trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up
by Tuk — 2015-11-02T03:10:40.310Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up

WHEN:
10 November 2015 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
269 Pearl St Manchester NH 03104

The seventh NH meet-up is Tuesday, 11/10, in Manchester, NH at 7 pm at a private residence. Light refreshments will be provided.

Have you read Rationality: from AI to Zombies, or any of the Sequences on Less Wrong? Maybe you're just a fan of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Come hang out with us and discuss optimization of whatever it is you want to optimize.

Agenda:
Brief overview of Effective Altruism
Propagating Urges technique

You may want to bring a notebook.

https://www.facebook.com/events/991921760846956/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/695201067251306/

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meet-up
Recent updates to gwern.net (2014-2015)
by gwern — 2015-11-02T00:06:11.241Z

Previously: 2011; 2012-2013; 2013-2014

“Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. / For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.”

Sorted by topic:

Darknet market related:

Darknet Market archives, 2011-2015: 1.5tb of mirrors of scores of Tor-Bitcoin black-markets & forums 2013-2015, and other material; this is the single largest public archive of all DNM materials, and creating it was a major focus of mine since December 2013. The release also marks the end of my career as DNM expert - I’ve lost interest in the topic due to the apparent stability of the DNMs & being trapped in a local equilibrium

DNM arrests compilation: a census of all known arrests Jan 2011-June 2015

“Silk Goxed: How DPR used MtGox for hedging & lost big”

there was an ICE subpoena on my Reddit account

Statistics & decision theory:

When Does The Mail Come? A subjective Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times

resorter tool for statistically re-ranking a set of ratings

analysis of Effective Altruists’ donations as reported in the LW survey

anthology on how “everything is correlated”

electric vs stove kettle boiling-time analysis: collected some simple data on my kettles & demonstrated some statistics tools on the dataset like a Bayesian measurement-error model

dysgenics power analysis: how much genetic data would it take to falsify those claims?

noisy polls: modeling potentially falsified poll data

Value of Information for suicide (example cost-benefit analysis of weakly predicting suicide)

Air conditioner upgrade cost-benefit analysis

probability/gerontology problem: can one visit 566 centenarians before any die? No.

do causal networks explain why correlation≠causation is so often true?

a little example of estimating scores from censored data

QS related:

2015 modafinil community survey (not quite finished)

Bitter Melon experimental & cost-benefit analysis

Redshift self-experiment: screen-reddening software shifts bedtime forward by 20 minutes

magnesium citrate experiment finished: initial benefits but apparent cumulative overdose led to net negative effect and mixed effects on sleep

playing with inferring Bayesian networks for my Zeo & body weight data (powerful generalization of SEMs, but r

...
November 2015 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2015-11-01T21:29:52.971Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
AI origin question
by hairyfigment — 2015-11-01T20:35:18.911Z

What do people see as the plausible ways for AGI to come into existence, in the absence of smart people specifically working on AI safety?

These are the ones that occur to me, in no precise order:

An improved version of Siri (itself an improved version of MS Clippy).

A program to make Google text ads that people will click on.

As #2, but for spam.

A program to play the stock market or otherwise maximize some numerical measure of profit, perhaps working against/with other programs with the same purpose.

A program to make viral music videos from scratch (generating all images and music).

An artificial programmer.

A program to analyze huge amounts of data looking for 'threats to national security.'

Uploads.

It seems like #2-5 would have formally specified goals which in the long term could be satisfied without human beings, and in the short term require manipulating human beings to some degree. Learning manipulation need not arouse suspicion on the part of the AI's creators, since the AI would be trying to fulfill its intended purpose and might not yet have thought of alternatives.
Optimal predictor schemes
by Vanessa Kosoy — 2015-11-01T17:28:46.000Z

I introduce the concept of "optimal predictor scheme" which differs from (quasi)optimal predictors in depending on an additional parameter representing the amount of computing resources the predictor is allowed to use. For a certain flavor of optimal predictor scheme, I prove existence for arbitrary distributional decision problems.

Results

It is convenient to think of the concepts of "optimal predictor" and "quasi-optimal predictor" as special cases of the more general Δ-optimal predictors corresponding to different choices of the "error space" Δ.

Definition 1

Let r be a positive integer. An error space of rank r Δ is a set of bounded functions from Nr to R≥0 s.t.

(i) If δ1,δ2∈Δ then δ1+δ2∈Δ.

(ii) If δ1∈Δ and δ2≤δ1 then δ2∈Δ.

(iii) Given α∈(0,1], if δ∈Δ then δα∈Δ.

(iv) There is a polynomial h:Nr→R s.t. 2−h∈Δ.

