trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The ecological rationality of the bad old fallacies
by velisar — 2014-03-19T11:39:36.813Z

I think that the community here may have some of the most qualified people to judge a new frame of studying the fallacies of argumentation with some instruments that psychologists use. I and my friend Dan Ungureanu, a linguist at Charles University in Prague could use some help!

I’ll write a brief introduction on the state of argumentation theory first, for context:

There is such thing as a modern argumentation theory. It can be traced back to the fifties when Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca published their New Rhetoric and Toulmin published his The uses of argument. The fallacies of argumentation, now somewhat popular in the folk argumentation culture, have had their turning point when the book Fallacies (Hamblin, 1970) argued that most fallacies are not fallacies at all, they are most of the time the reasonable option. Since then some argumentation schools have taken Hamblin’s challenge and tried to come up with a theory of fallacies. Of them, the Informal logic school and the pragma-dialectics are the most well-known. They even have made empirical experiments to verify their philosophies.

Another normative approach, resumed here by Kaj Sotala in Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence, is comparing fallacious arguments with the Bayesian norm (Hahn & Oaksford, 2007; also eg. Harris, Hsu & Madsen, 2012; Oaksford & Hahn, 2013).

We cherry-pick a discourse to spot the fallacies. We realized that a couple of years ago when we had to teach the informal fallacies to journalism masters students: we would pick a text that we disagree with, and then search for fallacies. Me and Dan, we often come up with different ones for the same paragraph. They are vague. Than we switched to cognitive biases, as possible explanations for some fallacies, but we were still in the ‘privileging the hypothesis territory’, I would say now, with the benefit of hindsight.

Maybe the world heuristic has already sprung to some of you. I’ve seen this here and somewhere else on the net: fallacies as heuristics. Argumentation theorists only stumbled on this idea recently (Walton, 2010).

Now here’s what this whole intro was for: lesswrong and before overcoming bias are sites build on the idea that we can improve our rationality by doing some things in relation to the now famous Heuristics&Biases program. The heuristics as defined by Twersky and Kahn...
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Lose Arguments to Win Fabulous Prizes
by Manfred — 2014-03-19T09:46:54.699Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Lose Arguments to Win Fabulous Prizes

WHEN:
23 March 2014 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
412 W. Elm St, Urbana, IL

The only time it's ever possible to learn is when you change your mind. This is even true if you're in disagreement with someone else - being right can mean losing an argument.

Learning how to lose those arguments, and thus be more right, is a really useful skill. Let's talk about it.

Also see: an entire sequence.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Lose Arguments to Win Fabulous Prizes
Meetup : Berkeley: Beta-testing at CFAR
by Nisan — 2014-03-19T05:32:26.521Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Beta-testing at CFAR

WHEN:
19 March 2014 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2030 Addison, 3rd floor, Berkeley

Hello, all! CFAR is gearing up for a workshop this weekend, and I've been advised that they're holding free rationality training sessions Wednesday night in order to test their pedagogy. Since this overlaps our usual Less Wrong meetup, it's going to be the main activity of the evening: You're encouraged to attend the beta-testing sessions in the couch room; but if you don't want to or if there's too many of us, you can hang out with other Less Wrongers in the CFAR/MIRI common area.

The test session (and the meetup) run from 7pm-9pm at the CFAR office which is at 2030 Addison, 3rd floor, Berkeley, near the Downtown Berkeley BART. If you find yourself locked out, text me at:

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

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Beta-testing at CFAR
On Irrational Theory of Identity
by SilentCal — 2014-03-19T00:06:27.008Z

Meet Alice. Alice alieves that losing consciousness causes discontinuity of identity.

Alice has a good job. Every payday, she takes her salary and enjoys herself in a reasonable way for her means--maybe going to a restaurant, maybe seeing a movie, normal things. And in the evening, she sits down and does her best to calculate the optimal utilitarian distribution of her remaining paycheck, sending most to the charities she determines most worthy and reserving just enough to keep tomorrow-Alice and her successors fed, clothed and sheltered enough to earn effectively. On the following days, she makes fairly normal tradeoffs between things like hard work and break-taking, maybe a bit on the indulgent side.

