trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Truth is holistic
by MrMind — 2015-04-23T07:26:47.004Z

You already know by now that truth is undefinable: by a famous result of Tarski, no formal system powerful enough (from now on, just system) can consistently talk about the truth of its own sentences.

You may however not know that Hamkins proved that truth is holistic.
Let me explain: while no system can talk about its own truth, it can nevertheless talk about the truth of its own substructures. For example, in every model of ZFC (the standard axioms of set theory) you can consistently define a model of standard arithmetics and a predicate that works as arithmetics' truth predicate. This can happen because ZFC is strictly more powerful than PA (the axioms of standard arithmetics).
Intuitively, one could think that if you have the same substructure in two different models, what they believe is the truth about that substructure is the same in both. Along this line, two models of ZFC ought to believe the same things about standard arithmetics.
However, it turns out this is not the case. Two different models extending ZFC may very well agree on which entities are standard natural numbers, and yet still disagree about which arithmetic sentences are true or false. For example, they could agree about the standard numbers, how the successor and addition operator works, and yet disagree on multiplication (corollary 7.1 in Hamkins' paper).
This means that when you can talk consistently about the truth of a model (that is, when you are in a more powerful formal system), that truth depends not only on the substructure, but on the entire structure you're immersed in. Figuratively speaking, local truth depends on global truth. Truth is holistic.
There's more: suppose that two model agree on the ontology of some common substructure. Suppose also that they agree about the truth predicate on that structure: they could still disagree about the meta-truths. Or the meta-meta-truths, etc., for all the ordinal levels of the definable truth predicates.

Another striking example from the same paper. There are two different extensions of set theory which agree on the structure of standard arithmetics and on the members of a subset A of natural numbers, and yet one thinks that A is first-order definable while the other thinks it's not (theorem 10).

Not even "being a model of ZFC" is an absolute property: there are two models which agree on an initial segment of the set hierarch...
Tally of LessWrong experience on Alcohol
by Elo — 2015-04-22T23:29:38.936Z

As a follow up post to: http://lesswrong.com/lw/m2r/lesswrong_experience_on_alcohol/

I tallied the responses.

In rought categories:

Doesnt drink: 11

Drinks: 19

Drinks heavily: 4

Disclaimers; I had to make judegements as to people who didn't like alcohol who drink very rarely (but are not morally opposed to the thought of it), and people who drink regularly as to how much would put them into the "drinks heavily" category. I think I did an okay job of it.

I wonder if LW (and other bodies) can make money for itself using similar click-thru tactics used on book buying but for online alcohol stores. Drink responsibly!

I will try to update this tally if any more responses are received.

I hope the following question finds its way onto the lesswrong survey:

How regularly do you drink?

daily (or almost daily)

5 days a week

3 days a week

twice a week

once a week

a few times a month

less than 12 time a year

less than 2 times a year

never

(and possibly)

Has your drinking habits changed since last year?

I drink more

I drink the same

I drink different things but about the same amount of drinks

I drink less

(follow up post on spice preferences coming in a few hours)

(Edit*2: 25/4/15 added some commenters to the tally)
Meetup : BYU-I Meetup
by Bound_up — 2015-04-22T23:27:01.562Z

Discussion article for the meetup : BYU-I Meetup

WHEN:
29 April 2015 03:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Rexburg, Idaho: McKay Library Commons, by the dictionaries

Optimization

Discussion article for the meetup : BYU-I Meetup
Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
by Scott Alexander — 2015-04-22T02:42:11.000Z

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things. But before we go any further, could you tell me the two prime factors of 1,522,605,027, 922,533,360, 535,618,378, 132,637,429, 718,068,114, 961,380,688, 657,908,494 ,580,122,963, 258,952,897, 654,000,350, 692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The sea was made of strontium; the beach was made of rye. Above my head, a watery sun shone in an oily sky. A thousand stars of sertraline whirled round quetiapine moons, and the sand sizzled sharp like cooking oil that hissed and sang and threatened to boil the octahedral dunes.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Let me tell you where I’m coming from. I was reading Scott McGreal’s blog, which has some good articles about so-called DMT entities, and mentions how they seem so real that users of the drug insist they’ve made contact with actual superhuman beings and not just psychedelic hallucinations. You know, the usual Terence McKenna stuff. But in one of them he mentions a paper by Marko Rodriguez called A Methodology For Studying Various Interpretations of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine-Induced Alternate Reality, which suggested among other things that you could prove DMT entities were real by taking the drug and then asking the entities you meet to factor large numbers which you were sure you couldn’t factor yourself. So to that end, could you do me a big favor and tell me the factors of 1,522,605,027, 922,533,360, 535,618,378, 132,637,429, 718,068,114, 961,380,688, 657,908,494, 580,122,963, 258,952,897, 654,000,350, 692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The sea turned hot and geysers shot up from the floor below. First one of wine, then one of brine, then one more yet of turpentine, and we three stared at the show.

