trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Engelbart: Insufficiently Recursive
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-26T01:05:57.789Z

Today's post, Engelbart: Insufficiently Recursive was originally published on 26 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The development of the mouse did lead to a productivity increase. But it didn't lead to a major productivity increase at creating future productivity increases. Therefore, the recursive process didn't take off properly.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Abstract/Distant Future Bias, 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 here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Credence calibration game FAQ
by Academian — 2012-11-26T00:52:12.885Z

Hey rationality friends, I just made this FAQ for the credence calibration game. So if you have people you'd like to introduce to it --- for example, to get them used to thinking of belief strengths as probabilities --- now is a good time :)

Also, shameless promotion: please tweet/g+/like it; I want the world to be thinking in probabilities ASAP!

*Also*, please email me (critch@math.berkeley.edu) if you're good at making apps quickly and are interested in improving the game or making a variant of it; I'm swamped in job applications right now, but could easily have a Skype or phone conversation about our cache of ideas for improvements / variations (e.g. collecting user data on a server, more question types, a variant awarding gambles rather than deterministic scores, a variant with clickable emotion buttons for the user...).

Cheers!
How minimal is our intelligence?
by Douglas_Reay — 2012-11-25T23:34:06.733Z

Gwern suggested that, if it were possible for civilization to have developed when our species had a lower IQ, then we'd still be dealing with the same problems, but we'd have a lower IQ with which to tackle them. Or, to put it another way, it is unsurprising that living in a civilization has posed problems that our species finds difficult to tackle, because if we were capable of solving such problems easily, we'd probably also have been capable of developing civilization earlier than we did.

How true is that?

In this post I plan to look in detail at the origins of civilization with an eye to considering how much the timing of it did depend directly upon the IQ of our species, rather than upon other factors.

Although we don't have precise IQ test numbers for our immediate ancestral species, the fossil record is good enough to give us a clear idea of how brain size has changed over time:

and we do have archaeological evidence of approximately when various technologies (such as pictograms, or using fire to cook meat) became common.

The First City

About 6,000 years ago (4000 BCE), Ur was a thriving trading village on the flood plain near the mouth of the river Euphrates in what is now called southern Iraq and what historians call Sumeria.

By 3000 BCE it was the heart of a city-state with a core built up populated area covering 37 acres, and would go on over the following thousand years to lead the Sumerian empire, raise a great brick Ziggurat to its patron moon goddess, and become the largest city in the world (65,000 people concentrated in 54 acres).

It was eventually doomed by desertification and soil salination, caused by its own success (over-grazing and land clearing) but, by then, cities had spread throughout the fertile crescent of rivers at the intersection of the European, African and Asian land masses.

Ur may not have been the first city, but it was the first one we know of that wasn't part of a false dawn - one whose culture and technologies did demonstrably spread to other areas. It was the flashpoint.

We don't know for certain what it was about the culture surrounding the dawn of cities that made that particular combination of trade, writing, specialisation, hierarchy and religion communicable, when similar cultures from previous false dawns failed to spread. We can trace each of those elements to earlier sources, none of them ...
LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
by daenerys — 2012-11-25T23:33:30.413Z

Standard Intro

The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.

About two months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.

Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.

Crocker's Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post

To the submittrs- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.

Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

Minimizing the Inferential Distance

One problem that I think exists in discussions about gender issues between men and women, is that the inferential distance is much greater than either group realizes. Women might assume that men know what experiences women might face, and so not explicitly mention specific examples. Men might assume they know what the women are talking about, but have never really heard specific examples. Or they might assume that these types of things only happened in the past, or not to the types of females in their in-group

So for the first post in this series, I thought it would be worthwhile to try to lower this inferential distance, by sharing specific examples of what it's like as a smart/geeky female. When submitters didn't know what to write, I directed them to this article, by Julia Wise (copied below), and told them to write their own stories. These are not related to LW culture specifically, but rather meant to explain where the women here are coming from. Warning: This article is a collection of anecdotes, NOT a logical ...
[SEQ RERUN] Abstract/Distant Future Bias
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-25T04:20:41.073Z

