trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Robot ethics returns
by KatjaGrace — 2013-02-15T03:25:51.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

People are often interested in robot ethics. I have argued before that this is strange. I offered two potential explanations:

Ethics seems deep and human, so it’s engagingly eerie to combine it with heartless AI

People vastly misjudge how much ethics contributes to the total value society creates

A more obvious explanation now: people are just more interested in ethics when the subject is far away, for instance in the future. This is the prediction of construal level theory. It says thinking about something far away makes you think more abstractly, and in terms of goals and ideals rather than low level constraints. Ethics is all this.

So a further prediction would be that when we come to use robots a lot, expertise from robot ethicists will be in as little demand as expertise from washing machine ethicists is now.

Some other predictions, to help check this theory:

Emerging or imagined technologies should arouse ethical feelings more than present technologies do in general

International trade should prompt more ethical feelings than local trade

Stories of old should be more moralizing than stories of now

Historical figures should be seen in a more moral light than present-day celebrities

Space travel should be discussed in terms of more moral goals than Earth travel.

Ethical features of obscure cultures should be relatively salient compared to familiar cultures

More? Which of these are actually true?

There is definitely some conflicting evidence, for instance people feel more compelled to help people in front of them than those in Africa (there was an old OB post on this, but I can’t find it). There are also many other reasons the predictions above may be true. Emerging technologies might prompt more ethical concerns because they are potentially more dangerous for instance. The ethical dimension to killing everyone is naturally prominent. Overall construal level theory still seems to me a promising model for variations in ethical concern.

Added: I’m not confident that there is disproportionate interest compared to other topic areas. I seem to have heard about it too much, but this could be a sampling bias.
LW Women: LW Online
by daenerys — 2013-02-15T01:43:08.454Z

Standard Intro

The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.

Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.

Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.

Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)

Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post

To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

(Note from me: I've been procrastinating on posting these. Sorry to everyone who submitted! But I've got them organized decently enough to post now, and will be putting one up once a week or so, until we're through)

Submitter A

I think this is all true. Note that that commenter hasn't commented since 2009.

Objectifying remarks about attractive women and sneery remarks about unattractive women are not nice. I worry that guys at less wrong would ignore unattractive women if they came to meetings. Unattractive women can still be smart! I also worry that they would only pay attention to attractive women insofar as they think they might get to sleep with them.

I find the "women are aliens" attitude that various commenters (and even Eliezer in the post I link to) seem to have difficult to deal with: http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/. I wish these posters would make it clear that they are talking about women on average: presumably they don't think that all men and all women find each other to be like al...
Meetup : Future Meetup for Indonesian LWers
by rv77ax — 2013-02-14T22:00:17.614Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Future Meetup for Indonesian LWers

WHEN:
01 January 2015 04:00:00PM (+0700)

WHERE:
Bandung, Indonesia

I remember about LW's survey sometimes ago, and when the survey result come out, I see that only one LWers is come from Indonesia. Obviously that was me.

I try to search forum and this site, using keyword "Indonesia", and only found one user, which is me.

Now, in case someone from and/or live in my country like to have a meetup, I put this reminder, so when they search this site they will find it and maybe we can have meetup.

Discussion article for the meetup : Future Meetup for Indonesian LWers
Learning critical thinking: a personal example
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2013-02-14T20:43:06.521Z

Related to: Is Rationality Teachable

“Critical care nursing isn’t about having critically ill patients,” my preceptor likes to say, “it’s about critical thinking.”

I doubt she's talking about the same kind of critical thinking that philosophers are, and I find that definition abstract anyway. There’s been a lot of talk about critical thinking during our four years of nursing school, but our profs seem to have a hard time defining it. So I’ll go with a definition from Google.

Critical thinking can be seen as having two components: 1) a set of information and belief generating and processing skills, and 2) the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behaviour. It is thus to be contrasted with: 1) the mere acquisition and retention of information alone, because it involves a particular way in which information is sought and treated; 2) the mere possession of a set of skills, because it involves the continual use of them; and 3) the mere use of those skills ("as an exercise") without acceptance of their results.1

That’s basically rationality–epistemic, i.e. generating true beliefs, and instrumental, i.e. knowing how to use them to achieve what you want. Maybe part of me expected, implicitly, to have an easier time learning this skill because of my Less Wrong knowledge. And maybe I am more consciously aware of my mistakes, and the cognitive factors that caused them, than most of my classmates. When it’s forty-five minutes past the end of my shift and I’m still charting, I’m also calling myself out on succumbing to the planning fallacy. I once went through the first half hour of a shift during my pediatrics rotation thinking that one of my patients had cerebral palsy, when he actually had cystic fibrosis–all because I misread my prof’s handwriting as ‘CP’ when she’d written ‘CF’. I was totally confused by all the enzyme supplements on his list of meds, but it still took me a while to figure it out–a combination of priming and confirmation bias, taken to the next level.

