trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How to inflict huge costs kindly
by KatjaGrace — 2011-06-18T19:57:30.000Z

Some nice, calm razor wire. Image via Wikipedia

Peter Moskos wrote in favour of bringing back the lash as a form of punishment.

Robin Hanson responded:

Yup. The US spends vast sums to affirm its myths of greatness, such on arms to affirm our saving the world from nazis, communists, etc. and on med to affirm our gift of modern med to the world. You might hope we’d give up eventually as myths become obviously wrong, but this prison myth, that we are kind because we won’t flog, has lasted for two centuries in the face of consistently contrary evidence, and gives no signs of abating. Could our military and med myths last that long?

I disagree. That we are kind because we don’t flog is no myth. In common use, whether you are kind or cruel is not about what happens to the person you are supposedly being kind or cruel to. It is about what your actions say about your psychology.

You can be perfectly kind while knowing strangers die far away for want of help. If strangers die in front of you without you responding, that’s much more of a problem because it says you have no strong emotional response to this. That’s a worrying characteristic in an ally, for whatever reason. You can be kind while you vote for policies that everyone knows will indirectly harm people, as long as you’re apparently motivated by the right feelings about the immediate, visible effects. Do the opposite, and you are a cold and heartless calculator. Not kind at all, even if your actions benefit abstract people somewhere.

Kind people respond to immediate, vivid things, but are less required to respond to more abstract ones, and should never do so at the expense of the vivid things.

Kind people are expected to have a stronger emotional reaction to seeing a person being bloodied and tortured than to seeing them sitting behind bars. I expect this is because the cost of imprisonment is stretched over a very long time, so only a tiny bit of it is ever immediate to the viewer.

So we are kind – in the sense of having appropriate emotional reactions – because we won’t flog. If being kind in this way is at the expense of prisoners, that is an abstract concern that kind people need not be upset by.
Help Request: Cryonics Policies
by Normal_Anomaly — 2011-06-18T18:58:20.786Z

I’m hoping to sign up for cryonics when I can afford it, and I’m not sure which agency and treatment plan to get.

As of this Cryonics institute document, whole-body suspension with Alcor costs $200,000. Neurosuspension costs $80,000. With the cheaper but possibly lower quality Cryonics Institute, whole-body suspension costs $28,000 and they don’t do neurosuspension. American Cryonics Society is in between, costing $155,000 (again, no neurosuspension option).

What are the upsides and downsides of these options, in the eyes of people who are signed up, considering signing up, or know a lot about the subject? Also, I know there are some people here who have looked at cryonics and found it a bad decision. Input from them is also welcome.
[prize] new contest for Spaced Repetition literature review ($365+)
by jsalvatier — 2011-06-18T18:31:48.680Z

Update: the prize is now finished!

The previous contest was poorly formatted for eliciting the most useful reviews of the spaced repetition literature so I've created a new slightly different contest.

I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:

Spaced Repetition is often mentioned on Less Wrong as a technique for adding facts to memory. I've started using Anki and it certainly seems to be useful. However, I haven't seen a good summary of evidence on Spaced Repetition and I would like to change that.

I hereby offer a prize, currently $385, to the best literature review submitted by August 1st. 'Best' will be judged by voting with discussion beforehand by the Seattle LW meetup group. People are not allowed to vote for their own submissions.

The summary should address questions such as:

What spacing is best?

How much does spaced repetition actually help memory?

Does spaced repetition have hidden benefits or costs?

Does the effectiveness vary across domains? How much?

Is there research on the kinds of questions that work best? Especially for avoiding 'guessing the password' and memorizing the card per se rather than the material.

What questions do researchers think are most important?

Is there any interesting ongoing research? If so, what is it on?

What, if any, questions do researchers think it is important to answer? Are there other unanswered questions that would jump out at a smart person?

What does spaced repetition not do that people might expect it to?

The post should summarize the state of current evidence and provide citations to back up the claims in the article. Referencing both academic and non-academic research is encouraged. Lukeprog's The Science of Winning At Life sequence contains several examples of good literature review posts.

If you think you would benefit from the result of this project, please add to the prize! You can contribute to the prize on the ChipIn page.

If you have suggestions, questions or comments, please leave them in the comments. Prizes demotivating? Due date too soon/far? Specification too vague? Judgement procedure not credible enough?

This project is tagged with the 'project' tag and listed on the Projects wiki page.
Today 4PM: Last minute Houston meetup
by Cog — 2011-06-18T16:22:49.549Z

Saturday June 18, 4:00PM

TX/RX Labs Hackerspace

2010 Commerce St

Houston, TX 77002

My apologies for the last minute meetup group notice. I am running an experiment this weekend, but I was uncertain until yesterday as to when I could use the equipment. I let the core group know yesterday. On the small chance that someone on these boards who has not shown up to the Houston meeting will see this and really want to come, there will be a LW meetup at the above address today at 4PM. We will be discussing the second chapter in ET Jaynes "The Logic of Science", play a few rounds of paranoid debating, and perhaps watch and discuss some videos on economics. A pizza can be ordered upon request.

