trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weak repugnant conclusion need not be so repugnant given fixed resources
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-11-17T15:44:04.431Z

I want to thank Irgy for this idea.

As people generally know, total utilitarianism leads to the repugnant conclusion - the idea that no matter how great a universe X would be, filled without trillions of ultimately happy people having ultimately meaningful lives filled with adventure and joy, there is another universe Y which is better - and that is filled with nothing but dull, boring people whose quasi-empty and repetitive lives are just one tiny iota above being too miserable to endure. But since the second universe is much bigger than the first, it comes out on top. Not only in that if we had Y it would be immoral to move to X (which is perfectly respectable, as doing so might involve killing a lot of people, or at least allowing a lot of people to die). But in that, if we planned for our future world now, we would desperately want to bring Y into existence rather than X - and could run great costs or great risks to do so. And if we were in world X, we must at all costs move to Y, making all current people much more miserable as we do so.

The repugnant conclusion is the main reason I reject total utilitarianism (the other one being that total utilitarianism sees no problem with painlessly killing someone by surprise, as long as you also gave birth to someone else of equal happiness). But the repugnant conclusion can emerge from many other population ethics as well. If adding more people of slightly less happiness than the average is always a bonus ("mere addition"), and if equalising happiness is never a penalty, then you get the repugnant conclusion (caveat: there are some subtleties to do with infinite series).

But repugnant conclusions reached in that way may not be so repugnant, in practice. Let S be a system of population ethics that accepts the repugnant conclusion, due to the argument above. S may indeed conclude that the big world Y is better than the super-human world X. But S need not conclude that Y is the best world we can build, given any fixed and finite amount of resources. Total utilitarianism is indifferent to having a world with half the population and twice the happiness. But S need to be indifferent to that - it may much prefer the twice-happiness world. Instead of the world Y, it may prefer to reallocate resources to instead achieve the world X', which has the same average happiness as X but is slightly larger.

Of course, since...
Quantum versus logical bombs
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-11-17T15:14:23.400Z

Child, I'm sorry to tell you that the world is about to end. Most likely. You see, this madwoman has designed a doomsday machine that will end all life as we know it - painlessly and immediately. It is attached to a supercomputer that will calculate the 10100th digit of pi - if that digit is zero, we're safe. If not, we're doomed and dead.

However, there is one thing you are allowed to do - switchout the logical trigger and replaced it by a quantum trigger, that instead generates a quantum event that will prevent the bomb from triggering with 1/10th measure squared (in the other cases, the bomb goes off). You ok paying €5 to replace the triggers like this?

If you treat quantum measure squared exactly as probability, then you shouldn't see any reason to replace the trigger. But if you believed in many worlds quantum mechanics (or think that MWI is possibly correct with non-zero probability), you might be tempted to accept the deal - after all, everyone will survive in one branch. But strict total utilitarians may still reject the deal. Unless they refuse to treat quantum measure as akin to probability in the first place (meaning they would accept all quantum suicide arguments), they tend to see a universe with a tenth of measure-squared as exactly equally valued to a 10% chance of a universe with full measure. And they'd even do the reverse, replace a quantum trigger with a logical one, if you paid them €5 to do so.

Still, most people, in practice, would choose to change the logical bomb for a quantum bomb, if only because they were slightly uncertain about their total utilitarian values. It would seem self evident that risking the total destruction of humanity is much worse than reducing its measure by a factor of 10 - a process that would be undetectable to everyone.

Of course, once you agree with that, we can start squeezing. What if the quantum trigger only has 1/20 measured-squared "chance" of saving us? 1/000? 1/10000? If you don't want to fully accept the quantum immortality arguments, you need to stop - but at what point?
Mainstream Epistemology for LessWrong, Part 1: Feldman on Evidentialism
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-11-16T16:16:21.749Z

Richard Feldman's Epistemology is a widely-used philosophy textbook published in 2003. I've decided to write a series of posts summarizing its contents, because it contains some surprisingly reasonable views (given what you may have heard about mainstream philosophy), and it also counters some common myths about what all philosophers supposedly know about evidence, the problem of induction, and so on. This installment briefly covers the first three chapters before moving on to Feldman's discussion of the philosophical view he calls evidentialism.

Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter, which explains that "The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, is the branch of philosophy that addresses philosophical questions about knowledge and rationality." Feldman says he will use the term "The Standard View" to refer to the collection of things we ordinarily think about knowledge and rationality.

On the Standard View, we know a large variety of things about a variety of topics, from science and mathematics to other people's mental states to the past and the future. Furthermore, the Standard View says that our primary sources of knowledge consist of perception, memory, testimony, introspection, reasoning, and rational insight. Those are just the sources of knowledge most people would agree on, though—Feldman acknowledges that some people might want to add to that list.

It's worth mentioning here that because philosophers agree on so little, when you read a philosophy textbook you should assume it will say some things that are just the author's personal opinion, rather than representing any professional consensus. And in describing the "Standard View," Feldman is mostly just trying to describe what ordinary people commonsensically believe, rather than claiming that it's the standard view within philosophy. But in fact, most philosophers probably would agree with what Feldman calls the "Standard View."

Chapter 1 also sketches the structure of the rest of the book: chapters 2-5 will develop the Standard View, while chapters 6-9 will consider various challenges and objections to the Standard View.

I'm going to mostly skip over chapters 2 and 3 because they cover a debate that was pretty accurately summarized by Luke Muelhlauser and Louie Helm in "Intelligence Explosion: Machine Ethics":

Since Plato, many have believed that knowledge is justified true belief. Gettie

...
Meetup : Washington DC: Goals, Political Advocacy as Effective Altruism, and Stories 
by rocurley — 2013-11-16T16:00:41.400Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Goals, Political Advocacy as Effective Altruism, and Stories

WHEN:
17 November 2013 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

So, we came up with three ideas, none of which will necessarily take a long time. So we're doing them together. We will be: Talking about goals and trying to revive the goals spreadsheet Discussing several posts on Givewell's blog about political advocacy as effective altruism And (if people have them) telling Haloween stories, as per this thread (a bit late, I know, but why not?)

(This is a duplicate: last meetup didn't get to these topics).

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Goals, Political Advocacy as Effective Altruism, and Stories
Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace?
by ialdabaoth — 2013-11-16T04:35:46.013Z

I'm just tired of the signal pollution, and would like to be able to use karma to honestly appraise the worth of my articles and posts, without seeing 80% of my downvotes come in chunks that correspond precisely to how many posts I've made since the last massive downvote spree.

EDIT to add data points:

Spurious downvoting stopped soon after I named a particular individual (not ALL downvoting stopped, but the downvotes I got all seemed on-the-level.)

One block of potentially spurious downvoting occurred approximately one week ago, but then karma patterns returned to expected levels. I consider this block dubious, because it reasonably matches what I'd expect to see if someone noticed several of my posts together and disagreed with all of them, and did not match the usual pattern of starting with the earliest or latest post that I had made and downvoting everything (it downvoted all posts in a few threads, but not in other threads), so I'm just adding for completeness.

Spurious, indiscriminate downvoting started up again approximately half an hour ago on Sunday (12/1/2013), around noon MDT.

Edit: And now on Tuesday, 12/3/2013, at 10 AM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 30 points so far.

Edit: And now on Saturday, 12/14/2013, at 2 PM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 15 points so far, at a rate of about 1-2 points per second.
I am switching to biomedical engineering and am looking for feedback on my strategy and assumptions
by Arkanj3l — 2013-11-16T03:42:36.885Z

I wrote this post up and circulated it among my rationalist friends. I've copied it verbatim. I figure the more rationally inclined people that can critique my plan the better.

--

TL;DR:
* I'm going to commit to biomedical engineering for a very specific set of reasons related to career flexibility and intrinsic interest.
* I still want to have computer science and design arts skills, but biomedical engineering seems like a better university investment.
* I would like to have my cake and eat it too by doing biomedical engineering, while practicing computer science and design on the side.
* There are potential tradeoffs, weaknesses and assumptions in this decision that are relevant and possibly critical. This includes time management, ease of learning, development of problem solving solving abilities and working conditions.
I am posting this here because everyone is pretty clever and likes decisions. I am looking for feedback on my reasoning and the facts in my assumptions so that I can do what's best. This was me mostly thinking out loud, and given the timeframe I'm on I couldn't learn and apply any real formal method other than just thinking it through. So it's long, but I hope that everyone can benefit by me putting this here.
--
So currently I'm weighing going into biomedical engineering as my major over a major in computer science, or the [human-computer interaction/media studies/gaming/ industrial design grab bag] major, at Simon Fraser University. Other than the fact that engineering biology is so damn cool, the relevant decision factors include reasons like:

medical science is booming with opportunities at all levels in the system, meaning that there might be a lot of financial opportunity in more exploratory economies like in SV;

the interdisciplinary nature of biomedical engineering means that I have skills with greater transferability as well as insight into a wide range of technologies and processes instead of a narrow few;

aside from molecular biology, biomedical engineering is the field that appears closest to cognitive enhancement and making cyborgs for a living;

compared to most kinds of engineering, it is more easy to self-teach computer science and other forms of digital value-making (web design or graphical modelling) due to the availability of educational resources; the approaching-free cost of computing power; esta

...
Research on unconscious visual processing
by passive_fist — 2013-11-15T22:54:55.781Z

There is a new paper out by Sanguinetti, Allen, and Peterson, The Ground Side of an Object: Perceived as Shapeless yet Processed for Semantics. In it, the authors conduct a series of experiments to try to answer the question of how the brain separates background from foreground in visual processing. I found it interesting, so I thought I'd share. The human visual system is incredibly complex and we still have no clear idea how it does a lot of the things it does.
The experimental protocol was as follows:

The stimuli were 120 small, mirror-symmetric, enclosed white silhouettes (Trujillo, Allen, Schnyer, & Peterson, 2010). Of these, 40 portrayed meaningful name-able objects (animals, plants, symbols) inside their borders and suggested only meaningless novel objects on the ground side of their borders. The remaining 80 silhouettes depicted meaningless novel objects (objects not encountered previously) inside their borders. Of these, 40 suggested portions of nameable meaningful objects on the ground side of their borders. Note, however, that participants were not aware of the meaningful objects suggested on the ground side of these silhouettes. The remaining 40 novel silhouettes suggested novel shapes on both sides of their borders."
Stimuli were presented on a 20-in. CRT monitor 90 cm from the participants using DMDX software. Participants’ heads were unrestrained. Their task was to classify the silhouettes as depicting real-world or novel objects. Responses were made via button press; assignment of the responses to the two response buttons was random.

They then recorded the EEG signals from the participants and found something surprising: When the background was meaningful, the subject's brain waves produced the same signatures as would be expected when conscious awareness had taken place (called 'N300' and 'N400' signatures because they occur 300 and 400 ms after presentation of the stimulus), even if the subjects did not report percieving anything meaningful in the images. However, if the background really was meaningless, this signature was absent.
This is consistent with the "Brains aren't magic" doctrine. The brain can't magically separate objects from non-objects in the simplest levels of processing. No, just like a computer it has to tediously go through the image, pixel by pixel, identifying patterns and gradually building up into complex repr...
The Restoration of William: the skeleton of a short story about resurrection and identity
by AlanCrowe — 2013-11-15T17:59:25.789Z

Bill died. He never liked having dumps done. Each year he would make excuses, put it off. "Next year." he would say. Only after Bill's death do people realise just how long this has been going on for: thirty years. They will have to restore Bill from a 30 year old tape. Is "restore" even the right word? How about "roll-back"?
Worse still, there was a big change in Bill's life 25 years ago when he had a mid-life crisis. He joined a personal growth cult, dropped old friends, made new ones. Some of his new friends can remember encounters with the old Bill of 30 years ago. They didn't like him and avoided him. There was a lot of friction when he joined the personal growth cult 5 years later. Some members wanted to black ball him. You cannot teach an old dog new tricks. It might be true, but the personal growth cult could hardly admit it.
Those who dreaded Bill's return had a week of respite when it seemed that Bill's tape had been lost. Lost? Bill really dead and gone for ever? That was unthinkable. Losing some-ones only back up tape would be a huge scandal. Who would stake their life with a careless archiving company?
After an increasingly panicky search it was found. Found! And still readable, after all those years, with a bit of manual fixing of uncorrectable errors.
Restored Bill woke to find 30 years had gone by. When we think back to what we were like 30 years ago, we do so as a process of diffs. What changed last year. What changed the year before that. What changed between two and three years ago. So when we think back to what changed between year 29 and year 30 and find we cannot remember, what are we to do? No doubt there were a whole years worth of changes, but not knowing what they were, we are seduced by the lazy assumption that they didn't amount to much. Restored Bill did not have the option of making lazy assumptions. He had 30 years of change dumped on him. The genuine article, the whole ka-boodle, with little relation to the convenient fictions that human memory embroiders over 30 years of telling, forgetting, patching and re-telling.
People who remembered disliking Bill 30 years ago were never-the-less sympathetic to the bewildered and pathetic figure, uncertain who and when he was. Phoning close friends to continue yesterday's conversation only to suffer them denying having know him was distressing. It wasn't people deny knowing him in retal...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-11-15T17:05:56.848Z

This summary was posted to LW main on November 8th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

[Atlanta GA] November Meetup (Second of Two): 23 November 2013 06:00PM
First Meetup in Cologne (Köln): 10 November 2013 03:00PM
Frankfurt: 24 November 2013 02:00PM
Moscow, Now 2 Sigma More Awesome: 10 November 2013 04:00PM
Princeton NJ Meetup: 16 November 2013 01:00PM
Saint Petersburg. Why rationality?: 10 November 2013 04:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Pages 70-140 Discussion Meetup: 10 November 2013 02:00PM

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:

Austin, TX: 09 November 2019 02:30PM
Brussels monthly meetup: memory!: 09 November 2013 01:00PM
[Cambridge MA] Comfort Zone Expansion at Citadel, Boston: 10 November 2013 02:00PM
London social meetup, 10/11/13: 10 November 2013 02:00PM
West LA—The Merits of Specificity: 13 November 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Brussels, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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 ci...
[Video Link] PostHuman: An Introduction to Transhumanism
by Joshua_Blaine — 2013-11-15T02:04:56.294Z

http://youtu.be/bTMS9y8OVuY

I think this is a nice introduction to Transhumanism, inspired by the style of many well known Youtube educators. Given how much LessWrong likes these ideas, I thought it was worth sharing.

The group also has a Kickstarter here to fund an entire series of videos of this kind. I think they deserve to be backed, and LW can probably influence the video creators in a useful/helpful way.
Game theory and expected opponents
by Manfred — 2013-11-14T23:26:19.693Z

Thanks to V_V and Emile for some great discussion. Since writing up a post seems to reliably spark interesting comments, that's what I'll do!

Summary

If I wanted to write down a decision theory that gets the correct answer to game-theoretic problems (like playing the middle Nash equilibrium in a blind chicken-like game), it would have to, in a sense, implement all of game theory. This is hard because human-generated solutions to games use a lot of assumptions about what the other players will do, and putting those assumptions into our algorithm is a confusing problem. In order to tell what's really going on, we need to make that information more explicit. Once we do that, maybe we can get a UDT-like algorithm to make good moves in tricky games.

Newcomb's Problem

For an example of a game with unusually good information about our opponent, how about Newcomb's problem. Is it really a game, you ask? Sure, I say!

In the payoff matrix to the right, you play red and Omega plays blue. The numbers for Omega just indicate that Omega only wants to put in the million dollars if you will 1-box. If this was a normal game-theory situation, you wouldn't easily know what to do - your best move depends on Omega's move. This is where typical game theory procedure would be to say "well, that's silly, let's specify some extra nice properties the choice of both players should have so that we get a unique solution."

But the route taken in Newcomb's problem is different - we pick out a unique solution by increasing how much information the players have about each other. Omega knows what you will play, and you know that Omega knows what you will play. Now all we need to figure out what to do is some information like "If Omega has an available strategy that will definitely get it the highest possible payoff, it will take it." The best strategy, of course, is to one-box so that Omega puts in the million dollars.

Newcomb's Game vs. an Ignorant opponent

Consider another possible opponent in this game - one who has no information about what your move will be. Whereas Omega always knows your move, an ignorant opponent has no idea what you will play - they have no basis to think you're more likely to 1-box than 2-box, or vice versa.

Interestingly, for this particular payoff matrix this makes you ignorant too - you have no basis to think the ignorant opponent would rather put the m...