trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Categorizing Love: How having more words for love might make it less scary
by squidious — 2018-04-05T23:10:00.919Z

When discussing the idea of loving more than just our spouses and families, the phrase "love thy neighbor" often comes to mind. A quote I tend to prefer was said by Thomas Aquinas: "The person who truly understands love could love anyone". He believed that true love was unspecific, and open to all humanity. When we speak of falling in love with someone, we tend to talk of the person as if they're flawless (as one does in the honeymoon period of a relationship). Aquinas instead preferred a less romantic, more modern view of love: where you love someone, flaws and all.
That's not to say you have to love strangers equally to family and friends. A popular children's poem goes "I love you, I love you, I love you, I do. But don't get excited; I love monkeys too!". Love gets underused with people because we want to save it for someone special, and overused with things and experiences. I might say that I love peanut butter, but feel shy telling my partner I love them, even though I have given up peanut butter due to their allergy. This is because we don't tend to quantify love, even though it is something that waxes and wanes with time. I might microlove peanut putter, but decalove my partner. Or maybe, I refuse to even say "I love you" to my partner until I feel that I megalove them -- even though they've already said it to me. I may have milliloved my husband at first sight, but now feel that I gigalove them. Someone who participates in hierarchical polyamory might kilolove their secondary partners and teralove their primary.
You'll note that these different examples imply different models of what love even is. A monogamous person may see jealousy as part of a normal, functioning romantic relationship, while a polyamorous person may do all in their power to process jealousy until they don't feel it anymore. Different cultures have different ideas of what kinds of closeness and affection are appropriate in couples, families, and friendships. Some people feel that love is something that fades or changes with time; others feel that it simply matures and grows stronger.
The ancient Greeks spoke of love based more in quality than quantity. The closes to the way we most often describe love in the West is Eros, or sexual passion. The Greeks found Eros to be fiery, but dangerous on its own. The next most common form of love was Philia, which is more of a friendship. This was

...
Review of CZEA "Intense EA Weekend" retreat 
by Jan_Kulveit — 2018-04-05T23:04:09.398Z
Link: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1mu/review_of_czea_intense_ea_retreat/

Cross-posted from EA fora.

Hopefully interesting for anyone running something like "thematic weekend retreat", even if the topic isn't effective altruism. Also it was an attempt to "blend" instrumental rationality techniques seamlessly into an event not focused directly on rationality.

In March the members and friends of the Czech Association of Effective Altruism (CZEA) met for a weekend long intense retreat (you can read more about CZEA in this post). We would like to share our experience in case any EA/rationalist/... group was interested in doing something similar.

Table of contents

Goals

Format

Design principles

Program

Logistics, costs and tips and tricks

Impact evaluation

Future plans

Goals

Our goals for the retreat were, in order of importance

Community building and networking. Local EAs should leave knowing each other better
Introducing CZEA activities and engaging more people in our projects
Analyzing the weekend impact and sharing our tips and insight
Education in more advanced EA topics

Based on extensive questionnaires (EA people are willing to fill them up even if they are long), the event seems to have had impact on the goals.

The average number of EAs participants know well grew from 3.7 to 9.6 (operationalized as “being able to describe in three sentences”)
Average self-reported knowledge of CZEA grew from 4.6 to 6.9 on a scale 1 to 10 (perfect).
Expected number of hours participants plan to spend on EA activities grew from 11.8 to 13.8 per week. If part of the effect persists, it means the event had some leverage.
Average self-reported knowledge of effective altruism grew from 5.1 to 6.5 on a scale 1 to 10.
We will consider the goal “Analyzing the weekend impact and sharing our tips and insight” fulfilled if someone in EA community running a weekend retreat reads this and actually utilizes some of the info shared, so if you do, please let us know! It is really important for our internal prioritization.

Format

The event ran from Friday evening to Sunday noon.

There were 25 participants in total (and 8 more cancelled applications), half of them already active in CZEA. Others were already familiar with EA basics.

Design principles

Establish epistemic standards. It helps to establish epistemic standard early. By epistemic standard we mean rational reasoning, cooperative solving of disagreements, asking about unclear things,...
Bounds of Attention
by squidious — 2018-04-05T22:53:12.523Z

I once worked in a special needs class that consisted mostly of kids with Downs Syndrome and Autism Spectrum disorder. There were many patterns I noticed that ran through both groups, but at the end of the free period when we had to draw the students' attention back to classwork, one difference became clear: their attention spans.

