trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences): Exercises
by RobinZ — 2011-04-17T15:31:26.691Z

The following is a series of exercises designed to test one's understanding of "Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)", a post in the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

A. Examine the following list of statements. For each statement, ask: What observations would you expect to make if this statement were true that you would not expect to make if this statement were false, or vice-versa? If no such observations exist, indicate that this is so.

Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota.

The universe does not exist; all existence is imaginary.

The earth is flat.

The comic book Queen & Country is based on the British ITV series The Sandbaggers.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter is a good book.

"A Visit from St. Nicholas" (a.k.a. "Twas the Night Before Christmas") was written by Clement Clarke Moore.

Herbert Hoover was left-handed.

B. In the Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip song "Thou Shalt Always Kill", one of the injunctions given to the listener is, "Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were." After this statement comes a list of such bands, beginning, "The Beatles: Were just a band. Led Zeppelin: Just a band. The Beach Boys: Just a band." Consider just this first statement, that the Beatles were just a band. What does it imply in terms of anticipated experiences?

The author's remarks on the solutions to these questions appear in this comment.
A confused model of the self-indication assumption
by AdeleneDawner — 2011-04-17T13:40:20.112Z

Imagine that I write a computer program that starts by choosing a random integer W between 0 and 2. It then generates 10^(3W) random simple math problems, numbering each one and placing it in list P. It then chooses a random math problem from P and presents it to me, without telling me what the problem number is for that particular math problem.

In this case, being presented with a single math problem tells me nothing about the state of W - I expect it to do that in any case. Similarly, if I subsequently find out that I was shown P(50), that rules out W=0 and makes W=1 1,000 times more likely than W=2.

Given that W represents which world we're in, each math problem in P represents a unique person, and being presented with a math problem represents experiencing being that person or knowing that that person exists, the self indication assumption says that my model is flawed.

According to the self-indication assumption, my program needs to do an extra step to be a proper representation. After it generates a list of math problems, it needs to then choose a second random number, X, and present me with a math problem only if there's a math problem numbered X. In this case, being presented with a math problem or not does tell me something about W - I have a much higher chance of getting a math problem if W=2 and a much lower chance if W=0 - and finding out that the one math problem I was presented with was P(50) tells me much more about X than it does about W.

I don't see why this is a proper representation, or why my first model is flawed, though I suspect it relates to thinking about the issue in terms of specific people rather than any person in the relevant set, and I tend to get lost in the math of the usual discussions. Help?
Shanghai Less Wrong Meetup April 30th, 2pm
by Patrick — 2011-04-17T11:11:35.144Z

John Teddy asked me to post the following info for a Less Wrong meetup he is organizing.

Where: Starbucks, Carrefour Mall, the Zhongshan Park Store, near the Zhongshan Park Station, Line 2, 3, or 4, Shanghai, China

B1&B2, No.1018, ChangNing Road, ChangNing District, Shanghai ( 长宁路1018号, 龙之梦购物中心B1-2楼 近凯旋路 )

When: 2011, April 30th at 2pm.

Contact John Teddy: 18721399070 (phone no.)
Ray Kurzweil on The Colbert Report [video embed]
by Kevin — 2011-04-17T10:13:00.247Z

