trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rationalist fiction: a Slice of Life IN HELL
by Ritalin — 2014-03-25T17:02:59.732Z

"If you're sent to Hell for that, you wouldn't have liked it in Heaven anyway."

This phrase inspired in me the idea of a Slice of Life IN HELL story. Basically, the strictest interpretation of the Abrahamic God turns out to be true, and, after Judgment Day, all the sinners (again, by the strictest standards), the pagans, the atheists, the gays, the heretics and so on end up in Hell, which is to say, most of humanity. Rather than a Fire and Brimstone torture chamber, this Hell is very much like earthly life, except it runs on Murphy's Law turned Up To Eleven ("everything that can go wrong, will go wrong"), and you can't die permanently, and it goes on forever. It's basically Life as a videogame, set to Maximum Difficulty, and real pain and suffering.

Our stories would focus actually decent, sympathetic people, who are there for things like following the wrong religion, or having sex outside missionary-man-on-woman, lack of observance of the daily little rituals, or even just being lazy. They manage to live more-or-less decently because they're extremely cautious, rational, and methodical. Given that reality is out to get them, this is a constant uphill battle, and even the slightest negligence can have a terrible cost. Thankfully, they have all the time in eternity to learn from their mistakes.

This could be an interesting way to showcase rationalist principles, especially those regarding safety and planning, in a perpetual Worst Case Scenario environment. There's ample potential for constant conflict, and sympathetic characters whom the audience can feel they really didn't deserve their fate. The central concept also seems classically strong to me: defying Status Quo and cruel authorities by striving to be as excellent as one can be, even in the face of certain doom.

What do you guys think? There's lots of little details to specify, and there are many things that I believe should be marked as "must NOT be specified". Any help, ideas, thoughts are very welcome.
Other minds and bats: the vampire Turing test
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-03-25T13:36:38.932Z

Thoughts inspired by Yvain's philosophical role-playing post.

Thomas Nagel produced a famous philosophical thought experiment "What Is It Like to Be A Bat?" In it, he argued that the reductionist understanding of consciousness was insufficient, since there exists beings - bats - that have conscious experiences that humans cannot understand. We cannot know what "it is like to be a bat", and looking reductively at bat brains, bat neurones, or the laws of physics, cannot (allegedly) grant us any understanding of this subjective experience. Therefore there remains an unavoidable subjective component to the problem of consciousness.

I won't address this issue directly (see for instance this, on the closely related subject of qualia), but instead look at the question: suppose someone told us that they actually knew what it was like to be a bat (as well as what it was like to be a human). Call such a being a vampire, for obvious reasons. So if someone claimed they were a vampire, how would we test this?

We can't simply ask them to describe what it's like to be a bat - it's perfectly possible they know what it's like to be a bat, but cannot describe it in human terms (just as we often fail to describe certain types of experiences to those who haven't experienced them). Could we run a sort of Turing test - maybe implant the putative vampire's brain into a bat body, and see how bat-like it behaved? But, as Nagel pointed out, this could be a test of whether they know how to behave like a bat behaves, not whether they know what it's like to be a bat.

I posit that one possible solution is to use the approach laid out in my post "the flawed Turing test". We need to pay attention as to how the "vampire" got their knowledge. If the vampire is a renown expert on bat behaviour and social interactions, who is also interested in sonar and paragliding - then them functioning as a bat is weak evidence as to them actually knowing what it is like to be a bat. But suppose instead that their knowledge comes from another source - maybe the vampire is a renown brain expert, who has grappled with philosophy of mind and spent many years examining the functioning of bat brains. But, crucially, they have never seen a full living bat in the wild or in the lab, they've never watched a natural documentary on bats, they've never even seen a photo of a bat. In that case, if they behave correctly wh...
How to trade money and time
by KatjaGrace — 2014-03-25T04:14:03.000Z

Time has a monetary value to you. That is, money and time can be traded for one another in lots of circumstances, and there are prices that you are willing to take and prices you are not. Hopefully, other things equal, the prices you are willing to take are higher than the ones you aren’t.

Sometimes people object to the claim that time has a value in terms of money, but I think this tends to be a misunderstanding, or a statement about the sacredness of time and mundanity of money. I also suspect that the feeling that time is sacred and money is in some sense not prompts people who believe that money and time can be compared in value in principle to object to actually doing it much. There are further reasons you might object to this too. For instance, perhaps having an explicit value on your time makes you feel stressed, or cold calculations make you feel impersonal, or accurate appraisals of your worth per hour make you feel arrogant or worthless.

