trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Advanced Placement exam cutoffs and superficial knowledge over deep knowledge
by JonahS — 2013-09-01T21:01:11.873Z

When I was in high school, I noticed is that it was possible to score the top mark on an Advanced Placement (AP) Exam by answering a relatively small portion of the questions correctly.

During my junior year, I self-studied calculus, and took the AP Calculus AB exam. I was very surprised that I scored a 5 (the top mark), because at the time when I took the exam, I didn't know some very basic things that were on the syllabus.

The College Board gives the raw score to AP score conversions for the exams that have been most recently released. The percentages needed to get a 5 are as follows:

Art History: 71%

Biology: 63%

Calculus AB: 63%

Calculus BC: 63%

Chemistry: 67%

Computer Science A: 77%

English Language and Composition: 75%

English Literature and Composition: 76%

Environmental Science: 71%

European History: 66%

French Language: 80%

German Language: 86%

Comparative Government & Politics: 70%

US Government and Politics: 77%

Human Geography: 61%

Latin: Vergil: 69%

Music Theory: 70%

Macroeconomics: 81%

Microeconomics: 83%

Physics B: 62%

Physics C: Mechanics: 55%

Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism: 59%

Psychology: 75%

Spanish Language: 78%

Spanish Literature: 76%

Statistics: 63%

US History: 61%

World History 64%

Conspicuously, these percentages are all well below the standard 90% needed for the top mark (A) in a high school or college course. Of course, the threshold of 90% that's typically used is arbitrary, and some courses have harder exams than others, but the fact that the above percentages are lower than 90% (and in some cases *much* lower) is a weak argument that the standards for getting a 5 on an AP exam are lenient (and in some cases *very* lenient).

On an object level, based on my experience taking the AP calculus exams as a high schooler, my experience teaching calculus for three years at University of Illinois, and my revisiting the exams, I think that students who score 90% on an AP calculus exam know the material very well, and that students who score 63% (the lowest percentage needed to get a 5) have only marginal knowledge of the material.

It's natural to ask what effect this has on incentives. Note that AP courses are taught to prepare students to get high marks on the AP exams, so that the grading scheme for AP exams propagates backward to the grading schemes for courses, which feed into college admissio

...
P/S/A - Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy
by Ben Pace — 2013-09-01T18:36:40.217Z

Sam Harris is here offering a substantial amount of money to anyone who can show a flaw in the philosophy of 'The Moral Landscape' in 1000 word or less, or at least the best attempt.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-moral-landscape-challenge1

Up to $20,000 is on offer, although that's only if you change his mind. Whilst we know that this is very difficult, note how few people offer large sums of money for the privelage of being disproven.

In case anyone does win, I will remind you that this site is created and maintained by people who work at MIRI and CFAR, which rely on outside donations, and with whom I am not affiliated.

Note: Is this misplaced in Discussion? I imagine that it could be easily overlooked in an open thread by the sorts of people who would be able to use this information well?
MIRI course list book reviews, part 1: Gödel, Escher, Bach
by So8res — 2013-09-01T17:40:52.171Z

I'm Nate. I was recently introduced to the ideas of existential risk and unfriendly AI. I've decided to read the books suggested in the MIRI course list. I'll review the books as I read them. Repeating the knowledge is expected to help solidify it. Public accountability is expected to help keep me on track. Hopefully my notes will also be useful to others. This is the first such review.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I'll be reviewing this book from memory. I started it in 2010 at the recommendation of a friend. I got frustrated early on when Hofstadter introduced topics that I already knew well (such as recursion). This turned out to be a mistake; the book picks up shortly thereafter. I finished the rest of it maybe four months ago, around the time that I finished the sequences.

Overview

Gödel, Escher, Bach is an incredibly well-written foray into the intersection of art, mathematics, philosophy, and biology. It explores the border between syntax and semantics. It's not a textbook, but you'll learn more about logic than most introductory courses will teach you.

