trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Climate science: how it matters for understanding forecasting, materials I've read or plan to read, sources of potential bias
by VipulNaik — 2014-07-07T16:18:57.061Z

As part of a review of forecasting, I've been looking at weather and climate forecasting (I wrote one post on weather forecasting and another on the different time horizons for weather and climate forecasting).

Climate forecasting is turning out to be a fairly tricky topic to look into, partly because of the inherent complexity of the task, and partly because of the politicization surrounding Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

Due to the complexity and the potential for bias, I decided to disclose what materials I've read and my potential sources of bias.

Why am I looking at climate forecasting?

Climate forecasting, and the debate surrounding what'll happen to the climate and how human choices today can shape it, is one of the biggest examples of a long-range forecasting effort that has attracted widespread attention, both in terms of the science and the policy and political implications. Understanding how it was done can give insights into the ability of humans to make forecasts about the long-run future (on the decadal or centennial timescale) in the face of considerable uncertainty, and use those forecasts to drive decisions today. This would be relevant for other long-range forecasting problems, such as (possibly) friendly AI. Note though that my focus isn't driven by finding parallels with any other specific forecasting problem, such as friendly AI.

The sorts of questions I hope to answer by the end of this inquiry

The following are questions to which I hope to state relatively clear answers by the end:

How good are we at climate forecasting?

How good are we at knowing how good we are at climate forecasting? Are the forecasts appropriately calibrated, or do they tend to be overconfident or underconfident?

Are climate forecasters using the best tools available to them from other domains (such as statistics, econometrics, forecasting, weather forecasting)? Are they using best practices in their efforts?

What is the level of evidence regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and to what extent have the people generally deferred to as experts correctly weighed the evidence?

The following are questions to which I may not obtain clear answers, but I'll be looking for and reporting information on them because they influence the answers to the preceding questions:

Given that climate forecasts, and the AGW hypothesis in particular, have been considered a basis

...
Open thread, 7-14 July 2014 
by David_Gerard — 2014-07-07T07:14:12.540Z

Previous thread

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Ethicality of Denying Agency
by pwno — 2014-07-07T05:40:53.430Z

If your 5-year-old seems to have an unhealthy appetite for chocolate, you’d take measures to prevent them from consuming it. Any time they’d ask you to buy them some, you’d probably refuse their request, even if they begged. You might make sure that any chocolate in the house is well-hidden and out of their reach. You might even confiscate chocolate they already have, like if you forced them to throw out half their Halloween candy. You’d almost certainly trigger a temper tantrum and considerably worsen their mood. But no one would label you an unrelenting tyrant. Instead, you’d be labeled a good parent.

Your 5-year-old isn’t expected to have the capacity to understand the consequences to their actions, let alone have the efficacy to accomplish the actions they know are right. That’s why you’re a good parent when you force them to do the right actions, even against their explicit desires.

You know chocolate is a superstimulus and that 5-year-olds have underdeveloped mental executive functions. You have good reasons to believe that your child’s chocolate obsession isn’t caused by their agency, and instead caused by an obsolete evolutionary adaptation. But from your child’s perspective, desiring and eating chocolate is an exercise in agency. They’re just unaware of how their behaviors and desires are suboptimal. So by removing their ability to act upon their explicit desires, you’re denying their agency.

So far, denying agency doesn’t seem so bad. You have good reason to believe your child isn’t capable of acting rationally and you’re only helping them in the long run. But the ethicality gets murky when your assessment of their rationality is questionable.

