trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Survey of older folks as data about one's future values and preferences?
by Bart119 — 2012-04-27T19:42:12.400Z

One thing that struck me in the 2011 survey was that 90% of LW respondents were under age 38. I'm 57 myself. It seems that often rationality in planning our lives depends on estimates of what values and utility functions we will hold in the future. Has anyone looked systematically at what projected older versions of themselves would think, based on what relevant groups of existing older folks think?

"You'll understand when you're older" is an annoying form of argument. Arguably there's some grain of truth there when a 7-year-old tells you that sex is disgusting and he or she will never ever think it's anything but incredibly gross. But you could explain hormonal changes that as a matter of empirical fact change opinions on that subject in the vast majority of cases. I can't think of anything that dramatic that distinguishes 60-year-olds or 80-year-olds from 20-year-olds.

My dim recollection of studies is that on the whole as people age they tend to be less idealistic, more resigned to society the way it is rather than how it might be, and more constrained by realities of politics and economics (for starters).

I don't presume to offer anything in this regard based on my age, and in any case I'm only a single person (a nihilist when pressed, but one who finds himself happier pretending not to be and working sporadically for rationality, truth, justice, love, and all that good stuff).

When I read of cryonics, what comes to my mind is the escalating costs of health care and (as I see it) the need to curb the development of expensive life-extending medical procedures. Cryonics sounds instead like an extremely expensive procedure. Maybe no one is suggesting it be covered by health insurance, and it's just an option that some people pay out of pocket for. Even so, the "health care is a right, not a privilege" sentiment will mean that if it was shown to work, everyone would want it, and (in my estimation) society would go completely haywire in an unpleasant way.

Now, the substance of the above has probably been discussed elsewhere at length; I raise it is an example because when I was 21 I would have thought of it very differently than I do now.
Weekly LW Meetups: Budapest, Fort Lauderdale, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rome, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv
by FrankAdamek — 2012-04-27T17:19:05.928Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Pittsburgh - Presentation on Anthropics: 20 April 2012 06:00PM
Tel Aviv, Israel: 21 April 2012 07:00PM
Budapest Meetup: 21 April 2012 05:30PM
Rome LessWrong Meetup: 21 April 2012 07:00PM
Fort Lauderdale: 21 April 2012 06:00PM
São Paulo Meet Up 2: 23 April 2012 07:30PM
Philadelphia Meetup: Against Rationalization: 26 April 2012 07:00PM
Longmont Sparkfun Soldering Competition Field Trip: 28 April 2012 11:00AM
Graz Meetup: 28 April 2012 11:21PM
First Copenhagen meetup: 29 April 2012 05:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Cambridge, MA First Sunday Meetup: 06 May 2012 02:00PM
Cambridge, MA Third Sunday Meetup: 20 May 2012 02:20PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

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, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become ...
Meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 4/29/12
by jumandtonic — 2012-04-27T15:26:02.990Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 4/29/12

WHEN: 29 April 2012 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: America's Best Coffee, Arlington

I apologize for the short notice. The Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex area desperately needs a Less Wrong meetup! Fun fact – it is the largest metro area in the US that does not have an active meetup group!

That said - I shall be sitting at America's Best Coffee [3751 Matlock Road, Arlington TX 76105] from 1 PM to 3 PM (at the very least) on Sundays starting Sunday April 29th. Come out and meet some DFW LessWrongers.

Leading isn't really my thing, but I realize that I can't wait around forever for someone else to get the ball rolling! I am really interested in improving my mind to behave more rationally, especially with respect to instrumental rationality. I've been a self-improvement junkie for a while (Starting Strength, Toastmasters, improv, and PUA for about a year now), but only recently discovered LessWrong. Some of the recent articles sparked me to write this post. I'm working my way through some of the core sequences, slowly but surely.

I'm looking forward to meeting you folks. Message me if you plan on going so we can trade contact info beforehand.

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 4/29/12
The Problem of Thinking Too Much [LINK]
by gjm — 2012-04-27T14:31:26.552Z

This was linked to twice recently, once in a Rationality Quotes thread and once in the article about mindfulness meditation, and I thought it deserved its own article.