The book is composed of alternating dialogs and chapters. The dialogs are witty narratives which take on the structure of concepts discussed in the following chapter. It's hard to describe how this works, but it's very effective. The dialogs are brilliantly designed and are by far the most entertaining part of the book.

What I didn't like

I'd already been exposed to many of the topics in GEB. I have an aversion to being taught things I already understand, so some chapters frustrated me. The new-signal to old-signal ratio was lowest in chapters 5-8. Computer scientists beware: the book will feel slow early on. Chapter 5 is skippable. 6-8 are not, because the specific variants of propositional calculus and number theory that Hofstadter sets up are used (to brilliant effect) in later chapters.

One of the late sections of GEB discusses reductionism. The discussion is quite good, and I would recommend it to people who misunderstand the reductionist argument. But personally I found it boring, as I need no further convincing (and it didn't introduce any Nate!novel arguments).

The final section of GEB is a discussion of the artificial intelligence field, including predictions made decades ago. While most of the predictions were solid, the chapter is no longer relevant. For some reason, temporally-irrel...
Bed time stories with clear concepts
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2013-09-01T12:26:25.320Z

Followup of: Raising numerate children

As promised I will now give one more parenting technique for raising a child as a rationalist.

This is about a special kind of bed time stories that I tell. The idea is to use clear concepts and pack them into a form accessible to small children (ages four to ten). I decided on the structure beforehand but the plot was mostly made up on the spot (based on available experiences of the day).

Endless story

This is the most well known and elementary form of a nested story. You could call it tail recursion without termination.

In German there is a well known song that goes as follow:

"Ein Hund lief in die Küche und stahl dem Koch ein Ei.

Da nahm der Koch den Löffel und schlug den Hund entzwei.

Da kamen alle Hunde und gruben ihm ein Grab,

und setzten einen Grabstein, worauf geschrieben ward:" (repeat)

I couldn't find an English translations of this (does anybody volunteer?) But I found a comparable song in English:

"This is the song that never ends."

(which has the nice additional benefit of being self-referential)

Now there are multiple ways to use and vary this basic pattern:

Stop when you get bored. If done well this emphasizes certain aspects of infinity - that nothing new is added; everything stays exactly the same and would continue on 'ad inifinitum'.

Introduce an explicit change breaking the loop with another explanation (e.g. "... und stahl dem Koch kein Ei" or "...because they like it").

Vary (reduce) the number of participants each time until it gets to zero ("Viele Hunde", "Einige Hunde", "Ein Hund", "keine Hunde" or "a few people", "no people").

Increase speed of singing it each time until it becomes noise (or if you do it well roughly doubling each time you can even 'solve' the infinite regress via Zeno) that's what my wife does.

Talk about what is written on the stone and that the text has to be smaller each time (only suitable for cases where a picture can be imagined).

Strictly nested story

This developed from a story in which a boy reads a book. Neverbug mentioned the Neverending Story which is the 'classical' example. But you can find pictures of books with pictures of themselves a lot even in childrens picture books.

I adapted this pattern one evening when my son had refused to clean up his toys. It went like this:

"There was a boy called Anton who had cleaned up his room quic...
September 2013 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2013-09-01T11:05:11.336Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Group Rationality Diary, September 1-15
by therufs — 2013-08-31T22:04:22.523Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for September 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Next diary: September 16-30

Immediate past diary: August 16-31

Rationality Diaries archive
Relevance of the STEPS project to (F)AI teams
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2013-08-31T17:27:55.473Z

The View Point Reasearch Institute http://www.vpri.org/ (which by the way brought us the squeek etoys) has a project called STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming.

The goal is basically to create a complete operating system, tool chain and program suite in 20000 lines of code. The reason for this and other goals are not relevant for this post but I recommend that you take a look into it anyway.

