trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[fic idea] Rationalist Gurren Lagann?
by Multiheaded — 2011-07-07T05:27:31.026Z

(If you don't know what Gurren Lagann is, don't hesitate to google & watch it, unless you have an aversion to anime in general, in which case ignore this altogether.)

I feel that a fanfic like HPMOR but with Gurren Lagann's setting and characters could be 1) absolutely kickass (given EY-level writing) and 2) in fact better suited to treatises on rationalism, logic and science than Harry Potter. The premise I saw on /a/, an indeterminate time ago, without any connection to HPMOR (hell, it was probably before HPMOR), but it struck me then as surprisingly well-conceived. It went like: "The heroes relieve the entire history of science, first inventing the scientific method, then examining specific fields, one per arc, for useful and creative stuff to use against the powers-that-be keeping humanity down through their ancient, rigid knowledge." Now, this is easy enough to fit into the specific setting of TTGL, first using older tech and basic rationality against Lordgenome, then, after the timeskip, going for current and speculative science to bring down the vastly more powerful but anti-creative Anti-Spirals, ultimately aiming for FAI. The divergence point could be, like in HPMOR, Simon's upbringing, e.g. his parents surviving and teaching him the few remaining scraps of the Lost Arts... then Kamina convinces him to improve on it, think freely, try new methods instead of just new applications, etc.

I should also make it clear that I'm not writing that anytime that could be reasonably defined as "soon", and am in fact looking to force the idea onto someone of you fine folks.

Well, discuss!

Possible structure:

v001

- ep. 1: Divergence point, state of humanity. Fallacies & biases: "It can't be any other way", "Must be a good reason for us to be kept underground".

- Kamina makes his first breakout attempt. Village Elder makes a very early point about heedless risk, existential or otherwise. Contrarianism. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

- The Beastman-driven mech falls down, kills Simon's parents. World-shattering event from outside the box. Kamina drags Simon kicking and screaming into battle, makes a point: why no-one truly wants to just die on an unfair universe.

- They figure out how to start up and control Lagann. Black box. Basics of experimentation.

v002

- Simon's parents had an archeotech laptop, so, besides knowing a tiny bit of BASIC, he had played a c...
An Outside View on Less Wrong's Advice
by Mass_Driver — 2011-07-07T04:46:17.611Z

Related to: Intellectual Hipsters, X-Rationality: Not So Great, The Importance of Self-Doubt, That Other Kind of Status,

This is a scheduled upgrade of a post that I have been working on in the discussion section. Thanks to all the commenters there, and special thanks to atucker, Gabriel, Jonathan_Graehl, kpreid, XiXiDu, and Yvain for helping me express myself more clearly.

-------------------

For the most part, I am excited about growing as a rationalist. I attended the Berkeley minicamp; I play with Anki cards and Wits & Wagers; I use Google Scholar and spreadsheets to try to predict the consequences of my actions.

There is a part of me, though, that bristles at some of the rationalist 'culture' on Less Wrong, for lack of a better word. The advice, the tone, the vibe 'feels' wrong, somehow. If you forced me to use more precise language, I might say that, for several years now, I have kept a variety of procedural heuristics running in the background that help me ferret out bullshit, partisanship, wishful thinking, and other unsound debating tactics -- and important content on this website manages to trigger most of them. Yvain suggests that something about the rapid spread of positive affect not obviously tied to any concrete accomplishments may be stimulating a sort of anti-viral memetic defense system.

Note that I am *not* claiming that Less Wrong is a cult. Nobody who runs a cult has such a good sense of humor about it. And if they do, they're so dangerous that it doesn't matter what I say about it. No, if anything, "cultishness" is a straw man. Eliezer will not make you abandon your friends and family, run away to a far-off mountain retreat and drink poison Kool-Aid. But, he *might* convince you to believe in some very silly things and take some very silly actions.

Therefore, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill, I am writing a one-article attack on much of we seem to hold dear. If there is anything true about what I'm saying, you will want to read it, so that you can alter your commitments accordingly. Even if, as seems more likely, you don't believe a word I say, reading a semi-intelligent attack on your values and mentally responding to it will probably help you more clearly understand what it is that you do believe.

Wishful Thinking

As far as I can tell, some of the most prominent themes in terms of short-term behavioral advice being...
How to annoy misanthropes and bleeding-hearts
by PhilGoetz — 2011-07-07T02:27:38.740Z

Related to Not for the Sake of Selfishness Alone, Crime and Punishment, and Separate morality from free will.

Here is a simple method for resolving some arguments about free will. Not for resolving the question, mind you. Just the arguments.