But, overall, even if I know what I'm doing wrong, it hasn’t been easier to do things right. I have a hard time with the hospital environment, possibly because I’m the kind of person who ended up reading and posting on L...
Meetup : Buffalo Meetup
by StonesOnCanvas — 2013-02-14T18:42:24.412Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo Meetup

WHEN:
17 February 2013 04:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
SPOT Coffee Delaware Ave & W Chippewa St, Buffalo, NY

(Apologies, for the short notice.) Last meetup we talked about making sure your beliefs "pay rent " by constraining anticipation.
This time we'll talk about specific examples of ways some beliefs may not even really count as beliefs at all:

Belief in Belief - http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/
Professing and Cheering - http://lesswrong.com/lw/i6/professing_and_cheering/
Belief as Attire - http://lesswrong.com/lw/i7/belief_as_attire/

The concepts are pretty similar so I thought I'd just lump them together for this meetup. Read what you can (3 posts is a lot, so don't worry about it if you don't get around to it). In any case, I'll do a cliff-notes summary for everyone. Anyone can attend. Feel free to invite friends who might be interested. We'll also play some cool games too. We're meeting at SPOT this time (I'll have a sign so you can find us easily).

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo Meetup
Domesticating reduced impact AIs
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-02-14T16:59:13.302Z

About a year ago, I posted several ideas for "reduced impact AI" (what Nick Bostrom calls "domesticity"). I think the most promising approach was the third one, which I pompously titled "The information in the evidence". In this post, I'll attempt to put together a (non-realistic) example of this, to see if it's solid enough to build on. I'll be highlighting assumptions I'm making about the AI; please point out any implicit assumption that I missed, and any other weaknesses of the setup. For the moment, I'm more interested in "this doesn't work" than "this can't be done in practice" or "this can't be usefully generalised".

EDIT: It wasn't clear here, but any paperclip constructed by the reduced impact AI would be destroyed in the explosion, and the AIs would not be observed during the process. How to get useful work out of the AI will be the next step, if this model holds up.

Intuitive idea

For a reduced impact AI, we want an AI that can accomplish something, say building a paperclip, without it going out of control and optimising the universe. We want the future to be roughly the same whether or not the AI was turned on. Hence the piece of information "the AI was turned on" is not particularly important - if we didn't know, we wouldn't go far wrong in our predictions.

To enforce this we'll equip the AI with a two-piece motivation: a utility function U (causing it to build paperclips) and a penalty function R (which penalises the AI if its actions have a large future 'impact'). The challenge is to have a setup and a definition of R that implements this intuitive idea.

Reduced impact

Can we hope to define reduced impact? Doesn't any change percolate across all future time? Yes, but not all changes are the same - especially where our ability to predict them is concerned. Imagine an AI, confined to a box. While inside the box, it will build a paperclip. Then, in one hour's time, an antimatter bomb inside the box will explode, obliterating everything inside. We would intuitively say that whether the paperclip was built or not, would have very little impact afterwards. What we really mean is that we are unable to usefully use that information for future predictions. To make it even harder, surround the box by a large mass of antimatter gas, moving chaotically. In order to figure out the consequences of anything happening inside the box, we'd have to be able t...
Meetup : Purdue Meetup
by Sek0M — 2013-02-14T16:48:20.713Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Purdue Meetup

WHEN:
16 February 2013 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Purdue - Hicks Library

A reminder that there will be a Purdue Less Wrong Meetup this Friday. We have reserved a space, but given the short timeline and incomplete email list the plan is to meet in Hicks, group up, and transition to the reserved space. I'm saying the meeting time is 7PM instead of 6:50 based on my own preference for round numbers.

