trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Recent updates to gwern.net (2015-2016)
by gwern — 2016-08-26T19:22:02.157Z

Previously: 2011; 2012-2013; 2013-2014; 2014-2015

"When I was one-and-twenty / I heard a wise man say, / 'Give crowns and pounds and guineas / But not your heart away; / Give pearls away and rubies / But keep your fancy free.' / But I was one-and-twenty, / No use to talk to me."

My past year of completed writings, sorted by topic:

Genetics:

Embryo selection for intelligence cost-benefit analysis

meta-analysis of intelligence GCTAs, limits set by measurement error, current polygenic scores, possible gains with current IVF procedures, the benefits of selection on multiple complex traits, the possible annual value in the USA of selection & value of larger GWASes, societal consequences of various embryo selection scenarios, embryo count versus polygenic scores as limiting factors, comparison with iterated embryo selection, limits to total gains from iterated embryo selection etc.

Wikipedia article on Genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA)

AI:

Computational Complexity vs the Singularity

Adding metadata to an RNN for mimicking individual author style

Armstrong’s AI control problem: Reinforce.js demo

Biology:

vitamin D & metformin for life-extension: cost-benefit analysis

Statistics:

Candy Japan new packaging decision analysis

“The Power of Twins: Revisiting Student’s Scottish Milk Experiment Example”

Genius Revisited: Critiquing the Value of High IQ Elementary Schools

Inferring mean ethnic IQs from very high IQ samples like TIP/SMPY

Cryptography:

shell scripts for easy cryptographic timestamping

Misc:

Newton’s comet apocalypse system

gwern.net itself has remained largely stable (some CSS fixes and image size changes); I continue to use Patreon and send out my newsletters.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-08-26T16:04:52.641Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on August 26th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup: 28 August 2016 08:00PM
European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM

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:

Moscow: rationalist culture, applied consequentialism, Stanovich: 28 August 2016 02:00PM
Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library: 09 September 2016 07:50PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - September 2016: 04 September 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - October 2016: 02 October 2016 04:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Legos: 28 August 2016 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sal...
Do you want to be like Kuro5hin?  Because this is how you get to be like Kuro5hin.
by Dentin — 2016-08-26T15:32:52.823Z

I log in this morning on a whim, and notice I have -15 karma. I dig around for a bit and find this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nsm/open_thread_jul_25_jul_31_2016/ddjm

To be clear, that's a block of four comments, each at -10, for no apparent obvious good reason other than eugine nier has a vendetta against Elo. I've apparently just been hit as splash damage, since I had the gall to try posting on an Elo comment thread.

I dig a little more, and I find this:

http://lesswrong.com/user/Elo/overview/

That's Elo's page, and I see a pile of discussion-grade posts that are all bulk downvoted below visibility, again for no apparent obvious good reason.

I find myself incredibly disincentivized to post or comment as a result of this. My feeble amount of karma has taken literally years to build up, and to see sizable fractions of it wiped out any time I step on a eugine nier landmine is bullshit. Sure, it's silly to value karma, but I value it anyway and if a year of incidental effort can be burned in two days because one guy wants to be an asshole to me, then I'm done here.

This has been going on for months. Years even.

I understand the staff of LW are pressed for time. I understand nobody understands how the code works. I understand that maintaining the site is hard. However, reality is that which does not go away when we close our eyes, and reality does not care: no matter how difficult the problems are, the fact remains that this sort of thing is abusive and it is actively driving people off the site.

If you value LW, fix this. Use the force harder, site owners.

On the other hand, if you want LW to turn into another Kuro5hin, then keep doing what you're doing.

Prediction: 50% odds this post will be downvoted below visibility within two days due to eugine, and will basically disappear without trace.

Prediction: if this isn't dealt with soon, 50% odds I'll stop visiting LW completely other than as an article archive by year end, because there's no goddamned point in trying to use the discussion system.
Hedging
by Elo — 2016-08-26T08:34:22.671Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/hedging/

Hedging.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_%28linguistics%29

Examples:

Men are evil

All men are evil

Some men are evil

most men are evil

many men are evil

I think men are evil

I think all men are evil

I think some men are evil

I think most men are evil

"I think" weakens your relationship or belief in the idea, hedges that I usually encourage are the some|most type. It weakens your strength of idea but does not reduce the confidence of it.