Imagine you and your mother have an important flight to catch 2 hours from now. You realize that you have to leave to the airport now in order to make it on time. As you’re about to leave, you recalled the 2 beers you recently consumed. But you feel the alcohol left in your system will barely affect your driving, if at all. The problem is that if your mother found out about your beer consumption, she’d refuse to be your passenger until you completely sobered up - as she’s done in the past. You know this would cause you to miss your flight because she can’t drive a...
Quickly passing through the great filter
by James_Miller — 2014-07-06T18:50:10.647Z

To quickly escape the great filter should we flood our galaxy with radio signals? While communicating with fellow humans we already send out massive amounts of information that an alien civilization could eventually pickup, but should we engage in positive SETI? Or, if you fear the attention of dangerous aliens, should we set up powerful long-lived solar or nuclear powered automated radio transmitters in the desert and in space that stay silent so long as they receive a yearly signal from us, but then if they fail to get the no-go signal because our civilization has fallen, continuously transmit our dead voice to the stars? If we do destroy ourselves it would be an act of astronomical altruism to warn other civilizations of our fate especially if we broadcasted news stories from just before our demise, e.g. physicists excited about a new high energy experiment.

Something prevents solar systems from giving birth to space faring civilizations. Robin Hanson has called this the great filter. Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg show that it would take an advanced civilization a trivial amount of effort to seed nearby galaxies with self-replicating intelligences. Since we seem pretty close to being able to expand throughout the stars ourselves, especially if the singularity is near, if much of the great filter lies in front of us, we are probably doomed. For reasons I won’t go into here, (but see this) there is good reason to believe that much of the great filter does lie before us (although Scott Alexander has a different view). Since I don’t want this post to be about the causes of the Fermi paradox, let’s make the following doomed assumption:

With high probability there has existed a large number of civilizations in our galaxy that equaled or exceeded our current level of technological development and would have gone on to make their presence felt throughout the galaxy, but they all suffered some disaster preventing this expansion. And assume with high probability that the number of civilizations that reached our level of development but soon collapsed greatly exceed the number that reached our level of development and survived at least another thousand years because if this were not true we would almost certainly have seen evidence of extraterrestrial intelligences by now....
Rationality Quotes July 2014
by VAuroch — 2014-07-06T06:51:00.708Z

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Good books for incoming college students?
by aarongertler — 2014-07-06T01:21:42.766Z

My sister (and about 2.5 million other people) are headed to college in the fall.

I gave her a copy of Cal Newport's How to Win at College as a graduation gift, but given that her life is about to change more than it has in any of the past 14 years, one book probably isn't enough.

What books do you think incoming/recently arrived college students should be reading? You can assign reading with any motivation you'd like, but I'm looking especially hard for books that meet the following criteria:

An average to somewhat-above-average college student can read them without much struggle.

They have some practical application in college life/job seeking/being a good adult (rather than just being a personal favorite book).

They are easy to find and budget-friendly (free online/cheap on Amazon/probably in the college library).

They are not Oh, The Places You'll Go, just to head you pranksters off at the pass.

Bonus points if it's a book that you read in late high school or college and you can tell us what impact it had on your life at the time!

My suggestions would include Getting Things Done, Thinking Fast and Slow, Redirect, and The Charisma Myth. What would you suggest?
Meetup : LessWrong Australia - Online Hangout
by taryneast — 2014-07-06T00:56:44.916Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Australia - Online Hangout

WHEN:
13 July 2014 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Australia

From the people who brought you a Lesswrong Australia mega-meetup. We now bring you an Australia-wide mega-online hangout. First hangout will be on Sunday the 13th at 6:30pm till Midnight (Sydney time). If you want to check in. feel free to do so!

link is here:
https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/gxswklalufwfqamex4yhkanevqa
subject to change depending on whether google likes us or not.

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Australia - Online Hangout
Toy problem: increase production or use production?
by Alexei — 2014-07-05T20:58:48.962Z

There is a class of problems that I noticed comes up again and again in various scenarios. Abstractly, you can formulate it like this: given a time limit, how much time should you spend increasing your production capacity, and then how much time should you use your production capacity to produce utility? Let's take a look at two version of this problem:

Version 1:

You have N days. You start with a production capacity C=0 and accumulated utility U=0. Each day you can either: 1) increase your production capacity (C=C+1) or 2) use your current production capacity to produce utility (U=U+C).

