trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Sydney Pub meetup - May
by Elo — 2017-05-11T01:35:23.795Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Pub meetup - May

WHEN:
18 May 2017 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
565 george st, Sydney

Level 2, outside the pizza kitchen
Come along to our regular monthly pub meetup to talk all things math, science, technology, engineering, thinking, growth, reasoning and beliefs. If you are an aspiring rationalist, a nerd, geek, scientist or just a quiet thinker - we can't wait to meet you to share ideas, discuss, debate, learn and grow together.
If you are interested in our rationality dojos, ask us about them in person.
See you there! Also, while you are at it - bring a friend along too!

https://www.meetup.com/lesswrong-Sydney0/events/239894261/
https://www.facebook.com/events/1724027377612959/

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Pub meetup - May
WMDs in Iraq and Syria
by ChristianKl — 2017-05-10T21:03:27.574Z

Tetlock wrote in Superforcasters that the US intelligence establishment was likely justified to believe that it was likely that Iraq was hiding WMDs. According to Tetlock their sin was that they asserted that it's certain that Iraq had WMD.

When first reading Superforcasters I didn't quite understand the situation. After reading https://theintercept.com/2015/04/10/twelve-years-later-u-s-media-still-cant-get-iraqi-wmd-story-right/ I did.

The core problem was that Saddam lost track of some of his chemical weapons. His military didn't do perfect accounting of them and they looked the same as conventional weapons. It takes an x-ray to tell his chemical weapons apart from the normal ones.

The US intercepted communications where Saddam told his units to ensure that they had no chemical weapons that inspectors could find. Of course, that communication didn't happen in English. That communication seems to have been misinterpreted by the US intelligence community as evidence that Saddam is hiding WMDs.

Nearly nobody understood that Iraq having chemical weapons and hiding them are two different systems because you need to know where your chemical weapons happen to be to hide them. On the same token, nobody publically argues that pure incompetence might be the cause of chemical weapon usage in Syria. We want to see human agency and if a chemical weapon exploded we want to know that someone is guilty of having made the decision to use them.
In a recent facebook discussion about Iraq and the value of IARPA, a person asserted that the US intelligence community only thought Iraq had WMDs because they were subject to political pressure.
We have to get better at understanding that bad events can happen without people intending them to happen.

After understanding Iraq it's interesting to look at Syria. Maybe the chemical weapons that exploded in Syria didn't explode because Assad's troops or the opposition wanted to use chemical weapons. They might have simply exploded because some idiot did bad accounting and mislabeled a chemical weapon as being a conventional weapon.

The idea that WMDs explode by accident might be too horrible to contemplate. We have to be better at seeing incompetence as a possible explanation when we want to pin the guilt for having made an evil decision on another person.
Meetup : Superintelligence chapter 6
by pepe_prime — 2017-05-10T12:55:33.010Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Superintelligence chapter 6

WHEN:
26 May 2017 05:45:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Lindstedtsvägen 3, room 1537, SE-114 28 Stockholm, Sverige

Cognitive superpowers

Functionalities and superpowers

An AI takeover scenario

Power over nature and agents

You don't have to have read the book, though it will probably help to read chapters 1-5.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 5:45, but don't officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:00 to accommodate stragglers. We often go out for dinner after the meetup.

How to find us:

The meetup is at a KTH academic building and the room is on the 5th floor, two stairs up.

Influence future meetups:

Times - http://www.when2meet.com/?5723551-cJBhD

Topics - https://druthe.rs/dockets/-KcCvpn97vUhg3tQRrKn

Discussion article for the meetup : Superintelligence chapter 6
Meetup : Modern portfolio theory
by pepe_prime — 2017-05-10T12:42:34.267Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Modern portfolio theory

WHEN:
19 May 2017 05:45:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Lindstedtsvägen 3, room 1537, SE-114 28 Stockholm, Sverige

Learn the basics of risky assets and leverage. This talk contains math presented in an accessible way for the inexperienced. After the talk you should know how to create a basic investment portfolio and how to evaluate new opportunities.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 5:45, but don't officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:00 to accommodate stragglers. We often go out for dinner after the meetup.

How to find us:

The meetup is at a KTH academic building and the room is on the 5th floor, two stairs up.

Influence future meetups:

Times - http://www.when2meet.com/?5723551-cJBhD

Topics - https://druthe.rs/dockets/-KcCvpn97vUhg3tQRrKn

Discussion article for the meetup : Modern portfolio theory
Meetup : Meetup 17 - Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE)
by  — 2017-05-10T09:59:48.318Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup 17 - Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE)

WHEN:
14 May 2017 03:10:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
meester treublaan 18 amsterdam

Something new for this week!

Much of the time, things that lie outside of our comfort zone are out there for good reason. They're things that cause us to anticipate danger, experience stress, and wrestle with uncertainty, and under many circumstances, it's good to avoid danger, stress, and uncertainty.

But there's a gray area between 'definitely good' and 'definitely bad' -- between comfortable and uncomfortable. It's an area chracterized by mixed experiences and filled with things we're not sure about, struggled with, or never dared to even try. They're outside our comfort zone, but it's not clear that they should be -- it's not clear whether they're actually Things We Ought To Avoid.

The Comfort Zone Expansion technique (CoZE) is a method for gathering data about this gray area. It asks that we stretch our comfort zone, in small, safe experiments, a little bit at a time. The idea is to calibrate our discomfort, loosening up and letting go of unhelpful inhibitions while preserving those that are helpful, appropriate, and useful.

We'll meet up in the same place as always to discuss CoZE and come up with ideas for experiments. Then we'll probably go outside, perhaps to the city center, to actually do our experiments!

See you coming Sunday!

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup 17 - Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE)
Time Well Spent
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-05-09T14:46:21.000Z

I’m too lazy to check, but I think that the most popular topic among rationalist writers is akrasia – whatever is in your head that prevents you from doing what upon reflection you wish you did. Akrasia covers things like procrastination, lack of will, and poor sele control. It has you doing what’s easy right now over what’s useful long term.

Who’s worried about akrasia and procrastination? Who isn’t! Scott is. Eliezer is. Luke is. Robin is. Tim Urban wrote a bunch of posts about procrastination, then decided to do a TED talk about it, then procrastinated on preparing the actual talk to the point of near calamity. With so many great thinkers thinking about vanquishing akrasia it’s a surprise that akrasia still exists! Of course, maybe it doesn’t. But it probably does.

Being late to a topic that was already covered by smarter people never discouraged me before, so why do I not have a post about procrastination yet? You see, I was about to write that post, back in 2015. And then I started reading all those other posts about procrastination. And then I read some other interesting posts. And then I read about the amazing speciation of blue and red cichlids swimming past each other in Lake Victoria, and how it’s a perfect metaphor for the red/blue political bubbles in the US.

And somehow, that post didn’t end up being written.

You’re still here? I was hoping that ten shiny links would be enough to distract you. You’re probably here because you’re hoping I’ll tell you the secret to becoming a strong-willed, hyperproductive person. I wish I knew it! If I did, I would have told you back in 2015. I would also be rich, have chiseled abs, and would blog every day instead of every other week.

I’m not a Productive Person™ but I do have a messy and convoluted method that lets me get some things done each week and avoid being a total catastrophe. I’ll tell you about it. I won’t tell you because I hope to make you more productive – I couldn’t if I tried. I’ll tell you about it because I’m at work, and I don’t feel like working, and I’m short 9 time-points to stay on track for my weekly goal.

Productivity advice comes in two flavors. On one side, there’s rigorous scientific research of human motivation. Unfortunately, it’s not easy...
Open thread, May 8 - May 14, 2017
by Thomas — 2017-05-08T08:10:15.778Z

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.
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories
by rocurley — 2017-05-08T06:17:04.958Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories

WHEN:
08 May 2017 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1769 15th St, San Francisco, CA 94103-3333, United States

We'll be meeting to tell each other stories! Ideally, come with a story from your life (doesn't have to be about anything in particular) that you want to tell other people. We’ll have a list of prompts to make this easier.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories
On-line google hangout on approaches to the control problem (2017/6/13 7PM UTC)
by  — 2017-05-07T19:13:21.613Z

I'd like to get more discussion on-line about approaches to the control problem, so I'm hosting a hangout.

I'll run it lean coffee style meeting with a broad theme of what to do about the control problem. So people propose topics, we vote on the topics to discuss. Then we have a set period of time to discuss the most popular topics, with the topic proposer going first.

Message me with your email address for an invite.

Voting for continuation of a topic will be done via slack, so video won't be mandatory. Topic write up will be on a trello board.
A correlated analogue of reflective oracles
by jessicata — 2017-05-07T07:00:38.000Z

Summary: Reflective oracles correspond to Nash equilibria. A correlated version of reflective oracles exists and corresponds to correlated equilibria. The set of these objects is convex, which is useful.

