trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rational Ethics
by OrphanWilde — 2012-07-11T22:26:40.730Z

[Looking for feedback, particularly on links to related posts; I'd like to finish this out as a post on the main, provided there aren't too many wrinkles for it to be salvaged.]

Morality as Fixed Computation, Abstracted Idealized Dynamics, as part of the Metaethics Sequence, discuss ethics as computation. This is a post primarily a response to these two posts, which discuss computation, and the impossibility of computing the full ethical ramifications of an action. Note that I treat morality as objective, which means, loosely speaking, that two people who share the same ethical values should arrive, provided neither makes logical errors, at approximately the same ethical system.

On to the subject matter of this post - are Bayesian utilitarian ethics utilitarian? For you? For most people?

And, more specifically, is a rational ethics system more rational than a heuristics and culturally based one?

I would argue that the answer is, for most people, "No."

The summary explanation of why: Because cultural ethics are functioning ethics. They have been tested, and work. They may not be ideal, but most of the "ideal" ethics systems that have been proposed in the past haven't worked. In terms of Eliezer's post, cultural ethics are the answers that other people have already agreed upon; they are ethical computations which have already been computed, and while there may be errors, most of the potential errors an ethicist might arrive upon have already been weeded out.

The longer explanation of why:

First and foremost, rationality, which I will use from here instead of the word "computation," is -expensive-. "A witch did it", or the equivalent "Magic!", while not in fact conceptually simple, is in fact logically simple; the complexity is encoded in the concept, not the logic. The rational explanation for, say, static electricity, requires far more information about the universe, which for an individual who aspires to be a farmer because he likes growing things, may never be useful, and whose internalization may never pay for itself. It can be fully consistent with a rational attitude to accept irrational explanations, when you have no reasonable expectation that the rational explanation will provide any kind of benefit, or more exactly when the cost of the rational explanation exceeds its expected benefit.

Or,...
Moderate alcohol consumption inversely correlated with all-cause mortality
by  — 2012-07-11T17:41:46.777Z

My roommate recently sent me a review article that LW might find interesting:

Conclusions: Low levels of alcohol intake (1-2 drinks per day for women and 2-4 drinks per day for men) are inversely associated with total mortality in both men and women. Our findings, while confirming the hazards of excess drinking, indicate potential windows of alcohol intake that may confer a net beneficial effect of moderate drinking, at least in terms of survival.

Personal observation says that LWers tend not to drink very much or often. Perhaps that should change, to the degree suggested by the article?

Full article here.
Useful maxims
by Paul Crowley — 2012-07-11T11:56:57.489Z

In a New York shop, I once got pressure-sold something expensive I didn't really want; when I said it cost too much, I was asked what I might be prepared to pay, and we ended up haggling. Since then, I've had a rule:

If it's a non trivial price, never decide to buy while you're in the shop

and I have been very glad of it on many occasions. I can go for a short walk to decide, and if I don't want it, I simply don't return to the shop. This means I'm deciding in calm surroundings, based on what I want rather than on embarrassment.

Are there other maxims I could adopt that would serve me equally well?

(Personal note: I'm in the Bay Area for a week after minicamp, Sunday July 29th to Sunday August 5th. Let's hang out, go to things together, help make my visit cooler! Mail me: paul at ciphergoth.org. Thanks!)
Kurzweil's predictions: good accuracy, poor self-calibration
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-07-11T09:55:11.169Z

Predictions of the future rely, to a much greater extent than in most fields, on the personal judgement of the expert making them. Just one problem - personal expert judgement generally sucks, especially when the experts don't receive immediate feedback on their hits and misses. Formal models perform better than experts, but when talking about unprecedented future events such as nanotechnology or AI, the choice of the model is also dependent on expert judgement.

Ray Kurzweil has a model of technological intelligence development where, broadly speaking, evolution, pre-computer technological development, post-computer technological development and future AIs all fit into the same exponential increase. When assessing the validity of that model, we could look at Kurzweil's credentials, and maybe compare them with those of his critics - but Kurzweil has given us something even better than credentials, and that's a track record. In various books, he's made predictions about what would happen in 2009, and we're now in a position to judge their accuracy. I haven't been satisfied by the various accuracy ratings I've found online, so I decided to do my own.