We're planning to bring some minor level of snackage, and in addition to our often very dynamic discussions I will offer some more structured thoughts on, well, structure, and how to grow the organization and offer more utility to our own meetup folks and possible to the campus and community in general. Please feel free to contact me with any question or concerns, and we hope to see you there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Purdue Meetup
The Singularity Wars
by JoshuaFox — 2013-02-14T09:44:53.666Z

(This is a introduction, for those not immersed in the Singularity world, into the history of and relationships between SU, SIAI [SI, MIRI], SS, LW, CSER, FHI, and CFAR. It also has some opinions, which are strictly my own.)

The good news is that there were no Singularity Wars.

The Bay Area had a Singularity University and a Singularity Institute, each going in a very different direction. You'd expect to see something like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front, burning each other's grain supplies as the Romans moved in.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence was founded first, in 2000, by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Singularity University was founded in 2008. Ray Kurzweil, the driving force behind SU, was also active in SIAI, serving on its board in varying capacities in the years up to 2010.
SIAI's multi-part name was clunky, and their domain, singinst.org, unmemorable. I kept accidentally visiting siai.org for months, but it belonged to the Self Insurance Association of Illinois. (The cool new domain name singularity.org, recently acquired after a rather uninspired site appeared there for several years, arrived shortly before it was no longer relevant.) All the better to confuse you with, SIAI has been going for the last few years by the shortened name Singularity Institute, abbreviated SI.
The annual Singularity Summit was launched by SI, together with Kurzweil, in 2006. SS was SI's premier PR mechanism, mustering geek heroes to give their tacit endorsement for SI's seriousness, if not its views, by agreeing to appear on-stage.

The Singularity Summit was always off-topic for SI: more SU-like than SI-like. Speakers spoke about whatever technologically-advanced ideas interested them. Occasional SI representatives spoke about the Intelligence Explosion, but they too would often stray into other areas like rationality and the scientific process. Yet SS remained firmly in SI's hands.

It became clear over the years that SU and SI have almost nothing to do with each other except for the word "Singularity." The word has three major meanings, and of these, Yudkowsky favored the Intelligence Explosion while Kurzweil pushed Accelerating Change.
But actually, SU's activities have little to do wit...
A Series of Increasingly Perverse and Destructive Games
by nigerweiss — 2013-02-14T09:22:23.380Z

Related to: Higher Than the Most High

The linked post describes a game in which (I fudge a little), Omega comes to you and two other people, and ask you to tell him an integer. The person who names the largest integer is allowed to leave. The other two are killed.

This got me thinking about variations on the same concept, and here's what I've come up, taking that game to be GAME0. The results are sort of a fun time-waster, and bring up some interesting issues. For your enjoyment...

THE GAMES:

GAME1: Omega takes you and two strangers (all competent programmers), and kidnaps and sedates you. You awake in three rooms with instructions printed on the wall explaining the game, and a computer with an operating system and programming language compiler, but no internet. Food, water, and toiletries are provided, but no external communication. The participants are allowed to write programs on the computer in a language that supports arbitrarily large numerical values. The programs are taken by Omega and run on a hypercomputer in finite time (this hypercomputer can resolve the halting problem and infinite loops, but programs that do not eventually halt return no output). The person who wrote the program with the largest output is allowed to leave. The others are instantly and painlessly killed. In the event of a tie, everyone dies. If your program returns no output, that is taken to be zero.

GAME2: Identical to GAME1, except that each program you write has to take two inputs, which will be the text of the other players' programs (assume they're all written in the same language). The reward for outputting the largest number apply normally.

GAME3: Identical to Game2, except that while you are sedated, Omega painlessly and imperceptibly uploads you. Additionally, the instructions on the wall now specify that your program must take four inputs - blackbox functions which represent the uploaded minds of all three players, plus a simulation of the room you're in, indistinguishable from the real thing. We'll assume that players can't modify or interpret the contents of their opponents' brains. The room function take an argument of a string (which controls the text printed on the wall, and outputs whatever number the person in the simulation's pro...
Meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-02]
by Sohum — 2013-02-14T09:02:50.102Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-02]

WHEN:
17 February 2013 11:00:00AM (+0000)

WHERE:
Trinity JCR, Cambridge, UK

Meetup! This week, we'll be continuing our reading group session of the Shiny New Sequence, Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 For Beginners. These are explicitly designed as introductory posts, and this is just our second session, so dive right in with us if you're new!

