trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Choosing research topics
by JoshuaFox — 2014-06-24T08:31:19.314Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Choosing research topics

WHEN:
26 June 2014 11:31:12AM (+0300)

WHERE:
Gibor Sport House, 15th Floor, 7 Menachem Begin St., Ramat-Gan.

(This is a duplicate generated by a bug. Now trying to resolve the bug. See meeting notice at http://lesswrong.com/meetups/11p)

At the next LessWrong meeting, on Thursday, June 26 at 19:00, we'll prepare for an upcoming MIRIx session. We will hear short talks on open problems in FAI and choose some problems to tackle.

VisionMap has kindly agreed to host us: Gibor Sport House, 15th Floor, 7 Menachem Begin St., Ramat-Gan.

If you can't find us, call Vadim Kosoy at 0542600919 or me at 0545691165.

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Choosing research topics
Utilitarianism and Relativity Realism
by TruePath — 2014-06-23T19:12:05.211Z

Introduction

Most people on less wrong seem to be some kind of hedonic consequentialist. They think states with less suffering and more joy are better. Moreover, it is intuitive that if you can cause some improvement in human well-being to be achieved then (other things being equal) it is better to realize that improvement as soon as possible. Also, most people on this site seem to be realists about special relativity. That is they assume that any inertial reference frame is an equally valid point from which to describe reality rather than believing there is one true reference which offers a preferred description of reality. I will point out that these beliefs (plus some innocuous assumptions) lead quickly to paradox.

Relativity Realism

Before I continue I want to point out that empirical observations really are agnostic about the existence of a preferred reference frame. Indeed, it's a consequence of the theory of relativity itself that it's predictions are equally well explained by postulating a single true inertial reference frame and simply using the Lorentz contraction and time dilation equations to compute behavior for all moving objects. To see that this must be true not that if we take relativity seriously the laws of physics must work correctly in any reference frame. In particular, if we imagine designating one reference frame to be the true reference frame then, relativity itself, tells us that applying the laws of physics in that reference frame has to give us the correct results.

In other words once we accept Einstein's equations for length contraction and time dilation with velocity we can interpret those equations as either undermining the idea of a fixed ether against which objects move (any reference frame is equally valid) or that there really is a fixed ether but objects in motion behave in such a manner that we can't empirically distinguish what is at rest.

At first blush this second result seems so jury rigged that surely the simpler assumption is that there is no preferred reference frame. This relies on a false description of the situation. The question isn't, "do we assign a low prior probability to the laws of physics conspiring to hide the true rest frame from us?" Presumably we do. The question should be, "given that the laws of physics do conspire ...
[LINK] Why Talk to Philosophers: Physicist Sean Carroll Discusses "Common Misunderstandings" about Philosophy
by Shmi — 2014-06-23T19:09:54.047Z

Why Talk to Philosophers? Part I. by philosopher of science Wayne Myrvold.

See also Sean Carroll's own blog entry, Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy.

Sean classifies the disparaging comments physicists make about philosophy as follows: "Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing". Specifically:

“Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”

“Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.”

“Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”

He counters each argument presented.

Personally, I am underwhelmed, since he does not address the point of view that philosophy is great at asking interesting questions but lousy at answering them. Typically, an interesting answer to a philosophical question requires first recasting it in a falsifiable form, so that is becomes a natural science question, be it physics, cognitive sciences, AI research or something else. This is locally known as hacking away at the edges. Philosophical questions don't have philosophical answers.
Lessons from weather forecasting and its history for forecasting as a domain
by VipulNaik — 2014-06-23T17:08:58.453Z

This is the first of two (or more) posts that look at the domain of weather and climate forecasting and what we can learn from the history and current state of these fields for forecasting as a domain. It may not be of general interest to the LessWrong community, but I hope that it's of interest to people here who have some interest either in weather-related material or in forecasting in general.

The science of weather forecasting has come a long way over the past century. Since people starting measuring and recording the weather (temperature, precipitation, etc.) two simple algorithms for weather prediction have existed (see also this):

Persistence: Assume that the weather tomorrow will be the same as the weather today.

Climatology: Assume that the weather on a given day of the year will be the same as the average of the weather on that same day in the last few years (we might also use averages for nearby days if we don't have enough years of data).

