trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Engaging First Introductions to AI Risk
by Rob Bensinger — 2013-08-19T06:26:26.697Z

I'm putting together a list of short and sweet introductions to the dangers of artificial superintelligence.

My target audience is intelligent, broadly philosophical narrative thinkers, who can evaluate arguments well but who don't know a lot of the relevant background or jargon.

My method is to construct a Sequence mix tape — a collection of short and enlightening texts, meant to be read in a specified order. I've chosen them for their persuasive and pedagogical punchiness, and for their flow in the list. I'll also (separately) list somewhat longer or less essential follow-up texts below that are still meant to be accessible to astute visitors and laypeople.

The first half focuses on intelligence, answering 'What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?'. The second half focuses on friendliness, answering 'How can we make AGI safe, and why does it matter?'. Since the topics of some posts aren't obvious from their titles, I've summarized them using questions they address.

Part I. Building intelligence.

1. Power of Intelligence. Why is intelligence important?

2. Ghosts in the Machine. Is building an intelligence from scratch like talking to a person?

3. Artificial Addition. What can we conclude about the nature of intelligence from the fact that we don't yet understand it?

4. Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers. How do human goals relate to the 'goals' of evolution?

5. The Blue-Minimizing Robot. What are the shortcomings of thinking of things as 'agents', 'intelligences', or 'optimizers' with defined values/goals/preferences?

Part II. Intelligence explosion.

6. Optimization and the Singularity. What is optimization? As optimization processes, how do evolution, humans, and self-modifying AGI differ?

7. Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization. What is intelligence?

8. The Design Space of Minds-In-General. What else is universally true of intelligences?

9. Plenty of Room Above Us. Why should we expect self-improving AGI to quickly become superintelligent?

Part III. AI risk.

10. The True Prisoner's Dilemma. What kind of jerk would Defect even knowing the other side Cooperated?

11. Basic AI drives. Why are AGIs dangerous even when they're indifferent to us?

12. Anthropomorphic Optimism. Why do we think things we hope happen are likelier?

13. The Hidden Complexity of Wishes. How hard is it to directly program an alien intellige...
One way to manipulate your level of abstraction related to a task
by Andy_McKenzie — 2013-08-19T05:47:10.920Z

In construal level theory, ideas can be classified along a spectrum from concrete ("near" in Robin Hanson's terminology) to abstract ("far"). As a summary, here is the abstract from a 2010 review (pdf):

People are capable of thinking about the future, the past, remote locations, another person’s perspective, and counterfactual alternatives. Without denying the uniqueness of each process, it is proposed that they constitute different forms of traversing psychological distance. Psychological distance is egocentric: Its reference point is the self in the here and now, and the different ways in which an object might be removed from that point—in time, in space, in social distance, and in hypotheticality— constitute different distance dimensions. Transcending the self in the here and now entails mental construal, and the farther removed an object is from direct experience, the higher (more abstract) the level of construal of that object. Supporting this analysis, research shows (a) that the various distances are cognitively related to each other, (b) that they similarly influence and are influenced by level of mental construal, and (c) that they similarly affect prediction, preference, and action.

Now, what if you want to think about some thing in a more or less near or far way? Here's one well-studied strategy to do so (e.g., see pdf here).

To think about a task in more concrete terms, ask yourself how you would do it. Then, however you answer that question, ask yourself how would you do that. Do this two (or so) more times, and you will be thinking about that task significantly more concretely.

To think about a task in more abstract terms, ask yourself why you would do it. Then ask yourself why you would want that 3 (or so) more times.

An excerpt from the 2007 study in the second link to give an example of how this would work:

Suppose you indicate “taking a vacation” as one of your goals. Please write the goal in the uppermost square. Then, think why you would like to go on vacation, and write your answer in the square underneath. Suppose that you write “in order to rest.” Now, please think why you would like to rest, and write your answer in the third square. Suppose that you write “in order to renew your energy.” Finally, write in the last square why you would like to renew your ene

...
Effective Altruist Job Board?
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-08-18T22:40:34.868Z

An idea I had while talking to Xio Kikauka and Joey Savoie is to run a jobs board for people interested in effective altruism. It seems like it actually would be relatively easy to have a script automatically monitor various job pages and synthesize them all into one area that looks nice.

