trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Durham NC meetup: Defense Against the Dumb Arts
by therufs — 2013-03-13T04:37:22.843Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Defense Against the Dumb Arts

WHEN:
14 March 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
706 9th St., Durham NC 27705

Or, "On interacting with people who are not aspiring rationalists."

Relevant reading includes:

The Fundamental Attribution Error/Correspondence Bias and Typical Mind Fallacy

Philosophical Landmines - On dealing with "the dangerous leftovers of past memetic wars".

Memetic Tribalism - Is arguing or trying to convince them of something instrumentally worth the investment?

More further reading in the RTLW group archive: http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw

Schedule:

7:00 Catching up; acquisition of beverages

7:30 Discussion

9:00 Egression and/or digression

And if this all is not incentive enough, there will probably be pie in honor of the day!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Defense Against the Dumb Arts
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Strong Evidence, Weak Evidence
by  — 2013-03-13T03:34:33.899Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Strong Evidence, Weak Evidence

WHEN:
13 March 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm Wednesday, March 13th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion: This week we will talk about evidence. This means we will do a bit of math (super basic Bayesian update example problems) to get a sense of how much weak evidence it takes to counter strong evidence, etc. This will certainly lead into discussion on how to do this in mathemtically intractable cases (basically, all of them), and probably into musing on what calculations we may have to reconsider in our own lives.

No foreknowledge or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessable and useful to anyone who values thinking for themselves. There will be open general conversation until 7:30, and that's always a lot of good, fun, intelligent discussion!

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Strong Evidence, Weak Evidence
Meetup : London Meetup, 24th March: Steelmanning
by philh — 2013-03-12T23:32:46.365Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 24th March: Steelmanning

WHEN: 24 March 2013 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE: Holborn, London

A fortnightly meetup in the Shakespeare's Head pub by Holborn tube station. We meet every other Sunday at 2pm. Everyone is welcome.

We also have a Google group.

This week's topic is steelmanning. The optional homework is to take an idea/argument that you disapprove of, disagree with, or otherwise dislike, and do your best to strengthen it. We'll report on these at some point during the meeting.

Aside from that, discussion topics might include techniques to use for steelmanning; how to notice if an argument can be steelmanned; impromptu attempts to steelman things brought up in the meeting; and admiration for Yvain, whose blog inspired this theme.

To reiterate: the homework is optional.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 24th March: Steelmanning
AI prediction case study 2: Dreyfus's Artificial Alchemy
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-03-12T11:07:34.826Z

Myself, Kaj Sotala and Seán ÓhÉigeartaigh recently submitted a paper entitled "The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions and what they mean for the future" to the conference proceedings of the AGI12/AGI Impacts Winter Intelligenceconference. Sharp deadlines prevented us from following the ideal procedure of first presenting it here and getting feedback; instead, we'll present it here after the fact.

The prediction classification shemas can be found in the first case study.

Dreyfus's Artificial Alchemy

Classification: issues and metastatements, using the outside view, non-expert judgement and philosophical arguments.

Hubert Dreyfus was a prominent early critic of Artificial Intelligence. He published a series of papers and books attacking the claims and assumptions of the AI field, starting in 1965 with a paper for the Rand corporation entitled 'Alchemy and AI' (Dre65). The paper was famously combative, analogising AI research to alchemy and ridiculing AI claims. Later, D. Crevier would claim ''time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier'' (Cre93). Ignoring the formulation issues, were Dreyfus's criticisms actually correct, and what can be learned from them?

Was Dreyfus an expert? Though a reasonably prominent philosopher, there is nothing in his background to suggest specific expertise with theories of minds and consciousness, and absolutely nothing to suggest familiarity with artificial intelligence and the problems of the field. Thus Dreyfus cannot be considered anything more that an intelligent outsider.

This makes the pertinence and accuracy of his criticisms that much more impressive. Dreyfus highlighted several over-optimistic claims for the power of AI, predicting - correctly - that the 1965 optimism would also fade (with, for instance, decent chess computers still a long way off). He used the outside view to claim this as a near universal pattern in AI: initial successes, followed by lofty claims, followed by unexpected difficulties and subsequent disappointment. He highlighted the inherent ambiguity in human language and syntax, and claimed that computers could not deal with these. He noted the importance of unconscious proce...
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
by Maelin — 2013-03-12T10:10:43.975Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup

WHEN:
15 March 2013 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Cartlon, Melbourne

Melbourne's next regular social meetup will be held on Friday 15th March at our usual venue (Ben's house) in Carlton. All are welcome from 6:30pm for a 7:00pm official start, but don't stress about being on time.

