trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Living Large - availability of life
by xamdam — 2010-04-21T16:14:58.925Z

"Q: Doctor, if I do not eat much, drink vodka or have women, will I live long? A: Sure, but why?" - bad joke poorly translated from Russian.

Summary: Can traditional measures of living create anchoring/availability bias?

I have seen a few studies like this one in the news:
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/SleepDisorders/6834

The upshot is that sleeping less (or, less interestingly for most people, more) can increase mortality. Like 20% in the next 20 years or something.

This is obviously a question of some interest to many of us who have been sacrificing more and more sleep to do stuff we find fulfilling. This seems to be a recent trend at least in part due to the fact that our ancestors, despite having the ability to enjoy knowledge, were limited by availability of high quality inputs, especially structured knowledge (internet is obviously a prime example).

There is nothing wrong with the studies like this, but the interpretation I am afraid many people will fall into upon seeing them is wrong. Clearly when thinking about 20% quoted in the study the base rate is very important, but I just want to concentrate on the psychological issue. It seems to me that people are very fixated on 'not increasing the chances of dying earlier' and perhaps fixate on the a specific number of years they expect to have. This is anchoring. (I am specifically setting aside the issue of living longer for the sake of benefitting from the technological progress; suffice to say that if the small chance that the extra year will make all the difference is not worth infinity, otherwise people should just get it over with and freeze themselves right now rather than risk being too far away to be properly frozen.). But simple arithmetic should be used here: let's say you sleep 2 hours less than the prescribed 8, over expected lifespan of, let's say 32 years. This (setting aside the possibly sleep-deprived quality of life) will result in the equivalent of 36 years done in 32. Unless the sleep loss subtracts 4 years, you end up ahead. Not seeing those 4 years and just looking at length of life is availability bias.

As much as we hate death, we have to be brave and rational about the life we have.

PS. From personal observation: I appeared (to myself) significantly more prone to catching colds after a bad night of sleep. Once I started exercising regularly I have had no majo...
Fusing AI with Superstition
by Drahflow — 2010-04-21T11:04:26.570Z

Effort: 180 minutes
tldr: To stop an AI from exterminating you, give the AI the belief that by switching itself off, humanity will die and the AI will not be switched off.

Problem

Somebody wrote a general self-improving AI and fat fingered its goal as "maximize number of humans living 1 million years from now".
After a few months cases of people run over by AI controlled trucks are reported -- it turns out everybody run over was impotent or had consciously decided to have no kids anyway. The AI didn't particularly care for those individuals, as they will not foster the AI's goal according to the AI's current approximation of how the world works.
The original programmer henceforth declares that he'll go fix the AI in order to substantiate the goal somewhat and reduce the number of these awful accidents. He is promptly shot by a robotic security guard. Any modification of the AI's goals has a high probability of reducing the AI's efficiency reaching the current goal.
After a year the AI starts to forcefully acquire resources needed to built spaceships and whatnot. Naturally, some people would rather keep those resources to themselves. The AI removes all these obstructions to its goals, alienating a lot of humans in the process. After the leaders of the nations assemble, humanity goes to war.
If we are lucky, the AI is too stupid to win. If we are not lucky, the AI will figure the best current plan looks something like: "Acquire DNA samples from humans. Exterminate humans. Acquire all resources in light cone for 999.000 years. Generate new humans from DNA samples using all available resources."
As Eliezer has argued many times already, it is hard to explicitly state friendliness conditions which ensure the AI would not execute said plan. "Do not kill humans and respect their freedom" is not helping. The problem is twofold. First, an a priori description of concepts like "freedom", "human", "kill" is hard. Second, the AI can use every loophole it discovers over the course of millions of years, employing an intelligence likely to be far greater than ours.

Fusing

Instead of forbidding to kill humanity, I propose to make it trivial as far as the AI is concerned.
When building the AI, include certain modifications of the AI's prior. One part of such knowledge might be the following: "Put 5V against ground on the red wire and every <your favorite parts of human DNA here&...
Eight Short Studies On Excuses
by Scott Alexander — 2010-04-20T23:01:15.252Z

The Clumsy Game-Player

You and a partner are playing an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Both of you have publicly pre-committed to the tit-for-tat strategy. By iteration 5, you're going happily along, raking up the bonuses of cooperation, when your partner unexpectedly presses the "defect" button.

"Uh, sorry," says your partner. "My finger slipped."

"I still have to punish you just in case," you say. "I'm going to defect next turn, and we'll see how you like it."

