trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
X-Risk Roll Call 
by fowlertm — 2013-06-19T04:07:36.931Z

I'm working on a substantial research piece concerned with x-risk, and a sub-task of that involves compiling a list of important people in the field along with a brief summary of their education and relevant links. I realized that such a list might be a useful bit of meta-scholarship on its own, so I'm posting an incomplete version of it here in case anyone thinks there are people I should add. I haven't tracked down all the cv's and personal websites yet but I'd like to get the feedback ball rolling. After the LW crowd has given me any criticisms it thinks are relevant, I'll polish the list up.

The focus is on researchers in x-risk and related fields, so I'm not including, say, every machine intelligence researcher, just the ones who, as far as I can tell, show an awareness of the possible existential impact of their work. In practice this means those who are affiliated with x-risk reduction groups like the Future of Humanity Institute or MIRI, or ones who've specifically written on x-risk. No, that's not quite fair, but I needed some heuristic for narrowing down the list, and my mind is open if anyone has a better idea.

And yes, this is mostly information that's available with a little Googling (though a few people were hard to track down). But this list, when completed, will allow any interested person to quickly see the educational pathways taken by a large number of x-risk researchers. I'm compiling this information as opposed to, say, current position or research interests because the former is more relevant to the bigger project I'm working on, the latter is more likely to change, and besides Googling is easy if you're only interested in a handful of people. But if there is demand for a more thorough and comprehensive document, I could also put that together.

I've erred on the side of inclusion, which means I included people even if they were interns or associates as opposed to primary researchers. Of course I intend to finish this on my own, but if anyone just wants to help, let me know.

Who did I miss?

Associated with the Future of Humanity Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute:

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Background:

extremely high mathematical talent with a strong philosophical bent.

wiki...
Why do theists, undergrads, and Less Wrongers favor one-boxing on Newcomb?
by CarlShulman — 2013-06-19T01:55:05.775Z

Follow-up to: Normative uncertainty in Newcomb's problem
Philosophers and atheists break for two-boxing; theists and Less Wrong break for one-boxing
Personally, I would one-box on Newcomb's Problem. Conditional on one-boxing for lawful reasons, one boxing earns $1,000,000, while two-boxing, conditional on two-boxing for lawful reasons, would deliver only a thousand. But this seems to be firmly a minority view in philosophy, and numerous heuristics about expert opinion suggest that I should re-examine the view.
In the PhilPapers survey, Philosophy undergraduates start off divided roughly evenly between one-boxing and two-boxing:

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Other
142 / 217 (65.4%)

Accept or lean toward: one box
40 / 217 (18.4%)

Accept or lean toward: two boxes
35 / 217 (16.1%)

But philosophy faculty, who have learned more (less likely to have no opinion), and been subject to further selection, break in favor of two-boxing:

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Other
441 / 931 (47.4%)

Accept or lean toward: two boxes
292 / 931 (31.4%)

Accept or lean toward: one box
198 / 931 (21.3%)

Specialists in decision theory (who are also more atheistic, more compatibilist about free will, and more physicalist than faculty in general) are even more convinced:

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Accept or lean toward: two boxes
19 / 31 (61.3%)

Accept or lean toward: one box
8 / 31 (25.8%)

Other
4 / 31 (12.9%)

Looking at the correlates of answers about Newcomb's problem, two-boxers are more likely to believe in physicalism about consciousness, atheism about religion, and other positions generally popular around here (which are also usually, but not always, in the direction of philosophical opinion). Zooming in one correlate, most theists with an opinion are one-boxers, while atheists break for two-boxing:

Newcomb's problem:two boxes
0.125

one box
two boxes

atheism

28.6%
(145/506)

48.8%
(247/506)

theism

40.8%
(40/98)

31.6%
(31/98)

Response pairs: 655 p-value: 0.001

Less Wrong breaks overwhelmingly for one-boxing in survey answers for 2012:
NEWCOMB'S PROBLEM
One-box: 726, 61.4%
Two-box: 78, 6.6%
Not sure: 53, 4.5%
Don't understand: 86, 7.3%
No answer: 240, 20.3%

When I elicited LW confidence levels in a poll, a majority indicated 99%+ confidence in one...
Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked?
by jefftk — 2013-06-18T14:40:36.167Z

The standard view of Mutually Assured Distruction (MAD) is something like:

During the cold war the US and USSR had weapons capable of immense destruction, but no matter how tense things got they never used them because they knew how bad that would be. While MAD is a terrifying thing, it did work, this time.

Occasionally people will reply with an argument like:

If any of several near-miss incidents had gone even slightly differently, both sides would have launched their missiles and we wouldn't be here today looking back. In a sense this was an experiment where the only outcome we could observe was success: nukes would have meant no observers, no nukes and we're still here. So we don't actually know how useful MAD was.

This is an anthropic argument, an attempt to handle the bias that comes from a link between outcomes and the number of people who can observe them. Imagine we were trying to figure out whether flipping "heads" was more likely than flipping "tails", but there was a coin demon that killed everyone if "tails" came up. Either we would see "heads" flipped, or we would see nothing at all. We're not able to sample from the "tails: everyone-dies" worlds. Even if the demon responds to tails by killing everyone only 40% of the time, we're still going to over-sample the happy-heads outcome.

Applying the anthropic principle here, however, requires that a failure of MAD really would have killed everyone. While it would have killed billions, and made major parts of the world uninhabitable, still many people would have survived. [1] How much would we have rebuilt? What would be the population now? If the cold war had gone hot and the US and USSR had fallen into wiping each other out, what would 2013 be like? Roughly, we're oversampling the no-nukes outcome by the ratio of our current population to the population there would have been in a yes-nukes outcome, and the less lopsided that ratio is the more evidence that MAD did work after all.

[1] For this wikipedia cites: The global health effects of nuclear war (1982), Long-term worldwide effects of multiple nuclear-weapons detonations (1975). Some looking online also turns up an Accelerating Future blog post. I haven't read them thoroughly, and I don't know much about the research here.

I also posted this on my blog
Learning programming: so I've learned the basics of Python, what next?
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-06-17T23:31:37.478Z

Lots of people (particularly people associated with LessWrong) are telling me I should become a computer programmer; in response I've taught myself a little Python using this site, written a couple Python scripts on my own, and just now sent in an application to App Academy. But if I don't end up going to App Academy, what's the best way to develop some actually marketable programming skills? I've heard people recommending getting involved in open source projects on Git Hub, but when I looked at Git Hub I found it overwhelming, with no idea of how to find a suitable project to work on. Advice?
Group Rationality Diary, June 1-30
by therufs — 2013-06-17T18:26:28.960Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for June 1-30; it's going up pretty late (sorry!) but entries for earlier in June are welcome.

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!

Next diary -- July 1-15

Immediate past diary -- May 16-31

Rationality Diaries archive
Meetup : [Moscow] How to use your brain
by Yuu — 2013-06-17T11:59:00.790Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] How to use your brain

WHEN:
23 June 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:10, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

How to be raise awareness when it is useful.

How to make rational choice — one approach.

Game session: the Liar's dice or the Resistance.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.
Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with photos

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] How to use your brain
Quotes and Notes on Scott Aaronson’s "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine"
by Shmi — 2013-06-17T05:11:29.160Z

This highly speculative paper has been discussed here before, but I found the discussion's quality rather disappointing. People generally took bits and pieces out of context and then mostly offered arguments already addressed in the paper. Truly the internet is the most powerful misinterpretation engine ever built. It's nice to see that Scott, who is no stranger to online adversity, is taking it in stride.

So I went through the paper and took notes, which I posted on my blog, but I am also attaching them below, in a hope that someone else here finds them useful. I initially intended to write up a comment in the other thread, but the size of it grew too large for a comment, so I am making this post. Feel free to downvote if you think it does not belong in Discussion (or for any other reason, of course).

TL;DR: The main idea of the paper is, as far as I can tell, that it is possible to construct a physical model, potentially related to the "free" part of the free will debate, where some events cannot be predicted at all, not even probabilistically, like it is done in Quantum Mechanics. Scott also proposes one possible mechanism for this "Knightian unpredictability": the not-yet-decohered parts of the initial state of the universe, such as the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. He does not claim a position on whether the model is correct, only that it is potentially testable and thus shifts a small piece of the age-old philosophical debate on free will into the realm of physics.

