trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why Politics are Important to Less Wrong...
by OrphanWilde — 2013-02-21T16:24:40.172Z

...and no, it's not because of potential political impact on its goals. Although that's also a thing.

The Politics problem is, at its root, about forming a workable set of rules by which society can operate, which society can agree with.

The Friendliness Problem is, at its root, about forming a workable set of values which are acceptable to society.

Politics as a process (I will use "politics" to refer to the process of politics henceforth) doesn't generate values; they're strictly an input, by which the values of society are converted into rules which are intended to maximize them. While this is true, it is value agnostic; it doesn't care what the values are, or where they come from. Which is to say, provided you solve the Friendliness Problem, it provides a valuable input into politics.

Politics is also an intelligence. Not in the "self aware" sense, or even in the "capable of making good judgments" sense, but in the sense of an optimization process. We're each nodes in this alien intelligence, and we form what looks, to me, suspiciously like a neural network.

The Friendliness Problem is equally applicable to Politics as it is to any other intelligence. Indeed, provided we can provably solve the Friendliness Problem, we should be capable of creating Friendly Politics. Friendliness should, in principle, be equally applicable to both. Now, there are some issues with this - politics is composed of unpredictable hardware, namely, people. And it may be that the neural architecture is fundamentally incompatible with Friendliness. But that is discussing the -output- of the process. Friendliness is first an input, before it can be an output.

More, we already have various political formations, and can assess their Friendliness levels, merely in terms of the values that went -into- them.

Which is where I think politics offers a pretty strong hint to the possibility that the Friendliness Problem has no resolution:

We can't agree on which political formations are more Friendly. That's what "Politics is the Mindkiller" is all about; our inability to come to an agreement on political matters. It's not merely a matter of the rules - which is to say, it's not a matter of the output: We can't even come to an agreement about which values should be used to form the rules.

This is why I think political discu...
[Link] You May Already Be Aware of Your Cognitive Biases
by maia — 2013-02-21T13:23:58.792Z

From the article:

Using an adaptation of the standard 'bat-and-ball' problem, the researchers explored this phenomenon. The typical 'bat-and-ball' problem is as follows: a bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The intuitive answer that immediately springs to mind is 10 cents. However, the correct response is 5 cents.

The authors developed a control version of this problem, without the relative statement that triggers the substitution of a hard question for an easier one: A magazine and a banana together cost $2.90. The magazine costs $2. How much does the banana cost?

A total of 248 French university students were asked to solve each version of the problem. Once they had written down their answers, they were asked to indicate how confident they were that their answer was correct.

Only 21 percent of the participants managed to solve the standard problem (bat/ball) correctly. In contrast, the control version (magazine/banana) was solved correctly by 98 percent of the participants. In addition, those who gave the wrong answer to the standard problem were much less confident of their answer to the standard problem than they were of their answer to the control version. In other words, they were not completely oblivious to the questionable nature of their wrong answer.

Article in Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130219102202.htm

Original abstract (the rest is paywalled): http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-013-0384-5
CEA does not seem to be credibly high impact
by Joanna Morningstar — 2013-02-21T10:29:18.426Z

I am highly grateful to Alexey Morgunov and Adam Casey for reviewing and commenting on an earlier draft of this post, and pestering me into migrating the content from many emails to a somewhat coherent post.

Will Crouch has posted about the Centre for Effective Altruism and in a follow up post discussed questions in more detail. The general sense of the discussion of that post was that the arguments were convincing and that donating to CEA is a good idea. Recently, he visited Cambridge, primarily to discuss 80,000 hours, and several Cambridge LWers spoke with him. These discussions caused a number of us to substantially downgrade our estimates of the effectiveness of CEA, and made our concerns more concrete.

We're aware that our kind often don't cooperate well, but we are concerned that at present CEA's projects are unlikely to cash out into large numbers of people changing their behaviour. Ultimately, we are concerned that the space for high impact meta-charity is limited, and that if CEA is suboptimal this will have large opportunity costs. We want CEA to change the world, and would prefer this happens quickly.

