trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[META] Inbox icon behaving unexpectedly
by RolfAndreassen — 2012-08-21T21:35:58.227Z

I just saw the letter icon under my username in orange, indicating that there should be something new in my inbox; but when I went to my inbox there was nothing there I hadn't already read. I wonder if this could be related to the recent trouble with the PM system? I sent a PM the other day and might have gotten a response to it which triggered the colour-the-icon code but not, perchance, the actual display-in-inbox code. Can I get a volunteer to receive a PM from me, or to PM me, and test whether the response shows up in the sender's inbox?
[LINK] Strong AI Startup Raises $15M
by olalonde — 2012-08-21T20:47:56.508Z

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/vicarious-good-ventures-funding/

Vicarious, a startup that says it’s “building software that thinks and learns like a human,” has just raised a $15 million Series A.

The round was led by Good Ventures, the investment firm founded by Dustin Moskovitz, who also co-founded Facebook and Asana. (The firm’s profits will be donated to the Good Ventures Foundation.) Founders Fund, Open Field Capital, Steve Brown, and Zarco Investment Group participated too.

Vicarious launched in February 2011 with funding from Founders Fund, Moskovitz, Adam D’Angelo (former Facebook CTO and co-founder of Quora), Felicis Ventures, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Since then, co-founder D. Scott Phoenix tells me that the company has been in research mode. The research has resulted in a system that’s supposed to interpret the content of photos and videos in a way that’s similar to humans, and which is powered by the company’s “key innovation”, the Recursive Cortical Network.

Ultimately, Phoenix says the technology could be used in “almost every industry,” including robotics, medical image analysis, and image and video search,. But that’s a ways off — Phoenix and his co-founder Dileep George say they’re still deep in research and development, and that the funding will be used to expand those R&D efforts. Developing products that commercialize the technology is still several years off, George says.

“Based on our experiments in the last year, we are very optimistic about our rate of progress,” he says. “At the same time, this is a very challenging problem. We are not getting too excited about how productize things. We’re testing everything very carefully.”

You don’t see too many venture-backed software companies spending years on research nowadays, and Phoenix says he was lucky to find investors who share his big vision — to use AI to “help humanity thrive.” The investors at Good Ventures and Founders Fund have a “natural affinity” for that kind of talk (Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel, for example, has been pretty vocal about what he sees as a lack of transformative innovation), but Phoenix says it’s “very different from the language that a lot of other investors speak.”

Discu...
Possible meetup: Singapore
by AnnaSalamon — 2012-08-21T18:52:07.108Z

Are there any Singaporean LW-ers out there? I'll be visiting Singapore for a few days with my husband, Carl Shulman, and we'd be keen to either have a short meet-up in a coffee shop somewhere, or to see Singaporean sites while talking to a LWer or two. Please comment or pm me if you're interested. We get in noon this Thursday (tomorrow), and leave the morning of Sunday, the 26th.
Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Operant conditioning game
by Nisan — 2012-08-21T15:07:36.431Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Operant conditioning game

WHEN:
22 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

This Wednesday's Berkeley meetup will feature an operant conditioning game. (The game is described here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e38/meetup_berkeley_meetup_discussion_about_startups/77fy . No actual operant conditioning involved!) It's quite fun. We'll keep playing as long as people are having fun. Optionally, afterward we can talk about how to use operant conditioning in our daily lives. The meetup will be at Zendo. Doors open at 7pm and the game starts at 7:30pm.

The game involves identical "clicker" devices. I have five of these, so that's enough for six people to play. If eleven people show up at the meeting, that's still okay, because we can trade off the clickers to maximize total hedonic utility ; )

For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Operant conditioning game
Meetup : Paris Meetup
by Emile — 2012-08-21T14:35:59.849Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup

WHEN: 01 September 2012 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE: Café des Arts et Métiers‎, 51 Rue Turbigo, Paris

The next Paris Meetup will be Sunday, November 13, at the Café des Arts et Métiers opposite the Museum.

At least four people plan on coming, et toi?

