trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
"Misbehaving Machines: The Emulated Brains of Transhumanist Dreams", Corry Shores
by gwern — 2011-12-29T22:33:17.497Z

“Misbehaving Machines: The Emulated Brains of Transhumanist Dreams”, by Corry Shores (grad student; Twitter, blog) is another recent JET paper. Abstract:

Enhancement technologies may someday grant us capacities far beyond what we now consider humanly possible. Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg suggest that we might survive the deaths of our physical bodies by living as computer emulations.­­ In 2008, they issued a report, or “roadmap,” from a conference where experts in all relevant fields collaborated to determine the path to “whole brain emulation.” Advancing this technology could also aid philosophical research. Their “roadmap” defends certain philosophical assumptions required for this technology’s success, so by determining the reasons why it succeeds or fails, we can obtain empirical data for philosophical debates regarding our mind and selfhood. The scope ranges widely, so I merely survey some possibilities, namely, I argue that this technology could help us determine

if the mind is an emergent phenomenon,

if analog technology is necessary for brain emulation, and

if neural randomness is so wild that a complete emulation is impossible.

1 Introduction

Whole brain emulation succeeds if it merely replicates human neural functioning. Yet for Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg, its success increases when it perfectly replicates a specific person’s brain…In 2008, Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg compiled the findings from a conference of philosophers, technicians and other experts who had gathered to formulate a “roadmap” of the individual steps and requirements that could plausibly develop this technology…As I proceed, I will look more closely at these philosophical assumptions individually. For now let it suffice to say that I will adopt the basic framework of their philosophy of mind.

…I will explore research that calls into question certain other ones. For example, although the authors diminish the importance of analog computation and noise interference, there are findings and compelling arguments that suggest otherwise. As well, there is reason to think that the brain’s computational dynamics would not call for Bostrom’s and Sandberg’s hierarchical model for the mind’s emergence. And finally, I will argue on these bases that if

...
Ambient control of the arithmetical hierarchy?
by Will_Newsome — 2011-12-29T22:25:22.710Z

Responding to this: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8ys/a_way_of_specifying_utility_functions_for_udt/

I had a similar idea a few months ago that highlights different aspects of the problem which I find confusing. In my version the UDT agent controls bits of Chaitin's constant instead of the universal prior directly, seeing as one of the programs that the oracle (which you can derive from Chaitin's omega) has to solve the halting problem for is the UDT agent's. But since the oracle for the oracle you get from Chaitin's constant depends on the latter oracle's bits, you seem to be able to ambiently control THE ENTIRE ARITHMETICAL HIERARCHY SAY WHAT!? That's the confusing part; isn't your one true oracle supposed to screen you off from higher oracles? Or is that only insofar as you can computably verify?

Anyway I like this theme of controlling computational contexts as it forms a tight loop between agent and environment, something currently lacking. Keep it up comrades!
Smart and under 20? Peter Thiel wants to pay you to not go to school.
by lukeprog — 2011-12-29T20:37:02.626Z

Peter Thiel is offering another round of "20 under 20" Fellowships. The application deadline is December 31st. We know many of the current Thiel fellows here in the Bay Area, and it's a great opportunity. Here's the official letter from the Thiel Foundation:

We are delighted to announce that we are now accepting applications for the 2012 class of Thiel Fellows. The 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship is a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 that lets extraordinary young adults skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education. The deadline is December 31st.

The 2011 class of Fellows includes 24 people who are tackling breakthroughs in hardware and robotics, making energy plentiful, making markets more effective, challenging the notion that there is only one way to get an education, and extending the human lifespan. Several of them have already launched companies, secured financing, and won prestigious awards. As they’re demonstrating, you don’t need college to invent the future (you can read about their progress in a recent article in TechCrunch).

If you’re under twenty and love science or technology, we hope you'll consider joining the 2012 class. Go to ThielFellowship.org and apply to change the world. There’s no cost to apply. Fellows will be appointed this spring and begin two-year fellowships in the summer of 2012.

If you’re twenty or over, we have a different request. Think of the smartest, most creative person you know who’s 19 or younger. Sit down and talk with that person about her or his goals and interests. For some people, such as future doctors, the time and cost of four years of college may be worth it. But for those who plan to invent things or start companies, starting now may make more sense. Please send such visionaries and tinkerers our way.

Millions of people enjoy a higher quality of life because smart people like Steve Jobs, Muriel Siebert, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Zuckerberg, and hundreds of others skipped college to start a project that couldn’t wait.

We hope you’ll help us spread the word.

Thanks,

The Thiel Foundation
Are Yearly/Monthly Book Suggestion Threads a Good Idea?
by RobertLumley — 2011-12-29T16:52:57.817Z

I thought I had seen a thread recently asking for book recommendations, and I had a recommendation to post there, but the thread I found is from about a year and a half ago. I didn't want to make an entire thread for my book suggestion, that would be a bit extreme (I will post it in the comments though). So I was wondering what people's thoughts were on a yearly or monthly discussion thread recommending good new books, perhaps with a brief synopsis or explanation. Would we have enough new recommendations to fill one? (I'm still astonished there are as few repeats in the quote threads as there are) Would we have so many that monthly would be a good idea? Should there be any guidelines like there are for the quotes threads? The only one I can think of would be just requiring a brief summary and why one thinks LWers might be interested in it.
Should we discount extraordinary implications?
by XiXiDu — 2011-12-29T14:51:27.834Z

(Spawned by an exchange between Louie Helm and Holden Karnofsky.)

tl;dr:

The field of formal rationality is relatively new and I believe that we would be well-advised to discount some of its logical implications that advocate extraordinary actions.
Our current methods might turn out to be biased in new and unexpected ways. Pascal's mugging, the Lifespan Dilemma, blackmailing and the wrath of Löb's theorem are just a few examples on how an agent build according to our current understanding of rationality could fail.
Bayes’ Theorem, the expected utility formula, and Solomonoff induction are all reasonable heuristics. Yet those theories are not enough to build an agent that will be reliably in helping us to achieve our values, even if those values were thoroughly defined.
If we wouldn't trust a superhuman agent equipped with our current grasp of rationality to be reliably in extrapolating our volition, how can we trust ourselves to arrive at correct answers given what we know?

We should of course continue to use our best methods to decide what to do. But I believe that we should also draw a line somewhere when it comes to extraordinary implications.

Intuition, Rationality and Extraordinary Implications

It doesn't feel to me like 3^^^^3 lives are really at stake, even at very tiny probability. I'd sooner question my grasp of "rationality" than give five dollars to a Pascal's Mugger because I thought it was "rational". — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Holden Karnofsky is suggesting that in some cases we should follow the simple rule that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

I think that we should sometimes demand particular proof P; and if proof P is not available, then we should discount seemingly absurd or undesirable consequences even if our theories disagree.

I am not referring to the weirdness of the conclusions but the foreseeable scope of the consequences of being wrong about them. We should be careful in using the implied scope of certain conclusions to outweigh their low probability. I feel we should put more weight to the consequences of our conclusions being wrong than being right.

As an example take the idea of quantum suicide and assume it would make sense under certain circumstances. I wouldn’t commit quantum suicide even given a high confidence in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics being true. Logical ...
Rationality of sometimes missing the point of the stated question, and of certain type of defensive reasoning
by Dmytry — 2011-12-29T13:09:35.483Z

Imagine that you are being asked a question; a moral question involving an imaginary world. From the prior experience with people, you have learnt that people behave in a certain way; people are, for the most part, applied thinkers and whatever is your answer, it will become a cached thought that will be applied in the real world, should the situation arise. The whole rationale behind thinking of imaginary worlds may be to create cached thoughts.

Your answer probably won't stay segregated in the well defined imaginary world for any longer than it takes the person who asked the question to switch the topic; it is the real world consequences you should be most concerned about.

Given this, would it not be rational to perhaps miss the point but answer that sort of question in the real world way?

To give a specific example, consider this question from The Least Convenient Possible World :

You are a doctor in a small rural hospital. You have ten patients, each of whom is dying for the lack of a separate organ; that is, one person needs a heart transplant, another needs a lung transplant, another needs a kidney transplant, and so on. A traveller walks into the hospital, mentioning how he has no family and no one knows that he's there. All of his organs seem healthy. You realize that by killing this traveller and distributing his organs among your patients, you could save ten lives. Would this be moral or not?

First of all, note that the question is not abstract "If [you are absolutely certain that] the only way to save 10 innocent people is to kill 1 innocent person, is it moral to kill?" . There's a lot of details. We are even told that this 1 is a traveller, I am not exactly sure why but I would think that it references kin selection related instincts; the traveller has lower utility to the village than a resident.

In light of how people process answers to such detailed questions, and how the answers are incorporated into the thought patterns - which might end up used in the real world - is it not in fact most rational not to address that kind of question exactly as specified, but to point out that one of the patients could be taken apart for the best of other 9 ? And to point out the poor quality of life and life expectancy of the surviving patients?

Indeed, as a solution one could gather all the patients and let them discuss how they solve the problem; perhaps one...
Why would a free human society be in agreement on how to alter itself?
by Multiheaded — 2011-12-29T11:49:19.077Z

So I've been grappling with these discussions on the plausibility or implausibility of redefining cultural boundaries of several sorts to (as the radical example of self-alteration by Eliezer goes) make non-consensual sex as tolerated and tolerable as non-consensual conversation. Said discussions being quite separate from EY's largely accepted underlying statement of principle; "Something in a world better than ours is likely to creep us out, at least purely emotionally."

Then I suddenly saw a plot hole in the source material. The story outright mentions that internal disagreement was present at all points in its culture during the transition from 20th century sexual mores to the end result. So... why didn't anyone who saw the trend of self-modification and couldn't accept it for themselves or their children, DO anything about it? To use another locally popular example, if Gandhi knew that his children, whom he had begun to raise in pacifism, were to be given pills that'd make them enjoy killing in self-defense*, why the hell wouldn't he and his followers split off? And, supposing that a large amount of Indians and others at the time disliked that slippery slope, wouldn't their forked culture make a considerable impact on the future's "mainstream" society, such as a much greater level of catering to pacifists in all areas of life than e.g. the visibility of Jewish kosher goods and services in today's West?

In other words, why didn't the story mention its (wealthy, permissive, libertarian) society having other arrangements in such a contentious matter - including, with statistical near-certainty, one of the half-dosen characters on the bridge of the Impossible Possible World? I strongly suspect that this blow to suspension of disbelief, while swallowed by most commenters who began talking about the implied binary choice (modify entire culture to tolerate rape/society at large stays frozen in stone), added a great deal of needless, irrational controversy, fueling the already incensed emotions and such.

*(I know the real Gandhi didn't totally abhor self-defense, but that's beside the point)
Negentropy Overrated?
by paulfchristiano — 2011-12-29T10:14:30.847Z

This post may be interesting to some LWers.

In summary: it looks like our universe can support reversible computers which don't create entropy. Reversible computers can simulate irreversible computers, with pretty mild time and space blowup. So if moral value comes from computation, negentropy probably won't be such an important resource for distant future folks, and if the universe lasts a long time we may be able to simulate astronomically long-lived civilizations (easily 10^(10^25) clock cycles, using current estimates and neglecting other obstructions).

Has this been discussed before, and/or is there some reason that it doesn't work or isn't relevant? I suspect that this consideration won't matter in the long run, but it is at least interesting and seems to significantly deflate (long-run) concerns about entropy.
[SEQ RERUN] Against Discount Rates
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-29T06:00:42.463Z

Today's post, Against Discount Rates was originally published on 21 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

We really shouldn't care less about the future than we do about the present.

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 Allais Malaise, 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.
Meetup : First Philadelphia Meetup of 2012
by DasAllFolks — 2011-12-29T05:16:35.754Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First Philadelphia Meetup of 2012

WHEN: 08 January 2012 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: 8620 Germantown Ave Philadelphia, PA 19118

Hello Philadelphian Less-Wrongers!

A couple of people have expressed interest in restarting regular Philadelphia-area Less Wrong meetups, so I thought it would be fun to hold one once the December holiday season has wound to a close.

Tentative date is Sunday, January 8th at 2 P.M.; if you're interested in coming, please fill out the Doodle poll at http://www.doodle.com/s2afikbngrz3d42z to give me an idea of how your schedule looks for the week (may be handy in determining if a better time will work after all).

Location is also flexible; the meetup is currently scheduled at the Chestnut Hill Coffee Company for its pleasant atmosphere, proximity to free Chestnut Hill parking, and - as the name might suggest - excellent coffee, but other ideas are also quite welcome.

Formal agenda will include general introductions, picking a time and place for regular meetups, and deciding what content we want to pursue at them: I was thinking that a combination of discussions of rational methods, project planning, and self-improvement a la Overcoming Bias NYC might be a good place to start, but we can obviously discuss this more in person.

Have a very Happy New Year, and I look forward to meeting all of you soon!

Discussion article for the meetup : First Philadelphia Meetup of 2012
Less Wrong mentoring thread
by John_Maxwell — 2011-12-29T00:10:58.774Z

I just had a 17-year-old Less Wronger e-mail me for advice regarding the Thiel Fellowship after reading my application essay from last year when I was 19. We had a long instant message conversation where I gave him a lot of advice which he seemed to find highly useful (my biggest piece of advice was to start teaching himself programming using Learn Python the Hard Way, shamelessly asking for help using a pseudonym on IRC channels, forums, and Stack Overflow if he got stuck).

It seems likely that there are other Less Wrong users who still live with their parents who could benefit from life and career advice. I'm especially interested in reaching those who see reducing existential risk as a major life goal.

A related idea is for people who have some goal they want to achieve, like having a romantic relationship with someone of their preferred gender or being admitted to a prestigious graduate school, to pair up with someone who has accomplished that goal.

