trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[LINK] Learning without practice, through fMRI induction
by maia — 2012-10-07T03:15:09.561Z

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122523&org=NSF&from=news
From the article:

New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise.

Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.

Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person's visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.

EDIT: To clarify, this is almost certainly over-hyped. However, it appears to at least be an instance of very interesting biofeedback.
Giulio Tononi's "Integrated Information Theory" of Consciousness
by DataPacRat — 2012-10-07T02:59:55.128Z

My daily browsing has come across an idea I haven't seen before, though it has been mentioned on LW occasionally. Created by Giulio Tononi, the basic premise seems to be that consciousness can be quantified, by measuring how much information is contained within the overall patterns of a system in excess of the information contained within its subsystems - that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Some further browsing has let me find a somewhat uninformative Wikipedia article, a printed book using a fictional narrative, a scientific paper, and a 'Provisional Manifesto'.

The general idea doesn't seem to fall prey to most of the more obvious flaws that theories about consciousness tend to end up suffering. But I'm far from an expert in the field, or potentially related fields such as considering Φ's possible use as a basis for developing AGI/FAI. So: what does the wisdom of the crowd of LW have to say about this concept?
Online Optimal Philanthropy Meetup: Tue 10/9, 8pm ET
by jefftk — 2012-10-06T13:35:42.346Z

How can we do the most good in the world? What impact can we have, and what's the impact on us?? What are the best charities? How can we evaluate them? Online discussion via g+ hangout, Tuesday October 9th, 8pm ET (Boston time).

https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cj57chi6jgse1avv8f80hjh9g3c?a=b
[LINK] The half-life of a fact
by David_Gerard — 2012-10-06T11:25:53.904Z

Everything you know will, in due course, be wrong. A review of Samuel Arbesman's The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date in Slate:

Arbesman's book expands on a piece he wrote in 2010 for the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. That short essay, called "Warning: Your reality is out of date," laid out a theory of what Arbesman named the mesofact. "When people think of knowledge," he wrote, "they generally think of two sorts of facts." One includes the data that should never change, like the atomic weight of hydrogen, while the other comprises all the tidbits that shift from day to day, like the closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Even in the stable camp, facts can mutate: An atom's weight, for example, varies depending on the isotope. But Arbesman is more interested in a third category of knowledge, one that's nestled between the other two in terms of how amenable it is to change. These are the facts that shift too slowly for us to notice, but not so slowly that they'll only matter to our children. "Mesofacts," he says, evolve within our lifetimes but often out of view.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/books/2012/10/samuel_arbesman_s_the_half_life_of_facts_reviewed_.html
Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-10-06T09:59:38.292Z

Followup to: The Useful Idea of Truth

It is an error mode, and indeed an annoyance mode, to go about preaching the importance of the "Truth", especially if the Truth is supposed to be something incredibly lofty instead of some boring, mundane truth about gravity or rainbows or what your coworker said about your manager.

Thus it is a worthwhile exercise to practice deflating the word 'true' out of any sentence in which it appears. (Note that this is a special case of rationalist taboo.) For example, instead of saying, "I believe that the sky is blue, and that's true!" you can just say, "The sky is blue", which conveys essentially the same information about what color you think the sky is. Or if it feels different to say "I believe the Democrats will win the election!" than to say, "The Democrats will win the election", this is an important warning of belief-alief divergence.

Try it with these:

I believe Jess just wants to win arguments.

It’s true that you weren’t paying attention.

I believe I will get better.

In reality, teachers care a lot about students.

If 'truth' is defined by an infinite family of sentences like 'The sentence "the sky is blue" is true if and only if the sky is blue', then why would we ever need to talk about 'truth' at all?

Well, you can't deflate 'truth' out of the sentence "True beliefs are more likely to make successful experimental predictions" because it states a property of map-territory correspondences in general. You could say 'accurate maps' instead of 'true beliefs', but you would still be invoking the same concept.

It's only because most sentences containing the word 'true' are not talking about map-territory correspondences in general, that most such sentences can be deflated.

Now consider - when are you forced to use the word 'rational'?

