trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : February 2015 Rationality Dojo - Introduction to Ethics
by MelbourneLW — 2015-01-25T00:26:47.401Z

Discussion article for the meetup : February 2015 Rationality Dojo - Introduction to Ethics

WHEN:
01 February 2015 03:30:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
Ross House Association, 247-251 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

[ATTN: This month we will be back at our usual location - the Jenny Florence Room, Level 3, Ross House at 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. 3:30pm start / arrival / preparation - formal dojo activities will commence at 4:00pm.]

The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are crafted to be serious self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth. Each month a community member will run a session involving a presentation of content, discussion, and exercises.

Continuing the succession of immensely successful dojos, Gus will run a session on Introduction to Ethics.

As always, we will review the personal goals we committed to at the previous Dojo (I will have done X by the next Dojo). Our goals are now being recorded via Google Forms here -https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MCHH4MpbW0SI_2JyMSDlKnnGP4A0qxojQEZoMZIdopk/viewform, and Melbourne Less Wrong organisers have access to the form results if you wish to review the goals you set last month.

This month, we are also seeking 2-3 lightning talks from members. Have you learned something cool? Gained an insight from one of the Less Wrong sequences? Give a lightning talk and share it with Melbourne LW! Speakers will be limited to 5 minutes with room for questions. If you
have something you would like to present a lightning talk on, please contact Louise with your topic at lvalmoria@gmail.com or talk to Richard on the day.

The Dojo is likely to run for 2-3 hours, after which some people will get dinner together.

If you have any trouble finding the venue or getting in, text or call Richard on 0421231789

If you would like to present at a future Dojo or suggest a topic, please fill it in on the Rationality Dojo Roster:
http://is.gd/dojoroster

To organise similar events, please send an email to melbournelw@gmail.com

Discussion article for the meetup : February 2015 Rationality Dojo - Introduction to Ethics
Meetup : February 2015 Rationality Dojo - Introduction to Ethics
by MelbourneLW — 2015-01-25T00:26:07.719Z

Discussion article for the meetup : February 2015 Rationality Dojo - Introduction to Ethics

WHEN:
01 February 2015 03:30:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
Ross House Association, 247-251 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

February 2015 Rationality Dojo - Introduction to Ethics
WHEN: 1 February 2015 at 15:30 - 19:00
WHERE: Ross House Association, 247-251 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

[ATTN: This month we will be back at our usual location - the Jenny Florence Room, Level 3, Ross House at 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. 3:30pm start / arrival / preparation - formal dojo activities will commence at 4:00pm.]

The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are crafted to be serious self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth. Each month a community member will run a session involving a presentation of content, discussion, and exercises.

Continuing the succession of immensely successful dojos, Gus will run a session on Introduction to Ethics.

As always, we will review the personal goals we committed to at the previous Dojo (I will have done X by the next Dojo). Our goals are now being recorded via Google Forms here -https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MCHH4MpbW0SI_2JyMSDlKnnGP4A0qxojQEZoMZIdopk/viewform, and Melbourne Less Wrong organisers have access to the form results if you wish to review the goals you set last month.

This month, we are also seeking 2-3 lightning talks from members. Have you learned something cool? Gained an insight from one of the Less Wrong sequences? Give a lightning talk and share it with Melbourne LW! Speakers will be limited to 5 minutes with room for questions. If you
have something you would like to present a lightning talk on, please contact Louise with your topic at lvalmoria@gmail.com or talk to Richard on the day.

The Dojo is likely to run for 2-3 hours, after which some people will get dinner together.

If you have any trouble finding the venue or getting in, text or call Richard on 0421231789

If you would like to present at a future Dojo or suggest a topic, please fill it in on the Rationality Dojo Roster:
http://is.gd/dojoroster

To organise similar events, please send an email to melbournelw@gmail.com

Discussion article for the meetup : February 2015 Rationality Dojo - Introduction to Ethics
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Prisoner's Dilema Tournament
by rocurley — 2015-01-24T10:23:05.212Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Prisoner's Dilema Tournament

WHEN:
26 January 2015 06:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1390 Market St., San Francisco, CA

We'll be having a prisoner's dilemma tournament! (We've done this in DC and it was pretty fun).

