trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How to avoid dying in a car crash
by  — 2012-03-17T19:44:45.374Z

Aside from cryonics and eating better, what else can we do to live long lives?

Using this tool, I looked up the risks of death for my demographic group. As a 15-24 year old male in the United States, the most likely cause of my death is a traffic accident; and so I’m taking steps to avoid that. Below I have included the results of my research as well as the actions I will take to implement my findings. Perhaps my research can help you as well.1

Before diving into the results, I will note that this data took me one hour to collect. It’s definitely not comprehensive, and I know that working together, we can do much better. So if you have other resources or data-backed recommendations on how to avoid dying in a traffic accident, leave a comment below and I’ll update this post.

General points

Changing your behavior can reduce your risk of death in a car crash. A 1985 report on British and American crash data discovered that “driver error, intoxication and other human factors contribute wholly or partly to about 93% of crashes.” Other drivers’ behavior matters too, of course, but you might as well optimize your own.2

Secondly, overconfidence appears to be a large factor in peoples’ thinking about traffic safety. A speaker for the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) stated that “Ninety-five percent of crashes are caused by human error… but 75% of drivers say they're more careful than most other drivers. Less extreme evidence for overconfidence about driving is presented here.

One possible cause for this was suggested by the Transport Research Laboratory, which explains that “...the feeling of being confident in more and more challenging situations is experienced as evidence of driving ability, and that 'proven' ability reinforces the feelings of confidence. Confidence feeds itself and grows unchecked until something happens – a near-miss or an accident.”

So if you’re tempted to use this post as an opportunity to feel superior to other drivers, remember: you’re probably overconfident too! Don’t just humbly confess your imperfections – change your behavior.

Top causes of accidents

Distraction

Driver distraction is one of the largest causes of traffic accident deaths. The Director of Traffic Safety at the American Automobile Association stated that "The re...
Suggestions for naming a class of decision theories
by orthonormal — 2012-03-17T17:22:54.160Z

In my recent post, I outlined 5 conditions that I'd like a decision theory to pass; TDT, UDT and ADT pass them, while CDT and EDT don't. I called decision theories that passed those conditions "advanced decision theories", but that's probably not an optimal name. Can I ask you to brainstorm some other suggestions for me? (I may be writing a follow-up soon.)

As usual, it's best to brainstorm on your own before reading any of the comments. You can write down your ideas, then check if any have already been suggested, then comment with the new ones.

Thanks!
Reply to Yvain on 'The Futility of Intelligence'
by XiXiDu — 2012-03-17T13:28:34.138Z

This is a reply to a comment by Yvain and everyone who might have misunderstood what problem I tried to highlight.

Here is the problem. You can't estimate the probability and magnitude of the advantage an AI will have if you are using something that is as vague as the concept of 'intelligence'.

Here is a case that bears some similarity and might shed light on what I am trying to explain:

At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.

He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."

Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:

La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."

Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."

La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."

Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."

"And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."

The use of 'intelligence' is as misleading and dishonest in evaluating risks from AI as the use of 'tech' in Star Trek.

It is true that 'intelligence', just as 'technology' has some explanatory power. Just like 'emergence' has some explanatory power. As in "the morality of an act is an emergent phenomena of a physical system: it refers to the physical relations among the components of that system". But it does not help to evaluate the morality of an act or in predicting if a given physical system will exhibit moral properties.
A singularity scenario
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-03-17T12:47:17.808Z

Wired Magazine has a story about a giant data center that the USA's National Security Agency is building in Utah, that will be the Google of clandestine information - it will store and analyse all the secret data that the NSA can acquire. The article focuses on the unconstitutionality of the domestic Internet eavesdropping infrastructure that will feed into the Bluffdale data center, but I'm more interested in this facility as a potential locus of singularity.

If we forget serious futurological scenario-building for a moment, and simply think in terms of science-fiction stories, I'd say the situation has all the ingredients needed for a better-than-usual singularity story - or at least one which caters more to the concerns characteristic of this community's take on the concept, such as: which value system gets to control the AI; even if you can decide on a value system, how do you ensure it has been faithfully implemented; and how do you ensure that it remains in place as the AI grows in power and complexity?

Fiction makes its point by being specific rather than abstract. If I was writing an NSA Singularity Novel based on this situation, I think the specific belief system which would highlight the political, social, technical and conceptual issues inherent in the possibility of an all-powerful AI would be the Mormon religion. Of course, America is not a Mormon theocracy. But in a few years' time, that Utah facility may have become the most powerful and notorious supercomputer in the world - the brain of the American deep state - and it will be located in the Mormon state, during a Mormon presidency. (I'm not predicting a Romney victory, just describing a scenario.)

Under such circumstances, and given the science-fictional nature of Mormon cosmology, it is inevitable that there would at least be some Internet crazies, convinced that it's all a big plot to create a Mormon singularity. What would be more interesting, would be to suppose that there were some Mormon computer scientists, who knew about and understood all our favorite concepts - AIXI, CEV, TDT... - and who were earnestly devout; and who saw the potential. If you can't imagine such people, just visit the recent writings of Frank Tipler.

