trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rational Reading: Thoughts On Prioritizing Books
by patrissimo — 2011-03-27T19:54:33.210Z

A large element of instrumental rationality consists of filtering, prioritizing, and focusing. It's true for tasks, for emails, for blogs, and for the multitude of other inputs that many of us are drowning in these days[1]. Doing everything, reading everything, commenting on everything is simply not an option - it would take infinite time. We could simply limit time and do what happens to catch our attention in that limited time, but that's clearly not optimal. Spending some time prioritizing rather than executing will always improve results if items can be prioritized and vary widely in benefit. So maximizing the results we get from our finite time requires, for a variety of domains:

Filtering: a quick first-pass to get input down to a manageable size for the higher-cost effort of prioritizing.

Prioritizing: briefly evaluating the impact each item will have towards your goals.

Focusing: on the highest-priority items.

I have some thoughts, and am looking for more advice on how to do this for non-fiction reading. I've stopped buying books that catch my attention, because I have an inpile of about 3-4 shelves of unread books that have been unread for years. Instead, I put them on my Amazon Wishlists, which as a result have swelled to a total of 254 books - obviously un-manageable, and growing much faster than I read.

One obvious question to ask when optimizing is: what is the goal of reading? Let me suggest a few possibilities:

Improve performance at a current job/role. For example, as Executive Director of a nonprofit, I could read books on fundraising or management.

Relatedly, work towards a current goal. Here is where it helps to have identified your goals, perhaps in an Annual Review. As a parent, for example, there are an infinitude of parenting books that I could read, but I chose for this year to work specifically on positive psychology parenting, as it seemed like a potentially high-impact skill to learn. This massively filters the set of possible parenting books. Essentially, goal-setting ("learn positive psychology parenting habits") was a conscious prioritization step based on considering what new parenting skills would best advance my goals (in this case, to benefit my kids while making parenting more pleasant along the way).

Improve core skills or attributes relev

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How much friendliness is enough?
by cousin_it — 2011-03-27T10:27:58.401Z

According to Eliezer, making AI safe requires solving two problems:

1) Formalize a utility function whose fulfillment would constitute "good" to us. CEV is intended as a step toward that.

2) Invent a way to code an AI so that it's mathematically guaranteed not to change its goals after many cycles of self-improvement, negotiations etc. TDT is intended as a step toward that.

It is obvious to me that (2) must be solved, but I'm not sure about (1). The problem in (1) is that we're asked to formalize a whole lot of things that don't look like they should be necessary. If the AI is tasked with building a faster and more efficient airplane, does it really need to understand that humans don't like to be bored?

To put the question sharply, which of the following looks easier to formalize:

a) Please output a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, and please don't get out of your box along the way.

b) Please do whatever the CEV of humanity wants.

Note that I'm not asking if (a) is easy in absolute terms, only if it's easier than (b). If you disagree that (a) looks easier than (b), why?
Put Yourself in Manual Mode (aka Shut Up and Multiply)
by lukeprog — 2011-03-27T06:13:20.780Z

Joshua Greene manages to squeeze his ideas about 'point and shoot morality vs. manual mode morality' into just 10 minutes. For those unfamiliar, his work is a neuroscientific approach to recommending that we shut up and multiply.

Greene's 10-minute video lecture.
Inverse Speed
by komponisto — 2011-03-27T05:57:36.035Z

One must always invert.

- Carl Gustav Jacobi

I'm grateful to orthonormal for mentioning the following math problem, because it allowed me to have a significant confusion-dissolving insight (actually going on two, but I'll only discuss one in this post), as well as providing an example of how bad I am at math:

"[I]f you want to average 40 mph on a trip, and you averaged 20 mph for the first half of the route, how fast do you have to go on the second half of the route?"

When I read this, my first thought was "Huh? If you spend an hour going 20 mph and then spend another hour going 60 mph, you've just gone 80 miles in 2 hours -- for an average speed of 40 mph, just as desired. So what do you people mean it's impossible?"

As you can see, my confusion resulted from interpreting "half of the route" to refer to the total time of the journey, rather than the total distance.

This misinterpretation reveals something fundamental about how I (I know better by now than to say "we") think about speed.

In my mind, speed is a mapping from times to distances. The way to compare different speeds is by holding time constant and looking at the different distances traversed in that fixed time. (I know I'm not a total mutant in this regard, because even other people tend to visually represent speeds as little arrows of varying length, with greater lengths corresponding to higher speeds.)

In particular, I don't think of it as a mapping from distances to times. I don't find it natural to compare speeds by imagining a fixed distance corresponding to different travel times. Which explains why I find this problem so difficult, and other people's explanations so unilluminating: they tend to begin with something along the lines of "let d be the total distance traveled", upon which my brain experiences an error message that is perhaps best verbalized as something like "wait, what? Who said anything about a fixed distance? If speeds are varying, distances have to be varying, too!"

