trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Don’t Fear The Filter
by Scott Alexander — 2014-05-29T00:45:51.000Z

There’s been a recent spate of popular interest in the Great Filter theory, but I think it all misses an important point brought up in Robin Hanson’s original 1998 paper on the subject.

The Great Filter, remember, is the horror-genre-adaptation of Fermi’s Paradox. All of our calculations say that, in the infinite vastness of time and space, intelligent aliens should be very common. But we don’t see any of them. We haven’t seen their colossal astro-engineering projects in the night sky. We haven’t heard their messages through SETI. And most important, we haven’t been visited or colonized by them.

This is very strange. Consider that if humankind makes it another thousand years, we’ll probably have started to colonize other star systems. Those star systems will colonize other star systems and so on until we start expanding at nearly the speed of light, colonizing literally everything in sight. After a hundred thousand years or so we’ll have settled a big chunk of the galaxy, assuming we haven’t killed ourselves first or encountered someone else already living there.

But there should be alien civilizations that are a billion years old. Anything that could conceivably be colonized, they should have gotten to back when trilobytes still seemed like superadvanced mutants. But here we are, perfectly nice solar system, lots of any type of resources you could desire, and they’ve never visited. Why not?

Well, the Great Filter. No knows specifically what the Great Filter is, but generally it’s “that thing that blocks planets from growing spacefaring civilizations”. The planet goes some of the way towards a spacefaring civilization, and then stops. The most important thing to remember about the Great Filter is that it is very good at what it does. If even one planet in a billion light-year radius had passed through the Great Filter, we would expect to see its inhabitants everywhere. Since we don’t, we know that whatever it is it’s very thorough.

Various candidates have been proposed, including “it’s really hard for life to come into existence”, “it’s really hard for complex cells to form”, “it’s really hard for animals to evolve intelligent”, and “actually space is full of aliens but they are hiding their existence from us ...
Meetup : Boston - Taking ideas seriously
by Vika — 2014-05-28T18:58:57.537Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Taking ideas seriously

WHEN:
01 June 2014 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Citadel House, 98 Elm St #1, Somerville, MA

Anders Huitfeldt will lead a discussion about whether taking ideas seriously is likely to increase the accuracy of mental maps, in the case of agents with human-level intelligence. For Less Wrong regulars this will be basic review, and for non-regulars it may be a useful introduction. He will have some slides, but he hopes that this will be an interactive discussion rather than a presentation.

It would be helpful to look over the following before the meetup:

Reason as memetic immune disorder by Phil Goetz

Epistemic learned helplessness by Scott Alexander

Taking ideas seriously by Will Newsome

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups start at 3:30pm, and have an alternating location:

1st Sunday meetups are at Citadel in Porter Sq, at 98 Elm St, apt 1, Somerville.

3rd Sunday meetups are in MIT's building 66 at 25 Ames St, room 156. Room number subject to change based on availability; signs will be posted with the actual room number.

(We also have last Wednesday meetups at Citadel at 7pm.)

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 4pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

—Phase 4: Dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Taking ideas seriously
Meetup : Durham/RTLW Discussion Meetup:  Cognitive Load Followup 
by therufs — 2014-05-28T18:16:13.469Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW Discussion Meetup: Cognitive Load Followup

WHEN:
30 May 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
420 W Geer St., Durham NC 27701

We'll start with followup on last meetup's discussion of cognitive load. As time and inclination permit, we'll do another round of other-optimizing and/or some games.

7:00 meet, gather drinks, general chat

7:30 discussion begins

9:00 adjourn to Fullsteam (probably)

Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW Discussion Meetup: Cognitive Load Followup
Meetup : Boston - Defense Against the Dark Arts: the Ethics and Psychology of Persuasion
by Vika — 2014-05-28T17:58:44.680Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Defense Against the Dark Arts: the Ethics and Psychology of Persuasion

WHEN:
28 May 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Citadel, 98 Elm St #1, Somerville, MA

How can you convince other people to agree with you? How can we make ourselves less likely to be swayed by the Dark Arts persuasion of others? And, of course, what are the ethical issues involved with all of this?

If you're the sort of person who finds these questions interesting, feel free to join us tonight as Jesse Galef discusses the psychology research on persuasion and its ethical implications. Meetup starts at 7pm, talk starts at 7:30pm.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong Wednesday meetups are once a month on the last Wednesday at 7pm at Citadel (98 Elm St Apt 1 Somerville, near Porter Square). All other meetups are on Sundays.

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 7:30pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Defense Against the Dark Arts: the Ethics and Psychology of Persuasion
Berkeley meetup May 28 outdoors in Ohlone Park
by pcm — 2014-05-28T16:42:44.404Z

Today's Berkeley LW meetup will start in Ohlone park one block east of the North Berkeley BART. Please try to arrive by 7pm, and look for us near the rocks in the middle of the block east of Sacramento St between Delaware St and Hearst Ave. I'll try to be there by 6:30.

We may take a walk up the Ohlone Greenway while the sun is shining and/or move to the CFAR office after sunset, depending on what people want.

If you have trouble finding us call me at 408 315-8120.
Timelessness as a Conservative Extension of Causal Decision Theory
by  — 2014-05-28T14:57:04.112Z

Author's Note: Please let me know in the comments exactly what important background material I have missed, and exactly what I have misunderstood, and please try not to mind that everything here is written in the academic voice.

Abstract: Timeless Decision Theory often seems like the correct way to handle many game-theoretical dilemmas, but has not quite been satisfactorily formalized and still handles certain problems the wrong way. We present an intuition that helps us extend Causal Decision Theory towards Timeless Decision Theory while adding rigor, and then formalize this intuition. Along the way, we describe how this intuition can guide both us and programmed agents in various Newcomblike games.

Introduction

One day, a Time Lord called Omega drops out of the sky, walks up to me on the street, and places two boxes in front of me. One of these is opaque, the other is transparent and contains $1000. He tells me I can take either the opaque box alone, or both boxes, but that if and only if he predicted using his Time Lord Science I would take just the opaque box, it contains $1,000,000. He then flies away back to the his home-world of Gallifrey. I know that whatever prediction he made was/will be correct, because after all he is a Time Lord.

The established, gold-standard algorithm of Causal Decision Theory fails to win the maximum available sum of money on this problem, just as it fails on a symmetrical one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma. In fact, as human beings, we can say that CDT fails miserably, because while a programmed agent goes "inside the game" and proceeds to earn a good deal less money than it could, we human observers are sitting outside, carefully drawing outcome tables that politely inform us of just how much money our programmed agents are leaving on the table. While purely philosophical controversies abound in the literature about the original Newcomb's Problem, it is generally obvious from our outcome tables in the Prisoners' Dilemma that "purely rational" CDT agents would very definitely benefit by cooperating, and that actual human beings asked to play the game calculate outcomes as if forming coalitions rather than as if maximizing personal utility -- thus cooperating and winning. Even in the philosophical debates, it is generally agreed that one-boxers in Newcomb's Problem are, in fact,...
The Useful Definition of "I"
by plex — 2014-05-28T11:44:23.789Z

aka The Fuzzy Pattern Theory of Identity

Background reading: Timeless Identity, The Anthropic Trilemma

Identity is not based on continuity of physical material.

Identity is not based on causal links to previous/future selves.

Identity is not usefully defined as a single point in thingspace. An "I" which only exists for an instant (i.e. zero continuity of identity) does not even remotely correspond to what we're trying to express by the word "I" in general use, and refers instead to a single snapshot. Consider the choice between putting yourself in stasis for eternity against living normally; a definition of "I" which prefers self-preservation by literally preserving a snapshot of one instant is massively unintuitive and uninformative compared to a definition which leads us to preserve "I" by allowing it to keep living even if that includes change.

Identity is not the current isolated frame.

So if none of those are what "I"/Identity is based on, what is?

Some configurations of matter I would consider to be definitely me, and some definitely not me. Between the two extremes there are plenty of border cases wherever you try to draw a line. As an exercise: five minutes in the past ete, 30 years in the future ete, alternate branch ete brought up by different parents, ete's identical twin, ete with different genetics/body but a mindstate near-identical to current ete, sibling raised in same environment with many shared memories, random human, monkey, mouse, bacteria, rock. With sufficiently advanced technology, it would be possible to change me between those configurations one atom at a time. Without appeals to physical or causal continuity, there's no way to cleanly draw a hard binary line without violating what we mean by "I" in some important way or allowing, at some point, a change vastly below perceptible levels to flip a configuration from "me" to "not-me" all at once.

