trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Deriving probabilities from causal diagrams
by Manfred — 2014-11-13T00:28:55.636Z

What this is: an attempt to examine how causal knowledge gets turned into probabilistic predictions.

I'm not really a fan of any view of probability that involves black boxes. I want my probabilities (or more practically, the probabilities of toy agents in toy problems I consider) to be derivable from what I know in a nice clear way, following some desideratum of probability theory at every step.

Causal knowledge sometimes looks like a black box, when it comes to assigning probabilities, and I would like to crack open that box and distribute the candy inside to smiling children.

What this is not: an attempt to get causal diagrams from constraints on probabilities.

That would be silly - see Pearl's article that was recently up here. Our reasonable desire is the reverse: getting the constraints on probabilities from the causal diagrams.

The Marble Game

Consider marbles. First, I use some coin-related process to get either Heads or Tails. If Tails, I give you a black marble. If Heads, I use some other process to choose between giving you a black marble or a white marble.

Causality is an important part of the marble game. If I manually interfere with the process that gives Heads or Tails, this can change the probability you should assign of getting a black marble. But if I manually interfere with the process that gives you white or black marbles, this won't change your probability of seeing Heads or Tails.

What I'd like versus what is

The fundamental principle of putting numbers to beliefs, that always applies, is to not make up information. If I don't know of any functional differences between two events, I shouldn't give them different probabilities. But going even further - if I learn a little information, it should only change my probabilities a little.

The general formulation of this is to make your probability distribution consistent with what you know, in the way that contains the very least information possible (or conversely, the maximum entropy). This is how to not make up information.

I like this procedure; if we write down pieces of knowledge as mathematical constraints, we can find correct distribution by solving a single optimization problem. Very elegant. Which is why it's a shame that this isn't at all what we do for causal problems.

Take the marble game. To get our probabilities, we start with the first causal node, figure out the probability of...
Meetup : Glasgow (Scotland) Meetup
by bentarm — 2014-11-12T23:55:37.128Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Glasgow (Scotland) Meetup

WHEN:
16 November 2014 03:30:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Curler's Rest, 256-260 Byres Rd, Glasgow G12 8SH

At lest two of us will be meeting in the Curler's Rest on Byers Road at 3.30 on Sunday. We decided we might as well advertise here so that a. anyone who is interested can come along and b. (more likely) anyone who thinks this is much too short notice for a meetup can let us know that they exist, and we can arrange something that better suits other people next time.

I'll bring along some sort of activity/game/something that can keep us entertained/avoid awkward silences if people do turn up.

If you are intending to come, feel free to PM me on here, and I'll get back to you with contact details so you can find us.

Discussion article for the meetup : Glasgow (Scotland) Meetup
Link: Snowden interviewed
by polymathwannabe — 2014-11-12T18:48:43.013Z

"The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people."

http://www.alternet.org/world/snowden-i-did-what-i-did-because-i-believe-it-right-thing-do?paging=off
Meetup : Warsaw November Meetup
by  — 2014-11-12T12:52:56.142Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw November Meetup

WHEN:
17 November 2014 06:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Warsaw

Where?
Cafe Niespodzianka, Marszałkowska 7, 00-626 Warszawa

When?
Vote and decide: http://doodle.com/t28anzntaczs8nwi

If you use Facebook, join our local group: www.facebook.com/groups/lwwarsaw

Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw November Meetup
Link: Interesting Video About Automation and the Singularity
by cameroncowan — 2014-11-12T06:31:42.202Z

I finally got into Ello (I was mad that I couldn't get an invitation for the longest time). I found this interesting video about automation and what we should do when most jobs no longer require humans. I have often wondered what we were going to do with the millions of unemployed people when machines create untold abundance. What will we need human workers to do? I have thought that there will be certain areas where we will want to interact with people. I think bots and other machines will be more assistants rather than fully taking over tasks in a few areas. I think it will be more balanced but that does not solve the problem of millions of unemployed undermining the economy and the wealth of nations. Do we save the jobs? Do we stop automation? Is this the natural course of history? Should we all be prepared to be destitute? Should we consider minimum income proposals more closely?

The video is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&feature=youtu.be

I found it on this interesting post. He projects a much more dystopian view of the Singularity and how it will affect humanity. I think his post is not mindful of Bostrom's work which I am plowing through but it might provide some discussion fodder.

The post is here:

https://ello.co/scottdakota/post/ofb9vzDer9NoiQvwdueyAg
Expansion on A Previous Cost-Benefit Analysis of Vaccinating Healthy Adults Against Flu
by Fluttershy — 2014-11-12T04:36:50.139Z

This post is an expansion on my post in main, A Cost- Benefit Analysis of Immunizing Healthy Adults Against Influenza (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/l81/a_cost_benefit_analysis_of_immunizing_healthy/). The purpose of this post is to examine different approaches to conducting the cost-benefit analysis given there, as well as to serve as an archive for a previous version of that post.

