trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Elites and AI: Stated Opinions
by lukeprog — 2013-06-15T19:52:36.207Z

Previously, I asked "Will the world's elites navigate the creation of AI just fine?" My current answer is "probably not," but I think it's a question worth additional investigation.

As a preliminary step, and with the help of MIRI interns Jeremy Miller and Oriane Gaillard, I've collected a few stated opinions on the issue. This survey of stated opinions is not representative of any particular group, and is not meant to provide strong evidence about what is true on the matter. It's merely a collection of quotes we happened to find on the subject. Hopefully others can point us to other stated opinions — or state their own opinions.

MIRI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky is famously pessimistic on this issue. For example, in a 2009 comment, he replied to the question "What kind of competitive or political system would make fragmented squabbling AIs safer than an attempt to get the monolithic approach right?" by saying "the answer is, 'None.' It's like asking how you should move your legs to walk faster than a jet plane" — again, implying extreme skepticism that political elites will manage AI properly.1

Cryptographer Wei Dai is also quite pessimistic:

...even in a relatively optimistic scenario, one with steady progress in AI capability along with apparent progress in AI control/safety (and nobody deliberately builds a UFAI for the sake of "maximizing complexity of the universe" or what have you), it's probably only a matter of time until some AI crosses a threshold of intelligence and manages to "throw off its shackles". This may be accompanied by a last-minute scramble by mainstream elites to slow down AI progress and research methods of scalable AI control, which (if it does happen) will likely be too late to make a difference.

Stanford philosopher Ken Taylor has also expressed pessimism, in an episode of Philosophy Talk called "Turbo-charging the mind":

Think about nuclear technology. It evolved in a time of war... The probability that nuclear technology was going to arise at a time when we use it well rather than [for] destruction was low... Same thing with... superhuman artificial intelligence. It's going to emerge... in a context in which we make a mess out of everything. So the probability that we make a mess out of this is really high.

Here, Taylor seems to express the view that humans are not yet morally and rationally advanced enough to be tr...
[META] LW bug: Private drafts are publicly viewable
by VincentYu — 2013-06-15T16:56:19.582Z

Private drafts on LW are currently publicly viewable on user pages (and RSS feeds). To verify this, you can view a draft that I have saved on my user page. This seems to be a bug caused by recent changes (also see [1] and [2]) to the LW codebase.
Rationality witticisms suitable for t-shirts or bumper stickers
by evand — 2013-06-15T12:56:19.245Z

What are your best short witticisms, suitable for use on a t-shirt, bumper sticker, or similar location? Ideally something that might make someone reading it think, or get curious enough to ask about it. Simple in-group identification is fine too, though.

For context, therufs is spending today at the NC Maker Faire making t-shirts, and asked me for suggestions this morning. As I was still mostly asleep, I wasn't very helpful.
Meetup : CFAR visits Salt Lake City
by AnnaSalamon — 2013-06-15T04:43:54.594Z

Discussion article for the meetup : CFAR visits Salt Lake City

WHEN:
16 June 2013 09:43:55PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Salt Lake City

Three of us from CFAR are hosting a meetup from 1pm to 3pm at

656 N Columbus Street, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84103.

Fun, games, and rationality conversations! You might also bring your dad; dads get a free cupcake in honor of father's day.

Discussion article for the meetup : CFAR visits Salt Lake City
Meetup : Brussels meetup with HEALES
by Axel — 2013-06-14T21:35:42.293Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup with HEALES

WHEN:
13 July 2013 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

This month I'm happy to announce we have a very special meetup! The kind people from Heales (The Healthy Life Extension Society) are giving a presentation and explaining what they are all about. If you have any interest in life extension or just want an intelligent discussion consider dropping by. For this meetup the room upstairs is booked for us so ask at the bar or just come upstairs and say hi.
If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form, to share your contact information.

About this meetup in particular:
The first part of the discussion will give a short description of why we age and the main fields of possible progression:

Drugs

Stem cells and creation of organs

Gene therapy

Nanotechnologies

Longer term prospective

The second part of the discussion will be about the consequences of life extension for the citizens and for the society as a whole:

The following aspects concerning life extension will be approached:

Economic consequences: lower health costs and questions related to pensions

Environmental consequences: the question of overpopulation and the pattern of consumption of people advancing in age

Psychological fears related to a longer life: boredom, hubris (playing God).

Harmonious society: ethical questions, lower level of crime and a higher level of resilience

The last part of the discussion will be about a political and ethical question: Should the State subsidize life extension?

Didier Coeurnelle is co-chair of Heales (Healthy Life Extension Society), which publishes a monthly newsletter of information: “La mort de la mort” (The Death of the Death) and organizes international conferences. He is vice-president of the French association Technoprog, which aims to “spread the themes and questions related to technologies that could extend and enhance the lives of individuals and of humankind”. He is also an active member of the environmental movement.

In January 2013, he published a book (in French): Et si on arrêtait de vieillir ! : Réalité, enjeux et perspectives d'une vie en bonne santé beaucoup plus longue (Amazon page - Dedicated website).

Discussion article for the m

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[LINK] The Selected Papers Network
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2013-06-14T20:20:21.542Z

John Baez has been writing, here and here, about problems with the academic journal system and a tool that might be a step towards fixing them:

Last time Christopher Lee and I described some problems with scholarly publishing. The big problems are expensive journals and ineffective peer review. But we argued that solving these problems require new methods of

• selection—assessing papers

and

• endorsement—making the quality of papers known, thus giving scholars the prestige they need to get jobs and promotions.

The Selected Papers Network is an infrastructure for doing both these jobs in an open, distributed way. It’s not yet the solution to the big visible problems—just a framework upon which we can build those solutions. It’s just getting started, and it can use your help.
The Virtue of Silence
by Scott Alexander — 2013-06-14T19:00:00.000Z

Leah Libresco writes a couple of essays (1, 2) on an ethical dilemma reported in the New York Times. In the course of a confidential medical history, a doctor hears her patient is suffering from stress-related complaints after having sent an innocent man to prison. The doctor wants to know whether it is ethical to report the matter to the police. The Times’ columnist says yes – it would save the poor prisoner. Leah says no – violating medical confidentiality creates an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the future, thus dooming patients who are too afraid to talk about drug use or gay sex or other potentially embarrassing but important medical risk factors.

But both sides are ignoring the much bigger dilemma lurking one meta-level up: is it ethical to debate this dilemma in the New York Times?

Let’s look more closely at that phrase “violating medical confidentiality creates an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the future.” There’s a very abstruse angels-and-clockwork interpretation of “creates an expectation” where, by making the decision to violate confidentiality, you are altering the Platonic machinery of the Universe in a way that allows other beings who know your source code to determine that you will do this. But most people don’t have the decision theory to understand this, and anyway most doctors do not publish their source code online.

The way “creates an expectation” pans out in our universe is that somebody hears that a doctor violated medical confidentiality, and that person tells someone else, and that person tells someone else, until eventually someone who was going to tell their doctor about having gay sex with drugs remembers having heard the story and decides not to.

How exactly would people hear about this doctor who revealed the innocence of the prisoner? Through the ensuing court case? Nah. Most people wouldn’t obsessively read the minutes of every single case at the local courthouse unless of course it has something to do with gender. Really, the only way that someone could hear about a doctor violating medical confidentiality is if she, like, somehow got a description of her intention to do so published in meticulous detail in the New York Times.

Oh, right.

The entire negative effect of the doctor breaking her pro...
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Eliezer and Nick Share a Cab...
by Scott Garrabrant — 2013-06-14T18:59:46.835Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Eliezer and Nick Share a Cab...

WHEN: 19 June 2013 11:20:26AM (-0700)

WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm Wednesday, June 5th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion: Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom once shared a cab and found an extra $20. EY said that he thought it was his with probability 20%, while NB said that it was his with probability 15%. How should they split the extra $20 they found. I will present at least four different justifications for four different answers. Hopefully we will be able to reach a consensus on the best way to distribute the money. I will also explain why I think this question could be very important for making decisions under uncertainty.

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible and useful to everyone who values thinking for themselves. There will be open general conversation until 7:30, and that's always a lot of good, fun, intelligent discussion!

There will be a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Eliezer and Nick Share a Cab...
How should Eliezer and Nick's extra $20 be split
by Scott Garrabrant — 2013-06-14T18:14:48.140Z

In "Principles of Disagreement," Eliezer Yudkowsky shared the following anecdote:

Nick Bostrom and I once took a taxi and split the fare. When we counted the money we'd assembled to pay the driver, we found an extra twenty there.

"I'm pretty sure this twenty isn't mine," said Nick.

"I'd have been sure that it wasn't mine either," I said.

"You just take it," said Nick.

"No, you just take it," I said.

We looked at each other, and we knew what we had to do.

"To the best of your ability to say at this point, what would have been your initial probability that the bill was yours?" I said.

"Fifteen percent," said Nick.

"I would have said twenty percent," I said.

I have left off the ending to give everyone a chance to think about this problem for themselves. How would you have split the twenty?

In general, EY and NB disagree about who deserves the twenty. EY believes that EY deserves it with probability p, while NB believes that EY deserves it with probability q. They decide to give EY a fraction of the twenty equal to f(p,q). What should the function f be?

In our example, p=1/5 and q=17/20

Please think about this problem a little before reading on, so that we do not miss out on any original solutions that you might have come up with.

I can think of 4 ways to solve this problem. I am attributing answers to the person who first proposed that dollar amount, but my reasoning might not reflect their reasoning.

f=p/(1+p-q) or $11.43 (Eliezer Yodkowsky/Nick Bostrom) -- EY believes he deserves p of the money, while NB believes he deserves 1-q. They should therefore be given money in a ratio of p:1-q.

f=(p+q)/2 or $10.50 (Marcello) -- It seems reasonable to assume that there is a 50% chance that EY reasoned properly and a 50% chance that NB reasoned properly, so we should take the average of the amounts of money that EY would get under these two assumptions.

f=sqrt(pq)/(sqrt(pq)+sqrt((1-p)(1-q))) or $10.87 (GreedyAlgorithm) -- We want to chose an f so that log(f/(1-f)) is the average of log(p/(1-p)) and log(q/(1-q)).

f=pq/(pq+(1-p)(1-q)) or $11.72 -- We have two observations that EY deserves the money with probability p and probability q respectively. If we assume that these are two independent pieces of evidence as to whether or not EY should get the money, then starting with equal likelihood of each person deserving the money, we shoul

...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-06-14T15:03:05.396Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on June 7th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta LessWrong June Meetup: Effective Altruism: 15 June 2013 07:00PM
Berlin Social Meetup: 15 June 2013 05:00PM
Bratislava Meetup IV.: 24 June 2013 06:00PM
[Bristol] Second Bristol meetup & mailing list for future meetups: 16 June 2013 03:00PM
Helsinki meetup with CatM (CFAR instructor) as special guest star: 08 June 2013 03:00PM
London - Inaugural Practical Session - June 9th: 09 June 2013 02:00PM
[Moscow] Rational choice: 09 June 2013 04:00PM

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: 08 June 2019 01:30PM
[NYC] Self Improvement - Productivity Apps: 09 June 2013 03:30PM
Vienna Meetup #3: 15 June 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orang...
Can we dodge the mindkiller?
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-06-14T12:25:46.702Z

I was thinking about the hazards of bad government, and wondering if there was a way for the LW community to do something to oppose them, and it occurred to me that we might be picking up the problem by the wrong end.

The usual way of thinking about political action is to start with one's political identity (progressive, libertarian, whatever), and that's likely to put one at odds with people who have opposed identities.

Instead, I believe there are projects which could appeal to rationalists across a wide range of the political spectrum. A couple I can think of are opposing the war on drugs and improving judicial systems. Any other suggestions?
Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy
by Epiphany — 2013-06-14T06:28:15.906Z

A new TED talk video just came out by Daniel Suarez, author of Daemon, explaining how autonomous combat drones with a capability called "lethal autonomy" pose a threat to democracy. Lethal autonomy is what it sounds like - the ability of a robot to kill a human without requiring a human to make the decision.

He explains that a human decision-maker is not a necessity for combat drones to function. This has potentially catastrophic consequences, as it would allow a small number of people to concentrate a very large amount of power, ruining the checks and balances of power between governments and their people and the checks and balances of power between different branches of government. According to Suarez, about 70 countries have begun developing remotely piloted drones (like predator drones), the precursor to killer robots with lethal autonomy.

Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot

One thing he didn't mention in this video is that there's a difference in obedience levels between human soldiers and combat drones. Drones are completely obedient but humans can throw a revolt. Because they can rebel, human soldiers provide some obstacles to limit the power that would-be tyrants could otherwise obtain. Drones won't provide this type of protection whatsoever. Obviously, relying on human decision making is not perfect. Someone like Hitler can manage to convince people to make poor ethical choices - but still, they need to be convinced, and that requirement may play a major role in protecting us. Consider this - it's unthinkable that today's American soldiers might suddenly decide this evening to follow a tyrannical leader whose goal is to have total power and murder all who oppose. It is not, however, unthinkable at all that the same tyrant, if empowered by an army of combat drones, could successfully launch such an attack without risking a mutiny. The amount and variety of power grabs a tyrant with a robot army of sufficient power can get away with is unlimited.

Something else he didn't mention is that because we can optimize technologies more easily than we can optimize humans, it may be possible to produce killer robots in less time than it takes to build armies of human soldiers and with less expense than training and paying those soldiers. Considering the salaries and ben...
[Link] Concrete steps are being taken towards futarchy
by NoSignalNoNoise — 2013-06-14T00:21:46.423Z

Article: Can investors make money in social services?

According to the article, six states are experimenting with funding social programs using "social impact bonds", which only pay out if the programs achieve their official objectives. The project is in its early stages, so it's not clear what will happen if the market decides that a program isn't worth funding, but this looks quite promising.
After critical event W happens, they still won't believe you
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-06-13T21:59:09.515Z

In general and across all instances I can think of so far, I do not agree with the part of your futurological forecast in which you reason, "After event W happens, everyone will see the truth of proposition X, leading them to endorse Y and agree with me about policy decision Z."

Example 1: "After a 2-year-old mouse is rejuvenated to allow 3 years of additional life, society will realize that human rejuvenation is possible, turn against deathism as the prospect of lifespan / healthspan extension starts to seem real, and demand a huge Manhattan Project to get it done." (EDIT: This has not happened, and the hypothetical is mouse healthspan extension, not anything cryonic. It's being cited because this is Aubrey de Grey's reasoning behind the Methuselah Mouse Prize.)

Alternative projection: Some media brouhaha. Lots of bioethicists acting concerned. Discussion dies off after a week. Nobody thinks about it afterward. The rest of society does not reason the same way Aubrey de Grey does.

Example 2: "As AI gets more sophisticated, everyone will realize that real AI is on the way and then they'll start taking Friendly AI development seriously."

Alternative projection: As AI gets more sophisticated, the rest of society can't see any difference between the latest breakthrough reported in a press release and that business earlier with Watson beating Ken Jennings or Deep Blue beating Kasparov; it seems like the same sort of press release to them. The same people who were talking about robot overlords earlier continue to talk about robot overlords. The same people who were talking about human irreproducibility continue to talk about human specialness. Concern is expressed over technological unemployment the same as today or Keynes in 1930, and this is used to fuel someone's previous ideological commitment to a basic income guarantee, inequality reduction, or whatever. The same tiny segment of unusually consequentialist people are concerned about Friendly AI as before. If anyone in the science community does start thinking that superintelligent AI is on the way, they exhibit the same distribution of performance as modern scientists who think it's on the way, e.g. Hugo de Garis, Ben Goertzel, etc.

Consider the situation in macroeconomics. When the Federal Reserve dropped interes...
Coursera Public Speaking Course - LW Study Group?
by sixes_and_sevens — 2013-06-13T17:15:06.246Z

ETA: ModusPonies has set up a Google Group for everyone doing this. It looks like it's officially a Thing.

I originally asked this on the London Less Wrong mailing list, but then realised the internet doesn't just have a ten mile radius.

There's been some interest in public speaking on LW lately, and it cropped up a couple of times at the London practical meetup as an area people would like to work on. I volunteered to collate some exercises and resources on the subject.

Since then, I've noticed a Coursera course on public speaking which is starting in a little under two weeks. I've signed up for it, and would like to encourage other LessWrongers to sign up for it alongside me. My reasons for this are as follows:

- The course involves the option of recording your progress and sharing it with other participants. As several of us have discovered on the Less Wrong Study Hall, seeing the faces of people you chat to on the internet is fun, sociable and motivational.

- We can read posts and articles on the subject all day long, but having an externally-imposed syllabus will provide the structure and motivation to actually act on it.

- There is an aspect of rhetoric and persuasion to the course, (cf. 'dark arts'), and having epistemically hygienic fellows will help keep participants on the straight-and-narrow.

- Turning a large number of aspiring rationalists into erudite and persuasive speakers can't be a bad thing.

So who else is in?

(Also, before anyone mentions it, yes, I am very, very aware of the existence of Toastmasters. They seem to be the default suggestion whenever public speaking comes up. For anyone who isn't aware of them, they are an international organisation of clubs practising communication and public speaking. Google them if you're interested. I'm not, for social- and time-commitment reasons.)