Directions

A pictoral view

This is the set of buildings that the hackerspace is in. It's difficult to see our front from this angle - unfortunately google maps decided to map everything but our little section of commerce street. It's near where the white truck and red motorcycle are. Currently, there is an old military vehicle and generator in front. We will have a Less Wrong sign posted on the generator.

And this is the empty lot that you can park in if all the nearby marked spots are taken.

For more reference:

http://maps.google.com/maps?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=2010+Commerce+St.+Houston,+Tx+77002&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x8640bed8ed95625d:0x4c9af214d2032035,2010+Commerce+St,+Houston,+TX+77002&gl=us&ei=C9LRTYHvE8fL0QGu8OjlCw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQ8gEwAA
Ottawa LW meetup, June 23, 7pm; two Bayesian Conspiracy sessions
by Cyan — 2011-06-18T03:58:00.633Z

Less Wrong meeting:

Date: Thursday June 23, 7:00pm 'til whenever.

Venue: Fox and Feather, upstairs, possibly in back room #1 if it's free. Look for the LW sign.

Bayes study group: Anyone in the region interested in learning how to do Bayesian statistics is welcome to join us. We'll be using the statistical package R (http://cran.r-project.org/) as a platform, so bring your laptop if you have one. We're currently covering the binomial model with its conjugate prior, the beta distribution.

Date: Thursday June 23, 9:00am to 10:30am. NB: 9 in the morning.

Venue: Jeanne Mance Building, Tunney's Pasture. Meet me in the lobby.

Bayes study group: This session will run in parallel but slightly delayed relative to the sessions at Tunney's Pasture.

Date: Tuesday June 21, 9:30pm

Venue: wmiles's house; join the Google group for the address.

I'm not feeling well, so I'm afraid I have to cancel.
Looking for a comic that was posted here
by Document — 2011-06-17T19:19:07.403Z

It opened with a fortune teller predicting a rich man's death and ended with him beaten by Death in a metaphorical boxing ring. It might have been in a Quotes thread or an open thread. Does anyone have it?

(Edit: for the record, I wanted to add it to the Challenge Gamer page at TV Tropes.)
Amateur Cryonics (one guy packed in dry ice) Festival Seeks Buyer
by khafra — 2011-06-17T16:57:41.276Z

http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_18282009?source=most_viewed

I'd imagine the efficacy is halfway between proper cryonics and embalming and burying; the more interesting part may be the festival. Nederland is a small town 20 miles from Boulder, CO. I doubt the festival attendees are cryonics advocates, but they don't seem prone to the negative associations corpsicles often raise. Perhaps it's just because Boulder, Colorado is full of weirdos, but I wonder if there are more exploitable effects in play.
When is further research needed?
by Richard_Kennaway — 2011-06-17T15:01:10.442Z

Here's a simple theorem in utility theory that I haven't seen anywhere. Maybe it's standard knowledge, or maybe not.

TL,DR: More information is never a bad thing.

The theorem proved below says that before you make an observation, you cannot expect it to decrease your utility, but you can sometimes expect it to increase your utility. I'm ignoring the cost of obtaining the additional data, and any losses consequential on the time it takes. These are real considerations in any practical situation, but they are not the subject of this note.

First, an example to illustrate the principle. Suppose you are faced with two choices, A and B. One of them is right and one is wrong, and it's very important to make the right choice, because being right will confer some large positive utility U (you get to marry the princess), while the wrong choice will get you -U (eaten by a tiger). However, you're not sure which is the right choice. You estimate that there's a 51% chance that A is right, and 49% that B is right. So, you shut up and multiply, and choose A for an expected utility of 0.02U, right?

Suppose the choice does not have to be made immediately, and that you can do something to get better information about whether A or B is the right choice. Say you can make certain observations which will tell you with 99% certainty which is right. Your prior expectation of your posterior is equal to your prior, so before you make the observation, you expect a 50/98 chance of it telling you that A is right, and 48/98 that B is right.

You make the observation and then choose the course of action it tells you. Whether it says A or B, it's 99% likely to be right, so your expected utility from choosing according to the observation is 0.98U, an increase over not making the observation of 0.96U.

Clearly, you should make the observation. Even though you cannot expect what it will tell you, you can expect to greatly benefit from whatever it tells you.

Now the general case.

Theorem: Every act of observation has, before you make it, a non-negative expected utility.

Proof. Let the set of actions available to an agent be C. For each action c in C, the agent has a probability distribution over possible outcomes. Each outcome has a certain utility. For present purposes it is not necessary to distinguish between outcomes and their utility, so we shall consid...
[SEQ RERUN] Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-06-17T14:46:06.254Z

Today's post, Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, was originally published on 26 June 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People want to think that the Enemy is an innately evil mutant. But, usually, the Enemy is acting as you might in their circumstances. They think that they are the hero in their story and that their motives are just. That doesn't mean that they are right. Killing them may be the best option available. But it is still a tragedy.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 Correspondence Bias, 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.
Drive-less AIs and experimentation
by  — 2011-06-17T14:33:59.852Z

One of the things I've been thinking about is how to safely explore the nature of intelligence. I'm unconvinced of FOOMing and would rather we didn't avoid AI entirely if we can't solve Yudkowsky style Friendliness. So some method of experimentation is needed to determine how powerful intelligence actually is.

So can we create an AI that has very limited scope? That is try and avoid the drives by setting goals such as avoiding changing the world and turning itself off after having achieved a small goal?

Let us say the goal is to change the colour of a ball from green to red. You can leave paint and paint brushes and a robot around to make it easy, but it might determine the best way (least world-changing) is to create a dye manufacturing bacteria instead. How well it did on the test would also allow you to gauge the optimising power of the system to know whether we need "first mover/winner take all" style friendliness or societal friendliness for many AI .

Creating AIs without drives seems easier than creating ones that do have goals to shape the rest of human history. What do other people think
Q&A with Shane Legg on risks from AI
by XiXiDu — 2011-06-17T08:58:06.099Z

[Click here to see a list of all interviews]

I am emailing experts in order to raise and estimate the academic awareness and perception of risks from AI.

Below you will find some thoughts on the topic by Shane Legg, a computer scientist and AI researcher who has been working on theoretical models of super intelligent machines (AIXI) with Prof. Marcus Hutter. His PhD thesis Machine Super Intelligence has been completed in 2008. He was awarded the $10,000 Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Prize.

Publications by Shane Legg:

Solomonoff Induction thesis

Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence paper

Algorithmic Probability Theory article

Tests of Machine Intelligence paper

A Formal Measure of Machine Intelligence paper talk slides

A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence paper

A Formal Definition of Intelligence for Artificial Systems abstract poster

Is there an Elegant Universal Theory of Prediction? paper slides

The full list of publications by Shane Legg can be found here.

The Interview:

Q1: Assuming no global catastrophe halts progress, by what year would you assign a 10%/50%/90% chance of the development of human-level machine intelligence?

Explanatory remark to Q1:
P(human-level AI by (year) | no wars ∧ no disasters ∧ beneficially political and economic development) = 10%/50%/90%

Shane Legg: 2018, 2028, 2050

Q2: What probability do you assign to the possibility of negative/extremely negative consequences as a result of badly done AI?

Explanatory remark to Q2:

P(negative consequences | badly done AI) = ?
P(extremely negative consequences | badly done AI) = ?
(Where 'negative' = human extinction; 'extremely negative' = humans suffer;)

Shane Legg: Depends a lot on how you define things. Eventually, I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this. But there's a big difference between this being within a year of something like human level AI, and within a million years. As for the former meaning...I don't know. Maybe 5%, maybe 50%. I don't think anybody has a good estimate of this.

If by suffering you mean prolonged suffering, then I think this is quite unlikely. If a super intelligent machine (or any kind of super intelligent agent) decided to get rid of us, I think it would do so pretty efficiently. I don't think we will deliberately design super inte...
Discussion: Socially Awkward Penguin as a tool for unraveling social enigmas
by Raw_Power — 2011-06-17T00:52:44.794Z

So I was there being my rationalist-with-akrasia-issues, nerdy, awkward self who studies acting, singing, rhetorics, PUA, TV Tropes, Machiavelli, The Art of War, the 48 Laws of Power, the Art of Seduction, the Seven Habits... in the hopes of escaping his chronic fear of his neighbor (with some success, shall I add, but it comes slowly). And then I sumble upon this nice little harmless meme:

Socially Awkward Penguin

I was absolutely stunned. This behavior. I thought it was strange and unique. It's incredibly common. This gave me great hope. If it is common, it means it isn't due to noise: there's a pattern there, there's something to unravel. The misjudgements of power, of what it's right to do, of when to fear and when to be bold, when to speak and when to be silent... What *is* the right thing to do when you're with a coworker on an elevator? What do you say when someone remembers you, but you don't remember them, and they have noticed that? What do you do when you're hit by a paper ball in class? What do you do when the only people you seem to be able to make friends with are older, younger, or of the opposite gender, and you're utterly intimidated by people of your same age and gender, the friendship of whom you know would profit you most? Why do you automatically recalculate trajectories to avoid acquaintances in the hall, at the super, on the bus? Why is it that when a person of the opposite gender so much as pays attention to you, you think you have a crush on them?

