trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Friendly AI Research and Taskification
by multifoliaterose — 2010-12-14T06:30:02.477Z

Eliezer has written a great deal about the concept of Friendly AI, for example in a document from 2001 titled Creating Friendly AI 1.0. The new SIAI overview states that:

SIAI's primary approach to reducing AI risks has thus been to promote the development of AI with benevolent motivations which are reliably stable under self-improvement, what we call “Friendly AI” [22].

The SIAI Research Program lists under its Research Areas:

Mathematical Formalization of the "Friendly AI" Concept. Proving theorems about the ethics of AI systems, an important research goal, is predicated on the possession of an appropriate formalization of the notion of ethical behavior on the part of an AI. And, this formalization is a difficult research question unto itself.

Despite the enormous value that the construction of a Friendly AI would have; at present I'm not convinced that researching the Friendly AI concept is a cost-effective way of reducing existential risk. My main reason for doubt is that as far as I can tell, the problem of building a Friendly AI has not been taskified to a sufficiently fine degree for it to be possible to make systematic progress toward obtaining a solution. I'm open-minded on this point and quite willing to change my position subject to incoming evidence

The Need For Taskification

In The First Step is to Admit That You Have a Problem Alicorn wrote:

If you want a peanut butter sandwich, and you have the tools, ingredients, and knowhow that are required to make a peanut butter sandwich, you have a task on your hands. If you want a peanut butter sandwich, but you lack one or more of those items, you have a problem [... ] treating problems like tasks will slow you down in solving them. You can't just become immortal any more than you can just make a peanut butter sandwich without any bread.

In Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks HughRistik wrote:

Similarly, many straight guys or queer women can't just find a girlfriend, and many straight women or queer men can't just find a boyfriend, any more than they can "just become immortal."

We know that the problems of making a peanut butter sandwich and of finding a romantic partner can (often) be taskified because many people have succeeded in solving them. It's less clear that a given problem that has never been solved can be taskified. Some problems are in principle ...
Honours Dissertation
by SeventhNadir — 2010-12-14T05:37:00.533Z

I'm picking a topic for my Psychology Honours dissertation next year and I've got so many options and interests that the overabundance of choice is near paralyzing. So in the interests of crowd sourcing and hopefully writing about something of substance, I'd like to hear suggestions for potential directions I could take. It can be any idea but one that frequently pops up on less wrong and needs further exploration or exposure would be ideal.

Basically feel free to offer suggestions but ideally I want something that (assuming I do it right) would help lay a part of the groundwork required to build up someones rationality.
Would the world be better off without 50% of the people in it?
by MoreOn — 2010-12-14T05:19:10.076Z

I made a stupid mistake of posting a conclusion before I had the whole analysis typed up or had looked up my references. I knew I would be called on it. I’ll appreciate any help with the <ref>'s. Also: I'm under Crocker's Rules, and criticism is welcome. So here goes nothi....

There's a theory out there that states that new inventions are combinations of old inventions <ref>. So if your hunter-gatherer tribe has knife-like rocks and sticks, just about the only thing you can invent is a spear. Fire + clay = pots. Little bones with holes + animal sinews + skins = needle => clothes. But if you were modern day's best chemist transported into the past, with all your knowledge intact, you'd be unlikely to make any aspirin. Why? Because the tools you need haven't been invented.

Instead of looking at what's projected to happen, consider what has been happening happened. With the increase in world population, the level technology and average standard of living have been going up.

I argue that more population => better technology => easier life => more population.

In the modern day, consider: US population, US Patents per year.

So what about the “unproductive” people? Those who “don't pull their own weight?” Those “living off of welfare, charity donations, etc?” Those who just barely survive off of subsistence living? They put a drain on world resources without adding anything back. Wouldn't the world be better off without them?

Suppose Omega made a backup copy of the Solar system. It created a perfect copy of everything else, but it only replicated 50% of humanity. Pick your favorite selection criterion for who will be copied. You will go to the copied world, and other you will live on as a zombie.

Suppose the people who work in sweatshops get copied. But subsistence farmers from the same regions don't. Then it's reasonable to predict that some people from sweatshops would quit their jobs and fill up the niche you left available. Fewer people would be supporting the developed world.

