trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Link] How to see into the future (Financial Times)
by fortyeridania — 2014-09-07T06:04:04.826Z

How to see into the future, by Tim Harford

The article may be gated. (I have a subscription through my school.)

It is mainly about two things: the differing approaches to forecasting taken by Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Babson; and Philip Tetlock's Good Judgment Project.

Key paragraph:

So what is the secret of looking into the future? Initial results from the Good Judgment Project suggest the following approaches. First, some basic training in probabilistic reasoning helps to produce better forecasts. Second, teams of good forecasters produce better results than good forecasters working alone. Third, actively open-minded people prosper as forecasters.

But the Good Judgment Project also hints at why so many experts are such terrible forecasters. It’s not so much that they lack training, teamwork and open-mindedness – although some of these qualities are in shorter supply than others. It’s that most forecasters aren’t actually seriously and single-mindedly trying to see into the future. If they were, they’d keep score and try to improve their predictions based on past errors. They don’t.
Meetup : Perth, Australia: Sunday lunch
by  — 2014-09-06T10:46:59.780Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Perth, Australia: Sunday lunch

WHEN:
21 September 2014 12:00:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
Annalakshmi, Barrack Square, Perth, Australia

Come have lunch with other Less Wrongians! I'll describe a bunch of the more noteworthy cognitive biases, and ask everyone else to think of (1) examples – real or fictional – and (2) ideas for how to notice ourselves making these errors.

We'll be at Annalakshmi (http://www.annalakshmi.com.au/), a vegetarian pay-what-you-want restaurant.

How to find me: I'll be by the entrance, carrying a silver water bottle labeled "CFAR" in orange.

You can RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/Perth-Less-Wrong/events/201429192/

Discussion article for the meetup : Perth, Australia: Sunday lunch
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games Meetup
by RobinZ — 2014-09-06T04:37:20.839Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games Meetup

WHEN:
07 September 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.
A note to those who plan ahead: we are tentatively switching to a monthly schedule for Fun & Games meetups, rather than every-three-meetings. Among the reasons for this is that the Mini Talks meetups seem to be fun enough and popular enough to deserve a regular slot as well. After this meetup, our tentative plan for the rest of the month is:

Sept. 14 - Parkour (Backup: CFAR's Getting Things Done systems)

Sept. 21 - Mini Talks

Sept. 28 - Book Swap

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games Meetup
Meetup : Vancouver, Canada: Backyard BBQ
by eggman — 2014-09-05T22:40:23.012Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver, Canada: Backyard BBQ

WHEN:
07 September 2014 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
3461 12th Avenue West, Vancouver, Canada

I've got access to a house with a big backyard, and I'm hosting a big meetup at my house on Sunday.

My address is 3461 12th Ave W., in Vancouver.

The meetup starts at 1500 hours, 3:00 p.m., The BBQ will go all evening, so feel free to show up anytime up until 10 p.m. If we're not outside in the backyard when you get there, knock on the front door, and we'll be outside.

Bring your own food to grill on the BBQ (meat, fish, veggie burgers, whatever). B.Y.O.B. Feel free to bring snacks to share as well. I'll have a few general beverages sitting around.

If you live nearby, and could spare an outside chair for seating, that would be appreciated, as I don't believe I own enough to accommodate everyone myself.

Feel free to invite your friends. Feel free to bring board games, any topic to the table to discuss, opportunities to join your start-up, whatever...

I'll see you there. Let me know if you have questions.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver, Canada: Backyard BBQ
Deception detection machines
by  — 2014-09-05T20:15:59.281Z

Assume you had access to:

1. a self-improving artificial general intelligence (AGI) of at least human-capability or better; and

2. a lie detector that the AGI is known to be susceptible to. A lie for this purpose is any intentional deception.

The AI is not omnipotent. It is running on a physical machine in the real world with limited inputs. One of these inputs is mechanism by which you can ask it questions, and receive answers filtered through the lie detector. A little light on the box turns red if the machine was intentionally deceptive in any way, or green otherwise. As it happens the lie detector is probabilistic, but the chance of a false negative (lie escaping detection) is infinitesimal—1 in 10^40, let's say, but assume you could make it even smaller if you needed to. The chance of a false positive (non-deception being labeled a lie) is effectively zero.

What could you do with this setup?