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup
Group rationality diary, 8/20/12
by cata — 2012-08-21T09:42:35.016Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of August 20th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Last week's diary; archive of prior diaries.
[SEQ RERUN] The True Prisoner's Dilemma
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-21T06:54:48.018Z

Today's post, The True Prisoner's Dilemma was originally published on 03 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The standard visualization for the Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't really work on humans. We can't pretend we're completely selfish.

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 Dreams of Friendliness, 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.
Can we teach Rationality at the University of Reddit?
by Lightwave — 2012-08-20T21:59:08.554Z

This was posted a few hours ago. Basically, the reddit admins have decided to promote the so-called "University of Reddit", a subreddit where people can offer and teach any course they'd like, or just attend a course. This is official website for all courses. At the time of this posting the subreddit had ~38,400 subscribers, but I expect it will grow significantly.
Given the reddit demographics, a Rationality course has the potential to become extremely popular. The exposure can popularize CFAR and LessWrong, and can be used to recruit fresh minds for rationality-related causes. Also maybe run experiments with curricula or methods of teaching rationality?
What do you guys think?
Meetup : Rational-Humanist Open Mic, NYC September 5th
by Raemon — 2012-08-20T19:49:29.808Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rational-Humanist Open Mic, NYC September 5th

WHEN:
05 September 2012 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
159 E Houston Street, New York, NY 10003

Last month was the first Open Mind Open Mic, a cultural event co-hosted by the Center for Inquiry. This is your opportunity to share performance art relating to rationality and human progress. Whether you want to perform or just listen, and whether you're experienced or just beginning, you're welcome to attend.

The first event went very successfully, with around 15 skeptics and rationalists showing (approximately an even mix of Less Wrong folk and CFI folk), plus another few people who wandered in from the bar. Including one "regular performer" who had been playing a gig upstairs, came down to see what we were about, and turned out to have a pretty awesome self-improvement themed song. It's a good opportunity to introduce rationality memes to wider audience.

We're building towards a larger event towards the end of year, incorporating the most popular performance art that accumulates at the Open Mic events.

The event is held in the basement of the National Underground. Ask the bartender if you're not sure where to go.

Discussion article for the meetup : Rational-Humanist Open Mic, NYC September 5th
Risk aversion does not explain people's betting behaviours
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-08-20T12:38:22.785Z

Expected utility maximalisation is an excellent prescriptive decision theory. It has all the nice properties that we want and need in a decision theory, and can be argued to be "the" ideal decision theory in some senses.

However, it is completely wrong as a descriptive theory of how humans behave. Those on this list are presumably aware of oddities like the Allais paradox. But we may retain some notions that expected utility still has some descriptive uses, such as modelling risk aversion. The story here is simple: each subsequent dollar gives less utility (the utility of money curve is concave), so people would need a premium to accept deals where they have a 50-50 chance of gaining or losing $100.

As a story or mental image, it's useful to have. As a formal model of human behaviour on small bets, it's spectacularly wrong. Matthew Rabin showed why. If people are consistently slightly risk averse on small bets and expected utility theory is approximately correct, then they have to be massively, stupidly risk averse on larger bets, in ways that are clearly unrealistic. Put simply, the small bets behaviour forces their utility to become far too concave.

For illustration, let's introduce Neville. Neville is risk averse. He will reject a single 50-50 deal where he gains $55 or loses $50. He might accept this deal if he were really rich enough, and felt rich - say if he had $20 000 in capital, he would accept the deal. I hope I'm not painting a completely unbelievable portrait of human behaviour here! And yet expected utility maximalisation then predicts that if Neville had fifteen thousand dollars ($15 000) in capital, he would reject a 50-50 bet that either lost him fifteen hundred dollars ($1 500), or gained him a hundred and fifty thousand dollars ($150 000) - a ratio of a hundred to one between gains and losses!

To see this, first define define the marginal utility at $X dollars (MU($X)) as Neville's utility gain from one extra dollar (in other words, MU($X) = U($(X+1)) - U($X)). Since Neville is risk averse, MU($X) ≥ MU($Y) whenever Y>X. Then we get the following theorem:

If Neville has $X and rejects a 50-50 deal where he gains $55 or loses $50, then MU($(X+55)) ≤ (10/11)*MU($(X-50)).

This theorem is a simple result of the fact that U($(X+55))-U($X) must be greater than 55*MU($(X+55)) (each dollar up from...
[Link] Social interventions gone wrong 
by  — 2012-08-20T09:24:03.086Z

A piece I saw that Benjamin Todd adapted from THINK's module on charity assessment. Some of you may recall the network's recent launch.

Lots of social interventions end up doing more harm than good. Many more make no difference at all, and are just a waste of resources. At times, we’ve probably argued with friends about which interventions we’d like to see, and which we wouldn’t. But are we any good at judging what’s likely to work?

Here’s a cool bit of content adapted from THINK. Try and guess which of these eight programs made a difference, which had no effect, and which made things worse.

cipergoth said that it should be emphasised that this isn't a trick question where the answer is they all worked or none did.

Round #1: Scared Straight

Program description: “In the 1970s, inmates serving life sentences at a New Jersey (USA) prison began a program to ‘scare’ or deter at‐risk or delinquent children from a future life of crime. The program, known as ‘Scared Straight’, featured as its main component an aggressive presentation by inmates to juveniles visiting the prison facility. The presentation depicted life in adult prisons, and often included exaggerated stories of rape and murder … The program received considerable and favorable media attention and was soon replicated in over 30 jurisdictions nationwide … Although the harsh and sometimes vulgar presentation in the earlier New Jersey version is the most famous, inmate presentations are now sometimes designed to be more educational than confrontational but with a similar crime prevention goal. Some of these programs featured interactive discussions between the inmates and juveniles, also referred to as ‘rap sessions.’(2)

Did the program decrease the rate of juvenile crime?

Round #2: Nurse‐Family Partnership

Program description: “The Nurse‐Family Partnership program provides nurse home visits to pregnant women with no previous live births, most of whom are i) low‐income, ii) unmarried, and iii) teenagers. The nurses visit the women approximately once per month during their pregnancy and the first two years of their children’s lives. The nurses teach i) positive health related behaviors, ii) competent care of children, and iii) maternal personal development (family planning, educational achievement, and par

...
"Measuring the distribution of spitefulness" - link
by D_Alex — 2012-08-20T07:51:48.358Z

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0041812

Here is a rather curious paper describing psychology researchers' attempts to investigate "spitefulness" - I think they define spitefulness roughly as "hurting others without any benefit to oneself". References the Stanford Prison Experiment. Concludes, more or less, that some people are spiteful, sometimes.

I have many reservations about the methodology used in this experiment (main one: not sure if the entire process really reflects any real-world motivations, and hence results might not mean much), but I thought it might be of interest to people on this site. Also, of the 30-odd references cited at the end of the paper some sound rather interesting and many are available online.
LessWrong could grow a lot, but we're doing it wrong.
by Epiphany — 2012-08-20T05:21:33.599Z

How do I know this? I got a copy of the website analytics.
The bounce rate for LessWrong's home page is 60%!
To be clear: Over half the people who visit LessWrong are going away without even clicking anything.

Yet how many NEW visitors are there? Almost half of the visitors are new!

Granted, new visitor statistics aren't perfect, but that's a LOT of people.

Simple math should tell us this:

If we got the bounce rate down around 30% (a reasonable rate for a good site) by making sure every visitor sees something awesome immediately, AND make sure that each visitor can quickly gauge how much they're going to relate to the community (assuming the new users are the right target audience), it would theoretically double the rate of growth, or more. There's a multiplier effect if the bounce rate is improved: you get better placement in search engines. Search engines get more users if they feel that the engine finds interesting content, not just relevant content.

It's been argued that it's possible that most of the bounces are returning visitors checking for new content. Well if half the visitors to the site each month are new, and we did a wonderful job of showing them that LessWrong is awesome, then the amount of returning visitors could double each month. We're getting a tiny, tiny fraction of that growth:

http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s18lesswrong&r=36

Why did I write you guys so much in the home page rewrites thread? Because I am a web professional who works with web marketing professionals at my job and to me it was blatantly obvious that there's that much room for improvement in the growth of LessWrong. Doing changes like the ones I suggested wouldn't even take long. Because I like this site, and I knew it had potential to grow by leaps and bounds if somebody just paid a little bit of attention to real web marketing. Because I was confused when I first found this site - I had no idea what it's about, or why it's awesome. I closed the home page, myself. Another friend mentioned LessWrong. Curiosity perked up again. I came back and read the about page. That didn't make things clearer either. I left again without going further. Friends kept telling me it was awesome. I came back one day and finally found an awesome article! It took me three tries...
[SEQ RERUN] Dreams of Friendliness
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-20T03:55:39.379Z

Today's post, Dreams of Friendliness was originally published on 31 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Why programming an AI that only answers questions is not a trivial problem, for many of the same reasons that programming an FAI isn't trivial.

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 Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness, 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.
Temporary Housing in the Boston area
by realitygrill — 2012-08-19T21:51:01.464Z

Hey,

I'm doing an internship near MIT this fall and it hadn't occurred to me to think of trying to live with other aspiring rationalists. As expected, it's tough to find a convenient short-term place when so many students are fine signing 1-year leases..

Any of you possibly open to subletting a room to me Sept-Dec? Extra awesome if you're in Cambridge.
[SEQ RERUN] Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-19T04:55:45.693Z

Today's post, Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness was originally published on 30 August 2008 . A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Qualitative strategies to achieve friendliness tend to run into difficulty.

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 Harder Choices Matter Less, 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.
Scott Aaronson's cautious optimism for the MWI
by calef — 2012-08-19T02:35:52.503Z

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103

Eliezer's gung-ho attitude about the realism of the Many Worlds Interpretation always rubbed me the wrong way, especially in the podcast between both him and Scott (around 8:43 in http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2220). I've seen a similar sentiment expressed before about the MWI sequences. And I say that still believing it to be the most seemingly correct of the available interpretations.

I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.
How to get cryocrastinators to actually sign up for cryonics
by JGWeissman — 2012-08-18T17:57:19.120Z

At the end of CFAR's July Rationality Minicamp, we had a party with people from the LW/SIAI/CFAR community in the San Francisco Bay area. During this party, I had a conversation with the girlfriend of a participant in a previous minicamp, who was not signed up for cryonics (her boyfriend was). The conversation went like this:

me: So, you know what cryonics is?

her: Yes

me: And you think it's a good idea?

her: Yes

me: And you are not signed up yet?

her: Yes

me: And you would like to be?

her: Yes

me: Wait a minute while I get my laptop.

And I got my laptop, pointed my browser at Rudi Hoffman's quote request form1, and said, "Here, fill out this form". And she did.

The hard part of all that was identifying a cryocrastinator, by which I mean someone who believes they should be signed up for cryonics, but for whatever reason, hasn't actually signed up. Once I know that I am talking to such a person, just giving them an actionable first step to do right now gets them to do that step.

Previously to the party, I had held an "unconference" seminar for cryocrastinating minicampers in which I did a scaled up version of the same thing. For this I told everyone in advance to bring their own laptops, and I gave them the URL. (There was some confusion about the target audience of this seminar, and some people who were not yet convinced it was a good idea for them came expecting more of a discussion. They had no trouble expressing this, and were not required to fill out the form.) At the party, I did this for one other person2.

What I have observed to work so far is that people will take the first step of filling out the quote request form when I make it easy for them. I am counting on Rudi to get them through the rest of the process, so they end up actually signed up. Rudi has agreed to track success rates of these people getting through the whole process, and I plan to check in with him in early December, and report back.

I was planning to write this up when I had the full results, but seeing this story of a young woman with brain cancer forced to beg to raise funds at the last minute reminded me that cryocrastinators are running out of time (even though getting brain cancer young is rare, there are cryocrastinators of all ages who aren't aware of when life insurance will become unaffordable). So I thought it would be good to let people know now how easy it is to get that cryocrastinat...