I 100% believe this happens 80% or more of the time (most men are evil)
Or

I 75% believe that this happens 100% of the time (I think all men are evil)
Or

I 75% believe this happens 20% of the time (I think that some men are evil)
Or

I 100% believe that this happens 20% of the time (some men are evil)
Or

I (Reader Interprets)% believe that this happens (Reader Interprets)% of the time (I think men are evil)

They are all hedges. I only like some of them. When you hedge - I recommend using the type that doesn't detract from the projected belief but instead detracts from the expected effect on the world. Which is to say - be confident of weak effects, rather than unconfident of strong effects.

This relates to filters in that some people will automatically add the "This person thinks..." filter to any incoming information. It's not good or bad if you do/don't filter, just a fact about your lens of the world. If you don't have this filter in place, you might find yourself personally attached to your words while other's remain detached from words that seem like they should be more personally attached to. This filter might explain the difference.

This also relates to Personhood and the way we trust incoming information from some sources. When we are very young we go through a period of trusting anything said to us, and at some point experience failures when we do trust. We also discover lying, and any parent will be able to tell you of the genuine childish glee when their children realise they can lie. These experiences shape us into adults. We have to trust some sources, we don't have enough time to be sceptical of all knowledge ever and sometimes we outsource to proven credentialed prof...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Legos
by RobinZ — 2016-08-25T19:23:33.389Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Legos

WHEN:
28 August 2016 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Mosaic at Metro Apartments

This week, we will be meeting to play with Legos. Richard (our host) will hold a house building contest:

He will set up baseplates with minifig people on them: elves, wizards, pirates, robots etc.

Each person chooses a group, gets a random bag of bricks, and builds a house for the group.

People are encouraged to trade for parts so they can get the colors or decorations that fit.

At the end, he will hand out three gems to everyone, and each person gives a gem to the house they think is: best engineered, most aesthetically pleasing, and most suitable for the people.

...but Legos will be available for unstructured play as well.

And, as always, side conversations are allowed and encouraged.

Directions:

Take the metro to the Prince Georges Plaza metro stop, or park in the metro garage there.

As you come up the metro escalators, you will be facing a traffic circle, and Belcrest Road. Go around the circle, continue, and take a right on the next street (Belcrest Road); the building entrance will be on your right. Call or email Richard Bruns (richardbruns [at] gmail.com) so he can let you in or send someone to do so.

Upcoming meetups:

Sep. 4: Fun & Games

Sep. 11: Singing

Sep. 18: Steelmanning

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Legos
Meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-08-25T17:52:31.684Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
28 August 2016 08:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1726 reisterstown road pikesville maryland 21208

Pikesville DoubleTree - Hilton, at the restaurant / bar or at one of the tables outside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup
Meetup : Moscow: rationalist culture, applied consequentialism, Stanovich
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-08-24T20:02:41.990Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: rationalist culture, applied consequentialism, Stanovich

WHEN:
28 August 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

Note: most our members join meetups via other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a short link to the hackpad document with the schedule here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

Pad with the details about 28.08.2016 meetup.

We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: rationalist culture, applied consequentialism, Stanovich
Inefficient Games
by David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet) — 2016-08-23T17:47:02.882Z

There are several well-known games in which the pareto optima and Nash equilibria are disjoint sets.
The most famous is probably the prisoner's dilemma. Races to the bottom or tragedies of the commons typically have this feature as well.
I proposed calling these inefficient games. More generally, games where the sets of pareto optima and Nash equilibria are distinct (but not disjoint), such as a stag hunt could be called potentially inefficient games.

