trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
SUGGEST and VOTE: Posts We Want to Read on Less Wrong
by lukeprog — 2011-02-07T02:51:05.458Z

Less Wrong is a large community of very smart people with a wide spectrum of expertise, and I think relatively little of that value has been tapped.

Like my post The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, this is meant to be a community-driven post. The first goal is to identify topics the Less Wrong community would like to read more about. The second goal is to encourage Less Wrongers to write on those topics. (Respecting, of course, the implicit and fuzzy guidelines for what should be posted to Less Wrong.)

One problem is that those with expertise on a subject don't necessarily feel competent to write a front-page post on it. If that's the case, please comment here explaining that you might be able to write one of the requested posts, but you'd like a writing collaborator. We'll try to find you one.

Rules

You may either:

Post the title of the post you want someone to write for Less Wrong. If the title itself isn't enough to specify the content, include a few sentences of explanation. "How to Learn a Language Quickly" probably needs no elaboration, but "Normative Theory and Coherent Extrapolated Volition" certainly does. Do not post two proposed post titles in the same comment, because that will confuse voting. Please put the title in bold.
or...

Vote for a post title that has already been suggested, indicating that you would like to read that post, too. Vote with karma ('Vote Up' or 'Vote Down' on the comment that contains the proposed post title).

I will regularly update the list of suggested Less Wrong posts, ranking them in descending order of votes (like this).

The List So Far (updated 02/11/11)

(35) Conversation Strategies for Spreading Rationality Without Annoying People

(32) Smart Drugs: Which Ones to Use for What, and Why

(30) A Survey of Upgrade Paths for the Human Brain

(29) Trusting Your Doctor: When and how to be skeptical about medical advice and medical consensus

(25) Rational Homeschool Education

(25) Field Manual: What to Do If You're Stranded in a Level 1 (Base Human Equivalent) Brain in a pre-Singularity Civilization

(20) Entrepreneurship

(20) Detecting And Bridging Inferential Distance For Teachers

(19) Detecting And Bridging Inferential Distance For Learners

(18) Teaching Utilizable Rationality Skills by Exemplifying the Application of Rationality

(13) Open Thread: Offers of Help, Requests for

...
What does a calculator mean by "2"?
by Wei Dai — 2011-02-07T02:49:52.785Z

I think my previous argument was at least partly wrong or confused, because I don't really understand what it means for a computation to mean something by a symbol. Here I'll back up and try to figure out what I mean by "mean" first.

Consider a couple of programs. The first one (A) is an arithmetic calculator. It takes a string as input, interprets it a formula written in decimal notation, and outputs the result of computing that formula. For example, A("9+12") produces "21" as output. The second (B) is a substitution cipher calculator. It "encrypts" its input by substituting each character using a fixed mapping. It so happens that B("9+12") outputs "c6b3".

What do A and B mean by "2"? Intuitively it seems that by "2", A means the integer (i.e., abstract mathematical object) 2, while for B, "2" doesn't really mean anything; it's just a symbol that it blindly manipulates. But A also just produces its output by manipulating symbols, so why does it seem like it means something by "2"? I think it's because the way A manipulates the symbol "2" corresponds to how the integer 2 "works", whereas the way B manipuates "2" doesn't correspond to anything, except how it manipulates that symbol. We could perhaps say that by "2" B means "the way B manipulates the symbol '2'", but that doesn't seem to buy us anything.

(Similarly, by "+" A means the mathematical operation of addition, whereas B doesn't really mean anything by it. Note that this discussion assumes some version of mathematical platonism. A formalist would probably say that A also doesn't mean anything by "2" and "+" except how it manipulates those symbols, but that seems implausible to me.)