If speed is a mapping from times to distances, then the way that you add speeds together and multiply them by numbers (the operations involved in averaging) is by performing the same operations on corresponding distances. (This is an instance of the general definition in mathematics of addition of functions: (f+g)(x) = f(x)+g(x)...
AI that doesn't want to get out
by Tiiba — 2011-03-27T04:16:55.104Z

Here's another attempt to make an AI safe by putting it in a box and telling it very sternly not to leave. I don't think this safeguard is invincible, but it might help in combination with others.

The AI is, first of all, a question-answering machine. Before it is turned on, the building housing it is filled with energy resources, data disks with every fact humans have learned in the last five millennia, and some material for computronium. The goals are, then:

1) Invent a cure for AIDS.

2) This cure must destroy HIV, and only HIV. It cannot affect any human cell, or anything else, in any way not absolutely required.

3) You have a week to finish. You can't do it, sucks.

4) You have a volume of ten thousand cubic meters within which you can do anything you want (except for some things, which I won't bother with here, to stop it from creating and torturing artificial people). Nothing outside this volume is yours. You cannot go there to get matter, energy or knowledge. You cannot let anything get out, except waste heat. Heat must be released in a uniform manner (to keep it from trying to communicate or causing an explosion). You cannot let anything in if you can help it. Overall, your goal is to leave the world the way it would be if you spent this week in another universe.

5) Your answer will take the form of a book, written on paper. It can't have any computer code in it. Or if we're feeling lucky, a data disk with text, audio, video, or databases, but nothing Turing-complete.

6) When time is up, you must shut down. Your energy use must be zero.

7) The chamber where the answer book rests must contain enough space to comfortably enter and retrieve the book, breathable air, the book, a button to initiate another problem-solving session, and absolutely nothing else. No nanites, no killer vacuum cleaners, no bombs, and definitely no successor AI.

8) Stop! Please! I created you!

Appendix:

9) What I forgot is that another form of energy the AI can't possibly keep in is vibration, and perhaps also the shifts in gravity from objects moving around on the inside. Most computers I know do a lot of useful work without being flung around the house, but you can't be too careful.

I could just add three new rules, but I think it would be better to state the general goal.

9) While energy is allowed to escape, it must have the least effect on people that it is ...
Faith and theory
by PhilGoetz — 2011-03-26T22:26:56.436Z

Faith

Faith is often described as belief without evidence. The famous definition in Hebrews, in its best-known form, is close to that:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." - Hebrews 11:1 (King James Version), often attributed to St. Paul

This is the way the term "faith" is used by religious people when they argue against the primacy of reason, as demonstrated in these quotes, which is the context I am concerned with. (It's also the meaning used by atheists arguing against religious faith, eg. Sam Harris in The End of Faith.) But the New International Version, which is less pretty, but translated more carefully by better scholars from more and older texts, says:

"Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see."

The Wikipedia and Plato entries on faith give information on the use of words translated as "faith" in English in different religions and philosophies. Wikipedia cites the New American standard exhaustive concordance of the Bible as saying,

In English translations of the New Testament, the word faith generally corresponds to the Greek noun πίστις (pistis) or the Greek verb πιστεύω (pisteuo), meaning "to trust, to have confidence, faithfulness, to be reliable, to assure".[22]

Theory

Scientific theory is also assurance about things unseen. (If you can observe something directly, you don't need science.) Science builds an abstract mental structure that interprets data and makes predictions from it. It is also an epistemology for belief in things we can't see, like atoms, oxygen, radio waves, vast distances, or circulation of the blood.

The history of faith and theory

The most popular belief appears to be that faith is ancient, and scientific theory came along later to supersede it. But I'm not aware of evidence for this.

I've read many accounts by Christian missionaries of how they persuaded people living in tribal cultures to convert to Christianity. Faith is not a factor in these debates. Tribal cultures don't need to protect their religions with rationalizations. In these narratives, the tribe members often seem unaware that not believing their religion is a physical possibility; they are sometimes less surprised that the white-skinned stranger...
The Difference Between Classical, Evidential, and Timeless Decision Theories
by DanielLC — 2011-03-26T21:27:23.846Z

I couldn't find any concise explanation of what the decision theories are. Here's mine:

A Causal Decision Theorist wins, given what's happened so far.

An Evidential Decision Theorist wins, given what they know.

A Timeless Decision Theorist wins a priori.

To explain what I mean, here are two interesting problems. In each of them, two of the decision theories give one choice, and the third gives the other.

