trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What Longevity Research Most Excites You?
by christina — 2012-07-14T21:54:10.719Z

For those who are interested in this topic, I'm just wondering what longevity research today looks most promising to you and why. Whether that's SENS, cryonics, nanotech, brain uploading, etc is fine with me. Any links to actual research papers would also be greatly appreciated. I'm very interested in longevity, and am curious to see if anyone else would like to offer some thoughts on the current state of the art.
Berkeley visit report
by EvelynM — 2012-07-14T19:02:56.108Z

A few weeks ago, ShannonFriedman, an IFS counselor living in Berkeley, posted Female compatriots stay for a week in Berkeley an offer for rationalist women who are agenty to stay in her spare room for a few days. I replied, as I have a goal of getting to know the people associated with Less Wrong, the Singularity Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR).

She and I had a get to know you skype video interview, to talk about the trip. Shannon is a master connector, who genuinely enjoys introducing people who share common interests and complementary skills. As I had a goal of meeting interesting people, the planning was around helping me accomplish that.

I traveled with a friend, copt, who I met through the Less Wrong group I organize in Fort Collins Colorado. Shannon, fortunately, had two spare rooms for us. Her house, which she shares with several other people is in a residential neighborhood not too far from the secondary shopping district on San Pedro. It is on the main floor of a house, with a big back yard.

Berkeley is beautiful. The yards are full of flowers. There was an excellent coffee shop, Caffee Trieste (the sad coffee), within walking distance of the house, and a good breakfast restaurant also within walking distance. Downtown Berkeley is only a mile away, with good public transit connections to San Francisco, The mornings were foggy and cool (50F), the afternoons sunny and warm (75F).

Over the 4 days of our visit, we met:

Julia Galef, mathy and elegant, formerly of New York, who is in Berkeley working with CFAR. She's known for her organizing work within the skeptical community. I had enjoyed watching her presentation to Skepticon this year, on The Straw Vulcan. She and Shannon are working on improving marketing for CFAR.

Luke Muehlhauser (lukeprog), tall, handsome, with dark hair, the Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, met briefly with us to discuss copt's work in finance.

Nisan, who organizes the Berkeley Less Wrong meetup, is a PhD student mathematician. He generously shared his Paleo groceries with us, and helped us navigate the BART on our trip into the city for a housewarming party. He explained operant conditioning as a technique for personal transform...
PZ Myers on the Infeasibility of Whole Brain Emulation
by Peter Wildeford — 2012-07-14T18:13:51.915Z

From: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/07/14/and-everyone-gets-a-robot-pony/

I’ve worked with tiny little zebrafish brains, things a few hundred microns long on one axis, and I’ve done lots of EM work on them. You can’t fix them into a state resembling life very accurately: even with chemical perfusion with strong aldehyedes of small tissue specimens that takes hundreds of milliseconds, you get degenerative changes. There’s a technique where you slam the specimen into a block cooled to liquid helium temperatures — even there you get variation in preservation, it still takes 0.1ms to cryofix the tissue, and what they’re interested in preserving is cell states in a single cell layer, not whole multi-layered tissues. With the most elaborate and careful procedures, they report excellent fixation within 5 microns of the surface, and disruption of the tissue by ice crystal formation within 20 microns. So even with the best techniques available now, we could possibly preserve the thinnest, outermost, single cell layer of your brain…but all the fine axons and dendrites that penetrate deeper? Forget those.

[...]

And that’s another thing: what the heck is going to be recorded? You need to measure the epigenetic state of every nucleus, the distribution of highly specific, low copy number molecules in every dendritic spine, the state of molecules in flux along transport pathways, and the precise concentration of all ions in every single compartment. Does anyone have a fixation method that preserves the chemical state of the tissue? All the ones I know of involve chemically modifying the cells and proteins and fluid environment. Does anyone have a scanning technique that records a complete chemical breakdown of every complex component present?

I think they’re grossly underestimating the magnitude of the problem. We can’t even record the complete state of a single cell; we can’t model a nematode with a grand total of 959 cells. We can’t even start on this problem, and here are philosophers and computer scientists blithely turning an immense and physically intractable problem into an assumption.

[...]

