trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Defense of Naive Metaethics
by Will_Sawin — 2011-06-09T17:46:12.624Z

I aim to make several arguments in the post that we can make statements about what should be done and what should not be done that cannot be reduced, by definition, to statements about the physical world.

A Naive Argument

Lukeprog says this in one of his posts:

If someone makes a claim of the 'ought' type, either they are talking about the world of is, or they are talking about the world of is not. If they are talking about the world of is not, then I quickly lose interest because the world of is not isn't my subject of interest.

I would like to question that statement. I would guess that lukeprog's chief subject of interest is figuring out what to do with the options presented to him. His interest is, therefore, in figuring out what he ought to do.

Consider the reasoning process that takes him from observations about the world to actions. He sees something, and then thinks, and then thinks some more, and then decides. Moreover, he can, if he chooses, express every step of this reasoning process in words. Does he really lose interest at the last step?

My goal here is to get people to feel the intuition that "I ought to do X" means something, and that thing is not "I think I ought to do X" or "I would think that I ought to do X if I were smarter and some other stuff".

(If you don't, I'm not sure what to do.)

People who do feel that intuition run into trouble. This is because "I ought to do X' does not refer to anything that exists. How can you make a statement that doesn't refer to anything that exists?

I've done it, and my reasoning process is still intact, and nothing has blown up. Everything seems to be fine. No one has explained to me what isn't fine about this.

Since it's intuitive, why would you not want to do it that way?

(You can argue that certain words, for certain people, do not refer to what one ought to do. But it's a different matter to suggest that no word refers to what one ought to do beyond facts about what is.)

A Flatland Argument

"I'm not interested in words, I'm interested in things. Words are just sequences of sounds or images. There's no way a sequence of arbitrary symbols could imply another sequence, or inform a decision."

"I understand how logical definitions work. I can see how, from a small set of axioms, you can derive a large number of interesting facts. But I'm not interested in words without definitio

...
[SEQ RERUN] Third Alternatives for Afterlife-ism
by badger — 2011-06-09T15:31:07.596Z

Today's post, Third Alternatives for Afterlife-ism was originally published on May 8, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

One source of hope against death is Afterlife-ism. Some say that this justifies it as a Noble Lie. But there are better (because more plausible) Third Alternatives, including nanotech, actuarial escape velocity, cryonics, and the Singularity. If supplying hope were the real goal of the Noble Lie, advocates would prefer these alternatives. But the real goal is to excuse a fixed belief from criticism, not to supply hope.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Third Alternative, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.
Checking for Threshold Number of Rationalists in São Paulo
by diegocaleiro — 2011-06-09T13:55:47.258Z

Hello, this post is only to check if there are enough people in São Paulo to make it worth it to arrange a meetup for São Paulo Less Wrongers.

Please reply saying "Paulista" if you are living in São Paulo area and would like to join a meeting (not necessarily monthly, just a meeting)
The Case of the Speluncean Explorers
by cousin_it — 2011-06-09T13:52:04.966Z

A fictional legal case about a team of explorers who got trapped in a cave and ate one of their own to survive. Summary:

From the testimony of the defendants, which was accepted by the jury, it appears that it was Whetmore who first proposed that they might find the nutriment without which survival was impossible in the flesh of one of their own number. It was also Whetmore who first proposed the use of some method of casting lots, calling the attention of the defendants to a pair of dice he happened to have with him. The defendants were at first reluctant to adopt so desperate a procedure, but after the conversations by wireless related above, they finally agreed on the plan proposed by Whetmore. After much discussion of the mathematical problems involved, agreement was finally reached on a method of determining the issue by the use of the dice.

Before the dice were cast, however, Whetmore declared that he withdrew from the arrangement, as he had decided on reflection to wait for another week before embracing an expedient so frightful and odious. The others charged him with a breach of faith and proceeded to cast the dice. When it came Whetmore's turn, the dice were cast for him by one of the defendants, and he was asked to declare any objections he might have to the fairness of the throw. He stated that he had no such objections. The throw went against him, and he was then put to death and eaten by his companions.

Was it right for them to kill and eat someone who wanted to opt out of the arrangement?
London Meetup 05-Jun-2011 - very rough minutes
by Alexandros — 2011-06-09T13:40:47.148Z

This was posted to the London LessWrong mailing list, but I am crossposting here, as per David Gerard's suggestion, in case anyone else finds this interesting.

