trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rational vs. real utilities in the cousin_it-Nesov model of UDT
by Karl — 2012-01-29T04:43:17.705Z

In this article cousin_it describes an algorithm, using a Turing Oracle, which gives a working model of UDT. This algorithm seems to work well in the case of a utility function which takes natural numbers or rationals as values but, as I will explain, the algorithm doesn't actually work for utilities given by real numbers; I will also propose an algorithm which doesn't use an oracle and which seems to wield the correct answer given sufficient computing time.

One of the hidden assumptions in the initial post is that comparison of utilities is decidable (at least decidable with a Turing oracle): in step 3 of the algorithm you are supposed to return the action that corresponds to the highest utility found on step 2 of the algorithm, but if comparison of utilities isn't actually decidable you won't be able (in the general case) to do that and as it happens that equality of real numbers isn't decidable (even using an oracle). Also there are no canonical forms for real numbers like there are for natural or rational numbers so you can have a situation where the order relationship between different real numbers depends on the value of A().

A simple modification of the original algorithm can deal with this problem:

Enumerate proofs of statements of the form A()=a ⇒ U()≥u, where u is a rational number in canonical form, for t time steps.

Return the action that corresponds to the highest utility found on step 2.

Why does this works? Because if the formal system used is sound, when the formal system proves that A()=a ⇒ U()≥u where a is the action which ends up actually being taken then U() must actually end up being at least u.

So for example, in the case of Newcomb's problem if t is sufficiently high it will eventually be proven that A()=1 ⇒ U()≥1 000 000 and so, if the formal system used is sound, the utility which ends up being received by the agent will have to be at least 1 000 000 which is of course only possible if the agent one boxes so that's what it will end up doing.
What are your benchmarks of rationality?
by DataPacRat — 2012-01-29T03:57:13.506Z

What quick-and-easy rules of thumb to gauge how rational someone else is do you tend to use? How accurate do you think those rules are, and can you think of any way they might be improved?

For some examples of what I mean, one of the benchmarks I use is the basic skeptics' list: astrology, chiropractic, little green men abducting cattle and performing anal probes, Nessie. Another is the denialist checklist: holocaust denial, moon landing denial, global warming denial. Another is supernaturalism in general: creationism, intercessory prayer, magick, psychics, curses, ghosts, and such. If I find out that anyone I know believes in any of that, then my estimation of how well they can consider things rationally goes down. Theism... well, I've gotten used to pretty much everyone around me being theistic, so that's kind of the baseline I assume; when I learn someone is an atheist, my estimation of their rationality tends to go /up/.

Do you have any items which make you think someone is even further along the path of rationality than simply not believing logical fallacies?
Efficient Charity: Cheap Utilons via bone marrow registration
by atorm — 2012-01-29T03:52:16.458Z

This topic is not really related to the things normally discussed here, but I think it's really important, and it might interest Less Wrongers, especially since many of us are interested in ethics and utility calculations that are essentially cost-benefit analyses. Bone marrow donation in the United States is managed by the National Marrow Donor Program. Because typing donors for matching purposes can be costly, they often require people signing up to donate to pay a registration fee, which probably prevents a lot of people from signing up. These costs are being covered until the end of the month by a corporate sponsor, which means that right now, all you need to do if you live in the US is go to http://marrow.org/Join/Join_Now/Join_Now.aspx and fill out a simple questionnaire. You will be sent a kit to collect a cheek swab, and then you will be entered into the donor database. Doing this does not require you to donate if a match comes up.

The reason I think this might interest Less Wrongers is that this is a really cheap way to improve the world. According to their website, about 1 in 500 potential donors are actually asked to donate, so registering doesn't actually make it all that likely that you will be asked to do anything more. If you ARE a match for someone who needs a donation, the cost to you is at most the temporary pain of marrow extraction (many donors are asked only for blood cells), whereas the other person’s chance to live is much improved. This looks like a huge net positive.

Unfortunately I only found out about this a few days ago, and it only occurred to me today that this might be a forum of people who would respond to the argument "you can make the world better at little cost to yourself." However, I ask that you go to the website and spend a few minutes signing up. This is like buying a 1 in 500 lottery ticket that SAVES SOMEONE’S LIFE. If the Singularity hits and an FAI can generate perfectly matched marrow for anyone who needs it from totipotency-induced cells, that will be wonderful, but this is a chance to make sure one more person gets there.
Toward "timeless" continuous-time causal models
by  — 2012-01-28T23:44:51.045Z

I'm a bit at a loss as to where to put this. I know the inferential gap is too great for it to go anywhere but here, and I know that the number of people on LW interested in this subject could be counted on one hand. The prerequisites would almost certainly be Timeless Causality and more mathematics than anyone is really interested in learning.