The key argument in favour of donating money to CEA which was presented by Will was that by donating $1 to CEA you produce more than $1 in donations to the most effective charities. We present some apparent difficulties with this remaining true on the margin. We also present more general worries with CEA as an organisation under these headings:

Transparency
Cost effectiveness estimates
Research
80,000 hours
Impact of 80,000 hours advice
Content of 80,000 hours advice
The 80,000 hours pledge
Scope and Goals
Speed of growth
Ambition

Transparency

It is worrying how little of the key information about CEA is publicly available. This makes assessment hard. By contrast to GiveWell, CEA programs are not particularly open about where their money is spent, what their marginal goals are, or what they are doing internally. As presented online, the majority of both 80,000 hours' and GWWC's day to day activity is maintaining blogs. These blogs are not substantial by comparison to, say, OB in terms of their frequency of content or their frequency of insight. Concretely, it does not seem that CEA is being tranparent in the sense of GiveWel...
[Links] Brain mapping/emulation news
by John_Maxwell — 2013-02-21T08:17:27.931Z

Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain - Like the Human Genome Project, but for brain mapping (Feb 17)

Human brain and graphene projects chosen for one billion euro grants: official press release (Jan 28)

Gary Marcus reacts

Edit: If anyone is going to email the people behind Obama's human brain project and offer suggestions, it's probably best to do so ASAP before they make the details of their project public and risk losing face by changing them.
The Logic of the Hypothesis Test: A Steel Man
by Matt_Simpson — 2013-02-21T06:19:21.995Z

Related to: Beyond Bayesians and Frequentists

Update: This comment by Cyan clearly explains the mistake I made - I forgot that the ordering of the hypothesis space is important is necessary for hypothesis testing to work. I'm not entirely convinced that NHST can't be recast in some "thin" theory of induction that may well change the details of the actual test, but I have no idea how to formalize this notion of a "thin" theory and most of the commenters either 1) misunderstood my aim (my fault, not theirs) or 2) don't think it can be formalized.

I'm teaching an econometrics course this semester and one of the things I'm trying to do is make sure that my students actually understand the logic of the hypothesis test. You can motivate it in terms of controlling false positives but that sort of interpretation doesn't seem to be generally applicable. Another motivation is a simple deductive syllogism with a small but very important inductive component. I'm borrowing the idea from a something we discussed in a course I had with Mark Kaiser - he called it the "nested syllogism of experimentation." I think it applies equally well to most or even all hypothesis tests. It goes something like this:

1. Either the null hypothesis or the alternative hypothesis is true.

2. If the null hypothesis is true, then the data has a certain probability distribution.

3. Under this distribution, our sample is extremely unlikely.

4. Therefore under the null hypothesis, our sample is extremely unlikely.

5. Therefore the null hypothesis is false.

6. Therefore the alternative hypothesis is true.

An example looks like this:

Suppose we have a random sample from a population with a normal distribution that has an unknown mean and unknown variance . Then:

1. Either or where is some constant.

2. Construct the test statistic where is the sample size, is the sample mean, and is the sample standard deviation.

3. Under the null hypothesis, has a distribution with degrees of freedom.

4. is really small under the null hypothesis (e.g. less than 0.05).

5. Therefore the null hypothesis is false.

6. Therefore the alternative hypothesis is true.

What's interesting to me about this process is that it almost tries to avoid induction altogether. Only the move from step 4 to 5 seems anything like an inductive argument. The rest is purely deductive - though admittedly it takes a couple premises in order...
[SEQ RERUN] The Thing That I Protect
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-21T05:39:33.987Z

Today's post, The Thing That I Protect was originally published on 07 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The cause that drives Yudkowsky isn't Friendly AI, and it isn't even specifically about preserving human values. It's simply about a future that's a lot better than 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 Epilogue: Atonement (8/8), 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 : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-03]
by Sohum — 2013-02-20T21:29:20.722Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-03]

WHEN:
24 February 2013 11:00:00AM (+0000)

WHERE:
Trinity JCR, Cambridge, UK

Meetup! This week, we'll be continuing our reading group session of the Shiny New Sequence, Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 For Beginners. These are explicitly designed as introductory posts, and this is just our third session, so dive right in with us if you're new!

We'll be covering The Fabric of Real Things and its adjunct, Casual Diagrams and Casual Models, this week.

See you there!

-Sohum

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-03]
Strongmanning Pascal's Mugging
by Pentashagon — 2013-02-20T12:36:38.554Z

A mugger appears and says "For $5 I'll offer you a set of deals from which you can pick any one. Each deal, d(N), will be N bits in length and I guarantee that if you accept d(N) I will run UTM(d(N)) on my hypercomputer, where UTM() is a function implementing a Universal Turing Machine. If UTM(d(N)) halts you will increase your utility by the number of bits written to the tape by UTM(d(N)). If UTM(d(N)) does not halt, I'll just keep your $5. Which deal would you like to accept?"