Going back to meta-ethics, I think a central mystery is what do we mean by "right" when we're considering moral arguments (by which I don't mean Nesov's technical term "moral arguments", but arguments such as "total utilitarianism is wrong (i.e., not right) because it leads to the following conclusions ..., which are obviously wrong"). If human minds are computations (which I think they almost certainly are), then the way that a human mind processes such arguments can be viewed as an algorithm (which may differ from individual to individual). Suppose we could somehow abstract this algorithm away from the rest of the human, and consider it as, say, a program that when given an input string consisting of a list of moral arguments...
[LINK] Levels of Ethics
by WrongBot — 2011-02-07T01:41:00.545Z

I've resumed blogging For Real This Time™, starting with an introductory overview of the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics.

Should I cross-post it to LessWrong? Should I link or cross-post future blogging about metaethics and other LW-relevant topics? Is it rubbish? Inquiring minds (mostly mine) need to know!
Value Stability and Aggregation
by jimrandomh — 2011-02-06T18:30:40.936Z

One of the central problems of Friendly Artificial Intelligence is goal system stability. Given a goal system - whether it's a utility function, a computer program, or a couple kilograms of neural tissue - we want to determine whether it's stable, meaning, is there something that might plausibly happen to it which will radically alter its behavior in a direction we don't like? As a first step in solving this problem, let's consider a classic example of goal systems that is not stable.

Suppose you are a true Bentham-Mill Utilitarian, which means you hold that the right thing to do is that which maximizes the amount of happiness minus the amount of pain in the world, summed up moment by moment. Call this HapMax for short. You determine this by assigning each person a happiness-minus-pain score at each moment, based on a complex neurological definition, and adding up the scores of each person-moment. One day, you are interrupted from your job as an antidepressant research chemist by a commotion outside. Rushing out to investigate, you find a hundred-foot tall monster rampaging through the streets of Tokyo, which says:

"I am a Utility Monster. Robert Nozick grew me in his underwater base, and now I desire nothing more than to eat people. This makes me very happy, and because I am so very tall and the volume of my brain's reward center grows with the cube of my height, it makes me *so* happy that it will outweigh the momentary suffering and shortened lifespan of anyone I eat."

As a true HapMaxer (not to be confused with a human, who might claim to be a HapMaxer but can't actually be one), you find this very convincing: the right thing to do is to maximize the number of people the monster can eat, so you heroically stand in front of the line of tanks that is now rolling down main street to buy it time. HapMax seemed like a good idea at first, but this example shows that it is very wrong. What lessons should we learn before trying to build another utility function? HapMax starts by dividing the world into pieces, and the trouble starts when one of those agents doesn't behave as expected.

Dividing and Recombining Utility

Human values are too complex to specify in one go, so like other complex things, we manage the complexity by subdividing the problem, solving the pieces, then recombining them back into a whole solution. Let's call these sub-problems value fragments,...
A bit meta: Do posts come in batches? If so, why?
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2011-02-06T13:28:52.380Z

15 Jan - 0 posts

16 Jan - 1 post

17 Jan - 1 post

18 Jan - 1 post

19 Jan - 0 posts

20 Jan - 2 posts

21 Jan - 0 posts

22 Jan - 1 post

23/24/25/26/27 Jan - 0 posts

28 Jan - 1 post

29 Jan - 1 post

30 Jan - 0 posts

31 Jan - 3 posts

1 Feb - 2 posts

2 Feb - 1 post

3 Feb - 0 posts

4 Feb - 1 post

5 Feb - 3 posts

Maybe 23-27 was Christmas? But I've gotten a general feeling that activity spikes around the same time. Perhaps when the site is populated with posts, people spend more time here, and then think more on related topics, and thus are more likely to post?

Note that this is all posts, not just promoted posts. It also includes rationality meetups and quotes threads - maybe it'd be more interesting analysis without that... I definitely get the feeling that a thought provoking post generates more. Whereas inactivity generates more inactivity. Thoughts?
Revising priors and anthropic reasoning
by PhilGoetz — 2011-02-06T05:42:41.536Z

I believe that life on Earth arose spontaneously. I also believe the galaxy around me is largely devoid of life. I reconcile these things using the anthropic principle.