You’re just going to increase the speed of the computations — how are you going to do that without disrupting the interactions between all of the su

...
[SEQ RERUN] Changing Your Metaethics
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-14T05:40:17.988Z

Today's post, Changing Your Metaethics was originally published on 27 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Discusses the various lines of retreat that have been set up in the discussion on metaethics.

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 Does Your Morality Care What You Think?, 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.
Where did mathematics begin to disagree between frequentist and Bayesian statistics, and why?
by Arkanj3l — 2012-07-14T03:57:00.120Z

I still can't see the relevance of Bayesian Statistics over Frequentist Statistics, and I take Less Wrong as evidence that this is a cause for clarification.

I'm looking for a historical narrative of the development of mathematics that tells me what mistake lead to frequentism over Bayesianism, which is supposedly the correct view. Alternatively, you can just say "Read PT:TLOS!" if it's that silly of a question.
Ruthless Extrapolation
by quanticle — 2012-07-13T20:51:23.463Z

Ruthless Extrapolation

Article Summary: One of the key adaptations of humanity is the ability to see trends, which allows us to anticipate and preemptively adapt to future conditions. However, this ability has its limits. We're very good at seeing first derivatives, but terrible at seeing higher level trends. This leaves us vulnerable to situations where those first derivative trends unexpectedly change. The example used is with energy resources, where our adaptation to continually increasing energy usage leaves us vulnerable to a situation where we no longer have access to ever increasing energy resources.

I have two questions regarding the linked article. First, is there a name for this cognitive bias? The author uses "Ruthless Extrapolation", which I find quite fetching, but I think this is well known enough to have a name already. Secondly, what assumptions do we make that could be described as ruthless extrapolation? It seems to me that many in the Singularity Studies community simply assume that CPU transistor densities will continue to increase indefinitely, which certainly seems to be a case of ruthless extrapolation. What would happen to whole-brain emulation if we woke up tomorrow and found out that the most powerful CPU possible would have a transistor density only two or four times higher than an Ivy Bridge Core i7?
Adding up to normality
by  — 2012-07-13T19:24:10.336Z

I think that the idea of ‘adding up to normality’ is incoherent, but maybe I don’t understand it. There is a rule of thumb that, in general, a theory or explanation should ‘save the phenomena’ as much as possible. But Egan’s law is presented in the sequences as something more strict than an exceptionable rule of thumb. I’m going to try to explain and formalize Egan’s law as I understand it so that once it’s been made clear, we can talk about how we would argue for it.

If a theory adds up to normality in the strict sense, then there are no true sentences in normal language which do not have true counterparts in a theory. Thus, if it is true to say that the apple is green, a theory which adds up to normality will contain a sentence which describes the same phenomenon as the normal language sentence, and is true (and false if the normal language sentence is false). For example: if an apple is green, then light of such and such wavelength is predominantly reflected from its surface while other visible wavelengths are predominantly absorbed. Let’s call this the Egan property of a theory. A theory would fail to add up to normality either if it denied the truth of true sentences in normal language (e.g. ‘the apple isn’t really green’) or if it could make nothing of the phenomenon of normal language at all (e.g. nothing really has color).

t has the property E = for all a in n, there is an α in t such that a if and only if α

t is a theoretical language and ‘α ‘is a sentence within it, n is the normal language and ‘a’ is a sentence within it. E is the Egan property. Now that we’ve defined the Egan property of a theory, we can move on to Egan’s law.

The way Egan’s law is articulated in the sequences, it seems to be an a priori necessary but insufficient condition on the truth of a theory. So it is necessary that, if a theory is true, it has the Egan property.

If α1, α2, α3..., then Et.

Or alternatively: If t is true, then Et.

