trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : LW Munich Meetup in July
by Valeriy — 2013-06-25T13:56:42.728Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Munich Meetup in July

WHEN:
06 July 2013 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Café at Gasteig, Rosenheimer Straße 5, 81667 München

The next Munich meetup will take place on July 6th. We will continue discussing the epistemology sequence as well as talk about productivity and emotional intelligence. You are highly welcome to come and say hi, no matter how long you’ve been reading LessWrong. If you plan to attend, please (optionally) post a comment saying what topics you’d like to discuss. Also if you on Facebook, think about joining the group (see comments to the previous meetup).

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Munich Meetup in July
Meetup : [Moscow] The Goals We Set
by Yuu — 2013-06-25T10:51:44.494Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] The Goals We Set

WHEN:
07 July 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 16:00 with “LW” sign inside the hall. And we will also check the entrance at 16:10, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Discussing the results of “The Trigger” exercise. The description in Russian is here.

Seminar on setting goals in our life.

Game session: the Liar's dice or the Resistance.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with more photos!

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] The Goals We Set
Part of a THINK Meetup Group? We Want to Hear From You!
by OnTheOtherHandle — 2013-06-25T07:41:07.401Z

Hello everybody, I've recently started as a volunteer for The High Impact NetworK, an effective altruism group with local chapters mostly in the US and UK. We're aiming to get more people, especially students, interested in effective altruism and enlarging the netowrk in a big way. Edit: Thank you to BenLowell for suggesting that I include a description!

One of the first things I'm trying to do is make THINK more personal and accessible. The modules provide a pretty good outline of the topics discussed, but they're highly structured and don't capture the feel of a live meeting very well. We'd like to advertise to potential members that there's a lot of value in attending a physical meetup beyond just learning the material already presented in the modules. We'd like it to feel more like a club and less like a classroom.

So if any of you are members of a THINK meetup group, I would love to hear your stories or see pictures and videos of your meetup groups in action. I'm hoping to convey the discussions and debates that go on after the more instructive module part is over. You don't have to reveal your name or face, but if you don't mind having your picture on the website, I would really appreciate seeing a name and face. If you choose to submit an anecdote, try focusing on something surprising or interesting that happened at a meetup, an experience you were unlikely to get elsewhere.

Please send your pictures/videos/anecdotes to ajeyac@berkeley.edu, and I'll forward them to THINK leader Mark Lee. I'll do my best to try to set up a section on the THINK website and put this up, but it may take a while, and if we get more submissions than we anticipated, they may not all show up.

Thank you!
Ancestor Simulations for Fun and Profit
by DataPacRat — 2013-06-25T03:48:30.273Z

A passing thought: "... it's beneath my dignity as a human being to be scared of anything that isn't smarter than I am" (-- HJPEV) likely applies equally well to superintelligences. Similarly, "It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity." (-- ditto) suggests that one of the stronger spurs for superintelligences becoming as super-intelligent as possible could very well be the competition as they try to outwit each other.

Thus, instead of ancestor simulations being implemented simply out of historical curiosity, a larger portion of such simulations may arise as one super-intelligence tries to figure out another by working out how its competitor arose in the first place. This casts a somewhat different light on how such simulations would be built and treated, then the usual suggestion of university researchers or over-powered child-gods playing Civilization-3^^^3.

* Assume for a moment that you're in the original, real (to whatever degree that word has meaning) universe, and you're considering the vast numbers of copies of yourself that are going to be instantiated over future eons. Is there anything that the original you can do, think, or be which could improve your future copies' lives? Eg, is there some pre-commitment you could make, privately or publicly?

* Assume for a moment that you're in one of the simulated universes. Is there anything you can do that would make your subjective experience any different from what your original experienced?

* Assume for a moment that you're a super-intelligence, or at least a proto-super-intelligence, considering running something that includes an ancestor simulation. Is there anything which the original people, or the simulated versions, could do or have done, which would change your mind about how to treat the simulated people?

* Assume for a moment that you're in one of the simulated universes... and due to battle damage to a super-intelligence, you accidentally are given root access and control over your whole universe. Taking into account Reedspacer's Lower Bound, and assuming an upper bound of not being able to noticeably affect the super-battle, what would you do with your universe?
How to Have Space Correctly
by fowlertm — 2013-06-25T03:47:10.994Z

[NOTE: This post has undergone substantial revisions following feedback in the comments section. The basic complaint was that it was too airy and light on concrete examples and recommendations. So I've said oops, applied the virtue of narrowness, gotten specific, and hopefully made this what it should've been the first time.]

Take a moment and picture a master surgeon about to begin an operation. Visualize the room (white, bright overhead lights), his clothes (green scrubs, white mask and gloves), the patient, under anesthesia and awaiting the first incision. There are several other people, maybe three or four, strategically placed and preparing for the task ahead. Visualize his tools - it's okay if you don't actually know what tools a surgeon uses, but imagine how they might be arranged. Do you picture them in a giant heap which the surgeon must dig through every time he wants something, or would they be arranged neatly (possibly in the order they'll be used) and where they can be identified instantly by sight? Visualize their working area. Would it be conducive to have random machines and equipment all over the place, or would every single item within arms reach be put there on purpose because it is relevant, with nothing left over to distract the team from their job for even a moment?

Space is important. You are a spatially extended being interacting with spatially extended objects which can and must be arranged spatially. In the same way it may not have occurred to you that there is a correct way to have things, it may not have occurred to you that space is something you can use poorly or well. The stakes aren't always as high as they are for a surgeon, and I'm sure there are plenty of productive people who don't do a single one of the things I'm going to talk about. But there are also skinny people who eat lots of cheesecake, and that doesn't mean cheesecake is good for you. Improving how you use the scarce resource of space can reduce task completion time, help in getting organized, make you less error-prone and forgetful, and free up some internal computational resources, among other things.

What Does Using Space Well Mean?

It means consciously manipulating the arrangement, visibility, prominence, etc. of objects in your environme...
The Mystery At The Heart of Central Banking
by  — 2013-06-24T19:51:51.451Z

Economists love decentralized competitive markets. There’s nothing an economist likes to see more than some decentralized entrepreneurs starting businesses with well-defined property rights, competing with each other to serve the interests of others in order to serve their own interests, coordinated through decentralized prices which transmit information about relative scarcities, with success determined by profits and failure by loss. We love decentralized competitive markets so much that we even call them “perfect.” Any deviation from this perfection is labeled “inefficient” and “failure” and economists quickly design a correction intended to push the system back towards perfection with minimal interference.

Now let’s look at central banking and try to predict whether economists would love or hate it. To what extent does central banking approach economists’ vision of perfection?

Is the bank decentralized? Nope, it has “central” in the name for crying out loud.

Competitive? Central banks are monopolies by law. Competing with a central bank is a crime.

Private actors serving the public good through self-interest? No, central banking uses government-employed technocrats whose motives are apparently supposed to be public-spiritedness in the manner of politicians and government bureaucrats.

Success determined by profits and failure by loss? The central bank is not a profit-maximizing entity and in any case has the explicit backing of the government in case it runs into trouble, a support central banks the world over have repeatedly had to turn to in crisis.

Coordination through decentralized profits? On the contrary, the central bank is the entity that is supposed to be doing the coordinating, these days on a global level, when economists are convinced that in every other industry centralized planning runs into insurmountable information and incentives problems at a scale far below what central banks these days are expected to manage.

So what do you predict? Are economists supportive of central banking or not?

That’s right, economists support central banking over competitive decentralized banking near-unanimously. The only university of any significance that might have an economics department a majority of whom sup

...
Economic growth and parallelization of work
by KatjaGrace — 2013-06-24T14:50:00.000Z

Eliezer suggests that increased economic growth is likely bad for the world, as it should speed up AI progress relative to work on AI safety. He reasons that this should happen because safety work is probably more dependent on insights building upon one another than AI work is in general. Thus work on safety should parallelize less well than work on AI, so should be at a disadvantage in a faster paced economy. Also, unfriendly AI should benefit more from brute computational power than friendly AI. He explains,

“Both of these imply, so far as I can tell, that slower economic growth is good news for FAI; it lengthens the deadline to UFAI and gives us more time to get the job done. “…

“Roughly, it seems to me like higher economic growth speeds up time and this is not a good thing. I wish I had more time, not less, in which to work on FAI; I would prefer worlds in which this research can proceed at a relatively less frenzied pace and still succeed, worlds in which the default timelines to UFAI terminate in 2055 instead of 2035.”

I’m sympathetic to others‘ criticisms of this argument, but would like to point out a more basic problem, granting all other assumptions. As far as I can tell, the effect of economic growth on parallelization should go the other way. Economic progress should make work in a given area less parallel, relatively helping those projects that do not parallelize well.

Economic growth, without substantial population growth, means that each person is doing more work in their life. This means the work that would have otherwise been done by a number of people can be done by a single person, in sequence. The number of AI researchers at a given time shouldn’t obviously change much if the economy overall is more productive. But each AI researcher will have effectively lived and worked for longer, before they are replaced by a different person starting off again ignorant. If you think research is better done by a small number of people working for a long time than a lot of people doing a little bit each, economic growth seems like a good thing.

On this view, economic growth is not like speeding up time – it is like speeding up how fast you can do things, which is like slowing down time. Robotic cars and more efficient coffee lids alike mean researchers (and everyone else) have more hours per day to do ...
Living in the shadow of superintelligence
by Mitchell_Porter — 2013-06-24T12:06:18.614Z

Although it regularly discusses the possibility of superintelligences with the power to transform the universe in the service of some value system - whether that value system is paperclip maximization or some elusive extrapolation of human values - it seems that Less Wrong has never systematically discussed the possibility that we are already within the domain of some superintelligence, and what that would imply. So how about it? What are the possibilities, what are the probabilities, and how should they affect our choices?
Start Under the Streetlight, then Push into the Shadows
by lukeprog — 2013-06-24T00:49:22.961Z

See also: Hack Away at the Edges.

The streetlight effect

You've heard the joke before:

Late at night, a police officer finds a drunk man crawling around on his hands and knees under a streetlight. The drunk man tells the officer he’s looking for his wallet. When the officer asks if he’s sure this is where he dropped the wallet, the man replies that he thinks he more likely dropped it across the street. Then why are you looking over here? the befuddled officer asks. Because the light’s better here, explains the drunk man.

The joke illustrates the streetlight effect: we "tend to look for answers where the looking is good, rather than where the answers are likely to be hiding."

Freedman (2010) documents at length some harms caused by the streetlight effect. For example:

A bolt of excitement ran through the field of cardiology in the early 1980s when anti-arrhythmia drugs burst onto the scene. Researchers knew that heart-attack victims with steady heartbeats had the best odds of survival, so a medication that could tamp down irregularities seemed like a no-brainer. The drugs became the standard of care for heart-attack patients and were soon smoothing out heartbeats in intensive care wards across the United States.

But in the early 1990s, cardiologists realized that the drugs were also doing something else: killing about 56,000 heart-attack patients a year. Yes, hearts were beating more regularly on the drugs than off, but their owners were, on average, one-third as likely to pull through. Cardiologists had been so focused on immediately measurable arrhythmias that they had overlooked the longer-term but far more important variable of death.

Start under the streetlight

Of course, there are good reasons to search under the streetlight:

It is often extremely difficult or even impossible to cleanly measure what is really important, so scientists instead cleanly measure what they can, hoping it turns out to be relevant.

In retrospect, we might wish cardiologists had done a decade-long longitudinal study measuring the long-term effects of the new anti-arrhythmia drugs of the 1980s. But it's easy to understand why they didn't. Decades-long longitudinal studies are expensive, and resources are limited. It was more efficient to rely on an easily-measurable proxy variable like arrhythmias.

We must remember, however, that the analogy to the...
Meetup : LW Meetup in Lyon
by Oriane — 2013-06-23T22:14:49.401Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Meetup in Lyon

WHEN:
03 July 2013 06:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
4 rue de la Charité, 69002 Lyon

It is time for a first LW Meetup in Lyon!

Some of the topics we could talk about are: effective altruism, munchkinism and other sorts of life hacking, belief updates or any other topic that you would like to discuss.

We will meet at Café de la Cloche, a "café-philo".

Please feel free to bring along non LW readers and non Anglophones who might be interested in such conversations.

I look forward to meeting you!

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Meetup in Lyon
Meetup : San Francisco: Effective Altruism
by ozziegooen — 2013-06-23T21:48:34.365Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco: Effective Altruism

WHEN:
27 June 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
170 Saint Germain Ave, San Francisco

Our first salon, about Effective Altruism groups in Oxford.

The current effective altruist movements seem to be spread between two very specific places. Here in the Bay Area we have Givewell, CFAR, MIRI, Leverage Research, and others. But across the Atlantic, in Oxford, there exist organizations such as 80,000 hours, the Life You Can Save, the Future of Humanity Institute, and several other fascinating groups.

Holly Morgan the Managing Director of The Life You Can Save and is also involved in several other Effective Altruist groups. She's here in San Francisco for a very limited time only, and will be discussing the ins and outs of English groups we should care about.

This will be in a lecture/salon format, with a talk for approximately 40 minutes, followed by some Q/A, followed by friendly discussions.

Come at 7pm, talk will start at 7:20pm.

Sign up here:
http://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Salon/events/125741742/

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco: Effective Altruism
Meetup : Melbourne LW Outing: Indoor Rock Climbing, Sunday June 30th
by BraydenM — 2013-06-22T05:21:01.550Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne LW Outing: Indoor Rock Climbing, Sunday June 30th

WHEN:
30 June 2013 02:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
501 Swanston Street Melbourne

We are going to try something different next week, and have our first group outing.

Come along to Hardrock Indoor Rockclimbing in the city for a couple for hours rock climbing next week on Sunday the 30th of June, from 2pm to 4pm.

You can get some exercise and hang out in a different setting to what we are used to. There is nothing like having to trust a partner with your life for effective personal relationship building!

The normal price is $30, but decreases to only $19, but only if you RSVP by 5pm, Sunday 23rd July. This is so I can make a group booking which requires a large deposit, and I need to gauge interest and need pre-commitments immediately. I will update the meetup post after this time to confirm.
Price includes everything: equipment, shoes, and safety instructions.

The address is:
501 Swanston Street
Melbourne
Victoria 3000.
Australia.

I will probably be doing something afterwards for food with anyone who is interested.

Brayden

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne LW Outing: Indoor Rock Climbing, Sunday June 30th
For FAI: Is "Molecular Nanotechnology" putting our best foot forward?
by leplen — 2013-06-22T04:44:10.976Z

Molecular nanotechnology, or MNT for those of you who love acronyms, seems to be a fairly common trope on LW and related literature. It's not really clear to me why. In many of the examples of "How could AI's help us" or "How could AI's rise to power" phrases like "cracks protein folding" or "making a block of diamond is just as easy as making a block of coal" are thrown about in ways that make me very very uncomfortable. Maybe it's all true, maybe I'm just late to the transhumanist party and the obviousness of this information was with my invitation that got lost in the mail, but seeing all the physics swept under the rug like that sets off every crackpot alarm I have.

I must post the disclaimer that I have done a little bit of materials science, so maybe I'm just annoyed that you're making me obsolete, but I don't see why this particular possible future gets so much attention. Let us assume that a smarter than human AI will be very difficult to control and represents a large positive or negative utility for the entirety of the human race. Even given that assumption, it's still not clear to me that MNT is a likely element of the future. It isn't clear to me than MNT is physically practical. I don't doubt that it can be done. I don't doubt that very clever metastable arrangements of atoms with novel properties can be dreamed up. Indeed, that's my day job, but I have a hard time believing the only reason you can't make a nanoassembler capable of arbitrary manipulations out of a handful of bottles you ordered from Sigma-Aldrich is because we're just not smart enough. Manipulating individuals atoms means climbing huge binding energy curves, it's an enormously steep, enormously complicated energy landscape, and the Schrodinger Equation scales very very poorly as you add additional particles and degrees of freedom. Building molecular nanotechnology seems to me to be roughly equivalent to being able to make arbitrary lego structures by shaking a large bin of lego in a particular way while blindfolded. Maybe a super human intelligence is capable of doing so, but it's not at all clear to me that it's even possible.

I assume the reason than MNT is added to a discussion on AI is because we're trying to make the future sound more plausible via adding burdensome details. I understand that AI and MNT is less probable than AI or MNT alone, but...
Meetup : San Francisco: Effective Altruism
by ozziegooen — 2013-06-22T02:54:41.483Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco: Effective Altruism

WHEN:
28 June 2013 07:54:30PM (-0700)

WHERE:
170 Saint Germain Ave, San Francisco

This is going to be a salon-style event, so we'll have a medium length talk, followed by some Q/A, followed by some general discussion.

Please register with Meetup so we know how many are attending.
http://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Salon/events/125741742/

This is our first salon, about Effective Altruism groups in Oxford.

The current effective altruist movements seem to be spread between two very specific places. Here in the Bay Area we have Givewell, CFAR, MIRI, Leverage Research, and others. But across the Atlantic, in Oxford, there exist organizations such as 80,000 hours, the Life You Can Save, the Future of Humanity Institute, and several other fascinating groups.
Holly Morgan the Managing Director of The Life You Can Save and is also involved in several other Effective Altruist groups. She's here in San Francisco for a very limited time only, and will be discussing the ins and outs of English groups we should care about.

This will be in a lecture/salon format, with a talk for approximately 40 minutes, followed by some Q/A, followed by friendly discussions.
Come at 7pm, talk will start at 7:20pm."

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco: Effective Altruism