Some have argued that we should penalise predictions that "lack originality" or were "anticipated by many sources". But hindsight bias means that we certainly judge many profoundly revolutionary past ideas as "unoriginal", simply because they are obvious today. And saying that other sources anticipated the ideas is worthless unless we can quantify how mainstream and believable those sources were. For these reasons, I'll focus only on the accuracy of the predictions, and make no judgement as to their ease or difficulty (unless they say things that were already true when the prediction was made).

Conversely, I won't be giving any credit for "near misses": this has the hindsight problem in the other direction, where we fit potentially ambiguous predictions to what we know happened. I'll be strict about the meaning of the prediction, as written. A prediction in a published book is a form of communication, so if Kurzweil actually meant something different to what was written, then the fault is entirely his for not spelling it out unambiguously.

One exception to that strictness: I'll be tolerant on the timeline, as I feel that a lot of the predictions were forced into a "ten years from 1999...
An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction
by Alex_Altair — 2012-07-11T08:05:20.544Z

This is the completed article that Luke wrote the first half of. My thanks go to the following for reading, editing, and commenting; Luke Muehlhauser, Louie Helm, Benjamin Noble, and Francelle Wax.

People disagree about things. Some say that television makes you dumber; other say it makes you smarter. Some scientists believe life must exist elsewhere in the universe; others believe it must not. Some say that complicated financial derivatives are essential to a modern competitive economy; others think a nation's economy will do better without them. It's hard to know what is true.

And it's hard to know how to figure out what is true. Some argue that you should assume the things you are most certain about and then deduce all other beliefs from your original beliefs. Others think you should accept at face value the most intuitive explanations of personal experience. Still others think you should generally agree with the scientific consensus until it is disproved.

Wouldn't it be nice if determining what is true was like baking a cake? What if there was a recipe for finding out what is true? All you'd have to do is follow the written directions exactly, and after the last instruction you'd inevitably find yourself with some sweet, tasty truth!

In this tutorial, we'll explain the closest thing we’ve found so far to a recipe for finding truth: Solomonoff induction.

There are some qualifications to make. To describe just one: roughly speaking, you don't have time to follow the recipe. To find the truth to even a simple question using this recipe would require you to follow one step after another until long after the heat death of the universe, and you can't do that.

But we can find shortcuts. Suppose you know that the exact recipe for baking a cake asks you to count out one molecule of H2O at a time until you have exactly 0.5 cups of water. If you did that, you might not finish the cake before the heat death of the universe. But you could approximate that part of the recipe by measuring out something very close to 0.5 cups of water, and you'd probably still end up with a pretty good cake.

Similarly, once we know the exact recipe for finding truth, we can try to approximate it in a way that allows us to finish all the steps sometime before the sun burns out.

This tutorial explains that best-we've-got-so-far recipe ...
[SEQ RERUN] Can Counterfactuals Be True?
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-11T06:54:41.480Z

Today's post, Can Counterfactuals Be True? was originally published on 24 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

How can we explain counterfactuals having a truth value, if we don't talk about "nearby possible worlds" or any of the other explanations offered by philosophers?

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 When (Not) To Use Probabilities, 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.
Rationality and Cancer
by SwingDancerMike — 2012-07-11T06:48:18.332Z