As with the word 'true', there are very few sentences that truly need to contain the word 'rational' in them. Consider the following deflations, all of which convey essentially the same information about your own opinions:

"It's rational to believe the sky is blue"
-> "I think the sky is blue"
-> "The sky is blue"

"Rational Dieting: Why To Choose Paleo"
-> "Why you should think the paleo diet has the best consequences for health"
-> "I like the paleo diet"

Generally, wh...
Skill: The Map is Not the Territory
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-10-06T09:59:25.358Z

Followup to: The Useful Idea of Truth (minor post)

So far as I know, the first piece of rationalist fiction - one of only two explicitly rationalist fictions I know of that didn't descend from HPMOR, the other being "David's Sling" by Marc Stiegler - is the Null-A series by A. E. van Vogt. In Vogt's story, the protagonist, Gilbert Gosseyn, has mostly non-duplicable abilities that you can't pick up and use even if they're supposedly mental - e.g. the ability to use all of his muscular strength in emergencies, thanks to his alleged training. The main explicit-rationalist skill someone could actually pick up from Gosseyn's adventure is embodied in his slogan:

"The map is not the territory."

Sometimes it still amazes me to contemplate that this proverb was invented at some point, and some fellow named Korzybski invented it, and this happened as late as the 20th century. I read Vogt's story and absorbed that lesson when I was rather young, so to me this phrase sounds like a sheer background axiom of existence.

But as the Bayesian Conspiracy enters into its second stage of development, we must all accustom ourselves to translating mere insights into applied techniques. So:

Meditation: Under what circumstances is it helpful to consciously think of the distinction between the map and the territory - to visualize your thought bubble containing a belief, and a reality outside it, rather than just using your map to think about reality directly? How exactly does it help, on what sort of problem?

...

...

...

Skill 1: The conceivability of being wrong.

In the story, Gilbert Gosseyn is most liable to be reminded of this proverb when some belief is uncertain; "Your belief in that does not make it so." It might sound basic, but this is where some of the earliest rationalist training starts - making the jump from living in a world where the sky just is blue, the grass just is green, and people from the Other Political Party just are possessed by demonic spirits of pure evil, to a world where it's possible that reality is going to be different from these beliefs and come back and surprise you. You might assign low probability to that in the grass-is-green case, but in a world where there's a territory separate from the map it is at least conceivable that reality turns out to disagree wit...
[link] Pei Wang: Motivation Management in AGI Systems
by Kaj_Sotala — 2012-10-06T09:25:50.533Z

Related post: Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue.

Motivation Management in AGI Systems, a paper to be published at AGI-12.

Abstract. AGI systems should be able to manage its motivations or goals that are persistent, spontaneous, mutually restricting, and changing over time. A mechanism for handles this kind of goals is introduced and discussed.

From the discussion section:

The major conclusion argued in this paper is that an AGI system should always maintain a goal structure (or whatever it is called) which contains multiple goals that are separately specifi ed, with the properties that

Some of the goals are accurately speci fied, and can be fully achieved, while some others are vaguely specifi ed and only partially achievable, but nevertheless have impact on the system's decisions.

The goals may conflict with each other on what the system should do at a moment, and cannot be achieved all together. Very often the system has to make compromises among the goals.

Due to the restriction in computational resources, the system cannot take all existing goals into account when making each decision, and nor can it keep a complete record of the goal derivation history.

The designers and users are responsible for the input goals of an AGI system, from which all the other goals are derived, according to the system's experience. There is no guarantee that the derived goals will be logically consistent with the input goals, except in highly simplifi ed situations.

One area that is closely related to goal management is AI ethics. The previous discussions focused on the goal the designers assign to an AGI system ("super goal" or "final goal"), with the implicit assumption that such a goal will decide the consequences caused by the A(G)I systems. However, the above analysis shows that though the input goals are indeed important, they are not the dominating factor that decides the broad impact of AI to human society. Since no AGI system can be omniscient and omnipotent, to be "general-purpose" means such a system has to handle problems for which its knowledge and resources are insufficient [16, 18], and one direct consequence is that its actions may produce unanticipated results. This consequence, plus the previous conclusion that the eff ective goal for an action may be inconsistent with the input goals, will render many of the previous suggestions mostly irrelevant to AI ethics

...
What I Learned About Meetup Organization
by  — 2012-10-06T02:11:33.892Z

Related: How to Run a Successful LW Meetup

(posted to lw-organizers and Lesswrong discussion)

I want more discussion of meetup organization tactics, failures, successes, and ideas. We are not going to build an awesome network of rationality dojos without sharing momentum with each other.