Still I think it is good to try to be aware of the value of your time. If you have an item, and you trade it all day long, and you don’t put a consistent value on it, you will be making bad trades all over the place. Imagine if you accepted wages on a day to day basis while refusing to pay any attention to what they were. Firstly, you could do a lot better by paying attention and accepting only the higher ones. But secondly, you would quickly be a target for exploitation, and only be offered the lowest wages.

I don’t think people usually do this badly in their everyday trading off of time and money, because they do have some idea of the trades they are making, just not a clear one. But many other things go into the sense of how much you should pay to buy time in different circumstances, so I think the prices people take vary a lot when they should not. For instance, a person who would not accept a wage below $30/h will waste an hour in an airport because they don’t have internet, instead of buying wifi for $5, because they feel this is overpriced. Or they will search for ten minutes to find a place that sells drinks for $3 instead of $4, because $4 is a lot for a drink. Or they will stand in line for twenty minutes to get the surprisingly cheap and delicious lunch, and won’t think of it as being an expensive lunch now.

I agree that time is very valuable. I just disagree that you should avo...
What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
by Punoxysm — 2014-03-25T01:53:14.141Z

This is an offshoot of a thread I made earlier, but which wasn't eliciting the sort of responses I'd hoped for.

So let me pose a clearer question with less potential to get people on watchlists.

What legal ways of making a profit are the most anti-altruistic, the most damaging to society, the opposite of effective altruism in result.

I am using utility loosely. The answers need not be given from a utilitarian perspective at all, but instead merely deal with any means of making a profit that seems to you clearly wretched, and such that the world would be better if nobody participated in it.

I'd also like to emphasize that these things should be legal. There are some obviously wretched illegal businesses that would top the list otherwise. If something is legal but only in a particular jurisdiction, then you should only discuss it within the context of the jurisdiction where it is legal.

If it's a grey area, go for it, but extra points for society-harming enterprises definitely legal in both the letter an the spirit of the law.

This is NOT about whether the enterprise in question should be illegal, just whether it causes a net loss of utility (deal with counterfactuals however you see fit).
What is the most anti-altruistic way to spend a million dollars?
by Punoxysm — 2014-03-24T21:50:29.145Z

Edit: The purpose of this question is not to make the world worse, but to see whether we actually have concrete ideas of what would, and my guess is that most of us don't, not in a really concrete way. From the downvotes I'm wondering if everyone else is thinking way darker directions than I am. If so please share.

There is a lot of discussion here about effective altruism. Organizations like GiveWell with donations, using criterion like quality-life-years-saved-per-dollar. People distinguish warm-and-fuzzy giving from the most effective use of dollars from various utilitarian perspectives.

But I want to ask a different question: What would effective anti-altruism be?

To make it more concrete:

I am an eccentric multimillionaire, proposing a contest to all of you, who will for the purposes of this exercise play greedy and callous, yet honest and efficient, contest entrants.

Whoever can propose the most negative possible use for my money, in the sense that it causes the greatest amount of global misery, (feel free to argue for your own interpretation of the details of what this means) will receive $1 million to carry out his or her proposal and $1 million to keep for him or herself to with as desired.

A few rules:

1) Everything must be 100% legal in whatever jurisdiction you propose. Edit: People had trouble with the old phrasing, so I'll add that it should not only be legal in the letter of the law, but also in some reasonable interpretation of the spirit of the law.

1a) In fact, I encourage you to think of things that aren't merely legal but that would also be legal under whatever your favorite hypothetical laws are. Maybe that means non-coercive, non-violent, or something else in that vein.

2) This money may be used as seed funding for a non-profit or for-profit anti-altruistic venture, but I will take into account both the risk and the marginal impact of only the first million dollars.

3) Risk and plausibility are factors just as they would be in any investment for effective altruism

4) If you're going to propose that you keep and embezzle the first million dollars, you should have an extremely good justification for why such a mundane plan would match my standards for anti-altruism.

I hope this pushes you all to think of truly anti-altruistic means of spending this money. I think you may find that effective anti-altruism is a good deal harder than you'd b...
Meetup : Helsinki Meetup
by mikko — 2014-03-24T13:34:29.024Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup

WHEN:
13 April 2014 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Vilhonkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki

We’re having a social meetup in Kaisla. To find us there, look for someone wearing a pink elephant hat.

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup
Meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - 4
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-03-23T23:07:59.515Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - 4

WHEN: 31 March 2014 07:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE: Michaelisstr.18, Hamburg

We will be at yet another location chosen by Sam: Ristorante Buon Giorno, Michaelisstraße 18, 20459 Hamburg next to station Stadthausbrücke quickly reachable from central station.

As we don't (yet?) manage to follow an agenda I just give a list of possible topics:

Open beginning until the expected persons have arrived A short presentation about theme-centered interaction to improve our communication culture (S.Z.) Books and games. Time for discussing LW topics Planning of next meetup

This Meetup will likely end at 10 PM due to the restaurant closing.

The mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-hamburg

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - 4
How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good?
by JonahS — 2014-03-23T18:06:09.170Z

In late December 2013, I announced that Vipul Naik and I had launched Cognito Mentoring, an advising service for intellectually curious young people.

Vipul Naik and I are aspiring effective altruists, and we started Cognito with a view toward doing the most good. We've learned a lot over the past 3 months, and are working on planning what to do next. We'd be very grateful for any feedback on current thinking, which I've described below.

Our Mission

Human capital is one of society's most valuable resources, and school years (ages 5 through 22) are a crucial time period for building human capital. Education is a ~$1 trillion dollar sector, but schools are often dysfunctional institutions, and very little effort goes into helping young people develop as much as possible and to allocate their human capital as well as possible. We want to help optimize young people's life trajectories. For the time being, we've chosen to focus on helping highly intellectually capable young people. Some reasons for this are:

Intellectually capable people contribute disproportionate social value (e.g. Bill Gates solved an unsolved mathematics research problem as a sophomore in college; the Google co-founders were computer science graduate students at Stanford), and helping them develop is correspondingly more leveraged.

We have deep knowledge of the population.

The educational infrastructure is designed for the average student, and the gap between how things are and what would be optimal is greatest for the outliers.

By focusing on a subpopulation, we can offer more targeted recommendations.

Some ways in which we aim to help them improve their life trajectories are:

Encouraging reflective decision making and meta-cognition: we get them thinking about what they want out of life, and how best to attain it. In this respect, we overlap with CFAR.

Highlighting the advantages of learning different subjects to help them decide which ones are most important to learn.

Pointing them to the best learning resources available.

Helping them find high value extracurricular activities to engage in.

Informing them of the advantages and disadvantages of different career choice. In this respect, we overlap with 80,000 Hours (while differing in that our focus is on people who won't be entering the job market for several years).

Connecting them with people who have subject matter knowledge

...
What are some science mistakes you made in college?
by aarongertler — 2014-03-23T05:28:48.941Z

Hello, Less Wrong!

This seems like a community with a relatively high density of people who have worked in labs, so I'm posting here.

I recently finished the first draft of something I'm calling "The Hapless Undergraduate's Guide to Research" (HUGR). (Yes, "HUGS" would be a good acronym, but "science" isn't specific enough.) Not sure if it will ever be released, or what the final format will be, but I'll need more things to put in it whatever happens.

Basically, this is meant to be an ever-growing collection of mistakes that new researchers (grad or undergrad) have made while working in labs. Hundreds of thousands of students around the English-speaking world do lab work, and based on my own experiences in a neuroscience lab, it seems like things can easily go wrong, especially when rookie researchers are involved. There's nothing wrong with making mistakes, but it would be nice to have a source of information around that people (especially students) might read, and which might help them watch out for some of the problems with the biggest pain-to-ease-of-avoidance ratios.

Since my experience is specifically in neuroscience, and even more specifically in "phone screening and research and data entry", I'd like to draw from a broad collection of perspectives. And, come to think of it, there's no reason to limit this to research assistants--all scientists, from CS to anthropology, are welcome!

So--what are some science mistakes you have made? What should you have done to prevent them, in terms of "simple habits/heuristics other people can apply"? Feel free to mention mistakes from other people that you've seen, as long as you're not naming names in a damaging way. Thanks for any help you can provide!

And here are a couple of examples of mistakes I've gathered so far:

--Research done with elderly subjects. On a snowy day, the sidewalk froze, so subjects couldn't be screened for a day, because no one thought to salt the sidewalks in advance. Lots of scheduling chaos.

--Data entry being done for papers with certain characteristics. Research assistants and principal investigator were not on the same page regarding which data was worth collecting. Each paper had to be read 7 or 8 times by the time all was said and done, and constructing the database took six extra weeks.

--A research assistant clamped a special glass tube too tight, broke i...
Meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
by Larks — 2014-03-23T00:22:06.409Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup

WHEN:
29 March 2014 01:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Small World Coffee, 14 Witherspoon St. Princeton, NJ 08540

Come one, come all! Yes, that's right, the third Princeton LW meetup is here, a mere month or two after it was promised. That's four years less procrastination than I did on cryonics!

Here's the plan:

1) Chatting and socialising
2) Discussion of Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder. You don't have to have read the article to attend the meetup though!
3) Some sort of fun rationality game! We did paranoid debating last time, but am open to other games this time.

As ever, everyone is welcome.

Discussion article for the meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
Agents with Cartesian childhood and Physicalist adulthood
by Squark — 2014-03-22T20:20:17.970Z

Followup to: Updateless intelligence metrics in the multiverse

In the previous post I explained how to define a quantity that I called "the intelligence metric" which allows comparing intelligence of programs written for a given hardware. It is a development of the ideas by Legg and Hutter which accounts for the "physicality" of the agent i.e. that the agent should be aware it is part of the physical universe it is trying to model (this desideratum is known as naturalized induction). My construction of the intelligence metric exploits ideas from UDT, translating them from the realm of decision algorithms to the realm of programs which run on an actual piece of hardware with input and output channels, with all the ensuing limitations (in particular computing resource limitations).

In this post I present a variant of the formalism which overcomes a certain problem implicit in the construction. This problem has to do with overly strong sensitivity to the choice of a universal computing model used in constructing Solomonoff measure. The solution sheds some interesting light on how the development of the seed AI should occur.

Structure of this post:

A 1-paragraph recap of how the updateless intelligence formalism works. The reader interested in technical details is referred to the previous post.

Explanation of the deficiencies in the formalism I set out to overcome.

Explanation of the solution.

Concluding remarks concerning AI safety and future development.

TLDR of the previous formalism

The metric is a utility expectation value over a Solomonoff measure in the space of hypotheses describing a "Platonic ideal" version of the target hardware. In other words it is an expectation value over all universes containing this hardware in which the hardware cannot "break" i.e. violate the hardware's intrinsic rules. For example, if the hardware in question is a Turing machine, the rules are the time evolution rules of the Turing machine, if the hardware in question is a cellular automaton, the rules are the rules of the cellular automaton. This is consistent with the agent being Physicalist since the utility function is evaluated on a different universe (also distributed according to a Solomonoff measure) which isn't constrained to contain the hardware or follow its rules. The coupling between these two different universes is achieved via the usual mechanism of interaction ...
Entrepreneurship and college attendance
by JonahS — 2014-03-22T19:32:05.089Z

Some remarks relevant to young aspiring entrepreneurs:

Entrepreneurship and age

• In Why to not not start a startup, venture capitalist Paul Graham says he thinks that the chances of creating a successful startup increase with age up to 23 (at least), but that the best way to gain experience relevant to creating a successful startup is to try creating a startup. He suggests that in unusual cases, 16 year olds may be equipped to create a startup.

Whether or not to go to college

• Going to college (especially an elite college) gives one the opportunity to find cofounders and early employees. Mark Zuckerberg met the early employees of Facebook while at Harvard. Drew Houston met a number of the early Dropbox employees while at MIT.

• It's rare for highly successful entrepreneurs to not have started college. Sean Parker (Napster founder & venture capitalist) skipped college but was already earning $80k+/year by his senior year of high school, which is very unusual. See also stay mainstream until you have demonstrated success doing unusual stuff.

• The general consensus in the comments on the Hacker News question To go or not to go college? seems to be that even a highly skilled high school programmer should go to college. However, the remarks therein are not directed at entrepreneurs specifically.

Creating a company while in college

• Entrepreneur Nate Berkopec wrote that an aspiring entrepreneur can learn more through starting a business than through coursework, which is very plausible.

• Entrepreneur Jason Baptiste suggests that rather than creating a company while in college, one should instead work on a less time-consuming side project, and see where it leads.

• If one does find a cofounder and has a promising project, there seems to be little harm in taking time off from college to work on a startup. However, unless one is exceptionally talented, the project probably won't be sufficiently successful so as to furnish a decisive case for not completing a degree.

• In Why to not not start a startup, Paul Graham says that he wouldn't feel comfortable recommending that somebody with a family do a startup. So all else being equal, one should try earlier in life rather than later in life, and this is an argument in favor of working on something entrepreneurial while in c...
Meetup : Washington DC Games meetup
by rocurley — 2014-03-22T18:40:51.358Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Games meetup

WHEN:
23 March 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games.
(Yes, this is off schedule. We're probably having Robin Hanson come by next week so I moved it).

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Games meetup