trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Alternate approaches to Pascal's Mugging
by DataPacRat — 2012-10-13T15:03:18.480Z

A lot's been said about Pascal's Mugging, counter-muggings, adding extra arrows to the hyper-power stack, and so forth; but if anyone's said anything about my own reaction, I've yet to read it; and, in case it might spur some useful discussion, I'll try explaining it.

Over the years, I've worked out a rough rule-of-thumb to figure out useful answers to most everyday sorts of ethical quandaries, one which seems to do at least as well as any other I've seen: I call it the "I'm a selfish bastard" rule, though my present formulation of it continues with the clauses, "but I'm a smart selfish bastard, interested in my long-term self-interest." This seems to give enough guidance to cover anything from "should I steal this or not?" to "is it worth respecting other peoples' rights in order to maximize the odds that my rights will be respected?" to "exactly whose rights should I respect, anyway?". From this latter question, I ended up with a 'Trader's Definition' for personhood: if some other entity can make a choice about whether or not to make an exchange with me of a banana for a backrub, or playtime for programming, or anything of the sort, then at least generally, it's in my own self-interest to treat them as if they were a person, whether or not they match any other criteria for personhood.

Which brings us to Pascal's Mugging itself: "Give me five dollars, or I'll use my magic powers from outside the Matrix to run a Turing machine that simulates and kills 3^^^^3 people."

To put it bluntly... why should I care? Even if the Mugger's claim is accurate, the entities he threatens to simulate and calls 'people' don't seem as if they will have any opportunity to interact with my portion of the Matrix; they will never have any opportunity to offer me any benefit or any harm. How would it benefit myself to treat such entities as if they not only had a right to life, but that I had an obligation to try to defend their right?

For an alternate approach: Most forms of ethics that have been built, have been created with an unstated assumption about the number of possible beings someone can interact with in their life - on the outside, someone who lived 120 years and met with a new person every second would meet less than 4 billion individuals. It's only in the past few centuries that hard, physical experience has given us sufficient insights into some of the rather more ba...
Good transhumanist fiction?
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-10-13T14:47:16.367Z

I just watched this, a very pretty version of "don't try to make yourself different, just accept who you are", and I realized that self-directed change in fiction is a worthwhile topic.

What I'm looking for is stories where main characters change themselves in ways which are basically improvements-- getting beyond the usual human is a plus, but for purposes of this discussion I'm including any significant positive change.

Another big plus would be the character needing to learn which of their goals make sense, and which methods work.

**ETA:** That was a bit of a stub-- HPMOR is partly about Harry and Hermione changing themselves, generally for the better I think (I've only read it once). It would be interesting to see what happens if Quirrell decides he needs to upgrade himself.

*Stranger in a Strange Land* is an interesting partial example-- the Martian language is presumably an upgrade for the human race, but it was developed by and for Martians, and needs some modification.

A *lot* of relatively recent fiction has people learning martial arts. I think appearance makeovers (typically for women) have become less common. I don't think there's a lot of fiction about appearance makeovers for men-- *The Stars My Destination* has one, but it's offstage. It wouldn't surprise me if *The Count of Monte Cristo* (frequently referenced with TSMD) has one.
Notes from Online Optimal Philanthropy Meetup: 12-10-09
by Giles — 2012-10-13T05:36:29.297Z

Here are my notes from the Optimal Philanthropy online meeting. Things in square brackets are my later additions and corrections. Let me know if there are factual errors or if I've incorrectly captured the drift of what you were saying.

Nick:

existential risk argument goes as follows:

small chance that people will be around for a really long time

if so, increasing probability of that happening by a small amount then really good

therefore, you should focus on this rather than things that have short-run impacts

focus only on things that reduce xrisk

Similar property: make things a little bit better for a really long time. Might be easier to do that.

name for these: trajectory change. Different from just economic growth – changes default trajectory along which things go

interesting for same reason as xrisk reduction but people haven’t talked much about them.

[sorry, didn’t note who said this]: education as an example. Particular kind of education?

