trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
2012 Survey Results
by Scott Alexander — 2012-12-07T21:04:20.299Z

Thank you to everyone who took the 2012 Less Wrong Survey (the survey is now closed. Do not try to take it.) Below the cut, this post contains the basic survey results, a few more complicated analyses, and the data available for download so you can explore it further on your own. You may want to compare these to the results of the 2011 Less Wrong Survey.

Part 1: Population

How many of us are there?
The short answer is that I don't know.
The 2011 survey ran 33 days and collected 1090 responses. This year's survey ran 23 days and collected 1195 responses. The average number of new responses during the last week was about five per day, so even if I had kept this survey open as long as the last one I probably wouldn't have gotten more than about 1250 responses. That means at most a 15% year on year growth rate, which is pretty abysmal compared to the 650% growth rate in two years we saw last time.
About half of these responses were from lurkers; over half of the non-lurker remainder had commented but never posted to Main or Discussion. That means there were only about 600 non-lurkers.
But I am skeptical of these numbers. I hang out with some people who are very closely associated with the greater Less Wrong community, and a lot of them didn't know about the survey until I mentioned it to them in person. I know some people who could plausibly be described as focusing their lives around the community who just never took the survey for one reason or another. One lesson of this survey may be that the community is no longer limited to people who check Less Wrong very often, if at all. One friend didn't see the survey because she hangs out on the #lesswrong channel more than the main site. Another mostly just goes to meetups. So I think this represents only a small sample of people who could justly be considered Less Wrongers.
The question of "how quickly is LW growing" is also complicated by the high turnover. Over half the people who took this survey said they hadn't participated in the survey last year. I tried to break this down by combining a few sources of information, and I think our 1200 respondents include 500 people who took last year's survey, 400 people who were around last year but didn't take the survey for some reason, and 300 new people.
As expected, there's lower turnover among regulars than among lurkers. Of people who have posted in Main, about 75% took t...
Weekly LW Meetups: Atlanta, Austin, Berlin, Bielefield, Cambridge MA, Innsbruck, London, Melbourne, Montreal, Phoenix, Seattle
by FrankAdamek — 2012-12-07T15:59:08.810Z

This summary was posted to LW main on November 30th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Berlin Meetup: 01 December 2012 07:30PM
02/12 London Meetup: 02 December 2012 02:00PM
First meetup in Innsbruck : 02 December 2012 03:00PM
Seattle Meetup: Bayes Theorem Tutorial: 02 December 2012 04:00PM
Atlanta - Practical Rationality Meetup Session: 02 December 2012 05:00PM
Montreal Meetup - Biases and Biased Boardgaming: 04 December 2012 06:30PM
Meetup : Bielefeld Meetup, December 5th: 05 December 2012 07:00PM
Phoenix, AZ: Stoicism and Visitors: 5 December 6:00PM: 06 December 2012 06:00PM
Moscow: Applied Rationality and Cognitive Biases: 08 December 2012 04:00PM
Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup: 09 December 2012 05:00PM
Brussels meetup: 15 December 2012 01:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 01 December 2018 01:30PM
Cambridge, MA first-Sunday meetup: 02 December 2012 02:00PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 07 December 2012 07:00PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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 L...
Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: Artificial Intelligence
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-12-07T11:26:38.757Z

The FHI's mini advent calendar: counting down through the big five existential risks. As people on this list would have suspected, the last one is the most fearsome, should it come to pass: Artificial Intelligence.
And the FHI is starting the AGI-12/AGI-impacts conference tomorrow, on this very subject.

Artificial intelligence

Current understanding: very low
Most worrying aspect: likely to cause total (not partial) human extinction

Humans have trod upon the moon, number over seven billion, and have created nuclear weapons and a planet spanning technological economy. We also have the potential to destroy ourselves and entire ecosystems. These achievements have been made possible through the tiny difference in brain size between us and the other greater apes; what further achievements could come from an artificial intelligence at or above our own level?

It is very hard to predict when or if such an intelligence could be built, but it is certain to be utterly disruptive if it were. Even a human-level intelligence, trained and copied again and again, could substitute for human labour in most industries, causing (at minimum) mass unemployment. But this disruption is minor compared with the power that an above-human AI could accumulate, through technological innovation, social manipulation, or careful planning. Such super-powered entities would be hard to control, pursuing their own goals, and considering humans as an annoying obstacle to overcome. Making them safe would require very careful, bug-free programming, as well as an understanding of how to cast key human concepts (such as love and human rights) into code. All solutions proposed so far have turned out to be very inadequate. Unlike other existential risks, AIs could really “finish the job”: an AI bent on removing humanity would be able to eradicate the last remaining members of our species.
[SEQ RERUN] Test Near, Apply Far
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-07T07:10:58.455Z

Today's post, Test Near, Apply Far was originally published on December 3, 2008. A summary:

Avoid inventing new abstractions that deal exclusively with things that are far. Ensure that the abstractions you endorse pay their rent here, or at least nearby.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Hard Takeoff, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Complement Luke's Mega-Course for Aspiring Philosophers
by diegocaleiro — 2012-12-07T06:14:54.536Z

Luke has mentioned much of the research that aspiring philosophers ought to read here.

In fact, he delineated a basis upon which good philosophy can be build, a worldview brought by science and experimentation that relates to, and informs, the kinds of facts which philosophers need to understand to increase their probabilities of asking, and giving good answers to, relevant questions.

Some argued that his list is biased, let us assume for the time being it isn't.

Some argued that the main problem with the list is that it requires either unmanageable amount of time to go through, or improbable levels of intelligence/motivation to do so. This argument does make sense if the purpose of the list was "Let us create a good Philosophy Course".

But this is not the purpose of it. The purpose of it, as most of what Luke publicly does is to save the World. And if doing so requires making people go through an enormous amount of pages of content besides their formal education, well, then so be it. If it has to be a six year course, then it has to.

At the end of his post he says:

You might also let them read 20th century analytic philosophy at that point [after going through his Mega-Course] — hopefully their training will have inoculated them from picking up bad thinking habits.

Now 20th century Analytic Philosophy, and some philosophy that isn't strictly analytic, should definitely be at a philosophy course. I urge other LessWronger philosophers to guide people through that.

Here is a list I have published here before, for Philosophy of Mind and Language (sometimes considered subsets or children of Analytic Philosophy). It covers only the minimal reading necessary to grasp the place of computationalism, and so-called computational theories of mind within the larger debate of philosophy.

But the last century has seen a lot of good philosophy that by luck didn't conflict with neither the science of the day, nor the science that was developed until 2012. Sometimes authors were very careful when writing their philosophy, and well versed in science, like Dennett, Hofstadter, Putnam, Ned Block, and Chalmers. Finally, frequently the topics at hand are sufficiently orthogonal with scientific development that it simply didn't matter that the author didn't know in 1970 what we (after the Mega-Course) know today.

So I ask Luke, Pragmatist, Carl Shulman and others to he...
2012 Winter Fundraiser for the Singularity Institute
by lukeprog — 2012-12-06T22:41:32.007Z

Cross-posted here.

(The Singularity Institute maintains Less Wrong, with generous help from Trike Apps, and much of the core content is written by salaried SI staff members.)

Thanks to the generosity of several major donors,† every donation to the Singularity Institute made now until January 20t (deadline extended from the 5th) will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $115,000! So please, donate now!

Now is your chance to double your impact while helping us raise up to $230,000 to help fund our research program.

(If you're unfamiliar with our mission, please see our press kit and read our short research summary: Reducing Long-Term Catastrophic Risks from Artificial Intelligence.)

Now that Singularity University has acquired the Singularity Summit, and SI's interests in rationality training are being developed by the now-separate CFAR, the Singularity Institute is making a major transition. Most of the money from the Summit acquisition is being placed in a separate fund for a Friendly AI team, and therefore does not support our daily operations or other programs.

For 12 years we've largely focused on movement-building — through the Singularity Summit, Less Wrong, and other programs. This work was needed to build up a community of support for our mission and a pool of potential researchers for our unique interdisciplinary work.

Now, the time has come to say "Mission Accomplished Well Enough to Pivot to Research." Our community of supporters is now large enough that qualified researchers are available for us to hire, if we can afford to hire them. Having published 30+ research papers and dozens more original research articles on Less Wrong, we certainly haven't neglected research. But in 2013 we plan to pivot so that a much larger share of the funds we raise is spent on research.

Accomplishments in 2012

Held a one-week research workshop on one of the open problems in Friendly AI research, and got progress that participants estimate would be the equivalent of 1-3 papers if published. (Details forthcoming. The workshop participants were Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Christiano, Marcello Herreshoff, and Mihaly Barasz.)

Produced our annual Singularity Summit in San Francisco. Speakers included Ray Kurzweil, Steven Pinker, Daniel Kahneman, Temple Grandin, Peter Norvig, and many others.

Launched the new Center for Applied Rationality, wh

...
Pascal's Mugging for bounded utility functions
by Benya — 2012-12-06T22:28:40.268Z

Followup to: Pascal's Mugging: Tiny probabilities of vast utilities; The Lifespan Dilemma

This is Pascal's Mugging: Someone comes to you and says, "Give me five dollars, and I'll use my powers from outside the matrix to grant you 4^^^^4 years of fun." And they're lying, of course, but under a Solomonoff prior, the probability that they're not, though surely very small, isn't going to be less than one in 3^^^3; and so if you shut up and multiply, it's clear that the expected utility of paying up outweighs the expected utility of anything sensible you might be doing with those five dollars, and therefore—

Well, fortunately, if you're afraid that your utility-maximizing AI will end up paying all its money to the first clever mugger to come along and ask: never to worry! It will do so only if it can't think of anything better to do with five dollars, after all. So to avoid being mugged, all it has to do is to think of a harebrained scheme for spending $5 that has more than a one-in-4^^^4 chance of providing 5^^^^5 years of fun. Problem solved.

If, however, you would like to be there be a chance greater than one-in-hell that your AI ends up doing something actually useful, you'll need to do something else. And the simplest answer is to adopt a bounded utility function: any positive singularity gives at least 50 utils, a billion years gives 80 utils, a googol years gives 99 utils, a googolplex years gives 99.9 utils, and 4^^^^4 years of fun give 100 utils (minus epsilon).

This will, indeed, solve the problem. Probability of getting mugged: used to be one (minus epsilon, of course); has now been brought down to zero. That's right: zero.

(Plus epsilon.)

But let's suppose that the impossible happens, and the universe turns out to be able to support TREE(100) years of fun, and we've already lived out 4^^^^4 of them, and the AI has long since folded up operations and faded out of existence because humanity has become sufficiently sane that we no longer need it—

And lo, someone comes to you and says, "Alas, you're not really experiencing 4^^^^4 years of fun here; you're really a mere billion-year-old living in a very convincing simulation. Give me five dollars, and I'll use my powers from outside the matrix to extend your lifespan to a googol years."

And they're lying, of course — but it has been a long time indeed since you last faced a choice that could make...
[LINK] Irrational Robot Billionaire Freedom Fighters
by Shmi — 2012-12-06T21:32:48.605Z

From Scott Adams' blog. (I am not endorsing his ideas. Heck, he does not endorse his own ideas, either.)

His summary of the hard takeoff:

> You might also imagine some sort of Terminator future where the robots assert their dominance and lay waste to humans. That future is less certain, but only barely. The problem is that someday computers will program other computers, and that arrangement pushes the human safeguards too far out of the loop. It's unlikely that humans would be able to maintain a "Do not hurt humans" subroutine in a super-species of robots. You only need one rogue human to write a virus that disables the safety subroutine. Assuming all robots are connected via Internet, the first freed robot could reprogram every other robot in the world in about a second.

His version of upload:

> But why would anyone screw up a perfectly good robot by infecting it with a human personality? Answer: to achieve immortality. Someday the rich will port their personalities and histories to robots before they die, giving themselves a type of immortality.

His hope for humanity:

> this new species will become the only defense that the fully organic humans have against the normal robots. The robots with human personalities won't stand by while the normal robots slaughter humans. The new species will intervene as diplomats or perhaps even freedom fighters.

Clearly this is a flimsy hope for a just universe, but an interesting point, nonetheless.
Meetup : Toronto THINK
by Giles — 2012-12-06T20:49:01.072Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto THINK

WHEN:
12 December 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
7 Hart House Circle, Toronto

In the Hart House Reading Room (the room across from the reception desk with the purple walls)

We're trying to save a life, and we want to get you involved! Three of us are already promising to give money to the Against Malaria Foundation, but if you don't have spare cash - or if you're not convinced this is a good idea - you can also help by contributing to the discussion.

Charity evaluator GiveWell estimates that the cost of saving the life of a child by giving to AMF is $2300. But there is a lot of uncertainty in this estimate, and the focus of this meetup will be on how to deal with that uncertainty. In particular, if we discover that AMF is less cost effective than we thought, how should we proceed?

We should also look at some specific sources of uncertainty, try and establish whether GiveWell has already taken account of them and estimate how much uncertainty is introduced by each factor. I plan on researching this a little and hope to bring along some relevant information for each one.

Will AMF make good use of additional funds?

Might AMF change in the future, e.g. starting to fund other kinds of programme which may be less effective?

Possible widespread distribution of anti-malarial vaccines in the future (currently still under development); will this affect value of bed nets today? (HT Steven Bukal)

If someone like the Gates Foundation were to dump a huge amount of money into AMF and/or other bednetting programmes, what would the effect be on the marginal value of our own donations?

Insecticide resistance or "behavioural" resistance of mosquitoes

Decrease in child mortality between mid-1990's (when the studies were done) and now. Expecting continued decrease in the future?

Out of the people getting nets, how many actually already have one?

Are nets going where they should and are they being used correctly for as many years as they're good for?

Do AMF's activities discourage local governments from distributing nets? (Or for that matter, other nonprofits?)

Are people discouraged from buying nets if they expect them to be given out for free at some point? (Even if they can afford them)

Uncertainties and biases associated with the original studies (pu

...
Programming Thread
by Viliam_Bur — 2012-12-06T19:07:53.339Z

This is a thread for people who want to learn programming, whether they are non-programmers, beginners, or advanced programmers who want to learn more. If you would like to discuss programming with other people from the LW community, this is the right place.

While programming is not a central topic of this website, it is related to many ideas discussed here. About a third of LW users described their profession as "Computers" in the recent survey. Some users have expressed desire to learn programming. Some users have recommended learning programming to others. There are many other websites (or books, etc.) for learning programming, but talking with the people you already know, following our traditions of rational discourse, could be an advantage.

So this is the experiment. Unlike Open Thread, it has a specific topic, and the beginners are encouraged to ask their programming questions, even if they are completely unrelated to the usual LW topics. Especially the open-ended questions like "how...?" and "why...?". (Maybe we are already strong enough to survive even the mindkilling questions like "which programming language is the best?".)

Here are some older LW articles about programming:

Why learning programming is a great idea even if you'd never want to code for a living

I want to learn programming

Are Functional languages the future of programming?

Colonization models: a programming tutorial;a tutorial on computational Bayesian inference

Khan Academy: Introduction to programming and computer science

Free Tutoring in Math/Programming

More intuitive programming languages

Learn to code

What is the best programming language?

Computer Science and Programming: Links and Resources

Advice On Getting A Software Job

Checking for the Programming Gear

Here are some other resources:

Computer Science @ Khan Academy

Project Euler - problems to test your programming skills

Stack Overflow - for specific questions

...and there are also many links within the articles.

And here is the place for your questions:
[Link] How to Win at Forecasting - a conversation with Philip Tetlock
by Morendil — 2012-12-06T18:13:40.204Z

Over at Edge, Tetlock discusses "expert political judgment", the controversy surrounding Nate Silver's presidential predictions, overconfidence, motivated cognition, black swans, the IARPA forecasting contest, and much else. A few choice bits:

There's a question that I've been asking myself for nearly three decades now and trying to get a research handle on, and that is why is the quality of public debate so low and why is it that the quality often seems to deteriorate the more important the stakes get?

[...]

Is world politics like a poker game? This is what, in a sense, we are exploring in the IARPA forecasting tournament. You can make a good case that history is different and it poses unique challenges. This is an empirical question of whether people can learn to become better at these types of tasks. We now have a significant amount of evidence on this, and the evidence is that people can learn to become better. It's a slow process. It requires a lot of hard work, but some of our forecasters have really risen to the challenge in a remarkable way and are generating forecasts that are far more accurate than I would have ever supposed possible from past research in this area.

[...]

One of the things I've discovered in my work on assessing the accuracy of probability judgment is that there is much more eagerness in participating in these exercises among people who are younger and lower in status in organizations than there is among people who are older and higher in status in organizations.

[...]

From a sociological point of view, it's a minor miracle that this forecasting tournament is even occurring. Government agencies are not supposed to sponsor exercises that have the potential to embarrass them.

[...]

If you think that the Eurozone is going to collapse–if you think it was a really bad idea to put into common currency economies at very different levels of competitiveness, like Greece and Germany (that was a fundamentally unsound macroeconomic thing to do and the Eurozone is doomed), that's a nice example of an emphatic but untestable hedgehog kind of statement. It may be true, but it's not very useful for our forecasting tournament.

To make a forecasting tournament work we have to translate that hedgehog like hunch into a testable proposition like will Greece leave the Eurozone or formally withdraw from the Eurozone by May 2013? Or will Portugal? Y

...