<table style='font:11px arial; color:#333; background-color:#f5f5f5' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' width='512' height='340'><tbody><tr style='background-color:#e5e5e5' valign='middle'><td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;'><a target='_blank' style='color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.colbertnation.com'>The Colbert Report</a></td><td style='padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; text-align:right; font-weight:bold;'>Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c</td></tr><tr style='height:14px;' valign='middle'><td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'><a target='_blank' style='color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/381488/april-12-2011/ray-kurzweil'>Ray Kurzweil</a></td></tr><tr style='height:14px; background-color:#353535' valign='middle'><td colspan='2' style='padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; width:512px; overflow:hidden; text-align:right'><a target='_blank' style='color:#96deff; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.colbertnation.com/'>www.colbertnation.com</a></td></tr><tr valign='middle'><td style='padding:0px;' colspan='2'><embed style='display:block' src='http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:381488' width='512' height='288' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' wmode='window' allowFullscreen='true' flashvars='autoPlay=false' allowscriptaccess='always' allownetworking='all' bgcolor='#000000'></embed></td></tr><tr style='height:18px;' valign='middle'><td style='padding:0px;' colspan='2'><table style='margin:0px; text-align:center' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' width='100%' height='100%'><tr valign='middle'><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;' href='http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/'>Colbert Report Full Episodes</a></td><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;' href='http://www.indecisionforever.com/'>Political Humor & Satire Blog</a></td><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; t

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The right kind of fun?
by Dorikka — 2011-04-16T23:20:51.350Z

If you consider that the utility generated by working is much greater than the utility directly generated by having fun, then the main thing that you're going to optimizing when you have fun is how much motivation the memory of having that fun increases your working capabilities. This is distinctly different from optimizing for the direct preference fulfillment generated by the fun, even if the same activities are optimal for both utility functions.

The same model works for any action A such that the utility generated by the effect of that action on another action is much greater than the utility generated by the action itself. This probably applies to most maintainance actions, such as doing laundry, sleeping, eating, but this is more obvious to us -- we usually don't see laundry as an end unto itself, but we often do pursue fun for it's own sake. I'm not advocating that we shouldn't have fun, but that we (or at least I) seem to be optimizing for the wrong thing -- direct preference fulfillment, rather than motivation.

This feels like a significant insight, but I tend to get a significant number of false positives. Any ideas on how we might use this?
"High Value" Karma vs "Regular" (i.e. Quirrell Points)
by Raemon — 2011-04-16T22:26:41.600Z

I consider this a low value post, because it muses about a particular idea without actually doing hard work to get it done. (I do not have the knowledge or resources to do so, or even know if it's possible to implement this idea on Less Wrong. I'm not even sure if it would be worth the effort)

There are posts that I upvote because I thought they were funny, mildly informative or well reasoned. Sometimes I upvote a simple (easy to produce) link to a good article. Sometimes I admit I upvote them simply because I agree with them (I generally don't upvote things I agree with if they use bad reasoning, but I am less likely to upvote something I DON'T agree with unless it is extremely well thought out, to the point that I actually updated my beliefs because of it.) I don't apologize for that - it's a natural outgrowth of the Karma system. It costs me nothing to give Karma to whatever I like and there is no means to enforce any particular usage of Karma.

But there are things I upvote because they were actually important and good and required hard work to put together. And I feel a little bit sad that the most I can reward those things is with a "click" that is exactly as valuable as the click I give people who said something mildly funny.

High value posts tend to acquire a lot of Karma because a lot of people feel motivated to click. But I think there is a qualitative difference between a guy who makes one amazing post that gathers 80 Karma and a guy who makes 80 posts that are kinda neat. I think it would interesting, fun, and potentially valuable to distinguish between those kinds of people.

So what if we had regular Karma, and then we had some kind of Superkarma. (Perhaps a good name would be "Status"). Status points would be genuinely rare - when you give one, you are not allowed to give another one for at least 24 hours. You can still give them to a funny joke or viewpoint that aligns with your tribe, but I think assigning them rarity would encourage people to reward genuinely important things. (I'm not sure 24 hours is the ideal waiting period, it just sounded nice).

I'm actually kinda amazed by how much I care about Karma. I get a "sweet, level up!" message in my head every time I see that I've passed another 100 points. But most of my Karma is from random comments. The two fastest upvoted posts I made were links to an article about the Singularity and a webcomic...
Sequence Exercise: first 3 posts from "A Human's Guide to Words"
by Normal_Anomaly — 2011-04-16T17:21:02.159Z

Folktheory, RobinZ, and I are designing exercises to go with the sequences. Here’s my first one. Please make suggestions as to how this could be improved or augmented and what to do the same/differently in future exercises. My current plan is to do more from the sequence "A Human's Guide to Words." This post will be edited to in response to suggestions.

