trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rationality Quotes October 2014
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2014-10-01T23:02:20.410Z

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
October 2014 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2014-10-01T17:27:18.797Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Meetup : Portland, OR: Improv for Rationalists
by VAuroch — 2014-10-01T05:45:53.789Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Portland, OR: Improv for Rationalists

WHEN:
18 October 2014 01:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2945 NE 64th Ave, Portland, OR

Last meetup we discussed using techniques from acting improv to improve social skills and impose personal habits. This month we'll be putting some of that into practice with lessons and practice.
Discussion to follow.

Discussion article for the meetup : Portland, OR: Improv for Rationalists
2014 iterated prisoner's dilemma tournament results
by tetronian2 — 2014-09-30T21:23:26.914Z

Followup to: Announcing the 2014 program equilibrium iterated PD tournament
In August, I announced an iterated prisoner's dilemma tournament in which bots can simulate each other before making a move. Eleven bots were submitted to the tournament. Today, I am pleased to announce the final standings and release the source code and full results.
All of the source code submitted by the competitors and the full results for each match are available here. See here for the full set of rules and tournament code.
Before we get to the final results, here's a quick rundown of the bots that competed:

AnderBot

AnderBot follows a simple tit-for-tat-like algorithm that eschews simulation:

On the first turn, Cooperate.

For the next 10 turns, play tit-for-tat.

For the rest of the game, Defect with 10% probability or Defect if the opposing bot has defected more times than AnderBot.

CheeseBot

CheeseBot tries several simulation-based strategies, and uses the first one that applies to the current situation.

If the opponent defected on the previous round, Defect.

If the opponent does not defect against defectBot, Defect.

If defecting on this round would lead to CheeseBot being punished for it in future rounds, Cooperate. CheeseBot checks this by simulating future rounds with a simulated history in which it defects on the current round.

If the opponent is a mirror-like bot, Cooperate. To test whether a bot is mirror-like, CheeseBot simulates the opponent and checks if it defects against DefectBot and cooperates with a bot that plays tit-for-tat but defects against CooperateBot and DefectBot.

If it is the last round, Cooperate.

Defect.

DefectBot

Defect!
This bot was submitted publicly by James Miller.

DMRB

DavidMonRoBot (DMRB) takes a more cautious approach to simulating: It spends a few hundred milliseconds simulating its opponent to figure out what the rest of the round will look like given a Cooperate or Defect on the current round, and then picks the outcome that leads to the highest total number of points for DMRB.
This allows DMRB to gauge whether its opponent is "dumb," i.e. does not punish defectors. If the opponent is dumb, DMRB reasons that the best move is to defect; otherwise, if DMRB thinks that its opponent will punish defection, it simply plays tit-for-tat. DMRB spends only a small amount of time simulating so that other simulation-based bots will be less likely to ha...
Meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Social and Board Games
by Anatoly_Vorobey — 2014-09-30T20:46:52.583Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Social and Board Games

WHEN:
02 October 2014 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Google Tel Aviv

We're going to have a meetup on Thursday, October 2nd at Google Israel's offices, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon st., Tel Aviv.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The time above might say 6pm or 7pm or 8pm depending on how daylight savings time is processed. The meetup is at 7pm Israel Local Time.

This time we're going to have a social meetup! We'll be socializing and playing games.

Specifically, we look forward to playing any cool board or card game anyone will bring. By all means bring your favorite game(s) with you and teach others or find people who already like that game. But it's also fine to come empty-handed. We always end up with enough games for everyone.

We'll start the meetup at 19:00, and we'll go on as much as we like to. Feel free to come a little bit later, as there is no agenda. (We've decided to start slightly earlier this time to give us more time and accommodate people with different schedules).

We'll meet at the 29th floor of the building. If you arrive and cant find your way around, call Anatoly, who is graciously hosting us, at 054-245-1060. Email at avorobey@gmail.com also works. See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Social and Board Games
Group Rationality Diary, October 1-15
by therufs — 2014-09-30T19:34:33.971Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for October 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Previous diary: September 16-30

Next diary: October 16-31

Rationality diaries archive
Discontinuous paths
by KatjaGrace — 2014-09-30T03:26:33.000Z

In my understanding, technological progress almost always proceeds relatively smoothly (see algorithmic progress, the performance curves database, and this brief investigation). Brain emulations seem to represent an unusual possibility for an abrupt jump in technological capability, because we would basically be ‘stealing’ the technology rather than designing it from scratch.

Similarly, if an advanced civilization kept their nanotechnology locked up nearby, then our incremental progress in lock-picking tools might suddenly give rise to a huge leap in nanotechnology from our perspective, whereas earlier lock picking progress wouldn’t have given us any noticeable nanotechnology progress.

If this is an unusual situation however, it seems strange that the other most salient route to superintelligence – artificial intelligence designed by humans – is also often expected to involve a discontinuous jump in capability, but for entirely different reasons. Is there some unifying reason to expect jumps in both routes to superintelligence, or is it just coincidence? Or do I overstate the ubiquity of incremental progress?

