trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Uncategories and empty categories
by PhilGoetz — 2015-02-16T01:18:28.970Z

Savory

What does "savory" mean when talking about food? Merriam-Webster says:

having a pleasant taste or smell

having a spicy or salty quality without being sweet

pleasing to the sense of taste especially by reason of effective seasoning

pungently flavorful without sweetness

Macmillan says:

a small piece of food that tastes of salt or spices and is not sweet

But when found in the wild, "savory" is usually contrasted with sweet, and is either freed from the "salt or spices" requirement, or used in a context that already implies "salty, spicy, or sweet." As this debate on chowhounds shows, plenty of cooks think "savory" means "not sweet." It is then not a category, but an uncategory, defined by what it is not.

Spirit as uncategory

Recently I had a conversation with a woman who wanted to know whether I really believed only in material things. I said, no; I also believed in magnetic fields and gravity, for instance.

She said those didn't count, because magnetic fields and gravity fields are explained by particle interactions. I said, maybe they are, but I still believed in them after I stopped believing in the soul, but before anybody told me they were mediated by particles.

She said gravity and magnetism are deterministic. I said I also believed in quantum mechanics. She said that didn't count as belief in something non-material either, because the things we see quantum-mechanical effects in aren't intelligent.

I was confused: What did being intelligent have to do with being material? She said that non-material things were spirits, and spirits were intelligent.

I should have immediately realized where this was going, but I pressed on. I said I was willing to believe that one could use gravitational forces to build a (very very large) computer, with a quantum-mechanical random number generator, and then implement an intelligent program on it, and would that count as a spirit?

By this time she was getting a little upset with me, and said, approximately, that a spirit is an intelligent being, not composed of analyzable simpler parts, whose interactions with our world are not subject to any physical laws or statistical regularities, yet which can perceive our actions and cause things to happen in our world.

That meant if she found something she called a spirit, and I found that it had a mind containing information about our world, that would prove there were statistical...
The Galileo affair: who was on the side of rationality?
by Val — 2015-02-15T20:52:32.129Z

Introduction

A recent survey showed that the LessWrong discussion forums mostly attract readers who are predominantly either atheists or agnostics, and who lean towards the left or far left in politics. As one of the main goals of LessWrong is overcoming bias, I would like to come up with a topic which I think has a high probability of challenging some biases held by at least some members of the community. It's easy to fight against biases when the biases belong to your opponents, but much harder when you yourself might be the one with biases. It's also easy to cherry-pick arguments which prove your beliefs and ignore those which would disprove them. It's also common in such discussions, that the side calling itself rationalist makes exactly the same mistakes they accuse their opponents of doing. Far too often have I seen people (sometimes even Yudkowsky himself) who are very good rationalists but can quickly become irrational and use several fallacies when arguing about history or religion. This most commonly manifests when we take the dumbest and most fundamentalist young Earth creationists as an example, winning easily against them, then claiming that we disproved all arguments ever made by any theist. No, this article will not be about whether God exists or not, or whether any real world religion is fundamentally right or wrong. I strongly discourage any discussion about these two topics.

This article has two main purposes:

1. To show an interesting example where the scientific method can lead to wrong conclusions

2. To overcome a certain specific bias, namely, that the pre-modern Catholic Church was opposed to the concept of the Earth orbiting the Sun with the deliberate purpose of hindering scientific progress and to keep the world in ignorance. I hope this would prove to also be an interesting challenge for your rationality, because it is easy to fight against bias in others, but not so easy to fight against bias on yourselves.

The basis of my claims is that I have read the book written by Galilei himself, and I'm very interested (and not a professional, but well read) in early modern, but especially 16-17th century history.

Geocentrism versus Heliocentrism

I assume every educated person knows the name of Galileo Galilei. I won't waste the space on the site and the time of the readers to present a full biography about his life, there are plenty of o...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
by rocurley — 2015-02-15T08:27:59.247Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects

WHEN:
16 February 2015 06:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1390 Market St., San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to discuss projects we're working on / plan things to do in the future/ give each other advice.

