trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] "Evicting" brain emulations
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-18T06:15:48.627Z

Today's post, “Evicting” brain emulations, by Carl Shulman was originally published on November 23, 2008. A summary:

As new models of ems are created, slight improvements will let them outcompete old models. In a system in which ems can simply be "evicted", the bots will likely not be pleased about this system. If they are simultaneously smarter, faster, and better unified than biological humans, they could be quite dangerous.

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 Surprised By Brains, 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.
If you could take it with you, what would you take?
by DataPacRat — 2012-11-18T00:12:24.446Z

The Scenario: Our protagonist estimates that present-day cryonics has around a five percent chance of leading to a successful revival. Since that's better than the zero percent chance if he doesn't sign up, and he can afford it, he makes the necessary arrangements. As part of those arrangements, he receives a lockable file-cabinet drawer, in which he can put any desired mementos, knick-knacks, or other objects; and which will be protected as securely as his own cryo-preserved body. The drawer is around one and a half cubic feet: two feet deep, one foot wide, nine inches high.
The Question: What should he arrange to have placed in his drawer?
Some of the more obvious options:
* Long-term archival DVDs, such as M-Discs, containing as much of his personal computer's data as possible. With slimline jewel cases, around 400 such discs would fit, which could hold up to around 1.5 terabytes. (Secondary question: Which data to archive?)
* Objects of sentimental value
* Objects with present-day value: cash, gold coins, jewelry
* Objects with predicted future value: collectibles, small antiques
* In honor of previous seekers of immortality: a copy of the ancient Egyptian funerary text, the Book of Coming Forth By Day (aka the Book of the Dead).
* For the purely practical and/or munchkin approach: a weapon, such as a fighting knife or even a pistol
What does the world look like, the day before FAI efforts succeed?
by  — 2012-11-16T20:56:30.399Z

TL;DR: let's visualize what the world looks like if we successfully prepare for the Singularity.

I remember reading once, though I can't remember where, about a technique called 'contrasting'. The idea is to visualize a world where you've accomplished your goals, and visualize the current world, and hold the two worlds in contrast to each other. Apparently there was a study about this; the experimental 'contrasting' group was more successful than the control in accomplishing its goals.

It occurred to me that we need some of this. Strategic insights about the path to FAI are not robust or likely to be highly reliable. And in order to find a path forward, you need to know where you're trying to go. Thus, some contrasting:

It's the year 20XX. The time is 10 AM, on the day that will thereafter be remembered as the beginning of the post-Singularity world. Since the dawn of the century, a movement rose in defense of humanity's future. What began with mailing lists and blog posts became a slew of businesses, political interventions, infrastructure improvements, social influences, and technological innovations designed to ensure the safety of the world.

Despite all odds, we exerted a truly extraordinary effort, and we did it. The AI research is done; we've laboriously tested and re-tested our code, and everyone agrees that the AI is safe. It's time to hit 'Run'.

And so I ask you, before we hit the button: what does this world look like? In the scenario where we nail it, which achievements enabled our success? Socially? Politically? Technologically? What resources did we acquire? Did we have superior technology, or a high degree of secrecy? Was FAI research highly prestigious, attractive, and well-funded? Did we acquire the ability to move quickly, or did we slow unFriendly AI research efforts? What else?

I had a few ideas, which I divided between scenarios where we did a 'fantastic', 'good', or 'sufficient' job at preparing for the Singularity. But I need more ideas! I'd like to fill this out in detail, with the help of Less Wrong. So if you have ideas, write them in the comments, and I'll update the list.

Some meta points:

This speculation is going to be, well, pretty speculative. That's fine - I'm just trying to put some points on the map.

However, I'd like to get a list of reasonable possibilities, not detailed sci-fi stories. Do your best.

In most

...
Room for more funding at the Future of Humanity Institute
by John_Maxwell — 2012-11-16T20:45:18.580Z

In case you didn't already know: The Future of Humanity Institute, one of the three organizations co-sponsoring LW, is a group within the University of Oxford's philosophy department that tackles important, large-scale problems for humanity like how to go about reducing existential risk.

I've been casually corresponding with the FHI in an effort to learn more about the different options available for purchasing existential risk reduction. Here's a summary of what I've learned from research fellow Stuart Armstrong and academic project manager Sean O'Heigeartaigh:

Sean reports that since this SIAI/FHI achievements comparison, FHI's full-time research team has expanded to 7, the biggest it's ever been. Sean writes: "Our output has improved dramatically by all tangible metrics (academic papers, outreach, policy impact, etc) to match this."

Despite this, Sean writes, "we’re not nearly at the capacity we’d like to reach. There are a number of research areas in which we would very like to expand (more machine intelligence work, synthetic biology risks, surveillance/information society work) and in which we feel that we could make a major impact. There are also quite a number of talented researchers over the past year who we haven’t been able to employ but would dearly like to."

They'd also like to do more public outreach, but standard academic funding routes aren't likely to cover this. So without funding from individuals, it's much less likely to happen.

