trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] 3 Levels of Rationality Verification
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-26T02:31:46.908Z

Today's post, 3 Levels of Rationality Verification was originally published on 15 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

How far the craft of rationality can be taken, depends largely on what methods can be invented for verifying it. Tests seem usefully stratifiable into reputational, experimental, and organizational. A "reputational" test is some real-world problem that tests the ability of a teacher or a school (like running a hedge fund, say) - "keeping it real", but without being able to break down exactly what was responsible for success. An "experimental" test is one that can be run on each of a hundred students (such as a well-validated survey). An "organizational" test is one that can be used to preserve the integrity of organizations by validating individuals or small groups, even in the face of strong incentives to game the test. The strength of solution invented at each level will determine how far the craft of rationality can go in the real world.

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 Schools Proliferating Without Evidence, 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.
Meetup : Tucson LW Meetup 0
by  — 2013-03-26T01:05:08.863Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tucson LW Meetup 0

WHEN:
30 March 2013 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
943 E University Blvd Tucson

We will meet at Caffe Luce(943 E University Blvd #191), a coffee shop off of University Ave., near the U of A. I'll have a sign.
This is a first meetup, so we'll talk about basic rationality and goals: where we are and where we want to go(and brainstorm how to get there).

Discussion article for the meetup : Tucson LW Meetup 0
Meetup : Washington DC Social meetup+ Birthday party!
by rocurley — 2013-03-26T00:23:52.414Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Social meetup+ Birthday party!

WHEN:
31 March 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA (courtyard)

So, next meetup coincides with Eileen's birthday party. We'll be meeting to hang out and eat cake!

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Social meetup+ Birthday party!
[SEQ RERUN] Schools Proliferating Without Evidence
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-25T11:54:22.153Z

Today's post, Schools Proliferating Without Evidence was originally published on 15 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The branching schools of "psychotherapy", another domain in which experimental verification was weak (nonexistent, actually), show that an aspiring craft lives or dies by the degree to which it can be tested in the real world. In the absence of that testing, one becomes prestigious by inventing yet another school and having students, rather than excelling at any visible performance criterion. The field of hedonic psychology (happiness studies) began, to some extent, with the realization that you could measure happiness - that there was a family of measures that by golly did validate well against each other. The act of creating a new measurement creates new science; if it's a good measurement, you get good science.

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 Epistemic Viciousness, 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.
Meetup : London Meetup, 31st March
by philh — 2013-03-24T23:55:58.929Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 31st March

WHEN:
31 March 2013 01:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Holborn, London

A usually-fortnightly meetup in the Shakespeare's Head pub by Holborn tube station.

We're switching from every other Sunday to every other-other Sunday, so this is two weeks in a row, and the next meetup will be two weeks afterwards (14th April).

Everyone is welcome to attend: we're a friendly group and we don't bite. If you're on the fence about coming, err on the side of showing up. It's probably safe to assume that we'd like to meet you.

We also have a Google group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 31st March
[LINK] The power of fiction for moral instruction
by David_Gerard — 2013-03-24T21:19:23.724Z

From Medical Daily: Psychologists Discover How People Subconsciously Become Their Favorite Fictional Characters

Psychologists have discovered that while reading a book or story, people are prone to subconsciously adopt their behavior, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses to that of fictional characters as if they were their own.

Experts have dubbed this subconscious phenomenon ‘experience-taking,’ where people actually change their own behaviors and thoughts to match those of a fictional character that they can identify with.

Researcher from the Ohio State University conducted a series of six different experiments on about 500 participants, reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that in the right situations, ‘experience-taking,’ may lead to temporary real world changes in the lives of readers.

They found that stories written in the first-person can temporarily transform the way readers view the world, themselves and other social groups.

I always wondered at how Christopher Hitchens (who, when he wasn't being a columnist, was a professor of English literature) went on and on about the power of fiction for revealing moral truths. This gives me a better idea of how people could imprint on well-written fiction. More so than, say, logically-reasoned philosophical tracts.

This article is, of course, a popularisation. Anyone have links to the original paper?

Edit: Gwern delivers (PDF): Kaufman, G. F., & Libby, L. K. (2012, March 26). "Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-Taking." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0027525
Reflection in Probabilistic Logic
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-03-24T16:37:36.197Z

Paul Christiano has devised a new fundamental approach to the "Löb Problem" wherein Löb's Theorem seems to pose an obstacle to AIs building successor AIs, or adopting successor versions of their own code, that trust the same amount of mathematics as the original. (I am currently writing up a more thorough description of the question this preliminary technical report is working on answering. For now the main online description is in a quick Summit talk I gave. See also Benja Fallenstein's description of the problem in the course of presenting a different angle of attack. Roughly the problem is that mathematical systems can only prove the soundness of, aka 'trust', weaker mathematical systems. If you try to write out an exact description of how AIs would build their successors or successor versions of their code in the most obvious way, it looks like the mathematical strength of the proof system would tend to be stepped down each time, which is undesirable.)

Paul Christiano's approach is inspired by the idea that whereof one cannot prove or disprove, thereof one must assign probabilities: and that although no mathematical system can contain its own truth predicate, a mathematical system might be able to contain a reflectively consistent probability predicate. In particular, it looks like we can have:

∀a, b: (a < P(φ) < b) ⇒ P(a < P('φ') < b) = 1
∀a, b: P(a ≤ P('φ') ≤ b) > 0 ⇒ a ≤ P(φ) ≤ b

Suppose I present you with the human and probabilistic version of a Gödel sentence, the Whitely sentence "You assign this statement a probability less than 30%." If you disbelieve this statement, it is true. If you believe it, it is false. If you assign 30% probability to it, it is false. If you assign 29% probability to it, it is true.

Paul's approach resolves this problem by restricting your belief about your own probability assignment to within epsilon of 30% for any epsilon. So Paul's approach replies, "Well, I assign almost exactly 30% probability to that statement - maybe a little more, maybe a little less - in fact I think there's about a 30% chance that I'm a tiny bit under 0.3 proba...
Meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
by matt — 2013-03-24T14:20:33.697Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality

WHEN:
05 April 2013 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
55 Walsh Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003, Australia

Practical rationality. This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month and is distinct from our social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
Why AI may not foom
by John_Maxwell — 2013-03-24T08:11:55.006Z

Summary

There's a decent chance that the intelligence of a self-improving AGI will grow in a relatively smooth exponential or sub-exponential way, not super-exponentially or with large jump discontinuities.

If this is the case, then an AGI whose effective intelligence matched that of the world's combined AI researchers would make AI progress at the rate they do, taking decades to double its own intelligence.

The risk that the first successful AGI will quickly monopolize many industries, or quickly hack many of the computers connected to the internet, seems worth worrying about. In either case, the AGI would likely end up using the additional computing power it gained to self-modify so it was superintelligent.

AI boxing could mitigate both of these risks greatly.

If hard takeoff could be impossible, it might be best to assume this case and concentrate our resources on ensuring a safe soft takeoff, given that the prospects for a safe hard takeoff look grim.

Takeoff models discussed in the Hanson-Yudkowsky debate

The supercritical nuclear chain reaction model

Yudkowsky alludes to this model repeatedly, starting in this post:

When a uranium atom splits, it releases neutrons - some right away, some after delay while byproducts decay further. Some neutrons escape the pile, some neutrons strike another uranium atom and cause an additional fission. The effective neutron multiplication factor, denoted k, is the average number of neutrons from a single fissioning uranium atom that cause another fission...

It might seem that a cycle, with the same thing happening over and over again, ought to exhibit continuous behavior. In one sense it does. But if you pile on one more uranium brick, or pull out the control rod another twelve inches, there's one hell of a big difference between k of 0.9994 and k of 1.0006.

I don't like this model much for the following reasons:

The model doesn't offer much insight in to the time scale over which an AI might self-improve. The "mean generation time" (time necessary for the next "generation" of neutrons to be released) of a nuclear chain reaction is short, and the doubling time for neutron activity in Fermi's experiment was just two minutes, but it hardly seems reasonable to generalize this to self-improving AIs.

A flurry of insights that either dies out or expands exponentially doesn't see

...
The transitivity of trust
by KatjaGrace — 2013-03-24T06:26:53.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

Suppose you tell a close friend a secret. You consider them trustworthy, and don’t fear for its release. Suppose they request to tell the secret to a friend of theirs who you don’t know. They claim this person is also highly trustworthy. I think most people would feel significantly less secure agreeing to that.

In general, people trust their friends. Their friends trust their own friends, and so on. But I think people trust friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends less than proportionally. e.g. if you act like there’s a one percent chance of your friend failing you, you don’t act like there’s 1-(.99*.99) chance of your friend’s friend failing you.

One possible explanation is that we generally expect the people we trust to have much worse judgement about who to trust than about the average thing. But why would this be so? Perhaps everyone does just have worse judgement about who to trust than they do about other things. But to account for what we observe, people would on average have to think themselves better in this regard than others. Which might not be surprising, except that they have to think themselves more better than others in this domain than in other domains. Otherwise they would just trust others less in general. Why would this be?

Another possibility I have heard suggested is that we trust our friends more than is warranted by their true probability of defecting, for non-epistemic purposes. In which case, which purposes?

Trusting a person involves choosing to make your own payoffs depend on their actions in a circumstance where it would not be worth doing so if you thought they would defect with high probability. If you think they are likely to defect, you only rely on them when there are particularly large gains from them cooperating combined with small losses from them defecting. As they become more likely to cooperate, trusting them in more cases becomes worthwhile. So trusting for non-epistemic purposes involves relying on a person in a case where their probability of defecting should make it not worthwhile, for some other gain.

What other gains might you get? Such trust might signal something, but consistently relying too much on people doesn’t seem to make one look good in any way obvious to me. It might signal to that person that you trust them, but that just brings us back to th...
[SEQ RERUN] Epistemic Viciousness
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-24T04:44:35.134Z

Today's post, Epistemic Viciousness was originally published on 13 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

An essay by Gillian Russell on "Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts" generalizes amazingly to possible and actual problems with building a community around rationality. Most notably the extreme dangers associated with "data poverty" - the difficulty of testing the skills in the real world. But also such factors as the sacredness of the dojo, the investment in teachings long-practiced, the difficulty of book learning that leads into the need to trust a teacher, deference to historical masters, and above all, living in data poverty while continuing to act as if the luxury of trust is possible.

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 A Sense That More Is Possible, 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.
How to Not Get Offended
by katydee — 2013-03-23T23:12:26.253Z

Followup to: Don't Get Offended

Draws heavily on: Stoicism, Keep Your Identity Small, Living Luminously

Previously, we discussed why not getting offended might be an effective strategy to adopt in order to increase one's practical epistemic rationality. That's all well and good, but just as knowing about biases isn't the same as protecting ourselves from them, the simple desire to avoid being offended is (usually) insufficient to actually avoid it-- practice, too, is required.

So what should you actually practice if you find yourself becoming offended and want to stop? This post aims to address that. In doing so, it also features an expanded discussion of one question that seemed to be a sticking point for several posters in the previous discussion-- if you aren't getting offended, how will you discourage offensive and inappropriate behaviors?

Preparation

First, you need to really truly recognize that experiencing the feeling of being offended is an undesirable process. You must see why experiencing offense runs counter to knowing the truth.

A good litmus test is to check whether experiencing the feeling of being offended seems obviously bad to you-- not the existence of the feeling itself or any behaviors tied to it, but the fact that you are experiencing it. It is important to understand that this refers only to the mental experience of being offended-- this post focuses entirely on the A (Affect) component of Alicorn's ABC model.

While it might sound silly to have the preliminary step be simply thinking that being offended is bad, if you don't think that there's not much point in practicing the remaining steps. In fact, if you don't think that, practicing the remaining steps may be harmful.

Part One: Detection

In order to stop being offended-- or really alter nearly anything about your mental state-- the first step is to increase your awareness of when you are becoming offended and what that process looks like in as early a stage as possible. As in the case of ugh fields, being mindful of your reactions and "watching for the flinch" is an important early step.

As soon as you feel yourself becoming offended, you should notice this. It is then critical to truly inspect your reactions and determine why you are becoming offended. This doesn't mean thinking things like "I was ...
Meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
by rocurley — 2013-03-23T22:24:02.822Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup

WHEN:
24 March 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery , Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games. Sorry for the late posting

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
Meetup : Moscow, Beliefs
by Yuu — 2013-03-23T18:00:24.830Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Beliefs

WHEN:
30 March 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:15, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Short presentations. Two or three people will tell us about something interesting.

Practical rationality. We will train useful skills.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with photos.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Beliefs
Suggestion: Read Paul Graham
by katydee — 2013-03-23T03:23:39.099Z

This isn't really a full post, but merely a note of potential interest. Paul Graham (who runs Hacker News) has several very interesting and thought-provoking essays located on his personal website. To me they fit very well with the style of thinking employed and advocated by many people on LW and I'd advise that nearly anyone interested in LW check out his work.

I especially recommend Keep Your Identity Small, What You Can't Say, and What You'll Wish You'd Known, but nearly every essay up there is interesting to me in some way. Many of them are directly relevant to issues of rationality, while others are only indirectly related, but either way I found them worth my time.
Personal Evidence - Superstitions as Rational Beliefs
by OrphanWilde — 2013-03-22T17:24:27.265Z

I'll start with a confession:

The evidence I have personally seen suggests haunted houses are, in fact, real, without given any particular credence to any particular explanation of what the haunting is. In particular, I own a house in which bizarre crap has happened since I first moved into it. Persistently. I've moved into another house, and have been making repairs in preparation to sell it; most recently, in a room with almost no furniture, in a space with absolutely no furniture, a key was dropped by myself. Four people searched the area for significant periods of time on three different occasions with no luck. I found it on the floor a week or two ago on top of something that wasn't there when it fell. Which is the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of my skepticism.

Other bizarre things that have happened include such things as my waking up to discover my recently-purchased bottle of key lime juice had been placed in the oven, and the oven turned on; the plastic bottle had just started to melt when I made the discovery. Another situation involved my sister, who one morning (while home alone) walked into the living room and discovered on a previously empty floor three sonograms of the previous occupant's baby. (There were -many- other things; I'm choosing for the purposes of this post the most unusual and least prone-to-outside-explanation occurrences. Night terrors, for example, are easily explained.)

Up until the last incident, the key, I was inclined to attribute the events to, say, sleepwalking and confirmation bias. At this point, I do not think the evidence really supports that conclusion anymore. My skepticism has been broken by personal experience; I'm not going to attribute anything to any -particular- explanation, but there is definitely something -not normal- about that house, whatever it may be; it has been the (nearly) sole repository of such experiences in my life. (The only other such experience was the day my grandfather (with whom I was extremely close) died, and given the mental turmoil I was experiencing, I'm disinclined to give that particular experience too much credit. For the curious, I was taking a shower, and the hot water repeatedly (3 times) turned off. As in, the knob was completely rotated to shut off the flow of hot water to the faucet....