Conservative Cost-Benefit Analysis of Receiving the Flu Vaccine (for Healthy Adults)

The cost-benefit analysis of receiving yearly flu shots in the main article was conducted with conservative estimates. The decision tree from this analysis is reprinted below:

The utility which each possible outcome contributes to either receiving a flu shot, or to not receiving a flu shot, is given in the following table:

Optimistic Cost-Benefit Analysis of Receiving the Flu Vaccine (for Healthy Adults)

The optimistic model was not discussed or referenced in the post on Main, and is only shown here. The assumptions which the optimistic model makes which differ from those made by the conservative model are:

1. In the optimistic model, it is assumed that one's insurance completely covers the cost of the flu shot.

2. In the optimistic model, a vaccine efficacy of 80% (rather than 70%) is used.

3. In the optimistic model, the expected percent of the population infected with influenza is taken to be 10%, rather than 5.7%, as in the conservative model.

4. In the optimistic model, it is assumed that one does not receive sick pay for time missed from work.

Assumption 2 was made on the basis of the NCIRD source (see http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/flu.html), which suggested that the efficacy of flu shots in healthy adults was 70-90%. Assumption 3 was made on the basis of the CDC Q&A source (see http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/disease.htm), which estimated that 5-20% of US citizens get the flu during the average flu season.

The utility which each possible outcome contributes to either receiving a flu shot, or to not receiving a flu shot, is given in the following table:

Drastically Conservative Cost-Benefit Analyses of Receiving the Flu Vaccine (for Healthy Adults)

After I started doing cost-benefit analyses which included factors that accounted for how much individuals valued not dying, I wasn't easily able to make the expected value of not receiving a flu shot higher than the expected...
The Argument from Crisis and Pessimism Bias
by Stefan_Schubert — 2014-11-11T20:25:44.734Z

Many people have argued that the public seems to have an overly negative view of society's development. For instance, this survey shows that the British public think that the crime rate has gone up, even though it has gone down. Similarly, Hans Rosling points out that the public has an overly negative view of developing world progress.

If we have such a pessimism bias, what might explain it? One standard explanation is that good news isn't news - only bad news is. A murder or a famine is news; their absense isn't. Hence people listening to the news gets a skewed picture of the world.

No doubt there is something to that. In this post I want, however, to point to another mechanism that gives rise to a pessimism bias, namely the compound effect of many uses of what I call the Argument from Crisis. (Please notify me if you've seen this idea somewhere else.)

The Argument from Crisis says that some social problem - say crime, poverty, inequality, etc - has worsened and that we therefore need to do something about it. This way of arguing is effective primarily because we are loss averse - because we think losing is worse than failing to win. By arguing that inequality was not as bad ten years ago and that we have now "lost" some degree of equality, your argument will be rhetorically stronger. The reason is that in that case more equality will eradicate a loss, whereas if inequality hasn't worsened, more equality will simply be a gain, which we value less. Hence we will be more inclined to act against inequality in the former case.

Even though the distinction between a gain and an eradication of a loss is important from a rhetorical point of view, it does not seem very relevant from a logical point of view. Whatever the level of crime or inequality is, it would seem that the value of reducing it is the same regardless of whether it has gone up or down the past ten years.

Another reason for why the Argument from Crisis is rhetorically effective is of course that we believe that whatever trend there is will continue (rightly or wrongly). Hence if we think that crime or inequality is increasing, we believe that it will continue do so unless we do something about it.

Both of these factors make the Argument from Crisis rhetorically effective. For this reason, many people argue that social problems which they want to alleviate are getting worse, even though in fa...
What's special about a fantastic outcome? Suggestions wanted.
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-11-11T11:04:30.407Z

I've been returning to my "reduced impact AI" approach, and currently working on some idea.

What I need is some ideas on features that might distinguish between an excellent FAI outcome, and a disaster. The more abstract and general the ideas, the better. Anyone got some suggestions? Don't worry about quality at this point, originality is more prized!

I'm looking for something generic that is easy to measure. At a crude level, if the only options were "papercliper" vs FAI, then we could distinguish those worlds by counting steel content.

So basically some more or less objective measure that has a higher proportion of good outcomes than the baseline.
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: TRVTH
by Manfred — 2014-11-11T06:07:55.513Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: TRVTH

WHEN:
16 November 2014 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
206 S. Cedar St. Urbana IL

How good would knowing the truth be, if we were perfect enough to use it?

How irrational do we have to be before lying to ourselves is a good idea? And how irrational do we have to be before it really is a bad idea after all?

Possibly also featuring our old nemesis, the remote associates test.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: TRVTH
A Cost- Benefit Analysis of Immunizing Healthy Adults Against Influenza
by Fluttershy — 2014-11-11T04:10:27.554Z

As of 11:30CST, 11/11/14, this cost-benefit analysis has been revised, in order to address concerns raised in the comments. See http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/l8k/expansion_on_a_previous_costbenefit_analysis_of/ for more on how the cost-benefit analysis was carried out, and on how varying certain parameters affected the determined expected value of receiving a flu shot.

Overview

The purpose of this post is to provide readers of LessWrong with a summary of what the literature has to say about the efficacy and safety of influenza vaccinations, as well as to weigh the costs of receiving yearly flu vaccinations against the benefits which healthy adults gain from vaccination. As illustrated in the "Cost-Benefit Analyses" section of this report, the expected value of receiving flu vaccinations is positive for healthy adults. Therefore, a further motivation for authoring this post is that writing this post may encourage LessWrong readers who have not yet been vaccinated this flu season to receive immediate vaccination.

Introduction and Review of Literature

Several meta-analyses on the efficacy and safety of live-attenuated influenza vaccines, trivalent inactivated influenza vaccines, and tetravalent inactivated influenza vaccines have been published within the last two years (see Coleman et. al, Demicheli et. al, Osterholm et. al). These meta- analyses reached broadly similar conclusions regarding the efficacy of flu vaccines, which groups were most at risk for being infected with influenza, the safety of being vaccinated, and the magnitude of social harm caused yearly by influenza. However, there was disagreement between some articles regarding whether or not vaccination of healthy adults against influenza should be pursued as a public health policy. Specifically, the Demicheli paper (wrongly) found "no evidence for the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure". The issue of whether or not healthy adults should receive flu shots will be examined in the "Cost-Benefit Analyses" section of this report.

While the severity of flu seasons varies greatly year-to-year, an average of 24,000 deaths from the flu occur yearly in the US (NCIRD); approximately 90% of these deaths are in people of at least 65 years of age (NCIRD, CDC Key Facts). For all flu seasons between 1976 and 2007, an average of 2,385 adul...
Superintelligence 9: The orthogonality of intelligence and goals
by KatjaGrace — 2014-11-11T02:00:09.458Z

This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.

Welcome. This week we discuss the ninth section in the reading guide: The orthogonality of intelligence and goals. This corresponds to the first section in Chapter 7, 'The relation between intelligence and motivation'.

This post summarizes the section, and offers a few relevant notes, and ideas for further investigation. Some of my own thoughts and questions for discussion are in the comments.

There is no need to proceed in order through this post, or to look at everything. Feel free to jump straight to the discussion. Where applicable and I remember, page numbers indicate the rough part of the chapter that is most related (not necessarily that the chapter is being cited for the specific claim).

Reading: 'The relation between intelligence and motivation' (p105-8)

Summary

The orthogonality thesis: intelligence and final goals are orthogonal: more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal (p107)

Some qualifications to the orthogonality thesis: (p107)

Simple agents may not be able to entertain some goals

Agents with desires relating to their intelligence might alter their intelligence

The motivations of highly intelligent agents may nonetheless be predicted (p108):

Via knowing the goals the agent was designed to fulfil

Via knowing the kinds of motivations held by the agent's 'ancestors'

Via finding instrumental goals that an agent with almost any ultimate goals would desire (e.g. to stay alive, to control money)

Another view

John Danaher at Philosophical Disquisitions starts a series of posts on Superintelligence with a somewhat critical evaluation of the orthogonality thesis, in the process contributing a nice summary of nearby philosophical debates. Here is an excerpt, entitled 'is the orthogonality thesis plausible?':

At first glance, the orthogonality thesis seems pretty plausible. For example, the idea of a superintelligent machine whose final goal is to maximise the number of paperclips in the world (the so-called paperclip maximiser) seems to be logically consistent. We can imagine — can’t we? — a machine

...
Should we go all in on existential risk? - Considering Effective Altruism
by Capla — 2014-11-10T23:23:37.061Z

Apparently, at a recent EA summit Robin Hanson berated the attendees for giving to more than one charity. I think his critique is salient: given our human scope insensitivity, giving all your charity-money to one cause feels like helping with only *one* thing, even if that one organization does vastly more good, much more efficiently, than any other group, and so every dollar given to that organization does more good than an anything else that could be done with that dollar. More rational and more effective is to find the most efficient charity and give only to that charity, until it has achieved its goal so completely that it is no longer the most efficient charity.

That said, I feel that there are at least some circumstances under which it is appropriate to divide one's charity dollars: those that include risky investments.
If a positive singularity were to occur, the impact would be enormous: it would swamp any other good that I could conceivably do. Yet, I don't know how likely a positive singularity is; it seems to be a long shot. Furthermore, I don't know how much my charity dollars affect the probability one way or another. It may be that a p-singularity will either happen or it won't, and there's not much I can do about it. There's a huge pay-off but high uncertainty. In contrast, I could (for instance) buy mosquito nets for third world counties, which has a lower, but much more certain pay-off.
Some people are more risk-seeking than others, and it seems to be a matter of preference whether one takes risky bets or more certain ones. However, there are "irrational" answers, since one can calculate the expected pay-off of a gambit by mere multiplication. It is true that it is imprudent to bet one's life savings on an unlikely chance of unimaginable wealth, but this is because of quirks of human utility calculation: losses are more painful than gain are enjoyable, and there is a law of diminishing marginal returns in play (to most of us, a gift of a billion dollars is not very emotionally different than two billion, and we would not be indifferent between a 100% chance of getting a billion dollars and a 50% chance of getting two billion dollars on the one hand, and a 50% chance of getting nothing on the other. In fact, I would trade my 50/50 chance of a billion, for a 100% certainty of a 10 million). But, we would do well to stick to mathemat...
Exploiting EDT
by Benya_Fallenstein — 2014-11-10T19:59:51.000Z

The problem with EDT is, as David Lewis put it, its "irrational policy of managing the news" (Lewis, 1981): it chooses actions not only because of their effects of the world, but also because of what the fact that it's taking these actions tells it about events the agent can't affect at all. The canonical example is the smoking lesion problem.

I've long been uncomfortable with the smoking lesion problem as the case against EDT, because an AI system would know its own utility function, and would therefore know whether or not it values "smoking" (presumably in the AI case it would be a different goal), and if it updates on this fact it would behave correctly in the smoking lesion. (This is an AI-centric version of the "tickle defense" of EDT.) Nate and I have come up with a variant I find much more convincing: a way to get EDT agents to pay you for managing the news for them, which works by the same mechanism that makes these agents one-box in Newcomb's problem. (It's a variation of the thought experiment in my LessWrong post on "the sin of updating when you can change whether you exist".)

Suppose that there's this EDT agent around which plays the stock market. It's pretty good at doing so, and has amassed a substantial net worth, but, unsurprisingly, it's not perfect; there's always a small chance of its investments going south. Currently, for example, there's a bit of a hubbub around the CEO of one of the companies the agent has been investing in, and the agent assigns a 0.4% chance that there's a scandal about to be revealed which will force that CEO to resign; if that's the case, it expects to lose $150,000,000.

Along comes a clever AI researcher, who is known to be extremely good at predicting how different kinds of AI systems will react on simple thought experiments, who has access to the source code of our agent, and who happens to be able to access information about whether or not there's a scandal. The researcher could find out and sell the information to the agent, but since it's a low-probability scenario, the value of that information wouldn't be that large. Instead, the researcher has a better idea: they are going to

find out whether or not there is a scandal;

figure out whether or not the agent will pay them $100,000,000 if they ask it to in the next step;

if either (a) there is no scandal and the researcher predicts that the agent will pay up, o

...
The value of doing one's own philanthropic research?
by Capla — 2014-11-10T19:15:00.013Z

I want to be informed and to act because I have evaluated the evidence, not just go "with the herd." There's a stigma against simply taking the word of an authority, and rightly so; on the net, the world would be better if more people stopped to think for themselves (does anyone disagree?). But it is also the case that there are many fields in which I have to defer to experts because I simply am not equipped to deal with or consider the problems.

I wonder, is it even worth my doing research on charities, when there exist resources like givewell, which will almost certainly be able to do a more thorough and more accurate analysis than I would be able to do? Should I just defer to givewell when giving my effective charity?

I'll note that there is a difference between values and facts: I might decide for myself that I care more about some issues than others, due to variations in my personal moral calculus (for instance, I may value the well being of no-human mammals, relative to human mammals, more than others, and so chose to support animal rights groups, instead of poverty elimination), but might still defer to the experts with regards to how to most efficiently accomplish my stated goals.

Also, do I have good evidence to defer to the expertise of givewell? I like the idea, their analysis seems insightful, and people on this forum often speak highly of them. But these are all relativity superficial and don't seem like sufficient reason to allow them to dictate my giving (that's just lazily, submitting to the slick-looking authority). How do I evaluate the expertise of experts?