trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Self Service Roundup
by Zvi — 2015-06-11T10:57:38.000Z

Follow-up to: Full Service

Before moving on to other topics, I thought I would round out my thoughts on self/full service itself (for some good follow-up on the drugstores, see the comments of the previous post) about the History of Self-Service, which I found fit my model of such things quite well, and summarizing key findings.

The idea that there is a natural free market, and a natural fair competition, between self-service and full-service was never the real situation. Instead, the two sides competed primarily at the state legislature, with both lobbying heavily to get laws that were favorable. In the beginning, the laws favored full service, then later they were more mixed. People were required to stay by the pump, making self-service worse, but the minimum wage going up made full-service better, and so forth. Regulations got increasingly complex and many entire chains could not hack it.

The hijack problem was also even more explicit than I realized, as self-service stations undercut full-service by also cutting out other services, not just the annoying “where is my tip” windshield cleaning but more importantly water and air, and emergency assistance. Having people able to assist you when you’re in trouble on the road, or in need of key supplies, is a valuable public good, because in practice one cannot charge what such things are marginally worth or anything close to it.

Thus, Maryland’s stance that basic elements of assistance must be provided at all gas stations makes sense; you ensure good public goods and put everyone on equal footing. These requirements seem far more justifiable than building and supporting the road and interstate systems in the first place, which are massive subsidies to cars from taxpayers that advantage them hugely over other transportation such as our pitiful train system. America is built and designed around cars, and it is a conscious governmental choice. Once you mess with a market like that, it is hard to avoid messing with it further. In this case, the cost gets born by the people who use the services, in the form of a de facto tiny additional tax on gasoline, which is clearly under-taxed relative to taxation rates.
A survey of the top posters on lesswrong
by Elo — 2015-06-11T01:47:04.732Z

In a post recently someone mentioned that there was a list of "Top 15" posters by karma. That inspired me to send all of them this note:

Hi,

I am messaging you (now) because you are one of the 15 top contributors of the past 30 days of LW.

I was wondering if you do any time tracking; or if you have any idea how much time you spend on LW. (i.e. rescuetime)

I have made the choice to spend more of my time engaging with LW and am wondering how much you (and your other top peers) spend. And also why?

Maybe you want to rate each of these out of 10; the reasons you partake in LW discussions:

Make the world better (raising the sanity waterline etc)

Fun (spend my spare time here)

Friends (here because my Real-Life is here; and so I come to hang with my friends - or my internet friends hang out here)

Gather rationality (maybe you still gather rationality from LW; maybe you have gathered most of what you can and now are creating your own craft)

here for new ideas (LW being a good place to share new ideas)

here to advertise an idea (promoting a line of thinking from elsewhere - could be anything from; more Effective Altruism; to this book)

Here to create my own craft. (from the craft and the community)

other? (as many other's as you like)

In addition do you think people (others) should participate more or less in the ongoing conversation? (or stay about as much as they are?) And would you give any particular message to others?

Do you feel like your time spent is effective?

I wonder if this small sample; once gathered will yield anything useful. with your permission I would like to publish your responses (anonymised for your protection) if either something interesting comes out; or nothing interesting (publish the null result)

Please add as many comments as you can :).

I'd also like to thank you for being a part of keeping the community active. I find it a good garden with many friends.

Sincerely, E

(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to rescue time I just like their tracking system)

As of the time of this post; I have received 10 replies. I waited an extra week or two and there were no more replies after about 2-3 days.

The funny thing about asking for something is that people don't always answer in the way that you want them to answer. (Mostly I blame myself and the way I asked; but I think its quite funny rea...
[Link] Nate Soares is answering questions about MIRI at the EA Forum
by Rob Bensinger — 2015-06-11T00:27:00.253Z

Nate Soares, MIRI's new Executive Director, is going to be answering questions tomorrow at the EA Forum (link). You can post your questions there now; he'll start replying Thursday, 15:00-18:00 US Pacific time.

Quoting Nate:

Last week Monday, I took the reins as executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. MIRI focuses on studying technical problems of long-term AI safety. I'm happy to chat about what that means, why it's important, why we think we can make a difference now, what the open technical problems are, how we approach them, and some of my plans for the future.

I'm also happy to answer questions about my personal history and how I got here, or about personal growth and mindhacking (a subject I touch upon frequently in my blog, Minding Our Way), or about whatever else piques your curiosity.

Nate is a regular poster on LessWrong under the name So8res -- you can find stuff he's written in the past here.

Update: Question-answering is live!

Update #2: Looks like Nate's wrapping up now. Feel free to discuss the questions and answers, here or at the EA Forum.

Update #3: Here are some interesting snippets from the AMA:

Alex Altair: What are some of the most neglected sub-tasks of reducing existential risk? That is, what is no one working on which someone really, really should be?