Until the end of the 19th century, there was no weather prediction algorithm that did consistently better than both persistence and climatology. Between persistence and climatology, climatology won out over medium to long time horizons (a week or more), whereas persistence won out in some kinds of places over short horizons (1-2 days), though even there, climatology sometimes does better (see more here). Both methods have very limited utility when it comes to predicting and preparing for rare extreme weather events, such as blizzards, hurricanes, cyclones, polar winds, or heavy rainfall.

This blog post discusses the evolution and progress of weather forecasting algorithms that significantly improve over the benchmarks of persistence and climatology, and the implications both for the future of weather forecasting and for our understanding of forecasting as a domain.

Sources for further reading (uncited material in my post is usually drawn from one of these): Wikipedia's page on the history of numerical weather prediction, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, and The origins of computer weather prediction and climate modeling by Peter Lynch.

The three challenges: theory, measurement, and computation

The problem facing any method that tries to do better than persistence and climatology is that whereas persistence and climatology can rely on existing aggregate records, any more sophisticated prediction algorithm re...
Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
by David_Gerard — 2014-06-23T07:21:58.074Z

Previous open thread

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
How do you take notes?
by ChristianKl — 2014-06-22T10:45:23.895Z

We all deal with a lot of information. What are your strategies of taking notes for new information?

Do you take any notes on paper? If so do you scan them or otherwise digilatize them?

Do you have specific strategies for deciding which information to write down?

How do you write notes to capture all important information?

Do you tag your notes?

If you use Evernote, or a similar system how private are your notes? Would you allow friends to read in them? Your spouse?
Will AGI surprise the world?
by lukeprog — 2014-06-21T22:27:31.620Z

Cross-posted from my blog.

Yudkowsky writes:

In general and across all instances I can think of so far, I do not agree with the part of your futurological forecast in which you reason, "After event W happens, everyone will see the truth of proposition X, leading them to endorse Y and agree with me about policy decision Z."

...

Example 2: "As AI gets more sophisticated, everyone will realize that real AI is on the way and then they'll start taking Friendly AI development seriously."

Alternative projection: As AI gets more sophisticated, the rest of society can't see any difference between the latest breakthrough reported in a press release and that business earlier with Watson beating Ken Jennings or Deep Blue beating Kasparov; it seems like the same sort of press release to them. The same people who were talking about robot overlords earlier continue to talk about robot overlords. The same people who were talking about human irreproducibility continue to talk about human specialness. Concern is expressed over technological unemployment the same as today or Keynes in 1930, and this is used to fuel someone's previous ideological commitment to a basic income guarantee, inequality reduction, or whatever. The same tiny segment of unusually consequentialist people are concerned about Friendly AI as before. If anyone in the science community does start thinking that superintelligent AI is on the way, they exhibit the same distribution of performance as modern scientists who think it's on the way, e.g. Hugo de Garis, Ben Goertzel, etc.

My own projection goes more like this:

As AI gets more sophisticated, and as more prestigious AI scientists begin to publicly acknowledge that AI is plausibly only 2-6 decades away, policy-makers and research funders will begin to respond to the AGI safety challenge, just like they began to respond to CFC damages in the late 70s, to global warming in the late 80s, and to synbio developments in the 2010s. As for society at large, I dunno. They'll think all kinds of random stuff for random reasons, and in some cases this will seriously impede effective policy, as it does in the USA for science education and immigration reform. Because AGI lends itself to arms races and is harder to handle adequately than global warming or nuclear security are, policy-makers and industry leaders will

...
Motivators: Altruistic Actions for Non-Altruistic Reasons
by Ruby — 2014-06-21T16:32:50.825Z

Introduction

Jane is an effective altruist: she researches, donates, and volunteers in the highest impact ways she can find. Jane has been intending to write an effective altruism book for over a year, but hasn't managed to overcome the akrasia. Jane then meets fellow effective altruist, Jessica, who she is keen to impress. She starts writing with palpable enthusiasm.

In one possible world:

Jane feels guilty that she has an impure motive for writing the book.

In another:

Jane is glad to leverage the motivation to impress Jessica to help her do good.

In the past few months, I've heard multiple people mention their use of less noble motivations in order to get valuable things done. It appears to be a common experience among rationalists and EAs, myself included. The way I'm using the terms, a reason for performing some action is the ostensible goal you wish to accomplish, e.g. the goal of reducing suffering. A motivator for that action is an associated reward which makes performing the action seem enticing - “yummy” - e.g. impressing your friends. I use the less common term ‘motivator’ to distinguish the specific motivations I'm discussing from the more general meaning of ‘motivation’.

Many of our goals are multiple steps removed from the actions necessary to achieve them, particularly the broad-scale altruistic ones. The goals are large, abstract, long-term, ill-specified, difficult to see progress on, and unintuitively connected to the action required. ‘I wrote a LessWrong post, is the world more rational yet?’ In contrast, motivators are tangible, immediate, and typically tickle the brain’s reward centres right in the sweet spot. Social approval, enjoyment of the action, money, skills gained, and others all serve as imminent rewards whose immediate anticipation drives us. ‘Woohoo, 77 upvotes!’ Unsurprisingly, we find ourselves turning to these immediate rewards if we want to accomplish something.

Note that a reason - the ostensible goal - can still be the root cause of the desire to perform an altruistic action. For one thing, if I didn't truly care about all the things I say I care about doing, and really only wanted social approval, then why join this particular group of people out of all others?

Embrace or Disgrace?

If motivators are the mechanism by which I'm getting ...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-06-21T16:14:31.854Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on June 13th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Bangalore meetup: 29 June 2014 04:40PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Helsinki Meetup: 15 June 2014 05:00PM
Houston, TX: 14 June 2014 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:

Boston - Computational Neuroscience of Perception: 15 June 2014 03:30PM
Brussels - Neuroatypicality: 14 June 2014 07:40PM
Canberra: Decision Theory: 14 June 2014 06:00PM
[LA] Second MIRIxLosAngeles Meeting: 14 June 2014 10:00AM
London Social Meetup (possibly) in the Sun: 15 June 2014 02:00PM
[Melbourne] July Rationality Dojo: Disagreement: 06 July 2014 03:00PM
Sydney Meetup - June: 25 June 2014 07:00PM
West LA: 18 June 2025 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, 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 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, Chicago, Cin...
Meetup : Washington D.C.: Seeing Off
by RobinZ — 2014-06-21T08:23:09.894Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington D.C.: Seeing Off

WHEN:
22 June 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We will be wishing Roger and Maia a fond farewell at their last meeting. There may be cake. Or cupcakes. Or cakes shaped like cupcakes with crumbly things on top.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington D.C.: Seeing Off
Identification of Force Multipliers for Success
by Nick5a1 — 2014-06-21T05:15:08.498Z

For a while now I've been very interested in learning useful knowledge and acquiring useful skills. Of course there's no shortage of useful knowledge and skills to acquire, and so I've often thought about how best to spend my limited time learning.

When I came across the concept of Force Multiplication, it seemed like an appropriate metaphor for a strategy to apply to choosing where to invest my time and energy in acquiring useful skills and knowledge. I started to think about what areas or skills would make sense to learn about or acquire first, to:

increase speed or ease of further learning/skill acquisition,

help me achieve success not only in my current goals, but in later goals that I have not yet developed, and

lead to interesting downstream options or other knowledge/skills to acquire.

There have been a small number of skills/areas that have helped me surge forward in progress towards my goals. I look back at these areas and wish only that I had come across them sooner. As most of my adult life has been focused on business, most of those areas that have had a tremendous impact on my progress have been business related, but not all.

So far I've found it hard to identify these areas in advance. Almost all of the skills or knowledge that I learned, that had a large impact on progress towards success, I pursued for unrelated reasons, or I had no concept of how truly useful they would be. The only solution I currently have for identifying force multipliers is to ask other people, and especially those more accomplished than me, what they've learned that had the most impact on their progress towards success.

So, what have you learned that had the most impact on your progress towards success (whatever that might be)?

Can you think of any other ways to identify areas of force multiplication?
Meetup : Bratislava Meetup XIV.
by Viliam_Bur — 2014-06-20T18:41:52.776Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup XIV.

WHEN:
30 June 2014 06:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Bistro The Peach, Heydukova 21, Bratislava

The usual place and time. Topic: going meta -- how to get more value from our meetups.

Zvyčajné miesto a čas. Téma: ako z našich stretnutí získať viac?

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup XIV.
Conservation of expected moral evidence, clarified
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-06-20T10:28:58.425Z

You know that when you title a post with "clarified", that you're just asking for the gods to smite you down, but let's try...

There has been some confusion about the concept of "conservation of expected moral evidence" that I touched upon in my posts here and here. The fault for the confusion is mine, so this is a brief note to try and explain it better.