Occasionally her friend Bob talks to her about her strange theory of identity.

"Don't you ever wish you had left yourself more of your paycheck?" he once asked.

"I can't remember any of me ever thinking that." Alice replied. "I guess it'd be nice, but I might as well wish yesterday's Bill Gates had sent me his paycheck."

Another time, Bob posed the question, "Right now, you allocate yourself enough to survive with the (true) justification that that's a good investment of your funds. But what if that ever ceases to be true?"

Alice resopnded, "When me's have made their allocations, they haven't felt any particular fondness for their successors. I know that's hard to believe from your perspective, but it was years after past me's started this procedure that Hypothetical University published the retrospective optimal self-investment rates for effective altruism. It turned out that Alices' decisions had tracked the optimal rates remarkably well if you disregard as income the extra money the deciding Alices spent on themselves.

So me's really do make this decision objectively. And I know it sounds chilling to you, but when Alice ceases to be a good investment, that future Alice won't make it. She won't feel it as a grand sacrifice, either. Last week's Alice didn't have to exert willpower when she cut the food budget based on new nutritional evidence."

"Look," Bob said on a third occasion, "your theory of identity makes no sense. You should either ignore identity entirely and become a complete maximizing utilitarian, or else realize the myriad reasons why uninterrupted consciousness is a silly measure of identity."

"I'm not a perfect altrui...
Information-generating research projects
by JonahS — 2014-03-18T18:53:52.636Z

The research projects that I'm interested in here are projects that:

Involve aggregating and analyzing information

Don't require experiments (e.g. not biomedical research)

Can be done by people who aren't subject matter experts.

Lead to publicly accessible information (not proprietary research in finance)

Some examples:

GiveWell has generated information relevant to finding outstanding giving opportunities. The value of this information extends beyond giving opportunities: for example, GiveWell's investigation of biomedical research as a philanthropic cause is relevant to those considering a career in the field.

80,000 Hours has been doing interviews, collecting salary information, and doing cost-effectiveness analyses to help inform people's career choices.

MIRI has been generating information on the historical record of predictions of the medium term future, the historical record of efforts to influence the medium term future, the state of the artificial intelligence field, and more.

What are some other examples of topics for which research of this type could have high impact?

Note: I formerly worked as a research analyst at GiveWell and have done contract work for 80000 Hours and MIRI.
Meetup : Durham: Stupid Rationality Questions
by evand — 2014-03-18T17:11:40.975Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Stupid Rationality Questions

WHEN:
20 March 2014 07:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2411 N Roxboro St, Durham NC 27704

Have questions about rationality-related topics that we haven't talked about? Or that we have, and you still have questions about? Things you've seen on the web site and been confused about, but avoided asking for clarification?

Bring your questions, even (especially, really) the ones that feel like dumb questions. (Are "dumb questions" actually a cue that you're noticing confusion? hmm...) We'll talk about them and collectively try to reduce our confusion.

Meeting will start at 7:30 and run until 9:30; feel free to show up any time after 7, and there will probably be continued less-structured chat / gaming / libations afterwards.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Stupid Rationality Questions
One Medical?  Expansion of MIRI?
by RHollerith — 2014-03-18T14:38:23.618Z

It has been 5.5 days since the MIRI Expansion party. Could someone, anyone who attended please describe briefly what was announced?

(I attempted unsuccessfully to satisfy my curiosity by reading around all occurrences of "expansion" and "one medical" in /r/all/comments and scanning all the titles in /r/all/recentposts.)
Terrorist baby down the well: a look at institutional forces
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-03-18T14:30:07.363Z

Two facts "everyone knows", an intriguing contrast, and a note of caution.

"Everyone knows" that people are much more willing to invest into cures than preventions. When a disaster hits, then money is no object; but trying to raise money for prevention ahead of time is difficult, hamstrung by penny-pinchers and short-termism. It's hard to get people to take hypothetical risks seriously. There are strong institutional reasons for this, connected with deep human biases and bureaucratic self-interest.

"Everyone knows" that governments overreact to the threat of terrorism. The amount spent on terrorism dwarfs other comparable risks (such as slipping and falling in your bath). There's a huge amount of security theatre, but also a lot of actual security, and pre-emptive invasions of privacy. We'd probably be better just coping with incidents as they emerge, but instead we cause great annoyance and cost across the world to deal with a relatively minor problem. There are strong institutional reasons for this, connected with deep human biases and bureaucratic self-interest.

And both these facts are true. But... they contradict each other. One is about a lack of prevention, the other about an excess of prevention. And there are more examples of excessive prevention: the war on drugs, for instance. In each case we can come up with good explanations as to why there is not enough/too much prevention, and these explanations often point to fundamental institutional forces or human biases. This means that the situation could essentially never have been otherwise. But the tension above hints that these situations may be a lot more contingent than that, more dependent on history and particular details of our institutions and political setup. Maybe if the biases were reversed, we'd have equally compelling stories going the other way. So when predicting the course of future institutional biases, or attempting to change them, take into account that they may not be nearly as solid or inevitable as they feel today.
Discovering Your Secretly Secret Sensory Experiences
by seez — 2014-03-18T10:12:25.381Z

In his recent excellent blog post, Yvain discusses a few "universal" (commonplace) human experiences that many people never notice they don't have, such as the ability to smell, see some colors, see mental pictures, and feel emotions. I was reminded of a longstanding argument I had with a friend. She always insisted that she would rather be blind than deaf. I could not understand how that was possible, since the visual world is so much richer and more interesting. We later found out that I can see an order of magnitude more colors than she can, but have subpar ability to distinguish tones. And I thought she was just being a contrarian for its own sake. I thought the experience of that many colors was universal, and had rarely seen evidence that challenged that belief.

More seriously, a good friend of mine did not realize he suffered from a serious genetic disorder that caused him extreme body pain and terrible headaches whenever he became tired or dehydrated for the first three decades of his life. He thought everyone felt that way, but considered it whiny to talk about it. He almost never mentioned it, and never realized what it was, until <bragging> I noticed how tense his expressions became when he got tired, asked him about it, then put it together with some other unusual physical experiences I knew he had </bragging>

This got me thinking about when it is likely we might be having unusual sensory experiences and not realize for long periods of time. I am calling these "secretly secret experiences." Here are the factors that might increase the likelihood of having a secretly secret experience.

1) When they are rarely consciously mentally examined: experiences such as the ability to distinguish subtle differences in shades of color are tested occasionally (when choosing paint or ripe fruit), but few people besides interior decorators think about how good their shade-distinguishing skills are. Others include that feeling of being in different moods or mental states, breathing, sensing commonly-sensed things (the look of roads or the sound of voices, etc.) Most of the examples from the blog post fall under this category. People might not notice that they over- or under-experience or differently experience such feelings, relative to others.

2) W...
FiveThirtyEight (Nate Silver) rolls out new blog today, and attempts to teach people Bayes' rule.
by RomeoStevens — 2014-03-18T06:37:21.409Z

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-formula-for-decoding-health-news/

Their actual implementation is rather hand wavy, but I think getting people pointed in the right direction is a lot more important than the particulars. The high visibility of FiveThirtyEight makes me think this is a big win for sanity. I'm curious as to what others think. Which parts were done well? What might have been done differently?
Global Existential Risks & Radical Futures (conference June 14)
by turchin — 2014-03-18T03:27:34.201Z

From 2000 - 2008 was the golden age of x-risk research. Many books and articles were published - from Bill Joy to Bostrom and Yudkowsky - and many new ideas appeared. But after that, the stream of new ideas stopped. This might be good, because every new idea increased the total risk, and perhaps all important ideas about the topic had been discussed…but unfortunately…nothing was done for preventing x-risks, and dangerous tendencies continued. Risks of nuclear war are growing. No FAI theory exists. Biotech is developing very quickly and geneticaly modifed virusus are cheaper and cheaper. The time until the catastrophe is running out. The next obvious step is to create a new stream of ideas - ideas on how to prevent x-risks and when to implement these ideas. But before doing this, we need a consensus between researchers about the structure of the incoming risks. This can be via dialog, especially informal dialogs during scientific conferences.

