trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : RESCHEDULED: Cambridge Less Wrong Meetup August 21st with Ken Hayworth of the Brain Preservation Foundation
by chronophasiac — 2011-07-19T23:17:10.965Z

Discussion article for the meetup : RESCHEDULED: Cambridge Less Wrong Meetup August 21st with Ken Hayworth of the Brain Preservation Foundation

WHEN:
21 August 2011 07:33:42PM (-0400)

WHERE:
MIT Stata Center 32 Vassar St Cambridge, MA

Please note that this meetup has been rescheduled from August 14th to August 21st. I've invited a guest speaker for a Cambridge Less Wrong meetup on August 14th. Ken Hayworth is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Lichtman Lab and a co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation. He'll be giving a talk on his work implementing mind uploading via high-throughput electron microscopy. Ken's talk won't take up the entire meetup, any suggestions for group activities are welcome. The meetup will be on Sunday, August 14th at 2pm, in the MIT Stata Center, room 261. The entrance is shown in Google Maps at http://goo.gl/maps/l0Cq.

Discussion article for the meetup : RESCHEDULED: Cambridge Less Wrong Meetup August 21st with Ken Hayworth of the Brain Preservation Foundation
LW's front page freezes, hangs and bugs on Chrome
by Bongo — 2011-07-19T19:38:44.721Z

Browser is Chrome 12.0.742.122. It doesn't happen on Firefox. "It" is:

sometimes I can't click on links and eventually I get Chrome's "dead tab" notification

other times it keeps loading, even though while I wait for it to load I can go to, say, my user page and have it load right away

twice I've gotten weird graphical bugs on it. Screenshots: 1 2

To reiterate, it only happens on the front page, the one you get when you go to lesswrong.com. Other pages are fine. Perhaps it's the map?
LW systemic bias: US centrism
by lucidfox — 2011-07-19T19:21:45.107Z

Recently, I have noticed a cultural bias for the United States running through LW threads. It is perhaps to be expected of an English-language website, but for one that is about, among other things, overcoming bias, it is important to recognize one's own.

Aspects of the bias I have observed include:

Using Imperial units over the SI system, which is the standard for scientific literature and discussion.

Presuming the US by default when it is assumed that no country name needs to be given.

Expecting reader familiarity with US-specific cultural concepts.

A tendency to focus on the US first and foremost when talking about worldwide problems and scenarios.

I'm not the first to raise such concerns, either.

By comparison, e.g. the English Wikipedia strikes me as an example of an international English-language project that's relatively successful at recognizing and fighting systemic bias, and a whole set of template messages to mark articles with identified problems.

To quote Wikipedia itself:

The average Wikipedian on the English Wikipedia is (1) a male, (2) technically inclined, (3) formally educated, (4) an English speaker (native or non-native), (5) European–descent, (6) aged 15–49, (7) from a majority-Christian country, (8) from a developed nation, (9) from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) likely employed as a white-collar worker or enrolled as a student rather than employed as a labourer.

The reason I haven't mentioned other obvious biases, such as gender, age, education, or First World biases, is because those (in my experience) tend to be more subtle here on LW and because I'm myself subject to some of them. However, I might cook something up on them later.
LW's image problem: "Rationality" is suspicious
by Bongo — 2011-07-19T18:16:07.999Z

Concerning Less Wrong's tagline, consider this plausible reaction of someone looking at LW for the first time:

Cut the crap, nobody cares about rationality in the abstract. Just tell me what view you're trying to push under the guise of presenting it as the only "rational" one.

And here are two real quotes from 2009:

[concerning the ban on SIAI discussion during the first weeks of LW] I think it was so that newcomers wouldn't think that LW are a bunch of fringe technophiles that just want to have their cause associated with rationality.

And in reply:

But that's pretty much what LW is, no? I've long suspected that "rationality," as discussed here, was a bit of a ruse designed to insinuate a (misleading) necessary connection between being rational and supporting transhumanist ideals.

The quoted text speaks for itself really. So therefore I think LW's admins/web designers should seriously consider replacing the rationality tagline with something more savory.
GiveWell interview with major SIAI donor Jaan Tallinn
by jsalvatier — 2011-07-19T15:10:25.905Z

GiveWell recently release notes from their interview with Jaan Tallinn, Skype co-founder and a major SIAI donor, about SIAI (link). Holden Karnofsky says

[M]y key high-level takeaways are that

I appreciated Jaan's thoughtfulness and willingness to engage in depth. It was an interesting exchange.

I continue to disagree with the way that SIAI is thinking about the "Friendliness" problem.

