trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)
by JulianMorrison — 2009-10-11T21:51:52.943Z

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791

Morsella has gone back to basics. Forget art, symphonies, science. Forget the step-by-step learning of complex tasks. Those may be some of the things we use consciousness for now but that doesn’t mean that’s what it evolved for, any more than the cones in our eyes evolved to give kaleidoscope makers something to do. What’s the primitive, bare-bones, nuts-and-bolts thing that consciousness does once we’ve stripped away all the self-aggrandizing bombast?

Morsella’s answer is delightfully mundane: it mediates conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles.
The Argument from Witness Testimony
by Johnicholas — 2009-10-10T14:05:50.422Z

(Note: This is essentially a rehash/summarization of Jordan Sobel's Lotteries and Miracles - you may prefer the original.)

George Mavrodes wrote an interesting analogy. Scenario 1: Suppose you read a newspaper report claiming that a particular individual (say, Henry Plushbottom of Topeka, Kansas) has won a very large lottery. Before reading the newspaper, you would have given quite low odds that Henry in particular had won the lottery. However, the newspaper report flips your beliefs quite drastically. Afterward, you would give quite high odds that Henry in particular had won the lottery. Scenario 2: You have read various claims that a particular individual (Jesus of Nazareth) arose from the dead. Before hearing those claims, you would have given quite low odds of anything so unlikely happening. However (since you are reading LessWrong) you presumably do not give quite high odds that Jesus arose from the dead.

What is it about the second scenario which makes it different from the first?

Let's model Scenario 1 as a simple Bayes net. There are two nodes, one representing whether Henry wins, and one representing whether Henry is reported to win, and one arrow, from first to the second.

What are the parameters of the conditional probability tables? Before any information came in, it seemed very unlikely that Henry was the winner - perhaps he had a one in a million chance. Given that Henry did win, what is the chance that he would be reported to have won? Pretty likely - newspapers do err, but it's reasonable to believe that 9 times out of 10, they get the name of the lottery winner correct. Now suppose that Henry didn't win. What is the chance that he would be reported to have won by mistake? There's nothing in particular to single him out from the other non-winners - being misreported is just as unlikely as winning, maybe even more unlikely.

So we have (using w to abbreviate "Henry Wins" and r to abbreviate "Henry is reported"):

P(w)=10-6 - Henry has a one-in-a-million-chance of winning.

P(!w)=1-10-6

P(r|w)=0.9 - Reporters are pretty careful about names in this kind of story.

P(!r|w)=0.1

P(r|!w)=10-7 - Not everyone plays, so there are even more people "competing" to be misreported, and Henry is supposed to be undistinguished.

P(!r|!w)=1-10-7

With a simple computation, we can verify that this model replicates the phenomenon in question. After reading th...
How to get that Friendly Singularity: a minority view
by Mitchell_Porter — 2009-10-10T10:56:46.960Z

Note: I know this is a rationality site, not a Singularity Studies site. But the Singularity issue is ever in the background here, and the local focus on decision theory fits right into the larger scheme - see below.

There is a worldview which I have put together over the years, which is basically my approximation to Eliezer's master plan. It's not an attempt to reconstruct every last detail of Eliezer's actual strategy for achieving a Friendly Singularity, though I think it must have considerable resemblance to the real thing. It might be best regarded as Eliezer-inspired, or as "what my Inner Eliezer thinks". What I propose to do is to outline this quasi-mythical orthodoxy, this tenuous implicit consensus (tenuous consensus because there is in fact a great diversity of views in the world of thought about the Singularity, but implicit consensus because no-one else has a plan), and then state how I think it should be amended. The amended plan is the "minority view" promised in my title.

Elements Of The Worldview

There will be strongly superhuman intelligence in the historically immediate future, unless a civilization-ending technological disaster occurs first.