(thanks to Sam for a lot of help with coming up with constructions)

Motivation

Reflective oracles assign a probability to each query. The set of reflective oracles is not convex. For example, consider a machine MO():=O(M,0.5) (i.e. a machine that asks whether the probability that it returns 1 is at least 0.5). There are reflective oracles that assign probabilities 0, 0.5, and 1 to the query O(M,0.5), and there aren't reflective oracles that assign other probabilities. So the set of possible reflective oracles isn't convex. This is for the same reason that the set of Nash equilibria isn't always convex.

Related to the non-convexity, there isn't in general a continuous way of mapping the numerical parameters of some Turing machines to a reflective oracle for those machines (or doing so as a Kakutani map). (Like there isn't a way of Kakutani-mapping the parameters of a game to an ϵ-approximate Nash equilibrium for that game).

This makes decision problems involving reflective oracles harder to analyze: the function mapping agents' policies to the resulting reflective oracle will be discontinuous.

So to analyze these decision problems, it might be useful to construct a convex set analogous to the non-convex set of reflective oracles. Luckily, the set of correlated equilibria in a game is convex. This post presents an analogue of them in reflective oracle land.

Setup

An oracle (mapping from queries to answers) will be selected at random from some distribution. A query can ask about the distribution over oracles, conditional on the answer to that query.

Definitions: machines, oracles, queries

Let M be some finite set of Turing machines that ZFC-provably halt on every input. (We could in principle deal with both infinite sets of Turing machines and possibly-non-halting Turing machines, as ordinary reflective oracles do, but this complicates things somewhat).

An oracle O maps each machine in M to a natural number. The set of oracles is O:=M→N.

An oracle distribution D is a probability distribution over oracles. The set of oracle distributions is D:=ΔO.

A query to an oracle is a way of asking about an oracle distribution in an "argmax" fashion. A query q is rep

...
Meetup : Baltimore
by l1n — 2017-05-06T23:51:20.429Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore

WHEN:
07 May 2017 08:00:31PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Building, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States

Casual discussion group! Suggested Reading:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ouc/project_hufflepuff_planting_the_flag/].
Meetup is on the 4th floor by the English department. Follow the voices. For help getting into the building, please text 619-357-6633.

Format: We meet and start hanging out at 8:00, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 8:15-8:30 to accommodate stragglers. Parking is available anywhere on campus because its a weekend. I suggest Lot 8. Heads up! This weekend has UMBC's Symphony Orchestra concert at the same time. If people feel like moving the meetup to another time, I'm not opposed.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore
Working with multiple problems at once
by Elo — 2017-05-06T22:14:12.316Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/working-with-multiple-problems-at-once/

I have a friend who works in a charity which deals with people who are on the streets. She was telling me about the struggles they face and the difficulties they are working with. It seems like every person out there has not just a mental health problem (sometimes without diagnosis), but also a finance problem, a relationship problem and often also a substance problem.

How does this happen? Do all people facing ill health suddenly also have relationship problems? Do all people with credit card debt also start having issues of mental stability?

Yes. But also no.

Keeping in mind the problem of joint over and under diagnosis, taking examples of people in this situation is looking at rock bottom. Enough of the time their troubles only started with one or the other problem. And we are talking a bit of credit card debt, or a few bad days every now and again, having some arguments with their partner. But that’s where it begins.

One problem represents a bit of trouble. Imagine. A small unresolved credit debt causes half an hour of angst a day. That’s maybe okay. There are what? 24 of them a day. plenty time to handle the problems.

Then work piles on. So you got a 9-5. that’s (168-3.5-40=124.5hrs) out of 168 hours left to hold your shit together.

Everything is going fine. You go drinking with friends on Friday nights, lose a bit of sleep but hold your life together. maybe you get hungover and lose 14 hours from Saturday. juggling 110.5hrs of time. Alcohol is a merely legal substance right?

Getting enough sleep? 8 hours a night. that’s (8*7=56hrs) 54.5hrs left.

Managing your home life. Exercising half an hour a day, showering ritual half an hour a day… Cooking breakfast and dinner half an hour each. (39.5hrs)

When do you go shopping? Buy food… Buy clothes, the rest of #life… A few hours a week?

Seasons change? Need more sleep…

Injure yourself? add in a break up…

Negative time is not actually possible. That’s when you try to cut sleep. or anything that can get cut just to stay above water.

It’s not a pretty picture. &nbs...
Generalizing Foundations of Decision Theory II
by abramdemski — 2017-05-06T20:40:03.000Z

As promised in the previous post, I develop my formalism for justifying as many of the decision-theoretic axioms as possible with generalized dutch-book arguments. (I'll use the term "generalized dutch-book" to refer to arguments with a family resemblance to dutch-book or money-pump.) The eventual goal is to relax these assumptions in a way which addresses bounded processing power, but for now the goal is to get as much of classical decision theory as possible justified by a generalized dutch-book.

I made some predictions about what I would and wouldn't be able to justify with generalized dutch-book. These turned out to be only partially correct. I was able to get a version of Jeffrey's evidential decision theory, but with nonstandard utility and probability functions and with less assumptions about the structure of the boolean algebra. Nonstandard probability and utility functions are not a very big generalization in themselves. This makes it a little less interesting, supporting Scott's comment. I still have some hope that more interesting things can be developed from this going forward, though.

I wouldn't be too surprised if this has all been done before and I just haven't been able to find it. Justifying all of the axioms in terms of generalized dutch-book arguments seems like an obviously desirable thing to do. Yet, I haven't seen such a complete justification of common axioms via generalized dutch-books; that is part of why I initially assumed it would not be possible. The closest thing I've heard about is Stuart Armstrong's post showing that immunity to a generalization of the money-pump argument is necessary and sufficient for the VNM axioms minus continuity. So, although the result here doesn't give as much of a generalization of decision theory as I might have hoped for, it's the nicest justification of evidential decision theory that I know of.

##Agents

The basic representation of an agent's preference is as follows:

The agent has a set B of possible beliefs, which is a Boolean algebra. Elements of B will be called propositions.

The agent has preferences over B−{⊥}, which can be revealed by asking it to choose from a non-empty set of propositions ∅⊂S⊆(B−{⊥}). (These need not be mutually exclusive; we can ask things like "Would you rather be a bank teller or a feminist bank teller?") The choices of the agent are represented by a choice function Ch

...
Infinite ethics comparisons
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-05-06T19:24:24.000Z

Work done with Amanda Askell; the errors are mine.

It's very difficult to compare utilities across worlds with infinite populations. For instance, it seems clear that world w1 is better than w2, if the number indicate the utilities of various agents:

w1=1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,…

w2=1,0,1,0,0,1,0,0,0,1,…

However, up to relabelling of the agents, these two worlds are actually identical. For this post, we'll only care about countable infinities of agents, and we'll assume that all utilities must occupy a certain finite range. This means that limsup and liminf of utilities in a world are defined and finite, independently of the ordering of the agents in that world. For a world w, label these as s(w) and i(w).

Unambiguous gains and losses

Then compare the following worlds, where {a}ω means there are infinitely many agents with utility a:

w3={4}ω,{3}ω,{0}ω

w4={4}ω,{2}ω,{0}ω

It seems that w3 is better than w4, because the middle category is higher. But this is deceptive, as we'll see.

Let's restrict ourselves to actions that change the utilities of agents in worlds, without creating or removing any agents.

Given any such action a, call (k,k′) the signature of a if k and −k are the limsup and liminf of all utility changes caused by a. If k′≤0 and k>0, we'll call a an unambiguous gain; if k≤0 and k′>0, we'll call a an unambiguous loss.

Then consider the action a that transforms w4 by moving all the agents at utility 2 to utility 3. This is certainly an unambiguous gain. But now consider the action a that sends all agents at utility 3 down to utility 0, and sends infinitely many agents at utility 4 down to utility 3 (while leaving infinitely many at utility 4). This is certainly an unambiguous loss.

However, both actions will send w4 to w3. So it's not clear at all which of these worlds is better than the other.

Comparing infinite worlds

Define m(w) as (s(w)+i(w))/2, the average of limsup and liminf of w. Then here are five ways <i of comparing worlds, which allow finer and finer comparisons.

#. If s(v)<i(w), then v<1w.
#. If s(w)≥s(v), i(w)≥i(v), and one of these inequalities is strict, then v<2w.
#. If m(v)<i(w), then v<3w.
#. If s(v)<m(w), then v<3′w.
#. If m(v)<m(w), then v<4w.

All these <i are transitive preorders, with <4 being a total preorder. The <2 is a refinement of <1 (in that if v<1w, then v<2w), as are

...