trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Track Your Happiness
by Matt_Simpson — 2011-05-04T02:59:47.067Z

Track your happiness using your iphone:

For thousands of years, people have been trying to understand the causes of happiness. What is it that makes people happy? Yet it wasn’t until very recently that science has turned its attention to this issue.

Track Your Happiness.org is a new scientific research project that aims to use modern technology to help answer this age-old question. Using this site in conjunction with your iPhone, you can systematically track your happiness and find out what factors – for you personally – are associated with greater happiness. Your responses, along with those from other users of trackyourhappiness.org, will also help us learn more about the causes and correlates of happiness.

Seems like a no-brainer to use this to me, at least if you have an iphone. For those with a droid, according to their twitter feed:

the next item on the roadmap is to make track your happiness available to as many people/phones as possible.

Despite being a really cool app for managing your happiness, this is just a great idea for doing research. Now I want to take advantage of the large iphone/droid user base to learn about people in some way. Any ideas?
The importance of open-source cryptography for Singleton prevention
by snarles — 2011-05-04T02:25:26.788Z

I'm sure most of the readers of lesswrong and overcomingbias would consider a (edit: non-FAI) singleton scenario undesirable. (In a singleton scenario, a single political power or individual rules over most of humanity.)

Singleton could occur if a group of people developed Artificial General Intelligence with a significant lead over their competitors. The economic advantage from sole possession of AGI technology would allow the controllers of the technology the opportunity to gain a economic or even a political monopoly in a relatively short timescale.

This particular risk, as Robin Hanson pointed out, is less plausible if the "race for AGI" involves many competitors, and no competitor can gain too large of a lead over others. This "close race" scenario is more likely if there is an "open-source" attitude in the AGI community. Even if private organizations attempt to maintain exclusive control of their own innovations, one might hope that hackers or internal leaks would release essential breakthroughs before the innovators could gain too much of a lead.

Then, supposing AGI is rapidly acquired by many different powers soon after its development, one can further hope that the existence of multiple organizations with AGI with differing goals would serve to prevent any one power from gaining a monopoly using AGI.

This post is concerned with what happens afterwards, when AGI technology is more or less publicly available. In this situation, the long-term freedom of humanity is still not guaranteed, because disparities in access to computational power could still allow one power to gain a technological lead over the rest of humanity. Technological leads in the form of conventional warfare technologies are not as likely, and perhaps not even as threatening, as technological leads in the form of breakthroughs in cryptography.

In this information-dependent post-utopia, any power which manages to take control of the computational structures of a society would gain incredible leverage. Any military power which could augment their conventional forces with the ability to intercept all of their enemies' communications whilst protecting their own would enjoy an incredible tactical advantage. In the post-AGI world, the key risk for singleton is exclusive access to key-cracking technology.

Therefore, a long-term plan for avoiding sing...
Official Less Wrong Redesign: View defaults for new users
by matt — 2011-05-04T02:21:50.156Z

Following along from Louie's post and the discussion around it…

How should new visitors to Lesswrong see posts and comments ordered and filtered? (Assume we'll address the new visitors should be introduced to the site issue.) These will remain settings that are easily changed, but how should they start?

Current defaults:
Promoted posts, ordered by recency is our most prominent post list.
Comments are sorted by "Popular", which is Top with a very strong ageing of points (so recently voted comments rise to the top of the list, and very high voted comments fairly quickly drop away).

Options seeded in comments by me below, my karma balance at bottom. Please vote on at least one "Posts:" comment and one "Comments:" comment.
Pleasure, Desire, and Arguing about Definitions
by lukeprog — 2011-05-04T01:02:51.744Z

This post is a bit of shameless self-promotion, but also a pointer to an example of Yudkowskian philosophy at work that LWers may enjoy, this time concerning philosophical theories of desire.

Episode 14 of my podcast with Alonzo Fyfe, Morality in the Real World, begins to dissolve some common philosophical debates about the nature of desire by replacing the symbol with the substance, etc. Transcript and links here, mp3 here. The episode can also probably serve as a big hint of where I'm going with my metaethics sequence.