Our social meetups are informal events held on the third Friday of each month, where we lounge about playing boardgames and chatting, with occasional group parlour games such as Mafia/Werewolf or Resistance if people are interested. If you haven't been to a Melbourne meetup before/recently, the social meetup can be less intimidating way to meet us as it's very informal.

Some snacks will be provided and we'll probably arrange some form of delivered food for dinner. BYO drinks and games.

For the address or any other questions, please see the Melbourne Less Wrong google group, or feel free to SMS me on 0421 231 789.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
[SEQ RERUN] Unteachable Excellence
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-12T09:03:53.982Z

Today's post, Unteachable Excellence was originally published on 02 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If it were possible to teach people reliably how to become exceptional, then it would no longer be exceptional.

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 Markets are Anti-Inductive, 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.
Pluralistic Existence in Many Many-Worlds
by Neotenic — 2013-03-12T02:18:52.957Z

There are at least ten different conceptions of how the World can be made of many worlds.

But are those just definitional disputes? Or are they separate claims that can be evaluated. If they are distinct, in virtue of what are they distinct. Finally, do we have good grounds to care (morally) about those fine distinctions?

Max Tegmark's taxonomy is well known here.

Brian Greene's is less, and has 9, instead of four, kinds of multiverse, I'll risk conflating the Tegmark ones that are superclasses of these, feel free to correct me:

In his book, Greene discussed nine types of parallel universes:

(Tegmark 1) The quilted multiverse only works in an infinite universe. With an infinite amount of space, every possible event will occur an infinite amount of times. However, the speed of light prevents us from being aware of these other identical areas.

(Tegmarks 1 and 2) The inflationary multiverse is composed of various pockets where inflaton fields collapse and form new universes.

The brane multiverse follows from M-theory and states that each universe is a 3-dimensional brane that exists with many others. Particles are bound to their respective branes except for gravity.

The cyclic multiverse has multiple branes (each a universe) that collided, causing Big Bangs. The universes bounce back and pass through time, until they are pulled back together and collided again, destroying the old contents and creating them anew.

(Tegmarks 2) The landscape multiverse relies on string theory's Calabi-Yau shapes. Quantum fluctuations drop the shapes to a lower energy level, creating a pocket with a different set of laws from the surrounding space.

(Tegmarks 3) The quantum multiverse creates a new universe when a diversion in events occurs, as in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The holographic multiverse is derived from the theory that the surface area of a space can simulate the volume of the region.

(Related to Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis) The simulated multiverse exists on complex computer systems that simulate entire universes. (for the sake of brevity I'll consider dust theory to be a subset of this)

(Tegmark's 4) The ultimate multiverse contains every mathematically possible universe under different laws of physics.

...
Meetup : Vancouver Extraordinary Evidence and Bayes
by  — 2013-03-12T02:04:41.243Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Extraordinary Evidence and Bayes

WHEN:
16 March 2013 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2150 macdonald st vancouver bc

I recently saw someone claim that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" was a terrible hueristic. Then I saw someone use it to possibly get the wrong answer on something. Then my friends here at the meetup claimed they weren't comfortable with the whole bayes thing. So maybe it's time we had a chat about this, and practical bayesian epistemology in general.

Of course the conversation will wander after that, and we will adventure through all sorts of wonderful topics.

I'm switching up the venue a bit; this time we will meet at 2150 macdonald st (a big brown house at 6th and macdonald). Still the usual 15:00 start-time.

Please join us on the mailing list.

(Haven't seen many lurkers in a while, lurkers please come out.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Extraordinary Evidence and Bayes
How to motivate women to speak up
by KatjaGrace — 2013-03-12T01:39:30.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

In mixed groups, women don’t talk as much as men. This is perhaps related to women being perceived as “bitches” if they do, i.e. pushy, domineering creatures whom one would best loath and avoid. Lindy West at Jezebel comments:

…it just goes back to that hoary old double standard—when men speak up to be heard they are confident and assertive; when women do it we’re shrill and bitchy. It’s a cliche, but it’s true. And it leaves us in this chicken/egg situation—we have to somehow change our behavior (i.e. stop conceding and start talking) while simultaneously changing the perception of us (i.e. asserting that assertiveness does not equal bitchiness). But how do you assert that your assertiveness isn’t bitchiness to a culture that perceives assertiveness as bitchiness? And how do you start talking to change the perception of how you talk when that perception is actively keeping you from talking? Answer: UGH, I HAVE NO IDEA…

One problem with asserting that your assertiveness doesn’t indicate bitchiness is that it probably does. If all women know that assertiveness will be perceived as bitchiness then those who are going to be perceived as bitches anyway (due to their actual bitchiness) and those who don’t mind being seen as bitches (and therefore are more likely to be bitches), will be the ones with the lowest costs to speaking up. So mostly the bitches speak, and the stereotype is self-fulfilling.

