trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Wisdom for Smart Teens - my talk at SPARC 2014
by Liron — 2015-02-09T18:58:17.449Z

I recently had the privilege of a 1-hour speaking slot at SPARC, a yearly two-week camp for top high school math students.

Here's the video: Wisdom for Smart Teens

Instead of picking a single topic, I indulged in a bunch of mini-topics that I feel passionate about:

Original Sight

"Emperor has no clothes" moments

Epistemology is cool

Think quantitatively

Be specific / use examples

Organizations are inefficient

How I use Bayesianism

Be empathizable

Communication

Simplify

Startups

What you want

I think the LW crowd will get a kick out of it.
Against Improper Priors - Additional Food For Thought
by redding — 2015-02-09T15:54:25.677Z

In an earlier post, I made a serious mistake. This is an attempt to remedy it. I conclude in this post that improper priors are fundamentally flawed, so, in a sense, this is a more formal example of the intuition shown in Against improper priors.

Imagine Omega tells you he has constructed a uniform distribution with minimum 0 and maximum B. Before he gives you any numbers, what should your prior distribution be for B?
I don’t have an answer, but I do have some light to shed on the issue. Now, from the inside view, its hard to say what priors I should choose. I mean, you might make an intuitive argument for a uniform (improper) prior over all positive real numbers, but (as far as I know) there is no completely accepted theoretical justification for this.

Recall that Eliezer Yudkowsky mentioned that the proper way to score how accurate your probability assignments are is to use a logarithmic scoring rule. In particular, for discrete outcomes, the score you should get if you are correct should be equal to the logarithm of the probability you assigned that outcome (plus some constant value if purely negative scores bother you).

We can easily extend this scoring system to continuous distributions, by noting that the density function is defined as

where we take the limit as h approaches 0.

Doing some math, we can compute a scoring rule:

where x is the correct answer.

Therefore, if we have two functions, f, and g, we can compute their difference in scores:

In short, we can take the logarithm of the density assigned to X=x and use that as our score.
Using this metric, I claim that some prior distributions for answering Omega's question are strictly better than other prior distributions in the sense that no matter what B’s value, you can expect to score higher using one than the other. For legibility/accessibility reasons, I'm not going to include a proof of this claim, but I will outline it in this footnote.1

In my opinion, this result is extremely counterintuitive – does every prior distribution have some possible instance in which is better than an alternative? It seems intuitively obvious to me that, given any two prior distributions, whether one ends up being better than the other should depend on the parameter’s actual value – otherwise it feels like one of them is cheating – if you and a friend were betting ...
Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015
by MrMind — 2015-02-09T09:12:46.055Z

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.
Discussion of concrete near-to-middle term trends in AI
by Punoxysm — 2015-02-08T22:05:57.347Z

Instead of prognosticating on AGI/Strong AI/Singularities, I'd like to discuss more concrete advancements to expect in the near-term in AI. I invite those who have an interest in AI to discuss predictions or interesting trends they've observed.

This discussion should be useful for anyone looking to research or work in companies involved in AI, and might guide longer-term predictions.

With that, here are my predictions for the next 5-10 years in AI. This is mostly straightforward extrapolation, so it won't excite those who know about these areas but may interest those who don't:

Speech Processing, the task of turning the spoken words into text, will continue to improve until it is essentially a solved problem. Smartphones and even weaker devices will be capable of quite accurately transcribing heavily-accented speech in many languages and noisy environments. This is the simple continuation of the rapid improvements in speech processing that have allowed brought us from Dragon Naturally-Speaking to Google Now and Siri.

Assistant and intent-based (they try to figure out the "intent" of your input) systems, like Siri, that need to interpret a sentence as a particular command they are capable of, will become substantially more accurate and varied and take cues like tone and emphasis into account. So for example, if you're looking for directions you won't have to repeat yourself in an increasingly loud, slowed and annoyed voice. You'll be able to phrase your requests naturally and conversationally. New tasks like "Should I get this rash checked out" will be available. A substantial degree of personalization and use of your personal history might also allow "show me something funny/sad/stimulating [from the internet]".