It seems to me that all the ways in which Jaan and I disagree on this topic have more to do with philosophy (how to quantify uncertainty; how to deal with conjunctions; how to act in consideration of low probabilities) and with social science-type intuitions (how would people likely use a particular sort of AI) than with computer science or programming (what properties has software usually had historically; which of these properties become incoherent/hard to imagine when applied to AGI)
Meetup : Rejection Therapy in DC
by Benquo — 2011-07-19T13:41:26.949Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rejection Therapy in DC

WHEN:
24 July 2011 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

We will meet in the inner courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery/American Museum of Art (near the Chinatown and Metro Center stations if you're taking the metro). We will take 30 minutes to an hour to discuss strategies and goals, and then we will go off separately to do rejection therapy (so be sure to show up well before 3PM - or if you know you'll be late, contact Benquo so you can find us later). After an hour or two of that, we will meet back in the courtyard at a designated time to discuss what we've learned, and any cool things we got by asking.

Discussion article for the meetup : Rejection Therapy in DC
Meetup : DC Meetup Learns Decision Theory
by Benquo — 2011-07-19T13:28:41.620Z

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup Learns Decision Theory

WHEN:
07 August 2011 01:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Washington, DC

Meetup is at a private residence, contact Benquo for details.

Our very own Jeff has agreed to present on decision theory.

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup Learns Decision Theory
Meetup : Phoenix, AZ Meetup on TDT
by Danny_Hintze — 2011-07-19T04:09:07.324Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix, AZ Meetup on TDT

WHEN:
01 August 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2502 E. Camelback Road Phoenix,AZ,85016

We will be getting together to discuss Timeless Decision Theory and other things. Time and day are currently flexible. We'll be meeting in the Paradise Bakery in the Biltmore mall.
Link to TDT paper: http://singinst.org/upload/TDT-v01o.pdf

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix, AZ Meetup on TDT
Connectionism: Modeling the mind with neural networks
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-19T01:16:21.478Z

For about a century, people have known that the brain is made up of neurons which connect to each another and perform computations through electrochemical transmission. For about half a century, people have known enough about computers to realize that the brain doesn't look much like one but still computes pretty well regardless. How?
Spreading Activation was one of the first models of mental computation. In this theory, you can imagine the brain as a bunch of nodes in a graph with labels like "Warlord" "Mongolia" "Barbarian", "Genghis Khan" and "Salmon". Each node has certain connections to the others; when they get activated around the same time, it strengthens the connection. When someone asks a question like "Who was that barbaric Mongol warlord, again?" it activates the nodes "warlord", "barbarian", and "Mongol". The activation spreads to all the nodes connected to these, activating them too, and the most strongly activated node will be the one that's closely connected to all three - the barbaric Mongol warlord in question, Genghis Khan. All the while, "salmon", which has no connection to any of these concepts, just sits on its own not being activated. This fits with experience, in which if someone asks us about barbaric Mongol warlords, the name "Genghis Khan" pops into our brain like magic, while we continue to not think about salmon if we weren't thinking about them before.
Bark leash bone wag puppy fetch. If the word "dog" is now running through your head, you may be a victim of spreading activation, as were participants in something called a Deese-Roediger-McDermott experiment, who when asked to quickly memorize a list of words like those and then test their retention several minutes later, were more likely to "remember" "dog" than any of the words actually on the list.
So this does seem attractive, and it does avoid the folk psychology concept of a "belief". The spreading activation network above was able to successfully answer a question without any representation of propositional statements like "Genghis Khan was a barbaric Mongol warlord." And one could get really enthusiastic about this and try to apply it to motivation. Maybe we have nodes like "Hunger", "Food", "McDonalds", and "*GET IN CAR, DRIVE TO MCDONALDS*". The stomach could send a burst of activation to "Hunger", which in turn activates the closely related "Food", which in turn activate...
Illustrator needed: Intuitive Bayes 2.0
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2011-07-19T00:24:55.106Z

A huge revision of The Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning is in progress, aimed at being considerably more accessible and hence with a lot more graphics. I need someone who can turn out versions of the illustrations that are technically accurate enough to try on beta readers, fast enough and reliably enough that I can ask for revised versions of the illustrations a day later if the beta reader says they didn't understand it. There is a Google Doc in progress which you would be given permission to edit, containing some hand-drawn attempts on my part to indicate what the illustrations should look like, and a number of finished illustrations from an illustrator who unfortunately cannot put in any further work on this job.

For this job, technical accuracy (i.e., if a ratio is 3:4, it should not look like 1:9), understandability, and speed is much more important than beauty - the idea is to get as quickly as possible to a working version with understandable illustrations that has been verified by the beta readers.

If interested, email me at yudkowsky@gmail.com.
[Link] The Bayesian argument against induction.
by Peterdjones — 2011-07-18T21:52:19.895Z

In 1983 Karl Popper and David Miller published an argument to the effect that probability theory could be used to disprove induction. Popper had long been an opponent of induction. Since probability theory in general, and Bayes in particular is often seen as rescuing induction from the standard objections, the argument is significant.

