trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Brief Overview of Machine Ethics
by lukeprog — 2011-03-05T06:09:50.550Z

Earlier, I lamented that even though Eliezer named scholarship as one of the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, there is surprisingly little interest in (or citing of) the academic literature on some of Less Wrong's central discussion topics.

Previously, I provided an overview of formal epistemology, that field of philosophy that deals with (1) mathematically formalizing concepts related to induction, belief, choice, and action, and (2) arguing about the foundations of probability, statistics, game theory, decision theory, and algorithmic learning theory.

Now, I've written Machine Ethics is the Future, an introduction to machine ethics, the academic field that studies the problem of how to design artificial moral agents that act ethically (along with a few related problems). There, you will find PDFs of a dozen papers on the subject.

Enjoy!
Case study: Console Insurance
by gwern — 2011-03-05T02:11:09.954Z

I've sometimes seen people say that they need concrete simple examples of ideas like expected utility and Bayes' theorem. So, continuing in the same vein as An Abortion Dialogue and Case Study: Melatonin, I recently polished up my shorter-but-hopefully-still-interesting article on Console Insurance.

It's basically a short discussion of how back of the envelop estimates show console insurance (and by extension, most warranty extensions) to be a bad investment.
Well-done documentary on the singularity: 'Transcendent Man'
by lukeprog — 2011-03-04T23:07:28.670Z

I just watched Transcendent Man about the singularity and Ray Kurzweil in particular. It's well-made, full-length, and includes the most popular criticisms of Kurzweil: that his prediction timeframes are driven by his own hope for immortality, that the timescale of his other predictions are too optimistic, that his predictions about the social outcomes of revolutionary technology are naively optimistic, and so on. Ben Goertzel and others get much face time.

You can rent or buy it on iTunes.
The Importance of Mathematics (Gowers)
by komponisto — 2011-03-04T20:32:37.911Z

For the past few days I've been pondering the question of how best to respond to paulfchristiano's recent posts and comments questioning the value of mathematical research. I don't think I can do it concisely, in a single post; bridging the inferential distance may require something more like a sequence of posts. I may end up writing such a sequence eventually, since it would involve ideas I've actually been wanting to write up for some time, and which are actually relevant to more than just the specific questions at issue here (whether society should sponsor mathematics, and given that it does, whether paulfchristiano or anyone else in the LW readership should pursue it).

However, as the preceding parenthetical hints at, I'm actually somewhat conflicted about whether I should even bother. Although I believe that mathematical research should be conducted by somebody, it's not at all clear to me that the discipline needs more people beyond those who already "get" its importance, and are out there doing it rather than writing skeptical posts like paulfchristiano's. It seems perfectly plausible to me that those who feel as paulfchristiano does should just leave the profession and do something else that feels more "important" to them. This is surely the best practical solution on an individual level for those who think they have a better idea than existing institutions of where the most promising research directions lie, at least until Hansonian prediction markets are (ever) implemented.

Nevertheless, for those interested in the society-level question of whether mathematics (as such) may be justifiably pursued by anyone, or any community of people, as a professional occupation (which is quite distinct from the question of whether e.g. paulfchristiano should personally pursue it), I recommend, at least as a start, grappling with the arguments put forward by the best mathematicians in their own words. I think this essay by Timothy Gowers (a Fields Medalist), titled "The Importance of Mathematics", is a good place to begin. I would particularly draw the attention of those like paulfchristiano, who think they have a good idea of which branches of mathematics are useful and which aren't, to the following passage, from pp.8-9 (unfortunately the illustrations are missing, but the point being made is pretty clear nonetheless):

So - mathematicians can tell their gov

...
The Trouble with Bright Girls [link]
by Dreaded_Anomaly — 2011-03-04T04:17:40.900Z

The Trouble with Bright Girls (article @ the Huffington Post)

Excerpt:

My graduate advisor, psychologist Carol Dweck (author of "Mindset") conducted a series of studies in the 1980s, looking at how Bright Girls and boys in the fifth grade handled new, difficult and confusing material.

She found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

The topic of this article seems to relate to several common Less Wrong issues: the nature of human intelligence, and the gender imbalance among LW readers.

I'm not sure how much credence I give to the proposed explanation of the difference in mindsets. It may well have to do with socialization and feedback, but the specific description of feedback that is presented seems a bit too much of a "just-so story" to me. The difference itself is fascinating, though, and I hope more is done to further our understanding of it.
Why are promisers innocent?
by KatjaGrace — 2011-03-04T03:13:44.000Z

It is generally considered unethical to break promises. It is not considered unethical to make promises you would have been better off not to make. Yet when a promise is made and then broken, there is little reason in the abstract to suppose that either the past promiser or the present promise breaker made a better choice about what the future person should do.

