trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
AAAI 2014 Spring Symposia
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-09-23T18:00:02.931Z

Probably of interest to researchers on this list (October 4 deadline):

AAAI Spring 2014 Symposium - March 24-26, 2014 / Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA

Implementing Selves with Safe Motivational Systems & Self-Improvement

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) most often focus on tools for collecting knowledge and solving problems or achieving goals rather than self-reflecting entities. Instead, this implementation-oriented symposium will focus on guided self-creation and improvement – particularly as a method of achieving human-level intelligence in machines through iterative improvement (“seed AI”).

In I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter argues that the key to understanding selves is the “strange loop”, a complex feedback network inhabiting our brains and, arguably, constituting our minds. Further, humans have both conscious and unconscious minds (Daniel Kahneman’s system one and system two), attention, emotions, partial self-reflection, a moral sense and many other aspects that are rarely addressed – yet seem critical for the creation of a safe self-sufficient autonomous system.

This symposium will focus on the integration of these components into a coherent self-improving self. Ideally, the ultimate end product will be a successful entity with extensive self-knowledge and a safe or moral/ethical motivational system that functions with context/ecologically sensitive egoistic/altruistic discrimination to promote cooperation with and contribution to community via iterative improvement of self, tools and theoretical constructs of relational dynamics and resource utilization, allocation and sharing.

This symposium is proposed as an implementation-oriented exploration of self, to include:

integrative architectures with explicit motivations

implementing “self” as operating system with “plug-ins”

implementing “self” as society (of mind - Marvin Minsky)

implementing “self” as economy (of idiots – Eric Baum)

implementing “self” as global workspace/consciousness (Baars/Franklin)

implementing “self” as authorship (Dennett, Wegner)

“safe” and/or “moral” and ethical motivational systems

value sets vs. goal hierarchies

context/ecological sensitivity

“safe&rdqu

...
A map of Bay Area memespace
by Julia_Galef — 2013-09-23T17:34:58.111Z

The main reason we picked the Bay Area as a home for the Center for Applied Rationality was simply because that's where our initial fiscal sponsor, MIRI, was located. Yet as I’ve gotten to know this region better in the year and a half since then, I’ve been struck by how good the fit has turned out to be. The Bay Area is unusually dense with idea-driven subcultures that mix and cross-pollinate in fascinating ways, many of which are already enriching rationalist culture.

This map is my attempt at illustrating that landscape of subcultures, and at situating the rationalist community within it. I’ve limited myself to the last 50 years or so, and to subcultures defined by ideology (as opposed to, say, ethnicity). I’ve also depicted some of the major memes that have influenced, and been influenced by, those subcultures:

(Click to enlarge)

Note that although many of these memes are widely influential, I only drew an arrow connecting a meme to a group if the meme was one of the defining features of the group. (For example, yoga may be popular among many entrepreneurs, but that meme -> subculture relationship isn’t strong enough to make my map.).

Below, I expand on the map with a quick tour through the landscape of Bay Area memes and subcultures. Instead of trying to cover everything in detail, I’ve focused on nine aspects of that memespace that help put the rationalist community in context:

1. Computer scientists

Some of the basic building blocks of rationality come from computer science, and the Bay Area is rich with the world’s top computer scientists, employed by companies like Intel, IBM, Google, and Microsoft, and universities like Stanford and UC Berkeley. The idea of thinking in terms of optimization problems – optimizing for these outcomes, under those constraints -- has roots in computer science and math, and it’s so fundamental to the rationalist approach to problem-solving that it’s easy to forget how different it is from people’s normal way of thinking.

Another rationalist building block, Bayesian inference, is several centuries old, but had fallen out of favor until the computing methods and power of the 1970s made it actually usable. Widespread use of Bayesianism in the field of artificial intelligence (e.g. Bayes nets) also contributed to its resurgent popularity.

2. Startup culture

...
Torture vs. Shampoo
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-09-23T04:34:25.417Z

I was reading the original comment thread on Torture vs. Dust Specks, and notice Eliezer saying he wouldn't pay a penny to avoid a single dust speck - which confused me, until I noticed that the original specification of the problem says the dust speck "floated into your eye and irritated it just a little, for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make you notice before you blink and wipe away the dust speck." I guess I blanked that out when I first read the post. My default visualization when I imagine "dust speck in my eye" is something substantially more annoying than that.

