trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Less Wrong Ottawa
by Cyan — 2011-06-28T02:59:18.305Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Ottawa

WHEN:
30 June 2011 07:00:19PM (-0400)

WHERE:
283 Elgin Street, Ottawa

We'll be meeting at the Fox and Feather, upstairs, possibly in back room #1 if it's free. Look for the LW sign. Newcomers welcome!

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Ottawa
[SEQ RERUN] Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-06-28T02:54:09.504Z

Today's post, Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable, was originally published on 04 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Religions used to claim authority in all domains, including biology, cosmology, and history. Only recently have religions attempted to be non-disprovable by confining themselves to ethical claims. But the ethical claims in scripture ought to be even more obviously wrong than the other claims, making the idea of non-overlapping magisteria a Big Lie.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 Belief as Attire, 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.
Start the week - On life extension, neuro-ethics, human enhancement and materialism
by FiftyTwo — 2011-06-27T21:13:45.580Z

Briefly Start the week is a popular BBC radio 4 program discussing scientific and cultural events in the UK. This episode covers a lot of issues relevant to Less Wrong.

In their own words:

"Andrew Marr explores the limits of science and art in this week's Start the Week. The philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis mounts an all-out assault on those who see neuroscience and evolutionary theory as holding the key to understanding human consciousness and society. While fellow scientist Barbara Sahakian explores the ethical dilemmas which arise when new drugs developed to treat certain conditions are used to enhance performance in the general population. And the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey looks to the future when regenerative medicine prevents the process of aging."

Available for listening here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0122szw

Podcast here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r9xr

Admittedly this is a more populist approach to the issues then we're used to, and there are a few moments where the guests make statements we would find a bit silly. But it seems to provide a very good summary of the issues for a lay audience, and an excellent defense of the moral importance of life extension.

Thoughts?
Organ donation vs Cryonics
by The Dao of Bayes — 2011-06-27T20:45:49.389Z

(I wrote this as a comment, but it struck me as something that was potentially worth sharing with a wider audience. It seems overly specific for a main post, however :))

1) I think I can save more lives by being an organ donor [ed: rather than doing cryonics]

There were about 6 thousand people last year in Canada who needed an organ transplant [1] and around 247 thousand deaths [2]. Of those deaths, about 1/3rd were prevented by existing donors. We'd be preventing less than 2% of all deaths in Canada if everyone got the donations they needed.

Donation is only viable in cases of brain death (~49% odds) [1], and I couldn't find any statistics on how often a donor body is actually usable (but I'd assume vastly less than 100% of those cases, since you have to die of brain death in a hospital and still have cardiac activity) All in all, there's a deficit of donors, so it's probably still helpful (unless you're a male who has had sex with another male, in which case you might not even be legally eligible; it's banned in Canada).

I think you're probably saving less than 1 life on average by being a donor. You'd probably do better to convince some friends and co-workers to sign up with, since organ donation is "low hanging fruit" (free, socially acceptable), and sign yourself up for cryonics (you can claim you've gone with the more complex "donate body to medical science" if you need a social excuse for why you're not an organ donor yourself)

If you're not doing cryonics, there's no excuse for not being an organ donor, of course, so don't use this as an excuse to wiggle out of doing one or the other! :)

[1] http://www.transplant.ca/pubinfo_orgtiss.htm

[2] http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/demo07a-eng.htm
Learning how to explain things
by  — 2011-06-27T20:28:11.606Z

We've learned not to expect short inferential distances when explaining ideas we understand. We've also learned that leaping too far ahead when explaining ideas like transhumanism can freak people out.

I want to be really really good at explaining ideas. Does anyone have recommendations about how to figure out what the next inferential step is in another person's mind?

Categories which are not answers themselves but are areas in which I expect to find answers:

Asking filter questions

Social contexts

Verbal cues

Body language

Ideally, I would like to find conversation-independent answers to this question; not just answers that fit for explaining transhumanism.
[Site Redesign Bug] Discussion post are duplicated in the main site.
by loup-vaillant — 2011-06-27T19:50:47.476Z

Here the canonical url of this post.

Here is the "main" url of this post.

And here is the draft url of this post (which by the way kept the first version).

Main posts don't look affected.

I discovered it by clicking through the link available through the list of my posts and comments. It uses the "main" link even though the post were submitted on the discussion section. The visible consequence is if I use the "main" link, my post looks like it has been submitted to the top level.

