trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Request for help with economic analysis related to AI forecasting
by ESRogs — 2016-02-06T01:27:39.810Z

[Cross-posted from FB]

I've got an economic question that I'm not sure how to answer.

I've been thinking about trends in AI development, and trying to get a better idea of what we should expect progress to look like going forward.

One important question is: how much do existing AI systems help with research and the development of new, more capable AI systems?

The obvious answer is, "not much." But I think of AI systems as being on a continuum from calculators on up. Surely AI researchers sometimes have to do arithmetic and other tasks that they already outsource to computers. I expect that going forward, the share of tasks that AI researchers outsource to computers will (gradually) increase. And I'd like to be able to draw a trend line. (If there's some point in the future when we can expect most of the work of AI R&D to be automated, that would be very interesting to know about!)

So I'd like to be able to measure the share of AI R&D done by computers vs humans. I'm not sure of the best way to measure this. You could try to come up with a list of tasks that AI researchers perform and just count, but you might run into trouble as the list of tasks to changes over time (e.g. suppose at some point designing an AI system requires solving a bunch of integrals, and that with some later AI architecture this is no longer necessary).

What seems more promising is to abstract over the specific tasks that computers vs human researchers perform and use some aggregate measure, such as the total amount of energy consumed by the computers or the human brains, or the share of an R&D budget spent on computing infrastructure and operation vs human labor. Intuitively, if most of the resources are going towards computation, one might conclude that computers are doing most of the work.

Unfortunately I don't think that intuition is correct. Suppose AI researchers use computers to perform task X at cost C_x1, and some technological improvement enables X to be performed more cheaply at cost C_x2. Then, all else equal, the share of resources going towards computers will decrease, even though their share of tasks has stayed the same.

On the other hand, suppose there's some task Y that the researchers themselves perform at cost H_y, and some technological improvement enables task Y to be performed more cheaply at cost C_y. After the team outsources Y to computers the share ...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-02-05T16:40:09.693Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on January 29th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Australia Online Hangout: 06 February 2016 07:30PM
Baltimore Area: Epistemology of Disagreement: 31 January 2016 03:00PM
European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
Palo Alto Meetup: Lightning Talks: 02 February 2016 06:30PM
San Francisco Meetup: Cooking: 01 February 2016 06:15PM

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

Raleigh, NC (RTLW) Discussion Meetup: 04 February 2027 07:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - February 2016: 07 February 2016 04:00PM
Vienna: 13 February 2016 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 31 January 2016 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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

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

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnat...
[Link] How I Escaped The Darkness of Mental Illness
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2016-02-04T23:08:47.444Z

A deeply personal account by aspiring rationalist Agnes Vishnevkin, who shares the broad overview of how she used rationality-informed strategies to recover from mental illness. She will also appear on the Unbelievers Radio podcast today live at 10:30 PM EST (-5 UTC), together with JT Eberhard, to speak about mental illness and recovery.

**EDIT** Based on feedback from gjm below, I want to clarify that Agnes is my wife and fellow co-founder of Intentional Insights.
Meetup : London Rationalish meetup, 7/2/16
by philh — 2016-02-04T16:34:13.317Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Rationalish meetup, 7/2/16

WHEN:
07 February 2016 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, 64-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6AH

(The new experimental name for the diaspora meetup group.)

We had around 30 people last time! (Plus at least four different meal shakes.) Go, us!

This meetup will be social discussion in a pub, with no set topic. If there's a topic you want to talk about, feel free to bring it.

The pub is the Shakespeare's Head in Holborn. There will be some way to identify us.

The event on facebook is visible even if you don't have a facebook account. Any last-minute updates will go there.

We're a fortnightly London-based meetup for members of the rationalist diaspora. The diaspora includes, but is not limited to, LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement.

You don't have to identify as a rationalist to attend: basically, if you think we seem like interesting people you'd like to hang out with, welcome! You are invited. You do not need to think you are clever enough, or interesting enough, or similar enough to the rest of us, to attend. You are invited.

People start showing up around two, and there are almost always people around until after six, but feel free to come and go at whatever time.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Rationalish meetup, 7/2/16
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games
by rocurley — 2016-02-04T06:15:39.644Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games

WHEN:
08 February 2016 06:15:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games!

You can call 301-458-0764 to be let in.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games
Gamify your goals: How turning your life into a game can help help you make better decisions and be more productive
by BayesianMind — 2016-02-03T22:48:57.044Z

Self-motivated hard work is the primary source of the intense, optimistic engagement known as flow—one of the greatest forms of happiness that makes us come alive with purpose and potential (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Sadly, for most people work does not feel so rewarding most of the time. Instead we often have to persevere through long periods of hard, painful, and unrewarding work when we could be doing something much more enjoyable. When faced with this motivational challenge people often give up too easily, get sidetracked, or procrastinate (Steel, 2007). The problem is not that we are not willing or unable to work hard. To the contrary, we crave being productively engaged in challenging tasks. Thus, instead of blaming ourselves for our limited will-power, it may be more productive to take a critical look at the carrots and the sticks that are supposed to help us stay motivated. Who put them there and why? Are these incentives helpful, distracting, irrelevant, or out of sight? If you could place them differently and add new ones, where would they go? Often, the problem is that the rewards we experience in the short run are misaligned with what we want to accomplish. In the short run the extremely valuable work that brings us closer to our cherished goals can be aversive while activities that are irrelevant or even opposed to everything we want to accomplish can be pleasant and rewarding. Hence, when we struggle to be engaged with something that we care about, then perhaps we are not the problem but the incentives are, or as Jane McGonigal (2011) put it "Reality is broken".