This leads me to wonder if people would have responded differently if instead of going out of his way to make the alternative to torture involve something as trivial-sounding as possible, Eliezer had gone for some merely minor mishap - say, getting shampoo in your eye. After all, lots of us have gotten shampoo in our eyes at least once (maybe when we were kids), and it's easy to imagine paying $2.99 for a bottle of won't-irritate-your-eyes shampoo over an otherwise identical $2.98 bottle that will hurt if you get it in your eyes (or your kid's eyes, if you're totally confident that, as an adult, you'll be able to keep shampoo out of your eyes).

From there, it's easy to argue that if you're honest with yourself you wouldn't pay $(3^^^3/100) to save one person from being tortured for 50 years, so you should choose one person getting tortured for 50 years over 3^^^3 people getting shampoo (the stingy kind) in their eyes. I suppose, however, that might not change your answer to torture vs. specks if you think there's a qualitative difference between the speck (as originally specified by Eliezer) and getting shampoo in your eye.
Hoping to start a discussion about overcoming insecurity
by ILikeLogic — 2013-09-22T20:53:45.605Z

Since Jr High at least, I've been frustrated by my insecurity. I don't intend this to be a personally revealing post so I'll just sum it up by saying that being insecure has had a profoundly negative impact on my life. I feel that it is the single biggest reason why I've failed to reach my potential in all ways. That's fine though, I'm not really bitter but I remain very frustrated and I want to solve this problem. I want to 'crack the code', if you will.

I've recently started reading some psychology books (again) which has led to me to revisit a couple of the self-help/psychology books that I used to be very fond of.

I've really been wanting to find a forum where I can discuss this with people who will understand what I'm talking about. Well, the other day, I followed a link to LessWrong, which I was somewhat familiar with because I used to visit and spend time here every now and then, and I remembered that I had read on here about self-help. Also I remember reading about how some of the people here had really liked the meetups because they were able to to talk more freely and be better understood than they normally are. I have had some frustration in discussing emotional topics elsewhere because of the lack of intellectual rigor with which they are often discussed. Like everything else, human emotions 'work a certain way'. Exactly how they work is not something that is perfectly understood by anyone but I find it frustrating when discussing them with people who don't seem to understand that, whatever the rules are, there are rules. So it occurred to me that LessWrong might be a good place to have the kind of discussion that I'd like to have. If you are interested in emotional insecurity in general and my take on it then you may want to read the rest of this post.

I've developed my own understanding of insecurity, which, admittedly, is a synthesis of other people's ideas, but I haven't found any book or therapy or system that puts it all together in a way that I fully agree with.

Here is what I think:

I think that what insecurity is, is inhibition of feelings of disappointment/loss because of an implicitly learned belief that to express these feelings will have negative consequences (ie – it will only make things worse).

I came across this idea after reading some EvPsych theory about the functional purpose of shame. The purpose of shame, it seems, is to sig...
Polyphasic Sleep Seed Study: Reprise
by LoganStrohl — 2013-09-21T22:29:05.744Z

(Original post on the polyphasic sleep experiment here.)
Welp, this got a little messy. The main culprit was Burning Man, though there were some other complications with data collection as well. Here are the basics of what went down.

Fourteen people participated in the main experiment. Most of them were from Leverage. There were a few stragglers from a distance, but communication with them was poor.

We did some cognitive batteries beforehand, mostly through Quantified Mind. A few people had extensive baseline data, partially because many had been using Zeos for months, and partly because a few stuck to the two-week daily survey. Leverage members (not me) are processing the data, and they'll probably have more detailed info for us in three months(ish).

With respect to the adaptation itself, we basically followed the plan outlined in my last post. Day one no sleep, then Uberman-12, then cut back to Uberman-6, then Everyman-3.
Most people ended up switching very quickly to Uberman-6 (within the first two or three days), and most switched to Everyman-3 after about five to seven days on Uberman-6. Three people tried to hold the Uberman schedule indefinitely: One person continued Uberman-6 for two full weeks, and two held out for twenty-one days. Afterwards, all three transitioned to Everyman-3.