Example 1.1

Δ10 is the set of functions δ:N→R≥0 s.t. limk→∞δ(k)=0.

Example 1.2

Δ1neg is the set of negligible functions δ:N→R≥0.

Example 1.3

Δ2avg is the set of bounded functions δ:N2→R≥0 s.t. for any f:N→N, if

limk→∞loglogkloglogf(k)=0

then

limk→∞f(k)−1∑j=3(loglog(j+1)−loglogj)δ(k,j)loglogf(k)−loglog3=0

It is slightly non-obvious that condition (iii) holds in this example. To see this, note that the expression inside the limit can be regarded as Eλkf[δ(k,j)] where λkf is a certain probability measure over j. limk→∞Eλkf[δ(k,j)]=0 implies that for any ϵ>0, limk→∞Prλkf[δ(k,j)>ϵ]=0 since Eλkf[δ(k,j)]≥ϵPrλkf[δ(k,j)>ϵ]. For any ϵ, we have Eλkf[δ(k,j)α]≤ϵ+Prλkf[δ(k,j)>ϵα−1]supδ, therefore limk→∞Eλkf[δ(k,j)α]=0.

Definition 2

Consider Δ an error space of rank 1 and (D,μ) a distributional decision problem. A Δ-optimal predictor for (D,μ) is a family of polynomial size Boolean circuits {Pk:suppμkcirc−−→[0,1]}k∈N s.t. for any family of polynomial size Boolean circuits {Qk:suppμkcirc−−→[0,1]}k∈N we have

Eμk[(Pk(x)−χD(x))2]≤Eμk[(Qk(x)−χD(x))2]+δ(k)

where δ∈Δ.

In particular, optimal predictors are Δ1neg-optimal predictors and quasi-optimal predictors are Δ10-optimal predictors.

Definition 3

Consider Δ an error space of rank 2 and (D,μ) a distributional decision problem. A Δ-optimal predictor scheme for (D,μ) is a family of Boolean circuits {Pkj:suppμkcirc−−→[0,1]}k,j∈N s.t.

(i) |Pkj|≤p(k,j) for some polynomial p.

(ii) for any family of Boolean circuits {Qkj:suppμkcirc−−→[0,1]}k,j∈N that satisfies

...
Working at MIRI: An interview with Malo Bourgon
by SoerenMind — 2015-11-01T12:54:58.841Z

[Cross-posted on the EA Forum]

This post is part of the Working At EA Organizations series on the EA Forum. The posts so far:

Why work at an EA organization?

80000 Hours

Effective Altruism Foundation

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) does “foundational mathematical research to ensure that smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact”. AI alignment is a popular cause within the effective altruism community and MIRI has made the case for their cause and approach. The following are my notes from an interview with Malo Bourgon (program management analyst and generalist at MIRI) which he reviewed before publishing.

Current talent needs

Since the size of the research team has just doubled, MIRI is not actively looking for new researchers for the next 6 months. However, if you are interested in working at MIRI you should still express your interest.

Researchers

In the foreseeable future, MIRI is planning to further grow the research team. The main ingredients for a good fit are interest in the problems that MIRI works on and strong talent in math and other quantitative subjects. Being further on the academic career path will therefore naturally help by teaching you more math, but absolutely isn’t necessary.

One of the best ways to evaluate your fit is to take a look at MIRI’s research guide. Look at MIRI’s problem areas and study the one that looks most interesting to you. In tandem, grab one of the textbooks to get acquainted with the relevant math. Contrary to what some EAs think, it’s not necessary to understand all of the research guide in order to start engaging with MIRI’s research. It’s a good indicator if you can develop an understanding of a specific problem in the guide and even more so if you can start contributing new ideas or angles of attack on that problem.

Fundraiser

It’s turned out very hard to find a fundraiser who is both very good at talking to donors and deeply understands the problems MIRI works on. If someone comes along they would potentially be open to hiring such a person.

How can you get involved on a lower commitment basis?

Although there are presently no official volunteer or intern positions, hires always go through a phase of lower commitment involvement through one of the following.