Nick:

not really thought through this idea yet. [This idea is at the same stage] as if you’d just stumbled across xrisk concept

another example is just changing people’s values for a better

ordinary – e.g. campaigning for particular political party

Scott:

calls this “static” [I assume this means as in “noise” rather than as in “stationary”]

I’m doing something – tends to break down after a month or so, very difficult to predict long term results

should focus on things that can be predicted, build better models

Nick:

things that look short run could have long run impacts

e.g. thinking of buying bednets for people as having short-term impact – has short run impact today, no impact in 100 years time

but if you think about all downstream consequences, actually making small impact

Scott agrees.

both good and bad long-term consequences included in static

it’s a wash

Jeff:

what makes you think bednets have good long term consequences?

currently thinks of bednet as short term good, long term wash

benefits of having more people, having more healthy kids?

really hard to predict long term value

Nick:

Four classes of thing

things that reduce xrisk

things that speed up progress

things that make trajectory change

only short run effect

bednet not a trajectory change.

buying bednet increases economic growth &nda

...
[SEQ RERUN] Building Something Smarter
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-13T02:59:59.472Z

Today's post, Building Something Smarter was originally published on 02 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It is possible for humans to create something better than ourselves. It's been done. It's not paradoxical.

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 Mundane Magic, 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.
Causal Diagrams and Causal Models
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-10-12T21:49:16.747Z

Suppose a general-population survey shows that people who exercise less, weigh more. You don't have any known direction of time in the data - you don't know which came first, the increased weight or the diminished exercise. And you didn't randomly assign half the population to exercise less; you just surveyed an existing population.

The statisticians who discovered causality were trying to find a way to distinguish, within survey data, the direction of cause and effect - whether, as common sense would have it, more obese people exercise less because they find physical activity less rewarding; or whether, as in the virtue theory of metabolism, lack of exercise actually causes weight gain due to divine punishment for the sin of sloth.

vs.

The usual way to resolve this sort of question is by randomized intervention. If you randomly assign half your experimental subjects to exercise more, and afterward the increased-exercise group doesn't lose any weight compared to the control group [1], you could rule out causality from exercise to weight, and conclude that the correlation between weight and exercise is probably due to physical activity being less fun when you're overweight [3]. The question is whether you can get causal data without interventions.

For a long time, the conventional wisdom in philosophy was that this was impossible unless you knew the direction of time and knew which event had happened first. Among some philosophers of science, there was a belief that the "direction of causality" was a meaningless question, and that in the universe itself there were only correlations - that "cause and effect" was something unobservable and undefinable, that only unsophisticated non-statisticians believed in due to their lack of formal training:

"The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm." -- Bertrand Russell (he later changed his mind)

"Beyond such discarded fundamentals as 'matter' and 'force' lies still another fetish among the inscrutable arcana of modern science, namely, the category of cause and effect." -- Karl Pearson

The famous statistician Fisher, who was also a smoker, testified before Congress that the correlation between smoking and lung cancer couldn't prove that the former c...
Meetup : SLC Meetup: Free Will, Minicamp Braindump, and Group Goals
by hamnox — 2012-10-12T20:50:30.737Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SLC Meetup: Free Will, Minicamp Braindump, and Group Goals

WHEN:
20 October 2012 03:00:38PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Calvin E. Smith Library: 810 East 3300 South, Salt Lake City, UT

810 East 3300 South, Salt Lake City, UT
We'll be in the small conference room at the back.

Here's the plan breakdown:
3:00 Greetings, Introduction and Catchup
3:10 Minicamp Brain Dump (Kevin V.)
3:30 discuss
3:40 Free Will (Kip W.)
4:00 discuss
4:10 Group Goals (Mel H.)
4:30 discuss
4:40 Wrap up and Final Thoughts, Sign up for next meetup
Free Discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : SLC Meetup: Free Will, Minicamp Braindump, and Group Goals
Raising the forecasting waterline (part 2)
by Morendil — 2012-10-12T15:56:44.168Z

Previously: part 1

The three tactics I described in part 1 are most suited to making an initial forecast. I will now turn to a question that was raised in comments on part 1 - that of updating when new evidence arrives. But first, I'd like to discuss the notion of a "well-specified forecast".

