trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Two kinds of responses
by KatjaGrace — 2016-07-22T06:08:10.000Z

Suppose that you are listening to music, and you reach a song that makes you sad. How do you respond? Here are two ideas:

A) Be sad. Perhaps think about bittersweet memories. Stare into space. Get completely sidetracked and cry a bit. Downgrade your assessment of how good your life is overall. Until some happy music comes on, at least.

B) Decide if you want to be sad, and adjust the playlist accordingly. Maybe you determine that your goals would be better served by listening to patriotic music on this occasion. So you change it. Even though the sad music is now making you feel like listening to sad music.

It seems to me that these correspond to two natural classes of things people are doing when they ‘respond’ to stuff.

The first kind of response is a relatively automatic reaction to a stimulus. Feeling sad when you hear sad music. Finding a clever retort if someone is rude to you.

The second kind of response is a continued pursuit of your goals, adjusted for any information contained in the stimulus. Turning off sad music if it doesn’t seem helpful. Walking away from a rude person if talking to them is not creating a lot of value, while perhaps considering whether their criticism is relevant to you.

I’m going to call these reflexive responses and agentic responses.

More examples of stimuli and reflexive and agentic responses to them:

Being cold: curl up under your meager blanket and shiver vigorously // get out of bed, cross the very cold room, turn on the heater.

Hearing a joke: Laugh proportional to the humor of the joke, adjusted for offensiveness and attractiveness of the joke teller // laugh if you think it would be good to raise the status of the person telling you the joke, or to make them happy, or to make the situation less awkward, etc.

Seeing misinformation on a blog: write a comment correcting the error // add ‘online misinformation’ to your mental list of problems in the world, and then if you decide that it is the most important one at some point, seriously scheme about what to do there.

Someone starts a conversation with you: say the natural next thing at every juncture // decide if there is something you want to achieve by talking to the person, and then steer the conversation appropriately (perhaps toward winding up)

Physically suffering: curl up in a ball, close your eyes and whimper // search for paink

...
Should you change where you live? (also - a worked “how to solve a question”)
by Elo — 2016-07-22T06:06:02.258Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/should-you-change-where-you-live-a-worked-how-to-solve-a-question/

It's not a hard question, but it potentially has a lot of moving parts.

This post is going to be two in one. The first is whether you should move geography, the second is how I go through a problem. In red.

First up - brainstorm ideas:

Meta-level

Make a list of relevant factors of staying or going (then google it to check for any I missed)

Decision making strategies

Object level

Why did this come up?

Make a list of things you wish were different with how you live now

Make a list of features of your current geography

Make a list of features that you know of in other geographies that you would like to obtain.

relevant factors

Family

Friends

Relationships

Population density

Population diversity breakdown

Local safety (bad neighbourhoods)

Religion

Politics, country-scale political climate

Government structure, public welfare

public transport

cost of living

qualify of food, variation of food, culture of food.

exchange rate

Normal temperature/weather/climate (rain, cloud, sun, heat, cold, wind)

Extreme weather risk. (i.e. cyclones, earthquakes, bushfires)

Work (and commute)

Salary

Pollution (Light, Air or noise pollution)

Residential or natural environment, parks, trees, tall buildings...

Ocean (if you swim, or like beach culture)

Landmarks

native plants, animals, diseases.

culture, art.

difficulty in moving

opportunity/plans

language barrier

public amenities

Education

Dwelling -> upsize, downsize, sidegrade...

Sleep - are you getting enough of it

postage costs

Why did this come up?

Usually you are thinking of a seeding factor; a reason why you are moving. It will help to keep it in mind when planning other things. Is there something wrong or pushing you out, is the current location stagnant, is something pulling you? Write that down. Keep it in mind. Considering the context of the event may help you make a more informed choice, it's also why it's often hard to ask for advice without being more specific about what seems to be the difficulty.

Factors

When you move you will be exchanging your current set of these factors for a new and different set of these factors. Sometimes you might move with your family, sometimes you might be moving across town and still have the same public transport netw...
Meetup : SF Meetup: Very Short Talks
by maia — 2016-07-22T00:24:54.425Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Very Short Talks

WHEN:
25 July 2016 06:15:43PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St., SF

We’ll be meeting to give and listen to very short talks!

We’ll do 7-minute lightning talks with 3 additional minutes allowed for questions. We’ll also limit the number of programming-related talks to no more than half of all talks, in order to promote variety.

A talk doesn’t have to be formal, planned, or even something that you’d expect someone to Give A Talk About; it can be as simple as telling the group about something you find interesting or cool. In the past, we’ve had people talk about topics like: how complicated the process of organizing fresh food for airplane flights is, their experience volunteering for a local political campaign, a video game they were designing and writing, and many others.

For help getting into the building, please call: three zero one, three five six, five four two four.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Very Short Talks
Meetup : San Antonio Meetup
by Bryan-san — 2016-07-21T17:05:34.434Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup

WHEN:
24 July 2016 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
12651 Vance Jackson Rd #118, San Antonio, TX 78230

Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong at Yumi Berry.

Topic of the Week: Dark Rationality

Look for the sign that says "LW"

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup
Meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game 
by Alexander230 — 2016-07-21T10:35:47.329Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game

WHEN:
27 July 2016 07:40:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2

Welcome to Moscow LW community makeshift games! In that games, some rationality skills are involved, so you can practise while you playing!

FallacyMania: it is a game where you guess logical fallacies in arguments, or practise using logical fallacies yourself (depending on team in which you will be).

Details about the game: http://goo.gl/BtRVhB

Tower of Chaos: funny game with guessing the rules of human placement on a Twister mat.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/u9qgc3

Training Game Party: all players try to train the subject to guess and make some action without words, using only positive reinforcement.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/mNT7J3

Come to antikafe "Kocherga", ul.B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2. The map is here: http://kocherga-club.ru/#contacts . Nearest metro station is Kievskaya. If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Games begin at 19:40, the length is 3.5 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game
Fallacymania: party game where you notice fallacies in arguments
by Alexander230 — 2016-07-21T09:34:59.343Z

Fallacymania is a game developed by Moscow LessWrong community. Main goals of this game is to help people notice fallacies in arguments, and of course to have fun. The game requires 3-20 players (recommended 4-12), and some materials: printed A3 sheets with fallacies (5-10 sheets), card deck with fallacies (you can cut one A3 sheet into cards, or print stickers and put them to common playing cards), pens and empty sheets, and 1 card deck of any type with at least 50 cards (optional, for counting guessing attempts). Rules of the game are explained here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzyKVqP6n3hKY3lQTVBuODRjRU0/view?resourcekey=0-SoMANgi5h_NQiJ4QGxHuuw

This is the sheet of fallacies, you can download it and print on A3 or A2 sheet of paper:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzyKVqP6n3hKRXZ5N2tZcDVlMW8/view?resourcekey=0-gbuigoHnERbxY5llHDwBqA

Also you can use this sheet to create playing cards for debaters.

UPD: There is also a version made by Luca Versari for printing on multiple A4 sheets of paper:

Player sheets: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v_CkPf_8UZw5yGDrguUwtfJJDjzSif2G/view?usp=share_link

Card stickers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jo7JIp7YvLXw18u68NJCf0xtJHCrvMEs/view?usp=share_link

UPD: Printed versions of Fallacymania are now available for purchase on The Game Crafter:

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/fallacymania-eng- - English version

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/fallacymania-rus- - Russian version

When we created this game, we used these online articles and artwork about fallacies:

http://obraz.io/ru/posters/poster_view/1/?back_link=%2Fru%2F&lang=en&arrow=right

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/rhetological-fallacies/

https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/

Also I've made electronic version of Fallacymania for Tabletop Simulator (in Steam Workshop):

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=723941480
Things Probably Matter
by Scott Alexander — 2016-07-21T02:03:46.000Z

A while back when I wrote about how China’s economic development might not have increased happiness there much, Scott Sumner wrote a really interesting response, Does Anything Matter?

He points out that it’s too easy to make this about exotic far-off Chinese. Much the same phenomenon occurs closer to home:

If nothing really matters in China, if even overcoming horrible problems doesn’t make the Chinese better off, then what’s the use of favoring or opposing any public policy? After all, America also shows no rise in average happiness since the 1950s, despite:

1. A big rise in real wages.

2. Environmental clean-up (including lead–does Flint matter?)

3. Civil rights for African Americans

4. Feminism, gay rights.

5. Dentists now use Novocain (My childhood cavities were filled without it)

6. 1000 channels in glorious widescreen HDTV

7. Blogs

I could go on and on. And yet, if the surveys are to be believed, we are no happier than before. And I think it’s very possible that we are in fact no happier than before, that there’s a sort of law of the conservation of happiness. As I walk down the street, grown-ups don’t seem any happier than the grown-ups I recall as a kid. Does that mean that all of those wonderful societal achievements since 1950 were absolutely worthless?

But there are exceptions. I recall reading that surveys showed a rise in European happiness in the decades after WWII, and Scott reports that happiness is currently very low in Iraq and Syria. So that suggests that current conditions do matter.