Would this be useful to create? And if so, where should we get jobs from?

Some potential ideas:

The Humane League (Jobs, Internships)

Effective Animal Activism

Giving What We Can

80,000 Hours

GiveWell

Innovations for Poverty Action (Jobs, Internships)

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

[Added 19 Aug --

Oxfam (International Secretariat Jobs, Affiliate Jobs)

Nyaya Health

The Hunger Project (Jobs, Internships)

Population Services International

Good Ventures

Farm Sanctuary (Jobs, Internships)

]

I'd be willing to make this happen if people were interested.

-

(Also cross-posted on my blog.)
My daily reflection routine
by Nick_Beckstead — 2013-08-18T11:54:00.596Z

In Common sense as a prior, I used the example of prayer as a practice that is probably adaptive but the people who adopt it may not know why it is adaptive. I wrote:

Another striking example is bedtime prayer. In many Christian traditions I am aware of, it is common to pray before going to sleep. And in the tradition I was raised in, the main components of prayer were listing things you were grateful for, asking for forgiveness for all the mistakes you made that day and thinking about what you would do to avoid similar mistakes in the future, and asking God for things. Christians might say the point of this is that it is a duty to God, that repentance is a requirement for entry to heaven, or that asking God for things makes God more likely to intervene and create miracles. However, I think these activities are reasonable for different reasons: gratitude journals are great, reflecting on mistakes is a great way to learn and overcome weaknesses, and it is a good idea to get clear about what you really want out of life in the short-term and the long-term.

…I think it would be better still to introduce a different routine that serves similar functions—this is something I have done in my own life…

Someone recently wrote to me asking about my routine. I wrote this person an answer, so I thought I might as well share it with others. I have a number of structured routines like this that I find helpful and have considered sharing more widely, so this post will also serve as a test for whether I should share these routines. (These routines include: planning the day and tracking your time, planning and evaluating a project, doing a literature search, keeping a record of personal principles, reading and evaluating a paper, weekly review, and a few others that are less developed.)

Below, I offer and explanation of my routine, a template for following it, and give examples of what it looks like when I have used it. I have been doing this for about 6 weeks and I spend 5-15 minutes doing this per day. I was raised in a very religious family, and did something pretty similar for about the first 18 years of my life. I think it is good, but I don’t think the effect size/my tracking ability combo allows me to confidently distinguish between “it’s a placebo” and “it actually works” on the basis of my personal ex...
The landscape of altruistic interventions
by KatjaGrace — 2013-08-18T11:00:38.000Z

Suppose you want to figure out what the best things to do are. One approach is to start by prioritizing high level causes: is it better broadly to work on developing world health, or on technological development? Then you can work your way downwards: is it better to work on treating infectious diseases or on preventative measures? Malaria or HIV? Direct bed-net distribution or political interventions? Which politician? Which tactic? Which day?

This should work well if the landscape of interventions is kind of smooth – if the best interventions are found with the pretty excellent interventions, which are in larger categories with the great interventions, etc. This approach might work well for finding a person who really likes hockey for instance. The extreme hockey lovers will be found with the fairly enthusiastic hockey lovers, who will probably ultimately be in countries of hockey lovers. It should not on the other hand work very well for finding the reddest objects in your house – the most red thing is not likely to be in the room which has the most overall red. Which of these is more similar to finding good altruistic interventions?

This method would work well for finding the reddest things in your house if the redness of things was influenced a lot by color of the lights, and you had very different colored lights throughout your house. Similarly, if most of the variation in value between different altruistic interventions comes from general characteristics of high level causes, we should expect this method to work better there. You might also expect it to work well if the important levels could be mixed and matched – if the best high level cause could be combined with the best generic method of pursuing a cause, and done with the best people. These things seem plausible to me in the case of altruistic interventions, but I’m not really sure. What do you think?
LW Melbourne: Report on Public Rationality Lecture
by  — 2013-08-17T14:17:45.028Z

Introduction

In the past couple of months, Melbourne LW has been working to expand our activities and community, as well generally promoting rationality. A huge shout out goes to BraydenM who is responsible for spearheading these efforts. So far we have opened up some of our meetups to new-comers, held a winter solstice dinner party, held a COZE event, created a Meetup.com group for Melbourne LW, presented at other Meetup.com groups, distributed copies of HPMoR, conducted a rationality-vox pop, and presented a public lecture on LW content.

