trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Berkeley: How Robot Cars Are Near
by Nisan — 2012-12-17T19:46:33.980Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: How Robot Cars Are Near

WHEN:
19 December 2012 07:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

Location and time for this Wednesday's meetup are confirmed! It will be at 7:30pm (not 7pm) at Zendo. I will not be there, but Michael Keenan will be giving a talk about robot cars.

Michael Keenan is an entrepreneur, activist and futurist who works with The Seasteading Institute and the Center For Applied Rationality. His talk, How Robot Cars Are Near, describes how robot cars will save millions of lives, billions of hours and trillions of dollars.

Michael will also be speaking at the Extreme Futurist Fest on December 22.

For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: How Robot Cars Are Near
[Link] Rethinking the way colleges teach critical thinking
by Despard — 2012-12-17T18:51:04.956Z

"Though critical thinking is universally regarded as a pillar of higher education ... results show that students are not developing their critical thinking skills to the extent we expect."

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/12/14/re-thinking-the-way-colleges-teach-critical-thinking/
Statistical checks on some social science
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-12-17T17:23:06.676Z

Simonsohn, a social scientist, investigates bad use of statistics in his field.

A few good quotes:

The three social psychologists set up a test experiment, then played by current academic methodologies and widely permissible statistical rules. By going on what amounted to a fishing expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.

Laugh or cry?:"He prefers psychology’s close-up focus on the quirks of actual human minds to the sweeping theory and deduction involved in economics."

Last summer, not long after Sanna and Smeesters left their respective universities, Simonsohn laid out his approach to fraud-busting in an online article called “Just Post It: The Lesson From Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone”. Afterward, his inbox was flooded with tips from strangers. People wanted him to investigate election results, drug trials, the work of colleagues they’d long doubted. He has not replied to these messages. Making a couple of busts is one thing. Assuming the mantle of the social sciences’ full-time Grand Inquisitor would be quite another.

This looks like a clue that there's work available for anyone who knows statistics. Eventually, there will be an additional line of work for how to tell whether a forensic statistician is competent.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 17, chapter 86
by Alsadius — 2012-12-17T07:19:33.096Z

Edit: New thread posted here.

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 86. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Wanted: Rationalist Pushback (link)
by aronwall — 2012-12-17T05:51:08.987Z

Recently I started a new blog, named "Undivided Looking: comments on physics and theology". You can find it here:

http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/

My main goals are to:

discuss science and/or religion issues

popularize some fundamental physics ideas to folks who aren't afraid of math, but don't necessarily know much physics

(My day job is researching quantum gravity at UC Santa Barbara, so I actually know what I'm talking about when it comes to the science.)

I'm posting this to Less Wrong in order to solicit comments from intelligent and civil members of the rationalist community. I'm a Christian, but I want to avoid groupthink in the comments section, since I believe ideas should be developed and tested around people with multiple viewpoints. So if anyone is willing to come and provide some friendly pushback from a rationalist perspective, that would be much appreciated.

Since the Less Wrong community is particularly interested in discussing epistemic norms, I'd be especially happy to get feedback on this series of posts:

Pillars of Science: Summary and Questions

in which I identify 6 different features of scientific inquiry which help account for its phenomenal success. (Religion is only mentioned tangentially in this particular series, so even if you aren't interested in rehashing religious debates, you could still make a valuable contribution there.)

Thanks!
[SEQ RERUN] Wrapping Up
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-17T04:33:13.684Z

Today's post, Wrapping Up was originally published on December 7, 2008. A summary:

A summary of what Hanson believes to be the key unresolved issues.

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 Artificial Mysterious Intelligence, 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.
Parallelizing Rationality: How Should Rationalists Think in Groups?
by almkglor — 2012-12-17T04:08:27.854Z

Consider the following statement: two heads are better than one.

It seems obvious to me that several rationalists working together can, effectively, bring more precious brainpower to bear on a problem, than one rationalist working alone (otherwise, what would be the point of having a Less Wrong forum community? You might as well just leave it as a curated community blog and excise the discussion forums.). Further, due to various efforts (HPMOR especially) it appears that LW is inevitably growing. This makes it not only desirable to find ways to effectively get groups of rationalists to think together, but also increasingly necessary.

