trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
January 2013 Media Thread
by RobertLumley — 2013-01-08T02:20:18.676Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

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

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

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Don't Build Fallout Shelters
by katydee — 2013-01-07T14:38:48.275Z

Related: Circular Altruism

One thing that many people misunderstand is the concept of personal versus societal safety. These concepts are often conflated despite the appropriate mindsets being quite different.

Simply put, personal safety is personal.

In other words, the appropriate actions to take for personal safety are whichever actions reduce your chance of being injured or killed within reasonable cost boundaries. These actions are largely based on situational factors because the elements of risk that two given people experience may be wildly disparate.

For instance, if you are currently a young computer programmer living in a typical American city, you may want to look at eating better, driving your car less often, and giving up unhealthy habits like smoking. However, if you are currently an infantryman about to deploy to Afghanistan, you may want to look at improving your reaction time, training your situational awareness, and practicing rifle shooting under stressful conditions.

One common mistake is to attempt to preserve personal safety for extreme circumstances such as nuclear wars. Some individuals invest sizeable amounts of money into fallout shelters, years worth of emergency supplies, etc.

While it is certainly true that a nuclear war would kill or severely disrupt you if it occurred, this is not necessarily a fully convincing argument in favor of building a fallout shelter. One has to consider the cost of building a fallout shelter, the chance that your fallout shelter will actually save you in the event of a nuclear war, and the odds of a nuclear war actually occurring.

Further, one must consider the quality of life reduction that one would likely experience in a post-nuclear war world. It's also important to remember that, in the long run, your survival is contingent on access to medicine and scientific progress. Future medical advances may even extend your lifespan very dramatically, and potentially provide very large amounts of utility. Unfortunately, full-scale nuclear war is very likely to impair medicine and science for quite some time, perhaps permanently.

Thus even if your fallout shelter succeeds, you will likely live a shorter and less pleasant life than you would otherwise. In the end, building a fallout shelter looks like an unwise investment unless you are extremely confident that a nuclear war will occur sh...
Nate Silver will do an AMA on Reddit on Tuesday
by BT_Uytya — 2013-01-07T09:08:24.252Z

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/163nqk/nate_silver_is_doing_an_ama_tuesday_at_2_pm/

I'm really excited to see this. Nate Silver might be the most famous present day Bayesian statistician.

UPD: It appears that author of the Reddit post deleted it for some reason. The link still works but it makes sense to post the link to the Nate Silver blog with his original announcement, just in case: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/ask-nate-anything/
How to Be Oversurprised
by royf — 2013-01-07T04:02:01.424Z

Followup to: How to Disentangle the Past and the Future

Some agents are memoryless, reacting to each new observation as it happens, without generating a persisting internal structure. When a LED observes voltage, it emits light, regardless of whether it did so a second earlier.

Other agents have very persistent memories. The internal structure of an amber nugget can remain unchanged by external conditions for millions of years.

Neither of these levels of memory persistence makes for very intelligent agents, because neither allows them to be good separators of the past and the future. Memoryless agents only have access to the most recent input of their sensors, which leaves them oblivious to the hidden internal structures of other things around them, and to the existence of things not around them. Unchanging agents, on the other hand, fail to entangle themselves with new evidence, which prevents them from keeping up to date with a changing world.

Intelligence requires observations. An intelligent agent needs to strike a delicate balance between the persistence of its internal structure and its susceptibility to new evidence. The optimal balance, a Bayesian update, has been explained many times before, and was shown to be optimal in keeping information about the world. This post highlights yet another aspect.

Suppose I predicted that a roll of a die will give 4, and then it did. How surprised would you be?

You may intuitively realize that the degree of your surprise should be a decreasing function of the probability that you assign to the event. Predicting a 4 on a fair die is more surprising than on one that is loaded in favor of 4. You may also want the measure of surprise to be extensive: if I repeated the feat a second time, you would be twice as surprised.

In that case, there's essentially one consistent notion of surprise (also called: self-information, surprisal). The amount of surprise that a random variable X has value x is

S(x) = -log Pr(X=x).

