trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Scarcity
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-16T05:34:04.595Z

Today's post, Scarcity was originally published on 27 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Describes a few pieces of experimental evidence showing that objects or information which are believed to be in short supply are valued more than the same objects or information would be on their own.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Is Humanism A Religion-Substitute?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Please advise the Singularity Institute with your domain-specific expertise!
by lukeprog — 2012-03-15T20:13:53.809Z

The Singularity Institute would benefit from having a team of domain-specific advisors on hand. If you'd like to help the Singularity Institute pursue its mission more efficiently, please sign up to be a Singularity Institute advisor!

If you sign up, we will occasionally ask you questions. You may be able to answer our questions or at least point us in the right direction. We may also request to schedule a quick chat with you.

Domains of expertise we especially need:

Nearly all subfields of economics, maths, computer science & AI, statistics, cognitive science, physics, biology, and naturalistic philosophy.

U.S. & California law

Non-profit development and tax compliance

Marketing & social media

U.S. government and military processes (lobbying, security, infrastructure, etc.)

Computer security

Large-scale logistics

Event planning

Executive coaching/training

Motivational speaking, social skills training

Publishing

Running workshops and meetups

Nuclear security, bio-security, disease control
[LINK] Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award
by  — 2012-03-15T16:32:51.558Z

Link to ACM press release.

In addition to their impact on probabilistic reasoning, Bayesian networks completely changed the way causality is treated in the empirical sciences, which are based on experiment and observation. Pearl's work on causality is crucial to the understanding of both daily activity and scientific discovery. It has enabled scientists across many disciplines to articulate causal statements formally, combine them with data, and evaluate them rigorously. His 2000 book Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference is among the single most influential works in shaping the theory and practice of knowledge-based systems. His contributions to causal reasoning have had a major impact on the way causality is understood and measured in many scientific disciplines, most notably philosophy, psychology, statistics, econometrics, epidemiology and social science.

While that "major impact" still seems to me to be in the early stages of propagating through the various sciences, hopefully this award will inspire more people to study causality and Bayesian statistics in general.
The Futility of Intelligence
by XiXiDu — 2012-03-15T14:25:24.062Z

The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?

I name artificial intelligence or thinking machines - usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise from "thinking" or the interaction of many low-level elements. (R. J. Sternberg quoted in a paper by Shane Legg: “Viewed narrowly, there seem to be almost as many definitions of intelligence as there were experts asked to define it.”) Taken literally, that allows for infinitely many degrees of intelligence to fit every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem. Imagine pointing to a chess computer and saying "It's not a stone!" Does that feel like an explanation? No? Then neither should saying "It's a thinking machine!"

It's the noun "intelligence" that I protest, rather than to "evoke a dynamic state sequence from a machine by computing an algorithm". There's nothing wrong with saying "X computes algorithm Y", where Y is some specific, detailed flowchart that represents an algorithm or process. "Thinking about" is another legitimate phrase that means exactly the same thing: The machine is thinking about a problem, according to an specific algorithm. The machine is thinking about how to put elements of a list in a certain order, according to the a specific algorithm called quicksort.

Now suppose I should say that a problem is explained by "thinking" or that the order of elements in a list is the result of a "thinking machine", and claim that as my explanation.

The phrase "evoke a dynamic state sequence from a machine by computing an algorithm" is acceptable, just like "thinking about" or "is caused by" are acceptable, if the phrase precedes some specification to be judged on its own merits.

However, this is not the way "intelligence" is commonly used. "Intelligence" is commonly used as an explanation in its own right.

I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, "an artificial general intelligence would have a genuine intelligence advantage" as if that explained its advantage. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. What do you know, after you have said that its "advantage" is "intelligence"?&...
Meta Addiction
by Voltairina — 2012-03-15T04:58:14.698Z

I was wondering if anyone has ever had the feeling, like I get sometimes, that they were addicted to 'meta-level' optimizing rather than low-level acting? As in, I'd rather think about how to encourage myself to brush my teeth more than brush my teeth. I'm guessing there's something about this under the akrasia threads?

The motivations to remain in meta and thinking about things rather than acting on them seems to be that it takes less effort to think about doing things than to do them, and there is potentially more long-term benefit in making an overall improvement than in engaging in a specific action. The drawback is that if you remain thinking about meta all the time, you won't get anything done.
Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute
by John_Maxwell — 2012-03-15T00:41:34.811Z

If you type "less wrong c" or "singularity institute c" into Google, you'll find that people are searching for "less wrong cult" and "singularity institute cult" with some frequency. (EDIT: Please avoid testing this out, so Google doesn't autocomplete your search and reinforce their positions. This kind of problem can be hard to get rid of. Click these instead: less wrong cult, singularity institute cult.)

There doesn't seem to be anyone arguing seriously that Less Wrong is a cult, but we do give some newcomers that impression.

I have several questions related to this:

Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?

If so, can you suggest any easy steps we could take?

Is it possible that there are aspects of the atmosphere here that are driving away intelligent, rationally inclined people who might otherwise be interested in Less Wrong?

Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?

Is it possible that our culture might be different if these folks were hanging around and contributing? Presumably they are disproportionately represented among certain personality types.

If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:

Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.

Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:

Some people consider the Sequences the most important work they have ever read.

Generally, if your comment or post is on-topic, thoughtful, and shows that you're familiar with the Sequences, your comment or post will be upvoted.

Many of us believe in the importance of developing qualities described in Twelve Virtues of Rationality: [insert mystical sounding description of how to be rational here]

And on the sequences page:

If you don't read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, little else on Less Wrong will make much sense.

This seems obviously false to me.

These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind f...
Dotting i's and Crossing t's - a Journey to Publishing Elegance
by wedrifid — 2012-03-14T21:23:28.381Z

More literally a journey to making the dots of the 'i's line up just right with the 'f's and ensuring that the crossing of 'T' meets up neatly with the tip of the 'h' - all without breaking text searching and copy and paste.

Task

Now, as we all know, science isn't just about little things like peer review and double blind placebo controlled studies. Far more important is presenting your work in accordance with the grand traditions of scientific publication - all while ensuring you flatter all the right people for their sometimes obsolete and possibly only slightly relevant past works. Of course you must do this all according to standard citation formulae developed a century or two ago back when the city in which a text document was published was somehow a useful piece of information.

Some may consider people like Galileo and Bacon to be the most influential figures in science but the man who made the greatest contribution to the way humanity seeks and disseminates knowledge is of course Donald Knuth. The man who took a decade off writing his multi-volume magnum opus [The Art of Computer Programming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming) to create TeX, the foundation of LaTeX and without which science as we know it would be unrecognizable. These days presenting academic publications without using LaTeX may be nearly as uncouth and banal as writing about your research in first person rather than than the passive voice!

The above cynicism is largely sincere and only a trifle exaggerated. Yet at the same time I acknowledge that there is much value to be had in wearing a uniform and the time for lonely dissent is not on matters as trivial as presentation. The overhead of presenting work in a form that other academics are willing to accept is comparatively minor and the payoffs significant.

One of the many initiatives lukeprog has set in motion now that he is organizing things over at SingInst is the porting of all of SIAI's past publications from various adhoc formats to LaTeX with a standard publication template. You can see an early example of the new format here.

Challenge

Unfortunately, Wei_Dai encountered a problem. In the first presentation of the converted document copy and pasting "The" would give something like "Ļe" and copying "fi" would give "ŀ". The problem is with the implementation of ligatures. Back when typesetting was done ma...
Deciding what to study at undergraduate level
by tomme — 2012-03-14T20:47:04.598Z

I'm a high school senior from Europe and in a few months I'll be heading to university.

I have a keen interest in the human body. As such, I would like to work in emerging interdisciplinary fields, such as stem cell transplantation and suspended animation.

I could go on to study, say, Biomedical Science, but I'm also fascinated with Engineering. That is, I think that my aspirations, which are to improve human condition, could be well served from an Engineering standpoint.

What do you think? Would my interest in the human body and its applications be better suited for Engineering or for Biomedical Science? How should I decide what to study?
DIY Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation. Who wants to go first?
by Dustin — 2012-03-14T16:58:30.024Z

There's been a bit of discussion about TDCS here on LessWrong. If you don't know what TDCS is here's an article from Technology Review.

Here's a company (soon) selling a DIY kit to build your own.

tDCS is one of the coolest pieces of health/ self improvement technology available today. The US Army and DARPA both currently use tDCS devices to train snipers and drone pilots, and have recorded 2.5x increases in learning rates. This incredible phenomenon is achieved through a very simple device called a tDCS machine.

Today if you want to buy a tDCS machine it's nearly impossible to find one for less than $600, and you are typically required to have a prescription to order one. We wanted a simpler cheaper option. So we made one. Then, because we're all egalitarian like, we thought others might want one too.

The GoFlow β1 is a full kit of all the parts and plans you need to build your own tDCS device. $99 will get you one of the first β1's and will help us develop β2!

Here's a video from Journal of Visualized Experiments on how to administer TDCS.

Thoughts?
How would you take over Rome?
by Scott Alexander — 2012-03-14T16:24:05.699Z

A recent discussion post has compared the difficulty of an AI destroying modern human civilization to that of a modern human taking over the Roman Empire, with the implication that it is impossible.

The analogy has a few problems: first, modern humans don't have much greater raw intelligence than the Romans, only a bit more knowledge and tools; an AI would have a genuine intelligence advantage. Second, a high-tech civilization like ours offers many more ways for a genius to cause chaos than existed in classical Rome: it's more plausible that you can throw a few existing technologies together to create a superweapon than that Ptolemy could have done likewise, and there's no ancient Roman equivalent to hacking a nuclear launch system.

But taking over ancient Rome might serve as an interesting upper bound on the difficulty of an AI taking over modern civilization. And it's a theme of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that rationalists should be able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly hard problems. So if Professor Quirrell offered it as an extra credit assignment, how would you take over Rome?

Here are the rules:

- You are thrown back in time to the year 1 AD. You can choose to arrive anywhere in the world, but your method of arrival cannot itself give an advantage (you can't appear in a flash of light in the middle of a religious ritual or anything).

- You do not start with Roman citizenship or any other legal record of your existence.

- You keep your original physical characteristics, including sex, height, and fitness. You will appear in period-appropriate dress of your choosing, and can't carry any artifacts with you. You may start with enough money to live a patrician lifestyle for a year.

- You are intellectually near-perfect. You know all human knowledge as of 2012. You speak fluent Latin (and all other languages of the day) and can orate as eloquently as Cicero or Demosthenes. You are a tactical genius of the order of Caesar and Napoleon. And you have infinite willpower and goal-directedness: aside from human necessities like sleep or food, you need never rest.

- You win if you either become Roman Emperor (and are acknowledged as such by most Romans), or if a state you control conquers the city of Rome. You lose if you die, of old age or otherwise, before completing either goal.
Anthropic Reasoning by CDT in Newcomb's Problem
by gRR — 2012-03-14T00:44:47.242Z

By orthonormal's suggestion, I take this out of comments.

Consider a CDT agent making a decision in a Newcomb's problem, in which Omega is known to make predictions by perfectly simulating the players. Assume further that the agent is capable of anthropic reasoning about simulations. Then, while making its decision, the agent will be uncertain about whether it is in the real world or in Omega's simulation, since the world would look the same to it either way.

The resulting problem has a structural similarity to the Absentminded driver problem1. Like in that problem, directly assigning probabilities to each of the two possibilities is incorrect. The planning-optimal decision, however, is readily available to CDT, and it is, naturally, to one-box.

Objection 1. This argument requires that Omega is known to make predictions by simulation, which is not necessarily the case.

Answer: It appears to be sufficient that the agent only knows that Omega is always correct. If this is the case, then a simulating-Omega and some-other-method-Omega are indistinguishable, so the agent can freely assume simulation.

[This is a rather shaky reasoning, I'm not sure it is correct in general. However, I hypothesise that whatever method Omega uses, if the CDT agent knows the method, it will one-box. It is only a "magical Omega" that throws CDT off.]

Objection 2. The argument does not work for the problems where Omega is not always correct, but correct with, say, 90% probability.

Answer: Such problems are underspecified, because it is unclear how the probability is calculated. [For example, Omega that always predicts "two-box" will be correct in 90% cases if 90% of agents in the population are two-boxers.] A "natural" way to complete the problem definition is to stipulate that there is no correlation between correctness of Omega's predictions and any property of the players. But this is equivalent to Omega first making a perfectly correct prediction, and then adding a 10% random noise. In this case, the CDT agent is again free to consider Omega a perfect simulator (with added noise), which again leads to one-boxing.

Objection 3. In order for the CDT agent to one-box, it needs a special "non-self-centered" utility function, which when inside the simulation would value things outside.

Answer: The agent in the simulation has exactly the same experiences as the agent outside, so it is ...
Biased Pandemic
by freyley — 2012-03-13T23:32:39.581Z

Recently, Portland Lesswrong played a game that was a perfect trifecta of: difficult mental exercise; fun; and an opportunity to learn about biases and recognize them in yourself and others. We're still perfecting it, and we'd welcome feedback, especially from people who try it.

The Short Version

The game is a combination of Pandemic, a cooperative board game that is cognitively demanding, and the idea of roleplaying cognitive biases. Our favorite way of playing it (so far), everyone selects a bias at random, and then attempts to exaggerate that bias in their arguments and decisions during the game. Everyone attempts to identify the biases in the other players, and, when a bias is guessed, the guessed player selects a new bias and begins again.

The Pieces

First, Pandemic. Pandemic is a cooperative game with a win condition and three lose conditions that are separate. It provides each player a list of available actions and then allows them 4 moves in which to mix and match those actions. Because of the combined win and lose conditions, players are constantly forced to decide between tactical and strategic objectives, with a strong emphasis on making it easy to choose tactically good moves at the expense of failing to win the game and thus losing by taking too long. Pandemic is a fun game, and it's a great game for people looking to stretch their brains. Obviously you want to be familiar with, preferably experienced at Pandemic before attempting Biased Pandemic. We did have one inexperienced player at Pandemic (out of 4) and that seemed to work okay, though it may have been harder for him than the rest of us.

Enter the biases. Each player selects a bias. We printed out the biases listed here and used them to select our biases. One of our players just made a TOC for selecting biases. There happen to be 104 biases listed in that document, so a deck of cards combined with a coin flip allowed for bias selection. A computer's random number generator, dice, or any other random method should suffice. Some biases may seem unplayable to some players -- certainly, the monetary biases seem unplayable to most of us -- but other players may find a way to play it, so we've refused to cross off biases and just allowed players to re-roll if they get a bias they're sure they can't play.

Examples

This can be a little difficult to wrap your brain around, so let me give a cou...
Decision Theories: A Less Wrong Primer
by orthonormal — 2012-03-13T23:31:51.795Z

Summary: If you've been wondering why people keep going on about decision theory on Less Wrong, I wrote you this post as an answer. I explain what decision theories are, show how Causal Decision Theory works and where it seems to give the wrong answers, introduce (very briefly) some candidates for a more advanced decision theory, and touch on the (possible) connection between decision theory and ethics.

What is a decision theory?

This is going to sound silly, but a decision theory is an algorithm for making decisions[1]. The inputs are an agent's knowledge of the world, and the agent's goals and values; the output is a particular action (or plan of actions). Actually, in many cases the goals and values are implicit in the algorithm rather than given as input, but it's worth keeping them distinct in theory.

For example, we can think of a chess program as a simple decision theory. If you feed it the current state of the board, it returns a move, which advances the implicit goal of winning. The actual details of the decision theory include things like writing out the tree of possible moves and countermoves, and evaluating which possibilities bring it closer to winning.

Another example is an E. Coli bacterium. It has two basic options at every moment: it can use its flagella to swim forward in a straight line, or to change directions by randomly tumbling. It can sense whether the concentration of food or toxin is increasing or decreasing over time, and so it executes a simple algorithm that randomly changes direction more often when things are "getting worse". This is enough control for bacteria to rapidly seek out food and flee from toxins, without needing any sort of advanced information processing.

A human being is a much more complicated example which combines some aspects of the two simpler examples; we mentally model consequences in order to make many decisions, and we also follow heuristics that have evolved to work well without explicitly modeling the world.[2] We can't model anything quite like the complicated way that human beings make decisions, but we can study simple decision theories on simple problems; and the results of this analysis were often more effective than the raw intuitions of human beings (who evolved to succeed in small savannah tribes, not negotiate a nuclear arms race). But the standard model used for this analysis, Causal Decision T...
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Decision Theory
by  — 2012-03-13T18:23:55.432Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Decision Theory

WHEN:
14 March 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, March 14th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion Topic: The topic du jour is Decision Theory. Take a look at this introductory post. It's also jam-packed with links to more advanced posts on the topic.

Don't worry if you don't have time to read anything, or even if you've never read any Less Wrong! Bring a friend! The atmosphere is casual, and good, intelligent conversation with friendly people is guaranteed.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Decision Theory