trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : SF Meetup: Cooking
by maia — 2017-03-02T02:26:24.490Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Cooking

WHEN:
06 March 2017 06:15:15PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1045 Mission St., SF

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

Here's how this works: I send out a planning doc on the mailing list (bayarealesswrong on Google Groups) 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 in 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.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

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
Meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group - Luminosity Part 3
by mingyuan — 2017-03-02T01:16:57.311Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group - Luminosity Part 3

WHEN:
05 March 2017 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Harper Memorial Library Room 148, 1116 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637

The Chicago Rationality Reading Group meets every Sunday from 1-3 PM in Room 148 of Harper Memorial Library. Though we meet on the University of Chicago campus, anyone is welcome to attend.

This week we will be finishing the Luminosity sequence, as well as reading Paul Graham's essay about lies we tell to kids:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1za/the_spotlight/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/209/highlights_and_shadows/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/20r/city_of_lights/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/21l/lampshading/

the last four stories from http://lesswrong.com/lw/2aw/seven_shiny_stories/

http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Reading Group - Luminosity Part 3
March 2017 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2017-03-01T22:54:09.475Z

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.
Meetup : March Rationality meetup
by Marko — 2017-03-01T16:59:50.131Z

Discussion article for the meetup : March Rationality meetup

WHEN:
04 March 2017 05:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Tibits Oerlikon, Zurich, Switzerland

Just a social meetup, no program.

Discussion article for the meetup : March Rationality meetup
Don't Fear the Reaper: Refuting Bostrom's Superintelligence Argument
by sbenthall — 2017-03-01T14:28:56.559Z

I've put a preprint up on arXiv that this community might find relevant. It's an argument from over a year ago, so it may be dated. I haven't been keeping up with the field much since I wrote it, so I welcome any feedback especially on where the crux of the AI risk debate has moved since the publication of Bostrom's Superintelligence book.

Don't Fear the Reaper: Refuting Bostrom's Superintelligence Argument

In recent years prominent intellectuals have raised ethical concerns about the consequences of artificial intelligence. One concern is that an autonomous agent might modify itself to become "superintelligent" and, in supremely effective pursuit of poorly specified goals, destroy all of humanity. This paper considers and rejects the possibility of this outcome. We argue that this scenario depends on an agent's ability to rapidly improve its ability to predict its environment through self-modification. Using a Bayesian model of a reasoning agent, we show that there are important limitations to how an agent may improve its predictive ability through self-modification alone. We conclude that concern about this artificial intelligence outcome is misplaced and better directed at policy questions around data access and storage.

As I hope is clear from the argument, the point of the article is to suggest that to the extent AI risk is a problem, we should shift our focus away from AI theory and more towards addressing questions of how we socially organize data collection and retention.
[Stub] The wrong philosophical question
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-03-01T12:31:47.466Z

Guy who wants to do philosophy with me: "If you made a perfect copy of yourself and destroyed the original, would that copy be you?"

Me: "Oh yes, of course. Trivially."

GWWTDPWM: "Ah, but what if you didn't destroy the original immediately, and then..."

Me: "What? You have two beings with the same history and same memories and same bodies and same claim to possessions/friends/legal status/partners walking around in the world? This has never happened in the history of the Earth! This is bizarre! Unique! Interesting! Let's plumb the philosophical mysteries of this novel arrangement, and what it means for identity!"
Meetup : #13 - Focusing
by  — 2017-02-28T20:52:57.897Z

Discussion article for the meetup : #13 - Focusing

WHEN:
05 March 2017 03:13:37PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands

If you see yourself as a kind of robot, focusing is for you.

About 50 years ago, a guy named Carl Rogers was trying to fix psychotherapy. He studied different modalities (like freudian, behaviorist, etc), trying to find out which one was better. It turned out none of these therapies had better results than the others. Guess Freud was full of shit.
But what did? There was one common factor among the group of clients that did recover. It was that when asked about their feelings, they did something like:
"uhhh... not sure... I guess I feel... frustrated? No wait that's not exactly it. uh... maybe I feel unjustly inhibited? Nah... closer but that's not quite the thing either..."
So Rogers took that thing and said: why don't we just try to teach that?

That thing is focusing. It's a way to query those deep subconscious beliefs that secretly impact everything you do in major ways. I (Toon) personally didn't really get the point of this, until I found out that pretty much everything that was wrong in my life was caused by not really being aware of my feelings. Now it's my favourite technique.

Don't be like Toon. Learn focusing.

Discussion article for the meetup : #13 - Focusing
CFAR Workshop Review: February 2017
by  — 2017-02-28T03:15:24.541Z

[A somewhat extensive review of a recent CFAR workshop, with recommendations at the end for those interested in attending one.]

I recently mentored at a CFAR workshop, and this is a review of the actual experience. In broad strokes, this review will cover the physical experience (atmosphere, living, eating, etc.), classes (which ones were good, which ones weren’t), and recommendations (regrets, suggestions, ways to optimize your experience). I’m not officially affiliated with CFAR, and this review represents my own thoughts only.

A little about me: my name is Owen, and I’m here in the Bay Area. This was actually my first real workshop, but I’ve had a fair amount of exposure to CFAR materials from EuroSPARC, private conversations, and LessWrong. So do keep in mind that I’m someone who came into the workshop with a rationalist’s eye.

I’m also happy to answer any questions people might have about the workshop. (Via PM or in the comments below.)

Physical Experience:

Sleeping / Food / Living:

(This section is venue-dependent, so keep that in mind.)

Despite the hefty $3000 plus price tag, the workshop accommodations aren’t exactly plush. You get a bed, and that’s about it. In my workshop, there were always free bathrooms, so that part wasn’t a problem.

There was always enough food at meals, and my impression was that dietary restrictions were handled well. For example, one staff member went out and bought someone lunch when one meal didn’t work. Other than that, there’s ample snacks between meals, usually a mix of chips, fruits, and chocolate. Also, hot tea and a surprisingly wide variety of drinks.

Atmosphere / Social:

(The participants I worked with were perhaps not representative of the general “CFAR participant”, so also take caution here.)

People generally seemed excited and engaged. Given that everyone hopefully voluntarily decided to show up, this was perhaps to be expected. Anyway, there’s a really low amount of friction when it comes to joining and exiting conversations. By that, I mean it felt very easy, socially speaking, to just randomly join a conversation. Staff and participants all seemed quite approachable for chatting.

I don’t have the actual participant stats, but my impression is that a good amount of people came from quantitative (math/CS) backgroun...
Familiar Finance
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-02-27T21:12:57.000Z

People seemed to dig my plan to Get Rich Slowly and declared that not-being-poor is something they plan to do. So, without stepping on any toes or mustaches, it’s time for part 2 of the “Putanumonit pretends to be a financial advice blog” series. To make sure I do this right, let’s first conduct a comprehensive review of the financial advice already on offer by the best sources online.

The Simple Dollar – Thinking of loaning money to family? Don’t do it!

Wall Street Journal – The perils of lending to family

Money Crashers – 10 reasons why you should NOT lend money to friends and family

Go Banking Rates – Why lending money to friends and family is a bad idea

Wall Street Journal again, in case you weren’t paying attention – Never lend money to a friend. Repeat: just don’t do it

Weird, one could almost think that financial advice on the internet was sponsored by retail banks. The same banks that only recently replaced family as people main source of financing, and are making a nice profit doing it.

All these articles talk about the downsides of lending or borrowing money from people you know, although mostly in an anecdotal way. What these articles fail to mention, however, are the downsides of not lending and borrowing from people you know. I have an anecdote regarding those as well.

5 years ago, I talked with a business school classmate who owed about $160,000 in student loans. An American with an MBA is practically guaranteed to earn enough to pay that back, but until he does he’s paying 7% annual interest for the pleasure. Meanwhile his parents, both employed and many years from retirement, held a similar amount of money in US treasury bonds which earned them around 2% interest. The difference between the total interest my friend’s family was paying and getting was 5% of $160,000, or $8,000. By not lending money directly to their son, my friend’s family was setting eight thousand dollars on fire every single year.

$8,000 a year is quite a bit of downside.

When I got into business school, my own dad declared that he trusts me more than he trusts the US government, and unlike Uncle Sam I’m not carrying 15 trillion dollars of previous debt either. He said he’s happy to lend me money while I attended school at the prevailing US Treasury rates. What terrible trage...
A Modern Myth
by Scott Alexander — 2017-02-27T17:29:17.000Z

1. Eris

A middle-aged man, James, had come on stage believing it was an audition for American Idol. It wasn’t. Out ran his ex-lover, Terri. “You said you loved me!” she said. “And then when I got pregnant, you disappeared! Twenty years, and you never even sent me a letter!”

The crowd booed.

As James tried to sputter a response, his wife ran onto the stage. “You cheating jerk!” she shouted at James. “You lying, cheating jerk! Twenty-five years we’ve been married, and I never…” She picked up a folding chair, tried to swing it at James.

“Stop!” cried James’ teenage daughter Katie, joining in the fray. “Mom, Dad, stop it!”

“You stay out of this!” shouted James’ wife. “Maybe if you’d had a good male role model, you wouldn’t have become a lesbian.”

The crowd gasped.

Katie’s girlfriend Lisa came out of a side door. “You take that back!” she yelled. Then she saw Terri. “Wait? Mom? What are you doing here?”

“That’s right,” said Alice DiScorria, sidling onto the stage, effortlessly drawing the audience’s attention from the brawl taking shape in front of them. “Katie’s girlfriend is the daughter of the woman her father cheated with, so many years ago. And we’ve got the paternity test right here.” She theatrically opened a manilla envelope. “And…James! James is the father!”

“I’VE BEEN LESBIAN LOVERS WITH MY HALF-SISTER!” shrieked Katie.

“This is all your fault!” everyone shouted at everyone else in unison. Then the punching started.

In short, it had been another successful episode of The Alice Show.

Now Ms. DiScorria was in her dressing room, wiping off the night’s makeup, trying to decide where to go to dinner. Knock, knock. She opened the door wide.

There stood Katie and Lisa. Katie was holding a shotgun.

“Why would you do this to us?” screamed Katie. “We were a happy family!”

“I loved her!” added Lisa.

“Why?” Katie screamed at her, waving the gun. “WHY?”

“Oh, put it away,” said Alice. “We both know you’re not going to shoot me. And it wouldn’t hurt me if you did. I do this because I’m Eris, the Greek Goddess of Discord. I ...
Open Thread, Feb. 27 - March 5, 2017
by Elo — 2017-02-27T04:32:57.215Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, 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 start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
Metrics in Everything: “Human Lives”
by Zvi — 2017-02-26T16:18:54.000Z

Epistemic Status: Ranting with the fire of a thousand suns

I was on page 48 of the (so far) otherwise interesting and enjoyable Algorithms to Live By, a birthday gift from my friend Jacob who writes the blog Put a Num on It, in which the authors Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths was discussing the Explore/Exploit dynamic and the virtues of A/B testing, when I came upon the following passage, which caused a strong instinct in me to say ‘until you have properly ranted about this you are not allowed to continue reading this book’:

In fact, these distinctions turn out to matter immensely-and it’s not just presidential elections and the internet economy that are at stake.

It’s also human lives.

No. Big No. A thousand times no. Stop. Just stop. Seriously, no, just stop. Now. All of you.

Human lives that might come to a proximate end are not the trump card. They are not the one and only metric that determines worthiness. The world is not divided into non-overlapping magisteria, Things That Are Human Lives, and Things That Might Effect Humans But Are Not Directly And Explicitly At-Risk Human Lives, with everything in the first magisteria more important than everything in the second magisteria.

You also can’t solve this problem by shifting some group of additional things from the second magisteria into the first magisteria.

You cannot say: Yes, I understand that when we talked about raising $57 million dollars for a presidential campaign, we were talking about only politics or only money. When we were talking about the entire internet economy, we were only talking about a bit of technology or only money. All of that pales in comparison to this one marginal improvement I will show you in one tiny corner of health care, because that might save a life, and therefore I win.

I also note that some people are still wondering why we have a cost disease problem.

If I wanted to refute this particular example, I could point to the fact that the presidential campaign in question resulted, for good or ill, in the passage of a bill that gave health insurance to tens of millions of Americans. Human lives were at stake!

If I wanted to defend the internet economy, I could point out that it enables people to get better medical information, find doctors and insurance plans, find alternate solutions, get better treatment, and also hold up our entire economy thereby...
Modal Combat for games other than the prisoner's dilemma
by AlexMennen — 2017-02-26T08:10:05.000Z

Modal Combat for arbitrary games

Modal combat has, as far as I know, only been studied in the context
of the prisoner's dilemma, but it can also be used for other games.
The definition of modal agent for an arbitrary game will be similar
to the definition of modal agent for the prisoner's dilemma given
in Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma, except that since
different players can have different sets of available actions, a
modal agent must know which position it is playing in, and since players
can have more than two available actions, multiple formulas will be
needed to express what action the agent takes. Formally, let G
be a game with players 1,...,n, where each player i has a set
of available actions Ai={a1i,...,amii}
(mi=|Ai|), and for each player i, the function
Ui:A1×...×An→R describes
the payoff for player i for each possible combination of actions.
A modal agent X for G of player type i and rank k≥0
consists of a finite sequence of triples {(tj,Yj,asjtj)}j∈{1,...,N},
where tj∈{1,...,n}∖{i},
Yj is either X or a modal agent of player type i and rank
<k, and sj∈{1,...,mtj}, together with
mi fully modalized formulas φℓ(p1,...,pN)
such that Godel-Lob logic proves that exactly one of φ1,...,φmi
holds. By definition, in a game played by modal agents Z1,...,Zi−1,X,Zi+1,...,Zn,
where Zj is of player type j, X takes action aℓi
(an event denoted as [X(Z1,...,Zn)=aℓi])
iff φℓ([Zt1(Z1,...,Zi−1,Y1,Zi+1,...,Zn)=as1t1],...,[ZtN(Z1,...,Zi−1,YN,Zi+1,...,Zn)=asNtN])
holds. (We could also allow modal agents to consider what happens
if players other than themselves are replaced by modal agents of lower
rank. Making this change would not affect anything in this post, and
I didn't allow for that mainly because the definition is already a
mouthful and I didn't want it to get any worse). The modal combat
version of G is the game in which each player i submits a modal
agent for G of player type i, and gets the payoff that their
agent does when the modal agents play G with each other.

A strong Nash equilibrium is a Nash equilibrium in which there is
no non-empty coalition of players that could achieve a Pareto improvement
for themselves (not including players outside the coalition) by switching
strategies, while the strategies of the other players are held fixed.
(Note: "Pareto improvement" is ambiguous as to whether it requires
at least one person to become stric

...
The AI Paper with The Best Title Ever
by Zvi — 2017-02-24T22:38:02.000Z

Epistemic Status: Confident I understood the paper, but no promises on its implications

The title is “Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent.” If anyone can top that title I am eager to hear about it. The idea is a good one on the merits, but I still suspect that one of the authors thought of the title and then decided to implement the technique in order to justify using the name as the title of a paper. That may sound like a lot of work, since it involved a lot of coding and eventually eight authors, but when you see a golden opportunity, it would be wrong not to seize it.

The paper is conceptually simple. Like most things that actually happen in AI (or elsewhere), the question in hindsight seems more like “why did it take so long for someone to do this?” rather than “how did you think of that?”

Machine learning is almost always done via gradient descent plus a few tricks. Gradient descent has a lot of parameters whose optimal values interact and are not obvious, and you can tinker with those parameters to try and improve its performance. That sounds a lot like a problem you can solve using… gradient descent.

They do this on some problems where gradient descent already gets a reasonable answer. They do what seems like the simplest thing, and use an LSTM optimizer on each parameter. It works. Performance is noticeably improved versus existing benchmarks.

One, two, three, victory! That is pretty cool.

Presumably the next thing to do is to learn to learn to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent by gradient descent, since the LSTM optimizer does not sound especially optimized but there’s this great idea for solving that particular problem. There might even be a clever trick that allows us to extend this to using a level of the network to tune itself, if you choose the right look-ahead for the optimization target.

This is what passes for meta-learning these days. How useful is it? How dangerous is it?

The process seems useful, but finitely useful. In the end, what you are left with is still a gradient descent algorithm that solves the original problem. We can find a better set of parameters, which should improve performance, but only if the problem was already solvable and only so much improvement will be available. In that case, you will find the best solution the system is capable of finding, and find it faster, assuming you don’t waste too ...