trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Put all your eggs in one basket?
by PhilGoetz — 2011-01-23T19:14:18.465Z

Having all known life on Earth concentrated on a single planet is an existential risk. So we should try to spread out, right? As soon as possible?

Yet, if we had advanced civilizations on two planets, that would be two places for unfriendly AI to originate. If, as many people here believe, a single failed trial ruins the universe, you want to have as few places trying it as possible. So you don't want any space colonization until after AI is developed.

If we apply that logic to countries, you would want as few industrialized nations as possible until AAI (After AI). So instead of trying to help Africa, India, China, and the Middle East develop, you should be trying to suppress them. In fact, if you really believed the calculations I commonly see used in these circles about the probability of unfriendly AI and its consequences, you should be trying to exterminate human life outside of your developed country of choice. Failing to would be immoral.

And if you apply it within the USA, you need to pick one of MIT and Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, and burn the other two to the ground.

Of course, doing this will slow the development of AI. But that's a good thing, if UFAI is most likely and has zero utility.

In fact, if slowing development is good, probably the best thing of all is just to destroy civilization and stop development completely.

Do you agree with any of this? Is there a point where you think it goes too far? If so, say where it goes too far and explain why.

I see two main flaws in the reasoning.

Categorization of outcomes as "FAI vs UFAI", with no other possible outcomes recognized, and no gradations within the category of either, and zero utility assigned to UFAI.

Failing to consider scenarios in which multiple AIs can provide a balance of power. The purpose of this balance of power may not be to keep humans in charge; it may be to put the AIs in an AI society in which human values will be worthwhile.

ADDED, after being reminded of this by Vladimir Nesov: Re. the final point, stopping completely guarantees Earth life will eventually be eliminated; see his comment below for elaboration.

ADDED: A number of the comments so far imply that the first AI built will necessarily FOOM immediately. FOOM is an appealing argument. I've argued in favor of it myself. Bu...
Knowledge doesn't just happen 
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-01-23T13:07:39.155Z

It should be obvious that people need to learn what they know, but a tremendous amount of effort goes into blaming them for not knowing whatever would have been useful if only they'd known it.

A lot of this appears in the form of "should have known better". Sometimes (especially after a low-probability disaster), it will be people tormenting themselves about ordinary behavior. If only they had left a little earlier or later, they wouldn't have been in the car crash. As far as I can tell, people are apt to expect themselves to be clairvoyant, and they expect other people to be telepathic.

The latter comes into play when they're shocked and infuriated that other people don't have the same views they do, or don't understand what is vividly clear to the telepathy expecter. This plays out both politically and personally.

One thing I've learned from arguing about torture is that moral intuitions don't transfer very well. To some people, it's completely obvious that torture is a bad thing and doesn't work, and to others, it's completely obvious that getting important information for one's own side is an emergency, people can't lie if they're suffering enough, and people on the other side don't deserve careful treatment. (The overlap between what people believe is moral and what they believe is effective is probably worth another essay.) When you're in the grasp of a moral intuition, it can be very hard to believe that people who don't share it aren't trying to hide bad motivations.

On the personal level, it's probably more complex. You do want to be around people who are reasonably clueful about how you want to be treated, but on the other hand, I've seen and done a certain amount of ranting about how people should just know how to behave. How are they to know it? They just should.

I suggest that as a matter of epistemic and emotional hygiene, downplaying "should have known better". As far as I can tell, if taken literally, it invokes an unavailable counterfactual and just leads to fury. I think I have better sense when I don't deploy it, but it's hard work to inhibit the reaction, and it's tempting to think that other people should know better than to invoke "should have known better".

It's possible that "should have known better" is one of those normal people things that geeks need to figure out. I can interpret it as "I am lowering your status because I want you to ne...
Gettier in Zombie World
by hairyfigment — 2011-01-23T06:44:29.137Z

A Dr. Nigel Thomas has tried to show a logical self-contradiction in Chalmers' "Zombie World" or zombiphile argument, in a way that would convince Chalmers (given perfect rationality, of course). The argument concerns the claim that we can conceive of a near-duplicate of our world sharing all of its physical laws and containing apparent duplicates of us, who copy everything we say or do for the same physical reasons that lead us to do it, but who lack consciousness. Chalmers says this shows the logical possibility of Zombie World (though nobody believes that it actually exists.) He concludes from this that our world has a nonphysical "bridging law" saying that "systems with the same functional organization have the same sort of conscious experiences," and we must regard this as logically independent of the world's physical laws. Thomas' response includes the following point:

Thus zombiphiles normally (and plausibly) insist that we know of our own consciousness directly, non-inferentially. Even so, there must be some sort of cognitive process that takes me from the fact of my consciousness to my (true) belief that I am conscious. As my zombie twin is cognitively indiscernible from me, an indiscernible process, functioning in just the same way, must lead it from the fact of its non-consciousness to the equivalent mistaken belief. Given either consciousness or non-consciousness (and the same contextual circumstances: ex hypothesis, ceteris is entirely paribus) the process leads one to believe that one is conscious. It is like a stuck fuel gauge, that reads FULL whether or not there is any gas in the tank.

While I think his full response has some flaws, it seems better than anything I produced on the subject — perhaps because I didn't try very hard to find a contradiction. Thomas tries to form a trilemma by arguing that we can't regard statements made by Zombie Chalmers about consciousness as true, or false, or meaningless. (If you think they deserve the full range of probabilistic truth values, then for the moment let "true" mean at least as much confidence as we place in our own equivalent statements and let "false" mean any lesser value.) But the important lemma requires an account of knowledge in order to work. To run through the other two lemmas: we know the zombie statements have meaning or truth values for us, the people postulating them, so let t...
Hyperlinks and Less Wrong
by Raemon — 2011-01-23T04:05:50.605Z

Just prior to learning about Less Wrong, I read an article that discussed internet usage, hyperlinks, and reading comprehension. The focus of the article was on numerous studies showing that people's reading comprehension goes down when they are searching the web, or viewing multimedia presentations. People reading an article with straight text and no distractions were able to answer more questions about it than people viewing a page that contained the same information, but which included video and hyperlinks. Even if you don't click on the hyperlinks, every time you see one you have to consciously make the decision whether to click, which is distracting.

I will link the article at the end of my post. If you want you can go read it now.

In my personal experience, I find it not only distracting but frustrating. Each link is a tantalizing window into interesting-sounding-new-information, and I know that if I don't click on it immediately I probably won't bother to go back to it later, but that if DO click on it immediately I'm probably going to lose track of what I'm currently reading. It can be fun to link-crawl through Wikipedia, starting out with an article about prepositions, and somehow ending on an article about animal sexuality. But what's fun is not the same thing as useful for education.

Enter Less Wrong. My initial reaction was "This is Wikipedia on Crack." Not only do a lot of articles here feature a bajillion hyperlinks, but each link often goes to another lengthy article full of fascinating information that I don't know, some of which is necessary to understand the first article, but none of which is easily summarized. With Wikipedia, if I run across a new word with a hyperlink it's at least possible for me to glance at the hyperlink, get a quick sense of what it's about, then return to my original reading. On Less Wrong that is often impossible. My first foray into this website felt like drowning in amazing ideas. It was a lot of fun, I definitely learned some things, but it was very confusing and hard to focus. Eventually I realized what the Sequences were and started reading them, but even they have a fair amount of interconnectedness that makes it hard to focus. (A related issue is that oftentimes I WAS already familiar with the introductory stuff, so I skipped ahead to the later articles, and then THOSE would link to various articles that I wasn...
Easy Intelligence Augmentation or Internet Wackaloonery?
by Cyan — 2011-01-23T02:17:14.029Z

On January 4, PJ Eby sent around an email linking an... interesting... website. The claim on the particular webpage he linked was as follows:

the normal span of your breath is critical to how well your mental faculties can function

the best activity for increasing your breath span is held-breath underwater swimming

this also results in an increase in intelligence caused by a permanent increase in blood flow to the brain

being fully underwater is important to the practice because it induces the diving reflex response

This site is part of a sales pitch, so many of the claims are stated in hyperbolic language. I've already noted one factual error: the webpage claims that being underwater triggers the diving reflex, while in fact (or at least, according to Wikipedia) the diving reflex is triggered when one's face is immersed in water colder that 21 °C.

But there is a testable claim here: learn to hold your breath for longer periods of time -- particularly in conditions that elicit the diving reflex -- and you will see increased intelligence. I know that some readers of LW regularly train and test their intelligence, so I offer this as an easily implemented potential method. The possible gains seem to me to outweigh the costs of the training and the low prior probability of the claim.
Link: Chessboxing could help train automatic emotion regulation
by Sniffnoy — 2011-01-22T23:40:17.572Z

EDIT: Argh, I really failed to read this closely. Rewriting...

Just saw this over at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Chessboxing (or similar games) could help train automatic emotion regulation. Obviously this should generalize. Has this - by which I mean finding things that can help train automatic emotion regulation - been done before? This doesn't seem to be anything new - and this is extrapolation, not experimental results - but it's a neat application.
Could/would an FAI recreate people who are information-theoretically dead by modern standards?
by AlexMennen — 2011-01-22T21:11:19.278Z

If someone gets cremated or buried long enough for eir brain to fully decompose into dirt, it becomes extremely difficult to revive em. Nothing short of a vastly superhuman intelligence would have a chance of doing it. I suspect that it would be possible for a superintelligence to do it, but unless there's a more efficient way to do it, it would require recomputing the Earth's history from the time the AGI is activated back to the death of the last person it intends to save. Not only does this require immense computational resources that could be used to the benefit of people who are still alive, it also requires simulating people experiencing pain (backwards). On the other hand, this saves people's lives. Does anyone have any compelling arguments on why an FAI would or would not recreate me if I die, decompose, and then the singularity occurs a long time after my death?

Why do I want to know? Well, aside from the question being interesting in its own right, it is an important factor in deciding whether or not cryonics is worth-while.
The Illusion of Sameness
by Elizabeth — 2011-01-22T06:41:33.992Z

I have lately been pondering two contradictory human beliefs: the belief in our own exceptionalism and the belief in our own ordinariness. We model the world with ourselves as prototypical humans, using our own emotions and reactions and thought processes to run a program predicting the behavior of others. That is, after all, what our mirror neurons evolved for. However, when it comes to our abilities or our intelligence or our problems, we believe we are something out of the ordinary. The second bias is easier to compensate for than the first, but it is the first that interests me, because even when confronted with significant evidence of your own difference, it is extremely difficult to really internalize it and change your model of the world.

I consider it likely that among those reading this, more of you grew up in families of intelligent, educated people than the national average. It is also likely that the number of readers who grew up in liberal and nonreligious families exceeds the norm. Not all, certainly. Quite possibly not even the majority. However, I think there must be many among you who understand the shock of leaving your family and community, perhaps to go to college, and slowly discovering that there are people who don't think like you. People who don't share your foundational knowledge, who trust different authorities, who have completely different default settings.

There are two separate pieces to this: the first is our default setting for the beliefs and authorities of others as similar to our own, and the second is our modeling of other people's mental processes as similar to our own. The second is seldom run across in everyday life, unless engaging in a discussion of mental processes as in the comments on this post. The first is run across fairly frequently, but here I must apologize for bringing up the mind-killer, for it is most apparent in politics. I will endeavor to keep my example brief.

In the spring of 2010 I was substitute teaching in a rural area of upstate New York. I was in the teacher's room eating lunch, with ten or so other teachers, when the subject of the BP oil spill arose, as it was the major current event at the time. My experience dictated that the conversation would start with "Isn't this a terrible thing?" and proceed to "Oil compani...
Hugo Awards - HP:MoR
by Eneasz — 2011-01-21T19:06:05.325Z

This year I'm a supporting member of WorldCon for the first time, and I noticed that the Hugo's have a category for Best Fan Writer ("Any person whose writing has appeared in semiprozines or fanzines or in generally available electronic media during 2010."). I do believe Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality counts, and I plan on nominating it. Even making it onto the ballot will probably expose it to a wider audience. Is anyone else here a WorldCon member and thinking of nominating MoR?
Politics is a fact of life
by  — 2011-01-21T11:07:56.256Z

There is a tendency to downvote articles and commentaries with a political subtext with a remark on how politics is the mind-killer. I completely understand that nobody wants his mind to be killed, however, I disagree on the employed methods. I don't think anybody can really afford to ignore politics. It's a fact about any group of even a handful of people. Thus instead of shunning politics I think it's better to build one's rational defenses. Understanding that politics is a problem is only the first step. If you stop there, there will always be a big part of life where you are not rational. Therefore I suggest that, as long as it doesn't get out of hands, there should always be room for political discussions if not on the main site at least in the discussion section.
Do Corporations Have a Right to Privacy?
by David_Allen — 2011-01-21T00:06:36.829Z

The link to Bruce Schneier's original post.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether or not corporations have the same rights to "personal privacy" that individuals do.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a amicus curiae brief in the case.

The brief makes legal and philosophical arguments for privacy as an important human right, and that it is not a corporate right, and does not need to be. It also contains a number of scholarly references on the topic.

I find the legal arguments against a corporate right to privacy convincing. Corporations in our current legal context are intentionally organized to provide certain types of public accountability.

However, I am not convinced by the philosophical arguments for restricting the right to privacy to individuals.

To summarize the utility of an individual right to privacy, as discussed in the brief:

A right to privacy is necessary for individuals to enjoy the feelings of autonomy, control and security, which are important for healthy cognitive development. It protects the seclusion needed for experimentation, developing identity, establishing intimate relationships, and for making meaningful choices free of ex-ante manipulation and coercion. It provides the opportunity to structure life in unconventional ways, freeing a person from the stultifying effects of scrutiny and approbation or disapprobation. It helps to avoid embarrassment, preserving dignity and respect, avoiding harm to social development and growth. It helps to prevent the appropriation of a person's name or likeness. It sets the balance of power between a person, and the world around them.

To summarize the philosophical argument against a corporate right to privacy:

Corporate entities are incapable of experiencing hurt feelings.

I think these arguments provide an unwarranted special status to human emotion. Emotions are body states related to expected utility. They bias decision making toward choices that maximize reward and minimize punishment.

Although corporate entities do not experience body states in the same way that humans do, they demonstrate responses similar to individuals in equivalent situations.

Corporate entities have strong survival related incentives for protecting their publi

...
Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge
by lukeprog — 2011-01-20T20:44:43.868Z

Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life

Some have suggested that the Less Wrong community could improve readers' instrumental rationality more effectively if it first caught up with the scientific literature on productivity and self-help, and then enabled readers to deliberately practice self-help skills and apply what they've learned in real life.

I think that's a good idea. My contribution today is a quick overview of scientific self-help: what professionals call "the psychology of adjustment." First I'll review the state of the industry and the scientific literature, and then I'll briefly summarize the scientific data available on three topics in self-help: study methods, productivity, and happiness.

The industry and the literature

As you probably know, much of the self-help industry is a sham, ripe for parody. Most self-help books are written to sell, not to help. Pop psychology may be more myth than fact. As Christopher Buckley (1999) writes, "The more people read [self-help books], the more they think they need them... [it's] more like an addiction than an alliance."

Where can you turn for reliable, empirically-based self-help advice? A few leading therapeutic psychologists (e.g., Albert Ellis, Arnold Lazarus, Martin Seligman) have written self-help books based on decades of research, but even these works tend to give recommendations that are still debated, because they aren't yet part of settled science.

Lifelong self-help researcher Clayton Tucker-Ladd wrote and updated Psychological Self-Help (pdf) over several decades. It's a summary of what scientists do and don't know about self-help methods (as of about 2003), but it's also more than 2,000 pages long, and much of it surveys scientific opinion rather than experimental results, because on many subjects there aren't any experimental results yet. The book is associated with an internet community of people sharing what does and doesn't work for them.

More immediately useful is Richard Wiseman's 59 Seconds. Wiseman is an experimental psychologist and paranormal investigator who gathered together what little self-help research is part of settled science, and put it into a short, fun, and useful Malcolm Gladwell-ish book. The next best popular-level general self-help book is perhaps Martin Seligman's What You Can Change and What You Can't.

Two large books&...
Who are these spammers? 
by Mitchell_Porter — 2011-01-20T09:18:10.037Z

The proposal for a minimum karma of 5 to post in discussion might solve the current spam problem. Or it might just slow the spammers down. But all this spam is coming from just one source, because it all advertises the same thing - "Pandora charm bracelets". In principle, therefore, one might seek a more permanent solution. Doing that, and perhaps even just talking about it, has a danger of its own - what if the spammers call on their friends and colleagues? What if they're egosurfing - checking on the image of their "brand" - and run across the discussion? Maybe the wise course of action for an intellectual community trying to have serious discussions, undisturbed, is to do the minimum thing necessary to block the source of noise, but not to provoke it.

Nonetheless, knowledge is supposed to be power, and it must be possible to discover something of who these spammers are, where they are physically located, what their methods are, what their history is, and what recourse the victims of their harassment have. Just today there have been posts from "pandorabracelet", "pandoracharm", "charmthomassabo", "pandorabraceletsuk", and "PandoraJewelryuk". There are no links visible in the messages, presumably because their methods aren't quite tuned to the peculiarities of LW's markup syntax. But it turns out that pandora-jewelry.uk.com is an existing domain. WHOIS information reveals a Russian IP, a registrant with a fake British address but a Chinese-sounding email address, and an American registrar.

Meanwhile, in case you were wondering: the real Pandora is a Danish jewelry company. But these spammers are promoting a scam which has nothing to do with the real Pandora. It is unclear to me whether their business model is to sell fakes, to just pocket the money and not send anything at all, or whether they're actually collecting credit-card information - it may be some combination of these - but the victims speak here.