trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
LessWrong Hamburg Meetup July 2015 Summary
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-07-18T23:13:20.023Z

After a hiatus of about a year the LessWrong Hamburg Meetup had a very strong revival! Infused by motivation from the Berlin Weekend I tried a reachout to collegues and via meetup.com and an amazing 24 people gathered on July, 17th in a location kindly provided by my employer.

Because the number of participants quickly exceeded my expectations I had to scramble to put something together for a larger group. For this I had tactical aid from blob and practical support from colleagues putting everything together from name tags to getting food and drinks and chairs.

We had an easy start with getting to know each other with Fela's Ice-Breaking Game.

The main topics covered were:

An introduction into the topics, goals and methods or LessWrong illustrated with The Parable of the Dagger by pinkgothic. This was followed up by many smaller talks about how to apply rationality.

A presentation and moderated discussion about effective altruism by ImmaSix.

Moderated discussion about methods of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

I answered many questions regarding biases and fallacies and we used the game cards I had prepared early multiple times. These attracted some interest and can be found here (Dropbox).

Beside the main topics there was a good athmosphere with many people having smaller discussions.

The event ended with a short wrap-up based on Irinas Sustainable Change talk from the Berlin event which did prompt some people to take action based on what they heard.

What I learned from the event:

I still tend to do overplanning. Maybe having a plan for eventualities isn't bad but the agenda doesn't need to be as highly structured as I did. It could cause expectations that can't be met.

Apparently I appeared stressed but I didn't feel that way myself. Probably from hurrying around. I wonder wheather that has a negative effect on other people and how I can avoid that. Esp. as I'm not feeling stressed myself.

A standard-issue meeting room for 12 people can comfortably host 24 people if tables and furniture are rearranged and comfy beanbags etc. are added.

Whe number of people showing up can vary unpredictably. This may depend on weather or how the event is communicated and unknown factors.

Visualize the concrete effects of your charity. This can give you a specific intuition you can use to decide w

...
List of Fully General Counterarguments
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-07-18T21:49:41.608Z

Follow-up to: Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

See also: Fully General Counterargument (LW Wiki)

A fully general counterargument [FGCA] is an argument which can be used to discount any conclusion the arguer does not like.

With the caveat that the arguer doesn't need to be aware that this is the case. But if (s)he is not aware of that, this seems like the other biases we are prone to. The question is: Is there a tendency or risk to accidentally form FGCAs? Do we fall easily into this mind-trap?

This post tries to (non-exhaustively) list some FGCAs as well as possible countermeasures.

The List

Here is a list of my own making:

My opponent is a clever arguer against whom I have no chance. This in itself may be a humble stance, but if used unconditionally in all cases is an FGCA. See also bottom line of this post.

Fallacies and biases - My opponent is just showing that (s)he falls prey to fallacies or biases. Thus I do not need to deal with any argument in particular.

Specific sub-cases/examples:

Experts are fallacious, thus you can't trust them (the first example in Knowing About Biases)

You see only confiming evidence and ignore the negative evidence I provide.

You are overconfident. I don't need to deal with your overconfidence until you became more humble.

You think everybody thinks like yourself and should trivially understand what you suggest.

Vagueness - real-life aspects do not admit precise definitions and this vagueness propagates into all arguments.

Words are ambiguous and all definitions refer back to words.

The fallacy of grey i.e. the belief that because nothing is certain, everything is equally uncertain.

Life is complicated. There are so many dependencies in real complex life that factual judgements cannot be made.

Nihilism - Life has no meaning and therefore any human endeavor - including arguments are meaningless.

everybody is entitled to his own opinon - I don't like your opinion but you may have your own. It's not important that we differ.

Humans are different. Your argument applies only to you because you are special.

Is so! ('I scream otherwise'). I am emotionally attached to my view and I will scream/run away/use ad hominem if you you don't get how important that is to me!

Applying hard science blindly. This yields true but over-general arguments which thus do not contri

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You are (mostly) a simulation.
by Fivehundred — 2015-07-18T16:40:20.613Z

This post was completely rewritten on July 17th, 2015, 6:10 AM. Comments before that are not necessarily relevant.

Assume that our minds really do work the way Unification tells us: what we are experiencing is actually the sum total of every possible universe which produces them. Some universes have more 'measure' than others, and that is typically the stable ones; we do not experience chaos. I think this makes a great deal of sense- if our minds really are patterns of information I do not see why a physical world should have a monopoly on it.

Now to prove that we live in a Big World. The logic is simple- why would something finite exist? If we're going to reason that some fundamental law causes everything to exist, I don't see why that law restricts itself to this universe and nothing else. Why would it stop? It is, arguably, simply the nature of things for an infinite multiverse to exist.

