trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-06-15T00:02:50.970Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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 be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
European Community Weekend 2015 Impressions Thread
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-06-14T20:21:05.673Z

The European Community Weekend in Berlin is over and was plain awesome.

This is no complete report of the event but a place where you can e.g. comment on the event, link to photos or what else you want to share.

I'm not the organizer of the Meetup but I have been there and for me it was the most grand experience since last years European Community Weekend. Meeting so many energetic, compassionate and in general awesome people - some from last year or many new. Great presentations and workshops. And such a positive and open athmosphere.

Cheers to all participants!

See also the Facebook Group for the Community Event.
Meetup : San Antonio New Meetup
by Bryan-san — 2015-06-14T19:12:44.971Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio New Meetup

WHEN:
28 June 2015 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Copalli Cafe 555 W Bitters Rd, San Antonio, TX 78216

Coffee and discussion at Copalli Cafe! All are welcome!

New Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong in San Antonio and meet the local community. Look for the sign that says Less Wrong!

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio New Meetup
Surprising examples of non-human optimization
by Jan_Rzymkowski — 2015-06-14T17:05:16.214Z

I am very much interested in examples of non-human optimization processes producing working, but surprising solutions. What is most fascinating is how they show human approach is often not the only one and much more alien solutions can be found, which humans are just not capable of conceiving. It is very probable, that more and more such solutions will arise and will slowly make big part of technology ununderstandable by humans.

I present following examples and ask for linking more in comments:

1. Nick Bostrom describes efforts in evolving circuits that would produce oscilloscope and frequency discriminator, that yielded very unorthodox designs:
http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/r.stow1/jb/publications/Bird_CEC2002.pdf (IV. B. Oscillator Experiments; also C. and D. in that section)

2. Algorithms learns to play NES games with some eerie strategies:
https://youtu.be/qXXZLoq2zFc?t=361 (description by Vsause)
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/14/teaching-a-computer-to-play-mario-seemingly-through-voodoo/ (more info)

3. Eurisko finding unexpected way of winning Traveller TCS stratedy game:
http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own
http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=14095
Supporting Effective Altruism through spreading rationality
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2015-06-14T00:31:57.190Z

So does spreading rationality contribute to Effective Altruism? I certainly think so, as a rationality popularizer and an Effective Altruist myself. My own donations of money and time is focused on my project, Intentional Insights, of trying to spread rationality to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline, including about effective, evidence-based philanthropy. Specifically in relation to EA, in blogs for Intentional Insights, and in our resources page, I make sure to highlight EA as an awesome thing to get involved in.

I'd particularly appreciate feedback on a draft fundraising letter (link here) for Effective Altruists on the way that Intentional Insights contributes to improving the world and specifically by getting people more engaged with Effective Altruism. I'd like to hear any thoughts on how I can optimize the letter to make it more effective. You can simply respond in comments, or send an email to gleb@intentionalinsights.org

I'd also like to hear your opinion of the broader issue of how spreading rationality helps contribute to improving the world and the EA movement in particular. Let me share my take. For the first, I think that, as shown by Brian Tomasik in this essay, increasing rational thinking is robustly positive for a broad range of short and long term future outcomes, and thus our broader work contributes to improving people’s lives overall. For the second, getting people to think rationally about themselves and their interactions with the world and use evidence-based means to evaluate reality and make their decisions will result in people applying these methods of thinking to their altruism.

What do you think?
[Link] Word-vector based DL system achieves human parity in verbal IQ tests
by jacob_cannell — 2015-06-13T23:38:54.543Z

A research team in China has created a system for answering verbal analogy questions of the type found on the GRE and IQ tests that scores a little above the average human score, perhaps corresponding to an IQ of around 105 or so. This improves substantially on the reported SOTA in AI for these types of problems.

This work builds on deep word-vector embeddings which have led to large gains in translation and many NLP tasks. One of their key improvements involves learning multiple vectors per word, where the number of specific word meanings is simply grabbed from a dictionary. This is important because verbal analogy questions often use more rare word meanings. They also employ modules specialized for the different types of questions.

I vaguely remember reading that AI systems already are fairly strong at solving visual raven-matrix style IQ questions, although I haven't looked into that in detail.

The multi-vector technique is probably the most important take away for future work.