These notes are from my perspective, so things will be missing (as some are added).

So here's my notes:

Bitcoin - Mostly how it's quite interesting, but annoying that we can't transfer money in from the UK. Myself and ciphergoth were the interested parties. If anyone has any ideas, let us know.

Euthyphro Dilemma and Moral Realism - The first religion-themed conversation, mostly on the sorts of answers that come up to the dilemma and what constitutes moral realism anyway.

Evolutionarily Stable Strategies - The discussion of moral realism naturally led to what the nature of morality is and how evolution gave rise to it.

Learning Decision Theory & Project Euler - Not sure how we got here, but I mentioned my desire that the people working on decision theory would make a Project Euler-type introduction to the material, so the rest of us can eventually join the conversation. I should probably write this up as a separate discussion post.

Rationality as Landgrab, and Definitions of Rationality - Apparently some high-ranking figures in the general futurist cluster dislike LessWrong for 'appropriating the term rationality'. There may or may not be a point there, but we started discussing how the term can be defined, preferably in a LW-independent manner.

Libertarianism & LessWrong - There seems to be a high concentration of libertarians on LW, and it seems that the ban on talking politics has kept this from being discussed much. Which brings us to...

Talking Politics on LessWrong - There seems to be this norm against talking politics, which was inherited by other online communities. However, LessWrong is very much not like other communities. We can discuss religion and philosophy without flamewars breaking out, so why not try politics too? People on LW have been known to change their minds, so there is a good chance we will generate more light than heat.

Describing LW & Changing our minds - Leonhart described the site as 'an Internet forum where people occasionally apologise and change their minds'. Everyone else felt this was a great formulation that should be noted down. Discussion on what we have changed our minds on on LW followed

Historicity of Jesus&nbs...
DC Meetup June 12th (New Location)
by atucker — 2011-06-09T04:56:03.761Z

Sunday June 12th
Core hours: 1 PM - 3PM
Apartment #1005
3001 Veazy Terrace
Washington, DC 20008

Notes:
Core hours are 1-3, but many people are willing to stay around longer than that.

Our topic for the meeting will be "Where/why rationalists win, and where they don't". However, if we seem to exhaust this topic, we'll move on as appropriate.

Benquo will also lead a few rationality exercises from the minicamp

Directions:
Benquo's apartment is near the Van Ness - UDC Metro station, just follow these directions.
See us also at lesswrong-dc@googlegroups.com
Safety Culture and the Marginal Effect of a Dollar
by jimrandomh — 2011-06-09T03:59:28.731Z

We spent an evening at last week's Rationality Minicamp brainstorming strategies for reducing existential risk from Unfriendly AI, and for estimating their marginal benefit-per-dollar. To summarize the issue briefly, there is a lot of research into artificial general intelligence (AGI) going on, but very few AI researchers take safety seriously; if someone succeeds in making an AGI, but they don't take safety seriously or they aren't careful enough, then it might become very powerful very quickly and be a threat to humanity. The best way to prevent this from happening is to promote a safety culture - that is, to convince as many artificial intelligence researchers as possible to think about safety so that if they make a breakthrough, they won't do something stupid.

We came up with a concrete (albeit greatly oversimplified) model which suggests that the marginal reduction in existential risk per dollar, when pursuing this strategy, is extremely high. The model is this: assume that if an AI is created, it's because one researcher, chosen at random from the pool of all researchers, has the key insight; and humanity survives if and only if that researcher is careful and takes safety seriously. In this model, the goal is to convince as many researchers as possible to take safety seriously. So the question is: how many researchers can we convince, per dollar? Some people are very easy to convince - some blog posts are enough. Those people are convinced already. Some people are very hard to convince - they won't take safety seriously unless someone who really cares about it will be their friend for years. In between, there are a lot of people who are currently unconvinced, but would be convinced if there were lots of good research papers about safety in machine learning and computer science journals, by lots of different authors.

Right now, those articles don't exist; we need to write them. And it turns out that neither the Singularity Institute nor any other organization has the resources - staff, expertise, and money to hire grad students - to produce very much research or to substantially alter the research culture. We are very far from the realm of diminishing returns. Let's make this model quantitative.

Let A be the probability that an AI will be created; let R the fraction of researchers that would be convinced to take safety seriously if there were a 100 good p...
Mediocre masses are not what’s repugnant
by KatjaGrace — 2011-06-09T03:17:04.000Z

The usual repugnant conclusion:

A world of people living very good lives is always less good than some much larger world of people whose lives are only just worth living.