Sean is currently working overtime to cover a missing administrative staff member, but he plans to release a new achievement report (see sidebar on this page for past achievement reports) sometime in the next few months.

Although the FHI has traditionally pursued standard academic funding channels, donations from individuals (small and large) are more than welcome. (Stuart says this can't be emphasized enough.)

Stuart reports current academic funding opportunities are "a bit iffy, with some possible hopes".

Sean is more optimistic than Stuart regarding near-term funding prospects, although he does mention that both Stuart and Anders Sandberg are currently being covered by FHI's "non-assigned" funding until grants for them can be secured.

Although neither Stuart nor Sean mentions this, I assume that one reason individual donations can be especially valuable is if they free FHI r...
Prediction: Autism Rate will Stop Increasing
by OneLonePrediction — 2012-11-16T19:26:11.490Z

I predict that the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders is done increasing because it has all come from better diagnosis. The autism rate in children has now reached one in 88; the autism rate in adults is estimated at one in 86. We just went within my error bars.

There are two things that I think could confuse the issue. The first is that the DSM-V will come out soon. If, following the DSM-V, diagnosticians continue exactly what they're currently doing, except that they diagnose all autism spectrum disorders as autistic disorder (which will not affect the one in 88 statistic because Asperger's and PDD-NOS have always been part of it), then the prevalence rate has stopped increasing. If, following the DSM-V, diagnosticians do what it tells them, the prevalence rate will decrease, with the loss coming from people with PDD-NOS who have communication or language difficulties and one of the other two points in the triad of impairments.

The second is that the adult rate may be lower than the childhood rate because of the existence of people who are diagnosable as children but not as adults because of learned coping skills. If that's true, the rate may continue to increase.

I will consider myself right if it reaches one in 84, slightly surprised at one in 80 (I'll assume I underestimated the number of people diagnosable only as children), shaken and looking for explanations at one in 75 and outright wrong (I will abandon the theory and concede defeat) if the prevalence reaches one in 70 without some really significant evidence of overdiagnosis.

I also allocate some probability mass to the idea that the prevalence rate will decrease. I don't predict a huge decrease with great likelihood, but if I do see one, I will update on my beliefs about diagnosticians and watch who is and isn't getting diagnosed in the next youngest cohort. If the DSM-V causes such a drop, I would expect it to more likely be sudden as doctors adopt changes after the DSM-V comes out, but it could be slow and steady if older doctors do as they were already doing and younger doctors act differently. Those cases could be distinguished by looking at diagnoses made by older doctors and newer ones and comparing them.

I note that while I do not predict a huge drop with great probability, mine is the only theory which would explain any drop at all.

I predict that if there is a drop, John Best will claim t...
Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.]
by arborealhominid — 2012-11-16T18:37:56.618Z

I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.

[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]
Meetup : Montreal Meetups - Now weekly!
by DaFranker — 2012-11-16T18:01:04.360Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Meetups - Now weekly!

WHEN:
19 November 2012 06:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Caffe Art Java - 645, av. du Président-Kennedy, Montréal, QC H3A 1K1

After several meetings with two other LessWrong readers and several "outside" friends or acquaintances interested in rationality, we've established that we'll meet every Monday at 18:00.

At this next meetup, we'll attempt to solidify-in-practice some key concepts of LW-style epistemology and start moving into the realm of training thought habits for using words (more) correctly.

If you're interested in joining us, we're interested in having you! If you have questions, please contact Paul_G or myself.

We don't really have a public signal yet, so if you want to avoid the possible embarrassment of asking random people in the café if they're here for the LessWrong meetup, I recommend getting in touch with us.

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Meetups - Now weekly!
Meetup : Cambridge, MA third-Sundays meetup
by jimrandomh — 2012-11-16T18:00:25.436Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, MA third-Sundays meetup

WHEN:
18 November 2012 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
25 Ames St Cambridge, MA

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups on the first and third Sunday of every month, 2pm at the MIT Landau Building [25 Ames St, Bldg 66], room 148. Room number subject to change based on availability, signs will be posted with the actual room number.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, MA third-Sundays meetup
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Champaign, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, Springfield MO, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-11-16T17:03:23.716Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on Nov 9th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Rio de Janeiro Meetup: 09 November 2012 08:00PM
(Springfield MO) Skepticon 5: 10 November 2012 01:06PM
Washington DC Show and tell meetup: Economics II: 11 November 2012 03:00PM
Berlin Meetup: 14 November 2012 07:30PM
Meetup, Champaign IL, : 14 November 2012 07:00PM
Moscow: Applied Rationality and Cognitive Biases: 17 November 2012 04:00PM
First Meetup- Cleveland and Akron, Ohio: 17 November 2012 08:03PM
18/11 London Meetup: 18 November 2012 02:00PM
(St. Louis MO) Psycology of memorization, Thiel Fellow James Koppel, and games: 24 November 2012 02:30PM
Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup: 09 December 2012 05:00PM

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: 10 November 2018 02:30PM
Melbourne social meetup: 16 November 2012 07:00PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM

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 ...
[draft] Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey
by Kaj_Sotala — 2012-11-16T14:29:13.811Z

Here's the biggest thing that I've been working on for the last several months:

Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey
Kaj Sotala, Roman Yampolskiy, and Luke Muehlhauser

Abstract: Many researchers have argued that humanity will create artificial general intelligence (AGI) within the next 20-100 years. It has been suggested that this may become a catastrophic risk, threatening to do major damage on a global scale. After briefly summarizing the arguments for why AGI may become a catastrophic risk, we survey various proposed responses to AGI risk. We consider societal proposals, proposals for constraining the AGIs’ behavior from the outside, and for creating AGIs in such a way that they are inherently safe.

This doesn't aim to be a very strongly argumentative paper, though it does comment on the various proposals from an SI-ish point of view. Rather, it attempts to provide a survey of all the major AGI-risk related proposals that have been made so far, and to provide some thoughts on their respective strengths and weaknesses. Before writing this paper, we hadn't encountered anyone who'd have been familiar with all of these proposals - not to mention that even we ourselves weren't familiar with all of them! Hopefully, this should become a useful starting point for anyone who's at all interested in AGI risk or Friendly AI.

The draft will be public and open for comments for one week (until Nov 23rd), after which we'll incorporate the final edits and send it off for review. We're currently aiming to have it published in the sequel volume to Singularity Hypotheses.

EDIT: I've now hidden the draft from public view (so as to avoid annoying future publishers who may not like early drafts floating around before the work has been accepted for publication) while I'm incorporating all the feedback that we got. Thanks to everyone who commented!
[SEQ RERUN] Surprised By Brains
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-16T07:33:39.492Z

Today's post, Surprised by Brains was originally published on 23 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you hadn't ever seen brains before, but had only seen evolution, you might start making astounding predictions about their ability. You might, for instance, think that creatures with brains might someday be able to create complex machinery in only a millenium.

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 Billion Dollar Bots, 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: Boardgames
by rocurley — 2012-11-16T03:47:15.236Z

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup: Boardgames

WHEN:
18 November 2012 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We'll be meeting to play games and hang out, and possibly try a new variation of Zendo.

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup: Boardgames
How well defined is ADHD?
by jsalvatier — 2012-11-15T23:34:02.266Z

I've long had attention and focus problems, but never explored the possibility that I have ADHD till recently. I understand that it's a standard term, but I'm still a bit suspicious; Psychiatry doesn't seem like the most reliable field.

Are there good reasons for picking out the behaviors associated with ADHD and giving them a name? Obviously this is a different question than whether ADHD is a 'disorder' or 'disease', and whether ADHD medication is good or bad for people.

Answers that would satisfy me

Behaviors associated with ADHD strongly cluster

Analyzing questionnaires of attention and focus behaviors with faction analysis naturally produces an 'ADHD dimension' that explains a lot of variance (similar methodology to identifying Big 5 personality traits).

ADHD diagnosis a strong predictor of anything interesting (income or grades or some contrived but interesting lab test)?

Something else along these lines.
Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity
by wdmacaskill — 2012-11-15T20:34:54.680Z

Disclaimer: I’m somewhat nervous about posting this, for fear of down-voting on my first LW post, given that this post explicitly talks in a positive light about organisations that I have helped to set up. But I think that the topic is of interest to LW-ers, and I’m hoping to start a rational discussion. So here it goes…

Hi all,

Optimal philanthropy is a common discussion topic on LW. It’s also previously been discussed whether ‘meta-charities’ like GiveWell — that is, charities that attempt to move money to other charities, or assess the effectiveness of other charities — might end up themselves being excellent or even optimal giving opportunities.

Partly on the basis of the potentially high cost-effectiveness of meta-charity, I have co-founded two such charities: Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours. Both are now open to taking donations (info here for GWWC and here for 80k). In what follows I’ll explain why one might think of Giving What We Can or 80,000 Hours as a good giving opportunity. It’s of course very awkward to talk about the reasons in favour of donating to one’s own organization, and the risk of bias is obvious, so I’ll just briefly describe the basic argument, and then leave the rest for discussion. I hope I manage to give an honest picture, rather than just pitching my own favourite idea: we really want to do the most good that we can with marginal resources, so if LW members think that giving to meta-charity in general, or GWWC or 80k in particular, is a bad idea, that’s important for us to know. So please don’t be shy in raising comments, questions, or criticism. If you find yourself being critical, please try to suggest ways in which GWWC or 80k could either change its activities or provide more information such that your criticisms would be addressed.

What is Giving What We Can?

Giving What We Can encourages people to give more and to give more effectively to causes that fight poverty in the developing world. It encourages people to become a member of the organisation and pledge to give at least 10% of their income to the charities that best fight extreme poverty, and it provides information on its website about how people can give as cost-effectively as possible.

What is 80,000 Hours?

80,000 Hours provides evidence-based advice on careers aiming to ...