trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Summary thread for Coursera classes
by mapnoterritory — 2012-07-17T18:40:18.239Z

Maybe it would be worth to have a single summary thread for Coursera (and also other source like Udacity etc.) material. At some future point when the courses are on-line and enough people seen them we could work out a "LW curiculum". Here is my subjective list of particularly intersting courses for LW audience:

A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior
Artificial Intelligence Planning
Automata
Basic Behavioral Neurology
Computer Science 101
Clinical Problem Solving
Critical Thinking in Global Challenges
Data Analysis
Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World
Game Theory
Human-Computer Interaction
Introduction to Genetics and Evolution
Introduction to Genome Science
Introduction to Mathematical Thinking
Machine Learning
Microeconomics Principles
Model Thinking
Nanotechnology: The Basics
Networked Life
Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes
Neural Networks for Machine Learning
Neuroethics
Principles of Economics for Scientists
Probabilistic Graphical Models
Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation
Rationing and Allocating Scarce Medical Resources
Statistics One
Think Again: How to Reason and Argue

Please note I haven't picked any programming/algorithm courses - there seem to be quite a lot of nice ones. Subscribe here. Plain text list (111 courses):

A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior
A History of the World since 1300
Aboriginal Worldviews and Education
Algorithms, Part I
Algorithms, Part II
Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1
Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 2
An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python
An Introduction to Operations Management
An Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Perspectives from Public Health
Analytic Combinatorics, Part I
Analytic Combinatorics, Part II
Analytical Chemistry
Artificial Intelligence Planning
Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Automata
Basic Behavioral Neurology
Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach
Calculus: Single Variable
Cardiac Arrest, Hypothermia, and Resuscitation Science
Chemistry: Concept Development and Application
Clinical Problem Solving
Community Change in Public Health
Compilers
Computational Investing, Part I
Computational Photography
Computer Architecture
Computer Science 101
Computer Vision: From 3D Reconstruction to Visual Recognition
Computer Vision: The Fundamentals
Computing for Data Analysis
Contraception: Choices, Culture and Consequences
Control o...
Meetup : West LA Meetup
by  — 2012-07-17T16:05:04.938Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup

WHEN:
18 July 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, July 18th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion Topic: If you have a chance, read an old article and a recent article, any whose title catches your eye. This week conversation will be unstructured, but those will make for good seeds of conversation.

But don't worry if you don't have time to read any articles, or even if you've never read any Less Wrong! Bring a friend! The atmosphere is casual, and good, intelligent conversation with friendly people is guaranteed.

We may also find time for a game, like The Resistance.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup
A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior - free Coursera class
by Utopiah — 2012-07-17T15:26:55.917Z

"learn about some of the many ways in which people behave in less than rational ways, and how we might overcome these problems."

starts 25 March 2013

cf https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon

see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/d3w/coursera_behavioural_neurology_course/
Critical Thinking in Global Challenges - free Coursera class
by Utopiah — 2012-07-17T15:23:52.806Z

"develop and enhance your ability to think critically, assess information and develop reasoned arguments in the context of the global challenges facing society today."

starts 28 January 2013

cf https://www.coursera.org/course/criticalthinking

see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/dni/a_beginners_guide_to_irrational_behavior_free/
and http://lesswrong.com/lw/d3w/coursera_behavioural_neurology_course/
[LINK] Nick Szabo: Beware Pascal's Scams
by David_Gerard — 2012-07-17T07:18:09.229Z

Nick Szabo on acting on extremely long odds with claimed high payoffs:

Beware of what I call Pascal's scams: movements or belief systems that ask you to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences. (The name comes of course from the infinite-reward Wager proposed by Pascal: these days the large-but-finite versions are far more pernicious). Naive expected value reasoning implies that they are worth the effort: if the odds are 1 in 1,000 that I could win $1 billion, and I am risk and time neutral, then I should expend up to nearly $1 million dollars worth of effort to gain this boon. The problems with these beliefs tend to be at least threefold, all stemming from the general uncertainty, i.e. the poor information or lack of information, from which we abstracted the low probability estimate in the first place: because in the messy real world the low probability estimate is almost always due to low or poor evidence rather than being a lottery with well-defined odds.