EDIT: Some of the details above are provided simply to make the problem tractable. E.g. having the deception detector be probabilistic allows its operating requirements to be less than the AI itself. If the AI is running on a supercomputer, it seems intractable to require a super-supercomputer for the deception detector.

EDIT2: Deception in this case simply means falsifying or omitting information. Loosely speaking, if the AI falsifies the computational traces fed into the deception detector, or leaves out any information in its response, this is detectable. Presumably the UFAI could output a very nice, very convincing plan of action with very tiny fine print hidden somewhere along the lines of "PS: This is all a lie! You implement this and I'm going to turn you all into meaty paperclips. Haha!" and it would get past the deception detector. But I would rather discussion not get sidetracked by such legalistic, nitpicky scenarios. Assume the humans involved are competent, conservative, responsible people who have setup institutional safeguards to prevent hasty action and make sure that output is sufficiently analyzed down to the very last digital bit by a competent, international team of highly rational people before being acted upon.
A reason to see the future
by Eneasz — 2014-09-05T19:33:42.298Z

I just learned of The Future Library project. In short, famous authors will be asked to write new, original fiction that will not be released until 2114. First one announced was Margaret Atwood, of The Handmaiden's Tale fame.

I learned of this when a friend posted on Facebook that "I'm officially looking into being cryogenically frozen due to The Future Library project. See you all in 2114." She meant it as a joke, but after a couple comments she now knows about CI, and she didn't yesterday.

What's one of the most common complaints we hear from Deathists? The future is unknown and scary and there won't be anything there they'd be interested in anyway. Now there will be, if they're Atwood fans.

What's one of the ways artists who give away most of their work (almost all of them nowadays) try to entice people to pay for their albums/books/games/whatever? Including special content that is only available for people who pay (or who pay more). Now there is special content only available for people who are around post-2113.

Which got me to thinking... could we incentivize seeing the future? I know it sounds kinda silly ("What, escaping utter annihilation isn't incentive enough??"), but it seems possible that we could save lives by compiling original work from popular artists (writers, musicians, etc), sealing it tight somewhere, and promising to release it in 100, 200, maybe 250 years. And of course, providing links to cryo resources with all publicity materials.

Would this be worth pursuing? Are there any obvious downsides, aside from cost & difficulty?
Shallow investigation into cause prioritization
by KatjaGrace — 2014-09-05T18:23:44.000Z

Cross-posted at 80,000 Hours Blog

I recently conducted a ‘shallow investigation*’ into cause prioritization, with help from Nick Beckstead. You can read it and various related interview notes here. It covers the importance of cause prioritization; who is doing it, funding it, or using it; and opportunities to contribute. This blog post is a summary of my impressions, given the findings of the investigation.

*see GiveWell.

Summary

Cause prioritization research seems likely enough to be high value to warrant further investigation. It appears that roughly billions of dollars per year might be influenced by it in just the near future, that current efforts cost a few million dollars per year and are often influential, and that there are many plausible ways to contribute. It also seems like things are likely to get better in the future, as more work is done.

Funding which might be substantially influenced by cause prioritization research is probably worth at least several billion dollars per year.

Prioritization research is likely more relevant to new funders than established ones, but we can get an idea of the scale of new cost-effectiveness sensitive philanthropists by looking at existing ones. This study found nine private funders (or groups of them) who appear to care about cost-effectiveness, and did not look that hard. The Gates Foundation spends around $3.4bn annually, The Hewlett Foundation spent $304M in 2012, and Good Ventures around $10m in 2014. The others spent less or I did not find data on them. Given these figures, it seems reasonable to expect more foundations worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year in the future, who care about cost-effectiveness.

I think funders not explicitly focused on cost-effectiveness are probably also influenced by prevailing beliefs about cause effectiveness, which are likely influenced (gradually) by research. $300bn is spent annually on philanthropy in the US, and probably somewhat less than twice that much is spent globally. Development assistance is at least $125bn per year. Government domestic spending on some kinds of programs is also a worthy target for prioritization research, not measured here.

Few organizations work on cause prioritization.

