trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Deliberate Grad School
by Academian — 2015-10-04T10:11:19.084Z

Among my friends interested in rationality, effective altruism, and existential risk reduction, I often hear: "If you want to have a real positive impact on the world, grad school is a waste of time. It's better to use deliberate practice to learn whatever you need instead of working within the confines of an institution."

While I'd agree that grad school will not make you do good for the world, if you're a self-driven person who can spend time in a PhD program deliberately acquiring skills and connections for making a positive difference, I think you can make grad school a highly productive path, perhaps more so than many alternatives. In this post, I want to share some advice that I've been repeating a lot lately for how to do this:

Find a flexible program. PhD programs in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, and theoretical computer science tend to give you a great deal of free time and flexibility, provided you can pass the various qualifying exams without too much studying. By contrast, sciences like biology and chemistry can require time-consuming laboratory work that you can't always speed through by being clever.

Choose high-impact topics to learn about. AI safety and existential risk reduction are my favorite examples, but there are others, and I won't spend more time here arguing their case. If you can't make your thesis directly about such a topic, choosing a related more popular topic can give you valuable personal connections, and you can still learn whatever you want during the spare time a flexible program will afford you.

Teach classes. Grad programs that let you teach undergraduate tutorial classes provide a rare opportunity to practice engaging a non-captive audience. If you just want to work on general presentation skills, maybe you practice on your friends... but your friends already like you. If you want to learn to win over a crowd that isn't particularly interested in you, try teaching calculus! I've found this skill particularly useful when presenting AI safety research that isn't yet mainstream, which requires carefully stepping through arguments that are unfamiliar to the audience.

Use your freedom to accomplish things. I used my spare time during my PhD program to cofound CFAR, the Center for Applied Rationality. Alumni of our workshops have gone on to do such awesome things as creating the Future of Life In

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Two Questions about Solomonoff Induction
by Scott Garrabrant — 2015-10-04T05:15:55.000Z

In this post, I ask two questions about Solomonoff Induction. I am not sure if these questions are open or not. If you know the answer to either of them, please let me know. I think that the answers may be very relevant to stuff I am currently working on in Asymptotic Logical Uncertainty.

Consider a universal Turing machine U which takes in an infinite stream of random bits, and outputs a finite or infinite string of bits. For any bit string w, let P(w) denote the probability that w is a prefix of the output of U.

Let E be an probabilistic environment which outputs an infinite bit string, and set ei be the first i bits output by E.

If E assigns outputs according to any computable probability distribution, then with probability 1, P(ei1)/P(ei) quickly converges to the actual probability that E outputs a 1 at location i+1 given that its first i bits were ei.

In particular, if E outputs an infinite stream of iid bits which are each 1 with some rational probability p, then P(ei1)/P(ei) will converge to p with probability 1.

However I am curious what happens if E is not computable. In the simplest case E outputs an infinite stream of iid bits which are each 1 with some uncomputable real number probability r. In this case, will P(ei1)/P(ei) converge to r with probability 1?

To make things slightly more complicated, assume that the odd index bits of E come from a fair coin, but the even bits come from an adversary who chooses the bits in an uncomputable way. (This adversary can see all the bits output by E so far, but not future bits.) In this case, will P(e2i1)/P(e2i) converge to 1/2?
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
by rocurley — 2015-10-04T03:27:50.873Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects

WHEN:
05 October 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA

SUPER IMPORTANT THING: This is not our normal place, although hopefully it will be in the future. Please check the address.
We'll be meeting to work on projects. Bring something to work on, come up with something there, or help other people out!

As usual, I can be reached at 301-458-0764.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
Meetup : Meetup : Turku Meetup - Critique towards Less Wrong and MIRI
by  — 2015-10-03T18:11:08.199Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup : Turku Meetup - Critique towards Less Wrong and MIRI

WHEN:
10 October 2015 04:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Cosmic Comic Cafe, Kauppiaskatu 4, 20100 Turku, Finland

Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong and meet the local community. Theme: critique towards Less Wrong, MIRI and other related groups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup : Turku Meetup - Critique towards Less Wrong and MIRI
Rationality Cardinality
by jimrandomh — 2015-10-03T15:54:03.793Z

Rationality Cardinality is a card game which takes memes and concepts from the rationality/Less Wrong sphere, and mixes them with jokes to make a game. After nearly two years of card-creation, playtesting and development, today, I'm taking the "beta" label off the web-based version of Rationality Cardinality. Go to the website and, if at least two other people visit at the same time, you can play against them.

I've put a lot of thought and a lot of work into the cards, and they're not just about humor; I also went systematically through blog posts and glossaries collecting terms and concepts that I think people should know about and be reminded of, and wrote concise explanations for them. It provides an easy way for everyone to quickly learn the jargon that's floating around, in a fun way; and it provides spaced repetition for concepts that might not otherwise have sunk in.

Rationality Cardinality will also soon have a print version. The catch is that in order to mass-produce it, I need to be sure there's enough demand. So, here's the deal: once enough people have played the online version, I'll launch a Kickstarter to sell print copies. You can speed this up by inviting people who might not otherwise see it to play.

Rationality Cardinality is somewhat inspired by Cards Against Rationality. Software for the web-based implementation is based on Cards for Humanity, with modifications.
Monthly Bragging Thread October 2015
by elharo — 2015-10-03T13:27:09.622Z

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

(Previous bragging thread)
Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 
by elharo — 2015-10-03T13:23:31.855Z

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Experiment: Changing minds vs. preaching to the choir
by cleonid — 2015-10-03T11:27:33.250Z

1. Problem

In the market economy production is driven by monetary incentives – higher reward for an economic activity makes more people willing to engage in it. Internet forums follow the same principle but with a different currency - instead of money the main incentive of internet commenters is the reaction of their audience. A strong reaction expressed by a large number of replies or “likes” encourages commenters to increase their output. Its absence motivates them to quit posting or change their writing style.

On neutral topics, using audience reaction as an incentive works reasonably well: attention focuses on the most interesting or entertaining comments. However, on partisan issues, such incentives become counterproductive. Political forums and newspaper comment sections demonstrate the same patterns:

The easiest way to maximize “likes” for a given amount of effort is by posting an emotionally charged comment which appeals to audience’s biases (“preaching to the choir”).

The easiest way to maximize the number of replies is by posting a low quality comment that goes against audience’s biases (“trolling”).

Both effects are amplified when the website places comments with most replies or “likes” at the top of the page.

The problem is not restricted to low-brow political forums. The following graph, which shows the average number of comments as a function of an article’s karma, was generated from the Lesswrong data.

The data suggests that the easiest way to maximize the number of replies is to write posts that are disliked by most readers. For instance, articles with the karma of -1 on average generate twice as many comments (20.1±3.4) as articles with the karma of +1 (9.3±0.8).

2. Technical Solution

Enabling constructive discussion between people with different ideologies requires reversing the incentives – people need to be motivated to write posts that sound persuasive to the opposite side rather than to their own supporters.

We suggest addressing this problem that this problem by changing the voting system. In brief, instead of votes from all readers, comment ratings and position on the page should be based on votes from the opposite side only. For example, in the deba

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Digital Immortality Map: How to collect enough information about yourself for future resurrection by AI
by turchin — 2015-10-02T22:21:20.079Z

If someone has died it doesn’t mean that you should stop trying to return him to life. There is one clear thing that you should do (after cryonics): collect as much information about the person as possible, as well as store his DNA sample, and hope that future AI will return him to life based on this information.

Two meanings of “Digital immortality”

The term “Digital immortality” is often confused with the notion of mind uploading, as the end result is almost the same: a simulated brain in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_immortality

But here, by the term “Digital immortality” I mean reconstruction of the person based on his digital footprint and other traces by future AI after this person death.

Mind uploading in the future will happen while the original is still alive (or while the brain exists in a frozen state) and will be connected to a computer by some kind of sophisticated interface, or the brain will be scanned. It cannot be done currently.

On the other hand, reconstruction based on traces will be done by future AI. So we just need to leave enough traces and we could do it now.

But we don’t know how much traces are enough, so basically we should try to produce and preserve as many traces as possible. However, not all traces are equal in their predictive value. Some are almost random, and others are so common that they do not provide any new information about the person.

Cheapest way to immortality

Creating traces is an affordable way of reaching immortality. It could even be done for another person after his death, if we start to collect all possible information about him.

Basically I am surprised that people don’t do it all the time. It could be done in a simple form almost for free and in the background – just start a video recording app on your notebook, and record everything into shared folder connected with a free cloud. (Evocam program for Mac is excellent, and mail.ru provides up 100gb free).

But really good digital immortality require 2-3 month commitment for self-description with regular every year updates. It may also require maximum several thousand dollars investment in durable disks, DNA testing, videorecorders, and free time to do it.

I understand how to set up this process and could help anyone interested.

Identity

The id...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-10-02T16:22:49.518Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 25th. The following week's summary is here.

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

First meetup in Lund: 19 October 2015 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Australia Online Hangout: 07 October 2015 06:00PM
Cologne meetup: 26 September 2015 05:00PM
Hamburg: 02 October 2015 07:00PM
Hamburg 2015 Q4: 16 October 2015 07:00PM
Oslo Lesswrong meetup, September: 26 September 2015 09:32AM

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 - Petrov Day Celebration: 26 September 2015 04:00PM
Cambridge Less Wrong Meetup - Book Recommendations: 04 October 2015 03:30PM
Moscow LW experimental group meetup: 25 September 2015 07:20PM
[Tel Aviv] Effective Altruism @ LessWrong Tel Aviv: 29 September 2015 07:00PM
Tel Aviv: Black Holes after Jacob Bekenstein: 24 November 2015 08:00AM
Vienna: 26 September 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Singing: 27 September 2015 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, 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 to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meet...
Donna Capsella and the four applicants, pt.1
by  — 2015-10-02T14:15:46.307Z

Once upon a time, in a dark, cruel world – maybe a world darker and crueller than it is – there lived a woman who wanted a piece of the action. Her name was Capsella Medik, but we remember her as Donna Capsella. This is an anecdote from her youth, told by a man who lived to tell it.

...you've got to understand, Donna started small. Real small. No money, no allies, no kin, and her wiles were – as feminine as they are. Still, she was ambitious, even then, and she had to look the part.

Girl had a way with people. Here's how it went.

One night, she rents a room – one table, five chairs – and two armed bodies, and sets up a date with four men at once – Mr. Burr, Mr. Sapp, Mr. Ast and Mr. Oriss, who've never seen her before. All are single, thirty-ish white collars. One look at the guns, and they're no trouble at all.

On the table, there's a heap: a coloured picture, a box of beads, another box (empty), four stacks of paper, four pens, a calculator and a sealed envelope.

'So,' says Donna. 'I need a manager. A clever man who'd keep my bank happy while I am...abroad. I offer you to play a game – just one game – and the winner is going to sign these papers. You leave hired, or not at all.'

The game was based on Mendel's Laws – can you imagine? The police never stood a chance against her... She had it printed out – a kind of cheat-sheet. It's like, if you have some biological feature, it's either what your genes say, or you helped Nature along the way; and the exact – wording – can be different, so you have blue eyes or brown eyes. The wording is what they call allele. Some alleles, dominant, shout louder than others, recessive, so you'll have at most two copies of each gene (hopefully), but only one will ever be heard on the outside.

(It's not quite that simple, but we didn't protest. Guns, you know.)

So there was a picture of a plant whose leaves came in four shapes (made by two genes with two alleles each):

From left to right: simplex, rhomboidea, heteris and tenuis. Simplex had only recessive alleles, aabb. Rhomboidea and tenuis each had only one pair of recessive alleles – aaB? and A?bb. But heteris, that one was a puzzler: A?B?.

'Okay,' Donna waves her hand over the heap on the table. 'Here are the rules. You will see two parent plants, and then you will see their offspring – one at a tim...
Conservative classifiers
by jessicata — 2015-10-02T03:56:46.000Z

Summary: If we train a classifier on a training set that comes from one distribution, and test it on a dataset coming from a different distribution, uniform convergence guarantees generally no longer hold. This post presents a strategy for creating classifiers that will reject test points when they are sufficiently different from training data. It works by rejecting points that are much more probable under the predicted test distribution than under the training distribution.

Introduction

In machine learning, we often train a system (e.g. a classifier or regression system) on a training set, and then test it on a test set. If the test set comes from the same distribution as the training set, uniform convergence guarantees allow us to bound the system's expected error on the test set based on its performance on the training set. As an example, if we are creating an automated system for making moral judgments, we could get training data by asking humans for their moral judgments. Then we could use the system to make additional moral judgments.

If the test dataset comes from the same distribution as the training dataset, then uniform convergence guarantees can give us nice bounds on the performance on the test set. In reality, the test set will often be different. For a moral judgment system, this could be disastrous: perhaps we only train the classifier on ordinary moral problems, but then the classifier decides whether it is a good idea to tile the universe with tiny smiley faces. At this point, we have no guarantees about whether the classifier will correctly judge this question.

Therefore, I aim to create a system that, when presented with a question, will choose to either answer the question or abort. It should abort when the question is sufficiently different from the training data that the system cannot make reliable judgments.

Mathematical setup

We have some input set X. Let ptrain:ΔX be the (known) distribution of training data.
We train a classifier (or some other system) on the training data, and (using uniform convergence guarantees)
estimate that it has good expected performance on random points from ptrain. Afterwards, we will receive test points in X. The system can either use the classifier on the test point and make decisions on the basis of this classification, or abort (e.g. by asking a human for their judgment instead of the classif

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Two Growth Curves
by AnnaSalamon — 2015-10-02T00:59:45.489Z

Sometimes, it helps to take a model that part of you already believes, and to make a visual image of your model so that more of you can see it.

One of my all-time favorite examples of this:

I used to often hesitate to ask dumb questions, to publicly try skills I was likely to be bad at, or to visibly/loudly put forward my best guesses in areas where others knew more than me.

I was also frustrated with this hesitation, because I could feel it hampering my skill growth. So I would try to convince myself not to care about what people thought of me. But that didn't work very well, partly because what folks think of me is in fact somewhat useful/important.

Then, I got out a piece of paper and drew how I expected the growth curves to go.

In blue, I drew the apparent-coolness level that I could achieve if I stuck with the "try to look good" strategy. In brown, I drew the apparent-coolness level I'd have if I instead made mistakes as quickly and loudly as possible -- I'd look worse at first, but then I'd learn faster, eventually overtaking the blue line.

Suddenly, instead of pitting my desire to become smart against my desire to look good, I could pit my desire to look good now against my desire to look good in the future :)

I return to this image of two growth curves often when I'm faced with an apparent tradeoff between substance and short-term appearances. (E.g., I used to often find myself scurrying to get work done, or to look productive / not-horribly-behind today, rather than trying to build the biggest chunks of capital for tomorrow. I would picture these growth curves.)
Meetup : San Antonio Meetup - Discussion
by Bryan-san — 2015-10-01T23:55:13.140Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup - Discussion

WHEN:
11 October 2015 12:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
12651 Vance Jackson Rd #118, San Antonio, TX 78230

Bubble tea, frozen yogurt, and discussion at Yumi Berry! All are welcome!

New Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong and meet the local community. Look for the sign that says Less Wrong!

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup - Discussion
October 2015 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2015-10-01T22:17:14.857Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.