trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Is GiveWell.org the best charity (excluding SIAI)?
by syllogism — 2011-02-26T13:37:40.758Z

Update: I should've said "non-existential risk charity", rather than specifically exclude SIAI. I'm having trouble articulating why I don't want to give to an existential risk charity, so I'm going to think more deeply about it. This post is close to my source of discomfort, which is about the many highly uncertain assumptions necessary to motivate existential risk reduction. However, I couldn't articulate this argument properly before, so it might not be the true source of my discomfort. I'll keep thinking.

I received my first pay-cheque from my first job after getting my degree, so it's time to start tithing. So I've been evalating which charity to donate to. I'd like to support the SIAI but I'm not currently convinced it's the best-value charity in a dollars-per-life sense, once time-value of money discounting is applied. I'd like to discuss the best non-SIAI charity available.

By far the best source of information I've found is www.givewell.org. It was started by two hedge fund managers who were struck by the absence of rational charity evaluations, so decided that this was the most pressing problem they could work on.

Perhaps the clearest, deepest finding from the studies they pull together and discuss is that charity is hard. Spending money doesn't automatically translate to doing good. It's not even enough to have smart people who care and know a lot about the problem think of ideas, and then spend money doing them. There's still a good chance the idea won't work. So we need to be evaluating programs rigorously before we scale them up, and keep evaluating as we scale.

The bad news is that this isn't how charity is usually done. Very few charities make convincing evaluations of their activities public, if they carry them out at all. The good news is that some of the programs that have been evaluated are very, very effective. So choosing a charity rationally is absolutely critical.

Let's say you're interested specifically in HIV/AIDS relief.[1] You could fund a program that mainly distributes Anti-Retroviral Therapy to HIV/AIDS patients, which has been estimated conservatively to cost $1494 per disability adjusted life-year (DALY). Alternatively, you could fund a condom distribution program, which has been estimated conservatively to cost $112 per DALY. Or, you could fund a program to prevent mother-to-child transmission, which has been estimated...
[link] On Reasonable Efforts
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-02-26T09:57:15.716Z

Related to: Make an Extraordinary Effort, On Doing the Impossible, Shut up and do the impossible!, Humans are not automatically strategic.

http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1587858.html

Excerpt:

We live in a culture so bound by what most people are willing to do that we often take them as hard limits - "I can't do more than that," we say. "I've done the best I can." But it really isn't. It's just the best we're willing to do for right then.
When I was running and got my side-stitch, I really thought that I'd put 100% into it. But the truth was that I hated running, and I hated exercise, and I was putting maybe 20% of myself into it. If I was being chased by a bear, suddenly I'd find new reserves within me. And though I hated math homework, and thought that the grudging half an hour I did was really balls-out for math homework, I'd forget how many hours I'd spend memorizing PAC-Man patterns.
After that, I realized where my real limits were - they were way up there. And maybe I could stop telling myself and others that I did my best. I didn't. Not even close. I did what I thought was reasonable.
Sometimes you don't want reasonable.
The thing about it is that you don't have to feel guilty about not giving it your all, all the time. That'd be crazy. If you started panning your friends to see the latest Rush concert, you'd be a mooch. But what's important is not to conflate "a reasonable effort" as the top end. Be honest. Know what percentage you're actually willing to give, and acknowledge that if it was that critical, you could do a lot of other, very creative, things to solve this problem. I don't ask you guys for money because I find it distasteful - but when my sister-in-law's life was at stake and I didn't have the cash, you bet your ass I begged.

Recommend reading the whole thing.
A Common Form of Erroneous Thinking about the Universe
by rohern — 2011-02-26T09:42:42.697Z

This essay may be something of a non sequitur compared to usual LW topics. I wrote it some time ago and have long been sitting on it, waiting to discover a place to share it. I have just spent some time stripping it down to bones for this forum. I wrote it because I kept hearing while listening to or reading debates about religion, often involving Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens (the Mighty Hitch), objections from religious types that contained some form of the argument:

“Some aspect of the universe or of an object present in the universe exhibits such a high level of complexity that it can be concluded that it is not a natural product of the universe. It indicates the existence of X [usually God].”

I think that my response to this argument is relevant to this community because scientists and philosophers also make judgments about the complexity and the orderedness of the universe, indeed so have I, and I think that my objections to the above – patently silly – argument can be generalized to critique the statements of these latter two groups as well. To it, then:

It is difficult to find sympathy for any opinion about the qualities of the universe predicated on the notion that a particular quality is beyond the capabilities of nature to produce unaided. Such opinions can be as extreme as those of the religious who find the complexities of life as grounds for inferring the existence of a Creator or a mild as the casual observation that a natural occurrence is unusually or unexpectedly beautiful or orderly. I recently found myself holding an opinion of the latter type concerning the human brain and the immense chemical and electrical complexities that effect its qualities. There is some bizarre intuition that suggests the question, “How can nature alone do something so great/complex/impressive?” I intend to here demonstrate that this intuition is specious and silly, and should be avoided by those who would make rational judgments.