If you call me when you get to the lobby (301-458-0764) I can give you directions on how to get in. Feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
Meetup : Sandy, UT—Altruism Discussion
by hamnox — 2015-02-13T19:16:13.464Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sandy, UT—Altruism Discussion

WHEN:
21 February 2015 03:00:11PM (-0700)

WHERE:
9425 Riverside Dr, Sandy, UT 84070

Topic: Altruism
==========================
When: Saturday, February 21 at 3:00pm
Where: Clubhouse at Legends at River Oaks in Sandy, Utah - https://goo.gl/maps/TPH3h (9425 Riverside Dr, Sandy, UT 84070)
Meetup is in Sandy this time, at 3pm, at the Legends clubhouse.
There will be an opportunity for anyone to give a neat 5-minute presentation or two on whatever subject they like before we get talking.
If the date and time doesn't work for you, you can just reply to this thread, or you can contact hamnox directly.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sandy, UT—Altruism Discussion
Meetup : Tel Aviv: Rationality in the Immune System
by Squark — 2015-02-13T16:57:22.278Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv: Rationality in the Immune System

WHEN:
24 February 2015 07:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv, Israel

There was a change of speaker after the first announcement.

On Tuesday, February 24, Liran Valadarsky will be speaking on rationality in the immune system.

Our immune system needs to balance many simultaneous and often contradictory tasks. For example, a weak inflammatory response might be insufficient to fight an infection while too strong of a response causes unnecessary damage and, in extreme cases, system failure. How does the immune system extract the relevant information from its environment and 'update its beliefs' so as to carry out the most relevant response?

Liran has a BSc in biology and is currently in transition between MSc and PhD in Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Where: Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv. Meet at the 29th floor (not the Google Campus floor). We'll then move to a room.

When: Tuesday, February 24 at 19:00

Contact: If you can't find us, call Anatoly, who is graciously hosting us, at 054-245-1060; or Joshua at 054-569-1165.

Facebook: Join the group. If you have FB, please RSVP at the FB event which will appear there, to help us get a sense of what to expect.

You can also post questions at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-tel-aviv

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv: Rationality in the Immune System
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-02-13T15:57:46.130Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on February 6th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Czech's first Meetup Prague: 16 February 2015 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Bangalore LWers meetup: 07 February 2015 11:00AM
Dallas, TX: 08 February 2015 01:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
[Frankfurt] Another Frankfurt meetup: 22 February 2015 02:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Effective Altruism for the masses: 15 February 2015 02:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Tell us the thing you find important: 15 February 2015 02:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Present the charity you'd like to give to: 01 March 2015 02:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Small concrete actions you could take: 29 March 2015 01:00PM
Warsaw February Meetup: 21 February 2015 06:00PM

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 - Fun and Games - Caffe Medici: 07 February 2026 01:30PM
Brussels February meetup: Words: 14 February 2015 01:00PM
Canberra Less Wrong Meet Up - Favourite Sequence Post + Discussion: 14 February 2015 06:00PM
Sydney Meetup - February: 25 February 2015 06:30PM
Vienna: 21 February 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 08 February 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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 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 ...
Meetup : West LA—Sphexishness and Meta-Sphexishness
by OpenThreadGuy — 2015-02-13T02:41:43.256Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Sphexishness and Meta-Sphexishness

WHEN:
18 February 2015 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: How we keep repeating that anecdote of the digger wasp's sphexish foolishness, repeating the same behavior over and over, never realizing it is accomplishing nothing. We repeat this anecdote over and over, over and over again, never realizing that it is a misleading intuition pump.

Recommended Reading:

Sphexishness

Digger Wasp: Uses in Philosophy

The Sphex Story: How the cognitive sciences kept repeating an old and questionable anecdote

The full text of the previous item, ungated by magic

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Sphexishness and Meta-Sphexishness
Meetup : Atlanta February Meetup - Relationships
by Adele_L — 2015-02-12T23:40:11.152Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta February Meetup - Relationships

WHEN:
15 February 2015 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2388 Lawrenceville Hwy. Unit L. Decatur, GA 30033

This meetup we'll be talking about social skills and making and maintaining healthy relationships. If you'd like, take a look at these posts in advance:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/818/how_to_understand_people_better/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/5p6/how_and_why_to_granularize/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/63i/rational_romantic_relationships_part_1/

Please park in a spot labeled visitor, because parking in a numbered spot can get your car towed. There are cats at the location.

As usual, there will be snacks, games, and good conversation. Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta February Meetup - Relationships
AI-created pseudo-deontology
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-02-12T23:07:31.000Z

Cross posted at less wrong.

I'm soon going to go on a two day "AI control retreat", when I'll be without internet or family or any contact, just a few books and thinking about AI control. In the meantime, here is one idea I found along the way.

We often prefer leaders to follow deontological rules, because these are harder to manipulate by those whose interests don't align with ours (you could say the similar things about frequentist statistics versus Bayesian ones).

What about if we applied the same idea to AI control? Not giving the AI deontological restrictions, but programming with a similart goal: to prevent a misalignment of values to be disastrous. But who could do this? Well, another AI.

My rough idea goes something like this:

AI A is tasked with maximising utility function u - a utility function which, crucially, it doesn't know yet. Its sole task is to create AI B, which will be given a utility function v and act on it.

What will v be? Well, I was thinking of taking u and adding some noise - nasty noise. By nasty noise I mean v=u+w, not v=max(u,w). In the first case, you could maximise v while sacrificing u completely, it w is suitable. In fact, I was thinking of adding an agent C (which need not actually exist). It would be motivated to maximise −u, and it would have the code of B and the set of u+noise, and would choose v to be the worst possible option (form the perspective of a u-maximiser) in this set.

So agent A, which doesn't know u, is motivated to design B so that it follows its motivation to some extent, but not to extreme amounts - not in ways that might sacrifice some of the values of some sub-part of its utility function, because that might be part of the original u.

Do people feel this idea is implementable/improvable?
AI-created pseudo-deontology
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-02-12T21:11:45.491Z

I'm soon going to go on a two day "AI control retreat", when I'll be without internet or family or any contact, just a few books and thinking about AI control. In the meantime, here is one idea I found along the way.

We often prefer leaders to follow deontological rules, because these are harder to manipulate by those whose interests don't align with ours (you could say the similar things about frequentist statistics versus Bayesian ones).

What about if we applied the same idea to AI control? Not giving the AI deontological restrictions, but programming with a similart goal: to prevent a misalignment of values to be disastrous. But who could do this? Well, another AI.

My rough idea goes something like this:

AI A is tasked with maximising utility function u - a utility function which, crucially, it doesn't know yet. Its sole task is to create AI B, which will be given a utility function v and act on it.

What will v be? Well, I was thinking of taking u and adding some noise - nasty noise. By nasty noise I mean v=u+w, not v=max(u,w). In the first case, you could maximise v while sacrificing u completely, it w is suitable. In fact, I was thinking of adding an agent C (which need not actually exist). It would be motivated to maximise -u, and it would have the code of B and the set of u+noise, and would choose v to be the worst possible option (form the perspective of a u-maximiser) in this set.

So agent A, which doesn't know u, is motivated to design B so that it follows its motivation to some extent, but not to extreme amounts - not in ways that might sacrifice some of the values of some sub-part of its utility function, because that might be part of the original u.

Do people feel this idea is implementable/improvable?
Un-manipulable counterfactuals
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-02-12T19:51:14.000Z

This is how I design my counterfactuals: take some stocahstic event that the AI cannot manipulate. This could be a (well defined) chaotic process, the result of a past process that has been recorded and not revealed yet, or maybe something to do with the AI's own decisions, calibrated so that the AI cannot access the information.

Then I have the world setup to make what we care dependent on that stochastic event. So, for instance, the output of an oracle is erased (before being read) dependent on this, the AI's utility gets changed if one particular value comes up (in conjunction with something else).

I then define the counterfactual on the stochastic process. So if X=1 implies the AI changes their utility, then the counterfactual is simply X=0. We can set the probability so that X=1 is almost certain, but X=0 is possible.

This seems to me the cleanest way of defining counterfactuals. Any obvious (or less obvious) problems?
Safe probability manipulation, superweapons, and stable self-improvement research
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-02-12T19:43:11.000Z

When I first discovered that even UDT would fail on certain "fair" problems (via "Evil" decision problems in provability logic), I was disappointed. It seemed to make things harder, in that there was no ideal decision theory, even on "fair" problems.

But then I realised I'd been handed a superweapon of extreme power. It's a tool that allows to constrain an AI of arbitrary intelligence to have the probabilistic beliefs that we desire.

For instance, take the "X" procedure that I used in the rather under-defined "counterfactual" post. We want the real probability of X=0 to be low, but for the AI to be unable to influence it (and, incidentally, unable to calculate it precisely).

Suppose that X could be 0, 1, etc... up to n. The AI runs a certain probability algorithm P. Then the procedure for calculating X is to run P on X=0, X=1, etc... X=n, and output the m for which P was lowest. In case of a tie, it outputs the highest number.

It seems clear that the AI must put P(X=0)=P(X=1)=...=P(X=n)=1/n, however we know that X=n (since the values are tied).

Basically we can use this to force the AI to be unable to influence or estimate certain events, even if it's much smarter than us.

This might provide a partial answer to Paul Christiano's point about the point of researching stable self-improvement. Because this kind of trick is not easily stable under self-improvement (eg if the AI upgrades P to P′ which can calculate stuff about P).

Similarly, my ideas about reduced impact require using the AI's predictive ability against the AI.

These seem to be cases where we can't just build a human level AI and "let it sort out stable self-improvement". Because here we've added constraints that the AI might "want" to get rid of, and that it potentially could. So it would be useful to know these constraints are stable.
Resource gathering agent
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-02-12T19:31:21.000Z

Here's an idea (inspired by "Less exploitable value-updating agent") of how to model an agent that does nothing but gather resources.

It's an agent which has a utility function u=Xv, for some utility function v. It doesn't know whether X=−1 or X=1 (maybe we used an approach like "Safe probability manipulation, superweapons, and stable self-improvement research" to guarantee ignorance), but it will find out tomorrow.

In the meantime, it will not seek to influence the value of v (as any action increasing v also decreases −v by the same amount), but will seek to gather as many resources to put itself in a position to act once it knows the value of X.

Now, this definition is somewhat dependent on the definition of v (eg: it would certainly want to be elected "president of the committee for setting the value of v" more than anything else), so a more thorough description might be some situation where the agent is completely ignorant about its future utility (but where the ignorance is symmetric; ie the probability of −v for any v is the same as for v). This could be a pure resource gathering agent.

Why could this be interesting? Well, I was wondering if we could take a generic agent and somehow "subtract off" a pure resource gathering agent from it. So it would pursue its goals, while also minimising its success were it such an agent.

The idea needs some developing, but there might be something there.
A long comment
by mathnerd314 — 2015-02-12T18:07:45.309Z

(extended rewrite of http://lesswrong.com/lw/lpf/the_truth_about_mathematical_ability/)

There's widespread confusion about the nature of ability, for a variety of reasons:
Most people don't know what it is.
Most people don't know enough statistics to analyze the question properly.
Most people are not very metacognitive.
Very few people have more than a casual interest in the subject.
If ability's nature were exclusively an object of intellectual interest, this would be relatively inconsequential. For example, many people are confused about Einstein’s theory of relativity, but this doesn’t have much of an impact on their lives. But in practice, people’s misconceptions about ability seriously interfere with their own ability to learn, something that hurts them both professionally and emotionally.
I have a long standing interest in the subject. Unfortunately I do not have any expertise, being too young to have acquired such credentials.
I’ve thought about writing about ability for a long time, but there was a missing element: I myself had never done genuinely original and high quality work. Indeed, I still have not; using R would be cheating, since to qualify for my notion of genuinely original, I would have to have started from the bare earth, smelted the ore, refined them into a computer, and written an entire operating system. This continued failure of originality has sharpened my understanding of the issues.
This is a post where I try to clarify the situation. I don't think it has a point, other than sarcasm and making fun of certain people.
What is up with Jobs?
I was saddened to learn of the death of Steve Jobs several years ago. He's the person who I identify with the most on a personal level, and I had hoped to have the chance to meet him. I hesitated as I kept the last sentence, because I'm not certain it will cause every reader to roll their eyes. The material below should make my state of mind clear:
“Steve Jobs's deep experience in hardware mass production (early Apple, NeXT) has been brought to bear in creating an unrivaled exclusive supply chain of advanced technology literally years ahead of anyone else on the planet,” Anonymous wrote. “Apple products are superior, since Jobs was such a visionary ...