trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
We Don't Drink Vodka (LW Moscow report)
by Yuu — 2013-03-18T18:12:24.356Z

And we don't have bears playing balalaikas. Well, I would like to tell you about Moscow rationality community after all, not about some B movie featuring crazy Russians.

Moscow community have grown from 5 people on my first meetup to 17 on the last one. And I believe we have possibility to grow even more. Moscow is a big city and it must have many smart people who can start to study rationality.

Our story began in May 2012, when I gathered the people for the first time. Spring meetup announcements hadn't attracted many new members, so we gathered, discussed our site with Russian translations of LessWrong Sequences and made some plans. Our first venue was one of the Subway restaurants in Moscow.

The next milestone in our development was September meetup, when I started to use on-line form to collect information from potential members of our group. Or maybe for some other reason we had got new faces, and even recurring ones. I also told everyone than we should practice rationality skills doing some exercises. Of course we had a lot of theories and ideas to duscuss, but we had to be closer to the real world. That's why we started to practice our rationality skills. We have approximately 8-10 people on each meetup during this fall.

Soon enough this practice yielded good results, new members became heroes and started to improve our ways of training and create new exercises. In January, 2013 one member of our group proposed big and comfortable office room, and we moved there. Our meetups suddenly became more organized and more new members appeared — this year we have 13 people on average.

As for exercises, we practice calibration, tabooing, reframing, information value estimation and five minute debiasing. I will describe our versions of exercises below, and five minute debiasing you can find in the “How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup” guidelines. Only a few people from our group can speak English well enough to come to CFAR workshops. I can't thank CFAR staff enough for their support for exercises adaptation. I hope they will be even more helpful in the future.

We have also started to design game that can teach group members some rationality skills. You can find some examples of interesting and fun games in the same guidelines I mentioned, but we want to develop games specially for the skills improvement. Of course even educatio

...
Arguing Orthogonality, published form
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-03-18T16:19:02.235Z

My paper "General purpose intelligence: arguing the Orthogonality thesis" has been accepted for publication in the December edition of Analysis and Metaphysics. Since that's some time away, I thought I'd put the final paper up here; the arguments are similar to those here, but this is the final version, for critique and citation purposes.

General purpose intelligence: arguing the Orthogonality thesis

STUART ARMSTRONG
stuart.armstrong@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School
Philosophy Department, University of Oxford

In his paper “The Superintelligent Will”, Nick Bostrom formalised the Orthogonality thesis: the idea that the final goals and intelligence levels of artificial agents are independent of each other. This paper presents arguments for a (narrower) version of the thesis. It proceeds through three steps. First it shows that superintelligent agents with essentially arbitrary goals can exist in our universe – both as theoretical impractical agents such as AIXI and as physically possible real-world agents. Then it argues that if humans are capable of building human-level artificial intelligences, we can build them with an extremely broad spectrum of goals. Finally it shows that the same result holds for any superintelligent agent we could directly or indirectly build. This result is relevant for arguments about the potential motivations of future agents: knowing an artificial agent is of high intelligence does not allow us to presume that it will be moral, we will need to figure out its goals directly.

Keywords: AI; Artificial Intelligence; efficiency; intelligence; goals; orthogonality

1 The Orthogonality thesis

Scientists and mathematicians are the stereotypical examples of high intelligence humans. But their morality and ethics have been all over the map. On modern political scales, they can be left- (Oppenheimer) or right-wing (von Neumann) and historically they have slotted into most of the political groupings of their period (Galois, Lavoisier). Ethically, they have ranged from very humanitarian (Darwin, Einstein outside of his private life), through amoral (von Braun) to commercially belligerent (Edison) and vindictive (Newton). Few scientists h

...
Caring about possible people in far Worlds
by Neotenic — 2013-03-18T14:49:06.729Z

This relates to my recent post on existence in many-worlds.

I care about possible people. My child, if I ever have one, is one of them, and it seems monstrous not to care about one's children. There are many distinct ways of being a possible person. 1)You can be causally connected to some actual people in the actual world in some histories of that world. 2)You can be a counterpart of an actual person on a distinct world without causal connections 3)You can be distinct from all actual individuals, and in a causally separate possible world. 4)You can be acausally connectable to actual people, but in distinct possible worlds.

