trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Social, Board Games and FAI
by SoftFlare — 2014-08-06T08:09:05.826Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Social, Board Games and FAI

WHEN:
07 August 2014 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Google Tel Aviv

We're going to have a meetup on Thursday, August 7th at Google Israel's offices, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon st., Tel Aviv.

This time we're going to have a social meetup! We'll be socializing and playing games. Also, we'll be continuing discussion we started in the mailing list about friendly AI!

We'll start the meetup at 19:00, and we'll go on as much as we like to. Feel free to come a little bit later, as there is no agenda.

We'll meet at the 29th floor of the building (Note: Not the 34th where Google Campus is). If you arrive and cant find your way around, call Anatoly who is very graciously hosting us at 054-245-1060.

Things that might happen:
- You'll trade cool ideas with cool people from the Israel LW community.
- You'll discover kindred spirits who agree with you about one/two boxing.
- You'll kick someone's ass (and teach them how you did it) at some awesome boardgame
- You'll discover how to build a friendly AGI running on cold fusion (well probably not) - You'll discuss interesting AI topics with new friends!

Things that will happen for sure: - You'll get to hang out with awesome people and have fun!

There is also talk of food and beers, and if you'd like to bring some too - that would be great. (But you don't have to).

If you have any question feel free to email me at hochbergg@gmail.com or call me at 054-533-0678 or call Anatoly at 054-245-1060. See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Social, Board Games and FAI
Raven paradox settled to my satisfaction
by Manfred — 2014-08-06T02:46:19.257Z

The raven paradox, originated by Carl Gustav Hempel, is an apparent absurdity of inductive reasoning. Consider the hypothesis:

H1: All ravens are black.

Inductively, one might expect that seeing many black ravens and no non-black ones is evidence for this hypothesis. As you see more black ravens, you may even find it more and more likely.

Logically, a statement is equivalent to its contrapositive (where you negate both things and flip the order). Thus if "if it is a raven, it is black" is true, so is:

H1': If it is not black, it is not a raven.

Take a moment to double-check this.

Inductively, just like with H1, one would expect that seeing many non-black non-ravens is evidence for this hypothesis. As you see more and more examples, you may even find it more and more likely. Thus a yellow banana is evidence for the hypothesis "all ravens are black."

Since this is silly, there is an apparent problem with induction.

Resolution

Consider the following two possible states of the world:

Suppose that these are your two hypotheses, and you observe a yellow banana (drawing from some fixed distribution over things). Q: What does this tell you about one hypothesis versus another? A: It tells you bananas-all about the number of black ravens.

One might contrast this with a hypothesis where there is one less banana, and one more yellow raven, by some sort of spontaneous generation.

Observations of both black ravens and yellow bananas cause us to prefer 1 over 3, now!

The moral of the story is that the amount of evidence that an observation provides is not just about whether it whether it is consistent with the "active" hypothesis - it is about the difference in likelihood between when the hypothesis is true versus when it's false.

This is a pretty straightforward moral - it's a widely known pillar of statistical reasoning. But its absence in the raven paradox takes a bit of effort to see. This is because we're using an implicit model of the problem (driven by some combination of outside knowledge and framing effects) where nonblack ravens replace black ravens, but don't replace bananas. The logical statements H1 and H1' are not alone enough to tell how you should update upon seeing new evidence. Or to put it another way, the version of induction that drives the raven paradox is in fact wrong, but probability theory implies a bigger version.