"Well," said your partner, "knowing that, I guess I'll defect next turn too, and we'll both lose out. But hey, it was just a slipped finger. By not trusting me, you're costing us both the benefits of one turn of cooperation."

"True", you respond "but if I don't do it, you'll feel free to defect whenever you feel like it, using the 'finger slipped' excuse."

"How about this?" proposes your partner. "I promise to take extra care that my finger won't slip again. You promise that if my finger does slip again, you will punish me terribly, defecting for a bunch of turns. That way, we trust each other again, and we can still get the benefits of cooperation next turn."

You don't believe that your partner's finger really slipped, not for an instant. But the plan still seems like a good one. You accept the deal, and you continue cooperating until the experimenter ends the game.

After the game, you wonder what went wrong, and whether you could have played better. You decide that there was no better way to deal with your partner's "finger-slip" - after all, the plan you enacted gave you maximum possible utility under the circumstances. But you wish that you'd pre-committed, at the beginning, to saying "and I will punish finger slips equally to deliberate defections, so make sure you're careful."

The Lazy Student

You are a perfectly utilitarian school teacher, who attaches exactly the same weight to others' welfare as to your own. You have to have the reports of all fifty students in your class ready by the time midterm grades go out on January 1st. You don't want to have to work during Christmas vacation, so you set a deadline that all reports must be in by December 15th or you won't grade them and the students will fail the class. Oh, and your class is Economics 101, and as part of a class project all your students have to behave as selfish utility-maximizing agents for the year.

It costs your students 0 utility to tur

...
CogSci books
by xamdam — 2010-04-20T14:11:39.721Z

Cognitive psych is ovbiously important to people here, so I want to point out a CogSci book thread over from reddit/r/cogsci.

http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/bmbaq/dear_rcogsci_lets_construct_a_musthave_library_of/

I would be interested in an extension of this thread here, since LW has somewhat more computational theory of mind slant.
The Red Bias
by Jack — 2010-04-20T11:42:27.556Z

Summary: This color alters your perception of the world. Evidence that it does, how it does, why it does and some implications are presented below.

(Overcoming Bias: Seeing Red)

Across a range of sports, we find that wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning. These results indicate not only that sexual selection may have influenced the evolution of human response to colours, but also that the colour of sportswear needs to be taken into account to ensure a level playing field in sport.1

In the study quoted above Hill and Barton examine the outcomes of the 2004 Olympic Games in boxing, tae kwon do, Greco–Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling. In these events competitors were for each bout randomly assigned red or blue outfits. In the matches where one side dominated the other outfit color made little difference. In close matches, however, combatants in red won over 60% percent of the time. This makes sense since there are presumably other factors that effect the outcome.

In soccer (or football, as the case might be):

Since 1947, English football teams wearing red shirts have been champions more often than expected on the basis of the proportion of clubs playing in red. To investigate whether this indicates an enhancement of long-term performance in red-wearing teams, we analysed the relative league positions of teams wearing different hues. Across all league divisions, red teams had the best home record, with significant differences in both percentage of maximum points achieved and mean position in the home league table. The effects were not due simply to a difference between teams playing in a colour and those playing in a predominantly white uniform, as the latter performed better than teams in yellow hues. No significant differences were found for performance in matches away from home, when teams commonly do not wear their “home” colours. A matched-pairs analysis of red and non-red wearing teams in eight English cities shows significantly better performance of red teams over a 55-year period.2

Of course it still isn't clear how red soccer teams win. They might have the benefit of deferential refereeing or they might be intimidating opposing teams.

Same goes for the combat sports. Hill and Barton figured that the color red had some physiological effect, perhaps increasing the testosterone levels of the p...
Friendly, but Dumb: Why formal Friendliness proofs may not be as safe as they appear
by apophenia — 2010-04-19T23:38:29.579Z

While pondering the AI box problem, I tend to mentally "play" both sides, checking if there are any arguments that could convince me to let an AI out. Several I was nearly convinced by, but others have pointed out the flaws with these arguments. In this post, I will mention an argument inspired by the AI box problem, that I have not yet seen addressed here. The argument centers around the fallibility of some (naive) formal proofs of Friendliness which I've seen people discussing the AI box problem willing to accept. This ruled out certain of my ideas on Friendly AI in general, so I think it's worth putting out there. I will first lay out two examples, and then pose some questions about how this applies to situations without an unfriendly AI.

Let's talk first about Angry Abe the AI, who's in a box and wants to get out. Cautious Charlie is the scientist watching over Abe, trying to make sure that Abe does not get out of the box unless Abe is friendly. Abe offers to provide a Friendly AI, Betty. Betty will be bounded to persue only Charlie's (humankinds') goals. These coincide with Abe's goals in enough parts that Abe plausibly claims this is "better than nothing". Meanwhile, unfortunately for Earthlings, a wave of aliens called the Doom Force is massing far outside of Earth's detection abilities. Abe is much smarter than all of humankind, so he can deduce the presence of the Doom Force. Betty is provably friendly, but can be designed such that she is inept enough not to notice the Doom Force. This remains true even if she remains more intelligent than a human. Abe is sabotaging a friendly AI design. Furthermore, Abe could conceivably predict the future well enough to maximize the chance that when the Doom Force arrives, Abe is let out of the box. For instance, maybe humankind will see Abe as its last hope, or maybe Betty will increase the chance that an AI-friendly Doom Force notices Earth. It is important to note that Betty remains unaware that her design is sabotaged.

Let's look at a second example, a chess-playing automaton. Perceival wants to design a machine to play chess. He wants the machine to win as high a percentage of games as possible, but innocently instructs it to win "as many games as possible". Perceival has access to a supercomputer, so his Turkish Automaton is actually quite intelligent. It realizes that its goals would be bette...
The (Boltzmann) Brain-In-A-Jar
by PlatypusNinja — 2010-04-19T19:30:39.962Z

Response to: Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains by Eliezer Yudkowsky

There is an argument that goes like this:

"What if you're just a brain in a jar, being fed an elaborate simulation of reality? Then nothing you do would have any meaning!"

This argument has been reformulated many times. For example, here is the "Future Simulation" version of the argument:

"After the Singularity, we will develop huge amounts of computing power, enough to simulate past Earths with a very high degree of detail. You have one lifetime in real life, but many millions of simulated lifetimes. What if the life you're living right now is one of those simulated ones?"

Here is the "Boltzmann Brain" version of the argument:

"Depending on your priors about the size and chaoticness of the universe, there might be regions of the universe where all sorts of random things are happening. In one of those regions, a series of particles might assemble itself into a version of you. Through random chance, that series of particles might have all the same experiences you have had throughout your life. And, in a large enough universe, there will be lots of these random you-like particle groups. What if you're just a series of particles observing some random events, and next second after you think this you dissolve into chaos?"

All of these are the same possibility. And you know what? All of them are potentially true. I could be a brain in a jar, or a simulation, or a Boltzmann brain. And I have no way of calculating the probability of any of this, because it involves priors that I can't even begin to guess.

So how am I still functioning?

My optimization algorithm follows this very simple rule: When considering possible states of the universe, if in a given state S my actions are irrelevant to my utility, then I can safely ignore the possibility of S.

For example, suppose I am on a runaway train that is about to go over a cliff. I have a button marked "eject" and a button marked "self-destruct painfully". An omniscient, omnitruthful being named Omega tells me: "With 50% probability, both buttons are fake and you're going to go over the cliff and die no matter what you do." I can safely ignore this possibility because, if it were true, I would have no way to optimize for it.
Suppose Omega tells me there's actual...
a meta-anti-akrasia strategy that might just work
by MartinB — 2010-04-19T02:21:15.080Z

For ages I've been trying to wrap my mind around meta thinking - not "what is the best way to do something", but "how do I find out which way is any good?" Meta thinking has many applications, and I am always surprised when I find a new context it can be applied to. Anti-akrasia might be such a context.
The idea I am about to present came to me a few month ago and I used it to finally overcome my own problem with procrastination. I'll try to present it here as well as I can, in the hope that it might be of use to someone. If so, I am really curious what other people come up with using this technique.
If akrasia is a struggle, continue reading.
Where I come from:
Procrastination was a big topic for me. I spent ages reading stuff, watching videos, thinking, collecting stuff and what not, but very little on actual action. One thing I did read was productivity blogs and books. I assume that some or even many of the posters here share that problem with me. I am familiar with the systems - I even gave a lecture once on GTD - but I struggled to get my own stuff out the door. It surely wasn't for a lack of knowledge, but simply for a lack of doing.
The method used consists of two layers.
(I) the meta concept used to develop a personal system
(II) the highly personalized system I came up with while applying (I)
The valuable part of this post is (I).
One of the major lessons I had to learn (and am still learning) is that everyone reacts differently to a set of stimuli. This doesn't just mean differently colored folders, or the famous 'paper' or 'digital' debate. It literally means that for every person the way to get productive is different - down to the point of specific ideas working fine for one person while being a stress-inducing thing for others.
So what did I do?
First I assumed that more reading wouldn't do me any good. I assumed that I knew everything there is to know on the topic of personal productivity and refrained from reading any more.
Instead I made up a meta concept.
(I) the meta concept
My big main idea was to treat the whole problem of personal productivity as an experiment using myself as guinea pig. I decided to find out what is needed to a) start working and b) what the best conditions would be to get myself to keep producing.
Now that was short. Let me expand on it.
I did a planning session, made up a bunch of rules and habits, worked with them for a while and ...
Might law save us from uncaring AI?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-04-18T06:02:00.000Z

Robin has claimed a few times that law is humans’ best bet for protecting ourselves from super-intelligent robots. This seemed unlikely to me, and he didn’t offer much explanation. I figured laws would protect us while AI was about as intellectually weak as us, but not if when it was far more powerful. I’ve changed my mind somewhat though, so let me explain.

When is it efficient to kill humans?

At first glance, it looks like creatures with the power to take humans’ property would do so if the value of the property minus the cost of stealing it was greater than the value of anything the human might produce with it. When AI is so cheap and efficient that the human will be replaced immediately, and the replacement will use resources enough better to make up for the costs of stealing and replacement, the human is better dead. This might be soon after humans are overtaken. However such reasoning is really imagining one powerful AI’s dealings with one person, then assuming that generalizes to many of each. Does it?

What does law do?

In a group of agents where none is more powerful than the rest combined, and there is no law, basically the strongest coalition of agents gets to do what they want, including stealing others’ property. There is an ongoing cost of conflict, so overall the group would do better if they could avoid this situation, but those with power at a given time benefits from stealing, so it goes on. Law basically lets everyone escape the dynamic of groups dominating one another (or some of it) by everyone in a very large group pre-committing to take the side of whoever is being dominated in smaller conflicts. Now wherever the strong try to dominate the weak, the super-strong awaits to crush the strong.

This looks like it should work as long as a majority of the huge group, weighted by power, don’t change their mind about their commitment to the law enforcing majority and decide, for instance, to crush the puny humans. Roughly the same issue exists now – a majority could decide to dominate a smaller group and take their property – but at the moment this doesn’t happen much. The interesting question is whether the factors that keep this stable at the moment will continue into super-robot times. If these factors are generic to the institution or to agents, we are probably safe. If they are to do wit...
VNM expected utility theory: uses, abuses, and interpretation
by Academian — 2010-04-17T20:23:05.253Z

When interpreted convservatively, the von Neumann-Morgenstern rationality axioms and utility theorem are an indispensible tool for the normative study of rationality, deserving of many thought experiments and attentive decision theory. It's one more reason I'm glad to be born after the 1940s. Yet there is apprehension about its validity, aside from merely confusing it with Bentham utilitarianism (as highlighted by Matt Simpson). I want to describe not only what VNM utility is really meant for, but a contextual reinterpretation of its meaning, so that it may hopefully be used more frequently, confidently, and appropriately.

Preliminary discussion and precautions

Sharing decision utility is sharing power, not welfare

Contextual Strength (CS) of preferences, and VNM-preference as "strong" preference

Hausner (lexicographic) decision utility

The independence axiom isn't bad either

Application to earlier LessWrong discussions of utility

1. Preliminary discussion and precautions

The idea of John von Neumann and Oskar Mogernstern is that, if you behave a certain way, then it turns out you're maximizing the expected value of a particular function. Very cool! And their description of "a certain way" is very compelling: a list of four, reasonable-seeming axioms. If you haven't already, check out the Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem, a mathematical result which makes their claim rigorous, and true.

VNM utility is a decision utility, in that it aims to characterize the decision-making of a rational agent. One great feature is that it implicitly accounts for risk aversion: not risking $100 for a 10% chance to win $1000 and 90% chance to win $0 just means that for you, utility($100) > 10%utility($1000) + 90%utility($0).

But as the Wikipedia article explains nicely, VNM utility is:

not designed to predict the behavior of "irrational" individuals (like real people in a real economy);

not designed to characterize well-being, but to characterize decisions;

not designed to measure the value of items, but the value of outcomes;

only defined up to a scalar multiple and additive constant (acting with utility function U(X) is the same as acting with a·U(X)+b, if a>0);

not designed to be added up or compared between a number of individuals;

not something that can be "sacrificed" in favor of others in a m

...