The expected increase in utility of any deal is p(d(N)) * U(UTM(d(N)), where p(d(N)) is the probability of accepting d(N) and actually receiving as many utilons as the number of bits a halting UTM(d(N)) writes to its tape. A non-empty subset of UTM programs of length N will write BB(N) bits to the tape where BB(X) is the busy-beaver function for programs of bit length X. Since BB(X) >= UTM(F) for any function F of bit length X, for every finite agent there is some N for which p(UTM(d(N)) = BB(N)) * BB(N) > 0. To paraphrase: Even though the likelihood of being offered a deal that actually yields BB(N) utilons is incredibly small, the fact that BB(X) grows at least as fast as any function of length X means that, at minimum, an agent that can be emulated on a UTM by a program of M bits cannot provide a non-zero probability of d(M) such that the expected utility of accepting d(M) is negative. In practice N can probably be much less than M.

Since p("UTM(d(X)) = BB(X)") >= 2^-X for d(X) with bits selected at random it doesn't make sense for the agent to assign p(d(X))=0 unless the agent has other reasons to absolutely distrust the mugger. For instance, discounting the probability of a deal based on a function of the promised number of utilons won't work; no discounting function grows as fast as BB(X) and an agent can't compute an arbitrary UTM(d(X)) to get a probability estimate without hypercomputational abilities. Any marginal-utility calculation fails in a similar manner.

I'm not sure where to go from here. I don't think it's rational to spend the rest of my life trying to find the largest integer I can think of to acausally accept d(biggest-integer) from some Omega. So far the strongest counterargument I've been able to think of is attempting to manage the risk of accepting the mugging by attempting to ...
Tutoring Small Groups of Children (for money)
by bramflakes — 2013-02-20T11:51:59.233Z

Harry had been sent to the best primary schools - and when that didn't work out, he was provided with tutors from the endless pool of starving students.

In about eight months or so, I will be one of those (hopefully not starving) students. I'll be moving out to London to live with my aunt and uncle in a rather nice middle-class neighbourhood, while I study and work to prepare for university the following year. They know a lot of the parents around there and suggested that I begin teaching small groups of 8-to-12 year old children for maybe an hour or two regularly, and charge their parents/guardians a reasonable sum per child. I would be teaching them math and science in all likelihood. Apparently word will get around quickly if I'm competent so I might have a substantial number of customers within a few months.

My questions:

Does anybody on LessWrong have any direct experience at this sort of thing, that could share some advice?

What are some good things to teach? I'll probably do the standard bottle rockets and baking soda+vinegar volcanoes, but I'd also want to spice things up and teach them something that they'd be hard-pressed to come across elsewhere (simple rationality techniques come to mind)

What is the best way to teach these things to this age group - or rather, what are some good books or other resources that I can use to teach myself how to teach?

If I were to teach them some basic rationality skills, which ones and how? Obviously I won't be talking about anything fancy like probability theory unless I strike gold and find a kid on the far-right of the bellcurve, but more like low-hanging fruit. I might do something like that radiator puzzle to warn them against password-guessing for example.

(edit: thanks to whoever fixed the font on this)
Desires You're Not Thinking About at the Moment
by Ghatanathoah — 2013-02-20T09:41:09.182Z

While doing some reading on philosophy I came across some interesting questions about the nature of having desires and preferences. One, do you still have preferences and desires when you are unconscious? Two, if you don't does this call into question the many moral theories that hold that having preferences and desires is what makes one morally significant, since mistreating temporarily unconscious people seems obviously immoral?

Philosophers usually discuss this question when debating the morality of abortion, but to avoid doing any mindkilling I won't mention that topic, except to say in this sentence that I won't mention it.

In more detail the issue is: A common, intuitive, and logical-seeming explanation for why it is immoral to destroy a typical human being, but not to destroy a rock, is that a typical human being has certain desires (or preferences or values, whatever you wish to call them, I'm using the terms interchangably) that they wish to fulfill, and destroying them would hinder the fulfillment of these desires. A rock, by contrast does not have any such desires so it is not harmed by being destroyed. The problem with this is that it also seems immoral to harm a human being who is asleep, or is in a temporary coma. And, on the face of it, it seems plausible to say that an unconscious person does not have any desires. (And of course it gets even weirder when considering far-out concepts like a brain emulator that is saved to a hard drive, but isn't being run at the moment)

After thinking about this it occurred to me that this line of reasoning could be taken further. If I am not thinking about my car at the moment, can I still be said to desire that it is not stolen? Do I stop having desires about things the instant my attention shifts away from them?

I have compiled a list of possible solutions to this problem, ranked in order from least plausible to most plausible.

