trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Link: WJS article that uses Steve Jobs' death to mock cryonics and the Singularity
by James_Miller — 2011-10-08T02:56:58.381Z

And One Last Thing: Digital immortality is an app that probably wouldn't have interested Steve Jobs

Excerpt:

Jobs made it clear that he did not welcome death, but also that life could be more interesting knowing that death would be coming.

One wonders, then, with what mixed feelings he viewed his Silicon Valley compatriots who've been seeking ways to make sure, at least for themselves, death never comes. No doubt they are being perfectly reasonable. When wealthy enough to satisfy every material appetite many times over, it make sense to try to prolong those appetites indefinitely through cryogenics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

This would not have been Jobs's interest in the subject. He likely would have been more intrigued by the specific claim, advanced by inventor Ray Kurzweil and other advocates of "technological singularity," that soon our individualities will be able to live eternally through digital electronics.

What kind of device should our consciousness occupy? Should it have a 4-inch screen or a 9-inch screen? Should it fit in a pocket or backpack? Should it have Bluetooth? Where should our essence primarily reside, in the cloud or in device memory? How much battery life would the user want?

And who is the user?

Hmmm. Jobs looked at technology from the perspective of the user, who wanted an object both beautiful and beautifully functional. If the user is our "survivors"—i.e., our loved ones who still exist in physical form—he might conclude that the most important feature such a device could have is an off-switch—a permanent one.
[SEQ RERUN] No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-08T02:36:01.333Z

Today's post, No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know was originally published on 25 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

In the modern world, unlike our ancestral environment, it is not possible for one person to know more than a tiny fraction of the world's scientific knowledge. Just because you don't understand something, you should not conclude that not one of the six billion other people on the planet understands it.

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 Double Illusion of Transparency, 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.
Applying Bayesian Analysis to History (post idea)
by Asymmetric — 2011-10-08T02:25:11.161Z

I am an aspiring historian and I'm very interested in ways to apply Bayesian reasoning to history. When I say "history" I mean the study of history -- as a historian, allowing my map of what has happened in the past to match the territory, and being able to represent more accurately the relative strength of historical evidence for and against various historical models.

I know that historical evidence works quite a bit differently from scientific evidence. But I think that historical evidence is also useful. Historians, in recording and assembling secondary sources, assess the relative strength of evidence (mostly primary sources) with regards to a topic already. But there must be a way to do it more formally. Shouldn't there be a right answer, just as no two people who are completely rational (and have the same information) should ever disagree?

This is a post (or series of posts) I might write in the future, and I have put a bit of thought into it so far, but I need to do quite a bit more research. Is there anyone interested in reading something on this topic? Has it been done before? Is there anyone who is knowledgeable about how historians treat evidence who might be able to offer some insights?
Morality is not about willpower
by PhilGoetz — 2011-10-08T01:33:09.717Z

Most people believe the way to lose weight is through willpower. My successful experience losing weight is that this is not the case. You will lose weight if you want to, meaning you effectively believe0 that the utility you will gain from losing weight, even time-discounted, will outweigh the utility from yummy food now. In LW terms, you will lose weight if your utility function tells you to. This is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy (the effective kind of therapy), which tries to change peoples' behavior by examining their beliefs and changing their thinking habits.

Similarly, most people believe behaving ethically is a matter of willpower; and I believe this even less. Your ethics is part of your utility function. Acting morally is, technically, a choice; but not the difficult kind that holds up a stop sign and says "Choose wisely!" We notice difficult moral choices more than easy moral choices; but most moral choices are easy, like choosing a ten dollar bill over a five. Immorality is not a continual temptation we must resist; it's just a kind of stupidity.

This post can be summarized as:

Each normal human has an instinctive personal morality.

This morality consists of inputs into that human's decision-making system. There is no need to propose separate moral and selfish decision-making systems.

Acknowledging that all decisions are made by a single decision-making system, and that the moral elements enter it in the same manner as other preferences, results in many changes to how we encourage social behavior.

Many people have commented that humans don't make decisions based on utility functions. This is a surprising attitude to find on LessWrong, given that Eliezer has often cast rationality and moral reasoning in terms of computing expected utility. It also demonstrates a misunderstanding of what utility functions are. Values, and utility functions, are models we construct to explain why we do what we do. You can construct a set of values and a utility function to fit your observed behavior, no matter how your brain produces that behavior. You can fit this model to the data arbitrarily well by adding parameters. It will always have some error, as you are running on stochastic hardware. Behavior is not a product of the utility function; the utility function is a product of (and predictor of) the behavior. If your behavior can't be...
Neural Correlates of Conscious Access
by atucker — 2011-10-07T23:12:04.837Z

Summary: Neuroimaging scans and EEG readings comparing nonconscious and conscious stimuli are compared, showing particular patterns in conscious processes. These findings are in line with predictions made by the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness, in which consciousness is closely related to interaction between specialized modules of the brain.

When a bunch of photons hit your eye, it unleashes a long chain of cause and effect that leads to an image being mapped in your brain. When does that image become conscious?

Conscious and Unconscious Perception1

The most basic method of discriminating between conscious and unconscious information is to ask the subject if they noticed it. However, people can respond to information that they don't report. What does it mean to notice something then?

Merikle et al performed experiments in the 80s which helped to resolve this question. In the Stroop task, people are asked to read words written in a different color than the word. Words written in their color (green) are easier to read than those not in their color (also red). Merikle modified the stroop task, using only two colors (red and green), and using the word to prime subjects to describe the color. As was expected, when "green" comes before a green square, subjects respond faster than with no priming.

However, when the situation is regularly reversed and the "red" prime normally comes before a green square (and vice versa) people also respond faster to similar levels. That is to say, subjects are able to notice that the prime and stimulus are incongruent, and act on that information to respond faster to the stimuli.

When the reversed prime ("red" before green) is flashed for such a short time span that people don't report seeing it, they are unable to use this information to react faster to the green stimulus, and the typical Stroop effect is observed -- being subliminally primed with a congruent color speeds up recognition, being subliminally primed with an incongruent color slows it.

There are methods of interfering with subject's reports (muteness trivially, anosognosia creepily), but for most humans it very closely corresponds to what is normally considered conscious perception.

People's brains respond to information even if the person is unaware of it, but there are measurable differences in perception without awareness and perception w

...
Keylogger virus strikes American UAV control center
by CarlShulman — 2011-10-07T21:30:11.175Z

At Wired:

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
Meetup : Dublin, IE, Meetup
by Barry_Cotter — 2011-10-07T12:34:24.574Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dublin, IE, Meetup

WHEN:
15 October 2011 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

Meet at Starbucks on College Green here

I'll be there even if noone replies, for an hour. My phone number is 086 3561738

Discussion article for the meetup : Dublin, IE, Meetup
Repression in the age of human enhancement
by KatjaGrace — 2011-10-07T09:54:59.000Z

Well, the age of even more human enhancement. I have a post about this at H+ magazine.

In other news about the future, I intend to be at the Singularity Summit, and also the next Pittsburgh Less Wrong meetup in two weeks, in case you are in one of those areas and would like to meet.
Marsh et al. "Serotonin Transporter Genotype (5-HTTLPR) Predicts Utilitarian Moral Judgments"
by Jack — 2011-10-07T07:08:54.108Z

The whole paper is here. In short, they found a genotype that predicts people's response to the original trolley problem:

A trolley (i.e. in British English a tram) is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?

Participants with one kind of serotonin transmitter (LL-homozygotes) judged flipping the switch to be better than a morally neutral action. Participants with the other kind (S-carriers) judged flipping the switch to be no better than a morally neutral action. The groups responded equally to the "fat man scenario" both rejecting the 'push' option.

Some quotes:

We hypothesized that 5-HTTLPR genotype would interact with intentionality in respondents who generated moral judgments. Whereas we predicted that all participants would eschew intentionally harming an innocent for utilitarian gains, we predicted that participants' judgments of foreseen but unintentional harm would diverge as a function of genotype. Specifically, we predicted that LL homozygotes would adhere to the principle of double effect and preferentially select the utilitarian option to save more lives despite unintentional harm to an innocent victim, whereas S-allele carriers would be less likely to endorse even unintentional harm. Results of behavioral testing confirmed this hypothesis.

Participants in this study judged the acceptability of actions that would unintentionally or intentionally harm an innocent victim in order to save others' lives. An analysis of variance revealed a genotype × scenario interaction, F(2, 63) = 4.52, p = .02. Results showed that, relative to long allele homozygotes (LL), carriers of the short (S) allele showed particular reluctance to endorse utilitarian actions resulting in foreseen harm to an innocent individual. LL genotype participants rated perpetrating unintentional harm as more acceptable (M = 4.98, SEM = 0.20) than did SL genotype participants (M = 4.65, SEM = 0.20) or SS genotype participants (M = 4.29, SEM = 0.30).

...

The results indicate that inherited variants in a genetic polymorphism that influences serotonin neurotransmission influence utilitarian moral

...
[SEQ RERUN] Double Illusion of Transparency
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-07T05:24:26.097Z

Today's post, Double Illusion of Transparency was originally published on 24 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

In addition to the difficulties encountered in trying to explain something so that your audience understands it, there are other problems associated in learning whether or not you have explained something properly. If you read your intended meaning into whatever your listener says in response, you may think that they understand a concept, when in fact they are simply rephrasing whatever it was you actually said.

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 Explainers Shoot High, Aim Low!, 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.
Should I play World of Warcraft?
by PhilGoetz — 2011-10-07T04:25:47.411Z

I've avoided playing World of Warcraft because many people enjoy it so much that they neglect other things in their life.

Does that make sense?

How about cocaine?

How about sex? I hear that's pretty good too.

ADDED: Lots of interesting discussion, but no one is getting at some points of particular interest to me. Most answers assume that you have important stuff to do, and you need to decide whether WoW will prevent you from getting that important stuff done. They also assume that your brain usually errs on the side of telling you to do "non-important" stuff (WoW) at the expense of "important stuff".

One question is whether there is any evidence that your brain is biased in this way. I think your reflective self greatly overestimates the probability of success at the "important stuff". I have worked very hard, twelve hours a day, 7 days a week, on "important stuff" for most of the past 30 years. The important stuff never pans out. So it appears that when my brain told me to play Freecell rather than work on that important paper on artificial intelligence that got pulled from the book the day before publication due to petty office politics, or to watch Buffy rather than do another test run of the demo I spent three months preparing for DARPA that no one from DARPA ever watched because the program officer was too busy to supervise his program, or to go hiking instead of spending another weekend working on the project for NASA that was eventually so big and successful that my boss took it over and then tried to get me fired1, or to go dancing rather than work on the natural-language processing approach that got shelved because my boss felt it emphasized the skills of mathematicians more than his own, or to LARP rather than put in another weekend on my approach using principal component analysis for early cancer detection that it turned out some guy from the FDA had already published 6 months earlier, or the technique for choosing siRNA sequences that a professor from George Mason already had a paper in press on - all those times, my brain was using a better estimate of success than my reflective self was.

Another question is why the "important stuff" is important. Fun is fun. On the surface, we are saying something like, "I have a part of my utility function that values contributions to the world, because I ...
[Link] Neural Correlates of Confusion?
by atucker — 2011-10-06T23:52:45.445Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3b

I found this article while researching something else and I was intrigued. Is this a neural correlate of confusion?

The P3b has been a prominent tool used to study cognitive processes for several decades. More specifically, this ERP component has played a key role in cognitive psychology research on information processing. Generally speaking, improbable events will elicit a P3b, and the less probable the event, the larger the P3b.[3] However, in order to elicit a P3b, the improbable event must be related to the task at hand in some way (for example, the improbable event could be an infrequent target letter in a stream of letters, to which a subject might respond with a button press). The P3b can also be used to measure how demanding a task is on cognitive workload.[4]

If so, awesome. Hats which actually do sound an alarm when your models are proven wrong could be arranged. I suspect that there might be things that make it not useful for that (like, if it also correlates with a bunch of other things). Seems like it's at least worth mentioning.
What are you working on?
by jsalvatier — 2011-10-06T16:19:37.266Z

This is the fifth bimonthly What Are You Working On? thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started, those are for a different thread.

Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).

Talk about your goals for the project.

Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.

Link to your work if it's linkable.
Upcoming book: "Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era"
by lukeprog — 2011-10-06T15:14:16.259Z

Announced here. Full title is Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. The author is James Barrat, best known (for now) for his TV documentaries. I chatted with him online; he'll be at this year's Singularity Summit.
More shameless ploys for job advice
by  — 2011-10-06T04:08:13.404Z

I've posted a few things seeking career advice with mixed success. In this case I have a more concrete question and if you feel like commenting, I'd appreciate it. I think it helps me to hear what a community of others thinks from a rational perspective because there are often many components to a decision that I had not anticipated.

I am currently a grad student working in computer vision. I dislike the way that my current adviser focuses only on projects that have short-term commercial gains. I want to study more fundamental, theoretical research which may take more time to develop but will also be more aesthetically pleasing to me. For me, the only reason to agree to be paid so little as a graduate student is to gain the opportunity to work freely on high risk projects that happen to be of personal interest. Practical considerations are not interesting to me as motivation for a Ph.D. On the other hand, it has felt nearly impossible to actually find faculty willing to have students work on theory. Rather than grinding away with no dental insurance for 3 more years, followed by low paying post-docs, etc., perhaps seeking a job will be better.
I have some interesting job prospects that are all with larger companies. The jobs are basically business analytics, including scientific computing, data mining, and machine learning. I'm sure the problems to work on are not that great; not going to be Earth shattering, but at the same time they sound a lot more interesting to me than hedge fund data analysis or military research labs (I have working experience at a government lab and I did not enjoy it). The hours would be better; the pay is fair and it would be a good living. I could pursue some things as serious hobbies outside work.
At the same time though, there feels like a nagging opportunity cost. I am not naive enough to believe there will be a nice faculty job waiting for me even if I finish my Ph.D. However, I really enjoy theoretical and mathematical physics, machine learning, computational complexity, and scientific computing, and various philosophical considerations generated by these. Being able to teach about them, research them, and work on them professionally seems incredibly appealing. Am I making a big mistake if I leave? How can one pursue philosophical interests and desires to work in theory outside of a typical job? Or should I even worry about such...
[SEQ RERUN] Explainers Shoot High, Aim Low!
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-06T03:19:18.847Z

Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low! was originally published on 24 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Humans greatly underestimate how much sense our explanations make. In order to explain something adequately, pretend that you're trying to explain it to someone much less informed than your target audience.

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 Expecting Short Inferential Distances, 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.
Volunteer needed to change the front page 'Featured Articles' each week
by lukeprog — 2011-10-06T02:10:03.583Z

Less Wrong needs a volunteer to change the 'Featured Articles' once a week. I have detailed instructions on what to do (which wiki entry to edit, which articles have already been featured, which articles to feature in the future, etc.) I've been doing it so far, but not changing it as often as it should be changed. It takes about 5 minutes each time you do it.

Who is willing to do this?