This is the negative logarithm of the probability of the event X=x.

This is a very useful concept in information theory. For example, the entropy of the random variable X is the surprise we expect to have upon seeing its value. The mutual information between X and another random variable Y is the difference between how much we expect x to surprise us now, and how much we expec...
[SEQ RERUN] Complex Novelty
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-07T03:57:00.425Z

Today's post, Complex Novelty was originally published on 20 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Are we likely to run out of new challenges, and be reduced to playing the same video game over and over? How large is Fun Space? This depends on how fast you learn; the faster you generalize, the more challenges you see as similar to each other. Learning is fun, but uses up fun; you can't have the same stroke of genius twice. But the more intelligent you are, the more potential insights you can understand; human Fun Space is larger than chimpanzee Fun Space, and not just by a linear factor of our brain size. In a well-lived life, you may need to increase in intelligence fast enough to integrate your accumulating experiences. If so, the rate at which new Fun becomes available to intelligence, is likely to overwhelmingly swamp the amount of time you could spend at that fixed level of intelligence. The Busy Beaver sequence is an infinite series of deep insights not reducible to each other or to any more general insight.

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 High Challenge, 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.
Meetup : Vancouver Fashion for Rationalists
by  — 2013-01-06T21:47:34.073Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Fashion for Rationalists

WHEN:
13 January 2013 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
2150 Macdonald St Vancouver BC

We are going to have a guest come up from Seattle (jsalvatier) to give us his presentation on fashion for rationalists. It's based on lukeprog's awesome fashion workshop from the minicamps. This will be tons of fun. We will discuss the basics of fashion, and then go shopping in kitsilano, and possibly downtown!

The meetup will be on Sunday at 13:00 (sorry for those of you who don't like Sundays). The house we will be in is big and brown and on the corner of 6th and Macdonald. Just come knock on the door.

As usual, if you aren't already, get on our mailing list.

This is going to be fun! See you there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Fashion for Rationalists
Morality is Awesome
by  — 2013-01-06T15:21:30.324Z

(This is a semi-serious introduction to the metaethics sequence. You may find it useful, but don't take it too seriously.)

Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into a whale. Is this awesome?

"Maybe? I guess it would be pretty cool to be a whale for a day. But only if I can turn back, and if I stay human inside and so on. Also, that's not a whale.

"Actually, a whale seems kind of specific, and I'd be suprised if that was the best thing the wizard can do. Can I have something else? Eternal happiness maybe?"

Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into orgasmium, doomed to spend the rest of eternity experiencing pure happiness. Is this awesome?

...

"Kindof... That's pretty lame actually. On second thought I'd rather be the whale; at least that way I could explore the ocean for a while.

"Let's try again. Wizard: maximize awesomeness."

Meditate on this: A wizard has turned himself into a superintelligent god, and is squeezing as much awesomeness out of the universe as it could possibly support. This may include whales and starships and parties and jupiter brains and friendship, but only if they are awesome enough. Is this awesome?

...

"Well, yes, that is awesome."

What we just did there is called Applied Ethics. Applied ethics is about what is awesome and what is not. Parties with all your friends inside superintelligent starship-whales are awesome. ~666 children dying of hunger every hour is not.

(There is also normative ethics, which is about how to decide if something is awesome, and metaethics, which is about something or other that I can't quite figure out. I'll tell you right now that those terms are not on the exam.)

"Wait a minute!" you cry, "What is this awesomeness stuff? I thought ethics was about what is good and right."

I'm glad you asked. I think "awesomeness" is what we should be talking about when we talk about morality. Why do I think this?

"Awesome" is not a philosophical landmine. If someone encounters the word "right", all sorts of bad philosophy and connotations send them spinning off into the void. "Awesome", on the other hand, has no philosophical respectability, hence no philosophical baggage.

