trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Continuity in Uploading
by Error — 2014-01-17T22:57:22.853Z

I don't acknowledge an upload as "me" in any meaningful sense of the term; if I copied my brain to a computer and then my body was destroyed, I still think of that as death and would try to avoid it.

A thought struck me a few minutes ago that seems like it might get around that, though. Suppose that rather than copying my brain, I adjoined it to some external computer in a kind of reverse-Ebborian act; electrically connecting my synapses to a big block of computrons that I can consciously perform I/O to. Over the course of life and improved tech, that block expands until, as a percentage, most of my thought processes are going on in the machine-part of me. Eventually my meat brain dies -- but the silicon part of me lives on. I think I would probably still consider that "me" in a meaningful sense. Intuitively I feel like I should treat it as the equivalent of minor brain damage.

Obviously, one could shorten the period of dual-life arbitrarily and I can't point to a specific line where expanded-then-contracted-consciousness turns into copying-then-death. The line that immediately comes to mind is "whenever I start to feel like the technological expansion of my mind is no longer an external module, but the main component," but that feels like unjustified punting.

I'm curious what other people think, particularly those that share my position on destructive uploads.

---

Edited to add:

Solipsist asked me for the reasoning behind my position on destructive uploads, which led to this additional train of thought:

Compare a destructive upload to non-destructive. Copy my mind to a machine non-destructively, and I still identify with meat-me. You could let machine-me run for a day, or a week, or a year, and only then kill off meat-me. I don't like that option and would be confused by someone who did. Destructive uploads feel like the limit of that case, where the time interval approaches zero and I am killed and copied in the same moment. As with the case outlined above, I don't see a crossed line where it stops being death and starts being transition.

An expand-contract with interval zero is effectively a destructive upload. So is a copy-kill with interval zero. So the two appear to be mirror images, with a discontinuity at the limit. Approach destructive uploads from the copy-then-kill side, and it feels clearly like death. Approach them from the expand-then-contract sid

...
Meetup : Rationality Meetup Ljubljana
by Ratcourse — 2014-01-17T20:35:27.562Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Ljubljana

WHEN:
25 January 2014 05:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Trubarjeva 44

We will be meeting at Kavarna Mačkon.
At least two organizers from the Vienna meetups are joining, and as such the meetup will be conducted in english.

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Ljubljana
Meetup : Less Wrong Montreal - Dissolving Disagreements
by bartimaeus — 2014-01-17T17:09:17.097Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Montreal - Dissolving Disagreements

WHEN:
22 January 2014 12:08:27PM (-0500)

WHERE:
3459 McTavish, Montréal, qc, ca

There's a question that you may sometimes ask yourselves when you are having an argument with someone: "Wait a minute...what are we ACTUALLY disagreeing about, exactly?" Sometimes, we get so lost in a web of ideas that we've lost track of which way points to reality.
We'll be looking at some more 5-second-level mental skills, this time aimed at clarifying what you're discussing and clearing up confusion that can be caused by the way we use words. The human brain has a particular method of classifying things using words; although it does its job very well most of the time, sometimes this classification method just doesn't work. We'll try to recognize situations where words might be confusing us, and how we can fix this.
The location worked out well last time, so we'll stick with it for this time. I'll confirm which pod once it's reserved. Here are the instructions as posted last time:
Due to construction, you need to:
-Enter the McLennan Library (the building on the northeast corner of McTavish and Sherbrooke, street view of the entrance: https://maps.google.com/?ll=45.503599,-73.576131&spn=0.001746,0.004128&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=45.503583,-73.576193&panoid=42_osk2KlEyXwc_eJsOYXQ&cbp=12,143.89,,0,11.22)
-Head towards the Redpath library (the building directly north of the McLennan library; so you need to turn right twice right after you walk in)
-On the left, there is a door leading towards some stairs (there should be signs for Cybertheque or something similar). Go down one level.
-You are now in a library with a bunch of glass "pods" in the middle. We are in POD 4 (the names are on the doors).
These directions might be very confusing, so don't hesitate to message me and I'll provide my phone number so you can call me.