Implicit assumption: problem-solving entities (natural and artificial intelligences, and coalitions thereof) do possess an attribute, their "general intelligence", which is both objective and rankable. Theoretical computer science suggests that this is so, but that it takes a lot of conceptual work to arrive at a fully objective definition of general intelligence.

The "historically immediate future" may be taken to mean, as an absolute upper bound, the rest of this century. Personally, I find it hard to see how twenty more years can pass without people being able to make planet-killing nanotechnology, so I give it twenty years maximum before we're in the endgame.

I specify technological disaster in the escape clause, because a natural disaster sufficient to end civilization is extremely unlikely on this timescale, and it will require a cultural disruption of that order to halt the progression towards superhuman intelligence.

In a conflict of values among intelligences, the higher intelligence will win, so for human values / your values to survive after superintelligence, the best chance is for the seed from which the superintelligence grew to have already been "human-friendly".

Elementary but very

...
I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-10-09T16:23:17.593Z

Razib summarized my entire cognitive biases talk at the Singularity Summit 2009 as saying: "Most people are stupid."

Hey! That's a bit unfair. I never said during my talk that most people are stupid. In fact, I was very careful not to say, at any point, that people are stupid, because that's explicitly not what I believe.

I don't think that people who believe in single-world quantum mechanics are stupid. John von Neumann believed in a collapse postulate.

I don't think that philosophers who believe in the "possibility" of zombies are stupid. David Chalmers believes in zombies.

I don't even think that theists are stupid. Robert Aumann believes in Orthodox Judaism.

And in the closing sentence of my talk on cognitive biases and existential risk, I did not say that humanity was devoting more resources to football than existential risk prevention because we were stupid.

There's an old joke that runs as follows:

A motorist is driving past a mental hospital when he gets a flat tire.
He goes out to change the tire, and sees that one of the patients is watching him through the fence.
Nervous, trying to work quickly, he jacks up the car, takes off the wheel, puts the lugnuts into the hubcap -
And steps on the hubcap, sending the lugnuts clattering into a storm drain.
The mental patient is still watching him through the fence.
The motorist desperately looks into the storm drain, but the lugnuts are gone.
The patient is still watching.
The motorist paces back and forth, trying to think of what to do -
And the patient says,
"Take one lugnut off each of the other tires, and you'll have three lugnuts on each."
"That's brilliant!" says the motorist. "What's someone like you doing in an asylum?"
"I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid."
LW Meetup Google Calendar
by MBlume — 2009-10-07T22:51:05.591Z

I've set up a calendar on Google to track future Less Wrong meetups. I've included links to view the calendar in a couple time zones, but note that if you add the calendar to your own google account, events should be shown in your usual time zone (if someone can confirm this for me, I'd appreciate it). I'll do my best to add any meetups posted to LW, but feel free to e-mail me if you don't see them.

Less Wrong Meetups: Pacific View
Less Wrong Meetups: Eastern View

Link for use in iCal or anything else supporting the ics format

Raw XML Version
Boston Area Less Wrong Meetup: 2 pm Sunday October 11th
by CarlShulman — 2009-10-07T21:15:14.155Z

There will be a Less Wrong meet-up this Sunday, October 11th, 2 pm, in Cambridge at the Central Square Starbucks Coffee at 655 Massachusetts Avenue (time and place are flexible if anyone has a conflict); please comment if you'd like to attend, or if you have any questions or ideas. Some confirmed attendees include SIAI folk and Less Wrongers Anna Salamon, Steve Rayhawk, Carl Shulman, and Roko Mijc. Also keep your eyes peeled for a probable appearance of expert reductionist Gary Drescher, and a rumored Scott Aaronson sighting.