"Awesome" is vague enough to capture all your moral intuition by the well-known mechanisms behind fake utility functions, and meaningless enough that this is no problem. If you think "happiness" is the stuff, you might get confused and try t

...
[SEQ RERUN] High Challenge
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-06T06:28:26.043Z

Today's post, High Challenge was originally published on 19 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Life should not always be made easier for the same reason that video games should not always be made easier. Think in terms of eliminating low-quality work to make way for high-quality work, rather than eliminating all challenge. One needs games that are fun to play and not just fun to win. Life's utility function is over 4D trajectories, not just 3D outcomes. Values can legitimately be over the subjective experience, the objective result, and the challenging process by which it is achieved - the traveller, the destination and the journey.

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 Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun, 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.
Macro, not Micro
by jsteinhardt — 2013-01-06T05:29:38.689Z

Overview

The basic observation is that, if we think of life as an optimization problem, then redefining the search space is much more important than making local optimizations; as a fact of human psychology it's hard to consciously focus on both; but we can implicitly get away with doing both by creating mental triggers for when local optimizations are likely to be particularly effective to think about, and by structuring things so that many local optimizations get made automatically.

Introduction

If you have been to one of the Rationality Minicamps or certain other CFAR events, you may have had the privilege to attend one of Anna Salamon's excellent classes on microeconomics (despite the title of the post, I am being sincere here; you really should attend them if you haven't already). There is too much content to briefly summarize, but essentially "microeconomics" in this context means applying basic microeconomic concepts like marginal value, value of information, etc. to everyday life. For example, if you spend 30 seconds brushing your teeth each day, then spending five minutes to think of something else to do at the same time (like stretching) will save you 3 hours a year, which is a great investment! (There are some caveats to this calculation, but I'm glossing over them as they aren't relevant to the post.)

And indeed, spending 5 minutes (once) to save 3 hours (every year) is almost tautologically a good investment. Now that I've brought up this example, and assuming you value your time, you should probably actually go through this exercise (or just use the stretching suggestion).

The Problem

I intend to argue against something similar to this but subtly different. Basically, while any given trade such as the one above is good, I think it is a mistake to systematically search for such trades. Note that I also don't want to argue that you should never search for such trades. If you're about to buy a car you should almost certainly put a lot of microeconomic optimization into it, and if you can find things that improve your overall work efficiency substantially, then you are winning big-time. But I worry that, sometimes, the wrong lesson is drawn from these microeconomics examples (or cognitive bias examples, or any other rationality skill), namely that X is suboptimal by default and we should go out looking for places to optimize X.

The reason I...
[Discussion] The Kelly criterion and consequences for decision making under uncertainty
by Metus — 2013-01-06T02:14:52.715Z

The Kelly criterion is the optimal way to allocate one's bankroll over a lifetime to a series of bets assuming the actor's utility increases logarithmically with the amount of money won. Most importantly the criterion gives motivation to decide between investments with identical expected value but different risk of default. It essentially stipulates that the proportion of one's bankroll invested in a class of bets should be proportional to the expected value divided by the payoff in case it pans out.

Now, nothing in the formalism restricts the rule to bets or money for that matter, but is applicable to any situation an actor as assumed above faces uncertainty and possible payoff in utility. Aside from the obvious application to investments, e.g. bonds, this is also applicable to the purchase of insurance or cryonic services.

Buying an insurance can obviously be modeled as bet in the Kelly sense. A simple generalisation of the Kelly criterion leads to a formula that allows to incorporate losses.

An open question, to me at least, is if it possible to generalise the Kelly criterion to arbitrary probability distributions. Also, how can it be that integration over all payoffs for constant expected value evaluates as infinity?

Finally, how would a similar criterion look like for other forms of utility functions?

I did not put this question in the open thread because I think the Kelly criterion deserves more of a discussion and is immediately relevant to this site's interests.
[LINK] Why taking ideas seriously is probably a bad thing to do
by David_Gerard — 2013-01-05T23:37:55.909Z

Yvain's blog: Epistemic learned helplessness.