The following hypothesis will sound really ad hoc, but matches the way a lot of people I know talk about their lives. Suppose people’s happiness is normally calibrated around the sort of lifestyle that they view as “normal.” As America got richer after 1950, it all seemed very normal, so people didn’t report more happiness. Ditto for China during the boom years. Everyone around you was also doing better, so you started thinking about how you were doing relative to your neighbors. But Germans walking through the rubble of Berlin in 1948, or Syrians doing so today in Aleppo, do see their plight as abnormal. They remember a time before the war. So they report less happiness than during normal times.

The obvious retort is – modern Chinese grew up when China was very poor. Why didn’t t...
Three Oracle designs
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-07-20T15:16:12.000Z

An initial draft looking at three ways of getting information out of Oracles, information that's useful and safe - in theory.

One thing I may need to do, is find slightly better names for them ^_^

Good and safe uses of AI Oracles

Abstract:

An Oracle is a design for potentially high power artificial intelligences (AIs), where the AI is made safe by restricting it to only answer questions. Unfortunately most designs cause the Oracle to be motivated to manipulate humans with the contents of their answers. The second challenge is to get the AI to provide accurate and useful answers. This paper presents three Oracle designs that get around the manipulation and accuracy problems in different ways: the Counterfactually Unread Agent, the Verified Selective Agent, and the Virtual-world Time-bounded Agent. It demonstrates how each design is safe (given that humans stick with the protocols), and allows different types of questions and answers. Finally, it investigates what happens when the implementation is slightly imperfect, concluding the first two agent designs are robust to this, but not the third.

Images of the three designs:

Counterfactually Unread Agent:

Verified Selective Agent:

Virtual-world Time-bounded Agent:
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2016-07-20T00:10:16.837Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games

WHEN:
24 July 2016 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We'll be meeting in the courtyard to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

Upcoming meetups:

Jul. 31: Visiting Museums

Aug. 7: TED Talks

Aug. 14: Outdoors Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
In partially observable environments, stochastic policies can be optimal
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-07-19T10:42:59.844Z

I always had the informal impression that the optimal policies were deterministic (choosing the best option, rather than some mix of options). Of course, this is not the case when facing other agents, but I had the impression this would hold when facing the environment rather that other players.

But stochastic policies can also be needed if the environment is partially observable, at least if the policy is Markov (memoryless). Consider the following POMDP (partially observable Markov decision process):

There are two states, 1a and 1b, and the agent cannot tell which one they're in. Action A in state 1a and B in state 1b, gives a reward of -R and keeps the agent in the same place. Action B in state 1a and A in state 1b, gives a reward of R and moves the agent to the other state.

The returns for the two deterministic policies - A and B - are -R every turn except maybe for the first. While the return for the stochastic policy of 0.5A + 0.5B is 0 per turn.

Of course, if the agent can observe the reward, the environment is no longer partially observable (though we can imagine the reward is delayed until later). And the general policy of "alternate A and B" is more effective that the 0.5A + 0.5B policy. Still, that stochastic policy is the best of the memoryless policies available in this POMDP.
Open thread, Jul. 18 - Jul. 24, 2016
by MrMind — 2016-07-18T07:17:04.692Z

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.
Earning money with/for work in AI safety
by rmoehn — 2016-07-18T05:37:55.551Z

(I'm re-posting my question from the Welcome thread, because nobody answered there.)

I care about the current and future state of humanity, so I think it's good to work on existential or global catastrophic risk. Since I've studied computer science at a university until last year, I decided to work on AI safety. Currently I'm a research student at Kagoshima University doing exactly that. Before April this year I had only little experience with AI or ML. Therefore, I'm slowly digging through books and articles in order to be able to do research.
I'm living off my savings. My research student time will end in March 2017 and my savings will run out some time after that. Nevertheless, I want to continue AI safety research, or at least work on X or GC risk.
I see three ways of doing this:

Continue full-time research and get paid/funded by someone.

Continue research part-time and work the other part of the time in order to get money. This work would most likely be programming (since I like it and am good at it). I would prefer work that helps humanity effectively.

Work full-time on something that helps humanity effectively.

Oh, and I need to be location-independent or based in Kagoshima.
I know http://futureoflife.org/job-postings/, but all of the job postings fail me in two ways: not location-independent and requiring more/different experience than I have.
Can anyone here help me? If yes, I would be happy to provide more information about myself.
(Note that I think I'm not in a precarious situation, because I would be able to get a remote software development job fairly easily. Just not in AI safety or X or GC risk.)
On using computers as brains and brains as computers
by KatjaGrace — 2016-07-17T23:32:19.000Z

I visited the DC area recently and recorded a couple more podcasts with Robin Hanson while there:

Robin’s book, Age of Em

Rationality

Talking to Robin is pretty entertaining and intellectually invigorating, and I recommend it.

The rest of our very occasional podcast series:

Ads

Relations

Play

Saving The World

The Big Question

School

Future

Signaling

Idealism
[Link] NYU conference: Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (October 14-15)
by ignoranceprior — 2016-07-16T21:07:57.167Z

FYI: https://wp.nyu.edu/consciousness/ethics-of-artificial-intelligence/

This conference will explore these questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence and a number of other questions, including:

What ethical principles should AI researchers follow?
Are there restrictions on the ethical use of AI?
What is the best way to design morally beneficial AI?
Is it possible or desirable to build moral principles into AI systems?
When AI systems cause benefits or harm, who is morally responsible?
Are AI systems themselves potential objects of moral concern?
What moral framework is best used to assess questions about the ethics of AI?

Speakers and panelists will include:

Nick Bostrom (Future of Humanity Institute), Meia Chita-Tegmark (Future of Life Institute), Mara Garza (UC Riverside, Philosophy), Sam Harris (Project Reason), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind/Google), Yann LeCun (Facebook, NYU Data Science), Peter Railton (University of Michigan, Philosophy), Francesca Rossi (University of Padova, Computer Science), Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley, Computer Science), Susan Schneider (University of Connecticut, Philosophy), Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside, Philosophy), Max Tegmark (Future of Life Institute), Wendell Wallach (Yale, Bioethics), Eliezer Yudkowsky (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), and others.

Organizers: Ned Block (NYU, Philosophy), David Chalmers (NYU, Philosophy), S. Matthew Liao (NYU, Bioethics)

A full schedule will be circulated closer to the conference date.

Registration is free but required. REGISTER HERE. Please note that admission is limited, and is first-come first-served: it is not guaranteed by registration.
Two forms of procrastination
by Viliam — 2016-07-16T20:30:55.911Z

I noticed something about myself when comparing two forms of procrastination:
a) reading online discussions,
b) watching movies online.
Reading online discussions (LessWrong, SSC, Reddit, Facebook) and sometimes writing a comment there, is a huge sink of time for me. On the other hand, watching movies online is almost harmless, at least compared with the former option. The difference is obvious when I compare my productivity at the end of the day when I did only the former, or only the latter. The interesting thing is that at the moment it feels the other way round.
When I start watching a movie that is 1:30:00 long, or start watching a series where each part is 40:00 long but I know I will probably watch more than one part a day, I am aware from the beginning that I am going to lose more than one hour of time; possibly several hours. On the other hand, when I open the "Discussion" tab on LessWrong, the latest "Open Thread" on SSC, my few favorite subreddits, and/or my Facebook "Home" page, it feels like it will only take a few minutes -- I will click on the few interesting links, quickly skim through the text, and maybe write a comment or two -- it certainly feels like much less than an hour.
But the fact is, when I start reading the discussions, I will probably click on at least hundred links. Most of the pages I will read just as quickly as I imagined, but there will be a few that will take disproportionally more time; either because they are interesting and long, or because they contain further interesting links. And writing a comment sometimes takes more time than it seems; it can easily be a half an hour for a three-paragraphs-long comment. (Ironically, this specific article gets written rather quickly, because I know what I want to write, and I write it directly. But there are comments where I think a lot, and keep correcting my text, to avoid misunderstanding when debating a sensitive topic, etc.) And when I stop doing it, because I want to make something productive for a change, I will feel tired. Reading many different things, trying to read quickly, and formulating my answers, that all makes me mentally exhausted. So after I close the browser, I just wish I could take a nap.
On the other hand, watching a movie does not make me tired in that specific way. The movies runs at its own speed and doesn't require me to do anything actively. Also, there is no s...
Quick puzzle about utility functions under affine transformations
by Liron — 2016-07-16T17:11:25.988Z

Here's a puzzle based on something I used to be confused about:

It is known that utility functions are equivalent (i.e. produce the same preferences over actions) up to a positive affine transformation: u'(x) = au(x) + b where a is positive.

Suppose I have u(vanilla) = 3, u(chocolate) = 8. I prefer an action that yields a 50% chance of chocolate over an action that yields a 100% chance of vanilla, because 0.5(8) > 1.0(3).

Under the positive affine transformation a = 1, b = 4; we get that u'(vanilla) = 7 and u'(chocolate) = 12. Therefore I now prefer the action that yields a 100% chance of vanilla, because 1.0(7) > 0.5(12).

How to resolve the contradiction?