trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Machine learning and unintended consequences
by lukeprog — 2011-09-23T02:31:11.431Z

In Artificial Intelligence as a Negative and Positive Factor in Global Risk, Yudkowsky uses the following parable to illustrate the danger of using case-based learning to produce the goal systems of advanced AIs:

Once upon a time, the US Army wanted to use neural networks to automatically detect camouflaged enemy tanks. The researchers trained a neural net on 50 photos of camouflaged tanks in trees, and 50 photos of trees without tanks. Using standard techniques for supervised learning, the researchers trained the neural network to a weighting that correctly loaded the training set - output "yes" for the 50 photos of camouflaged tanks, and output "no" for the 50 photos of forest. This did not ensure, or even imply, that new examples would be classified correctly. The neural network might have "learned" 100 special cases that would not generalize to any new problem. Wisely, the researchers had originally taken 200 photos, 100 photos of tanks and 100 photos of trees. They had used only 50 of each for the training set. The researchers ran the neural network on the remaining 100 photos, and without further training the neural network classified all remaining photos correctly. Success confirmed! The researchers handed the finished work to the Pentagon, which soon handed it back, complaining that in their own tests the neural network did no better than chance at discriminating photos.

It turned out that in the researchers' data set, photos of camouflaged tanks had been taken on cloudy days, while photos of plain forest had been taken on sunny days. The neural network had learned to distinguish cloudy days from sunny days, instead of distinguishing camouflaged tanks from empty forest.

I once stumbled across the source of this parable online, but now I can't find it.

Anyway, I'm curious: Are there any well-known examples of this kind of problem actually causing serious damage — say, when a narrow AI trained via machine learning was placed into a somewhat novel environment?
The neural bases of behavioral game theory
by lukeprog — 2011-09-22T20:29:05.714Z

Bhatt & Camerer (2011). The cognitive neuroscience of strategic thinking. Abstract:

This chapter focuses on some emerging elements of a neuroscientific basis for behavioral game theory. The premise of this chapter is that game theory can be useful in helping to elucidate the neural basis of strategic thinking. The great strength of game theory is that it offers precision in defining what players are likely to do and suggesting algorithms of reasoning and learning. Whether people are using these algorithms can be estimated from behavior and from psychological observables (such as response times and eye tracking of attention), and used as parametric regressors to identify candidate brain circuits that appear to encode those regressors.

This review article may be particularly interesting for those who suspect that game theory may play a major role in human value, perhaps even in ways that would make it more intuitively plausible that reasonable value extrapolation algorithms can be developed.
AGI-2011 conference videos 
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-09-22T18:55:30.374Z

Google tech talks published a bunch of video from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) 2011 today, they're all linked from the conference site. I haven't watched any of them yet but the titles sound interesting.

http://agi-conf.org/2011/conference-schedule/#vp

(Via Patrick Hahn @OB-NYC.)
Blindsight and Consciousness
by atucker — 2011-09-22T18:42:01.305Z

Thomas Metzinger is a philosopher who pays lots of attention to cognitive science and psychology, and likes to think about consciousness. Most of the interesting ideas that follow come from his books The Ego Tunnel and Being No One. I hope to write a series of posts summarizing some of the evidence and arguments in Being No One, which focuses on consciousness.

Blindsight1

Blindsight patients have damage to their primary visual cortex (V1), leading to a scotoma, or area of blindsight in the visual field. Most but not all visual signals go through V1, so they can still influence the brain in very restricted channels. Blindsight patients don't report seeing things in their scotoma, and don't initiate plans based on it. If they're thirsty and there's a bottle of water in their scotoma, they don't pick it up and drink it.

Human subjects and animal subjects are treated differently in psychological experiments regarding what they do and don't know. Humans are generally asked to report on their own experience, while animal actions are observed. We get interesting results when we ask people to report on their experience, while also observing their actions.

If you ask a blindsight patient what they see in their scotoma, they respond to the point that they can't see anything there. However, if you tell them to do things like "grab the thing in your scomata" they can grasp it. If you ask them to guess what's in it, they can perform better than chance. Some blindsight patients can tell if something is moving in their scotoma, but they can't tell you what it is. They often describe this awareness as a hunch.

Most people consider it fair to say that blindsight patients are not conscious of the things in their scotoma.

Attention and Conscious Experience

Patients with blindsight can act on visual information in their scotomas in some ways, but they can't notice it.

Metzinger argues that humans don't have a conscious experience of what we can't pay attention to. Note: There's a difference between can't pay attention to, and not currently paying attention to.