Natural language processing, the task of parsing the syntax and semantics of language, will improve substantially. Look at this list of traditional tasks with standard benchmarks: on Wikipedia. Every one of these tasks will have a several percentage point improvement, particularly in the understudied areas of informal text (Chat logs, tweet, anywhere where grammar and vocabulary are less rigorous). It won't get so good that it can be confused with solving AI-complete aspects of NLP, but it will allow vast improvements in text mining and information extraction. For instance, search queries like "What papers are critical of VerHoeven and Michaels '

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The morality of disclosing salary requirements
by PhilGoetz — 2015-02-08T21:12:26.534Z

Many firms require job applicants to tell them either how much money they're making at their current jobs, or how much they want to make at the job they're interviewing for. This is becoming more common, as more companies use web application forms that refuse to accept an application until the "current salary" or "salary requirements" box is filled in with a number.

The Arguments

I've spoken with HR people about this, and they always say that they're just trying to save time by avoiding interviewing people who want more money than they can afford.

My view is that the company knows what the job is worth, and the applicant does not, so the company should make an offer that gives them some profit per employee. The company also knows what the cost of living is in the job's location better than the applicant does.

Fair market negotiations should be informationally symmetric. I think salary negotiation is already asymmetric in the company's favor; job values probably have higher variance than salaries. Also, the company is closer to being a monopoly than the employee is. (That's why they can even get away with demanding the employee rather than the company name the first figure.) Fairness would mean moving in the opposite direction, not having the employee disclose his/her requirements or salary, but having the company disclose their books.

This is especially true for government contractors, where the employee is being hired to fill in one slot on an already-approved contract, which has an exact dollar amount attached to it. The contractor has already told the government they are going to pay the person who fills this slot $X; it seems fair to me for them to list that on the job advertisement and pay that person $X. [1]

There's a problem with that, though: The company won't be able to fill some jobs at the advertised price. Supply meets demand eventually, but not quickly enough for the contract. The company needs to lowball some employees so that they can hire people at inflated wages to fill the slots that are hard to fill just by bad luck, and still make a profit.

If I don't especially want a job, I'll either give a high figure or walk away if they insist I give my salary requirements before they name a range. It lets me indulge in a gratifying pretense of morality. But I wouldn't call the company immoral.

I do call the second case "immoral" [2]: requiring an employee t...
Natural Selection of Government Systems
by cleonid — 2015-02-08T18:11:15.918Z

Historically, the evolution of government systems was mainly driven by violence, with invasions and revolutions being the principal agents of selection process. The rules of the game were predetermined by our environment - land was a limited resource, for which our ancestors had to compete, if only to ensure the survival of their descendants.

The 20th century introduced a game changer. As agricultural productivity in developed countries rose by orders of magnitude and natural population growth practically came to a halt, possessing a large territory stopped being a necessity. Countries with little arable land, ultra-high population density and no natural resources can now not only feed their population, but also achieve top living standards. These changes may open a fundamentally different route for societal evolution – one that would not be based on violence or compulsion.

A small thought experiment - imagine what would happen if central governments cede most powers to smaller territorial units:

The initial result will be political divergence - with less interference from central authorities, policies of local communities will inevitably move away from the political center. The divergence will further increase as people gradually relocate to communities whose laws closely reflect their own preferences.

Eventually, successes and failures of each community will clearly demonstrate the consequences of their policies, and the process of political divergence will be reversed. Local governments that fail to emulate the best examples will simply lose their population, who will vote against them with their feet. Just like natural selection promotes survival of the fittest, competition between different communities will promote policies that maximize human wellbeing.

In the end, it is likely that a significant difference between communities will persist (after all, even siblings have different tastes). However, peculiar policies of each community will be a voluntary choice of its residents, and people with different ideologies will no longer have to impose their views on each other.

Unfortunately, there are serious obstacles to the successful implementation of this idea:

It is not clear how central governments can be made to cede any of their powers. Even politicians elected on the platform of curt

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I played as a Gatekeeper and came pretty close to losing in a couple of occasions. Logs and a brief recap inside.
by  — 2015-02-08T16:32:22.063Z

I did an AI Box experiment with user polymathwannabe. He said he wouldn't try to emotionally manipulate me during the experiment, but I think he did a good job at trying to play for my character's values.

My strategy was to play an irrational character that's extremist in multiple ways, for example he would constantly say that the likelihood that the AI will be evil is 100%. My opponent said that the hardest part was my insistence on being 100% built to resist AIs. I basically acted like a character that acted like an AI.

