trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
If we're in a sim...
by AdeleneDawner — 2011-07-05T21:22:07.762Z

My father, who is home recovering from surgery, emailed the following web page to me and a few other members of my family, and expressed interest in reading interesting responses.

If We Are In A Computer Simulation

Is the universe just a big computer simulation running in another universe? Suppose it is. Then I've got some questions:

Are intelligent entities modeled as objects? In other words, are they instantiated and managed as distinct tracked pieces in the simulation? Or is the universe just modeled as huge numbers of subatomic particles and energy?

If intelligences aren't modeled as objects are they at least tracked or studied by whoever is running the sim? Or is the evolution of intelligence in the sim just seen as an uninteresting side effect and irrelevant to the sim's purposes?

Is The Big Bang the moment the sim started running? Or did it start long before that point? Or has it been started at a much later point with data loading in to make it look like it started earlier?

Do the creators of the sim intervene as it runs? Do they patch it?

What is the purpose of the sim? Entertainment? Political decision-making? Scientific research?

Were the physical laws of the universe designed to reduce the computational cost of the sim? If so, what aspects of the physical laws were designed to make computation cheaper?

Imagine the purpose of the sim is entertainment or decision-making. Either way, it could be that out-of-universe sentient beings actually enter this universe and interact with some of its intelligent entities. Interact with simulated people for fun. Or interact in order to try out different experiments of political development. In the latter case I would expect more rerunning of the same sim backed up to restart at the same point but with some alteration of what some people say or do.

So what's your (simulated) gut feeling? Are you in a sim? If so, what's it for?

Any thoughts?
Basics of Animal Reinforcement
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-05T20:42:23.133Z

Behaviorism historically began with Pavlov's studies into classical conditioning. When dogs see food they naturally salivate. When Pavlov rang a bell before giving the dogs food, the dogs learned to associate the bell with the food and salivate even after they merely heard the bell . When Pavlov rang the bell a few times without providing food, the dogs stopped salivating, but when he added the food again it only took a single trial before the dogs "remembered" their previously conditioned salivation response1.

So much for classical conditioning. The real excitement starts at operant conditioning. Classical conditioning can only activate reflexive actions like salivation or sexual arousal; operant conditioning can produce entirely new behaviors and is most associated with the idea of "reinforcement learning".
Serious research into operant conditioning began with B.F. Skinner's work on pigeons. Stick a pigeon in a box with a lever and some associated machinery (a "Skinner box"2). The pigeon wanders around, does various things, and eventually hits the lever. Delicious sugar water squirts out. The pigeon continues wandering about and eventually hits the lever again. Another squirt of delicious sugar water. Eventually it percolates into its tiny pigeon brain that maybe pushing this lever makes sugar water squirt out. It starts pushing the lever more and more, each push continuing to convince it that yes, this is a good idea.
Consider a second, less lucky pigeon. It, too, wanders about in a box and eventually finds a lever. It pushes the lever and gets an electric shock. Eh, maybe it was a fluke. It pushes the lever again and gets another electric shock. It starts thinking "Maybe I should stop pressing that lever." The pigeon continues wandering about the box doing anything and everything other than pushing the shock lever.
The basic concept of operant conditioning is that an animal will repeat behaviors that give it reward, but avoid behaviors that give it punishment3.
Skinner distinguished between primary reinforcers and secondary reinforcers. A primary reinforcer is hard-coded: for example, food and sex are hard-coded rewards, pain and loud noises are hard-coded punishments. A primary reinforcer can be linked to a secondary reinforcer by classical conditioning. For example, if a clicker is clicked just before giving a dog a treat, the clicker itself will eventually...
[SEQ RERUN] You Can Face Reality
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-07-05T15:25:05.711Z

Today's post, You Can Face Reality, was originally published on 09 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

This post quotes a poem by Eugene Gendlin, which reads, "What is true is already so. / Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. / Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. / And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. / Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. / People can stand what is true, / for they are already enduring it."

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 The Virtue of Narrowness, 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.
Dark Arts: Schopenhauer wrote The Book on How To Troll
by Raw_Power — 2011-07-05T13:13:59.722Z

AKA "The Art Of Controversy" AKA "The Art Of Always Being Right" AKA "Dialectic Eristic". Here's a pretty fun, illustrated version of the text, in actual Troll terms]. Here's an audiobook.

EDIT: In this article I adopt a bit of a Devil's Advocate attitude. I'm not entirely convinced of what I'm suggesting, but I'll try to give it my all to make it look at least worth considering. I might get carried away at some points and overtly relish the villainy like a mad Britannian prince, which is unsightly, and, more importantly, unwarranted, so please forgive that. I'll leave those elements in, so that this is a Self Demonstrating Article.