Or, put another way, identity is not binary, it is fuzzy like everything else in human conceptspace.

It's interesting to note that examining common language use shows that in some sense this is widely known. When someone's changed by an experience or acting in a way unfitting with your model of them it's common to say something along the lines of "he's like a different person" or "she's not acting like herself", and the qualifier!person nomenclature that is becoming a bit more fr...
Meetup : June Meetup in Munich
by Valeriy — 2014-05-27T07:37:45.920Z

Discussion article for the meetup : June Meetup in Munich

WHEN:
01 June 2014 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Outside the mathematics building, Theresienstraße 41, Munich

You are invited to come to the June Munich LW Meetup! We're planning to meet outside the mathematics building at the LMU. Depending on the weather, we'll stay outside or occupy a free room inside the math department. If anyone would bring food for the group, it would be awesome. :) It goes without saying that newcomers are very welcomed.
We want to discuss the article http://rockstarresearch.com/19-traits-of-player-characters/ and maybe talk about agency. Any further suggestions are highly encouraged.

Discussion article for the meetup : June Meetup in Munich
Pascal's Mugging Solved
by common_law — 2014-05-27T03:28:08.719Z

Since Pascal’s Mugging is well known on LW, I won’t describe it at length. Suffice to say that a mugger tries to blackmail you by threatening enormous harm by a completely mysterious mechanism. If the harm is great enough, a sufficiently large threat eventually dominates doubts about the mechanism.
I have a reasonably simple solution to Pascal’s Mugging. In four steps, here it is:

The greater the harm, the more likely the mugger is trying to pick a greater threat than any competitor picks (we’ll call that maximizing).

As the amount of harm threatened gets larger, the probability that the mugger is maximizing approaches unity.

As the probability that the mugger is engaged in maximizing approaches unity, the likelihood that the mugger’s claim is true approaches zero.

The probability that a contrary claim is true—that contributing to the mugger will cause the feared calamity—exceeds the probability that the mugger’s claim is true when the probability that the mugger is maximizing increases sufficiently.

Pascal’s Mugging induces us to look at the likelihood of the claim in abstraction from the fact that the claim is made. The paradox can be solved by breaking the probability that the mugger’s claim is true into two parts: the probability of the claim itself (its simplicity) and the probability that the mugger is truthful. Even if the probability of magical harm doesn’t decrease when the amount of harm increases, the probability that the mugger is truthful decreases continuously as the amount of harm predicted increases.
Solving the paradox in Pascal’s Mugging depends on recognizing that, if the logic were sound, it would engage muggers in a game where they try to pick the highest practicable number to represent the amount of harm. But this means that the higher the number, the more likely they are to be playing this game (undermining the logic believed sound).
But solving Pascal’s Mugging also depends on recognizing that the evidence that the mugger is maximizing can lower the probability below that of the same harm when no mugger has claimed it. It involves recognizing that, when it is almost certain that the claim is motivated by something unrelated to the claim’s truth, the claim can become less believable than if it hadn’t been expressed. The mugger’s maximizing mo...
Meetup : Canberra: Decision Theory
by DanielFilan — 2014-05-26T14:44:31.621Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Decision Theory

WHEN:
14 June 2014 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
108 North Road, Acton, ACT

Jan Leike, PhD student in Computer Science at the ANU, will give a brief talk about decision theory, giving an overview of the goal of the field and outlining evidential and causal decision theory. There will then be a Q&A session and general discussion. Vegan snacks will, as always, be provided.

General meetup info:

If you use Facebook, please join our group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwcanberra/

Structured meetups are held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

There will be LWers at the Computer Science Students Association's weekly board games night, held on Wednesdays from 7 pm in the same location.

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Decision Theory
Open Thread, May 26 - June 1, 2014
by BarbaraB — 2014-05-26T07:42:06.547Z

Previous Open Thread: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/k94/open_thread_may_19_25_2014/

You know the drill - 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.