So if you're a young person who would like advice, an older person who would like to give advice, a person who wants to accomplish a goal, or a person who has accomplished a goal and is willing to help others accomplish that goal, consider leaving a comment on this post so you can find your counterpart.

I realize this post is a bit open ended--consider it an experiment in tapping Less Wrong's social capital in a novel fashion.
Meetup : San Diego experimental meetup
by Mercurial — 2011-12-28T22:02:40.566Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Diego experimental meetup

WHEN:
15 January 2012 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
6380 Del Cerro Blvd. San Diego, CA 92120

We're having a meetup in our usual haunt on Sunday, January 15th at 1pm. Food and drink are available for purchase, though you'll need your ID to get anything alcoholic.

In the spirit of developing Rationality Dojo curricula, we're going to test a newly developed training session. We want to see how it works and to get your feedback on how it came across to you. And I think we'll have good fun in the process. :-)

If there's time and interest, I'm also willing to continue the discussion from last time by giving a presentation on what I call the Enneagram keys. These are guidelines for interacting with the types that let you (a) build a good relationship with someone of a known type, (b) hit their hot buttons like nothing else (which is really meant to help you know why they get hurt or angry and how to avoid doing that), and (c) open communications and build rapport. Because each Ennea-type has a relatively specific way of reacting to specific keys, you can also use the keys to test hypotheses about someone's type. For instance, if you don't know whether you're dealing with a Four or a Nine, you can try suggesting something optimistic about their future ("Today might be a bit drab, but tomorrow is a new day!"). A Nine will typically respond with something positive (a spacey smile if they're withdrawn or a big grin and nods if they're feeling confident), whereas a Four will typically turn cold and might even give you an eyeroll. So the keys are where the Enneagram most blatantly pays rent.

But I'm definitely open to other options! I could stand to train my calibration better, and I have as yet to play any of the calibration games others have brought on occasion. (I'm looking at you, Jennifer!)

So! Please, show up, help us develop a solid Rationality Dojo curriculum by joining us in getting stronger, and join in on some delightful conversation!

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : San Diego experimental meetup
For-Profit Rationality Training
by ksvanhorn — 2011-12-28T21:42:58.466Z

As I've been reading through various articles and their comments on Less Wrong, I've noticed a theme that has appeared repeatedly: a frustration that we are not seeing more practical benefits from studying rationality. For example, Eliezer writes in A Sense that More Is Possible,

Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren't they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most "rationalists" just seem like ordinary people...

Yvain writes in Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great,

...I've gotten countless clarity-of-mind benefits from Overcoming Bias' x-rationality, but practical benefits? Aside from some peripheral disciplines, I can't think of any.

patrissimo wrote in a comment on another article,

Sorry, folks, but compared to the self-help/self-development community, Less Wrong is currently UTTERLY LOSING at self-improvement and life optimization.

These writers have also offered some suggestions for improving the situation. Eliezer writes,

Of this [question] there are several answers; but one of them, surely, is that they have received less systematic training of rationality in a less systematic context than a first-dan black belt gets in hitting people.

patrissimo describes what he thinks an effective rationality practice would look like.

It is a group of people who gather in person to train specific skills.

While there are some theoreticians of the art, most people participate by learning it and doing it, not theorizing about it.

Thus the main focus is on local practice groups, along with the global coordination to maximize their effectiveness (marketing, branding, integration of knowledge, common infrastructure). As a result, it is driven by the needs of the learners [emphasis added].

You have to sweat, but the result is you get stronger.

You improve by learning from those better than you, competing with those at your level, and teaching those below you.

It is run by a professional, or at least someone getting paid [emphasis added] for their hobby. The practicants receive personal benefit from their practice, in particular from the value-added of the coach, enough to pay for talented coaches.

Dan Nuffer and I have decided that it's time to stop talking and start doing. We are in the very early stages of creating a business to help people impro...
[Link] Opacity as a defense against bias?
by malthrin — 2011-12-28T18:15:11.598Z

This article makes the claim that financial systems are opaque in order to help us overcome our risk aversion:

Opacity is not something that can be reformed away, because it is essential to banks’ economic function of mobilizing the risk-bearing capacity of people who, if fully informed, wouldn’t bear the risk. Societies that lack opaque, faintly fraudulent, financial systems fail to develop and prosper. Insufficient economic risks are taken to sustain growth and development. You can have opacity and an industrial economy, or you can have transparency and herd goats.

I don't entirely agree. There's also a risk-pooling aspect (similar to insurance) and a middleman research value-add (individuals don't have to study thousands of possible investments). Still, it's an interesting idea. What other areas of the economy could make a similar argument?