trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Are smart contracts AI-complete?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-06-22T14:08:46.464Z

Many people are probably aware of the hack at DAO, using a bug in their smart contract system to steal millions of dollars worth of the crypto currency Ethereum.

There's various arguments as to whether this theft was technically allowed or not, and what should be done about it, and so on. Many people are arguing that the code is the contract, and that therefore no-one should be allowed to interfere with it - DAO just made a coding mistake, and are now being (deservedly?) punished for it.

That got me wondering whether its ever possible to make a smart contract without a full AI of some sort. For instance, if the contract is triggered by the delivery of physical goods - how can you define what the goods are, what constitutes delivery, what constitutes possession of them, and so on. You could have a human confirm delivery - but that's precisely the kind of judgement call you want to avoid. You could have an automated delivery confirmation system - but what happens if someone hacks or triggers that? You could connect it automatically with scanning headlines of media reports, but again, this is relying on aggregated human judgement, which could be hacked or influenced.

Digital goods seem more secure, as you can automate confirmation of delivery/services rendered, and so on. But, again, this leaves the confirmation process open to hacking. Which would be illegal, if you're going to profit from the hack. Hum...

This seems the most promising avenue for smart contracts that doesn't involve full AI: clear out the bugs in the code, then ground the confirmation procedure in such a way that it can only be hacked in a way that's already illegal. Sort of use the standard legal system as a backstop, fixing the basic assumptions, and then setting up the smart contracts on top of them (which is not the same as using the standard legal system within the contract).
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates
by RobinZ — 2016-06-22T01:13:33.435Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates

WHEN:
26 June 2016 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to do Fermi estimates. Please come with things in mind for others to estimate (questions you know or can find the answer to). The link includes examples.

As usual, side conversations are allowed and encouraged.

Upcoming meetups:

Jul. 3: Outdoor Fun & Games

Jul. 10: Webcomics

Jul. 17: Reading Book Excerpts

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fermi Estimates
Meetup : Bay City Meetup
by Bound_up — 2016-06-21T19:23:14.555Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bay City Meetup

WHEN:
30 June 2016 03:23:15PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2010 5th St, Bay City, MI

Anybody around here?

Discussion article for the meetup : Bay City Meetup
Moral progress enhancement
by KatjaGrace — 2016-06-21T12:00:00.000Z

[Epistemic status: speculation]

If moral progress is so important, probably we should try to improve it.

1. Why have ordinary people been immoral en masse?

From a previous post:

I would like to think I wouldn’t have been friends with slave owners, anti-semites or wife-beaters, but then again most of my friends couldn’t give a damn about the suffering of animals, so I guess I would have been. – Robert Wiblin

I expect the same friends would have been any of those things too, given the right place and period of history. The same ‘faults’ appear to be responsible for most old fashioned or foreign moral failings: not believing that anything bad is happening if you don’t feel bad about it, and not feeling bad about anything unless there is a social norm of feeling bad about it.

That is, I claim that the procedure individuals use for morality has these key components:

Conformist moral affect: people have moral feelings, and these mostly reflect what their peers deem right or wrong.

Dictatorship of moral affect: moral feelings directly determine what people endorse.

So for instance if everyone around tortures puppies, most people consequently feel ok about puppy torture. And then if you feel ok torturing puppies, you assume that you are in fact ok with it, rather than for instance doing an extra step of conscious deliberation to check this.

(You might wonder what you would be consciously deliberating here: I’m not taking a stance on ethics or meta-ethics, but I think many popular stances do not equate moral correctness with ‘what a person feels like’ so it should often be intelligible to check that one endorses the output of one’s moral feelings.)

This is all a complicated way of saying ‘people do bad because they copy other people who do bad’.

I think it is valuable to say it in the complicated way, because it helps with seeing what might be done differently. It also makes it clearer why things are not so bad—if people only ever copied other people, human morality would be random, which I think is false.

I could say more about why I believe these things, but I probably won’t unless anyone especially disagrees.

2. Should everyone use a different procedure instead?

I claim that while these procedures lead to terrible moral failings by otherwise nice people, they also lead to virtually all nice moral behavior by nice people. ...
Meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library
by Alexander230 — 2016-06-21T07:56:29.906Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library

WHEN:
01 July 2016 07:50:00AM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Дубининская, 20

Welcome to the next Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library!

Our plan:

A talk about Planning Fallacy.

FallacyMania game ( https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/Fallacymania--neGfMe9MFjH ).