Even if subsequent follow up work reaches superhuman verbal IQ in a few years, this of course doesn't immediately imply AGI. These types of IQ tests measure specific abilities which are correlated with general intelligence in humans, but these specific abilities are only a small subset of the systems/abilities required for general intelligence, and probably rely on a smallish subset of the brain's circuitry.
Meetup : West LA: Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation
by abramdemski — 2015-06-13T20:09:09.596Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation

WHEN:
17 June 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
11066 santa monica blvd, la, ca

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: The availability heuristic allows us to estimate probabilities based on how available things are to our memory. This is not a terrible heuristic, but it is not perfect, either. Intuitive estimates of frequencies of different crimes tend to correspond better to how often those crimes are reported in the news, than to how often they actually occur. One particularly troubling aspect of this is the availability cascade, a chain reaction which elevates a group's probability estimate like a rising tide: each mention of a subject makes other people more likely to be concerned and mention it to others; each news report makes the subject more popular and makes other news sources more likely to mention it as well. This has a potential to alter public policy, when policy-makers apply the availability heuristic themselves or respond to the probabilities as estimated by the larger group.

Recommended Reading:

Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation (academic paper)

Information Cascades post by johnnicolas

Availability post by Eliezer

Wikipedia entry

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation
Seeking advice: Writing skills and workspaces
by DataPacRat — 2015-06-13T19:42:35.195Z

Yesterday, I set a personal deadline: If I haven't started writing more "S.I." by Canada Day, then I'm going to start writing up the fast-finish version of the plotline to at least tie up the story and stop having it hanging over me.

Never underestimate the power of precommitment.

Now that I've started thinking in terms of my writing more of SI as a simple fact, I've realized that, due to complicated/personal/private home-life stuff, in order to actually have a reasonable chance of even writing the short ending, I need a new low-distraction work-space, and nowhere in my home is suitable. The most likely candidates are my local public library when it's open (Tue-Sat, 10am-5/6/9pm), and, elsewhen, a particular local coffee-shop with a customer-available power outlet. And, in fact, my not noticing the lack of a suitable low-noise typing location may have induced an ugh field that kept me from even trying to catch up with suggestions and comments to SI even as my depressive episode has waned.

It occurs to me that there may be further options I'm not considering; and that there may even be other aspects to the process of writing which could be hindering my progress. And so, I come here, to inquire of the local hivemind: What advice can you offer?

For example, I currently have two and a half devices to type with: A Thinkpad laptop, an iPhone with a touchscreen keyboard, and an iPhone with a (folding) full-size Bluetooth keyboard. Should I look into some other input device?

Or: Is there some aspect of nutrition or hydration that I should pay more attention to?

Or: How significant is the audio environment? Should I pick a particular soundscape or playlist and hook up the headphones, or would there be minimal effect compared to a library's shuffling or coffeeshop's satellite radio?

Or: Would turning off my connection to the internet, save when I'm looking up some reference, be useful or annoying?
Epistemic Trust: Clarification
by abramdemski — 2015-06-13T19:29:11.470Z

Cross-posted to my blog.

A while ago, I wrote about epistemic trust. The thrust of my argument was that rational argument is often more a function of the group dynamic, as opposed to how rational the individuals in the group are. I assigned meaning to several terms, in order to explain this:
Intellectual honesty: being up-front not just about what you believe, but also why you believe it, what your motivations are in saying it, and the degree to which you have evidence for it.
Intellectual-Honesty Culture: The norm of intellectual honesty. Calling out mistakes and immediately admitting them; feeling comfortable with giving and receiving criticism.
Face Culture: Norms associated with lack of intellectual honesty. In particular, a need to save face when one's statements turn out to be incorrect or irrelevant; the need to make everyone feel included by praising contributions and excusing mistakes.
Intellectual trust: the expectation that others in the discussion have common intellectual goals; that criticism is an attempt to help, rather than an attack. The kind of trust required to take other people's comments at face value rather than being overly concerned with ulterior motives, especially ideological motives. I hypothesized that this is caused largely by ideological common ground, and that this is the main way of achieving intellectual-honesty culture.
There are several subtleties which I did not emphasize last time.

Sometimes it's necessary to play at face culture. The skills which go along with face-culture are important. It is generally a good idea to try to make everyone feel included and to praise contributions even if they turn out to be incorrect. It's important to make sure that you do not offend people with criticism. Many people feel that they are under attack when engaged in critical discussion. Wanting to work against this is not an excuse for ignoring it.