Nate Soares: Policy work / international coordination. Figuring out how to build an aligned AI is only part of the problem. You also need to ensure that an aligned AI is built, and that’s a lot harder to do during an international arms race. (A race to the finish would be pretty bad, I think.)

I’d like to see a lot more people figuring out how to ensure global stability & coordination as we enter a time period that may be fairly dangerous.

Diego Caleiro: 1) Which are the implicit assumptions, within MIRI's research agenda, of things that "currently we have absolutely no idea of how to do that, but we are taking this assumption for the time being, and hoping that in the future either a more practical version of this idea will be feasible, or that this version will be a guiding star for practical implementations"? [...]

2) How do these assumptions diverge from how FLI, FHI, or non-MIRI people publishing on the AGI 2014 book conceive of AGI research?

3) Optional: Justify the differences in 2 and why MIRI is t...
What do you do with a surprise journal?
by MaximumLiberty — 2015-06-10T20:17:31.976Z

I read the article found at:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3035671/how-i-get-it-done/a-new-technique-for-creating-more-aha-moments-the-surprise-journal

I started writing a few things down. I realize that the point of the surprise journal is to give your brain a little reward for noticing something. So, the actual keeping of the journal is surplus. You could write it down and then throw it away.

But that feels intuitively like an open loop. Is anyone doing anything with a surprise journal after writing it down?
Meetup : Moscow: existential risks, case-method, epistemic logic
by Slava Matyukhin — 2015-06-10T18:48:30.087Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: existential risks, case-method, epistemic logic

WHEN:
14 June 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, Льва Толстого, 16

We're meeting at Yandex, at 7.Nebo. Please fill this form OR join this FB event if you're planning to visit.

Most people at our last meetup supported the proposal that we need less lectures and more activities and coworking-style projects. So this time we have only one talk:

turchin on the roadmap of the possible AI scenarios, both friendly and unfriendly.

Activities:

Alexander230 will lead a case-based exercise for practical rationality training.

Pion will organize the first session of a group for studying dynamic epistemic logic.

I'll show the MVP for my human subject volunteers database project.

Detailed schedule

Information for the newcomers:

I wrote a new document explaining how to get to our meetups and what to expect. You can read it here. In the rare case you don't speak Russian and can't read this link, shoot me a PM.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: existential risks, case-method, epistemic logic
The president didn't die: failures at extending AI behaviour
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-06-10T16:00:19.613Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

In a previous post, I considered the issue of an AI that behaved "nicely" given some set of circumstances, and whether we could extend that behaviour to the general situation, without knowing what "nice" really meant.

The original inspiration for this idea came from the idea of extending the nice behaviour of "reduced impact AI" to situations where they didn't necessarily have a reduced impact. But it turned out to be connected with "spirit of the law" ideas, and to be of potentially general interest.

Essentially, the problem is this: if we have an AI that will behave "nicely" (since this could be a reduced impact AI, I don't use the term "friendly", which denotes a more proactive agent) given X, how can we extend its "niceness" to ¬X? Obviously if we can specify what "niceness" is, we could just require the AI to do so given ¬X. Therefore let us assume that we don't have a good definition of "niceness", we just know that the AI has that given X.

To make the problem clearer, I chose an X that would be undeniably public and have a large (but not overwhelming) impact: the death of the US president on a 1st of April. The public nature of this event prevents using approaches like thermodynamic miracles to define counterfactuals.

I'll be presenting a solution in a subsequent post. In the meantime, to help better understand the issue, here's a list of failed solutions:

First Failure: maybe there's no problem

Initially, it wasn't clear there was a problem. Could we just expect niceness to extend naturally? But consider the following situation: assume the vice president is a warmonger, who will start a nuclear war if ever they get into power (but is otherwise harmless).

Now assume the nice AI has the conditional action criteria: "if the vice president ever becomes president, launch a coup". This is safe, it can be extended to the ¬X situation in the way we want.

However, conditioning on X, that criteria is equivalent with "launch a coup on the 2nd of April". And if the AI has that criteria, then extending it to ¬X is highly non-safe. This illustrates that there is a real problem here - the coup example is just one of the myriad of potential issues that could arise, and we can't predict them all.

Second failure: don't condition on X

Maybe the trick could be preventing the AI from conditioning o...
[Informal/Colloquial] Open Survey: Ideas for Improving Less Wrong
by Gondolinian — 2015-06-10T13:53:14.680Z

[I apologize if this is considered lower-quality content, but I felt this was too big for an open thread post, and Discussion is currently the next-lowest option.]