So, I apologize in advance if you read this and discover at the end it was a waste of your time. But at the same time, I need people who know about these things to talk about them with me, to ensure that I haven't gone crazy... yet. And most importantly, I need to know the people who have done this before, so that I don't have to do it. Google can't find them.

Introduction

There are currently some efforts to generalize the causal models of Pearl to continuous-time situations. Most of these attempts involve replacing some causal discrete variables Xi with time-dependent random variables Xi(t). Possibly due to memetic infection from Yudkowsky, I don't think this is necessarily the correct approach. The philosophical power of Pearl's theory comes from the fact that it is timeless, that ba'o vimcu ty bu.

In order to motivate my working definitions for where such a timeless continuous-time theory will go, I need to go back to classical causality and decide what a timeless formulation actually means, formally. Spoiler: it means replacing time-dependent evolution with a global flow on the phase space of the system. This is more or less in line with what is said in Timeless Physics with regard to the glimpse of "quantum mist" illustrated there.

The role of phase space

What is "timelessness"? The first thing I thought of after reading the timeless subsequence was, "What does a timeless formulation of the wave equation look like?" First of all, this was the right thought, because the wave equation is what I'll call (after the fact) "classically causal" in a sense to be described soon. I wouldn't have seen the timelessness in a different mathematical model, because not all mathematical models of reality preserve the underlying phenomena's causal structure. On the other hand, this was the wrong thought, because the wave equation is not the simplest continuous-time system that would have led me to this formalization of timelessness. Unfortunately the one that is easier for me to see (Lagrangian mechanics) is...
Self-Indication Assumption - Still Doomed
by drnickbone — 2012-01-28T23:09:14.240Z

I recently posted a discussion article on the Doomsday Argument (DA) and Strong Self-Sampling Assumption. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/9im/doomsday_argument_with_strong_selfsampling/

This new post is related to another part of the literature concerning the Doomsday Argument - the Self Indication Assumption or SIA. For those not familiar, the SIA says (roughly) that I would be more likely to exist if the world contains a large number of observers. So, when taking into account the evidence that I exist, this should shift my probability assessments towards models of the world with more observers.

Further, on first glance, it looks like the SIA shift can be arranged to exactly counteract the effect of the DA shift. Consider, for instance, these two hypotheses:

H1. Across all of space time, there is just one civilization of observers (humans) and a total of 200 billion observers.

H2. Across all of space time, there is just one civilization of observers (humans) and a total of 200 billion trillion observers.

Suppose I had assigned a prior probability ratio p_r = P(H1)/P(H2) before considering either SIA or the DA. Then when I apply the SIA, this ratio will shrink by a factor of a trillion i.e. I've become much more confident in hypothesis H2. But then when I observe I'm roughly the 100 billionth human being, and apply the DA, the ratio expands back by exactly the same factor of a trillion, since this observation is much more likely under H1 than under H2. So my probability ratio returns to p_r. I should not make any predictions about "Doom Soon" unless I already believed them at the outset, for other reasons.

Now I won't discuss here whether the SIA is justified or not; my main concern is whether it actually helps to counteract the Doomsday Argument. And it seems quite clear to me that it doesn't. If we choose to apply the SIA at all, then it will instead overwhelming favour a hypothesis like H3 below over either H1 or H2:

H3. Across all of space time, there are infinitely many civilizations of observers, and infinitely many observers in total.

In short, by applying the SIA we wipe out from consideration all the finite-world models, and then only have to look at the infinite ones (e.g. models with an infinite universe, or with infinitely many universes). But now, consider that H3 has two sub-models:

H3.1...
Let's fix the RSS feed so it doesn't re-post articles every time their titles are edited (forgot the hyphen in "re-post")
by Postal_Scale — 2012-01-28T22:17:01.927Z

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
[META] My Negative Results
by RobertLumley — 2012-01-28T20:44:47.318Z

Yesterday, I made a post asking if anyone else had noticed LW being particularly slow. I offered to collect data on this, and was fairly sure (Probably about 80%) that it would show that LW loaded slower than other webpages. I took the post down after about 20 seconds (sorry if I confused you) since it was almost entirely insubstantial, and resolved to collect some actual data to report.

So I did that. Data was taken using this website. I was on my school's wireless network at the time, running Firefox 8.0. I didn't think to disable my addons before doing this, but I was running Adblock Plus, FastestFox, Greasemonkey, IE Tab 2, Movable Firefox Button, Omnibar, and Web of Trust. Data points were generated at the following websites. Each website was measured five times.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/new
http://lesswrong.com
http://lesswrong.com/user/RobertLumley
http://lesswrong.com/promoted/
http://predictionbook.com
http://predictionbook.com/predictions
http://predictionbook.com/users/rlumley
http://www.nature.com/news/index.html
http://volokh.com/
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-opinion-commentary.html
http://www.webdiplomacy.net/index.php

After doing this, I downloaded an offline copy of each of these websites, and calculated load time per byte of website size. I plotted these results. To my surprise, LessWrong ended up being one of the fastest, although PredictionBook could use some work. I considered deleting the obvious outlier, but trends are clear even with it in there, and all things equal, I'd rather not delete data. Data points (in groups of 5) correspond to the webpages above, in order, ie. the first five points are from the discussion page of LW.

Surprisingly, LW is still one of the best even when only raw load time is compared. But the discussion page (remember, that's the first 5 points) takes somewhat longer than the other pages:
The excel spreadsheet used to generate this can be viewed here.
Since there is no real problem here, and it was all in my head, I considered not publishing this, but after all of the discussion we have about positive bias, I wasn't about to turn around and do the same thing. So here they are: my negative results.
The Personality of (great/creative) Scientists: Open and Conscientious
by gwern — 2012-01-28T20:01:02.984Z

We’ve discussed the Big Five in the past, such as the relationship of Openness to parasites & signaling or whether hallucinogens increase Openness and parasites decrease it, along with my little notes on the value of Conscientiousness. This is another entry in the topic of ‘what is Big Five good for’.

I researched the topic of how and whether Conscientiousness and Openness correlate with scientific achievement for Luke for the Intelligence Explosion paper; here is some of what I found:

“Creativity, Intelligence, and Personality”, 1981 review:

“Studies of creative adult artists, scientists, mathematicians, and writers find them scoring very high on tests of general intelligence (e.g. Barron 1969; Bachtold & Werner 1970; Helson & Crutchfield 1970b; Cattell 1971; Helson 1971; Bachtold & Werner 1973; Gough 1976a), though rs between tested intelligence and creative achievement in these samples range from insignificantly negative (r = -.05, Gough 1976a) to mildly and significantly positive (r = +.31, Helson 1971).”

I found this one amusing:

“It should be noted that creative people are often perceived and rated as more intelligent than less creative people even in samples where no corresponding correlations between tested intelligence and creativity obtain. Despite an r of -.08 between Terman’s Concept Mastery Test and professionally rated creativity among the top 40 IPAR architects (MacKinnon 1962a), e.g., staff ratings of the single adjective “intelligent” correlated +.39 with the index of creativity (MacKinnon 1966). While such an r may reflect some spurious halo effects, it may also tell us something about the true overlap in meaning of these terms in the natural language."

An embarrassment of riches; no summary, but a starting point if one needs more:

“SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: Personality correlates of scientific achievement and creativity were studied in elementary school children (Milgram et al 1977); high school students (Schaefer & Anastasi 1968, Parloff et al 1968, Anastasi & Schaefer 1969, Schaefer 1969a, b, Walberg 1969a); undergraduates, young adults, and graduate students (Rossman & Horn 1972, Schaefer 1973, Gough 1979, Korb & Frankiewicz 1979); psychologists (Chambers 1964, Wispe 1965, Bachtold & Werner 1970); inventors (Bergum 1975,

...
The Ellsberg paradox and money pumps
by fool — 2012-01-28T17:34:32.807Z

Followup to: The Savage theorem and the Ellsberg paradox

In the previous post, I presented a simple version of Savage's theorem, and I introduced the Ellsberg paradox. At the end of the post, I mentioned a strong Bayesian thesis, which can be summarised: "There is always a price to pay for leaving the Bayesian Way."1 But not always, it turns out. I claimed that there was a method that is Ellsberg-paradoxical, therefore non-Bayesian, but can't be money-pumped (or "Dutch booked"). I will present the method in this post.

I'm afraid this is another long post. There's a short summary of the method at the very end, if you want to skip the jibba jabba and get right to the specification. Before trying to money-pump it, I'd suggest reading at least the two highlighted dialogues.

Ambiguity aversion

To recap the Ellsberg paradox: there's an urn with 30 red balls and 60 other balls that are either green or blue, in unknown proportions. Most people, when asked to choose between betting on red or on green, choose red, but, when asked to choose between betting on red-or-blue or on green-or-blue, choose green-or-blue. For some people this behaviour persists even after due calculation and reflection. This behaviour is non-Bayesian, and is the prototypical example of ambiguity aversion.

There were some major themes that came out in the comments on that post. One theme was that I Fail Technical Writing Forever. I'll try to redeem myself.

Another theme was that the setup given may be a bit too symmetrical. The Bayesian answer would be indifference, and really, you can break ties however you want. However the paradoxical preferences are typically strict, rather than just tie-breaking behaviour. (And when it's not strict, we shouldn't call it ambiguity aversion.) One suggestion was to add or remove a couple of red balls. Speaking for myself, I would still make the paradoxical choices.

A third theme was that ambiguity aversion might be a good heuristic if betting against someone who may know something you don't. Now, no such opponent was specified, and speaking for myself, I'm not inferring one when I make the paradoxical choices. Still, let me admit that it's not contrived to infer a mischievous experimenter from the Ellsberg setup. One commentator puts it better than me:

Betting generally includes an adversary who wants you to lose money so they win in. Possibly in psychology experi

...
The Neglected Virtue of Curiosity
by vallinder — 2012-01-28T17:28:34.576Z

Curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its objects perpetually; it has an appetite which is sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety.

- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Curiosity is the first virtue: "[a] burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth." Yet I find surprisingly little material about curiosity on Less Wrong. Sure, AnnaSalamon shows us how to use curiosity, lukeprog ponders what curiosity looks like, Elizabeth discusses the limits of curiosity, and Eliezer_Yudkowsky offers the meditation on curiosity. But we have never been provided with an overview of the science of curiosity, as has been done for procrastination, motivation, and happiness, for instance. Perhaps most Less Wrongers score high on curiosity already, so there hasn't been much need to study it. But I often wish I were more curious. Some of you may, too. For the rest, what follows is a journey back to the basics of rationality.

What is curiosity, and how can we become more curious?

Curiosity: what?

We have all felt that burning itch to know on at least some occasions. It leads us to ask questions,1 manipulate interesting objects,2 and continue doing challenging tasks.3 Kashdan and Fincham (2004) define curiosity as "the volitional recognition, pursuit, and self-regulation of novel and challenging opportunities (reflecting intrinsic values and interests)". Loewenstein (2000) also emphasizes the fact that curiosity occurs in the absence of an extrinsic reward. All theories of curiosity agree that its short term function is to learn and explore. In the longer term, curiosity aids us in building knowledge and competence.4 When curious, we enter a state of flow, and become immersed in whatever it is we are doing.5

Researchers distinguish between state curiosity and trait curiosity. State curiosity is evoked by external situations. Why is the sky blue? How does quantum levitation work? Trait curiosity on the other hand is a characteristic that people possess to varying degrees. Someone with high trait curiosity seeks out complexity, novelty, conflict, and uncertainty.6 7

Curiosity can be measured across several dimensions (Kashdan, 2009):

Intensity. How strong is that burning itch to know?

Frequency. How often do you f

...
Meetup : Atlanta
by hankx7787 — 2012-01-28T15:51:39.017Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta

WHEN: 04 February 2012 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: 2094 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033-5367

All,

Our next meeting is February 4th.

From now on we will be meeting every 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month at 6:30pm at Chocolate Coffee in Decatur:

http://www.mychocolatecoffee.com/
2094 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033-5367
(404) 982-0790

Here is the official agenda for our next meeting:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysterious_Questions
1.16 Fake Causality
1.17 Semantic Stopsigns
1.18 Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
1.19 The Futility of Emergence
1.20 Say Not "Complexity"

I believe we were also planning on discussing the anthropic principle.

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta
HPMOR: What could've been done better?
by Anubhav — 2012-01-28T13:31:07.828Z

Warning: As per the official spoiler policy, the following discussion may contain unmarked spoilers for up to the current chapter of the Methods of Rationality. Proceed at your own risk.

Assume HPMOR was written by a super-intelligence implementing the CEV of Eliezer Yudkowsky and assorted literary critics. What would it have written differently?

... is what I want to know, but that's hard to answer. So here's an easier question:

In what ways do you think Eliezer's characterisations/world-building/plot-fu are sub-optimal? <optional> How could they be made less sub-optimal? </optional>

(My own ideas are in the comments.)

To put it another way... Assume a group of intrepid fanfic writers in the late 2020s are planning to write a reboot. What parts of Eliezer's story do you think they should tweak?

And just to make sure we're all on the same page: Eliezer isn't going to go back and change anything he's written to bring it in line with anything suggested here. This is purely an "Ah, just consider the possibilities!" thread.

... which means that we can safely suggest drastic rewrites encompassing 30 chapters or something. Or change fundamental facts about the world.

(Exercise due restraint on this one. Getting rid of the Ministry/the Noble Houses/blood purism would probably turn the story into something completely different; this isn't what we're trying to do here.)

With that, let the nit-picking begin!!