I also believe that fundamental cosmological constants have values convenient for the development of life. I don't know if it makes sense to pretend that those constants could have had other values - it seems to me like arguing that e could have been 2.716. But it's certainly done. And again, the anthropic principle is sometimes invoked, as an alternative to, say, God.

Suppose somebody came up with a new theory of cosmological constants, that claimed that only certain values are allowable, and that a large percentage of the allowable sets would make life possible. Then you wouldn't have to use the anthropic principle. Wouldn't you be more comfortable with that?

But if that's so, doesn't it mean that you really attach a low prior to the anthropic principle? And that you don't truly accept the anthropic principle?

How do you do Bayesian belief revision when one of your alternative hypotheses uses the anthropic principle? Can you give a strong preference to the hypothesis that does not require it? Because I know that I would.
post proposal: Attraction and Seduction for Heterosexual Male Rationalists
by lukeprog — 2011-02-06T04:43:46.536Z

It seems there's some interest in PUA and attraction at Less Wrong. Would that subject be appropriate for a front-page post? I've drafted the opening of what I had in mind, below. Let me know what you think, and whether I should write the full post.

Also, I've done lots of collaborative writing before, with much success (two examples). I would welcome input from or collaboration with others who have some experience and skill in the attraction arts. If you're one of those people, send me a message! Even if you just want to comment on early drafts or contribute a few thoughts.

I should probably clarify my concept of attraction and seduction. The founders of "pickup" basically saw it as advice on "how to trick women into bed", but I see it as a series of methods for "How to become the best man you can be, which will help you succeed in all areas of life, and also make you attractive to women." Ross Jeffries used neuro-linguistic programming and hypnosis, and Mystery literally used magic tricks to get women to sleep with him. My own sympathies lie with methods advocated by groups like Art of Charm, who focus less on tricks and routines and more on holistic self-improvement.

...

...

EDIT: That didn't take long. Though I share much of PhilGoetz's attitude, I've decided I will not write this post, for the reasons articulated here, here, here and here.

...

Here was the proposed post...

...

When I interviewed to be a contestant on VH1's The Pick-Up Artist, they asked me to list my skills. Among them, I listed "rational thinking."

"How do you think rational thinking will help you with the skills of attraction?" they asked.

I paused, then answered: "Rational thinking tells me that attraction is a thoroughly non-rational process."

A major theme at Less Wrong is "How to win at life with rationality." Today, I want to talk about how to win in your sex life with rationality.a

I didn't get the part on the VH1 show, but no matter: studying and practicing pick-up has transformed my life more than almost anything else, even though getting excellent and frequent sex is, oddly enough, not one of my life's priorities. Nor is finding a soulmate.

If you want lots of sex, or a soulmate, or you want to improve your current relationship, then attraction skills will help with that. Loneliness need not be one of the costs of rationality. But even if you don't want any o...
My hour-long interview with Yudkowsky on "Becoming a Rationalist"
by lukeprog — 2011-02-06T03:19:25.796Z

It makes for good Less Wrong introductory material to point people to, since there are lots of people who won't read long article online but will listen to a podcast on the way to work: LINK.

Apologies for the self-promotion, but it could hardly be more relevant to Less Wrong...
Request: A historian's take on the singularity
by knb — 2011-02-06T02:37:20.147Z

A while ago, I saw an excellent video of a speech/lecture by an English professor of history (in front of an American audience). In the video, the historian touches on many topics of interest to this community, including the ways modern people are different (more individualistic, more concerned with "rights") from agriculturalists and how things like the industrial revolution occur. At the end, he gives a long discussion of the likely future of humanity, and I think he mentioned artificial intelligence (by brain emulation) and life-extension as the defining technologies of the future.

I think the video was posted one or two years ago maximum. Since I imagine the people of LW probably read many of the same websites as I do, I'm hoping someone will know the video to which I'm referring. If not, suggestions of who the professor might be (or the website it was posted on are much appreciated.
You're in Newcomb's Box
by HonoreDB — 2011-02-05T20:46:20.306Z

Part 1: Transparent Newcomb with your existence at stake

Related: Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality

Omega, a wise and trustworthy being, presents you with a one-time-only game and a surprising revelation.

"I have here two boxes, each containing $100," he says. "You may choose to take both Box A and Box B, or just Box B. You get all the money in the box or boxes you take, and there will be no other consequences of any kind. But before you choose, there is something I must tell you."

Omega pauses portentously.

"You were created by a god: a being called Prometheus. Prometheus was neither omniscient nor particularly benevolent. He was given a large set of blueprints for possible human embryos, and for each blueprint that pleased him he created that embryo and implanted it in a human woman. Here was how he judged the blueprints: any that he guessed would grow into a person who would choose only Box B in this situation, he created. If he judged that the embryo would grow into a person who chose both boxes, he filed that blueprint away unused. Prometheus's predictive ability was not perfect, but it was very strong; he was the god, after all, of Foresight."

Do you take both boxes, or only Box B?

For some of you, this question is presumably easy, because you take both boxes in standard Newcomb where a million dollars is at stake. For others, it's easy because you take both boxes in the variant of Newcomb where the boxes are transparent and you can see the million dollars; just as you would know that you had the million dollars no matter what, in this case you know that you exist no matter what.

Others might say that, while they would prefer not to cease existing, they wouldn't mind ceasing to have ever existed. This is probably a useful distinction, but I personally (like, I suspect, most of us) score the universe higher for having me in it.

Others will cheerfully take the one box, logic-ing themselves into existence using whatever reasoning they used to qualify for the million in Newcomb's Problem.

But other readers have already spotted the trap.

Part 2: Acausal trade with Azathoth

Related: An Alien God, An identification with your mind and memes, Acausal Sex

(ArisKatsaris proposes an alternate trap.)

Q: Why does this knife have a handle?

A: This allows you to grasp it without cutting yourself.

Q: Why d...
How to Beat Procrastination
by lukeprog — 2011-02-05T18:49:55.327Z

Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life

My own behavior baffles me. I find myself doing what I hate, and not doing what I really want to do!

- Saint Paul (Romans 7:15)

Once you're trained in BayesCraft, it may be tempting to tackle classic problems "from scratch" with your new Rationality Powers. But often, it's more effective to do a bit of scholarship first and at least start from the state of our scientific knowledge on the subject.

Today, I want to tackle procrastination by summarizing what we know about it, and how to overcome it.

Let me begin with three character vignettes...

Eddie attended the sales seminar, read all the books, and repeated the self-affirmations in the mirror this morning. But he has yet to make his first sale. Rejection after rejection has demoralized him. He organizes his desk, surfs the internet, and puts off his cold calls until potential clients are leaving for the day.

Three blocks away, Valerie stares at a blank document in Microsoft Word. Her essay assignment on municipal politics, due tomorrow, is mind-numbingly dull. She decides she needs a break, texts some friends, watches a show, and finds herself even less motivated to write the paper than before. At 10pm she dives in, but the result reflects the time she put into it: it's terrible.

In the next apartment down, Tom is ahead of the game. He got his visa, bought his plane tickets, and booked time off for his vacation to the Dominican Republic. He still needs to reserve a hotel room, but that can be done anytime. Tom keeps pushing the task forward a week as he has more urgent things to do, and then forgets about it altogether. As he's packing, he remembers to book the room, but by now there are none left by the beach. When he arrives, he finds his room is 10 blocks from the beach and decorated with dead mosquitos.

Eddie, Valerie, and Tom are all procrastinators, but in different ways.1

Eddie's problem is low expectancy. By now, he expects only failure. Eddie has low expectancy of success from making his next round of cold calls. Results from 39 procrastination studies show that low expectancy is a major cause of procrastination.2 You doubt your ability to follow through with the diet. You don't expect to get the job. You really should be going out and meeting girls and learning to flirt better, but you expect only rejection now, so you ...
Fast Minds and Slow Computers
by jacob_cannell — 2011-02-05T10:05:33.734Z

The long term future may be absurd and difficult to predict in particulars, but much can happen in the short term.

Engineering itself is the practice of focused short term prediction; optimizing some small subset of future pattern-space for fun and profit.

Let us then engage in a bit of speculative engineering and consider a potential near-term route to superhuman AGI that has interesting derived implications.

Imagine that we had a complete circuit-level understanding of the human brain (which at least for the repetitive laminar neocortical circuit, is not so far off) and access to a large R&D budget. We could then take a neuromorphic approach.

Intelligence is a massive memory problem. Consider as a simple example:

What a cantankerous bucket of defective lizard scabs.

To understand that sentence your brain needs to match it against memory.

Your brain parses that sentence and matches each of its components against it's entire massive ~10^14 bit database in just around a second. In terms of the slow neural clock rate, individual concepts can be pattern matched against the whole brain within just a few dozen neural clock cycles.

A Von Neumman machine (which separates memory and processing) would struggle to execute a logarithmic search within even it's fastest, pathetically small on-die cache in a few dozen clock cycles. It would take many millions of clock cycles to perform a single fast disk fetch. A brain can access most of it's entire memory every clock cycle.

Having a massive, near-zero latency memory database is a huge advantage of the brain. Furthermore, synapses merge computation and memory into a single operation, allowing nearly all of the memory to be accessed and computed every clock cycle.

A modern digital floating point multiplier may use hundreds of thousands of transistors to simulate the work performed by a single synapse. Of course, the two are not equivalent. The high precision binary multiplier is excellent only if you actually need super high precision and guaranteed error correction. It's thus great for meticulous scientific and financial calculations, but the bulk of AI computation consists of compressing noisy real world data where precision is far less important than quantity, of extracting extropy and patterns from raw information, and thus optim...
Another Argument Against Eliezer's Meta-Ethics
by Wei Dai — 2011-02-05T00:54:38.070Z

I think I've found a better argument that Eliezer's meta-ethics is wrong. The advantage of this argument is that it doesn't depend on the specifics of Eliezer's notions of extrapolation or coherence.

Eliezer says that when he uses words like "moral", "right", and "should", he's referring to properties of a specific computation. That computation is essentially an idealized version of himself (e.g., with additional resources and safeguards). We can ask: does Idealized Eliezer (IE) make use of words like "moral", "right", and "should"? If so, what does IE mean by them? Does he mean the same things as Base Eliezer (BE)? None of the possible answers are satisfactory, which implies that Eliezer is probably wrong about what he means by those words.

1. IE does not make use of those words. But this is intuitively implausible.

2. IE makes use of those words and means the same things as BE. But this introduces a vicious circle. If IE tries to determine whether "Eliezer should save person X" is true, he will notice that it's true if he thinks it's true, leading to Löb-style problems.

3. IE's meanings for those words are different from BE's. But knowing that, BE ought to conclude that his meta-ethics is wrong and morality doesn't mean what he thinks it means.
Trying to track down a quote about evolution
by erniebornheimer — 2011-02-05T00:37:29.974Z

Not sure if this is the best place to ask this question. If not please suggest a better.

I came across a great quote about evolution a while back. I thought I grabbed it, but now can't find it anywhere (including searching LW and the Web).

I seem to recall it was on LW and was by Eleizer, but I'm not sure.

It went something like: "Bodies (organisms) are not the meaningful units of evolution. They come and go, like evanescent wisps of smoke. What endures, what persists, are alleles." And I think there was some mention of competition between two animals...the image of two mountain goats butting heads sticks in my mind, but I may be conflating with something else.

Does this ring a bell with anyone? Thank you!

Ernie