Meetup schedule is here: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/-1-2016-UgXm8zFwrVX

Come to "Nauchka", ul.Dubininskaya, 20. Entrance through the Central children library #14. Nearest metro station is Paveletskaya. Map is here: http://nauchka.ru/contact-information/ . If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Meetup begins at 19:50, the length is 1.5 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library
Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016
by Elo — 2016-06-21T02:45:44.402Z

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.
Towards cause priotisation estimates for child abuse
by  — 2016-06-21T00:30:28.879Z

Closest community background reading: http://www.givewell.org/labs/causes/criminal-justice-reform

Scale

prevalence

Back of the envelope estimate of the number of abused excluding those who are emotionaly abused and neglected (because those stats aren’t on the wikipedia page for child abuse):

>Despite these limitations, international studies show that a quarter of all adults report experiencing physical abuse as children, and that and 1 in 5 women and 1 in 13 men report experiencing childhood sexual abuse. Emotional abuse and neglect are also common childhood experiences ("Child maltreatment: Fact sheet No. 150". World Health Organization. December 2014)

If all those physically abused are the same as those sexually abused (most conservative estimate) then 0.2 of all people are abused as children. If they are completely seperate populations then ((1/5 + 1/13)/2) + (1/4) = 0.39 (~0.4) of all people are abused as children. So, 0.2-0.4 of all people are abused.

>A long-term study of adults retrospectively reporting adverse childhood experiences including verbal, physical and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of childhood trauma found 25.9% of adults reported verbal abuse as children, 14.8% reported physical abuse, and 12.2% reported sexual abuse

More likely ¼ of all people are abused as children in some way or another

Harm (qualitatively)

>reduction in lifespan of 7 to 15 years (Kolassa, Iris – Tatjana. "Biological memory of childhood maltreatment – current knowledge and recommendations for future research" (PDF). Ulmer Volltextserver – Institutional Repository der Universität Ulm. Retrieved 30 March 2014.)

>more likely to suffer from physical ailments such as allergies, arthritis, asthma, bronchitis, high blood pressure, and ulcers (Dolezal, T.; McCollum, D.; Callahan, M. (2009). Hidden Costs in Health Care: The Economic Impact of Violence and Abuse. Academy on Violence and Abuse.)

>emotional abuse has been linked to increased depression, anxiety, and difficulties in interpersonal relationships ("Reactive attachment disorder")

>One long-term study found that up to 80% of abused people had at least one psychiatric disorder at age 21, with problems including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicide a

...
Why are humans soft?
by KatjaGrace — 2016-06-21T00:00:39.000Z

Softer, easier, less technical subjects: the ones about algorithmically sophisticated self-replicating nano-machinery-based robots with human-level intelligence that were constructed using selection effects, and their elaborate game theoretic interactions. e.g. sociology, economics, psychology, biology.

Harder, more difficult, more technical subjects: the ones about numbers, shapes, simple substances, rocks, making and moving macro-objects, algorithms. e.g. math, physics, chemistry, geology, engineering, computer science.

Why are the easy subjects about super-complicated, hard to understand things and the hard subjects about relatively simple things?

The first theory that comes to mind (perhaps because I’ve heard it before) is that the ‘easy’ subjects are just too hard. Nobody can get anywhere in them, which does two things. It means those subjects don’t accrue any hard-to-learn infrastructure of concepts and theories. And it completely undermines their use as a costly signal of ability to get somewhere in a subject. This leaves these subjects disproportionately popular among people who wouldn’t have been able to send that particular signal in any case, and empty of difficult concepts and theories. Worse, once the capable people leave, the body of useful science grows even more slowly and interest in the subject becomes a worse signal of competence.

Or less cynically, the capable people reasonably go to subjects that are feasible to make progress on, where they can contribute social value.

At any rate, the easy subjects are seen as hard because they have more sophisticated science, and are full of impressive people. They are hard to play at a socially acceptable level, because the frontier is more sophisticated and the competition is stiff.

On this theory, in ancient times rocket science was probably left up to the least capable members of the tribe, while pointy stick science was the place for impressive technical expertise. Which sounds pretty plausible to me.

I’m not sure if this theory really makes sense of the evidence. The kinds of subjects that are too hopeless for a capable person to perceptibly outperform a fool in are the ones like ‘detailed turbulence prediction’. People do actually make progress in soft sciences, and it would be surprising to me if those people were not disproportionately capable. It might...
Two kinds of Expectations, *one* of which is helpful for rational thinking
by MalcolmOcean — 2016-06-20T16:04:13.994Z

Expectation is often used to refer to two totally distinct things: entitlement and anticipation. My basic opinion is that entitlement is a rather counterproductive mental stance to have, while anticipations are really helpful for improving your model of the world.