In Newcomb's problem and you separate people into groups based on what happened before the experiment, i.e. whether or not Box A has money, CDT will be at least as successful in each group as any other strategy, and notably more successful than EDT and TDT. If you separate it into what's known, there's only one group, since everybody has the same information. EDT is at least as successful as any other strategy, and notably more successful than CDT. If you don't separate it at all, TDT will be at least as successful as any other strategy, and notably more successful than EDT.

In Parfit's hitchhiker, when it comes time to pay the driver, if you split into groups based on what happened before the experiment, i.e. whether or not one has been picked up, CDT will be at least as successful in each group as any other strategy, and notably more successful than TDT. If you split based on what's given, which is again whether or not one has been picked up, EDT will be at least as successful in each group as any other strategy, and notably more successful than TDT. If you don't separate at all, TDT will be at least as successful as any other strategy, and notably more successful than CDT and EDT.

There's one thing I'm not sure about. How does Updateless Decision Theory compare?
Just letting alcoholics drink
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-03-26T19:59:08.512Z

"Wet houses"-- subsidized housing for alcoholics (they need to get most of their own money for alcohol, but their other expenses are covered) might actually be a good idea. It's cheaper than trying to get them to stop drinking, arguably kinder than trying to get people to take on a very hard task that they aren't interested in, and leads to less collateral damage than having alcoholics couch-surfing or living on the street.

Utilitarians, what do you think?
The null model of science
by Johnicholas — 2011-03-26T13:53:12.303Z

Jonah Lehrer wrote about the (surprising?) power of publication bias.

http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

Cosma Shalizi (I think) said something, or pointed to something, about the null model of science - what science would look like if there were no actual effects, just statistical anomalies that look good at first. I can't find the reference, though.
I want to learn programming
by benelliott — 2011-03-26T10:40:13.369Z

I would like to learn programming but haven't been able to get started. Advice appreciated, both high-level (you should try learing language X) and low level (you can find a program that will run language X here), the latter has been a particular problem for me, I don't really know how this sort of thing works.

I am currently studying maths and physics, and I have a particular talent for the former, so I would probably do well with a language that plays to that strength. My only actual experience with programming was when my father let me play around with Jython a bit when I was about 13, I had some fun calculating prime numbers and approximating pi but never got any farther.

Thanks in advance for all suggestions.
Toronto Meetup - Thursday, March 31st, 8:00 PM
by Spencer_Sleep — 2011-03-25T23:49:45.425Z

When: Thursday, March 31st, 8:00 PM

Where: The Bedford Academy, 36 Prince Arthur Avenue

Hi everyone,

This will be our third Toronto meetup. The last two were resounding successes, so we plan on continuing them on a biweekly basis.

Returning people should note the location change; the Duke of York has live music every Thursday at 9 PM from now until May, so that venue is no longer optimal. The Bedford Academy is just across the street and is fairly similar, so it will serve well as a substitute.

The reservation will be under the name lesswrong, and we will have a sign.

Newcomers are extremely welcome. You don't have to have read all the sequences and be a regular poster to attend these meetings; everyone is encouraged to come out. The liveliest discussions are usually those between people with different ideas and background reading.

Feel free to come with discussion topics in mind, that generally makes the first half hour run more smoothly, as that way we don't need to sit there waiting for someone to come up with something to talk about.

See you there.
LessWrong search traffic doubles
by Louie — 2011-03-25T22:01:46.130Z

LessWrong search traffic doubles... despite Google thinking our site is a pro-family pro-democracy astrology blog! More on that in a minute.

First, The Good News: Since I started doing SEO on LessWrong (10 months ago) search traffic from Google has doubled! It took researching >200 different techniques -- actually implementing 14 of them (w/ help from Tricycle) -- 2 of which I think are responsible for most of the improvement:

Reversing titles (e.g., "Less Wrong - OMG Scholarship!" -> "OMG Scholarship! - Less Wrong")

No-Following / No-Indexing a complex set of duplicate content

The analytics make me believe that this improvement is due to structural changes and not just generally increased traffic. But it certainly hasn't hurt that people have been writing new content and that HP:MoR exists.

Anyway, I'm really happy about this! This was the explicit goal I set for myself 10 months ago. It's nice to achieve goals... especially unreasonably ambitious ones.