There are clues to some of these questions in the books and works I linked back there. But, more often than not, we expect those problems to solve themselves, with one magical word, "confidence".

I am confused at that notion. I find it unsatisfactory. I want to understand social awkwardness. The rules thereof. And how to vanquish it. And I want the keys in a way that can be taught. So that, when I have kids, they don't have to go through the same stupid struggles and can actually feel good about themselves and focus on getting stuff done.

So, I hereby summon the powers of the Lesswrong community: let us pick apart this problem as we know so well, and let us unbury the roots of this evil that is social awkwardness, so that we nerds and geeks may defeat it at last, and live free of its funk.
N-back news: Jaeggi 2011, or, is there a psychologist/statistician in the house?
by gwern — 2011-06-16T18:47:54.966Z

Following up on the 2010 study, Jaeggi and University of Michigan people have run a Single N-back study on 60 or so children.

Abstract: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/03/1103228108.abstract

PDF: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/03/1103228108.full.pdf

The abstract is confident and the mainstream coverage unquestioning of the basic claim. But reading it, the data did not seem very solid at all - I will forbear from describing my reservations exactly; I have been accused of being biased against n-backing, however, and I'd appreciate outside opinions, especially from people with expertise in the area.

(Background: Jaeggi 2011 in my DNB FAQ. Don't read it unless you can't render the above requested opinion, since it includes my criticisms.)
Friendly to the Extreme: Kids and Adults With Williams Syndrome (Link)
by XiXiDu — 2011-06-16T17:37:26.383Z

Williams Syndrome is a rare genetic condition [...].

"Little babies will come up to you, they will stare into your face, and it will be hard to actually disengage from that stare," explained Helen Tager-Flusberg whose lab at Boston University studies the social behavior of children with Williams. "When they're four or five...whether they know you or not, within about five minutes you're their new best friend."

One fascinating study by researchers in Europe found that children with Williams show no racial bias whatsoever. While children, even babies, prefer people of their own race, the neural pathway that imprints for race bias is somehow lacking in children with Williams.

Williams Syndrome is caused by the deletion of roughly 25 genes on chromosome 7. The deletion can occur randomly during the production of a sperm or egg cell. Though there are 20,000 to 25,000 genes in the human genome, even the loss of just 25 genes can have profound effects on a person's physical, behavioral and cognitive make-up.

[...]

In one experiment to test empathy, the adult experimenter bangs her knee on a table and expresses a great deal of pain. In many runs the lab recorded, the typically-developing child just watched and expressed no empathy or concern. But children with Williams often went right over to the experimenter to rub her knee and ask, "What's wrong?"

[...]

What do most children with Williams Syndrome do when presented with the creepy spider? They pet it.

Link: abcnews.go.com/Health/friendly-extreme-meet-kids-adults-williams-syndrome/
Trying to better understand futarchy
by Pavitra — 2011-06-16T05:20:41.116Z

I'm trying to work out exactly what instruments should be traded for the purposes of a futarchy.

Let the decision be whether to adopt some proposal C; our options are C or ~C. In particular, we wish to know which of EV|C or EV|~C is larger, where EV is expected-value utility according to a utility function agreed upon somewhere offscreen.

For convenience, let our utility U be bounded on [0,1].

We can create the following primitive instruments:

a. U|C, worth (EV|C) * p(C)

b. U|~C, worth (EV|~C) * p(~C)

c. (1-U)|C, worth (1-(EV|C)) * p(C)

d. (1-U)|~C, worth (1-(EV|~C)) * p(~C)

It's worth pointing out a few compounds we can make by combining these:

a+b is worth EV. c+d is worth 1-EV.

a+c is worth p(C). b+d is worth p(~C).

a+b+c+d is worth 1.

I know that I can achieve what I want by establishing two separate markets, one trading a versus a+c and the other trading b versus b+d, and comparing the spot prices of the two.

The question is: is it possible in a single market?
1-2pm is for ???
by Jonathan_Graehl — 2011-06-16T05:01:04.539Z

I left myself a cryptic note for trying some lifestyle habit a few weeks ago, and can no longer recall its meaning. Here's the note in its entirety:

> 1-2pm

Any suggestions for what's best done at 1-2pm? I feel like (70%) it has something to do with diet or exercise (but not napping). I'm half hoping to hear a more useful idea than the one I forgot, which wasn't spectacular enough for me to remember. I already searched web, mail, and my RSS.