trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Google Deepmind and FHI collaborate to present research at UAI 2016
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-06-09T18:08:18.558Z

Safely Interruptible Agents

Oxford academics are teaming up with Google DeepMind to make artificial intelligence safer. Laurent Orseau, of Google DeepMind, and Stuart Armstrong, the Alexander Tamas Fellow in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, will be presenting their research on reinforcement learning agent interruptibility at UAI 2016. The conference, one of the most prestigious in the field of machine learning, will be held in New York City from June 25-29. The paper which resulted from this collaborative research will be published in the Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).

Orseau and Armstrong’s research explores a method to ensure that reinforcement learning agents can be repeatedly safely interrupted by human or automatic overseers. This ensures that the agents do not “learn” about these interruptions, and do not take steps to avoid or manipulate the interruptions. When there are control procedures during the training of the agent, we do not want the agent to learn about these procedures, as they will not exist once the agent is on its own. This is useful for agents that have a substantially different training and testing environment (for instance, when training a Martian rover on Earth, shutting it down, replacing it at its initial location and turning it on again when it goes out of bounds—something that may be impossible once alone unsupervised on Mars), for agents not known to be fully trustworthy (such as an automated delivery vehicle, that we do not want to learn to behave differently when watched), or simply for agents that need continual adjustments to their learnt behaviour. In all cases where it makes sense to include an emergency “off” mechanism, it also makes sense to ensure the agent doesn’t learn to plan around that mechanism.

Interruptibility has several advantages as an approach over previous methods of control. As Dr. Armstrong explains, “Interruptibility has applications for many current agents, especially when we need the agent to not learn from specific experiences during training. Many of the naive ideas for accomplishing this—such as deleting certain histories from the training set—change the behaviour of the agent in unfortunate ways.”

In the paper,...
Meetup : SF Meetup: Group Debugging
by maia — 2016-06-09T16:24:57.186Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Group Debugging

WHEN:
13 June 2016 06:15:01PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St., San Francisco

We’ll be meeting to solve each other’s problems!

We have a new format for this meetup: we’ll have everyone brainstorm silently for a few minutes, then go around and summarize what problems we might like to work on; then people can break up into smaller conversations according to problems they think they could be most helpful with. This format gave much better results last time we tried it out.

For help getting into the building, please call: three zero one, three five six, five four two four.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Group Debugging
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2016-06-08T20:55:17.015Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games

WHEN:
12 June 2016 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Old Patent Office Building

We will be meeting in the courtyard to play games, hang out, and engage in fun conversation.

Upcoming meetups:

Jun. 19: History of Science Fiction Fandom

Jun. 26: Fermi Estimates

Jul. 3: Outdoor Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
Morality of Doing Simulations Is Not Coherent [SOLVED, INVALID]
by SquirrelInHell — 2016-06-07T02:34:03.680Z

Edit:

I consider this solved and no longer stand behind this or similar arguments. The answer given by hairyfigment (thank you!) is simple: combine the information-theoretic approach (as advocated by Eliezer) with admitting degrees of consciousness to be real values (not just is or isn't).

Thank you again hairyfigment for dispelling my confusion.

Original post:

Consider the following scenario:

1. I have technical capabilities that allow me to simulate you and your surroundings with high enough accuracy, that the "you" inside my simulation behaves as the real "you" would (at least for some time).

1b. I take an accurate snapshot "S" of your current state t=0 (with enough surroundings to permit simulation).

2. I want to simulate your behavior in various situations as a part of my decision process. Some of my possible actions involve very unpleasant consequences for you (such as torturing you for 1 hour), but I'm extremely unlikely to choose them.

3. For each action A from the set of my possible actions I do the following:

3a. Update S with my action A at t=0. Let's call this data A(S).

3b. Simulate physics in the world represented by A(S), until I reach a time t=+1 hour. Denote this by A(S)_1.

3c. Evaluate result of the simulation by computing value(A(S)_1), which is a single 32-bit floating point number. Discard all the other data.

A large portion of transhumanists might stand behind the following statement:

What I do in step 1 is acceptable, but step 3 (or in particular, step 3b) is "immoral" or "wrong". You feel that the simulated you's suffering matters, and you'd act to stop me from doing simulations of torture etc.

If you disagree with the above statement, what I write below doesn't apply to you. Congratulations.

However if you are in the group (probably a majority) that agrees with the "wrongness" of my doing the simulation, consider changing my actions to the version described below.