It seems worthwhile to study (potentially) inefficient games as a class and see what can be discovered about them, but I don't know of any such work (pointers welcome!)
A Conversation with GoD
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-08-23T07:59:02.000Z

The following is an inexact transcript of a conversation that happened exactly like this. The scene: a wine bar in Manhattan, on my second (and final) date with a Jewish girl. We’ll call her “Jewish Girl on Date”, or J-GoD for short.

J-GoD: You’ve changed your OKCupid religion status from “Jewish” to “atheist” since last week. What happened this weekend that proved to you that God doesn’t exist?

Jacob’s inner voice: Actually, I switched it to optimize my dating profile and avoid Jewish girls that give me grief about not being as Jewish as their moms expect me to be.

Jacob’s mouth: I don’t think that anything can really prove that God doesn’t exist. That’s partly because the definition of God will usually shift to accommodate any evidence.

J-GoD: So why do you call yourself an atheist if you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist?

Jacob: I give the existence of any specific god a low enough probability that I functionally behave as if I was sure no god existed.

J-GoD: Probability?!

Jacob: I give about a 1 in 10 chance for the existence of any popularly conceived supernatural beings, including humanity’s descendants simulating our reality. For some specific religion’s god, like the Old Testament Jewish God (we’ll call him J-God for short), something like 1 in 1,000,000.

J-GoD: How can you put a number on the existence of J-God?

Jacob: Umm, I have this blog about how you can put a number on almost anything… Anyway, probability numbers are how I represent how confident I am that something is true or not.

J-GoD: How the hell can you be exactly one in a million confident that God exists?

Jacob: I wish I could say that I calculated the prior of the Kolmogorov complexity implied by the description of J-God and updated on all available evidence. In reality, I just picked a really low number that matches how confident I allow myself to be on complex metaphysical questions.

J-GoD: So you’re just making up a number to say that you think that God doesn’t exist?

Jacob: No, no, the exact number is important. For example, if I was walking down the street and suddenly saw a bush burst in flames, and the bush burned but wasn’t consumed, and I heard a voice from the sky saying: “I am the God of your father, God of Abraham of Isaac and of Jacob...
Productivity - List Notch system
by Elo — 2016-08-23T04:46:38.939Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/productivity-list-notch-system/

This is a write up of my current to do list system. My system and the method of this write up is based on Mark Forster's to do lists. If you are familiar with The Final Version Perfected you will be able to recognise elements from that system.

It's not perfect, but it has been working for a few weeks now. I have difficulty often with tasks of variable "size" and variable "time" (these are both a measure of "getting it done"). I started with the FVP and modified as I felt like it. This is my Notch system.

I am confident, and I have not yet written about it - as far as I can tell, telling someone your final system is a bit like giving to someone in the pre-industrial revolution, "a working 2010 car" and expecting them to use that to build their own. If they are a very very good engineer they will work out how to take it apart and how to put it back together so that they can build their own and get driving. Of course systems are not that complicated, and maybe it's not so hard to give someone a to-do list system and hope they can make use of it. I also don't credit myself for using a working car in contrast to being in the pre-industrial revolution era.

I believe the trick that underpins systems, the one that doesn't get mentioned often enough when we talk about systems that do or don't work for us, is the underlying meta-system of trying things and iterating on the results.

Having said all that about cars and underlying iterative systems... This is where I am today.

To start, make a list of all the tasks that you want to do today in any order that they come to mind. If you are confident that things cannot be done today, they don't belong on the list. i.e. tasks requiring a specific geographic location that you are not intending on visiting today. Consider things that might be due, things that are large are acceptable.

--I make assumptions that significantly small tasks of under 5 minutes don't belong on the list, and regular activities don't need reminding (i.e. dinner with friends).

Example list:
Dogs
Space
write
Sanding
Emails
Battery blocks

Next to each task, write how long you predict it will take. These will be wrong, that's okay...
Meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library
by Alexander230 — 2016-08-22T20:50:26.130Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library

WHEN:
09 September 2016 07:50:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Дубининская, 20

Welcome to the next Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library!

Our plan:

A talk about using Bayes formula for updating your certainty in beliefs.

FallacyMania game ( http://goo.gl/BtRVhB ).