&n

...
London meetup, Sunday 2011-03-06 14:00, near Holborn (reminder)
by Paul Crowley — 2011-02-26T08:10:02.466Z

Reminder: we're meeting up in London next weekend. Sunday 6th March, at 2pm, in the Shakespeares Head (official page) on Kingsway near Holborn Tube station. We'll have a big picture of a paperclip on the table so you can find us; I look like this. Hope to see lots of you there!
Does SI make everyone look like swimsuit models?
by KatjaGrace — 2011-02-26T04:02:26.000Z

William Easterly believes Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue externalises toward women with their ‘relentless marketing of a “swimsuit” young female body type as sex object’. He doesn’t explain how this would happen.

As far as I can tell, the presumed effect is that pictures of women acting as ‘sex objects’ causes men to increase their credence that all other women are ‘sex objects’. I’m a bit puzzled about the causal path toward badness after that, since men do not seem on the whole less friendly when hoping for sex.

I think the important bit here must be about ‘objects’. I have no idea how one films someone as if they are an object. The women in SI don’t look inanimate, if that’s what it’s about. It’s also hard to make robots that good. I will guess that ‘sex object’ means something like ‘low status person to have sex with’, as opposed to just being sexually alluring. It seems unlikely that the concern is that women are taken to be sexier than they really are, so I think the problem is that they are taken to be low status in this particular sexy way.

If I guessed right so far, I think it is true that men increase their expectation that all other women are sex objects when they view videos of women being sex objects. I doubt this is a big effect, since they have masses of much better information about the sexiness and status of women around them. Nonetheless, I agree it is probably an effect.

However as usual, we are focussing on the tiny gender related speck of a much larger issue. Whenever a person has more than one characteristic, they give others the impression that those characteristics tend to go together, externalising to everyone else with those characteristics. When we show male criminals on the news, it is an externality to all other men. When we show clowns with big red noses it is an externality to all other people with big red noses. When I go outside it gives all onlookers a minuscule increase in their expectation that a tallish person will tend to be brown haired, female, dressed foreignly and not in possession of a car.

Most characteristics don’t end up delineating much of an externality, because we mostly don’t bother keeping track of all the expectations we could have connected to tallish people. What makes something li...
Use curiosity 
by AnnaSalamon — 2011-02-25T22:23:54.462Z

Related to: Rationalization, Meditation on curiosity, Original Seeing.

Why aren’t you learning faster?

For me, one answer is: because I’m not asking questions. I blunder through conversations trying to “do my job”, or to look good, or elaborating my own theories, or allowing cached replies to come out of my mouth on autopilot. I blunder through readings, scanning my eyes over the words and letting thoughts strike me as they may. Rarely am I pulled by a specific desire to know.

And most of my learning happens at those rare times.

How about you? When you read, how often do you chase something? When you chat with your friends -- are you curious about how they’re doing, why their mouth twitched as they said that, or why exactly they disagree with you about X? When you sit down to write, or to do research -- are you asking yourself specific questions, and then answering them?

Are there certain situations in which you get most of your useful ideas -- situations you could put yourself in more often?

Lately, when I notice that I’m not curious about anything, I’ve been trying to interrupt whatever I’m doing. If I’m in a conversation, and neither I nor my interlocutor is trying to figure something out, I call a mini “halt, melt, and catch fire” (inside my head, at least), and ask myself what I want. Surely not stale conversations. If I’m writing, and I don’t like the sentence I just wrote -- instead of reshuffling the words in the hopes that the new version will just happen to be better, I ask myself what I don’t like about it.

Thus, for the past six months, several times a day, I've interrupted my thoughts and put them back on an “ask questions” track. (“Grrr, he said my argument was dishonest... Wait, is he right? What should it look like if he is?”; “I notice I feel hopeless about this paper writing. Maybe there’s something I should do differently?”) It's helping. I'm building the habit of interrupting myself when I'm "thinking" without trying to find something out, or taking actions that I expect won't accomplish anything. As a human, I’m probably stuck running on habits -- but I can at least change *which* habits I...
The Value of Theoretical Research
by paulfchristiano — 2011-02-25T18:06:26.100Z

For many of us, choosing a career path has a dominant effect on our contribution to the society. For those of us who care what happens to society, this makes it one of the most important decisions we make. Like most decisions, this one is very often made by impulses significantly below the level of conscious recognition, with considerable intellectual effort spent on justifying a conclusion but very little spent on actually reaching one. In the case of smart, altruistic rationalists, this seems like the most tragic failure of rationality; so, whatever the outcome, I advocate much more serious consideration by smart rationalists of how our career choices affect society. For the most part this is a personal thing, but some public discussion may be valuable. I apologize (largely in advance) for anything that seems condescending.

I previously planned to do research in pure math (and more recently in theoretical computer science). I frequently justified my position with carefully constructed arguments which I no longer believe. It still may be the case that doing research is a good idea (and spending the rest of my life doing research is still the easiest possible career path for me), so I am interested in additional arguments, or reasons why anything I am about to write is wrong. Here is a basic list of my justifications, and why I no longer believe them.

Argument 1: Much math is practically important today. The math I am working on is not practically important today, but maybe it will be the math that is practically important tomorrow. How can we predict what will be useful? It seems like pushing math generally forward is the best response to this uncertainty.

Rebuttal: If we really want to evaluate this argument, it is important to understand the conditions under which the important math of today was done. In the case of calculus, differential equations, statistics, functional analysis, linear algebra, group theory, and numerical methods, the important results for modern work were in fact developed after their usefulness could be appreciated by an intelligent observer. There is very little honestly compelling evidence that pushing math for the sake of pushing math is likely to lead to practically important results more effectively than waiting until new math is needed and then developing it. Perhaps the most compelling case is number theory and its ...
Some informal ramblings abaut what a defenition of reality might look like.
by Armok_GoB — 2011-02-25T16:04:38.567Z

I were originally going to just chat about this on IRC but last few times I did that I ended up concludin it'd have been better to make an inchoherent discusion post on it and i just got some karma to burn, so here goes nothing. Sorry for the lots and lots of things I'm assuming everywhere with no citing sources or proof, this wasn't really meant as anything articlelike.

Many problems would have become a lot easier if we could assume everything you might even theoretically care about was Turing computable, and given a few more assumptions that most LWers appear to consider likely most kinds of uncertainty could be completely eliminated. However, that assumption seems that, while it might be true in practice, it's not obviously true or true per definition. Even if we turn out to live in a Turing computable universe, we still might care about non computable things outside it and try to influence then through ambient control or timeless trade or other such things.

Looking at Bayes theorem, and under the influence of LW ideas in general, it seems that the difference between the probability of being in a certain universe, and how much you care about that universe relatively, is indistinguishable from the inside. I have been planing to write something about this topic but never got around do it so lets just have it as an assumption for now.

Imagine a civilization building an AI to maximize the distance of handcomponents to hands, from http://lesswrong.com/lw/p2/hand_vs_fingers/ . It's defined through the green dots on the hand radar. The task involves escaping the universe so the AI decides to foom, and then it takes a look at the data again, and come to a 40% probability of the actual scenario, were it's supergoal is no longer even defined, and as a logical impossibility not simply local to this universe or time, and all actions have zero utility. However, this AI also realizes it can archive far, far more computational power if the universe turns out to be this way, and this computational power could be sold counter-factually on the timeless market, so it pre commits to gaining this computational power and trying to help it's counter factual self in that'd have happened if math had turned out differently. TDT means this'd have been the end result even if it hadn't realized the possibility and pre commited in advance.

So now we have an AI that cares about a logically...
Go Try Things
by atucker — 2011-02-25T06:23:03.965Z

So this isn't quite done, and its late here so I don't quite trust my judgements about writing at this hour. I've never done a top-level post before, so I wanted to get some feedback first.

Failure isn’t that Bad

You’ve probably read about how to properly turn information into beliefs, and how to squeeze every last bit from your data. What seems not to have received as much attention is the importance of just going and getting data.

For precise and well-defined fields and problems, clear thinking and reasoning will get you really far. Mathematics departments don’t use that much equipment, and they’ve been going fine for hundreds of years.

For more mundane day-to-day concerns, getting data is probably more important than being rational. Where Rationality helps you get an accurate model of the world based on the data, Data gets you well, data. And practice. Your human brain can’t rederive social rules in a vacuum, no matter how smart you are, so you have to go out and get information about it. But rationality with data is far better than either alone.

Sometimes you have to get your data by actually trying. Some things are just hard to explain in words and video. Your brain has all of this built in hardware for detecting and interpreting emotions and body language, but people are comparatively terrible at talking about it. This makes learning about different social or mood-variant things online difficult. Motions are also hard to teach online. I can kind of visualize how to do a front handspring, but I really can’t transmit what it feels like to someone else without just asking them to try it. Note: I’m not saying that asking others is useless, but I am saying that its mostly only effective as a complement to actually trying.

Practice is important. As any akrasiatic or novice would know, knowledge in a field or domain doesn’t translate directly to success in it. Like muscle memory, you need practice in order to get your brain to incorporate what you know to the point that you can use it automatically. Consciously thinking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it tends to cause lag and awkwardness, and in some fields (like conversation or physical activities) is a pretty large detriment.

I had/have the problem of hesitating on acting until I’m sure that whatever I’m consider...
[Link] [Fiction] Ted Chiang: The Lifecycle of Software Objects
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-02-24T22:56:58.482Z

http://www.subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2010/fiction-the-lifecycle-of-software-objects-by-ted-chiang/

A well-written novella about a company that has a proto-AI engine they use to make teachable virtual pets for sale in a cyberspace environment. Then the interest for the pets begins to decline and the company making them goes out of business. This makes for increasingly hard times for pet enthusiasts who've grown attached to theirs and refuse to just suspend them.

Quite good, even though I find some elements a bit implausible. I find the premise particularly interesting because the "let's build an AI engine to make virtual pets" approach is what the OpenCog folks were planning on doing at one point. The story also touches on a number of other transhumanist themes.

Besides, I cannot dislike a story that has the line, "the demand for sex with Lojban-speaking tripods would be microscopic".
February 27 2011 Southern California Meetup
by JenniferRM — 2011-02-24T05:05:39.907Z

There will be a LessWrong meetup for Southern California on Sunday February 27th at 1:30PM. The location is being kindly provided by the Harvey Mudd A.I. & Future Technology Club in the Platt Campus Center of Harvey Mudd College. There will food, drinks, small group conversation, a whiteboard, a projector, and an opportunity to try paranoid debating.

For travel planning purposes, the meetup is happening about 10 blocks north of the Claremont Metrolink Station, which connects to the hub at LA Union Station. Train schedules can be searched here. Also there should be car pooling opportunities in the comments.

As more meetups have happened attendance has been increasing. If you want to make sure to see future announcements so you don't miss a meetup, you can sign up for the mailing list. The room should be comfy for up to 40 people and we've never had more than that number yet, but for planning purposes it would be helpful if people RSVP in the comments.

See you there!
South Bay Less Wrong Meetup Saturday Feb 26th
by Jasen — 2011-02-23T22:45:00.578Z

There will be a Less Wrong meetup at 6:00PM this Saturday, the 26th of February, at Tortuga (850 Williams way, Mountain View, CA), the planned community founded by Patri Friedman. Shannon Friedman will be our gracious host for the evening.

As usual, the meet-up will be party-like and full of small group conversations. Feel free to bring food to share, or not.

Please RSVP at the meetup.com page if you plan to attend.
Does Solomonoff always win?
by cousin_it — 2011-02-23T20:42:19.863Z

Can a computable human beat a Solomonoff hyperintelligence at making predictions about an incoming sequence of bits? If the sequence is computable, he probably can't. I'm interested in what happens when the sequence can be uncomputable. The answer depends on what you mean by "beat".

Game 1: on each round you and Omega state your probabilities that the next bit will be 1. The logarithm of the probability you assigned to the actual outcome gets added to your score. (This setup is designed to incentivize players to report their true beliefs, see Eliezer's technical explanation.)

Game 2: you both start with a given sum of money. On each round you're allowed to bet some of it on 0 or 1 at 1:1 odds. You cannot go below zero. (This is the "martingale game", for motivation see the section on "constructive martingales" in the Wikipedia article on Martin-Löf randomness.)

Game 3: on each round you call out 0 or 1 for the next bit. If you guess right, you win 1 dollar, otherwise you lose 1 dollar. Going below zero is allowed. (This simple game was suggested by Wei Dai in this thread on one-logic.)

As it turns out, in game 1 you cannot beat Omega by more than an additive constant, even if the input sequence is uncomputable and you know its definition. (I have linked before to Shane Legg's text that can help you rederive this result.) Game 2 is a reformulation of game 1 in disguise, and you cannot beat Omega by more than a multiplicative constant. In game 3 you can beat Omega. More precisely, you can sometimes stay afloat while Omega sinks below zero at a linear rate.

Here's how. First let's set the input sequence to be very malevolent toward Omega: it will always say the reverse of what Omega is projected to say based on the previous bits. As for the human, all he has to do is either always say 0 or always say 1. Intuitively it seems likely that at least one of those strategies will stay afloat, because whenever one of them sinks, the other rises.

So is Solomonoff induction really the shining jewel at the end of all science and progress, or does that depend on the payoff setup? It's not clear to me whether our own universe is computable. In the thread linked above Eliezer argued that we should be trying to approximate Solomonoff inference anyway:

If you're dealing with non-exceptional situations - non-devilish environments - then shouldn't a proo

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