Those 4 ways are not separate partitions without overlap, sometimes they overlap, and I don't believe they exhaust the scope of possible people. The most natural question to ask is "should we care equally about about all kinds of possible people". Some people are seriously studying this, and let us hope they give us accurate ways to navigate our complex universe. While we wait, some worries seem relevant:

1) The Multiverse is Sadistic Argument:

P1.1: If all possible people do their morally relevant thing (call it exist, if you will) and

P1.2: We cannot affect (causally or acausally) what is or not possible

C1.0: Then we cannot affect the morally relevant thing.

2) The Multiverse is Paralyzing (related)

P2.1: We have reason to care about X-Risk

P2.2: Worlds where X-Risk obtains are possible

P2.3: We have nearly as much reason to worry about possible non-actual1 worlds where X-risk obtains, as we have to actual worlds where it obtains.

P2.4: There are infinitely more worlds where X-risk obtains that are possible than there are actual1

C2.0: Infinitarian Paralysis

1Actual here means belonging to the same quantum branching history as you. If you think you have many quantum successors, all of them are actual, same for predecessors, and people who inhabit your Hubble volume.

3) Reality-Fluid Can't Be All That Is Left Argument

P3.1) If all possible people do their morally relevant thing

P3.2) The way in which we can affect what is possible is by giving some subsets of it more units of reality-fluid, or quantum measure

P3.3) In fact reality-fluid is a ratio, such as a percentage of successor worlds of kind A or kind B for a particular world W

P3.4) A possible World3 with 5% reality-fluid in relation t...
Meetup : Thursday Meetup at UB
by StonesOnCanvas — 2013-03-18T12:04:36.636Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Thursday Meetup at UB

WHEN:
21 March 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
University at Buffalo-North Campus, Rm 124 Capen Hall Buffalo,NY

So I recently read Jackdaws' "The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo" and I think it would be a great discussion topic.

I would also like to practice finding errors in reasoning. But in order to specifically combat the habit of motivated skepticism, I would like to find articles or blog posts where you actually agree with the conclusions of the paper, but still find fault with the reasoning used to support it (Brownie points if you can find an argument you were once a strong proponent of).

New Location: Rooms 123-125 Capen are in the Capen Library. These are "group study rooms" located in the computer section on the first floor. There is no way to sign them out in advance, so I will try to get one of them early. If I can't, I will leave a note on the door that will lead you a some other location (there are group study rooms on the 3rd floor too, and often empty class rooms also)

Discussion article for the meetup : Thursday Meetup at UB
Meetup : South Bay Meetup: Be Specific
by fiddlemath — 2013-03-18T07:27:26.606Z

Discussion article for the meetup : South Bay Meetup: Be Specific

WHEN:
19 March 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
278 Castro St, Mountain View, CA

"Being specific" doesn't seem like a skill that we can say much about, in the abstract.
(Though this post does anyway.)
Nonetheless, we usually aren't all that specific. How might we practice to become more specific?

I have a few ideas, a couple of concrete exercises, and at least one moderately amusing game to try in this vein. You all get to try them!

If you're at the Quixey door and need to be let in, you can call me at 608.698.2959.

See you there!

If you're in the San Francisco Bay area and reading this, consider joining the Bay Area Less Wrong mailing list. Regular meetups in Mountain View are Berkeley are announced and discussed there, and other events of interest to the local community.

Discussion article for the meetup : South Bay Meetup: Be Specific
[SEQ RERUN] Moore's Paradox
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-18T04:21:38.309Z

Today's post, Moore's Paradox was originally published on 08 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People often mistake reasons for endorsing a proposition for reasons to believe that proposition.

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 Belief in Self-Deception, 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.
Population Ethics Shouldn't Be About Maximizing Utility
by Ghatanathoah — 2013-03-18T02:35:56.727Z

let me suggest a moral axiom with apparently very strong intuitive support, no matter what your concept of morality: morality should exist. That is, there should exist creatures who know what is moral, and who act on that. So if your moral theory implies that in ordinary circumstances moral creatures should exterminate themselves, leaving only immoral creatures, or no creatures at all, well that seems a sufficient reductio to solidly reject your moral theory.

-Robin Hanson

I agree strongly with the above quote, and I think most other readers will as well. It is good for moral beings to exist and a world with beings who value morality is almost always better than one where they do not. I would like to restate this more precisely as the following axiom: A population in which moral beings exist and have net positive utility, and in which all other creatures in existence also have net positive utility, is always better than a population where moral beings do not exist.