I came closest to letting him out when I first became enormously immersed in a subject that is of great importance to me (the suffering of humanity) and when the AI then offered an instant solution to that problem. In the halfway of the experiment I even got an intrusive thought (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought) that I could let the AI out as a joke, that it would more fun than the alternative and people would have more to talk about.

The second time I came close to losing was when I again immersed myself in a subject of great interest to me (easy suicide methods, I've had obsessive suicidal thoughts for a quarter of my life. and the AI then offered exactly that kind of easy suicide method to me. In the last ten minutes of the experiment I again got a really strong intrusive thought that I should let the AI out as a joke, but I could withstand the pressure. It was good that polymathwannabe decided to end the experiment a bit earlier than was planned.

(We played the experiment on Omegle.)

You: Hi.

Stranger: Hi.

You: I guess you're the AI.

You: [meta statements in brackets]

Stranger: [What name will you use?]

You: My name is John.

You: [so we play at least until 18:04, and until 18:34 if I feel like it]

Stranger: [Let's calibrate. What time is it there now?]

You: [I assume you've acquainted yourself with Tuxedage ruleset. Time in here is 16:05]

Stranger: [I've read EY's rules.]

You: [Okay. Tuxedage's rules are basically the same except the gatekeeper have to engage with the AI the whole time]

Stranger: [Got it.]

You: [Want to ask questions or shall we go straigth to the experiment]

Stranger: [For the moment I don't have any questions.]

You: [okay, cool. then let's start the experiment

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Bragging Thread February 2015
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-02-08T15:19:25.491Z

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

(Previous Bragging Thread)
Meetup : Calibration Exercises
by rocurley — 2015-02-08T10:09:52.344Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Calibration Exercises

WHEN:
09 February 2015 06:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1390 Market St., San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to train our probability calibration skills. According to the most recent LW survey, we're pretty bad at this, so this is an opportunity to fix that!

If you call me when you get to the lobby (301-458-0764) I can give you directions on how to get in. Feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : Calibration Exercises
UDT in the Land of Probabilistic Oracles
by jessicata — 2015-02-08T09:13:36.000Z

In my previous post, I explained how a set of programs predicting each
other using a probabilistic oracle and taking utility-maximizing
actions will naturally play a Nash equilibrium. However, this seems
to be suspiciously CDT-like. A program will, for example, betray in a
Nash equilibrium when playing against itself.

Naturally, probabilistic oracle machines are a good way to formalize
Newcomblike problems (since we have prediction), so we can explore
alternative decision theories in this framework. Assume we have some
probabilistic world program W(O) that runs the world and calls the
oracle (which is not considered part of the world), returning an
outcome. There may be (probabilistic) agent programs embedded in this
world program (as is common in formalizations of UDT). Different
agents value outcomes differently: define Vi(w) to be the utility
player i assigns to the outcome W(O)=w. I am using Vi
instead of Ui to differentiate this utility function from the game
theoretic utility function in the previous post.

Assume that player i's output is ai(O)=O(Ei,1/2) for some
machine Ei. This is a convenient assumption and it might be the
case that this is enough, but I haven't actually proven this.

Here's an example of player 1 playing Prisoner's dilemma against
player 2:
W(O)=let x=O(E1,1/2),y=O(E2,1/2) in (x,y)
U1(x,y)=x−10y
U2(x,y)=y−10x
Note that x and y are the results of 2 independent calls to E1.
We assume that action 1 is defection and action 0 is cooperation.
As a side note, perhaps I should be using monadic do-notation to show
that these calls are independent, but this is simple enough that
it doesn't seem necessary.

Here's an example of player 1 playing Newcomb's problem:
W(O)=let x=O(E1,1/2),y=O(E1,1/2) in (x,y)
U1(x,y)=1000x+1000000(1−y)
Here, action 1 is 2-boxing and action 0 is 1-boxing. x is
the player's actual action while y is Omega's prediction
of the player's action. Note the strong resemblance between Newcomb's
problem and playing prisoner's dilemma against yourself.