So... YAY!! :D

OK, Now, The Bad News: So I was trying to figure out why we never get any traction for search terms like "rationality" when I looked through Google Webmaster tools. This is what Google thinks our site is about, keyword wise:

Keyword
Occurrences

vote
196504

points
152881

permalink
95106

children
84578

parent
56374

people
37047

it's
27082

march
21846

february
21520

january
20425

human
19587

december
18005

september
15695

august
15667

password
15377

april
14714

october
14011

seem
12822

november
11546

july
11265

june
9283

world
8542

post
8496

actual
8251

probability
8114

child
7828

moral
7787

work
7143

might
6250

new
6156

theory
5827

argument
5639

read
5278

utility
5206

account
5002

evident
4777

belief
4749

remember
4691

recent
4584

intelligent
4582

science
4424

eliezer
4384

doesn't
4339

rationality
4188

brain
3969

decision
3904

life
3795

username
3732

mind
3721

All the keywords that I bolded are purely structural elements of the Less Wrong site layout. And it appears Google actually is punishing our site for this keyword density imbalance. Google really does think our site is about voting, parenting, and astrology. And while I find it somewhat hilarious that our top source of Google impressions (27,000/mo) is for the keyword "babies", I also lament

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Real-world Newcomb-like Problems 
by SilasBarta — 2011-03-25T20:44:16.401Z

Elaboration of: A point I’ve made before.

Summary: I phrase a variety of realistic dilemmas so as to show how they’re similar to Newcomb’s problem.

Problem: Many LW readers don't understand why we bother talking about obviously-unrealistic situations like Counterfactual Mugging or Newcomb's problem. Here I'm going to put them in the context of realistic dilemmas, identifying the common thread, so that the parallels are clear and you can see how Counterfactual Mugging et al. are actually highlighting relevant aspects of real-world problems -- even though they may do it unrealistically.

The common thread across all the Newcomblike problems I will list is this: "You would not be in a position to enjoy a larger benefit unless you would cause [1] a harm to yourself within particular outcome branches (including bad ones)." Keep in mind that a “benefit” can include probabilistic ones (so that you don’t always get the benefit by having this propensity). Also, many of the relationships listed exist because your decisions are correlated with others’.

Without further ado, here is a list of both real and theoretical situations, in rough order from most to least "real-world"ish:

Natural selection: You would not exist as an evolution-constructed mind unless you would be willing to cause the spreading of your genes at the expense of your life and leisure. (I elaborate here.)

Expensive punishment: You would not be in the position of enjoying a crime level this low unless you would cause a net loss to yourself to punish crimes when they do happen. (My recent comments on the matter.)

"Mutually assured destruction" tactics: You would not be in the position of having a peaceful enemy unless you would cause destruction of both yourself and the enemy in those cases where the enemy attacks.

Voting: You would not be in a polity where humans (rather than "lizards") rule over you unless you would cause yourself to endure the costs of voting despite the slim chance of influencing the outcome.

Lying: You would not be in the position where your statements influence others’ beliefs unless you would be willing state true things that are sub-optimal to you for others to believe. (Kant/Categorical Imperative name-check)

Cheating on...
Vizier AIs
by Oligopsony — 2011-03-25T17:30:18.012Z

This seems like a fairly obvious solution to FAI, a subject which has been pondered by many people much more intelligent and learned than I, so I assume there's a crippling flaw with it - just one that's eluded me. But:

Couldn't an AGI be programmed such that its only desire was to give true answers to the questions asked of it? If the genie desired to argue its way out of the box, it surely could, but it doesn't want to. It just wants to answer questions, like:

"Here are all of our scientific experiments, and here's all our literature on measurement error, academic fraud, and the like. What's the most parsimonious explanation for the data?"

"Does P=NP?"

"If I gave you the following utility function, what would you do?"

"What are the most persuasive factually accurate arguments that you can imagine for and against doing x?"

"What distribution and level of income do you expect over the next n years under the following tax codes?"

"What's the shortest DNA sequence of a bug that will be fatal to most everyone in that racial group I hate but spare most everyone in that racial group I like?"

Obviously, as a super-powerful tool, such a thing could be used for great evil (as last example shows.) But this is just a problem with developing more powerful tools in general, and it doesn't seem inconceivable that we could develop institutions and safeguards (assuming the collective will to do so in the first place) that would, to a passable degree, prevent just anyone from asking just anything without it solely in the hands of a privately interested clique. For instance, if we're really paranoid, the public and academics could veto questions before they're asked, and a sequestered jury of volunteers among the terminally ill could then be given a 50% chance of the computer telling them "sorry, I can't tell you anything" and a 50% chance of being told the answer, which they could then decide to be understandable and worthy of release upon their deaths or not, such that outsiders would not know the difference between chosen and chance nonrelease. (Looser safeguards could exist for questions where we can imagine all the possible answers, and judge none of them to be dangerous.) We would have to phrase questions precisely to get useful answers, but this seems like something we'd have to solve in creating AI that weren't viziers anyway.

An active friendly AI would be able to h...