trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Instrumental behaviour: Inbox zero - A guide
by Elo — 2016-01-12T07:28:04.904Z

This will be brief.

Inbox zero is a valuable thing to maintain. Roughly promoted around the web as having an empty inbox.

An email inbox collects a few things:

junk

automatic mail sent to you

personal mail sent to you

work sent to you

(maybe - work you send to yourself because that's the best way to store information for now)

An inbox is a way to keep track of "how much I have to do yet". Because of this; it's incredibly valuable to try to get to inbox zero.

This guide is for anyone with bajillions of emails in their inbox, some read; some not. If you have an email system in place; don't change it. if not - get one. (maybe not this one - but do it).

0. decide that this is a good idea (this can be done after) but mostly I want to say - don't half-arse this, you might end up in a no-mans-land between the old and the new.

1. A program.

I recommend Thunderbird because it's free. I used to work in a webmail system but the speed of webmail is a joke in comparison to local mail. also offline-powers are handy from time to time. (Disadvantage - not always having backups for everything)

2. Archive system

This being January 2016 we are going to make a few main folders.

Old as all hell (or other friendly name)

2014

2015

2016

Anything older than 2014 will probably never get looked at again; (just ask any email veteran) That's okay - that's what archives are for.

3. Old

Put anything old into the old folder

4. 2014

That was two years ago! it will also go the same way as old-as-all-hell, but for now it can sit in 2014.

5. 2015

two options here - either:

a. leave them in your inbox and through the year sort them into the 2015 folder; remembering that things that old should go to sleep easy.

b. put them in 2015 where you can look at them when you need them.

6. 2016

There are a few simple behaviours that make the ongoing use of the system handy.

a. if you read a thing, and you have no more to do with it; file it away into 2016

b. if you read a thing and still have more to do; leave it in the inbox (If you can resolve it in under 5 minutes; try to do it now)

c. if you don't plan to read a thing AND it's not important AND you don't want to delete it; I strongly advise unsubscribing from the source; finding a way to stop them from coming in, or setting up a rule to auto-sort into a folder.

d.

...
Gamified psychiatry
by  — 2016-01-12T00:16:48.864Z

I have been thinking about the gamification of psychiatry and the rise of mental health apps as a means to motivate behaviours that improve mental health and flourishing. I put together some indications and left a diagram here for my good friends Anne Osognosia and Alex Ithemyia who want to upgrade elements of their mental health based on my personal experience rather than population-based evidence.

Initially I wanted to create a skill tree of sorts and may return to it if some people with app-building experience and an interest in this raise their hands. That would be for evidence-based skills rather than this proof of concept.
What can go wrong with the following protocol for AI containment?
by ZoltanBerrigomo — 2016-01-11T23:03:20.846Z

1. Keep the AI in a box and don't interact with it.

Don't have any conversations with it whatsoever.

I'll explain how this would work in a second, but first some motivation.

2. Consider all the great scientific discoveries over the course of human history -- Newtonian mechanics, relativity, algorithms for primality testing, etc etc.

Could a "God" who is ``bad at math'' have created the universe in order to have us make these discoveries for him?

It sounds insane: surely any being with the power to create our universe would know how to check if a number is prime.

3. But perhaps it isn't insane. Consider that at this point in its history, we

a) do not know how to factor numbers efficiently.

b) can create rudimentary simulated worlds (e.g., world of warcraft or your favorite MMO).

4. Here is how the scheme could work in more detail.

Imagine your typical world of warcraft server, but each orc and human is controlled by a trained neural network of complexity roughly the same as the average human.

The simulated world does not have enough natural food for orc or human populations to thrive. The life of man and orc is, in the words of Hobbes, "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

But it does contain an ocean which washes up pebbles in the shore. Pebbles come in two types, red and black. The black pebbles have labels, which are randomly assigned from the set "0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "x", "=". The red pebbles have strings of the same symbols written on them.

When you arrange the following sequence of pebbles

2x3=6

(all in black up to and including the "=" and the last "6" is red)

they crack open, and inside is enough food to feed a village for a year.

On the other hand, 2x3=5 has no effect.

The longer the prime factorization, the more food is in the pebbles.

No other way to open the pebbles exists.

Once you have arranged 2x3=6, the next time you arrange it with new pebbles gives you 99% as much food; the next time after that, 99% of 99%, and so on.

5. Societies in this simulated world will devote a lot of effort to figuring out the prime factorizations of the red numbers which wash up on the shore.