I haven't tested whether this can hijack the karma system.
Human Biases (Ab)used by commerce [link]
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-06-27T19:37:47.020Z

Pretty nice article by Dan Ariely on cognitive biases benefiting certain commercial entities.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5506657/ArielyWired.pdf

I think he (rightly) does not claim these are all intentional, I suspect sufficient trial-and error + testing (used by many of the business he covers) will find some of these (which is relevant to the "super-intelligent companies" meme), though no doubt these can be conscious applications of clever marketing.

There used to be a whole semi-quacky but interesting site that was dedicated (among other things) to commercial conspiracies, many pages dedicated to placement of products in supermarket isles, but that was in the age before delicious, and I can no longer find it. It also had some hacking information and was widely duplicated - appreciate if anyone remembers it.
Biomedical engineers analyze—and duplicate—the neural mechanism of learning in rats [link]
by Dreaded_Anomaly — 2011-06-27T18:35:14.098Z

Restoring Memory, Repairing Damaged Brains (article @ PR Newswire)

Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget.

This series of experiments, as described, sounds very well-constructed and thorough. The scientists first recorded specific activity in the hippocampus, where short-term memory becomes long-term memory. They then used drugs to inhibit that activity, preventing the formation of and access to long-term memory. Using the information they had gathered about the hippocampus activity, they constructed an artificial replacement and implanted it into the rats' brains. This successfully restored the rats' ability to store and use long-term memory. Further, they implanted the device into rats without suppressed hippocampal activity, and demonstrated increased memory abilities in those subjects.

"These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes," says the paper.

It's a truly impressive result.
The RPG Thread
by Raw_Power — 2011-06-27T17:22:14.782Z

I thought maybe playing RPG's might help us get to know each other outside meet-ups. Specifically, I found this particular game of interest to this community: it is in many ways the antithesis of everything we stand for... which is why I think we rationalists, of all people, would appreciate it the most. It might also be a useful tool for elaborating collective thought experiments in a playful way (among many other things, it's one of the few gaming systems where roleplaying an artificial superintelligence trying to break out into the real world would be a perfectly plausible and context-relevant and plot-justifiable scenario), and help us expand and explore our idea-space further and deeper. Anyone interested in starting a game somewhere?

Other RPG's and suggestions are of course absolutely welcome.
Searching for: Patri's post on abandoning violent revolution
by calcsam — 2011-06-27T16:44:13.107Z

I'm writing my next post and am trying to quote a post Patri Friedman, username patrissimo, wrote a while ago about how he gave up dreams of violent revolution when his son was born.

I remember reading this post, but cannot now find it. Does anyone know where this post is, and if so, could you link it?

(Yes, I searched his LJ).

Thanks!
Most-Moral-Minority Morality
by byrnema — 2011-06-27T16:28:04.925Z

In this post, I discuss a theoretical strategy for finding a morally optimum world in which -- regardless of my intrinsic moral preferences -- I fold to the preferences of the most moral minority.

I don't personally find X to be intrinsically immoral. I know that if some people knew this about me, they might feel shocked, sad and disgusted. I can understand how they would feel because I feel that Y is immoral and not everyone does, even though they should.

These are unpleasant feelings and, combined with the fear that immoral events will happen more frequently due to apathy, I'm willing to fold X into my category of things that shouldn't happen. Not because of X itself, but because I know it makes people feel bad.

This is more than the gaming strategy I'll be anti-X if they'll be anti-Y. This is a reflection that the most moral world is a world in which people's moral preferences are maximally satisfied, so that no one needs to feel that their morality is marginalized and suffer the feelings of disgust and sadness.

Ideal Application: Nested Morality Model

The sentiment and strategy just described is ideal in the case of a nested model of moralities in which preferences can be roughly universally ranked from most immoral to least immoral: X1, X2, X3, X4, ... . Every one has an immoral threshold where they no longer care. For example, all humans consider the first few elements to be immoral. However, only the most morally sensitive humans care about the elements after the first few thousand. In such a world where this model was accurate, it would be ideal to fold to the morality of the most morally sensitive. Not only would you be satisfying the morality of everyone, you could be certain that you were also satisfying the morality of your most moral, future selves, especially by extending the fold a little further out.

