trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Any Christians Here?
by DragonGod — 2017-06-12T23:18:18.798Z

I’m currently atheist; my deconversion was quite the unremarkable event. September 2015 (I discovered HPMOR in February and RAZ then or in March), I was doing research on logical fallacies to better argue my points for a manga forum, when I came across Rational Wiki; for several of the logical fallacies, they tended to use creationists as examples. One thing lead to another (I was curious why Christianity was being so hated, and researched more on the site) I eventually found a list of how the bible outright contradicts Science and realized the two were mutually incompatible—fundamentalist Christianity at least. I faced my first true crisis of faith and was at a crossroads: “Science or Christianity”? I initially tried to be both a Christian and an atheist, having two personalities for my separate roles, but another Christian pointed out the hypocrisy of my practice, so I chose—and I chose Science. I have never looked back since, though I’ve been tempted to “return to my vomit” and even invented a religion to prevent myself from returning to Christianity and eventually just became a LW cultist. Someone said “I’m predisposed to fervour”; I wonder if that’s true. I don’t exactly have a perfect track record though…

In the times since I departed from the flock, I’ve argued quite voraciously against religion (Christianity in particular (my priors distribute probability over the sample space such that P(Christianity) is higher than the sum of the probabilities of all other religions. Basically either the Christian God or no God at all. I am not entirely sure how rational such an outlook is, especially as the only coherent solution I see to the (paradox of first cause)[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument] is an acausal entity, and YHWH is not compatible with any Demiurge I would endorse.)) and was disappointed by the counter-arguments I would receive. I would often lament about how I wish I could have debated against myself before I deconverted (an argument atheist me would win as history tells). After discovering the Rationalist community, I realised there was a better option—fellow rationalists. 

Now this is not a request for someone to (steel man)[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man] C...
Open thread, June. 12 - June. 18, 2017
by Thomas — 2017-06-12T05:36:02.328Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, 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 start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting
Why I think worse than death outcomes are not a good reason for most people to avoid cryonics
by Synaptic — 2017-06-11T15:55:50.061Z

Content note: torture, suicide, things that are worse than death

Follow-up to: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lrf/can_we_decrease_the_risk_of_worsethandeath/

TLDR: The world is certainly a scary place if you stop to consider all of the tail risk events that might be worse than death. It's true that there is a tail risk of experiencing one of these outcomes if you choose to undergo cryonics, but it's also true that you risk these events by choosing not to kill yourself right now, or before you are incapacitated by a TBI or neurodegenerative disease. I think these tail risk events are extremely unlikely and I urge you not to kill yourself because you are worried about them, but I also think that they are extremely unlikely in the case of cryonics and I don't think that the possibility of them occurring should stop you from pursuing cryonics.

I

Several members of the rationalist community have said that they would not want to undergo cryonics on their legal deaths because they are worried about a specific tail risk: that they might be revived in a world that is worse than death, and that doesn't allow them to kill themselves. For example, lukeprog mentioned this in a LW comment:

Why am I not signed up for cryonics?

Here's my model.

In most futures, everyone is simply dead.

There's a tiny sliver of futures that are better than that, and a tiny sliver of futures that are worse than that.

What are the relative sizes of those slivers, and how much more likely am I to be revived in the "better" futures than in the "worse" futures? I really can't tell.

I don't seem to be as terrified of death as many people are. A while back I read the Stoics to reduce my fear of death, and it worked. I am, however, very averse to being revived into a worse-than-death future and not being able to escape.

I bet the hassle and cost of cryonics disincentivizes me, too, but when I boot up my internal simulator and simulate a world where cryonics is free, and obtained via a 10-question Google form, I still don't sign up. I ask to be cremated instead.

Cryonics may be reasonable for someone who is more averse to death and less averse to worse-than-death outcomes than I am. Cryonics may also be reasonable for someone who has strong reasons to believe they are more likely to be revived in better-than-death futures than in worse-than-death futures. Finally,

...
We are the Athenians, not the Spartans
by wubbles — 2017-06-11T05:53:29.414Z

The Peloponnesian War was a war between two empires: the seadwelling Athenians, and the landlubber Spartans. Spartans were devoted to duty and country, living in barracks and drinking the black broth. From birth they trained to be the caste dictators of a slaveowning society, which would annually slay slaves to forestall a rebellion. The most famous Spartan is Leonidas, who died in a heroic last stand delaying the invasion of the Persians. To be a Spartan was to live a life devoted to toughness and duty.