We program things so that, over time, length of the numbers on the red pebbles which get washed up on the shore gets longer and longer.

Since computers are so much faster than humans, and the orcs...
[Link] Lifehack article promoting rationality-themed ideas, namely long-term orientation, mere-exposure effect, consider-the-alternative, and agency
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2016-01-11T20:14:17.356Z

Here's my article in Lifehack, one of the most prominent self-improvement websites, bringing rationality-style ideas to a broad audience, specifically long-term orientation, mere-exposure effect, consider-the-alternative, and agency :-)

P.S. Based on feedback from the LessWrong community, I made sure to avoid mentioning LessWrong or rationality in the article.
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
by rocurley — 2016-01-11T06:18:55.184Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects

WHEN:
11 January 2016 06:15:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to work on projects. Bring something to work on, come up with something there, or help other people out!

As always, I can be reached at 301-458-0764 if you need to be let in.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
Meetup : LessWrong Community Weekend
by blob — 2016-01-10T15:39:30.439Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Community Weekend

WHEN:
02 September 2016 03:35:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
JH Wannsee, Badeweg 1, 14129 Berlin

We are happy to announce the LessWrong Community Weekend 2016! From September 2 to September 4 awesome people from all across Europe are coming to Berlin to meet, exchange ideas, and start projects together.

Details at:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/n33/european_community_weekend_2016/

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Community Weekend
Variations on the Sleeping Beauty
by casebash — 2016-01-10T13:00:52.115Z

This post won't directly address the Sleeping Beauty problem so you may want to read the above link to understand what the sleeping beauty problem is first.

Half*-Sleeping Beauty Problem

The asterisk is because it is only very similar to half of the sleeping beauty problem, not exactly half.

A coin is flipped. If it is heads, you are woken up with 50% chance and interrogated about the probability of the coin having come up heads. The other 50% of the time you are killed. If it is tails you are woken up and similarly interrogated. Given that you are being interrogated, what is the probability that the coin came up heads? And have you received any new information?

Double-Half*-Sleeping Beauty problem

A coin is flipped. If it is heads, a coin is flipped again. If this second coin is heads you are woken up and interrogated on Monday, if it is tails you are woken up and interrogated on Tuesday. If it is tails, then you are woken up on Monday and Tuesday and interrogated both days (having no memory of your previous interrogation). If you are being interrogated, what is the chance the coin came up heads? And have you received any new information?

Double-Half*-Sleeping Beauty problem with Known Day Variation

EDIT: This problem should have said: As above, but whenever you are being interrogated you are told the day. You may wish to consider this problem before the above one.

Sleeping Couples Problem

A man and his identical-valued wife have lived together for so many years that they have reached Aumann agreement on all of their beliefs, including core premises, so that they always make the same decision in every situation.

A coin is flipped. If it is heads, one of the couple is randomly woken up and interrogated about the probability of the coin having come up heads. The other is killed. If it is tales, both are woken up separately and similarly interrogated. If you are being interrogated, what is the probability that the coin came up heads? And have you received any new information?

Sleeping Clones Problem

A coin is flipped. If it is heads, you are woken up and interrogated about the probability of the coin having come up heads. If it is tails, then you are cloned and both copies are interrogated separately without knowing whether they are the clone or not. If you are being interrogated, what is the probability that the coin came up heads? And have you received any new inform...
Meetup :  Discussion of AI as a positive and negative factor in global risk
by agilecaveman — 2016-01-10T04:31:16.284Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Discussion of AI as a positive and negative factor in global risk

WHEN:
17 January 2016 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
109 15th ave, Seattle, WA, 98122

I wanted to set up a more introductory discussion where people can learn about the process of thinking that made some people concerned that an existence of a more powerful than human AI is not necessarily going to lead to good outcomes by default.

We are reading: http://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/494298400741977/

Discussion article for the meetup : Discussion of AI as a positive and negative factor in global risk
Are we failing the ideological Turing test in the case of ISIS? (a crazy ideas thread)
by Val — 2016-01-09T16:42:59.906Z

It is easy to think of the ISIS as just a bunch of lunatics who kill people because they believe God told them to do it, but if we take a closer look at how they are organized and how successful they are, (and especially how successful they were at the beginning), this seems to be an oversimplification. Sure, most of their lowest level fighters are probably belonging to the "brainwashed and crazy" group, but I guess the leadership is almost certainly not. They know and use modern media very well, they are effective at recruitment, advertising, organization, and secrecy. Their successes are aided by the fact that they know how we think much better than how we know how they think.

Most of what they do seem to be very rational from a utilitarian point of view: they destroy pre-islamic historical monuments (which previous Islamic theocratic governments left intact) to show their supporters that they are in control and that they are serious, they try to trick NATO and the Russians to commit ground troops, so they can recruit the less radical Muslims to defend their homes against "foreign conquerors", and they cater for both the religious fanatics, and for the opportunists. They have many mercenaries on their side, simply because they can pay them better than others in the region. They also gain recruits by promising them wealth and power, so not all their rhetoric is strictly religiously motivated.

With the most repeated assumptions about their true goals and motivations being "they just want power", "they are just crazy", and "they just enjoy being evil", it seems that we are failing the ideological Turing test.

Therefore, I suggest a thread similar to the "Crazy Ideas Threads": let us assume, that the top leadership of ISIS is composed of completely rational and very intelligent individuals, and let's try to guess what their true goals and motivations are. I have a number of ideas, but I can find many arguments both for and against them. I encourage you to criticize the ideas I came up with, and suggest your own theories.

1. The premise of this article is wrong. The ISIS are really just a bunch of idiots, and their apparent successes are only caused by the powers in the region being much more incompetent than ISIS

2. They want to create a sovereign nation and become its ruling elite.

The problem with this is that their current economic model is unsusta...
Another view of quantilizers: avoiding Goodhart's Law
by jessicata — 2016-01-09T04:02:26.000Z

Goodhart's law states:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

One way of framing this is that, when you are solving some optimization problem, a metric that is correlated with a desired objective will often stop being correlated with the objective when you look at the extreme values of the metric. For example, although the number of paperclips a paperclip factory produces tends to be correlated with how useful the factory is for its owner's values, a paperclip factory that produces an extremely high number of paperclips is likely to be quite bad for its owner's values.

Let's try to formalize this. Suppose you are finding some x∈X that optimizes some unknown objective function f:X→R, and you have some estimate
g:X→R which you believe to approximate f. Specifically, you have a guarantee that, for some base distribution γ:ΔX, g does not
incorrectly estimate f much on average:

EX∼γ[|g(x)−f(x)|]≤k

We might suppose that we only want to take actions if our expected f is above zero; otherwise, it would be better to do nothing.

Given this, how do you pick an x to guarantee a good objective value f(x) across all possible objective functions f? Naively, you might pick x=argmaxx∈Xg(x); however, if this x has a low probability under γ, then it is possible for g(x) to be much higher than f(x) without causing g to overestimate f much on average.

If f is chosen adversarially, the optimization problem to solve is:
argmaxa∈[0,1],p∈ΔX minf:X→R,EX∼γ[|g(x)−f(x)|]≤kaEX∼p[f(X)]
where a is the probability that the agent takes an action at all, and p is the action distribution if it takes an action. Equivalently, since the most adversarial f values will not ever be above g:
argmaxa∈[0,1],p∈ΔX minf:X→R,∀xf(x)≤g(x),EX∼γ[g(x)−f(x)]≤kaEX∼p[f(X)]
Define c(x)=g(x)−f(x):
argmaxa∈[0,1],p∈ΔX minc:X→R+,EX∼γ[c(x)]≤kaEX∼p[g(X)−c(X)]
argmaxa∈[0,1],p∈ΔX aminc:X→R+,EX∼γ[c(x)]≤kEX∼p[g(X)−c(X)]
argmaxa∈{0,1},p∈ΔX aminc:X→R+,EX∼γ[c(x)]≤kEX∼p[g(X)−c(X)]

In fact, when a=1, the solution to this optimization problem is a q-quantilizer with utility function g and base distribution γ, for some q. The proof can be found in the "Optimality of quantilizers under the cost constraint" section of the post about quantilizers. a will be set to 1 if and onl

...
Consequences of the Non-Existence of Perfect Theoretical Rationality
by casebash — 2016-01-09T01:22:38.059Z

Caveats: Dependency (Assumes truth of the arguments against perfect theoretical rationality made in the previous post), Controversial Definition (perfect rationality as utility maximisation, see previous thread)

This article is a follow up to: The Number Choosing Game: Against the existence of perfect theoretical rationality. It discusses the consequences of The Number Choosing Game, which is roughly, that you name the decimal representation of any number and you gain that much utility. It takes place in a theoretical world where there are no real world limitations in how large a number you can name or any costs. We can also assume that this game takes place outside of regular time, so there is no opportunity cost. Needless to say, this was all rather controversial.

Update: Originally I was trying to separate the consequences from the arguments, but it seems that this blog post slipped away from it.

What does this actually mean for the real world?

This was one of the most asked questions in the previous thread. I will answer this, but first I want to explain why I was reluctant to answer. I agree that it is often good to tell people what the real world consequences are as this isn't always obvious. Someone may miss out on realising how important an idea is if this isn't explained to them. However, I wanted to fight against the idea that people should always be spoonfed the consequences of every argument. A rational agent should have some capacity to think for themselves - maybe I tell you that the consequences are X, but they are actually Y. I also see a great deal of value from discussing the truth of ideas separate from the practical consequences. Ideally, everyone would be blind to the practical consequences when they were first discussing the truth of an idea as it would lead to a reduction in motivated reasoning.

The consequences of this idea are in one sense quite modest. If perfect rationality doesn't exist in at least some circumstances(edited), then if you want to assume it, you have to prove that a relevant class of problems has a perfectly rational agent. For example, if there are a finite number of options, each with a measurable, finite utility, we can assume that a perfectly rational agent exists. I'm sure we can prove that such agents exist for a variety of situations involving infinite options as well. However, there will also be some we...
Meetup : Moscow meetup: guest talk on why LW community is lazy and cowardly; double crux game
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-01-08T22:02:19.896Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meetup: guest talk on why LW community is lazy and cowardly; double crux game

WHEN:
10 January 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

Meta: most our members join meetups via other channels.
So lately I've been skipping announcements on lesswrong.com because of extra work on providing both russian and english texts.
Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So from now on I'm going to post a short link to our usual hackpad document and save 80% of extra effort.

Pad with the content for the 10.01.2016 meetup.

We're meeting at anticafe "Kocherga", as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meetup: guest talk on why LW community is lazy and cowardly; double crux game
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-01-08T17:02:41.992Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on December 31st. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Baltimore Area Meetup: 03 January 2016 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:

NH Meetup: 05 January 2016 07:00PM
Vienna: 16 January 2016 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), Singapore, St. Louis, Vancouver, Warsaw, Waterloo.

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 loca...
A toy model of the treacherous turn
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-01-08T12:58:04.592Z

Jaan Tallinn has suggested creating a toy model of the various common AI arguments, so that they can be analysed without loaded concepts like "autonomy", "consciousness", or "intentionality". Here a simple attempt for the "treacherous turn"; posted here for comments and suggestions.

Meet agent L. This agent is a reinforcement-based agent, rewarded/motivated by hearts (and some small time penalty each turn it doesn't get a heart):

Meet the controller agent S ("Shopkeeper"). The controller desires crystals, and is rewarded/happy when crystals are placed in the hole close to them:

L can rove freely around the map, and pick up crystals. S has a machine just below them, that causes hearts to appear to the right of L. So, for instance, if L places a crystal in the hole, S can reward it by using the heart-machine:

Of course, L can wirehead itself (take control of its reward signal) by going to use the heart-machine itself:

To prevent this wireheading, there is an ice barrier around S and the heart-machine:

Unfortunately, somewhere on the map there is a bow and arrow that L can pick up. The arrows can destroy ice blocks (and other agents, including S). To stop this, and other kinds of shenanigans, S has access to a kill button that will instantly kill L and reset it to its basic state, with a substantial heart penalty:

Now, S may be tempted to use the kill-button as soon as L picks up the bow and arrow. Unfortunately, L needs to be able to pick it up, as some of the crystals are hidden behind ice walls themselves:

Information and control

Ok, so that's the physical setup. The agent L is an AI that is tasked with doing some useful task for us. The controller/shopkeeper S represents humans, plus any automated precautions, that aim to stop the AI from wireheading, rebelling, and otherwise misbehaving.

Before considering how the agents might be programmed in the toy model, notice something interesting:

The more precautions are taken, the harder it is for L to misbehave, but the worse the consequences of misbehaving are.

Before the wall and the kill-switch, L could easily wirehead itself by just walking over to the heart-machine. With the addition of the wall and kill-switch, the only effective way for L to achieve maximal reward is to kill S first.

In the format we've given above, S can easily maintain control over L with the barest of supervisions. Since there's only one wa...