trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Madrid - Rationality lecture and activities
by Pablo Villalobos — 2017-04-15T22:19:17.030Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madrid - Rationality lecture and activities

WHEN:
21 April 2017 05:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Ciudad Universitaria, Plaza Ciencias, 3, 28040 Madrid

Next Friday, we will give a small lecture about rationality at the mathematics faculty of the Complutense University of Madrid. After that, we will have some discussion and/or other activities.

The specific classroom is not known yet, but I will post it as soon as possible.

Discussion article for the meetup : Madrid - Rationality lecture and activities
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games
by rocurley — 2017-04-15T20:19:25.041Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games

WHEN:
17 April 2017 06:15:00PM (-0700)

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

We’re trying a new format this week!

Some people don’t like board games, and based on our straw poll at the recent meta meetup, most of those people seem to like group singing. So we’re gonna try doing a meetup with both.

We have a variety of games, but feel free to bring your own.

We’ll also bring lyrics for some songs to sing together. If there’s anything you really like singing and think other people might know, please feel free to bring it or a link to lyrics for it that we can pull up. A rhythm instrument might be nice to bring, iff. you know the particular songs we’re doing well enough to keep up easily.

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: Board Games
Bad Religion
by Jacob Falkovich — 2017-04-15T05:53:52.000Z

Accusing something of being like a religion is like a religion.

It’s a shared cultural practice, that reinforces a group’s confidence in the parts of their worldview that provide an order to existence, while facilitating dismissal of contradictory evidence.

– Rob Wiblin

A couple of weeks ago Tyler Cowen accused the Rationality community of being a religion. I used to think that Tyler Cowen is a brilliant thinker™. After he said all that, I’m absolutely sure of it!

I initially read it as pure trolling: a lot of rationalists came from online atheist circles, and our “Holy Scripture” has a whole book about how to avoid becoming a religion. Calling rationality a religion is a cheaper shot than Jim Beam. See also: anyone with 10 karma on r/pol can free associate for 30 seconds and contrive a clever sounding argument why social justice warriors are the real racists. But calling SJW “racist” isn’t constructive criticism, it’s just what you say to get people riled up.

Tyler, however, knows exactly whom to troll. Accusing rationalists of anything whatsoever is great fun. People who dislike rationalists will retweet and comment “lol thos n3rds”, while actual rationalists will write long essays interpreting anything you say in the most charitable possible terms while suggesting that your disagreements lie merely in diverging readings of Plato’s Republic. Calling out rationalists is an enjoyable pastime, I used to do it myself on LessWrong!

But at the end of the day, Tyler actually loves the rationality community and wants us to be happy. With a single remark, he made rationalists bond together, rekindled our community pride, and provided all of us with something fun to blog about for a week.

Bravo, sir!

Credit: Marcia Hunter

There’s just one problem: someone will actually start in rationality hoping to find a religion, and they’ll be hella disappointed. Rationality is a crap religion.

The first job of any religion worth its name is to provide its followers with an outgroup that’s fun to hate. A religion that I am devoted to myself, Carolina Basketball, excels at this. We have our holy temple, our communal worship, our sixth coming. But really, the joy of the Tar Heel way is hating Duke. I don’t remember whom UNC lost to in my first year on campus, but I remember that Lehigh ...
LessWrong and Miri mentioned in major German newspaper's article on Neoreactionaries
by -necate- — 2017-04-14T08:20:53.430Z

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of germanies largest newspapers has mentioned LessWrong and Miri today in an article on the neoreactionary movement. I thought this might be interesting for some of you, so I translated the passages related to LessWrong.

After introducing the neoreactionary movement the article contains the following pararaph:

It did not happen by chance that the seed of this ideology, that now presents itself on various websites were blogs such as Overcomming Bias and Less Wrong, which deal with artificial intelligence and the Idea to reach immortality with the help of technology("Transhumanism"). The "Martial Art of Rationality" which is practised there, tries not mainly to make machines smarter by using the human intellect, but to change human rationality by using the anticipated machine intelligence, according to computer-researcher Eliezer Yudkoswsky. "We need to apply science to our intuitions, we need to use abstract knowledge to correct our mental movements"

Yudkoswsky has personally distanced himself from the neoreactionary movement, but the approach to see the logic of computers as standard of measurement for the human thinking was key for this movement in its try to distance itself from the current intellectual history that lead to the liberal mainstream.