Face culture is not the error. Being unable to play the right culture at the right time is the error. In my personal experience, I've seen that some people are unable to give up face-culture habits in more academic settings where intellectual honesty is the norm. This causes great strife and heated arguments! There is no gain in playing for face when you're in the midst of an honesty culture, unless you can do it very well and subtly. You gain a lot mo

...
Regular Lesswronger's interviews
by Elo — 2015-06-13T09:12:41.803Z

As was commented by Clarity:

Perhaps someone can do a interview to differentiate his mind and rationality from others. For instance, his motivation for different posts or blog posts- or to what extent he consciously optimises his optimisation processes. Gwern, if you feel this is inappropriate and would rather not be put in the spotlight, make your feelings known and I'll won't hassle you further.

Otherwise, for the sake of developing my rationalist skill set and knowledge, I'd like to know more. Elo, would you be so kind as to consider conducting an indepth case study type interview?

(http://lesswrong.com/lw/m9e/a_survey_of_the_top_posters_on_lesswrong/)

(http://lesswrong.com/lw/m9e/a_survey_of_the_top_posters_on_lesswrong/cgyo)

I am more than happy to start a small project in interviewing LW'ers of active participation.

With that in mind:

Who would you like to have interviewed? (can be multiples)

What would you ask them? (can be multiples)
2a. what would generally be good questions for interviews of lesswrongers?

What format would you prefer (will survey in the comments)?

OR:

Would you like to be interviewed?

Do you have a project that you would like to be interviewed about?

Disclosure: I am personally concerned with raising the profile, status and existence of in-person meetups, so I would probably include a few questions about:

Where are you from?

Which meetups have you visited?

What was the most valuable thing you found in a meetup?

Other questions would probably concern http://www.rot13.com :

Jung qb lbh qb jvgu lbhe gvzr (gvzr hfr)?

Jung qb lbh qb sbe n yvivat (va pnfr gurl ner qvssrerag)?

Jung ner lbh jbexvat ba?

Jung qb lbh qb sbe sha?

Jung zrffntr jbhyq lbh funer jvgu YJ?

Jung qb lbh frr bs gur jbeyq va 10 lrnef?

I am keen to try to set up one interview every week or two. (willing to put in 2 hours of effort each week towards contacting people, planing questions, talking to them, interviewing on record, tidying up the audio, then publishing the interview. Est 15-45min interview)
Philosophical differences
by ahbwramc — 2015-06-13T01:16:21.237Z

[Many people have been complaining about the lack of new content on LessWrong lately, so I thought I'd cross-post my latest blog post here in discussion. Feel free to critique the content as much as you like, but please do keep in mind that I wrote this for my personal blog and not with LW in mind specifically, so some parts might not be up to LW standards, whereas others might be obvious to everyone here. In other words...well, be gentle]

---------------------------

You know what’s scarier than having enemy soldiers at your border?

Having sleeper agents within your borders.

Enemy soldiers are malevolent, but they are at least visibly malevolent. You can see what they’re doing; you can fight back against them or set up defenses to stop them. Sleeper agents on the other hand are malevolent and invisible. They are a threat and you don’t know that they’re a threat. So when a sleeper agent decides that it’s time to wake up and smell the gunpowder, not only will you be unable to stop them, but they’ll be in a position to do far more damage than a lone soldier ever could. A single well-placed sleeper agent can take down an entire power grid, or bring a key supply route to a grinding halt, or – in the worst case – kill thousands with an act of terrorism, all without the slightest warning.

Okay, so imagine that your country is in wartime, and that a small group of vigilant citizens has uncovered an enemy sleeper cell in your city. They’ve shown you convincing evidence for the existence of the cell, and demonstrated that the cell is actively planning to commit some large-scale act of violence – perhaps not imminently, but certainly in the near-to-mid-future. Worse, the cell seems to have even more nefarious plots in the offing, possibly involving nuclear or biological weapons.

Now imagine that when you go to investigate further, you find to your surprise and frustration that no one seems to be particularly concerned about any of this. Oh sure, they acknowledge that in theory a sleeper cell could do some damage, and that the whole matter is probably worthy of further study. But by and large they just hear you out and then shrug and go about their day. And when you, alarmed, point out that this is not just a theory – that you have proof that a real sleeper cell is actually operating and making plans right now ...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-06-12T14:53:38.870Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on June 5th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Ann Arbor, MI Discussion Meetup 6/13: 13 June 2015 01:30PM
Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Dallas, TX: 14 June 2015 01:00PM
[Edinburgh] LessWrong Scotland: 28 June 2015 02:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Munich June Meetup: 20 June 2015 03:00PM
[Prague] Rationality meetup in Prague #3: 30 June 2015 06:30PM

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 - Wiki Editing: 06 June 2015 01:30PM
Boston: Making space in Interpersonal Interactions: 07 June 2015 03:30PM
Boston: Trigger action planning: 21 June 2015 03:30PM
Canberra: More Zendo!: 13 June 2015 06:00PM
[Melbourne] June Rationality Dojo: Logical fallacies & dojo structure discussion: 07 June 2015 03:30PM
Moscow LW lecture centre meetup: 07 June 2015 03:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Intuitive Bayes: 07 June 2015 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - June: 24 June 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - July: 22 July 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - August: 26 August 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 23 September 2015 06:30PM
Vienna: 20 June 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 07 June 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 ...
Whole genome sequencing vs SNP genotyping
by Vlad Sitalo — 2015-06-11T22:09:06.044Z

Hi, I was considering possibility of undergoing some kind of genetic testing for a while now. But I hesitated because I have a quite limited financial resources available right now. Eventually I've figured that in the future I'd do it anyway, so why don't just do it right away. Especially taking into account that knowing some data available via such tests in an earlier stage of life and acting on it could be quite beneficial in a long run.

So after that realization I've thought about going with 23andme and performing SNP genotyping. But in the process of browsing related information I've encountered article about rapid decreasing in price for Whole genome sequencing. After that I've found this listing: https://www.scienceexchange.com/services/whole-genome-seq?page=2 and the lowest price tag there is $795 (but it's not clear whether that particular option is applicable to human genomes).

And as a result the whole WGS thing seems quite appealing, but I have some concerns here. I still have quite limited finance and WGS seems to have at least 10x prize in relation to SNP. And the other concern is data applicability (more on this one further).

Information about what and how you can do with WGS data is somewhat scarce on the Internet. So I have some questions here:

What can I actually do with data from WGS?

I know that for SNP tests there are tools like Promethease (http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Promethease) that allow you to analyze your data. But I was not able to find anything about tools for analyzing your WGS data.

So are there any good tools available for you to analyze your WGS data? And: Is it computationally feasible to get results in an adequate time, using a general pc for this purposes?

Do you know any end-customer oriented company that provides WGS for a good price?

And finally with all above said: should I go for whole genome sequencing/SNP/or my whole line of reasoning is invalid and I should wait for now and get WGS in a few years for a smaller price?

(My main concern here is positive influence on health in a long run.)

Thanks.
A simple model of the Löbstacle
by orthonormal — 2015-06-11T16:23:22.000Z

The idea of the Löbstacle is that basic trust in yourself and your successors is necessary but tricky: necessary, because naively modeling your successor's decisions cannot rule out them making a bad decision, unless they are in some sense less intelligent than you; tricky, because the strongest patches of this problem lead to inconsistency, and weaker patches can lead to indefinite procrastination (because you always trust your successors to do the thing you are now putting off). (For a less handwavy explanation, see the technical agenda document on Vingean reflection.)

It is difficult to specify the circumstances under which this kind of self-trust succeeds or fails. Here is one simple example in which it can succeed, but for rather fragile reasons.

We will consider a sequential decision problem, where an agent's payoff can depend on the actions of "later" agents in "later" universes. Even in the case where the identities of the later agents are known in advance and correspond closely to the current agent, the current agent can have difficulties in trusting the later ones.

Each universe is defined with respect to the output of the current agent, and to the output of the next universe on the next agent:

def Un(a):

if a=`Quit': return 0

else if a=`Explode': return -10

else return 2−n+Un+1(An+1())

Note that if An's successors continue for a while but then explode, then An should quit rather than continue; but if none of An's successors explode, then An should continue. So ideally, a sensible sequence of agents An should continue indefinitely in this problem.

We will consider a sequence of agents inspired by the descending search order version of modal UDT:

def An():

for (a, u) in {`Continue',`Quit',`Explode'}×Utilities, sorted in decreasing order of u:

if PA⊢Un(a)≥u: return a

if still here: return some default action

Here, Utilities is a finite set of possible utilities, and we may choose it differently depending on n.

In the language of the Vingean reflection paper, we have replaced the suggester-verifier architecture with a known order of proof searches (which may or may not succeed). We are also using a sequence of agents that use the same formal system, rather than a descending chain of formal systems in which each can prove the next one consistent. So in order to achieve self-trust, these agents will need to find some Löbian shortcuts.

Let's sta

...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories
by rocurley — 2015-06-11T15:08:25.405Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories

WHEN:
14 June 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We'll be meeting to tell each other stories!

As usual, call 301-458-0764 to be let in.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories