trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why space stopped captivating minds ?
by kilobug — 2012-07-29T09:58:18.172Z

This article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kessler/why-you-should-be-more-interested-in-mars-than-the-olympics_b_1712462.html -- ok, I admit, I read Slashdot sometimes, no one is perfect ;) -- made me wonder why the awesomeness of space conquest stopped motivating people.

I remember the tales of my parents at the time of the Apollo landing, it was indeed instilling awe and wonder in the minds of people. It was followed by people like the Olympics or the football competitions are. And nowadays, NASA about to send a nuclear-powered rover to Mars, in a very delicate mission requiring the best of human engineering and scientific skills, and not in line in most media, most people not even aware of it? How did we fall that low?

Sure there was the Cold War. It definitely played a role, in the amount of resources invested by both sides in space conquest, and in the way the media broadcasted the news.

But here in France, a country that was mostly neutral during the Cold War (slightly west-aligned, but not part of NATO for most of the Cold War), the interest of people for space was not really partisan. People who were pro-USSR were amazed and cheering for the Appolo mission, people who were pro-USA were amazed and cheering for Gagarin. My brother and I played with (USSR) Sputnik as much as with (USA) space shuttles. We praised equally Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin. I don't think the lack of Cold War explains it all.

So what happened to the space conquest spirit? How did it disappear? I notice a blank spot on my map (well, not totally blank, but still very fuzzy) of reality, do some of you have clues for how to fill it?
[SEQ RERUN] "Arbitrary"
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-29T06:19:43.274Z

Today's post, "Arbitrary" was originally published on 12 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When we say that something is arbitrary, we are saying that it feels like it should come with a justification, but doesn't.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Abstracted Idealized Dynamics, 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.
discounting on the radio
by jdinkum — 2012-07-29T05:24:54.448Z

I thought this was an interesting radio piece. The economist is interviewed about hyperbolic discounting and existential risk (though not using those exact terms) and how it related to government spending. With a dose of "Politics is the mindkiller" thrown in for good measure.

https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/20/157105414/episode-388-putting-a-price-tag-on-your-descendants
[Applications Closed] The Singularity Institute is hiring remote LaTeX editors
by Malo — 2012-07-29T00:27:26.381Z

The Singularity Institute has recently made the transition to a LaTeX based document production workflow for its publications and republished its existing research papers. However, there is still much work to be done and we need more remote LaTeX editors. Some projects currently in the queue include converting both The Sequences and Facing the Singularity into LaTeX based books.

As with other remote positions, pay is hourly and starts at $14/hr but will increase if you produce a good product.

Perks:

Work flexible hours: Complete your work in few large chunks or many small ones—at 03:00 or 18:00—it's up to you.

Work from wherever you please: your home (maybe even in bed), your local coffee shop, a hostel in Nepal, whatever.

Age and credentials are irrelevant; only product matters.

Make money while contributing to The Singularity Institute.

Requirements:

Experience creating and typesetting LaTeX based documents.

Good attention to detail (this is more important than being a LaTeX wiz).

Ability to work autonomously and set your own schedule.

If you're interested, apply here. If you aren't sure you're qualified, err on the side of applying.

Edit: Applications have been closed.
Reinforcement Learning: A Non-Standard Introduction (Part 1)
by royf — 2012-07-29T00:13:38.238Z

Imagine that the world is divided into two parts: one we shall call the agent and the rest - its environment. Imagine you could describe in full detail the state of both the agent and the environment. The state of the agent is denoted M: it could be a Mind if you're a philosopher, a Machine if you're researching machine learning, or a Monkey if you're a neuroscientist. Anyway, it's just the Memory of the agent. The state of the rest of the World (or just World, for short) is denoted W.

These states change over time. In general, when describing the dynamics of a system, we specify how each state is determined by the previous states. So we have probability distributions for the states Wt and Mt of the world and the agent in time t:

p(Wt|Wt-1,Mt-1)

q(Mt|Wt-1,Mt-1)

This gives us the probabilities that the world is currently in state Wt, and the agent in state Mt, given that they previously were in states Wt-1 and Mt-1. This can be illustrated in the following Bayesian network (see also):

Bayesian networks look like they represent causation: that the current state is "caused" by the immediately previous state. But what they really represent is statistical independence: that the current joint state (Wt, Mt) depends only on the immediately previous joint state (Wt-1, Mt-1), and not on any earlier state. So the power of Bayesian networks is in what they don't show, in this case there's no arrow from, say, Wt-2 to Wt.

The current joint state of the world and the agent represents everything we need to know in order to continue the dynamics forward. Given this state, the past is independent of the future. This property is so important, that it has a name, borrowed from one of its earliest researchers, Markov.