It then goes on to talk more about key figures from the neoreactionary movement and then contains a paragraph on Miri.

Yudkowsky founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, with the money of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, which focusses on the development of a benevolent AI. It should be benevolent, because it will have power over people, when it gets smarter than them. For the neoreactionaries, Intelligence is necessarily related to politics. based on the concept of human biodiversity, they believe that social and economical differences are caused and justified by a genetic difference in intelligence among ethnic groups. They reject the idea of a common human nature.

The article then goes on to talk more about the neoreactionary movement and ends by relating it to the trump administration, by mentioning that steve banon has contacted a prominent advocate of the movement.

For those of you who can read german here is the link to the full article: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-digital-debatte/neoreaktionaere-im-silicon-valley-14...
Meetup : Chicago Rationality Meeting: Applied Rationality Training
by mingyuan — 2017-04-14T00:08:03.990Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Meeting: Applied Rationality Training

WHEN:
16 April 2017 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Harper Memorial Library Room 148, 1116 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637

The Chicago rationality group meets every Sunday from 1-3 PM in Room 148 of Harper Memorial Library. Though we meet on the University of Chicago campus, anyone is welcome to attend.

For the next few weeks I will be giving lessons in applied rationality! This week's lesson will be introductory and will include trigger action planning, and we'll see where it goes from there based on people's interests.

We also have a new Google Group - request to be added if you're interested in rationality-related events in the Chicago area and I'll approve you!

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Rationality Meeting: Applied Rationality Training
ALBA: can you be "aligned" at increased "capacity"?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-04-13T19:25:12.000Z

I think that Paul Christiano's ALBA proposal is good in practice, but has conceptual problems in principle.

Specifically, I don't think it makes sense to talk about bootstrapping an "aligned" agent to one that is still "aligned" but that has an increased capacity.

The main reason being that I don't see "aligned" as being a definition that makes sense distinct from capacity.

These are not the lands of your forefathers

Here's a simple example: let r be a reward function that is perfectly aligned with human happiness within ordinary circumstances (and within a few un-ordinary circumstances that humans can think up).

Then the initial agent - B0, a human - trains a reward r1 for an agent A1. This agent is limited in some way - maybe it doesn't have much speed or time - but the aim is for r1 to ensure that A1 is aligned with B0.

Then the capacity of A1 is increased to B1, a slow powerful agent. It computers the reward r2 to ensure the alignment of A2, and so on.

The nature of the Bj agents is not defined - they might be algorithms calling Ai for i≤j as subroutines, humans may be involved, and so on.

If the humans are unimaginative and don't deliberately seek out more extreme and exotic test cases, the best case scenario is for ri→r as i→∞.

And eventually there will be an agent An that is powerful enough to overwhelm the whole system and take over. It will do this in full agreement with Bn−1, because they share the same objective. And then An will push the world into extra-ordinary circumstance and proceed to maximise r, with likely disastrous results for us humans.

The nature of the problem

So what went wrong? At what point did the agents go out of alignment?

In one sense, at An. In another sense, at A1 (and, in another interesting sense, at B0, the human). The reward r was aligned, as long as the agent stayed near the bounds of the ordinary. As soon as it was no longer restricted to that, it went out of alignment, not because of a goal drift, but because of a capacity increase.
ALBA: can you be "aligned" at increased "capacity"?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-04-13T19:23:43.809Z

Crossposted at the Intelligent Agents Forum.

I think that Paul Christiano's ALBA proposal is good in practice, but has conceptual problems in principle.

Specifically, I don't think it makes sense to talk about bootstrapping an "aligned" agent to one that is still "aligned" but that has an increased capacity.

The main reason being that I don't see "aligned" as being a definition that makes sense distinct from capacity.

These are not the lands of your forefathers

Here's a simple example: let r be a reward function that is perfectly aligned with human happiness within ordinary circumstances (and within a few un-ordinary circumstances that humans can think up).

Then the initial agent - B0, a human - trains a reward r1 for an agent A1. This agent is limited in some way - maybe it doesn't have much speed or time - but the aim is for r1 to ensure that A1 is aligned with B0.

