trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Mind uploading from the outside in
by Alexandros — 2015-11-29T02:05:07.228Z

Most discussion of uploading talks of uploading from the inside out: simply, a biological person undergoes a disruptive procedure which digitises their mind. The digital mind then continues the person’s timeline as a digital existence, with all that entails.

The thing that stands out here is the disruptive nature of the process from biological to digital being. It is not only a huge step to undergo such a transformation, but few things in reality operate in such binary terms. More commonly, things happen gradually.

Being an entrepreneur and also having a keen interest in the future, I both respect audacious visions, and study how they come to be realised. Very rarely does progress come from someone investing a bunch of resources in a black-box process that ends in a world-changing breakthrough. Much more commonly, massive innovations are realised through a process of iteration and exploration, fueled by a need that motivates people to solve thousands of problems, big and small. Massive trends interact with other innovations to open up opportunities that when exploited cause a further acceleration of innovation. Every successful startup and technology, from Facebook to Tesla and from mobile phones to modern medicine can be understood in these terms.

With this lens in mind, how might uploading be realised? This is one potential timeline, barring AI explosion or existential catastrophy.

It is perhaps useful to explore the notion of “above/below the API”. A slew of companies have formed, often called “Uber for X” or “AirBnB for Y”, solving needs we have, through a computer system, such as a laptop or a mobile phone app. The app might issue a call to a server via an API, and that server may delegate the task to some other system, often powered by other humans. The original issuer of the command then gets their need covered, minimising direct contact with other humans, the traditional way of having our needs covered. It is crucial to understand that API-mediated interactions win because they are superior to their traditional alternative. Once they were possible, it was only natural for them to proliferate. As an example, compare the experience of taking a taxi with using Uber.

And so computer systems are inserted between human-to-human interactions. This post is composed on a computer, t...
There is no try
by So8res — 2015-11-29T02:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/there-is-no-try/

Ok, so "try" is actually a pretty useful concept; there's a reason we have a very short word for it in the English language. Nevertheless, I have found it quite useful to occasionally spend a few weeks refusing to use the word "try" or any of its synonyms, at least when talking about myself, and especially when thinking about myself to myself.

This is a quick and easy way to put success in the background, as discussed last week. For example, compare these two responses to "what are you doing?"

I'm trying to solve this math problem.

versus

I'm pursuing a promising line of inquiry on this math problem. If it doesn't lead anywhere, I have two others to pursue next. If all three are fruitless, I'll ask for help.

For the first person, "failure" is either first or second on the list of things they expect to happen next: they're trying to solve the problem, and either they'll solve it, or they'll fail. If they fail, they can say "well, I tried", and move on. And because failing and moving on is such a prominent option, they must struggle against it each time they pause; they are like the person trying to sprint up and down a soccer field as much as they can, rather than the person playing soccer.

The second person, who does not have 'try' in their vocabulary, is forced to say what specific actions they are actually taking — and now, failure on the entire problem is much further down on the list of possible outcomes. Failure at this particular line of approach just drops them into the next line of approach. They're more like the person playing the soccer game, getting exercise ("trying to solve the problem") without that idea explicit in their mind. This sort of mindset, I find, is often helpful.

Imagine that I'm in the middle of flossing my teeth, when someone knocks on the door and asks what I'm doing. I wouldn't answer "trying to floss," I'd just answer "flossing" — unless I had been interrupted so many times that I was beginning to doubt my ability to complete the task. When we're sure of our ability to complete a task, we don't describe ourselves as "trying", we just do it. I don't get up every morning and try to dress myself, I just get up and dress myself.

Whenever you can honestly say that you are doing, rather than trying, then I suggest you do so — but often this is only honestly possible when you're quite confident in your own ability to succeed.

(Some self-help b...
What do we need value learning for?
by jessicata — 2015-11-29T01:41:59.000Z

I will be writing a sequence of posts about value learning. The purpose of
these posts is to create more explicit models of some value learning ideas, such as
those discussed in The Value Learning
Problem. Although
these explicit models are unlikely to capture the complexity of real value
learning systems, it is at least helpful to have some explicit model of value
learning in mind when thinking about problems such as corrigibility.

This came up because I was discussing value learning with some people at MIRI
and FHI. There were disagreements about some aspects of the problem, such as
whether a value-learning AI could automatically learn how to be corrigible. I
realized that my thinking about value learning was somewhat confused. Making concrete
models will make my thinking clearer and also create more common models that
people can discuss.

A value learning model is an algorithm that observes human behaviors and
determines what values humans have. Roughly, the model consists of:

a type of values, V

a prior over values, P(V)

a conditional distribution of human behavior given their values and observation, P(A|V,O)

Of course, this is very simplified: in real life the model must account for
beliefs, memory, etc. Such a model can be used for multiple purposes. Each of
these purposes requires different things from the model. It is important to
look at these applications when constructing these models, so it is clear what
target we are shooting for.

Creating systems that predict human behavior

Some proposals for safe AI systems require predicting human behavior. These
include both approval-directed
agents and mimicry-based
systems.
Additionally, quantilizers benefit from
having a distribution over actions that assigns reasonable probability to good actions,
such as an approximation of the distribution of actions a human might take.
These systems become more useful the more
accurate the predictions of human behavior are. To the
extent that knowing about human values helps a system predict human behavior,
value learning models should make these systems more accurate. Value learning models are also likely to be easier for humans to understand than models created by "black-box" supervised learning methods, such as neural networks.

It is notable that the behavior model here is only used for its distribution
of actions P(A|O), not its internal representation o

...
[link] Desiderata for a model of human values
by Kaj_Sotala — 2015-11-28T19:25:00.020Z

http://kajsotala.fi/2015/11/desiderata-for-a-model-of-human-values/

Soares (2015) defines the value learning problem as

By what methods could an intelligent machine be constructed to reliably learn what to value and to act as its operators intended?

There have been a few attempts to formalize this question. Dewey (2011) started from the notion of building an AI that maximized a given utility function, and then moved on to suggest that a value learner should exhibit uncertainty over utility functions and then take “the action with the highest expected value, calculated by a weighted average over the agent’s pool of possible utility functions.” This is a reasonable starting point, but a very general one: in particular, it gives us no criteria by which we or the AI could judge the correctness of a utility function which it is considering.

To improve on Dewey’s definition, we would need to get a clearer idea of just what we mean by human values. In this post, I don’t yet want to offer any preliminary definition: rather, I’d like to ask what properties we’d like a definition of human values to have. Once we have a set of such criteria, we can use them as a guideline to evaluate various offered definitions.
The Growth of My Pessimism: Transhumanism, Immortalism, Effective Altruism. 
by diegocaleiro — 2015-11-28T11:07:40.531Z

This text has many, many hyperlinks, it is useful to at least glance at frontpage of the linked material to get it. It is an expression of me thinking so it has many community jargon terms. Thank Oliver Habryka, Daniel Kokotajlo and James Norris for comments. No, really, check the front page of the hyperlinks.

Why I Grew Skeptical of Transhumanism

Why I Grew Skeptical of Immortalism

Why I Grew Skeptical of Effective Altruism

Only Game in Town

Wonderland’s rabbit said it best: The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

We approach 2016, and the more I see light, the more I see brilliance popping everywhere, the Effective Altruism movement growing, TEDs and Elons spreading the word, the more we switch our heroes in the right direction, the behinder I get. But why? - you say.

Clarity, precision, I am tempted to reply. I have left the intellectual suburbs of Brazil, straight into the strongest hub of production of things that matter, The Bay Area, via Oxford’s FHI office, I now split my time between UC Berkeley, and the CFAR/MIRI office. In the process, I have navigated an ocean of information, read hundreds of books, papers, saw thousands of classes, became proficient in a handful of languages and a handful of intellectual disciplines. I’ve visited the Olympus and I met our living demigods in person as well.

Against the overwhelming forces of an extremely upbeat personality surfing a hyper base-level happiness, these three forces: approaching the center, learning voraciously, and meeting the so-called heroes, have brought me to the current state of pessimism.

I was a transhumanist, an immortalist, and an effective altruist.

Why I Grew Skeptical of Transhumanism

The transhumanist in me is skeptical of technological development fast enough for improving the human condition to be worth it now, he sees most technologies as fancy toys that don’t get us there. Our technologies can’t and won’t for a while lead our minds to peaks anywhere near the peaks we found by simply introducing weirdly shaped molecules into our brains. The strangeness of Salvia, the beauty of LSD, the love of MDMA are orders and orders of magnitude beyond what we know how to change from an engineering perspective. We can induce a rainbow, but we don’t even have the concept of force yet. Our knowledge about the brain, given our goal...
Meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up
by Tuk — 2015-11-27T23:41:46.542Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up

WHEN:
08 December 2015 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
269 Pearl St Manchester NH 03104

The ninth NH meet-up is Tuesday, 12/8, in Manchester, NH at 7 pm at a private residence. Light refreshments will be provided.