Towards that end, here's some useful stuff that I learned from trying to make the vancouver meetup more awesome.

First of all, I'll second everything in the NYC case study. A lot of the stuff in this post is going to be rehashed stuff from that post, but I still had to learn it the hard way. Maybe if we repeat it enough, it will stick and someone won't have to learn it the hard way.

When I started going to the Vancouver meetup, it wasn't really happening. I got inspired by the "communities need heroes" thing and started to just make it happen. It worked. You really do need someone holding the bottom line. When I fail to make things happen, other people don't reliably step in, things just stop happening. This one keeps getting drilled into me. I still seem to have an aversion to seizing power and stepping on toes, but I'm starting to see that it's really ok. Go ahead and seize power. Be the benevolent dictator. People like it.

For a while, we tried to do group readings of The Sequences and some books like "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It didn't really work. To quote some Web 2.0 troll: "Users don't read". Not only do people not read, they feel like they shouldn't come if they haven't read the stuff, even if you insist it doesn't matter. What does work is one person reading something, summarizing it, and preparing a presentation of it. It's more work, but you get better discussion and more value.

Another thing that works well is presentations and led activities on any interesting topic. This is even better than "book review" type stuff. We've had wonderful talks on how to make a lot of money, basics of decision and probability theory, some material from the CFAR minicamps. It's all gone over really well, and we get interesting discussions and lots of learning. Talks and lectures work really well. People can just come in and receive value with no effort on their part. This is good.

The other day, no one prepared anything to present, and we ended up just having unfocused discussion. It sucked. We talked about inconsequential stuff and didn't learn anything valuable and didn...
Meetup : Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup
by blueowl — 2012-10-06T00:09:03.392Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup

WHEN:
09 December 2012 05:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Sofia, Bulgaria

If interested, join our group: http://groups.google.com/group/sofia-lesswrong
Ignore the date in the description. Time and place will be discussed in the group at some point in the future.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup
Meetup : Washington DC Show and tell meetup: Economics
by rocurley — 2012-10-05T20:47:12.320Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Show and tell meetup: Economics

WHEN:
14 October 2012 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery Plaza, Washington, DC 20001, USA

This meetup is going to be the first in what I hope will be a series of "show and tell" meetups. One of our members has agreed to talk about economics, one of his areas of expertise. This should be much better if people come equipped with questions or subtopics of particular interest to them, so please do so!

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Show and tell meetup: Economics
[Link] Inside the Cold, Calculating Mind of LessWrong?
by  — 2012-10-05T18:23:46.223Z

An article from the Wall Street Journal. The original title might be slightly mind-killing for some people, but I found it moderately interesting especially considering that many LessWrongers formed part of the data set for the study the article talks about and a large fraction of us identified as libertarian on the last survey.

Inside the Cold, Calculating Libertarian Mind

An individual's personality shapes his or her political ideology at least as much as circumstances, background and influences. That is the gist of a recent strand of psychological research identified especially with the work of Jonathan Haidt. The baffling (to liberals) fact that a large minority of working-class white people vote for conservative candidates is explained by psychological dispositions that override their narrow economic interests.

In tests, libertarians displayed less emotion, empathy and disgust than conservatives or liberals.

In his recent book "The Righteous Mind," Dr. Haidt confronted liberal bafflement and made the case that conservatives are motivated by morality just as liberals are, but also by a larger set of moral "tastes"—loyalty, authority and sanctity, in addition to the liberal tastes for compassion and fairness. Studies show that conservatives are more conscientious and sensitive to disgust but less tolerant of change; liberals are more empathic and open to new experiences.

But ideology does not have to be bipolar. It need not fall on a line from conservative to liberal. In a recently published paper, Ravi Iyer from the University of Southern California, together with Dr. Haidt and other researchers at the data-collection platform YourMorals.org, dissect the personalities of those who describe themselves as libertarian.