Historically, people used technology to solve population problems only when those problems became bad enough. Farming wasn't invented until there were too many hunter-gatherers. Industry was not invented until there were too many farmers. Sewers were not invented until there was a problem with urban pollution....
Exponentiation goes wrong first
by  — 2010-12-14T04:13:45.647Z

The great Catholic mathematician Edward Nelson does not believe in completed infinity, and does not believe that arithmetic is likely to be consistent. These beliefs are partly motivated by his faith: he says arithmetic is a human invention, and compares believing (too strongly) in its consistency to idolatry. He also has many sound mathematical insights in this direction -- I'll summarize one of them here.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/z3detbt6int7a56/warn.pdf

Nelson's arguments flow from the idea that, contra Kronecker, numbers are man-made. He therefore does not expect inconsistencies to have consequences that play out in natural or divine processes. For instance, he does not expect you to be able to count the dollars in a stack of 100 dollars and arrive at 99 dollars. But it's been known for a long time that if one can prove any contradiction, then one can also prove that a stack of 100 dollars has no more than 99 dollars in it. The way he resolves this is interesting.

The Peano axioms for the natural numbers are these:

1. Zero is a number

2. The successor of any number is a number

3. Zero is not the successor of any number

4. Two different numbers have two different successors

5. If a given property holds for zero, and if it holds for the succesor of x whenever it holds for x, then it holds for all numbers.

Nelson rejects the fifth axiom, induction. It's the most complicated of the axioms, but it has another thing going against it: it is the only one that seems like a claim that could be either true or false. The first four axioms read like someone explaining the rules of a game, like how the pieces in chess move. Induction is more similar to the fact that the bishop in chess can only move on half the squares -- this is a theorem about chess, not one of the rules. Nelson believes that the fifth axiom needs to be, and cannot be, supported.

A common way to support induction is via the monologue: "It's true for zero. Since it's true for zero it's true for one. Since it's true for one it's true for two. Continuing like this we can show that it's true for one hundred and for one hundred thousand and for every natural number." It's hard to imagine actually going through this proof for very large numbers -- this is Nelson's objection.

What is arithmetic like if we reject i...
Karma Motivation Thread
by Jack — 2010-12-13T21:59:08.756Z

This idea is so obvious I can't believe we haven't done it before. Many people here have posts they would like to write but keep procrastinating on. Many people also have other work to do but keep procrastinating on Less Wrong. Making akrasia cost you money is often a good way to motivate yourself. But that can be enough of a hassle to deter the lazy, the ADD addled and the executive dysfunctional. So here is a low transaction cost alternative that takes advantage of the addictive properties of Less Wrong karma. Post a comment here with a task and a deadline- pick tasks that can be confirmed by posters; so either Less Wrong posts or projects that can be linked to or photographed. When the deadline comes edit your comment to include a link to the completed task. If you complete the task, expect upvotes. If you fail to complete the task by the deadline, expect your comment to be downvoted into oblivion. If you see completed tasks, vote those comments up. If you see past deadlines vote those comments down. At least one person should reply to the comment, noting the deadline has passed-- this way it will come up in the recent comments and more eyes will see it.

Edit: DanArmak makes a great suggestion.

Several people have now used this to commit to doing something others can benefit from, like LW posts. I suggest an alternative method: when a user commits to doing something, everyone who is interested in that thing being done will upvote that comment. However, if the task is not complete by the deadline, everyone who upvoted commits to coming back and downvoting the comment instead.

This way, people can judge whether the community is interested in their post, and the karma being gained or lost is proportional to the amount of interest. Also, upvoting and then downvoting effectively doubles the amount of karma at stake.
Brainstorming: neat stuff we could do on LessWrong
by Emile — 2010-12-13T20:38:25.782Z

Are there any community activities or rituals or experiments we could try?

Preferably things that don't require special software.

As an example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of, Reddit has special "I Am A" posts (no, I don't think we should have those), or things we already have, like Quotes or Open Threads or Diplomacy games.

(This is a complement to the previous post about which topics we would like to learn about here.)
What topics would you like to see more of on LessWrong?
by Emile — 2010-12-13T16:20:11.474Z

Are there any areas of study that you feel are underrepresented here, and would be interesting and useful to lesswrongers?

I feel some topics are getting old (Omega, drama about moderation policy, a newcomer telling us our lack of admiration for his ideas is proof of groupthink, Friendly AI, Cryonics, Epistemic vs. Instrumental Rationality, lamenting how we're a bunch of self-centered nerds, etc. ...), and with a bit of luck, we might have some lurkers that are knowledgeable about interesting areas, and didn't think they could contribute.