Have you read Rationality: from AI to Zombies, or any of the Sequences on Less Wrong? Maybe you're just a fan of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Come hang out with us and discuss optimization of whatever it is you want to optimize.

Agenda: Propagating Urges follow-up + more

You may want to bring a notebook.

https://www.facebook.com/events/525673120924942/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/695201067251306/

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - December
by luminosity — 2015-11-27T23:24:59.693Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - December

WHEN:
06 December 2015 04:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
10 Shepherd Street, Chippendale

Join us for the last dojo of the year -- what better time to get a helping hand sorting through whatever in your life you need to get sorted?

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - December
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-11-27T17:06:10.960Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on November 20th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Prague Less Wrong Meetup: 02 December 2015 07:00PM
San Antonio Meetup!: 29 November 2015 02:00PM

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

Moscow meetup: discussion on community evolution; power and culture talk; rational games: 23 November 2015 02:00PM
[Moscow] FallacyMania game in Kocherga club: 25 November 2015 07:30PM
NYC Solstice: 19 December 2015 05:30PM
Seattle Solstice: 19 December 2015 05:00PM
Tel Aviv: Black Holes after Jacob Bekenstein: 24 November 2015 08:00AM
Vienna: 21 November 2015 04:00PM
[Vienna] Five Worlds Collide - Vienna: 04 December 2015 08:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 22 November 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, 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 noti...
The meaning of words
by casebash — 2015-11-27T05:15:33.311Z

This article aims to challenge the notion that the meaning of the words should and must be understood as the propositional or denotation content, in preference to the implied or connotational content. This is an assumption that I held for most of my life and which I suspect a great deal of aspiring rationalists will naturally tend towards. But before I begin, I must first clarify the argument that I am making. When a rationalist is engaged in conversation, it is very likely that they are seeking truth and that they want (or would at least claim to want) to know the truth regardless of the emotions that it might stir up. Emotions are seen as something that must be overcome and subjected to logic. The person who would object to statement due to its phrasing, rather than its propositional content is seen as acting irrationally. And these beliefs are indeed these are true to a large extent. Those who hide from emotions are often coddling themselves and those who object due to phrasing are often subverting the rules of fair play. But there are also situations where using particular words necessarily implies more than the strict denotational content and trying to ignore these connotations is foolhardy. For many people, this last sentence alone may be all that needs to be said on this topic, but I believe that there is still some value in breaking down precisely what words actually mean.

So why is there a widespread belief within certain circles that the meaning of a word or sentence is its denotational content? I would answer that this is a result of a desire to enforce norms that result in productive conversation. In general conversation, people will often take offense in a way that derails the conversation into a discussion of what is or is not offensive, instead of substantive disagreements. One way to address this problem is to create a norm that each person should only be criticised on their denotations, rather connotations. In practise, it is considerably more complicated as particularly blatant connotations will be treated by denotations, but this is a minor point. The larger point is that meaning consisting of purely the connotations is merely a social norm within a particular context and not an absolute truth.

This means that when the social norms are different and people complain about connotations in other social settings, the issues isn't tha...
Audio version of Rationality: From AI to Zombies out of beta
by Rick_from_Castify — 2015-11-25T20:19:37.277Z

All three volumes of the ebook Rationality: From AI to Zombies are complete and available for purchase on Castify. A big thanks to the narrator George Thomas. The total recording time is over 51 hours.

Five math-heavy essays in the second volume went unread because they didn't make for good listening. To read these the ebook can be downloaded on a "pay-what-you-want" basis from intelligence.org.

Thanks again to the original kickstarter backers, we wouldn't have been able to do this without you.

Direct Links:

Volume 1

Volume 2

Volume 3
Omega's Idiot Brother, Epsilon
by OrphanWilde — 2015-11-25T19:57:41.351Z

Epsilon walks up to you with two boxes, A and b, labeled in rather childish-looking handwriting written in crayon.

"In box A," he intones, sounding like he's trying to be foreboding, which might work better when he hits puberty, "I may or may not have placed a million of your human dollars." He pauses for a moment, then nods. "Yes. I may or may not have placed a million dollars in this box. If I expect you to open Box B, the million dollars won't be there. Box B will contain, regardless of what you do, one thousand dollars. You may choose to take one box, or both; I will leave with any boxes you do not take."