One group of people doesn't want to give people any credit for anything they do. All good deeds are ultimately done for "selfish" reasons, where even having a goal of helping other people counts as selfish. The quote from Lukeprog's recent article is a perfect example:

No one deserves thanks from another about something he has done for him or goodness he has done. He is either willing to get a reward from God, therefore he wanted to serve himself. Or he wanted to get a reward from people, therefore he has done that to get profit for himself. Or to be mentioned and praised by people, therefore, it is also for himself. Or due to his mercy and tenderheartedness, so he has simply done that goodness to pacify these feelings and treat himself.

- Mohammed Ibn Al-Jahm Al-Barmaki

Another group of people doesn't want to blame people for anything they do. Criminals sometimes had criminal parents - crime was in their environment and in their genes. Or, to take a different variety of this attitude, cultural beliefs that seem horrible to us are always justifiable within their own cultural context.

The funny thing is that these are different groups. Both assert that people should not be given credit, or else blame, for their actions, beyond the degree of free will that they had. Yet you rarely find the same person who will not give people credit for their good deeds unwilling to blame them for their bad deeds, or vice-versa.

When you find yourself in an argument that appears to be about free will, but is really about credit or blame, ask the person to agree that the matter applies equally to good deeds and bad deeds - however they define those terms. This may make them lose interest in the argument - because it no longer does what they want it to do.
Outline of possible Singularity scenarios (that are not completely disastrous)
by Wei Dai — 2011-07-06T21:17:22.701Z

Suppose we could look into the future of our Everett branch and pick out those sub-branches in which humanity and/or human/moral values have survived past the Singularity in some form. What would we see if we then went backwards in time and look at how that happened? Here's an attempt to answer that question, or in other words to enumerate the not completely disastrous Singularity scenarios that seem to have non-negligible probability. Note that the question I'm asking here is distinct from "In what direction should we try to nudge the future?" (which I think logically ought to come second).

Uploading first

Become superintelligent (self-modify or build FAI), then take over the world

Take over the world as a superorganism

self-modify or build FAI at leisure

(Added) stasis

Competitive upload scenario

(Added) subsequent singleton formation

(Added) subsequent AGI intelligence explosion

no singleton

IA (intelligence amplification) first

Clone a million von Neumanns (probably government project)

Gradual genetic enhancement of offspring (probably market-based)

Pharmaceutical

Direct brain/computer interface

What happens next? Upload or code?

Code (de novo AI) first

Scale of project

International

National

Large Corporation

Small Organization

Secrecy - spectrum between

totally open

totally secret

Planned Friendliness vs "emergent" non-catastrophe

If planned, what approach?

"Normative" - define decision process and utility function manually

"Meta-ethical" - e.g., CEV

"Meta-philosophical" - program AI how to do philosophy

If emergent, why?

Objective morality

Convergent evolution of values

Acausal game theory

Standard game theory (e.g., Robin's idea that AIs in a competitive scenario will respect human property rights due to standard game theoretic considerations)

Competitive vs. local FOOM

(Added) Simultaneous/complementary development of IA and AI

Sorry if this is too cryptic or compressed. I'm writing this mostly for my own future reference, but perhaps it could be expanded more if there is interest. And of course I'd welcome any scenarios that may be missing from this list.
Basics of Human Reinforcement
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-06T21:09:01.568Z

Today: some more concepts from reinforcement learning and some discussion on their applicability to human behavior.

For example: most humans do things even when they seem unlikely to result in delicious sugar water. Is this a violation of behaviorist principles?
No. For one thing, yesterday's post included a description of secondary reinforcers, those reinforcers which are not hard-coded evolutionary goods like food and sex, but which nevertheless have a conditioned association with good things. Money is the classic case of a secondary reinforcer among humans. Little colored rectangles are not naturally reinforcing, but from a very young age most humans learn that they can be used to buy pleasant things, like candy or toys or friends. Behaviorist-inspired experiments on humans often use money as a reward, and have yet to run into many experimental subjects whom it fails to motivate1.
Speaking of friends, status may be a primary reinforcer specific to social animals. I don't know if being able to literally feel reinforcement going on is a real thing, but I maintain I can feel the rush of reward when someone gives me a compliment. If that's too unscientific for you, consider studies in which monkeys will "exchange" sugary juice for the opportunity to look at pictures of high status monkeys, but demand extra juice in exchange for looking at pictures of low status monkeys.
Although certain cynics might consider money and status an exhaustive list, we may also add moral, aesthetic, and value-based considerations. Evolutionary psychology explains why these might exist and Bandura called some of them "internal reinforcement".
But more complicated reinforcers alone are not sufficient to bridge the gap between lever-pushing pigeons and human behavior. Humans have an ability to select for or against behaviors without trying them. For example: most of us would avoid going up to Mr. T and giving him the finger. But most of us have not personally tried this behavior and observed the consequences.
Is this the result of pure reason? No; the rational part of our mind is the part telling us that Mr. T is probably sixty years old by now and far too deep in the media spotlight to want to risk a scandal and jail time by beating up a random stranger. So where exactly is the reluctance coming from?

GENERALIZATION
Roko wrote in his post Ugh Fields that "your brain propagates psychologica...
Meetup : Weekly Berkeley Meetup
by FrankAdamek — 2011-07-06T18:47:57.166Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Weekly Berkeley Meetup

WHEN:
06 July 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2128 Oxford Street, Berkeley, CA 94704

Regular Weekly Berkeley Meetup! We'll meet at 7:00 at starbucks, and depart for a nearby restaraunt at 7:20. Give me a call at 952.217.0505 if you arrive past 7:20 and would like to know where we've gone.

The suggested topic this week will be Aumann updating, and whether our beliefs can, do, and should count as evidence about the world.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Weekly Berkeley Meetup
What do the patterns of good and bad behaviours in an online world reveal about the nature of humanity?
by XiXiDu — 2011-07-06T17:36:50.622Z

Title:

Emergence of good conduct, scaling and Zipf laws in human behavioral sequences in an online world

Abstract:

We study behavioral action sequences of players in a massive multiplayer online game. In their virtual life players use eight basic actions which allow them to interact with each other. These actions are communication, trade, establishing or breaking friendships and enmities, attack, and punishment. We measure the probabilities for these actions conditional on previous taken and received actions and find a dramatic increase of negative behavior immediately after receiving negative actions. Similarly, positive behavior is intensified by receiving positive actions. We observe a tendency towards anti-persistence in communication sequences. Classifying actions as positive (good) and negative (bad) allows us to define binary 'world lines' of lives of individuals. Positive and negative actions are persistent and occur in clusters, indicated by large scaling exponents alpha~0.87 of the mean square displacement of the world lines. For all eight action types we find strong signs for high levels of repetitiveness, especially for negative actions. We partition behavioral sequences into segments of length n (behavioral `words' and 'motifs') and study their statistical properties. We find two approximate power laws in the word ranking distribution, one with an exponent of kappa-1 for the ranks up to 100, and another with a lower exponent for higher ranks. The Shannon n-tuple redundancy yields large values and increases in terms of word length, further underscoring the non-trivial statistical properties of behavioral sequences. On the collective, societal level the timeseries of particular actions per day can be understood by a simple mean-reverting log-normal model.

Link:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.0392

Popular science interpretation:

The way patterns of behaviour emerge and spread through society is the subject of intense research at the moment.

[...] behaviours spread from one network to another, for example, an angry phone conversation can affect the next email you write.

Today, Stefan Thurner at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and a couple of pals [...] study the patterns of behaviour that emerge in a virtual world where every interaction is recorded for posterity.

The world they've chosen is a massive multiplayer online game called Pardus, which st

...
For meetup groups: Restaurant gift card coupons
by AdeleneDawner — 2011-07-06T17:35:50.097Z

From here:

Restaurant.com cuts 70% off any gift certificate via coupon code "SHARE". This coupon drops most $10 dining certificates to $1.50 and $25 gift certificates to $3. Restaurant.com's gift certificates are redeemable at local restaurants across the United States. Some gift certificates have restrictions, like dinner-only or a $15 minimum. (Each restaurant lists its individual restrictions.) Coupon expires July 7.

If the consensus is that this is too much like spam, I'll remove it, but it seemed like it'd be of interest to meetup groups who meet at restaurants.
[SEQ RERUN] The Apocalypse Bet
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-07-06T17:27:41.921Z

Today's post, The Apocalypse Bet, was originally published on 09 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you think that the apocalypse will be in 2020, while I think that it will be in 2030, how could we bet on this? One way would be for me to pay you X dollars every year until 2020. Then, if the apocalypse doesn't happen, you pay me 2X dollars every year until 2030. This idea could be used to set up a prediction market, which could give society information about when an apocalypse might happen.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 You Can Face 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.
Topics to discuss CEV
by diegocaleiro — 2011-07-06T14:19:55.116Z

CEV is our current proposal for what ought to be done once you have AGI flourishing around. Many people have had bad feelings about this. When in Singularity Institute, I decided to write a text do discuss CEV, from what it is for, to how likely it is to achieve it's goals, and how much fine-grained detail needs to be added before it is an actual theory.

Here you find a draft of the topics I'll be discussing in that text. The purpose of showing this is that you take a look at the topics, spot something that is missing, and write a comment saying: "Hey, you forgot this problem, which, summarised, is bla bla bla bla" and also "be sure to mention paper X when discussing topic 2.a.i,"

Please take a few minutes to help me add better discussions.

Do not worry about pointing previous Less Wrong posts about it, I have them all.

Summary of CEV

Troubles with CEV

Troubles with the overall suggestion

Concepts on which CEV relies that may not be well shaped enough

Troubles with coherence

The volitions of the same person when in two different emotional states might be different - it’s as if they are two different people. Is there any good criteria by which a person’s “ultimate” volition may be determined? If not, is it certain that even the volitions of one person’s multiple selves will be convergent?

But when you start dissecting most human goals and preferences, you find they contain deeper layers of belief and expectation. If you keep stripping those away, you eventually reach raw biological drives which are not a human belief or expectation. (Though even they are beliefs and expectations of evolution, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

Once you strip away human beliefs and expectations, nothing remains but biological drives, which even the animals have. Yes, an animal, by virtue of its biological drives and ability to act, is more than a predicting rock, but that doesn’t address the issue at hand.

Troubles with extrapolation

Are small accretions of inteligence analogous to small accretions of time in terms of identity? Is extrapolated person X still a reasonable political representant of person X?

Problems with the concept of Volition

Blue eliminating robots (Yvain post)

Error minimizer

Goals x Volitions

Problems of implementation

Undesirable solutions for hardware shortage, or time short

...
Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta
by Raw_Power — 2011-07-06T10:59:15.551Z

You've been on Less Wrong for a while. You've become very good at a lot of stuff. Specifically, arguing. You win arguments. All the time. Effortlessly. And the worst part is, you often win for the wrong reasons. Perhaps there were counters to your propositions. Perhaps you failed to mention a very important, non trivial premise, and your public accepted your shaky proposition with as much enthusiasm as if it had been rock-solid, if not more.

They have failed you. You now know that, if you want to remain objective, to keep your grip on reality, to keep your mind sharp and your guard high, you need a Worthy Opponent, someone who's on the same level as you, who's as different in ideology and character from you as possible, who will not hesitate to point out any and every flaw your propositions would have, and would in fact go out of their way to contradict you, just for fun. This intellectual sparring will strengthen you both, and make you more careful in actual debate, on the public arena, whether you choose to use the Dark Arts or not.

Quoth JoshuaZ: In many forms of Judaisms one often studies with a chavruta, with whom one will debate and engage the same texts. Such individuals are generally chosen to be about the same background level and intelligence, often for precisely the sort of reason you touch upon [I paraphrased that in the two first paragraphs] (as well as it helping encourage them to each try their hardest).

A couple of interesting excerpts from the wikipedia artilce:

Unlike conventional classroom learning, in which a teacher lectures to the student and the student memorizes and repeats the information back in tests, and unlike an academic academy, where students do individual research,[5] chavruta learning challenges the student to analyze and explain the material, point out the errors in his partner's reasoning, and question and sharpen each other's ideas, often arriving at entirely new insights into the meaning of the text.[1][6]

A chavruta helps a student stay awake, keep his mind focused on the learning, sharpen his reasoning powers, develop his thoughts into words, and organize his thoughts into logical arguments.[7] This type of learning also imparts precision and clarity into ideas that would otherwise remain vague.[8] Having to listen to, analyze and respond to another's opinion also inculcates respect for others. It is considered poor manne...
Meetup : Austin, TX LW Meetup, 7/9 1:30PM
by Vaniver — 2011-07-06T01:21:47.018Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX LW Meetup, 7/9 1:30PM

WHEN:
09 July 2011 01:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2222B Guadalupe St Austin, Texas 78705

Last week, Caffe Medici was closed and we didn't notice until we were standing outside! Hopefully we didn't miss you when we walked over to Chipotle next door. Once again, we're meeting at Caffe Medici. The back streets have free parking on Saturdays, so long as you're in a pay to park spot.

Other things we've got going on: there's a google group for non-Saturday things here and a Steam group for gaming together (send a PM to myself or NMJablonski with your steam id and we'll invite you!).

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX LW Meetup, 7/9 1:30PM
Best articles to link to when introducing someone to Less Wrong?
by FiftyTwo — 2011-07-06T00:52:50.771Z

I've recently been trying to introduce some of my friends to less wrong. As a starting point I've linked them to HP:MOR and 'Three worlds collide' on the basis that they are both entertaining and accessible. But I'm not sure where to go next. Sending them to a main index page would likely be overwhelming, so could you suggest some sample articles to give them a general flavour of less wrong and envourage them to read more?

Qualities for such articles would probably include being:

accessible to an intelligent non-specialist, so not include too much jargon and dependences on other articles;

relatively short, so they can be absorbed at one sitting and aren't offputtingly long;

well written and readable, in such a way that gives a good impression of less wrong's competence to the skeptical;

and more optionally being on a particularly interesting subject matter.

What would you suggest?

[As I'm still a relative novice myself, apologies if a similar discussion has been had in the past and I haven't stumbled across it.]