trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Introducing Leverage Research
by lukeprog — 2012-01-09T19:47:00.843Z

Geoff Anders asked me to post this introduction to Leverage Research. Several friends of the Singularity Institute are now with Leverage Research, and we have overlapping goals.

Hello Less Wrong! I'm Geoff Anders, founder of Leverage Research. Many Less Wrong readers are already familiar with Leverage. But many are not, and because of our ties to the Less Wrong community and our deep interest in rationality, I thought it would be good to formally introduce ourselves.

I founded Leverage at the beginning of 2011. At that time we had six members. Now we have a team of more than twenty. Over half of our people come from the Less Wrong / Singularity Institute community. One of our members is Jasen Murray, the leader of the Singularity Institute's recent Rationality Boot Camp. Another is Justin Shovelain, a two-year Visiting Fellow at SIAI and the former leader of their intelligence amplification research. A third is Adam Widmer, a former co-organizer of the New York Less Wrong group.

Our goal at Leverage is to make the world a much better place, using the most effective means we can. So far, our conclusion has been that the most effective way to change the world is by means of high-value projects, projects that will have extremely positive effects if they succeed and that have at least a fair probability of success.

One of our projects is existential risk reduction. We have conducted a study of the efficacy of methods for persuading people to take the risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI) seriously. We have begun a detailed analysis of AGI catastrophe scenarios. We are working with risk analysts inside and outside of academia. Ultimately, we intend to achieve a comprehensive understanding of AGI and other global risks, develop response plans, and then enact those plans.

A second project is intelligence amplification. We have reviewed the existing research and analyzed current approaches. We then created an initial list of research priorities, ranking techniques by likelihood of success, likely size of effect, safety, cost and so on. We plan to start testing novel techniques soon.

These are just two of our projects. We have several others, including the development of rationality training program, the construction and testing of theories of the human mind and an investigation of the laws of idea propagation.

Changing the world is a c

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Q&A with experts on risks from AI #2
by XiXiDu — 2012-01-09T19:40:26.776Z

[Click here to see a list of all interviews]

I am emailing experts in order to raise and estimate the academic awareness and perception of risks from AI.

(Note: I am also asking Reinforcement Learning / Universal AI researchers, teams like the one that build IBM Watson, organisations like DARPA and various companies. Some haven't replied yet while I still have to write others.)

Nils John Nilsson is one of the founding researchers in the discipline of Artificial intelligence. He is the Kumagai Professor of Engineering, Emeritus in Computer Science at Stanford University. He is particularly famous for his contributions to search, planning, knowledge representation, and robotics. [Wikipedia] [Homepage] [Google Scholar]

Peter J. Bentley, a British author and computer scientist based at University College London. [Wikipedia] [Homepage]

David Alan Plaisted is a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [Wikipedia] [Homepage]

Hector Levesque is a Canadian academic and researcher in artificial intelligence. He does research in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence. [Wikipedia] [Homepage]

The Interview:

Nils Nilsson: I did look at the lesswrong.com Web page. Its goals are extremely important! One problem about blogs like these is that I think they are read mainly by those who agree with what they say -- the already converted. We need to find ways to get the Fox News viewers to understand the importance of what these blogs are saying. How do we get to them?
Before proceeding to deal with your questions, you might be interested in the following:
1. An article called "Rationally-Shaped Artificial Intelligence" by Steve Omohundro about robot "morality." It's at:
http://selfawaresystems.com/2011/10/07/rationally-shaped-artificial-intelligence/
2. I have a draft book on "beliefs" that deals with (among other things) how to evaluate them. See:
http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/Beliefs.html
(Comments welcome!)
3. Of course, you must know already about David Kahneman's excellent book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

Here are some (maybe hasty!) answers/responses to your questions.

David Plaisted: Your questions are very interesting and I've had such questions for a long time, actually. I've been surprised that people are not more concerned about such things.
However, right ...
Dead Child Currency
by jefftk — 2012-01-09T18:46:50.722Z

From Yvain's 'proposal' to measure money in dead children:

According to Population Services International, a respected charity research group, it costs between $650 and $1000 [1] to save one child's life through charity. You've probably heard lower numbers like twenty cents somewhere. The lower numbers are wrong. Yes, maybe an anti-measles vaccine for a kid in Africa only costs twenty cents, and measles can be fatal. But there's a lot of overhead, and you have to immunize a lot of people before you get the one kid otherwise destined to die of measles. I find the $650-$1000 figure much more believable. Let's round it off to $800.

So one dead child = eight hundred dollars. If you spend eight hundred dollars on a laptop, that's one African kid who died because you didn't give it to charity. Distasteful but true. Now that we know that, we can get down to the details of designing the currency itself. It should be a big gold coin, with a picture of a smiling Burmese child on the front, and a tombstone on the back. The abbreviation can be DC.

This makes sense to me, to a limited extent. You can spend money for your own benefit or to help others elsewhere, and there really are people who wouldn't have to die if you would forgo some luxuries. Making this tradeoff more explicit ("we're looking for an apartment costing no more than six dead children annually") might lead some people to greater generosity. It's a way of abstracting compassion.

Two things worry me, though. The first is that there's a big focus on spending here [2], but increasing earnings deserves more focus: getting a raise or a new job that added $10K to my salary would let me keep more children from dying than would reducing my spending on myself to zero. [3] The second is that thinking of all your purchases in terms of dead children is likely to make you miserable. Not just that, but miserable to little gain: you still probably spend almost as much money on yourself, you just feel more guilty about it. Much better, I think, is to pick a rule for how much to give and then apply it to money as it comes in. That way each purchase has no effect on the number of deaths you're averting.

(Note: I also posted this on my blog)

[1] The current number is probably closer to $2K.

[2] Maybe this is because it sounds weird to talk about salary in terms of dead children? ("I wonder what job earns me the most dead chil...
[Link] A Bayes' Theorem Visualization
by  — 2012-01-09T16:44:55.503Z

A while ago when Bret Victor's amazing article Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction was being discussed, someone mentioned that they'd like to see one made for Bayes' Theorem. I've just completed version 1.0 of my "Bayes' Theorem Ladder of Abstraction", and it can be found here: http://www.coarsegra.in/?p=111

(It uses the Canvas html5 element, so won't work with older versions of IE).

There's a few bugs in it, and it leaves out many things that I'd like to (eventually) include, but I'm reasonably satisfied with it as a first attempt. Any feedback for what works and what doesn't work, or what you think should be added, would be greatly appreciated.
The Ethical Status of Non-human Animals
by syllogism — 2012-01-09T12:07:15.339Z

There's been some discussion on this site about vegetarianism previously, although less than I expected. It's a complicated topic, so I want to focus on a critical sub-issue: within a consequentialist/utilitarian framework, what should be the status of non-human animals? Do only humans matter? If non-human animals matter only a little, just how much do they matter?

I argue that species-specific weighting factors have no place in our moral calculus. If two minds experience the same sort of stimulus, the species of those minds shouldn't affect how good or bad we believe that to be. I owe the line of argument I'll be sketching to Peter Singer's work. His book Practical Ethics is the best statement of the case that I'm aware of.

Front-loaded definitions and summary:

Self-aware: A self-aware mind is one that understands that it exists and that it persists through time.

Sentience: A sentient mind is one that has subjective experiences, such as pleasure and pain. I assume that self-awareness subsumes sentience (i.e. all self-aware minds are also sentient, but not vice versa).

Person: A self-aware mind.

A human may be alive but non-sentient, due to injury or birth defects.

Humans may be sentient but not self-aware, due to injury, birth defect or infancy.

Non-human persons are possible: hypothetically, aliens and AIs; controversially, non-human great apes.

Many non-human animals are sentient, many are not.

Utilitarian ethics involve moral calculus: summing the impacts of an action (or some proxy for them, such as preferences) on all minds.

When performing this calculus, do sentient (but non-self aware) minds count at all? If so, do they count as much as persons?

If they count for zero, there's no ethical problem with secretly torturing puppies, just for fun.

We're tempted to believe that sentient minds count for something, but less than persons.

I think this is just a cover for what we're really tempted to believe: humans count for more than non-humans, not because of the character of our minds, but simply because of the species we belong to.

Historically, allowing your ethical system to arbitrarily promote the interests of those similar to you has led to very bad results.

Personhood and Sentience

Cognitively healthy mature humans have minds that differ in many ways from the other species on Earth. The most striking is probably the level of abstraction we...
[SEQ RERUN] Buy Now or Forever Hold Your Peace
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-09T05:45:50.070Z

Today's post, Buy Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace was originally published on 04 February 2008 . A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you really think that your reasoning is superior to that of prediction markets, there is free money available to you right now. If you aren't picking it up, you clearly don't really believe that you can beat the markets.

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 http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/995/seq_rerun_extensions_and_intensions/, 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.
Meetup : Monthly San Francisco Bay Area meetup
by Nisan — 2012-01-09T03:56:11.977Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monthly San Francisco Bay Area meetup

WHEN:
14 January 2012 07:49:14PM (-0800)

WHERE:
2128 Oxford St., Berkley, CA

The first monthly meetup of the new year will be Saturday, January 14. We'll meet at 7pm in the Starbucks on Oxford Street and then migrate to a restaurant, probably Biryani House.

Discussion article for the meetup : Monthly San Francisco Bay Area meetup
[Transcript] Richard Feynman on Why Questions
by Grognor — 2012-01-08T19:01:11.825Z

I thought this video was a really good question dissolving by Richard Feynman. But it's in 240p! Nobody likes watching 240p videos. So I transcribed it. (Edit: That was in jest. The real reasons are because I thought I could get more exposure this way, and because a lot of people appreciate transcripts. Also, Paul Graham speculates that the written word is universally superior than the spoken word for the purpose of ideas.) I was going to post it as a rationality quote, but the transcript was sufficiently long that I think it warrants a discussion post instead.

Here you go:

Interviewer: If you get hold of two magnets, and you push them, you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them around the other way, and they slam together. Now, what is it, the feeling between those two magnets?

Feynman: What do you mean, "What's the feeling between the two magnets?"

Interviewer: There's something there, isn't there? The sensation is that there's something there when you push these two magnets together.

Feynman: Listen to my question. What is the meaning when you say that there's a feeling? Of course you feel it. Now what do you want to know?

Interviewer: What I want to know is what's going on between these two bits of metal?

Feynman: They repel each other.

Interviewer: What does that mean, or why are they doing that, or how are they doing that? I think that's a perfectly reasonable question.

Feynman: Of course, it's an excellent question. But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital. How do you get to the hospital when the hip is broken? Well, because her husband, seeing that her hip was broken, called the hospital up and sent somebody to get her. All that is understood by people. And when you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you're perpetually asking why. Why did the husband call up the hospital? Because the husband is interested in his wife's welfare. Not always, some husbands aren't interested in their wives' welfare when they're drunk, and they're angry.

And yo

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Q&A with experts on risks from AI #1
by XiXiDu — 2012-01-08T11:46:15.378Z

[Click here to see a list of all interviews]

Brandon Rohrer

Sandia National Laboratories
Cited by 536

Education

PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002.
Neville Hogan, Advisor and Thesis Committee Chair.

MS, Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999.
National Science Foundation Fellowship

BS cum laude, Mechanical Engineering, Brigham Young University, 1997.
Ezra Taft Benson (BYU's Presidential) Scholarship
National Merit Scholarship

Experience

Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM.
Principal Member of the Technical Staff, 2006 - present
Senior Member of the Technical Staff, 2002 - 2006
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.
Adjunct Assistant Professor,
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2007 - present

Homepage: sandia.gov/~brrohre/

Papers: sandia.gov/rohrer/papers.html

Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Brandon+Rohrer

Tim Finin

Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland
Cited by 20832

Tim Finin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has over 30 years of experience in applications of Artificial Intelligence to problems in information systems and language understanding. His current research is focused on the Semantic Web, mobile computing, analyzing and extracting information from text and online social media, and on enhancing security and privacy in information systems.

Finin received an S.B. degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held full-time positions at UMBC, Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI Laboratory. He is the author of over 300 refereed publications and has received research grants and contracts from a variety of sources. He participated in the DARPA/NSF Knowledge Sharing Effort and helped lead the development of the KQML agent communication language and was a member of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group that standardized the OWL Semantic Web language.

Finin has chaired of the UMBC Computer Science Department, served on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association, been a AAAI councilor, and chaired several major research conferences. He is currently an editor-in-chief of the Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics

...
A variant on the trolley problem and babies as unit of currency
by Solvent — 2012-01-08T08:13:01.850Z

I was discussing utilitarianism and charitable giving and similar ideas with someone today, and I came up with this hybrid version of the trolley problem, particularly the fat man variation, and the article by Scott Alexander/Yvain about using dead children as a unit of currency. It's not extremely original, and I'd be surprised if no-one on LW had thought of it before.

You are offered a magical box. If you press the button on the box, one person somewhere in the world will die, you get $6000, and $4,000 is donated to one of the top rated charities on GiveWell.org. According to the $800 per life saved figure, this charity gift would save five lives, which is a net gain of four lives and $6,000 to you. Is it moral to press the button?

All of the usual responses to the trolley problem apply. To wit: It's good to have heuristics like "don't kill." There's arguments about establishing Schelling points with regards to not killing people. (This Schelling point argument doesn't work as well in a case like this, with anonymity and privacy and randomization of the person who gets killed.) Eliezer argued that for a human, being in the trolley problem is extraordinarily unlikely, and he would be willing to acknowledge that killing the fat man would be appropriate for an AI in the situation to do, but not a human.

There's also lots of arguments against giving to charity, too. See here for some discussion of this on LessWrong.

I feel that the advantage of my dilemma is that in the original extreme altruism faces a whole lot of motivated cognition against it, because it implies that you should be giving much of your income to charity. In this dilemma, you want the $6,000, and so are inclined to be less skeptical of the charity's effectiveness.

Possible use: Present this first, then argue for extreme altruism. This would annoy people, but as far as I can tell, pretty much everyone gets defensive and comes up with a rationalization for their selfishness when you bring up altruism anyway.

What would you people do?

EDIT: This $800 figure is probably out of date. $2000 is probably more accurate. However, it's easy to simply increase the amount of money at stake in the thought experiment.

Edit 2: I fixed some swapped-around values, as kindly pointed out by Vaniver.
Non-theist cinema?
by Jay_Schweikert — 2012-01-08T07:54:12.190Z

There isn't much in the way of explicitly atheist cinema* -- that is, movies that contain the explicit or implicit message that religion is nothing but superstition, and where this point itself is a central part of the story. The only popular films that jump to mind here are The Invention of Lying, and to a lesser extent The Man from Earth (overall a phenomenal movie, but far less well known). Sure, there are lots of popular movies that make fun of organized religion, or what some people might call religious "fanaticism" (e.g., Dogma, Saved, The Life of Brian, Jesus Camp). But pretty much all of these come away with the message that it's fine to be "spiritual" or whatever, so long as you don't hurt other people, and don't get too crazy about what you believe. As much as some "conservative" pundits love to accuse Hollywood "liberals" of being godless, there sure aren't many movies where godlessness is really taken seriously.

And that's unfortunate, in my view, as movies are probably the most prevalent and influential art form for the general public, and because many people will form their views on abstract concepts based on the percepts that movies provide (related to the issue of generalizing from fictional evidence). One need only glance over the examples on the tvtropes page "Hollywood Atheist" to see that movies and television aren't exactly putting the best foot forward for our kind.

But perhaps there's a bit more hope in the way of non-theist cinema, as opposed to overt atheist cinema. Of course, any story without gods is a non-theist story, and there are plenty of movies that don't touch on gods or religion at all. But what I'm talking about are movies where one would normally expect to find religion, but where no religion is to be found -- in other words, movies that seem to be depicting the alternate world where humanity never fell prey to this particular superstition, and where the concepts of god and religion simply don't exist.

The movie that inspired this particular thought was 50/50, the recent comedy-drama where Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a man dealing with potentially fatal cancer. It's a great movie, but what struck me afterwards is how completely absent any mention of god, religion, the afterlife, etc. was in a movie about a man, along with his friends and family, potentially facing his own death. There are lots of char...
[SEQ RERUN] Extensions and Intensions
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-08T06:48:53.468Z

Today's post, Extensions and Intensions was originally published on 04 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You try to define a word using words, in turn defined with ever-more-abstract words, without being able to point to an example. "What is red?" "Red is a color." "What's a color?" "It's a property of a thing?" "What's a thing? What's a property?" It never occurs to you to point to a stop sign and an apple.

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 Words as Hidden Inferences, 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.