The canonical example is that of a child who wants to steal a cookie. That child gets its morality mainly from its parents. The child strongly suspects that if it asks, all parents will indeed confirm that stealing cookies is wrong. So it decides not to ask, and happily steals the cookie.

I argued that this behvaiour showed a lack of "conservation of expected moral evidence": if the child knows what the answer would be, then that should be equivalent with actually asking. Some people got this immediately, and some people were confused that the agents I defined seemed Bayesian, and so should have conservation of expected evidence already, so how can they violate that principle?

The answer is... both groups are right. The child can be modelled as a Bayesian agent reaching sensible conclusions. If it values "I don't steal the cookie" at 0, "I steal the cookie without being told not to" at 1, and "I steal the cookie after being told not to" at -1, then its behaviour is rational - and those values are acceptable utility values over possible universes. So the child (and many value loading agents) are Bayesian agents with the usual properties.

But we are adding extra structure to the universe. Based on our understanding of what value loading should be, we are decreeing that the child's behaviour is incorrect. Though it doesn't violate expected utility, it violates any sensible meaning of value loading. Our idea of value loading is that, in a sense, values should be independent of many contingent things. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with "stealing cookies is wrong iff the Milky Way contains an even number of pulsars", but it violates what values should be. Similarly for "stealing cookies is wrong iff I ask about it".

But lets dig a bit deeper... Classical conservation of expected evidence fails in many cases. For instance, I can certainly influence the variable X="what Stuart will do in the next ten seconds" (or at least, my decision theory is constructed on assumptions that I can influence that). My decisions ch...
Meetup : Moscow meet up
by Yuu — 2014-06-20T05:05:59.123Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meet up

WHEN:
22 June 2014 02:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Attention! Time is changed, we gather at 14:00!

We will have:

Paradoxes and cognitive shifts, report.

Nootropics, report.

Discussion modes, report.

Discussion and the discussion analysis.

Extraterrestrial intelligence, report.

Fallacymania, a game.

We gather in the Yandex office, you need the first revolving door under the archway. Here is additional guide how to get there: link.
You can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information.

We start at 14:00 and sometimes finish at night. Please pay attention that we only gather near the entrance and then come inside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meet up
Meetup : Vienna
by Viliam_Bur — 2014-06-19T20:28:15.902Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vienna

WHEN:
21 June 2014 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Vienna, Schottenfeldgasse 29/1

When: Saturday, 21.06.2014 at 14:00

Where: IFF Vienna, Schottenfeldgasse 29/1, floor 5, wing 1, seminar room 5

Oliver Habryka is visiting Vienna and offered to hold a 60 minute workshop.

Topic: Attention and Mental Resources (What it means to get "tired" or "exhausted")

Agenda: The workshop will take place in the seminar room at 14:00. After 2 hours, at 16:00 the "official" part will be over and we will probably head into the city to find a café or a park to continue the disucssion in a more informal setting.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vienna
[LINK] Scott Aaronson on Google, Breaking Circularity and Eigenmorality
by Shmi — 2014-06-19T20:17:14.063Z

Scott suggests that ranking morality is similar to ranking web pages. A quote:

Philosophers from Socrates on, I was vaguely aware, had struggled to define what makes a person “moral” or “virtuous,” without tacitly presupposing the answer. Well, it seemed to me that, as a first attempt, one could do a lot worse than the following:

A moral person is someone who cooperates with other moral people, and who refuses to cooperate with immoral people.

Proposed solution:

Just like in CLEVER or PageRank, we can begin by giving everyone in the community an equal number of “morality starting credits.” Then we can apply an iterative update rule, where each person A can gain morality credits by cooperating with each other person B, and A gains more credits the more credits B has already. We apply the rule over and over, until the number of morality credits per person converges to an equilibrium. (Or, of course, we can shortcut the process by simply finding the principal eigenvector of the “cooperation matrix,” using whatever algorithm we like.) We then have our objective measure of morality for each individual, solving a 2400-year-old open problem in philosophy.

He then talks about "eigenmoses and eigenjesus" and other fun ideas, like Plato at the Googleplex.

One final quote:

All that's needed to unravel the circularity is a principal eigenvector computation on the matrix of trust.

EDIT: I am guessing that after judicious application of this algorithm one would end up with the other Scott A's loosely connected components with varying definitions of morality, the Archipelago. UPDATE: He chimes in.

EDIT2: The obvious issue of equating prevailing mores with morality is discussed to death in the comments. Please read them first before raising it yet again here.