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Montreal - Dissolving Disagreements
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-01-17T17:00:04.600Z

This summary was posted to LW main on January 10th. The following week's summary is here.

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

[Portland] I moved to Portland! I want to meet you!: 11 January 2014 11:50AM
Sydney Meetup: January: 22 January 2014 06:30PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta, January Meetup & Movie Night!: 11 January 2014 07:00PM
Moscow, First New Year: 12 January 2014 04:00PM
Vancouver Biweekly Sequences Discussion: Politics Is the Mind-killer: 12 January 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: 11 January 2020 01:30PM
Boston - Macroeconomic Theory (Joe Schneider): 12 January 2014 02:00PM
Brussels monthly meetup: Futurology!: 11 January 2014 01:00PM
London - The Schelling Point Strategy Game (plus socials): 19 January 2014 02:00AM
Melbourne Social Meetup: 17 January 2014 05:42PM
Vienna: 18 January 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Brussels, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, 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 weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are 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 c...
Cryonics As Untested Medical Procedure
by jefftk — 2014-01-17T16:36:20.461Z

If you're trying to prevent information-theoretic death by preserving the brain it's critical that the information that makes you be "you" actually be preserved. If you could freeze the brain in a way that did keep around the necessary information then some future civilization might be able to recover the person or the memories, but if the information is gone it's gone for good. The problem is, this is an untested medical procedure, and it's not something we should expect to get right flying blind.

In freezing a brain there are obvious things that can go wrong. For example, if you just cool it down to below freezing the water in the cells will turn to sharp little ice crystals, disrupting synapse structure and making a huge mess. We know about this now, though, so since the early 2000s cryonics organizations have used "cryoprotectants" which are able to vitrify the brain tissue and reduce [1] ice crystal formation. Beyond these known problems, however, there are many aspects of the brain structure that might or might not be relevant. Is information stored in the positions of proteins within the cells? Are phosphorylation states significant? What scale of preservation is sufficient?

Our normal approach is to try something, see if it works, fix apparent problems, and try again, each cycle getting us closer to something that does work. With cryonics the "see if it works" step isn't there, and there's only "check for known failures". So what we should expect is that the current process will be "good to the best of our knowledge" and then repeatedly our knowledge will expand about what matters and the process will need to be updated.

(Situations where current preservation technology fails to preserve something we know is required are actually kind of nice, because they're as close as we get to cryonics as an experimental science. Those are the cases when the process can actually improve because the feedback loop is temporarily closed.)

Imagine if in the development of In-Vitro Fertilization an inexplicable barrier stopped researchers from continuing any experiments past the "combine egg and sperm" stage. Instead they worked out something they thought was as good as they were going to get, documented it, and started freezing hopefully-fertilized eggs. How likely would it be that later we would be able to take these frozen eggs and complete the process? Much more likel...
Write down your basic realizations as a matter of habit. Share this file with the world.
by FeepingCreature — 2014-01-17T12:57:04.455Z

Say you have just realized something that seems, in hindsight, pretty obvious - but that you were totally unaware of before now. You scratch your head, update your model of the world, and move on.

Hold on. Update your model of your model. Why were you not aware of it before? If this insight, in retrospect, seems so basic, then why did you not realize it earlier? And how many other people do you think missed it as well?

There is a common situation in user interface development, where you've written a marvellous, clear, easy to use piece of software - after all, you have no problems with it at all! You've stuck to the practice of dogfooding ("eat your own dog food" - use your own tool in day to day life) like a good developer should and are now quite faster in it than in whatever you were using before. So find a random coworker who has never touched your software before and may only be passingly familiar with the subject matter. Put him in front of your shiny user interface and watch him waddle around, dumbstruck and befuddled, as he misses all the obvious interface elements and tries nonworking things you'd never attempted in a hundred years. Resist your urge to correct him - pay attention to what he tries.

You cannot judge the obviousness of an idea from the inside - you have to find somebody without prior exposure and observe them attempt to come to terms with it, to understand. And it only works once - after he's become familiar with your idioms, he'll never be able to show this bright-eyed naiveté again.