Image from icaromoreno

For instance suppose a married woman has an affair. Much moral criticism is usually directed at her for having the affair, yet almost none is directed at her earlier self for marrying her husband in the first place.

It’s not that the later woman, who broke the promise, caused more harm than the earlier woman. Both of their acts were needed together to cause the broken promise. The later woman would have been acting just fine if the earlier woman hadn’t done what she did.

I think we direct all criticism to the later women who breaks the promise because it is very useful to be seen as someone who thinks its important to keep promises. It is of little use to be seen as the sort of person who doesn’t make stupid promises, except as far as it suggests we are more likely to keep promises.

This seems to me a clear case of morality being self serving. It serves others too in this case as usual, but the particular form of it is chosen to help its owner. Which is not particularly surprising if you think morality is a bunch of useful behaviours evolved like all our other self serving bits and pieces. However if you think it is more like maths – something which is actually out there, and we have somehow evolved to be able to intuitively appreciate – it is more surprising that it self serving like this.
Rationality Activism: Open Thread
by atucker — 2011-03-04T02:06:56.838Z

So as I read around the discussion section I keep coming across ideas (like this, this, this, or this) which all seem to be very related to the same topics:

How do we use rationality to better contribute to the world?

How do we spread rationality among other people?

Other posts talk about similar things.

I have been interested in this for a while now, and have gotten some great feedback.

But now I'm wondering how many groups, other than SIAI, are trying to do this. It seems like it would be silly to have something like this stagnate because of a simple coordination problem.

So if you are, please come forth and comment. If you're interested, do the same. Share what you know, learn from others, maybe maybe maybe get the ball rolling a bit more.
Note:
I changed the title (originally "Rationality Activism Groups") to reflect the more discussion-oriented nature of this thread.
What are you working on?
by jsalvatier — 2011-03-04T01:33:32.120Z

Whpearson recently mentioned that people in some other online communities frequently ask "what are you working on?". I personally love asking and answering this question. I made sure to ask it at the Seattle meetup. However, I don't often see it asked here in the comments, so I will ask it:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started, those are for a different thread.

Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).

Talk about your goals for the project.

Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.

Link to your work if it's linkable
Shikamaru vs. the Logical Fallacies
by Nick_Roy — 2011-03-04T00:35:07.199Z

Presenting: Shikamaru vs. the Logical Fallacies, a rationalist fanfic set in the Naruto universe and starring a realistically rational Shikamaru. The writer is a friend of mine going under the alias FanFicBias, and I am an editor along with the author.

We welcome reviews on FanFiction.Net and both reviews and discussion (naturally) are welcome here. We are looking to improve our work, so please be as honest and as harsh in constructive criticism as you like. Praise, however, is also always welcome!

This story does contain SPOILERS for the Naruto series. Readers who are unfamiliar with Naruto may have a hard time understanding what's going on, but it would still be interesting to hear from non-Naruto fans, since perhaps we can ameliorate this issue with the aid of constructive criticism.

We do strive to follow the First Law of Fanfiction and the Rule of Rationalist Fanfiction, so please call us on it if we fail to do so.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6781426/1/Shikamaru_versus_the_Rational_Fallacies

Note: Thanks to all reviewers and participants in this discussion! We're trying hard to make Part 2 even better.
Sydney Less Wrong Meetup (cancelled due to lack of interest)
by syllogism — 2011-03-03T06:21:38.636Z

Update: Well this seems to be a bust =/. Maybe people don't check the "new" section, only "promoted", or maybe the site visit statistics are deceptive.

Just saw here that Sydney has the 2nd most LWers of any city without a meet-up. So, let's have a meet-up!

Let's instant-runoff vote on the specifics until Sunday 6th, and I'll update the post with the verdict then:

1. Which date and time of the following work for you? Rank the ones you can attend in preference order

a) Evening of Tuesday, 15th March

b) Evening of Wednesday, 16th March

c) Afternoon of Saturday, 19th March

c) Evening of Saturday, 19th March

e) Afternoon of Sunday, 20th March

2. What kind of setting do you prefer?

a) Bar

b) Restaurant

c) Other (park for picnic, cafe, etc. Please specify)

3. Which area of Sydney is best for you? Rank the ones you could make it to.

a) City/Central

b) Lower North Shore (e.g. Neutral Bay, North Sydney, etc)

c) Greater West (e.g. Parramatta)

d) Inner West (e.g. Newtown, Enmore). Tempted to suggest the Humanist House in Chippendale, although I don't know what the deal with it is.
Go Try Things
by atucker — 2011-03-03T01:51:38.645Z

This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of posts about why you should try things, and with strategies against common reasons for not doing so.

Overview:

You’ve probably read about how to properly turn information into beliefs, and how to squeeze every last bit from your data. There's been less attention on the importance of going and getting data.

This article is about how personal experience is an incredibly useful form of data, and in particular how in many activities going out and trying something is more marginally useful than doing more exploratory research into it. In particular, I'll examine how personal experience is useful because it makes information more tangible and easier to learn, is good practice, and exposes common circumstances that you didn't build your models to handle.

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 on pretty well for hundreds of years.

Rationality is about how to turn data into maps. But this still requires data. I think that in a wide variety of not particularly theoretical subjects (like sports, social interactions, negotiation, cooking, etc.) rationality needs to be augmented by personal experience. Instrumental Rationality turns models into high-utility actions, but before you can do that you need a model.

Tangibility:

Personal experience is useful in fields where there are certain building blocks which are treated as conceptual atoms when thinking consciously about it, but where said building blocks are hard to acquire without experience. In these fields, experience is needed before advice can be particularly useful.

One thing about these kinds of fields is that your brain has a lot of circuitry built in for dealing with things related to them. Sports involve muscle memory and your kinesthetic sense. Social interactions involve a lot of non-verbal cues that your brain is optimized to handle. If you’re unaware of these basic concerns, then further progression is difficult. You can give the best explanation in the world, but if you missed that the other person didn’t understand your first assertion then it doesn’t matter.

The best way that I’ve found for me to be able to recognize and learn things like that is for me to go out ...
Testing Intelligence
by paulfchristiano — 2011-03-02T23:29:54.260Z

In my model of human behavior, there is an unobservable parameter I associate with intelligence. I observe people's behavior when playing a game, when solving a problem, when defending their beliefs, or when learning something new, and I infer something about their intelligence. This in turn informs my predictions about their success in a wide variety of pursuits. In practice, I often make strong predictions about someone's intelligence after observing their behavior on a single occasion.

An accurate conception of intelligence seems to be generally important. Understanding what easily leveraged factors affect someone's intelligence---during childhood, later education, and after formal education is complete---is important if your goal is improving intelligence generally. If you are considering relatively expensive personal engagement to develop rationality, you may want to direct efforts at individuals who have the potential to have a significant impact as researchers or entrepreneurs. And so on.

Before thinking about how to understand determiners of intelligence, how to measure intelligence effectively, or the effects of intelligence on behavior, I would first like to get a feel for what my intuitive understanding of intelligence really corresponds to, if anything. It is possible that my intuitive assessments of intelligence are largely unrelated to reality, and that my beliefs about the world could be improved by discarding them. It is also possible that some of my intuitions about intelligence are quite accurate, and I could make better decisions by giving them more credence or by changing the way I use those intuitive judgments.

Intuitively, I expect the results of many types of otherwise apparently unrelated tests to be very tightly correlated with intelligence. To understand the extent to which this intuition is correct, I am considering conducting a slightly systematic study of the relationship between different metrics. I would appreciate pointers to reliable scholarship surrounding this question, but a brief search turned up mostly very muddled thinking and a general lack of people doing good experiments.

Here is a range of metrics which I suspect correlate well with my conception of intelligence, at least in certain regimes (some of these metrics may only correlate meaningfully when applied to very bright subjects, or may not correlate meaningfull...
Are You a Paralyzed Subordinate Monkey?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2011-03-02T21:12:37.464Z

During a discussion today about the bizarre "can't get crap done" phenomenon that afflicts large fractions of our community, the suggestion came up that most people can't do anything where there is a perceived choice that includes the null option / "do nothing" as an option. Of which Michael Vassar made the following observation:

In a monkey tribe, there's no verbal communication - they can't discuss where to go using language. So if you get up and start going anywhere, you must be the leader.

And if you're not the leader, it is not good for your reproductive fitness to act like one. In modern times the penalties for standing up are much lower, but our instincts haven't updated.

Interesting to reconsider the events of "To lead, you must stand up" in this light. It makes more sense if you read it as "None of those people had instincts saying it was a good idea to declare themselves the leader of the monkey tribe, in order to solve this particular coordination problem where 'do nothing' felt like a viable option" instead of "nobody had the initiative".
What Else Would I Do To Make a Living?
by magfrump — 2011-03-02T20:09:47.330Z

Response to: The Value of Theoretical Research

Reading paulfchristiano's article the other day, I realized that I had had many similar discussions with myself, and have been guilty of motivated stopping and poor answers to all of them.

However, one major roadblock in my pursuing better answers, is that I feel that I have been "locked in" to my current path.

I am currently a mathematics Ph.D. student. I did not have a minor. I don't have significant programming skills or employment experience. I know nothing about finance. I know a lot about mathematics.

Paul says:

There is a shortage of intelligent, rational people in pretty much every area of human activity. I would go so far as to claim this is the limiting input for most fields.

However, "most fields" is not a very good tool for narrowing my search space; I have spent my entire life in school, and I like having structures and schedules that tell me when I'm doing productive things and that I've progressed to certain stages. I'm not ready to drop out and do whatever, and I don't have a particular idea of what whatever might be.

On the other hand, I currently have a variety of resources available to me. For example, I have a steady income (a grad student stipend isn't much, but it's plenty for me to live on), and I have the ability to take undergraduate classes for free (though not the spare time at the moment.)

My current intent is to continue and finish my Ph.D., but to attempt to take classes in other subjects, such as linguistics, biology and chemistry, and computer science which might lead to other interesting career paths.

Has anybody else had a similar feeling of being "locked in"? How have you responded to it? For those who have studied mathematics, are you still? If you continued, what helped you make that decision? If you stopped, what about that? What did you end up doing? How did you decide on it?
Rationality Quotes: March 2011
by Alexandros — 2011-03-02T11:14:22.319Z

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.
Hong Kong LW meetup
by Isaac — 2011-03-02T09:53:32.353Z

Any LW readers in Asia's world city interested in a meetup? I have a hunch that there might be more of us that the statistics suggest, possibly due to some of us showing up in the analytics as being based in Kowloon, not Hong Kong. At any rate, I'd be surprised if we couldn't find enough people for a decent gathering, HK being such a wired and technophilic place.

Date: Saturday 12th March, 6:00 pm.

Place: 168 Future Bar, Mong Kok

Reading Starting a LW Meetup is Easy inspired me to try and get this moving. Remember, you don't need to be an active contributor to the site to come along and meet like-minded people (I personally don't post or comment very often, though I do lurk a lot). Don't be shy, if you're at all interested please reply so we can get the ball rolling!
[LINK] John Baez Interview with astrophysicist Gregory Benford 
by multifoliaterose — 2011-03-02T09:53:26.298Z

The content of John Baez's This Week's Finds: Week 310:

Includes

Discussion of global warming and geoengineering.

A reference to a paper by David Wolpert and Gregory Benford on Newcomb's paradox

Note: The upcoming This Week's Finds: Week 311 is an interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky by John Baez.
Revisiting Psy-Kosh's Non-Anthropic Decision Problem
by Vaniver — 2011-03-02T06:24:36.149Z

Previous formulation here. (There's a link to the original formulation from there.)

I showed a related problem to someone and got back the objection "well, that's a coordination problem- you need game theory to model the other players, and so you can't simply declare a strategy correct." At first I thought that was an evasion, and so reformulated it so you make all the decisions. It seems to me that this problem is isomorphic to the previous formulation, except switching from nay to yay is more clearly ridiculous (if you disagree, I'd like to hear it!). Here it is:

To simplify calculations, assume you are risk-neutral with regards to dollars at this scale. You provide me a byte of 8 bits, all zeros or ones. I flip a fair coin: if it lands heads, I select one bit from the byte you provided me uniformly at random; if it lands tails, I select seven bits from the byte you provided me uniformly at random.

If all bits selected are 0s, I pay you $21. For every selected bit that is a 1, I pay you $4.

You do some byte-level calculations before I flip the coin, and decide that the byte 00000000 is best, because it has an expected value of $21/2+$21/2=$21. The coin is flipped, and then without telling you the flip I give you the option to flip every bit that I will select (or you imagine this, and submit the opposite byte instead). Bit-level reasoning suggests you should flip all bits, as each bit impacts the total result in 8/16 cases, and in seven of those cases the coin came up tails. 7/8*$28+1/8*$4=$25>$21. Byte-level reasoning suggests you shouldn't flip all the bits, because the byte 11111111 has an expected value of $4/2+$28/2=$16<$21. This is the conflict in the formulation linked above- before you know you're a decider, you think "nay" is superior,but once you know you're a decider, you calculate that "yay" is superior.

But this still has a coordination problem- the $21 payoff requires every bit to be a 0. What happens when we get rid of that?

Now, if I get heads, I pay out $21 for a 0 and $4 for a 1. If I get tails, I pay out $3 for each 0 and $4 for each one. E[00000000]=21, E[11111111]=16 (as before), but now E[0]=21*1/8+3*7/8=5.25 and E[1]=4*1/8+4*7/8=4. Now, by precisely the same amount as the byte-level analysis, E[0]>E[1]! Indeed, this appears to be general.1

Is there a way to formulate an Uncoordinated Psy-Kosh's Non-Anthropic Decision Problem? (UPKN...