MIRIx workshops

These are independently run...
[link] New essay summarizing some of my latest thoughts on AI safety
by Kaj_Sotala — 2015-11-01T08:07:03.433Z

New essay summarizing some of my latest thoughts on AI safety, ~3500 words. I explain why I think that some of the thought experiments that have previously been used to illustrate the dangers of AI are flawed and should be used very cautiously, why I'm less worried about the dangers of AI than I used to be, and what are some of the remaining reasons for why I do continue to be somewhat worried.

http://kajsotala.fi/2015/10/maverick-nannies-and-danger-theses/

Backcover celebrity endorsement: "Thanks, Kaj, for a very nice write-up. It feels good to be discussing actually meaningful issues regarding AI safety. This is a big contrast to discussions I've had in the past with MIRI folks on AI safety, wherein they have generally tried to direct the conversation toward bizarre, pointless irrelevancies like "the values that would be held by a randomly selected mind", or "AIs with superhuman intelligence making retarded judgments" (like tiling the universe with paperclips to make humans happy), and so forth.... Now OTOH, we are actually discussing things of some potential practical meaning ;p ..." -- Ben Goertzel
Meetup : NYC Solstice
by Raemon — 2015-11-01T05:56:29.553Z

Discussion article for the meetup : NYC Solstice

WHEN:
19 December 2015 05:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2 West 64th Street

Our annual, huge East Coast event. Saturday will be the Solstice Proper - a beforeparty starting at 5:30pm, 2 hours of singalong music starting at 6:30, followed by an afterparty running till 10:30. Tickets are on sale at http://www.humanistculture.com, for $25 each.

Discussion article for the meetup : NYC Solstice
Transmute guilt into resolve
by So8res — 2015-11-01T02:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/transmute-guilt-i/

A friend of mine came to me and said that he cares about his immediate friends, and he cares about humanity in the abstract, but he has trouble caring for most people. They seemed too shallow, too bitter, too spiteful to be worth an effort.

He'd been a sixth grade teacher, so I asked, "What about when they were eleven? Were they worth an effort then?"

"Yes," he answered adamantly. Or, most could still be salvaged at eleven, though there are some that you'd need to get to even earlier, if you wanted to save them from the shallowness and the learned helplessness and the death of curiosity.

"So then we live in a world that mishandles its youth, that turns them from bright children full of potential into empty shells. What are your feelings about that process, and the people subjected to it?"

His answer, more or less, was "A bit of anger, a bit of nothing-I-can-do-about-it, and a bit of victim-blaming, which I don't endorse."

Those last two emotions are very interesting: Why assure yourself that there is nothing you can do about the problem, if you don't care about the people who are harmed? Why assure yourself that it is their fault, if you stop caring about people once they are lost?

These seem like defense mechanisms, to me — defense mechanisms my friend generated unconsciously, because it was too painful look at bitter shallow adults and see lost mistreated eleven-year-olds.

Most of the time, if something is hurting you, I recommend making it stop. There is one exception, though.

Imagine walking past a beggar on the street. They're dirty and downtrodden; weathered but not much older than you. They ask you for change as you pass by.

This causes a certain type of pain in people — enough pain that most people develop some sort of coping mechanism. Some people pretend they didn't see or hear the beggar. Some give an apology, some make up an excuse about not having any money. Some shove their hands in their pockets and drag out some spare change, so that they may discharge their moral duty.

Other people cope with cynicism or bitterness — the sight of a beggar reminds them of the failings of the hated out group, the people who voted for the Wrong Political Party in the local elections. Still others cope with a wave of guilt, shorting out the pain, because the guilt seems easier to bear.

My suggestion, this week, is notice that impulse. Notice the impulse to look away, to ign...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-10-30T15:37:24.946Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on October 23rd. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Suzhou Meet-up: 28 October 2015 07:35PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

San Antonio Meetup: 25 October 2015 12:30PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

NH Meet-up: 27 October 2015 07:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - November: 01 November 2015 04:00PM
Tel Aviv: Hardware Verification and FAI: 28 October 2015 12:59AM
Tel Aviv: Black Holes after Jacob Bekenstein: 24 November 2015 08:00AM
Vienna: 21 November 2015 04:00PM
[Vienna] Five Worlds Collide - Vienna: 04 December 2015 08:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Wise Sayings: 25 October 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta...
The Ultimate Testing Grounds
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-10-30T15:19:30.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

EDIT: the mathematics of the post can be found here.

In a previous post, I described a procedure for querying an AI about whether a certain outcome was desirable for it. When I did so, I didn't realise the power of the idea.

In brief, that idea allows us to query an AI with utility v as to whether an outcome X or an outcome ¬X was the one it most desired in a particular situation. By judicious use of 'false beliefs', the AI would react as if it had miraculous powers to determine X vs ¬X in ways that no-one could ever know about.

Many (including Toby Ord) has suggested variants on the 'honey pot' idea: leave something available to the AI that looks like an oversight, but is actually a trap, to see if the AI goes beyond the parameters of what we'd expect. Maybe a wire to the internet that the AI is not supposed to use, but seems to be unobserved.

The problem with these ideas is that the honey pots had to be physically constructed, physically accessible to the AI, and the AI had to be wrong about whether it was a trap or not.

But using the method above, we can go much further. We can test the AI in any scenario which we can imagine, as long as we can precisely physically describe it. We can check what would happen if the AI was given the ability to launch the world's nuclear arsenals, or divert an asteroid towards Earth. We can check what it would design if it was given unrestricted access to a DNA synthesiser. We could see what it would do if it could rewrite the text of a speech an important world leader was due to give. We could see whether it would sabotage the creation of other AIs - and if so, which ones. We could see what it did to a probe humanity planned to launch to the stars, what numbers it would call if it had access to a phone, what it would purchase if it had capital.

And, in all cases, the AI would be behaving as if its actions were undetectable and certain to succeed, while we ensured that they were (almost certainly) detectable and certain to fail. There is no "almost" in that certain to fail condition, because the AI is acting as if it had miraculous powers that it doesn't have.

Now, we can't use testing as our sole method of AI control (for reasons similar to here), but it does allow us some pretty effective ways of catching bad AIs.
AI utility-based correlation
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-10-30T15:02:44.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This presents one way of implementing the indifference-based correlations of these posts.

Let u be a utility function, a map from worlds to real numbers. An expected utility maximiser considering whether to produce output Y, looks at the expected utility

Σ_w u(w)P(w|Y).

We now assume that there is another random variable X in the world, and we want the AI to be indifferent to worlds where Y≠X. We also want it to be indifferent to worlds where Z=0. Then it will assess the value of output Y as:

Σ_w u(w)P(w|X=Y,Z=1,Y).

Now, the idea of the setup was to ensure that Z=1 would erase the output Y so that it was never read. Hence P(w|Z=1,Y) Hence that equation simplifies to:

Σ_w u(w)P(w|X=Y).

Therefore the AI will chose the Y that maximises the (conditional) expected utility of u if X=Y. To get the full version of the initial post, you need to define some function f of Y and modify this to

Σ_w u(w)P(w|X=Y) + f(Y).
AI utility-based correlation
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-10-30T14:53:15.594Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This presents one way of implementing the indifference-based correlations of these posts.

Let u be a utility function, a map from worlds to real numbers. An expected utility maximiser considering whether to produce output Y, looks at the expected utility

Σw u(w)P(w|Y).

We now assume that there is another random variable X in the world, and we want the AI to be indifferent to worlds where Y≠X. We also want it to be indifferent to worlds where Z=0. Then it will assess the value of output Y as:

Σw u(w)P(w|X=Y,Z=1,Y).

Now, the idea of the setup was to ensure that Z=1 would erase the output Y so that it was never read. Hence P(w|Z=1,Y) Hence that equation simplifies to:

Σw u(w)P(w|X=Y).

Therefore the AI will chose the Y that maximises the (conditional) expected utility of u if X=Y. To get the full version of the initial post, you need to define some function f of Y and modify this to

Σw u(w)P(w|X=Y) + f(Y).
Meetup : West LA: Futarchy
by abramdemski — 2015-10-30T07:22:40.687Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Futarchy

WHEN:
04 November 2015 08:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA

How To Find Us: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking: Free for three hours.

Discussion: This week we will attempt to tackle Robin Hanson's proposal for solving coordination problems on a massive scale, Futarchy. This will be a freestyle discussion, so it's probably best to at least read a little of the recommended reading to know what's going on. However, this is not required.

Recommended Reading:

Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs by Robin Hanson.

Questions about Futarchy by Andrew Gelman.

Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs? by Robon Hanson.

Where do I disagree with Robin Hanson? by Tyler Cowen.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Futarchy
Meetup : Moscow meetup: science research issues, global risks, fallacymania
by Slava Matyukhin — 2015-10-29T14:37:44.852Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meetup: science research issues, global risks, fallacymania

WHEN:
01 November 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

I haven't announced our meetups here on lesswrong.com for a while, but we are still meeting bi-weekly. We moved from Yandex to our new anticafe "Kocherga".

Planned content:

1) I'll give a talk about scientific methodology issues, based on this great article.
2) Alexey Turchin will talk about global risks and will show his roadmap dedicated to this topic.
3) Alexander Popov will organize Fallacymania game. He'll also organize Zendo game at the afterparty.
We also have another (secret and fun) event happening in Kocherga around 14:00. We have reserved a 15-minute section for explanations.

Pad with a detailed schedule.

PS: If you're joining us for the first time, read this, it might answer some of your questions.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meetup: science research issues, global risks, fallacymania