So, if reality is broken, then what can we do to fix it? One approach is to design better incentive structures that make the pursuit of our goals more engaging. If we want to go this way, then there is a lot to be learned from games, because their incentive structures are so well designed that they let people enjoy hard work for many hours on end (McGonigal, 2011). In the past five years, the success of video games has inspired the gamification of education, work, health, and business. Gamification is the use of game elements, like points, levels, badges, and quests to engage, motivate, and nudge people in non-game contexts. There are even tools like SuperBetter and Habitica that individuals like you and I can use to gamify our own lives. Previous studies ...
A Rationalist Guide to OkCupid
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-02-03T20:50:05.175Z

There's a lot of data and research on what makes people successful at online dating, but I don't know anyone who actually tried to wholeheartedly apply this to themselves. I decided to be that person: I implemented lessons from data, economics, game theory and of course rationality in my profile and strategy and OkCupid. Shockingly, it worked! I got a lot of great dates, learned a ton and found the love of my life. I didn't expect dating to be my "rationalist win", but it happened.

Here's the first part of the story, I hope you'll find some useful tips and maybe a dollop of inspiration among all the silly jokes.

P.S.

Does anyone know who curates the "Latest on rationality blogs" toolbar? What are the requirements to be included?
Value learners & wireheading
by Manfred — 2016-02-03T09:50:25.165Z

Dewey 2011 lays out the rules for one kind of agent with a mutable value system. The agent has some distribution over utility functions, which it has rules for updating based on its interaction history (where "interaction history" means the agent's observations and actions since its origin). To choose an action, it looks through every possible future interaction history, and picks the action that leads to the highest expected utility, weighted both by the possibility of making that future happen and the utility function distribution that would hold if that future came to pass.

We might motivate this sort of update strategy by considering a sandwich-drone bringing you a sandwich. The drone can either go to your workplace, or go to your home. If we think about this drone as a value-learner, then the "correct utility function" depends on whether you're at work or at home - upon learning your location, the drone should update its utility function so that it wants to go to that place. (Value learning is unnecessarily indirect in this case, but that's because it's a simple example.)

Suppose the drone begins its delivery assigning equal measure to the home-utility-function and to the work-utility-function (i.e. ignorant of your location), and can learn your location for a small cost. If the drone evaluated this idea with its current utility function, it wouldn't see any benefit, even though it would in fact deliver the sandwich properly - because under its current utility function there's no point to going to one place rather than the other. To get sensible behavior, and properly deliver your sandwich, the drone must evaluate actions based on what utility function it will have in the future, after the action happens.

If you're familiar with how wireheading or quantum suicide look in terms of decision theory, this method of deciding based on future utility functions might seem risky. Fortunately, value learning doesn't permit wireheading in the traditional sense, because the updates to the utility function are an abstract process, not a physical one. The agent's probability distribution over utility functions, which is conditional on interaction histories, defines which actions and observations are allowed to change the utility function during the process of predicting expected utility.

Dewey also mentions that so long as the probability distribution over utility functi...
Upcoming LW Changes
by Vaniver — 2016-02-03T05:34:34.472Z

Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.

Technical Changes

Changes will be tracked as issues on the LW issue tracker here. Volunteer contributions very welcome and will be rewarded with karma, and if you'd like to be paid for spending a solid block of high-priority time on this get in touch with me. If you'd like to help, for now I recommend setting up a dev environment (as laid out here and here).

Some technical changes (links to the issues in the issue tracker):

Enable linkposts.

Remove distinction between main and discussion (moving forward)

Don't allow votes from accounts with insufficient (currently, <10) karma

Admins should be able to view comment voting (to investigate misuse of the karma system)

Users who aren't logged in should have the same default visibility settings as new users.

Edit the homepage

Increase the importance and ease of the tag system (allow users to tag others' posts, use tags to adjust position in feed, etc.)

Make the meetup system friendlier to recurring meetups / more similar to the EA Hub.

A tangential note on third-party technical contributions to LW (if that's a thing you care about): the uncertainty about whether changes will be accepted, uncertainty about and lack of visibility into how that decision is made or even who makes it, and lack of a known process for making pull requests or getting feedback on ideas are incredibly anti-motivating.

--Nick_Tarleton

This is something I care about quite a bit! Ideally, the three people above would scrutinize every change and determine whether or not it's worthwhile. In practice, they're all extremely busy, and as I'm only very busy I've been deputized to handle whether or not change will be accepted. If you're unsure about a change, talk to me.

Trike still maintains the site, and so it's still a Trike dev's call when a change will make its way to production (or if it's too buggy to accept). We've got a turnaround time guarantee from Matt for any time-sensitive changes (which I ima...
Meetup : Rationality Dojo: Habits
by Calien — 2016-02-03T02:11:04.710Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Dojo: Habits

WHEN:
14 February 2016 03:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Acton, Canberra

This is a focused self-improvement session around a couple of specific topics, inspired by LW Melbourne and Sydney's monthly dojos. Eliot from Sydney will be visiting Canberra and leading the session.

Location TBD.

There will be vegan snacks!

See the Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/440220139502120/

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Dojo: Habits
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates
by RobinZ — 2016-02-02T21:14:24.154Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates

WHEN:
07 February 2016 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center

x-posted from list. Gathering in courtyard from 3:00pm, hard start 3:30pm - until closing (7:00 pm).

We'll be practicing Fermi estimates. Please come with things in mind for others to estimate (questions you know or can find the answer to). The link includes examples.

As always, side conversations are allowed and encouraged.

Upcoming meetups:

Feb. 14: Portrait Gallery/American Art Museum

Feb. 21: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates
The AI That Pretends To Be Human
by Houshalter — 2016-02-02T19:39:33.253Z

The hard part about containing AI, is restricting it's output. The AI can lie, manipulate, and trick. Some speculate that it might be able to do far worse, inventing infohazards like hypnosis or brain hacking.

A major goal of the control problem is preventing AIs from doing that. Ensuring that their output is safe and useful.

Awhile ago I wrote about an approach to do this. The idea was to require the AI to use as little computing power as it needed to perform a task. This prevents the AI from over-optimizing. The AI won't use the full power of superintelligence, unless it really needs it.

The above method isn't perfect, because a superintelligent AI may still have super abilities, even when it has a limited compute budget. And it will still try to do all those bad things mentioned above, unless it can find a better way that uses less computing power.

We don't really want to minimize the AIs compute budget. We just want it to act more human-like. When we ask it to solve a problem, we want it to try to solve the problem as a human would solve it. All of the problems arise from the AI behaving totally different than a human. Not necessarily from it using more computing power.

Is there any way to make an AI act like a human? Or is that as impossible as just solving FAI?

Stuart Armstrong posted an idea on how to achieve that. It involves an AI that tries to mimic output that is indistinguishable from what a human would produce, but conditional on it also solving the problem. However his idea also involves whole brain emulation and a complicated method for the AI to predict the future and avoid changing it too much.

We don't need that. The idea for the AI to try to be indistinguishable from a human is actually a really interesting control idea. It significantly limits the AI's ability to Do Sneaky Things, since humans don't do those things.

Here is my idea on how to achieve this. It's the same as my limited computing power idea mentioned earlier, but applied to "appearing human" as a goal, instead of minimizing computing power.

We start with two AIs. The first AI tries to appear human. The second AI does a sort of Turing test, and tries to tell the AI apart from an actual human.

The human AI's first goal is to produce a correct solution. It will predict how likely it's solution is to be accepted. And it will try to produce a solution that has a >50% chance of working. T...
Rationality Quotes Thread February 2016
by elharo — 2016-02-02T18:17:22.039Z

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
A Strange Argument about the potential Importance of Multiverse Theory
by mako yass — 2016-02-02T04:22:06.876Z

Multiverse Theory is the science of guessing at the shape of the state space of all which exists, once existed, will exist, or exists without any temporal relation to our present. Multiverse theory attempts to model the unobservable, and it is very difficult.

Still, there's nothing that cannot be reasoned about, in some way (Tegmark's The Multiverse Heirarchy), given the right abstractions. The question many readers will ask, which is a question we ourselves˭ asked when we were first exposed to ideas like simulationism and parallel universes, is not whether we can reason about multiverse theory, but whether we should, given that we have no means to causally affect anything beyond the known universe, and no reason to expect that it would causally affect us in a way that would be useful to predict.

We then discovered something which shed new light on the question of whether we can, and began to give an affirmative answer to the question of whether we should.

Compat, which we would like to share with you today, is a new field, or perhaps just a very complex idea, which we found in the intersection of multiverse theory, simulationism and acausal trade (well motivated by Hofstadter's Sanity and Survival, a discussion of superrational solutions to the one shot prisoner's dilemmas). Compat asks what kind of precommitments an entity (primarily, the class of living things on the threshold of their singularity) aught to make if they wanted to acausally boost the measure of their desired patterns, if not across the entire multiverse, at least across the subset of the multiverse in which they may find their future selves.

A compat thinker negotiates acausally with hypothetical agentsଽ in other universes⬨. We call the resolutions of these negotiations pacts.ˣ

We define Life's Pact as the protocol we expect most living species to adhere to. It is the primary object of study in Compat. I'm not sure where to start explaining it, as the reasoning is... hopefully not circular, but recursive, self-referrentialˑ. Hopefully the reasons we consider it a primal candidate for life's pact will become clear as I connect it back around. Well. I guess I'll start with the conditions of adherence:

An adherent steward of Life's Pact allocates some proportion of their computational resources to doing a randomized...