trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-07-29T09:09:27.464Z

Since living in Oxford, one of the centers of the "effective altruism" movement, I've been spending a lot of time discussing the classic “effective altruism” topic -- where it would be best to focus our time and money.

Some people here seem to think that the most important thing we should be focusing our time and money on are speculative projects, or projects that promise a very high impact, but involve a lot of uncertainty. One such very common example is "existential risk reduction", or attempts to make a long-term far future for humans more likely, say by reducing the chance of things that would cause human extinction.

I do agree that the far future is the most important thing to consider, by far (see papers by Nick Bostrom and Nick Beckstead). And I do think we can influence the far future. I just don't think we can do it in a reliable way. All we have are guesses about what the far future will be like and guesses about how we can affect it. All of these ideas are unproven, speculative projects, and I don't think they deserve the main focus of our funding.

While I waffled in cause indecision for a while, I'm now going to resume donating to GiveWell's top charities, except when I have an opportunity to use a donation to learn more about impact. Why? My case is that speculative causes, or any cause with high uncertainty (reducing nonhuman animal suffering, reducing existential risk, etc.) requires that we rely on our commonsense to evaluate them with naīve cost-effectiveness calculations, and this is (1) demonstrably unreliable with a bad track record, (2) plays right into common biases, and (3) doesn’t make sense based on how we ideally make decisions. While it’s unclear what long-term impact a donation to a GiveWell top charity will have, the near-term benefit is quite clear and worth investing in.

Focusing on Speculative Causes Requires Unreliable Commonsense

How can we reduce the chance of human extinction? It just makes sense that if we fund cultural exchange programs between the US and China, there will be more goodwill for the other within each country, and therefore the countries will be less likely to nuke each other. Since nuclear war would likely be very bad, it's of high value to fund cultural exchange programs, right?

Let's try another. The Machine Intelligence Resea...
Repository repository
by pinyaka — 2013-07-28T22:59:02.955Z

A few weeks ago, Adele_L suggested that the repositories were underutilized and looked for suggestions on how to improve that. In that spirit, I added the following links to the Special Threads wiki page.

Solved Problems Repository - A collection of "solved problems in instrumental rationality."
Useful Concepts Repository - A collection of concepts that Less Wrong users have "found particularly useful for understanding the world."
Boring Advice Repository - A collection of advice that is optimized for helpfulness rather than depth of insight.
Useful Questions Repository - Questions that are useful to keep in mind in various situations.
Bad Concepts Repository - A collection of useless or harmful concepts
Grad Student Advice Repository - A collection of advice for graduate students.
Textbook Repository - The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
Reference repository - List of references and resources for LessWrong
Procedural Knowledge Gaps - How to do things that are "common sense" but that you may not know.
Mistakes Repository - A list of life-course altering mistakes that LW members have made.
Good things to have learned - A collection of skills and life lessons LWers have learned
Financial Effectiveness Repository - Tips for maximizing financial returns on (not necessarily market) investments.

In a similar vein, there is also a wiki page for the LessWrong Communities How-To's and Recommendations.

If there are other repositories that I've missed or a better way to collect these things, please link to it in a top level comment so that I get a direct message. A year and a half after this was originally posted, I still get suggestions and still add them or explain why I don't add them.

Edit: Added a few more to the list.
Arguments Against Speciesism
by Lukas_Gloor — 2013-07-28T18:24:58.354Z

There have been some posts about animals lately, for instance here and here. While normative assumptions about the treatment of nonhumans played an important role in the articles and were debated at length in the comment sections, I was missing a concise summary of these arguments. This post from over a year ago comes closest to what I have in mind, but I want to focus on some of the issues in more detail.

A while back, I read the following comment in a LessWrong discussion on uploads:

I do not at all understand this PETA-like obsession with ethical treatment of bits.

Aside from (carbon-based) humans, which other beings deserve moral consideration? Nonhuman animals? Intelligent aliens? Uploads? Nothing else?