Visual information in the scotoma isn't accessible to the parts of my brain that plan, or the parts that cause me to say "I can see X". My unconscious is able to refer to this information for things in forced choice situations, but the information isn't available to me.

Constraints on Theories of Consciousness

Any theory which says ...
"Technical implication: My worst enemy is an instance of my self."
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2011-09-22T08:46:49.941Z

I think this one needs more discussion, it looks like a really valuable and interesting train of thought.

In "You'll be who you care about," Stuart Armstrong wrote -

Instead of wondering whether we should be selfish towards our future selves, let's reverse the question. Let's define our future selves as agents that we can strongly influence, and that we strongly care about.

Wedrifdid replied with this gem of insight (bold added) -

Technical implication: My worst enemy is an instance of my self.

Actual implication: Relationships that don't include a massive power differential or a complete lack of emotional connection are entirely masturbatory.

It is critical to consider that thing which is "future agents that we strongly care about and can influence" but calling those things our 'future selves' makes little sense unless they are, well, actually our future selves.

Pedanterriffic feels the same way about it I did -

This explains so much.

The basic point has already gotten some good discussions, but let's talk about the implication. Assuming for a moment that your future self is an agent you can strongly influence and strongly care about, does that make your worst enemy an instance of yourself?

Let's not get too hung up on the words "worst enemy" - I think swapping in "main adversary" or "chief competitor" makes the point stand. Your thoughts?
Review: Michel Thomas French (Direct Instruction)
by  — 2011-09-22T08:34:58.572Z

Purpose of Review

Owen’s recent post brought up the topic of optimizing education. One particular approach, Direct Instruction (Misha’s better explanation), claims to have essentially solved the problem. In particular, Direct Instruction (DI) does allegedly not only work for basic reading skills, but any teaching task. Owen brought up the Michel Thomas language courses as a good application. Language learning is one of my main interests, so I gave the French Foundation course a try.

The main point of the review is to summarize what Michel Thomas actually does, how it differs from other common paradigms and how effective it seems to me.

Summary: Nice for beginners and people with bad learning experiences; limited use afterwards. The audio-only aspect is very convenient. It complements other strategies well and I see it as a good proof-of-concept of DI-like methods for language learning.

Overview

Let’s start with a disclaimer. Michel Thomas (MT) is not officially a DI course and as far as I could google, Thomas propbably wasn’t aware of DI at all. However, according to Solity's The Language Revolution and Owen, the reason MT works so well is that it applies (an approximation of) DI techniques. It is right now the best realistic example beyond the grade school level, so it’ll have to do.

I had some French in high school and thanks to fluency in German and English, I can read some French, but I have no active skill at all, nor have I ever used French in a serious way.

I have now completed the first half of the French Foundation course and skimmed many other courses. You can listen to the first 20 minutes here; they are very representative. Furthermore you can read the booklets to get an idea of the material covered in each course. The whole course is audio-only, consists of 8 CDs (and 2 review CDs) and is intended to be listened to only once.1 There are several advanced courses which merely cover more grammar points and vocabulary. Structurally, they are all the same.

Method

MT teaches the course to two new students2. You’re supposed to take the role of a third student, pausing the recording whenever MT asks a question so that you can say your own answer. One of the two students also answers and you can compare your reply and listen to MT’s advice and error correction. Both students are beginners, so most of your mistakes wi...
Yet another book on life extension - "100+", author: Sonia Arrison
by D_Alex — 2011-09-22T07:47:35.376Z

http://www.soniaarrison.com/index.php

I have not read the book. But a review on the Singularity Hub (http://singularityhub.com/2011/09/20/sonia-arrison-brings-longevity-to-the-masses-with-her-book-100/) is quite positive. It mentions that a good part of the book is devoted to considering the impact of increased lifespans on society, and it appears that the author's views are in the anti-deathism camp.

If anyone here has read this, I would appreciate an opinion.
[SEQ RERUN] Priming and Contamination
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-22T03:52:17.962Z

Today's post, Priming and Contamination was originally published on 10 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Contamination by Priming is a problem that relates to the process of implicitly introducing the facts in the attended data set. When you are primed with a concept, the facts related to that concept come to mind easier. As a result, the data set selected by your mind becomes tilted towards the elements related to that concept, even if it has no relation to the question you are trying to answer. Your thinking becomes contaminated, shifted in a particular direction. The data set in your focus of attention becomes less representative of the phenomenon you are trying to model, and more representative of the concepts you were primed with.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was A Priori, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Real time video face substitution (and the resulting "psychological hacks")
by Icelus — 2011-09-21T23:32:20.562Z

"Arturo Castro's real time face substitution technique"

Link/Videos: http://www.notcot.org/post/43233/

An HN comment I found very interesting:

Real-time virtual puppeting has been done in movies/television and research for a while now and yes, it can easily fool people.

A professor friend of mine Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford actually uses the Kinect to track facial movements and uses 3D models of others to create puppets in real-time. Even more interesting, he can morph your face with the person you're video conferencing with to create a feeling of commonality in them.

He actually wrote a book on it called Infinite Reality [1] which talks about all kinds of ways people will probably get manipulated in the future. He talks about things like mirroring movements (which he can do automatically in a video conference), looking into the eyes of every participant in a group video conference and other really interesting psychological hacks.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Reality-Avatars-Eternal-Revolution/dp/0061809500/

From: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3022929

Hacker News discussion thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3022479
Bayesian exercise
by RolfAndreassen — 2011-09-21T21:34:13.402Z

I am confused.

Suppose you are in charge of estimating the risk of catastrophic failure of the Space Shuttle. From engineers, component tests, and guesswork, you come to the conclusion that any given launch is about 1% likely to fail. On the strength of this you launch the Shuttle, and it does not blow up. Now, with this new information, what is your new probability estimate? I write down

P(failure next time | we observe one successful launch) = P (we observe one successful launch | failure next time) * P(failure) / P(observe one success)

or

P(FNT|1S) = P(1S|FNT)*P(F)/P(S)

We have P(F) = 1-P(S) = 0.03. Presumably your chances of success this time are not affected by the next one being a failure, so P(1S|FNT) is just P(S) = 0.97. So the two 97% chances cancel, and I'm left with the same estimate I had before, 3% chance of failure. Is this correct, that a successful launch does not give you new information about the chances of failure? This seems counterintuitive.
Meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup
by amacfie — 2011-09-21T21:15:28.087Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup

WHEN:
26 September 2011 07:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Private residence in the Elgin & Gladstone area, Ottawa, ON

Matthew Kelly (http://memoryechoes.blogspot.com/) will be present to talk about his work in cognitive science.

For details on location, (join and) see the mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/less-wrong-ottawa

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup
Knowledge is Worth Paying For
by lukeprog — 2011-09-21T18:09:33.035Z

Have you ever asked a store manager if you can use their bathroom and been told that you must order something first? Even if it's obviously worth $1 to not wet your pants, you feel a bit resentful about having to buy the Arizona iced tea. You're so used to using other stores' bathrooms for free that you actually considered not paying.

Wikipedia, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay have trained many people to expect that knowledge should always be zero-cost. I used to feel that way, too. I would try half a dozen techniques to get some set of highly compressed knowledge (a textbook or review article) for free, and if that failed, my brain felt a bit indignant, and I would move on to something else.

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about the neglected virtue of scholarship is this: Sometimes, knowledge is worth paying for.

How much do you value your time, and how much do you value understanding a certain thing? After reading lots of research and many book excerpts, I learned that Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (2010) was the best overview available on how the brain encodes value and makes decisions. But I couldn't find it for free. I had a hunch that coming to understand the subject without reading the best overview available would take at least a dozen extra hours. The Kindle price for Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis was only $55. Easy choice: I bought it.

(As it turns out, Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis is one of the best books I've ever purchased, and much better than the next best thing — Handbook of Reward and Decision Making — so purchasing the book probably saved me several dozen hours.)

Anyone who has made it through The Sequences understands the value of knowledge. And the absurdly high value of The Sequences is not so much in their novel content as in their idea selection. You could have figured out most of what's in The Sequences yourself by reading lots of cognitive science and the best of physics and philosophy, but that would have required many years and highly developed rationality skills.

But, having some indication of their value, would you have paid to read The Sequences, if that was the only way? I hope you can see that would have been a good choice.

If you want to be a scholar, learn how to get knowledge for free. But if you can't find a high-value source of knowle...
Willpower and diet: advice?
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-09-21T17:54:44.875Z

Since the beginning of September, I have been attempting a gluten-free diet. (I was tested and I'm not celiac, but eating wheat, and especially highly refined-flour foods like cookies, tends to make me bloated and give me diarrhea.) I also wanted to lose 5 to 10 pounds. I'm not overweight per se, but I possess a roll of belly fat that I (and my boyfriend!) would prefer to say goodbye too.

The first little while went well, and almost effortlessly. I was at the cottage with my family, exercising moderately (about 2 kilometers of swimming daily) and eating my mom's excellent-tasting cooking. After about one and a half weeks, I had lost 5 pounds, although I suspect a lot of it was water retention/bloating, since I had been eating wheat and various junk foods all summer.

Then school started, and with it my 16-hour days away from home, including one marathon session where I leave my parents' house at 5:00 am on Monday morning, sleep at a friend's house, and don't come back again until 11 pm on Tuesday, only to work 5:30 am to 4 pm at the pool the next day.

In short: my diet is quickly deteriorating and I have regained those 5 pounds. I find it next to impossible to stay gluten-free, since I have to be incredibly organized and pack everything from home, and inevitably it isn't quite enough for 16 hours. (I eat 3000 calories a day or more when not dieting. According to a metabolism study I participated in last year, this is actually how much I burn per day with the amount of exercise I get. If I eat much less, say less than 2000 for one day or less than 2,500 for several consecutive days, I get dizzy and weak when I exercise, which is really irritating.) I would probably be able to lose weight more easily if I exercised LESS, but this would a) kind of defeat the point, and b) be difficult because exercise is my main stress control method.

Willpower is a big issue, which is weird and annoying because usually it's not a big issue for me. Especially when I'm sleep deprived (nearly all the time), stressed, or bored to tears in my classes, I tend to comfort or reward myself with food, and nearly all my 'comfort foods' have wheat in them. I can resist to a degree if I have access to other reward/comforts, like sleep, or lots and lots of tea.

I've never really had to learn any willpower tricks for dieting, since I usually let my weight sit at ...
NIH Solicitation: Basic research on decision making
by PhilGoetz — 2011-09-21T15:56:33.143Z

The NIH recently announced a solicitation for Basic Research on Decision Making: Cognitive, Affective, and Developmental Perspectives. This is an R01, which means you aren't going to get it unless you have a team, with members who already have a bunch of publications in refereed journals. It's possible that SIAI could go after this as a prime - unlikely that they would win, but possible. OppNet intends to commit approximately $3,000,000 in FY 2012 to fund 5 to 15 grants in response to this FOA. Applications budgets may not exceed $500,000 direct costs per year. Letter of intent due December 18, 2011.
[SEQ RERUN] A Priori
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-21T03:42:58.591Z

Today's post, A Priori was originally published on 08 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The facts that philosophers call a priori arrived in your brain by a physical process. Thoughts are existent in the universe; they are identical to the operation of brains. The "a priori" belief generator in your brain works for a reason.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : Penn State University: NEW Meetup starting!
by TheDave — 2011-09-21T02:52:37.914Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Penn State University: NEW Meetup starting!

WHEN:
22 October 2011 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Panera bread: 148 South Allen Street State College, PA 16801

I'll be hosting a meetup at the Panera Bread meeting room on Oct. 22nd in State College! We'll be introducing ourselves, playing rationality games, and discussing what comes to mind. I was exposed to a lot of cool things at the Mini-camp in San Francisco this summer, and I'm eager to spread them around!

This meetup is mostly structured around getting to know each other, but future ones will have discussions about the sequences and current research results as well as more games and many other topics. Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Penn State University: NEW Meetup starting!
Subjective Realities
by TheatreAddict — 2011-09-20T19:10:06.590Z

So I have a friend who I sit next to in class, and we talk about philosophy. Well today, he brought up that when people leave your presense, and you can't observe them any longer, you no longer have proof they exist.

Well I pointed out that it would violate the conservation of mass law, right?

So then, with a bit more prodding, I figured out that by "no longer exist", he means they exist in their world, but they no longer exist in mine. So basically you can't prove that anyone exists unless they're directly in front of you.

I'm really not certain how to go about answering this question. I mean, he challenged me to prove that my mother existed, without seeing her. Obviously I couldn't.

Is he right? Or is there some flaw in his argument, some fallacy that I'm missing?

I went through a few of the Sequences, and the closest article I could find was about not believing in the invisible. But in this case, he doesn't literally (I think) believe they just vanish, he believes they enter alternate universes that are selected when I come in contact them again.

My mind is boggled. I also apologize if this is dumb question, and it's common knowledge or has already been answered, and to my credit, I did make an attempt to figure out the answer before bothering you all. Thanks.
Meetup : Austin, TX
by Vaniver — 2011-09-20T18:38:00.620Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX

WHEN:
24 September 2011 01:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2222B Guadalupe St Austin, Texas 78705

Austin meetups continue unabated! Come one, come all!

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX