trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Munich April Meetup
by jasticE — 2015-03-28T12:32:18.506Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich April Meetup

WHEN:
18 April 2015 03:00:03PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Café Puck, Türkenstraße 33, Munich

It's time for another meetup! If you are new, please do come and say hi.

Topics: Let's develop and play a prediction game, taking some inspirations from Julia Galef's post "16 types of useful predictions": http://lesswrong.com/lw/m0m/
Further suggestions absolutely welcome.

Bad weather location: Café Puck, Türkenstraße 33

Good weather location (one can hope): The lawn between Pinakothek der Moderne and Mathebau / Museum Reich der Kristalle.

Join the LessWrong Munich Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmunich/
If you have any trouble finding us, call me: +49 151 65156 404

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich April Meetup
Discussion of Slate Star Codex: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"
by Artaxerxes — 2015-03-28T09:17:55.577Z

Link to Blog Post: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"
_____

Phil Robertson is being criticized for a thought experiment in which an atheist’s family is raped and murdered. On a talk show, he accused atheists of believing that there was no such thing as objective right or wrong, then continued:

I’ll make a bet with you. Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him.

Then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them, and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him, and then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now, is it dude?’

Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if [there] was something wrong with this? But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun. We’re sick in the head, have a nice day.’

If it happened to them, they probably would say, ‘Something about this just ain’t right’.

The media has completely proportionally described this as Robinson “fantasizing about” raping atheists, and there are the usual calls for him to apologize/get fired/be beheaded.

So let me use whatever credibility I have as a guy with a philosophy degree to confirm that Phil Robertson is doing moral philosophy exactly right.

_____
This is a LW discussion post for Yvain's blog posts at Slate Star Codex, as per tog's suggestion:

Like many Less Wrong readers, I greatly enjoy Slate Star Codex; there's a large overlap in readership. However, the comments there are far worse, not worth reading for me. I think this is in part due to the lack of LW-style up and downvotes. Have there ever been discussion threads about SSC posts here on LW? What do people think of the idea occasionally having them? Does Scott himself have any views on this, and would he be OK with it?

Scott/Yvain's permission to repost on LW was granted (from facebook):

I'm fine with anyone who wants reposting things for comm

...
Clean real-world example of the file-drawer effect
by enfascination — 2015-03-28T09:06:48.083Z

I've only ever seen publication bias taught with made-up or near-miss examples. Has anyone got a really well-documented case in which:

* (About) nine people independently get the idea for the same experiment because it seems like it should be there, and they all see that nothing has been published on it, so they all work on it, and all get a (true) null result.

* The tenth experiment is eventually published reporting an NHST effect of about p = 0.10

* The slow (g)rumbling of science surfaces the nine previous, unpublished versions of that experiment and someone catches it and gets it all down, with citations and dates and the specifics of whichever effect these ten people found themselves rooting around for.

The most representative real-world example I've seen lately has been Bem/psi, but, as a pedagogical example, I find it too distracting. The ideal example would report on an effect that's more sympathetic, that a sharp student or outsider would say "Yeah, I'd also have thought that effect would have come through."

Thanks.
[LINK] Amanda Knox exonerated
by fortyeridania — 2015-03-28T06:15:23.789Z

Here are the New York Times, CNN, and NBC. Here is Wikipedia for background.

The case has made several appearances on LessWrong; examples include:

You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event (December 2009)

The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour Beats a Year in the Courtroom (December 2009)

Amanda Knox: post mortem (October 2011)

Amanda Knox Guilty Again (January 2014)
Slate Star Codex: alternative comment threads on LessWrong?
by tog — 2015-03-27T21:05:43.039Z

Like many Less Wrong readers, I greatly enjoy Slate Star Codex; there's a large overlap in readership. However, the comments there are far worse, not worth reading for me. I think this is in part due to the lack of LW-style up and downvotes. Have there ever been discussion threads about SSC posts here on LW? What do people think of the idea occasionally having them? Does Scott himself have any views on this, and would he be OK with it?

Update:

The latest from Scott:

I'm fine with anyone who wants reposting things for comments on LW, except for posts where I specifically say otherwise or tag them with "things i will regret writing"

In this thread some have also argued for not posting the most hot-button political writings.

Would anyone be up for doing this? Ataxerxes started with "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"
Crude measures
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-03-27T15:44:27.283Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Partially inspired by as conversation with Daniel Dewey.

People often come up with a single great idea for AI, like "complexity" or "respect", that will supposedly solve the whole control problem in one swoop. Once you've done it a few times, it's generally trivially easy to start taking these ideas apart (first step: find a bad situation with high complexity/respect and a good situation with lower complexity/respect, make the bad very bad, and challenge on that). The general responses to these kinds of idea are listed here.

However, it seems to me that rather than constructing counterexamples each time, we should have a general category and slot these ideas into them. And not only have a general category with "why this can't work" attached to it, but "these are methods that can make it work better". Seeing the things needed to make their idea better can make people understand the problems, where simple counter-arguments cannot. And, possibly, if we improve the methods, one of these simple ideas may end up being implementable.

Crude measures

The category I'm proposing to define is that of "crude measures". Crude measures are methods that attempt to rely on non-fully-specified features of the world to ensure that an underdefined or underpowered solution does manage to solve the problem.

To illustrate, consider the problem of building an atomic bomb. The scientists that did it had a very detailed model of how nuclear physics worked, the properties of the various elements, and what would happen under certain circumstances. They ended up producing an atomic bomb.

The politicians who started the project knew none of that. They shovelled resources, money and administrators at scientists, and got the result they wanted - the Bomb - without ever understanding what really happened. Note that the politicians were successful, but it was a success that could only have been achieved at one particular point in history. Had they done exactly the same thing twenty years before, they would not have succeeded. Similarly, Nazi Germany tried a roughly similar approach to what the US did (on a smaller scale) and it went nowhere.

So I would define "shovel resources at atomic scientists to get a nuclear weapon" as a crude measure. It works, but it only works because there are other features of the environment that are making it ...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-03-27T15:04:23.233Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on March 20th. The following week's summary is here.

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

[Basel] Effective Altruism Meetup Switzerland: 21 March 2015 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Small concrete actions you could take: 29 March 2015 01:00PM
Prague - setting up: 23 March 2015 07:30PM
Umbc meetup : 24 March 2015 04:56PM

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 - Caffe Medici - Fun and Games: 21 March 2015 01:30PM
Boston: Unconference: 05 April 2015 03:30AM
London Newcomers-Are-Especially-Welcome Meetup, March 29th: 29 March 2015 01:00PM
Moscow LW lecture centre meetup: 22 March 2015 02:00PM
Seattle Sequences group: Mysterious Answers 4: 23 March 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - March - Bring a Newbie!: 25 March 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Skill Training Part 2: 12 April 2015 05:00PM
Tel Aviv: Slightly Less Hard Problems of Consciousness: 24 March 2015 07:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Rationalist Taboo: 22 March 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, 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.

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 wee...
Meetup : Chicago Rationality Training Group - Meeting 1: "Why Rationality?" and Using the Inner Simulator 
by Capla — 2015-03-27T15:04:19.730Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Training Group - Meeting 1: "Why Rationality?" and Using the Inner Simulator

WHEN:
05 April 2015 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Harper Memorial Library, room 145. 1116 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637

The first meeting of the rationality training group will be at one o'clock on Sunday April 5th, in room 145 of Harper Memorial Library at the University of Chicago.

My ideas for this group:

I would like to meet on a weekly basis to learn and practice both epistemic rationality (critical thinking and calibration: “what do you know and why do you think you know it?”) as well as CFAR-style instrumental rationality ("what do I need to do to win?"). We’ll start by working our way though the CFAR curriculum (circa January 2015) and some key parts of the LessWrong sequences, but I would like this group to evolve over time and we are not constrained to that material. Ultimately I’d love for this to turn into less a series of lessons, and more a “rationality dojo”: a place to practice what we know, consider ways to apply it better, and experiment with original techniques. If you have any interest in this at all, I recommend you come to this first meeting since I’ll explain what I’m thinking in more detail and we can collectively begin to decide what we want this group to be.

The topics of this first meeting will be “Why bother with rationality?” and using one’s inner simulator, which is fundamental to several CFAR techniques.

The suggested readings for this week are:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/go/why_truth_and/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8ma/how_rationality_can_make_your_life_more_awesome/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/

Each of these are pretty short. They shouldn’t take very long to read, but I’d like to to spend some time thinking about each one.

I’m sending this email, I’m posting to meetup.com, and I’m listing this event on LessWrong. If you have other ideas for how to publicize this event, let me know. Pass along this invite to anyone who you think might be interested in this.

If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask.

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Training Group - Meeting 1: "Why Rationality?" and Using the I

...
Learning and testing environments
by  — 2015-03-27T14:41:37.885Z

Not a full article. Discussion-starter. Half-digested ideas for working them out collaboratively, if you are interested. Will edit article with your feedback.

Learning environments

Examples: Less Wrong, martial arts gyms, Toastmasters

- Focused on improving a skill or virtue or ability

- "we are all here to learn" attitude

- Little if any status competition with that skill or ability, because it is understood your level is largely based on how long you are practicing or learning it, being better because having started 5 years before others does not make you an inherently superior person, it is the expected return of your investment which others also expect to get with time.

- If there is any status competition at all, it is in the dedication to improve

- It is allowed, in fact encouraged to admit weakness, as it both helps improving and signals dedication thereto

- The skill or ability is not considered inherent or inborn

- People do not essentialize or "identitize" that skill or ability, they generally don't think about each other in the framework of stupid, smart, strong, weak, brave, timid

Testing environment

Examples: most of life, that is the problem actually! Most discussion boards, Reddit. Workplaces. Dating.

- I should just invert all of the above, really

- People are essentialized or "identitized" as smart, stupid, strong, weak, brave, timid

- Above abilities or other ones seen as more or less inborn, or more accurate people don't really dwell on that question much but still more or less consider them unchangable, "you are what you are"

- Status competition with those abilities

- Losers easily written off, not encouraged to improve

- Social pressure incentive to signal better ability than you have

- Social pressure incentive to not admit weakness

- Social pressure incenctive to not look like someone who is working on improving: that signals not already being awesome at it, and certainly not being "born" so

- Social pressure incentive to make accomplishing hard things look easy to show extra ability

Objections / falsification / what it doesn't predict: competition can incentivize working hard. It can make people ingenious.

Counter-objection: as long as you make it clear it is not about an innate ability. That is terrible for development. but if it is not about ability but working on improving, you get the above social pressure incentive problems: a...
Boxing an AI?
by tailcalled — 2015-03-27T14:06:19.281Z

Boxing an AI is the idea that you can avoid the problems where an AI destroys the world by not giving it access to the world. For instance, you might give the AI access to the real world only through a chat terminal with a person, called the gatekeeper. This is should, theoretically prevent the AI from doing destructive stuff.

Eliezer has pointed out a problem with boxing AI: the AI might convince its gatekeeper to let it out. In order to prove this, he escaped from a simulated version of an AI box. Twice. That is somewhat unfortunate, because it means testing AI is a bit trickier.

However, I got an idea: why tell the AI it's in a box? Why not hook it up to a sufficiently advanced game, set up the correct reward channels and see what happens? Once you get the basics working, you can add more instances of the AI and see if they cooperate. This lets us adjust their morality until the AIs act sensibly. Then the AIs can't escape from the box because they don't know it's there.
The great decline in Wikipedia pageviews (condensed version)
by VipulNaik — 2015-03-27T14:02:23.518Z

To keep this post manageable in length, I have only included a small subset of the illustrative examples and discussion. I have published a longer version of this post, with more examples (but the same intro and concluding section), on my personal site.

Last year, during the months of June and July, as my work for MIRI was wrapping up and I hadn't started my full-time job, I worked on the Wikipedia Views website, aimed at easier tabulation of the pageviews for multiple Wikipedia pages over several months and years. It relies on a statistics tool called stats.grok.se, created by Domas Mituzas, and maintained by Henrik.

One of the interesting things I noted as I tabulated pageviews for many different pages was that the pageview counts for many already popular pages were in decline. Pages of various kinds peaked at different historical points. For instance, colors have been in decline since early 2013. The world's most populous countries have been in decline since as far back as 2010!

Defining the problem

The first thing to be clear about is what these pageviews count and what they don't. The pageview measures are taken from stats.grok.se, which in turn uses the pagecounts-raw dump provided hourly by the Wikimedia Foundation's Analytics team, which in turn is obtained by processing raw user activity logs. The pagecounts-raw measure is flawed in two ways:

It only counts pageviews on the main Wikipedia website and not pageviews on the mobile Wikipedia website or through Wikipedia Zero (a pared down version of the mobile site that some carriers offer at zero bandwidth costs to their customers, particularly in developing countries). To remedy these problems, a new dump called pagecounts-all-sites was introduced in September 2014. We simply don't have data for views of mobile domains or of Wikipedia Zero at the level of individual pages for before then. Moreover, stats.grok.se still uses pagecounts-raw (this was pointed to me in a mailing list message after I circulated an early version of the post).

The pageview count includes views by bots. The official estimate is that about 15% of pageviews are due to bots. However, the percentage is likely higher for pages with fewer overall pageviews, because bots have a minimum crawling frequency. So every page might have at least 3 bot crawls a day, resulting in a minimum of 90 bot pageviews even if there are only a handful o

...
Utility vs Probability: idea synthesis
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-03-27T12:40:25.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This post is a synthesis of some of the ideas from utility indifference and false miracles, in an easier-to-follow format that illustrates better what's going on.

Utility scaling

Suppose you have an AI with a utility u and a probability estimate P. There is a certain event X which the AI cannot affect. You with to change the AI's estimate of the probability of X, by, say, doubling the odds ratio P(X):P(¬X). However, since it is dangerous to give an AI false beliefs (they may not be stable, for one), you instead want to make the AI behave as if it were a u-maximiser with doubled odds ratio.

Assume that the AI is currently deciding between two actions, α and ω. The expected utility of action α decomposes as:

u(α) = P(X)u(α|X) + P(¬X)u(α|¬X).

The utility of action ω is defined similarly, and the expected gain (or loss) of utility by choosing α over ω is:

u(α)-u(ω) = P(X)(u(α|X)-u(ω|X)) + P(¬X)(u(α|¬X)-u(ω|¬X)).

If we were to double the odds ratio, the expected utility gain becomes:

u(α)-u(ω) = (2P(X)(u(α|X)-u(ω|X)) + P(¬X)(u(α|¬X)-u(ω|¬X)))/Ω, (1)

for some normalisation constant Ω = 2P(X)+P(¬X), independent of α and ω.

We can reproduce exactly the same effect by instead replacing u with u', such that

u'( |X)=2u( |X)

u'( |¬X)=u( |¬X)

Then:

u'(α)-u'(ω) = P(X)(u'(α|X)-u'(ω|X)) + P(¬X)(u'(α|¬X)-u'(ω|¬X)),

= 2P(X)(u(α|X)-u(ω|X)) + P(¬X)(u(α|¬X)-u(ω|¬X)). (2)

This, up to an unimportant constant, is the same equation as (1). Thus we can accomplish, via utility manipulation, exactly the same effect on the AI's behaviour as a by changing its probability estimates.

Notice that we could also have defined

u'( |X)=u( |X)

u'( |¬X)=**(1/2)**u( |¬X)

This is just the same u', scaled.

The utility indifference and false miracles approaches were just special cases of this, where the odds ratio was sent to infinity/zero by multiplying by zero. But the general result is that one can start with an AI with utility/probability estimate pair (u,P) and map it to an AI with pair (u',P) which behaves similarly to (u,P'). Changes in probability can be replicated as changes in utility.

Utility translating

In the previous, we multiplied certain utilities by two. But by doing so, we implicitly used the zero point of u. But utility is invariant under translation, so this zero point is not actually anything significant.

It turns out that we don't need to care about t

...
Utility vs Probability: idea synthesis
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-03-27T12:30:06.631Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This post is a synthesis of some of the ideas from utility indifference and false miracles, in an easier-to-follow format that illustrates better what's going on.

Utility scaling

Suppose you have an AI with a utility u and a probability estimate P. There is a certain event X which the AI cannot affect. You wish to change the AI's estimate of the probability of X, by, say, doubling the odds ratio P(X):P(¬X). However, since it is dangerous to give an AI false beliefs (they may not be stable, for one), you instead want to make the AI behave as if it were a u-maximiser with doubled odds ratio.

Assume that the AI is currently deciding between two actions, α and ω. The expected utility of action α decomposes as:

u(α) = P(X)u(α|X) + P(¬X)u(α|¬X).

The utility of action ω is defined similarly, and the expected gain (or loss) of utility by choosing α over ω is:

u(α)-u(ω) = P(X)(u(α|X)-u(ω|X)) + P(¬X)(u(α|¬X)-u(ω|¬X)).

If we were to double the odds ratio, the expected utility gain becomes:

u(α)-u(ω) = (2P(X)(u(α|X)-u(ω|X)) + P(¬X)(u(α|¬X)-u(ω|¬X)))/Ω, (1)

for some normalisation constant Ω = 2P(X)+P(¬X), independent of α and ω.

We can reproduce exactly the same effect by instead replacing u with u', such that

u'( |X)=2u( |X)

u'( |¬X)=u( |¬X)

Then:

u'(α)-u'(ω) = P(X)(u'(α|X)-u'(ω|X)) + P(¬X)(u'(α|¬X)-u'(ω|¬X)),

= 2P(X)(u(α|X)-u(ω|X)) + P(¬X)(u(α|¬X)-u(ω|¬X)). (2)

This, up to an unimportant constant, is the same equation as (1). Thus we can accomplish, via utility manipulation, exactly the same effect on the AI's behaviour as a by changing its probability estimates.

Notice that we could also have defined

u'( |X)=u( |X)

u'( |¬X)=(1/2)u( |¬X)

This is just the same u', scaled.

The utility indifference and false miracles approaches were just special cases of this, where the odds ratio was sent to infinity/zero by multiplying by zero. But the general result is that one can start with an AI with utility/probability estimate pair (u,P) and map it to an AI with pair (u',P)...