trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Mike Darwin on animal research, moral cowardice, and reasoning in an uncaring universe
by Synaptic — 2012-08-25T16:38:34.640Z

He writes this essay in response to someone who writes about their "gut level emotional response when [they] thought about dogs being likely killed by an as yet unproven and dangerous medical procedure."

I recommend the whole thing. If you are going to read it all, note that some text is duplicated near the end, though there is one paragraph at the very end which is not.

First, he describes how animals share empathy and emotions with humans:

It is a maxim of the Animal Rights ideologues that "a rat is a dog is a boy." [PETA] This is patently not true, and might just be denounced as absurd on its face. But, it is true that rats, dogs and boys share important properties, or more generally, that rats, dogs and people share important properties. I have a huge reservoir of experience with rats, dogs and people. All three have a well developed sense of self, the ability to read my face and determine my mental state, and, obviously, the ability to experience most, if not all of the basic emotions and mental states that humans experience: anxiety, fear, emotional attachment to others (or their own and other species), sexual arousal and release, anticipation, enjoyment, curiosity, and so on. Most importantly, they have the ability to experience empathy - to extend their internal feelings to others. Well socialized rats and dogs know that the people they interact with can be hurt, provoked, pleased, and otherwise be emotionally and physically affected by their actions and they, in turn, act accordingly within the limits of their abilities to do so. Neither "pet" dogs nor rats bite their owners with abandon nor destroy their homes. This isn't just "conditioned behavior," but rather is the result of a more global understanding that humans, like them, can feel; and thus can be rewarded or made to suffer.

This is a very important and valuable property to people. it is so valuable that, when members of our own species fail to demonstrate it, we imprison them or even kill them! Jails and prisons are full of people who either lack empathy, or lack the ability to act upon it. What then does it say of us if we treat animals in ways that demonstrate a lack of understanding or respect for their feelings - for their ability to suffer or experience pleasure?

The answer is that it would, at first glance, say that we were either sociopaths, profoundly ignoran

...
Meetup : SLC, UT: Free Will and Rationality Checklists
by hamnox — 2012-08-25T04:29:45.793Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SLC, UT: Free Will and Rationality Checklists

WHEN:
15 September 2012 03:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Calvin S Smith Library, 810 East 3300 South, Salt Lake City, UT

We'll be in the back conference room

3:00 Greetings, Introduction and Catchup

3:10 Minicamp Brain Dump (Kevin V.)

3:30 discuss

3:40 Willpower (Dan N.)

4:00 discuss

4:10 SLOT FREE

4:30 discuss

4:40 Wrap up and Final Thoughts, Sign up for next meetup

Free Discussion

I'd suggest bringing a notebook and pen.

Discussion article for the meetup : SLC, UT: Free Will and Rationality Checklists
Cryonics donation fund for Kim Suozzi established by Society for Venturism
by JGWeissman — 2012-08-25T03:09:50.992Z

Following the news that Kim Suozzi has terminal brain cancer and wants to be cryopreserved, many of us have donated to help her out, while others, including me, planned to donate when CI set up a fund to receive donations on her behalf. Now the Society for Venturism has set up a fund, and it is time for us to follow through on those plans. (Unless you are really insisting that the fund be managed by CI specifically.)

(ETA: Kim has posted on this herself.)
[SEQ RERUN] Excluding the Supernatural
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-25T02:35:48.941Z

Today's post, Excluding the Supernatural was originally published on 12 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Don't rule out supernatural explanations because they're supernatural. Test them the way you would test any other hypothesis. And probably, you will find out that they aren't true.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Points of Departure, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Completeness of simulations
by RolfAndreassen — 2012-08-24T22:44:38.928Z

Suppose I have an exact simulation of a human. Feeling ambitious, I decide to print out a GLUT of the action this human will take in every circumstance; while the simulation of course works at the level of quarks, I have a different program that takes lists of quark movements and translates them into a suitably high-level language, such as "Confronted with the evidence that his wife is also his mother, the subject will blind himself and abdicate".

Now, one possible situation is "The subject is confronted with the evidence that his wife is also his mother, and additionally with the fact that this GLUT predicts he will do X". Is it clear that an accurate X exists? In high-level language, I would say that, whatever the prediction is, the subject may choose to do something different. More formally we can notice that the simulation is now self-referential: Part of the result is to be used as the input to the calculation, and therefore affects the result. It is not obvious to me that a self-consistent solution necessarily exists.

It seems to me that this is somehow reminiscent of the Halting Problem, and can perhaps be reduced to it. That is, it may be possible to show that an algorithm that can produce X for arbitrary Turing machines would also be a Halting Oracle. If so, this seems to say something interesting about limitations on what a simulation can do, but I'm not sure exactly what.
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin; Bratislava, Slovakia; Cambridge MA; Melbourne; Sydney; Washington DC 
by FrankAdamek — 2012-08-24T14:28:38.470Z

This summary was posted to LW main on August 17th, and has been moved to discussion.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Bratislava, Slovakia - the first LW meetup: 18 August 2012 05:00PM
Washington DC TED talks Meetup: 19 August 2012 04:00PM
Less Wrong Sydney: 20th August : 20 August 2012 06:30PM
Berlin Meetup: 04 September 2012 07:30PM

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

Austin, TX: 18 August 2018 01:30PM
Cambridge (MA) Meetup: 19 August 2012 02:00PM
Melbourne social meetup: 24 August 2012 07:00PM
Meetup: Southwestern Ohio: 26 August 2012 04:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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 will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups li...
Using Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to teach the scientific method to Psychology undergraduates
by Weisguy — 2012-08-23T14:50:18.554Z

As a psychology graduate student I have the opportunity to teach an introductory psychology course. I'm hoping to take what I have learned here and start helping my students improve their rationality. Specifically, I'm planning to have the students read excerpts from Ch 22 & 23 of HPMOR as a fun and interesting way to start learning to think like a scientist. I'm hoping the community can assist me with possibly narrowing down the sections I'm going to have them read and consider possible methods of assessment. As of now, I know that I want to have the students analyze the methodology used by Harry in his two experiments from those chapters (Harry and Hermione testing spells and Harry and Draco "testing" the blood hypotheses), and I probably want to have students come up with their own hypotheses and methods to test them. Any help the community wants to provide is most appreciated.
[SEQ RERUN] Points of Departure
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-23T03:05:33.913Z

Today's post, Points of Departure was originally published on 09 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Hollywood seems to model "emotionless" AI's as humans with some slight differences. For the most part, they act as emotionally repressed humans, despite the fact that this is a very unlikely way for AI's to behave.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
What's Wrong with Evidential Decision Theory?
by aaronde — 2012-08-23T00:09:14.404Z

With all the exotic decision theories floating around here, it doesn't seem like anyone has tried to defend boring old evidential decision theory since AlexMennen last year. So I thought I'd take a crack at it. I might come off a bit more confident than I am, since I'm defending a minority position (I'll leave it to others to bring up objections). But right now, I really do think that naive EDT, the simplest decision theory, is also the best decision theory.

Everyone agrees that Smoker's lesion is a bad counterexample to EDT, since it turns out that smoking actually does cause cancer. But people seem to think that this is just an unfortunate choice of thought experiment, and that the reasoning is sound if we accept its premise. I'm not so convinced. I think that this "bad example" provides a pretty big clue as to what's wrong with the objections to EDT. (After all, does anyone think it would have been irrational to quit smoking, based only on the correlation between smoking and cancer, before randomized controlled trials were conducted?) I'll explain what I mean with the simplest version of this thought experiment I could come up with.

Suppose that I'm a farmer, hoping it will rain today, to water my crops. I know that the probability of it having rained today, given that my lawn is wet, is higher than otherwise. And I know that my lawn will be wet, if I turn my sprinklers on. Of course, though it waters my lawn, running my sprinklers does nothing for my crops out in the field. Making the ground wet doesn't cause rain; it's the other way around. But if I'm an EDT agent, I know nothing of causation, and base my decisions only on conditional probability. According to the standard criticism of EDT, I stupidly turn my sprinklers on, as if that would make it rain.

Here is where I think the criticism of EDT fails: how do I know, in the first place, that the ground being wet doesn't cause it to rain? One obvious answer is that I've tried it, and observed that the probability of it raining on a given day, given that I turned my sprinklers on, isn't any higher than the prior probability. But if I know that, then, as an evidential decision theorist, I have no reason to turn the sprinklers on. However, if all I know about the world I inhabit are the two facts: (1...
Let's Talk About Intelligence
by Crystalist — 2012-08-22T20:19:27.471Z

I'm writing this because, for a while, I have noticed that I am confused: particularly about what people mean when they say someone is intelligent. I'm more interested in a discussion here than actually making a formal case, so please excuse my lack of actual citations. I'm also trying to articulate my own confusion to myself as well as everyone else, so this will not be as focused as it could be.

If I had to point to a starting point for this state, I'd say it was in psych class, where we talked about research presented by Eyesenck and Gladwell. Eyesenck is very clear to define intelligence as the ability to solve abstract problems, but not necessarily the motivation . In many ways, this matches Yudkowsky's definition, where he talks about intelligence as a property we can ascribe to an entity, which lets us predict that the entity will be able to complete a task, without ourselves necessarily understanding the steps toward completion.

The central theme I'm confused about is the generality of the concept: are we really saying that there is a general algorithm or class of algorithms that will solve most or all problems to within a given distance from optimum?

Let me give an example. Depending on what test you use, an autistic can look clinically retarded, but with 'islands' of remarkable ability, even up to genius levels. The classic example is “Rain Man,” who is depicted as easily solving numerical problems most people don't even understand, but having trouble tying his shoes. This is usually an exaggeration (by no means are all autistics savants), and these island skills are hardly limited to math. The interesting point, though, is that even someone with many such islands can have an abysmally low overall IQ.

Some tests correct for this – Raven's Pattern matching test, for instance, gives you increasingly complex patterns that you have to complete – and this tends to level out those islands, and give an overall score that seems commensurate with the sheer genius that can be found in some areas.

What I find confusing is why we're correcting this at all. Certainly, we know that some people, given a task, can complete that task, and of course, depending on the person, this task can be unfathomably complex. But do we really have the evidence to say that, in general, this task does not depend on the person as well? Or, more specifically, on t...
How to cheat Löb's Theorem: my second try
by Benya — 2012-08-22T18:21:42.067Z

In his open problems talk, Eliezer explains how Löb's theorem prevents you from having a consistent proof system P with an axiom schema that anything P proves is actually true, and asks how we can then "build an AI that could completely rewrite itself, without decreasing the amount of trust it had in math every time it executed that self-rewrite" (18:46).

Recently, I posted about an attempt to apply a general trick for avoiding diagonalization problems to a minimal toy version of this problem. Since then, Wei Dai has posted an interesting quining approach to the same toy problem, and Giles had a promising idea for doing something similar in a different way and will hopefully do a write-up filling in the details. Unfortunately my own "proof" turned out to be broken.

I think I've fixed the problem and made the proof more comprehensible and intuitive in the process. (To avoid confusion, note that what I'm proving is slightly different from, though related to, what I did in the previous post.) However, getting the details right seems to be far from trivial, so I would very much appreciate if people checked my new argument, and told me that it looks okay / where it goes wrong / where they get lost. Thanks in advance!

I'll be more explicit about quoting/unquoting than before, which means I'll need to introduce some notation. However, to sustain you through the schlep of preliminaries, I thought I'd start with an informal summary.

*

Löb's theorem shows that it's inconsistent to assume BAD := Peano Arithmetic + for each statement C, the axiom "if 'C' is provable in BAD, then C". I will extend the language of PA with a constant symbol K, and consider the proof system PPT.2 := Peano Arithmetic + for each statement C, the axiom "if K>0, and 'C' is provable in PPT.2, then D", where D is the statement obtained from C by replacing each occurrence of "K" by "K-1". [PPT.2 is short for for parametric polymorphism trick, version 0.2.] There will also be a variant PPT.3, where C can have a free variable.

I won't just show that these systems are consistent — I will show that they are true (i.e., sound), from which consistency follows. Of course, to do so I will have to say what my strange constant K is supposed to mean. I will show that for any natural number n, all axioms of PPT.2 and PPT.3 are true in the standard model of PA if K is interpreted to mean n.

What's...
Meetup : Dorset Meetup
by danielmamay — 2012-08-22T16:18:30.850Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dorset Meetup

WHEN:
29 August 2012 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Starbucks Coffee, 4 New Bond St, Weymouth, DT4 8LY

The second Dorset meetup will be 2pm on Wednesday 29th August at Starbucks, Weymouth. (There will be a sign on the table.)

Please leave a comment if you're planning to attend. Hope to see you there!

Join the Facebook group!

Discussion article for the meetup : Dorset Meetup
Heading off a near-term AGI arms race
by lincolnquirk — 2012-08-22T14:23:58.382Z

I know people have talked about this in the past, but now seems like an important time for some practical brainstorming here. Hypothetical: the recent $15mm Series A funding of Vicarious by Good Ventures and Founders Fund sets off a wave of $450mm in funded AGI projects of approximately the same scope, over the next ten years. Let's estimate a third of that goes to paying for man-years of actual, low-level, basic AGI capabilities research. That's about 1500 man-years. Anything which can show something resembling progress can easily secure another few hundred man-years to continue making progress.

Now, if this scenario comes to pass, it seems like one of the worst-case scenarios -- if AGI is possible today, that's a lot of highly incentivized, funded research to make it happen, without strong safety incentives. It seems to depend on VCs realizing the high potential impact of an AGI project, and of the companies having access to good researchers.

The Hacker News thread suggests that some people (VCs included) probably already realize the high potential impact, without much consideration for safety:

...I think this exactly the sort of innovation timeline real venture capitalists should be considering - funding real R&D that could have a revolutionary impact even if the odds are against it.

The company to get all of this right will be the first two trillion dollar company.

Is there any way to reverse this trend in public perception? Is there any way to reduce the number of capable researchers? Are there any other angles of attack for this problem?

I'll admit to being very scared.
AI timeline prediction data
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-08-22T11:49:51.995Z

The data forming the background of my analysis of AI timeline predictions is now available online. Many thanks to Jonathan Wang and Brian Potter, who gathered the data, to Kaj Sotala, who analysed and categorised it, and to Luke Muehlhauser and the Singularity Institute, who commissioned and paid for it.

The full data can be found here (this includes my estimates for the "median date for human level AGI"). The same data without my median estimates can be found here.

I encourage people to produce their own estimate of the "median date"! If you do so, you should use the second database (the one without my estimates). And you should decide in advance what kind of criteria you are going to use to compute this median, or whether you are going to reuse my criteria. And finally you should inform me or the world in general of your values, whether they are very similar or very different to mine.

My criteria were:

When a range was given, I took the mid-point of that range (rounded down). If a year was given with a 50% likelihood estimate, I took that year. If it was the collection of a variety of expert opinions, I took the prediction of the median expert. If the author predicted some sort of AI by a given date (partial AI or superintelligent AI), and gave no other estimate, I took that date as their estimate rather than trying to correct it in one direction or the other (there were roughly the same number of subhuman AIs as suphuman AIs in the list, and not that many of either). I read extracts of the papers to make judgement calls when interpreting problematic statements like "within thirty years" or "during this century" (is that a range or an end-date?). I never chose a date other than one actually predicted, or the midpoint of a range.

Incidentally, you may notice that a certain Stuart Armstrong is included in the list, for a prediction I made back in 2007 (for AI in 2207). Yes, I counted that prediction in my analysis (as a non-expert prediction), and no, I don't stand by that date today.
[SEQ RERUN] The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-22T06:16:49.377Z

Today's post, The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma was originally published on 04 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

According to classic game theory, if you know how many iterations there are going to be in the iterated prisoner's dilemma, then you shouldn't use tit for tat. Does this really seem right?

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The True Prisoner's Dilemma, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Four major problems with neuroscience
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-08-22T05:25:18.833Z

A discussion of four errors which lead to false positives-- neglecting maturation (that brains change with time, even without intervention, learning effects (people who take a test more than once get better at it), regression to the mean (people who are unusually good or bad at something will probably have a more average score on subsequent attempts), and the placebo effect.

The link above is a summary of a lecture which isn't playing for me, so any further information about the lecture would be greatly appreciated.