Crossposted from my own comment on the Superintelligence reading group. Commenters encouraged to do it over there.
Superintelligence Reading Group 3: AI and Uploads
by KatjaGrace — 2014-09-30T01:00:15.992Z

This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.

Welcome. This week we discuss the third section in the reading guide, AI & Whole Brain Emulation. This is about two possible routes to the development of superintelligence: the route of developing intelligent algorithms by hand, and the route of replicating a human brain in great detail.

This post summarizes the section, and offers a few relevant notes, and ideas for further investigation. My own thoughts and questions for discussion are in the comments.

There is no need to proceed in order through this post. Feel free to jump straight to the discussion. Where applicable, page numbers indicate the rough part of the chapter that is most related (not necessarily that the chapter is being cited for the specific claim).

Reading: “Artificial intelligence” and “Whole brain emulation” from Chapter 2 (p22-36)

Summary

Intro

Superintelligence is defined as 'any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest'

There are several plausible routes to the arrival of a superintelligence: artificial intelligence, whole brain emulation, biological cognition, brain-computer interfaces, and networks and organizations.

Multiple possible paths to superintelligence makes it more likely that we will get there somehow.

AI

A human-level artificial intelligence would probably have learning, uncertainty, and concept formation as central features.

Evolution produced human-level intelligence. This means it is possible, but it is unclear how much it says about the effort required.

Humans could perhaps develop human-level artificial intelligence by just replicating a similar evolutionary process virtually. This appears at after a quick calculation to be too expensive to be feasible for a century, however it might be made more efficient.

Human-level AI might be developed by copying the human brain to various degrees. If the copying is very close, the resulting agent would be a 'whole brain emulation', which we'll discuss shortly. If the copying is only of a few key insights about brains, the resulting AI might be very unlike humans

...
Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014
by polymathwannabe — 2014-09-29T13:28:48.393Z

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. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

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

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
[Link] Forty Days
by GLaDOS — 2014-09-29T12:29:59.656Z

A post from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's excellent blog West Hunter.

One of the many interesting aspects of how the US dealt with the AIDS epidemic is what we didn’t do – in particular, quarantine. Probably you need a decent test before quarantine is practical, but we had ELISA by 1985 and a better Western Blot test by 1987.

There was popular support for a quarantine.

But the public health experts generally opined that such a quarantine would not work.

Of course, they were wrong. Cuba institute a rigorous quarantine. They mandated antiviral treatment for pregnant women and mandated C-sections for those that were HIV-positive. People positive for any venereal disease were tested for HIV as well. HIV-infected people must provide the names of all sexual partners for the past sic months.

Compulsory quarantining was relaxed in 1994, but all those testing positive have to go to a sanatorium for 8 weeks of thorough education on the disease. People who leave after 8 weeks and engage in unsafe sex undergo permanent quarantine.

Cuba did pretty well: the per-capita death toll was 35 times lower than in the US.

Cuba had some advantages: the epidemic hit them at least five years later than it did the US (first observed Cuban case in 1986, first noticed cases in the US in 1981). That meant they were readier when they encountered the virus. You’d think that because of the epidemic’s late start in Cuba, there would have been a shorter interval without the effective protease inhibitors (which arrived in 1995 in the US) – but they don’t seem to have arrived in Cuba until 2001, so the interval was about the same.

If we had adopted the same strategy as Cuba, it would not have been as effective, largely because of that time lag. However, it surely would have prevented at least half of the ~600,000 AIDS deaths in the US. Probably well over half.

I still see people stating that of course quarantine would not have worked: fairly often from dimwitted people with a Masters in Public Health.

My favorite comment was from a libertarian friend who said that although quarantine certainly would have worked, better to sacrifice a few hundred thousand than validate the idea that the Feds can sometimes tell you what to do with good effect.

The commenter Ron Pavellas adds:

I

...
Tweets Thread
by 2ZctE — 2014-09-29T04:17:25.987Z

Rationality Twitter is fun. Twitter's format can promote good insight porn/humor density. It might be worth capturing and voting on some of the good tweets here, because they're easy to miss and can end up seemingly buried forever. I mean for this to have a somewhat wider scope than the quotes thread. If you liked a tweet a lot for any reason this is the place for it.
Decision theories as heuristics
by owencb — 2014-09-28T14:36:27.460Z

Main claims:

A lot of discussion of decision theories is really analysing them as decision-making heuristics for boundedly rational agents.

Understanding decision-making heuristics is really useful.

The quality of dialogue would be improved if it was recognised when they were being discussed as heuristics.

Epistemic status: I’ve had a “something smells” reaction to a lot of discussion of decision theory. This is my attempt to crystallise out what I was unhappy with. It seems correct to me at present, but I haven’t spent too much time trying to find problems with it, and it seems quite possible that I’ve missed something important. Also possible is that this just recapitulates material in a post somewhere I’ve not read.

Existing discussion is often about heuristics

Newcomb’s problem traditionally contrasts the decisions made by Causal Decision Theory (CDT) and Evidential Decision Theory (EDT). The story goes that CDT reasons that there is no causal link between a decision made now and the contents of the boxes, and therefore two-boxes. Meanwhile EDT looks at the evidence of past participants and chooses to one-box in order to get a high probability of being rich.

