trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Friendly AI FAQ drafts
by lukeprog — 2011-11-13T16:47:31.970Z

I and a few others have gradually been writing up a large FAQ on Friendly AI. I'll be posting early drafts of the content to Less Wrong discussion for feedback.

We aim to keep the answers in this FAQ brief, though they can be significantly longer than those in the Singularity FAQ.

Here, I'll keep a table of contents for the posted FAQ sections.

What is the history of the Friendly AI concept?

What is Friendly AI?

What is the Singularity?

What is nanotechnology?

What is general intelligence and what is greater-than-human intelligence?

...

For references, see here.
Modularity, signaling, and belief in belief
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-11-13T11:54:46.483Z

This is the fourth part in a mini-sequence presenting material from Robert Kurzban's excellent book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind.

In the previous post, Strategic ignorance and plausible deniability, we discussed some ways by which people might have modules designed to keep them away from certain kinds of information. These arguments were relatively straightforward.
The next step up is the hypothesis that our "press secretary module" might be designed to contain information that is useful for certain purposes, even if other modules have information that not only conflicts with this information, but is also more likely to be accurate. That is, some modules are designed to acquire systematically biased - i.e. false - information, including information that other modules "know" is wrong.

Kurzban builds up this argument as follows:
Humans are incredibly social. Our intelligence might have evolved exactly because of competition in social domains, living alone and a lack of social interaction are correlated with poor health and unhappiness, and the pain levels reported by people reliving socially painful events, especially ostracism, are "comparable to pain levels reported ... for chronic back pain and even childbirth". Evolution has very strongly wired us for being social and avoiding ostracism and disapproval by the group.
There's a lot of competition in the social world. Our survival and reproduction are determined in large part by how well we navigate the social world. Our minds are likely to have been designed to compete fiercely for the benefits of the social world: the best mates, the best friends, membership in the best groups, and so on.
Social competition is often framed in terms of competing for the best mate or romantic partner, but Kurzban believes that the importance of friendship jealousy is underappreciated. If you are someone's best friend, they are likely to help you in times of need, and to also take your side in nearly all social conflicts. Having many people consider you to be among their best friends is one of the greatest advantages a person can have, and it would be surprising if we didn't have many modules that caused us to try to be valuable for others. People report satisfaction from helping their friends, and of course from making new ones.
We also like to be part of groups. Some groups are very exclusive, ...
[SEQ RERUN] Mere Messiahs
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-13T06:54:51.904Z

Today's post, Mere Messiahs was originally published on 02 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

John Perry, an extropian and a transhumanist, died when the north tower of the World Trade Center fell. He knew he was risking his existence to save other people, and he had hope that he might be able to avoid death, but he still helped them. This takes far more courage than someone who dies, expecting to be rewarded in an afterlife for their virtue.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Superhero Bias, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Umbilical cord stem cell banking for future medical use
by Synaptic — 2011-11-13T01:41:43.149Z

I had not heard of this until recently, and I doubt I am alone. I will quote from this source, which looks OK (there is also this).

What is the idea?

[D]uring the 1970s, researchers discovered that umbilical cord blood could supply the same kinds of blood-forming (hematopoietic) stem cells as a bone marrow donor. And so, umbilical cord blood began to be collected and stored.

How the cells are collected:

After a vaginal delivery, the umbilical cord is clamped on both sides and cut. In most cases, an experienced obstetrician or nurse collects the cord blood before the placenta is delivered. One side of the umbilical cord is unclamped, and a small tube is passed into the umbilical vein to collect the blood. After blood has been collected from the cord, needles are placed on the side of the surface of the placenta that was connected to the fetus to collect more blood and cells from the large blood vessels that fed the fetus.

How the cells are stored:

After cord-blood collection has taken place, the blood is placed into bags or syringes and is usually taken by courier to the cord-blood bank. Once there, the sample is given an identifying number. Then the stem cells are separated from the rest of the blood and are stored cryogenically (frozen in liquid nitrogen) in a collection facility, also known as a cord-blood bank.

How the cells can be used:

Then, if needed, blood-forming stem cells can be thawed and used in either autologous procedures (when someone receives his or her own umbilical cord blood in a transplant) or allogeneic procedures (when a person receives umbilical cord blood donated from someone else — a sibling, close relative, or anonymous donor).

The major upside:

The primary reason that parents consider banking their newborn's cord blood is because they have a child or close relative with or a family medical history of diseases that can be treated with bone marrow transplants.

The monetary cost:

The expense of collecting and storing the cord blood can be a deciding factor for many families. At a commercial cord-blood bank, you'll pay approximately $1,000-$2,000 to store a sample of cord blood, in addition to an approximately $100 yearly maintenance fee. You might also pay an additional fee of several hundred dollars for the cord-blood collection kit, courier service to the cord-blood bank, and initial pro

...
List of potential cognitive enhancement methods
by lukeprog — 2011-11-13T00:57:37.271Z

Participants in the Singularity Summit 2011 workshops held on October 17-18 brainstormed a list of cognitive enhancement methods they would like to see tested — some of them for the first time, many of them more thoroughly than has been done so far. Here is that list:

rationality instruction

potassium and nutrients/micronutrients in general

modafinil and its class

racetam class, adderall, riatlin

paleo and other popular diets

multigenerational embryo selection

particular TMS interventions

doing math or logic problems every day

amount of sleep

neurofeedback; EEG, etc.

physical health, specific types of exercise, yoga

more red blood cells

certain types of electrical stimulation

spaced repetition

practicing visualization

practicing chess and Go

dual n-back training

prolonged sensory deprivation

experience manipulating physical objects (craftsmanship and engineering)

listening to music actively (and engaging with other art forms actively)

using specific visual languages for specific tasks

happiness in general (gratitude, etc.)

changing the oxygen content of what you're breathing

gene expression levels

operant conditioning

irradiation or administration of other toxins

lucid dreaming

GHB

intermittent fasting

creatine

nicotine, caffeine

arterial glucose drip to get more sugar to the brain

Ekman training

steroids
Meetup : San Diego meetup
by Mercurial — 2011-11-12T18:26:12.580Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Diego meetup

WHEN:
20 November 2011 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
6380 Del Cerro Blvd. San Diego, CA 92120

We're having another San Diego meetup on Sunday, November 20th at 1pm at our usual location. As mentioned in the first San Diego meetup announcement, it's in a kind of strip next to a grocery store. The room we have is in the far back, so once you come in just go as straight as possible against the left wall. Minors are allowed; they just can't order alcohol. (So if you want to order any, be sure to bring your ID.)

Since there was interest expressed in this last time, I'll prepare a presentation on the Enneagram and bring a projector. (At last check they had removed their projector but still have a projection screen mounted on a wall.) For those who weren't there for that part of the discussion, the very short version is that the Enneagram is a personality typing system that is ridiculously insightful and predicative. It intertwines motivation, affect, thought, and behavior into a coherent pattern and details what nine of those patterns are, with the implicit claim that there are only nine such patterns (although there are relationships between them that add variety to types' expression). It turns out you can make insanely accurate predictions of others' behavior using this tool because you learn to understand where they're coming from on a surprisingly subtle level, and you can also learn things about yourself that introspection normally fails to pick up on. If you're curious to learn more before the meetup, read this. Just be aware that the Enneagram started out as a "sacred symbol" used for spiritual purposes, so you'll sometimes encounter some religious elements tossed in randomly. Just ignore those parts. Over the last ten years, I've found that the Enneagram works perfectly well from a rational reductionist materialist perspective.

With all that said, I'll offer this only if people who come are interested. If there's a strong preference for just hanging out and chatting, then so be it! I just want to hang out with fellow aspiring rationalists.

If there's something you want to present that requires a speaker for a laptop (or equivalent), let me know. I can almost certainly pick one up at the same time I'm getting the projec

...
The promise of connected science
by lukeprog — 2011-11-12T18:22:57.453Z

Sometimes, scientific discovery is just a matter of sitting down and using the tools of "connected science" already available to us. Stories like this one underscore the need for generalists:

Don Swanson seems an unlikely person to make medical discoveries. A retired but still active information scientist at the University of Chicago, Swanson has no medical training, does no medical experiments, and has never had a laboratory. Despite this, he’s made several significant medical discoveries. One of the earliest was in 1988, when he investigated migraine headaches, and discovered evidence suggesting that migraines are caused by magnesium deficiency. At the time the idea was a surprise to other scientists studying migraines, but Swanson’s idea was subsequently tested and confirmed in multiple therapeutic trials by traditional medical groups.

How is it that someone without any medical training could make such a discovery? Although Swanson had none of the conventional credentials of medical research, what he did have was a clever idea. Swanson believed that scientific knowledge had grown so vast that important connections between subjects were going unnoticed, not because they were especially subtle or hard to grasp, but because no one had a broad enough understanding of science to notice those connections: in a big enough haystack, even a 50-foot needle may be hard to find. Swanson hoped to uncover such hidden connections using a medical search engine called Medline, which makes it possible to search millions of scientific papers in medicine—you can think of Medline as a high-level map of human medical knowledge. He began his work by using Medline to search the scientific literature for connections between migraines and other conditions. Here are two examples of connections he found: (1) migraines are associated with epilepsy; and (2) migraines are associated with blood clots forming more easily than usual. Of course, migraines have been the subject of much research, and so those are just two of a much longer list of connections that he found. But Swanson didn’t stop with that list. Instead, he took each of the associated conditions and then used Medline to find further connections to that condition. He learned that, for example, (1) magnesium deficiency increases susceptibility to epilepsy; and (2) magnesium deficiency makes b

...
[SEQ RERUN] Superhero Bias
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-12T06:30:27.822Z

Today's post, Superhero Bias was originally published on 01 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It is better to risk your life to save 200 people than to save 3. But someone who risks their life to save 3 people is revealing a more altruistic nature than someone risking their life to save 200. And yet comic books are written about heroes who save 200 innocent schoolchildren, and not police officers saving three prostitutes.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Halo Effect, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Wiki Spam
by dbaupp — 2011-11-12T00:26:02.510Z

Recently, I have noticed that the "Recent Wiki Edits" box (equivalently, this page) in the sidebar seems to be almost exclusively filled with the edits from spam bots and either Gwern or Vladimir Nesov cleaning up after them (thanks!). This seems like it should be fixed, if only to save those two the time they spend on maintenance.

The wiki registration form does have a reCAPTCHA in an attempt to block spam-bots, but this is apparently not effective enough (maybe because reCAPTCHA has been cracked, or the spammers are using humans in some way).

I have some possible solutions, but I shall wait a bit before suggesting them.

(I vaguely remember there being a discussion like this previously, but I can't find it again, if it exists.)
Sometimes, talking the issue through *works*
by lukeprog — 2011-11-11T21:51:07.735Z

Michael Nielsen's new book Reinventing Discovery is invigorating. Here's one passage on how a small group talked an issue through and had a large impact on scientific progress:

Why is it that biologists share genetic data in GenBank in the first place? When you think about it, it’s a peculiar choice: if you’re a professional biologist it’s to your advantage to keep data secret as long as possible. Why share your data online before you get a chance to publish a paper or take out a patent on your work? In the scientific world it’s papers and, in some fields, patents that are rewarded by jobs and promotions. Publicly releasing data typically does nothing for your career, and might even damage it, by helping your scientific competitors.

In part for these reasons, GenBank took off slowly after it was launched in 1982. While many biologists were happy to access others’ data in GenBank, they had little interest in contributing their own data. But that has changed over time. Part of the reason for the change was a historic conference held in Bermuda in 1996, and attended by many of the world’s leading biologists, including several of the leaders of the government-sponsored Human Genome Project. Also present was Craig Venter, who would later lead a private effort to sequence the human genome. Although many attendees weren’t willing to unilaterally make the first move to share all their genetic data in advance of publication, everyone could see that science as a whole would benefit enormously if open sharing of data became common practice. So they sat and talked the issue over for days, eventually coming to a joint agreement—now known as the Bermuda Agreement—that all human genetic data should be immediately shared online. The agreement wasn’t just empty rhetoric. The biologists in the room had enough clout that they convinced several major scientific grant agencies to make immediate data sharing a mandatory requirement of working on the human genome. Scientists who refused to share data would get no grant money to do research. This changed the game, and immediate sharing of human genetic data became the norm. The Bermuda agreement eventually made its way to the highest levels of government: on March 14, 2000, US President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a joint statement prais

...
Meetup : Madison Monday Meetup: Tegmark universes
by fiddlemath — 2011-11-11T21:30:21.179Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison Monday Meetup: Tegmark universes

WHEN:
14 November 2011 06:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1831 Monroe St. Madison, WI

Again, we'll meet at the Barrique's on Monroe St. Patrick will describe and discuss Max Tegmark's multiverse theory (pdf. pdf). I'll make a number of incredulous comments. Coffee, conversation, maybe a couple rounds of Zendo or The Resistance. And again, if you're interested in meeting LW folk in Madison, you should sign up on the Madison meetup mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison Monday Meetup: Tegmark universes
Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Canberra, Zurich, Mountain View
by FrankAdamek — 2011-11-11T13:52:52.936Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Melbourne practical rationality meetup: 04 November 2011 07:00PM
Canberra Meetup Saturday November 5th: 05 November 2011 11:00AM
First Zurich LW Meetup: 12 November 2011 03:00PM

Notice for the Mountain View/Tortuga meetup: The Mountain View meetup is moving to *Mondays* (still at 7pm, still at Tortuga); and over the next few weeks will present pieces of the "Detaching from Sunk Costs" rationality kata currently under development.

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Irvine, London, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles.

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, and have fun!

Despite the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, we've decided to continue posting an overview of upcoming meetups on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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 meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Chicago, Helsinki, London, Madison, WI, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.
[SEQ RERUN] The Halo Effect
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-11T03:33:25.489Z

Today's post, The Halo Effect was originally published on 30 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Positive qualities seem to correlate with each other, whether or not they actually do.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : The Planning Fallacy
by jsalvatier — 2011-11-11T01:48:58.825Z

Discussion article for the meetup : The Planning Fallacy

WHEN:
13 November 2011 04:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
4133 University Way NE, Seattle, WA

We're going to have a meetup this Sunday at 4pm since we haven't had one in a while. We'll be talking about The Planning Fallacy, when we've been burned by it, when and why it happens and how to ameliorate it.

See you folks there!

Discussion article for the meetup : The Planning Fallacy
Transhumanism and Gender Relations
by daenerys — 2011-11-11T01:48:02.411Z

Upon reading Eliezer's possible gender dystopias ([catgirls](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xt/interpersonal_entanglement/), and [verthandi](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xu/failed_utopia_42/) and the other LW comments and posts on the subject of future gender relations, I came to a rather different conclusion than the ones I've seen espoused here. After searching around the internet a bit, I discovered that my ideas tend to fall under the general category of "postgenderism", and I am wondering what my fellow LessWrongians think of it.

This can generally be broken down to the following claims:

A higher level of egalitarianism between the sexes increases utility. For example, if only men are generally allowed to do Job A, then you are halving the talent pool of people who can do Job A, AND women who would otherwise be happy in Job A lose that utility. It is equally of dis-utility if only women are socially allowed to be emotionally expressive, etc, etc. In other words, Equality = Good.

The differences between men and women are a mix of environmental factors, such as social conditioning, and biological factors, such as varying levels of hormones.

Some of these differences are optimal in the current environment, and others are suboptimal. For example-Women have better social skills (good!), but are more prone to depression (bad). Men are better self-promoters (good!), but are more prone to suicide (bad).

Should transhumanism occur, it will eliminate the suboptimal differences. We can help people become less suicidal and not depressed.

This will lead to a spiraling effect- Fewer *actual* differences will lead to a lessening of socialized differences, which will lead to less actual differences, etc

I am positive at least *some* of this will occur. In fact, I would posit that it is already occuring in that we have drugs to treat depression, and hormone therapy to assist people with hormonal problems, etc. Some postgenderists claim there will be no need for different genders at all, as we can have male pregnancies, and female paternity, etc. I rather doubt it would go that far.

My questions to you all is- When do you see these changes occuring, if at all? How far do you think we will go? Will we end up as essentially a one-gender society? Will we move towards the middle but still retain some gender differences? What would they be? Will they be purely

...