The Markov property is not enough for our purposes. We are going to make a further assumption, which is that the states of the world and the agent don't both change together. Rather, they take turns changing, and while one does the other remains the same. This gives us the dynamics:

p(Wt|Wt-1,Mt-1)

q(Mt|Mt-1,Wt)

and the Bayesian network:

Sometimes this assumption can be readily justified. For example, let's use this model to describe a chess player.

Suppose that at time t the game has reached state Wt where it is our agent's turn to play. Our agent has also reached a decision of what to do next, and its mind is now i...
[SEQ RERUN] Abstracted Idealized Dynamics
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-28T06:34:14.755Z

Today's post, Abstracted Idealized Dynamics was originally published on 12 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A bit of explanation on the idea of morality as "computation".

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Moral Error and Moral Disagreement, 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.
Notes on the Psychology of Power
by gwern — 2012-07-27T19:22:43.416Z

Luke/SI asked me to look into what the academic literature might have to say about people in positions of power. This is a summary of some of the recent psychology results.

The powerful or elite are: fast-planning abstract thinkers who take action (1) in order to pursue single/minimal objectives, are in favor of strict rules for their stereotyped out-group underlings (2) but are rationalizing (3) & hypocritical when it serves their interests (4), especially when they feel secure in their power. They break social norms (5, 6) or ignore context (1) which turns out to be worsened by disclosure of conflicts of interest (7), and lie fluently without mental or physiological stress (6).

What are powerful members good for? They can help in shifting among equilibria: solving coordination problems or inducing contributions towards public goods (8), and their abstracted Far perspective can be better than the concrete Near of the weak (9).

Galinsky et al 2003; Guinote, 2007; Lammers et al 2008; Smith & Bargh, 2008

Eyal & Liberman

Rustichini & Villeval 2012

Lammers et al 2010

Kleef et al 2011

Carney et al 2010

Cain et al 2005; Cain et al 2011

Eckel et al 2010

Slabu et al; Smith & Trope 2006; Smith et al 2008

These benefits may not exceed the costs (is inducing contributions all that useful with improved market mechanisms like assurance contracts - made increasingly famous thanks to Kickstarter?) Now, to forestall objections from someone like Robin Hanson that these traits - if negative - can be ameliorated by improved technology and organizations and the rest just represents our egalitarian forager prejudice against the elites and corporations who gave us the wealthy modern world, I would point out that these traits look like they would be quite effective at maximizing utility and some selected for in future settings…

(Additional cautions include that, in order to control for all sorts of confounds, these are generally small WEIRD samples in laboratory or university settings involving small-scale power shifts, priming, or other cues; as such, all the usual criticisms apply.)

1 Notes

key phrases: “moral hypocrisy”; “construal level theory” (Near/Far) (Hanson’s visual summary)

check or blacklist any paper related to Diederik Stapel! (eg. “Fraud Case Seen as a Red Flag for Psychology Research”)

2 R

...
Is Politics the Mindkiller? An Inconclusive Test
by OrphanWilde — 2012-07-27T17:45:13.390Z

Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?

I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):

1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.

2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.

3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?

Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)

I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.

Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.

The fac...
Weekly LW Meetups: Madison, NYC, Ohio, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-07-27T14:24:44.743Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on July 20th, and has now been moved to discussion.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Washington DC Calibration Games meetup: 22 July 2012 03:00AM
Madison: Rough Numbers: 22 July 2012 07:00PM

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

(NYC) A Game of Nomic: 21 July 2012 03:00PM
Monthly Ohio meetup: 22 July 2012 04:00PM

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

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

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

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become inactive, let me know so we can present more accurate information to newcomers.
[SEQ RERUN] Moral Error and Moral Disagreement
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-27T05:49:14.473Z

Today's post, Moral Error and Moral Disagreement was originally published on 10 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

How can you make errors about morality?

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps, 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.
Zero-sum conversion: a cute trick for decision problems
by Manfred — 2012-07-26T21:36:57.813Z

A while ago, we were presented with an interesting puzzle, usually just called "Psy-kosh's non-anthropic problem." This problem is not, as is made clear, an anthropic problem, but it generates a similar sort of confusion by having you cooperate with people who think like you, and you're unsure which of these people you are.

In the linked post, cousin_it declares "no points for UDT," which is why this post is not called a total solution, but a cute trick :) What I call zero-sum conversion is just a way to make the UDT calculations (that is, the things you do when calculating what the actual best choice is) seem obvious - which is good, since they're the ones that give you the right answer. This trick also makes the UDT math obvious on the absent-minded driver problem and the Sleeping Beauty problem (though that's trickier).

The basic idea is to pretend that your decision is part of a zero-sum game against a non-anthropic, non-cooperating, generally non-confusing opponent. In order to do this, you must construct an imaginary opponent such that for every choice you could make, their expected utility for that choice is the negative, the opposite of your expected utility. Then you simply do the thing your opponent likes least, and it is equivalent to doing the thing you'll like best.