Nick clarifies in the comments that he is indeed talking about singularitarians, including his GMU colleague Robin Hanson. This post appears to revisit a comment on an earlier post:

In other words, just because one comes up with quasi-plausible catastrophic scenarios does not put the burden of proof on the skeptics to debunk them or else cough up substantial funds to supposedly combat these alleged threats.
[SEQ RERUN] Interpersonal Morality
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-17T04:54:20.597Z

Today's post, Interpersonal Morality was originally published on 29 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A few clarifications on how Yudkowsky's theory of metaethics applies to interpersonal interactions.

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 The Meaning of Right, 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.
Exploiting the Typical Mind Fallacy for more accurate questioning?
by Xachariah — 2012-07-17T00:46:26.935Z

I was reading Yvain's Generalizing from One Example, which talks about the typical mind fallacy. Basically, it describes how humans assume that all other humans are like them. If a person doesn't cheat on tests, they are more likely to assume others won't cheat on tests either. If a person sees mental images, they'll be more likely to assume that everyone else sees mental images.

As I'm wont to do, I was thinking about how to make that theory pay rent. It occurred to me that this could definitely be exploitable. If the typical mind fallacy is correct, we should be able to have it go the other way; we can derive information about a person's proclivities based on what they think about other people.

Eg, most employers ask "have you ever stolen from a job before," and have to deal with misreporting because nobody in their right mind will say yes. However, imagine if the typical mind fallacy was correct. The employers could instead ask "what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen from their job is?" and know that the applicants who responded higher than average were correspondingly more likely to steal, and the applicants who responded lower than average were less likely to cheat. It could cut through all sorts of social desirability distortion effects. You couldn't get the exact likelihood, but it would give more useful information than you would get with a direct question.

In hindsight, which is always 20/20, it seems incredibly obvious. I'd be surprised if professional personality tests and sociologists aren't using these types of questions. My google-fu shows no hits, but it's possible I'm just not using the correct term that sociologists use. I'm was wondering if anyone had heard of this questioning method before, and if there's any good research data out there showing just how much you can infer from someone's deviance from the median response.
Meetup : Monthly Ohio meetup
by RolfAndreassen — 2012-07-17T00:03:54.197Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monthly Ohio meetup

WHEN: 22 July 2012 04:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: The Dublin Pub, 300 Wayne Avenue, Dayton

Our usual monthly meetup; note the unusual date and place. This month's topic is the next set of minicamp exercises. Erica, Elizabeth, Alex, and Rolf have said they'll be there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Monthly Ohio meetup
Tips for Starting Group Houses
by ShannonFriedman — 2012-07-16T21:03:51.886Z

I've lived in several intentional communities and have been one of the creators of two that I've lived in. After recently securing Zendo, I wrote up some tips to a friend who is thinking about starting another Berkeley house, which Nisan pointed out might be valuable to share with the community at large, so here it is guys! These tips apply most to shared rental places, as opposed to bought property, although the stuff about vision applies to pretty much any joint venture that people embark on with shared leadership, such as group housing, event planning, and start-ups. The part about using padmapper.com and acting quickly applies a lot to Berkeley in particular, because the housing market in this city is especially messed up with rent control and thus finding good places is particularly difficult. We found our place over a month in advance of move in, and it was about $200-300 cheaper/room than similar places in the vicinity/class we were looking at that showed up during the same timeframe. Using these techniques is how we got it — I called within an hour of the posting thanks to being on email when I got the padmapper alert, set up an appointment to see the property manager right away, and while I was there in person, another person made her an offer of a downpayment on the spot. I'm pretty certain that its because of my pro-activeness and handing her a big stack of rental agreements and credit reports that we got this place rather than the several other interested parties. Many thanks to Kevin Fischer, Louie Helm, and Eliezer Yudkowsky for helping me with the rental search and acquisition information!

Tips:

Arrange meetings with people a week or two in advance over Doodle.com to find dates/times that work for large groups. You might not be able to accomodate everyone even doing that and might need to pick the day that the largest number of people can make it. You can do things like record calls or have people Skype in or do a conference line.

Get credit reports from everyone. There are services for free reports.

Download the standard application form and have everyone fill it out, so that you can deliver both credit reports and applications on the spot when you go to check a place out.

Use padmapper.com to track the areas you're interested in. Contact places asap — good

...
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
by Yurifury — 2012-07-16T11:01:12.406Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup

WHEN:
20 July 2012 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Ben's house - see mailing list - Carlton, VIC

Melbourne's next social meetup is on Friday, 20th of July. Once again, it'll be at Ben's house - see the mailing list for location details, or I can give you the address - you can call me at 0401 584 380, or email me at yuri@tbqh.net.
We'll organise some sort of take-away for dinner. BYO drinks.
It will help attendance numbers to comment, saying you'll be attending. We look forward to seeing you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
Revisiting SI's 2011 strategic plan: How are we doing?
by lukeprog — 2012-07-16T09:10:43.863Z

Progress updates are nice, but without a previously defined metric for success it's hard to know whether an organization's achievements are noteworthy or not. Is SI making good progress, or underwhelming progress?

Luckily, in August 2011 we published a strategic plan that outlined lots of specific goals. It's now almost August 2012, so we can check our progress against the standard set nearly one year ago. The plan doesn't specify a timeline for the stated goals, but I remember hoping that we could do most of them by the end of 2012, while understanding that we should list more goals than we could actually accomplish given current resources.

Let's walk through the goals in that strategic plan, one by one. (Or, you can skip to the "summary and path forward" section at the end.)

1.1. Clarify the open problems relevant to our core mission

This was accomplished to some degree with So You Want to Save the World, and is on track to be accomplished to a greater degree with Eliezer's sequence "Open Problems in Friendly AI," which you should begin seeing late in August.

1.2. Identify and recruit researcher candidates who can solve research problems.

Several strategies for doing this were listed, but the only one worth doing at our current level of funding was to recruit more research associates and hire more researchers. Since August 2011 we have done both, adding half a dozen research associates and hiring nearly a dozen remote researchers, including a few who are working full-time on papers and other projects (e.g. Kaj Sotala).

1.3. Use researchers and research associates to solve open problems related to Friendly AI theory.

I never planned to be doing this by the end of 2012; it's more of a long-term goal. A first step in this direction is to have Eliezer transition back to FAI work, e.g. with his "Open Problems in Friendly AI" Summit 2011 talk and forthcoming blog sequence. And actually, SI research associate Vladimir Slepnev has been making interesting progress in LW-style decision theory, and is working on a paper explicating one of his results. (Some credit is due to Vladimir Nesov and others.)

1.4. Estimate current AI risk levels.

Alas, we haven't done much of this. There's some analysis in Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import, Reply to Holden on Tool AI, and Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute. Also...
[SEQ RERUN] The Meaning of Right
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-16T04:22:27.255Z

Today's post, The Meaning of Right was originally published on 29 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Eliezer's long-awaited theory of meta-ethics.

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 Setting Up Metaethics, 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.
Tool/Agent distinction in the light of the AI box experiment
by Jost — 2012-07-15T17:29:43.466Z

This article poses questions on the distinction between Tool AGI and Agent AGI, which was described very concisely by Holden Karnofsky in his recent Thoughts on the Singularity Institute post:

In short, Google Maps is not an agent, taking actions in order to maximize a utility parameter. It is a tool, generating information and then displaying it in a user-friendly manner for me to consider, use and export or discard as I wish.

For me, this instantly raised one question: What if a Tool AGI becomes/is self-aware (which, for the purposes of this post, I define as “able to have goals that are distinct from the goals of the outside world”) and starts manipulating its results in a way that is non-obvious to its user? Or, even worse: What if the Tool AGI makes its user do things (which I do not expect to be much more difficult than succeding in the AI box experiment)?

My first reaction was to flinch away by telling myself: “But of course a Tool would never become self-aware! Self-awareness is too complex to just happen unintentionally!”

But some uncertainty survived and was strenghtened by Eliezer's reply to Holden:

[Tool AGI] starts sounding much scarier once you try to say something more formal and internally-causal like "Model the user and the universe, predict the degree of correspondence between the user's model and the universe, and select from among possible explanation-actions on this basis."

After all, “Self-awareness is too complex to just happen unintentionally!” is just a bunch of English words expressing my personal incredulity. It's not a valid argument.

So, can we make the argument, that self-awareness will not happen unintentionally?

If we can't make that argument, can we stop Tool AGIs from potentially becoming a Weak Agent AGI which acts through its human user?

If we can't do that, how meaningful is the distinction between a Weak Agent AGI (a.k.a. Tool AGI) and an Agent AGI?