This article is intended to shed light on these questions; it is however not the intent of this post to advocate a specific ethical framework. Instead, I'll try to show that some ethical principles held by a lot of people are inconsistent with some of their other attitudes -- an argument that doesn't rely on ethics being universal or objective.

More precisely, I will develop the arguments behind anti-speciesism (and the rejection of analogous forms of discrimination, such as discrimination against uploads) to point out common inconsistencies in some people's values. This will also provide an illustrative example of how coherentist ethical reasoning can be applied to shared intuitions. If there are no shared intuitions, ethical discourse will likely be unfruitful, so it is likely that not everyone will draw the same conclusions from the arguments here.

What Is Speciesism?

Speciesism, a term popularized (but not coined) by the philosopher Peter Singer, is meant to be analogous to sexism or racism. It refers to a discriminatory attitude against a being where less ethical consideration i.e. caring less about a being's welfare or interests is given solely because of the "wrong" species membership. The "solely" here is crucial, and it's misunderstood often enough to warrant the redundant emphasis.

For instance, it is not speciesist to deny pigs the right to vote, just like it is not sexist to deny men the right to have an abortion performed on their body. Treating beings of different species differently is not speciesist if there are relevant criteria for doing so.

Singer summarized his case against speciesism in this essay....
Anthropics and a cosmic immune system
by Mitchell_Porter — 2013-07-28T09:07:19.427Z

Some people like to assume that the cosmos is ours for the taking, even though this could make us special to the order of 1 in 1080. The argument is that the cosmos could be transformed by technology - engineered on astronomical scales - but hasn't been thus transformed.

The most common alternative hypothesis is that "we are in a simulation". Perhaps we are. But there are other possibilities too.

One is that technological life usually destroys, not just its homeworld, but its whole bubble of space-time, by using high-energy physics to cause a "vacuum decay", in which physics changes in a way that makes space uninhabitable. For example, the mass of an elementary particle is essentially equal to the energy density of the Higgs field, times a quantity called a "yukawa coupling". If the Higgs field increased its energy density by orders of magnitude, but the yukawas stayed the same, matter as we know it would be destroyed, everywhere that the change spread.

Here I want to highlight a different possibility. The idea is that the universe contains very large lifeforms and very small lifeforms. We are among the small. The large ones are, let's say, mostly dark matter, galactic in scale, and stars and planets for them are like biomolecules for us; tiny functional elements which go together to make up the whole. And - the crucial part - they have immune systems which automatically crush anything which interferes with the natural celestial order.

This is why the skies are full of untamed stars rather than Dyson spheres - any small life which begins to act on that scale is destroyed by dark-matter antibodies. And it explains anthropically why you're human-size rather than galactic-size: small life is more numerous than large life, just not so numerous as cosmic colonization would imply.

Two questions arise - how did large life evolve, and, shouldn't anthropics favor universes which have no large life, just space-colonizing small life? I could spin a story about cosmological natural selection, and large life which uses small life to reproduce, but it doesn't really answer the second question, in particular. Still, I feel that this is a huge unexplored topic - the anthropic consequences of "biocosmic" ecology and evolution - and who knows what else is lurking here, waiting to be discovered?
Alternative to Bayesian Score
by Scott Garrabrant — 2013-07-27T19:26:59.792Z

I am starting to wonder whether or not Bayes Score is what I want to maximize for my epistemic rationality. I started thinking about by trying to design a board game to teach calibration of probabilities, so I will use that as my example:

I wanted a scoring mechanism which motivates honest reporting of probabilities and rewards players who are better calibrated. For simplicity, lets assume that we only have to deal with true/false questions for now. A player is given a question which they believe is true with probability p. They then name a real number x between 0 and 1. Then, they receive a score which is a function of x and whether or not the problem is true. We want the expected score to be maximized exactly when x=p. Let f(x) be the output if the question is true, and let g(x) be the output if the question is false. Then, my expected utility is (p)f(x)+(1-p)g(x). If we assume f and g are smooth, then in order to have a maximum at x=p, we want (p)f'(p)+(1-p)g'(p)=0, which still leaves us with a large class of functions. It would also be nice to have symmetry by having f(x)=g(1-x). If we further require this, we get (p)f'(p)+(1-p)(-1)f'(1-p)=0, or equivalently (p)f'(p)=(1-p)f'(1-p). One way to achieve this is to set (x)f'(x) to be a constant So then, f'(x)=c/x, so f(x)=log x. This scoring mechanism is referred to as "Bayesian Score".

However, another natural way to to achieve this is by setting f'(p)/(1-p) equal to a constant. If we set this constant equal to 2, we get f'(x)=2-2x, which gives us f(x)=2x-x2=1-(1-x)2. I will call this the "Squared Error Score."

There are many other functions which satisfy the desired conditions, but these two are the simplest, so I will focus on these two.

Eliezer argues for Bayesian Score in A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation, which I recommend reading. The reason he prefers Bayesian Score is that he wants the sum of the scores associated with determining P(A) and P(B|A) to equal the score for determining P(A&B). In other words he wants it to not matter whether you break a problem up into one experiment or two experiments. This is a legitimate virtue of this scoring mechanism, but I think that many people think it is a lot more valuable than it is. This doesn't eliminate the problem of we don't know what questions to ask. It gives us the same answer regardless of how we break up an experiment into smaller expe...
Norbert Wiener on automation and unemployment
by JonahS — 2013-07-27T18:02:19.802Z

As a part of my work on the "Can we know what to do about AI?" project for MIRI, I looked at mathematician Norbert Wiener's predictions about the impact of automation on society, and how he acted based on these predictions.

I already wrote about Wiener's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" type concerns about the dangers of automation, which parallel MIRI's concerns and Eliezer's concerns about AI risk. But Wiener was also concerned that automation would cause unemployment.

Coincidentally, immediately after I investigated this, Eliezer wrote The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ, which argues against the position that Wiener held.

I found a recent paper titled Some Notes on Wiener’s Concerns about the Social Impact of Cybernetics, the Effects of Automation on Labor, and “the Human Use of Human Beings” which summarizes Wiener's views on automation and unemployment and how he acted based on them.

Wiener's prediction

Wiener believed that unless countermeasures were taken, automation would render low-skilled workers unemployable, precipitating an economic depression of far greater magnitude than the Great Depression of the 1930s:

Wiener voiced his reservations about the potential impact of the new technology on working people in every business and industry, [saying] the second, cybernetic, industrial revolution “is [bound] to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions [until] the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone’s money to buy.”

[...]

“It is perfectly clear that [automation] will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which…the depression of the [nineteen] thirties will seem a pleasant joke. This depression will ruin many industries—possibly even the industries which have taken advantage of the new potentialities.…”

What Wiener did based on his prediction

Wiener believed that the problem that he foresaw was so great that he considered giving top priority to mitigating it:

“I wondered whether I had not got into a moral situation in which my first duty might be to speak to others concerning material which could be socially harmful.”

He attempted to network with labor unions so as to mitigate the problem:

Early in the postwar period, Wiener began an active ou

...
Meetup : Israel (Tel Aviv) Meetup: Fun and Games with Cognitive Biases
by SoftFlare — 2013-07-27T16:24:54.515Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Israel (Tel Aviv) Meetup: Fun and Games with Cognitive Biases

WHEN:
01 August 2013 08:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Adventures Garden (Gan Harpatkaot), Tel Aviv, Israel

This meetup is going to be about Cognitive Biases, a whole bunch of socializing, and a rump session.

We will be meeting next to the Adventure Park in Park Hayarkon in Tel Aviv at 8pm.

Here: https://ssl.panoramio.com/photo/19706559

Its next to "Theatre in the park".

The main talk will be:

Fun and Games with Cognitive Biases / Gal Hochberg
Exploring and brainstorming cognitive biases, how to recognize them, how to avoid them and how to use them to win. Based on an NYC LW meetup session.

A rump session is (to those unfamiliar with the concept):
Each participant will give a 4-minute talk (+3 minute encore if we applaud hard enough). Giving a talk isn't mandatory, but it's highly recommended. Not confident that what you have to say is relevant to our interests? Unsure about your public speaking skills? Doesn't matter - in the rump session, anything goes.

The schedule:

| Start | End | What |

|---------+-------+--------------------------------------|

| 20:00 | 20:15 | Assembly |

| 20:15 | 21:00 | Main Talk |

| 21:00 | 22:00 | Dinner & Discussion |

| 22:00 | 23:00 | Rump Session (minitalks) |

| 23:00 | ??:?? | End of official programming |

See you all there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Israel (Tel Aviv) Meetup: Fun and Games with Cognitive Biases
Meetup : Helsinki Practical Meetup
by mikko — 2013-07-27T14:13:46.502Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Practical Meetup

WHEN:
04 August 2013 03:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Kirjasto 10, Elielinaukio, Helsinki

We’ll tackle the theme of Quantified Self – can measurement and tracking of personal statistics be fun and useful, and how? We’ll go through examples of quantifying, and we’ll learn some very easy methods for doing statistical analysis.

We’re meeting in room 40 in Kirjasto 10. It’s reserved for three hours (15-18), after which we can relocate to either Kaisla or the Helsinki Music Centre.

In the future, meetups will probably happen every two weeks.

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Practical Meetup
Meetup : (Improv?) games meetup
by rocurley — 2013-07-27T07:20:54.373Z

Discussion article for the meetup : (Improv?) games meetup

WHEN:
28 July 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery courtyard, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to do improv games! However, because I will not actually be there and I'm not sure anyone (including me, actually) knows how to run such an event, as a backup it will be a normal games meetup.

Discussion article for the meetup : (Improv?) games meetup
Meetup : Meetup: Vancouver
by eggman — 2013-07-27T04:51:40.244Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup: Vancouver

WHEN:
27 July 2013 01:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2505 W Broadway, Vancouver, BC

Tomorrow we will be discussing the Landmark Education forum, a self-improvement workshop attended by some of our members, who reflect positively on it and would like to discuss its merits.
http://www.landmarkworldwide.com/

Also, two of us have recently returned from the July CFAR workshop, and there will hopefully be discussion of how great that was.

Anyways, please join us for rationality discussion and learning at Benny's Bagels on west Broadway. Note that tomorrow will be meeting at the earlier time of 1:30 PM, instead of the usual 3:30, but we will still be there for the full time we usually chill out there.

Join the mailing list if you're new or haven't already:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/vancouver-rationalists

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup: Vancouver
A Call For Advice:
by Ambition — 2013-07-27T02:45:45.320Z

I'll start off by introducing myself.

My name is Caleb, I'm currently 14 years old and taking High School. I'm an INTP, I stand 6'2" tall, and enjoy composing music in my spare time.

Now, the purpose of this post is not to bring new research or ideas to the table from me, (probably going to take a while before that happens), but rather to request it, for a specific project I'm doing.

I've been reading LessWrong for about a year and a half now, and in that time I've made a multitude of improvements to my life. Since I came here I've started meditating, working out regularly, reading a number of books on psychology, and becoming more aware of my own biases. Rationality has become my passion, and I work on it daily.

The Plan

Onto the purpose of this post. On August 4th, I will be turning 15, and I've decided to initiate a very large project, which for lack of a better name, I will dub "The Plan".

I intend to spend the days leading up to my 15th Birthday by taking information from an enormous variety of sources on what life improvements can be made, what skills are most useful, and what areas should be studied, to reach the ultimate goal of gaining as much benefit possible, as quick as possible.

There's tons of things to consider, even assuming I have a tireless work ethic and can implement this immediately. What types of utility increases are there? Which are more important? Should all time be devoted to the quickest increases in utility, or should energy be set aside for starting some long term goals early? Does it make more sense to improve yourself, so you can make more money? Or to make some money, and use it to improve yourself?

Obviously I'm not going to find a perfect answer, and attempting to plan out my whole life is doomed to fail, but I'd at least like to have a better idea of where to go from here. (Besides, even if I fail, I'll still have learned a lots of useful information.)

The Question

So, I pose this question to the LessWrong Community:

If you were me, and turning 15, what would you recommend that I do over the next year, to give me the biggest utility bonus the fastest, both in intelligence and wealth?

Hopefully, even if it proves an impossible question, we'll see some interesting discussion.
A Personal Record, and a Call For Advice:
by Ambition — 2013-07-27T01:08:17.385Z

Introduction:

This is my first post here on LessWrong, so I'll start off by introducing myself.

My name is Caleb, and I've been reading here on LessWrong for quite some time now. I suspect nobody will be surprised when I say it was HPMOR that brought me here, as it has so many people. I am a Musician, I play the Violin, Piano and somewhat Guitar, (which I need to work on), and my hobbies include recursive self-improvement, reading books, and discovering new ways to improve my life.

Now, it should be clear from the title that I'm not really offering new insight here, (not quite there yet), but am instead asking the community for advice. I know there are a lot of people out there who stand to benefit from hearing applicable information that doesn't require too much base knowledge of rationality. I'm going to be talking quite a bit about my personal history, mostly for a personal record. I recommend skipping directly to the "A Call for Advice" section, to get to the part where I actually talk about what information I'm looking for, if you could care less about my history.

My Childhood

When I was born, my parents were both Christian. My mother came from a family that took the Bible literally. Thus it was a patriarchy, and she grew up having been taught that a "woman's purpose" was to serve man. My father came from a "cherry-picking" Christian family, and had three separate stepfathers before he turned 10. They were both 21 when I came into existence, and still trying to achieve their goals.

I was very young, (not quite sure how old), when they became atheists, or at least stopped believing in a god. Because of this, it wasn't particularly hard for me to change perspectives, and I could somewhat follow my father's, "Just because somebody says he's Superman, that doesn't mean he is" explanation for me. My brother, Pascal, was born when I was 4, and Atlas soon followed.

My Education

We moved often, and so I was taught by my mother until we settled in Hollywood, where my father pursued his dream of becoming a filmmaker. Because of this, I made my first encounter with public schooling in the third grade, where I was quickly made aware of how regular children behaved. My mother had not neglected my education, and I already knew nearly everything my teacher had to offer. It wasn't long before she told me to stop raising my hand, and to not ask any more questio...
Meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 77-78, Part 2
by therufs — 2013-07-26T17:58:16.824Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 77-78, Part 2

WHEN:
27 July 2013 12:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
726 Rigsbee Avenue, Durham NC, 27701

Meet at Fullsteam for discussion of HPMoR chapters 77-78, Electric Boogaloo.

Feel free to bring coffee from Cocoa Cinnamon (420 West Geer St., right around the corner), food from any convenient food truck, friends, neighbors, etc.

12:00 -- collect consumables, introductions, chat

12:30 -- discussion!

2:00 ish -- disperse and/or go play ping pong

If you have a chance to do the reading (or have already done the reading!) think about a few possible discussion questions. If you don't have a chance to do the reading, as always, you're welcome to join anyway!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 77-78, Part 2
System Administrator Appreciation Day - Thanks Trike!
by John_Maxwell — 2013-07-26T17:57:52.410Z

In honor of System Administrator Appreciation Day, this is a post to thank Trike Apps for creating & maintaining Less Wrong. A lot of the time when they are mentioned on Less Wrong, it is to complain about bugs or request new features. So this is the time of year: thanks for everything that continues to silently go right!