trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Open thread, Jul. 04 - Jul. 10, 2016
by MrMind — 2016-07-04T07:02:11.193Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Good intuitions
by KatjaGrace — 2016-07-04T06:56:10.000Z

Sometimes people have ‘good intuitions’. Which is to say something like, across a range of questions, they tend to be unusually correct for reasons that are hard to explain explicitly.

How do people come to have good intuitions? My first guess is that new intuitions are born from looking at the world, and naturally interpreting it using a bunch of existing intuitions. For instance, suppose I watch people talking for a while, and I have some intuitions about how humans behave, what they want, what their body language means, and how strategic people tend to be. Then I might come to have an intuition for how large a part status plays in human interactions, which I could then go on to use in other cases. If I had had different intuitions about those other things, or watched different people talking, I might have developed a different intuition about the relevance of status.

On this model, when a person has consistently unusually good intuitions, it could be that:

A) Their innate intuition forming machinery is good: perhaps they form hypotheses easily, or they avoid forming hypotheses too easily. Or they absorb others’ useful words into their intuitions easily.

B) They had a small number of particularly useful early intuitions, that tend to produce good further intuitions in the presence of the outside world.

C) They have observed more or higher quality empirical data across the areas where they have superior intuitions.

D) They got lucky, and randomly happen to have a lot of good intuitions instead of bad intuitions.

Which of these plays the biggest part seems important, for:

Judging intuitions in hard or unusual areas: If A), then good intuitions are fairly general. So good intuitions about math (testable) suggest good intuitions about how to avoid existential risk (harder to test). This is decreasingly the case as we move down the alphabet.

Spreading good intuitions: If B), then it might be possible to distill the small number of core intuitions a person with good intuitions has, and share them with other people.

I expect some of all of A-D play a part (and that I have forgotten more possibilities). But are some of them particularly common in people who have surprisingly good intuitions?
Link: Re-reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow
by toomanymetas — 2016-07-04T06:32:21.010Z

"A bit over four years ago I wrote a glowing review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I described it as a “magnificent book” and “one of the best books I have read”. I praised the way Kahneman threaded his story around the System 1 / System 2 dichotomy, and the coherence provided by prospect theory.

What a difference four years makes. I will still describe Thinking, Fast and Slow as an excellent book – possibly the best behavioural science book available. But during that time a combination of my learning path and additional research in the behavioural sciences has led me to see Thinking, Fast and Slow as a book with many flaws."

Continued here: https://jasoncollins.org/2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/
The map of future models
by turchin — 2016-07-03T13:17:33.485Z

TL;DR: Many models of the future exist. Several are relevant. Hyperbolic model is strongest, but too strange.

Our need: correct model of the future
Different people: different models = no communication.

Assumptions:
Model of the future = main driving force of historical process + graphic of changes
Model of the future determines global risks

The map: lists all main future models.
Structure: from fast growth – to slow growth models.
Pfd: http://immortality-roadmap.com/futuremodelseng.pdf
Zombies Redacted
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2016-07-02T20:16:33.687Z

I looked at my old post Zombies! Zombies? and it seemed to have some extraneous content. This is a redacted and slightly rewritten version.

Your "zombie", in the philosophical usage of the term, is putatively a being that is exactly like you in every respect—identical behavior, identical speech, identical brain; every atom and quark in exactly the same position, moving according to the same causal laws of motion—except that your zombie is not conscious.

It is furthermore claimed that if zombies are "conceivable" (a term over which battles are still being fought), then, purely from our knowledge of this "conceivability", we can deduce a priori that consciousness is extra-physical, in a sense to be described below.

See, for example, the SEP entry on Zombies. The "conceivability" of zombies is accepted by a substantial fraction, possibly a majority, of academic philosophers of consciousness.

I once read somewhere, "You are not the one who speaks your thoughts—you are the one who hears your thoughts".

If you conceive of "consciousness" as a quiet, passive listening, then the notion of a zombie initially seems easy to imagine. It's someone who lacks the the inner hearer.

Sketching out that intuition in a little more detail:

When you open a refrigerator and find that the orange juice is gone, you think "Darn, I'm out of orange juice." The sound of these words is probably represented in your auditory cortex, as though you'd heard someone else say it.

Why do I think the sound of your inner thoughts is represented in the auditory cortex, as if it were a sound you'd heard? Because, for example, native Chinese speakers can remember longer digit sequences than English-speakers. Chinese digits are all single syllables, and so Chinese speakers can remember around ten digits, versus the famous "seven plus or minus two" for English speakers. There appears to be a loop of repeating sounds back to yourself, a size limit on working memory in the auditory cortex, which is genuinely phoneme-based.

It's not only conceivable in principle, but possibly possible in the next couple of decades, that surgeons will lay a network of neural taps over someone's auditory cortex and read out their internal narrative. Researchers have already tapped the lateral geniculate nucleus of a cat and reconstructed recognizable visual inputs...
Ethicists should look less ethical
by KatjaGrace — 2016-07-02T12:00:27.000Z

Are ethicists more ethical than other people? Philosopher Eric Shwitzgebel has investigated this at some length and basically says no. He suggests this is because ethicists think of themselves as employed to think about ethics, not to be personally more ethical, and they are just not any more ethically ambitious than other people.

To find out if ethicists are more ethical, he checked how well they behave according to commonly held moral views. How much they steal library books, how much they call their mothers, how often they eat meat, and so on.

This seems like a poor way to judge the ethicalness of ethicists. Unless I am mistaken, the whole point of doing ethics research is to change our understanding of ethics. Successful ethics research then should lead to aiming to be ‘less ethical’, all things equal, if the measure of ethicalness is agreement with pre-existing or commonsense ethical norms.

Similarly, if your navigator directs you along a different route to the one you would have guessed, this suggests your navigator might actually be adding value.

The more troubling claim is that ethicists are apparently about as ethical as other people, rather than less ethical. This is not all that damning, since popular ethics is mostly deontological, and you could rearrange a lot of human behavior without much affecting adherence to a few deontological constraints. For instance, you can change which charities you give to substantially without affecting whether you give to charity and whether you kill anyone directly. Also, presumably a given ethicist studies some narrow set of activities, and is unlikely to have made progress on calling her mother aberrantly or whatever you happen to ask her about.

Ethicists like Peter Singer do manage to have views that at least sound like an ethical step backwards to the average person. Which seems like a good sign about whether they might be getting anywhere with the research.

I actually doubt that ethicists are much more ethical than other people. I just object to concluding that they are not with experiments that wouldn’t tell you if they were.
Aisle seat theorizing
by KatjaGrace — 2016-07-02T05:41:54.000Z

I recently went on some planes. Here is what I think about whenever I go on a plane.

A basic plane has N rows of M seats, divided by an aisle. For instance, maybe N=50 and M=6.

The standard routine by which people exit a plane looks like this. First, about two thirds of the people positioned next to the aisle stand up and prepare their items to leave. Then the first two or so walk off the plane (the people from seats x and w in the diagram). Then the two people in seats v and y get out, prepare their things, and walk off. Then u and z do that. Then the next couple of people in the original queue walk off, allowing the people in their row to climb out, get their stuff, and leave. And so on, for every row.

Let:

A be the time it takes to prepare one’s things to go

B be the time it takes to walk one seat forward in the plane (such that it takes the last person NB to walk from their seat to the front of the plane)

Then the time it takes for the usual procedure is:

time for one row to depart * number of rows + time for last person to walk off

= number of people in a row * time to take your stuff and step forward for the next person to get out * number of rows + number of rows * time to walk forward one row

= M(A+B) * N + BN

= AMN + BMN + BN

Here is an alternative method. Everyone in row Q stands and collects their things. They all walk off the plane. Row R stands and repeats the process. And so on.

