trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Appropriateness of Discussing Rationalist Discourse of a Political Nature on LW?
by Evan_Gaensbauer — 2018-03-12T23:21:52.844Z

There was recently a back-and-forth between Slate Star Codex and Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs, a major national news magazine on the political left in the United States. It didn't end well. I think it would serve as a good example in how I think rationalist diaspora members could better think and go about publicly engaging those outside the community on topics of common interest. I wouldn't publish it without running it by Scott first. But I don't want to waste the time to write a draft if it wouldn't be appropriate content for LW anyway.

I could post the write-up on my own blog and submit it as a community post. It wouldn't have any relevance to people outside the rationalist diaspora, so I'd prefer to post it to LW, but my own blog would be fine. If submitting it as a link/community post would be frowned up as well, that'd be fine with me too. I just want to know what the expected norms are here. If the answer to these questions would depend on the content of my write-up, that's also fine. I can drum something up, come back here, and then get feedback. Anyway, if the moderators or anyone else wants to give me their two cents, that'd be great.
Welcome to Rationality Vienna
by Viliam — 2018-03-12T21:07:07.921Z

We meet once a month in a building next to train station "Wien, Stadlau". There are usually people from many countries; the communication language is English.

Program typically follows this structure:

15:00 - 15:30 : arrival, tea and coffee

15:30 : round of introductions

16:00 - 18:00 : talks or open microphone

after 18:00 there is a dinner in the city, and then people individually leave.
Avoiding AI Races Through Self-Regulation
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2018-03-12T20:53:45.465Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/avoiding-ai-races-through-self-regulation-1b815fca6b06

Summary

The first group to build artificial general intelligence or AGI stands to gain a significant strategic and market advantage over competitors, so companies, universities, militaries, and other actors have strong incentives to race to build AGI first. An AGI race would be dangerous, though, because it would prioritize capabilities over safety and increase the risk of existential catastrophe. A self-regulatory organization (SRO) for AGI may be able to change incentives to favor safety over capabilities and encourage cooperation rather than racing.

Introduction

The history of modern technology has often been a history of technological races. A race starts when a new technology becomes cost-effective, then companies, states, and other actors hurry to develop the technology in hopes of capturing market share before others can, gaining a strategic advantage over competitors, or otherwise benefitting from a first-mover position. Some notable examples of recent technological races include races over rockets, personal computers, and DNA sequencing.

Although most of these races have been generally beneficial for society by quickly increasing productivity and expanding the economy, others, like races over weapons, generally make us less safe. In particular the race to build nuclear weapons dramatically increased humanity’s capability to extinguish itself and exposed us to new existential risks that we previously did not face. This means that technological races can harm as much as they can help, and nowhere is that more true than in the burgeoning race to build AI.

In particular we may be near the start of a race to build artificial general intelligence or AGI thanks to recent advances in deep learning. And unlike existing narrow AI that outperforms humans but only on very specific tasks, AGI will be as good or better than humans at all tasks such that an AGI could replace a human in any context. The promise of replacing humans with AGI is extremely appealing to many organizations since AGI could be cheaper, more productive, and more loyal than humans, so the incentives to race to build the first AGI are strong, but the very capabilities that make AGI so compelling also make them extremely dangerous, and we may actually be better off not building AGI at all if we cannot build them safely!

The risks of AGI have been widely discussed, but we may briefly summarize...
AI Alignment Prize: Round 2 due March 31, 2018
by Zvi — 2018-03-12T12:10:00.676Z

There are still several weeks left to enter the second round of the AI Alignment Prize. The official announcement of the second round, along with the first round’s winners, is here. We’ll be awarding a minimum of $10,000 for advances in technical, philosophical and/or strategic approaches to AI alignment: Ensuring that future smarter than human intelligence will have goals aligned with the goals of humanity. Last time we got such good entries we tripled our announced prize pool, and we’d love to justify doing that again. You can enter by replying to this post, to the original announcement of the second prize, or by emailing apply@ai-alignment.com.

AI alignment is wide open for both amateur and professional ideas. It’s one of the most important things humanity needs to work on, yet it receives almost no serious attention. Much of the low hanging fruit remains unpicked. We hope to help change that. Even for those who don’t produce new advances or win prizes, more time spent on this problem is time well spent.

Whether or not you’re considering entering, please help get the word out and remind people of the upcoming deadline. Please do repost this notice with a link back to the original (since people won’t be able to enter by replying to the copy). Entries for the second round are running behind the pace from the first round, and second times around risk being less sexy and exciting than the first, despite the increased prize pool. We also didn’t do enough to make it clear the contest was continuing with a larger prize pool.

Paul Christiano is also offering an additional $10,000 prize for the best evidence that his preferred approach to AI alignment, which is reflected in posts at

ai-alignment.com

and centered on

iterated amplification,

is doomed. That one is due on April 20.

Last November, Paul Christiano, Vladimir Slepnev and myself announced the AI Alignment Prize for publicly posted work advancing our understanding of AI alignment. We were hopeful that a prize could be effective at motivating good work and the sharing of good work, but worried we wouldn’t get quality entries.

We need not have worried. On all fronts, it was a smashing success, exceeding all of our expectations for both quantity and quality. We got winning entries both from employees of organizations like FRI and MIRI, and from independent bloggers. Our original prize pool was $5,000 total, but ...
Multiplicity of "enlightenment" states and contemplative practices
by Wei Dai — 2018-03-12T08:15:48.709Z

It seems that there are multiple different mental states that people have historically called "enlightenment", as well as many different types of contemplative practices with different underlying cognitive mechanisms. I link to and quote from a couple of papers showing this. Given the apparent multiplicity of "enlightenment" states and contemplative practices, I'd like to request that future discussions on these topics include more detailed references or descriptions as to which states and practices are being talking about.

Can enlightenment be traced to specific neural correlates, cognition, or behavior?

The term ’’enlightenment” is an extraordinarily imprecise construct. Using the term enlightenment or even the term more native to Buddhist traditions, “awakening” (bodhi), as if it referred to a single outcome either privileges one conception over others or else assumes that there is some commonality among the traditional goals of diverse contemplative traditions. There are deep disagreements over the nature of the goal between and even within various Buddhist schools. Scientific investigations cannot assume that there is any commonality among the transformative changes referred to as “kensho,” “stream entry,” “realizing the nature of mind,” and so on, that various Buddhist traditions take as various stages of awakening. Empirical investigations of these constructs can only proceed with reference to the specific psychological and behavioral outcomes described in the native discourse of a specific tradition (see Lutz et al., 2007). [...]

Given the differences between various competing conceptions of awakening, one scientific approach to tracing enlightenment would be to use the tools of social psychology to investigate which states and traits are valued in a particular community. For instance, recent work in moral psychology suggests how value judgments of people and practices as either enlightened or unenlightened could be traced to affective reactions of admiration and disgust (Rozin et al., 1999; Schnall et al., 2008; Brandt and Reyna, 2011; Schnall and Roper, 2011). Some of the most virulent disagreements over what counts as genuine awakening occur between closely related practice traditions, such as the debates between various Theravāda Buddhist traditions in Burma over which states are to count as realizations of nibbāna and which

...
The San Francisco LessWrong Meetup
by rocurley — 2018-03-12T05:06:31.285Z

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome. Yes, that includes you, if you're reading this.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

We meet every Monday in SF at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7:00 to accommodate stragglers. Sometimes there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

Meetups are generally at 855 Brannan St. (with some exceptions: check the post for the specific meetup you're planning to attend).

Frequent topics include:

Board Games / Singing

Projects (some group pomodoros interspersed with socializing)

Group Debugging (chatting with other people about problems in your life and getting help with them)

Short Talks (7-minute lightning talks, given by participants extemporaneously)

... and several more.
Should we remove markdown parsing from the comment editor? 
by habryka — 2018-03-12T05:00:22.062Z

As was just brought up in the discussion about the vote, the current markdown-parsing in the comments is causing quite a few bugs and the associated convenience might not be worth the costs of the bugs. We now have an experimental option in your user-profile to switch to a pure markdown editor, so it might make sense to just remove the automatic markdown parsing from the comment editor and have it just be a pure rich-text editor.

I left two comments that you can vote on to decide between the options.
A Taxonomy of Weirdness 
by  — 2018-03-12T02:33:33.962Z

To begin, here is is a story of Weirdness Points spent unwisely.

In elementary school, my mother would come in on occasion to lecture us on art and art history. The task one day was family portraits: specifically, caricatures of our close family members that expressed their respective personalities and quirks. As an example, she pulled out her drawings of my family, each person assembled of different shapes. My father was made of rectangles, because he was a mathematician and thought in logical and linear fashion. My mother herself was made of circles, because she was an art-lover and thought in what she saw as soft, roundabout ways. My sister was made of triangles, a compromise. At last she revealed me, saying: "And Evan is a fried egg!" And indeed, there I was, looking like the first frame of a Ricci flow animation, or perhaps more pertinently, a very poorly fried egg. There were the requisite gales of laughter from all around (and the requisite lack of laughter and mild mortification on my part). It would have been little consolation at the time that the picture would prove prophetic.

I have recently been contemplating the nature of my weirdness, and like any good LessWronger, I have expanded that contemplation into a full-blown world-girdling model, which hopefully is at least sufficiently superficially accurate.

Weirdo Varieties:

Fried Eggs - The constitutionally weird. People who will always end up on the margins, even relative to the margins. Not necessarily those who desire to be odd or unusual - although that is sometimes the case - but those for whom the self is inevitably expressed. Fried Eggs are often the most unique and creative, but they are also the sort of people who unfortunately find it hard to build a community, because they are uncompromisingly themselves. No Fried Egg will ever be a head of state. Some examples of Fried Eggs are Ed Wood, Marilyn Manson, Salvador Dalí, Diogenes of Sinope, and Nikola Tesla.

Believers - the devotionally weird. People who are on the margins only because of their total adherence to a marginal dogma. A devoted Communist who would be normal (if only Communism were) is a Believer and not a Fried Egg. They are not at all incrementalists, however, and will only surrender their weirdness when the last enemy falls. Believers build the strongest communities of the three - their communities become locally norma...
Welcome to Los Angeles Rationality!
by RobertM — 2018-03-12T01:00:13.161Z

Hi everybody!

If you're reading this post, you're probably interested in attending the meetup. While we have a weekly topic, it's more of a "we'll get to it when we get to it" thing rather than a rigid structure; that said we almost always have a brief discussion on it at some point during the night.

You should attend even if:

you're worried about not having anything interesting to say (we have enough pro-social people that you'll get drawn into a conversation if you want to)
you're worried about not having enough background knowledge (if you're reading this site, you already know more than a few of our regulars and they're happy enough)
you're worried about having too much background knowledge (we have PhD students who will happily debate the problem of induction with you)
you have a question or problem that can be addressed by asking me on Discord (here's a link: https://discord.gg/TaYjsvN)

We also occasionally throw parties and stuff.
Rationality Sydney pub meetups and Lesswrong Dojos
by Elo — 2018-03-12T00:09:47.215Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?

See Details here: <a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Physical_Meetup_in_Sydney]"> https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/PhysicalMeetup in_Sydney
Leaving beta: Voting on moving to LessWrong.com
by Vaniver — 2018-03-11T23:40:26.663Z

It took longer than we hoped, but LessWrong 2.0 is finally ready to come out of beta. As discussed in the original announcement, we’re going to have a vote on whether or not to migrate the new site to the lesswrong.com URL. The vote will be open to people who had 1,000 or more LW karma at the time we announced the vote back in September, and they’ll receive a link by email or private message on the current LessWrong.com. If you had above 1000 karma in September and did not receive an email or PM, send an email to habryka@lesserwrong.com and we will send you the form link.

We take rationalist virtues seriously, and I think it’s important that the community actually be able to look at the new implementation and vision and be able to say “no thanks.” If over half of the votes are to not migrate, the migration will not happen and we’ll figure out how we want to move forward with the website we’ve built.

Unfortunately, the alternative option for what will happen with the lesswrong.com URL is not great. Before I got involved, the original dominant plan was to replace it with a static HTML site, which would require minimal maintenance while preserving the value of old Sequences articles. So in the absence of another team putting forward heroic efforts and coordinating with Trike, MIRI, etc. that would be the world we would be moving towards.

Why not just keep things as they are? At the time, it was the consensus among old regulars that LW felt like an abandoned ghost town. A major concern about keeping it alive for the people still using it was that newcomers would read Sequences articles linked from elsewhere, check out the recent discussion and find it disappointing, and then bounce off of LW. This reduced its value for bringing people into the community.

More recently, various security concerns have made it a worse option to just keep old websites running – Trike has run into some issues where updating the server and antiquated codebase to handle security patches proved difficult, and they would prefer to no longer be responsible for maintaining the old website.

In case you’re just tuning in now, some basic details: I’ve been posting on LW for a long time, and about two years ago thought I was the person who cared most about making sure LW stayed alive, so decided to put effort into making sure that happened...
Leaving beta: Voting on moving to LessWrong.com
by Vaniver — 2018-03-11T22:53:17.721Z

It took longer than we hoped, but LessWrong 2.0 is finally ready to come out of beta. As

discussed in the original announcement

, we’re going to have a vote on whether or not to migrate the new site to the lesswrong.com URL. The vote will be open to people who had 1,000 or more LW karma at the time we announced the vote back in September, and they’ll receive a link by email or private message on the current LessWrong.com. If you had above 1000 karma in September and did not receive an email or PM, send an email to habryka@lesserwrong.com and we will send you the form link.

If we move, we will not break old incoming links to LessWrong.com.

We take rationalist virtues seriously, and I think it’s important that the community actually be able to look at the new implementation and vision and be able to say “no thanks.” If over half of the votes are to not migrate, the migration will not happen and we’ll figure out how we want to move forward with the website we’ve built.

Unfortunately, the alternative option for what will happen with the lesswrong.com URL is not great. Before I got involved, the original dominant plan was to replace it with a static HTML site, which would require minimal maintenance while preserving the value of old Sequences articles. So in the absence of another team putting forward heroic efforts and coordinating with Trike, MIRI, etc. that would be the world we would be moving towards.

Why not just keep things as they are? At the time, it was the consensus among old regulars that LW felt like an abandoned ghost town. A major concern about keeping it alive for the people still using it was that newcomers would read Sequences articles linked from elsewhere, check out the recent discussion and find it disappointing, and then bounce off of LW. This reduced its value for bringing people into the community.

More recently, various security concerns have made it a worse option to just keep old websites running – Trike has run into some issues where updating the server and antiquated codebase to handle security patches proved difficult, and they would prefer to no longer be responsible for maintaining the old website.

In case you’re just tuning in now, some basic details: I’ve been posting on LW for a long time, and about two years ago thought I was the person who cared most about making sure LW stayed alive, so decided to put effort into making sure that...
Editor Mini-Guide
by Ben Pace — 2018-03-11T20:58:59.828Z

Here is a brief overview of what you can do in the editor on LessWrong. This will change a great deal over time, so I’ll keep a note here of when the latest update was: Friday 5th July, 2019.

Three things you need to know

Highlight text in the editor to get a popup menu.
Whatever you make in the editor will look exactly the same when you post it.
The editor supports markdown and LaTex.

Extra details

If you're on your phone/tablet the editor will be transformed into markdown. If you want an only-markdown editor on desktop, go to your settings to turn it on.
There are extensive online resources for basic markdown on the internet, if you want to find something do use google.
You can use a lot of markdown in the normal editor. Enter the markdown command, press enter (with your cursor at the end of the command), and the editor will render it in real time.
WYSIWYG means what you see is what you get. The editor automatically turns a lot of markdown into the finished product, so what you can see when you hit submit, is exactly what the comment or post will look like after you hit submit. If it looks wrong when you're editing it, it will look wrong when you hit publish.
Use Ctrl-4 to open the LaTex prompt (or Cmd-4 if you're on a Mac). Open a centred LaTex popup using Ctrl-M (aka Cmd-M). If you’ve written some maths in normal writing and want to turn it into LaTex, if you highlight the text and then hit the LaTex editor button it will turn straight into LaTex.

f_i(x) = y_i becomes fi(x)=yi.
S(ω)=αg2ω5e[−0.74{ωUω19.5g}−4] (how cool does that look?)
There are extensive resources for using LaTex on the internet, so again, use google to figure out how to write things like this:

Images, videos, and footnotes

Images

Unfortunately, you can't yet upload your images to the website. To include an image in a post, you'll first need to add it to an image hosting site like Dropbox or Cloudinary. Then you can use the native image-adding button that appears when you highlight text. Click on the image to see a menu that lets you move it the left/right/centre.

Videos

Videos can't be used in posts at the minute.

There is a markdown hack you can do instead, that lets you include a snapshot of the video.

Here's the text that will create a snapshot image.

![](http://img.youtube.com/vi/YOUTUBE_VIDEO_ID_HERE/0.jpg)

NB:... ,