Exercise for “The Parable of the Dagger," "The Parable of Hemlock," and "Words as Hidden Inferences”

This exercise is meant to be worked on a computer. You can fill it out either in your head or by copying the text into a word processor. Please do not read ahead of where you are working. Where applicable, answers are posted in rot13.

1. List several properties which are common to crows. Here’s a picture of one to help you out:

______________________ ______________________

______________________ ______________________

______________________ ______________________

Some of the characteristics you may have put down are “black,” “bird,” “can fly,” and “caws.”

People in the time of Aristotle believed things were logically 100% certain to have all the properties that were part of their definition. For instance, they said they could be 100% certain that Socrates was mortal because humans are mortal "by definition."

Now, thinking like an Aristotelian and using those four characteristics, is that bird in the linked picture a crow?

Answer: Lbh pna’g fnl jurgure vg vf be abg. Lbh unira’g frra vg syl be urneq vg pnj.

2. Now, suppose I (assume I’m completely trustworthy) were to tell you that there is a crow behind that door. If your brain worked like Aristotle thought, you would be certain that it had all the properties listed above. Think of two ways that you could be wrong.

Some possible answers:

Gur pebj pbhyq or n ungpuyvat, jvgubhg erq srnguref be gur novyvgl gb syl.

Vg pbhyq or na nyovab.

Vg pbhyq or obea zhgr.

If you were able to think of any of those answers, that shows you weren’t really certain....
Friendly to who?
by TimFreeman — 2011-04-16T11:43:06.959Z

At
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ru/the_bedrock_of_fairness/ldy
Eliezer mentions two challenges he often gets, "Friendly to who?" and "Oh, so you get to say what 'Friendly' means." At the moment I see only one true answer to these questions, which I give below. If you can propose alternatives in the comments, please do.

I suspect morality is in practice a multiplayer game, so talking about it needs multiple people to be involved. Therefore, let's imagine a dialogue between A and B.

A: Okay, so you're interested in Friendly AI. Who will it be Friendly toward?

B: Obviously the people who participate in making the system will decide how to program it, so they will decide who it is Friendly toward.

A: So the people who make the system decide what "Friendly" means?

B: Yes.

A: Then they could decide that it will be Friendly only toward them, or toward White people. Aren't that sort of selfishness or racism immoral?

B: I can try to answer questions about the world, so if you can define morality so I can do experiments to discover what is moral and what is immoral, I can try to guess the results of those experiments and report them. What do you mean by morality?

A: I don't know. If it doesn't mean anything, why do people talk about morality so much?

B: People often profess beliefs to label themselves as members of a group. So far as I can tell, the belief that some things are moral and other things are not is one of those beliefs. I don't have any other explanation for why people talk so much about something that isn't subject to experimentation.

A: So if that's what morality is, then it's fundamentally meaningless unless I'm planning out what lies to tell in order to get positive regard from a potential ingroup, or better yet I manage to somehow deceive myself so I can truthfully conform to the consensus morality of my desired ingroup. If that's all it is, there's no constraint on how a Friendly AI works, right? Maybe you'll build it and it will be only be Friendly toward B.

B: No, because I can't do it by myself. Suppose I approach you and say "I'm going to make a Friendly AI that lets me control it and doesn't care about anyone else's preference." Would you help me?

A: Obviously not.

B: Nobody else would either, so the only way I can unilaterally run the world with an FAI is to create it by mys...
wireless-heading, value drift and so on
by h-H — 2011-04-16T06:45:54.847Z

A typical image of the wire-head is that of a guy with his brain connected via a wire thingy to a computer, living in a continuous state of pleasure, sort of like being drugged up for life.

