trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Moscow: pedagogy goals, willpower research, community growth
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-12-08T21:05:10.457Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: pedagogy goals, willpower research, community growth

WHEN:
11 December 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

Note: most our members join meetups through other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a short link to the hackpad document with the schedule here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

Pad with the details about 11.12.2016 meetup.

We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: pedagogy goals, willpower research, community growth
Meetup : AI safety Berlin
by blob — 2016-12-08T14:36:06.272Z

Discussion article for the meetup : AI safety Berlin

WHEN:
07 January 2017 04:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
U Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Park, Berlin, Germany

We invite everyone with a technical interest in AI safety to a get-together in the Bayesment (see below) on Saturday, January 7th 16:00 - 20:00. Sign up here.

We’re looking forward to meeting everyone with an interest in AI safety research, no matter whether you’re just getting started or already working in the field. After the intro round (which starts 16:30) we expect we’ll be talking about prerequisites, approaches and current developments. In particular: What’s the path for engaged people to start contributing usefully?

To give focus to the meeting we’d like to exclude discussion of “is AI safety a problem?”.

We will probably be ordering dinner.

Sign up

Best,
Dima and Christian

[1] Hafenplatz 5, 10963 Berlin, near S Anhalter Bahnhof and U Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Park, Doorbell says Schreiber / Wissemann, 5th floor and to the right

Discussion article for the meetup : AI safety Berlin
Making nothing out of a big deal
by KatjaGrace — 2016-12-08T03:41:02.000Z

I recently asked my boyfriend how he heats water, given that he apparently doesn’t use a kettle. He said you can in fact heat water in a pot on the stove. Heating water in a pot sounds arduous to me, which is a bit strange because it’s not obviously more complicated than heating water in a kettle (assuming there is a clean pot, which is maybe a strong assumption). I wondered if maybe the issue is that once you have a pot on the stove, you are cooking. And cooking is a big deal. I’m not going to make a cup of tea if it involves cooking!

I have actually learned to cook a bit recently, and I think perhaps an important thing going on in ‘learning to cook’ for me is internalizing that you can achieve the same outcome as you might by cooking—which is perhaps too big a deal to carry out just to get some food— by merely doing some physically easy actions that are not a big deal, like picking up objects and putting them on other objects and turning knobs. Sometimes when I turn a knob and fire appears or something it seems like I might be doing something that is a big deal, but overall its going ok.

I remember hearing the advice that if you have an ‘ugh field’, around filling out a certain form at the faculty office say, it can be pretty helpful to do it just once. Then you have ‘an affordance’ and can do it more times easily. An affordance means roughly that it is an action you see as feasible. Taken literally, this might seem strange—surely you thought it was feasible to fill out the form previously. If someone had offered to bet with you about what would happen if you tried to fill out the form, I claim you would have bet confidently on your success conditional on trying.

I speculate that what ‘an affordance’ often means is seeing something that was a big deal as a set of actions that aren’t. And that in general, when people see actions as abstract ‘big deals’ they expect the actions to be harder and take longer than when they see them as constellations of non-big-deal component actions.

So, you get an affordance for starting a company if you feel like it involves writing some things in boxes and sending some emails rather than somehow moving things at the abstract level of ‘companies’. You get an affordance for punching people in the face when punching someone in the face becomes a known physical action to you instead of an abstract sin. You get...
Combining Prediction Technologies to Help Moderate Discussions
by Wei Dai — 2016-12-08T00:19:35.854Z

I came across a 2015 blog post by Vitalik Buterin that contains some ideas similar to Paul Christiano's recent Crowdsourcing moderation without sacrificing quality. The basic idea in both is that it would be nice to have a panel of trusted moderators carefully pore over every comment and decide on its quality, but since that is too expensive, we can instead use some tools to predict moderator decisions, and have the trusted moderators look at only a small subset of comments in order to calibrate the prediction tools. In Paul's proposal the prediction tool is machine learning (mainly using individual votes as features), and in Vitalik's proposal it's prediction markets where people bet on what the moderators would decide if they were to review each comment.

It seems worth thinking about how to combine the two proposals to get the best of both worlds. One fairly obvious idea is to let people both vote on comments as an expression of their own opinions, and also place bets about moderator decisions, and use ML to set baseline odds, which would reduce how much the forum would have to pay out to incentivize accurate prediction markets. The hoped for outcome is that the ML algorithm would make correct decisions most of the time, but people can bet against it when they see it making mistakes, and moderators would review comments that have the greatest disagreements between ML and people or between different bettors in general. Another part of Vitalik's proposal is that each commenter has to make an initial bet that moderators would decide that their comment is good. The article notes that such a bet can also be viewed as a refundable deposit. Such forced bets / refundable deposits would help solve a security problem with Paul's ML-based proposal.

Are there better ways to combine these prediction tools to help with forum moderation? Are there other prediction tools that can be used instead or in addition to these?
How I use Anki to learn mathematics
by Arthur Milchior — 2016-12-07T22:29:32.309Z

Here is my first less wrong post (after years spent blogging in French). I discovered Anki on this blog. I'm now sharing the tips I've been using for months to learn mathematics with Anki. Example(s) of deck can be found on http://milchior.fr/Anki/

I'm a French researcher in fundamental computer science, which essentially means that I do mathematics all day long. But my biggest problem is that I'm really bad at learning mathematics. Let me give an example. Hopefully, you should be able to understand even if you don't know the domains I'm using in my examples. One day, I wanted to discover what category theory is. Another day, I wanted to read an introduction to number theory. Two subjects which seem really interesting. And the first pages of those books seems to be crystal clear. After 10 or 20 pages, I have already forgotten the definitions given in the first page, and I am lost. Definitions are not hard, there is just too many of them.

Let me emphasize that I'm speaking of learning definitions you understand. As far as I know, it is mathematically useless to learn things you do not understand. (Apart, may be, if you try to learn the first digits of Pi, or some few things like that).

In the category theory example, definitions are explained by showing how well-known properties of algebra or of topology are special cases of the introduced category definition. Those examples are really helpful to understand the definitions. Indeed, it allows my mind to go from new notions to known notions. For example, I recall that Epi and Mono are generalization of injective and of surjective. Or of surjective and injective. I can't remember which is which. But at least I know that an arrow can both be Epi and Mono. And even know that I know that Epi in Sets are surjective, I still don't know which of the properties of surjection remains. Which is a trouble since having only the Set example would imply that Epi and Mono imply Iso.

And, to solve this kind of problem, a spaced memorization software is wonderful. The only trouble I have is that the decks which already exist are not really interesting. Because, usually, card creation did not follow any special logic (some scanned hand written lectures note). And furthermore, the already existing decks concern mathematics I'm not interested in. I don't want to learn multiplication table, nor calculus. In fac

...
Land war in Asia
by Apprentice — 2016-12-07T19:31:49.302Z

Introduction: Here's a misconception about World War II that I think is harmful and I don't see refuted often enough.

Misconception: In 1941, Hitler was sitting pretty with most of Europe conquered and no huge difficulties on the horizon. Then, due to his megalomania and bullshit ideology, he decided to invade Russia. This was an unforced error of epic proportions. It proved his undoing, like that of Napoleon before him.

Rebuttal: In hindsight, we think of the Soviet Union as a superpower and military juggernaut which you'd be stupid to go up against. But this is not how things looked to the Germans in 1941. Consider World War I. In 1917–1918, Germany and Austria had defeated Russia at the same time as they were fighting a horrifyingly bloody war with France and Britain - and another devastating European war with Italy. In 1941, Italy was an ally, France had been subdued and Britain wasn't in much of a position to exert its strength. Seemingly, the Germans had much more favorable conditions than in the previous round. And they won the previous round.

In addition, the Germans were not crazy to think that the Red Army was a bit of a joke. The Russians had had their asses handed to them by Poland in 1920 and in 1939–1940 it had taken the Russians three months and a ridiculous number of casualties to conquer a small slice of Finland.

Nevertheless, Russia did have a lot of manpower and a lot of equipment (indeed, far more than the Germans had thought) and was a potential threat. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was obviously cynical and the Germans were not crazy to think that they would eventually have to fight the Russians. Being the first to attack seemed like a good idea and 1941 seemed like a good time to do it. The potential gains were very considerable. Launching the invasion was a rational military decision.

Why this matters: The idea that Hitler made his most fatal decision for irrational reasons feeds into the conception that evil and irrationality must go hand in hand. It's the same kind of thinking that makes people think a superintelligence would automatically be benign. But there is no fundamental law of the universe which prevents a bad guy from conquering the world. Hitler lost his war with Russia for perfectly mundane and contingent reasons like, “the communists had been surprisingly effective at industrialization.”
Meetup : Solstice Day-After Megameetup
by Raemon — 2016-12-07T17:42:18.972Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Solstice Day-After Megameetup

WHEN:
18 December 2016 01:00:00AM (-0500)

WHERE:
Manhattan - TBD

Coming to NYC for the Secular Solstice? Want more time to hangout with all the cool rational-folk people who ALSO came to NY to ALSO do that? And possibly the cool people who lived in NY anyway? We'll have people from several interrelated communities: people interested in skepticism, secularism, rationality and scientific-philanthropy. You can RSVP on the FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/187105845029955/

Discussion article for the meetup : Solstice Day-After Megameetup
Meetup : December Rationality meetup featuring Double Crux
by Marko — 2016-12-07T08:05:22.519Z

Discussion article for the meetup : December Rationality meetup featuring Double Crux

WHEN:
10 December 2016 05:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Tibits Oerlikon, Zurich, Switzerland

Double Crux is a strategy for resolving and illuminating disagreements by investigating what it would take to make each party change their minds:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/o6p/double_crux_a_strategy_for_resolving_disagreement/

Prepare some beliefs you have that other people are likely to disagree with and you would like to investigate.

Discussion article for the meetup : December Rationality meetup featuring Double Crux
Measuring the Sanity Waterline
by moridinamael — 2016-12-06T20:38:57.307Z

I've always appreciated the motto, "Raising the sanity waterline." Intentionally raising the ambient level of rationality in our civilization strikes me as a very inspiring and important goal.

It occurred to me some time ago that the "sanity waterline" could be more than just a metaphor, that it could be quantified. What gets measured gets managed. If we have metrics to aim at, we can talk concretely about strategies to effectively promulgate rationality by improving those metrics. A "rationality intervention" that effectively improves a targeted metric can be said to be effective.

It is relatively easy to concoct or discover second-order metrics. You would expect a variety of metrics to respond to the state of ambient sanity. For example, I would expect that, all things being equal, preventable deaths should decrease when overall sanity increases, because a sane society acts to effectively prevent the kinds of things that lead to preventable deaths. But of course other factors may also cause these contingent measures to fluctuate whichever way, so it's important to remember that these are only indirect measures of sanity.

The UN collects a lot of different types of data. Perusing their database, it becomes obvious that there are a lot of things that are probably worth caring about but which have only a very indirect relationship with what we could call "sanity". For example, one imagines that GDP would increase under conditions of high sanity, but that'd be a pretty noisy measure.

Take five minutes to think about how one might measure global sanity, and maybe brainstorm some potential metrics. Part of the prompt, of course, is to consider what we could mean by "sanity" in the first place.

~~~ THINK ABOUT THE PROBLEM FOR FIVE MINUTES ~~~

This is my first pass at brainstorming metrics which may more-or-less directly indicate the level of civilizational sanity:

(+) Literacy rate

(+) Enrollment rates in primary/secondary/tertiary education

(-) Deaths due to preventable disease

(-) QALYs lost due to preventable causes

(+) Median level of awareness about world events

(-) Religiosity rate

(-) Fundamentalist religiosity rate

(-) Per-capita spent on medical treatments that have not been proven to work

(-) Per-capita spent on medical treatments that have been proven not to work

(-) Adolescent fertility rate

(+) Human devel

...
My problems with Formal Friendly Artificial Intelligence work
by  — 2016-12-06T20:31:53.431Z

I'm writing this to get information about the lesswrong community and whether it worth engaging. I'm a bit out of the loop in terms of what the LW community is like and whether it can maintain multiple view points (and how known the criticisms are).

The TL;DR is I have problems with treating computation in an overly formal fashion. The more pragmatic philosophy suggested implies (but doesn't prove) that AI will not be as powerful as expected as the physicality of computation is important and instantiating computing in a physical fashion is expensive.

I think all the things I will talk about are interesting, but I don't see the sufficiency of them when considering AI running in the real world in real computers.

1. Source code based decision theory

I don't understand why:

other agents trust that your source code is what you say it is

other agents trust that your implementation of your interpreter matches their understanding of the interpreter. I don't see how they get round trustless trust (inserting code/behaviour via malicious compiler/interpreter) issues when they don't have the ability to do diverse compilation.

I understand the justification that causal decision theory is not optimal and you want something better. But it seems that whatever that better thing is has to be able to adapt to conditions. If people start baking in TDT or UDT into the core of their AIs philosophy for all eternity, they can be tricked by machines that 99% the time run the source code they purport to run as expected, but not when the fate of the galaxy decisions are being made. You need a system that can start to do hardware verification on an ad hoc basis if the problems it comes across in the environment warrant it.

2. General Functionalism

The idea that it doesn't matter how you compute something just whether the inputs and outputs are the same.

The battery life of my phone says that the way of computation is very important, is it done on the cloud and I have to power up my antennae to transmit the result.

Timing attacks say that speed of the computation is important, that faster is not always better.

Rowhammer says that how you layout your memory is important. Can I flip a bit of your utility calculation?

Memory usage, overheating, van Eck phreaking etc etc....

Functionalism is leaky abstraction over all of physics. It is in many cases a han

...
Unfortunate Information
by NatashaRostova — 2016-12-06T05:31:07.099Z

I'm growing increasingly convinced the unfortunate correlations between types of people and types of arguments leads to persistent biases in uncovering actual knowledge.

As an example, MR wrote this article (they just linked to again today) on Ben Carson in 2015/11. Cowen's argument is that, while perhaps implausible (although it may have tenuous support), the idea that Carson believes that the pyramids were used as grain storage isn't in any possible way less unrealistic than any other religious beliefs. If anything, that singular belief is relatively realistic compared to more widely accepted miracles in Christianity, or similar religions.

So why does he get so much flak for it? Cowen argues that he shouldn't, that it's unfounded and irrational/inconsistent. Is it? He obviously has a fair point. The downside is that despite the belief when analyzed not being particularly ridiculous, we all have a shared estimation/expectation that people who hold this type of belief (let's call them Class B religious beliefs) ARE particularly ridiculous.

This then creates a new equilibrium, where only those people who take their Class B religious beliefs *very* seriously will share them. As a result when Carson says the pyramids have grain, our impulse is "wacky!" But when Obama implies he believes Jesus rose from the dead, our impulse is "Boilerplate -- he probably doesn't give it too much thought -- it's a typical belief, which he might not even believe."

As a result we get this constant mismatch between the type of person to hold a belief, and the truth value of the belief itself. I don't mean to only bring up controversial examples, but it's no surprise that this is where these examples thrive. HBD is another common one. While there is something there, which after a fair amount of reading I suspect is overlooked, the type of person to be really passionate about HBD is (more often than not, with exceptions), not the type of person you want over for dinner.

This can suck for people like us. On one hand we want to evaluate individual pieces of information, models, or arguments, based on how they map to reality. On the other hand, if we advocate or argue for information that is correlated with an unsavory type of person, we are classified as that type of person. In this sense, for someone who values a good social standing and no risk to their career as primary objectives, it wo...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Statistics
by RobinZ — 2016-12-05T22:37:25.615Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Statistics

WHEN:
11 December 2016 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

Note: the Game Theory meetup has been postponed to accommodate the schedule of the person who requested the topic.

We will be meeting in the courtyard to discuss topics related to probability and statistics.

Upcoming meetups:

Dec. 18: Game Theory

Dec. 25: no meetup (Christmas)

Jan. 1: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Statistics
Meetup : Meetup #8 - Reversed stupidity is not intelligence
by  — 2016-12-05T19:59:45.201Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #8 - Reversed stupidity is not intelligence

WHEN:
11 December 2016 03:11:11PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands

Part relaxed socializing, part rationalist dojo. Hang around at the coffee shop, having the most interesting conversations you'll have all week, occasionally interrupted by practicing and discussing the next big applied rationality technique.

See you on Sunday the 11th!

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #8 - Reversed stupidity is not intelligence
Open thread, Dec. 05 - Dec. 11, 2016
by MrMind — 2016-12-05T07:52:15.153Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
Beware of identifying with schools of thought
by ChristianKl — 2016-12-05T00:30:52.748Z

As a child I decided to do a philosophy course as an extracurricular activity. In it the teacher explained to us the notion of schools of philosophical thought. According to him classifying philosophers as adhering either to school A or school B, is typical for Anglo thought.

It deeply annoys me when Americans talk about Democrat and Republican political thought and suggest that you are either a Democrat or a Republican. The notion that allegiance to one political camp is supposed to dictate your political beliefs feels deeply wrong.

A lot of Anglo high schools do policy debating. The British do it a bit differently than the American but in both cases it boils down to students having to defend a certain side. Traditionally there's nearly no debating at German high schools.

When writing political essays in German school there’s a section where it's important to present your own view. Your own view isn't supposed to be one that you simply copy from another person. Good thinking is supposed to provide a sophisticated perspective on the topic that is the synthesis of arguments from different sources instead of following a single source.

That's part of the German intellectual thought has the ideal of 'Bildung'. In Anna Wierzbicka tells me that 'Bildung' is a particularly German construct and the word isn't easily translatable into other languages. The nearest English word is 'education'. 'Bildung' can also be translated as 'creation'. It's about creating a sophisticated person, that's more developed than the average person on the street who doesn't have 'Bildung'. Having 'Bildung' signals having a high status.

According to this ideal you learn about different viewpoints and then you develop a sophisticated opinion. Not having a sophisticated opinion is low class. In liberal social circles in the US a person who agrees with what the Democratic party does at every point in time would have a respectable political opinion. In German intellectual life that person would be seen as a credulous low status idiot that failed to develop a sophisticated opinion. A low status person isn't supposed to be able to fake being high status by memorizing the teacher's password.

If you ask me the political question "Do you support A or B?", my response is: "Well, I neither want A or B. There are these reasons for A, there are those reasons for B. My opinion is that ...