Inspired by the recent discussion surrounding Lesswrong, Effective Altruism Forum and Slate Star Codex: Harm Reduction, this thread is intended for brainstorming ideas to improve Less Wrong, and also for including polls with your ideas as an easy way to get an estimate of what people in the community think of them.

Information on putting polls in comments can be found here. Please be thoughtful about how you word your poll options, and (in the case of multiple-choice polls) include a "no vote" or equivalent option so that people who just want to see the poll results won't be forced into picking an option they don't really support.

Thanks to everyone who shares ideas and everyone who takes the time to think about them and vote!
Short Story: Quarantine
by Dias — 2015-06-10T01:21:39.617Z

June 2nd, 42 After Fall
Somewhere in the Colorado Mountains

They first caught sight of the man walking a few miles from the compound. At least it looked like a man. Faded jeans, white t-shirt, light jacket, rucksack. White skin, light brown hair. No obvious disabilities. No logos.

They kept him under surveillance as he approached. In other times they might have shot him on sight, but not now. They were painfully aware of the bounds of sustainable genetic diversity, so instead they drove over in a battered van, rifles loaded, industrial earmuffs in place. Once he was on his knees, they sent Javid the Unhearing over to bind and gag him, then bundled him into the van. No reason to risk exposure.

Javid had not always been deaf, but it was an honor. Some must sacrifice for the good of the others, and he was proud to defend the Sanctum at Rogers Ford.

Once back at the complex, they moved the man to a sound-proofed holding room and unbound him. An ancient PC sat on the desk, marked “Imp Association”. The people did not know who the Imp Association were, but they were grateful for it. Perhaps it was a gift from Olson. Praise be to Olson.

With little else to do, the man sat down and read the instructions on the screen. A series of words showed, and he was commanded to select left or right based on various different criteria. It was very confusing.

In a different room, watchers huddled around a tiny screen, looking at a series of numbers.

REP/DEM 0.0012 0.39 0.003

Good. That was a very good start.

FEM/MRA -0.0082 0.28 -0.029

SJW/NRX 0.0065 0.54 0.012

…

Eventually they passed the lines the catechism denoted “purge with fire and never speak thereof”, on to those merely marked as “highly dangerous”.

KO/PEP 0.1781 0.6 0.297

Not as good, but still within the proscribed tolerances. They would run the supplemental.

T_JCB/T_EWD -0.0008 1.2 -0.001

…

The test continued for some time, until eventually the cleric intoned, “The Trial by Fish is complete. He has passed the Snedecor Fish.” The people nodded as if they understood, then proceeded to the next stage.

This was more dangerous. This required a sacrifice.

She was young – just 15 years old. Fresh faced with long blond hair tied back, Sophia had a cute smile: she was perfect for the duty. Her family were told it was an honor to have their daughter selected.

Sophia entered the ro...
When does heritable low fitness need to be explained?
by DanArmak — 2015-06-10T00:05:10.338Z

Epistemic status: speculating about things I'm not familiar with; hoping to be educated in the comments. This post is a question, not an answer.

ETA: this comment thread seems to be leading towards the best answer so far.

There's a question I've seen many times, most recently in Scott Alexander's recent links thread. This latest variant goes like this:

Old question “why does evolution allow homosexuality to exist when it decreases reproduction?” seems to have been solved, at least in fruit flies: the female relatives of gayer fruit flies have more children. Same thing appears to be true in humans. Unclear if lesbianism has a similar aetiology.

Obligate male homosexuality greatly harms reproductive fitness. And so, the argument goes, there must be some other selection pressure, one great enough to overcome the drastic effect of not having any children. The comments on that post list several other proposed answers, all of them suggesting a tradeoff vs. a benefit elsewhere: for instance, that it pays to have some proportion of gay men who invest their resources in their nieces and nephews instead of their own children.

But how do we know if this is a valid question - if the situation really needs to be explained at all?

For obvious political and social reasons, it's hard to be sure how many people are homosexual. Note that we are interested only in obligate homosexuality - bisexuals presumably don't have strongly reduced fitness. The Wikipedia article doesn't really distinguish obligate homosexuality from bi-, pan- and even trans-sexuals. The discussion in the SSC comments used an (unsourced?) range of 1%-3%, which seems at least consistent with other sources, so let's run with that.

The rate of major birth defects in the US, as reported by the CDC, is also about 3%. This counts both developmental and genetic problems, and includes everything from anencephaly (invariably fatal) through Down syndrome (severe but survivable) to cleft palates (minor). But most of these, at least 1.5% of births, were always fatal before modern medicine, and many of the others reduced fitness (via mate selection, if nothing else). Various other defects and diseases, which only manifest later in life, are also thought to be influenced or determined during early development. And so is sexual preference.

(Whether homosexuality is a developmental disorde...
Opinion piece on the Swedish Network for Evidence-Based Policy
by Stefan_Schubert — 2015-06-09T21:13:09.327Z

Cross-posted from the Effective Altruism Forum

Follow up to: The effectiveness-alone strategy and evidence-based policy

A translation of the opinion piece can be found here.

I

Effective altruism is a great concept, but it's not trivial to sell. There are therefore good reasons to ally ourselves with other rationalist memes to increase the level of rationality and effectiveness in the world. One powerful such rationalist meme is "evidence-based policy", which is inspired by the "evidence-based medicine" movement.

The exact meaning of evidence-based policy is somewhat disputed, but generally proponents of evidence-based policy demand that the standards on which policy is based should be raised. Many believe strongly in randomized control trials (RCTs) and in the "hierarchy of evidence", but there is not complete agreement on the strength of RCTs relative to other kinds of studies.

In the US and the UK, there are several organizations which work on evidence-based policy, such as the British What Works Network and the American Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy. Inspired by them, I took the initative to start a Swedish network for evidence-based policy at the start of this year. We are by now around 50 (depending on how you count) researchers, civil servants, journalists, consultants, students and other activists in the network. Only myself and a few others are EA members, so it's not an EA organization, but as I argued in my previous post, I do believe working on this nevertheless is an effectively altruistic cause.

One difference between us and What Works is that we aim to be a broad campaigning organization. We believe that policy not being evidence-based is not only due to a lack of knowledge, but also due to a lack of will, especially among politicians. Politicians often disregard expert advice (on what policies are the most effective to reach a given set of goals) which goes against their political prejudices. Therefore we need to put pressure on politicians - not the least in the media - rather than just work behind the scenes as an expert organization.

II (Most linked replies below are in Swedish)

Our activities were fairly modest until last Sunday, when we wrote an opinion piece calling for evidence-based policy (Eng...
The Joy of Bias
by estimator — 2015-06-09T19:04:30.588Z

What do you feel when you discover that your reasoning is flawed? when you find your recurring mistakes? when you find that you have been doing something wrong for quite a long time?

Many people feel bad. For example, here is a quote from a recent article on LessWrong:

By depicting the self as always flawed, and portraying the aspiring rationalist's job as seeking to find the flaws, the virtue of perfectionism is framed negatively, and is bound to result in negative reinforcement. Finding a flaw feels bad, and in many people that creates ugh fields around actually doing that search, as reported by participants at the Meetup.

But actually, when you find a serious flaw of yours, you should usually jump for joy. Here's why.

If you are an ambitious person, you have likely exhausted all the easy ways to improve your performance known to you; all the shortcuts, all the low-hanging fruits. If not, what are you waiting for? So, what's left for you is the hard ways, which require a lot of effort for relatively small improvements. Think harder, work harder, have more willpower, be more restless, et cetera. Such improvements are neither easy nor fast.

Now, suppose that you have found a serious flaw in your reasoning.

What has happened, actually?

Firstly, you have lost nothing. All your achievements are still with you; as well as all your abilities; as well as anything else. However, one possibility is that your predictions about the future may become worse; maybe, you have just noticed that your road is leading to the abyss. But I'm talking here about noticing biases, errors and flaws that you have had for a long time, and such biases are unlikely to have irreversible forthcoming consequences. For example, if you have had a biased estimate of radioactivity effects on health and have gotten a dose -- that's an unpleasant bias to find, indeed. But most long-term biases aren't that malicious.

Secondly, now you have an opportunity to fix it. Whatever you achieved before, you achieved while being impaired by the flaw. And now, when the bias is eliminated, you can do even better. Fixing a bias might require some effort, but usually way less effort than your default hard ways of improvement. Or maybe you just got rid of some risk which could hit you in the future -- that's good too.

When I find a flaw or a recurring mistake of mine, I imagine how my life will be improved aft...
How much do we know about creativity?
by NancyLebovitz — 2015-06-09T12:43:44.964Z

A lot of Less Wrong frames becoming more rational in terms of correcting biases. When Scott Alexander is asked how he does it, he doesn't seem to actually have an answer-- if I recall correctly, he's just said that all he's got in his life is his job, his girlfriend, and his blog, which doesn't begin to explain his remarkable flow of interesting posts.

It's a good thing to have fewer and weaker biases, but it's better if de-biasing can be applied to new ideas which have a good chance of paying off.
Is there LW material about creativity that I'm not remembering? Any recommendations for information about creativity elsewhere? I'm especially interested in material which you've seen help you or other people become more creative, as distinct from material which has been plausible and/or fun to read.

Edited to add: While I think this is a generally applicable topic, I also have a local interest. I'm fond of LW, but it seems to be in a doldrums, and at least part of the cause is a lack of interesting new material.