Famous Athenians are Herodotus, inventor of history, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Hippocrates of the oath medical students still take, all the Greek playwrights, etc. Attic Greek is the Greek we learn in our Classics courses. Athens was a city where the students of the entire known Greek world would come to learn from the masters, a maritime empire with hundreds of resident aliens, where slavery was comparable to that of the Romans. Luxury apartments, planned subdivisions, sexual hedonism, and free trade made up the life of the Athenian elite.

These two cities had deeply incompatible values. Spartans lived in fear that the Helots would rebel and kill them. Deeply suspicious of strangers, they imposed oligarchies upon the cities they conquered. They were described by themselves and others cautious and slow to act. Athenians by contrast prized speed and risk in their enterprises. Foreigners could live freely in Athens and even established their own temples. Master and slave comedies of Athens inspired PG Woodhouse.

All intellectual communities are Athenian in outlook. We remember Sparta for its killing and Athens for its art. If we want the rationalist community to tackle the hard problems, if we support a world that is supportive of human values and beauty, if we yearn to end the plagues of humanity, our values should be Athenian: individualistic, open, trusting, enamoured of beauty. When we build social technology, it should not aim to cultivate values that stand against these.

High trust, open, societies are the societies where human lives are most improved. Beyond merely being refugees for the persecuted they become havens for intellectual discussion and the improvement of human knowledge and practice. It is not a coincidence that one city produced Spinoza, Rubens, Rembrandt, van Dyke, Huygens, van Leeuwenhoek, and Grotius in a few short decades, while d...
Bi-Weekly Rational Feed
by sapphire — 2017-06-10T21:56:38.374Z

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Bring Up Genius by Viliam (lesswrong) - An "80/20" translation. Positive motivation. Extreme resistance from the Hungarian government and press. Polgar's five principles. Biting criticism of the school system. Learning in early childhood. Is Genius a gift or curse? Celebrity. Detailed plan for daily instruction. Importance of diversity. Why chess? Teach the chess with love, playfully. Emancipation of women. Polgar's happy family.

The Shouting Class by Noah Smith - The majority of comments come from a tiny minority of commentators. Social media is giving a bullhorn to the people who constantly complain. Negativity is contagious. The level of discord in society is getting genuinely dangerous. The French Revolution. The author criticizes shouters on the Left and Right.

How Givewell Uses Cost Effectiveness Analyses by The GiveWell Blog - GiveWell doesn't take its estimates literally, unless one charity is measured as 2-3x as cost-effective GiveWell is unsure if a difference exists. Cost-effective is however the most important factor in GiveWell's recommendations. GiveWell goes into detail about how it deals with great uncertainty and suboptimal data.

Mode Collapse And The Norm One Principle by tristanm (lesswrong) - Generative Adversarial Networks. Applying the lessons of Machine Learning to discourse. How to make progress when the critical side of discourse is very powerful. "My claim is that any contribution to a discussion should satisfy the "Norm One Principle." In other words, it should have a well-defined direction, and the quantity of change should be feasible to implement."

The Face Of The Ice by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - Mountaineering. Survival Mindset vs Sexual-Selection Mindset. War and the Wilderness. Technical Skill.

Bayes: A Kinda Sorta Masterpost by Nostalgebraist - A long and very well thought-out criticism of Bayesianism. Explanation of Bayesian methodology. Comparison with classical statistics. Arguments for Bayes. The problem of ignored hypotheses with known relations. The problem of new ideas. Where do priors come from? Regularization and insights from machine learning.

===Scott:

SSC Journal Club Ai Timelines by Scott Alexander - A new paper surveying what Ai experts think about Ai progress. Contradictory results about when Ai will surpass humans at all tasks. Opinions on Ai...
Stupid Questions June 2017
by gilch — 2017-06-10T18:32:57.352Z

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Epistemology vs Critical Thinking
by Onemorenickname — 2017-06-10T02:41:39.684Z

Short vocabulary points :

By epistemy, I refer to to the second meaning of epistemology in the wiktionary (ie, a particular theory of knowledge). Polysemy is bad and should be fixed when possible.

By episteme, I mean the knowledge and understanding of a given science at a given point in time.

By field, I mean a set of related thoughts. A science is a field with an epistemy.

Epistemy comes from "epistimi", meaning science. I like the identification of a science with its epistemy.

Epistemic ... :

Effort. Much more reasoning behind that post. I'm mostly trying to see if people are interested. If they are, much more writing will ensue.

Status. Field : Rationalist epistemology. Phase : pre-epistemy.

Epistemies work.

General approaches don't work.

Model-checking, validity and proof-search can be hard. Like, NP, PSPACE, non-elementary hard or even undecidable. Particularly, validity of propositions in first-order logic is undecidable.

Our propositions about the world are more complex than what's described by first order logic. Making it impossible to prove validity of propositions in the general case. As such, trying to find a general logic to deal with the world (ie, critical thinking) is energy badly spent.

Specific approaches work.

This problem has been answered in fields relying on logic. For instance : model checking, type theory or not-statistical computational linguistics. The standard answer is finding specialized and efficiently computable logics.

However, not every field can afford a full formalization. At least, as humans studying the world, we can't. Epistemies can be seen as detailed informal efficient logics. They give us a particular way to study some particular thing, just like logics. They don't provide mathematical guarantees, but they still can offer guarantees.

Science faced that problem, as the study of world by humans. However, critical thinking wasn't enough. That's partly why we moved from philosophy to sciences. The Science solution was to subdivide the world into several overlapping-but-independently-experimentable parts.

Thus, rather than by its object of study, a science is defined by a combination of its object of study and its epistemy. This explains why 3 different articles studying logic can be discriminated by their science : to Philosophy, Math and Theoretical Computer Science.

Implications.

Stopping redundancy.

Valuin...
Summer Programming Notice
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-06-09T17:37:17.000Z

For the last 20 months, Putanumonit has been your reliable source for wanton quantification of romantic relationships, devaluation of p-values, the sort of liberal politics that makes liberals angry, and updates on Asians doing sports. For the next 3-4 month, the supply of all the above is going to become much less reliable.

I’m not taking a break from writing, quite the opposite: I have taken on two serious writing projects for this summer. I also have to maintain my day job, plan my wedding, and raise a hedgehog. You’ll see my progress towards the first project on Putanumonit, but there may not be a lot else.

The first project on which I’m collaborating is writing a guide to human rationality based on the LessWrong Sequences. I endorsed reading the Sequences themselves for this purpose because they’re the best guide to rationality that currently exists. But the Sequences are far from perfect: they take on too many subjects that are important but unrelated to human rationality, Eliezer’s writing style can turn people off, and at 1800+ pages they’re too damn long.

Also, in the decade since the Sequences were written the Rationality community grew in both numbers and wisdom, no guide to rationality can be complete without the contributions of Scott, Robin and everyone else.

A lot of my readers are exactly the audience that we are targeting – smart and nerdy people who are sympathetic to the ideas of rationality but were turned off by the core of LessWrong for various reasons. My first contribution to the “Sequences 2.0” project is tackling the Fake Beliefs sequence. As I progress on it I will post chunks on Putanumonit to get feedback from all of you, which will hopefully lead to a better product in the end.

If nothing else, there may at least be some value is trimming down the Sequences to 400 pages and avoiding saying “so it is written” and then quoting myself, like Eliezer does. That’s our minimum standard: LessWrong, LessLong, LessSelfQuoting.

The goal of the first project is to contribute to pure LessWrong rationality. The goal of the second project is to betray it – I signed up for the Ribbonfarm longform refactored perception blogging course.

I don’t know what refactored perception is, and I don’t like “postrationalists”. I knew that if I wrote about my disli...
Humans are not agents: short vs long term
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-06-09T11:16:35.069Z

Crossposted at the Intelligent Agents Forum.

This is an example of humans not being (idealised) agents.

Imagine a human who has a preference to not live beyond a hundred years. However, they want to live to next year, and it's predictable that every year they are alive, they will have the same desire to survive till the next year.

This human (not a completely implausible example, I hope!) has a contradiction between their long and short term preferences. So which is accurate? It seems we could resolve these preferences in favour of the short term ("live forever") or the long term ("die after a century") preferences.

Now, at this point, maybe we could appeal to meta-preferences - what would the human themselves want, if they could choose? But often these meta-preferences are un- or under-formed, and can be influenced by how the question or debate is framed.

Specifically, suppose we are scheduling this human's agenda. We have the choice of making them meet one of two philosophers (not meeting anyone is not an option). If they meet Professor R. T. Long, he will advise them to follow long term preferences. If instead, they meet Paul Kurtz, he will advise them to pay attention their short term preferences. Whichever one they meet, they will argue for a while and will then settle on the recommended preference resolution. And then they will not change that, whoever they meet subsequently.

Since we are doing the scheduling, we effectively control the human's meta-preferences on this issue. What should we do? And what principles should we use to do so?

It's clear that this can apply to AIs: if they are simultaneously aiding humans as well as learning their preferences, they will have multiple opportunities to do this sort of preference-shaping.
SSC Journal Club: AI Timelines
by Scott Alexander — 2017-06-08T19:00:00.000Z

I.

A few years ago, Muller and Bostrom et al surveyed AI researchers to assess their opinion on AI progress and superintelligence. Since then, deep learning took off, AlphaGo beat human Go champions, and the field has generally progressed. I’ve been waiting for a new survey for a while, and now we have one.

Grace et al (New Scientist article, paper, see also the post on the author’s blog AI Impacts) surveyed 1634 experts at major AI conferences and received 352 responses. Unlike Bostrom’s survey, this didn’t oversample experts at weird futurist conferences and seems to be a pretty good cross-section of mainstream opinion in the field. What did they think?

Well, a lot of different things.

The headline result: the researchers asked experts for their probabilities that we would get AI that was “able to accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average there was a 50% chance of this happening by 2062 – and a 10% chance of it happening by 2026!

But on its own this is a bit misleading. They also asked by what year “for any occupation, machines could be built to carry out the task better and more cheaply than human workers”. The experts thought on average that there was a 50% chance of this happening by 2139, and a 20% chance of it happening by 2037.

As the authors point out, these two questions are basically the same – they were put in just to test if there was any framing effect. The framing effect was apparently strong enough to shift the median date of strong human-level AI from 2062 to 2139. This makes it hard to argue AI experts actually have a strong opinion on this.

Also, these averages are deceptive. Several experts thought there was basically a 100% chance of strong AI by 2035; others thought there was only a 20% chance or less by 2100. This is less “AI experts have spoken and it will happen in 2062” and more “AI experts have spoken, and everything they say contradicts each other and quite often themselves”.

This does convey more than zero information. It conveys the information that AI researchers are really unsure. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard say “there’s no serious AI researcher who thinks there’s any chance of human-level intelligence before 2050”. Well actually, there are a few dozen conference-paper-presenting experts who think there’s a one hundred percent chance of human-level AI before that

...
Bring up Genius
by Viliam — 2017-06-08T17:44:03.696Z

(This is a "Pareto translation" of Bring up Genius by László Polgár, the book recently mentioned at Slate Star Codex. I hope that selected 20% of the book text, translated approximately, could still convey 80% of its value, while taking an order of magnitude less time and work than a full and precise translation. The original book is written in an interview form, with questions and answers; to keep it short, I am rewriting it as a monologue. I am also taking liberty of making many other changes in style, and skipping entire parts, because I am optimizing for my time. Instead of the Hungarian original, I am using an Esperanto translation Eduku geniulon as my source, because that is the language I am more fluent in.)

Introduction

Genius = work + luck

This is my book written in 1989 about 15 years of pedagogic experiment with my daughters. It is neither a recipe, nor a challenge, just a demonstration that it is possible to bring up a genius intentionally.

The so-called miracle children are natural phenomena, created by their parents and society. Sadly, many potential geniuses disappear without anyone noticing the opportunity, including themselves.

Many people in history did a similar thing by accident; we only repeated it on purpose.

1. Secrets of the pedagogic experiment

1.1. The Polgár family

The Polgár sisters (Susan, Sofia, Judit) are internationally as famous as Rubik Ernő, the inventor of the Rubik Cube.

Are they merely their father's puppets, manipulated like chess figures? Hardly. This level of success requires agency and active cooperation. Puppets don't become geniuses. Contrariwise, I provided them opportunity, freedom, and support. They made most of the decisions.

You know what really creates puppets? The traditional school system. Watch how kids, eagerly entering school in September, mostly become burned out by Christmas.

Not all geniuses are happy. Some are rejected by their environment, or they fail to achieve their goals. But some geniuses are happy, accepted by their environment, succeed, and contribute positively to the society. I think geniuses have a greater chance to be happy in life, and luckily my daughters are an example of that.

I was a member of the Communist Party for over ten years, but I disagreed with many things; specifically the lack of democracy, and the opposition to elite education.

I work about 15 h...
Research Assistant positions at the Future of Humanity Institute and Centre for Effective Altruism
by crmflynn — 2017-06-08T17:20:48.383Z

Both the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at the University of Oxford, and the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), are advertising for research assistant positions for Toby Ord as he writes a book on Existential Risk. These positions are each for 6 months initially, with the possibility of extension.

Details of the CEA position, including information on how to apply, are available here (https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/research-assistant/). The deadline is 14 June.

Details of the FHI position, including information on how to apply, are available here (https://tinyurl.com/yc9n9e2q). The deadline is 22 June.

It is worth noting that the FHI position will not provide visa sponsorship, but it is possible that the CEA position will. Accordingly, non-EU citizens are especially encouraged to apply to the CEA position