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-05-25T16:38:00.517Z

This summary was posted to LW main on May 16th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Houston, TX: 17 May 2014 11:31AM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Chicago Calibration Game: 31 May 2014 03:00PM
Christchurch, New Zealand Meetup: 18 May 2014 04:30PM
Frankfurt: 25 May 2014 02:00PM
Montreal - Fun and games: 17 May 2014 06:00PM
Montreal - How to be charismatic: 26 May 2014 07:00PM
Moscow meet up: 18 May 2014 04:00PM
Utrecht - Social discussion at the Film Café: 17 May 2014 05:00PM

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:

Austin, TX: 17 May 2025 01:30PM
Boston - An introduction to digital cryptography: 18 May 2014 03:30PM
Canberra: Rationalist Fun and Games!: 24 May 2014 06:00PM
London social meetup - possibly in a park: 18 May 2014 02:00PM
Melbourne June Rationality Dojo: Memory: 01 June 2014 03:00PM
Sydney Meetup - May: 21 May 2014 07:00PM
Sydney Social Meetup - June (Games night): 12 June 2014 06:30PM
Vienna Meetup: 17 May 2014 03:00PM
Washington DC Short Talks Meetup: 18 May 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 ...
Meetup : test meetup
by FrankAdamek — 2014-05-25T16:35:16.985Z

Discussion article for the meetup : test meetup

WHEN:
13 May 2014 09:35:10AM (-0700)

WHERE:
Minneapolis, MN

testing. using past date should prevent this from cluttering LW. I hope.

test complete but I'm not sure how to delete meetups. it doesn't look like this shows up though so I'll let it be.

Discussion article for the meetup : test meetup
Meetup : Prof. Roman Yampolskiy on approaches to AGI risk, Tel Aviv
by JoshuaFox — 2014-05-25T11:27:23.868Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Prof. Roman Yampolskiy on approaches to AGI risk, Tel Aviv

WHEN:
28 May 2014 06:34:45AM (+0300)

WHERE:
98 Yigal Alon St.,, 33rd floor, Tel Aviv

On Wednesday May 28, Roman Yampolskiy will speak on approaches to AGI risk. See his overview article "Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk," coauthored with Kaj Sotala.

It will be at Google Israel's offices, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon St., Tel Aviv.

We'll meet at the 29th floor at 20:00, then go right up to the 33rd floor and start the talk at 20:30.

If you can't find us, call Anatoly who is graciously hosting us at 054-245-1060, or me at 054-569-1165.

Discussion article for the meetup : Prof. Roman Yampolskiy on approaches to AGI risk, Tel Aviv
Dissolving the Thread of Personal Identity
by Skeptityke — 2014-05-25T06:36:18.024Z

(Background: I got interested in anthropics about a week ago. It has tormented my waking thoughts ever since in a cycle of “be confused, develop idea, work it out a bit, realize that it fails, repeat” and it is seriously driving me berserk by this point. While drawing a bunch of “thread of personal continuity” diagrams to try to flesh out my next idea, I suspected that it was a fairly nonsensical idea, came up with a thought experiment that showed it was definitely a nonsensical idea, realized I was trying to answer the question “Is there any meaningful sense in which I can expect to wake up as myself tomorrow, rather than Brittany Spears?”, kept thinking anyways for about an hour, and eventually came up with this possible reduction of personal identity over time. It differs somewhat from Kaj Sotala’s. And I still have no idea what the hell to do about anthropics, but I figured I should write up this intermediate result. It takes the form of a mental dialogue with myself, because that’s what happened.)

Doubt: Hang on, this whole notion of “thread of personal continuity” looks sort of fishy. Self, can you try to clarify what it is?

Self: Let’s see… I have a causal link to my past and future self, and this causal link is the thread of personal identity!

Current Me: Please notice Past Self’s use of the cached thought from “Timeless Identity” even though it doesn’t fit.

Doubt: Causal links can’t possibly be the thread of personal continuity. Your state at time t+1 is not just caused by your state at time t, lots of events in your surroundings also cause the t+1 state as well. A whole hell of a lot of stuff has a causal link to you. That can’t possibly be it. And when you die, alive you has a causal link to dead you.

Doubt: And another thing, personal continuity isn’t just an on-off thing. There’s a gradient to it.

Self: What do you mean?

Doubt: Let’s say you get frozen by cryonics, and then revived a century later.

Self: Sure.

Doubt: Let’s say you know that you will be revived with exactly the same set of memories, preferences, thought patterns, etc, that you have currently. As you are beginning the process, what is your subjective credence that you will wake up a century later?

Self: Fairly close to 1.

Doubt: Now, let’s say ...