I'm pretty terrible at math, so please try to forgive me if this sounds wrong. Take the 'density' of physical universes where you exist- the measure, if you will- and call it j. Then take the measure of universes where you are simulated and call it p. So, the question become is j greater than p? You might be thinking yes, but remember that it doesn't only have to be one simulation per universe. According to our Big World model there is a universe out there in which all processing power (or a significant portion) as been turned into simulations of you.

So we take the amount of minds being simulated per universe and call that x. Then the real question becomes if j > px. What sort of universe is common enough and contains enough minds to overcome j? If you say that approximately 10^60 simulated human minds could fit in it (a reasonable guess for this universe) but that such universes are five trillion times rarer than the universe we live in, than it's clear that our own 'physical' measure is hopelessly lower than our simulated measure.

Should we worry about this? It would seem highly probable that in most universes where I am being simulated I once existed in, or humans did, since the odds of randomly stumbling upon me in Mind Space seem unlikely enough to ignore. Presumably they are either AIs gone wrong or someone trying to grab some of my measure, for whatever reason.

As way of protecting measure, pretty much all of our postsingularity universes would divide up the matter o...
I have just donated $10,000 to the Immortality Bus, which was the most rational decision of my life
by turchin — 2015-07-18T13:13:57.949Z

I have non-zero probability to die next year. In my age of 42 it is not less than 1 per cent, and probably more. I could do many investment which will slightly lower my chance of dying – from healthy life style to cryo contract. And I did many of them.

From economical point of view the death is at least loosing all you capital.

If my net worth is something like one million (mostly real estate and art), and I have 1 per cent chance to die, it is equal to loosing 10 k a year. But in fact more, because death it self is so unpleasant that it has large negative monetary value. And also I should include the cost of lost opportunities.

Once I had a discussion with Vladimir Nesov about what is better: to fight to immortality, or to create Friendly AI which will explain what is really good. My position was that immortality is better because it is measurable, knowable, and has instrumental value for most other goals, and also includes prevention of worst thing on earth which is the Death. Nesov said (as I remember) that personal immortality does not matter as much total value of humanity existence, and more over, his personal existence has no much value at all. All what we need to do is to create Friendly AI. I find his words contradictory because if his existence does not matter, than any human existence also doesn’t matter, because there is nothing special about him.

But later I concluded that the best is to make bets that will raise the probability of my personal immortality, existential risks prevention and creation of friendly AI simultaneously. Because it is easy to imagine situation where research in personal immortality like creation technology for longevity genes delivery will contradict our goal of existential risks reduction because the same technology could be used for creating dangerous viruses.

The best way here is invest in creating regulating authority which will be able to balance these needs, and it can’t be friendly AI because such regulation needed before it will be created.

That is why I think that US needs Transhumanist president. A real person whose value system I can understand and support. And that is why I support Zoltan Istvan for 2016 campaign.

Me and Exponential Technologies Institute donated 10 000 USD for Immortality bus project. This bus will be the start of Presidential campaign for the writer of “Transhum...
Reverse Psychology
by Scott Alexander — 2015-07-18T04:25:14.000Z

[Content warning: suicide]

I.

It all started when I made that phone call.

I was really bad. All the tenure-track positions I’d applied to had politely declined, and I saw my future in academia gradually slipping away from me. Then the night before, my boyfriend had said he thought maybe we should start seeing other people. I didn’t even know if we were broken up or not, and at that point I couldn’t bring myself to care. I sat on my bed, thinking about things for a while, and finally I called the suicide hotline.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered on the other side. Somehow, just hearing someone else made me feel about five times better.

“Hello,” I said, a little more confidently. “I’ve been thinking of committing suicide. I need help.”

“Okay,” she said. “Is there a gun in your house?”

“No.”

“All right. The first thing you need to do is get one. Overdosing on pills is common, but it almost never works. You can get a firearm at almost any large sporting goods store, but if there aren’t any near you, we can start talking about maybe jumping from a high…”

“What the HELL?” I interrupted, suddenly way more angry than depressed. “You’re supposed to @#!$ing tell me not to do it!”

“This is the suicide hotline,” the woman said, now sounding confused. Then, “Are you sure you weren’t thinking of the suicide prevention hotline?”

“Give me a break! I took a psychology class in undergrad, I know what a suicide hotline is!”

“I’m sorry you seem to be upset. But this is the suicide hotline. It’s like how there’s the Walk For Breast Cancer, but also the Walk Against Breast Cancer.”

“There’s the what? But…I was in the Walk For Breast Cancer! I thought…”

“It sounds like you have some issues,” said the woman, politely.

“Ugh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Do you feel like you need professional help?”

“Yeah.”

“I do have a free clinic with an opening available tomorrow at three PM, would you like me to slot you in for an appointment?”

So you’re probably wondering why in the world I would take an appointment arranged by the suicide hotline that wasn’t a suicide prevention hotline....
Experiences in applying "The Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting"
by juliawise — 2015-07-17T19:19:20.908Z

I'm posting this because LessWrong was very influential on how I viewed parenting, particularly the emphasis on helping one's brain work better. In this context, creating and influencing another person's brain is an awesome responsibility.

It turned out to be a lot more anxiety-provoking than I expected. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as the possibility of screwing up someone's brain should make a parent anxious, but it's something to be aware of. I've heard some blithe "Rational parenting could be a very high-impact activity!" statements from childless LWers who may be interested to hear some experiences in actually applying that.

One thing that really scared me about trying to raise a child with the healthiest-possible brain and body was the possibility that I might not love her if she turned out to not be smart. 15 months in, I'm no longer worried. Evolution has been very successful at producing parents and children that love each other despite their flaws, and our family is no exception. Our daughter Lily seems to be doing fine, but if she turns out to have disabilities or other problems, I'm confident that we'll roll with the punches.

Cross-posted from The Whole Sky.

Before I got pregnant, I read Scott Alexander’s excellent Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting and was so excited to have this knowledge. I thought how lucky my child would be to have parents who knew and cared about how to protect her from things that would damage her brain.

Real life, of course, got more complicated. It’s one thing to intend to avoid neurotoxins, but another to arrive at the grandparents’ house and find they’ve just had ant poison sprayed. What do you do then?

Here are some tradeoffs Jeff and I have made between things that are good for children in one way but bad in another, or things that are good for children but really difficult or expensive.

Germs and parasites

The hygiene hypothesis states that lack of exposure to germs and parasites increases risk of auto-immune disease. Our pediatrician recommended letting Lily playing in the dirt for this reason.

While exposure to animal dander and pollution increase asthma later in life, it seems that being exposed to these in the first year of life actually protects against asthma. Apparently if you’re going to live in a house with roaches, you should do it ...
A Counterexample to an Informal Conjecture on Proof Length and Logical Counterfactuals
by SamEisenstat — 2015-07-17T17:34:51.000Z

Previous: An Informal Conjecture on Proof Length and Logical Counterfactuals

This is a simplified and more complete presentation of my previous counterexample to Scott Garrabrant's conjecture on logical counterfactuals. I present an example of two statements ϕ and ψ such that PA⊢ϕ→ψ and PA⊬ϕ→¬ψ, but ψ is not "really" a counterfactual consequence of ϕ, in an intuitive, informal sense. I also argue, based on the proof of ϕ→ψ, that we should trust our intuition that ψ is not a real counterfactual consequence, rather than believing that our intuitions are being stretched too far and misleading us.

Consider the following universe and agent.

def U():
if A() = 1:
if PA is consistent:
return 10
else:
return 0
else: return 5

def A():
if PA ⊢ A() = 1 → U() = 10:
return 1
else: return 2

Note that this agent reasons very similarly to modal UDT. It is simpler, but that's because it's clear that action 2 will lead to utility 5, so if the agent cannot get utility 10 by taking action 1, there is no reason for it to continue its proof search.

Consider the statements ϕ≡(A()=1) and ψ≡(U()=0). We first show PA⊢ϕ→ψ. Work in PA and suppose for contradiction that ϕ∧¬ψ, i.e. A()=1∧U()≠0. If PA were inconsistent, the agent would get 0 utility, so it must be the case that PA is consistent. Also, since A()=1, we know by looking at the agent's code that the proof search succeeded, so we have □┌A()=1→U()=10┐. PA knows that it can prove this, so it knows that the agent takes action 1, i.e. we have □┌A()=1┐. Putting this all together, consistency tells us that ¬□┌A()=1→U()=0┐. This is logically equivalent to ◊┌(A()=1∧U()≠0). Thus, stepping back to the metalanguage, we see that the theory PA+(A()=1∧U()≠0) asserts its own consistency, so it is inconsistent. (Gödel's second incompleteness theorem is used here, but the same argument can be carried out using Löb's theorem.)

Since PA+(A()=1∧U()≠0) is inconsistent, PA proves ¬(A()=1∧U()≠0), i.e. A()=1→U()=0. (By soundness of PA, we can see at this point that the agent takes action 2, but this is unnecessary for the present argument.) It remains only to show that PA⊬A()=1→U()≠0. If PA is inconsistent, then the agent takes action 1, since its proof search trivially succeeds, and it receives utility 0, so there is at least one model of PA where A()=1 and U()=0, establishing the result.

We now have both PA⊢A()=1→U()=0 an

...
New LW Meetup: Kyiv, New Hampshire
by FrankAdamek — 2015-07-17T15:38:57.057Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on July 10th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

New Hampshire Inaugural Meet-up: 14 July 2015 07:00PM
Kyiv, Ukraine: 24 July 2015 06:30PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Cologne meetup: 11 July 2015 05:00PM
Frankfurt Meet-Up: 16 July 2015 06:30PM
Hamburg : 17 July 2015 06:30PM
Oslo Meetup at Bitraf.: 18 July 2015 04:00PM
Paris Meetup: Saturday, July 11 : 11 July 2015 02:00PM
San Antonio, TX: 12 July 2015 01:30PM
San Francisco Meetup: Board Games: 13 July 2015 06:15PM
Scotland: 12 July 2015 02:00PM
Warsaw integration: Barbecue on the beach: 31 July 2015 06:30PM

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:

[Seattle] Rationality Reading Group (62-66): 13 July 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - July: 22 July 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - August: 26 August 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 23 September 2015 06:30PM
Vienna: 18 July 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates: 12 July 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, 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.

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 th...
AI: requirements for pernicious policies
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-07-17T14:18:54.040Z

Some have argued that "tool AIs" are safe(r). Recently, Eric Drexler decomposed AIs into "problem solvers" (eg calculators), "advisors" (eg GPS route planners), and actors (autonomous agents). Both solvers and advisors can be seen as examples of tools.

People have argued that tool AIs are not safe. It's hard to imagine a calculator going berserk, no matter what its algorithm is, but it's not too hard to come up with clear examples of dangerous tools. This suggests the solvers vs advisors vs actors (or tools vs agents, or oracles vs agents) is not the right distinction.

Instead, I've been asking: how likely is the algorithm to implement a pernicious policy? If we model the AI as having an objective function (or utility function) and algorithm that implements it, a pernicious policy is one that scores high in the objective function but is not at all what is intended. A pernicious function could be harmless and entertaining or much more severe.

I will lay aside, for the moment, the issue of badly programmed algorithms (possibly containing its own objective sub-functions). In any case, to implement a pernicious function, we have to ask these questions about the algorithm:

Do pernicious policies exist? Are there many?

Can the AI find them?

Can the AI test them?

Would the AI choose to implement them?

The answer to 1. seems to be trivially yes. Even a calculator could, in theory, output a series of messages that socially hack us, blah, take over the world, blah, extinction, blah, calculator finishes its calculations. What is much more interesting is some types of agents have many more pernicious policies than others. This seems the big difference between actors and other designs. An actor AI in complete control of the USA or Russia's nuclear arsenal has all sort of pernicious policies easily to hand; an advisor or oracle has much fewer (generally going through social engineering), a tool typically even less. A lot of the physical protection measures are about reducing the number of sucessfull pernicious policies the AI has a cess to.

The answer to 2. is mainly a function of the power of the algorithm. A basic calculator will never find anything dangerous: its programming is simple and tight. But compare an agent with the same objective function and the ability to do an unrestricted policy search with vast resources... So it seems that the answer to 2. does ...
On the Galactic Zoo hypothesis
by estimator — 2015-07-16T19:12:03.017Z

Recently, I was reading some arguments about Fermi paradox and aliens and so on; also there was an opinion among the lines of "humans are monsters and any sane civilization avoids them, that's why Galactic Zoo". As implausible as it is, but I've found one more or less sane scenario where it might be true.

Assume that intelligence doesn't always imply consciousness, and assume that evolution processes are more likely to yield intelligent, but unconscious life forms, rather than intelligent and conscious. For example, if consciousness is resource-consuming and otherwise almost useless (as in Blindsight).

Now imagine that all the alien species evolved without consciousness. Being an important coordination tool, their moral system takes that into account -- it relies on a trait that they have -- intelligence, rather than consciousness. For example, they consider destroying anything capable of performing complex computations immoral.

Then human morality system would be completely blind to them. Killing such an alien would be no more immoral, then, say, recycling a computer. So, for these aliens, human race would be indeed monstrous.

The aliens consider extermination of an entire civilization immoral, since that would imply destroying a few billions of devices, capable of performing complex enough computations. So they decide to use their advanced technology to render their civilizations invisible for human scientists.
Scope sensitivity?
by AnthonyC — 2015-07-16T14:03:31.933Z

Just wanted to share a NYT article on empathy and how different circumstances can reverse the usual bias to feel more empathy for 1 suffering child than 8, and a bunch of other interesting observations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html?ref=international