trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
AI surprise research: high value?
by KatjaGrace — 2014-09-11T14:00:00.000Z

If artificial intelligence was about to become ‘human-level’, do you think we (society) would get advance notice? Would artificial intelligence researchers have been talking about it for years? Would tell-tale precursor technologies have triggered the alert? Would it be completely unsurprising, because AI’s had been able to do almost everything that humans could do for a decade, and catching up at a steady pace?

Whether we would be surprised then seems to make a big difference to what we should do now. Suppose that there are things someone should do before human-level AI appears (a premise to most current efforts to mitigate AI impacts). If there will be a period in which many people anticipate human-level AI soon, then probably someone will do the highest priority things. If you try to do them now, you might replace them or just fail because it is hard to see what needs doing so far ahead of time. So if you think AI will not be surprising, then the best things to do regarding AI now will tend to be the high value things which require a longer lead time. This might include building better institutions and capabilities; shifting AI research trajectories; doing technical work that is hard to parallelize; or looking for ways to get the clear warning earlier.

Anders Sandberg has put some thought into warning signs for AI.

On the other hand, if the advent of human-level AI was very surprising, then only a small group of people will ever respond to the anticipation of human-level AI (including those who are already concerned about it). This makes it more likely that a person who anticipates human-level AI now – as a member of that small group – should work on the highest priority things that will need to be done about it ever. This might include object-level tools for controlling moderately powerful intelligences, or design of features that would lower any risks of those intelligences.

I have just argued that the best approach for dealing with concerns about human-level AI should be depend on how surprising we expect it to be. I also think there are relatively cheap ways to shed light on this question that (as far as I know) haven’t received much attention. For instance one could investigate:

How well can practitioners in related areas usually predict upcoming developments? (especially for large developments, and for closely related fields)

To wha

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Overcoming Decision Anxiety
by TimMartin — 2014-09-11T04:22:47.774Z

I get pretty anxious about open-ended decisions. I often spend an unacceptable amount of time agonizing over things like what design options to get on a custom suit, or what kind of job I want to pursue, or what apartment I want to live in. Some of these decisions are obviously important ones, with implications for my future happiness. However, in general my sense of anxiety is poorly calibrated with the importance of the decision. This makes life harder than it has to be, and lowers my productivity.

I moved apartments recently, and I decided that this would be a good time to address my anxiety about open-ended decisions. My hope is to present some ideas that will be helpful for others with similar anxieties, or to stimulate helpful discussion.

Solutions

Exposure therapy
One promising way of dealing with decision anxiety is to practice making decisions without worrying about them quite so much. Match your clothes together in a new way, even if you're not 100% sure that you like the resulting outfit. Buy a new set of headphones, even if it isn't the “perfect choice.” Aim for good enough. Remind yourself that life will be okay if your clothes are slightly mismatched for one day.
This is basically exposure therapy – exposing oneself to a slightly aversive stimulus while remaining calm about it. Doing something you're (mildly) afraid to do can have a tremendously positive impact when you try it and realize that it wasn't all that bad. Of course, you can always start small and build up to bolder activities as your anxieties diminish.
For the past several months, I had been practicing this with small decisions. With the move approaching in July, I needed some more tricks for dealing with a bigger, more important decision.
Reasoning with yourself
It helps to think up reasons why your anxieties aren't justified. As in actual, honest-to-goodness reasons that you think are true. Check out this conversation between my System 1 and System 2 that happened just after my roommates and I made a decision on an apartment:
System 1: Oh man, this neighborhood [the old neighborhood] is such a great place to go for walks. It's so scenic and calm. I'm going to miss that. The new neighborhood isn't as pretty.
System 2: Well that's true, but how many walks did we actually take in five years living in the old neighborhood? If I recall correctly, we didn't even take...
Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
by Scott Alexander — 2014-09-11T00:27:06.000Z

Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards.

There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socially determined, and therefore mutable. And social problems are easy to fix, through things like education and social services and public awareness campaigns and “calling people out”, and so we have a responsiblity to fix them, thus radically improving society and making life better for everyone.

But the Right (by now I guess the far right) believes human characteristics are biologically determined, and biology is fixed. Therefore we shouldn’t bother trying to improve things, and any attempt is just utopianism or “immanentizing the eschaton” or a shady justification for tyranny and busybodyness.

And I think I reject this whole premise.

See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just giving people more iron supplements. But the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades – including many forms of drug abuse.

Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed bra...
[Link] 3 Short Walking Breaks Can Reverse Harm From 3 Hours of Sitting
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-09-10T10:26:49.779Z

I found the below link which is in the spirit of Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity:

3 Short Walking Breaks Can Reverse Harm From 3 Hours of Sitting"

The /.-summary:

> Medical researchers have been steadily building evidence that prolonged sitting is awful for your health. One major problem is that blood can pool in the legs of a seated person, causing arteries to start losing their ability to control the rate of blood flow. A new experimental study (abstract) has discovered it's quite easy to negate these detrimental health effects: all you need to do is take a leisurely, 5-minute walk for every hour you sit. "The researchers were able to demonstrate that during a three-hour period, the flow-mediated dilation, or the expansion of the arteries as a result of increased blood flow, of the main artery in the legs was impaired by as much as 50 percent after just one hour. The study participants who walked for five minutes for each hour of sitting saw their arterial function stay the same — it did not drop throughout the three-hour period. Thosar says it is likely that the increase in muscle activity and blood flow accounts for this."

One way to incorporate this into ones habits is to use WorkRave.
Meetup : Portland Teachable Skills Discussion
by VAuroch — 2014-09-10T02:26:47.861Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Portland Teachable Skills Discussion

WHEN:
20 September 2014 01:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2945 NE 64th Ave, Portland, OR

First meetup in Portland after a long break.
This month's meetup will be a discussion on Teachable Skills; what are you learning, what can you teach, what do you need practice in, etc. It may break off into groups practicing specific skills, or we may arrange to do so at future meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Portland Teachable Skills Discussion
Meetup : Social Skills
by Anders_H — 2014-09-10T00:55:23.241Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Social Skills

WHEN:
24 September 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
98 Elm Street, Somerville MA

Come hear the amazing and charismatic Sam Rosen speak! Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong Wednesday meetups are once a month on the last Wednesday at 7pm at Citadel (98 Elm St Apt 1 Somerville, near Porter Square). All other meetups are on Sundays.
Our default schedule is as follows:
—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation. —Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 7:30pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes. —Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Social Skills
Meetup : Passive Investing and Financial Independence
by Anders_H — 2014-09-10T00:53:05.455Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Passive Investing and Financial Independence

WHEN:
21 September 2014 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
25 Ames Street , Cambridge MA 02139

Chase will be dispensing his financial wisdom.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups start at 3:30pm, and have an alternating location:

1st Sunday meetups are at Citadel in Porter Sq, at 98 Elm St, apt 1, Somerville.

3rd Sunday meetups are in MIT's building 66 at 25 Ames St, room 156. Room number subject to change based on availability; signs will be posted with the actual room number.

(We also have last Wednesday meetups at Citadel at 7pm.)

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 4pm, 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 : Passive Investing and Financial Independence
Talking to yourself: A useful thinking tool that seems understudied and underdiscussed
by chaosmage — 2014-09-09T16:56:38.149Z

I have returned from a particularly fruitful Google search, with unexpected results.

My question was simple. I was pretty sure that talking to myself aloud makes me temporarily better at solving problems that need a lot of working memory. It is a thinking tool that I find to be of great value, and that I imagine would be of interest to anyone who'd like to optimize their problem solving. I just wanted to collect some evidence on that, make sure I'm not deluding myself, and possibly learn how to enhance the effect.

This might be just lousy Googling on my part, but the evidence is surprisingly unclear and disorganized. There are at least three seperate Wiki pages for it. They don't link to each other. Instead they present the distinct models of three seperate fields: autocommunication in communication studies, semiotics and other cultural studies, intrapersonal communication ("self-talk" redirects here) in anthropology and (older) psychology and private speech in developmental psychology. The first is useless for my purpose, the second mentions "may increase concentration and retention" with no source, the third confirms my suspicion that this behavior boosts memory, motivation and creativity, but it only talks about children.

Google Scholar yields lots of sports-related results for "self-talk" because it can apparently improve the performance of athletes and if there's something that obviously needs the optimization power of psychology departments, it is competitive sports. For "intrapersonal communication" it has papers indicating it helps in language acquisition and in dealing with social anxiety. Both are dwarfed by the results for "private speech", which again focus on children. There's very little on "autocommunication" and what is there has nothing to do with the functioning of individual minds.

So there's a bunch of converging pieces of evidence supporting the usefulness of this behavior, but they're from several seperate fields that don't seem to have noticed each other very much. How often do you find that?

Let me quickly list a few ways that I find it plausible to imagine talking to yourself could enhance rational thought.

It taps the phonological loop, a distinct part of working memory that might otherwise sit idle in non-auditory tasks. More memory is always better, right?

Auditory information is retained more easily, so making thoughts auditory helps

...
Meetup : Brussels - September meetup
by Roxolan — 2014-09-09T04:44:32.417Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels - September meetup

WHEN:
13 September 2014 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

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.

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group.

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on meetup.com

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels - September meetup
Omission vs commission and conservation of expected moral evidence
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-09-08T14:22:36.130Z

Consequentialism traditionally doesn't distinguish between acts of commission or acts of omission. Not flipping the lever to the left is equivalent with flipping it to the right.

But there seems one clear case where the distinction is important. Consider a moral learning agent. It must act in accordance with human morality and desires, which it is currently unclear about.

For example, it may consider whether to forcibly wirehead everyone. If it does so, they everyone will agree, for the rest of their existence, that the wireheading was the right thing to do. Therefore across the whole future span of human preferences, humans agree that wireheading was correct, apart from a very brief period of objection in the immediate future. Given that human preferences are known to be inconsistent, this seems to imply that forcible wireheading is the right thing to do (if you happen to personally approve of forcible wireheading, replace that example with some other forcible rewriting of human preferences).

What went wrong there? Well, this doesn't respect "conversation of moral evidence": the AI got the moral values it wanted, but only though the actions it took. This is very close to the omission/commission distinction. We'd want the AI to not take actions (commission) that determines the (expectation of the) moral evidence it gets. Instead, we'd want the moral evidence to accrue "naturally", without interference and manipulation from the AI (omission).
Conversation with Paul Penley of Excellence in Giving
by KatjaGrace — 2014-09-08T14:00:51.000Z

Cross posted from 80,000 Hours Blog. Part of the Cause Prioritization Shallow, all parts of which are available here. Previously in this series, conversations with Owen Cotton-Barratt and Paul Christiano.

Participants

Paul Penley

Paul Penley: Director of Research, Excellence in Giving

Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Nick Beckstead: Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute; Board of Trustees, Center for Effective Altruism

Notes

This is a summary of Paul Penley’s points in a conversation on April 3, 2014, written by Katja with substantial help from the other participants.

What kind of philanthropic advising work does Excellence in Giving do?

Excellence in Giving is a philanthropic advisory firm with around seven staff members. Around 20 families retain them to act in the place of foundation staff, and other foundations consult with them on specific issues. Excellence in Giving provides an experienced staff who can share what they have learned serving clients for the past 12 years with new family foundations. They don’t manage money, but they do track giving, structure grants, research grant effectiveness, produce grant impact reports and plan experiences for clients to see and celebrate their giving’s impact.

The research department at Excellence in Giving evaluates nonprofit organizations, performs community solutions assessments and sets up outcomes measurement processes for grantees to ensure its clients support strategic, well-managed charities making a difference. Evaluations at the organization level are discussed online here. Such organizational evaluations have taken place at after school programs in Iowa, colleges in Oxford, children’s charities in Uganda and Kenya, and charitable trusts in north India.

Assessments of community needs and solutions tend to focus on a geographic location (e.g. Chicago), a population to be served (e.g. inner-city youths), and a focus area (e.g. early childhood development). They will identify problems among the population to be served that are related to the focus area, organizations that work on those problems, and solutions to those problems that have evidence of helping to alleviate the problems in question. This involves making tough judgement calls with data in hand from quantitative and qualitative research methods. Often an intervention is valuable, but enough work i...
Open thread, September 8-14, 2014
by polymathwannabe — 2014-09-08T12:31:36.779Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Is it a good idea to use Soylent once/twice a day?
by Adam Zerner — 2014-09-08T00:00:36.118Z

Edit: Sorry, I didn't realize there has been so much discussion on this already! I thought I had just stumbled across some obscure product haha. Anyway, I've been reading through discussions here, on Hacker News, Tim Ferris' blog etc. There's been a lot of talk about whether or not this is truly a "replacement for eating" (or whatever the term is). I think the more interesting question is whether it's a good idea to:

Have Soylent once or twice a day.

Have whole food snacks throughout the day like cheerios, trail mix, fruits etc.

Have a nice big dinner each day.

Maybe focus more on whole foods on weekends when you have more time.

I don't think this particular question has been discussed enough. And it seems that it hasn't been discussed here for a while. So perhaps we should start a new conversation!

My initial impression is that it is a good idea to use it as a once or twice a day thing.

It saves time. To me, this is huge.

It saves money.

It makes it easier to eat fewer calories, fat, sugar and salt. I'm surprised this health benefit isn't talked about more. Most american diets have way too much of these four things. I think Soylent helps in this area for two main reasons: a) It makes you full faster. b) It doesn't have as much calories/fat/sugar/salt as you a typical diet probably does.

It is probably way more nutritious than the meal it's replacing. Typical diets probably are lacking in certain nutrients, and Soylent will probably help to "fill in these gaps". Again, another huge benefit that I'm surprised doesn't get talked about as much (although this doesn't apply for people who use multivitamins).

There really don't seem to be anything unhealthy about having it once or twice a day. I'm not very confident about this claim because it hasn't been studied enough, but so far I haven't heard of anyone experiencing health problems from Soylent* as a once or twice a day thing, and meal replacement stuff like Soylent seems to have been around for a while and hasn't caused anyone any problems.
*The two main problems (digestive issues and headaches) seem to be sufficiently addressed by 1. Adopting it slowly into your diet (over the course of 5 days or so) and 2. Making sure you get enough salt.

So what do you guys think about using Soylent once or twice a day as I describe?

Edit: I just found an informative article - http://www.meghantelpner.com/blog/th

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Meetup : London social meetup
by philh — 2014-09-07T11:26:52.626Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup

WHEN:
14 September 2014 02:00:00AM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Holborn, WC2B 6BG

The next LW London meetup will be on September 14th. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.

I'll try to remember to bring an identifying sign, but if you have difficulty finding us, my number is 07792009646.

About London LessWrong:

We run this meetup approximately every other week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....

Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.

Related discussion happens on both our google group and our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup
Meetup : LW Copenhagen - September: This Wavefunction Has Uncollapsed
by Ruby — 2014-09-07T08:19:46.172Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Copenhagen - September: This Wavefunction Has Uncollapsed

WHEN:
13 September 2014 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Studenterhuset, Købmagergade 52, 1150 København, Denmark

Less Wrong Copenhagen is back!

Join us for this coming Saturday at Studenterhuset. The meetup will have two components:

Rationality Dojo: a section intended to be a serious self-improvement session for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth. At this meetup I'll talk about "Sphexishness, Agentiness, and Noticing" and follow with related exercises.

Socialising: second component is getting to know and enjoy the company of fellow humans who care about doing better. We'll drink, talk, maybe play a board game.

I'll be there from slightly before 15:00, call me on 22 47 83 73 if you're having trouble finding the group.

From the soon-to-published published CFAR Glossary:

Agency:
Agency is the property of agents. An agent has explicit goals which they strive to accomplish by planning and executing appropriate actions. Non-agents unreflectively act out default behaviours, without considering whether these actions achieve their goals. Agency is the opposite of sphexishness.

Sphexishness:
Coined by Douglas Hofstader in reference to the sphex wasp, sphexishness is the execution of seemingly intelligent behaviour by following a rigid algorithm. Sphexish behaviours, are repeated automatically, on habit, without checking for their effectiveness at achieving desired goals. Opposite of agency.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Copenhagen - September: This Wavefunction Has Uncollapsed