Feel free to contact me at my first name DOT my last name AT post.harvard.edu or 646-525-5383.
Thanks, and see everyone there!
New Haven/Yale Less Wrong Meetup: 5 pm, Monday October 12
by CarlShulman — 2009-10-07T20:35:09.646Z

Posted on behalf of Thomas McCabe:

I (Thomas McCabe, a Yale math student) will be hosting a Less Wrong meetup in New Haven, Connecticut, on the Yale University campus. The meetup will take place at 5 PM on Monday, October 12th, at the Yorkside Pizza & Restaurant at 288 York St. (time and place are flexible if anyone has a conflict); please comment if you'd like to attend, or if you have any questions or ideas. The location can be found on Google Maps at this link.

Some confirmed attendees include SIAI folk and Less Wrongers Anna Salamon, Steve Rayhawk, Carl Shulman, and Roko Mijc.

Feel free to contact me at thomas.mccabe@yale.edu, or at 518-248-5525.
Thanks, and see everyone there!
Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks
by HughRistik — 2009-10-07T16:35:16.698Z

When I read Alicorn's post on problems vs tasks, I immediately realized that the proposed terminology helped express one of my pet peeves: the resistance in society to applying rationality to socializing and dating.

In a thread long, long ago, SilasBarta described his experience with dating advice:

I notice all advice on finding a girlfriend glosses over the actual nuts-and-bolts of it.

In Alicorn's terms, he would be saying that the advice he has encountered treats problems as if they were tasks. Alicorn defines these terms a particular way:

It is a critical faculty to distinguish tasks from problems. A task is something you do because you predict it will get you from one state of affairs to another state of affairs that you prefer. A problem is an unacceptable/displeasing state of affairs, now or in the likely future. So a task is something you do, or can do, while a problem is something that is, or may be.

Yet as she observes in her post, treating genuine problems as if they were defined tasks is a mistake:

Because treating problems like tasks will slow you down in solving them. You can't just become immortal any more than you can just make a peanut butter sandwich without any bread.

Similarly, many straight guys or queer women can't just find a girlfriend, and many straight women or queer men can't just find a boyfriend, any more than they can "just become immortal."

People having trouble in those areas may ask for advice, perhaps out of a latent effort to turn the problem into more of a task. Yet a lot of conventional advice doesn't really turn the problem into the task (at least, not for everyone), but rather poses new problems, due to difficulties that Alicorn mentioned, such as lack of resources, lack of propositional knowledge, or lack of procedural knowledge.
Take, for example, "just be yourself," or "just meet potential partners through friends." For many people, these pieces of advice just open up new problems: being oneself is a problem of personal identity. It's not a task that you can execute as part of a step in solving the problem of dating. Having a social network, let alone one that will introduce you to potential partners, is also a problem for many people. Consequently, these pieces of advice sound like "let them eat cake."
Society in general resists the notion that socializing (dating and mating in parti...
The First Step is to Admit That You Have a Problem
by Alicorn — 2009-10-06T20:59:41.195Z

This is part 1 of a sequence on problem solving. Here is part 2.

It is a critical faculty to distinguish tasks from problems. A task is something you do because you predict it will get you from one state of affairs to another state of affairs that you prefer. A problem is an unacceptable/displeasing state of affairs, now or in the likely future. So a task is something you do, or can do, while a problem is something that is, or may be. For example:

If you want a peanut butter sandwich, and you have the tools, ingredients, and knowhow that are required to make a peanut butter sandwich, you have a task on your hands. If you want a peanut butter sandwich, but you lack one or more of those items, you have a problem.

If you are sad, and you know that this is because you have not seen your favorite cousin in a while, and you have the wherewithal to arrange to have your cousin over, then arranging to have your cousin over is a task. If you are sad, and you don't know why, then the sadness is a problem.

If eight of your friends are involved in massive unpleasant social drama, but you have a forty-three-step surefire plan to calm down the angry and smooth over the ruffled and chew out the misbehaved and bring back the normalcy, you have forty-three subtasks of one big task. If you have no clue what the heck is up with the drama but it's on your last nerve, problem ahoy!

If you are a mortal creature, you may already be a problem-haver.