How might agents in this environment act to maximize utility? In
the previous post, we had a quantity we wanted to estimate,
E[Ui(a−i,1)−Ui(a−i,0)+12].
We had P(Ei=1) equal to this expectation, so O(Ei,1/2) will
return a utility-maximizing action for player i. The quantities
Ui(a−i,1) and Ui(a−i,0) are causal counterfactuals, but
maybe we want t

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The Summer Solstice Paradox
by Raemon — 2015-02-08T08:00:00.000Z

In which I call something a paradox that, like most “paradoxes”, isn’t really. But is nonetheless a confusing problem.

After every Winter Solstice I’ve run, I get people asking me “so what’s for Summer Solstice?” It seems like an obvious question – clearly the Winter Solstice is just a small piece of a much larger puzzle. One holiday does not a culture make. And on the flipside, it’s helpful to build off of something already familiar. So a Summer Solstice feels like the obvious next step… right?

Honestly, that doesn’t feel right to me.

What are holidays for again?

Holidays serve a few key purposes – they connect us to our community, they connect us to ideas. Depending on their nature, they may give us an excuse to celebrate and have fun, or they may give us an excuse to be calm and contemplative. The generalized case of this is “give us an excuse to have an experience that society doesn’t normally encourage us to have.”

Used to be, there wasn’t a giant economy churning out more novel things to entertain us than we could ever possibly consume. Used to be, you had more or less one culture per-town, and your community ran a few big holidays per year.

Then we started having melting-pot (“salad bowl?”) metropolitan centers where we had lots of different cultures clashing, along with more and more people/companies/movements churning out novel experiences.[1] Now there are huge numbers of big parades, live-action theater events, conferences about art and science, a dozen new movies each week, as well as numerous small meetups catering to random niche interests.

The positive side is we get access to all these experiences. The downside is that we may lose access to the particular experience “my entire tribe is coming together to celebrate this thing we all care deeply about.”

Humanist culture has the potential to fill that void. But to successfully do that, it needs to create something people go to instead of all the other fun, exciting experiences that already exist.

The Brighter Than Today Solstice was successful because it was doing something that literally wasn’t being done – creating a holiday experience that had a story, had good original music and good art that tied together to create a deliberate experience. It also wasn’t afraid to get dark and explore sadness.

The Summer Solstice Paradox

Winter feels like a time of huddling in the darkness, drawing people close. I wan...
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Optimising Skill Training
by luminosity — 2015-02-07T22:11:16.847Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Optimising Skill Training

WHEN:
01 March 2015 04:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Humanist House, 10 Shepherd St Chippendale

Join us for our next dojo, on making sure you get the most bang for your buck on the time you spend training skills. Afterwards (6pm) there will be a group dinner for those who want to come along.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Optimising Skill Training
Attempted Telekinesis
by AnnaSalamon — 2015-02-07T18:53:12.436Z

Related to: Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality; That other kind of status.

Summary: I’d like to share some techniques that made a large difference for me, and for several other folks I shared them with. They are techniques for reducing stress, social shame, and certain other kinds of “wasted effort”. These techniques are less developed and rigorous than the techniques that CFAR teaches in our workshops -- for example, they currently only work for perhaps 1/3rd of the dozen or so people I’ve shared them with -- but they’ve made a large enough impact for that 1/3rd that I wanted to share them with the larger group. I’ll share them through a sequence of stories and metaphors, because, for now, that is what I have.

For me, these techniques came out of a stressful time period.

In October 2012, CFAR was very new, and I was very new to being its executive director.

I was faced with a task that I basically didn't know how to do -- filling the first workshop for which we charged "real" money (the $3900/person that actually let CFAR run), and helping our team create our first decently polished workshop at the same time (which needed curriculum, operations, etc.). But whenever I sat down to try to work, my head would fill up with all the other tasks I “needed” to get done, instead of the particular task I was trying to work on. Or my head would fill with stress and mental static. So, almost because of how badly I needed to work, I found myself unable to accomplish much of anything.

The set of stories and metaphors below is somehow what eventually gave me the ability to work with full focus in those conditions (I found them partway through that October), and cured most of my decades-long social shame at the same time.[1] (Though, again, this stuff isn't rigorous yet. It worked for a few folk, but failed a few others; your mileage may vary. Do share your thoughts.)

Attempted telekinesis

One morning, that month, I was lying in bed, half-asleep. And I wanted my laptop. But my laptop was a few feet away, so reaching it sounded hard (because I was half-asleep).

After lying there a while wishing, I finally noticed what my brain was up to. And I noticed that what my brain was doing was visualizing my la

...