My variant, in brief:

A world containing a number of people living very good lives is always less good than some much larger, longer lived world of people whose lives contain extremes of good and bad that overall add to life being only just worth living.

The usual repugnant conclusion is considered very counterintuitive, so most people disagree with it. Consequently avoiding the repugnant conclusion is often taken as a strong constraint on what a reasonable population ethics could look like (e.g. see this list of ways to amend population ethics, or chapter 17 onwards of Reasons and Persons ). I asked my readers how crazy they thought it was to accept my variant of the repugnant conclusion, relative to the craziness of accepting the usual one. Below are the results so far.

Poll results

Most people’s intuitions about my variant were quite different from the usual intuition about the repugnant conclusion, with only 21% considering both conclusions about as crazy. Everyone else who made the comparison found my version much more palatable, with 57% of people claiming it was quite sensible or better. These are the reverse of the usual intuition.

This difference demonstrates that the usual intuition about the repugnant conclusion can’t be so easily generalised to ‘large populations of low value lives shouldn’t add up to a lot of value’, which is what the repugnant conclusion is usually taken to suggest. Such a generalization can’t be made because the intuition does not hold in such situations in general. The usual aversion must be about something other than population and the value in each life. Something that we usually abstract away when talking about the repugnant conclusion.

What could it be? I changed several things in my variant, so here are some hypotheses:

Variance: This is the most obvious change. Perhaps our intuitions are not so sensitive to the overall quality of a life as by the heights of the best bits. It’s not the notion of a low average that’s depressing, it’s losing the hope of a high.

Time: I described my large civilization as lasting much longer than my short one, rather than being larger only in space. This could make a difference:...
Berkeley Monthly Meetup, June 11th, 7:00 PM
by FrankAdamek — 2011-06-09T01:20:24.086Z

Hey all!
The monthly Berkeley meetup will be held at 3045 Shattuck Avenue, two blocks east of the Ashby BART station. It's a 3 story building with apartments on the top 2 floors and a large open commercial space on the bottom. The Singularity Institute has rented the commercial space and the top floor apartment; they haven't rented the middle floor, so avoid disturbing the neighbors there. The building is a really great location, recently built, and with a plethora of chairs and tables. What's more, you can actually move them! The day will be Saturday the 11th, and as usual the time will be 7 PM.

Also, consider requesting an invitation to the bayarealesswrong google group if you're in the area and not already on it, as there are further events and postings there.

This is my first time posting a meetup, so I may fail in my attempt to check back for any replies.

See you there!
The Four-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss - any LWers tried it?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2011-06-08T22:18:26.913Z

I've just read the Four-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss. It seems on the face of it like ridiculously valuable material, if true - like what the completed version of Michael Vassar's proposed reboot of dietary science would look like at the finish point if dieting turned out to be more susceptible to Munchkinism than in my wildest dreams. Ferriss also talks the rationalist talk quite well in this book, much more so than in Four-Hour Workweek; he cites the experiments and occasionally says things like "I spent a lot of money on this and I expected it to work and it didn't work at all" or "I tried this and it seemed to work and I have no idea why it worked and I think it was probably a placebo effect."

Does the LessWrong hivemind have an opinion about 4HB? Has anyone tried it and found that it doesn't work, or that it does work, or that it works but not as well as Ferriss thinks it should work?
What does lack of evidence of a causal relationship tell you?
by James_Miller — 2011-06-08T19:03:45.283Z

Imagine that you know there is a strong correlation between X and Y. Statistically competent scholars have extensively examined the causal relationship between X and Y and have failed to find a significant causal relationship and have failed to rule out the possibility that there is a significant causal relationship.

Would it be reasonable for you to claim that the causal relationship between X and Y probably isn't too strong or it would have shown up clearly on statistical analysis? At the very least, should learning of the negative results of the scholars cause you to decrease your estimate of the causal relationship between X and Y?
Requirements for AI to go FOOM
by XiXiDu — 2011-06-08T18:54:23.104Z

Related to: Should I believe what the SIAI claims?; What I would like the SIAI to publish

The argument, that an AI can go FOOM (undergo explosive recursive self-improvement), requires various premises (P#) to be true simultaneously:

P1: The human development of artificial general intelligence will take place quickly.

P2: Any increase in intelligence does vastly outweigh its computational cost and the expenditure of time needed to discover it.