“I was afraid you might say that. Is there anyone more, uh, verbal here whom I could talk to?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

At the sound of that, the big green bat started rotating in place. On its other side was a bigger greener bat, with a ancient, wrinkled face.

“Not splitting numbers /...
Ukraine
by Mitchell_Porter — 2015-04-21T20:54:00.122Z

I am not really following your discussion about ethics of having children, but I thought I would mention Uriupina.com, a blogger from your city who does take the radical "antinatalist" position. For her it's a development out of a generally pessimist philosophy, and I think she studied psychology too... So, she is a mind that is geographically near yours, but philosophically distant... but I thought I would still mention her, just in case.
Happiness and Goodness as Universal Terminal Virtues
by  — 2015-04-21T16:42:37.779Z

Hi, I'm new to LessWrong. I stumbled onto this site a month ago, and ever since, I've been devouring Rationality: AI to Zombies faster than I used to go through my favorite fantasy novels. I've spent some time on website too, and I'm pretty intimidated about posting, since you guys all seem so smart and knowledgeable, but here goes... This is probably the first intellectual idea I've had in my life, so if you want to tear it to shreds, you are more than welcome to, but please be gentle with my feelings. :)

Edit: Thanks to many helpful comments, I've cleaned up the original post quite a bit and changed the title to reflect this.

Ends-in-themselves

As humans, we seem to share the same terminal values, or terminal virtues. We want to do things that make ourselves happy, and we want to do things that make others happy. We want to 'become happy' and 'become good.'

Because various determinants--including, for instance, personal fulfillment--can affect an individual's happiness, there is significant overlap between these ultimate motivators. Doing good for others usually brings us happiness. For example, donating to charity makes people feel warm and fuzzy. Some might recognize this overlap and conclude that all humans are entirely selfish, that even those who appear altruistic are subconsciously acting purely out of self-interest. Yet many of us choose to donate to charities that we believe do the most good per dollar, rather than handing out money through personal-happiness-optimizing random acts of kindness. Seemingly rational human beings sometimes make conscious decisions to inefficiently maximize their personal happiness for the sake of others. Consider Eliezer's example in Terminal Values and Instrumental Values of a mother who sacrifices her life for her son.

Why would people do stuff that they know won't efficiently increase their happiness? Before I de-converted from Christianity and started to learn what evolution and natural selection actually were, before I realized that altruistic tendencies are partially genetic, it used to utterly mystify me that atheists would sometimes act so virtuously. I did believe that God gave them a conscience, but I kinda thought that surely someone rational enough to become an atheist would be rational enough to realize that his conscience didn't always lead him to his optimal mind-state, and work...
Mental representation and the is-ought distinction
by Error — 2015-04-20T18:37:58.755Z

I'm reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. In appendix B I came across the following comment. Emphasis mine:

Studies of language comprehension indicate that people quickly recode much of what they hear into an abstract representation that no longer distinguishes whether the idea was expressed in an active or in a passive form and no longer discriminates what was actually said from what was implied, presupposed, or implicated (Clark and Clark 1977).

My first thought on seeing this is: holy crap, this explains why people insist on seeing relevance claims in my statements that I didn't put there. If the brain doesn't distinguish statement from implicature, and my conversational partner believes that A implies B when I don't, then of course I'm going to be continually running into situations where people model me as saying and believing B when I actually only said A. At a minimum this will happen any time I discuss any question of seemingly-morally-relevant fact with someone who hasn't trained themselves to make the is-ought distinction. Which is most people.

The next thought my brain jumped to: This process might explain the failure to make the is-ought distinction in the first place. That seems like much more of a leap, though. I looked up the Clark and Clark cite. Unfortunately it's a fairly long book that I'm not entirely sure I want to wade through. Has anyone else read it? Can someone offer more details about exactly what findings Kahneman is referencing?
Meetup : London: Presentation and Performance Games
by sixes_and_sevens — 2015-04-20T16:23:56.536Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London: Presentation and Performance Games

WHEN:
26 April 2015 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Lincoln's Inn Fields, Holborn, London

Hey you!

Yes, you!

Do you like games? Do you like being awesome? Then you'll LOVE Presentation and Performance Games!

Starting at 2pm, the plan is to spend a couple of hours on a bunch of activities loosely related to being the focus of a group of people. We'll then declare victory and descend into anarchy. Anarchy may involve sitting around and talking, or may involve more games if we want.

You're also welcome to come along and not participate in these games, or just hang out and talk about abstruse moral dilemmas, or bitcoin fanfic, or how much measure you anticipate having when you simulate winning the lottery or whatever.

We'll be making the most of this unreasonably good weather by having the meetup at Lincoln's Inn Fields, just around the corner from the regular venue. We'll be in the north-west quadrant of the green. If you have trouble finding us, call 07887 718458. If the weather is bad, we'll fall back to the Shakespeare's Head.

Discussion article for the meetup : London: Presentation and Performance Games
Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
by skilesare — 2015-04-20T13:38:12.859Z

I posted a stupid question a couple of weeks ago and got some good feedback.

@ChristianKl suggested that I start building a model of hypercapitalism for people to play with. I have the first one ready! It isn't quite to the point where people can start submitting bots to play in the economy, but I think it shows that the idea is worth more thought.

Analysis:

http://www.hypercapital.info/news/2015/4/19/a-published-model-of-hypercapitalism

Runnable Code - fork it and mess around with it:

http://runnable.com/VTBkszswv6lIdEFR/hypercapitalism-sample-economy-for-node-js-and-hello-world

I'd love some more feedback and opinions.

A couple of other things for context:

hypercapital.info - all about hypercapitalism

Overcoming bias about our money

Information Theory and the Economy
Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-04-20T00:02:58.277Z

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. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

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

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Self-verification 
by Nanashi — 2015-04-19T23:36:39.719Z

This isn't a trick question, nor do I have a particular answer in mind.

Tomorrow, all of your memories are going to be wiped. There is a crucial piece of information that you need to make sure you remember, and more specifically, you need to be very confident you were the one that sent this message and not a third party pretending to be you.

How do you go about transmitting, "signing", and verifying such a message*?

--edit: I should have clarified that one of the assumptions is that some malicious third party can/will be attempting to send you false information from "yourself" and you need to distinguish between that and what's really you.

--edit2: this may be formally impossible, I don't actually know. If anyone can demonstrate this I'd be very appreciative.

--edit3: I don't have a particular universal definition for the term "memory wipe" in mind, mainly because I didn't want to pigeonhole the discussion. I think this pretty closely mimics reality. So I think it's totally fine to say, "If you retain this type of memory, then I'd do X."
A quick sketch on how the Curry-Howard Isomorphism kinda appears to connect Algorithmic Information Theory with ordinal logics
by  — 2015-04-19T19:35:08.541Z

The following is sorta-kinda carried on from a recent comments thread, where I was basically saying I wasn't gonna yack about what I'm thinking until I spent the time to fully formalized it. Well, Luke got interested in it, and I spewed the entire sketch and intuition to him, and he asked me to put it up where others can participate. So the following is it.

Basically, Algorithmic Information Theory as started by Solomonoff and Kolmogorov, and then continued by Chaitin, contains a theorem called Chaitin's Incompleteness Theorem, which says (in short, colloquial terms) "you can't prove a 20kg theorem with 10kg of axioms". Except it says this in fairly precise mathematical terms, all of which are based in the undecidability of the Halting Problem. To possess "more kilograms" of axioms is mathematically equivalent to being able to computationally decide the halting behavior of "more kilograms" of Turing Machines, or to be able to compress strings to smaller sizes.

Now consider the Curry-Howard Isomorphism, which says that logical systems as computation machines and logical systems as mathematical logics are, in certain precise ways, the same thing. Now consider ordinal logic as started in Turing's PhD thesis, which starts with ordinary first-order logic and extends it with axioms saying "First-order logic is consistent", "First-order logic extended with the previous axiom is consistent", all the way up to the limiting countable infinity Omega (and then, I believe but haven't checked, further into the transfinite ordinals).

In a search problem with partial information, as you gain more information you're closing in on a smaller and smaller portion of your search space. Thus, Turing's ordinal logics don't violate Goedel's Second Incompleteness Theorem: they specify more axioms, and therefore specify a smaller "search space" of models that are, up to any finite ordinal level, standard models of first-order arithmetic (and therefore genuinely consistent up to precisely that finite ordinal level). Goedel's Completeness Theorem says that theorems of a first-order theory/language are provable iff they are true in every model of that first-order theory/language. The clearest, least mystical, presentation of Goedel's First Incompleteness ...
Astronomy, space exploration and the Great Filter
by JoshuaZ — 2015-04-19T19:26:40.620Z

Astronomical research has what may be an under-appreciated role in helping us understand and possibly avoiding the Great Filter. This post will examine how astronomy may be helpful for identifying potential future filters. The primary upshot is that we may have an advantage due to our somewhat late arrival: if we can observe what other civilizations have done wrong, we can get a leg up.