I claim that both of these stories are applications of the rules as simple heuristics to the most salient features of the case. As such they are robust to variation in the fine specification of the case, so we can have a conversation about them. If we want to apply them with more sophistication then the answers do become sensitive to the exact specification of the scenario, and it’s not obvious that either has to give the same answer the simple version produces.

First consider CDT. It has a high belief that there is no causal link between choosing to one- or two- box and Omega’s previous decision. But in practice, how high is this belief? If it doesn’t understand exactly how Omega works, it might reserve some probability to the possibility of a causal link, and this could be enough to tip the decision towards one-boxing.

On the other hand EDT should properly be able to consider many sources of evidence besides the ones about past successes of Omega’s predictions. In particular it could assess all of the evidence that normally leads us to believe that there is no backwards-causation in our universe. According to how strong this evidence ...
Request for feedback on a paper about (machine) ethics
by Caspar Oesterheld — 2014-09-28T12:03:05.500Z

I have written a paper on ethics with special concentration on machine ethics and formality with the following abstract:
Most ethical systems are formulated in a very intuitive, imprecise manner. Therefore, they cannot be studied mathematically. In particular, they are not applicable to make machines behave ethically. In this paper we make use of this perspective of machine ethics to identify preference utilitarianism as the most promising approach to formal ethics. We then go on to propose a simple, mathematically precise formalization of preference utilitarianism in very general cellular automata. Even though our formalization is incomputable, we argue that it can function as a basis for discussing practical ethical questions using knowledge gained from different scientific areas.
Here are some further elements of the paper (things the paper uses or the paper is about):

(machine) ethics

(in)computability

artificial life in cellular automata

Bayesian statistics

Solomonoff's a priori probability

As I propose a formal ethical system, things get mathy at some point but the first and by far most important formula is relatively simple - the rest can be skipped then, so no problem for the average LWer.
I already discussed the paper with a few fellow students, as well as Brian Tomasik and a (computer science) professor of mine. Both recommended me to try to publish the paper. Also, I received some very helpful feedback. But because this would be my first attempt to publish something, I could still use more help, both with the content itself and scientific writing in English (which, as you may have guessed, is not my first language), before I submit the paper and Brian recommended using the LW's discussion board. I would also be thankful for recommendations on which journal is appropriate for the paper.
I would like to send those interested a draft via PM. This way I can also make sure that I don't spend all potential reviewers on the current version.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a moral realist. Also and as mentioned in the abstract, the proposed ethical system is incomputable and can therefore be argued to have infinite Kolmogorov complexity. So, it does not really pose a conflict with LW-consensus (including Complexity of value).
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Urge Propagation
by luminosity — 2014-09-28T01:56:32.113Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Urge Propagation

WHEN:
05 October 2014 03:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Humanist House, 10 Shepherd St Chippendale

We'll be examining how to connect your desire for goals or outcomes to specific emotional urges to perform the actions to bring about that outcome.

After the session is over, there will also be an optional group dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Urge Propagation
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Urge Propagation
by luminosity — 2014-09-28T01:54:50.322Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Urge Propagation

WHEN:
05 October 2014 03:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Humanist House, 10 Shepherd St Chippendale

We'll be examining how to connect your desire for goals or outcomes to specific emotional urges to perform the actions to bring about that outcome.

After the session is over, there will also be an optional group dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Urge Propagation
Meetup : October Rationality Dojo - Non-Violent Communication
by MelbourneLW — 2014-09-28T00:31:42.545Z

Discussion article for the meetup : October Rationality Dojo - Non-Violent Communication

WHEN:
05 October 2014 03:30:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
Ross House Association, 247-251 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

[ATTN: Please remember the new location for the dojos: the Jenny Florence Room, Level 3, Ross House at 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. 3:30pm start / arrival - formal dojo activities will commence at 4:00pm.]

The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are crafted to be serious self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth. Each month a community member will run a session involving a presentation of content, discussion, and exercises.
Continuing the succession of immensely successful dojos, Chris will run a session on Non-Violent Communication.

As always, we will review the personal goals we committed to at the previous Dojo (I will have done X by the next Dojo). Our goals are now being recorded via Google Forms here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MCHH4MpbW0SI_2JyMSDlKnnGP4A0qxojQEZoMZIdopk/viewform, and Melbourne Less Wrong organisers have access to the form results if you wish to review the goals you set last month.

This month, we are also seeking 2-3 lightning talks from members. Speakers will be limited to 5 minutes with room for questions. We will be asking for talks from attendees present, but if you already have a talk topic in mind, please contact Louise at lvalmoria@gmail.com
The Dojo is likely to run for 2-3 hours, after which some people will get dinner together.

If you have any trouble finding the venue or getting in, call Louise on 0419 192 367.

If you would like to present at a future Dojo or suggest a topic, please fill it in on the Rationality Dojo Roster: http://is.gd/dojoroster

To organise similar events, please send an email to melbournelw@gmail.com

Discussion article for the meetup : October Rationality Dojo - Non-Violent Communication