For those here who say that the free-will question has been dissolved, let me note that the picture presented in the paper is one explicitly rejected by Eliezer, probably a bit hastily. Specifically in this diagram:

Eliezer says that the sequential picture on the left is the only correct one, whereas Scott offers a perfectly reasonable model which is better described by the picture on the right. To reiterate, there is a part of the past (Scott calls it "microfacts") which evolves reversibly and unitarily until some time in the future. Given that this part has not been measured yet, there is no way, not even probabilistically, to estimate its influence on some future event, when some of those microfacts interact with the rest of the world and decohere, thus affecting "macrofacts", potentially including human choices. This last speculative idea could be tested if it is shown t...
[video] "Transhuman", featuring Sandberg and Bostrom
by Pablo — 2013-06-16T18:59:57.994Z

Transhuman, a 20-minute Dutch documentary about Anders Sandberg, is now available online. From Sandberg's blog:

Here is the chance of see my beetle collection, my grubby kitchen, and an absolutely stunning combination between a supercomputer center and an oxford library. Oh, and some discussion about transhumanism and the meaning of life too.

The documentary features Nick Bostrom at 9:23-10:32 and at 19:28-19:37. There's also a cameo appearance of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Carl Shulman, Anna Salamon, Toby Ord, William MacAskill, David Pearce and Stuart Armstrong.
The Classic Literature Workshop
by Ritalin — 2013-06-16T09:54:22.971Z

From EY's Facebook page, there were two posts that got me thinking about fiction and how to work it better and make it stronger:

It would have been trivial to fix _Revenge of the Sith_'s inadequate motivation of Anakin's dark turn; have Padme already in the hospital slowly dying as her children come to term, not just some nebulous "visions". (Bonus points if you have Yoda lecture Anakin about the inevitability of death, but I'd understand if they didn't go there.) At the end, Anakin doesn't try to choke Padme; he watches the ship with her fly out of his reach, away from his ability to use his unnatural Sith powers to save her. Now Anakin's motives are 320% more sympathetic and the movie makes 170% more sense. If I'd put some serious work in, I'm pretty sure I could've had the movie audience in tears.

I still feel a sense of genuine puzzlement on how such disastrous writing happens in movies and TV shows. Are the viewers who care about this such a tiny percentage that it's not worth trying to sell to them? Are there really so few writers who could read over the script and see in 30 seconds how to fix something like this? (If option 2 is really the problem and people know it's the problem, I'd happily do it for $10,000 a shot.) Is it Graham's Design Paradox - can Hollywood moguls just not tell the difference between competent writers making such an offer, and fakers who'll take the money and run? Are the producers' egos so grotesque that they can't ask a writer for help? Is there some twisted sense of superiority bound up with believing that the audience is too dumb to care about this kind of thing, even though it looks to me like they do? I don't understand how a >$100M movie ends up with flaws that I could fix at the script stage with 30 seconds of advice.

A helpful key to understanding the art and technique of character in storytelling, is to consider the folk-psychological notion from Internal Family Systems of people being composed of different 'parts' embodying different drives or goals. A shallow character is then a character with only one 'part'.

A good rule of thumb is that to create a 3D character, that person must contain at least two different 2D characters who come into conflict. Contrary to the first thought that crosses your mind, three-dimensional good people are constructed by combining at least two different good people with two diffe

...
Meetup : Melbourne Winter Solstice Dinner Party and Social Meetup
by BraydenM — 2013-06-16T09:46:12.712Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Winter Solstice Dinner Party and Social Meetup

WHEN:
21 June 2013 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Carlton, Victoria, Australia

Melbourne's next regular social meetup comes with a twist. As we are holding the event on the shortest day of the year, we will be doing something special to celebrate the winter solstice.

This will be an occasion for reflection on the universe, and humanity's place within it. We will be celebrating with a winter feast, courtesy of Thomas, and short speeches to be presented by a small number of participants.

All are welcome at the usual start time of 6:30pm, although there will be a couple of us there from 6pm getting the food ready, so feel free to come earlier than usual. Please contact one of the hosts for the address if you have not visited before, and check out the google group: groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/melbourne-less-wrong

At 8:30pm we will kick off the official part of the event, so we encourage you to arrive before this time if possible.

Following the feast and speeches, the event will return to standard social activities including boardgames and chatting, parlour games etc. If you haven't been to a Melbourne meetup before/recently, the social meetup can be less intimidating way to meet us as it's very informal.

For the location/any questions, please see the Melbourne Less Wrong Google group, or feel free to contact Brayden (0407 943 917), Richard (0421 231 789) or Ben (0412 996 288).

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Winter Solstice Dinner Party and Social Meetup
Normative uncertainty in Newcomb's problem
by CarlShulman — 2013-06-16T02:16:44.853Z

Here is Wikipedia's description of Newcomb's problem:

The player of the game is presented with two boxes, one transparent (labeled A) and the other opaque (labeled B). The player is permitted to take the contents of both boxes, or just the opaque box B. Box A contains a visible $1,000. The contents of box B, however, are determined as follows: At some point before the start of the game, the Predictor makes a prediction as to whether the player of the game will take just box B, or both boxes. If the Predictor predicts that both boxes will be taken, then box B will contain nothing. If the Predictor predicts that only box B will be taken, then box B will contain $1,000,000.

Nozick also stipulates that if the Predictor predicts that the player will choose randomly, then box B will contain nothing.

By the time the game begins, and the player is called upon to choose which boxes to take, the prediction has already been made, and the contents of box B have already been determined. That is, box B contains either $0 or $1,000,000 before the game begins, and once the game begins even the Predictor is powerless to change the contents of the boxes. Before the game begins, the player is aware of all the rules of the game, including the two possible contents of box B, the fact that its contents are based on the Predictor's prediction, and knowledge of the Predictor's infallibility. The only information withheld from the player is what prediction the Predictor made, and thus what the contents of box B are.

Most of this is a fairly general thought experiment for thinking about different decision theories, but one element stands out as particularly arbitrary: the ratio between the amount the Predictor may place in box B and the amount in box A. In the Newcomb formulation conveyed by Nozick, this ratio is 1000:1, but this is not necessary. Most decision theories that recommend one-boxing do so as long as the ratio is greater than 1.
The 1000:1 ratio strengthens the intuition for one-boxing, which is helpful for illustrating why one might find one-boxing plausible. However, given uncertainty about normative decision theory, the decision to one-box can diverge from one's best guess at the best decision theory, e.g. if I think there is a 1 in 10 chance that one-boxing decision theories I may one-box on Newcomb's problem with a potential payoff ratio of 1000:1 but not if the rat...
How to Write Deep Characters
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-06-16T02:10:02.674Z

Triggered by: Future Story Status

A helpful key to understanding the art and technique of character in storytelling, is to consider the folk-psychological notion from Internal Family Systems of people being composed of different 'parts' embodying different drives or goals. A shallow character is a character with only one 'part'.

A good rule of thumb is that to create a 3D character, that person must contain at least two different 2D characters who come into conflict. Contrary to the first thought that crosses your mind, three-dimensional good people are constructed by combining at least two different good people with two different ideals, not by combining a good person and a bad person. Deep sympathetic characters have two sympathetic parts in conflict, not a sympathetic part in conflict with an unsympathetic part. Deep smart characters are created by combining at least two different people who are geniuses.

E.g. HPMOR!Hermione contains both a sensible young girl who tries to keep herself and her friends out of trouble, and a starry-eyed heroine, neither of whom are stupid. (Actually, since HPMOR!Hermione is also the one character who I created as close to her canon self as I could manage - she didn't *need* upgrading - I should credit this one to J. K. Rowling.) (Admittedly, I didn't actually follow that rule deliberately to construct Methods, I figured it out afterward when everyone was praising the characterization and I was like, "Wait, people are calling me a character author now? What the hell did I just do right?")

If instead you try to construct a genius character by having an emotionally impoverished 'genius' part in conflict with a warm nongenius part... ugh. Cliche. Don't write the first thing that pops into your head from watching Star Trek. This is not how real geniuses work. HPMOR!Harry, the primary protagonist, contains so many different people he has to give them names, and none of them are stupid, nor does any one of them contain his emotions set aside in a neat jar; they contain different mixtures of emotions and ideals. Combining two cliche characters won't be enough to build a deep character. Combining two different realistic people in that character's situation works much better. Two is not a limit, it's a minimum, but everyone involved still has to be recogniz...