A friend in business recently complained about his hiring pool, saying that he couldn't find people with the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don't like it. He told me a good portion of the point of CfAR was to either find or create people who would believe something after it had been proven to them.
And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn't until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went "Wait, no, that would be the worst idea ever."
I don't think I'm overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average high school dropout. Like I mean that on almost any topic, given almost any position, I could totally demolish her and make her look like an idiot. Reduce her to some form of "Look, everything you say fits together and I can't explain why you're wrong, I just know you are!" Or, more plausibly, "Shut up I don't want to talk about this!"
Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem and what it means for CEV
by AlexMennen — 2013-01-05T21:38:42.693Z

A Friendly AI would have to be able to aggregate each person's preferences into one utility function. The most straightforward and obvious way to do this is to agree on some way to normalize each individual's utility function, and then add them up. But many people don't like this, usually for reasons involving utility monsters. If you are one of these people, then you better learn to like it, because according to Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem, any alternative can result in the supposedly Friendly AI making a choice that is bad for every member of the population. More formally,

Axiom 1: Every person, and the FAI, are VNM-rational agents.

Axiom 2: Given any two choices A and B such that every person prefers A over B, then the FAI prefers A over B.

Axiom 3: There exist two choices A and B such that every person prefers A over B.

(Edit: Note that I'm assuming a fixed population with fixed preferences. This still seems reasonable, because we wouldn't want the FAI to be dynamically inconsistent, so it would have to draw its values from a fixed population, such as the people alive now. Alternatively, even if you want the FAI to aggregate the preferences of a changing population, the theorem still applies, but this comes with it's own problems, such as giving people (possibly including the FAI) incentives to create, destroy, and modify other people to make the aggregated utility function more favorable to them.)

Give each person a unique integer label from to , where is the number of people. For each person , let be some function that, interpreted as a utility function, accurately describes 's preferences (there exists such a function by the VNM utility theorem). Note that I want to be some particular function, distinct from, for instance, , even though and represent the same utility function. This is so it makes sense to add them.

Theorem: The FAI maximizes the expected value of , for some set of scalars .

Actually, I changed the axioms a little bit. Harsanyi originally used “Given any two choices A and B such that every person is indifferent between A and B, the FAI is indifferent between A and B” in place of my axioms 2 and 3 (also he didn't call it an FAI, of course). For the proof (from Harsanyi's axioms), see section III of Harsanyi (1955), or section 2 of Hammond (1992). Hammond claims that his proof is simpler, but he uses jargon that scar...
[Link] The school of science fiction
by  — 2013-01-05T18:07:22.369Z

I recently discovered a cool new blog called studiolo and wanted to share it here. You will probably like this post if you like science fiction since it contains long excerpts of it. Unfortunately formatting it properly as a quote has been giving me some trouble, so I'll go with the least ugly looking solution, please don't think I claim to have wrote it. I found the speculation entertaining and interesting because I have extensively thought along similar lines about the effect of science fiction I consumed on my own world view (though I didn't mention it often).

Link to original post by Federico.

The school of science fiction

I have tried to persuade my friends and acquaintances that governmental reboot, and friendly AI, are important problems. I have failed. Two candidate hypotheses:

1. They do not share my distaste for the banal.

2. They did not consume, at the formative age, a sufficient amount of science fiction.

#1 and #2 are not mutually exclusive. Distaste for the banal is merely an attitude—but in the first place, fascinating consequences are what nourished my Bayesian, utilitarian beliefs. Science fiction encourages kids to realise that life, the Universe and everything holds out fascinating possibilities, and that it is both valid and essential for humans to explore these ideas.

Sister Y, in her pornographically insightful essay on insight porn, highlights Philip K Dick’s short stories. I concur. Dick writes in 1981:

I will define science fiction, first, by saying what sf is not. It cannot be defined as “a story (or novel or play) set in the future,” since there exists such a thing as space adventure, which is set in the future but is not sf: it is just that: adventures, fights and wars in the future in space involving super-advanced technology. Why, then, is it not science fiction? It would seem to be, and Doris Lessing (e.g.) supposes that it is. However, space adventure lacks the distinct new idea that is the essential ingredient. Also, there can be science fiction set in the present: the alternate world story or novel. So if we separate sf from the future and also from ultra-advanced technology, what then do we have that can be called sf?

We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: it is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society; that is, our known society acts as a jumping-

...