Figure: Hierarchy of Moral Preferences in the Nested Morality Model

Note that in this model it doesn't actually matter if individual humans would rank the preferences differently. Since they're all satisfied, the ordering of preferences doesn't matter. Folding to the most moral minority should solve all moral conflicts that result from varying sensitivity to a moral issue, regardless of differences in relative rankings. For example, by such a strategy I should become a vegetarian (although I'm not).

Real Life Application: Very Limited

However, in ...
[Meta] [Solved] Unstable Karma
by loup-vaillant — 2011-06-27T14:51:10.322Z

Update: my karma is back to normal, and more. If you feel the need to compensate in my favour, don't.

I noticed that my Karma just jumped from 38 to 20, then 22, in less than an hour, with no apparent reason (votes on my most recent comments stayed rather stable). I didn't wrote any main, toplevel article, so I suppose there's something going on with the site redesign or something that is temporarily messing up Karma?

Edit: Mystery solved. (thanks Normal_Anomaly and nazgulnarsil) My Karma did jump in odd ways, in very little time, through -1 steps only (no toplevel article). The first jump went from 38 to 20, which is a loss of 18 karma points. Before I wrote this post, I had exactly 18 comments and articles here. That makes me about 99% confident that someone actually walked through my 16 comments and 2 submissions, and downvoted every single one. Weird.

The 2 Karma points I gained shortly after probably were upvotes on my 2 most recent comments (it appears I had more after that).
Competitive Essay Writing
by Vaniver — 2011-06-27T09:07:45.753Z

Quick report on an anti-akrasia method NMJablonski and I tried out: Competitive Essay Writing. Two (or more) people have something they need to write (but may not particularly want to)- everyone gets on a IM client and every thirty minutes reports how many words they've written so far.

I didn't have an essay to write, but I did have a wiki to update for the D&D campaign I'm running, and I so did that while NMJablonski wrote an essay for school due the next day. I won handily, but that may have been the style of writing I was doing. I found it useful to have the pressure to not waste time chasing rabbit trails (hmm, I ought to name this professor after the guy who discovered the circulation of blood. Why, hello wikipedia!), and he found it useful to have pressure to report a number- instead of staring at the screen wondering what to write, he would just pick something and go with it.

The next step, I think, is to write a program so that, instead of having to manually report progress every 30 minutes, the word count automatically updates for everyone you're competing with. I don't know if that would be distracting or not- I imagine having immediate feedback, instead of delayed feedback, would be superior.
The True Rejection Challenge
by Alicorn — 2011-06-27T07:18:41.914Z

An exercise:

Name something that you do not do but should/wish you did/are told you ought, or that you do less than is normally recommended. (For instance, "exercise" or "eat vegetables".)

Make an exhaustive list of your sufficient conditions for avoiding this thing. (If you suspect that your list may be non-exhaustive, mention that in your comment.)

Precommit that: If someone comes up with a way to do the thing which doesn't have any of your listed problems, you will at least try it. It counts if you come up with this response yourself upon making your list.

(Based on: Is That Your True Rejection?)

Edit to add: Kindly stick to the spirit of the exercise; if you have no advice in line with the exercise, this is not the place to offer it. Do not drift into confrontational or abusive demands that people adjust their restrictions to suit your cached suggestion, and do not offer unsolicited other-optimizing.

To alleviate crowding, Armok_GoB has created a second thread for this challenge.
asking an AI to make itself friendly
by anotheruser — 2011-06-27T07:06:15.415Z

edit: I think I have phrased this really poorly and that this has been misinterpreted. See my comment below for clarification.

A lot of thought has been put into the discussion of how one would need to define the goals of an AI so that it won't find any "loopholes" and act in an unintended way.

Assuming one already had an AI that is capable of understanding human psychology, which seems necessary to me to define the AI's goals anyway, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that the AI would have an understanding of what humans want?

If that is the case, would the following approach work to make the AI friendly?

-give it the temporary goal to always answer questions thruthfully as far as possible while admitting uncertainty

-also give it the goal to not alter reality in any way besides answering questions.

-ask it what it thinks would be the optimal definition of the goal of a friendly AI, from the point of view of humanity, accounting for things that humans are too stupid to see coming.

-have a discussion between it and a group of ethicists/philosophers wherein both parties are encouraged to point out any flaws in the definition.

-have this go on for a long time until everyone (especially the AI, seeing as it is smarter than anyone else) is certain that there is no flaw in the definition and that it accounts for all kinds of ethical contingencies that might arise after the singularity.

-implement the result as the new goal of the AI.

What do you think of this approach?
Meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday June 29
by JGWeissman — 2011-06-27T03:34:55.669Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday June 29

WHEN:
29 June 2011 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
4187 Campus Dr, University Center, Irvine, CA 92612

The weekly meetups in Irvine, California are returning to their normal schedule on Wednesday June 29. As always the meetup at the outdoor food court in the University Center near UCI, from 6:00 to 8:00 (or whenever we actually decide to leave). Look for the sign with naive neural classifiers for bleggs and rubes.

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday June 29
Futurama does an episode on nano-technology.
by Alexei — 2011-06-27T02:44:14.496Z

Futurama, Season 6, Episode 15: Benderama

Naturally, this episode's goal is entertainment, not so much the accurate portrayal of the technology.

Quoting from wikipedia article:

The premise of "Benderama" is based around the transhumanist theory of grey goo, an end-of-the-world scenario in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves.

The episode is not officially available for viewing online (but you can still find it, of course).
[SEQ RERUN] Belief as Attire
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-06-27T01:51:13.316Z

Today's post, Belief as Attire, was originally published on 02 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you've stopped anticipating-as-if something is true, but still believe it is virtuous to believe it, this does not create the true fire of the child who really does believe. On the other hand, it is very easy for people to be passionate about group identification - sports teams, political sports teams - and this may account for the passion of beliefs worn as team-identification attire.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 Professing and Cheering, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
What can we gain from rationality?
by  — 2011-06-27T00:08:57.072Z

If you are already an atheist that does not believe in ghosts, what can you learn from rationality? I'd love to be wrong about lots of things but my problem is, I think I'm right.

As far as I can tell, none of this reflective thinking has lead to deeper understanding of consciousness. (A subject I wish I wasn't so interested in, because its study seems so futile).

If you feel like it, please tell me about any particular instances where actively working on your own thought processes has lead you to realize you were wrong about something (other than blatantly false things like those I mentioned above) or if the same program lead to any new understanding of consciousness.
Music: Hatsune Miku 3D Live in Los Angeles on the 2nd July 2011
by listic — 2011-06-26T23:09:22.526Z

Hatsune Miku is a singing synthesizer application with a female persona, developed by Crypton Future Media using Yamaha's Vocaloid technology. She will be preforming live in the NOKIA Theatre in Los Angeles Convention Center on the 2nd July 2011, during the ANIME EXPO 2011.

Vocaloid technology was first released in 2004, but didn't meet wide recognition at first. When designing the second generation of Vocaloids, Crypton Future Media asked the manga artist Kei to design an avatar for their upcoming synthesized voice. The first to be released, "CV01 - Hatsune Miku" became runaway success, as thousands of internet users started making their songs with Hatsune Miku. Sega made a game and helped with organizing the first solo live perfomance in Tokyo on March 9, 2010, titled "Miku no Hi Kanshasai 39's Giving Day"(Miku's Day Thanksgiving). The concert included some of the best songs made by users, performed by Hatsune Miku and a band of human musicians. The concert in LA on 2nd July, 2011 should be the second of a kind and the first one outside Japan of that level (there was another event, and it is said to be not that good without Sega's involvement; but now the organisers promise "a few improvements over the original event")

Examples of Vocaloids in action:

Vocaloid Sweet Ann (English): Let it be (the Beatles)

Vocaloid Hatsune Miku (Japanese): Nebula (Tripshots)

The previous event "Miku no Hi Kanshasai 39's Giving Day"(Miku's Day Thanksgiving) on March 9, 2010 at the Zepp Tokyo in Odaiba, Tokyo

Nice fragment on YouTube (HD too)

torrent of the whole thing in HD

What seems to be the official event page:

Hatsune Miku 3D Live in Los Angeles

It looks like the tickets are sold out, but maybe it will be possible to buy some tickets at the event or something?. I would try if I was not living half the globe away.

I think that it's fitting for a community of people interested in the possibility of a technological singularity to take interest in the kind of entertainment that pushes the envelope of what's possible with technology. Human voice was the last musical instrument unconquered by synthesis. Now this page of human history is turned, and for me, Miku is the symbol of it. If there are technically better voice synthesizers (which is quite possible, since Miku was released in 2007), they don't have their o...