trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Tel Aviv: Nick Lane's Vital Question
by Squark — 2016-01-15T18:54:26.602Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv: Nick Lane's Vital Question

WHEN:
19 January 2016 07:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Yigal Alon 118, Tel Aviv

This time in LessWrong Tel Aviv, Daniel Armak will review Nick Lane's books on evolutionary biology. The abstract of the talk:

"The largest scale of biology contains many unexplained facts. Many important traits are exclusive to eukaryotes: large cell and genome size, internal complexity, multicellularity, sex and the haploid-diploid cell cycle, mitochondria, phagocytosis, and hundreds more. What is the relation between them? How did they evolve, why do all eukaryotes have them (or once had), and why don't any other cells have any of them? What are some of them even for? I will present a summary of Nick Lane's books, themselves a popular summary of other researchers, that attempts to answer many questions with one big answer."

The event will take place in the Cluster. Entrance is from Totzeret Haaretz street. Ring the doorbell on the brown door.

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/435804276616336/

Contant number: +972542600919 (Vadim Kosoy)

Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv: Nick Lane's Vital Question
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-01-15T16:59:31.502Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on January 8th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Palo Alto Meetup: Introduction to Causal Inference: 19 January 2016 06:30PM
Portland meetup - Dojo style.: 12 January 2016 06:00PM

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:

Austin, TX - Quack's: 09 January 2016 01:30PM
London diaspora meetup, 10/01/2016: 10 January 2016 02:00PM
[Melbourne] Rationality Dojo & Picnic in the park: 10 January 2016 03:30PM
Vienna: 16 January 2016 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 10 January 2016 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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 when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Lo...
[LINK] Common fallacies in probability (when numbers aren't used)
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-01-15T08:29:28.743Z

Too many people attempt to use logic when they should be using probabilities - in fact, when they are using probabilities, but don't mention it. Here are some of the major fallacies caused by misusing logic and probabilities this way:

"It's not certain" does not mean "It's impossible" (and vice versa).

"We don't know" absolutely does not imply "It's impossible".

"There is evidence against it" doesn't mean much on its own.

Being impossible *in a certain model*, does not mean being impossible: it changes the issue to the probability of the model.

Common fallacies in probability
[link] "The Happiness Code" - New York Times on CFAR
by Kaj_Sotala — 2016-01-15T06:34:58.955Z

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-code.html

Long. Mostly quite positive, though does spend a little while rolling its eyes at the Eliezer/MIRI connection and the craziness of taking things like cryonics and polyamory seriously.
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
by rocurley — 2016-01-14T17:21:49.493Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks

WHEN:
18 January 2016 06:15:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to give/listen to short talks. Planning isn't necessary: these are not expected to be polished.

I can be reached at 301-458-0764 if you need help getting in. As always, feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
Meetup : Finding Effective Altruism with Biased Inputs on Options - LA Rationality Weekly Meetup
by Davidmanheim — 2016-01-14T05:31:20.472Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Finding Effective Altruism with Biased Inputs on Options - LA Rationality Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
20 January 2016 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90064Westside Pavilion - Upstairs Wine Bar (Next to the movie theater)

We're going to be discussing the general question of how to use biased information to make rational decisions, but talk about the specific context of how to be an Effective Altruist doing so.

The various EA nonprofits each have a claim to effective altruism, and there is lots of uncertainty about which will end up being the most effective; we can give to AMF and save lives in the near future for around $1,000 a life, or try policy interventions, with unknown effects, or perhaps we should try prevent one of severeal potential tail risks that could destroy humanity in the near or far future. The experts in each area argue for their cause, and we'd love a clearer way to think about the options. Come join us as we try to find one!

Discussion article for the meetup : Finding Effective Altruism with Biased Inputs on Options - LA Rationality Weekly Meetup
Rationality Reading Group: Part R: Physicalism 201
by Gram_Stone — 2016-01-13T23:41:49.711Z

This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post.

Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This fortnight we discuss Part R: Physicalism 201 (pp. 983-1078). This post summarizes each article of the sequence, linking to the original LessWrong post where available.

R. Physicalism 201

214. Hand vs. Fingers - When you pick up a cup of water, is it your hand that picks it up, or is it your fingers, thumb, and palm working together? Just because something can be reduced to smaller parts doesn't mean that the original thing doesn't exist.

215. Angry Atoms - It is very hard, without the benefit of hindsight, to understand just how it is that these little bouncing billiard balls called atoms, could ever combine in such a way as to make something angry. If you try to imagine this problem without understanding the idea of neurons, information processing, computing, etc you realize just how challenging reductionism actually is.

216. Heat vs. Motion - For a very long time, people had a detailed understanding of kinetics, and they had a detailed understanding of heat. They understood concepts such as momentum and elastic rebounds, as well as concepts such as temperature and pressure. It took an extraordinary amount of work in order to understand things deeply enough to make us realize that heat and motion were really the same thing.

217. Brain Breakthrough! It's Made of Neurons! - Eliezer's contribution to Amazing Breakthrough Day.

218. When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid - Anthropomorphism didn't become obviously wrong until we realized that the tangled neurons inside the brain were performing complex information processing, and that this complexity arose as a result of evolution.

219. A Priori - The facts that philosophers call "a priori" arrived in your brain by a physical process. Thoughts are existent in the universe; they are identical to the operation of brains. The "a priori" belief generator in your brain works for a reason.

220. Reductive Reference - Virtually every belief you have is not about elementary particle fields, which are (as far as we know) the actual reality. This doesn't mean that those beliefs aren't true. "Snow ...
Welcome to LessWrong (January 2016)
by  — 2016-01-13T21:34:14.615Z

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

(This is the fifth incarnation of the welcome thread; once a post gets over 500 comments, it stops showing them all by default, so we make a new one. Besides, a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you have any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

Replies to your comments across the site, plus private messages from other users, will show up in your inbox. You can reach it via the little mail icon beneath your karma score on the upper right of most pages. When you have a new reply or message, it glows red. You can also click on any user's name to view al

...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Economics Discussion
by RobinZ — 2016-01-13T17:41:03.237Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Economics Discussion

WHEN:
17 January 2016 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center

x-posted from list. Gathering in courtyard from 3:00pm, hard start 3:30pm - until closing (7:00 pm).

Richard will be leading a discussion this week on economics questions that people bring.

As always, side conversations are permitted and welcome.

Upcoming meetups:

Jan. 24: Game Design

Jan. 31: Fun & Games

Feb. 7: Fermi Estimates

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Economics Discussion
Extending the stated objectives
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-01-13T16:20:50.310Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

A system that is optimizing a function of n variables, where the objective depends on a subset of size k<n, will often set the remaining unconstrained variables to extreme values; if one of those unconstrained variables is actually something we care about, the solution found may be highly undesirable.

Stuart Russell

Think of an AI directing a car, given the instructions to get someone to the airport as fast as possible (optimised variables include "negative of time taken to airport") with some key variables left out - such as a maximum speed, maximum acceleration, respect for traffic rules, and survival of the passengers and other humans.

Call these other variables "unstated objectives" (UO), as contrasted with the "stated objectives" (SO) such as the time to the airport. In the normal environments in which we operate and design our AIs, the UOs are either correlated with the SOs (consider the SO "their heart is beating" and the UO "they're alive and healthy") or don't change much at all (the car-directing AI could have been trained on many examples of driving-to-the-airport, none of which included the driver killing their passengers).

Typically, SOs are easy to define, and the UOs are the more important objectives, left undefined either because they are complex, or because they didn't occur to us in this context (just as we don't often say "driver, get me to the airport as fast a possible, but alive and not permanently harmed, if you please. Also, please obey the following regulations and restrictions: 1.a.i.α: Non-destruction of the Earth....").

The control problem, in a nutshell, is that optimising SOs will typically set other variables to extreme values, including the UOs. The more extreme the optimisation, and the furthest from the typical environment, the more likely this is to happen.

One of the ideas of reduced impact is to preserve the typical environment, so that the unchanging UOs are left unchanged and the correlation remains between the changing UOs and the changing SOs. I've had some ideas for optimisation that "doesn't optimise too much". Jessica Taylor has been formalising similar ideas; the idea for both is to preserve the connection between SOs and UOs by preserving certain assumptions about in the standard environment.

Inverse Reinforcement Learning

But those methods are some...
[Stub] Ontological crisis = out of environment behaviour?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-01-13T15:11:54.000Z

One problem with AI is the possibility of ontological crises - of AIs discovering their fundamental model of reality is flawed, and being unable to cope safely with that change. Another problem is the out-of-environment behaviour - that an AI that has been trained to behave very well in a specific training environment, messes up when introduced to a more general environment.

It suddenly occurred to me that these might in fact be the same problem in disguise. In both cases, the AI has developed certain ways of behaving in reaction to certain regular features of their environment. And suddenly they are placed in a situation where these regular features are absent - either because they realised that these features are actually very different from what they thought (ontological crisis) or because the environment is different and no longer supports the same regularities (out-of-environment behaviour).

In a sense, both these errors may be seen as imperfect extrapolation from partial training data.
[Stub] Ontological crisis = out of environment behaviour?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-01-13T15:10:54.477Z

One problem with AI is the possibility of ontological crises - of AIs discovering their fundamental model of reality is flawed, and being unable to cope safely with that change. Another problem is the out-of-environment behaviour - that an AI that has been trained to behave very well in a specific training environment, messes up when introduced to a more general environment.