It is being discussed over at the Critical Rationalism site.
Spaced Repetition literature review contest submissions: August 1st deadline
by jsalvatier — 2011-07-18T15:58:39.237Z

This is a reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Spaced Repetition literature review contest is August 1st (about 2 weeks from now). If you have questions or comments post them in the original thread or email me (jsalvatier@gmail.com).

The Seattle meetup group is looking forward to reviewing your submissions!
Meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly(ish) Meetup
by XFrequentist — 2011-07-18T14:59:32.453Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly(ish) Meetup

WHEN:
21 July 2011 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Fox and Feather Pub, 283 Elgin Street, Ottawa, Ontario

Venue: Fox and Feather, upstairs, possibly in back room #1 if it's free. Look for the LW sign. New people always warmly welcome!

Discussion post: Cached Selves

Bayes study group: Congrats to new baby daddy Corey (aka Cyan The Fecund) for successfully producing yet another replicon! As a result, the Bayes Conspiracy will take a brief hiatus.

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly(ish) Meetup
Psychologist making pseudo-claim that recent works "compromise the Bayesian point of view"
by  — 2011-07-18T14:06:30.420Z

I have recently been corresponding with a friend who studies psychology regarding human cognition and the best underlying models for understanding it. His argument, summarized very briefly, is given by this quote:

Lastly, there has been a huge amount of research over the last two decades that shows human reasoning is 1) entirely constituted by emotion, and that it is 2) mostly unconscious and therefore out of our control. A lot of this research has seriously compromised the Bayesian point of view. I am referring to work done by Antonio Damasio, who demonstrated the essential role emotion plays in decision making (Descartes' Error), Timothy Wilson, who demonstrated the vital role of the unconscious (Strangers to Ourselves), and Jonathan Haidt, who demonstrated how moral reasoning is dictated by intuition and emotion (The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail). I could go on and on here. I assume that you are familiar with this stuff. I'd just like to know how you who respond to this work from the point of view of your studies (in particular, those two points). I don't mean to get in a tit for tat debate here, just want the other side of the story.

I am having trouble synthesizing a response that captures the Bayesian point of view (and is sufficiently backed up by sources so that it will be useful for my friend rather than just gainsaying of the argument) because I am mostly a decision theory / probability person. Are these works of psychology and neuroscience really illustrating that human emotion governs decision making? What are some good neuroscience papers to read that deal with this, and how do Bayesians respond? It may be that everything he mentions above is a correct assessment (I don't know and don't have enough time to read the books right now), but that it is irrelevant if you want to make good decisions rather than just accept the types of decisions we already make.
Recent neuroscience relevant to metaethics and extrapolation algorithms
by lukeprog — 2011-07-18T05:07:01.259Z

Some Yudkowskian metaethicists have supposed that the brain does not compute value for actions or states of affairs at all, but instead uses purely behavioristic methods (via reward signals) to motivate action, and thus the 'terminal goals' we could program an AGI to realize must be extracted from brains only via an extrapolation algorithm.

My recent Neuroscience of Desire post summarized recent work in neuroeconomics that suggests the extrapolation procedure may be a bit easier than originally supposed because the brain does seem to compute expected utility for some actions, and perhaps for some states of affairs.

One caveat, though, is that information about objective stimuli intensities is always lost at the transducer (for neuronal efficiency, stimuli intensity is always computed relative to a locally-built reference point, but reference point information is quickly thrown away by the brain), and thus the brain cannot be computing utility for objective states of affairs.

Two recent papers, though, shed more light on how the brain produces human motivation by combining input from model-free systems (e.g. standard behavioristic systems that don't encode value for anything) and model-based systems (systems that mentally represent actions and encode value for them). The brain may be encoding value for mentally simulated actions that are isomorphic to possible real-world actions, and this value encoding might not involve a reference point like the signals concerning external stimuli do. This again suggests that the extrapolation algorithm needed to build a utility function for a Friendly AI may not be quite as difficult to write as would be the case if the brain did not encode value for anything at all.

Of course this is all very early and speculative. But if you get hedons from following a rapidly advancing scientific field, computational cognitive neuroscience is a great one to watch. It's amazing what we've learned in the past 5 years.
Recent Less Wrong downtime
by drpowell — 2011-07-18T04:50:14.546Z

Many users may have noticed that Less Wrong experienced about 6 hours of downtime on 16/7/2011.

CAUSE: The server was put under an unusual amount of load and started up a new instance to load-balance the traffic. Unfortunately, there was a bug in the script that starts the new instance that caused it to use an inconsistent mix of old and new code. The symptom seen by users was that any post with comments was inaccessible.