Here are some quick examples to whet your appetite…

1. Consider a parent who says to their teenager: “I expect you to be home by midnight.” The parent may or may not anticipate the teen being home on time (even after this remark). Instead, they’re staking out a right to be annoyed if they aren’t back on time.

Contrast this with someone telling the person they’re meeting for lunch “I expect I’ll be there by 12:10” as a way to let them know that they’re running a little late, so that the recipient of the message knows not to worry that maybe they’re not in the correct meeting spot, or that the other person has forgotten.

2. A slightly more involved example: I have a particular kind of chocolate bar that I buy every week at the grocery store. Or at least I used to, until a few weeks ago when they stopped stocking it. They still stock the Dark version, but not the Extra Dark version I’ve been buying for 3 years. So the last few weeks I’ve been disappointed when I go to look. (Eventually I’ll conclude that it’s gone forever, but for now I remain hopeful.)

There’s a temptation to feel indignant at the absence of this chocolate bar. I had an expectation that it would be there, and it wasn’t! How dare they not stock it? I’m a loyal customer, who shops there every week, and who even tells others about their points card program! I deserve to have my favorite chocolate bar in stock!

…says this voice. This is the voice of entitlement.

The entitlement also wants to not just politely ask a shelf stocker if they have any out back, but to do things like walk up to the customer service desk and demand that they give me a discount on the Dark ones because they’ve been out of the Extra Dark ones for three weeks now. To make a fuss.

Entitlement is the feeling that you have a right to something. That you deserve it. That it’s owed to you.

(Relevant aside: the word “ought” used to be a synonym for “owed”, i.e. the past tense of “to owe”.)

A brief history of entitlemen

...
Meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow
by Alexander230 — 2016-06-20T12:54:16.662Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow

WHEN:
16 July 2016 03:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Большая Дорогомиловская, 5к2

Welcome to our custom made role playing game "Hogwarts and methods of rationality", inspired by HPMOR story! It will be intellectual role playing game with rationality-based minigames. You can read more detailed announce and description here: https://goo.gl/3vGLUn

Discussion article for the meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow
Meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game
by Alexander230 — 2016-06-20T12:38:48.526Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game

WHEN:
29 June 2016 07:40:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2

Welcome to Moscow LW community makeshift games! In that games, some rationality skills are involved, so you can practise while you playing!

FallacyMania: it is a game where you guess logical fallacies in arguments, or practise using logical fallacies yourself (depending on team in which you will be).

Details about the game: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/Fallacymania--neGfMe9MFjH

Tower of Chaos: funny game with guessing the rules of human placement on a Twister mat.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/u9qgc3

Training Game Party: all players try to train the subject to guess and make some action without words, using only positive reinforcement.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/mNT7J3

Come to antikafe "Kocherga", ul.B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2. The map is here: http://kocherga-club.ru/#contacts . Nearest metro station is Kievskaya. If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Games begin at 19:40, the length is 3.5 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game
Skills training for dating anxiety
by  — 2016-06-19T19:30:36.607Z

A half-baked literature review: Skills training for dating anxiety

In order to infer whether sociosexual skills training is a useful adjunct to standard treatment of anxiety, the first page of Google scholar was systematically reviewed for unique interventional studies that include with any measure of anxiety as an outcome, studies with comment on methodological issues or otherwise theorising with implications for the interpretation of the empirical evidence were discovered using the search terms: (1) social skills training for anxiety and (2) heterosexual social skills and (3) dating anxiety. And (4) behavioural replication training and (5) sensitivity training 10 studies were found, each very dated. The search space was expanded from (1) to searches (2) till (5) due to the keywords found in potentially relevant studies.

Studies that did not contextualise in terms of sexual motivations (e.g. dating) were excluded (namely: the study - Social skills training augments the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral group therapy for social anxiety disorder : www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005789405800619)

The studies found were (strike out: excluded):

Social skills training and systematic desensitization in reducing dating anxiety: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0005796775900546

Treatment strategies for dating anxiety in college men based on real-life practice.: psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1979-31475-001

Evaluation of three dating-specific treatment approaches for heterosexual dating anxiety.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/43/2/259/

A comparison between behavioral replication training and sensitivity training approaches to heterosexual dating anxiety.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/cou/23/3/190/

Social skills training and systematic desensitization in reducing dating anxiety: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0005796775900546

Social skills training augments the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral group therapy for social anxiety disorder : www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005789405800619

Skills training as an approach to the treatment of heterosexual-social anxiety: A review.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/84/1/140/

Self-ratings and judges' ratings of heterosexual social anxiety and skill: A generalizability study.: psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/47/1/164/

Heterosexual social skills in a population of rapists and child mole

...
Meetup : Summer Solstice Party, NYC
by Raemon — 2016-06-19T19:13:56.956Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Summer Solstice Party, NYC

WHEN:
25 June 2016 03:00:05PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Flushing Meadows - Corona Park

We'll be meeting outdoors to celebrate the longest day of the year[1]. The format will be something like an "Open Space," or "Unconference", but in an outdoor environment where people are welcome to share things other than talks. If you have an idea for an activity to run, a workshop to lead, or an experiment to try, you're welcome to sign up for a timeslot.

We'll be meeting at 3:00PM under the Unisphere (the huge globe at the center of the park). We'll make sure to hang out in the immediate vicinity of that until at least 4:00PM some latecomers can find us - after that, we may migrate around looking at interesting things.

RSVP on the facebook event to help us plan better:

https://www.facebook.com/events/515609545311250/

Discussion article for the meetup : Summer Solstice Party, NYC
The meaningful action treadmill
by KatjaGrace — 2016-06-19T12:00:39.000Z

Steven Pinker describes ‘the euphemism treadmill’:

People invent new “polite” words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations.

“Water closet” becomes “toilet” (originally a term for any body care, as in “toilet kit”), which becomes “bathroom,” which becomes “rest room,” which becomes “lavatory.”

“Garbage collection” turns into “sanitation,” which turns into “environmental services.”

I think a similar thing can happen with actions that are intended to carry meanings that are contrary to the context in which they are used.

For instance, eating ice cream is a happy activity. Snuggling up in bed is a happy activity. So if you are unhappy, you might try cuddling up in bed and eating ice cream. Eventually eating ice cream in bed becomes a depressing activity because it is what you do when you are unhappy. So now you have to move to some other activity that is still happy. Activities don’t become unhappy instantly, so each one can still cheer you up for a bit.

This naturally happens in the direction of good things coming to be associated with badness. The opposite associations happen too—intrinsically bad things come to be associated with goodness—but I think there is no particular treadmill in that direction. At the time of writing this, I am undressed in a half made bed on a mattress on the floor in a darkened room with little furniture at noon, and the floor is decorated with used glasses, and discarded clothes. Such situations are perhaps intrinsically depressing, but right now it just seems like what having a goal looks like, so it seems nice. In this direction, there is a negative feedback instead of a positive one. If sitting in a messy room is less depressing than usual, I’m less inclined to change to a new activity.
Recommend what the customer wants
by KatjaGrace — 2016-06-19T12:00:28.000Z

I asked:

Suppose you are in the business of making charity recommendations to others. You have found two good charities which you might recommend: 1) Help Ugly Children, and 2) Help Cute Children. It turns out ugly children are twice as easy to help, so 1) is the more effective place to send your money.

You are about to recommend HUC when it occurs to you that if you ask other people to help ugly children, some large fraction will probably ignore your advice, conclude that this effectiveness road leads to madness, and continue to support 3) Entertain Affluent Adults, which you believe is much less effective than HUC or HCC. On the other hand, if you recommend Help Cute Children, you think everyone will take it up with passion, and much more good will be done directly as a result.

What do you recommend?

Here are some of my own thoughts.

First, it depends on what you are claiming to do.

If you claim to be recommending ‘something good’, or ‘something better than EAA’ or anything that is actually consistent with recommending HCC, then probably you should recommend HCC. (This ignores some potential for benefit from increasing the salience of effective giving to others by recommending especially effective things).

If you claim to be recommending the most effective charity you can find, then recommending HCC is dishonest. I claim one shouldn’t be dishonest, but people do have different views on this. Setting aside any complicated moral, game theoretic and decision theoretic issues, dishonestly about recommendations seems likely to undermine trust in the recommender in the medium run, and so ultimately lead to the recommender having less impact.

You could honestly recommend HCC if you explicitly said that you are recommending the thing that is most effective to recommend (rather than most effective to do). However this puts you at odds with your listeners. If you have listeners who want to be effective, and have a choice between listening to you and listening to someone who is actually telling them how to be effective, they should listen to that other person.

Perhaps there should just be two different recommendations for different groups of people? An ‘effective’-labeled recommendation of HUC for effectiveness-minded people who will do it, and a something-else-labeled recommendations of HCC for other people. (Some readers las...