You've been anticipating this. He's appeared to around twelve thousand people so far. Out of eight thousand people who accepted both boxes, eighty found the million dollars missing, and walked away with $1,000; the other seven thousand nine hundred and twenty people walked away with $1,001,000 dollars. Out of the four thousand people who opened only box A, only four found it empty.

The agreement is unanimous: Epsilon is really quite bad at this. So, do you one-box, or two-box?

There are some important differences here with the original problem. First, Epsilon won't let you open either box until you've decided whether to open one or both, and will leave with the other box. Second, while Epsilon's false positive rate on identifying two-boxers is quite impressive, making mistakes about one-boxers only .1% of the time, his false negative rate is quite unimpressive - he catches 1% of everybody who engages in it. Whatever heuristic he's using, clearly, he prefers to let two-boxers slide than to accidentally punish one-boxers.

I'm curious to know whether anybody would two-box in this scenario and why, and particularly curious in the reasoning of anybody whose answer is different between the original Newcomb problem and this one.
HPMOR and the Power of Consciousness
by Algernoq — 2015-11-25T07:00:53.906Z

Throughout HPMOR, the author has included many fascinating details about how the real world works, and how to gain power. The Mirror of CEV seems like a lesson in what a true Friendly AI could look like and do.

I've got a weirder theory. (Roll for sanity...)

The entire story is plausible-deniability cover for explaining how to get the Law of Intention to work reliably.

(All quoted text is from HPMOR.)

This Mirror reflects itself perfectly and therefore its existence is absolutely stable.

"This Mirror" is the Mind, or consciousness. The only thing a Mind can be sure of is that it is a Mind.

The Mirror's most characteristic power is to create alternate realms of existence, though these realms are only as large in size as what can be seen within the Mirror

A Mind's most characteristic power is to create alternate realms of existence, though these realms are only as large in size as what can be seen within the Mind.

Showing any person who steps before it an illusion of a world in which one of their desires has been fulfilled.

The final property upon which most tales agree, is that whatever the unknown means of commanding the Mirror - of that Key there are no plausible accounts - the Mirror's instructions cannot be shaped to react to individual people...the legends are unclear on what rules can be given, but I think it must have something to do with the Mirror's original intended use - it must have something to do with the deep desires and wishes arising from within the person.

More specifically, the Mirror shows a universe that obeys a consistent set of physical laws. From the set of all wish-fulfillment fantasies, it shows a universe that could actually plausibly exist.

It is known that people and other objects can be stored therein

Actors store other minds within their own Mind. Engineers store physical items within their Mind. The Mirror is a Mind.

the Mirror alone of all magics possesses a true moral orientation

The Mind alone of all the stuff that exists possesses a true moral orientation.

If that device had been completed, the story claimed, it would have become an absolutely stable existence that could withstand the channeling of unlimited magic in order to grant wishes. And also - this was said to be the vastly harder task - the device would somehow avert the inevitable catastrophes any sane person would expect to follow from that premise.&n

...
Creating lists
by casebash — 2015-11-25T04:41:18.335Z

Suppose you are trying to create a list. It may be of the "best" popular science books, or most controversial movies of the last twenty years, tips for getting over a breakup or the most interesting cat gifs posted in the last few days.

There are many reasons for wanting to create one of these lists, but only a few main simple methods:

Voting model - This is the simplest model, but popularity doesn't always equal quality. It is also particularly problematic for regularly updated lists (like Reddit), where a constantly changing audience can result in large amounts of duplicate content and where easily consumable content has an advantage.

Curator model - A single expect can often do an admirable job of collecting high-quality content, but this is subject to their own personal biases. It is also effort intensive to evaluate different curators to see if they have done a good job.

Voting model with (content) rules - This can cut out the irrelevant or sugary content that is often upvoted, but creating good rules is hard. Often there is no objective line between high and low-quality content. These rules can often result in conflict.

Voting model with sections - This is a solution to some of the limitations of 1 and 3. Instead of declaring some things off-topic outright, they can be thrown into their own section. This is the optimal solution, but is usually neglected.

Voting model with selection - This covers any model where only certain people are allowed to vote. Sometimes selection is extraordinarily rigorous, however, it can still be very effective when it isn't. As an example, Metafilter charges a $5 one-time only fee and that is sufficient to keep the quality high.

The main point is that model 1 shouldn't automatically be selected. The other models have advantages too.