What I mean by wireless heading-which is not such an elegant term but anyway- is the idea of little to no value drift. Clippy is usually brought up as a most dangerous AI that we should avoid creating at all costs, yet what's the point of creating copies of us and tile the universe with them? how is that different than what clippy does?

by 'us' I mean beings who share our intuitive understanding or can agree with us on things like morality or joy or not being bored etc.

Shouldn't we focus on engineered/controlled value drift rather than preventing it entirely? is that possible to program into an AI? somehow I don't think so. It seems to me that the whole premise of a single benevolent AI depends to a large extent on the similarity of basic human drives, supposedly we're so close to each other it's not a big deal to prevent value drift.

but once we get really close to the singularity all sorts of technologies will cause humanity to 'fracture' into so many different groups, that inevitably there will be some groups with what we might call 'alien minds', minds so different than most baseline humans as they are now that there wouldn't be much hope of convincing them to 'rejoin the fold' and not create an AI of their own. for all we know they might even have an easier time creating an AI that's friendly to them than it is for baseline humans to do the same, considering this a black swan event-or one that is impossible to predict when it will happen-what to do?

discuss.
Offense versus harm minimization
by Scott Alexander — 2011-04-16T01:06:23.475Z

Imagine that one night, an alien prankster secretly implants electrodes into the brains of an entire country - let's say Britain. The next day, everyone in Britain discovers that pictures of salmon suddenly give them jolts of painful psychic distress. Every time they see a picture of a salmon, or they hear about someone photographing a salmon, or they even contemplate taking such a picture themselves, they get a feeling of wrongness that ruins their entire day.
I think most decent people would be willing to go to some trouble to avoid taking pictures of salmon if British people politely asked this favor of them. If someone deliberately took lots of salmon photos and waved them in the Brits' faces, I think it would be fair to say ey isn't a nice person. And if the British government banned salmon photography, and refused to allow salmon pictures into the country, well, maybe not everyone would agree but I think most people would at least be able to understand and sympathize with the reasons for such a law.
So why don't most people extend the same sympathy they would give Brits who don't like pictures of salmon, to Muslims who don't like pictures of Mohammed?

SHOULD EVERYBODY DRAW MOHAMMED?
I first1 started thinking along these lines when I heard about Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, and revisited the issue recently after discovering http://www.reddit.com/r/mohammadpics/.
I have to admit, I find these funny. I want to like them. But my attempts to think of reasons why this is totally different from showing pictures of salmon to British people fail:
• You could argue Brits did not choose to have their abnormal sensitivity to salmon while Muslims might be considered to be choosing their sensitivity to Mohammed. But this requires a libertarian free will. Further, I see little difference between how a Muslim "chooses" to get upset at disrespect to Mohammed, and how a Westerner might "choose" to get upset if you called eir mother a whore. Even though the anger isn't being caused by alien technology, it doesn't feel like a "choice" and it's more than just a passing whim. And if tomorrow I tried to "choose" to become angry every time someone showed me a picture of a salmon, I couldn't do it - I could pretend to be angry, but I couldn't make myself feel genuine rage.
• Muslims' sensitivity to Mohammed is based on a falsehood; Islam is a false religion and Mohammed is...
Cryonics: convincing my parents
by Axel — 2011-04-15T19:02:02.230Z

I'm currently trying to convince my parents to sign up for cryonics.

The problem is that they are completely opposed to the any form of life extension and/or immortality (and that’s without even mentioning something as "strange" as cryonics). Unfortunately, being their child, I have the intrinsic property that I can never know more about life then they do. The only thing they will believe are scientific studies from respectable scientists (a respectable scientist being someone who only says what they want to hear and is not me)

I have the arguments I gathered from Less Wrong and the Alcor Library. I’m focusing on my mother since my dad is impossible to convince without her support.
Her argument is that when you live for a very long time/forever wars are almost guaranteed to occur at least once in your lifetime and she doesn’t want to live through those. I asked her when, given that we could perfectly predict the future, we would know a war would break out tomorrow she would commit suicide today. Her answer was yes, as she couldn’t bear losing any of us and doesn’t want experience a war. I pointed out how I would feel if she died but she just dismissed the entire thing as crazy.