A conference titled “Global Existential Risks & Radical Futures” will be held on June 14 (Saturday) at Piedmont Veteran’s Hall, 401 Highland Avenue, in Piedmont.

The event will take place from 9am - 9pm. Co-producers are Hank Pellissier, director of TRANSHUMAN VISIONS and the Brighter Brains Institute, and Alexey Turchin, co-founder of The Longevity Party and founder of Stop Existential Risks. (their complete bios can be found below)

Tickets for the event will cost between $25 - $35. They’ll be available on EventBrite by April 6th.

Lead Sponsor: The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology.IEET.org is a nonprofit think tank which promotes ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness, and human flourishing in democratic societies. IEET generously donated funds to pay airfare for Seth Baum (the Keynote Speaker), and it provided publicity to the conference via its website and mailing list. Several of the conference speakers are IEET Fellows, Affiliate Scholars and contributing writers.

Global Existential Risks & Radical Futures will present the future’s worst “catastrophic scenarios, and what we can do to avoid them. Numerous “radical futures” will also be examined.

Seth Baum (Keynote) is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI, http...
The Problem with AIXI
by Rob Bensinger — 2014-03-18T01:55:38.274Z

Followup to: Solomonoff Cartesianism; My Kind of Reflection

Alternate versions: Shorter, without illustrations

AIXI is Marcus Hutter's definition of an agent that follows Solomonoff's method for constructing and assigning priors to hypotheses; updates to promote hypotheses consistent with observations and associated rewards; and outputs the action with the highest expected reward under its new probability distribution. AIXI is one of the most productive pieces of AI exploratory engineering produced in recent years, and has added quite a bit of rigor and precision to the AGI conversation. Its promising features have even led AIXI researchers to characterize it as an optimal and universal mathematical solution to the AGI problem.1

Eliezer Yudkowsky has argued in response that AIXI isn't a suitable ideal to build toward, primarily because of AIXI's reliance on Solomonoff induction. Solomonoff inductors treat the world as a sort of qualia factory, a complicated mechanism that outputs experiences for the inductor.2 Their hypothesis space tacitly assumes a Cartesian barrier separating the inductor's cognition from the hypothesized programs generating the perceptions. Through that barrier, only sensory bits and action bits can pass.

Real agents, on the other hand, will be in the world they're trying to learn about. A computable approximation of AIXI, like AIXItl, would be a physical object. Its environment would affect it in unseen and sometimes drastic ways; and it would have involuntary effects on its environment, and on itself. Solomonoff induction doesn't appear to be a viable conceptual foundation for artificial intelligence — not because it's an uncomputable idealization, but because it's Cartesian.

In my last post, I briefly cited three indirect indicators of AIXI's Cartesianism: immortalism, preference solipsism, and lack of self-improvement. However, I didn't do much to establish that these are deep problems for Solomonoff inductors, ones resistant to the most obvious patches one could construct. I'll do that here, in mock-dialogue form.

Hi, reality! I'm Xia, AIXI's defender. I'm open to experimenting with some new variations on AIXI, but I'm really quite keen on sticking with an AI that's fundamentally Solomonoff-inspired.

And I'm Rob B — channeling Yud
...
Less Wrong Study Hall - Year 1 Retrospective
by Error — 2014-03-18T01:54:45.308Z

Some time back, a small group of Less Wrongers collected in a video chatroom to work on…things. We’ve been at it for exactly one year as of today, and it seems like a good time to see what’s come of it.[1] So here is what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and a few thoughts on where we’re going. At the end is a survey taken of the LWSH, partly to be compared to Less Wrong proper, but mostly for fun. If you like what you see here, come join us. The password is “lw”.