Problems are solved by turning them into tasks and carrying out those tasks. Turning problems into tasks can sometimes be problematic in itself, although small taskifications can be tasky. For instance, in the peanut butter sandwich case, if your only missing component for sandwich-making is bread, it doesn't take much mental acrobatics to determine that you now have two tasks to be conducted in order: 1. obtain bread, 2. make sandwich. Figuring out why you're sad, in case two, could be a task (if you're really good at introspecting accurately, or are very familiar with the cousin-missing type of sadness in particular) or could be a problem (if you're not good at that, or if you've never missed your favorite cousin before and have no prior experience with the precise feeling). And so on.

Why draw this distinction with such care? Because treating problems like t...
The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend
by PlaidX — 2009-10-05T05:26:23.736Z

One day, you and the presumptuous philosopher are walking along, arguing about the size of the universe, when suddenly Omega jumps out from behind a bush and knocks you both out with a crowbar. While you're unconscious, she builds two hotels, one with a million rooms, and one with just one room. Then she makes a million copies of both of you, sticks them all in rooms, and destroys the originals.

You wake up in a hotel room, in bed with the presumptuous philosopher, with a note on the table from Omega, explaining what she's done.

"Which hotel are we in, I wonder?" you ask.

"The big one, obviously" says the presumptuous philosopher. "Because of anthropic reasoning and all that. Million to one odds."

"Rubbish!" you scream. "Rubbish and poppycock! We're just as likely to be in any hotel omega builds, regardless of the number of observers in that hotel."

"Unless there are no observers, I assume you mean" says the presumptuous philosopher.

"Right, that's a special case where the number of observers in the hotel matters. But except for that it's totally irrelevant!"

"In that case," says the presumptuous philosopher, "I'll make a deal with you. We'll go outside and check, and if we're at the small hotel I'll give you ten bucks. If we're at the big hotel, I'll just smile smugly."

"Hah!" you say. "You just lost an expected five bucks, sucker!"

You run out of the room to find yourself in a huge, ten thousand story attrium, filled with throngs of yourselves and smug looking presumptuous philosophers.
Don't Think Too Hard.
by  — 2009-10-05T03:51:15.695Z

I find it interesting that when we're asleep - supposedly unconscious - we're frequently fully conscious, mired in a nonsensical dreamworld of our own creation. There's currently no universally accepted theory for the purpose of dreams - they range from cleaning up mental detritus to subconscious problem solving to cognitive accidents. On the other hand, we DO know plenty about what goes on in the brain during the dream state.
Studies show that in dreams, our thought processes are largely the same as they ones we use when we're awake. The main difference seems to be that we don't notice the insane world that we're a part of. We reason perfectly normally based on our surroundings, we're just incapable of reasoning about those surroundings - we lack metacognition when we're dreaming. The culprit behind this is a brain area known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). It's responsible for, among other things, executive function (directing other brain functions), as well as working memory and motor planning. This combined with the fact that it's the last brain area to develop (meaning it was the last brain area to evolve) suggests that it's key in creating conscious, directed thought. And during sleep, it's shut down, cutting off our ability to question the premises we're given. So, barring entering a lucid dream state, we lack the mental hardware to recognize we're in a hallucination when we dream - it seems perfectly normal.[1]

While we're dreaming, a number of other neurological events are taking place. Long term memories are being accessed and replayed. Brain regions that are normally unconnected work in concert to unite disparate bits of information. Whatever the purpose of dreams is (if they indeed have a purpose at all), they appear to be a window to the strengthening of mental connections and creation of new ones that takes place while we're asleep. And this behavior is necessary to maintain high-level mental functioning. People do better on tests after getting REM sleep, and people who are REM sleep deprived show extremely impaired memory and learning abilities.
Something similar occurs when our mind is wandering - unrelated brain areas are working together to develop new mental pathways (which is why talking about the importance of daydreaming is currently all the rage). The same thing happens when consuming alcohol - daydreaming and mental connec...
Dying Outside
by HalFinney — 2009-10-05T02:45:02.960Z

A man goes in to see his doctor, and after some tests, the doctor says, "I'm sorry, but you have a fatal disease."