So the scenario would be, not that the elders of the LDS church are secretly running the American intelligence community, but that a small coalition of well-placed...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 11
by Oscar_Cunningham — 2012-03-17T09:41:23.620Z

EDIT: New discussion thread here.

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With two chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 500 comments. The latest chapter as of 17th March 2012 is Ch. 79.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.
[SEQ RERUN] To Spread Science, Keep It Secret
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-17T05:01:15.191Z

Today's post, To Spread Science, Keep It Secret was originally published on 28 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People don't study science, in part, because they perceive it to be public knowledge. In fact, it's not; you have to study a lot before you actually understand it. But because science is thought to be freely available, people ignore it in favor of cults that conceal their secrets, even if those secrets are wrong. In fact, it might be better if scientific knowledge was hidden from anyone who didn't undergo the initiation ritual, and study as an acolyte, and wear robes, and chant, and...

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 Scarcity, 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.
"Nice Guys Finish First" - Youtube Video of selected reading (by Dawkins) from The Selfish Gene
by Logos01 — 2012-03-17T01:33:17.532Z

Check it out here.

Brief summary: Dawkins demonstrates a classic "Prisoner Dilemma AI tournament". No big surprise to us today, but at the time the revelation that Tit for Tat is one of -- if not *the* -- most effective strateg(y|ies) was a surprising result. He goes on to demonstrate animals employing the Tit for Tat strategy. Assumptions of generosity, with vengefulness, appear to be strongly selected for.
Schelling fences on slippery slopes
by Scott Alexander — 2012-03-16T23:44:05.322Z

Slippery slopes are themselves a slippery concept. Imagine trying to explain them to an alien:
"Well, we right-thinking people are quite sure that the Holocaust happened, so banning Holocaust denial would shut up some crackpots and improve the discourse. But it's one step on the road to things like banning unpopular political positions or religions, and we right-thinking people oppose that, so we won't ban Holocaust denial."
And the alien might well respond: "But you could just ban Holocaust denial, but not ban unpopular political positions or religions. Then you right-thinking people get the thing you want, but not the thing you don't want."
This post is about some of the replies you might give the alien.
Abandoning the Power of Choice
This is the boring one without any philosophical insight that gets mentioned only for completeness' sake. In this reply, giving up a certain point risks losing the ability to decide whether or not to give up other points.
For example, if people gave up the right to privacy and allowed the government to monitor all phone calls, online communications, and public places, then if someone launched a military coup, it would be very difficult to resist them because there would be no way to secretly organize a rebellion. This is also brought up in arguments about gun control a lot.
I'm not sure this is properly thought of as a slippery slope argument at all. It seems to be a more straightforward "Don't give up useful tools for fighting tyranny" argument.
The Legend of Murder-Gandhi
Previously on Less Wrong's The Adventures of Murder-Gandhi: Gandhi is offered a pill that will turn him into an unstoppable murderer. He refuses to take it, because in his current incarnation as a pacifist, he doesn't want others to die, and he knows that would be a consequence of taking the pill. Even if we offered him $1 million to take the pill, his abhorrence of violence would lead him to refuse.
But suppose we offered Gandhi $1 million to take a different pill: one which would decrease his reluctance to murder by 1%. This sounds like a pretty good deal. Even a person with 1% less reluctance to murder than Gandhi is still pretty pacifist and not likely to go killing anybody. And he could donate the money to his favorite charity and perhaps save some lives. Gandhi accepts the offer.
Now we iterate the process: every time Gandhi takes the 1%-more-likely-to-murder-...
Evolutionary psychology: evolving three eyed monsters
by Dmytry — 2012-03-16T21:28:24.339Z

Summary

We should not expect evolution of complex psychological and cognitive adaptations in the timeframe in which, morphologically, animal bodies can only change by very little. The genetic alteration to the cognition for speech shouldn't be expected to be dramatically more complex than the alteration of vocal cords.

Evolutions that did not happen

When humans descended from trees and became bipedal, it would have been very advantageous to have an eye or two on back of the head, for detection of predators and to protect us against being back-stabbed by fellow humans. This is why all of us have an extra eye on the back of our heads, right? Ohh, we don't. Perhaps the mate selection resulted in the poor reproductive success of the back-eyed hominids. Perhaps the tribes would kill any mutant with eyes on the back.

There are pretty solid reasons why none the above has happened, and can't happen in such timeframes. The evolution does not happen simply because the trait is beneficial, or because there's a niche to be filled. A simple alteration to the DNA has to happen, causing a morphological change which results in some reproductive improvement; then DNA has to mutate again, etc. The unrelated nearly-neutral mutations may combine resulting in an unexpected change (for example, the wolves have many genes that alter their size; random selection of genes produces approximately normal distribution of the sizes; we can rapidly select smaller dogs utilizing the existing diversity). There's no such path rapidly leading up to an eye on back of the head. The eye on back of the head didn't evolve because evolution couldn't make that adaptation.

The speed of evolution is severely limited. The ways in which evolution can work, too, are very limited. In the time in which we humans have got down from the trees, we undergone rather minor adaptation in the shape of our bodies, as evident from the fossil record - and that is the degree of change we should expect in rest of our bodies including our brains.