During the originally planned one-month period, five people dropped out. Nine were on some form of polyphasic for the whole month. One returned to monophasic at the end of the official experiment with only partial adaptation achieved.

Then Burning Man disrupted everybody's sleep schedule. Afterward, one person continued experimenting with less common variations of the Everyman schedule. Three went back to Everyman-3. One switched to Everyman-2. Two people have flexible schedules that include two hours less sleep per day. One person's schedule was disrupted by travel for a while after Burning Man, and they're now re-adapting.

Now that all is said and done, eight of the original fourteen are polyphasic.

I'll hold off on concluding very much from this until I see the results of the cognitive battery and such, plus the number who are still polyphasic after three months. In the mean time, I'll just stick with this: Some people are capable of going polyphasic and staying that way (probably?). Sleep is complicated and confusing. I don't know how it works. I don't th...
Predicting Organizational Behavior
by ksvanhorn — 2013-09-21T19:33:42.667Z

Can someone recommend a good introduction to the topic of organizational behavior? My interest is in descriptive rather than prescriptive models -- I'm interested in what is known about predicting the behavior of organizations, rather than guidance on what they should do to achieve their goals. This kind of prediction strikes me as something of substantial practical use, especially to business; being able to work out the plausible range of future actions of city hall, the state legislature, Congress, regulatory agencies, competitors in the marketplace, large customers, and important suppliers would be a valuable capability in making one's own plans.
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: The löbstacle for picking good actions.
by Manfred — 2013-09-21T12:46:50.675Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: The löbstacle for picking good actions.

WHEN:
22 September 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
40.111240, -88.227370

Let's have a slightly more technical meetup!
When: 2:00 PM this Sunday.
Where: The benches overlooking UIUC's Bardeen Quad, Urbana-Champaign, IL.
What: I'll give a primer on why even the best agent can't prove that they're always right (see e.g. You Provably Can't Trust Yourself), and why this poses a problem for some common models of decision-making (discussed at length here). And then we can talk about what other models we could use!

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: The löbstacle for picking good actions.
Meetup : Washington DC Book Swap meetup
by rocurley — 2013-09-21T05:59:28.169Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Book Swap meetup

WHEN:
22 September 2013 03:00:12PM (-0400)

WHERE:
national portrait gallery

We'll be meeting to hang out and swap books. (Sorry for the late notice).

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Book Swap meetup
Amplituhedron?
by linkhyrule5 — 2013-09-20T22:09:01.071Z

I recently ran across a rather interesting result while browsing the Internet:

Physics Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.

The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

Unfortunately, I'm still at the point in my education where my best response to new physics is "cache for later," and the fact that it claims to eliminate locality/unitarity seems decidedly odd to my mostly-untrained mind. I notice I am confused, and that LessWrong has a rather large number of trained physicists.
Instinctive Frequentists, the Outside View, and de-Biasing
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-09-20T20:19:08.082Z

In "How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond Heuristics and Biases", Gerd Gigerenzer attempts to show that the whole "Heuristics and Biases" approach to analysing human reasoning is fundamentally flawed and incorrect.

In that he fails. His case depends on using the frequentist argument that probabilities cannot be assigned to single events or situations of subjective uncertainty, thus removing the possibility that people could be "wrong" in the scenarios where the biases were tested. (It is interesting to note that he ends up constructing "Probabilistic Mental Models", which are frequentist ways of assigning subjective probabilities - just as long as you don't call them that!).

But that dodge isn't sufficient. Take the famous example of the conjunction fallacy, where most people are tricked to assigning a higher probability to "Linda is a bank teller AND is active in the feminist movement" than to "Linda is a bank teller". This error persists even when people take bets on the different outcomes. By betting more (or anything) on the first option, people are giving up free money. This is a failure of human reasoning, whatever one thinks about the morality of assigning probability to single events.

However, though the article fails to prove its case, it presents a lot of powerful results that may change how we think about biases. It presents weak evidence that people may be instinctive frequentist statisticians, and much stronger evidence that many biases can go away when the problems are presented in frequentist ways.