Those identified in this study to be working directly on public cause prioritization research have a total annual budget of around $3M. Philanthropists also sometimes...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-09-05T16:18:34.387Z

This summary was posted to LW main on August 29th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta August meetup - Media representations: 30 August 2014 07:00PM
Bratislava: 08 September 2014 06:00PM
Houston, TX: 13 September 2014 02:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: Reconstituting: 31 August 2014 02:00PM
[Utrecht] Topic to be determinined: 06 September 2014 02:00PM
[Utrecht] Debiasing techniques: 20 September 2014 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Canberra: Akrasia-busters!: 13 September 2014 06:00PM
London Meetup - Effective Altruism: 31 August 2014 02:00PM
[Melbourne] September Rationality Dojo - Fixed and Growth Mindset: 07 September 2014 03:30PM
Moscow Meetup: 31 August 2014 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Parkour: 31 August 2014 03:00PM
West LA Meetup: Lightning Talks: 03 September 2014 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified whe...
Meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna - Superintelligence
by AnnaLeptikon — 2014-09-05T15:53:39.325Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna - Superintelligence

WHEN:
27 September 2014 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Kaisermühlenstraße 24/2, 1220 Wien, meeting room behind the building

location: When arriving by U2 or Schnellbahn train: take the exit towards Kaisermühlenstraße, cross the street, step through the (very modern looking) building (on Erich Fried Weg) and go right, along the backside of the building until you get to the meeting room (it has a glass front so it should be hard to miss).
Important: Google maps doesn't recognise the address, so what is being displayed here is nonsense.

topic: Marko will summarize "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna - Superintelligence
I'm holding a birthday fundraiser
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-09-05T12:38:21.030Z

EDIT: The fundraiser was successfully completed, raising the full $500 for worthwhile charities. Yay!

Today's my birthday! And per Peter Hurford's suggestion, I'm holding a birthday fundraiser to help raise money for MIRI, GiveDirectly, and Mercy for Animals. If you like my activity on LW or elsewhere, please consider giving a few dollars to one of these organizations via the fundraiser page. You can specify which organization you wish to donate in the comment of the donation, or just leave it unspecified, in which case I'll give your donation to MIRI.

If you don't happen to be particularly altruistically motivated, just consider it a birthday gift to me - it will give me warm fuzzies to know that I helped move money for worthy organizations. And if you are altruistically motivated but don't care about me in particular, maybe you still can get yourself to donate more than usual by hacky stuff like someone you know on the Internet having a birthday. :)

If someone else wants to hold their own birthday fundraiser, here are some tips: birthday fundraisers.
What motivates politicians?
by Adam Zerner — 2014-09-05T05:41:01.629Z

It seems that politicians make a lot of decisions that aren't socially optimal because they want money from lobbyists and other campaign contributors. Presumably, the purpose this money serves is to keep them in office by allowing them to advertise a lot the next time they're up for reelection.

So the question then becomes, "why do they want to remain in office?". I could think of two reasons: money and power. From what I know, politicians have a pretty high salary (congressmen make ~$175k), so that's an understandable motivator. But power is the one I don't understand.

Supposedly they want to remain in office so they could use their power to have an influence. I don't know too much about politics, but it seems that politicians spend most of their time catering to lobbyists and voters rather than pushing the things they actually believe in. So much so that they aren't actually exerting that much power. And it seems that most of this catering is to special interests and is socially suboptimal. (I may very well be wrong on these points. I really don't know but it's the impression I get.)

Why are congressmen so motivated to stay in office, make $175k a year, exert a minimal amount of real power, and spend their time catering to lobbyists and making socially suboptimal decisions? I'm sure they could make twice as much in the private sector. I feel like there's something obvious that I'm missing here, but I'm genuinely confused.
Meetup :  Sydney Meetup - September
by taryneast — 2014-09-05T03:52:58.778Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - September

WHEN:
24 September 2014 06:30:06PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Sydney City RSL, 565 George St, Sydney, Australia 2000

6:30 PM for early discussion 7PM general dinner-discussion after dinner we'll have our rationality exercise and a more specific discussion-topic.

We normally meet in the restaurant on level 2. So far they've always put it about 5m to the left of the lift, up against the kitchen area.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - September
Goal retention discussion with Eliezer
by Max Tegmark — 2014-09-04T22:23:22.292Z

Although I feel that Nick Bostrom’s new book “Superintelligence” is generally awesome and a well-needed milestone for the field, I do have one quibble: both he and Steve Omohundro appear to be more convinced than I am by the assumption that an AI will naturally tend to retain its goals as it reaches a deeper understanding of the world and of itself. I’ve written a short essay on this issue from my physics perspective, available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0813.pdf.