It is also desirable that methods of getting groups to think should be feasibly doable over the Internet. (I am aware that real-life meetups and stuff exist, but please be reminded that some people in the world do have to live in shitty little third-world countries and might not at all find it economically feasible to go to first-world countries with atrociously high costs-of-living)

So first, let us start with the current "best methods" of getting groups of Traditional Rationalists to coordinate and think, while avoiding groupthink effects that diminish our aggregate rationality. Hopefully, we can then use it as the basis of part of the art of rationalist group thinking. So I'll discuss:

Disputation Arenas - procedures with centrifugal and centripetal phases

Delphi Method - members secretly answer questions, non-member summarizer anonymizes answers, members read anonymized summary, repeat

Prediction Market - members place stock bets on market, market settles on price, members react to price signal, repeat

Nominal Group Technique - members write down ideas privately, non-member facilitator guides members in sharing ideas, non-member facilitator guides members in paring down and cleaning up ideas, members vote

Conclusion - strengths and weaknesses of the various disputation arenas shown here

Disputation Arenas

One of my favorite SF authors, David Brin, talks a bit about what he calls "disputation arenas". I won't discuss his ideas here, since his concept of "disputation arena" is actually a relatively "new", raw, and relatively untested procedure - what I intend to discuss for now are things that have at least been studied more rigorously than just a bunch of blog posts (or personal website pages, whatever).

However, I do want to...
A utility-maximizing varient of AIXI
by AlexMennen — 2012-12-17T03:48:05.173Z

Response to: Universal agents and utility functions

Related approaches: Hibbard (2012), Hay (2005)

Background

Here is the function implemented by finite-lifetime AI:

,

where is the number of steps in the lifetime of the agent, is the current step being computed, is the set of possible observations, is the set of possible actions, is a function that extracts a reward value from an observation, a dot over a variable represents that its value is known to be the true value of the action or observation it represents, underlines represent that the variable is an input to a probability distribution, and is a function that returns the probability of a sequence of observations, given a certain known history and sequence of actions, and starting from the Solomonoff prior. More formally,

,

where is the set of all programs, is a function that returns the length of a program in bits, and a program applied to a sequence of actions returns the resulting sequence of observations. Notice that the denominator is a constant, depending only on the already known , and multiplying by a positive constant does not change the argmax, so we can pretend that the denominator doesn't exist. If is a valid program, then any longer program with as a prefix is not a valid program, so .

Problem

A problem with this is that it can only optimize over the input it receives, not over aspects of the external world that it cannot observe. Given the chance, AI would hack its input channel so that it would only observe good things, instead of trying to make good things happen (in other words, it would wirehead itself). Anja specified a variant of AI in which she replaced the sum of rewards with a single utility value and made the domain of the utility function be the entire sequence of actions and observations instead of a single observation, like so:

.

This doesn't really solve the problem, because the utility function still only takes what the agent can see, rather than what is actually going on outside the agent. The situation is a little better because the utility function also takes into account the agent's actions, so it could punish actions that look like the agent is trying to wirehead itself, but if there was a flaw in the instructions not to wirehead, the agent would exploit it, so the incentive not to wirehead would have to be perfect...
A utility-maximizing varient of AIXI
by AlexMennen — 2012-12-17T01:12:19.518Z

Background
Here is the function implemented by finite-lifetime [AI![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\\xi)](http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.pdf):
![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\{\\displaystyle%20\\dot\{y\}\_\{k\}:=\\arg\\max\_\{y\_\{k\}\\in%20Y\}\\sum\_\{x\_\{k\}\\in%20X\}\\max\_\{y\_\{k\+1\}\\in%20Y\}\\sum\_\{x\_\{k\+1\}\\in%20X\}\.\.\.\\max\_\{y\_\{m\}\\in%20Y\}\\sum\_\{x\_\{m\}\\in%20X\}\\left\(r\\left\(x\_\{k\}\\right\)\+\.\.\.\+r\\left\(x\_\{m\}\\right\)\\right\)\\cdot\\xi\\left\(\\dot\{y\}\\dot\{x\}\_\{%3Ck\}y\\underline\{x\}\_\{k:m\}\\right\)\}),
where ![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?m) is the number of steps in the lifetime of the agent, ![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?k)
is the current step being computed, ![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?X) is the set of possible observations,
![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?Y) is the set of possible actions, ![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?r) is a function that extracts
a reward value from an observation, a dot over a variable represents
that its value is known to be the true value of the action or observation
it represents, underlines represent that the variable is an input
to a probability distribution, and ![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\\xi) is a function that returns
the probability of a sequence of observations, given a certain known
history and sequence of actions, and starting from the Solomonoff
prior. More formally,
![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\{\\displaystyle%20\\xi\\left\(\\dot\{y\}\\dot\{x\}\_\{%3Ck\}y\\underline\{x\}\_\{k:m\}\\right\)=\\left\(\\sum\_\{q\\in%20Q:q\\left\(y\_\{\\leq%20m\}\\right\)=x\_\{\\leq%20m\}\}2%5E\{\-\\ell\\left\(q\\right\)\}\\right\)\\diagup\\left\(\\sum\_\{q\\in%20Q:q\\left\(\\dot\{y\}\_\{%3Ck\}\\right\)=\\dot\{x\}\_\{%3Ck\}\}2%5E\{\-\\ell\\left\(q\\right\)\}\\right\)\}),
where ![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?Q) is the set of all programs, ![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\\ell) is a function that
returns the length of a program in bits, and a program applied to
a sequence of actions returns the resulting sequence of observations.
Notice that the denominator is a constant, depending only on the already
known ![](http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\\dot\{y\}\\dot\{x\}\_\{%3Ck\}), and multiplying by a positive constant
does not change the argmax, so we can pretend that the denominator
doesn't exist. If ![](http://www.codecogs.co...
a utility-maximizing varient of AIXI
by AlexMennen — 2012-12-17T00:58:17.443Z

Background

Here is the function implemented by finite-lifetime [AI<img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\xi" title="\xi" align="bottom" />](http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.pdf):
<img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?{\displaystyle \dot{y}_{k}:=\arg\max_{y_{k}\in Y}\sum_{x_{k}\in X}\max_{y_{k+1}\in Y}\sum_{x_{k+1}\in X}...\max_{y_{m}\in Y}\sum_{x_{m}\in X}\left(r\left(x_{k}\right)+...+r\left(x_{m}\right)\right)\cdot\xi\left(\dot{y}\dot{x}_{<k}y\underline{x}_{k:m}\right)}" title="{\displaystyle \dot{y}_{k}:=\arg\max_{y_{k}\in Y}\sum_{x_{k}\in X}\max_{y_{k+1}\in Y}\sum_{x_{k+1}\in X}...\max_{y_{m}\in Y}\sum_{x_{m}\in X}\left(r\left(x_{k}\right)+...+r\left(x_{m}\right)\right)\cdot\xi\left(\dot{y}\dot{x}_{<k}y\underline{x}_{k:m}\right)}" align="bottom" />,
where <img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?m" title="m" align="bottom" /> is the number of steps in the lifetime of the agent, <img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?k" title="k" align="bottom" />
is the current step being computed, <img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?X" title="X" align="bottom" /> is the set of possible observations,
<img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?Y" title="Y" align="bottom" /> is the set of possible actions, <img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?r" title="r" align="bottom" /> is a function that extracts
a reward value from an observation, a dot over a variable represents
that its value is known to be the true value of the action or observation
it represents, underlines represent that the variable is an input
to a probability distribution, and <img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\xi" title="\xi" align="bottom" /> is a function that returns
the probability of a sequence of observations, given a certain known
history and sequence of actions, and starting from the Solomonoff
prior. More formally,
<img src="http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?{\displaystyle \xi\left(\dot{y}\dot{x}_{<k}y\underline{x}_{k:m}\right)=\left(\sum_{q\in Q:q\left(y_{\leq m}\right)=x_{\leq m}}2^{-\ell\left(q\right)}\right)\diagup\left(\sum_{q\in Q:q\left(\dot{y}_{<k}\right)=\dot{x}_{<k}}2^{-\ell\left(q\right)}\right)}" title="{\displaystyle \xi\left(\dot{y}\dot{x}_{<k}y\underline{x}_{k:m}\right)=\left(\sum_{q\in Q:q\left(y_{\leq m}\right)=x_{\leq m}}2^{-\ell\left(q\right)}\right)\diagup\left(\sum_{q\in Q:q\...
Ask LW: ω-self-aware systems
by robertzk — 2012-12-16T22:18:52.514Z

I was having a conversation with a religious friend of mine who argued that even if materialism was true, we would never be able to fully understand or replicate human intelligence because a physical system cannot understand itself--it would need to use the resources contained within it to perform that understanding, excluding the possibility of full understanding.

