trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists
by Will_Newsome — 2010-06-04T16:08:40.556Z

Meta: Influenced by a cool blog post by Kaj, which was influenced by a cool Michael Vassar (like pretty much everything else; the man sure has a lot of ideas). The name of this post is intended to be taken slightly more literally than the similarly titled Deontology for Consequentialists.

There's been a hip new trend going around the Singularity Institute Visiting Fellows house lately, and it's not postmodernism. It's virtue ethics. "What, virtue ethics?! Are you serious?" Yup. I'm so contrarian I think cryonics isn't obvious and that virtue ethics is better than consequentialism. This post will explain why.

When I first heard about virtue ethics I assumed it was a clever way for people to justify things they did when the consequences were bad and the reasons were bad, too. People are very good at spinning tales about how virtuous they are, even more so than at finding good reasons that they could have done things that turned out unpopular, and it's hard to spin the consequences of your actions as good when everyone is keeping score. But it seems that moral theorists were mostly thinking in far mode and didn't have too much incentive to create a moral theory that benefited them the most, so my Hansonian hypothesis falls flat. Why did Plato and Aristotle and everyone up until the Enlightenment find virtue ethics appealing, then? Well...

Moral philosophy was designed for humans, not for rational agents. When you're used to thinking about artificial intelligence, economics, and decision theory, it gets easy to forget that we're hyperbolic discounters: not anything resembling sane. Humans are not inherently expected utility maximizers, they're bounded agents with little capacity for reflection. Utility functions are great and all, but in the words of Zack M. Davis, "Humans don't have utility functions." Similarly, Kaj warns us: "be extra careful when you try to apply the concept of a utility function to human beings." Back in the day nobody thought smarter-than-human intelligence was possible, and many still don't. Philosophers came up with ways for people to live their lives, have a good time, be respected, and do good things; they weren't even trying to create morals for anyone too far outside the norm of whatever society they inhabited at the time, or whatever society they imagined to be perfect. I personally think that the Buddha had some really interes...
Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit
by Wei Dai — 2010-06-03T20:30:29.518Z

It’s the year 2045, and Dr. Evil and the Singularity Institute have been in a long and grueling race to be the first to achieve machine intelligence, thereby controlling the course of the Singularity and the fate of the universe. Unfortunately for Dr. Evil, SIAI is ahead in the game. Its Friendly AI is undergoing final testing, and Coherent Extrapolated Volition is scheduled to begin in a week. Dr. Evil learns of this news, but there’s not much he can do, or so it seems. He has succeeded in developing brain scanning and emulation technology, but the emulation speed is still way too slow to be competitive.

There is no way to catch up with SIAI's superior technology in time, but Dr. Evil suddenly realizes that maybe he doesn’t have to. CEV is supposed to give equal weighting to all of humanity, and surely uploads count as human. If he had enough storage space, he could simply upload himself, and then make a trillion copies of the upload. The rest of humanity would end up with less than 1% weight in CEV. Not perfect, but he could live with that. Unfortunately he only has enough storage for a few hundred uploads. What to do…

Ah ha, compression! A trillion identical copies of an object would compress down to be only a little bit larger than one copy. But would CEV count compressed identical copies to be separate individuals? Maybe, maybe not. To be sure, Dr. Evil gives each copy a unique experience before adding it to the giant compressed archive. Since they still share almost all of the same information, a trillion copies, after compression, just manages to fit inside the available space.

Now Dr. Evil sits back and relaxes. Come next week, the Singularity Institute and rest of humanity are in for a rather rude surprise!
Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way)
by komponisto — 2010-06-03T04:40:21.377Z

(This post is elementary: it introduces a simple method of visualizing Bayesian calculations. In my defense, we've had other elementary posts before, and they've been found useful; plus, I'd really like this to be online somewhere, and it might as well be here.)

I'll admit, those Monty-Hall-type problems invariably trip me up. Or at least, they do if I'm not thinking very carefully -- doing quite a bit more work than other people seem to have to do.

What's more, people's explanations of how to get the right answer have almost never been satisfactory to me. If I concentrate hard enough, I can usually follow the reasoning, sort of; but I never quite "see it", and nor do I feel equipped to solve similar problems in the future: it's as if the solutions seem to work only in retrospect.

Minds work differently, illusion of transparency, and all that.

Fortunately, I eventually managed to identify the source of the problem, and I came up a way of thinking about -- visualizing -- such problems that suits my own intuition. Maybe there are others out there like me; this post is for them.