The public lecture was my project, and here is my report.

Initial Planning

In early July, we held a planning session for expanding the community and promoting rationality. Holding public rationality lectures was deemed a possibility worth trying.

Being students in our early twenties, we judged the most receptive market would be our peers. We considered who we should target: (1) High IQ, heavily academic students with technical backgrounds in maths/science/philosophy of the sort who might join LW, or (2) everyone else as well. Having visions of a world where everyone was more rational, I opted for the latter.

I was ambitious at this point and wanted to run a series of six lectures progressing through core sequences content. Wiser heads suggested we run a single, stand-alone lecture to get data. Since I still hoped to run a whole series, the first lecture had to be given at the beginning of new semester (start of August here).

Content

(slides: open in PP to view presenter's notes)

To meet the deadline, I developed the lecture material unaided and without much planning or revision. Speed came at the price of quality.

The lecture could have focused on either of a) cognitive biases or b) core sequences content such as simple truth, probabilistic reasoning, beliefs paying rent, and evidence.

Reasons in favour of and against:

Cognitive Biases
+ I have a prior that biases would be more appealing and get better attendance

- requires more research to present on

- teaching people about biases can be dangerous

Core LW Material

+ I know the content well, easy to prepare material on

+ provides motivation for overcoming biases

- more abstract, philosophical, and less interesting to most

Overwhelmingly, I decided to focus on core sequence material because of the ability to prepare lecture ...
Meetup : New Meetup: Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
by Mestroyer — 2013-08-17T03:39:53.619Z

Discussion article for the meetup : New Meetup: Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.

WHEN:
25 August 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Illini Union South Lounge 1401 W Green St Urbana, IL 61801

Meetup topic will be determined by popular consensus at the actual meetup. The expectations of active LessWrongers in the area about future meetup topics will probably be affected by the meetup topic at this first meetup. If you have strong preferences, be there on the 25th and make them known. I will bring Zendo and cards from Wits and Wagers (trivia with quantitative answers, good for Fermi estimates), meaning we can do calibration, or play prediction-based games.

Here is a mailing list for the meetup group I'm attempting to create

Discussion article for the meetup : New Meetup: Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
Group Rationality Diary, August 16-31
by therufs — 2013-08-16T23:29:02.445Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for August 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Next diary: September 1-15

Immediate past diary: August 1-15

Rationality Diaries archive
Humans are utility monsters
by PhilGoetz — 2013-08-16T21:05:28.195Z

When someone complains that utilitarianism1 leads to the dust speck paradox or the trolley-car problem, I tell them that's a feature, not a bug. I'm not ready to say that respecting the utility monster is also a feature of utilitarianism, but it is what most people everywhere have always done. A model that doesn't allow for utility monsters can't model human behavior, and certainly shouldn't provoke indignant responses from philosophers who keep right on respecting their own utility monsters.

The utility monster is a creature that is somehow more capable of experiencing pleasure (or positive utility) than all others combined. Most people consider sacrificing everyone else's small utilities for the benefits of this monster to be repugnant.

Let's suppose the utility monster is a utility monster because it has a more highly-developed brain capable of making finer discriminations, higher-level abstractions, and more associations than all the lesser minds around it. Does that make it less repugnant? (If so, I lose you here. I invite you to post a comment explaining why utility-monster-by-smartness is an exception.) Suppose we have one utility monster and one million others. Everything we do, we do for the one utility monster. Repugnant?

Multiply by nine billion. We now have nine billion utility monsters and 9x1015 others. Still repugnant?

Yet these same enlightened, democratic societies whose philosophers decry the utility monster give approximately zero weight to the well-being of non-humans. We might try not to drive a species extinct, but when contemplating a new hydroelectric dam, nobody adds up the disutility to all the squirrels in the valley to be flooded.