That’s Egan’s law, so far as I understand it. Now, how do we argue for it? There’s an inviting, but I think troublesome Tarskian way to argue for Egan’s law. Tarski’s semantic definition of truth is such that some sentence β is tr...
Weekly LW Meetups: Berkeley, Hyderabad, Madison, New Jersey, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-07-13T16:25:25.066Z

This summary was posted to LW main on July 6th, and has now been moved to discussion.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Hyderabad Meetup: 08 July 2012 03:00PM
Washington DC Meetup-Post-Minicamp edition: 08 July 2012 03:00PM
Tucson: Fundamental Questions: 09 July 2012 07:00PM
First New Jersey Meetup: 12 July 2012 01:30AM
Brussels meetup: 14 July 2012 12:00PM
Less Wrong Sydney 16th July Event for Less Wrong: 16 July 2012 06:35PM

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

Salt Lake City: The Really Getting Bayes Game: 08 July 2012 03:00PM
Madison: Probability Calibration: 08 July 2012 07:00PM
Berkeley meta-meetup: 11 July 2012 07:00PM
(NYC) A Game of Nomic: 21 July 2012 03:00PM

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

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or ...
Two books by Celia Green
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-07-13T08:43:11.468Z

Celia Green is a figure who should interest some LW readers. If you can imagine Eliezer, not as an A.I. futurist in 2000s America, but as a parapsychologist in 1960s Britain - she must have been a little like that. She founded her own research institute in her mid-20s, invented psychological theories meant to explain why the human race was walking around resigned to mortality and ignorance, felt that her peers (who got all the research money) were doing everything wrong... I would say that her two outstanding books are The Human Evasion and Advice to Clever Children. The first book, while still very obscure, has slowly acquired a fanbase online; but the second book remains thoroughly unknown.

For a synopsis of what the books are about, I think something I wrote in 1993 (I've been promoting her work on the Internet for years) remains reasonable. They contain an analysis of the alleged deficiencies and hidden motivations of normal human psychology, description of an alternative outlook, and an examination of various topics from that new perspective. There is some similarity to the rationalist ideal developed in the Sequences here, in that her alternative involves existential urgency, deep respect for uncertainty, and superhuman aspiration.

There are also prominent differences. Green's starting point is not Bayesian calculation, it's Humean skepticism. Green would agree that one should aspire to "think like reality", but for her this would mean, above all, being mindful of "total uncertainty". It's a fact that I don't know what comes next, that I don't know the true nature of reality, that I don't know what's possible if I try; I may have habitual opinions about these matters, but a moment's honest reflection shows that none of these opinions are knowledge in any genuine sense; even if they are correct, I don't know them to be correct. So if I am interested in thinking like reality, I can begin by acknowledging the radical uncertainty of my situation. I exist, I don't know why, I don't know what I am, I don't know what the world is or what it has planned for me. I may have my ideas, but I should be able to see them as ideas and hold them apart from the unknown reality.

If you are like me, you will enjoy the outlook of open-ended striving that Green develops in this intellectual context, but you will be jarred by her account of ordinary, non-striving psychology. He...
[SEQ RERUN] Does Your Morality Care What You Think?
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-13T05:23:06.664Z

Today's post, Does Your Morality Care What You Think? was originally published on 26 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If, for whatever reason, evolution or education had convinced you to believe that it was moral to do something that you now believe is immoral, you would go around saying "This is moral to do no matter what anyone else thinks of it." How much does this matter?

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 Math is Subjunctively Objective, 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.
WorldviewNaturalism.com: A "landing page" for scientific naturalism
by lukeprog — 2012-07-13T03:39:21.180Z

I've just launched WorldviewNaturalism.com, which is intended as a simple "landing page" to be used for introducing your friends to scientific naturalism. Many of the recommended readings linked there are written by LWers. Enjoy.

(This is a very old personal project on which I've spent a few hours per month, and it is not at all associated with the Singularity Institute or the Center for Applied Rationality.)
New book on atheism, transhumanism, and x-risk
by lukeprog — 2012-07-12T21:17:10.435Z

Phil Torres is the creative force behind the highly enjoyable folk music of Baobab, and he also writes philosophy papers (under the name "Philippe Verdoux").