The correct application of evolutionary theory should be entirely unable to account for outrageous hypothetical like extra eye on back of our heads (extra eye can evolve, of course, but would take very long time). Evolution is not magic. The power of scientific theory is that it can't explain everything, but only the things which are true - that's what makes scientific theory usef...
[Request] Software or Articles on financial life planning
by  — 2012-03-16T19:06:18.120Z

Does anyone have recommendations for software or articles on how to plan your financial life?

Lets say I have a goal, retire at age 50 to X location with Y income in todays currency. Are there any tools that help me make decisions? E.g. to rent for a while, until a property dip (based on cyclical observations). Or how to spread investments over countries and investment types to mitigate black swan events like economic collapses.

I found reno when googling. But I don't know whether thats just because they are good at SEO or actually useful for what I am suggesting. Preferably it would have a wealth of data, such as property price increases by location etc.
Muehlhauser-Goertzel Dialogue, Part 1
by lukeprog — 2012-03-16T17:12:57.728Z

Part of the Muehlhauser interview series on AGI.

Luke Muehlhauser is Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, a non-profit research institute studying AGI safety.

Ben Goertzel is the Chairman at the AGI company Novamente, and founder of the AGI conference series.

Luke Muehlhauser:

[Jan. 13th, 2012]

Ben, I'm glad you agreed to discuss artificial general intelligence (AGI) with me. There is much on which we agree, and much on which we disagree, so I think our dialogue will be informative to many readers, and to us!

Let us begin where we agree. We seem to agree that:

Involuntary death is bad, and can be avoided with the right technology.

Humans can be enhanced by merging with technology.

Humans are on a risky course in general, because powerful technologies can destroy us, humans are often stupid, and we are unlikely to voluntarily halt technological progress.

AGI is likely this century.

AGI will, after a slow or hard takeoff, completely transform the world. It is a potential existential risk, but if done wisely, could be the best thing that ever happens to us.

Careful effort will be required to ensure that AGI results in good things for humanity.

Next: Where do we disagree?

Two people might agree about the laws of thought most likely to give us an accurate model of the world, but disagree about which conclusions those laws of thought point us toward. For example, two scientists may use the same scientific method but offer two different models that seem to explain the data.

Or, two people might disagree about the laws of thought most likely to give us accurate models of the world. If that's the case, it will be no surprise that we disagree about which conclusions to draw from the data. We are not shocked when scientists and theologians end up with different models of the world.

Unfortunately, I suspect you and I disagree at the more fundamental level — about which methods of reasoning to use when seeking an accurate model of the world.

I sometimes use the term "Technical Rationality" to name my methods of reasoning. Technical Rationality is drawn from two sources: (1) the laws of logic, probability theory, and decision theory, and (2) the cognitive science of how our haphazardly evolved brains fail to reason in accordance with the laws of logic, probability theory, and decision theory.

Ben, at one time you tweeted a William S. Burroughs quote: "R

...
Global warming is a better test of irrationality that theism
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-03-16T17:10:20.396Z

Theism is often a default test of irrationality on Less Wrong, but I propose that global warming denial would make a much better candidate.

Theism is a symptom of excess compartmentalisation, of not realising that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, of belief in belief, of privileging the hypothesis, and similar failings. But these are not intrinsically huge problems. Indeed, someone with a mild case of theism can have the same anticipations as someone without, and update their evidence in the same way. If they have moved their belief beyond refutation, in theory it thus fails to constrain their anticipations at all; and often this is the case in practice.

Contrast that with someone who denies the existence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This has all the signs of hypothesis privileging, but also reeks of fake justification, motivated skepticism, massive overconfidence (if they are truly ignorant of the facts of the debate), and simply the raising of politics above rationality. If I knew someone was a global warming skeptic, then I would expect them to be wrong in their beliefs and their anticipations, and to refuse to update when evidence worked against them. I would expect their judgement to be much more impaired than a theist's.

Of course, reverse stupidity isn't intelligence: simply because one accepts AGW, doesn't make one more rational. I work in England, in a university environment, so my acceptance of AGW is the default position and not a sign of rationality. But if someone is in a milieu that discouraged belief in AGW (one stereotype being heavily Republican areas of the US) and has risen above this, then kudos to them: their acceptance of AGW is indeed a sign of rationality.
Weekly LW Meetups: Pittsburgh, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Sydney
by FrankAdamek — 2012-03-16T15:36:17.926Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 4!: 11 March 2012 12:00PM
[Seattle] Queueing and More: 11 March 2012 03:00PM
Sydney - Core sequences: 13 March 2012 06:00PM
São Paulo Meetup: 14 March 2012 07:00PM
Brussels meetup: 17 March 2012 11:15AM
Atlanta: 17 March 2012 05:30PM
Fort Collins Meetup Saturday 17th: 17 March 2012 05:00PM
[Ohio/Washington DC] Interest in Reason Rally meetup?: 24 March 2012 04:14PM

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

Ohio Monthly: 17 March 2012 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become inactive, let me know so we can present ...