If you're trying to write a FAQ for life, it'd be very much helpful to have such a coworker go over your life, re-learn all your lessons, all the insights you now consider obvious, and highlight them so you could add them to the help file. But of course, we cannot relive a life. We can only live it once.

So the obvious thing to do is when you realize that you've just had a novel realization - no matter how apparently trivial - is write it down. The brain is really good at caching - realizations become thought habits frighteningly fast. So write it down, so you don't forget that you once had no idea. And after you've written it down (probably on a file on your PC), why not share this file with the world? Might as well let others profit from your insights.

I think it would be useful to spread this habit. Imagine: somebody just did something really clever t...
Community bias in threat evaluation
by pianoforte611 — 2014-01-17T04:01:57.662Z

If I were to ask the question "What threat poses the greatest risk to society/humanity?" to several communities I would expect to get some answers that follow a predictable trend:

If I asked the question on an HBD blog I'd probably get one of the answers demographic disaster/dysgenics/immigration.

If I asked the question to a bunch of environmentalists they'd probably say global warming or pollution.

If I asked the question on a leftist blog I might get the answer: growing inequality/exploitation of workers.

If I asked the question to Catholic bishops they might say abortion/sexual immorality.

And if I were to ask the question on LessWrong (which is heavily populated by Computer scientists and programmers) many would respond with unfriendly AI.

One of these groups might be right, I don't know. However I would treat all of their claims with caution.

Edit: This may not be a bad from thing from an instrumental rationality perspective. If you think that the problem you're working on is really important then you're more likely to put a good effort into solving it.
Meetup : Washington DC: Potatoes
by rocurley — 2014-01-17T03:41:39.358Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Potatoes

WHEN:
19 January 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to fully describe potatoes, then try to find them based on the description.

Yes really.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Potatoes
[Link] Humanity in Jeopardy - Max Tegmark on AI risk
by Vika — 2014-01-16T22:30:34.515Z

Article by Max Tegmark for the 3rd anniversary of "Jeopardy day" - Humanity in Jeopardy.

Exactly three years ago, on January 13, 2011, we humans were dethroned by a computer on the quiz show Jeopardy!. A year later, a computer was licensed to drive cars in Nevada after being judged safer than a human. What's next? Will computers eventually beat us at all tasks, developing superhuman intelligence?

[...] After this, life on Earth would never be the same. Whoever or whatever controls this technology would rapidly become the world's wealthiest and most powerful, outsmarting all financial markets, out-inventing and out-patenting all human researchers, and out-manipulating all human leaders. Even if we humans nominally merge with such machines, we might have no guarantees whatsoever about the ultimate outcome, making it feel less like a merger and more like a hostile corporate takeover.

In summary, will there be a singularity within our lifetime? And is this something we should work for or against? On one hand, it could potentially solve most of our problems, even mortality. It could also open up space, the final frontier: unshackled by the limitations of our human bodies, such advanced life could rise up and eventually make much of our observable universe come alive. On the other hand, it could destroy life as we know it and everything we care about - there are ample doomsday scenarios that look nothing like the Terminator movies, but are far more terrifying.
Productivity tool: race!
by wwa — 2014-01-16T21:53:52.447Z

Inspired by recent batch of productivity posts, I wrote my short story down. To a reasonable extent, this story is real.

2:00
As usual, I put my breakfast into the microwave and set it to 2:00.

1:58
It took two seconds for a train of though to start:

"Waste, again. Again!"

"What am I supposed to do this entire time? Stare at the clock?"

"Useless and boring, but can't start any serious work or thought in time-frame this short"

"Why don't I switch to Soylent, hire a maid or just eat the damn thing cold?"

1:53
It took me five seconds to notice and derail that train on the basis of "Been there, done that, nothing significant changed since"

But this time something went differently.

1:52
"What do I get to lose if I just try to do something, anything?"

"Food's gonna get cold. Also you can't multitask that much, so no thinking either."

"So what. If I don't make it in time I'll just reheat that food and at least one other thing will be done already. And didn't I just say I can't think of anything serious that fast anyway?"

It took me 16 seconds to scan today's TODO for anything I had any chance to accomplish within ninety-something seconds.

"Work. Takes too long to start, hardware limitation"

"Read... what? Would take a while to find something new and short enough. I could prepare next time, not now"

...