(Note that for simplicity of presentation, I assume that the operator of calculating future-time snapshots is linear, and therefore I can use addition to combine two snapshots, and later subtract to get one of the components back. If you think the operation of directly adding snapshots is not plausible, feel free to substitute another one - attacking this particular detail does not weaken the reasoning. The same can be done with addition of complex probability amplitudes...
June Outreach Thread
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2016-06-06T13:47:14.768Z

Please share about any outreach that you have done to convey rationality and effective altruism-themed ideas broadly, whether recent or not, which you have not yet shared on previous Outreach threads. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline, a form of cognitive altruism that contributes to creating a flourishing world. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.
Review and Thoughts on Current Version of CFAR Workshop
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2016-06-06T13:44:10.525Z

Outline: I will discuss my background and how I prepared for the workshop, and then how I would have prepared differently if I could go back and have the chance to do it again; I will then discuss my experience at the CFAR workshop, and what I would have done differently if I had the chance to do it again; I will then discuss what my take-aways were from the workshop, and what I am doing to integrate CFAR strategies into my life; finally, I will give my assessment of its benefits and what other folks might expect to get who attend the workshop.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to fellow CFAR alumni and CFAR staff for feedback on earlier versions of this post

Introduction

Many aspiring rationalists have heard about the Center for Applied Rationality, an organization devoted to teaching applied rationality skills to help people improve their thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns. This nonprofit does so primarily through its intense workshops, and is funded by donations and revenue from its workshop. It fulfills its social mission through conducting rationality research and through giving discounted or free workshops to those people its staff judge as likely to help make the world a better place, mainly those associated with various Effective Altruist cause areas, especially existential risk.

To be fully transparent: even before attending the workshop, I already had a strong belief that CFAR is a great organization and have been a monthly donor to CFAR for years. So keep that in mind as you read my description of my experience (you can become a donor here).

Preparation

First, some background about myself, so you know where I’m coming from in attending the workshop. I’m a professor specializing in the intersection of history, psychology, behavioral economics, sociology, and cognitive neuroscience. I discovered the rationality movement several years ago through a combination of my research and attending a LessWrong meetup in Columbus, OH, and so come from a background of both academic and LW-style rationality. Since discovering the movement, I have become an activist in the movement as the President of Intentional Insights, a nonprofit devoted to popularizing rationality and effective altruism (see here for our EA work). So I came to the workshop with some training and knowledge of rationality, including some CFAR techniqu...
Counterfactual Mugging Alternative
by wafflepudding — 2016-06-06T06:53:41.637Z

Edit as of June 13th, 2016: I no longer believe this to be easier to understand than traditional CM, but stand by the rest of it. Minor aesthetic edits made.

First post on the LW discussion board. Not sure if something like this has already been written, need your feedback to let me know if I’m doing something wrong or breaking useful conventions.

An alternative to the counterfactual mugging, since people often require it explained a few times before they understand it -- this one I think will be faster for most to comprehend because it arose organically, not seeming specifically contrived to create a dilemma between decision theories:

Pretend you live in a world where time travel exists and Time can create realities with acausal loops, or of ordinary linear chronology, or another structure, so long as there is no paradox -- only self-consistent timelines can be generated.

In your timeline, there are prophets. A prophet (known to you to be honest and truly prophetic) tells you that you will commit an act which seems horrendously imprudent or problematic. It is an act whose effect will be on the scale of losing $10,000; an act you never would have taken ordinarily. But fight the prophecy all you want, it is self-fulfilling and you definitely live in a timeline where the act gets committed. However, if it weren’t for the prophecy being immutably correct, you could have spent $100 and, even having heard the prophecy (even having believed it would be immutable) the probability of you taking that action would be reduced by, say, 50%. So fighting the prophecy by spending $100 would mean that there were 50% fewer self-consistent (possible) worlds where you lost the $10,000, because its just much less likely for you to end up taking that action if you fight it rather than succumbing to it.

You may feel that there would be no reason to spend $100 averting a decision that you know you’re going to make, and see no reason to care about counterfactual worlds where you don’t lose the $10,000. But the fact of the matter is that if you could have precommitted to fight the choice you would have, because in the worlds where that prophecy could have been presented to you, you’d be decreasing the average disutility by (($10,000)(.5 probability) - ($100) = $4,900). Not following a precommitment that you would have made to prevent the exa...
Open Thread June 6 - June 12, 2016
by Elo — 2016-06-06T04:21:53.526Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Meetup : Less Wrong NH Meetup
by Tuk — 2016-06-05T22:45:38.714Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meetup

WHEN:
14 June 2016 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
269 Pearl St Manchester NH 03104

The twentieth NH meet-up is Tuesday, 6/14, in Manchester, NH at 7 pm at a private residence. Light refreshments will be provided.

Have you read Rationality: from AI to Zombies, or any of the Sequences on Less Wrong? Maybe you're just a fan of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Come hang out with us and discuss optimization of whatever it is you want to optimize.

Agenda: See Facebook

You may want to bring a notebook.

https://www.facebook.com/events/778977078906347/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/695201067251306/

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-06-03T19:07:20.280Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on June 3rd. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
[Munich] Less Wrong, More Summer, Munich Picnic: 04 June 2016 01:00PM
SF Meetup: Stories: 06 June 2016 06:15PM

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

[Melbourne] June Rationality Dojo: 04 June 2016 03:00PM
Moscow: Utilitarianism, Good Judgement Project, Order team meeting, rational games: 05 June 2016 02:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - June: 05 June 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - July: 03 July 2016 04:00PM
Vienna: 25 June 2016 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Intro to Rationality: 05 June 2016 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

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

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, C...
Rationality Quotes June 2016
by Sabiola — 2016-06-03T07:51:29.792Z

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted 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 from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Meetup : Moscow: Utilitarianism, Good Judgement Project, Order team meeting, rational games
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-06-02T14:52:49.625Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Utilitarianism, Good Judgement Project, Order team meeting, rational games

WHEN:
05 June 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya ul., 5к2

Note: most our members join meetups via other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a short link to the hackpad document with the schedule here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

Pad with the details about 05.06.2016 meetup.

We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Utilitarianism, Good Judgement Project, Order team meeting, rational games
Thoughts on hacking aromanticism?
by hg00 — 2016-06-02T11:52:55.241Z

Several years ago, Alicorn wrote an article about how she hacked herself to be polyamorous. I'm interested in methods for hacking myself to be aromantic. I've had some success with this, so I'll share what's worked for me, but I'm really hoping you all will chime in with your ideas in the comments.

Motivation

Why would someone want to be aromantic? There's the obvious time commitment involved in romance, which can be considerable. This is an especially large drain if you're in a situation where finding suitable partners is difficult, which means most of this time is spent enduring disappointment (e.g. if you're heterosexual and the balance of singles in your community is unfavorable).

But I think an even better way to motivate aromanticism is by referring you to this Paul Graham essay, The Top Idea in Your Mind. To be effective at accomplishing your goals, you'd like to have your goals be the most interesting thing you have to think about. I find it's far too easy for my love life to become the most interesting thing I have to think about, for obvious reasons.

Subproblems

After thinking some, I came up with a list of 4 goals people try to achieve through engaging in romance:

Companionship.

Sexual pleasure.

Infatuation (also known as new relationship energy).

Validation. This one is trickier than the previous three, but I think it's arguably the most important. Many unhappy singles have friends they are close to, and know how to masturbate, but they still feel lousy in a way people in post-infatuation relationships do not. What's going on? I think it's best described as a sort of romantic insecurity. To test this out, imagine a time when someone you were interested in was smiling at you, and contrast that with the feeling of someone you were interested in turning you down. You don't have to experience companionship or sexual pleasure from these interactions for them to have a major impact on your "romantic self-esteem". And in a culture where singlehood is considered a failure, it's natural for your "romantic self-esteem" to take a hit if you're single.

To remove the need for romance, it makes sense to find quicker and less distracting ways to achieve each of these 4 goals. So I'll treat each goal as a subproblem and brainstorm ideas for solving it. Subproblems 1 t...
Meetup : SF Meetup: Stories
by maia — 2016-06-02T02:25:40.802Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Stories

WHEN:
06 June 2016 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St., San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to tell stories about our lives. Last time we had a list of prompts which helped a lot, so I'll be bringing those again.

As usual, we encourage people to use the topic as a jumping off point for other conversations, and break off from the main group if you'd like.

For help getting into the building, please call: three zero one, three five six, five four two four.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Stories
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Intro to Rationality
by RobinZ — 2016-06-02T01:22:55.902Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Intro to Rationality

WHEN:
05 June 2016 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center

x-posted from the lesswrong-dc Google Group. Meetup location is in the courtyard on the first floor, on the other side of an information desk from either entrance.

This week, we're meeting to give an introduction/overview to the kind of rationalism that is talking about flaws in reasoning and how to be affected by them less. Bring questions! If you've been a lurker up till now, or have a friend you've been thinking of inviting, consider this me putting out a hand to welcome you in. If you think you might not be "the right kind of person" for whatever reason, you're explicitly encouraged to try it out.

A note on format: although it's not uncommon for the meetup topic to be abandoned in favor of whatever seems interesting, this time we will make an effort to keep things on topic.

Upcoming meetups:

Jun. 12: Fun & Games

Jun. 19: History of Science Fiction Fandom

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Intro to Rationality
June 2016 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2016-06-01T10:29:48.237Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
rationalfiction.io - publish, discover, and discuss rational fiction
by rayalez — 2016-05-31T12:02:17.566Z

Hey, everyone! I want to share with you a project I've been working on for a while - http://rationalfiction.io.

I want it to become the perfect place to publish, discover, and discuss rational fiction.

We already have a lot of awesome stories, and I invite you to join and post more! =)