Today, my dentist found a possible oral cancer.
I'm 31, a non-smoker, in good health. I know the research showing that doctors ignore base rates and overestimate your chances of cancer. (I asked the doctor the base rate, he didn't know.) I know that we grossly overprescribe biopsies and surgeries, when it would be better to just wait and see. But I'm having it removed and biopsied on Friday, even though I don't have dental insurance and it's costing me $1,000 of my own money.
Why?
I thought this would be an interesting case study: Introspectively, what's going on to make me ignore my rationalist training, ignore the external data, and choose what I know is probably the less optimal path?
My first thought is embarrassment: If I do nothing, and it turns out I have cancer, will my support network roll their eyes and blame me for not being more aggressive? My feeling is yes, that even though they wouldn't do it to my face, they would secretly blame me, and become less available.
My second thought is fear of the unknown: I roughly know what the biopsy will entail. It's a light anesthesia, a few stitches, and 1-2 days of recovery. No big deal. And $1,000 isn't tiny, but it's not a big deal for me, either. In contrast, what happens if I don't do the biopsy? Huge, scary unknown. And, even if I know that I only have a 0.01% chance of having cancer (to guess a number), I also know my emotional mind is bad at math, and I'll have great difficulty controlling its worry. And so, it's rational to buy some level of anti-worry insurance -- I don't know what the rational value of that anti-worry insurance is, and I don't know if that value exceeds $1,000, but clearly, anti-worry insurance has some positive value, and probably a fairly high value.
There are other considerations. I need some wisdom teeth removed, and we're doing them at the same time, so adding the biopsy doesn't affect the recovery time. And I have a 6-week trip to Australia coming up, and I'd hate to have problems while I'm traveling. But mostly, I think it's embarrassment and worry.

By the way, this is a personal matter than I'm choosing to share with you. Honest advice about how to handle it, particularly from people who've faced similar decisions, is welcome and appreciated. Flames about how I'm ignoring research are not. Thanks for understanding.

Update: I talked with a friend who does research in medical decisio...
Meetup : Vancouver Big Monthly
by  — 2012-07-11T02:46:10.659Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Big Monthly

WHEN:
12 July 2012 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
885 W Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC

Lurkers everywhere, come on out for Vancouver's monthly big meetup.

Meet in the lobby of 885 W Georgia, we may move upstairs to 1228 later.

As usual, our mailing list is here.

The meetup is at 18:00 on Thursday (yes that's very soon, sorry for not posting this earlier).

See you there. (free hugs and food for incentive if you like that sort of thing).

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Big Monthly
Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute
by lukeprog — 2012-07-10T23:20:18.690Z

Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell has objected to the Singularity Institute (SI) as a target for optimal philanthropy. As someone who thinks that existential risk reduction is really important and also that the Singularity Institute is an important target of optimal philanthropy, I would like to explain why I disagree with Holden on these subjects. (I am also SI's Executive Director.)

Mostly, I'd like to explain my views to a broad audience. But I'd also like to explain my views to Holden himself. I value Holden's work, I enjoy interacting with him, and I think he is both intelligent and capable of changing his mind about Big Things like this. Hopefully Holden and I can continue to work through the arguments together, though of course we are both busy with many other things.

I appreciate the clarity and substance of Holden's objections, and I hope to reply in kind. I begin with an overview of some basic points that may be familiar to most Less Wrong veterans, and then I reply point-by-point to Holden's post. In the final section, I summarize my reply to Holden.

Holden raised many different issues, so unfortunately this post needed to be long. My apologies to Holden if I have misinterpreted him at any point.

Contents

Existential risk reduction is a critical concern for many people, given their values and given many plausible models of the future. Details here.

Among existential risks, AI risk is probably the most important. Details here.

SI can purchase many kinds of AI risk reduction more efficiently than other groups can. Details here.

These points and many others weigh against many of Holden's claims and conclusions. Details here.

Summary of my reply to Holden

Comments

I must be brief, so while reading this post I am sure many objections will leap to your mind. To encourage constructive discussion on this post, each question (posted as a comment on this page) that follows the template described below will receive a reply from myself or another SI representative.

Please word your question as clearly and succinctly as possible, and don't assume your readers will have read this post before reading your question (because: the conversations here may be used as source material for a comprehensive FAQ).

Here's an example of how you could word the first paragraph of your question: "You claimed that [insert direct quote here], and also that [insert another direct quot...
SI visiting fellow Diego Caleiro gives a TED talk on Friendly AI
by lukeprog — 2012-07-10T22:57:03.573Z

Diego Caleiro, a past SI visiting fellow and current leader of a transhumanist institution in Brazil, recently delivered this TED@SaoPaulo talk on Friendly AI and Effective Altruism. If it goes viral, it has a chance to be selected for TED Global. (The importance thing is to have lots of positive comments on the TED page, methinks.) TED Global's talks reach on average 40,000 viewers within the first 24 hours, and 500,000 within half a year.

Check it out, share, and especially: comment!
Group rationality diary, 7/9/12
by cata — 2012-07-10T08:35:27.873Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of July 9th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Academian put up a wiki page with links to the prior May and June threads for reference. Good idea, thanks!
[SEQ RERUN] When (Not) To Use Probabilities
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-10T05:33:02.802Z

Today's post, When (Not) To Use Probabilities was originally published on 23 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you don't have a numerical procedure to generate probabilities, you're probably better off using your own evolved abilities to reason in the presence of uncertainty.

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 Fake Norms, or "Truth" vs. Truth, 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.
Steam Greenlight
by BrandonReinhart — 2012-07-10T05:11:43.065Z

I know there is interest among this community in building rationality oriented games as teaching tools. Today we announced Steam Greenlight. We're essentially turning the game approval process over to the community. It may be possible for quality rationality games produced by the Less Wrong community to create enough gamer-community interest to get placed on Steam for distribution.

http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight

I feel that this creates a better opportunity for rationality games as teaching tools to find broad distribution than if it had to go through the Steam product review team. Ultimately, it shifts the responsibility onto the games' creators and their community to create and drive interest for the product and it removes our limited decision making from the system.

I'm posting this here for awareness of this possible avenue toward reaching a broader audience.
Dual N-Back browser-based "game" in public alpha-testing state.
by Logos01 — 2012-07-10T03:36:39.203Z

Link.

Found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/wb44q/my_dual_nback_browsergame_is_ready_for/

From the author:

Quick notes:

If you experience any technical problems running the game, please let me know what browser and OS you're using.

If you're unfamiliar with what Dual N-Back is, [1] this is a good place to start reading.
Low hanging fruit: Websites that significantly improve your life?
by RomeoStevens — 2012-07-10T02:32:58.362Z

It suddenly occurred to me that not everyone uses a website I love. Of all the websites I browse if you asked me which one improves my standard of living in the largest, most concrete way, it would be slickdeals.

What it is: a community driven "hot deals" website with voting. By itself this is already useful, but the best feature is deal alerts. you never have to actually browse slickdeals. Just create an account, set up deal alerts for whatever strings interest you (I for example have a deal alert for "whey" to get alerted to deals on whey protein powder).

More than 50% of my belongings come from sales I've been alerted to via slickdeals. Any big ticket items I need, but don't need immediately I just set alerts and wait. My laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone, clothes, toiletries, books, games, even some food are all slightly better for the price I paid than they otherwise would have been.

So what other sites am I missing out on that would make my life a lot better?

A website I just discovered for habit building chains.cc seems cool, but I haven't had time to evaluate its usefulness yet.
Should LW have a separate AI section?
by Alex_Altair — 2012-07-10T01:42:39.259Z

LessWrong seems to have two main topics for discussion; rationality and AI. This, of course, is caused by Eliezer Yudkowsky's sequences (and interests), which are mostly about rationality, but also include a lot of writing about AI. LessWrong currently has two sections, Main and Discussion. This is meant to separate the purpose and quality of the post. I think usability of the site has improved greatly since adding the Discussion section. Should split the discussion section, and have one for rationality and one for AI?

Advantages

It would make LW more pleasant for rationality enthusiasts who don't want to sort through lots of AI discussions.

It would make LW more pleasant for AI enthusiasts who don't want to sort through lots of rationality discussions.

It would not split up the community as much as a new AI community site would.

It would increase LW's capacity for discussion.

Newcomers could learn about rationality, while people who want higher quality of discussion on AI topics could have it.

Disadvantages

Many posts about both subjects are highly relevant about both subjects

It would make LW less pleasant for enthusiasts of both subjects.

It would split up the community more than doing nothing.

Everybody has their ideas for separate sections, and we can't do them all.

What do you guys think?