So, the rationale is as follows: sometimes you get in an argument with someone. You're not quite sure you're right. You're not quite sure he's right. Even if you play fair, there's no guarantee it's the truth that'll come out. A few hours later, you could think up of an argument that would have saved your cause, you just failed to think of it during the discussion itself. And usually it's not just a matter of finding the truth.
First, it's a matter of "being right". If you want to clash intellects, there's no more violent, crude, intimate way than this. When you're proven wrong in a discussion, especially in public and in a way that makes you look like an idiot, your ego could get hit hard. Not to mention your status. Back when this book was written, people killed themselves, and each other, over this stuff.
Second, beside your own pride and life, there might be stuff bigger than yourself riding on this. You just can't afford to stick to the truth, or to give up just because the other side has better arguments. You gotta win, in the eyes of the public, no matter what.
This book makes a fairly good job of singling out different tricks to bullshit your way into winning an argument. Or at least stall for time and take your opponent off-balance and distract them while you think of something legitimate to say. Let's review a non-comprehensive list of the tricks he proposes (the cartoon site and the full text are much more adequate, having one or many examples per case and being very eloquently phrased by the writer himself.

Let's classify them by blocks:

Attacks to the opponent's morale:

being an openly unfair and insolent prick just to piss them off.

claiming vicotry in an authoritative, assertive voice, despite the argument going

...
Meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup
by hwc — 2011-07-05T12:26:19.994Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup

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

WHERE:
Caribou Coffee‎, 1406 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC

Location:
Caribou Coffee‎, 1406 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC

Agenda:
The game of Nomic.
Rational discussion.

Join the mailing list!
http://groups.google.com/group/RTLW

Discussion article for the meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup
Anyone else going to the WorldFuture 2011 Conference in Vancouver?
by michaelkeenan — 2011-07-05T07:54:05.987Z

I'm attending the WorldFuture 2011 conference this weekend in Vancouver. I'd love to meet other rationalists here, so if you're coming too, please contact me at michael.keenan AT gmail.com, or just come say hi at the event. I'll be at the table representing The Seasteading Institute.
Open Problems
by lukeprog — 2011-07-05T07:25:48.852Z

(Inspired by.)

Einstein's four fundamental papers of 1905 were inspired by the statement of three open problems in science by Henri Poincaré:

Having earlier failed to get his doctorate in physics, [Einstein] had temporarily given up on the idea of an academic career, telling a friend that "the whole comedy has become boring." [But he] had recently read a book by Henri Poincaré, a French mathematician of enormous reputation, which identified three fundamental unsolved problems in science. The first concerned the 'photoelectric effect': how did ultraviolet light knock electrons off the surface of a piece of metal? The second concerned 'Brownian motion': why did pollen particles suspended in water move about in a random zigzag pattern? The third concerned the 'luminiferous ether' that was supposed to fill all of space and serve as the medium through which light waves moved, the way sound waves move through air, or ocean waves through water: why had experiments failed to detect the earth’s motion through this ether? Each of these problems had the potential to reveal what Einstein held to be the underlying simplicity of nature. Working alone, apart from the scientific community, the unknown junior clerk rapidly managed to dispatch all three. His solutions were presented in four papers, written in the months of March, April, May, and June of 1905.

A few years earlier, David Hilbert had published 23 open problems in mathematics, about half of which were solved during the 20th century.

More recently, Timothy Gowers has used his blog to promote open problems in mathematics that might be solved collaboratively, online. After just seven weeks, the first problem was "probably solved," resulting in some published papers under the pseudonym 'D.H.J. Polymath.'

The Clay Mathematics Institute offers a $1 million prize for the solution to any of 7 particularly difficult problems in mathematics. One of these problems has now been solved.

In 2006, researchers defined 14 open problems in artificial life, and their paper continues to guide research in that field.

And of course there are many more open problems. Many more.

One problem with Friendly AI research is that even those who could work on the project often don't have a clear picture of what the open problems are and how they interact with each other. There are a few

...
Meetup : Marin & SF Less Wrong Make Things Go Boom
by Mass_Driver — 2011-07-05T04:38:25.480Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Marin & SF Less Wrong Make Things Go Boom

WHEN: 05 July 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: Mel's Diner, 801 Mission St., San Francisco, CA

Happy Independence Day! San Francisco's Less Wrong group is having a meetup tomorrow, Tuesday July 5th, at our usual spot at Mel's Diner, starting at 7 pm sharp. This week, we are being joined by the better part of Marin County's 6 LW'ers, and I'd really like to show them a good time. I will bring fireworks to dinner that we can all set off together in as public a place as people have risk-tolerance for. In honor of the national holiday, this week's discussion theme will be "When (if ever) does it make sense to sacrifice yourself for a greater cause?" Note that we will try hard not to debate any -particular- cause for too long; the goal is not so much as to find The Answer To Politics as it is to find general heuristics that can help us evaluate political claims.

UPDATE -- The meetup attracted 4 people, and we all had a nice time. Planning for another joint SF-Marin meetup is in the works, this time hopefully with a bit more notice to everyone so that more of those who want to can attend. Photos of BOOM are available here.

Discussion article for the meetup : Marin & SF Less Wrong Make Things Go Boom
'Is' and 'Ought' and Rationality
by BobTheBob — 2011-07-05T03:53:05.786Z

On the face of it, there is a tension in adhering both to the idea that there are facts about what it's rational for people to do and to the idea that natural or scientific facts are all the facts there are. The aim of this post is just to try to make clear why this should be so, and hopefully to get feedback on what people think of the tension.

In short

To a first approximation, a belief is rational just in case you ought to hold it; an action rational just in case you ought to take it. A person is rational to the extent that she believes and does what she ought to. Being rational, it is fair to say, is a normative or prescriptive property, as opposed to a merely descriptive one. Natural science, on the other hand, is concerned merely with descriptive properties of things -what they weigh, how they are composed, how they move, and so on. On the face of it, being rational is not the sort of property about which we can theorize scientifically (that is, in the vocabulary of the natural sciences). To put the point another way, rationality concerns what a thing (agent) ought to do, natural science concerns only what it is and will do, and one cannot deduce 'ought' from 'is'.

At greater length

There are at least two is/ought problems, or maybe two ways of thinking about the is/ought problem. The first problem (or way of thinking about the one problem) is posed from a subjective point of view. I am aware that things are a certain way, and that I am disposed to take some course of action, but neither of these things implies that I ought to take any course of action -neither, that is, implies that taking a given course of action would in any sense be right. How do I justify the thought that any given action is the one I ought to take? Or, taking the thought one step further, how, attending only to my own thoughts, do I differentiate merely being inclined to do something from being bound by some kind of rule or principle or norm, to do something?
This is an interesting question -one which gets to the very core of the concept of being justified, and hence of being rational (rational beliefs being justified beliefs). But it isn't the problem of interest here.
The second problem, the problem of interest, is evident from a purely objective, scientific point of view. Consider a lowly rock. By empirical investigation, we can learn its mass, its density, its mineralogical com...
Meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup
by hwc — 2011-07-05T02:25:46.354Z
Link: self

Discussion article for the meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup

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

WHERE:
Caribou Coffee‎, 1406 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC

Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup #5

Location:
Caribou Coffee‎, 1406 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC

Agenda:
The game of Nomic.
Rational discussion.

Join the mailing list!
http://groups.google.com/group/RTLW

Discussion article for the meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup
Is g a measure of ability to absorb information in a non-inductive way?
by  — 2011-07-05T01:46:17.989Z

Eliezer and Robin discussed g somewhat in their debate. I think this question is one that we can do some more research on ourselves. The current hypothesis I'm exploring is that g measures the ability to take in information non-inductively this includes gossip, culture and taught skills.

If g is a real phenomenon then it has to be explained in some form. What is it that some people possess that enables them to do better in a vast range of activities than other people? It seems likely that it is ability to absorb information from the world in some sense.

When I was studying machine learning I was exhorted to put all the information about a problem domain in the learning algorithm, to make it learn efficiently. Now it was supposed to be learning about the world, so it seemed backwards that I needed to tell it about the problem to make it work. And each problem would need different information. So from this view there shouldn't be one factor that makes a system efficient over large numbers of problems. There is however one regularity about information in the world that could be exploited to help solve other problems, there is lots of information generated by humans stored in standard formats. So if this skill increased, you would expect it to have knock on effects in solving lots of other problems.

I'm avoiding calling it social or linguistic information, as that seems to have connotations of solving social and linguistic problems, where as this type of information can help in solving pattern recognition problems. For example learning the concept of a triangle, that it's triangle-ness is invariant to rotation, scaling etc, can help in IQ tests where changes are made to pictures of triangles and you have to spot the commonalities.

There is a sea of useful information out there in linguistic form. Maths and languages are taught linguistically, we memorise times tables and the letters of the alphabet. Even rationality as practised by lesswrong is counted in this class. What happens if you aren't very good at absorbing this vast wealth for some reason? It would be reasonable to expect that you would be less competent in general than your fellow man. Being able to "understand" concepts or formula is closely associated with the lay meaning of intelligence.