Today's post, Abstract/Distant Future Bias was originally published on November 26, 2008. A summary:

An introduction to the idea of Near vs Far mode reasoning.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was ...Recursion, Magic, 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 here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Cryonic resurrection - an ethical hypothetical
by ialdabaoth — 2012-11-25T00:44:09.458Z

At some point in the future, we hope, brains which have been cryonically preserved may be resurrected, by some process of neural reconstruction (most likely either as nanotech, reconstituted wetware, or virtual simulation).

Imagine that the technology has just come available to resurrect a frozen brain. However, the process has low fidelity, due to resource and technique limitations. Luckily, these limitations are purely practical - as the technique is refined, the process of resurrection will become better and better. The process is also destructive to the original preserved brain, so there's no going back and making a second, higher-quality scan.

The results of the process is effectively a copy of the old brain and personality, but with permanent brain damage in several regions - this manifests effectively as an extreme form of cerebral palsy, partial amnesia (retrograde and anteretrograde), bipolar disthymia, and a partial frontal lobotomy - in short, you'll get something that has recognizable facets of the original, but it's an utter mess.

As the technology progresses, each of these symptoms will be lessened, until eventually they will be effectively eliminated altogether. However, the first few thousand subjects will suffer irrecoverable memory loss and will suffer a horrifically low quality-of-life for at least several decades until the technology improves.

The technology will not progress in refinement without practice, and practice requires actually restoring cryogenically frozen human brains.

Let's establish a metric so we can talk numerically:

0.000 - complete and persistent vegetative state, aka dead (this is our current state of progress in this technology)

0.100 - Terry Schiavo (persistent vegetative state with occasional non-conscious responses)

0.500 - the equivalent of advanced Alzheimer's syndrome; severe mental and physical impairment

0.700 - moderate mental and physical impairment

0.800 - significant reduction in facilities (IQ loss of 20 to 35 points, severe difficulty with memory, slurred speech, frequent and severe mood swings)

0.900 - slight reduction in facilities (IQ loss of 10 to 20 points, moderate short- and long-term memory loss, frequent but moderate mood swings)

0.950 - liminal reduction in facilities (IQ loss of 5 to 10 points; occasional slowness in memory recall, occasional mood swings)

1.000 - a perfect reproduction of your origin...
Meetup : Brussels meetup
by Axel — 2012-11-24T18:31:22.424Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup

WHEN:
15 December 2012 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

We are once again meeting at 'la fleur en papier doré' close to the Brussels Central station. If you feel like an intelligent discussion and are in the neighborhood, consider dropping by. As always, I'll have a sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup
Mathematical Measures of Optimization Power
by Alex_Altair — 2012-11-24T10:55:17.145Z

In explorations of AI risk, it is helpful to formalize concepts. One particularly important concept is intelligence. How can we formalize it, or better yet, measure it? “Intelligence” is often considered mysterious or is anthropomorphized. One way to taboo “intelligence” is to talk instead about optimization processes. An optimization process (OP, also optimization power) selects some futures from a space of possible futures. It does so according to some criterion; that is, it optimizes for something. Eliezer Yudkowsky spends a few of the sequence posts discussing the nature and importance of this concept for understanding AI risk. In them, he informally describes a way to measure the power of an OP. We consider mathematical formalizations of this measure.

Here's EY's original description of his measure of OP.

Put a measure on the state space - if it's discrete, you can just count. Then collect all the states which are equal to or greater than the observed outcome, in that optimization process's implicit or explicit preference ordering. Sum or integrate over the total size of all such states. Divide by the total volume of the state space. This gives you the power of the optimization process measured in terms of the improbabilities that it can produce - that is, improbability of a random selection producing an equally good result, relative to a measure and a preference ordering.

If you prefer, you can take the reciprocal of this improbability (1/1000 becomes 1000) and then take the logarithm base 2. This gives you the power of the optimization process in bits.

Let's say that at time we have a formalism to specify all possible world states at some future time . Perhaps it is a list of particle locations and velocities, or perhaps it is a list of all possible universal wave functions. Or maybe we're working in a limited domain, and it's a list of all possible next-move chess boards. Let's also assume that we have a well-justified prior over these states being the next ones to occur in the absence of an OP (more on that later).

We order according to the OP's preferences. For the moment, we actually don't care about the density, or “measure” of our ordering. Now we have a probability distribution over . The integral from to over this represents the probability that the worldstate at will b...
[SEQ RERUN] ...Recursion, Magic
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-24T05:54:13.615Z

Today's post, ...Recursion, Magic was originally published on 25 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you have a system that gets better at making itself get better, it will appear to discontinuously advance. Add in the ability of intelligences to accomplish tasks which previous intelligences labeled impossible, and you have the potential for dramatic advancement.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was When Life is Cheap, Death is Cheap, 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 here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Overconfident Pessimism
by lukeprog — 2012-11-24T00:47:43.721Z

You can build a machine to draw [deductive] conclusions for you, but I think you can never build a machine that will draw [probabilistic] inferences.

George Polya, 34 years before Pearl (1988) launched the probabilistic revolution in AI

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

Ernest Rutherford in 1933, 18 years before the first nuclear reactor went online

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself...

Wilbur Wright, in a 1908 speech

Startling insights are hard to predict.1 Polya and Rutherford couldn't have predicted when computational probabilistic reasoning and nuclear power would arrive. Their training in scientific skepticism probably prevented them from making confident predictions about what would be developed in the next few decades.

What's odd, then, is that their scientific skepticism didn't prevent them from making confident predictions about what wouldn't be developed in the next few decades.

I am blessed to occasionally chat with some of the smartest scientists in the world, especially in computer science. They generally don't make confident predictions that certain specific, difficult, insight-based technologies will be developed soon. And yet, immediately after agreeing with me that "the future is very hard to predict," they will confidently state that a specific, difficult technology is more than 50 years away!

Error. Does not compute.

What's going on, here?

I don't think it's always a case of motivated skepticism. I don't think think Wilbur Wright was motivated to think flight was a long way off. I think he was "zoomed in" on the difficulty of the problem, didn't see a way to solve it, and misinterpreted his lack of knowledge about the difficulty of flight as positive information that flight was extremely difficult and far away.

As Eliezer wrote:

When heavier-than-air flight or atomic energy was a hundred years off, it looked fifty years off or impossible; when it was five years off, it still looked fifty years off or impossible. Poor information.

(Of course, we can predict some technological ad...
Example of neurons usefully communicating without synapses found in flies [LINK]
by Sniffnoy — 2012-11-23T23:25:43.019Z

Or, yet another obstacle to WBE.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33350/title/Neurons-Talk-Without-Synapses/

OK, apparently ephaptic coupling is old news, but this seems to be the first example where we can say just what it does and that it is doing something useful.
Musk, Mars and x-risk 
by Kawoomba — 2012-11-23T20:32:53.247Z

Article on space.com

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Relevant Sagan quote:

(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.

This should also at least somewhat reduce the x-risk stemming from uFAI (a subset of uFAI's may not concern themselves with space travel), and may significantly reduce the x-risk posed by many other x-risk categories (bioengineered threats, catastrophic climate change, global nuclear catastrophe, grey goo scenarios, etcetera).

For total x-risk reduction, prima facie it's unclear to me how supporting an endeavor such as Musk's stacks up against the SI's effectiveness, measured by total x-risk reduction per donated currency unit.

What's your take?
Meetup : Phoenix, AZ: Stoicism and Visitors: 6 December 6:00PM
by Danny_Hintze — 2012-11-23T19:08:59.983Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix, AZ: Stoicism and Visitors: 5 December 6:00PM

WHEN: 06 December 2012 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: 1038 South Mill Avenue, Tempe, AZ

Jay will give a brief presentation on Stoicism and we will get to see some friends from Australia! The meeting will be at the Chipotle near Gammage Theater.

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix, AZ: Stoicism and Visitors: 5 December 6:00PM
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Chicago, Cincinnati/Columbus, Cleveland/Akron, Durham, London, Moscow, Paderborn, Salt Lake City, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-11-23T17:18:04.087Z

This summary was posted to LW main on Nov 16th, and has been moved to discussion. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Moscow: Applied Rationality and Cognitive Biases: 17 November 2012 04:00PM
Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 15-17: 17 November 2012 11:00AM
Chicago Organizational Meeting and Open Discussion: 17 November 2012 01:00PM
First Meetup- Cleveland and Akron, Ohio: 17 November 2012 08:03PM
18/11 London Meetup: 18 November 2012 02:00PM
DC Meetup: Boardgames: 18 November 2012 03:00PM
Paderborn Meetup, November 22th: 22 November 2012 07:00PM
(St. Louis MO) Psycology of memorization, Thiel Fellow James Koppel, and games: 24 November 2012 02:30PM
Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup: 09 December 2012 05:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 17 November 2018 01:30PM
Salt Lake City Monthly meetup: 17 November 2012 03:00PM
Cincinnati/Columbus: Memorisation exercise (NB, time changed): 18 November 2012 02:00PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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 will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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, cons...
Request for community insight
by Caerbannog — 2012-11-23T14:20:17.593Z

Hi LW. I think that this community's insight could help me with my problem. I may have an undiagnosed medical condition, and I wanted to present it here in order to get some ideas, either on what it is, or what I should try to do to figure it out.

I'm a relatively active and relatively healthy-eating 36 yo male, but over the last 5.5 years I've had a bunch of musculo-skeletal problems (joints, tendons, muscles) each lasting a long time. Each of these by themselves would not be that unusual, but most have not resolved, and they are just so widespread:

- r ankle (1 yr. minor catching, occasional worse pain)

- both knees (5 yr. major pain, catching, crepitus)

- both hips, (1 yr. major pain, better right now, but not gone)

- r shoulder (major weakness resolved after 2y by aggressive stretching)

- neck (6 mo., helped by stretching upper back , but still a problem: can't swim)

- l elbow (3yr. minor pain and weakness)

Some (maybe all) of these feel like they could be due to muscles getting so tight or short that they overtax the connected tendons/bones/cartilage.

The knees are the worst right now, though the hips were just as bad. I'm not sure what made the hips get better, possibly strengthening hip abductors.

Additionally, approximately at the time this started, I became lactose intolerant, but am currently okay. I also started getting springtime allergies for the first time 5.5 yrs ago.

I started a gluten-free diet a couple of weeks ago, and have also stopped all exercise for the last 3 weeks, but no effect so far. Because I've been active and athletic for so long, the physical problems are a major impact on my life and have a huge negative impact on my mood. I've never felt worse in my life, honestly.

I'm presenting this here because I know the reponses I get will be well thought out.

I appreciate your time. Thanks!
Meetup : Meetup : Bielefeld Meetup, December 5th
by Just_existing — 2012-11-23T11:50:11.333Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup : Bielefeld Meetup, December 5th

WHEN:
05 December 2012 07:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Grill/Bar Verve, Klosterplatz 13, Bielefeld

The second meetup of this group.

We will have some topics prepared for discussion, although we don't know which yet.

We will be delighted about every new face we see. If you want on the mailing list of this group to learn about potential topics in advance, you can write me and I will add you.

I will have a sign.

Everybody is welcome!

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup : Bielefeld Meetup, December 5th