(Technical note: In the hypotheses ...
From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social Epistemology
by HalMorris — 2014-08-06T00:48:44.425Z

I've been reading an anthology called Naturalizing Epistemology (1986) edited by Hilary Kornblith.
"Naturalizing" epistemology has been heavily identified with W.V.O. Quine (author of the 2 first articles in _Naturalizing Epistemology).
Others draw parallels between naturalized epistemology and the much earlier philosophy of pragmatism, or John Dewey in particular, as in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Vol. 32, No. 4, Fall, 1996, "Dewey, Quine, and Pragmatic Naturalized Epistemology". Or see Stich 1993 "Naturalizing Epistemology: Quine, Simon and the Prospects for Pragmatism". The title alludes to Herb Simon, who is no doubt better known to lesswrong.com than most philosophical epistemologists. [For some good articles and quite a few broken links, see: http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~kak7409/EpistPapersBySubject.html] Naturalized epistemology, like many other intellectual approaches (to whatever) has a strong and a weak program, or position. The strong might be represented by Quine's "Why not settle for psychology".
Basically, I think general naturalized epistemology aims to ground epistemology in something solid and material like people, and their scientific study -- as opposed to reasoning with purely mental constructs. Another tendency that claims to be "naturalizing" epistemology is to study how "good reasoners" arrive at what they think is the truth, and this may mean trying to rigorously define how scientists think.
"Why not settle for psychology" is to pass the buck or forward all questions to another department (e.g. psychology, sociology, history of science), as if the disciplinary traditions of philosophy have nothing to offer. Do they really have nothing to offer?
I think one way to not pass the buck is to focus on certain habits that seem to affect, or afflict, virtually all of philosophy when it deals with thoughts, truth, etc. Namely to talk as if our subject is some "canonical knower", talking of what "is known" without reference to any particular knower, seeming to forget about the fact that I am in my mind and you are in yours. Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" might be more naturalistic if he had written "So you think maybe you don't exist? But then aren't you experiencing something, an awareness of words and...
Six Plausible Meta-Ethical Alternatives
by Wei Dai — 2014-08-06T00:04:14.485Z

In this post, I list six metaethical possibilities that I think are plausible, along with some arguments or plausible stories about how/why they might be true, where that's not obvious. A lot of people seem fairly certain in their metaethical views, but I'm not and I want to convey my uncertainty as well as some of the reasons for it.

Most intelligent beings in the multiverse share similar preferences. This came about because there are facts about what preferences one should have, just like there exist facts about what decision theory one should use or what prior one should have, and species that manage to build intergalactic civilizations (or the equivalent in other universes) tend to discover all of these facts. There are occasional paperclip maximizers that arise, but they are a relatively minor presence or tend to be taken over by more sophisticated minds.

Facts about what everyone should value exist, and most intelligent beings have a part of their mind that can discover moral facts and find them motivating, but those parts don't have full control over their actions. These beings eventually build or become rational agents with values that represent compromises between different parts of their minds, so most intelligent beings end up having shared moral values along with idiosyncratic values.

There aren't facts about what everyone should value, but there are facts about how to translate non-preferences (e.g., emotions, drives, fuzzy moral intuitions, circular preferences, non-consequentialist values, etc.) into preferences. These facts may include, for example, what is the right way to deal with ontological crises. The existence of such facts seems plausible because if there were facts about what is rational (which seems likely) but no facts about how to become rational, that would seem like a strange state of affairs.

None of the above facts exist, so the only way to become or build a rational agent is to just think about what preferences you want your future self or your agent to hold, until you make up your mind in some way that depends on your psychology. But at least this process of reflection is convergent at the individual level so each person can reasonably call the preferences that they endorse after reaching reflective equilibrium their morality or real values.

None of the above facts exist, and reflecting on what one wants turns out to be a

...
[LINK] "Harry Potter And The Cryptocurrency of Stars"
by Shmi — 2014-08-05T20:57:27.644Z

A blog post by Patrick McKenzie/patio11, a frequently cited here blogger/entrepreneur/SEO wiz/etc. about Stellar, a new currency exchange protocol. [EDIT: apparently not that new.] He explains it in the ELI5 (or, more accurately, ELIRW, explain-like-I'm-Ron-Weasley) way. With plenty of humor. Bonus: a comment from Eliezer.

Some quotes:

Harry Potter: [...] Stellarmus, I trust Ron Weasley with one Weasley!GBP.