These are people who often call themselves economically conservative but socially liberal. They like free societies as well as free markets, and they want the government to get out of the bedroom as well as the boardroom. They don't see why, in order to get a small-government president, they have to vote for somebody who is keen on military spending and religion; or to get a tolerant and compassionate society they have to vote for a large and intrusive state.

The study collated the results of 16 personality surveys and experiments completed by nearly 12,000 self-identified libertarians who visited YourMorals.org. The re

...
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Melbourne, Moscow, Purdue, Vienna, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-10-05T16:13:13.326Z

This summary was posted to LW main on September 28th, and has been moved to discussion. The more recent summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Berlin Meetup: 28 September 2012 07:30PM
Vienna meetup: 28 September 2012 07:00PM
Purdue Meetup: 28 September 2012 09:45PM
Moscow: applied rationality and web resources: 29 September 2012 04:00PM
Washington DC: Choice Blindness: 30 September 2012 03:00PM
Munich Meetup, October 6th : 06 October 2012 02:00PM
(Durham NC) HPMoR Discussion, chapters 4-7: 06 October 2012 11:00AM
(Durham NC) Research Triangle Area Less Wrong: 11 October 2012 06:00PM

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: 29 September 2018 01:30PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 05 October 2012 07:00PM
Cambridge (MA) first-Sundays meetup: 07 October 2012 02:00PM
(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 i...
[Link] Technology will destroy human nature
by  — 2012-10-05T15:07:29.178Z

Related to: Kaj Sotala's Posts, Blogs by LWers

By fellow LessWronger Kaj_Sotala on his blog.

Scott recently made two posts [1 2] about some of the dangers of technology, and of becoming too powerful for yourself. Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t entirely understand his concern. As far as I could tell, he was worried that at some point, we might perfectly know the best possible strategy for pursuing all of our desires, and have the willpower to do so. Then, in a sense, one could say that we’d no longer experience having a free will. There would always be only one reasonable action in any situation, and we would always pick that one.

Well, I’m not too concerned about that. But the post hilighted one possible way that technology could damage something that we consider dear and essential, by removing essential constraints. That’s actually a rather major worry, and a far broader one than just one example suggests. (This essay was also influenced by a recent comment by Randal Koene.)

First, though, let’s review a bit of history.

In 1967, the biologist Sol Spiegelman took a strand of viral RNA, and placed it on a dish containing various raw materials that the RNA could use to build new copies of itself. After the RNA strands had replicated on the dish, Spiegelman extracted some of them and put them on another dish, again with raw materials that the strands could use to replicate themselves. He then kept repeating this process.

No longer burdened with the constraints of needing to work for a living, produce protein coats, or to do anything but reproduce, the RNA evolved to match its new environment. The RNA mutated, and the strands which could copy themselves the fastest won out. Everything in those strands that wasn’t needed for reproduction had just become an unnecessary liability. After just 74 generations, the original 4,500 nucleotide bases had been reduced to a mere 220. Useless parts of the genome had been discarded; the viral RNA had now become a pure replicator, dubbed “Spiegelman’s monster”. (Source.)

What happens in evolution is that organisms adapt themselves to exploit, and protect themselves from, the various regularities of the environment. Light reflects off distant objects in a predictable manner, so creatures have evolved eyes that they can use to see. If the environment ceases to possess some reg

...
We won't be able to recognise the human Gödel sentence
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-10-05T14:46:39.666Z

Building on the very bad Gödel anti-AI argument (computers's are formal and can't prove their own Gödel sentence, hence no AI), it occurred to me that you could make a strong case that humans could never recognise a human Gödel sentence. The argument goes like this:

Humans have a meta-proof that all Gödel sentences are true.

If humans could recognise a human Gödel sentence G as being a Gödel sentence, we would therefore prove it was true.

This contradicts the definition of G, which humans should never be able to prove.

Hence humans could never recognise that G was a human Gödel sentence.

Now, the more usual way of dealing with human Gödel sentences is to say that humans are inconsistent, but that the inconsistency doesn't blow up our reasoning system because we use something akin to relevance logic.

But, if we do assume humans are consistent (or can become consistent), then it does seem we will never knowingly encounter our own Gödel sentences. As to where this G could hide and we could never find it? My guess would be somewhere in the larger ordinals, up where our understanding starts to get flaky.