trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Dreams of Autarky
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-28T06:39:00.719Z

Today's post, Dreams of Autarky was originally published on November 27, 2008. A summary:

Some selections from a Robin Hanson essay on the tendency to assume that people in the future will be substantially autonomous.

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 Total Nano Domination, 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 : Durham NC meetup: Rationality Checklist
by therufs — 2012-11-28T06:27:35.671Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Rationality Checklist

WHEN: 29 November 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: Whole Foods Market, 621 Broad St., Durham NC 27705

We'll be reading, discussing, and checking the Checklist of Rationality Habits (http://lesswrong.com/lw/fc3/checklist_of_rationality_habits/). If you're feeling ambitious, look at the list in advance think of a few examples from your own life that correspond to checklist items. Zendo to follow as interest and time allow. Meet in the seating area (to the far right as you enter the building.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Rationality Checklist
[LINK] "Moral Machines" article in the New Yorker links to SI paper
by Antisuji — 2012-11-28T01:38:34.679Z

Link

Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.

That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems.

The discussion itself is mainly concerned with the behavior of self-driving cars and robot soldiers rather than FAI, but Marcus does obliquely reference the prickliness of the problem. After briefly introducing wireheading (presumably as an example of what can go wrong), he links to http://singularity.org/files/SaME.pdf, saying:

Almost any easy solution that one might imagine leads to some variation or another on the Sorceror’s Apprentice, a genie that’s given us what we’ve asked for, rather than what we truly desire.

He also mentions FHI and Yale Bioethics Center along with SingInst:

A tiny cadre of brave-hearted souls at Oxford, Yale, and the Berkeley California Singularity Institute are working on these problems, but the annual amount of money being spent on developing machine morality is tiny.

It's a mainstream introduction, and perhaps not the best or most convincing one, but I think it's a positive development that machine ethics is getting a serious treatment in the mainstream media.
Thoughts on designing policies for oneself
by John_Maxwell — 2012-11-28T01:27:36.337Z

Note: This was originally written in relation to this rather scary comment of lukeprog's on value drift. I'm now less certain that operant conditioning is a significant cause of value drift (leaning towards near/far type explanations), but I decided to share my thoughts on the topic of policy design anyway.

Several years ago, I had a reddit problem. I'd check reddit instead of working on important stuff. The more I browsed the site, the shorter my attention span got. The shorter my attention span got, the harder it was for me to find things that were enjoyable to read. Instead of being rejuvenating, I found reddit to be addictive, unsatisfying, and frustrating. Every time I thought to myself that I really should stop, there was always just one more thing to click on.

So I installed LeechBlock and blocked reddit at all hours. That worked really well... for a while.

Occasionally I wanted to dig up something I remembered seeing on reddit. (This wasn't always bad--in some cases I was looking up something related to stuff I was working on.) I tried a few different policies for dealing with this. All of them basically amounted to inconveniencing myself in some way or another whenever I wanted to dig something up.

After a few weeks, I no longer felt the urge to check reddit compulsively. And after a few months, I hardly even remembered what it was like to be an addict.

However, my inconvenience barriers were still present, and they were, well, inconvenient. It really was pretty annoying to make an entry in my notebook describing what I was visiting for and start up a different browser just to check something. I figured I could always turn LeechBlock on again if necessary, so I removed my self-imposed barriers. And slid back in to addiction.

After a while, I got sick of being addicted again and decided to do something about it (again). Interestingly, I forgot my earlier thought that I could just turn LeechBlock on again easily. Instead, thinking about LeechBlock made me feel hopeless because it seemed like it ultimately hadn't worked. But I did try it again, and the entire cycle then finished repeating itself: I got un-addicted, I removed LeechBlock, I got re-addicted.

This may seem like a surprising lack of self-awareness. All I can say is: Every second my brain g...
Should correlation coefficients be expressed as angles?
by Sniffnoy — 2012-11-28T00:05:50.347Z

Edit 11/28: Edited note at bottom to note that the random variables should have finite variance, and that this is essentially just L². Also some formatting changes.

This is something that has been bugging me for a while.