RESPONSE: A hotfix was deployed as soon as the problem was detected, unfortunately it was a Saturday so this reponse time was slower than we would like. We have since implemented a proper fix for the particular bug that caused this problem. We are also creating some extra monitoring probes so we'll be notified promptly of any similar problems in the future.

Apologies for the inconvenience.
Anyone with the medical knowledge to evaluate an extraordinary claim?
by ArisKatsaris — 2011-07-18T02:45:46.479Z

In a different forum I frequent ( The Ornery American ), a regular member there (LetterRip) has recently been making an extraordinary claim - a new theory of medicine he has devised that relates and can contribute in the cure of several neurological-related conditions.

I understand that the prior probabilities for him being a crank are much much higher than him being a new Louis Pasteur. Still I was wondering if there is anyone here with sufficient medical/medicinal knowledge that they can easily determine if there's something obviously ludicrous in LetterRip's theory, or even the opposite: if indeed there's something there that makes sense and is worth investigating.

Here are some of the relevant threads he began:

- where he requests contacts

- where he publishes portion of his theory as a Kindle book

- where he announces more "breakthroughs" and insights and offers to cure or at least alleviate simple ailments

Once again: I understand it's highly unlikely there's anything in his theory; still, I felt a cost-benefit analysis justified my making this post here.

So... anyone with enough understanding of biology/medicine to evaluate these claims of his?
Anyone with the medical knowledge to evaluate an extraordinary claim?
by ArisKatsaris — 2011-07-18T02:38:48.770Z

In a different forum I frequent ( <a href="http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi">The Ornery American</a> ), a regular member there (LetterRip) has recently been making an extraordinary claim - a new theory of medicine he has devised that relates and can contribute in the cure of several neurological-related conditions.

I understand that the prior probabilities for him being a crank are much much higher than him being a new Louis Pasteur. Still I was wondering if there is anyone here with sufficient medical/medicinal knowledge that they can easily determine if there's something obviously ludicrous in LetterRip's theory, or even the opposite: if indeed there's something there that makes sense and is worth investigating.

Here are some of the relevant threads he began:

-<a href="http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=014966">where he requests contacts</a>

-<a href="http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=014997">where he publishes portion of his theory as a Kindle book</a>

-<a href="http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=015009">where he announces more "breakthroughs" and insights and offers to cure or at least alleviate simple ailments</a>

Once again: I understand it's highly unlikely there's anything in his theory; still, I felt a cost-benefit analysis justified my making this post here.

So... anyone with enough understanding of biology/medicine to evaluate these claims of his?
Anyone with the medical knowledge to evaluate an extraordinary claim?
by ArisKatsaris — 2011-07-18T02:37:02.685Z

In a different forum I frequent ( [The Ornery American](http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi) ), a regular member there (LetterRip) has recently been making an extraordinary claim - a new theory of medicine he has devised that relates and can contribute in the cure of several neurological-related conditions.

I understand that the prior probablities for him being a crank are much much higher than him being a new Louis Pasteur. Still I was wondering if there is anyone here with sufficient medical/medicinal knowledge that they can easily determine if there's something obviously ludicrous in LetterRip's theory, or even the opposite: if indeed there's something there that makes sense and is worth investigating.

Here are some of the relevant threads he began:

-[where he requests contacts] (http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=014966)

-[where he publishes portion of his theory as a Kindle book](http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=014997)

-[where he announces more "breakthroughs" and insights and offers to cure or at least alleviate simple ailments](http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=015009)

Once again: I understand it's highly unlikely there's anything in his theory; still, I felt a cost-benefit analysis justified my making this post here.

So... anyone with enough understanding of biology/medicine to evaluate these claims of his?
Anyone with the medical knowledge to evaluate an extraordinary claim?
by ArisKatsaris — 2011-07-18T02:35:43.168Z

In a different forum I frequent ([The Ornery American](http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi)), a regular member there (LetterRip) has recently been making an extraordinary claim - a new theory of medicine he has devised that relates and can contribute in the cure of several neurological-related conditions.

I understand that the prior probablities for him being a crank are much much higher than him being a new Louis Pasteur. Still I was wondering if there is anyone here with sufficient medical/medicinal knowledge that they can easily determine if there's something obviously ludicrous in LetterRip's theory, or even the opposite: if indeed there's something there that makes sense and is worth investigating.

Here are some of the relevant threads he began:

-[where he requests contacts] (http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=014966)

-[where he publishes portion of his theory as a Kindle book](http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=014997)

-[where he announces more "breakthroughs" and insights and offers to cure or at least alleviate simple ailments](http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=015009)

Once again: I understand it's highly unlikely there's anything in his theory; still, I felt a cost-benefit analysis justified my making this post here.

So... anyone with enough understanding of biology/medicine to evaluate these claims of his?