I've mentioned before that I like to think in very abstract terms. What this means in practice is that, if there's some simple, general, elegant point to be made, tell it to me right away. Don't start with some messy concrete example and attempt to "work upward", in the hope that difficult-to-grasp abstract concepts will be made more palatable by relating them to "real life". If you do that, I'm liable to get stuck in the trees and not see the forest. Chances are, I won't have much trouble understanding the abstract concepts; "real life", on the other hand...

...well, let's just say I prefer to start at the top and work downward, as a general rule. Tell me how the trees relate to the forest, rather than the other way around.

Many people have found Eliezer's Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning to be an excellent introduction to Bayes' theorem, and so I don't usually hesitate to recommend it to others. But for me personally, if I didn't know Bayes' theorem and you were trying to explain it to me, pretty much the worst thing you could do would be to start with some detailed scenario involving breast-cancer screenings. (And not just because it tarnishes beautiful mathematics with images of sickness and death, either!)

So what's the right way to explain Bayes' theorem to me?

Like this:

W...
Singularity Summit 2010 on Aug. 14-15 in San Francisco
by alyssavance — 2010-06-02T06:01:26.276Z

The Singularity Summit 2010 will be held on August 14th and 15th at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, and will feature Ray Kurzweil and famed Traditional Rationalist James Randi as speakers, in addition to numerous others. During last year's Summit (in New York City), there was a very large Less Wrong meetup with dozens of attendees, and it is quite possible that there will be one again this year. Anyone interested in planning such a meetup (not just attending) should contact the Singularity Institute at institute@intelligence.org. The Singularity Summit press release follows after the jump.

Singularity Summit 2010 returns to San Francisco, explores intelligence augmentation
Speakers include Futurist Ray Kurzweil, Magician-Skeptic James Randi

Will it be one day become possible to boost human intelligence using brain implants, or create an artificial intelligence smarter than Einstein? In a 1993 paper presented to NASA, science fiction author and mathematician Vernor Vinge called such a hypothetical event a “Singularity”, saying “From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye”. Vinge pointed out that intelligence enhancement could lead to “closing the loop” between intelligence and technology, creating a positive feedback effect.

This August 14-15, hundreds of AI researchers, robotics experts, philosophers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and interested laypeople will converge in San Francisco to address the Singularity and related issues at the only conference on the topic, the Singularity Summit. Experts in fields including animal intelligence, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfacing, tissue regeneration, medical ethics, computational neurobiology, augmented reality, and more will share their latest research and explore its implications for the future of humanity.

“This year, the conference shifts to a focus on neuroscience, bioscience, cognitive enhancement, and other explorations of what Vernor Vinge called ‘intelligence amplification’ — the other route to the Singularity,” said Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute, which is hosting the event.

Irene Pepperberg, author of “Alex & Me,” who has pushed the frontier of animal intelligence with her research on African Gray Parrots, w...
Rationality quotes: June 2010
by Morendil — 2010-06-01T18:07:17.716Z

This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down 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 comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Open Thread: June 2010
by Morendil — 2010-06-01T18:04:48.504Z

To whom it may concern:

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

(After the critical success of part II, and the strong box office sales of part III in spite of mixed reviews, will part IV finally see the June Open Thread jump the shark?)
Seven Shiny Stories
by Alicorn — 2010-06-01T00:43:11.646Z

It has come to my attention that the contents of the luminosity sequence were too abstract, to the point where explicitly fictional stories illustrating the use of the concepts would be helpful. Accordingly, there follow some such stories.

1. Words (an idea from Let There Be Light, in which I advise harvesting priors about yourself from outside feedback)

Maria likes compliments. She loves compliments. And when she doesn't get enough of them to suit her, she starts fishing, asking plaintive questions, making doe eyes to draw them out. It's starting to annoy people. Lately, instead of compliments, she's getting barbs and criticism and snappish remarks. It hurts - and it seems to hurt her more than it hurts others when they hear similar things. Maria wants to know what it is about her that would explain all of this. So she starts taking personality tests and looking for different styles of maintaining and thinking about relationships, looking for something that describes her. Eventually, she runs into a concept called "love languages" and realizes at once that she's a "words" person. Her friends aren't trying to hurt her - they don't realize how much she thrives on compliments, or how deeply insults can cut when they're dealing with someone who transmits affection verbally. Armed with this concept, she has a lens through which to interpret patterns of her own behavior; she also has a way to explain herself to her loved ones and get the wordy boosts she needs.

2. Widgets (an idea from The ABC's of Luminosity, in which I explain the value of correlating affect, behavior, and circumstance)

Tony's performance at work is suffering. Not every day, but most days, he's too drained and distracted to perform the tasks that go into making widgets. He's in serious danger of falling behind his widget quota and needs to figure out why. Having just read a fascinating and brilliantly written post on Less Wrong about luminosity, he decides to keep track of where he is and what he's doing when he does and doesn't feel the drainedness. After a week, he's got a fairly robust correlation: he feels worst on days when he doesn't eat breakfast, which reliably occurs when he's stayed up too late, hit the snooze button four times, and had to dash out the door. Awkwardly enough, having been distra...
Cultivating our own gardens
by  — 2010-05-31T20:05:24.763Z

This is a post about moral philosophy, approached with a mathematical metaphor.

Here's an interesting problem in mathematics. Let's say you have a graph, made up of vertices and edges, with weights assigned to the edges. Think of the vertices as US cities and the edges as roads between them; the weight on each road is the length of the road. Now, knowing only this information, can you draw a map of the US on a sheet of paper? In mathematical terms, is there an isometric embedding of this graph in two-dimensional Euclidean space?

When you think about this for a minute, it's clear that this is a problem about reconciling the local and the global. Start with New York and all its neighboring cities. You have a sort of star shape. You can certainly draw this on the plane; in fact, you have many degrees of freedom; you can arbitrarily pick one way to draw it. Now start adding more cities and more roads, and eventually the degrees of freedom diminish. If you made the wrong choices earlier on, you might paint yourself in a corner and have no way to keep all the distances consistent when you add a new city. This is known as a "synchronization problem." Getting it to work locally is easy; getting all the local pieces reconciled with each other is hard.

This is a lovely problem and some acquaintances of mine have written a paper about it. (http://www.math.princeton.edu/~mcucurin/Sensors_ASAP_TOSN_final.pdf) I'll pick out some insights that seem relevant to what follows. First, some obvious approaches don't work very well. It might be thought we want to optimize over all possible embeddings, picking the one that has the lowest error in approximating distances between cities. You come up with a "penalty function" that's some sort of sum of errors, and use standard optimization techniques to minimize it. The trouble is, these approaches tend to work spottily -- in particular, they sometimes pick out local rather than global optima (so that the error can be quite high after all.)

The approach in the paper I linked is different. We break the graph into overlapping smaller subgraphs, so small that they can only be embedded in one way (that's called rigidity) and then "stitch" them together consistently. The "stitching" is done with a very handy trick involving eigenvectors of sp...
London UK, Saturday 2010-07-03: "How to think rationally about the future"
by Paul Crowley — 2010-05-31T15:23:20.972Z

Myself and Roko will be giving a presentation about LessWrong-style thinking to the UK Transhumanist Association on the afternoon of Saturday 3 July. Here's the official announcement:

Title: "How to think rationally about the future"

2pm-4pm, Saturday 3rd July. [but see above]

Room 416
Fourth floor
Birkbeck College
Torrington Square
LONDON
WC1E 7HX

Speakers: Paul Crowley and Roko Mijic

About the talk:

Over the past forty years, science has built up a substantial body of experimental evidence that highlights dozens of alarming systematic failings in our capacity for reason. These errors are especially dangerous in an area as difficult to think about as the future of humanity, where deluding oneself is tempting and the "reality check" won't arrive until too late.

How can we form accurate beliefs about the future in the face of these considerable obstacles? We'll outline ways of identifying and correcting cognitive biases, in particular the use of probability theory to quantify and manipulate uncertainty, and then apply these improved methods to try to paint a more accurate picture of what we all have to look forward to in the 21st century.

About the speakers:

Paul Crowley is a cryptographer and computer programmer whose work includes breaks in ciphers designed by Cisco and by Bruce Schneier. His website is http://www.ciphergoth.org

Roko Mijic graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in Mathematics, and the Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics. He spent a year doing research into the foundations of knowledge representation at the University of Edinburgh and holds an MSc in informatics. He is currently an advisor for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Both speakers are contributors to the community website for refining the art of human rationality, http://LessWrong.com

Further details:
There's no charge to attend this meeting, and everyone is welcome.
There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions and to make comments.
Discussion will continue after the event, in a nearby pub, for those who are able to stay.
Why not join some of the UKH+ regulars for a drink and/or light lunch beforehand, any time after 12.30pm, in The Marlborough Arms, 36 Torrington Place, London WC1E 7HJ. To find us, look out for a table where there's a copy of the book "The Singularity Is Near" displayed.
About the venue:
Room 416 is on the fourth flo...
On Less Wrong traffic and new users -- and how you can help
by Kevin — 2010-05-31T08:19:15.248Z

This is a breakdown of Less Wrong's recent new user traffic, data sourced from the Less Wrong Google Analytics account.

67% StumbleUpon
16% Google
5.4% Reddit
3.6% Hacker News
3% Harry Potter story
0.7% Facebook
0.3% Overcoming Bias
4% "The Long Tail"

The 16% for Google is artificially high because many of those hits are users that are using Google as an address bar by searching for Less Wrong.

So we get an order of magnitude more traffic from Stumble Upon than anywhere else -- sometimes thousands of new users a day. Stumble Upon has been Less Wrong's biggest referrer of new users from the beginning of the site. That was surprising to me and I suspect it is also surprising to you. Some of our very best users, like Alicorn, came from Stumble Upon.

Why does it matter?

Imagine your life without Less Wrong... now realize that the overwhelming majority of humans go through their entire lives without ever thinking of Bayesianism, fallacies, how to actually change your mind, or even philosophical zombies. Seriously, try to picture your life without Less Wrong. An article that recently made the rounds on the internet claimed that one real way to make yourself happier was to imagine your life without something that you liked.

We try to take existential risk seriously around these parts. Each marginal new user that reads anything on Less Wrong has a real chance of being the one that tips us from existential Loss to existential Win.

What can you do?

Sign up for Stumble Upon and start "thumbs up'ing" or likeing LW articles that you sincerely like and want to recommend to others. You could start by stumbling one of my favorite Less Wrong articles on the power of a superintelligence and the real meaning of making efficient use of sensory information.
In order to get maximum Stumble power, you can't just stumble LW articles and only LW articles. You need to use Stumble Upon for a minute or two every now and then and vote up or down the random links it gives you. I know, it's annoying, but what are a few dust specks when we are talking about saving the world?

Help our Google traffic by linking to Less Wrong using the word rationality. Less Wrong is the best web site out there on rationality. We should rank #1 on Google for rationality, not #57. At this point in Google's metaphorical paperclipping of the web, some

...
Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease
by Scott Alexander — 2010-05-30T21:16:19.449Z

Related to: Disguised Queries, Words as Hidden Inferences, Dissolving the Question, Eight Short Studies on Excuses

Today's therapeutic ethos, which celebrates curing and disparages judging, expresses the liberal disposition to assume that crime and other problematic behaviors reflect social or biological causation. While this absolves the individual of responsibility, it also strips the individual of personhood, and moral dignity

-- George Will, townhall.com

Sandy is a morbidly obese woman looking for advice.

Her husband has no sympathy for her, and tells her she obviously needs to stop eating like a pig, and would it kill her to go to the gym once in a while?

Her doctor tells her that obesity is primarily genetic, and recommends the diet pill orlistat and a consultation with a surgeon about gastric bypass.

Her sister tells her that obesity is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, and that fat-ism, equivalent to racism, is society's way of keeping her down.

When she tells each of her friends about the opinions of the others, things really start to heat up.

Her husband accuses her doctor and sister of absolving her of personal responsibility with feel-good platitudes that in the end will only prevent her from getting the willpower she needs to start a real diet.

Her doctor accuses her husband of ignorance of the real causes of obesity and of the most effective treatments, and accuses her sister of legitimizing a dangerous health risk that could end with Sandy in hospital or even dead.

Her sister accuses her husband of being a jerk, and her doctor of trying to medicalize her behavior in order to turn it into a "condition" that will keep her on pills for life and make lots of money for Big Pharma.

Sandy is fictional, but similar conversations happen every day, not only about obesity but about a host of other marginal conditions that some consider character flaws, others diseases, and still others normal variation in the human condition. Attention deficit disorder, internet addiction, social anxiety disorder (as one skeptic said, didn't we used to call this "shyness"?), alcoholism, chronic fatigue, oppositional defiant disorder ("didn't we used to call this being a teenager?"), compulsive gambling, homosexuality, Aspergers' syndrome, antisocial personality, even depression have all been placed in two or mo...