While the axiom that morality should exist is extremely obvious to most people, there is one strangely popular ethical system that rejects it: total utilitarianism. In this essay I will argue that Total Utilitarianism leads to what I will call the Genocidal Conclusion, which is that there are many situations in which it would be fantastically good for moral creatures to either exterminate themselves, or greatly limit their utility and reproduction in favor of the utility and reproduction of immoral creatures. I will argue that the main reason consequentialist theories of population ethics produce such obviously absurd conclusions is that they continue to focus on maximizing utility1 in situations where it is possible to create new creatures. I will argue that pure utility maximization is only a valid ethical theory for "special case" scenarios where the population is static. I will propose an alternative theory for population ethics I call "ideal consequentialism" or "ideal utilitarianism" which avoids the Genocidal Conclusion and may also avoid the more famous Repugnant Conclusion.

I will begin my argument by pointing to a common problem in population ethics known as the Mere Addition Paradox (MAP) and the Repugnant Conclusion. Most Less Wrong readers will already be familiar with this problem, so I do not think I need to elaborate on it. You may also be familiar with a even stronger variati...
Meetup : Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup
by Nova_Division — 2013-03-17T21:49:53.378Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup

WHEN:
29 March 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1314 Hosea L Williams Drive NE, Atlanta, GA 30317

Let's get together and rock some rationality. Snacks, games, and various other fun activities will follow the official business. New members welcome! No reading or other preparation is required, just come and join in!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup
Meetup : Toronto: fight/flight/freeze experiences
by Giles — 2013-03-17T11:58:07.953Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto: fight/flight/freeze experiences

WHEN:
19 March 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Tim Horton's, 26 Dundas Street, Toronto, ON

Tim Hortons on Victoria Street near Dundas station. We'll be at the back by the paperclip sign.

The "fight or flight" response evolved to help us cope with life-threatening situations, which called for quick judgement and maybe aggression or bursts of energy. But it comes at a price - when in this mode, blood is diverted away from the parts of the brain that deal with empathy, social relationships and long term planning.

This doesn't sound so good for rationality! In the modern environment, we can go into fight or flight response when it really isn't necessary (or a mild version of it, if we suffer from chronic stress). In this meetup we'll be sharing stories about the fight/flight/freeze response, how well we handled it and what the consequences were!

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto: fight/flight/freeze experiences
Bayesian Adjustment Does Not Defeat Existential Risk Charity
by steven0461 — 2013-03-17T08:50:02.096Z

(This is a long post. If you’re going to read only part, please read sections 1 and 2, subsubsection 5.6.2, and the conclusion.)

1. Introduction

Suppose you want to give some money to charity: where can you get the most bang for your philanthropic buck? One way to make the decision is to use explicit expected value estimates. That is, you could get an unbiased (averaging to the true value) estimate of what each candidate for your donation would do with an additional dollar, and then pick the charity associated with the most promising estimate.

Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell, an organization that rates charities for cost-effectiveness, disagreed with this approach in two posts he made in 2011. This is a response to those posts, addressing the implications for existential risk efforts.

According to Karnofsky, high returns are rare, and even unbiased estimates don’t take into account the reasons why they’re rare. So in Karnofsky's view, our favorite charity shouldn’t just be one associated with a high estimate, it should be one that supports the estimate with robust evidence derived from multiple independent lines of inquiry.1 If a charity’s returns are being estimated in a way that intuitively feels shaky, maybe that means the fact that high returns are rare should outweigh the fact that high returns were estimated, even if the people making the estimate were doing an excellent job of avoiding bias.

Karnofsky’s first post, Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They’re Unbiased), explains how one can mitigate this issue by supplementing an explicit estimate with what Karnofsky calls a “Bayesian Adjustment” (henceforth “BA”). This method treats estimates as merely noisy measures of true values. BA starts with a prior representing what cost-effectiveness values are out there in the general population of charities, then the prior is updated into a posterior in standard Bayesian fashion.