"A shower. Usually takes me at least 5 minutes... but why?"

1:36
I rushed to the bathroom.

"Skip everything that can be skipped, but nothing important"

Leaving clothes where I stand.

"No time to fiddle with the faucet. Just turn it on roughly around the point where it's supposed to be"

A bit too cold. So what.

"No time to select soap/shampoo/gel. Just apply top-to-bottom whatever comes up first."

Blargh, hair conditioner. Bad idea.

"Note to self: sort this stuff"

Top-to-bottom, fast moves, keep accurate.

"Come on, come on, come on! I can't believe the microwave didn't finish yet!"

Head too. Don't skip anything important, remember? One last jet of water and I grab the towel.

"No need to dry the hair so much, you're not going out anytime soon"

I throw the towel back on the hanger and run to the kitchen. Did it beep already and I didn't hear it? D

...
Meetup : Boston - Connection Theory
by Vika — 2014-01-16T21:09:29.111Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Connection Theory

WHEN:
19 January 2014 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
98 Elm St Apt 1, Somerville, MA

Mike Raimondi is giving a talk on Connection Theory, a theory of human motivation developed by the Leverage Institute, and a theoretical foundation for goal charting.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are every Sunday at 2pm at Citadel (98 Elm St Apt 1 Somerville, near Porter Square), except 2nd and 4th Sunday meetups which are held at MIT.

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 3pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

—Phase 4: Dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Connection Theory
Meetup : Brussels: Morality - also cake
by Roxolan — 2014-01-16T16:09:07.764Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels: Morality - also cake

WHEN:
08 February 2014 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

On one train track: three transhuman babies. On the other train track, a utility monster who regularly paints masterpieces. Next to you on the bridge, a very fat blue-spotted giraffe, last of its kind. What's a moral agent to do? And what if the giraffe... was your mother? All these questions and more won't be answered in this month's meetup.

We may have to taboo a lot of words in the process, so recommended reading: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/

This meetup marks the two-years anniversary of the LW Brussels meetup group. There will be cake. It is all right to eat the cake, as that cake would've grown up to become Hitler. (It is also all right to bring cake.)

We will meet at 1 pm at La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form, to share your contact information: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1qSvI1NWkFSsfIJhUMORb_Wd8fdJTVPhdw49grDQwRTI/viewform

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-brussels

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on: http://www.meetup.com/LWBrussels/

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels: Morality - also cake
Group Rationality Diary, January 16-31
by therufs — 2014-01-16T13:56:38.834Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for January 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: January 1-15

Rationality diaries archive
Meetup : Meet Up: Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Uses of Cryptography
by SoftFlare — 2014-01-16T11:08:58.150Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meet Up: Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Uses of Cryptography

WHEN:
30 January 2014 08:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
7 begin ramat gan

We're going to have a meetup on Thursday, Jan 30th at VisionMap's offices, Gibor Sport House, 15th floor, 7 Menachem Begin st., Ramat-Gan.

Our program is:

20:00-20:15: Assembly

20:15-21:00: Main Talk

21:00-22:00: Dinner & Discussion

22:00-23:00: Rump Session (minitalks)

23:00-: End of official programming

Main Talk: Uses of Cryptography / Daniel Armak

How can you use Cryptography as a tool? Most conversations about cryptography deal with the available crypto primitives. This talk will instead focus on what you can do with them and describe the most important and/or interesting things that have been built using crypto as a tool. (The primitives will be briefly described).

The talk will be accessible to people without knowledge of the math behind cryptography.

Backup Talk: TBA

Rump Session: Each participant will give a 4-minute talk (+3 minute encore if we applaud hard enough). Giving a talk isn't mandatory, but it's highly recommended. Not confident that what you have to say is relevant to our interests? Unsure about your public speaking skills? Doesn't matter - in the rump session, anything goes. - Note, you don't have to prepare a talk to come! Speaking at the rump session is completely only if you want to.

Feel free to contact me (Gal Hochberg) at hochbergg@gmail.com or at 0545330678 for any further information

Discussion article for the meetup : Meet Up: Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Uses of Cryptography