For more, see the Tools versus Agents post by Stuart_Armstrong, which points to similar questions.
Bargaining and Auctions
by Scott Alexander — 2012-07-15T17:01:42.358Z

Some people have things. Other people want them. Economists agree that the eventual price will be set by supply and demand, but both parties have tragically misplaced their copies of the Big Book Of Levels Of Supply And Demand For All Goods. They're going to have to decide on a price by themselves.
When the transaction can be modeled by the interaction of one seller and one buyer, this kind of decision usually looks like bargaining. When it's best modeled as one seller and multiple buyers (or vice versa), the decision usually looks like an auction. Many buyers and many sellers produce a marketplace, but this is complicated and we'll stick to bargains and auctions for now.
Simple bargains bear some similarity to the Ultimatum Game. Suppose an antique dealer has a table she values at $50, and I go to the antique store and fall in love with it, believing it will add $400 worth of classiness to my room. The dealer should never sell for less than $50, and I should never buy for more than $400, but any value in between would benefit both of us. More specifically, it would give us a combined $350 profit. The remaining question is how to divide that $350 pot.
If I make an offer to buy at $60, I'm proposing to split the pot "$10 for you, $340 for me". If the dealer makes a counter-offer of $225, she's offering "$175 for you, $175 for me" - or an even split.
Each round of bargaining resembles the Ultimatum Game because one player proposes to split a pot, and the other player accepts or rejects. If the other player rejects the offer (for example, the dealer refuses to sell it for $60) then the deal falls through and neither of us gets any money.
But bargaining is unlike the Ultimatum Game for several reasons. First, neither player is the designated "offer-maker"; either player may begin by making an offer. Second, the game doesn't end after one round; if the dealer rejects my offer, she can make a counter-offer of her own. Third, and maybe most important, neither player is exactly sure about the size of the pot: I don't walk in knowing that the dealer bought the table for $50, and I may not really be sure I value the table at $400.
Our intuition tells us that the fairest method is to split the profits evenly at a price of $225. This number forms a useful Schelling point (remember those?) that prevents the hassle of further bargaining.
The Art of Strategy (see the beginning of...
Magic players: "How do I lose?"
by Manfred — 2012-07-15T08:58:59.631Z

An excellent habit that I've noticed among professional players of the game Magic: The Gathering is asking the question "how do I lose?" - a sort of strategic looking into the dark.

Imagine this situation: you have an army ready to destroy your opponent in two turns. Your opponent has no creatures under his command. Victory seems inevitable. And so you ask "how do I lose?"

Because your victory is now the default, the options for your opponent are very limited. If you have a big army, they need to play a card that can deal with lots of creatures at once. If you have a good idea what their deck contains, you can often narrow it down to a single card that they need to play in order to turn the game around. And once you know how you could lose, you can plan to avoid it.

For example, suppose your opponent was playing white. Then their card of choice to destroy a big army would be Wrath of God. That card is the way you could lose. But now that you know that, you can avoid losing to Wrath of God by keeping creature cards in your hand so you can rebuild your army - you'll still win if he doesn't play it, since you winning is the default. But you've made it harder to lose. This is a bit of an advanced technique, since not playing all your cards is counterintuitive.

A related question is "how do I win?" This is the question you ask when you're near to losing. And like above, this question is good to ask because when you're really behind, only a few cards will let you come back. And once you know what those cards are, you can plan for them.

For example, suppose you have a single creature on your side. The opponent is attacking you with a big army. You have a choice: you can let the attack through and lose in two turns, or you can send your creature out to die in your defense and lose in three turns. If you were trying to postpone losing, you would send out the creature. But you're more likely to actually win if you keep your forces alive - you might draw a sword that makes your creature stronger, or a way to weaken their army, or something. And so you ask "how do I win?" to remind yourself of that.

This sort of thinking is highly generalizable. The next time you're, say, packing for a vacation and feel like everything's going great...
[SEQ RERUN] Setting Up Metaethics
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-15T05:17:42.293Z

Today's post, Setting Up Metaethics was originally published on 28 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

What exactly does a correct theory of metaethics need to look like?

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 Changing Your Metaethics, 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.
Why could you be optimistic that the Singularity is Near?
by gwern — 2012-07-14T23:33:07.974Z

A while ago I wrote briefly on why the Singularity might not be near and my estimates badly off. I saw it linked the other day, and realized that pessimism seemed to be trendy lately, which meant I ought to work on why one might be optimistic instead: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#counter-point

(Summary: long-sought AI goals have been recently achieved, global economic growth & political stability continues, and some resource crunches have turned into surpluses - all contrary to long-standing pessimistic forecasts.)