1. One possibility would be to consider it immoral to harm a sleeping person because if they will have desires in the future, even if they don't now. I find this argument extremely implausible because it has some extremely bizarre implications, some of which may lead to insoluble moral contradictions. For instance, this argument could be used to argue that it is immoral to destroy skin cells because it is possible to use them to clone ...
Calibrating Against Undetectable Utilons and Goal Changing Events (part1)
by diegocaleiro — 2013-02-20T09:09:04.562Z

Summary: Random events can preclude or steal attention from the goals you set up to begin with, hormonal fluctuation inclines people to change some of their goals with time. A discussion on how to act more usefully given those potential changes follows, taking in consideration the likelihood of a goal's success in terms of difficulty and length.

Throughout I'll talk about postponing utilons into undetectable distances. Doing so (I'll claim), is frequently motivationally driven by a cognitive dissonance between what our effects on the near world are, and what we wish they were. In other words it is:

A Self-serving bias in which Loss aversion manifests by postponing one's goals, thus avoiding frustration through wishful thinking about far futures, big worlds, immortal lives, and in general, high numbers of undetectable utilons.

I suspect that some clusters of SciFi, Lesswrong, Transhumanists, and Cryonicists are particularly prone to postponing utilons into undetectable distances, and in the second post I'll try to specify which subgroups might be more likely to have done so. The phenomenon, though composed of a lot of biases, might even be a good thing depending on how it is handled.

Sections will be:

What Significantly Changes Life's Direction (lists)

Long Term Goals and Even Longer Term Goals

Proportionality Between Goal Achievement Expected Time and Plan Execution Time

A Hypothesis On Why We Became Long-Term Oriented

Adapting Bayesian Reasoning to Get More Utilons

Time You Can Afford to Wait, Not to Waste

Reference Classes that May Be Postponing Utilons Into Undetectable Distances

The Road Ahead

Sections 4-8 will be on a second post so that I can make changes based on commentary to this one.

1What Significantly Changes Life's Direction

1.1 Predominantly external changes

As far as I recall from reading old (circa 2004) large scale studies on happiness, the most important life events in how much they change your happiness for more than six months are:

Becoming the caretaker of someone in a chronic non-curable condition

Separation (versus marriage)

Death of a Loved One

Losing your Job

Child rearing per child including the first

Chronic intermittent disease

Separation (versus being someone's girlfriend/boyfriend)

Roughly in descending order.

That is a list of happiness changing events, I'm...
Think Like a Supervillain
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2013-02-20T08:34:55.618Z

See also: Everything I Needed To Know About Life, I Learned From Supervillains

Mr. Malfoy would hardly shrink from talk of ordinary murder, but even he was shocked - yes you were Mr. Malfoy, I was watching your face - when Mr. Potter described how to use his classmates' bodies as raw material. There are censors inside your mind which make you flinch away from thoughts like that. Mr. Potter thinks purely of killing the enemy, he will grasp at any means to do so, he does not flinch, his censors are off.

-- Quirinus Quirrell

A while back, I claimed the Less Wrong username Quirinus Quirrell, and started hosting a long-running, approximate simulation of him in my brain. I have mostly used the account trivially - to play around with crypto-novelties, say mildly offensive things I wouldn't otherwise, and poke fun at Clippy. Several times I have doubted the wisdom of hosting such a simulation. Quirrell's values are not my own, and the plans that he generates (which I have never followed) are mostly bad when viewed in terms of my values. However, I have chosen to keep this occasional alter-identity, because he sees things that would otherwise be invisible to me.

-- Quirinus_Quirrell

I was once asked whether I would rather be a superhero or a supervillain, and I probably shouldn't tell you how little time it took for me to answer "supervillain."

Being a superhero sounds awful, at least if you intend to keep being recognized as a superhero. Superheroes are bound by the chains of public opinion. A superhero can only do what people generally agree is good for superheroes to do. If you stray too far off the beaten path in search of how best to use your superpowers to actually save the world, you could easily end up doing things that look, at first glance, somewhat to incredibly evil. And if people are going to turn against you once you start actually optimizing, you might as well just be a supervillain to begin with. They look like they're having more fun anyway.

You probably won't get the chance to decide between being a superhero or a supervillain, but you do get the chance to decide what kind of person you think of yourself as, and I think you should think of yourself more as a supervillain than as a superhero. Why?

In the same way that being a superhero limits what you can do, thinking of yourself as a superhero limits what you can think. And if you want t...
[SEQ RERUN] Epilogue: Atonement (8/8)
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-20T03:21:38.722Z

Today's post, Epilogue: Atonement (8/8) was originally published on 06 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The last moments aboard the Impossible Possible World.

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 True Ending: Sacrificial Fire, 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.