His forthcoming book may be of interest to LWers: A Crisis of Faith: Atheism, Emerging Technologies, and the Future of Humanity. Mostly it's a beginner's book about atheism, but chapter 20 discusses cognitive enhancement and mind uploading, and chapter 21 discusses existential risks as one of the most important things for humans to address once they've stopped fooling around with religion. There's also an appendix on the simulation argument.
What Is Signaling, Really?
by Scott Alexander — 2012-07-12T17:43:56.045Z

The most commonly used introduction to signaling, promoted both by Robin Hanson and in The Art of Strategy, starts with college degrees. Suppose, there are two kinds of people, smart people and stupid people; and suppose, with wild starry-eyed optimism, that the populace is split 50-50 between them. Smart people would add enough value to a company to be worth a $100,000 salary each year, but stupid people would only be worth $40,000. And employers, no matter how hard they try to come up with silly lateral-thinking interview questions like “How many ping-pong balls could fit in the Sistine Chapel?”, can't tell the difference between them.
Now suppose a certain college course, which costs $50,000, passes all smart people but flunks half the stupid people. A strategic employer might declare a policy of hiring (for a one year job; let's keep this model simple) graduates at $100,000 and non-graduates at $40,000.
Why? Consider the thought process of a smart person when deciding whether or not to take the course. She thinks “I am smart, so if I take the course, I will certainly pass. Then I will make an extra $60,000 at this job. So my costs are $50,000, and my benefits are $60,000. Sounds like a good deal.”
The stupid person, on the other hand, thinks: “As a stupid person, if I take the course, I have a 50% chance of passing and making $60,000 extra, and a 50% chance of failing and making $0 extra. My expected benefit is $30,000, but my expected cost is $50,000. I'll stay out of school and take the $40,000 salary for non-graduates.”
...assuming that stupid people all know they're stupid, and that they're all perfectly rational experts at game theory, to name two of several dubious premises here. Yet despite its flaws, this model does give some interesting results. For example, it suggests that rational employers will base decisions upon - and rational employees enroll in - college courses, even if those courses teach nothing of any value. So an investment bank might reject someone who had no college education, even while hiring someone who studied Art History, not known for its relevance to derivative trading.
We'll return to the specific example of education later, but for now it is more important to focus on the general definition that X signals Y if X is more likely to be true when Y is true than when Y is false. Amoral self-inter...
[SEQ RERUN] Math is Subjunctively Objective
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-12T02:07:43.998Z

Today's post, Math is Subjunctively Objective was originally published on 25 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It really does seem like "2+3=5" is true. Things get confusing if you ask what you mean when you say "2+3=5 is true". But because the simple rules of addition function so well to predict observations, it really does seem like it really must be true.

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 Can Counterfactuals Be True?, 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.
What Is Optimal Philanthropy?
by alyssavance — 2012-07-12T00:17:00.016Z

Much has been written about the idea of optimal philanthropy. Yet, it seems like optimal philanthropy isn't a single claim. Instead, it's a collection of related, but quite distinct, claims that have all been bundled together, much like the Singularity.

Here's the website of GiveWell, and here's the main video introduction for 80,000 Hours, two of the major optimal philanthropy sites. I'll try to break them down into their component claims (written in bold), and also give my views on each of the claims. Some of them are explicitly stated, but others are more implicit, so I definitely welcome feedback if optimal philanthropists feel they disagree with some of the claims as stated.

1. We should evaluate charities according to how efficient they are, along some common metric - for example, number of lives saved per dollar, or existential risk reduction per dollar. We should then encourage charities to be more efficient, and selectively donate to (or otherwise help) the most efficient ones.

This one I support wholeheartedly. It's the main message of GiveWell, and though I have disagreements with their methodology, the basic idea (of marginal utility evaluation) is one that must happen more often. People are way too prone, by default, to donate to the Society for Curing Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies. Much has been written about this in Purchase Fuzzies And Utilons Separately, and other Less Wrong posts.

2. In order to do the most good for our fellow humans, we should start/work for/donate to/otherwise become involved in charitable organizations.

Of course, this is widely believed outside the optimal philanthropy movement. But I think this belief is inherent in many optimal philanthropy claims, and it ought to be examined more critically. It's plausible, but if one looks at the total good done over the last thousand years, the vast majority comes from science and various businesses, not popular causes like (back then) "tithe to the church" or (now, from the 80,000 Hours video) "campaigning against climate change". (Examples: electricity, air travel, enough food, trains, air conditioning... ) However, it's also true that much more total effort has been put into for-profit organizations than non-profits. Which one is more efficient per dollar, I don't know, but it's a question worth examining, rather than just ignoring it by default.

3. We should design careers around bei...