trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Even when contrarians win, they lose: Jeff Hawkins
by endoself — 2015-04-08T04:54:49.342Z

Related: Even When Contrarians Win, They Lose

I had long thought that Jeff Hawkins (and the Redwood Center, and Numentia) were pursuing an idea that didn't work, and were continuing to fail to give up for a prolonged period of time. I formed this belief because I had not heard of any impressive results or endorsements of their research. However, I recently read an interview with Andrew Ng, a leading machine learning researcher, in which he credits Jeff Hawkins with publicizing the "one learning algorithm" hypothesis - the idea that most of the cognitive work of the brain is done by one algorithm. Ng says that, as a young researcher, this pushed him into areas that could lead to general AI. He still believes that AGI is far though.

I found out about Hawkins' influence on Ng after reading an old SL4 post by Eliezer and looking for further information about Jeff Hawkins. It seems that the "one learning algorithm" hypothesis was widely known in neuroscience, but not within AI until Hawkins' work. Based on Eliezer's citation of Mountcastle and his known familiarity with cognitive science, it seems that he learned of this hypothesis independently of Hawkins. The "one learning algorithm" hypothesis is important in the context of intelligence explosion forecasting, since hard takeoff is vastly more likely if it is true. I have been told that further evidence for this hypothesis has been found recently, but I don't know the details.

This all fits well with Robin Hanson's model. Hawkins had good evidence that better machine learning should be possible, but the particular approaches that he took didn't perform as well as less biologically-inspired ones, so he's not really recognized today. Deep learning would definitely have happened without him; there were already many people working in the field, and they started to attract attention because of improved performance due to a few tricks and better hardware. At least Ng's career though can be credited to Hawkins.

I've been thinking about Robin's hypothesis a lot recently, since many researchers in AI are starting to think about the impacts of their work (most still only think about the near-term societal impacts rather than thinking about superintelligence though). They recognize that this shift towards thinking about societal impacts is recent, but they have no idea why it is occurring. They know that many people, such as ...
Sapiens
by Vaniver — 2015-04-08T02:56:25.114Z

This is a section-by-section summary and review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It's come up on Less Wrong before in the context of Death is Optional, a conversation the author had with Daniel Kahneman about the book, and seems like an accessible introduction to many of the concepts underlying the LW perspective on history and the future. Anyone who's thought about Moloch will find many of the same issues discussed here, and so I'll scatter links to Yvain throughout. I'll discuss several of the points that I thought were interesting and novel, or at least had a novel perspective and good presentation.

A history as expansive as this one necessarily involves operating on higher levels of abstraction. The first section expresses this concisely enough to quote in full:

About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.

About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.

About 3.8. billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.

About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.

Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.

The main charm of the book, as I see it, is what I would call the "view from Mars," or what others might call the "outside view" or "view from nowhere." We live in the middle of the Scientific Revolution, of history, biology, chemistry, and physics, and it is hard to imagine the days when biology was *new*. Overarching histories like this...
Blind artifacts
by So8res — 2015-04-07T23:23:17.542Z

This is the second of four short essays that say explicitly some things that I would tell an intrigued proto-rationalist before pointing them towards Rationality: AI to Zombies (and, by extension, most of LessWrong). For most people here, these essays will be very old news, as they talk about the insights that come even before the sequences. However, I've noticed recently that a number of fledgling rationalists haven't actually been exposed to all of these ideas, and there is power in saying the obvious.

This essay is cross-posted on MindingOurWay.

A note on what sort of artifact a brain is:

A brain is a specialty device that, when slammed against its surroundings in a particular way, changes so that its insides reflect its outsides. A brain is a precise, complex machine that continually hits nearby things just so, so that some of its inner bits start to correlate with the outside world.

Consider the photons bouncing off the chair in the room where I write this. In coarse summary, those photons slam into specialized proteins in the membrane of my photoreceptor cells, changing their shape and setting off a chain reaction that activates an enzyme that breaks down certain nucleotides, thereby changing the electrochemical gradient between the inside and the outside of the cell, preventing the release of certain neurotransmitters through its membrane. This lack of neurotransmitters causes nearby cells to undergo similar ionization events, and those cells transmit the signal from a number of nearby photoreceptor cells into the first layer of my retinal cells (again, by the mechanism of proteins changing shape and altering the electrochemical gradient). And that's just the very beginning of a looooong Rube Goldberg machine: the signal then makes its way down the retina (interacting, at each level, with signals from higher levels) until it's passed to the optic nerve, where it's passed to the visual cortex, where the specific pattern of nerve cell ionization events causes a specific pattern of neurons to fire, setting off a cascade of neurons-affecting-other-neurons in a domino effect that results in the inside of my brain containing a tiny summarized representation of a chair.