Here is how long this procedure would take:

time for one column to depart * number of columns

= (time for a person to get their stuff + time for each person to move one seat forward, allowing the person behind them to start walking + time for the last person to walk all the way off) * number of columns

= (A + B(2N-1)) * M

= AM + 2BMN – BM

(In both cases I assumed that each person can only start walking forward after the person in front of them has moved one seat forward. So the last person in line takes B(N-1) time to start moving, and then BN time to get out. This is probably not quite right, but near enough.)

It might not be intuitively obvious, but in general AMN + BMN + BN is much bigger than AM + 2BMN – BM, if we assume it takes substantially longer to collect your bags than it does to walk a couple of steps forward. In fact, it is (A-B)M(N-1) + BN bigger, if we assume that I can do algebra.

For example if there are fifty rows (N = 50) of 6 seats (M = 6), and gathering ...
New LW Meetup: Dallas
by FrankAdamek — 2016-07-01T15:41:06.359Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on July 1st. The following week's summary is here.

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

Dallas Meetup: 09 July 2016 01:30PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Ann Arbor Area Amalgam of Rationalist-Adjacent Anthropoids: Assemblage at Adam's: 09 July 2016 07:00PM
Australian-ish Online Hangout July: 15 July 2016 07:30PM
European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM

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:

Baltimore Weekly Meetup: 03 July 2016 08:00PM
[Moscow] Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow: 16 July 2016 03:00PM
[Tel Aviv] Giving What We Can at LessWrong Tel Aviv: 05 July 2016 05:06PM
San Francisco Meetup: Cooking: 11 July 2016 06:15PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - July: 03 July 2016 04:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Outdoor Fun & Games: 03 July 2016 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, 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 i...
Meetup : Giving What We Can at LessWrong Tel Aviv
by Squark — 2016-07-01T14:07:14.541Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Giving What We Can at LessWrong Tel Aviv

WHEN:
05 July 2016 05:06:58PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Cluster - Disruptive Technologies hub, Yigal Alon 118 Tel Aviv

This Tueday, LessWrong Tel Aviv is proud to host a talk by Erwan Atcheson from Giving What We Can. GWWC is an organization based in the United Kingdom whose mission is promoting donations to effective charities in the global poverty domain. GWWC is associated with the Centre for Effective Altruism and is one of the most famous organizations in the effective altruism movement, known among other things for the pledge to give 10% of one's income to charity which anyone can take to become a member. Erwan will talk about GWWC's mission and work and will take questions from the audience.

As usual, the meetup begins at 19:00 but the talk will only begin around 19:30-19:45. Entrance to the Cluster is from Totseret Ha'aretz street, through a brown door with a doorbell.

See you all there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Giving What We Can at LessWrong Tel Aviv
Rationality Quotes July 2016
by Sabiola — 2016-07-01T09:02:15.327Z

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.
Meetup : Australian-ish Online Hangout July
by Calien — 2016-07-01T07:35:04.739Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Australian-ish Online Hangout July

WHEN:
16 July 2016 07:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Canberra ACT

EDIT: Changed the day to Saturday.
https://www.facebook.com/events/281081835576888/

Hey guys, I’ve dropped the ball on these but it’s back!
Tell us what you've learned recently, ask for rationalist advice, talk about cool stuff, and so on. (Bonus points from me if you have a cat you can present to the webcam.) I'll post a Google Hangouts link on Facebook close to the time.
We tend to go until late, so if you can't make it for the official time, you're welcome to pop in anyway.
People outside Australia are welcome too! We've heard from New Zealanders, South Americans, Europeans, North Americans...

Discussion article for the meetup : Australian-ish Online Hangout July
July 2016 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2016-07-01T06:52:43.557Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Anecdotal uncertainty of pain
by KatjaGrace — 2016-07-01T06:34:20.000Z

My experience of pain seems to be somewhat different from that of other people. For instance, for much of the day I wrote this I thought I was probably in pain, though I was unsure exactly where, or how bad it was, or if it was really pain instead of something else. To be clear, it was still unpleasant and fairly distracting.

Sometimes I feel like everything is terrible for five minutes or so before figuring out that the problem is that I’m in physical pain. I even explicitly wonder whether the problem is pain, and decide probably not, before later realizing I was wrong. In such cases I infer that I was in pain all along because it feels more like a picture emerging after staring at a bunch of dots for long enough, rather than something in the world changing. Also, I don’t have any other good explanation for what was so bad earlier.

I point this out because I think the usual folk theory of pain says that pain is a kind of direct experience that you can’t really be confused about. If you don’t know if you are in pain, you aren’t. Pain is a conscious experience, so being in pain implies being aware that you are in pain. Also knowing what the pain is like. I think I kind of assumed something like this until I paid more attention to my own experiences, or until my own experiences became more incomprehensible on this model. I don’t have a well worked out alternative model (maybe others do), but I expect it should the possibility of being consciously confused about basically everything.

I’m also curious about whether I am especially unusual in this regard, or just tend to hear from people who are surprised by this. Are you ever unsure whether you are in pain? Are you ever unsure about its characteristics?
Notes on the Safety in Artificial Intelligence conference
by UmamiSalami — 2016-07-01T00:36:57.309Z

These are my notes and observations after attending the Safety in Artificial Intelligence (SafArtInt) conference, which was co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Carnegie Mellon University on June 27 and 28. This isn't an organized summary of the content of the conference; rather, it's a selection of points which are relevant to the control problem. As a result, it suffers from selection bias: it looks like superintelligence and control-problem-relevant issues were discussed frequently, when in reality those issues were discussed less and I didn't write much about the more mundane parts.

SafArtInt has been the third out of a planned series of four conferences. The purpose of the conference series was twofold: the OSTP wanted to get other parts of the government moving on AI issues, and they also wanted to inform public opinion.

The other three conferences are about near term legal, social, and economic issues of AI. SafArtInt was about near term safety and reliability in AI systems. It was effectively the brainchild of Dr. Ed Felten, the deputy U.S. chief technology officer for the White House, who came up with the idea for it last year. CMU is a top computer science university and many of their own researchers attended, as well as some students. There were also researchers from other universities, some people from private sector AI including both Silicon Valley and government contracting, government researchers and policymakers from groups such as DARPA and NASA, a few people from the military/DoD, and a few control problem researchers. As far as I could tell, everyone except a few university researchers were from the U.S., although I did not meet many people. There were about 70-100 people watching the presentations at any given time, and I had conversations with about twelve of the people who were not affiliated with existential risk organizations, as well as of course all of those who were affiliated. The conference was split with a few presentations on the 27th and the majority of presentations on the 28th. Not everyone was there for both days.

Felten believes that neither "robot apocalypses" nor "mass unemployment" are likely. It soon became apparent that the majority of others present at the conference felt the same way with regard to superintelligence. The general intention among researchers and policymakers at the con...
Meetup : SF Meetup: Cooking
by maia — 2016-06-30T15:24:13.355Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Cooking

WHEN:
11 July 2016 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St., SF

Please note: this meetup is on July 11th, not July 4th. There will be no meetup on July 4th.

We'll be meeting to cook and eat food together!

Here's how this works: I'll send out a planning doc via the bayarealesswrong mailing list, to recruit 3-5 people to bring a recipe and be "leaders" for their particular dish. Everyone else who shows up will help the leaders as needed with the cooking. I'll ask the leaders to populate a grocery list beforehand so that I can do the grocery shopping, and everyone who shows up and helps eat will split the bill.

If you have dietary restrictions and want to come, feel free to mention that on the mailing list thread to encourage others to choose a dish that will work for you - or lead a dish yourself.

Instead of the usual "wait for stragglers" thing, we'll start the meetup as soon as people show up, since cooking can be time consuming.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Cooking
Link: The Economist on Paperclip Maximizers
by Anders_H — 2016-06-30T12:40:33.942Z

I certainly was not expecting the Economist to publish a special report on paperclip maximizers (!).

See http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21700762-techies-do-not-believe-artificial-intelligence-will-run-out-control-there-are?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/frankensteinspaperclips

As the title suggests, they are downplaying the risks of unfriendly AI, but just the fact that the Economist published this is significant