Warning: Alonzo and I are not voice actors, and my sound engineering cannot compare to that of Radiolab.
[link] Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms
by Wei Dai — 2011-05-03T23:38:27.270Z

Robin Hanson has made several recent posts on Overcoming Bias about upload economics. I remain mystified why he doesn't link to or otherwise reference or comment on Carl Shulman's 2010 paper, Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms, which mentions many of the same ideas and seems to have taken them to their logical conclusions. I was going to complain again in the comments section over there, but then I noticed that the paper hasn't been posted or discussed here either. So here's the abstract. (See above link for the full paper.)

Many scientists expect the eventual development of intelligent software programs capable of closely emulating human brains, to the point of substituting for human labor in almost every economic niche. As software, such emulations could be cheaply copied, with copies subsequently diverging and interacting with their copy-relatives. This paper examines a set of evolutionary pressures on interaction between related emulations, pressures favoring the emergence of superorganisms, groups of emulations ready to self-sacrifice in service of the superorganism. We argue that the increased capacities and internal coordination of such superorganisms could pose increased risks of overriding human values, but also could facilitate the solution of global coordination problems.
[SEQ RERUN] Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-05-03T18:13:57.618Z

Today's post, Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided, was originally published on 03 March 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Robin Hanson proposed a "banned products shop" where things that the government ordinarily would ban are sold. Eliezer responded that this would probably cause at least one stupid and innocent person to die. He became surprised when people inferred from this remark that he was against Robin's idea. Policy questions are complex actions with many consequences. Thus they should only rarely appear one-sided to an objective observer. A person's intelligence is largely a product of circumstances they cannot control. Eliezer argues for cost-benefit analysis instead of traditional libertarian ideas of tough-mindedness (people who do stupid things deserve their consequences).

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 You Are Not Hiring the Top 1%, 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.
Terrorist leaders are not about Terror
by gwern — 2011-05-03T17:57:35.700Z

From "Academics Doubt Impact of Osama bin Laden’s Death":

"...Fifty-three percent of the terrorist organizations that suffered such a violent leadership loss fell apart — which sounds impressive until you discover that 70 percent of groups who did not deal with an assassination no longer exist.

Further crunching of the numbers revealed that leadership decapitation becomes more counterproductive the older the group is. The difference in collapse rates (between groups that did and did not have a leader assassinated) is fairly small among organizations less than 20 years old but quite large for those more than 20 years in age, and even larger for those that have been around more than 30 years.

Assassination of a leader does seem to negatively impact smaller terrorist groups: The data shows organizations with fewer than 500 members are more likely to collapse if they suffer such a leadership loss. But organizations with more than 500 members are actually more likely to survive after an assassination, making this strategy “highly counterproductive for larger groups,” Jordan writes."

See also Lost Purposes, The Importance of Goodhart's Law, & Faster than Science.
Discussion: Pathways for the Aspiring AGI Researcher?
by Zetetic — 2011-05-03T16:48:09.957Z

Follow up to: Best career models for doing research?

First, I must apologize for the somewhat self-serving post, but as it is in the discussion section I hope that this can be forgiven. Also, I would not be surprised if there are at least a few college age people lurking around with very similar problems/issues, so I expect that this might prove very useful to at least a couple of people here. If this works out, I do hope to eventually put it into the form of a more general top-level post on career advice for those interested in a career in AGI.

Now, on to the issue:

It has come to my attention that research opportunities in AGI appear to both be somewhat limited, and somewhat unstructured compared to more well-developed fields that I have looked into. It seems to me that it would be useful to have a discussion here, given the unusual population density of AGI enthusiasts/professionals, about the possible pathways that one might take after the completion of an undergraduate degree. In my case, I have a strong background in mathematics, computer science and philosophy as well as a growing knowledge base in psychology. I've been studying Pearl's work, Timeless Decision Theory, cognitive science, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, Bishop's book on Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, the link between category theory and cognitive science/AI (which appears to have some promise for building ontologies that can combine concepts and generalize), game theory, probability/statistics, computational complexity and I have been trying to get a few more programming languages under my belt.

My initial impulse was to go ahead and study for, and then take, all of the relevant GRE subject tests (Mathematics, Psychology and Computer science anyway) and apply to cognitive science and computer science programs with strong AGI groups. I've found that the latter option is more difficult that I had realized, which is somewhat disheartening, as my future planning model does not seem to work in such an underdeveloped field, and there is no easy to find established standard source for finding out which schools/programs to look at. I also realized that the former option does not necessarily conform to my research interestes as much as I would like it to, this being a fairly long term commitment.

Perhaps I lack the knowledge to successfully evaluate AGI programs; perhaps in the case...
DC Meetup: Discussion
by atucker — 2011-05-03T02:39:55.204Z

LessWrong DC has had its first meetup! 13 people showed up, and it was pretty fun.
We have a google group here, and will have most of the planning there.
However, we haven't met all the LWers in the DC area yet, so that's what this thread is for.
We're meeting again on the 15th, but were wondering -- is there anyone in Northern Virginia who would be potentially interested, but didn't come?
Proposal: consolidate meetup announcements before promotion
by CarlShulman — 2011-05-03T01:34:26.807Z

The Less Wrong feed is getting crowded with meetups rather than substantive posts. Hopefully, this should be fixed in the redesign, but one way to work around it in the meanwhile would be to make top-level posts announcing several meetups at once.

Folk would post meetups under the 'NEW' category, and each week or even every several days one of the meetup organizers could edit her post to announce all the meetups since the last consolidated post. This would greatly reduce the cluster while still getting meetups in the main feed. On the other hand, it would reduce average warning time before meetups, and the additional activation energy might deter some meetups.

If you have thoughts on the workability of this scheme, or an adjustment to make it workable, please comment below.

[HT: Anna Salamon]
Compare the unconceived – don’t unchain them
by KatjaGrace — 2011-05-02T20:09:36.000Z

People often criticise me of thinking of potential people as Steven Landsburg describes without necessarily endorsing:

…like prisoners being held in a sort of limbo, unable to break through into the world of the living. If they have rights, then surely we are required to help some of them escape.

Such people seem to believe this position is required for considering creating good lives an activity with positive value. It is not required, and I don’t think of potential people like that. My position is closer to this:

Benefit and harm are comparative notions. If something benefits you, it makes your life better than it would have been, and if something harms you it makes your life worse than it would have been. To determine whether some event benefits or harms you, we have to compare the goodness of your life as it is, given the event, with the goodness it would otherwise have had. The comparison is between your whole life as it is and your whole life as it would have been. We do not have to make the comparison time by time, comparing each particular time in one life with the same time in the other life.

That is John Broome explaining why death harms people even if they hold that all benefit and harm consists of pleasure and pain, which are things that can’t happen when you are dead. The same goes for potential people.

Yes, you can’t do much to a person who doesn’t exist. They don’t somehow suffer imaginary pains. If someone doesn’t exist in any possible worlds I agree they can’t be helped or harmed at all. What makes it possible to affect a potential person is that there are some worlds where they do exist. It is in the comparison between these worlds and the ones where they don’t exist where I say there is a benefit to them in having one over the other. The benefit of existing consists of the usual things that we hold to benefit a person when they exist; bananas, status, silly conversations, etc. The cost of not existing relative to existing consists of failing to have those benefits, which only exist in the world where the person exists. The cost does not consist of anything that happens in the world where the person doesn’t exist. They don’t have any hypothetical sorrow, boredom or emptiness at missing out. If they did have such things and they mattered somehow, that would be another entirely...
How did you actually become more effective?
by  — 2011-05-02T19:21:59.590Z

Like many people here, I think a lot about how to become more awesome. I'm fairly optimistic about my chances, because I can clearly remember times in the past when I was less awesome than I am now-- not necessarily less rational, but less productive and with fewer relevant skills.1

So I've been thinking about what changes I believe have most improved my effectiveness, changes which have caused me to learn many useful things and/or greatly increased my productive capacity. I found the list interesting:

Getting into a comfortable, highly supportive relationship: it has tremendously decreased my level of anxiety, improved my motivation to maintain a basic level of functioning, and increased my reserve capacity.

Finding enjoyable, appropriately challenging but low-stress work. Work forces me to get out of the house and interact with other humans, keeps me away from harmful behaviors like playing video games for hours, provides mental stimulation, and boosts my self-worth. Since I work as a math tutor, it's also been great practice at teaching, doing math, and the kind of general personhood skills that fall under the heading of Professionalism.

Attempting very difficult things at which I was highly motivated to succeed (but was not necessarily successful). These are the times when I've learned the most.

Limiting my own access to time-wasters by using LeechBlock and being commited to a schedule(LW is certainly on the list of time-wasters).

Things which are notably not on the list:

Therapy. If you have found therapy helpful, I'd really appreciate hearing exactly how you used it. It hasn't been worth a damn for me.

ADD meds. (Depression meds were somewhat helpful when I was actually depressed, however.)

Ambitious self-improvement projects undertaken alone, or without major consequences for failure (including but not limited to diets, exercise programs, and extensive programs of independent study3).

So how have you actually improved your own effectiveness?

1 Some of these less-awesome past versions of me suffered from clinical depression, but the last time I had a major episode of depression I was able to deal with it much more purposefully than in the past and still accomplish a large percentage of the shit I was supposed to be doing, so I think there has been improvement independent of my state of me...
[SEQ RERUN] You Are Not Hiring the Top 1%
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-05-02T18:50:25.517Z

Today's post, You Are Not Hiring the Top 1%, was originally published on 02 March 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Software companies may see themselves as being very selective about who they hire. Out of 200 applicants, they may hire just one or two. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're hiring the top 1%. The programmers who weren't hired are likely to apply for jobs somewhere else. Overall, the worst programmers will apply for many more jobs over the course of their careers than the best. So programmers who are applying for a particular job are not representative of programmers as a whole. This phenomenon probably shows up in other places as well.

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 Just Lose Hope Already, 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.
Personals, anyone?
by Gray — 2011-05-02T17:36:56.280Z

Meet ups are great and all, but a lot of us live far away from the large masses of LW-participants. I live in the Toledo, Ohio area, and I'm also one of those people who are looking for people who I can relate to. Most people I can't relate to, intellectual conversation makes most people I know uncomfortable. Even people who are intelligent are often too timid to speak their minds (this could be because of the before mentioned people). Nothing against people who are more ordinary than I am, but I have this sense that the people I read here are people I have more in common with than most people I will ever meet by chance.

I'm not looking for a date (well, I am, but not in this case), just people who I can relate to better than people I will meet by chance. This isn't my personal ad, but I was wondering what would be the best place to put such an ad, to see if there are people in my area who are the kind of people who would read this website? I'm not a transhumanist, but I'm not religious either. I've been an atheist since I was 12. I'm not autistic, but I have ADHD which I've only recently been treated for. This is also the main reason why I never finished college, which probably would have been *the* best way to meet people. So I'm looking for second or third best.

After reading the recent post about the LW user who committed suicide, I realized that I could lose a lot by not making the effort of trying to reach out and meet people.
Ames, IA LW meetup Sunday May 8 (First Iowa Meetup!) 2pm
by Matt_Simpson — 2011-05-02T15:32:13.028Z

Date: Sunday May 8, 2:00pm until at least 4:00pm.

Venue: Cafe Milo in Ames, IA (~ 1 hour from Des Moines, ~ 3 hours from Iowa City)

This weekend finals are finally over at Iowa State University, so why not celebrate by holding the first LW meetup in Iowa? Apparently there are a substantial amount of LWers in Ames, given it's small size, so maybe it's time we all came out of the woodwork and met each other. I'll be at Cafe Milo in Ames, IA this Sunday from 2:00pm until at least 4:00pm with a black Sony Vaio laptop, probably of stack of tests that I'm grading while I wait, and a sign that says "Less Wrong." Ames is only about an hour from Des Moines, so anyone from that area or anywhere else nearby should feel free to come as well. I'm willing to talk about anything interesting and rationality related, but let's say the discussion topic is productivity and self improvement more generally for the purpose of having something to fall back on.

If you're from the area, leave a comment saying whether you're coming or not! If you need to contact me directly for some reason (directions, coming late, etc.) you can call or text my cell: (three one four) four oh one - oh three oh one