trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
I attempted the AI Box Experiment again! (And won - Twice!)
by Tuxedage — 2013-09-05T04:49:48.644Z

Summary

Update #3: I have since played two more experiment. Please read this for a follow-up.

So I just came out of two AI Box experiments. The first was agaist Fjoelsvider, with me playing as Gatekeeper, and the second was against SoundLogic, with me as an AI. Both are members of the LessWrong IRC. The second game included a $40 monetary incentive (also $20 to play), which I won and is donated on behalf of both of us:

For those of you who have not seen my first AI box experiment where I played against MixedNuts\Leotal and lost, reading it will provide some context to this writeup. Please do so.

At that time, I declared that I would never play this experiment again -- since losing put me in incredibly frustrating weird mental states. Of course, this post is evidence that I'm terrible at estimating likelihood of refraining from an activity, since I played two games seven months after the first. In my defense, in the first game, I was playing as the gatekeeper, which was much less stressful. In the second game, I played as an AI, but I was offered $20 to play plus $40 if I won, and money is a better motivator than I initially assumed.

Furthermore, in the last thread I have asserted that

Rather than my loss making this problem feel harder, I've become convinced that rather than this being merely possible, it's actually ridiculously easy, and a lot easier than most people assume.

It would be quite bad for me to assert this without backing it up with a victory. So I did.

First Game Report - Tuxedage (GK) vs. Fjoelsvider (AI)

I (Gatekeeper) played against Fjoelsvider (AI), a regular in the Lesswrong IRC (he doesn't have an account on the official website). This game used the standard EY ruleset seen here. It took 1 hour 20 minutes out of a possible two hours, and the total word count was 7066 words long. The AI box experiment occured because Fjoelsvider believed that it was easy for an AI to escape the box, and wanted to experimentally test this. I obliged. This was an experiment I did not prepare for, and I went in completely blind, not sure what to expect.

Halfway through the experiment, I wondered if it would be possible to try to win not by simply waiting for the timer to end, but to convince the AI to remain in the box and not try to get out any further.

<Tuxedage> I wonder if I can convince the AI to remain in the box?

<Re

...
Meetup : Saskatoon: Zendo!
by Nicholas_Rutherford — 2013-09-05T00:28:09.281Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Saskatoon: Zendo!

WHEN:
07 September 2013 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2318 8th St E, Saskatoon, SK

Hello again everyone!
Saskatoon's 3rd meetup, at the same place and time as the last one: Broadway Roaster on 8th street (not on broadway!) at 1:00 in the afternoon.
For this week we'll be playing Zendo (aka Science, the game)! More info here: http://www.meetup.com/Saskatoon-Rationalists/
Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Saskatoon: Zendo!
Meetup : Rutgers New Brunswick
by pleeppleep — 2013-09-05T00:07:49.681Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rutgers New Brunswick

WHEN:
08 September 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Livingston Campus Student Center

Anyone who's interested can meet me in the Dunkin Donuts this Sunday. I'll be wearing sunglasses next to a sign.

If you know someone in the area who might want to check it out and may or may not see this let them know.

Discussion article for the meetup : Rutgers New Brunswick
You are the average of the five people you spend most time with. 
by diegocaleiro — 2013-09-04T23:02:42.482Z

Mudus Ponies wrote:

If you are a human, then the biggest influence on your personality is your peer group. Choose your peers.

If you want to be better at math, surround yourself with mathematicians. If you want to be more productive, hang out with productive people. If you want to be outgoing or artistic or altruistic or polite or proactive or smart or just about anything else, find people who are better than you at that thing and become friends with them. The status-seeking conformity-loving parts of your mind will push you to become like them. (The incorrect but pithy version: "You are an average of the five people you spend the most time with.")

I've had a lot of success with this technique by going to the Less Wrong meetups in Boston, and by making a habit of attending any event where I'll be the stupidest person in the room (such as the average Less Wrong meetup).

66 people upvoted it.

Before, Lukeprog and Ferriss had mentioned the same: You are the average of your surroundings.

I believe that. I would prefer that to not be the case, but I do think that even if you are not truly the average of the five, it is better to act as if you were the average of the five than to act as if you never heard this advice.

If I am to follow such advice I have a problem: I should spend time with: Nick Bostrom, Natalie Portman, Whoever parties as hard as Sean Parker does in "The Social Network", Steve Pinker and Ferriss.