So what can we predict about g if this view is correct?

Taking in non-statistical social ...
Meetup : Less Wrong Ottawa
by Cyan — 2011-07-05T01:19:28.276Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Ottawa

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

WHERE:
283 Elgin Street, Ottawa, ON

Come and meet fellow truth-seekers on the second floor of the Fox and Feather. We'll be in back room #1 if it's free.

Recently we've decided to try discussing one LW post each week. This week's post is reasons for being rational.

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Ottawa
The Blue-Minimizing Robot
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-04T22:26:18.838Z

Imagine a robot with a turret-mounted camera and laser. Each moment, it is programmed to move forward a certain distance and perform a sweep with its camera. As it sweeps, the robot continuously analyzes the average RGB value of the pixels in the camera image; if the blue component passes a certain threshold, the robot stops, fires its laser at the part of the world corresponding to the blue area in the camera image, and then continues on its way.
Watching the robot's behavior, we would conclude that this is a robot that destroys blue objects. Maybe it is a surgical robot that destroys cancer cells marked by a blue dye; maybe it was built by the Department of Homeland Security to fight a group of terrorists who wear blue uniforms. Whatever. The point is that we would analyze this robot in terms of its goals, and in those terms we would be tempted to call this robot a blue-minimizer: a machine that exists solely to reduce the amount of blue objects in the world.
Suppose the robot had human level intelligence in some side module, but no access to its own source code; that it could learn about itself only through observing its own actions. The robot might come to the same conclusions we did: that it is a blue-minimizer, set upon a holy quest to rid the world of the scourge of blue objects.
But now stick the robot in a room with a hologram projector. The hologram projector (which is itself gray) projects a hologram of a blue object five meters in front of it. The robot's camera detects the projector, but its RGB value is harmless and the robot does not fire. Then the robot's camera detects the blue hologram and zaps it. We arrange for the robot to enter this room several times, and each time it ignores the projector and zaps the hologram, without effect.
Here the robot is failing at its goal of being a blue-minimizer. The right way to reduce the amount of blue in the universe is to destroy the projector; instead its beams flit harmlessly through the hologram.
Again, give the robot human level intelligence. Teach it exactly what a hologram projector is and how it works. Now what happens? Exactly the same thing - the robot executes its code, which says to scan the room until its camera registers blue, then shoot its laser.
In fact, there are many ways to subvert this robot. What if we put a lens over its camera which inverts the image, so that white appears as black, re...
Behaviorism: Beware Anthropomorphizing Humans
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-04T20:40:49.748Z

Related to: The Comedy of Behaviorism

Behaviorism's gotten a bad rap.
It's gone down in history as the school founded upon the idea that there's no such thing as mental phenomena or cognitive processing, and if there are we can't ever know anything about them, and if we can I don't want to know about it, and if you tell me I will put my fingers in my ears and whistle, and SHUT UP SHUT UP I CAN'T HEAR YOU.
Actually it was more subtle.

The movement did begin with a variation on that principle for historical reasons. John Watson began his work thirty years before the first computer. Information processing still looked like magic; most scientists didn't realize that reductionist accounts of information processing were even possible. Neurons were still "the thing that Spanish guy keeps talking about". Today we discuss the brain by analogy to computers; in Watson's day, they discussed the brain by analogy to their own most advanced technology, mechanical devices. Today we talk about looking for mental programs and subroutines; they sought its gears and levers instead. And just as today many philosophers dismiss consciousness as an epiphenomenon of information processing because computers don't seem to be conscious, so Watson dismissed all mental states as an epiphenomenon of mechanical processing because mechanical devices didn't have mental states.

As science advanced, and as it picked up glimpses of cognition from the Stroop effect and early priming experiments, behaviorism became more sophisticated. Maybe its pinnacle of subtlety came with B.F. Skinner's "radical behaviorism" movement, which accepted inner mental life (which Skinner called "mental behavior") and sought to explain it.

If Skinner was willing to acknowledge inner life, why do we still call his theory behaviorist? It's hard and not especially profitable to define "behaviorism", but if I had to try I'd say it is a methodology that doesn't consider mental phenomena useful as a fundamental level of explanation. So if we want to know why Wanda runs away from a wasp, saying "because her previous encounters wasps have been negatively reinforced" is more useful than "because she felt scared".
And if Wanda herself says "No, I ran away because I felt scared," we shouldn't be especially interested in her opinion: she has privileged access to a certain type of output of the process generating her behavior, but not ...