I countered with the following argument. Assume you are what your neurons are doing, and suppose you wish to extend your consciousness to fully grasp yourself (be aware of the larger systems functioning of your neuronal circuits, as well as possibly the smaller biochemical details, and the larger conceptual maps). Since consciousness offers us gestalt parallel information processing, and we will assume it can be extended to arbitrarily large concurrent information flow, one could create a (much larger) co-brain which consciously perceives all the functioning of your original brain. Now you can identify with your old consciousness and the newly added (much more expansive) co-consciousness.

The problem is that now you do not understand the full brain & co-brain system. But you can perform the process again, adding a co-co-brain which gives a realtime gestalt understanding of the co-brain consciousness. Since this process may be performed to arbitrarily large nesting levels, we can say that any physical system that is like the brain is ω-self-aware, with n-self-aware referring to the nesting level n. Since we do not expect the neural structures required to encode an n-self-aware system in an n+1-self-aware system to be any functionally different, we can say we've satisfactorily produced a physical system with full understanding of itself. Denying this would be equivalent to claiming we do not understand the natural numbers because we have not written every one of them down.

Does anyone see any trouble with this argument?
Meetup : First Buffalo Meetup
by StonesOnCanvas — 2012-12-16T19:55:17.981Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First Buffalo Meetup

WHEN: 28 December 2012 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: 765 Elmwood Avenue Buffalo, NY 14222

Its the first ever Buffalo LW Meetup! It will be at Spot Coffee on Elmwood. Lets meet at 6:30pm, I'll get there earlier and have some seating by the couches with a LW sign.

Since this is the first meeting, we will be getting to know each other and talking about what we want to get out of the group meetups. We can discuss the locations, times, and frequency of future meetups. Also, I thought some games and group activities might be a fun way to get know each each other.

Discussion article for the meetup : First Buffalo Meetup
Consistence of reciprocity?
by yttrium — 2012-12-16T19:08:36.565Z

Many people see themselves in various groups (member of the population of their home country, or their social network), and feel justified in caring more about the well-being of people in this group than about that of others. They will argue with reciprocity: "Those people pay taxes in our country, they are entitled to more support from 'us' than others!" My question is: Is this inconsistent with some rationality axioms that seem obvious? What often-adopted or reasonable axioms are there that make this inconsistent?
[SEQ RERUN] Artificial Mysterious Intelligence
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-16T05:35:21.975Z

Today's post, Artificial Mysterious Intelligence was originally published on 07 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Attempting to create an intelligence without actually understanding what intelligence is, is a common failure mode. If you want to make actual progress, you need to truly understand what it is that you are trying to make.

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 Shared AI Wins, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : DC meetup Dec 16
by  — 2012-12-15T17:18:30.297Z

Discussion article for the meetup : DC meetup Dec 16

WHEN:
16 December 2012 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

The current plan is to meet at the Gallery courtyard, and walk to the US Botanic Garden to see the Season's Greenings display. Visiting a museum or two afterwards is possible.

Discussion article for the meetup : DC meetup Dec 16
Meetup : Brussels meetup
by Axel — 2012-12-15T17:04:24.308Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup

WHEN:
05 January 2013 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

We are once again meeting at 'la fleur en papier doré' close to the Brussels Central station. If you feel like an intelligent discussion and are in the neighborhood, consider dropping by. As always, I'll have a sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup
[SEQ RERUN] Shared AI Wins
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-15T07:24:04.926Z

Today's post, Shared AI Wins was originally published on December 6, 2008. A summary:

AIs do have enormous difficulties in communicating. That's why decreasing those difficulties is important. Collections of AIs that are able to share data, like ems, are more likely to succeed at making new developments.

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 Is That Your True Rejection?, 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.