The correlation coefficient between two random variables can be interpreted as the cosine of the angle between them[0]. The higher the correlation, the more "in the same direction" they are. A correlation coefficient of one means they point in exactly the same direction, while -1 means they point in exactly opposite directions. More generally, a positive correlation coefficient means the two random variables make an acute angle, while a negative correlation means they make an obtuse angle. A correlation coefficient of zero means that they are quite literally orthogonal.

Everything I have said above is completely standard. So why aren't correlation coefficients commonly expressed as angles instead of as their cosines? It seems to me that this would make them more intuitive to process.

Certainly it would make various statements about them more intuitive. For instance "Even if A is positive correlated with B and B is positively correlated with C, A might be negatively correlated with C." This sounds counterintuitive, until you rephrase it as "Even if A makes an acute angle with B and B makes an acute angle with C, A might make an obtuse angle with C." Similarly, the geometric viewpoint makes it easier to make observations like "If A and B have correlation exceeding 1/√2 and so do B and C, then A and C are positively correlated" -- because this is just the statement that if A and B make an angle of less than 45° and so do B and C, then A and C make an angle of less than 90°.

Now when further processing is to be done with the correlation coefficients, one wants to leave them as correlation coefficients, rather than take their inverse cosines just to have to take their cosines again later. (I don't know that the angles you get this way are actually useful mathematically, and I suspect they mostly aren't.) My question rather is about when correlation coefficients are expressed to the reader, i.e. when they are considered as an end product. It seems to me that expressing them as angles would give people a better intuitive feel for them.

Or am I just entirely off-base here? ...
Meetup : 02/12 London Meetup
by philh — 2012-11-27T23:45:07.544Z

Discussion article for the meetup : 02/12 London Meetup

WHEN:
02 December 2012 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Holborn, London

A meetup in the Shakespeare's Head pub by Holborn tube station. Everyone is welcome.

There was talk of making these regular every-other-week events. If you'd like to come along but can't usually make Sundays at 2pm, please let us know and feel free to suggest an alternative slot.

Discussion article for the meetup : 02/12 London Meetup
What is your true decision metric? A look at medicinal chemists 
by brilee — 2012-11-27T19:43:05.609Z

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/11/27/how_do_chemist_think_that_they_judge_compounds.php

Some background: medicinal chemists are responsible for identifying drug candidates, usually by screening large (10^6) libraries of combinatorially generated molecules. Some of these hits turn out to be biologically active, and then it's up to the medicinal chemists to decide whether these hits are false positives or not, and further, to synthesize analogous compounds to see if they can tweak the biological activity of each compound.

It's in this 'synthesizing analogous compounds' step that subjective judgment comes in, with Lipinski's rule of five being the most 'basic' of the heuristics, and with most medicinal chemists adopting more and more complex heuristics. Or, as this paper shows, perhaps they're just deluding themselves and their true metric is something very simple, and after making their decision, they dress it up with fancy post-hoc rationalizations.
A definition of wireheading
by Anja — 2012-11-27T19:31:51.515Z

Wireheading has been debated on Less Wrong over and over and over again, and people's opinions seem to be grounded in strong intuitions. I could not find any consistent definition around, so I wonder how much of the debate is over the sound of falling trees. This article is an attempt to get closer to a definition that captures people's intuitions and eliminates confusion.

Typical Examples

Let's start with describing the typical exemplars of the category "Wireheading" that come to mind.

Stimulation of the brain via electrodes. Picture a rat in a sterile metal laboratory cage, electrodes attached to its tiny head, monotonically pushing a lever with its feet once every 5 seconds. In the 1950s Peter Milner and James Olds discovered that electrical currents, applied to the nucleus accumbens, incentivized rodents to seek repetitive stimulation to the point where they starved to death.

Humans on drugs. Often mentioned in the context of wireheading is heroin addiction. An even better example is the drug soma in Huxley's novel "Brave new world": Whenever the protagonists feel bad, they can swallow a harmless pill and enjoy "the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was!"

The experience machine. In 1974 the philosopher Robert Nozick created a thought experiment about a machine you can step into that produces a perfectly pleasurable virtual reality for the rest of your life. So how many of you would want to do that? To quote Zach Weiner: "I would not! Because I want to experience reality, with all its ups and downs and comedies and tragedies. Better to try to glimpse the blinding light of the truth than to dwell in the darkness... Say the machine actually exists and I have one? Okay I'm in."

An AGI resetting its utility function. Let's assume we create a powerful AGI able to tamper with its own utility function. It modifies the function to always output maximal utility. The AGI then goes to great lengths to enlarge the set of floating point numbers on the computer it is running on, to achieve even higher utility.

What do all these examples have in common? There is an agent in them that produces "counterfeit utility" that is potentially worthless compared to some other, idealized true set of goals.

Agency & Wirehead

...
Meetup : Montreal Meetup - Biases and Biased Boardgaming
by Paul_G — 2012-11-27T18:06:30.022Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Meetup - Biases and Biased Boardgaming

WHEN:
03 December 2012 03:57:30PM (-0500)

WHERE:
655 Avenue du Président Kennedy, Montreal, QC H3A 3H9

Another weekly meeting of the Montreal group!
We're going to be discussing different cognitive biases, and then if we have time, trying out biased boardgaming! Games of choice will probably be Pandemic and/or Shadowrift.
We'll be upstairs, with some sort of sign that says "LessWrong". Also, we'll have board games. Hopefully.
See you there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Meetup - Biases and Biased Boardgaming
Holding your own LW Solstice
by Raemon — 2012-11-27T16:03:30.053Z

Winter is coming, and with it, the Less Wrong Solstice, a celebration of humanity's progress over the centuries and how our relationship with sun and winter has changed.

There is, of course, the public meetup in NYC. But I've now had two different people, in different regions, discuss with me the possibility of holding local Solstice parties. Currently it's unclear whether either of them are going to happen, but after the second person asked about it I realized I should probably post about it here.

I was already putting together materials that would make it easier for other people to hold their own events, I just hadn't expected to need it for this year. I expect to have them *mostly* finished by the end of this week (this means a pdf of a book of songs, and a powerpoint you can use instead of a songbook that includes scrolling lyrics and helps keep people focused on a central location rather than staring down at the pages in their lap)

It's still a sizeable amount of work to put a Solstice party together. You'll probably want to tailor it for the interests of your own friends. If you're doing something similar to what I'm doing, you'll want:

1) People to prepare tasty dishes for a communal dinner

2) At least one musically skilled person to lead songs, and/or good orator to do readings.

3) Several enthusiastic people who are excited about singing songs, whether or not they have a musical background

4) A bunch of light sources to extinguish and relight over the course of the evening.

We're holding the NY event on the 15th so people who are busy on the actual Solstice (due to family obligations) can come. But if you're doing it with local people, you can probably hold it on the Solstice itself (Friday, December 21), or whenever is convenient for you. (The themes of the night also make for a good New Years party)

Let me know if you'd like access to the materials as they become available.
[SEQ RERUN] Total Nano Domination
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-27T04:54:51.719Z

Today's post, Total Nano Domination was originally published on 27 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you get a small advantage in nanotechnology, that might not be enough to take over the world. But if you use that small advantage in nanotechnology to gain a major advancement in bots, you could gain an extraordinary amount of power very fast.

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 Engelbart: Insufficiently Recursive, 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.
[META] Retributive downvoting: Why?
by ialdabaoth — 2012-11-27T02:24:31.320Z

Several people posted recently in a thread on women, mostly espousing feminist views - only to find that someone had declined to respond to their post, but instead browsed their history and downvoted every single comment or article they had ever posted.

I have two questions:

1. Why would you come to a site like this and pollute the karma system? How does it make you smarter? How does it make anyone else on the site smarter?

2. What would be a good technical workaround? In my mind, some system that detects mass-downvoting and flags a user for review would be preferable, but what should happen then? Should the system be more lenient to higher-karma posters? Who should perform the review process? What should be done with those whom the reviewer ascertains are abusing the karma system? I would prefer some kind of lesson that is more corrective than retributive - it seems to me that people who would perform this behavior are exactly the sort of people who need some of the lessons that this site provides. Any ideas?
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge makes headlines.
by betterthanwell — 2012-11-26T20:56:00.183Z

As of an hour ago, I had not yet heard of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

Luke announced it to Less Wrong, as The University of Cambridge announced it to the world, back in April:

CSER at Cambridge University joins the others.

Good people involved so far, but the expected output depends hugely on who they pick to run the thing.

CSER is scheduled to launch next year.