It suddenly occurred to me that these might in fact be the same problem in disguise. In both cases, the AI has developed certain ways of behaving in reaction to certain regular features of their environment. And suddenly they are placed in a situation where these regular features are absent - either because they realised that these features are actually very different from what they thought (ontological crisis) or because the environment is different and no longer supports the same regularities (out-of-environment behaviour).

In a sense, both these errors may be seen as imperfect extrapolation from partial training data.
Meetup : Baltimore Area: Epistemology of Disagreement
by iarwain1 — 2016-01-12T13:33:43.696Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area: Epistemology of Disagreement

WHEN:
31 January 2016 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1852 Reisterstown Rd, Pikesville, MD 21208

This is the second recent meetup in the Baltimore area. We'll be meeting at the Panera Bread in Pikesville.

Discussion topic is whether and how much to update your opinions when you discover that those who you respect as epistemic peers or superiors disagree with you.

My contact info:

Cell: 443-453-6673 (might not pick up if I don't recognize the number, so leave a message)

Email: nyratynaqre@tznvy.pbz (rot13'd to avoid spam)

UPDATE: Meetup was pushed off for one week due to snow forecast.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area: Epistemology of Disagreement
Tackling the subagent problem: preliminary analysis
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-01-12T12:27:36.000Z

Status: preliminary. This mainly to put down some of the ideas I've had, for later improvement or abandonment.

The subagent problem, in a nutshell, is that "create a powerful subagent with goal U that takes over the local universe" is a solution for many of the goals an AI could have - in a sense, the ultimate convergent instrumental goal. And it tends to evade many clever restrictions people try to program into the AI (eg "make use of only X amount of negentropy", "don't move out of this space").

So if the problem could be solved, many other control approaches could be potentially available.

The problem is very hard, because an imperfect definition of a subagent is simply an excuse to create an a subagent that skirts the limits of that definition (hum, that style of problem sounds familiar). For instance, if we want to rule out subagents by preventing the AI from having much influence if the AI itself were to stop ("If you die, you fail, no other can continue your quest"), then it is motivated to create powerful subagents that carefully reverse their previous influence if the AI were to be destroyed.

Controlling subagents

Some of the methods I've developed seem suitable for controlling the existence or impact of subagents.

Reduced impact methods can prevent subagents from being created, by requiring that the AI's interventions be non-disruptive ("Twenty million questions") or undetectable.
Reducing the AI's output options to a specific set can prevent them from being able to create any in the first place.
Various methods around detecting importance can be used to ensure that, though subagents may exist, they won't be very influential.
Pre-corriged methods can be used to ensure that any subagents remain value aligned with the original agent. Then, if there is some well-defined "die" goal for the agent, this could take all the agents with them.
These can be thought as ruling out the agent's existence, their creation, their influence (or importance) and their independence. The last two can be particularly tricky, as we want to make sure that our formal definition of importance matches up with our informal one, and we currently lack a well defined "die" goal.

We could also think of defining identity by using some of the tricks and restrictions that have caused humans to develop one (such as our existing in a single body with no east of copying), but it's not clear t

...
Tackling the subagent problem: preliminary analysis
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-01-12T12:26:05.310Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Status: preliminary. This mainly to put down some of the ideas I've had, for later improvement or abandonment.

The subagent problem, in a nutshell, is that "create a powerful subagent with goal U that takes over the local universe" is a solution for many of the goals an AI could have - in a sense, the ultimate convergent instrumental goal. And it tends to evade many clever restrictions people try to program into the AI (eg "make use of only X amount of negentropy", "don't move out of this space").

So if the problem could be solved, many other control approaches could be potentially available.

The problem is very hard, because an imperfect definition of a subagent is simply an excuse to create an a subagent that skirts the limits of that definition (hum, that style of problem sounds familiar). For instance, if we want to rule out subagents by preventing the AI from having much influence if the AI itself were to stop ("If you die, you fail, no other can continue your quest"), then it is motivated to create powerful subagents that carefully reverse their previous influence if the AI were to be destroyed.

Controlling subagents

Some of the methods I've developed seem suitable for controlling the existence or impact of subagents.

Reduced impact methods can prevent subagents from being created, by requiring that the AI's interventions be non-disruptive ("Twenty million questions") or undetectable.

Reducing the AI's output options to a specific set can prevent them from being able to create any in the first place.

Various methods around detecting importance can be used to ensure that, though subagents may exist, they won't be very influential.

Pre-corriged methods can be used to ensure that any subagents remain value aligned with the original agent. Then, if there is some well-defined "die" goal for the agent, this could take all the agents with them.

These can be thought as ruling out the agent's existence, their creation, their influence (or importance) and their independence. The last two can be particularly tricky, as we want to make sure that our formal definition of importance matches up with our informal one, and we currently lack a well defined "die" goal.

We could also think of defining identity by using some of the tricks and restrictions that have caused humans to develop one (such as our existing in...
Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016
by username2 — 2016-01-12T10:29:29.953Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.