My parents aren’t religious at all, so that’s one less bridge to cross but for all the rest I would greatly appreciate anything that might help convince them.
How Many of Me Are There?
by Eneasz — 2011-04-15T19:00:48.008Z

This post is not about many worlds. It is somewhat disjointed, but builds to a single point.

If an AI was asked today how many human individuals populate this planet, it may not return a number the several-billions range. In fact I’d be willing to bet it’d return a number in the tens of thousands, with the caveat that the individuals vary wildly in measure.

I agree with Robin Hanson that if two instances of me exist, and one is terminated, I didn’t die, I simply got smaller.

In 1995 Robert Sapolsky wrote in Ego Boundaries “My students usually come with ego boundaries like exoskeletons. […] They want their rituals newly minted and shared horizontally within their age group, not vertically over time,” whereas in older societies “needs transcend individual rights to a bounded ego, and people in traditional communities are named and raised as successive incarnations. In such societies, Abraham always lives 900 years--he simply finds a new body to inhabit now and then. ”

Ego boundaries may be more rigid now, but that doesn’t make people more unique. If anything, people have become more like each other. Memes are powerful shapers of mental agents, and as technology allows memes to breed and compete more freely the most viral ones spread through the species.

Acausal trade allows for amazing efficiencies, not merely on a personal level but also via nationalism and religion. People executing strong acausal trading routines will out-compete those who don’t.

Timeless Decision Theory proscribes making decisions as if choosing the outcome for all actors sufficiently like yourself across all worlds. As competition narrows the field of memeplexes to a handful of powerful and virulent ubermemes, and those memeplexes influence the structure and strength of individual’s mental agents in similar ways, people become more like each other. In so doing they are choosing *as if* a single entity more and more effectively. To an outside observer, there may be very little to differentiate two such humans from each other.

Therefore it may be wrong to think of oneself as a singular person. I am not just me – I am also effectively everyone who is sufficiently like me. It’s been argued that there are only seven stories, and every story can be thought of as an elaboration of one of these. It seems likely there are only...
DC Meetup: Last Discussion Thread
by atucker — 2011-04-15T04:48:10.113Z

Followup to: this and this

I'm going to be in Cambridge for the next week or so, so I'm posting things now to make sure that we can get the ball rolling.

There's going to be DC meetups on May 1st and May 15th. 2 PM - 8 PM, unless anyone objects.

There was discussion about whether to meet in Bethesda or NW DC. I propose that we just try a meetup in both, May 1st in Bethesda and May 15th in NW DC.

Some questions I have:

Any suggestions on what I should look for in a venue?

Anything you want me to ask the Cambridge meetup group?

I have some preliminary things to talk about in mind, but if you guys could think about a few topics too, it would be helpful.
First Triangle LW Meetup 5/4 7pm (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill)
by curiousepic — 2011-04-15T03:54:32.787Z

When: Wednesday, May 4th at 7:00 pm

Where: Morrisville Outlet Mall Food Court I'll be wearing a Lego evolution shirt and may or may not have a LW sign.

This Google doc contains some preliminary notes as well as my phone number. I imagine this meeting will consist of introductions and some meta stuff about future meetups. We have seven people that can attend, including the number three LW poster, Alicorn. Hopefully there are even more LWers in the area, or at least rationalists that we can reach out to; it certainly seems like there should be, being the "Research Triangle" and all. And feel free to join us if you're not officially inside the Triangle, of course. If there are a bunch of people in Greensboro or Charlotte, we can probably move the venue further West.

Hope to see you there!