he's looking for an argument and how much he actually believes what he's advocating, but he doesn't display any behavior that would contradict him believing it and several of us (LauraABJ, SarahC and Andrew) were on hand and unable to shake him.

Today he emailed me these "Thoughts on Immortality"

Our not wanting to die is a bit of irrational behavior selected for by evolution. The universe doesn’t care if you’re there or not. The contrasting idea that you are the universe is mystical, not rational.

The idea that you are alive “now” but will be dead “later” is irrational. Time is just a persistent illusion according to relativistic physics. You are alive and dead, period.

A cyber-replica is not you. If one were made and stood next to you, you would still not consent to be shot.

Ditto a meat replica

If you believe the many worlds model of quantum physics is true (Eliezer does), then there already are a vitually infinite number of replicas of you already, so why bother making another one?

Given we'd already been over this several times I decided to try a different approach this tme, so this was my completely off-the-cuff reply:

"Are you here to have an argument? I'm sorry, this is abuse.
Terminal values and preferences are not rational or irrational. They simply are your preferences. I want a pizza. If I get a pizza, that won't make me consent to get shot. I still want a pizza. There are a virtually infinite number of me that DO have a pizza. I still want a pizza. The pizza from a certain point of view won't exist, and neither will I, by the time I get to eat some of it. I still want a pizza, damn it.

Of course, if you think all of that is irrational, then by all means don't order the pizza. More for me."

He's effectively an atheist so no need to worry about that angle. He would be a potentially strong asset were he to come around, and I hate to see him sit around without hope effectively waiting to die; when he tries to do good he doesn't exactly give to the Society for Cute Kittens and Rare Diseases but he's accomplishing far less than he could. I also would feel better knowing he fully supported my signing up for Alcor. More generally, I'd like

...