Please stick to one topic per comment, so that highly-upvoted topics stand out more clearly.
What is Evil about creating House Elves? 
by  — 2010-12-13T13:57:11.403Z

Edit: This is old material. It may be out of date.

I'm talking about the fictional race of House Elves from the Harry Potter universe first written about by J. K. Rowling and then uplifted in a grand act of fan-fiction by Elizer Yudkowsky. Unless severely mistreated they enjoy servitude to their masters (or more accurately the current residents of the homes they are binded to), this is also enforced by magical means since they must follow the letter if not the spirit of their master's direct order.

Overall treating House Elves the way they would like to be treated appears more or less sensible and don't feel like debating this if people don't disagree. Changing agents without their consent or knowledge seems obviously wrong, so turning someone into a servant creatures seem intuitively wrong. I can also understand that many people would mind their descendants being modified in such a fashion, perhaps their dis-utility is enough to offset the utility of their modified descendants. However how true is this of distant descendants that only share passing resemblance? I think a helpful reminder of scale might be our own self domestication.
Assuming one created elf like creatures ex nihilo, not as slightly modified versions of a existing species why would one not want to bring a mind into existence that would value its own existence and benefits you, as long as the act of creation or their existence in itself does not represents huge enough dis-utility? This seems somewhat related to the argument Robin Hanson once made that any creatures that can pay for their own existance and would value their own existance should be created.

I didn't mention this in the many HP fan fiction threads because I want a more general debate on the treatment and creation of such a class of agents.

Edit: Clearly if the species or class contains exceptions there should be ways for them to pursue their differing values.
Reading Level of Less Wrong
by Alexandros — 2010-12-13T09:54:28.812Z

Here's something to pick our collective spirits up:

According to Google's infallible algorithms, 20% of the content on LessWrong.com falls within the 'Advanced' reading level. For comparison, another well-known bastion of intelligence on the internets, Hacker News, only has 4% of it's content in that category.

Strangely, inserting a space before the name of the site in the query tends to reduce the amount of content that falls in the highest bucket, but I am told that highly trained Google engineers are interrogating the bug in a dimly lit room as we speak, and expect it to crack soon.
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by beautifuljewelry — 2010-12-13T07:19:47.377Z

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Moderation of apparent trolling
by lsparrish — 2010-12-12T22:16:17.636Z

A brief line from this comment indicates that the author of the cryonics-critical comment quoted here was perhaps not the one that deleted it.

You know what - I am rather glad my comment was deleted on less wrong - good reason for people not to post on there.

Was it deleted by a moderator?

Honestly, the decisive downvoting seemed to do the trick of hiding it from casual readers who don't want to see the long annoying rants. I don't think it was casting any doubt on the credibility of cryonics.

While it sounds like the author regrets posting it, I would think they should be allowed to delete it themselves.

Edit: Originally titled "Cryonics critical comment deleted?"
Bayesian approach: UFO vs. AI hypotheses
by turchin — 2010-12-12T21:52:12.278Z

The goal of this post is not to prove or disprove existing of so called UFO or feasibility of AI but to study limits of Bayesian approach to complex problems.
Here we will test two hypotheses:
1)	UFOs exist. We will take for simplicity the following form of this thesis: Unknown nonhuman intelligence exists on the Earth and manifests itself with unknown laws of physics.
2)	AI will be created. In the XXI century will be created computer program which will surpass humans in every kind of intellectual activity by many orders of magnitude.
From the point of view of a layman both hypothesis are bizarre and so belongs to the reference class of “strange ideas”, most of each are false.
But both hypotheses have large communities which accumulated many evidences to support this ideas. (Here we could see “confirmation bias”).
In the begging we should point on isomorphism of the two hypotheses: in both cases the question is an existence of nonhuman intelligence. In the first case it is said that nonhuman intelligence already exists on the Earth, in second case that nonhuman intelligence would soon be created on the Earth.
For Bayesian estimation we need a priori probability, and then change it with some evidences.
Supporters of AI-hypothesis usually say that a priori probability is quite high: if the human mind exists, then AI is possible, and in addition, it is typical to human to repeat the achievements of nature. Therefore, a priori, we can assume that the creation of AI is possible and highly likely.
The situation with evidence in the field of AI is worse because creation of AI is a future event and direct empirical evidence is impossible. Moreover, many failed attempts to create AI in the past are used as evidence against the possibility of it creation.
Therefore, information about the success in "helping" disciplines is used as evidence of the possibility of AI: performance of computers and its continued growth, the success of brain scans, the success of various computer programs to recognize images and games. These circumstantial evidences cannot be directly substituted into the formula for calculating the probability, therefore, their credibility will always include taking something for granted.
In the case of UFOs a priori hypothesis is less convincing, since it argues not only that that nonhuman intelligence does exist on Earth, but also that i...
Testing the effectiveness of an effort to help
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-12-12T15:47:25.448Z

"It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without.

Now, New York City is applying the same methodology to assess one of its programs to prevent homelessness. Half of the test subjects — people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted — are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless."
$100 for the best article on efficient charty - the winner is ... 
by Roko — 2010-12-12T15:02:06.007Z

Part of the Efficient Charity Article competition. Several people have written articles on efficient charity. The entries were:

Throwawayaccount_1

Waitingforgodel

Multifoliaterose

Louie

The original criteria for the competition are listed here, but bascially the idea is to introduce the idea to a relatively smart newcomer without using jargon.

Various people gave opinions about which articles were best. For me, two articles in particular stood out as being excellent for a newomer. Those articles were:

Throwawayaccount_1

and

Multifoliaterose's

articles.

I therefore declare them joint winners, and implore our kind sponsor Jsalvatier to split the prize between them evenly. Throwawayaccount_1 should also unmask his/her identity.

[I would also ask the winners to kindly not offer to donate the money to charity, but to actually take the prize money and spend it on something that they selfishly-want, such as ice-cream or movie tickets or some other luxury item. Establishing a norm of giving away prizes creates very bad incentives and will tend to decrease the degree to which prizes actually motivate people in the future]
The Long Now
by Nic_Smith — 2010-12-12T01:40:07.470Z

It's surprised me that there's been very little discussion of The Long Now here on Less Wrong, as there are many similarities between the groups, although the approach and philosophy between them are quite different. At a minimum, I believe that a general awareness might be beneficial. I'll use the initials LW and LN below. My perspective on LN is simply that of someone who's kept an eye on their website from time to time and read a few of their articles, so I'd also like to admit that my knowledge is a bit shallow (a reason, in fact, I bring the topic up for discussion).

Similarities

Most critically, long-term thinking appears as a cornerstone of both the LW and LN thought, explicitly as the goal for LN, and implicitly here on LW whenever we talk about existential risk or decades-away or longer technology. It's not clear if there's an overlap between the commenters at LW and the membership of LN or not, but there's definitely a large number of people "between" the two groups -- statements by Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil have been recent topics on the LN blog and Hillis, who founded LN, has been involved in AI and philosophy of mind. LN has Long Bets, which I would loosely describe as to PredictionBook as InTrade is to Foresight Exchange. LN apparently had a presence at some of the past SIAI's Singularity Summits.

Differences

Signaling: LN embraces signaling like there's no tomorrow (ha!) -- their flagship project, after all, is a monumental clock to last thousands of years, the goal of which is to "lend itself to good storytelling and myth" about long-term thought. Their membership cards are stainless steel. Some of the projects LN are pursuing seem to have been chosen mostly because they sound awesome, and even those that aren't are done with some flair, IMHO. In contrast, the view among LW posts seems to be that signaling is in many cases a necessary evil, in some cases just an evolutionary leftover, and reducing signaling a potential source for efficiency gains. There may be something to be learned here -- we already know FAI would be an easier sell if we described it as project to create robots that are Presidents of the United States by day, crime-fighters by night, and cat-people by late-night.

Structure: While LW is a project of SIAI, they're not the same, so by extension the comparison between LN and LW is just a bit apples-to-kumquats. It'd be a l...
Should LW have a public censorship policy?
by Bongo — 2010-12-11T22:45:15.282Z

It might mollify people who disagree with the current implicit policy, and make discussion about the policy easier. Here's one option:

There's a single specific topic that's banned because the moderators consider it a Basilisk. You won't come up with it yourself, don't worry. Posts talking about the topic in too much detail will be deleted.

One requirement would be that the policy be no more and no less vague than needed for safety.

Discuss.