trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
You’re Entitled to Everyone’s Opinion
by satt — 2014-09-20T15:39:07.903Z

Over the past year, I've noticed a topic where Less Wrong might have a blind spot: public opinion. Since last September I've had (or butted into) five conversations here where someone's written something which made me think, "you wouldn't be saying that if you'd looked up surveys where people were actually asked about this". The following list includes six findings I've brought up in those LW threads. All of the findings come from surveys of public opinion in the United States, though some of the results are so obvious that polls scarcely seem necessary to establish their truth.

The public's view of the harms and benefits from scientific research has consistently become more pessimistic since the National Science Foundation began its surveys in 1979. (In the wake of repeated misconduct scandals, and controversies like those over vaccination, global warming, fluoridation, animal research, stem cells, and genetic modification, people consider scientists less objective and less trustworthy.)

Most adults identify as neither Republican nor Democrat. (Although the public is far from apolitical, lots of people are unhappy with how politics currently works, and also recognize that their beliefs align imperfectly with the simplistic left-right axis. This dissuades them from identifying with mainstream parties.)

Adults under 30 are less likely to believe that abortion should be illegal than the middle-aged. (Younger adults tend to be more socially liberal in general than their parents' generation.)

In the 1960s, those under 30 were less likely than the middle-aged to think the US made a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam. (The under-30s were more likely to be students and/or highly educated, and more educated people were less likely to think sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake.)

The Harris Survey asked, in November 1969, "as far as their objectives are concerned, do you sympathize with the goals of the people who are demonstrating, marching, and protesting against the war in Vietnam, or do you disagree with their goals?" Most respondents aged 50+ sympathized with the protesters' goals, whereas only 28% of under-35s did. (Despite the specific wording of the question, the younger respondents worried that the protests reflected badly on their demographic, whereas older respondents were more often glad to see their own dissent voiced.)

A 2002 survey found

...
LessWrong's attitude towards AI research
by Florian_Dietz — 2014-09-20T15:02:40.692Z

AI friendliness is an important goal and it would be insanely dangerous to build an AI without researching this issue first. I think this is pretty much the consensus view, and that is perfectly sensible.

However, I believe that we are making the wrong inferences from this.

The straightforward inference is "we should ensure that we completely understand AI friendliness before starting to build an AI". This leads to a strongly negative view of AI researchers and scares them away. But unfortunately reality isn't that simple. The goal isn't "build a friendly AI", but "make sure that whoever builds the first AI makes it friendly".

It seems to me that it is vastly more likely that the first AI will be built by a large company, or as a large government project, than by a group of university researchers, who just don't have the funding for that.

I therefore think that we should try to take a more pragmatic approach. The way to do this would be to focus more on outreach and less on research. It won't do anyone any good if we find the perfect formula for AI friendliness on the same day that someone who has never heard of AI friendliness before finishes his paperclip maximizer.

What is your opinion on this?
Discussion of "What are your contrarian views?"
by Metus — 2014-09-20T12:09:50.492Z

I'd like to use this thread to review the "What are your contrarian views?" thread as the meta discussion there was drowned out by the intended content I feel. What can be done better with the voting system? Should threads like these be a regular occurence? What have you specifically learned from that thread? Did you like it at all?

Usual voting rules apply.
[question] What edutainment apps do you recommend?
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-09-20T08:55:31.119Z

Follow up to: Rationality Games Apps

In the spirit of: Games for rationalists

My son (10) wants a smartphone and I reasonably expect that he wants to and will play games with it. He appears to be the right age to use it. I don't want to prevent him from playing games nor do I think that possible or helpful. But I'd like to suggest and promote a few apps and games that *are* helpful or from which he can learn something.

Obvious candidates are

Dragon Box

HabitRPG

Anki App

There are lots of low profile apps filed under learning in the app stores but most of this is crap and it takes lots of time to explore these.

I also found some recommendation for learning with Android apps and will point my son to these.

I'd like to hear what apps do you or yours children use. Which apps and esp. games do you recommend for future rationalists?
Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy
by Lexico — 2014-09-19T22:18:39.041Z

I remember seeing a talk of the concept of privilege show up in the discussion thread on contrarian views.

Some discussion got started from "Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real."

This is an article that presents some of those ideas in a way that might be approachable for LW.

http://curt-rice.com/quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy/

One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought, but can be the result as a failure mode where we don't rationality correctly in these social situations.

Of course a broad view of these issues exist, and many people have different ways of looking at these issues, but I think it would be good to focus on the case presented in this article rather than your other associations.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-09-19T16:43:19.602Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 12th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Copenhagen - September: This Wavefunction Has Uncollapsed: 13 September 2014 03:00PM
Frankfurt: How to improve your life: 28 September 2014 02:00PM
Houston, TX: 13 September 2014 02:00PM
[Perth] Sunday lunch: 21 September 2014 12:00PM
Portland Teachable Skills Discussion: 20 September 2014 01:00PM
Tel Aviv: Rational Career Development: 18 September 2014 08:33PM
Utrecht: Debiasing techniques: 21 September 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Effective Altruism and Politics: 05 October 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Artificial Intelligence: 19 October 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Climate Change: 02 November 2014 03:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 13 September 2025 01:30PM
Brussels - September meetup: 13 September 2014 01:00PM
[Cambridge MA] Passive Investing and Financial Independence: 21 September 2014 03:30PM
[Cambridge MA] Social Skills: 24 September 2014 03:30PM
Canberra: Akrasia-busters!: 13 September 2014 06:00PM
London social meetup: 14 September 2014 02:00AM
Moscow Meetup: Codename Felix: 14 September 2014 02:00PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 24 September 2014 06:30PM
Vienna - Superintelligence: 27 September 2014 03:00PM
Washington D.C.: Parkour (Backup: Task Management): 14 September 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming w...
A proof of Löb's theorem in Haskell
by cousin_it — 2014-09-19T13:01:41.032Z

I'm not sure if this post is very on-topic for LW, but we have many folks who understand Haskell and many folks who are interested in Löb's theorem (see e.g. Eliezer's picture proof), so I thought why not post it here? If no one likes it, I can always just move it to my own blog.

A few days ago I stumbled across a post by Dan Piponi, claiming to show a Haskell implementation of something similar to Löb's theorem. Unfortunately his code had a couple flaws. It was circular and relied on Haskell's laziness, and it used an assumption that doesn't actually hold in logic (see the second comment by Ashley Yakeley there). So I started to wonder, what would it take to code up an actual proof? Wikipedia spells out the steps very nicely, so it seemed to be just a matter of programming.

Well, it turned out to be harder than I thought.

One problem is that Haskell has no type-level lambdas, which are the most obvious way (by Curry-Howard) to represent formulas with propositional variables. These are very useful for proving stuff in general, and Löb's theorem uses them to build fixpoints by the diagonal lemma.

The other problem is that Haskell is Turing complete, which means it can't really be used for proof checking, because a non-terminating program can be viewed as the proof of any sentence. Several people have told me that Agda or Idris might be better choices in this regard. Ultimately I decided to use Haskell after all, because that way the post will be understandable to a wider audience. It's easy enough to convince yourself by looking at the code that it is in fact total, and transliterate it into a total language if needed. (That way you can also use the nice type-level lambdas and fixpoints, instead of just postulating one particular fixpoint as I did in Haskell.)

But the biggest problem for me was that the Web didn't seem to have any good explanations for the thing I wanted to do! At first it seems like modal proofs and Haskell-like languages should be a match made in heaven, but in reality it's full of subtle issues that no one has written down, as far as I know. So I'd like this post to serve as a reference, an example approach that avoids all difficulties and just works.

LW user lmm has helped me a lot with understanding the issues involved, and wrote a candidate implementation in Scala...
Friendliness in Natural Intelligences
by Slider — 2014-09-18T22:33:52.817Z

The challenge of friendliness in Artificial Intelligence is to ensure how a general intelligence will be of utility instead of being destructive or pathologically indifferent to the values of existing individuals or aims and goals of their creation. The current provision of computer science is likely to yield bugs and way too technical and inflexible guidelines of action. It is known to be inadequate to handle the job sufficiently. However the challenge of friendliness is also faced by natural intelligences, those that are not designed by an intelligence but molded into being by natural selection.

We know that natural intelligences do the job adequately enough that we do not think that natural intelligence unfriendliness is a significant existential threat. Like plants do solar energy capturing way more efficently and maybe utilising quantum effects that humans can't harness, we know that natural intelligences are using friendliness technology that is of higher caliber that we can build into machines. However as we progress this technology maybe lacking dangerously behind and we need to be able to apply it to hardware in addition to wetware and potentially boost it to new levels.

The earliest concrete example of a natural intelligence being controlled for friendliness I can think of is Socrates. He was charged for "corruption of the heart of the societys youngters". He defended that his stance of questioning everything was without fault. He was however found quilty even thought the trial could be identified with faults. The jury might have been politically motivated or persuaded and the citizens might have expected the results to not be taken seriously. While Socrates was given a very real possibility of escaping imprisonment and capital punishment he did not circumvent his society operation. In fact he was obidient enough that he acted as his own executioner drinking the poison himself. Because of the kind of farce his teachers death had been Plato lost hope for the principles that lead to such an absurd result him becoming skeptical of democrasy.

However if the situation would have been about a artificial intelligence a lot of things went very right. The intelligences society became scared of him and asked it to die. There was dialog about how the deciders were ignorant and stupid and that nothing questionable had been done. However ultimately when issues of ...
Friendliness in Natural Intelligences
by Slider — 2014-09-18T22:33:31.750Z

The challenge of friendliness in Artificial Intelligence is to ensure how a general intelligence will be of utility instead of being destructive or pathologically indifferent to the values of existing individuals or aims and goals of their creation. The current provision of computer science is likely to yield bugs and way too technical and inflexible guidelines of action. It is known to be inadequate to handle the job sufficiently. However the challenge of friendliness is also faced by natural intelligences, those that are not designed by an intelligence but molded into being by natural selection.

We know that natural intelligences do the job adequately enough that we do not think that natural intelligence unfriendliness is a significant existential threat. Like plants do solar energy capturing way more efficently and maybe utilising quantum effects that humans can't harness, we know that natural intelligences are using friendliness technology that is of higher caliber that we can build into machines. However as we progress this technology maybe lacking dangerously behind and we need to be able to apply it to hardware in addition to wetware and potentially boost it to new levels.

The earliest concrete example of a natural intelligence being controlled for friendliness I can think of is Socrates. He was charged for "corruption of the heart of the societys youngters". He defended that his stance of questioning everything was without fault. He was however found quilty even thought the trial could be identified with faults. The jury might have been politically motivated or persuaded and the citizens might have expected the results to not be taken seriously. While Socrates was given a very real possibility of escaping imprisonment and capital punishment he did not circumvent his society operation. In fact he was obidient enough that he acted as his own executioner drinking the poison himself. Because of the kind of farce his teachers death had been Plato lost hope for the principles that lead to such an absurd result him becoming skeptical of democrasy.

However if the situation would have been about a artificial intelligence a lot of things went very right. The intelligences society became scared of him and asked it to die. There was dialog about how the deciders were ignorant and stupid and that nothing questionable had been done. However ultimately when issues of ...
Link: The trap of "optimal conditions"
by polymathwannabe — 2014-09-18T18:37:14.708Z

"the next time you’re stopping yourself from trying something because the conditions are not optimal, remember that those optimal conditions may not have been the reason it worked. They may not be the cause. They may not even be correlated. They may just be a myth you’ve bought into or sold yourself that limits you from breaking out and exceeding your expectations."

More at:

http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/1-huge-way-limit-break-fiff
Meetup : Moscow Meetup: Unusual as usual
by Alexander230 — 2014-09-18T16:57:38.372Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow Meetup: Unusual as usual

WHEN:
28 September 2014 02:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Here's our plan:

"Calibration with topics" excercise.

A talk about consequences of a belief.

A talk about habits.

A talk about one Cognitive Bias.

A talk about Shelling points and Shelling fences.

A game of Fallacymania at the afterparty.

Details and schedule:

https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/-28--1SH4T1crrv6

Yudcoins, positive reinforcement and pizza will all be present. If you've been to our meetups, you know what I'm talking about, and if you didn't, the best way to find out is to come and see for yourself.

Info for newcomers: We gather in the Yandex office, you need the first revolving door under the archway. Here is a guide how to get there:

http://company.yandex.ru/contacts/redrose/

Call Slava at +7(926)313-96-42 if you're late. We start at 14:00 and stay until at least 19-20. Please pay attention that we only gather near the entrance and then come inside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow Meetup: Unusual as usual
Petrov Day is September 26
by jimrandomh — 2014-09-18T02:55:19.303Z

On September 26th, 1983, the world was nearly destroyed by nuclear war. That day is Petrov Day, named for the man who averted it. Petrov Day is now a yearly event on September 26 commemorating the anniversary of the Petrov incident. Last year, Citadel, the Boston-area rationalist house, performed a ritual on Petrov day. We will be doing it again - and have published a revised version, for anyone else who wants to have a Petrov Day celebration themselves.

The purpose of the ritual is to make catastrophic and existential risk emotionally salient, by putting it into historical context and providing positive and negative examples of how it has been handled. This is not for the faint of heart and not for the uninitiated; it is aimed at those who already know what catastrophic and existential risk is, have some background knowledge of what those risks are, and believe (at least on an abstract level) that preventing those risks from coming to pass is important.

Petrov Day is designed for groups of 5-10 people, and consists of a series of readings and symbolic actions which people take turns doing. It is easy to organize; you'll need a few simple props (candles and a candle-holder) and a printout of the program for each person, but other than that no preparation is necessary.

Organizer guide and program (for one-sided printing) (PDF)
Program for two-sided print and fold (PDF)

There will be a Petrov Day ritual hosted at Citadel (Boston area) and at Highgarden (New York area). If you live somewhere else, consider running one yourself!
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks
by RobinZ — 2014-09-17T18:56:52.273Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks

WHEN:
21 September 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to take turns presenting short (~10-20 minute) lectures on random topics. As before, the period from 3:00 to 3:30 will be reserved for congregating; the talks will run as long as people are interested or until the museum closes at 7:00 p.m., whichever comes first.
(If you need to show up late or leave early, that's fine - feel free to let us know if you want to give a talk at a particular time.)

Upcoming meetups:

Sept. 28: Book Swap

Oct. 5: Fun & Games

Oct. 12: TBA

Oct. 19: Mini Talks

Oct. 26: TBA

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks
Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves
by LoganStrohl — 2014-09-17T18:11:10.505Z

I sometimes let imaginary versions of myself make decisions for me.

I first started doing this after a friend told me (something along the lines of) this story. When they first became executive director of their organization, they suddenly had many more decisions to deal with per day than ever before. "Should we hire this person?" "Should I go buy more coffee for the coffee machine, or wait for someone else deal with it?" "How many participants should attend our first event?" "When can I schedule time to plan the fund drive?"

I'm making up these examples myself, but I'm sure you, too, can imagine how leading a brand new organization might involve a constant assault on the parts of your brain responsible for making decisions. They found it exhausting, and by the time they got home at the end of the day, a question like, "Would you rather we have peas or green beans with dinner?" often felt like the last straw. "I don't care about the stupid vegetables, just give me food and don't make me decide any more things!"

They were rescued by the following technique. When faced with a decision, they'd imagine "the Executive Director of the organization", and ask themselves, "What would 'the Executive Director of the organization' do?" Instead of making a decision, they'd make a prediction about the actions of that other person. Then, they'd just do whatever that person would do!

In my friend's case, they were trying to reduce decision fatigue. When I started trying it out myself, I was after a cure for something slightly different.

Imagine you're about to go bungee jumping off a high cliff. You know it's perfectly safe, and all you have to do is take a step forward, just like you've done every single time you've ever walked. But something is stopping you. The decision to step off the ledge is entirely yours, and you know you want to do it because this is why you're here. Yet here you are, still standing on the ledge.

You're scared. There's a battle happening in your brain. Part of you is going, "Just jump, it's easy, just do it!", while another part--the part in charge of your legs, apparently--is going, "NOPE. Nope nope nope nope NOPE." And you have this strange thought: "I wish someone would just push me so I don't have to decide."

Maybe you've been bungee jumping, and this is not at all how you responded to it. But I hope (for the sake of communication) that you've exper...