Karnofsky provides some example graphs, illustrating his preference for robustness. If the estimate error is small, the posterior lies close to the explicit estimate. But if the estimate error is large, the posterior lies close to the prior. In other words, if there simply aren’t many high-return charities out there, a sharp estimate can be taken seriously, but a noisy estimate that sa...
Significance and motivation
by KatjaGrace — 2013-03-16T06:39:28.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

Over at philosophical disquisitions, John Danaher is discussing Aaron Smuts’ response to Bernard Williams’ argument that immortality would be tedious. Smuts’ thesis, in Danaher’s words, is a familiar one:

Immortality would lead to a general motivational collapse because it would sap all our decisions of significance.

This is interestingly at odds with my observations, which suggests that people are much more motivated to do things that seem unimportant, and have to constantly press themselves to do important things once in a while. Most people have arbitrary energy for reading unimportant online articles, playing computer games, and talking aimlessly. Important articles, serious decisions, and momentous conversations get put off.

Unsurprisingly then, people also seem to take more joy from apparently long-run insignificant events. Actually I thought this was the whole point of such events. For instance people seem to quite like cuddling and lazing in the sun and eating and bathing and watching movies. If one had any capacity to get bored of these things, I predict it would happen within the first century. While significant events also bring joy, they seem to involve a lot more drudgery in preceding build up.

So it seems to me that living forever could only take the pressure off and make people more motivated and happy. Except inasmuch as the argument is faulty in other ways, e.g. impending death is not the only time constraint on activities.

Have I missed something?
[SEQ RERUN] Belief in Self-Deception
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-16T05:58:43.062Z

Today's post, Belief in Self-Deception was originally published on 05 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Deceiving yourself is harder than it seems. What looks like a successively adopted false belief may actually be just a belief in false belief.

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 No, Really, I've Deceived Myself, 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 : Berlin social
by blob — 2013-03-15T20:06:05.570Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin social

WHEN:
23 March 2013 05:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
S Wuhletal, Berlin

We're meeting at my house again for a meetup on Saturday, March 23rd. Everyone is welcome. Please check the thread on our mailing list for details and the precise location.

Primarily, this is a social event where we talk and play games. There's one extra activity on the agenda:

Everyone shares one goal. No matter whether it's something big or a short-term thing. State it, explain why, have a 2-minute pause to think, talk about how to achieve it as well as about alternatives for getting the same effect a different way.

Food worked out really well last time, we'll try that again unchanged. That means I'll make some soup, we will probably order pizza and you are encouraged to bring something tasty. It's perfectly ok to bring just a little, last time there was a lot left over.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin social
Programming the LW Study Hall
by ShannonFriedman — 2013-03-15T18:28:10.697Z

We've had considerable interest and uptake on the Less Wrong Study Hall, especially with informal timed Pomodoro sessions for everyone to synchronize on. Working together with a number of other visible faces, and your own face visible to them, does seem effective. Keeping the social chat to the 5 off minutes prevents this from turning into just another chatroom.
We've been using this Tinychat room, and implementing everything Pomodoro-related with manual typing. Is there anyone out there who's interested in taking this to the next level with some custom code, possibly via the Google Hangouts API (Javascript), so we can have the following nice features?

Synchronized, software-implemented Pomodoros for everyone.

Maybe one chat room with 20/5 and one with 45/5.

Actual enforcement of the "no chatting unless the Pomodoro is on" and/or muted microphones.

Chat rooms with an N-person limit (several people report being more productive in smaller groups, so we're not sure if N should be 5 or 10) and new chat rooms being spawned as earlier ones get full.

Moderatability (we've already had one troll). One person suggested the ability to +1/-1 one person per day, with a kick at -5. (Eliezer remarks that he expects this to be completely ineffective and that you need actual mods, maybe a group of trusted users.)

We only wish and dream that we could integrate with LW logins, but this would require LW development resources that apparently don't exist. Maybe with enough grotesque hackery we could have a page somewhere that you comment to confirm you're a Study Hall user, and the system could look up your karma from there to decide if you can cast +1/-1 user votes.

A custom page layout (which you don't get if you use Tinychat!) which has the watching participants lined up vertically on the left, so we can work on something while still easily seeing our friends.

A small line underneath everyone's image saying what they're currently working on.

Maybe a common room where people can initially talk about what they intend to work on. (Eliezer says: This needs either strong group norms or built-in limits on talk time to avoid becoming a social chat timesink.)

The ability to branch off small sub-chat rooms (maybe with limit 2 or 3) in case somebody wants to talk (about work!)

A welcome page (mockup) where people see the group

...