Eliezer Yudkowsky just sent the following extremely interesting comments, and told me he was OK with me sharing them here to spur a broader discussion of these issues, so here goes.

On Sep 3, 2014, at 17:21, Eliezer Yudkowsky <yudkowsky@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Max! You're asking the right questions. Some of the answers we can
give you, some we can't, few have been written up and even fewer in any
well-organized way. Benja or Nate might be able to expound in more detail
while I'm in my seclusion.
Very briefly, though:
The problem of utility functions turning out to be ill-defined in light of
new discoveries of the universe is what Peter de Blanc named an
"ontological crisis" (not necessarily a particularly good name, but it's
what we've been using locally).
http://intelligence.org/files/OntologicalCrises.pdf
The way I would phrase this problem now is that an expected utility
maximizer makes comparisons between quantities that have the type
"expected utility conditional on an action", which means that the AI's
utility function must be something that can assign utility-numbers to the
AI's model of reality, and these numbers must have the further property
that there is some computationally feasible approximation for calculating
expected utilities relative to the AI's probabilistic beliefs. This is a
constraint that rules out the vast majority of all completely chaotic and
uninteresting utility functions, but does not rule out, say, "make lots of
paperclips".
Models also have the property of being Bayes-updated using sensory
information; for the sake of discussion let's also say that models are
about universes that can generate sensory information, so that these
models can be probabilistically falsified or confirmed. Then an
"ontological crisis" occurs when the hypothesis that best fits sensory
information corresponds to a model that the utility function d...
"NRx" vs. "Prog" Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1)
by Matthew_Opitz — 2014-09-04T16:58:55.950Z

I know that many people on LessWrong want nothing to do with "neoreaction." It does seem strange that a website commonly associated with techno-futurism, such as LessWrong, would end up with even the most tangential networked association with an intellectual current, such as neoreaction, that commonly includes nostalgia for absolute monarchies and other avatistic obessions.

Perhaps blame it on Yvain, AKA Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex.com for attaching this strange intellectual node to LessWrong. ; ) That's at least how I found out about neoreaction, and I doubt that I am alone in this.

Certainly many on LessWrong would view any association with "neoreaction" as a Greek gift to be avoided. I understand the concept of keeping "well-kept gardens" and of politics being the "mind-killer," although some at LessWrong have argued that some of the most important questions humanity will face in the next decades will be questions that are unavoidably "political" in nature. Yes, "politics is hard mode," but so is life itself, and you don't get better at hard mode without practicing in hard mode.

LessWrong proclaims itself as a community devoted to refining the art of rationality. One aspect of the art of rationality is locating the true sources of disagreement between two parties who want to communicate with each other, but who can't help but talk past each other in different languages due to having radically different pre-existing assumptions.

I believe that this is the problem that any discourse between neoreaction and progressivism currently faces.

Even if you have no interest at all in neoreaction or progressivism as ideologies, I invite you to read this analysis as a case study in locating sources of disagreement between ideologies that have different unspoken assumptions. I will try to steelman neoreaction as much as I can, despite the fact that I am more sympathetic to the progressivist point of view.

In particular, I am interested in the following question: to what extent do neoreactionary and progressive disagreements stem from judgments that merely differ in degree? (For example, being slightly more or less pessimistic about X, Y, and Z propositions). Or to what extent do neoreactionary and progressive disagreements stem from assumptions that are qualitatively different?

Normative vs....
Meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Herzliya): Social and Board Games
by DanArmak — 2014-09-04T13:17:23.800Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Herzliya): Social and Board Games

WHEN:
04 September 2014 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
HaMada 5, Herzliya Pituach, Israel, EMC offices, floor 4

This time we're going to have a social meetup! We'll be socializing and playing games.

We'll start the meetup at 19:00 and finish at 22:00 (we may move the discussion to a nearby cafe afterwards). Feel free to come a little bit later, as there is no agenda.

We'll meet at the 4th floor of the building. Our gracious host is Yonatan Cale, and if you have trouble finding us, you can reach him at 052-5563141.

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!

Parking: There's a parking place under the building, and several others around us too. I'll update about free parking (I don't have a car)

Public transport:
Busses: Namir, get off at צומת הרצליה/אקדיה (not הסירה), it's 5 minutes slow-walking from there.
Herzelia train: ~15 minutes walking
Use your GPS!

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Herzliya): Social and Board Games