Well-specified forecasts

It is often surprisingly hard to frame a question in terms that make a forecast reasonably easy to verify and score. Questions can be ambiguous (consider "X will win the U.S. presidential election" - do we mean win the popular vote, or win re-election in the electoral college?). They can fail to cover all possible outcomes (so "which of the candidates will win the election" needs a catch-all "Other").1

Another way to make questions ambiguous is to leave out their sell-by date. Consider the question, "Google Earth / Street View will become a video gaming platform." This seems designed to prompt a "by when?" On both PredictionBook and the Good Judgment Project, questions come with a "known on" or a "closing" date respectively. But the question itself generally includes a date: "Super Mario Bros. Z episode 9 will be released on or before November 24, 2012". The "known on" or "closing" date often leaves a margin of safety, for cases where some time may pass between the event happening and the outcome becoming known. 2

Questions for GJP are provided by IARPA, the tournament sponsor. Both IARPA and the GJP research team go to some lengths to make sure that questions leave little room for interpretation or ambiguity: a deadline is always specified, and a "judge's statement" clarifies the meaning of terms (even such obvious-seeming ones as "by" a certain date, which is expanded into "by midnight of that date") and which sources will be taken as authoritative (for instance, "gain control of the Somali town of Kismayo" was to be verified by one of BBC, Reuters or the Economist announcing a control transition and failing to then announce a reversal within 48 hours). Some questions have been voided (not scored) due to ambiguity in the wording. This is one of the things I appreciate about GJP.

Tool 4 - Prepare lines of retreat

Many forecasts are long-range, and many unexpected things might happen between making your initial forecast and reaching the deadline, or the occurrence of one of the specified outcomes. There are two pitfalls to avoid: one is ...
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Bielefield, Cambridge MA, Chicago, Durham NC (2), Urbana-Champaign, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-10-12T15:25:18.835Z

This summary was posted to LW main on October 5th, and has now been moved to discussion. The more recent summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

(Durham NC) HPMoR Discussion, chapters 4-7: 06 October 2012 11:00AM
Urbana-Champaign, IL: 07 October 2012 02:00PM
Bielefeld Meetup, October 9th : 09 October 2012 06:00PM
(Durham NC) Research Triangle Area Less Wrong: 11 October 2012 06:00PM
(Chicago) Zendo in the West Loop: 12 October 2012 06:30PM
Munich Meetup, EDIT: October 27th/28th: 27 October 2012 02:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 06 October 2018 01:30PM
Cambridge (MA) first-Sundays meetup: 07 October 2012 02:00PM
DC Meetup: Boardgames: 07 October 2012 03:00PM
(Berkeley CA) Pre-Singularity Summit Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong Meetup Party: 11 October 2012 07:00PM
Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays Meetup: 21 October 2012 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London...
[SEQ RERUN] Mundane Magic
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-12T04:58:06.728Z

Today's post, Mundane Magic was originally published on 31 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A list of abilities that would be amazing if they were magic, or if only a few people had them.

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 Intelligence in Economics, 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 : Madison: Prospect Theory
by fiddlemath — 2012-10-12T04:34:39.516Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison: Prospect Theory

WHEN:
14 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
325 Rethke Ave, Madison WI

Prospect theory is a very simple, but reasonably predictive, model of actual human decisions. This Sunday, I'll give a short presentation on prospect theory -- in particular, what kinds of predictions it makes, what ways agents using it exhibit irrational behavior, and what we can do with this knowledge. Probably, I'll ramble about some other bits of behavioral economics, too. :)

Also, of course: general discussion, and probably some board games.

This Sunday, we'll meet at David's place. If you're in town, or near it, but you don't have an easy way to get to David's place, then ask for a ride, either here or on the mailing list. Someone will surely offer; if no one else does, I will pick you up. :)

Also, also: if you're near Madison, do join our mailing list! There's some discussion there that never quite reaches this forum.