Question: On what days should you increase your production, and on what days should you produce utility to maximize total accumulated utility at the end of the N days?

It's trivial to prove that the optimal solution looks like increasing capacity for T days, and then switching to producing utility for N-T days. What is T? In this case it's really straight-forward to figure it out. We can compute final utility as U(T)=(N-T)*T. The maximum is at T=N/2. So, you should spend the first half increasing your production and the second half producing utility. Interesting...

Version 2:

You have N days. You start with a production capacity C=1 and accumulated utility U=0. Each day you can either: 1) increase your production capacity by a factor F (C=C*F), where F>1 or 2) use your current production capacity to produce utility (U=U+C).

Same question. Now the final utility is U(T)=F^T*(N-T). Doing basic calculus, we find the optimal T=max(0, N-1/ln(F)). A few interesting points you can take a way from this solution:

1) If your growth factor F is not large enough, you might have to stick with your original production capacity of 1 and never increase it. E.g. F=1.01 and N=100, where optimal T=max(0,-0.499171).

2) The bigger the N, the lower growth factor you can accept as being useful, i.e. T>0.

3) For most scenarios, you should spend 80-90% of the time increasing the production. Example. With larger F, T will approach N. This reminds me of Reducing Astronomical Waste post.

Questions for you: where have you seen these types of problems come up in your life? Is this a known class of problems?
Meetup : Washington D.C. Games Meetup
by RobinZ — 2014-07-05T04:39:52.083Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington D.C. Games Meetup

WHEN:
06 July 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

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

We will be congregating in the Kogod Courtyard for games and conversation.

(For those of you not familiar with the building, the courtyard is in the center; go in through either entrance and continue straight around the desk, and you will reach it.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington D.C. Games Meetup
Meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park
by philh — 2014-07-04T23:22:56.836Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park

WHEN:
13 July 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Holborn, WC2B 6BG

We've decided to go back to meeting every other week. As such, the next LW meetup will be on July 13th. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.

If the weather is nice, we'll head to Lincoln's Inn Fields, probably somewhere in the northwest quadrant. If not, we'll be in the usual Shakespeare's Head. If the weather is variable, we might move from one to the other - give me a call or text if you're not sure. My number is 07792009646.

Update: Bad weather. :( To the pub we go.

About London LessWrong:

We run this meetup almost every week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....

Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.

Related discussion happens on both our google group and our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park
[LINK] Claustrum Stimulation Temporarily Turns Off Consciousness in an otherwise Awake Patient
by Shmi — 2014-07-04T20:00:48.176Z

This paper, or more often the New Scientist's exposition of it is being discussed online and is rather topical here. In a nutshell, stimulating one small but central area of the brain reversibly rendered one epilepsia patient unconscious without disrupting wakefulness. Impressively, this phenomenon has apparently been hypothesized before, just never tested (because it's hard and usually unethical). A quote from the New Scientist article (emphasis mine):

One electrode was positioned next to the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments (Epilepsy and Behavior, doi.org/tgn).

To confirm that they were affecting the woman's consciousness rather than just her ability to speak or move, the team asked her to repeat the word "house" or snap her fingers before the stimulation began. If the stimulation was disrupting a brain region responsible for movement or language she would have stopped moving or talking almost immediately. Instead, she gradually spoke more quietly or moved less and less until she drifted into unconsciousness. Since there was no sign of epileptic brain activity during or after the stimulation, the team is sure that it wasn't a side effect of a seizure.

If confirmed, this hints at several interesting points. For example, a complex enough brain is not sufficient for consciousness, a sort-of command and control structure is required, as well, even if relatively small. A low-consciousness state of late-stage dementia sufferers might be due to the damage specifically to the claustrum area, not just the overall brain deterioration. The researchers speculates that stimulating the area in vegetative-state patients might help "push them out of this state". From an AI research perspective, understanding the difference between wakefulness and consciousness might be interesting, too.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-07-04T17:18:33.080Z

This summary was posted to LW main on July 27th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Bratislava Meetup XIV.: 30 June 2014 06:00PM

Houston, TX: 12 July 2014 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

[Melbourne] July Rationality Dojo: Disagreement: 06 July 2014 03:00PM

[Washington DC) Rationality Practice - Be Specific: 29 June 2014 03:00PM

West LA: 02 July 2025 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Tel Aviv, Vancouver.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups. And if you're not interested in notifications you can still enter your approximate location, which w...
Weather and climate forecasting: how the challenges differ by time horizon
by VipulNaik — 2014-07-04T15:28:08.735Z

Prelude: Climate change, in particular the question of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is both an intellectually complex and a politically loaded topic. Politics has been called the mind-killer here. For a mix of both reasons (the intellectual complexity and the political loadedness), I hope to approach the issue in steps: I'll first lay out my (probably quite flawed, but hopefully still broadly correct) understanding of the scientific questions, and in subsequent posts, I'll tackle some of the trickier and more controversial questions. I'd appreciate any error corrections -- it'll help improve the accuracy of my subsequent posts.

In a previous post, I discussed weather forecasting through numerical weather simulation. With numerical weather simulation, we first construct a series of equations using the laws of physics that describe the evolution of the weather system. Then, we discretize the system in space and time (we break up the spatial region into a grid and we break the time into discrete time steps). We compute the evolution of the discretized system numerically. We tackle uncertainty in the measurement by computing several alternate scenarios and assigning probabilities to them.

Is this the way we predict long-term climate? Sort of, but not quite. The equations describing the evolution of the system are the same for weather and climate, and the only thing that's different in principle is the longer timescale. However, some mechanisms matter a lot in the short term, and others matter more in the long term.

Six time horizons for weather forecasting

There are qualitative differences between the challenges of forecasting for different time horizons. The set of time horizons spans a continuum, but to simplify the discussion, I'll identify five different types of time horizons:

The very near future, i.e., the next half an hour to 2 hours. Weather forecasting for this time frame is sometimes called nowcasting.

The period ranging from the next 1-2 days. This is sometimes called short-range weather forecasting and is generally quite reliable.

The period ranging 3-14 days from the present. This is short-to-medium-range weather forecasting. The weather forecasts for up to a week show forecast skill (relative to the benchmarks of persistence and climatology), but the 7-14 day period is still being worked on, and forecast skill here is relatively small. Naive nu

...
Tools want to become agents
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-07-04T10:12:45.351Z

In the spirit of "satisficers want to become maximisers" here is a somewhat weaker argument (growing out of a discussion with Daniel Dewey) that "tool AIs" would want to become agent AIs.

The argument is simple. Assume the tool AI is given the task of finding the best plan for achieving some goal. The plan must be realistic and remain within the resources of the AI's controller - energy, money, social power, etc. The best plans are the ones that use these resources in the most effective and economic way to achieve the goal.

And the AI's controller has one special type of resource, uniquely effective at what it does. Namely, the AI itself. It is smart, potentially powerful, and could self-improve and pull all the usual AI tricks. So the best plan a tool AI could come up with, for almost any goal, is "turn me into an agent AI with that goal." The smarter the AI, the better this plan is. Of course, the plan need not read literally like that - it could simply be a complicated plan that, as a side-effect, turns the tool AI into an agent. Or copy the AI's software into a agent design. Or it might just arrange things so that we always end up following the tool AIs advice and consult it often, which is an indirect way of making it into an agent. Depending on how we've programmed the tool AI's preferences, it might be motivated to mislead us about this aspect of its plan, concealing the secret goal of unleashing itself as an agent.

In any case, it does us good to realise that "make me into an agent" is what a tool AI would consider the best possible plan for many goals. So without a hint of agency, it's motivated to make us make it into a agent.