Then the capacity of A1 is increased to B1, a slow powerful agent. It computers the reward r2 to ensure the alignment of A2, and so on.

The nature of the Bj agents is not defined - they might be algorithms calling Ai for i ≤ j as subroutines, humans may be involved, and so on.

If the humans are unimaginative and don't deliberately seek out more extreme and exotic test cases, the best case scenario is for ri → r as i → ∞.

And eventually there will be an agent An that is powerful enough to overwhelm the whole system and take over. It will do this in full agreement with Bn-1, because they share the same objective. And then An will push the world into extra-ordinary circumstance and proceed to maximise r, with likely disastrous results for us humans.

The nature of the problem

So what went wrong? At what point did the agents go out of alignment?

In one sense, at An. In another sense, at A1 (and, in another interesting sense, at B0, the human). The reward r was aligned, as long as the agent stayed near the bounds of the ordinary. As soon as it was no longer restricted to that, it went out of alignment, not because of a goal drift, but because of a capacity increase.
Cheating Omega
by gilch — 2017-04-13T03:39:10.943Z

In Newcomb's problem, a superintelligence called Omega shows you two boxes, A and B, and offers you the choice of taking only box A, or both boxes A and B. Omega has put $1,000 in box B. If Omega thinks you will take box A only, he has put $1,000,000 in it. Otherwise he has left it empty. Omega has played this game many times, and has never been wrong in his predictions about whether someone will take both boxes or not.

Though a controversial position, my audience has probably heard by now that the "rational" answer is to one-box. (If not, see Newcomb's problem on the wiki).

I can do better.

The Deal

See, I've heard about Omega. I'm prepared. I installed the Universe Splitter app on my iPhone. It's basically a quantum coin flip: both outcomes happen in their respective Everett branches.

Now, I've pre-committed that after Omega offers me The Deal, I'll make two quantum coin flips. If I get two tails in a row, I'll two-box. Otherwise, I'll one-box.

It's an interesting finding of game theory that sometimes a winning strategy is to deliberately limit yourself. If you're playing a game of chicken for the fate of the human race, the winning strategy is to defiantly rip off the steering wheel and throw it out the window before your opponent does.

I've gained a third option in Newcomb's game by deliberately limiting my knowledge of my future actions. I physically can't know at the present time if I'll choose one box or two. (As both outcomes do, in fact, happen assuming Many Worlds.) And crucially, Omega physically can't know that either. Not until after it decides the contents of box A.

Therefore, Omega must predict that I'll one-box. After all, it's the higher probability. There's a 75% chance. If you have a large urn filled with three purple skittles for each yellow skittle, then your most accurate prediction of a sequence of four draws must rationally be PPPP, rather than some permutation of YPPP, as one might naiively expect.

There are now four possible outcomes:

HH = $1,000,000
HT = $1,000,000
TH = $1,000,000
TT = $1,001,000

The expected value is $4,001,000 / 4 = $1,000,250. I just cheated Omega out of an expected $250 over one-boxing.

Having proven a strategy superior to one-boxing, I can claim that if your decision theory just one-boxes without pre-committing to use quantum dice, something is wrong with it.

Even better

Of course, we can do even b...
Escalator Action
by Zvi — 2017-04-12T22:25:43.000Z

Epistemic Status: Slow ride. Take it easy.

You Memba Elevator Action? I memba.

A recent study (link is to NY Times) came out saying that we should not walk on escalators, because not walking is faster.

From the article:

The train pulls into Pennsylvania Station during the morning rush, the doors open and you make a beeline for the escalators.

You stick to the left and walk up the stairs, figuring you can save precious seconds and get a bit of exercise.

But the experts are united in this: You’re doing it wrong, seizing an advantage at the expense and safety of other commuters. Boarding an escalator two by two and standing side by side is the better approach.

We will ignore the talk about which method is better for the escalator, which seems downright silly, and focus on the main event: They are explicitly saying that when you choose to walk up the stairs, you are doing it wrong.

Since walking is trivially and obviously better than walking, this result is a little suspicious. And by a little suspicious, I mean almost certainly either wrong, highly misleading or both.

Certainly individually, on the margin, for yourself you are quite obviously doing it right.

Consider a largely empty escalator. If Alice gets on the escalator and sits there, it takes her 40 seconds. If she walks up the left side, and no one is in her way, it takes her 26 (numbers from article). Given everyone else’s actions, if she wants to get from Point A to Point B quickly, and I strongly suspect that she does, she should walk up the escalator.

Consider an escalator in the standard style. On the left people walk up, on the right people stand. If there is enough space for all, then nothing Alice does impacts anyone else unless she blocks the left side, so assume there is not enough room. In that situation, demand for the right side almost always exceeds demand for the left side, so Alice is almost certainly going to not only get to the top faster by walking, she is helping everyone else get there faster too. Yay Alice.

Consider an escalator where people are already standing on both sides without walking, Alice will hit a wall of people if she tries to walk. She now is faced with either asking people to let her through, and paying that social cost, or not doing so. If she does ask, if she gets turned down no one moves any slower or faster. If people agree to move, then

...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Visiting Museums
by RobinZ — 2017-04-12T14:45:21.086Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Visiting Museums

WHEN:
16 April 2017 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

The AI Risk/Safety meetup is being postponed because the person leading the discussion will be out of town.

This week, we will be meeting in the courtyard to walk together to a museum.

If the weather is ill suited for traveling outdoors, we will walk through the Portrait Gallery(/American Art Museum).

Upcoming meetups:

Apr. 23: Slate Star Codex

Apr. 30: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Visiting Museums
Meetup : Meetup 15 (for real this time) - Trigger Action Planning
by  — 2017-04-12T12:52:40.546Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup 15 (for real this time) - Trigger Action Planning

WHEN:
16 April 2017 03:10:01PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands

I'll do it at some point.

I'll answer this message later.

I could try this sometime.

For most people, all of these thoughts have the same result. The thing in question likely never gets done - or if it does, it's only after remaining undone for a long time and causing a considerable amount of stress. Leaving the "when" ambiguous means that there isn't anything that would propel you into action.

What kinds of thoughts would help avoid this problem? This is the domain of Trigger Action Planning/Plans or TAP(s), which is our topic of discussion for Easter Sunday. See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup 15 (for real this time) - Trigger Action Planning
Open thread, Apr. 10 - Apr. 16, 2017
by MrMind — 2017-04-11T06:57:34.883Z

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.
Akrasia Tactics Review 3: The Return of the Akrasia
by MalcolmOcean — 2017-04-10T15:05:10.711Z

About three and a half years ago, polutropon ran an akrasia tactics review, following the one orthonormal ran three and a half years prior to that: an open-ended survey asking Less Wrong posters to give numerical scores to productivity techniques that they'd tried, with the goal of getting a more objective picture of how well different techniques work (for the sort of people who post here). Since it's been years since the others and the rationality community has grown and developed significantly while retaining akrasia/motivation/etc as a major topic, I thought it'd be useful to have a new one!

(Malcolm notes: it seems particularly likely that this time there are likely to be some noteworthy individually-invented techniques this time, as people seem to be doing a lot of that sort of thing these days!)

A lightly modified version of the instructions from the previous post:

Note what technique you've tried. Techniques can be anything from productivity systems (Getting Things Done, Complice) to social incentives (precommitting in front of friends) to websites or computer programs (Beeminder, Leechblock) to chemical aids (Modafinil, Caffeine). If it's something that you can easily link to information about, please provide a link and I'll add it when I list the technique; if you don't have a link, describe it in your comment and I'll link that. It could also be a cognitive technique you developed or copied from a friend, which might not have a clear name but you can give it one if you like!

Give your experience with it a score from -10 to +10 (0 if it didn't change the status quo, 10 if it ended your akrasia problems forever with no unwanted side effects, negative scores if it actually made your life worse, -10 if it nearly killed you). For simplicity's sake, I'll only include reviews that give numerical scores.

Describe your experience with it, including any significant side effects. Please also say approximately how long you've been using it, or if you don't use it anymore how long you used it before giving up.

Every so often, I'll combine all the data back into the main post, listing every technique that's been reviewed at least twice with the number of reviews, average score, standard deviation and common effects. I'll do my best to combine similar techniques appropriately, but it'd be appreciated if you could try to organize it a bit by ...