We only covered The Useful Idea of Truth last week, so this week we'll do Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms and the two minor posts, Skill: The Map is Not The Territory and Firewalling the Optimal From The Rational.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-02]
Rationalist Lent
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2013-02-14T06:32:40.415Z

As I understand it, Lent is a holiday where we celebrate the scientific method by changing exactly one variable in our lives for 40 days. This seems like a convenient Schelling point for rationalists to adopt, so:

What variable are you going to change for the next 40 days?

(I am really annoyed I didn't think of this yesterday.)
[SEQ RERUN] War and/or Peace (2/8)
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-14T04:50:06.199Z

Today's post, War and/or Peace (2/8) was originally published on 31 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The true prisoner's dilemma against aliens. The conference struggles to decide the appropriate course of action.

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 The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8), 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 : Cincinnati February: Predictions
by RolfAndreassen — 2013-02-14T04:01:18.709Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cincinnati February: Predictions

WHEN:
16 February 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
354 Ludlow Avenue

We will meet at the Amol India on Ludlow street at 1400. This month's exercise is to try for calibration. Each of us should give a probability for each of the five events below occurring before April 1st; at the meetup we will discuss our reasoning and perhaps update. Then in April we'll see how we did, as a group and individually.

Will Kim Jong-un cease to be dictator of Best Korea?

Will the sentence of any of the seven scientists convicted of failing to adequately warn of the L'Aquila earthquake be modified?

Will a large (more than 1000 soldiers) foreign force invade Iran?

Will pope Bendict's resignation be revealed as for other than medical reasons?

Will Eliezer update HPMOR
a) Exactly once
b) Exactly twice
c) Three or more times?

If you like, you can substitute other questions, or suggest new ones, in the comments. Posting to PredictionBook is optional but encouraged.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cincinnati February: Predictions
Meetup : Vancouver Boredom vs Scope Insensitivity, and life-debugging
by  — 2013-02-14T03:15:02.280Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Boredom vs Scope Insensitivity, and life-debugging

WHEN:
16 February 2013 03:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
2505 W broadway, vancouver

Meet at Benny's Bagels on west broadway at 15:00 on saturday.

We are going to discuss Boredom vs Scope Insensitivity and related issues with utility curves.

To complement such a theoretical topic, we may also discuss the rationality failures in our lives that we'd like to get better at. It should be thoroughly depressing and hopefully useful.

As usual, see us on our mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Boredom vs Scope Insensitivity, and life-debugging
Memetic Tribalism
by  — 2013-02-14T03:03:04.591Z

Related: politics is the mind killer, other optimizing

When someone says something stupid, I get an urge to correct them. Based on the stories I hear from others, I'm not the only one.

For example, some of my friends are into this rationality thing, and they've learned about all these biases and correct ways to get things done. Naturally, they get irritated with people who haven't learned this stuff. They complain about how their family members or coworkers aren't rational, and they ask what is the best way to correct them.

I could get into the details of the optimal set of arguments to turn someone into a rationalist, or I could go a bit meta and ask: "Why would you want to do that?"

Why should you spend your time correcting someone else's reasoning?

One reason that comes up is that it's valuable for some reason to change their reasoning. OK, when is it possible?

You actually know better than them.

You know how to patch their reasoning.

They will be receptive to said patching.

They will actually change their behavior if the accept the patch.

It seems like it should be rather rare for those conditions to all be true, or even to be likely enough for the expected gain to be worth the cost, and yet I feel the urge quite often. And I'm not thinking it through and deciding, I'm just feeling an urge; humans are adaptation executors, and this one seems like an adaptation. For some reason "correcting" people's reasoning was important enough in the ancestral environment to be special-cased in motivation hardware.

I could try to spin an ev-psych just-so story about tribal status, intellectual dominance hierarchies, ingroup-outgroup signaling, and whatnot, but I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, so I wouldn't actually know what I was doing, and the details don't matter anyway. What matters is that this urge seems to be hardware, and it probably has nothing to do with actual truth or your strategic concerns.

It seems to happen to everyone who has ideas. Social justice types get frustrated with people who seem unable to acknowledge their own privilege. The epistemological flamewar between atheists and theists rages continually across the internet. Tech-savvy folk get frustrated with others' total inability to explore and use Google. Some aspiring rationalists get annoyed with people who refuse to decompartmentalize or claim that something is in a separate magisteria...