Now, it's known that people are more comfortable with frequencies that with probabilities. The examples in the paper extend that intuition. For instance, when people are asked:

There are 100 persons who fit the description above (i.e., Linda's). How many of them are:
(a) bank tellers
(b) bank tellers and active in the feminist movement.

Then the conjunction fallacy essentially disappears (22% of people make the error, rather than 85%). That is a huge difference.

Similarly, overconfidence. When people were 50 general knowledge questions and asked to rate their confidence for their answer on each question, they were systematically, massively overconfident. But when they were asked afterwards "How many of these 50 questions do you think you got right?", they were... underconfident. But only very slightly: they were essentially cor...
Interactive Infographic on Simpson's Paradox
by Antisuji — 2013-09-20T17:37:39.644Z

Since Simpson's Paradox has been discussed here recently (and not so recently), I thought I'd share this interactive1 infographic that I found via the FlowingData blog. I already understood Simpson's Paradox pretty well, but playing with the sliders helped me get a more intuitive feel for it.

I expect similar tools would be helpful for explaining Bayes' Theorem and some of the other things we talk about on LW (like Pareto efficiency and Nash equilibria). Do such things exist?

1 The interactive part is farther down the page.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-09-20T16:02:07.346Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 13th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Berlin: Fermi paradox discussion: 18 October 2013 07:00PM
Brussels monthly meetup: 14 September 2013 01:00PM
Frankfurt: 22 September 2013 02:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 22 September 2013 02:00PM
Moscow: Yet Another Meetup: 15 September 2013 04:00PM
[Ottawa] Applied Rationality Talks: Thinking in Bayes: 26 September 2013 07:00PM
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Games/Discussion: 15 September 2013 02:00PM

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:

London social meetup: 15 September 2013 02:00PM
Melbourne Social Meetup: 20 September 2013 06:30PM
[Salt Lake City] Fall Equinox: Festival of Heroes: 21 September 2013 03:00PM
Washington DC fun and games meetup: 15 September 2013 03:00AM
West LA—Talk Like a Pirate Day: 18 September 2013 07:00AM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 in order to be notified when a...
AI-related honours projects?
by klkblake — 2013-09-20T03:50:05.604Z

I'm starting my Honours next year, and would like to do something towards helping MIRI with Friendly AI. I would also prefer to avoid duplicating any of MIRI's work (either already done, or needed to be done before my honours are finished midway through 2015). I decided to post this here rather than directly email MIRI as I guessed a list of potential projects would probably be useful for others as well (in fact, I was sure such a thing had already been posted, but I was unable to find it if it did in fact exist). So: what sort of Friendly AI related projects are there that could potentially be done by one person in a year of work? (I suppose it would make sense to include PhD-length suggestions here as well).

Some notes about me and my abilities: I am reasonably good with math, though my understanding of probability, model theory and provability logic are lacking (I will have a few months before hand that I plan to use to try and learn whatever maths I will need that I don't already have). I am a competent Haskell programmer, and (besides AI) I am interested in dependent type systems, total languages, and similar methods of proving certain program errors cannot occur, although I would have to do some background research to learn more of the state of the art in that field. I would (hesitantly) guess that this would be the best avenue for something that a single person could do that might be useful, but I'm not sure how useful it would be.
Meetup : Saskatoon: Iterative Improvement and Concrete Planning.
by Nicholas_Rutherford — 2013-09-20T02:50:57.121Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Saskatoon: Iterative Improvement and Concrete Planning.

WHEN:
21 September 2013 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2318 8th St E, Saskatoon, SK

Hello again everyone!

Another Saskatoon meetup at the same place and time as the last one: Broadway Roaster on 8th street (not on broadway!) at 1:00 in the afternoon.

For this week we'll be going over two concepts:
1) How to improve ones life by doing regular reviews on how things are going and improving on what didn't work.
2) How to make plans that will have a higher probability of you actually following through with them.

More info here: http://www.meetup.com/Saskatoon-Rationalists/

Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Saskatoon: Iterative Improvement and Concrete Planning.