Ron Weasley: Stellarmus, send Harry Potter a quid!

...

Harry Potter: Stellarmus, what currencies does Hermione Granger accept?

Stellarmus rattles off a long, long list.

Harry Potter: What on earth is a Tokyo!ABL?

Hermione Granger: It’s a claim against an online Magic: The Gathering exchange headquartered in Tokyo for one Alpha Black Lotus, which is a card that I’ve wanted for a while.

Ron Weasley: You’d trust a random company in Tokyo to send you magic cards?

Hermione Granger: They’re not magic cards, they’re Magic cards, and yes, I’d trust that company to hold Magic cards for me. Nothing else though. It would certainly be dreadfully stupid to say “Stellarmus, I trust The Company That Must Not Be Named for 50 million USD.”

Harry Potter: Why do I get the feeling you know more about this topic than I do?

Hermione Granger: Welcome to life, Harry Potter. I know more about every topic than you do.

(Note that this is Canon!Harry, not MoR!Harry, though the defense professor is a lot closer to MoR!Quirrell.)

...

Hermione Granger: I like you, Ron, but not enough to trust you with money. Save my life a few times first and maybe we’ll talk.

...

Harry Potter: Wait, why do Hogwarts faculty trust the Defense Professor when the first rule of wizardry is “Don’t trust the Defense Professor?”

Defense Professor: Because the Hogwarts faculty are fools. Trust is for the weak, anyhow. The only real currency is a totally trustless currency.

...

Defense Professor: Granger is, of course, trusting that The Adversary never controls Hogwarts, Gringotts, and the Ministry of Magic at the same time.

Ron Weasley: That seems pretty reasonable, though.

Defense Professor: You think a far-reaching conspiracy can’t simultaneously capture all your trusted institutions? I love the young and naive.

...

Defense Professor: [...] By the eldritch rites of S...
The dangers of dialectic
by PhilGoetz — 2014-08-05T20:02:25.531Z

I'm reading The Last Intellectuals: American culture in the age of academe by Russell Jacoby (1987). It contains many interesting and important observations and insights, but also much stupidity. By the last chapter, I was as interested in the question of how a person can be so smart and stupid at the same time as in the author's actual arguments.

Jacoby's thesis is that Intellectuals (I capitalize to denote a definition with scope local to the book) are socially-engaged intellectuals who stand outside institutions, culture, and class to critique society and call for change. Their natural habitat is the coffee shops of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and New York City, where they lived lives of social activism fueled by coffee, cigarettes, sex, poetry, and perhaps resentment. The species has gone extinct, driven out of urban areas by crime, high rent, and (literally) automobiles, and having been co-opted by the academic establishment. Academia provides would-be Intellectuals with a paycheck and possibly tenure, in exchange for their disengaging from politics and instead making only harmless, jargon-laden theoretical arguments readable only by other specialists. Jacoby documents that the generation of leftists since 1960 have retreated into purely academic arguments and politics; for instance, from 1959-1969, "the three leading political science journals published but one article on Vietnam".

The stupidity arises when he goes into detail about good guys versus bad guys. He blames all of the following for the decline of intellectualism:

the inherent conservatism of privately-funded colleges

high rent

crime

the automobile

suburbs

publish-or-perish

modernism and post-modernism

academic elitism (judging people's work by their institutional affiliations)

leftist ideals going mainstream

specialization (especially jargon and self-imposed isolation)

technology transfer ("capitalism")

grants ("academic capitalism")

quantitative science

Every person and every idea at play must be either for him or against him. He can never quite acknowledge the existence of conservative intellectuals, though he admits there are smart conservatives who have learned and activist journals; his vocabulary does not admit terms that don't have a single position on the conservative-leftist axis. "Intellectual" is a synonym for "leftist", which is a synonym for "Marxist". Everything that is n...
Why are people "put off by rationality"?
by Adam Zerner — 2014-08-05T18:15:03.905Z

I was reading reviews of HPMOR on Goodreads and I noticed that the people who didn't like the book were essentially "put off by the rationality". They thought Harry was arrogant and condescending.