Kids on the Autism Spectrum would drop what they were doing as soon as they were told that it was time for lecture. To these kids, making sure everything scheduled happened on time was important; if something came up and they had to skip math, they would be distressed -- even if they didn't really like math. In contrast, kids with Downs Syndrome wanted to finish what they were doing. If they were in the middle of a puzzle, they had to finish it. If they were watching a Youtube video, they couldn't hit pause until it was over. We'd have to keep track of their activities and anticipate when a good time to pull them away. If a kid was listening to music, we'd approach them five minutes before the end of the period and allow them one more song.

This is not meant to draw boundaries between diagnoses (not every person with one of these conditions will act like the kids in my class did), but it does illustrate two very different approaches to attention: time-bound and task-bound. Someone who prefers to stick to a schedule is more likely to have time-bound attention, finishing a task when it is time for the next task, even if the previous task isn't completely finished. Others may be more task-bound, preferring to finish one task before moving on to the next.

To apply this to yourself, imagine being a child reading your favorite book before bed. You are told that it is time to go to sleep, but you are in the middle of a chapter. How reluctant are you to put the book down? Regardless of how good the book is, are you willing to go to bed before the chapter is done?

Variable answers are expected here. A gripping mystery novel is going to treat your attention differently from a comic book, in the same way that activities you enjoy feel different from those you don't. A person's willingness to move on to the next task may depend on many things, including time spent or remaining in the task, time until you can return to the task, enjoyment, and rarity of the task. You may be more reluctant to leave a party if ...
Welcome to Altruisme Efficace Montréal - Effective Altruism Montreal [Edit With Your Details]
by Mati_Roy — 2018-04-05T18:52:06.463Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Welcome to Montréal LessWrong/ACX Montreal
by Mati_Roy — 2018-04-05T18:50:13.793Z

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

We hold meetups/discussions at L'Esplanade Tranquille during the summer months and the Ye Olde Pub Bar & Grill during the winter months, where we discuss a wide range of topics of interest. We also occasionally meet to play board games.

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

We usually meet biweekly on Saturdays at 1PM. All meetups are announced on the Montréal Lesswrong page, the ACX Montreal mailing list, and the Montreal Rationalists Discord. Join those to never miss an event!

Who would be a good fit for your group?

Anyone who likes to discuss a wide range of lesswrong/ACX-y topics, but really anyone is welcome.

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?

When we have a discussion topic, we often suggest some light and optional background reading to get everyone up to speed before the discussion. But other than that, not at all. The only skill you need is to be a decent person :)
Against Occam's Razor
by zulupineapple — 2018-04-05T17:59:27.583Z

Why should the Occamian prior work so well in the real world? It's a seemingly profound mystery that is asking to be dissolved.

To begin with, I propose a Lazy Razor and a corresponding Lazy prior:

Given several competing models of reality, we should select the one that is easiest to work with.

This is merely a formulation of the obvious trade-off between accuracy and cost. I would rather have a bad prediction today than a good prediction tomorrow or a great prediction ten years from now. Ultimately, this prior will deliver a good model, because it will let you try out many different models fast.

The concept of "easiness" may seem even more vague than "complexity", but I believe that in any specific context its measurement should be clear. Note, "easiness" is measured in man-hours, dollars or etc, it's not to be confused with "hardness" in the sense of P and PN. If you still don't know how to measure "easiness" in your context, you should use the Lazy prior to choose an "easiness" measurement procedure. To break the recursive loop, know that the Laziest of all models is called "pulling numbers out of your ass".

Now let's return to the first question. Why should the Occamian prior work so well in the real world?

The answer is, it doesn't, not really. Of all the possible priors, the Occamian prior holds no special place. Its greatest merit is that it often resembles Lazy prior in the probabilities it offers. Indeed it is easy to see, that a random model with a billion parameters is disliked by both priors, and that a model with two parameters is loved by both. By the way, its second greatest merit is being easy to work with.

Note, the priors are not interchangeable. One case where they disagree is on making use of existing resources. Suppose mathematics has derived powerful tools for working with A-theory but not B-theory. Then Lazy prior would suggest that a complex model based on A-theory may be preferable to a simpler one based on B-theory. Or, suppose some process took millions of years to produce abundant and powerful meat-based computers. Then Lazy prior would suggest that we make use of them in our models, regardless of their complexity, while the Occamian prior would object.
Adult Neurogenesis – A Pointed Review
by Scott Alexander — 2018-04-05T04:50:03.107Z

[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article.]

Hey, let’s review the literature on adult neurogenesis! This’ll be really fun, promise.

Gage’s Neurogenesis In The Adult Brain, published in the Journal Of Neuroscience and cited 834 times, begins:

A milestone is marked in our understanding of the brain with the recent acceptance, contrary to early dogma, that the adult nervous system can generate new neurons. One could wonder how this dogma originally came about, particularly because all organisms have some cells that continue to divide, adding to the size of the organism and repairing damage. All mammals have replicating cells in many organs and in some cases, notably the blood, skin, and gut, stem cells have been shown to exist throughout life, contributing to rapid cell replacement. Furthermore, insects, fish, and amphibia can replicate neural cells throughout life. An exception to this rule of self-repair and continued growth was thought to be the mammalian brain and spinal cord. In fact, because we knew that microglia, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes all normally divide in the adult and respond to injury by dividing, it was only neurons that were considered to be refractory to replication. Now we know that this long accepted limitation is not completely true

Subsequent investigation has found adult neurogenesis in all sorts of brain regions. Wikipedia notes that “In humans, new neurons are continually born throughout adulthood in two regions of the brain: the subgranular zone and the striatum”, but adds that “some authors (particularly Elizabeth Gould) have suggested that adult neurogenesis may also occur in regions within the brain not generally associated with neurogenesis including the neocortex”, and there’s also some research pointing to the cerebellum.

Some research has looked at the exact mechanism by which neurogenesis takes place; for example, in a paper in Nature cited 1581 times, Song et al determine that astroglia have an important role in promoting neurogenesis from FGF-2-dependent stem cells. Other research has tried to determine the rate; for example, Cameron et al (1609 citations) find that there is “a substantial pool of immature granule neurons” that may generate as many as 250,000 new cells per month. Still other research looks at the c...
Death in Groups
by ryan_b — 2018-04-05T00:45:24.990Z

What is the value of your life? Not a life, but your life. Would you consider yourself expendable?

The last time I almost died, it was over a missing shotgun. I was in Afghanistan at the time, somewhere closer to the border with Pakistan. The roads are rough, particularly when there aren't any, and during our travels we would occasionally have to stop and re-secure our cargo. During one such stop, it seems a weapon was left on the bed of the truck and then fell off somewhere. It was discovered the weapon was missing, and then we were ordered to go back out and find it.

It's important to recognize early on that there was no expectation of success here - this was a punishment. It was more than three hours' travel, through mountains and river valleys. Spotting a shotgun through the armored window was not likely. Up the chain of command went the observation that driving up and down the same road a bunch of times is a bad plan considering we were in Afghanistan. Down the chain of command came the orders to go out anyway. It was clear that we were expected to operate continuously until we were attacked, or the higher ups relented. Everyone knew. Everyone knew that everyone knew. It was common knowledge. These are moments that test men and their oaths: we looked at one another in grimly, seeing the hubris and stupidity at work; there was talk of refusing to go.

We went.

The fourth time we covered the ground, ~300lbs of home-made explosive went off under the back tire of the truck I was in. Where there should have been a sound there was a mighty shockwave, and everything went silent and in slow motion. The world was queerly bright, and I wondered why the smell of dust was so strong. Then I saw my arms floating in front of me, and the tied down equipment only held by its ties; I knew what had happened, and what was next. I thought very clearly: "This part is going to suck."

Everybody lived - the new trucks have all kinds of tricks for dispensing with kinetic energy, so every nut and bolt on the thing blew off and they found one of the tires 400 meters away. Those weighed 700lbs or so, with the wheel in them; we made a game of trying to flip one in our camp, and perhaps a quarter succeeded. Three of us left in a helicopter, myself included. One or more of us would probably have died but for a series of recent changes: we stopped having a rear gunne...
Competition for Power
by Samo Burja — 2018-04-04T17:10:00.888Z

This is an excerpt from the draft of

my upcoming book

on great founder theory. It was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can

access the original here.

To win on the global strategic stage, you must understand how to gain and wield power. As soon as you decide to gain power, however, you’ll find yourself surrounded by others doing the same. Suddenly, you’re competing for power. By studying the competitors and the nature of the competition, it becomes possible to craft a winning strategy.

Understanding the competition for power also provides a window into understanding the behavior of other important players. While you yourself may not be competing in a strategic landscape, other powerful people certainly are. Understanding the landscape they’re competing within begins to reveal their plans, goals, and next moves, which you can use to piece together what’s happening all over the world.

So, how does the competition for power work?

The distribution of skill

There is good reason to think skill lies on a

Pareto distribution

— some people are dramatically more skilled than others and can accomplish feats others cannot. For example, very few people have the skill to found a company, far fewer have the skill to found a successful company, and fewer still can found a successful company that does anything at all interesting. Google seeks to hire programmers who are 10 times more competent than others, known as 10X programmers. Master

Go

players consistently beat those of even slightly lower rank. Some politicians are drastically more persuasive and charismatic than others.

There are two theoretical explanations for this that I find plausible. I call the first explanation the Completeness Hypothesis. It is the idea that having all of the important contributing pieces to producing an effect makes a given effect much, much larger than having most of the pieces. Having 100% of the pieces of a car produces a very different effect than having 90% of the pieces. The four important pieces for producing mastery in a domain are good feedback mechanisms, extreme motivation, the right equipment, and sufficient time. According to the Completeness Hypothesis, people that stably have all four of these pieces will have orders-of-magnitude greater skill than people that have only two or three of the components. This produces the observed distributi...
Realistic thought experiments
by KatjaGrace — 2018-04-04T01:50:01.763Z

What if…

…after you died, you would be transported back and forth in time and get to be each of the other people who ever lived, one at a time, but with no recollection of your other lives?

…you had lived your entire life once already, and got to the end and achieved disappointingly few of your goals, and had now been given the chance to go back and try one more time?

…you were invisible and nobody would ever notice you? What if you were invisible and couldn’t even affect the world, except that you had complete control over a single human?

…you were the only person in the world, and you were responsible for the whole future, but luckily you had found a whole lot of useful robots which could expand your power, via for instance independently founding and running organizations for years without your supervision?

…you would only live for a second, before having your body taken over by someone else?

…there was a perfectly reasonable and good hypothetical being who knew about and judged all of your actions, hypothetically?

…everyone around you was naked under their clothes?

…in the future, many things that people around you asserted confidently would turn out to be false?

…the next year would automatically be composed of approximate copies of today?

…eternity would be composed of infinitely many exact copies of your life?

***

(Sometimes I or other people reframe the world for some philosophical or psychological purpose. These are the ones I can currently remember off the top of my head. Several are not original to me. I’m curious to hear others.)
Specification gaming examples in AI
by Vika — 2018-04-03T12:30:47.871Z

[Cross-posted from personal blog]

Various examples (and lists of examples) of unintended behaviors in AI systems have appeared in recent years. One interesting type of unintended behavior is finding a way to game the specified objective: generating a solution that literally satisfies the stated objective but fails to solve the problem according to the human designer’s intent. This occurs when the objective is poorly specified, and includes reinforcement learning agents hacking the reward function, evolutionary algorithms gaming the fitness function, etc. While ‘specification gaming’ is a somewhat vague category, it is particularly referring to behaviors that are clearly hacks, not just suboptimal solutions.

Since these examples are currently scattered across several lists, I have put together a master list of examples collected from the various existing sources. This list is intended to be comprehensive and up-to-date, and serve as a resource for AI safety research and discussion. If you know of any interesting examples of specification gaming that are missing from the list, please submit them through this form.

Thanks to Gwern Branwen, Catherine Olsson, Alex Irpan, and others for collecting and contributing examples!
[Draft for commenting] Near-Term AI risks  predictions
by avturchin — 2018-04-03T10:29:08.665Z

"Predictions of the Near-Term Global Catastrophic Risks of Artificial Intelligence"

Abstract: In this article, we explore risks of the appearance of dangerous AI in the near (0–5 years) and medium term (5–15 years). Polls show that around 10 percent of the probability weight is given to early appearance of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the next 15 years. Neural net performance and other characteristics, like the number of “neurons”, are doubling every year, and extrapolating this tendency suggests that roughly human-level performance will be reached in 4–6 years, around 2022–24. The performance of the hardware is accelerating, thanks to advances in graphic processing units and use of many chips in one processing unit, which have helped to overcome the limits of Moore’s law. Alternate extrapolations of the technological development produce similar results. AI will become dangerous when it reaches ability to solve the “computational complexity of omnicide”, or will be able to create self-improving AI. The appearance of near-human AI will strongly accelerate the speed of AI development, and as a result, some form of superintelligent AI may appear before 2030.

Highlights:
• Median timing of AI prediction is the wrong measure to use in AI risk assessment.
• Dangerous AI level is defined through AI’s ability to facilitate a global catastrophe and it could happen before AGI.
• The growth rate of hardware performance for AI applications has accelerated since 2016 and Moore’s law will provide enough computational power for AGI in near term.
• Main measures of neural nets performance have been doubling every one year in the last five years since 2012 and if this trend continues, will reach human level in 2022.
• Several independent methods predict near-human-level AI after 2022 and a “singularity” around 2030.

Full text open for commenting here: https://goo.gl/6DyTJG