If you believe the utility monster is a problem with utilitarianism, how do you take into account the well-being of squirrels? How about ants? Worms? Bacteria? You've gone to 1015 others just with ants.2 Maybe 1020 with nematodes.

"But humans are different!" our anti-utilitarian complains. "They're so much more intelligent and emotionally complex than nematodes that it would be repugnant to wipe out all humans to save any number of nematodes."

Well, that's what a real utility monster looks like.

The same people who believe this then turn around and say there's a problem with utilitarianism because (when unpacked into a plausible real-life example) it might kill all the nematodes to save one human. Given the...
New LW Meetup: Saskatoon
by FrankAdamek — 2013-08-16T15:38:27.877Z

This summary was posted to LW main on August 9th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Saskatoon's First Meetup!: 17 August 2013 01:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta LessWrong: Games Night: 24 August 2013 06:00PM
Brussels meetup: 17 August 2013 01:00PM
LessWrong Israel September meetup: 12 September 2013 08:00PM
[Lyon] Picnic au Parc de la Tête d'Or: 17 August 2013 12:30PM
LW Munich Meetup in August: 10 August 2013 03:00PM
Vancouver!: 11 August 2013 03:00PM

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:

Austin, TX: 10 August 2019 01:30PM
[Cambridge MA] Using Causal Graphs to Understand Bias in the Medical Literature: 11 August 2013 02:00PM
Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 79-81: 10 August 2013 12:00PM
London Social - The Unwelcome but Probable Decline and Fall of Direct Sunlight: 18 August 2013 02:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 17 August 2013 03:00PM
Washington DC books meetup: 11 August 2013 03:00PM
West LA Meetup—Confess Your Unpopular Opinion: 14 August 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, Research Triangle NC, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, 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 meet...
High level climate intervention considerations
by KatjaGrace — 2013-08-16T11:00:24.000Z

I’ve lately helped Giving What We Can extend their charity evaluation to climate change mitigation charities. This is a less abridged draft of a more polished post up on their blog.

Suppose you wanted to prevent climate change. What methods would get you the most emissions reduction for your money?

GWWC research has recently tried to answer this question, with a preliminary investigation of a number of climate change mitigation charities. Another time, I’ll discuss our investigation and its results in more detail. This time I’m going to tell you about some of the high level arguments and considerations we encountered for focusing on some kinds of mitigation methods over others.

The binding budget consideration

The world’s nations have been trying to negotiate agreements, limiting their future emissions in concert. The emissions targets chosen in such agreements are intended to sum up to meet a level deemed ‘safe’. Suppose some day such agreements are achieved. It seems then that any emissions you have reduced in advance will just be extra that someone will be allowed to emit after that agreement.

This argument implies political strategies are better than more direct means of reducing emissions. In particular, political strategies directed at causing such an agreement to come about.

This argument may sound plausible, but note that it relies on the following assumptions:

the probability of such an agreement being formed is not substantially altered by prior emissions reductions

the emissions targets set in such an agreement are not sensitive to the cost of achieving them

such targets will be met, or we will fail to meet them by a similar margin regardless of how far we begin from them.

None of these is very plausible. Agreement seems more likely if it will be cheaper for the parties to uphold, or if it is more expensive to have no agreement. These are both altered by prior emissions reductions. There is no threshold of danger at which targets will automatically be set; more expensive targets are presumably less likely to be chosen. Two degrees is especially likely due to past discussions, however as it becomes harder to meet it becomes less likely to be retained as the goal. The further we begin from the targets we set, the less likely we are to attain them. Overall, it seems unclear whether reducing emissions by a tonne y...
Meetup : Moscow: The Sunday Meetup
by Yuu — 2013-08-16T08:28:59.125Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: The Sunday Meetup

WHEN:
18 August 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door. We will meet you at 16:00 with “LW” sign inside the hall or just look for group of geek-looking people.

Main topics:

Applied rationality exercises.

Short presentation about self deception.

Game session.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with more photos!

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: The Sunday Meetup