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison: Prospect Theory
LessWrong, can you help me find an article I read a few months ago, I think here?
by Thecommexokid — 2012-10-12T04:24:46.456Z

I'm sorry in advance for a post that doesn't really offer the chance for any substantive discussion, but I am engaged in the most futile of all tasks — trying to find again something I read on the Internet six months ago — and I need all the help I can get. So onward to the point:

Within the last 6 months I read an article. In my memory of the event I read it on LessWrong, but perhaps it was on Ovcoming Bias, or linked to from a LW post, or something. The main thesis of the piece was that American politics is covered in the press as a spectator sport, and issues that have enormous impact for millions of Americans are treated as though their only importance lies in their political ramifications. E.g., newspaper headlines say things like "Victory for Obama as Congress passes healthcare bill," as if the only importance of the bill was that it constituted a political win, as if the American public ought to care more about the political victories and defeats of one guy in Washington than about the actual ramifications of the law on their own healthcare.

Does anyone recognize the sound of this article? I have searched LessWrong in vain, but is it nonetheless here somewhere? Is anyone so familiar with the site that they can confirm definitively that it is not from here, so I can at least cross it off the list? In short, help?

All my thanks.
The Fabric of Real Things
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-10-12T02:11:13.686Z

Followup to: The Useful Concept of Truth

We previously asked:

What rule would restrict our beliefs to just statements that can be meaningful, without excluding a priori anything that could in principle be true?

It doesn't work to require that the belief's truth or falsity make a sensory difference. It's true, but not testable, to say that a spaceship going over the cosmological horizon of an expanding universe does not suddenly blink out of existence. It's meaningful and false, rather than meaningless, to say that on March 22nd, 2003, the particles in the center of the Sun spontaneously arranged themselves into a short-lived chocolate cake. This statement's truth or falsity has no consequences we'll ever be able to test experientally. Nonetheless, it legitimately describes a way reality could be, but isn't; the atoms in our universe could've been arranged like that on March 22nd 2003, but they weren't.

You can't say that there has to be some way to arrange the atoms in the universe so as to make the claim true or alternatively false. Then the theory of quantum mechanics is a priori meaningless, because there's no way to arrange atoms to make it true. And if you try to substitute quantum fields instead, well, what if they discover something else tomorrow? And is it meaningless -rather than meaningful and false - to imagine that physicists are lying about quantum mechanics in a grand organized conspiracy?

Since claims are rendered true or false by how-the-universe-is, the question "What claims can be meaningful?" implies the question "What sort of reality can exist for our statements to correspond to?"

If you rephrase it this way, the question probably sounds completely fruitless and pointless, the sort of thing that a philosopher would ponder for years before producing a long, incomprehensible book that would be studied by future generations of unhappy students while being of no conceivable interest to anyone with a real job.

But while deep philosophical dilemmas such as these are never settled by philosophers, they are sometimes settled by people working on a related practical problem which happens to intersect the dilemma. There are a lot of people who think I'm being too harsh on philosophers when I express skepticism about mainstream philosophy; but in this case, at least, history clearl...
[Link] Free TEDYouth Event in NYC for High School Students
by  — 2012-10-12T02:05:50.537Z

Taken from the TEDYouth event description page:

Held annually in New York City, TEDYouth is a day-long event for high school students that includes live speakers, hands-on activities, demonstrations and an opportunity for the youth attendees and speakers to connect. TEDYouth coincides with more than 100 self-organized TEDxYouthDay events happening worldwide over a 48-hour period.

This year’s TEDYouth conference will be held on Saturday, November 17th, 2012, at the Times Center in Manhattan, from 1pm-6pm.

More than 20 scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, artists, performers (and more!) will share short lessons on what they do best. They’ll dazzle us with mind-shifting stories, inspire us with creativity and make us want to dive even deeper into this broad array of topics.

The program will be made up of two sessions and a break with engaging activities, demonstrations and even a chance to meet the speakers. Attendance is free of charge for 400 high school students from within the New York City area.

Students must apply by the 15th of October. I personally attended last year's TEDYouth conference and enjoyed it. One of my favorite things about it is that all the attendees were able to personally talk to all the speakers afterwards, including Adam Savage from MythBusters and The Science Babe, Dr. Deborah Berebichez .