Man: "That's terrible! How long have I got?"

Doctor: "Ten."

Man: "Ten? What kind of answer is that? Ten months? Ten years? Ten what?"

The doctor looks at his watch. "Nine."

Recently I received some bad medical news (although not as bad as in the joke). Unfortunately I have been diagnosed with a fatal disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS causes nerve damage, progressive muscle weakness and paralysis, and ultimately death. Patients lose the ability to talk, walk, move, eventually even to breathe, which is usually the end of life. This process generally takes about 2 to 5 years.

There are however two bright spots in this picture. The first is that ALS normally does not affect higher brain functions. I will retain my abilities to think and reason as usual. Even as my body is dying outside, I will remain alive inside.

The second relates to survival. Although ALS is generally described as a fatal disease, this is not quite true. It is only mostly fatal. When breathing begins to fail, ALS patients must make a choice. They have the option to either go onto invasive mechanical respiration, which involves a tracheotomy and breathing machine, or they can die in comfort. I was very surprised to learn that over 90% of ALS patients choose to die. And even among those who choose life, for the great majority this is an emergency decision made in the hospital during a medical respiratory crisis. In a few cases the patient will have made his wishes known in advance, but most of the time the procedure is done as part of the medical management of the situation, and then the ALS patient either lives with it or asks to have the machine disconnected so he can die. Probably fewer than 1% of ALS patients arrange to go onto ventilation when they are still in relatively good health, even though this provides the best odds for a successful transition.

With mechanical respiration, survival with ALS can be indefinitely extended. And the great majority of people living on respirators say that their quality of life is good and they are happy with their decision. (There may be a selection effect here.) It seems, then, that calling ALS a fatal disease is an oversimplification. ALS takes away your body, but it does not take away yo...
When Willpower Attacks
by jimrandomh — 2009-10-03T03:36:49.690Z

Less Wrong has held many discussions of willpower. All of them have focused on the cases where willpower fails, and its failure causes harm, such as procrastination, overeating and addiction. Collectively, we call these behaviors akrasia. Akrasia is any behavior that we believe is harmful, but do anyways due to a lack of willpower. Akrasia, however, represents only a small subset of the cases in which willpower fails, and focusing on it too much creates an availability bias that skews our perception of what willpower is, how it works and how much of it is desireable. To counter this bias, I present here some common special cases where strong willpower is harmful or even fatal.

Consider the human sleep cycle. By default, we settle into an equilibrium in which we sleep for about eight hours per day, starting at about the same time each evening. We can override the normal sleep schedule, and stay awake when we should be asleep, or sleep when we should be awake, by applying willpower. For this example, we'll confine the definition of willpower to just this one ability. Willpower is the ability to control sleep times; we'll leave the ability to work hard and resist cake for later.

We use sleep-willpower to arrange our hours strategically. However, we can only do so within certain constraints, which cannot be overriden by conscious choice. It isn't possible to refrain from sleeping entirely, because the amount of willpower required to stay awake increases with the amount sleep missed, until eventually it exceeds the amount of willpower available. Attempting to minimize sleep for a long enough period will eventually cause a shift to an alternative equilibrium, polyphasic sleep, in which all but the most important stage of sleep (REM) are skipped. It's harder to stay awake in some circumstances, like dark rooms and boring lectures, than in others. And it's impossible to sleep too much more than normal; the better rested we are, the harder it is to fall asleep. These restrictions are protective; when rats are artificially prevented from sleeping for too long, they die, and when humans use stimulants to stay awake too long, they die too. If a human had unlimited sleep-willpower, then they would risk serious injury every time they used it.

Next, consider diet-willpower. Humans have a system that decides what is good to eat, which manifests as cravings and taste preference...