Then I was thinking, a lot of people are "put off by rationality" for similar reasons. What a shame. There's a lot of value in spreading rationality, and this seems to be a big obstacle in doing so.

Any thoughts on how to make people less "put off by rationality"? I think the core issues are:

In some cases, people think it's rude to suggest to someone that they're wrong. (I have a vague idea of when, but am having trouble articulating it. Can anyone articulate this well?). Edit: EY has articulated (part?) of what I'm getting at. He calls it the status slapdown emotion.

People pattern-match the tone to "smart aleck"?
A Pragmatic Epistemology
by StephenR — 2014-08-05T05:43:35.056Z

For the past three thousand years epistemology has been about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Philosophers and scientists have continuously attempted to pinpoint the nature of truth, to find general logico-syntactic criteria for generating justified inferences, and to discover the true nature of reality. I happen to think that truth is overrated. And by that I don't mean that I'm a stereotypical postmodernist, prepared to say that all views are on equal footing (because after all, who can really say what's true and what isn't?). Instead I mean that I don't even think that the truth is a useful or coherent concept when stretched to accommodate what philosophers have tried to make it accommodate. It's not a malleable enough concept to have the generality that philosophers are asking of it. We need something else in its place.

A view similar to this is reservationism, which was first introduced[1] by Moldbug in A Reservationist Epistemology. If you haven't read it, I suggest at least skimming it before reading the rest of this post, but the basic idea is that you can try to cram reason into an explicit General Theory of Reason for as long as you like, but at best it will always be a special case of "common sense." I have mixed feelings about Moldbug's post. On the one hand, it's delightfully witty and I agree with the general thrust of the argument. On the other hand, I think you can go a bit farther to explain his "common sense" notion than he lets on, and the abrasiveness and vagueness of his writing are likely to cloak some of the finer points. And despite giving (likely unintentional) hints about what we might replace "truth" with, he never does criticise the concept of truth, although he obviously criticises general theories of truth.

Since I do depart from Moldbug, I'll call myself a pragmatist rather than a reservationist. I'll also give my pragmatism a slogan: "It's just a model."[2] What's just a model? Bayesianism, falsificationism, positivism, naturalism, physicalism, panpsychism, quantum mechanics, operant conditioning, phlogistic chemistry, Catholicism, atheism, Hinduism, category theory, number theory, constructive analysis ... we could go all day with obvious examples. Here are some other examples: "Bayesian reasoners are optimal," "loop quantum gravity will give us a theory of everything," "a sentence is meaningfu...
Causal Inference Sequence Part II: Graphical Models
by Anders_H — 2014-08-04T23:10:02.285Z

(Part 2 of a Sequence on Applied Causal Inference. Follow-up to Part 1)

Saturated and Unsaturated Models

A model is a restriction on the possible states of the world: By specifying a model, you make a claim that you have knowledge about what the world does not look like.

To illustrate this, if you have two binary predictors A and B, there are four groups defined by A and B, and four different values of E[Y|A,B]. Therefore, the regression E[Y|A,B] = β0 + β1*A + β2*B + β3 * A * B is not a real model : There are four parameters and four values of E[Y|A,B], so the regression is saturated. In other words, the regression does not make any assumptions about the joint distribution of A, B and Y. Running this regression in statistical software will simply give you exactly the same estimates as you would have obtained if you manually looked in each of the four groups defined by A and B, and estimated the mean of Y.

If we instead fit the regression model E[Y|A,B] = β0 + β1*A + β2*B , we are making an assumption: We are assuming that there is no interaction between A and B on the average value of Y. In contrast to the previous regression, this is a true model: It makes the assumption that the value of β3 is 0. In other words, we are saying that the data did not come from a distribution where β3 is not equal to 0. If this assumption is not true, the model is wrong: We would have excluded the true state of the world

In general, whenever you use models, think first about what the saturated model looks like, and then add assumptions by asking what parameters you can reasonably assume are equal to a specific value (such as zero). The same type of logic applies to g

...
Meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup
by Pablo — 2014-08-04T22:00:08.749Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup

WHEN:
09 August 2014 04:00:00PM (-0300)

WHERE:
Roseti 1380, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

This will be our fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup.

On this occasion, Pablo will give a brief introductory presentation about effective altruism, followed by discussion. Optional reading material:

Luke Muehlhauser: Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism

Will MacAskill: What is Effective Altruism

Holden Karnofsky: Effective Altruism

Ben Kuhn: A Critique of Effective Altruism

The meeting will take place at GarageLab.

To stay informed about future meetups, please subscribe to our Google group.

Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup
LINK-Robot apocalypse taken (somewhat) seriously
by polymathwannabe — 2014-08-04T16:32:24.937Z

"Even a non-anthropomorphic human intelligence still could pose threats to mankind, but they are probably manageable threats. The greatest problem is that such artificial intelligence may be indifferent to human welfare. Thus, for instance, unless otherwise programmed, it could solve problems in ways that could lead to harm against humans. But indifference, rather than innate malevolence, is much more easily cured. Artificial intelligence can be programmed to weigh human values in its decision making. The key will be to assure such programming."

More at:

http://www.businessinsider.com/robot-apocalypse-2014-7
Knightian Uncertainty: Bayesian Agents and the MMEU rule
by So8res — 2014-08-04T14:05:47.758Z

Recently, I found myself in a conversation with someone advocating the use of Knightian uncertainty. We both agreed that there's no point in singling out some of your uncertainty as "special" unless you treat it differently.

I am under the impression that most advice from advocates of Knightian uncertainty can be taken to heart in a Bayesian framework, and so I find the concept of "Knightian uncertainty" uncompelling. My friend, who I'm anonymizing as "Sir Percy", claims that he does treat Knightian uncertainty differently from normal uncertainty, and so he needs to make the distinction. Unlike an aspiring Bayesian reasoner, who attempts to maximize expected value, he maximizes the minimum expected value given his Knightian uncertainty. This is the MMEU rule motivated previously.

This surprised me: is it possible for a rational agent to refuse to maximize expected utility? My reflexive reaction was simple:

If you're a rational agent and you don't think you're maximizing expected utility, then you've misplaced your "utility" label.

Sir Percy had a response ready:

That can't be. Remember Sir Percy's coin toss. A coin has been tossed, and the event "H" is "the coin came up heads". Consider the following two bets:

Pay 50¢ to be payed $1.10 if H

Pay 50¢ to be payed $1.10 if ¬H

I don't know whether the coin was biased, I know only that my credence is in the interval [0.4, 0.6]. When considering the first bet, I notice that the probability of H may be 0.4, in which case the bet is expected to lose me 6¢. When considering the second bet, I notice that the probability of H may be 0.6, in which case the bet is expected to lose me 6¢. But when considering both together, I see that I will win 10¢ with certainty. So I reject each bet if presented individually, but I will pay up to 10¢ to play the pair.

As you can see, my preferences change under agglomeration of bets. It's not possible to view me as a Bayesian reasoner maximizing expected utility, because there is no credence you can assign to H such that a Bayesian reasoner shares my preferences. I can't be maximizing expected utility, no matter where you put your labels.

My rejection was vague and unformed at the time. I've since fleshed it out, and it will be presented below. But before continuing, see if you can spot my argument on your own:

My friend believes that H occured with p...
Open thread, August 4 - 10, 2014
by polymathwannabe — 2014-08-04T12:20:18.540Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), 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.

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Rationality Quotes August 2014
by RolfAndreassen — 2014-08-04T03:12:33.667Z

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.

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.