trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What Should I Do?
by paulfchristiano — 2011-04-06T00:56:48.785Z

I have been having some difficulty deciding what to do with my life. I'm not really ashamed or surprised, because the problem seems extremely difficult and worth getting right. I still don't really know. Here are some of my options, though I wouldn't be surprised if what I end up doing is not on the list. I thought I would share to elicit advice, to give some context to some of my recent remarks, and maybe to provide comparison for people in similar situations.

1. Research

I could do research in a university, or in a private research lab. Many fields have at least a few questions that seem important and interesting.

A. Theoretical Computer Science. I could work on collaborative learning, recommendation and reputation systems, distributed protocols, or anything else that might assist collaboration in the future.

B. AI / Computational Cognitive Neuroscience. I could work on algorithms for inference and planning, to increase the probability that we develop comprehensible or human-like AI before something horrible happens (like developing incomprehensible strong AI).

C. Neuroscience. I know almost nothing about this field, but technology for measuring and interfacing with the brain appears to be important and developing rapidly. I don't know how hard it would be to start working in the field, but I suspect that the connection to computer science is strong enough at MIT that it wouldn't be impossible.

2. Start a company

This seems way harder, but I am sufficiently arrogant and risk-neutral that I consider it a reasonable option. In particular, this is what I would do if I decided that making money as efficiently as possible and giving it away

A. Tech company. If I had to guess based on the currently available evidence, I would guess that this is the way to maximize my expected earnings.

B. Online Education. I would like to take a shot at designing materials for online education of smart, significantly underserved, high school students.

3. Cooperate with Other Rationalists

A. Work for a rational charity. Self-explanatory. Probably worse than earning a lot of money and giving away.

B. Start a rational charity. Probably worse than supporting an existing charity.

C. Work for a rational start-up. Can't really arrange this one; but optimistically it could happen if you were prepared (someone else does 2).

4. Be a Hobbyist

I could also simply try and earn a living as quickly as ...
Problem noticed in aspect of LW comunity bonding?
by Armok_GoB — 2011-04-05T23:40:09.093Z

I have noticed that given how much I identify as a rationalist, how much I have in common with the community here, how important I consider it, etc. I have surprisingly little instant in group identification with community members compared to other online communities. There seem to be an aspect of social involvement that LW does bad at. And there is one thing lacking that to me seems the obvious first suspect; the lack of of-topic unstructured chatter.

What I do when I feel that I identify with some continuity online is in fact not usually the thing the community is ABOUT. Instead, it's the things that grow out of the sides; forum games, members art projects, photo share threads, fanworks. I can speculate on why this happens this is so, but it dosn't seem very useful at the moment, I'm not highly confident on any specific theory, and most will probably find it fairly obvious anyway.

LW, however, has no real room for this. Even in the discussion section, things that are not reasonably on topic will be punished with negative karma. Now, this is obviously needed, but one must still recognize there IS a prise to being so structured and focused on a single goal when humans naturally tend not to be. Look for third options.

Now, I have a specific solution in mind, but I'm going to hold of on proposing it and see if you come up with something better before I post my idea.

EDIT: My suggestion has now been added in the comments, please check it out.
Science Fiction Recommendations
by MinibearRex — 2011-04-05T17:38:22.998Z

I have never read very much Science Fiction, unlike some of the people here on Less Wrong, and I think I would like to. At least, the few books I have read I enjoyed. I've read a couple of books from Asimov's Foundation Series, two Michael Crichton books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, and an anthology of SciFi short stories (no really famous authors) that my dad owned.

That list looks very short. I just finished reading a fiction book, and am looking to start another. Recommendations? What are the two or three books I simply must read?
Details of Taskforces; or, Cooperate Now
by paulfchristiano — 2011-04-05T17:16:05.819Z

Recently I've spent a lot of time thinking about what exactly I should be doing with my life. I'm lucky enough to be in an environment where I can occasionally have productive conversations about the question with smart peers, but I suspect I would think much faster if I spent more of my time with a community grappling with the same issues. Moreover, I expect I could be more productive if I spent time with others trying to get similar things done, not to mention the benefits of explicit collaboration.
I would like to organize a nonstandard sort of meetup: regular gatherings with people who are dealing with the question "How do I do the most good in the world?" focused explicitly on answering the question and acting on the answer. If I could find a group with which I am socially compatible, I might spend a large part of my time working with them. I am going to use the term "taskforce" because I don't know of a better one. It is vaguely related to but quite different from the potential taskforces Eliezer discusses.
Starting such a taskforce requires making many decisions.
Size:
I believe that even two people who think through issues together and hold each other accountable are significantly more effective than two people working independently. At the other limit, eventually the addition of individuals doesn't increase the effectiveness of the group and increases coordination costs. Based on a purely intuitive feeling for group dynamics, I would feel most comfortable with a group of 5-6 until I knew of a better scheme for productively organizing large groups of rationalists (at which point I would want to grow as large as that scheme could support). I suspect in practice there will be huge constraints based on interest and commitment; I don't think this is a terminal problem, because there are probably significant gains even for 2-4 people, and I don't think its a permanent one, because I am optimistic about our ability as a community to grow rapidly.
Frequency:
Where I am right now in life, I believe that thinking about this question and gathering relevant evidence is the most important thing for me to be doing. I would be comfortable spending several hours several times a week working with a group I got along with. Due to scheduling issues and interest limitations, I think this means that I would like to invest as much time as schedules and interests allow. I thi...
How can I delete my less wrong account?
by  — 2011-04-05T17:12:04.741Z

Where can I get my less wrong account deleted?

No, the 'delete account' function doesn't work, and I am not posting from the account I want to have deleted as I don't want the name to stay in the google cache for another couple of months

I already asked that question here; I got no reaction that gets me further but were upvoted enough to post here.
[Link] A review of proposals toward safe AI
by XiXiDu — 2011-04-05T13:49:05.452Z

Eliezer Yudkowsky set out to define more precisely what it means for an entity to have “what people really want” as a goal. Coherent Extrapolated Volition was his proposal. Though CEV was never meant as more than a working proposal; his write-up provides the best insights to date into the challenges of the Friendly AI problem, the pitfalls and possible paths to a solution.

[...]

Ben Goertzel responded with Coherent Aggregated Volition, a simplified variant of CEV. In CAV, the entity’s goal is a balance between the desires of all humans, but it looks at the volition of humans directly, without extrapolation to a wiser future. This omission is not just to make the computation easier (it is still quite intractable), but rather to show some respect to humanity’s desires as they are, without extrapolation to a hypothetical improved morality.

[...]

Stuart Armstrong’s “Chaining God” is a different approach, aimed at the problem of interacting with and trusting the good will of an ultraintelligence so far beyond us that we have nothing in common with it. A succession of AIs, of gradually increasing intelligence, each guarantees the trustworthiness of one which is slightly smarter than it. This resembles Yudkowsy’s idea of a self-improving machine which verifies that its next stage has the same goals, but the successive levels of intelligence remain active simultaneously, so that they can continue to verify Friendliness.

Ray Kurzweil thinks that we will achieve safe ultraintelligence by gradually becoming that ultraintelligence. We will merge with the rising new intelligence, whether by interfacing with computers or by uploading our brains to a computer substrate.

Link: adarti.blogspot.com/2011/04/review-of-proposals-toward-safe-ai.html
The Nature of Self
by XiXiDu — 2011-04-05T10:52:31.807Z

In this post I try to fathom an informal definition of Self, the "essential qualities that constitute a person's uniqueness". I assume that the most important requirement for a definition of self is time-consistency. A reliable definition of identity needs to allow for time-consistent self-referencing since any agent that is unable to identify itself over time will be prone to make inconsistent decisions.

Data Loss

Obviously most humans don't want to die, but what does that mean? What is it that humans try to preserve when they sign up for Cryonics? It seems that an explanation must account and allow for some sort of data loss.

The Continuity of Consciousness

It can't be about the continuity of consciousness as we would have to refuse general anesthesia due to the risk of "dying" and most of us will agree that there is something more important than the continuity of consciousness that makes us accept a general anesthesia when necessary.

Computation

If the continuity of consciousness isn't the most important detail about the self then it very likely isn't the continuity of computation either. Imagine that for some reason the process evoked when "we" act on our inputs under the control of an algorithm halts for a second and then continues otherwise unaffected, would we don't mind to be alive ever after because we died when the computation halted? This doesn't seem to be the case.

Static Algorithmic Descriptions

Although we are not partly software and partly hardware we could, in theory, come up with an algorithmic description of the human machine, of our selfs. Might it be that algorithm that we care about? If we were to digitize our self we would end up with a description of our spatial parts, our self at a certain time. Yet we forget that all of us possess such an algorithmic description of our selfs and we're already able back it up. It is our DNA.

Temporal Parts

Admittedly our DNA is the earliest version of our selfs, but if we don't care about the temporal parts of our selfs but only about a static algorithmic description of a certain spatiotemporal position, then what's wrong with that? It seems a lot, we stop caring about past reifications of our selfs, at some point our backups become obsolete and having to fall back on them would equal death. But what is it that we lost, what information is it that we value more than all of the previously mentioned po...
[link] flowchart for rational discussions
by Alex Flint — 2011-04-05T09:14:40.772Z

I came across the following flow chart on a climate change blog and thought LWers would be interested to comment:

http://thoughtcatalog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/A-Flowchart-to-Help-You-Determine-if-Yoursquore-Having-a-Rational-Discussion.jpg
DC Meetup Discussion
by atucker — 2011-04-04T23:27:50.032Z

There are some LWers in the DC area. We should meet up.
Unfortunately, I'm out of town pretty much until the end of April. But there are a few things to work out before then, so I might as well post now.
A meetup needs:

People

Location

Time/Day

Things to do/talk about

The first one is covered by you and your rational friends showing up.
I'm not sure about the other three. Does anyone else have input on these? I'm particularly clueless about the location, but think we should meet on the weekends. I'm fine arbitrarily deciding these, but if there's anything more convenient for other people we have time to plan before I'm available again.

Please comment if you're interested, or have suggestions.

I hereby precommit to having a meetup in May planned by April 26th.

This also talked about having a meeting on May 15th.
The Importance of Research
by falenas108 — 2011-04-04T22:08:41.998Z

This is just a quick example of why it's always good to check the source material.

Cracked ran an article today about several things people are doing wrong, and the number one thing they listed was sitting. According to a an experiment they cite, one researcher tested disk movement for people slouching, sitting up straight, and leaning back at a 135˚ angle. They found that leaning back does the least damage to the spine.

Interested, I clicked on their link which sent me to this article from MSNBC, which among other things, says:

When strain is placed on the spine, the spinal disks start to move and misalign. At a 90-degree sitting position, this movement was most prominent.

With this, I was considered making a lifestyle change to slouching when using the computer, as leaning back isn't usually an option for serious work. But, I still wanted to read more about the experiment.

Unfortunately, they didn't have the link to the actual paper. A bit of googling led me to an article that actually had the experiment's methodology, which says that slouching was actually the worst position!

It maintained that leaning back is best, but according to the results the 90˚ angle isn't that bad, especially since most of the other articles I found were implying that the advice to sit up straight is wrong. Considering that people are usually slouching when the advice is given, sitting up is still an improvement. This is especially true at places like dinner tables, where leaning back as suggested isn't really an option.

Moral of the story: Do research before changing personal habits, regardless of where the information comes from.

Note: Afterwards, I did a bit more googling to see which other news sources carried this story incorrectly. The most prominent misinformation came from a Fox News article, who carried the following headline:

Study: Slouching Better for Back Than Sitting Up Straight
Rationality, Community, and Death
by zaph — 2011-04-04T17:07:01.524Z

(I was really on the fence about posting this. It's just some thoughts tend to go through around this time of year, plus some current new thinking that resulted from being a LW lurker).

Around this time of year, I tend to start thinking about death a lot. My dad died 12 years ago this month, and it’s still one of the most significant events of my life. Death is something that still seems to be solidly in the hands of religious and spiritual types as a discussion topic. I’m hoping that this post (in addition to not being too rambling) can provide some impetus for people to challenge that in daily life.

I don’t mean this to be an angry screed against religions. There was a priest on hand when my dad died. My mom, sister and aunt were gathered around, and it was in the midst of praying that my dad finally passed away (I apologize for the wording; our language can be so spiritually loaded, I just want to avoid saying died over and over). He told a really nice story about my dad being in heaven. It was comforting at the moment, a kind of way for my family to keep those awful, overwhelming feelings of loss at bay.

But it was after I got home and started calling my relatives that the enormity of the situation hit me. My uncle in particular broke down into angry tears when I told him the news. My dad was his older brother, and meant so much to him. There wasn’t any story that was going to make that loss any better. My uncle really thought there was more that could have been done medically. At the time (I don’t know what the state of the art medicine of today could have done), I really don’t believe that was the case. I remember watching my dad have seizures at the rate of about twice a minute. When he died, I was relieved to see that come to an end. He was going through intensive chemotherapy at the time, and died of sepsis. His body was just facing too much, and finally succumbed. There just wasn’t any way around what the eventual outcome was going to be, sadly.

The bright side in the situation, and what I hope to impart, was the strength I got from being around my friends and fa

...
Economics of Bitcoin
by Matt_Simpson — 2011-04-04T17:02:11.012Z

I haven't read/listened to them, but I thought these might be interesting to the local bitcoin users:

Eli Dourado (GMU econ PhD candidate) on the economics of cryptocurrency.

Econtalk podcast - Russ Roberts (GMU econ prof) with Gavin Andresen, Principal of the BitCoin Virtual Currency Project on, Virtual Currency.

Roberts' podcast is always stimulating even if I disagree with him, and Eli is a pretty insightful guy who I've met in meatspace.
How to offer peer review comments
by lukeprog — 2011-04-04T16:24:55.979Z

I was recently asked by an editor to offer (single-blind) peer review comments for some upcoming academic work on the Singularity. Having never done this before, I sought out some literature on how to do it.

In case others find themselves in this position, here are some helpful papers I found:

Benos et al., How to review a paper

Guilford, Teaching peer review and the process of scientific writing

Provenzale & Stanley, A systematic guide to reviewing a manuscript

But I know that many Less Wrongers have been engaged in the peer review process for many years. If so, please offer your own comments or link to other helpful instructions!
Talk and Meetup today 4/4 in San Diego
by AnnaSalamon — 2011-04-04T11:40:05.167Z

Today in San Diego, Carl Shulman and I will be giving a talk at 3:30pm at San Diego State University, on whether whole brain emulation can help us safely navigate the Singularity. There will be a gathering afterward for beer and discussion. Come join us for the talk, beer, or both; it should be stimulating.

The talk is in the GMCS (Geology, Mathematics and Computer Science) building, room 405. (This is on the East side of campus, near the college avenue exit off the 8 freeway. But campus is small enough that parking anywhere and then asking someone should also work; feel free also to give me a call). The after-party is walking distance from the same place; give me a call for directions, at 619 213 2741.

Hope to see you there!
Rationality Quotes: April 2011
by benelliott — 2011-04-04T09:55:03.526Z

You all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Approaching rationality via a slippery slope
by paulfchristiano — 2011-04-04T05:51:49.929Z

I have been thinking recently about how to get other people to do the things I want them to do, because it seems like overwhelmingly the best way to get those things done.

I typically encounter two difficulties off the bat:

Convincing people they should care about the future of humanity.

Convincing people that they should spend time thinking about how to act strategically on that preference.

One interesting observation is that people typically reject either one or the other. Some people agree that if they wanted to help other people, they should do rather extreme and unusual things, but claim to not care about other people. Some people agree that helping other people is very important, but think that typical philanthropic activity is reasonably effective (so effective that its not worth spending much time to optimize further). I think this is a consistent quirk of human nature: people encounter a conclusion they don't like and a bunch of premises that seem reasonable, and they choose one premise to reject while they can be manipulated into accepting the others. This is probably a useful thing to make a mental note of and try to exploit productively.

That observation aside, I think the easiest plan is to talk to smart people who already care deeply about other humans, but don't think too hard about how to act strategically on that preference. One approach is to present an idea very concisely which strongly suggests that 5 minutes of thought about strategic behavior is warranted. With the 5 minutes, maybe an idea can be communicated which implies that an hour of thought about strategic behavior is warranted. With an hour, maybe more progress can be made. And so on.

I would like to brainstorm ideas which have a good ratio of "Amount of re-evaluation of priorities / strategies they inspire in someone who is unconsciously trying very hard to avoid changing their behavior" / "Amount of time required to communicate to someone who is attentive but unconsciously trying very hard to avoid changing their behavior." Perhaps more important are thoughts about how to present these ideas efficiently. A lot of what I am about to say is somewhat redundant with other content at LW: try and consider it particularly in the context of strong time limitations and trying to talk to someone who is not fundamentally interested in becoming rational.

1. Rational philanthropy. Prese...
Berkeley LW Meet-Up Saturday April 9
by LucasSloan — 2011-04-04T03:37:31.422Z

Hey everyone! Since the Berkeley Meet up group added a weekly meet up to the monthly, we've had two weekly meetups (with two more at Tortuga) which went splendidly, including a trip to a karaoke place. But the weekly meet up is only an addition to the usual monthly meet up, which this month will happen on Saturday April 9, at 7 pm. As usual, we will be meeting at the Oxford Street Starbucks and then moving to Free Speech Cafe on the UC Berkeley Campus (the Cafe is outdoors, bring a coat). We will make time for people to get take out dinner from restaurants in downtown Berkeley, to be eaten at the Cafe. This is great time to meet the Bay Area Less Wrong community, and I welcome newcomers and, from the old hands, guests.

If you enjoy LW meetups, and want to go to them more often, there is the weekly meetup in Berkeley, which also meets at the Oxford Street Starbucks, on Wednesdays at 7. This week we will be playing board games, so if you enjoy being strategic, please come. Bringing your favorite board game is welcomed. To receive regular information about the LW events planned in the Bay Area, please sign up for the Google Group.