I'm going to throw some problems in, and present no solutions, I hope comments may provide them if anyone knows one:
1)The people one would like to be average of are incredibly busy doing what made them become those people

2)They do not live at the same place

3)They seldom have reason to be near you

4)If they displayed well enough, their success precludes them from taking new people in due to lack of cognitive space.

5)They may be interested in you and what you have to say in as much as that is something you can provide them, but not necessarily that means they will share what you'd like them to with you.

6)If you were literally the average that wouldn't help much since most of us want to succeed in more than one domain, and we usually model ourselves with people who are monomaniacal, who are the only ones who thrive enough to be seen in a 7 billion world.

I would like to know a lot of ...
How effectively can we plan for future decades? (initial findings)
by lukeprog — 2013-09-04T22:42:05.195Z

Cross-posted from MIRI's blog.

MIRI aims to do research now that increases humanity's odds of successfully managing important AI-related events that are at least a few decades away. Thus, we'd like to know: To what degree can we take actions now that will predictably have positive effects on AI-related events decades from now? And, which factors predict success and failure in planning for decades-distant events that share important features with future AI events?

Or, more generally: How effectively can humans plan for future decades? Which factors predict success and failure in planning for future decades?

To investigate these questions, we asked Jonah Sinick to examine historical attempts to plan for future decades and summarize his findings. We pre-committed to publishing our entire email exchange on the topic (with minor editing), just as Jonah had done previously with GiveWell on the subject of insecticide-treated nets. The post below is a summary of findings from our full email exchange (.docx) so far.

We decided to publish our initial findings after investigating only a few historical cases. This allows us to gain feedback on the value of the project, as well as suggestions for improvement, before continuing. It also means that we aren't yet able to draw any confident conclusions about our core questions.

The most significant results from this project so far are:

Jonah's initial impressions about The Limits to Growth (1972), a famous forecasting study on population and resource depletion, were that its long-term predictions were mostly wrong, and also that its authors (at the time of writing it) didn't have credentials that would predict forecasting success. Upon reading the book, its critics, and its defenders, Jonah concluded that many critics and defenders had seriously misrepresented the book, and that the book itself exhibits high epistemic standards and does not make significant predictions that turned out to be wrong.

Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) did a surprisingly good job of climate modeling given the limited information available to him, but he was nevertheless wrong about two important policy-relevant factors. First, he failed to predict how quickly carbon emissions would increase. Second, he predicted that global warming would have positive rather than negative humanitarian impacts. If more peo

...
Should We Tell People That Giving Makes Them Happier?
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-09-04T21:22:06.770Z

Why do people give to charity?

It seems strange to even ask. Most people would point to the fact that they’re altruistic and want to make a difference. Others are concerned with inequality and justice. Another group points to the concept of “paying it forward” or repaying a debt to society. Other explanations cite various religious or social reasons.

Not too many people cite the fact that giving makes them happier. Even if people agree this is true, I don’t often hear it as people’s main reason. Instead, it’s more like a beneficial side effect. In fact, it seems pretty odd to me to hear someone boldly proclaim that they give only because it makes them happier, even if it might be true.

But if it’s true that giving does make people happier, should we be promoting that publicly and loudly? Luke's article "Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings" suggests that we should tell people to enjoy the happiness that giving brings. Perhaps it might make a great opportunity to tap into groups who wouldn’t consider giving otherwise or have misconceptions that giving would make them miserable?

However, I’m a bit worried about how it might affect people’s incentives. In this essay, I follow the evidence provided in the Harvard Business School working paper "Feeling Good About Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior" by Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. Overall, in light of potential incentive effects, I think caution and further investigation is warranted when promoting the happiness side of giving.

Giving and Happiness

Giving What We Can has published its own review of research on happiness and giving and find a pretty strong connection. And it’s true -- lots of evidence confirms the connection and even indicates that it’s a causal relationship rather than a misleading correlation. In fact, it goes in both directions -- giving makes people happier and happier people are more likely to give[1].

Neurological studies of people found that people experienced pleasure when they saw money go to charity, even when it wasn’t their own, but experienced even more pleasure when they gave to charity directly[2], a conclusion that has been backed up with revealed preference tests in the lab[3, 4].