I have followed the progress of the STEPS project more or less since its beginning in 2007: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf

This project is interesting to the (F)AI community in so far as it contains a complete operating system in a form that contains more or less no noise or redundancy in its implementation, is extremely powerful (in terms of expressivity and generality) and thus more amenable to artificial reasoning and optimization than any other system.

The current report http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf contains a very interesting paragraph on page 22:

"An awkward and complicated ʹoptimization tower of babelʹ is avoided by giving our DSLs the ability to act on their own implementation and optimizations, flattening the ʹtowerʹ into a collection of reflexive and metacircular mechanisms. The line between strategy and implementation, between coordination and computation, is eliminated ‑‑ or at least guaranteed to be eliminable whenever necessary."

That means that an AI system running on top of that could optimize itself as is needed for an intelligence explosion I guess. And you may guess who might be running AI on top of it.

EDIT: Some seem to think that this post is somewhat inappropriate. But I can't make out why. Because it is too short? Because it is about AI? Because it requires reading up on that project? Because it is about software engineering instead of rationality? I'm a newbie and don't know which or how to improve. Please comment your negative rating.
Any interest in a one-time meetup in Charlotte, NC this Tuesday?
by pinyaka — 2013-08-31T17:09:09.882Z

I am in Charlotte, NC for the week due to a family emergency and wondered if anyone from Less Wrong wanted to get together for dinner this Tuesday night? There is a small chance that my emergency will come to a head on Tuesday and I won't be able to attend, but hopefully enough people will want to get together that my absence won't matter too much if it comes to that.

I've created a google group here to pin down a specific time and place to get together or feel free to PM me here if you don't want to join the google group.
Raising numerate children
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2013-08-30T23:44:31.550Z

How do you raise a child as a rationalist? I can't say that that was exactly what I had in mind but it seems to make for a fitting title here. A more precise title could have been: "How to deeply educate a child such that it fun and natural".

Today I'd like to tell you about the lullabies I sung and to what that led.

When my firstborn was very young I adapted a classic German lullaby "Schlaf kindlein schlaf" to numbers. It started with with only a few verses but grew over time (in part by the need to cover longer times until he slept).

I did sing it in German but I tried to translate it here to give you a better idea. It goes to the melody of "Schlaf Kindlein Schlaf which you may not know but can google easily (note that in German there are nicer rhymes for 100, million, googol):

Sleep, baby, sleep!

Thy father counts the sheep,

One, two, three and four

Little baby sleep some more

Sleep, baby, sleep!

The refrain repeats and the verses are replaced as follows:

Five, six, seven, eight - Tired at the dreamland gate.

Nine, ten and eleven - Sleeping in the number heaven.

Twelve, thirteen and fourteen - Sleeping babies have you seen.

Fifteen up to twentyone - Dreaming baby sleep is done.

Twentytwo to hundredtwo - Baby I will care for you.

Hundredthree to thousendfive - Caring for you all your life.

Thousandsix to millionthree - Of your dream you can break free.

Millionfour to one googol - Dreaming of a giant ball.

Googol-one to googolplex - Steaming in the dreamland tracks.

Googolplex to infinity - I will always care for thee.

I get slower during the song and very slow with infinity - mostly they slept then.

I have dreams of this song where sheep accumulate to larger and larger blocks until the block number thats raising in blocks and everything ends in white noise.

I do no longer sing it to my older sons but they accompany me sometimes when singing it to my youngest (two years old). And they do know what googol means already.

I also have a bed ritual where I let them give the number of times I put the blanket on their face (they like it). When they give too large numbers I use blocks. These tended to get high too.

One time I asked for lower numbers (that was when my second oldest already knew halfs and quarters) which led to gaming for unusual fractions and ultimately to his insight that "There is no larger fraction than one half that can divide one" (by a seven year...
Looking for Opinions on "Antifragile" by N. Taleb
by Torello — 2013-08-30T22:29:32.173Z

I'm reading Antifragile, and I don't have much relevant background, so it's hard for me to evaluate what he's saying. If anyone has relevant background/expertise, I'd like to hear it.

I can certainly see how the author's tone could annoy a lot of readers, but so far I've found his style entertaining and quite obviously (to me at least) a part of his "shtick", so it comes across as clever and funny instead of arrogant.

I guess this could also evolve into a meta-discussion of how to evaluate books when you have little frame of reference, but I would imagine that has been discussed in other posts on this site. (Please link to a post of that topic if you can).
Meetup : Washington, DC: Goals
by maia — 2013-08-30T20:13:42.473Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, DC: Goals

WHEN:
01 September 2013 10:45:39AM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We'll be meeting to talk about goals, both long-term and short-term. Do you have a Plan? Do you think you need one? What projects are you working on / do you want to start?
I'd also like to start a regular system (used by the NY self-improvement group) where we talk about our goals for the next few weeks, and check in on them after that time has passed.
I will also be bringing an array of toys (a PowerBall, a cylindrical sliding puzzle, and similar items).
We'll be meeting in the courtyard adjoining the National Portrait Gallery, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, DC: Goals
New LW Meetup: Urbana-Champaign
by FrankAdamek — 2013-08-30T17:50:11.494Z

This summary was posted to Main on August 23rd. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

New Meetup: Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.: 25 August 2013 02:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta LessWrong: Games Night: 24 August 2013 06:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 08 September 2013 03:00PM
LessWrong Israel September meetup: 12 September 2013 08:00PM
Philadelphia - Humans are not automatically strategic: 25 August 2013 04:00PM
VA Callibration/Biased games meetup: 25 August 2013 03:00PM

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:

[Boston] Estimation Experiment & Discussion: 25 August 2013 02:00PM
Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 82-85: 24 August 2013 12:00PM
Durham NC/Triangle Area: Cognitive Biases and Where to Find Them + games!: 29 August 2013 07:00PM
[London] Comfort Zone Expansion outing - London: 01 September 2013 11:00AM
[Washington DC] Robin Hanson visits to talk about prediction markets: 08 September 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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 be...
Genies and Wishes in the context of computer science
by private_messaging — 2013-08-30T12:43:30.192Z

Using computers to find a cure

What it could be like to make a program which would fulfill our wish to "cure cancer"? I'll try to briefly present the contemporary mainstream CS perspective on this.

Here's how "curing cancer using AI technologies" could realistically work in practice. You start with a widely applicable, powerful optimization algorithm. This algorithm takes in a fully formal specification of a process, and then finds and returns the parameters for that process for which the output value of the process is high. (I am deliberately avoiding use of the word "function").

If you wish to cure a cancer, even having this optimization algorithm at your disposal, you can not simply write "cure cancer" on the terminal. If you do so, you will get something to the general sense of:

No command 'cure' found, did you mean:
Command 'cube' from package 'sgt-puzzles' (universe)
Command 'curl' from package 'curl' (main)

The optimization algorithm by itself not only does not have a goal set for it, but does not even have a domain for the goal to be defined on. It can't by itself be used to cure cancer or make paperclips. It may or may not map to what you would describe as AI.

First, you would have to start with the domain. You would have to make a fairly crude biochemical model of the processes in the human cells and cancer cells, crude because you have limited computational power and there is very much that is going on in a cell. 1
On the model, you define what you want to optimize - you specify formally how to compute a value from the model so that the value would be maximal for what you consider a good solution. It could be something like [fraction of model cancer cells whose functionality is strongly disrupted]*[fraction of model noncancer cells whose functionality is not strongly disrupted]. And you define model's parameters - the chemicals introduced into the model.

Then you use the above mentioned optimization algorithm to find which extra parameters to the model (i.e. which extra chemicals) will result in the best outcome as defined above.

Similar approach can, of course, be used to find manufacturing methods for that chemical, or to solve sub-problems related to senescence, mind uploading, or even for the development of better algorithms including optimization algorithms.

Note that the approach described above does not map to genies and wishes in any ...