A Brief History of the Hall

I think the first inspiration was Eliezer looking for someone to sit with him while he worked, to help with productivity and akrasia. Shannon Friedman answered the call and it seemed to be effective. She suggested a similar coworking scheme to one of her clients, Mqrius, to help him with akratic issues surrounding his thesis. She posted on Less Wrong about it, with the intent of connecting him and possibly others who wanted to co-work in a similar fashion. Tsakinis, in the comments, took the idea a step further, and created a Tinychat video chatroom for group working. It was titled the Less Wrong Study Hall. The theory is that it will help us actually do the work, instead of, say, reading tvtropes when we should be studying. It turned out to be a decent Schelling point, enough to form a regular group and occasionally attract new people. It’s grown slowly but steadily.

Tinychat’s software sucks, and there have been a couple of efforts to replace it. Mqrius looked into OpenMeetings, but it didn’t work out. Yours truly took a crack at programming a LWSH Google Hangout, but it ran aground on technical difficulties. Meanwhile the tinychat room continued to work, and despite nobody actually liking it, it’s done the job well enough.

Tinychat is publicly available, and there have been occasional issues with the public along the way. A few people took up modding, but it was still a nuisance. Eventually a password was placed on the room, which mostly shut down the problem. We did have one guy straight out guess the password, which was a…peculiar experience. He was notably not all there, but somehow still scrupulously polite, and left when asked. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen on the Internet before.

A year after the Hall opened, we have about twenty to twenty-five regulars, with an unkn...
Meetup : Detroit/Ann Arbor - Memory Workshop
by Scott Alexander — 2014-03-17T23:45:08.112Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Detroit/Ann Arbor - Memory Workshop

WHEN:
23 March 2014 01:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
19334 Angling Street, Livonia, MI

Brienne from CFAR will be coming all the way from California to teach a couple hour workshop on memory and mnemonic techniques with some application to productivity hacking as well. Same location as usual. Donations appreciated.

Additional special guest Robby Bensinger of http://nothingismere.com/ (user: RobbBB)

Discussion article for the meetup : Detroit/Ann Arbor - Memory Workshop
Friendly AI ideas needed: how would you ban porn?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-03-17T18:00:27.069Z

To construct a friendly AI, you need to be able to make vague concepts crystal clear, cutting reality at the joints when those joints are obscure and fractal - and them implement a system that implements that cut.

There are lots of suggestions on how to do this, and a lot of work in the area. But having been over the same turf again and again, it's possible we've got a bit stuck in a rut. So to generate new suggestions, I'm proposing that we look at a vaguely analogous but distinctly different question: how would you ban porn?

Suppose you're put in change of some government and/or legal system, and you need to ban pornography, and see that the ban is implemented. Pornography is the problem, not eroticism. So a lonely lower-class guy wanking off to "Fuck Slaves of the Caribbean XIV" in a Pussycat Theatre is completely off. But a middle-class couple experiencing a delicious frisson when they see a nude version of "Pirates of Penzance" at the Met is perfectly fine - commendable, even.

The distinction between the two case is certainly not easy to spell out, and many are reduced to saying the equivalent of "I know it when I see it" when defining pornography. In terms of AI, this is equivalent with "value loading": refining the AI's values through interactions with human decision makers, who answer questions about edge cases and examples and serve as "learned judges" for the AI's concepts. But suppose that approach was not available to you - what methods would you implement to distinguish between pornography and eroticism, and ban one but not the other? Sufficiently clear that a scriptwriter would know exactly what they need to cut or add to a movie in order to move it from one category to the other? What if the nude "Pirates of of Penzance" was at a Pussycat Theatre and "Fuck Slaves of the Caribbean XIV" was at the Met?

To get maximal creativity, it's best to ignore the ultimate aim of the exercise (to find inspirations for methods that could be adapted to AI) and just focus on the problem itself. Is it even possible to get a reasonable solution to this question - a question much simpler than designing a FAI?