If you call me when you get to the lobby (301-458-0764) I can give you directions on how to get in. Feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Prisoner's Dilema Tournament
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-01-23T19:20:09.179Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on January 16th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Paris LW Meetup - LHC Exhibit: 17 January 2015 02:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta January Meetup: Boring Advice & Stupid Questions: 17 January 2015 07:00PM
Australia Mega-meetup planning meeting: 22 January 2015 07:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Montreal Effective Altruism: Global Poverty: 22 January 2015 10:38AM
[Munich] January Meetup in Munich: 17 January 2015 03:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Unconference: 19 January 2015 06:00PM

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 - Caffe Medici: 17 January 2026 01:30PM
Brussels February meetup: Words: 14 February 2015 01:00PM
Canberra: the Hedonic Treadmill: 23 January 2015 06:00PM
London Social Meetup, 18/01/2015: 18 January 2015 02:00PM
Moscow LW lecture centre meetup: The New Foundation: 25 January 2015 02:00PM
Sydney Meetup - January: 28 January 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - How bad statistics can ruin your life: 01 February 2015 04:00PM
Vienna: 24 January 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 18 January 2015 03:00PM
West LA—Keep Your Identity Small: 21 January 2015 07:00PM

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, 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 weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup...
New, Brief Popular-Level Introduction to AI Risks and Superintelligence
by LyleN — 2015-01-23T15:43:30.387Z

The very popular blog Wait But Why has published the first part of a two-part explanation/summary of AI risks and superintelligence, and it looks like the second part will be focused on Friendly AI. I found it very clear, reasonably thorough and appropriately urgent without signaling paranoia or fringe-ness. It may be a good article to share with interested friends.

Update: Part 2 is now here.
The Role of Attractiveness in Mate Selection: Individual Variation
by JonahS — 2015-01-23T11:21:22.327Z

This post reports on a portion of my analysis of Fisman and Iyengar's speed dating dataset which bears on the question of how people select romantic partners.

Note: I made very substantial edits to the second to last section of this post having posted it, addressing questions of generalizability. I've also cross-posted to my blog.

Summary

Participants rated one another on several dimensions. The majority of variation in the ratings is captured by the average of the different rating types: some people were regarded as good overall, and others were regarded as not good overall.

The second most important source of variation in the ratings given to participants is that some were regarded as more attractive and fun than they were intelligent/sincere, and for others, the situation was reversed.

Broadly, when people had to chose between partners who were seen as attractive and fun and partners who were seen as intelligent and sincere, they had a moderately strong preference for partners who were seen as attractive and fun.

Individuals varied substantially in how they responded to the tradeoff, with some showing very strong preference for people who were seen as attractive and fun people, and others showed virtually no such preference.

The speed dating context may be unusual in that people make a decision on whether or not to see somebody again after only 4 minutes of interaction. On the other hand, some people do meet their partners in contexts such as bars and speed dating events where decisions are made based on brief interactions. To this extent, the empirical phenomena in data from the study are relevant to understanding mate selection in general.

The Predictive Power of Attractiveness

In How Subjective Is Attractiveness? I described how the group consensus on somebody's attractiveness explained 60% of the variance in people's perceptions of attractiveness. My original purpose in writing it was as background for a discussion of how much attractiveness influenced people's decisions as to whether or not to see their partners again.

I touched on this in Predictors of Selectivity and Desirability at Speed Dating Events. The group consensus on attractiveness is highly predictive of how often people wanted to see somebody again. I remember being slightly shocked upon first viewing the graphs below:

I...
Formalizing Two Problems of Realistic World Models
by So8res — 2015-01-22T23:12:21.975Z

I'm pleased to announce a new paper from MIRI: Formalizing Two Problems of Realistic World Models.

Abstract:

An intelligent agent embedded within the real world must reason about an environment which is larger than the agent, and learn how to achieve goals in that environment. We discuss attempts to formalize two problems: one of induction, where an agent must use sensory data to infer a universe which embeds (and computes) the agent, and one of interaction, where an agent must learn to achieve complex goals in the universe. We review related problems formalized by Solomonoff and Hutter, and explore challenges that arise when attempting to formalize analogous problems in a setting where the agent is embedded within the environment.

This is the fifth of six papers discussing active research topics that we've been looking into at MIRI. It discusses a few difficulties that arise when attempting to formalize problems of induction and evaluation in settings where an agent is attempting to learn about (and act upon) a universe from within. These problems have been much discussed on LessWrong; for further reading, see the links below. This paper is intended to better introduce the topic, and motivate it as relevant to FAI research.

Intelligence Metrics with Naturalized Induction using UDT

Building Phenomenological Bridges

Failures of an Embodied AIXI

The Naturalized Induction wiki page

The (rather short) introduction to the paper is reproduced below.

An intelligent agent embedded in the real world faces an induction problem: how can it learn about the environment in which it is embedded, about the universe which computes it? Solomonoff (1964) formalized an induction problem faced by agents which must learn to predict an environment which does not contain the agent, and this formalism has inspired the development of many useful tools, including Kolmogorov complexity and Hutter's AIXI. However, a number of new difficulties arise when the agent must learn about the environment in which it is embedded.

An agent embedded in the world also faces an interaction problem: how can an agent learn to achieve a complex set of goals within its own universe? Legg and Hutter (2007) have formalized an ``intelligence measure" which scores the performance of agents on which learn about and act upon an environment that does not contain the agent, but again, new difficulties a

...
An Introduction to Löb's Theorem in MIRI Research
by orthonormal — 2015-01-22T20:35:50.000Z

At a recent MIRIx workshop, I gave an introductory talk about the surprising number of times that MIRI applied Löb's Theorem in their research papers. It was well-received, so I wrote up and expanded my notes into a primer for new researchers:

An Introduction to Löb's Theorem in MIRI Research (pdf)

Any comments appreciated!
Bill Gates: problem of strong AI with conflicting goals "very worthy of study and time"
by Paul Crowley — 2015-01-22T20:21:48.539Z

Steven Levy: Let me ask an unrelated question about the raging debate over whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to society, or even the survival of humanity. Where do you stand?

Bill Gates: I think it’s definitely important to worry about. There are two AI threats that are worth distinguishing. One is that AI does enough labor substitution fast enough to change work policies, or [affect] the creation of new jobs that humans are uniquely adapted to — the jobs that give you a sense of purpose and worth. We haven’t run into that yet. I don’t think it’s a dramatic problem in the next ten years but if you take the next 20 to 30 it could be. Then there’s the longer-term problem of so-called strong AI, where it controls resources, so its goals are somehow conflicting with the goals of human systems. Both of those things are very worthy of study and time. I am certainly not in the camp that believes we ought to stop things or slow things down because of that. But you can definitely put me more in the Elon Musk, Bill Joy camp than, let’s say, the Google camp on that one.

"Bill Gates on Mobile Banking, Connecting the World and AI", Medium, 2015-01-21
Meetup : Czech's first Meetup Prague
by kotrfa — 2015-01-22T10:40:15.694Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Czech's first Meetup Prague

WHEN:
16 February 2015 06:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Václavské náměstí 778/14, Praha 110 00

Hello, this is going to be the first meetup I know about in Czech Republic. Since I don't know any other LessWrongers here, I'll be waiting in Dobrá Čajovna s.r.o. (tea-room) for at least one hour. Look for 22-year-old, tall, skinny, brown curly haired guy.

Please contact me if you are interested in a meeting, but the time just doesn't fit you - it will be at least some sign for me that someone is at least interested.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

I decided to try to make a meetup from time to time (this is the second try) to see if someone will ever show up. It's a pity (and shame) that there are no meetups here. My goal is to estabilish regular meetings of stable core of LessWrongers.

Discussion article for the meetup : Czech's first Meetup Prague
Control Theory Commentary
by Vaniver — 2015-01-22T05:31:03.698Z

This is the third and final post in a sequence on control theory. In the first post I introduced the subject of control theory and stepped through some basics. In the second post I outlined Powers's model, as presented in Behavior: The Control of Perception. This post is a collection of comments on the subject that are only somewhat related, and so I'll use section headings to separate them. I'll also explicitly note the absence of a section on the design of control systems, which is where most of the effort used in talking about them in industrial settings goes, and is probably relevant to philosophical discussions surrounding them.

History

From Wikipedia's Cybernetics page:

Artificial intelligence (AI) was founded as a distinct discipline at a 1956 conference. After some uneasy coexistence, AI gained funding and prominence. Consequently, cybernetic sciences such as the study of neural networks were downplayed; the discipline shifted into the world of social sciences and therapy.

I'm no historian of science, and it's not clear to me why this split happened. It seems likely that control theory was simply not a useful approach for many of the early problems researchers associated with AI, like natural language processing: Powers has a description of how neural circuits as he models them could solve the phoneme parsing problem (which seems very compatible with sophisticated approaches that use Hidden Markov Models) but how one would go from parsing sounds to make words to parsing words to make concepts is not quite clear. It seems like there might be some difference in kind between the required circuitry, but perhaps not: one of the recent advances in machine learning is "deep learning," which the ultra-simplified explanation of is "neural nets, just dialed up to 11." It seems possible (certain, if you count NNs as a 'cybernetic' thing) that AI is moving back in the direction of cybernetics/control theory/etc., but possibly without much intellectual continuity. Did backpropagation spread from controls to AI, or was it independently invented? As mentioned before, I'm not a historian of science. People working in robotics, as my limited understanding goes, have always maintained a connection to engineering and cybernetics and so on, but the 'hardware' and 'software' fields diverged, where the roboticists sought to move from the first l...
Purchasing research effectively open thread
by John_Maxwell — 2015-01-21T12:24:22.951Z

Many of the biggest historical success stories in philanthropy have come in the form of funding for academic research. This suggests that the topic of how to purchase such research well should be of interest to effective altruists. Less Wrong survey results indicate that a nontrivial fraction of LW has firsthand experience with the academic research environment. Inspired by the recent Elon Musk donation announcement, this is a thread for discussion of effectively using money to enable important, useful research. Feel free to brainstorm your own questions and ideas before reading what's written in the thread.
Meetup : Dallas, TX
by DubiousTwizzler — 2015-01-21T02:59:51.616Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas, TX

WHEN:
25 January 2015 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
3725 Belt Line Road, Addison, TX 75001

This is the new Dallas meetup. We will be meeting up at Dunn Bros Coffee on Sunday, Jan 25th at 1 PM. I will have a sign that says "Less Wrong" on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas, TX
Behavior: The Control of Perception
by Vaniver — 2015-01-21T01:21:58.801Z

This is the second of three posts dealing with control theory and Behavior: The Control of Perception by William Powers. The previous post gave an introduction to control theory, in the hopes that a shared language will help communicate the models the book is discussing. This post discusses the model introduced in the book. The next post will provide commentary on the model and what I see as its implications, for both LW and AI.

B:CP was published in 1973 by William Powers, who was a controls engineer before he turned his attention to psychology. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he thought that the best lens for psychology was the one he had been trained in, and several sections of the book contrast his approach with the behaviorist approach. This debate is before my time, and so I find it mostly uninteresting, and will only bring it up when I think the contrast clarifies the difference in methodology, focusing instead on the meat of his model.

The first five chapters of B:CP introduce analog computers and feedback loops, and make the claim that it's better to model the nervous system as an analog computer, with continuous neural currents (with the strength of the current determined by the rate of the underlying impulses and number of branches, as each impulse has the same strength) rather than as a digital computer. On the macroscale, this seems unobjectionable, and while it makes the model clearer I'm not sure that it's necessary. He also steps through how to physically instantiate a number of useful mathematical functions with a handful of neurons; in general, I'll ignore that detailed treatment but you should trust that the book makes a much more detailed argument for the physical plausibility of this model than I do here.

The sixth chapter discusses the idea of hierarchical modeling. We saw a bit of that in the last post, with the example of a satellite that had two control systems, one which used sense data of the thruster impulses and the rotation to determine the inertia model, and the other which uses the rotation and the inertia model to determine the thruster impulses. The key point here is that the models are inherently local, and thus can be separated into units. The first model doesn't have to know that there's another feedback loop; it just puts the sense data it receives through a formula, and uses another formula to update its memory, which has the prop...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates
by RobinZ — 2015-01-20T23:32:22.958Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates

WHEN:
25 January 2015 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

Note: the meetup location has not changed. The National Portrait Gallery shares the Old Patent Office Building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the text of the announcement has been updated to use the official name for the location.

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to practice making order-of-magnitude estimates to answer questions. As usual, we will congregate between 3:00 and 3:30.

A Fermi estimate is a particular style of back-of-the-envelope calculation where one calculates an approximate answer to one's question by multiplying and dividing a series of related estimates. For example, at a late-2013 Fermi estimate meetup, the group calculated a good estimate of the total length of the U.S. road network by taking (the width of the continental U.S.) times (the number of roads one would cross per mile traveling that width) times (the height of the continental U.S.). As a rule, a satisfactory Fermi estimate should be correct to within a factor of ten.

Anyone who would like to contribute problems for the group is welcome to do so - thank you. For practice purposes, precisely stated questions about mudane subjects with accurately-known answers (in the above example, "the number of center-lane miles of road in the United States in 2011") are ideal.

As always, anyone not interested in the official topic is allowed and encouraged to start side conversations.

According to WMATA, there will be 20-24 minute gaps between trains except on the Red Line towards Shady Grove. The Verizon Center has no events scheduled for the 18th.

Upcoming meetups:

Feb. 1: Performance of Masculinity discussion (read and discuss a pair of articles about male gender roles in U.S.)

Feb. 8: Fun & Games (bring games, play games, converse, socialize, or any combination thereof)

Feb. 15: Book Swap (lend books, borrow books, talk about books)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates