trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Meetup: Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv) with special guest Tomer Kagan
by SoftFlare — 2013-12-16T00:00:30.334Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup: Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv) with special guest Tomer Kagan

WHEN:
26 December 2013 08:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
weizman 18, givatayim, Israel

* UPDATE *

Sadly, Tomer had to move his flight to an earlier date, and so he will not be able to attend.

Instead, our main talk will be Solving real problems with economics by Aur Saraf .

Furthermore, we will be hosting another special guest, Joshua Fox, a MIRI Research Associate and representative in Israel who will tell us a little about his job at MIRI and AI research.

* Previous meetup info below *

We're very proud to host special guest Tomer Kagan from Quixey for this upcoming event on Thursday, December 26th.
Tomer is the CEO and Co-Founder of Quixey. Quixey is a company dedicated to helping users find and use apps in their everyday lives. In 2011 he was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30.

He currently sits on the board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and is also an advisor to Innovation Endeavors, Mucker Lab Seed Fund, and Upwest Labs.

A lifelong entrepreneur, Tomer was the Founder and CEO of Your Logo Here, a branding solutions provider for companies such as Google and Slide. In his spare time he is an advisor to a local AZA chapter - a high school aged Jewish leadership-focused youth organization.

Our program is:

20:00-20:15: Assembly

20:15-21:00: Main Talk

21:00-22:00: Dinner & Discussion

22:00-23:00: Rump Session (minitalks)

23:00-: End of official programming

Main Talk: Tomer Kagan

Backup Talk: Aur Saraf - Solving real problems with economics

Rump Session: Each participant will give a 4-minute talk (+3 minute encore if we applaud hard enough). Giving a talk isn't mandatory, but it's highly recommended. Not confident that what you have to say is relevant to our interests? Unsure about your public speaking skills? Doesn't matter - in the rump session, anything goes. - Note, you don't have to prepare a talk to come! Speaking at the rump session is completely only if you want to.

Feel free to contact me (Gal Hochberg) at hochbergg@gmail.com or at 0545330678 for any further information

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup: Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv) with special guest Tomer Kagan
Luck II: Expecting White Swans
by fowlertm — 2013-12-15T17:40:08.775Z

When we left off last time, we had discussed two of the four principles which Dr. Richard Wiseman believes accounts for the differences between lucky and unlucky people: do more to maximize the number of chance opportunities you have and take steps to improve your intuition. In this post we will discuss the third principle: expect good luck. We will talk a little about principle four, but it's going to get its own post.

But before all that, I want to spend the first bit of this post clearing up some of the confusion which resulted from my less-than-perfect presentation. My most persistent critic, Lumifer, made a number of claims which I think are worth addressing. As I understand it, here is the meat of the criticism:

1) Luck should be defined as the benefit one receives from events they have no control over, not the result of systematic differences between lucky and unlucky people.

2) The luck being discussed in the post was entirely the result of self-perception. More neurotic people are of course going to think themselves less lucky and are going to be less open to novel experiences. Whether or not this is true is another matter.

3) Related to point 2), perhaps lucky people are simply the people located in the thin strip on the right of a certain bell curve, and so they (naturally) consider themselves lucky. In other words, maybe the arrow of causality is pointing: [objectively lucky] --> [acts differently], rather than the reverse. This point will crop up repeatedly.

We could argue definitions all day, but let it be known that when I talk about luck I mean the differences between lucky and unlucky people which are a result of differences in their behavior. When I talk about lucky people I mean people who self-describe as lucky and for whom there is weak anecdotal evidence of their luck. After reading Dr. Wiseman's book I have a high confidence level that such behavioral differences exist, a high confidence level that they matter, and a slightly less high confidence level that they can be taught.

Of course, there isn't much a person can do to prevent their being killed by a meteorite, and nothing at all a person can do to stop themselves being born with Down Syndrome. But taken to an extreme, points 2) and 3) seem equivalent to saying that there is simply nothing a person can do to increase the likelihood tha...
Naturalistic trust among AIs: The parable of the thesis advisor's theorem
by Benya — 2013-12-15T08:32:51.311Z

Eliezer and Marcello's article on tiling agents and the Löbian obstacle discusses several things that you intuitively would expect a rational agent to be able to do that, because of Löb's theorem, are problematic for an agent using logical reasoning. One of these desiderata is naturalistic trust: Imagine that you build an AI that uses PA for its mathematical reasoning, and this AI happens to find in its environment an automated theorem prover which, the AI carefully establishes, also uses PA for its reasoning. Our AI looks at the theorem prover's display and sees that it flashes a particular lemma that would be very useful for our AI in its own reasoning; the fact that it's on the prover's display means that the prover has just completed a formal proof of this lemma. Can our AI now use the lemma? Well, even if it can establish in its own PA-based reasoning module that there exists a proof of the lemma, by Löb's theorem this doesn't imply in PA that the lemma is in fact true; as Eliezer would put it, our agent treats proofs checked inside the boundaries of its own head different from proofs checked somewhere in the environment. (The above isn't fully formal, but the formal details can be filled in.)

At the MIRI's December workshop (which started today), we've been discussing a suggestion by Nik Weaver for how to handle this problem. Nik starts from a simple suggestion (which he doesn't consider to be entirely sufficient, and his linked paper is mostly about a much more involved proposal that addresses some remaining problems, but the simple idea will suffice for this post): Presumably there's some instrumental reason that our AI proves things; suppose that in particular, the AI will only take an action after it has proven that it is "safe" to take this action (e.g., the action doesn't blow up the planet). Nik suggests to relax this a bit: The AI will only take an action after it has (i) proven in PA that taking the action is safe; OR (ii) proven in PA that it's provable in PA that the action is safe; OR (iii) proven in PA that it's provable in PA that it's provable in PA that the action is safe; etc.

Now suppose that our AI sees that lemma, A, flashing on the theorem prover's display, and suppose that our AI can prove that A implies that action X is safe. Then our AI can also prove that it's provable that A -> safe(X), and it can prove that A ...
Examples in Mathematics
by kgalias — 2013-12-14T22:15:08.908Z

After reading Luke's interview with Scott Aaronson, I've decided to come back to an issue that's been bugging me.

Specifically, in the answer to Luke's question about object-level tactics, Scott says (under 3):

Sometimes, when you set out to prove some mathematical conjecture, your first instinct is just to throw an arsenal of theory at it. (..) Rather than looking for “general frameworks,” I look for easy special cases and simple sanity checks, for stuff I can try out using high-school algebra or maybe a five-line computer program, just to get a feel for the problem.

In a similar vein, there's the Halmos quote which has been heavily upvoted in the November Rationality Quotes:

A good stack of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one.

Every time I see an opinion expressing a similar sentiment, I can't help but contrast it with the opinions and practices of two wildly successful (very) theoretical mathematicians:

Alexander Grothendieck

One striking characteristic of Grothendieck's mode of thinking is that it seemed to rely so little on examples. This can be seen in the legend of the so-called "Grothendieck prime". In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to Grothendieck that they should consider a particular prime number. “You mean an actual number?” Grothendieck asked. The other person replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck suggested, “All right, take 57.” But Grothendieck must have known that 57 is not prime, right? Absolutely not, said David Mumford of Brown University. “He doesn’t think concretely." Consider by contrast the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who was intimately familiar with properties of many numbers, some of them huge. That way of thinking represents a world antipodal to that of Grothendieck. "He never really worked on examples," Mumford observed. "I only understand things through examples and then gradually make them more abstract. I don't think it helped Grothendieck in the least to look at an example. He really got control of the situation by thinking of it in absolutely the most abstract way possible. It's just very strange. That's the way his mind worked."

(from Allyn Jackson's account of Grothendieck's life).

Maxim Kontsevich

...
Defining causal isomorphism
by badtheatre — 2013-12-14T18:39:40.101Z

I previously posted this question in another discussion, but it didn't get any replies so, since I now have enough karma, I've decided to make it my first "article".

This brings up something that has been on my mind for a long time. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for two computations to be (homeo?)morphic? This could mean a lot of things, but specifically I'd like to capture the notion of being able to contain a consciousness, so what I'm asking is, what we would have to prove in order to say program A contains a consciousness --> program B contains a consciousness. "pointwise" isomorphism, if you're saying what I think, seems too strict. On the other hand, allowing any invertible function to be a _morphism doesn't seem strict enough. For one thing we can put any reversible computation in 1-1 correspondence with a program that merely stores a copy of the initial state of the first program and ticks off the natural numbers. Restricting our functions by, say, resource complexity, also seems to lead to both similar and unrelated issues...

Any takers?
Meetup : Brussels monthly meetup: Futurology!
by Roxolan — 2013-12-14T16:55:24.033Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels monthly meetup: Futurology!

WHEN:
11 January 2014 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

When will self-driving cars become the norm? How soon until an AI passes the Turing Test, and how soon afterwards will we all be out of a job? Which organization will be the first to unleash uncontrolled all-consuming nanomachines upon the world? That is what we'll discuss this month (until the conversation goes wildly off-topic, as it usually does). If you've read anything interesting recently about new technologies and future trends, please share.

Fermi estimates and predictionbook.com will be involved.

In other news, and for at least the next six months, the Brussels meetup group has a page on Meetup.com. It's for recruitment purposes only, but the meetups will be announced there too. If you find that more convenient than subscribing to our Google Group, feel free to join it (link below).

We will meet at 1 pm at La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form, to share your contact information: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1qSvI1NWkFSsfIJhUMORb_Wd8fdJTVPhdw49grDQwRTI/viewform
The Brussels meetups use a Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-brussels
And, for meetups announcements only, a Meetup Group:
http://www.meetup.com/LWBrussels/

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels monthly meetup: Futurology!
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Fun and Games
by Mestroyer — 2013-12-14T15:19:19.627Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Fun and Games

WHEN:
15 December 2013 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
300 S Goodwin Ave Apt 102, Urbana, IL.

There will also probably be HPMOR discussion.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Fun and Games
Meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
by rocurley — 2013-12-14T03:09:58.366Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup

WHEN:
15 December 2013 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
an ethical puzzle about brain emulation
by asr — 2013-12-13T21:53:10.881Z

I've been thinking about ethics and brain emulations for a while and now have realized I am confused. Here are five scenarios. I am pretty sure the first is morally problematic, and pretty sure the last is completely innocuous. But I can't find a clean way to partition the intermediate cases.

A) We grab John Smith off the street, scan his brain, torture him, and then by some means, restore him to a mental and physical state as though the torture never happened.

B) We scan John Smith's brain, and then run a detailed simulation of the brain being tortured for ten seconds, and over again. If we attached appropriate hardware to the appropriate simulated neurons, we would hear the simulation screaming.

C) We store, on disk, each timestep of the simulation in scenario B. Then we sequentially load each timestep into memory, and overwrite it.

D) The same as C, except that each timestep is encrypted with a secure symmetric cipher, say, AES. The key used for encryption has been lost. (Edit: The key length is much smaller than the size of the stored state and there's only one possible valid decryption.)

E) The same as D, except we have encrypted each timestep with a one time pad.

I take for granted that scenario A is bad: one oughtn't be inflicting pain, even if there's no permanent record or consequence of the pain. And I can't think of any moral reason to distinguish a supercomputer simulation of a brain from the traditional implementation made of neurons and synapses. So that says that B should be equally immoral.

Scenario C is just B with an implementation tweak -- instead of _calculating_ each subsequent step, we're just playing it back from storage. The simulated brain has the same sequence of states as in B and the same outputs.

Scenario D is just C with a different data format.

Scenario E is just D with a different encryption.

Now here I am confused. Scenario E is just repeatedly writing random bytes to memory. This cannot possibly have any moral significance! D and E are indistinguishable to any practical algorithm. (By definition, secure encryption produces bytes that "look random" to any adversary that doesn't know the key).

Either torture in case A is actually not immoral or two of these adjacent scenarios are morally distinct. But none of...
New LW Meetups: Leipzig, Utrecht
by FrankAdamek — 2013-12-13T16:45:42.389Z

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

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

[Leipzig] Secular Solstice Celebration! (And the Inauguration of the LW Leipzig Community): 21 December 2013 05:05PM
Mumbai Meetup: 15 December 2013 03:00PM
Newcastle-upon-Tyne meetup, December: 07 December 2013 12:00PM
Utrecht: 14 December 2013 02:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Berlin: 01 January 2019 01:30PM
Frankfurt meetup:: 08 December 2013 02:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 15 December 2013 03:00PM
Moscow, The First Winter One: 08 December 2013 04:00PM
Munich Meetup: 07 December 2013 02:00PM
Saint Petersburg, Russia. On discussions and some social skills: 08 December 2013 04:00PM
San Francisco / App Academy meetup [LOCATION CHANGE]: 07 December 2014 07:00PM
Urbana-Champaign fun and games: 07 December 2013 02:00PM
[Vienna] The Return of the Rationalists!: 14 December 2013 03:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 07 December 2019 01:30PM
Bay Area Solstice: 07 December 2013 06:00PM
Boston/Cambridge - The Attention Economy: 08 December 2013 02:00PM
Brussels monthly meetup: time!: 14 December 2013 01:00PM
London Practical Meetup - Calibration Training!: 08 December 2013 02:00AM
Washington DC Fermi Estimates Meetup: 08 December 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Brussels, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview 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 ...
Walkthrough of the Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI paper
by So8res — 2013-12-13T03:23:55.984Z

This is my walkthrough of Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI, and the Löbian Obstacle. It's meant to summarize the paper and provide a slightly-less-technical introduction to the content. I've also collected a number of typos and suggestions, which can be found at the end of the post.

Motivation

We want to be able to consider agents which build slightly better versions of themselves, which build slightly better versions of themselves, and so on. This is referred to as an agent "tiling" itself. This introduces a question: how can the parent agent trust its descendants?

We'll be dealing with logical systems, which are crisply deterministic. In such a setting, child agents can be "absolutely trustworthy": for example, if the child uses the same methods of proof and the same axioms as the parent, then the parent should be able to trust the child unconditionally: or, at least, the parent should trust the child at least as much as it trusts itself.

This turns out to be a huge problem, because modern logical systems don't trust themselves (or any logical systems of equal strength), to say nothing of (supposedly more powerful) successor systems.

This problem of trust is rooted in a theorem stated by the mathematician Löb.

Assuming that we can surmount such difficulties, there are a number of other principles that we want in our tiling agents, such as the Vingean principle (the parent shouldn't have to know exactly what the children will do) and the Naturalistic principle (agents should think of themselves as part of the world). These will be discussed in detail later in the paper.

Glossary

I'll use @x to mean "the execution of x". (The paper uses x̄ instead.)

I'll use [x] denotes the Gödel number of x in some suitable encoding. (The paper uses ⌈x⌉ instead).

□T[x] is read "There is a proof of x in T". It's the same as "∃y. Prooves_T(y, [x])". The T is omitted when it's clear from the context.

A0, A1, … will denote agents. Note that A0 is the child and A1 is the parent. I personally would have done things the other way around, but I'll stick to the paper's descending style.

G will be used to denote a world-state in which the agent's goals have been achieved.

∅ will be used to denote a world-state wherein nothing of import has been changed by the agent. For more specificity, see the paper.

A ⊩ x is read "A has c

...
Truth Tables
by johnlawrenceaspden — 2013-12-12T22:16:00.190Z

Summary: There's a short program that can run all possible programs, OMG

Alternative Summary: Just about any universe that can exist must contain ours, OMG.

I was thinking about diagonalization arguments. Does this make any sense? Can anyone debug it for me?

Self Evident Truths

The universe is computable.
All computations can be performed by Turing Machines.
The mind is made out of atoms.
The name of the empty string is epsilon.

Truths

Binary Strings are enumerable : epsilon, 0, 1, 00, 01, 10, 11, 000, ....
There's a way of converting binary strings to Turing machines and back again. It gets all Turing machines.

Consequence

Consider tables TT(n), which are numbered by binary strings along the top and side, representing turing machines and inputs respectively.
Construct a series of finite triangular tables which are defined iteratively as follows:

TT(1)

To construct the first table, we need one element, the top left, which corresponds to the turing machine epsilon working on the input string epsilon.
Convert the string epsilon to its corresponding turing machine, which has no states and no transition rules, and which therefore halts immediately without accepting.

The value of TT(1)(epsilon,epsilon) is therefore F0 (Fail after no steps).

eps
eps F0

That's it for TT(1).

TT(2)

TT(2) will have three cells, the topleftmost three
To construct the second table, consider again the element at the top left. Since it represents a halted state, copy it verbatim from the last table.

Then consider the element corresponding to (epsilon,0) , or row epsilon, column 0, or (TM(epsilon), "0")
Again TM(epsilon) is either a machine with no states, or an invalid specification, and so it halts immediately on the input 0.
For the third step in constructing the second triangle, consider (TM("0"), epsilon).
TM("0") is another dud. It halts immediately without accepting.
So TT(2) is the table

eps 0

eps F0 F0

0 F0

Towards Infinity...

It should be reasonably clear how to continue the construction of these tables
For instance TT(3) looks like

eps 0 1

eps F0 F0 F0

0 F0 F0

1 F0

Eventually we will reach a row whose string represents a TM which does something other than halt immediately without accepting.
As an example o...