Tower of Chaos game ( https://goo.gl/u9qgc3 ).

Meetup schedule is here: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/-9-2016-5YTwkfG7DdF

Come to "Nauchka", ul.Dubininskaya, 20. Entrance through the Central children library #14. Nearest metro station is Paveletskaya. Map is here: http://nauchka.ru/contact-information/ . If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Meetup begins at 19:50, the length is 2 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library
The map of the risks of aliens
by turchin — 2016-08-22T19:05:55.715Z

Stephen Hawking famously said that aliens are one of the main risks to human existence. In this map I will try to show all rational ways how aliens could result in human extinction. Paradoxically, even if aliens don’t exist, we may be even in bigger danger.

1.No aliens exist in our past light cone

1a. Great Filter is behind us. So Rare Earth is true. There are natural forces in our universe which are against life on Earth, but we don’t know if they are still active. We strongly underestimate such forces because of anthropic shadow. Such still active forces could be: gamma-ray bursts (and other types of cosmic explosions like magnitars), the instability of Earth’s atmosphere, the frequency of large scale volcanism and asteroid impacts. We may also underestimate the fragility of our environment in its sensitivity to small human influences, like global warming becoming runaway global warming.

1b. Great filter is ahead of us (and it is not UFAI). Katja Grace shows that this is a much more probable solution to the Fermi paradox because of one particular version of the Doomsday argument, SIA. All technological civilizations go extinct before they become interstellar supercivilizations, that is in something like the next century on the scale of Earth’s timeline. This is in accordance with our observation that new technologies create stronger and stronger means of destruction which are available to smaller groups of people, and this process is exponential. So all civilizations terminate themselves before they can create AI, or their AI is unstable and self terminates too (I have explained elsewhere why this could happen ).

2. Aliens still exist in our light cone.

a) They exist in the form of a UFAI explosion wave, which is travelling through space at the speed of light. EY thinks that this will be a natural outcome of evolution of AI. We can’t see the wave by definition, and we can find ourselves only in the regions of the Universe, which it hasn’t yet reached. If we create our own wave of AI, which is capable of conquering a big part of the Galaxy, we may be safe from alien wave of AI. Such a wave could be started very far away but sooner or later it would reach us. Anthropic shadow distorts our calculations about its probability.

b) ...
Open Thread, Aug. 22 - 28, 2016 
by polymathwannabe — 2016-08-22T16:24:25.969Z

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

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

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
The non-indifferent behaviour of stratified indifference?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-08-22T13:51:18.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This post aims to show some of the odd behaviour of stratified indifference. It seems that stratified indifference does not accomplish what I intended it to do, at least in certain situations.

Assume there are two binary events A and A′, that can happen with probability 1/2. The AI has no control over either event, but has some control over the correlation between them.

If the AI does nothing (takes the ∅ action), then A↔A′: the two events are perfectly correlated. If it takes action a instead, A↔¬A′: the two events are perfectly anti-correlated.

There are two utilities u and v. If A happens, the humans will choose u as the utility to maximise; if ¬A does, then the humans will choose v. If A′ happens, then u=0 and v=1; if ¬A′ does, then u=1 and v=0.

Given ∅, there are two outcomes: u=0, v=1 and u is chosen (p0,1=1), and u=1, v=0 and v is chosen (p1,0=1). The value of ∅ is 0.

Now consider action a. The definition above does not define where probability from (0,1) (or A,A′) flows to. So assume that action A (or ¬A) happens first, and that a versus ∅ is simply changing the value of the subsequent A′ (or ¬A′).

Then A,A′ flows to A,¬A′ while ¬A,¬A′ flows to ¬A,A′. Consequently, the action a does not change the utility that the human will choose, but interchange the values of the two utilities.

Thus E′(a)=0.5(0×0+1×1)+0.5(1×1+0×0)=1. Hence the action a is clearly superior to the default action.

Now, this action does seem sensible. It's equivalent with waiting till the human choice is clear (even if that choice hasn't been 'officially' made yet), then maximising that utility. It just doesn't quite seem to fit within the indifference formalism.