This model makes it clearer how to proceed. If you want to credibly communicate to the world that women who speak up are not bitches, first you need for the women who speak up to not be bitches. This can happen through any combination of bitches quietening down and non-bitches speaking up. Both are costly for the people involved, so they will need altruism or encouragement from the rest of the anti-stereotype conspiracy. Counterintuitively, not all women should be encouraged to speak more. The removal of such a stereotype should also be somewhat self-fulfilling – as it is reduced, the costs of speaking up decline, and non-bitchy women do it more often.

Interestingly and sadly, this is exactly opposite to the strategy that Lindy finds self-evident:

…But I guess I will start with this pledge I just made up: I, Lindy West, a shrill bitch, do hereby pledge to talk really really loud in meetings if I have something to say,

...
AI prediction case study 1: The original Dartmouth Conference
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-03-11T18:09:19.943Z

Myself, Kaj Sotala and Seán ÓhÉigeartaigh recently submitted a paper entitled "The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions and what they mean for the future" to the conference proceedings of the AGI12/AGI Impacts Winter Intelligence conference. Sharp deadlines prevented us from following the ideal procedure of first presenting it here and getting feedback; instead, we'll present it here after the fact.

As this is the first case study, it will also introduce the paper's prediction classification shemas.

Taxonomy of predictions

Prediction types

There will never be a bigger plane built.

Boeing engineer on the 247, a twin engine plane that held ten people.

A fortune teller talking about celebrity couples, a scientist predicting the outcome of an experiment, an economist pronouncing on next year's GDP figures - these are canonical examples of predictions. There are other types of predictions, though. Conditional statements - if X happens, then so will Y - are also valid, narrower, predictions. Impossibility results are also a form of prediction. For instance, the law of conservation of energy gives a very broad prediction about every single perpetual machine ever made: to wit, that they will never work.

The common thread is that all these predictions constrain expectations of the future. If one takes the prediction to be true, one expects to see different outcomes than if one takes it to be false. This is closely related to Popper's notion of falsifiability (Pop). This paper will take every falsifiable statement about future AI to be a prediction.

For the present analysis, predictions about AI will be divided into four types:

Timelines and outcome predictions. These are the traditional types of predictions, giving the dates of specific AI milestones. Examples: An AI will pass the Turing test by 2000 (Tur50); Within a decade, AIs will be replacing scientists and other thinking professions (Hal11).

Scenarios. These are a type of conditional predictions, claiming that if the conditions of the scenario are met, then certain types of outcomes will follow. Example: If someone builds a human-level AI that is easy to copy and cheap to run, this will cause mass unemployment among ordinary humans (Han94).

Plans. These are a specific type of conditional prediction, claiming that if someone decides to implement a speci

...
Game Theory of the Immortals
by Crystalist — 2013-03-11T17:47:01.078Z

I’m sure many others have put much more thought into this sort of thing -- at the moment, I’m too lazy to look for it, but if anyone has a link, I’d love to check it out.
Anyway, I ran into some interesting musings on game theory for immortal agents and I thought it was interesting enough to talk about.
Cooperation in games like the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is partly dependent on the probability of encountering the other player again. Axelrod (1981) gives the payoff for a sequence of 'cooperate's as R/(1-p) where R is the payoff for cooperating, and p is a discount parameter that he takes as the probability of the players meeting again (and recognizing each other, etc.). If you assume that both players continue playing for eternity in a randomly mixing, finite group of other players, then the probability of encountering the other player again approaches 1, and the payoff for an extended period of cooperation approaches infinity.
So, take a group of rational, immortal agents, in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Should we expect them to cooperate?
I realize there is no optimal strategy without reference to the other players’ strategies, and that the universe is not actually infinite in time, so this is not a perfect model on at least two counts, but I wanted to look at the simple case before adding complexities.
Thoughts on the frame problem and moral symbol grounding
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-03-11T16:18:28.944Z

(some thoughts on frames, grounding symbols, and Cyc)

The frame problem is a problem in AI to do with all the variables not expressed within the logical formalism - what happens to them? To illustrate, consider the Yale Shooting Problem: a person is going to be shot with a gun, at time 2. If that gun is loaded, the person dies. The gun will get loaded at time 1. Formally, the system is:

alive(0) (the person is alive to start with)

¬loaded(0) (the gun begins unloaded)

true → loaded(1) (the gun will get loaded at time 1)

loaded(2) → ¬alive(3) (the person will get killed if shot with a loaded gun)

So the question is, does the person actually die? It would seem blindingly obvious that they do, but that isn't formally clear - we know the gun was loaded at time 1, but was it still loaded at time 2? Again, this seems blindingly obvious - but that's because of the words, not the formalism. Ignore the descriptions in italics, and the names of the suggestive LISP tokens.

Since that's hard to do, consider the following example. Alicorn, for instance, hates surprises - they make her feel unhappy. Let's say that we decompose time into days, and that a surprise one day will ruin her next day. Then we have a system:

happy(0) (Alicorn starts out happy)

¬surprise(0) (nobody is going to surprise her on day 0)

true → surprise(1) (somebody is going to surprise her on day 1)

surprise(2) → ¬happy(3) (if someone surprises her on day 2, she'll be unhappy the next day)

So here, is Alicorn unhappy on day 3? Well, it seems unlikely - unless someone coincidentally surprised her on day 2. And there's no reason to think that would happen! So, "obviously", she's not unhappy on day 3.

Except... the two problems are formally identical. Replace "alive" with "happy" and "loaded" with "surprise". And though our semantic understanding tells us that "(loaded(1) → loaded (2))" (guns don't just unload themselves) but "¬(surprise(1) → surprise(2))" (being surprised one day doesn't mean you'll be surprised the next), we can't tell this from the symbols.

And we haven't touched on all the other problems with the symbolic setup. For instanc...
Young Cryonicist Gathering Warning
by hankx7787 — 2013-03-11T14:12:16.403Z

Edit 1: context: Cryonics is a common topic on Less Wrong. There are a lot of Less Wrong cryonicists... and a good portion of people to whom this warning is relevant to are Less Wrongers. So this seems like as good a place as any to post this, since I'm just trying to get some potentially helpful information to these people.

Edit 2: It also occurred to me that if you just randomly see this you might have no idea if it's legitimate... feel free to message me if you'd like references to back up the story or anything... all you have to do is ask

Sent this to a friend, and I thought I should share:
Warning on the Young Cryonicists Gathering: The lady who runs this is quite literally, nuts. Cairn Adun will revoke your scholarship for petty reasons and leave you screwed. I had to heroically bargain down her punishment on two friends who were late to breakfast and missed the sign-in sheet. Another guy missed his flight or something and showed up late and had his entire scholarship revoked.

I went last year and escaped unscathed (as did most everyone). You can certainly do it, and yes I would recommend setting independent alarms, ample planning time, etc. I would also recommend going ahead and just sending Cairn an email saying hello, you know maybe thank her for putting the event together, you're looking forward to seeing her (lol) and you're having no problems so far (and make sure you let her know right away if there are any problems, and that it isn't your fault). When you get the chance maybe try to cautiously elicit what exactly her criteria are for screwing someone (lol), and try to be extra responsible (make sure you fill in all the fields in all the stupid forms she hands out, with at least some decent BS or something - don't give completely sarcastic answers or anything, I think she had it in for some from the beginning for half-trolling in their answers).
They will encourage you to stay out late Saturday night, and if you miss breakfast Sunday morning, multiple people were having their entire scholarships revoked, without ever being told about any of these criteria beforehand (I've heard that some of this is stated more explicitly in the contract this year). They didn't really seem to be standing up for themselves, so I went and pleaded with her as best I could and she agreed to only revoke their hotel scholarship. (Which they did end up having to pay.)

B...
[SEQ RERUN] Markets are Anti-Inductive
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-11T04:13:14.012Z

Today's post, Markets are Anti-Inductive was originally published on 26 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The standard theory of efficient markets says that exploitable regularities in the past, shouldn't be exploitable in the future. If everybody knows that "stocks have always gone up", then there's no reason to sell them.

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 Formative Youth, 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.