P3: AGI is able to create, or acquire, resources, empowering technologies or civilisatory support.

P4: AGI can undergo explosive recursive self-improvement and reach superhuman intelligence without having to rely on slow environmental feedback.

P5: Goal stability and self-preservation are not requirements for an AGI to undergo explosive recursive self-improvement.

P6: AGI researchers will be smart enough and manage to get everything right, including a mathematically precise definition of the AGI's utility-function, yet fail to implement spatio-temporal scope boundaries, resource usage and optimization limits.

Therefore the probability of an AI to go FOOM (P(FOOM)) is the probability of the conjunction (P#∧P#) of its premises:

P(FOOM) = P(P1∧P2∧P3∧P4∧P5∧P6)

Of course, there are many more premises that need to be true in order to enable an AI to go FOOM, e.g. that each level of intelligence can effectively handle its own complexity, or that most AGI designs can somehow self-modify their way up to massive superhuman intelligence. But I believe that the above points are enough to show that the case for a hard takeoff is not disjunctive, but rather strongly conjunctive.

Premise 1 (P1): If the development of AGI takes place slowly, a gradual and controllable development, we might be able to learn from small-scale mistakes, or have enough time to develop friendly AI, while having to face other existential risks.

This might for example be the case if intelligence can not be captured by a discrete algorithm, or is modular, and therefore never allow us to reach a point where we can suddenly build the smartest thing ever that does just extend itself indefinitely.
Premise 2 (P2): If you increase intelligence you might also increase the computational cost of its further improvement, the distance to the discovery of some unknown unknown that could enable another quantum leap, by reducing the design space with ev...
States of knowledge as amplitude configurations
by  — 2011-06-08T18:38:39.074Z

I am reading through the sequence on quantum physics and have had some questions which I am sure have been thought about by far more qualified people. If you have any useful comments or links about these ideas, please share.

Most of the strongest resistance to ideas about rationalism that I encounter comes not from people with religious beliefs per se, but usually from mathematicians or philosophers who want to assert arguments about the limits of knowledge, the fidelity of sensory perception as a means for gaining knowledge, and various (what I consider to be) pathological examples (such as the zombie example). Among other things, people tend to reduce the argument to the existence of proper names a la Wittgenstein and then go on to assert that the meaning of mathematics or mathematical proofs constitutes something which is fundamentally not part of the physical world.

As I am reading the quantum physics sequence (keep in mind that I am not a physicist; I am an applied mathematician and statistician and so the mathematical framework of Hilbert spaces and amplitude configurations makes vastly much more sense to me than billiard balls or waves, yet connecting it to reality is still very hard for me) I am struck by the thought that all thoughts are themselves fundamentally just amplitude configurations, and by extension, all claims about knowledge about things are also statements about amplitude configurations. For example, my view is that the color red does not exist in and of itself but rather that the experience of the color red is a statement about common configurations of particle amplitudes. When I say "that sign is red", one could unpack this into a detailed statement about statistical properties of configurations of particles in my brain.

The same reasoning seems to apply just as well to something like group theory. States of knowledge about the Sylow theorems, just as an example, would be properties of particle amplitude configurations in a brain. The Sylow theorems are not separately existing entities which are of themselves "true" in any sense.

Perhaps I am way off base in thinking this way. Can any philosophers of the mind point me in the right direction to read more about this?
[SEQ RERUN] The Third Alternative
by badger — 2011-06-08T14:19:42.504Z

Today's post, The Third Alternative was originally published on May 6, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

People justify Noble Lies by pointing out their benefits over doing nothing. But, if you really need these benefits, you can construct a Third Alternative for getting them. How? You have to search for one. Beware the temptation not to search or to search perfunctorily. Ask yourself, "Did I spend five minutes by the clock trying hard to think of a better alternative?"

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Beware the Unsurprised, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.
Logan, UT meetup Sat 18 Jun 4pm
by lextori — 2011-06-08T06:08:28.626Z

Mezik and I got talking this week and figured that being in an town with a major engineering program we might have enough less wrongians to begin a useful meet-up group. So we're making one happen.

Meet at 4pm at the USU Library If the weather is nice we will be outside of the cafe, otherwise we will head inside.

I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to what to do, but if we have enough people we will plan on playing paranoid debate.

What are some good question types for use in paranoid debate?

Edit: added a few tags. and question about good topics for paranoid debate.