A brain is a complex piece of machinery that, when immersed in a big soup of photons while connected to light-sensors, undergoes a massive chain reaction that causes the inn...
Meetup : Moscow meetup: lectures and tournaments
by Alexander230 — 2015-04-07T20:45:40.481Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meetup: lectures and tournaments

WHEN:
12 April 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

This Sunday, at our usual place and time, we will perform the next meetup. Our plan:

A talk about relations with bad habits.

A talk about validity in psychology.

A talk about Stanovich.

The Prisoner's dilemma tournament.

The Colonel Blotto game tournament.

Details are in the hackpad: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/-12-2015-hF3L1bJI6DU

Info for newcomers: We gather in the Yandex office, first revolving door is on the right from the archway, entrance 8.1. Here is a guide how to get to Yandex: http://company.yandex.ru/contacts/redrose/. If you're late, send SMS to Slava at +7(926)313-96-42; you'll have to wait until he is free to go down and meet you (which might take a while). Expected duration of the meetup is 4-5 hours.

If you're not the member of our Moscow community yet, you might want to check out https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/ , there's a lot of content about what's been going on for the last two years.

Also, please subscribe to our mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rationality-in-moscow

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meetup: lectures and tournaments
Even better cryonics – because who needs nanites anyway?
by maxikov — 2015-04-07T20:10:49.757Z

Abstract: in this post I propose a protocol for cryonic preservation (with the central idea of using high pressure to prevent water from expanding rather than highly toxic cryoprotectants), which I think has a chance of being non-destructive enough for us to be able to preserve and then resuscitate an organism with modern technologies. In addition, I propose a simplified experimental protocol for a shrimp (or other small model organism (building a large pressure chamber is hard) capable of surviving in very deep and cold waters; shrimp is a nice trade-off between the depth of habitat and the ease of obtaining them on market), which is simple enough to be doable in a small lab or well-equipped garage setting.

Are there obvious problems with this, and how can they be addressed?

Is there a chance to pitch this experiment to a proper academic institution, or garage it is?

Originally posted here.

I do think that the odds of ever developing advanced nanomachines and/or brain scanning on molecular level plus algorithms for reversing information distortion - everything you need to undo the damage from conventional cryonic preservation and even to some extent that of brain death, according to its modern definition, if wasn't too late when the brain was preserved - for currently existing cryonics to be a bet worth taking. This is dead serious, and it's an actionable item.

Less of an action item: what if the future generations actually build quantum Bayesian superintelligence, close enough in its capabilities to Solomonoff induction, at which point even a mummified brain or the one preserved in formalin would be enough evidence to restore its original state? Or what if they invent read-only time travel, and make backups of everyone's mind right before they died (at which point it becomes indistinguishable from the belief in afterlife existing right now)? Even without time travel, they can just use a Universe-sized supercomputer to simulate every singe human physically possible, and naturally of of them is gonna be you. But aside from the obvious identity issues (and screw the timeless identity), that relies on unknown unknowns with uncomputable probabilities, and I'd like to have as few leaps of faith and quantum suicides in my life as possible.

So although vitrification right after diagnosed brain death relies on far smaller assumptions, and if totally worth doing - let m...
Is Belief in Belief a Useful Concept?
by Unknowns — 2015-04-07T05:15:40.407Z

I am not sure that it is productive to tell certain people that they do not really believe what they claim to believe, and that they only believe they believe it. I have an alternative suggestion that could possibly be more useful.

Binary Beliefs

It seems that human beings have two kinds of beliefs: binary beliefs and quasi-Bayesian beliefs. The binary beliefs are what we usually think of as beliefs, simple statements which are true or false like "Two and two make four," "The sun will rise tomorrow," "The Messiah is coming," and so on.

Binary beliefs are basically voluntary. We can choose such beliefs much as we can choose to lift our arms and legs. If I say "the sun will rise tomorrow," I am choosing to say this, just as I can choose to lift my arm. I can even choose the internal factor. I can choose to say to myself, "the sun will rise tomorrow." And I can also choose to say that the sun will NOT rise. I can choose to say this to others, and I can even choose to say it to myself, within my own head.

Of course, it would be reasonable to respond to this by saying that this does not mean that someone can choose to believe that the sun will not rise. Even if he says this to himself, he still does not act as though the sun is not going to rise. He won't start making preparations for a freezing world, for example. The answer to this is that choosing to believe something is more than choosing to say it to oneself and to others. Rather, it is choosing to conform the whole of one's life to the idea that this is true. And someone could indeed choose to believe that the sun will not rise in this sense, if he thought he had a reason to do so. If he did so choose, he would indeed begin to make preparations for a dark world, because he would be choosing to conform his actions to that opinion. And he would do this voluntarily, just as someone can voluntarily lift his arm.

Quasi-Bayesian Beliefs

At the same time, human beings have quasi-Bayesian beliefs. These are true degrees of belief like probabilities, never really becoming absolutely certain of the truth or falsity of anything, but sometimes coming very close. These are internal estimates of the mind, and are basically non-voluntary. Instead of depending on choice, they actually depend on evidence, although they are influenced by other factors as well. A person cannot choose to increase or decrease ...
How urgent is it to intuitively understand Bayesianism?
by Adam Zerner — 2015-04-07T00:43:43.215Z

The current state of my understanding (briefly):

I very much understand reductionism and the distinction between the map and the territory. And I very much understand that probability is in the mind.

From what I understand, prior probability is just the probability you thought something was going to happen before having observed some evidence, and posterior probability is just the probability you think something will happen after having observed that evidence.

I don't really have a precise way of using evidence to update my beliefs though. I'm trying to think of and explain how I currently use evidence to update my beliefs, and I'm disappointed to say that I am struggling. I guess I just sort of think something along the lines of "I'd be unlikely that I observe X if A were really true. I observed X. I think it's less likely that A is true now."

I've made attempts at learning Bayes' Theorm and stuff. When I think it through slowly, it makes sense. But it really takes me time to think it through. Without referring to explanations and thinking it through, I forget it. And I know that that demonstrates my lack of "true" understanding. In general, my short term memory and ability to reason through quantitative things quickly seems to be well above average, but far from elite. Probably way below average amongst this community.

I definitely plan on taking the time to study probability completely and from the ground up. I also plan on doing this for math in general, and a handful of other things as well.

Questions:

What are the practical benefits of having an intuitive understanding of Bayes' Theorem? If it helps, please name an example of how it impacted your day today.

I mention in 3) that it takes me time to think it through. To those of you who consider yourselves to have an intuitive understanding, do you have to think it through, or do you instinctively update in a Bayesian way?

How urgent is it to intuitively understand Bayesian thinking? To use me as an example, my short-mid-term goals include getting good at programming and starting a startup. I have a ways to go, and am working towards these things. So I spend most of my time learning programming right now. Is it worth me taking a few weeks/months to study probability?

I don't intend for this post to just be about me. I sense that other's have similar questions, and that this post would be a useful

...
Meetup : LW Cologne meetpu
by EGI — 2015-04-06T20:00:23.334Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Cologne meetpu

WHEN:
11 April 2015 05:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Marienweg 43 50858 Köln

Hi everyone,
time for our monthly LW meetup comes up. Since several people wanted to try a more private / less expensive venue this time, I would suggest we try meeting at my house (Marienweg 43 50858 Köln) saturday 5 pm this time. Is this OK for everyone? If you want to attend please send a quick notification to me so I can estimate how much food I need to provide. I will cook some rice with halloumi and perhaps some sweets. If you want to bring food please include this in your note. Several people suggested games we did not get around to last time. Please bring them along if you can. If you did receive this mail only from me and not via google groups please notify Milo (sherincall(at)gmail(dot)com) to be included.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Cologne meetpu
Is there a LessWrong Index?
by Bound_up — 2015-04-06T18:27:57.621Z

Pardon me, please, if this is not the way to go about asking such questions (it's all I know). Is this more for LessWrong itself, or for LessWrong Discussion?

Is there some kind of comprehensive organization by subject of LessWrong posts?

I know there are the sequences, but also a lot of other useful posts.

If I want to learn about learning, about lifespan extension, about charity work, about happiness, etc., is there a place I can go to view all relevant posts in each respective area?

Thanks much
Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015
by philh — 2015-04-06T14:18:34.872Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Language Learning and the Dark Arts.
by Lemmih — 2015-04-06T11:33:18.183Z

I've been wanting to learn Mandarin Chinese for years now and just recently I wrote a small website to help me practise.1 All of the exercises are gap sentences that require you to type the correct answer before you can move on. I chose this kind of exercise because of the convincing evidence for the spacing effect and the testing effect.

Knocking through a bunch of exercises every day feels efficient but it's not exactly fun and I put in less time than I should. I've found two things that help with this: setting small and achievable goals, and reading short stories once I'm proficient with the vocabulary. And if there are two ways to make practicing more fun, there gotta be a lot more that I haven't thought about. So, how do I make myself work harder? Are there are any of the so called Dark Arts that are more than hearsay and could work in my favor? How do you people out there learn foreign languages and how do you keep yourself from giving up or slowing down? Do you use the pomodoro technique?

Cheers, David.

[1]: https://talentsrs.com

Edit: more on -> move on.
Meetup : Canberra: A Sequence Post You Disagreed With + Discussion
by DanielFilan — 2015-04-06T10:38:21.824Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: A Sequence Post You Disagreed With + Discussion

WHEN:
11 April 2015 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
108 North Road, Acton, ACT

In February we had a meet up based around us discussing our favorite sequence post. As a counterbalance to that, this time we will be discussing a sequence post that we disagreed with. Each person will summarize the article that they chose and why they disagree with it and that will lead into group discussion.

Please post the article you are bringing on this FB event page so everyone has a chance to read all of them before hand. The disagreement can be major issues or minor nit picks, buy if you can't think of any that you disagree with that might be a bad sign :P

As usual, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

If you use Facebook, please join our group.

Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: A Sequence Post You Disagreed With + Discussion
SETI-related: fast radio bursts
by RyanCarey — 2015-04-06T10:23:01.688Z

Recently, there has been some media coverage of a recent sample of fast radio bursts (FRBs) that are an unusual regular integer spacing apart, raising the possibility of intelligent life.

The original paper:

We have noted a potential discrete spacing in DM of FRBs. Identified steps are integer multiples of 187.5cm−3

...

In case this would hold, an extragalactic origin would seem unlikely, as high (random) DMs would be added by intergalactic dust. A more likely option could be a galactic source producing quantized chirped signals, but this seems most surprising. If both of these options could be excluded, only an artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered, particularly since most bursts have been observed in only one location (Parkes radio telescope). A re-assessment of man-made phenomena, such as perytons (Burke-Spolaor et al. 2011), would then be required. Failing some observational bias, the suggestive correlation with terrestrial time standards seems to nearly clinch the case for human association of these peculiar phenomena.

Usefully sceptical coverage by Gizmodo:

No matter how you slice it, eleven data points is a small sample set to draw any meaningful conclusions from. A handful of deviant observations could cause the entire pattern to unravel. And that’s exactly what seems to be happening. As Nadia Drake reports for National Geographic, newer observations, not included in the latest scientific report or other popular media articles, don’t fit:

“There are five fast radio bursts to be reported,” says Michael Kramer of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy. “They do not fit the pattern.”

Instead of aliens, unexpected astrophysics, or even Earthly interference, the mysterious mathematical pattern is probably an artifact produced by a small sample size, Ransom says. When working with a limited amount of data – say, a population of 11 fast radio bursts – it’s easy to draw lines that connect the dots. Often, however, those lines disappear when more dots are added.

“My prediction is that this pattern will be washed out quite quickly once more fast radio bursts are found,” says West Virginia University’s Duncan Lorimer, who reported the first burst in 2007. “It’s a good example of how apparently si

...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Revaled New Years Resolutions (Pretend it's January edition)
by rocurley — 2015-04-06T06:00:42.177Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Revaled New Years Resolutions (Pretend it's January edition)

WHEN:
06 April 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We'll be meeting to determine what New Years resolutions (ignoring that it is not, in fact, the beginning of a new year) are implied by our behavior over the last year. This is hopefully a way to get better access to our actual preferences, as opposed to whatever we claim to be our preferences.

If you need help getting in, you can call (484) 624-9170, and Jake will let you in. Not that this is NOT the normal phone number (mine), as I won't be able to make it this week.

As usual, feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Revaled New Years Resolutions (Pretend it's January edition)