This post is not arguing that colonization is a route to remove some existential risks. There is no question that colonization will reduce the risk of many forms of Filters, but the vast majority of astronomical work has no substantial connection to colonization. Moreover, the case for colonization has been made strongly by many others already, such as Robert Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars" or this essay by Nick Bostrom.

Note: those already familiar with the Great Filter and proposed explanations may wish to skip to the section "How can we substantially improve astronomy in the short to medium term?"

What is the Great Filter?

There is a worrying lack of signs of intelligent life in the universe. The only intelligent life we have detected has been that on Earth. While planets are apparently numerous, there have been no signs of other life. There are three possible lines of evidence we would expect to see if civilizations were common in the universe: radio signals, direct contact, and large-scale constructions. The first two of these issues are well-known, but the most serious problem arises from the lack of large-scale constructions: as far as we can tell the universe look natural. The vast majority of matter and energy in the universe appears to be unused. The Great Filter is one possible explanation for this lack of life, namely that some phenomenon prevents intelligent life from passing into the interstellar, large-scale phase. Variants of the idea have been floating around for a long time; the term was first coined by Robin Hanson in this essay. There are two fundamental versions of the Filter: filtration which has occurred in our past, and Filtration which will occur in our future. For obvious reasons the second of the two is more of a concern. Moreover, as our technological level increases, the chance that we are getting to the last point of serious filtration gets higher since as one has a civilization spread out to multiple stars, filtration becomes more di...
Concept Safety: What are concepts for, and how to deal with alien concepts
by Kaj_Sotala — 2015-04-19T13:44:37.425Z

In The Problem of Alien Concepts, I posed the following question: if your concepts (defined as either multimodal representations or as areas in a psychological space) previously had N dimensions and then they suddenly have N+1, how does that affect (moral) values that were previously only defined in terms of N dimensions?

I gave some (more or less) concrete examples of this kind of a "conceptual expansion":

Children learn to represent dimensions such as "height" and "volume", as well as "big" and "bright", separately at around age 5.
As an inhabitant of the Earth, you've been used to people being unable to fly and landowners being able to forbid others from using their land. Then someone goes and invents an airplane, leaving open the question of the height to which the landowner's control extends. Similarly for satellites and nation-states.
As an inhabitant of Flatland, you've been told that the inside of a certain rectangle is a forbidden territory. Then you learn that the world is actually three-dimensional, leaving open the question of the height of which the forbidden territory extends.
An AI has previously been reasoning in terms of classical physics and been told that it can't leave a box, which it previously defined in terms of classical physics. Then it learns about quantum physics, which allow for definitions of "location" which are substantially different from the classical ones.

As a hint of the direction where I'll be going, let's first take a look at how humans solve these kinds of dilemmas, and consider examples #1 and #2.

The first example - children realizing that items have a volume that's separate from their height - rarely causes any particular crises. Few children have values that would be seriously undermined or otherwise affected by this discovery. We might say that it's a non-issue because none of the children's values have been defined in terms of the affected conceptual domain.

As for the second example, I don't know the exact cognitive process by which it was decided that you didn't need the landowner's permission to fly over their land. But I'm guessing that it involved reasoning like: if the plane flies at a sufficient height, then that doesn't harm the landowner in any way. Flying would become impossible difficult if you had to get separate permission from every person whose land you were going to fly over. And, especially befo...
Meetup : Canberra: Intro to Solomonoff induction
by DanielFilan — 2015-04-19T10:58:17.933Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Intro to Solomonoff induction

WHEN:
24 April 2015 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
108 North Road, Acton

Assume we are walking through the world and see a bunch of objects. Some
of these objects are ravens, and all of the ravens turn out to be black.
So we start entertaining the hypothesis that 'all ravens are black'. But
how can we believe in this hypothesis? It talks about an infinite number
of ravens, almost all of which we haven't seen!

What we need is a method of induction, generalizing a finite number of
examples into a universal rule. It has been claimed that Solomonoff
induction is the best method out there. Is that true? Does that mean all
scientists should use Solomonoff induction? How does it work? And what
can it do for me?

Jan will explain these and related questions giving a brief tour from
probability theory to the universally intelligent agent AIXI. No prior
knowledge about math is required. As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

If you use Facebook, please join our group.

Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Intro to Solomonoff induction