Example in the case of the non-anthropic problem (yes, you should probably have that open in another tab):

Your opponent here is the experimenter, who really dislikes giving money to charity (characterization isn't necessary, but it's fun). For every utilon that you, personally, would get from money going to charity when you say "yea" or "nay," the experimenter gets a negative utilon.

Proof that the experimenter's expected utilities are negative yours is trivial in this case, since the utilities are opposites for every possible outcome, including cases where you're not a decider. But things can be trickier in other problems, since expected utilities can be opposites without the utilities being exactly opposite for all outcomes. For example, what happens in the case where the participants in the non-anthropic problem get individual candybars instead of collective money to charity?

Anyhow, now that we have our opponent whose expected utilities are the opposite of yours for every decision you make, you just have to make the decision that's...
Many-worlds implies the future matters more
by jefftk — 2012-07-26T12:09:26.914Z

If you believe the MWI [1] you should care about the future a lot more than the present. Imagine you're considering whether to take a break and eat some chocolate in an hour or in two. You'll get similar enjoyment out of both choices, so you might think it doesn't matter. But if every quantum event between one and two hours from now will branch the universe, and there are lots of such events, in two hours there would be hugely many more yous to experience your chocolate break than in only one hour. The MWI implies we should be willing to make substantial sacrifices in terms of current happiness for the benefit of our future selves. In other words, your preference for investing probably isn't strong enough.

In trying to apply this to altruism you do need to be careful. Some charities are more like spending, in that their benefits are mostly in the present, while others are like investing. If I donate to the Against Malaria Foundation to distribute mosquito nets, the main benefits are preventing current or near-future people from dying. There are probably some long term effects, like a stronger economy when you have fewer people sick, but they're not the goal or the main effect. On the other hand the Future of Humanity Institute, a charity trying to prevent existential risk, is much more like an investment in that nearly all its benefit (which is really hard to predict or quantify) goes to future people. Metacharities promoting effective altruism, like 80,000 hours, Giving What We Can, and GiveWell, are another sort of investment-like charity, influencing people's future giving. And then there's the option of straight up monetary investing now and donating later.

If you accept the MWI you should be evaluating your altruistic options primarily on their future effects, with more emphasis on farther-future ones.

I also posted this on my blog

[1] Which I still don't know enough about to have an opinion on the truth of.
What are the boundaries?
by Stabilizer — 2012-07-26T08:15:00.618Z

Computer science and information theory were separate from physics. Not anymore. People realized that information had to be physical and this had profound consequences, especially in the form of quantum information/computation.

Psychology and economics were separate. Not anymore. People realized that humans were the core of economic systems and their behaviors fundamentally shape the nature of economies, even at the largest scales. Note the rise of behavioral economics.

Neuroscience and computer science were separate. Not anymore. People realized that thinking about the brain as a computer is probably the best possible abstraction to understand it.

Reality exists. There are no intrinsic boundaries in reality. All fields of study are created by humans. But these divisions seem so natural that nobody realizes that the boundaries have to dissolve. The fields have to collide. And when we realize that--or finally have the language and ideas to meaningfully talk about it--we find out all of kinds of crazy, cool stuff.

So: what collisions are we currently blind to?
The Mere Cable Channel Addition Paradox
by Ghatanathoah — 2012-07-26T07:20:05.081Z

The following is a dialogue intended to illustrate what I think may be a serious logical flaw in some of the conclusions drawn from the famous Mere Addition Paradox.

EDIT: To make this clearer, the interpretation of the Mere Addition Paradox this post is intended to criticize is the belief that a world consisting of a large population full of lives barely worth living is the optimal world. That is, I am disagreeing with the idea that the best way for a society to use the resources available to it is to create as many lives barely worth living as possible. Several commenters have argued that another interpretation of the Mere Addition Paradox is that a sufficiently large population with a lower quality of life will always be better than a smaller population with a higher quality of life, even if such a society is far from optimal. I agree that my argument does not necessarily refute this interpretation, but think the other interpretation is common enough that it is worth arguing against.

EDIT: On the advice of some of the commenters I have added a shorter summary of my argument in non-dialogue form at the end. Since it is shorter I do not think it summarizes my argument as completely as the dialogue, but feel free to read it instead if pressed for time.

Bob: Hi, I'm with R&P cable. We're selling premium cable packages to interested customers. We have two packages to start out with that we're sure you love. Package A+ offers a larger selection of basic cable channels and costs $50. Package B offers a larger variety of exotic channels for connoisseurs, it costs $100. If you buy package A+, however, you'll get a 50% discount on B.

Alice: That's very nice, but looking at the channel selection, I just don't think that it will provide me with enough utilons.

Bob: Utilons? What are those?

Alice: They're the unit I use to measure the utility I get from something. I'm really good at shopping, so if I spend my money on the things I usually spend it on I usually get 1.5 utilons for every dollar I spend. Now, looking at your cable channels, I've c

...