Here is a small selection of CSER press coverage from the last two days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20501091

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/shortcuts/2012/nov/26/cambridge-university-terminator-studies

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238152/Cambridge-University-open-Terminator-centre-study-threat-humans-artificial-intelligence.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/26/new_centre_human_extinction_risks/

http://www.slashgear.com/new-ai-think-tank-hopes-to-get-real-on-existential-risk-26258246/

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/super-brains-to-guard-against-robot-apocalypse-1115293

http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/Europe/Cambridge-to-study-risks-from-robots-at-Terminator-Centre/Article1-964746.aspx

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/cambridge-to-study-risks-from-robots-at-terminator-centre/articleshow/17372042.cms

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/141372-judgment-day-update-disneys-grenade-catching-robot-and-the-burger-flipping-robot-that-could-replace-2-million-us-workers

http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/cambridge-university-vs-skynet/

http://www.businessinsider.com/researchers-robots-risk-human-civilization-2012-11

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22534-megarisks-that-could-drive-us-to-extinction.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57553993-76/killer-robots-cambridge-brains-to-assess-ai-risk/

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/cambridge-university-opens-so-called-termintor-centre-stu

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/cambridge-university-to-open-center-studying-the-risks-of-technology-to-humans/2012/11/25/e551f4d0-3733-11e2-9258-ac7c78d5c680_story.html

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/11/26/terminator-center-to-open-at-cambridge-university/

Google News: All 119 news sources...

Here's an excerpt from one quite typical story appearing in tech-tabloid theregister.co.uk today:

Cambridge boffins fear 'Pandora's Unboxi

...
Meetup : Weekly meetup, Champaign IL: Cafe Paradiso
by aspera — 2012-11-26T18:06:57.407Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Weekly meetup, Champaign IL: Cafe Paradiso

WHEN:
28 November 2012 08:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
801 South Lincoln Avenue, Urbana, IL

Let's meet at 8pm. We decided last time that we'd like to start talking about Timeless decision theory. It's a big topic, but try to come to the meeting with questions or discussion points. Also, let's talk about doing something social next week.

Discussion article for the meetup : Weekly meetup, Champaign IL: Cafe Paradiso
Meetup :  Moscow: Applied Rationality and Cognitive Biases
by Yuu — 2012-11-26T12:34:58.794Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Applied Rationality and Cognitive Biases

WHEN:
08 December 2012 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Rossiya, Moscow, ulitsa Ostozhenka 14/2

We will meet at “Subway” restaurant, entrance from Lopukhinskiy pereulok. Look for a table with “LW” banner, I will be there from 16:00 MSK.

Main topics:

Applied rationality: practice. We will improve our rationality skills.

Cognitive biases analysis. Here is the link to the list of biases we will work on (in Russian).

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

N. B. Google may show incorrect location, please use Yandex maps.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Applied Rationality and Cognitive Biases
Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Hermeneutics!
by Nisan — 2012-11-26T05:40:29.186Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Hermeneutics!

WHEN:
28 November 2012 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

This Wednesday's meetup will feature Hermeneutics!, a brand-new game invented by Scott Alexander. You can read about it on his blog:

http://squid314.livejournal.com/343000.html

The purpose of the game is to see how easy it is to come up with plausible false arguments, and how plausible such arguments can sound coming from others. As far as I know, this may be the first time the game has ever been played.
Doors open at 7pm, and we'll start playing the game at 7:30pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong
or call me at:
http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png
Next week we can have another social-skills-themed meetup.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Hermeneutics!
What do you think of my reading list? 
by  — 2012-11-26T02:13:42.792Z

(I am slightly anxious about making my first discussion post! If there is anything about this that should not have been done, or done differently, please let me know!)

I'm new to this rationalist stuff. I want to improve my grasp on many topics. I want a richer vocabulary and set of concepts with which to discuss these topics. These are some nonfiction books I'm thinking of trying to eat this year, in no particular order of priority:

So if you have read any of these books and would like to help me with this:

Are there any that you would endorse? Which books might I be I wasting my time with? Are any of them too crank or pseudoscientific to be worthy of my time? Ones I had better save for later because I couldn't get anything out of them with my high school level math ability? Books that are similar to a different book that does the same thing better? Or any books along these lines you think it would be a CRIME not to include? Or any other suggestions? I would be grateful for any bit of help!