It's a transcript of a talk by Persi Diaconis, called "The problem of thinking too much". The general theme is more or less what you'd expect from the title: often our explicit models of things are wrong enough that trying to think them through rationally gives worse results than (e.g.) just guessing. There are some nice examples in it.
[LINK] System 2 thinking decreases religious belief
by maia — 2012-04-27T13:36:47.077Z

This experiment, to be published in Science, used priming (cues like hard-to-read fonts, showing participants the sculpture The Thinker) and problem-solving tasks to induce "analytical thinking" in the participants, and found that it seemed to reduce their degree of religious belief. Participants not given such tasks showed no such reduction.

Their methods of quantifying "religious belief" aren't given in detail (a questionnaire, probably), so it may be interesting to see the actual article when it comes out.
Extrapolating values without outsourcing
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-04-27T06:39:20.840Z

I first took note of "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" in 2006. I thought it was a brilliant idea, an exact specification of how to arrive at a better future: Figure out exactly how it is that humans make their existing choices, idealize that human decision procedure according to its own criteria, and then use the resulting "renormalized human utility function" as the value system of an AI. The first step is a problem in cognitive neuroscience, the second step is a conceptual problem in reflective decision theory, and the third step is where you make the Friendly AI.

For some reason, rather than pursuing this research program directly, people interested in CEV talk about using simulated human beings ("uploads", "ems", "whole-brain emulations") to do all the hard work. Paul Christiano just made a post called "Formalizing Value Extrapolation"; but it's really about formalizing the safe outsourcing of value extrapolation to a group of human uploads. All the details of how value extrapolation is actually performed (e.g. the three steps listed above) are left completely unspecified. Another recent article proposed that making an AI with a submodule based on models of its makers' opinions is the fast way to Friendly AI. It's also been suggested to me that simulating human thinkers and running them for centuries of subjective time until they reach agreement on the nature of consciousness is a way to tackle that problem; and clearly the same "solution" could be applied to any other aspect of FAI design, strategy, and tactics.

Whatever its value as a thought experiment, in my opinion this idea of outsourcing the hard work to simulated humans has zero practical value, and we would be much better off if the minuscule sub-sub-culture of people interested in creating Friendly AI didn't think in this way. Daydreaming about how they'd solve the problem of FAI in Permutation City is a recipe for irrelevance.

Suppose we were trying to make a "C.elegans-friendly AI". The first thing we would do is take the first step mentioned above - we would try to figure out the C.elegans utility function or decision procedure. Then we would have to decide how to aggregate utility across multiple individuals. Then we would make the AI. Performing this task for H.sapiens is a lot more difficult, and qualitatively new factors enter at the first and second steps, but I don't see why it is fu...
[SEQ RERUN] Decoherence is Simple
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-27T04:35:37.013Z

Today's post, Decoherence is Simple was originally published on 06 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The idea that decoherence fails the test of Occam's Razor is wrong as probability theory.

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 Spooky Action at a Distance, 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.
Bootstrapping to Friendliness
by  — 2012-04-26T21:54:11.717Z

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing."

155,000 people are dying, on average, every day. For those of us who are preference utilitarians, and also believe that a Friendly singularity is possible, and capable of ending this state of affairs, it also puts a great deal of pressure on us. It doesn't give us leave to be sloppy (because human extinction, even multiplied by a low probability, is a massive negative utility). But, if we see a way to achieve similar results in a shorter time frame, the cost to human life of not taking it is simply unacceptable.
I have some concerns about CEV on a conceptual level, but I'm leaving those aside for the time being. My concern is that most of the organizations concerned with a first-mover X-risk are not in a position to be that first mover -- and, furthermore, they're not moving in that direction. That includes the Singularity Institute. Trying to operationalize CEV seems like a good way to get an awful lot of smart people bashing their heads against a wall while clever idiots trundle ahead with their own experiments. I'm not saying that we should be hasty, but I am suggesting that we need to be careful of getting stuck in dark intellectual forests with lots of things that are fun to talk about until an idiot with the tinderbox burns it down.

My point, in short, is that we need to be looking for better ways to do things, and to do them extremely quickly. We are working on a very, very, existentially tight schedule.

So, if we're looking for quicker paths to a Friendly, first-mover singularity, I'd like to talk about one that seems attractive to me. Maybe it's a useful idea. If not, then at least I won't waste any more time thinking about it. Either way, I'm going to lay it out and you guys can see what you think.

So, Friendliness is a hard problem. Exactly how hard, we don't know, but a lot of smart people have radically different ideas of how to attack it, and they've all put a lot of thought into it, and that's not a good sign. However, designing a strongly superhuman AI is also a hard problem. Probably much harder than a human can solve. The good news is, we don't expect that we'll have to. If we can build something just a little bit smarter than we are...
Meetup : London
by Paul Crowley — 2012-04-26T20:03:09.209Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London

WHEN:
01 May 2012 06:30:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeares Head, 64-68 Kingsway. Holborn, London, WC2B 6BG

Let's talk about what we want out of meetups! I'd like to encourage everyone to read How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/bak/draft_how_to_run_a_successful_less_wrong_meetup/ but other links on the resources page are also useful http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_meetup_group_resources . See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : London
Optimizing your Social Network
by  — 2012-04-26T19:26:13.310Z

From Crowdsourcing The Availabiliy Hueristic:

There are people who already utilize their social network to the utmost, and who expand it strategically, adding people just to enhance the diversity of available viewpoints. But I will take a chance, and state that most of us probably don’t. And as a result, we aren’t able to recognize all of the resources available to us, to optimally use those we do recognize, or to realize optimal strategies for approaching our goals.

From Sympathetic Minds:

Who is the most formidable, among the human kind? The strongest? The smartest? More often than either of these, I think, it is the one who can call upon the most friends.

There's a lot more where that came from, but you get the point. Your social network could be the biggest, most valuable resource you have. I think we should spend more time and thought on strategies to optimize our social networks.

We have dabbled lightly in the importance of social skills, fashion, and so on, but I haven't seen discussion of *explicitly, strategically optimizing social networks*. If such discussion exists, please link me.

Anyways, after being hit by subtle hints like the above all through reading LW and other resources, and reading Dale Carnagie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, I have realized that I should work explicitly and strategically to optimize my social network. I think the rest of you are probably in the same boat, so we could all benefit from a good brainstorm on this topic.

Some Ideas:

Clubs. I belong to the local hackerspace, where technical-minded people hang out, talk about cool stuff, share ideas, help each other with projects, and share tools and resources. I also try to keep the local LW meetup in good repair, partially in the service of having a bunch of rationalist friends. I only just realized that the useful properties of these clubs probably apply to a good portion of possible clubs.

The useful property of clubs is that the relationships take drastically less overhead to maintain than more unstructured social networks. Instead of having to stay close to each friend individually, you hang out in a place where you end up dealing with them a lot, so you can get full benefit with way cheaper social bonds. Think of the difference between a bunch of objects individually tied together versus a bunch of objects in a bucket...
Recognizing memetic infections and forging resistance memes
by Johnicholas — 2012-04-26T14:40:40.309Z

What does an memetic infection look like? Well, you would encounter something (probably on the internet) that seems very compelling. You think intensely about it for a while, and it spurs you to do something - probably to post something related on the internet. After a while, the meme may not seem that compelling to you anymore, and you wonder why you invested that time and energy. The meme has reproduced itself. For example, Bruce Sterling's response to the 'New Aesthetic' is a paradigmatic example of memetic infection: he encountered it, he found it compelling, he wrote about it, I read about it and now I know about it. (Note that the word 'infection' has a stigma to it, but I don't mean it to be necessarily a bad thing. I will use 'disease' to mean 'infection with bad consequences'.)

Now, let me jump to an apparently unrelated concept - Viral Eukaryogenesis. If I understand correctly, Viral Eukaryogenesis is the theory that eukaryotes (including you and me) are inheritors of a bargain between two kinds of life - metabolic life and viral life, something like the way lichens are a bargain between fungi and algae. The nucleus that characterizes eukaryotes is supposed to be descended from a virus protein shell, and the membrane-fusion proteins that we use for gamete fusion (crucial for sex) are supposed to be descended from viral infection proteins. I am not a biologist, but my understanding of the state of biology is that it is an interesting hypothesis, as yet neither proven nor disproven. However, I'm going to talk as if it were true, because I'm actually trying to make an analogy with memes.

What is the advantage of the bargain between metabolic life and viral life? Perhaps sex. What is the advantage of sex? Perhaps defense against parasites and/or disease. What would a memetic parasite or disease look like? Well, it would be a memetic infection that, on the whole, leaves the individuals it touches worse off. For example, if someone spent so much time propagating the meme that their previous goals were harmed, then they would be suffering from a memetic disease. A cult might be a memetic disease. I have heard that abused children sometimes grow up to be abusers - that would be a memetic disease. Any sort of self-catalyzing pattern of behavior (particularly communication behavior) that on the whole harms the individuals exhibiting it is a memetic d...
[SEQ RERUN] Spooky Action at a Distance
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-26T04:34:31.752Z

Today's post, Spooky Action at a Distance: The No-Communication Theorem was originally published on 05 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

As Einstein argued long ago, the quantum physics of his era - that is, the single-global-world interpretation of quantum physics, in which experiments have single unique random results - violates Special Relativity; it imposes a preferred space of simultaneity and requires a mysterious influence to be transmitted faster than light; which mysterious influence can never be used to transmit any useful information. Getting rid of the single global world dispels this mystery and puts everything back to normal again.

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 Bell's Theorem: No EPR "Reality", 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.
Formalizing Value Extrapolation
by paulfchristiano — 2012-04-26T00:51:04.077Z

A recent post at my blog may be interesting to LW. It is a high-level discussion of what precisely defined value extrapolation might look like. I mostly wrote the essay while a visitor at FHI.

The basic idea is that we can define extrapolated values by just taking an emulation of a human, putting it in a hypothetical environment with access to powerful resources, and then adopting whatever values it eventually decides on. You might want some philosophical insight before launching into such a definition, but since we are currently laboring under the threat of catastrophe, it seems that there is virtue in spending our effort on avoiding death and delegating whatever philosophical work we can to someone on a more relaxed schedule.

You wouldn't want to run an AI with the values I lay out, but at least it is pinned down precisely. We can articulate objections relatively concretely, and hopefully begin to understand/address the difficulties.

(Posted at the request of cousin_it.)
Papers framing anthropic questions as decision problems?
by jsalvatier — 2012-04-26T00:40:11.266Z

A few weeks ago at a Seattle LW meetup, we were discussing the Sleeping Beauty problem and the Doomsday argument. We talked about how framing Sleeping Beauty problem as a decision problem basically solves it and then got the idea of using same heuristic on the Doomsday problem. I think you would need to specify more about the Doomsday setup than is usually done to do this.

We didn't spend a lot of time on it, but it got me thinking: Are there papers on trying to gain insight into the Doomsday problem and other anthropic reasoning problems by framing them as decision problems? I'm surprised I haven't seen this approach talked about here before. The idea seems relatively simple, so perhaps there is some major problem that I'm not seeing.
Intelligence as a bad
by PhilGoetz — 2012-04-25T16:55:40.850Z

An interesting new article, "Cooperation and the evolution of intelligence", uses a simple one-hidden-layer neural network to study the selection for intelligence in iterated prisoners' dilemma and iterated snowdrift dilemma games.

The article claims that increased intelligence decreased cooperation in IPD, and increased cooperation in ISD. However, if you look at figure 4 which graphs that data, you'll see that on average it decreased cooperation in both cases. They state that it increased cooperation in ISD based on a Spearman rank test. This test is deceptive in this case, because it ignores the magnitude of differences between datapoints, and so the datapoints on the right with a tiny but consistent increase in cooperation outweigh the datapoints on the left with large decreases in cooperation.

This suggests that intelligence is an externality, like pollution. Something that benefits the individual at a cost to society. They posit the evolution of intelligence as an arms race between members of the species.

ADDED: The things we consider good generally require intelligence, if we suppose (as I expect) that consciousness requires intelligence. So it wouldn't even make sense to conclude that intelligence is bad. Plus, intelligence itself might count as a good.

However, humans and human societies are currently near some evolutionary equilibrium. It's very possible that individual intelligence has not evolved past its current levels because it is at an equilibrium, beyond which higher individual intelligence results in lower social utility. In fact, if you believe SIAI's narrative about the danger of artificial intelligence and the difficulty of friendly AI, I think you would have to conclude that higher individual intelligence results in lower expected social utility, for human measures of utility.