This connection has also...
Eudaimonic Utilitarianism
by Darklight — 2013-09-04T19:43:37.202Z

Eliezer Yudkowsky on several occasions has used the term “Eudaimonia” to describe an objectively desirable state of existence. While the meta-ethics sequence on Less Wrong has been rather emphatic that simple universal moral theories are inadequate due to the complex nature of human values, one wonders, just what would happen if we tried anyway to build a moral theory around the notion of Eudaimonia. The following is a cursory attempt to do so. Even if you don’t agree with everything I say here, I ask that you please bear with me to the end before making judgments about this theory. Also, if you choose to downvote this post, please offer some criticism in the comments to explain why you choose to do so. I am admittedly new to posting in the Less Wrong community, and would greatly appreciate your comments and criticisms. Even though I use imperative language to argue my ideas, I consider this theory to be a work in progress at best. So without further ado, let us begin…

Classical Utilitarianism allows for situations where you could theoretically justify universal drug addiction as a way to maximize happiness if you could find some magical drug that made people super happy all the time with no side effects. There's a book called Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, where this drug called Soma is used to sedate the entire population, making them docile and dependent and very, very happy. Now, John Stuart Mill does argue that some pleasures are of a higher quality than others, but how exactly do you define and compare that quality? What exactly makes Shakespeare better than Reality TV? Arguably a lot of people are bored by Shakespeare and made happier by Reality TV.

Enter Aristotle. Aristotle had his own definition of happiness, which he called Eudaimonia. Roughly translated, it means "Human Flourishing". It is a complex concept, but I like to think of it as "reaching your full potential as a human being", "being the best that you can be", "fulfilling your purpose in life", and “authentic happiness” (based on the existential notion of authenticity). I think a better way to explain it is like this. The Classical Utilitarian concept of happiness is subjective. It is just the happiness that you feel in your limited understanding of everything. The Eudaimonic Utilitarian concept of happiness is objective. It is the hap...
LINK: Study demonstrates politically motivated innumeracy
by Alejandro1 — 2013-09-04T18:14:21.891Z

Original article: Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government.

Easy-to-read summary of the results: Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math.

Easier-to-read summary of the summary: A group including both liberals and conservatives were first tested for numeracy, then given either fictional stats on the efficacy of a rash treatment (how many people get better/worse, with/without the treatment) or quantitatively identical fictional stats on gun regulation and crime (in how many cities crime went up/down, with/without gun control laws). They had to say whether, according to the stats, the treatment was effective or whether the laws reduced crime. (In half of the cases the answer was yes, in half no). For the rash problem, numerate people did better in giving the right answer, irrespectively of their politics. For the gun control problem, numerate people (of both political sides) were much better at giving the right answer when it agreed with their political beliefs; when the conclusion implied by the stats disagreed with their political beliefs, they did no better than innumerate people.
Which subreddits should we create on Less Wrong?
by lukeprog — 2013-09-04T17:56:33.729Z

Less Wrong is based on reddit code, which means we can create subreddits with relative ease.

Right now we have two subreddits, Main and Discussion. These are distinguished not by subject matter, but by whether a post is the type of thing that might be promoted to the front page or not (e.g. a meetup announcement, or a particularly well-composed and useful post).

As a result, almost everything is published to Discussion, and thus it is difficult for busy people to follow only the subjects they care about. More people will be able to engage if we split things into topic-specific subreddits, and make it easy to follow only what they care about.

To make it easier for people to follow only what they care about, we're building the code for a Dashboard thingie.

But we also need to figure out which subreddits to create, and we'd like community feedback about that.

We'll probably start small, with just 1-5 new subreddits.

Below are some initial ideas, to get the conversation started.

Idea 1

Main: still the place for things that might be promoted.

Applied Rationality: for articles about what Jonathan Baron would call descriptive and prescriptive rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (stuff about biases, self-improvement stuff, etc.).

Normative Rationality: for articles about what Baron would call normative rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (examining the foundations of probability theory, decision theory, anthropics, and lots of stuff that is called "philosophy").

The Future: for articles about forecasting, x-risk, and future technologies.

Misc: Discussion, renamed, for everything that doesn't belong in the other subreddits.

Idea 2

Main

Epistemic Rationality: for articles about how to figure out the world, spanning the descriptive, prescriptive, and normative.

Instrumental Rationality: for articles about how to take action to achieve your goals, spanning the descriptive, prescriptive, and normative. (One difficulty with the epistemic/instrumental split is that many (most?) applied rationality techniques seem to be relevant to both epistemic and instrumental rationality.)

The Future

Misc.
Types of recursion
by AnthonyC — 2013-09-04T17:48:55.709Z

As a freshman in college I took an intro linguistics class where we spent a lot of time discussing universal grammar and recursive phrase structures. One of the examples we looked at I still don't fully understand - it illustrated two distinct forms of nested phrases that he mind handles very differently.

1. Nested prepositional phrases

The car in the driveway of the house on the street in NY...

I can make that sentence go on indefinitely, and while a reader (or listener) might get bored or forget parts, it will never feel confusing. It's just (The car (in the driveway (of the house (on the street (...))))).

2. Nested tense phrases

The mouse the cat the dog the man walked barked at chased ate the cheese.

Yes, it's grammatical. The mouse ate the cheese. (The mouse the cat chased) ate the cheese. The mouse (the cat the dog barked at) chased ate the cheese. The mouse the cat (the dog the man walked) barked at chased at the cheese.

Personally, I lose track with the introduction of the dog. At first I thought it was just a matter of working memory, but the information content is not that high. I can even turn it back into the first kind of recursion and then suddenly have no difficulty keeping it all in my head: The man walked the dog that barked at the cat that chased the mouse that ate the cheese. It seems to be more a bug in my natural language processing module.

Any suggestions on what might be going on here?
Meetup : Zagreb Meetup
by IsTheLittleLion — 2013-09-04T17:38:43.779Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Zagreb Meetup

WHEN:
07 September 2013 05:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Stupnička 14, Zagreb, Croatia

Meetup will start with open discussion, but we have prepared some exercises and games to play :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Zagreb Meetup
Confidence In Opinions, Intensity In Opinion
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2013-09-04T16:56:17.883Z

On a scale of 1 to 100, how sure are you?

It's a good thing to ask yourself from time to time about intense beliefs, especially if you're having a disagreement with someone else smart.

Just putting a number on something is good. If you're in business, putting any number in the high 90's is dangerous and shouldn't happen too often.

Yet, you still have to aggressively and intensely pursue your plans.

You can be only 80% sure you're correct, and still intensely pursue a course of action.

Most people make a mistake: they only go intensely after things they have a very high certainty will work.

But this is backwards. It's absolutely right to say "I'm only 80% sure that going and making a great talk to this group will help develop my business," and to still aggressively pursue giving a great talk.

The same is true with having ridiculously exceptionally good service. You can say, "I'm only 60% sure that doing this is going to lead to more customer loyalty... this might just be a time sink and cost more than it returns. But let's kill it on it, and find it."

You don't need to be highly confident to intensely pursue something.

In fact, intensely pursuing not-certain things seems to be how the world develops.
Supposing you inherited an AI project...
by bokov — 2013-09-04T08:07:26.074Z

Supposing you have been recruited to be the main developer on an AI project. The previous developer died in a car crash and left behind an unfinished AI. It consists of:

A. A thoroughly documented scripting language specification that appears to be capable of representing any real-life program as a network diagram so long as you can provide the following:

A.1. A node within the network whose value you want to maximize or minimize.

A.2. Conversion modules that transform data about the real-world phenomena your network represents into a form that the program can read.

B. Source code from which a program can be compiled that will read scripts in the above language. The program outputs a set of values for each node that will optimize the output (you can optionally specify which nodes can and cannot be directly altered, and the granularity with which they can be altered).

It gives remarkably accurate answers for well-formulated questions. Where there is a theoretical limit to the accuracy of an answer to a particular type of question, its answer usually comes close to that limit, plus or minus some tiny rounding error.

Given that, what is the minimum set of additional features you believe would absolutely have to be implemented before this program can be enlisted to save the world and make everyone live happily forever? Try to be as specific as possible.
Rationality Quotes September 2013
by Vaniver — 2013-09-04T05:02:05.267Z

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Meetup : Phoenix Tuesday Lunch Group
by Danny_Hintze — 2013-09-04T01:44:05.445Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix Tuesday Lunch Group

WHEN:
10 September 2013 12:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1290 S. Normal Ave., Tempe, AZ, 85287

This is now a weekly thing! We will be meeting at Engrained in the MU. Currently we are getting to know each other, and have hopes of planning some future meetings on specific topics in evening time slots.

My phone number is 602-501-9420, text is best!

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix Tuesday Lunch Group