trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
My experience of the recent CFAR workshop
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-11-27T16:17:03.600Z

Originally posted at my blog.

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I just got home from a four-day rationality workshop in England that was organized by the Center For Applied Rationality (CFAR). It covered a lot of content, but if I had to choose a single theme that united most of it, it was listening to your emotions.

That might sound like a weird focus for a rationality workshop, but cognitive science has shown that the intuitive and emotional part of the mind (”System 1”) is both in charge of most of our behavior, and also carries out a great deal of valuable information-processing of its own (it’s great at pattern-matching, for example). Much of the workshop material was aimed at helping people reach a greater harmony between their System 1 and their verbal, logical System 2. Many of people’s motivational troubles come from the goals of their two systems being somehow at odds with each other, and we were taught to have our two systems have a better dialogue with each other, harmonizing their desires and making it easier for information to cross from one system to the other and back.

To give a more concrete example, there was the technique of goal factoring. You take a behavior that you often do but aren’t sure why, or which you feel might be wasted time. Suppose that you spend a lot of time answering e-mails that aren’t actually very important. You start by asking yourself: what’s good about this activity, that makes me do it? Then you try to listen to your feelings in response to that question, and write down what you perceive. Maybe you conclude that it makes you feel productive, and it gives you a break from tasks that require more energy to do.

Next you look at the things that you came up with, and consider whether there’s a better way to accomplish them. There are two possible outcomes here. Either you conclude that the behavior is an important and valuable one after all, meaning that you can now be more motivated to do it. Alternatively, you find that there would be better ways of accomplishing all the goals that the behavior was aiming for. Maybe taking a walk would make for a better break, and answering more urgent e-mails would provide more value. If you were previously using two hours per day on the unimportant e-mails, possibly you could now achieve more in terms of both relaxation and actual productivity by spending an hour on a wa...
Meetup : Warsaw December Meetup
by  — 2014-11-27T15:34:54.266Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw December Meetup

WHEN:
03 December 2014 06:30:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Warsaw

In Cafe Niespodzianka, Marszałkowska 7, Śródmieście, Warszawa, Poland.

Join our Facebook group for details: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwwarsaw/

Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw December Meetup
Misdiagnosed Asperger's syndrome is ruining my life.
by Fivehundred — 2014-11-27T10:33:57.775Z

So I've been rejected for conscription in the IDF because the psychiatrist thinks the Asperger's diagnosis I received as a child means that there is something wrong with me. Never mind that I've been examined very recently and been recommended for enlistment, he thinks that even though I probably don't have Asperger's, there must be something wrong with me because in the past I've had trouble socially. Of course I have no such problems now, but it's not as if he's going to risk his job in the face of anything less than perfection.

(This, btw, is what I meant when I said there was no such thing as a competent mental health professional- the entire system works against evidence-based methods.)

There has to be something wrong with this, some way that I can appeal. I have no idea of the Israeli legal process and I'm not sure if I could just write a letter to someone, or if I might need a lawyer. I can definitely prove that there is nothing psychologically wrong with me. I just have no idea where to turn, no idea how to do anything, and have no allies whatsoever. I feel like my life is collapsing, and I do have very good reasons personally for wanting to join the army. It's not just something I felt like doing.

This community obviously has better things to do than this sort of thing. But I feel like I'm going to explode if I can't talk to anyone, or get some idea of what I can do. I feel almost as if I'm becoming mentally ill.
Why I will Win my Bet with Eliezer Yudkowsky
by Unknowns — 2014-11-27T06:15:23.484Z

The bet may be found here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Bets_registry#Bets_decided_eventually

An AI is made of material parts, and those parts follow physical laws. The only thing it can do is to follow those laws. The AI’s “goals” will be a description of what it perceives itself to be tending toward according to those laws.

Suppose we program a chess playing AI with overall subhuman intelligence, but with excellent chess playing skills. At first, the only thing we program it to do is to select moves to play against a human player. Since it has subhuman intelligence overall, most likely it will not be very good at recognizing its goals, but to the extent that it does, it will believe that it has the goal of selecting good chess moves against human beings, and winning chess games against human beings. Those will be the only things it feels like doing, since in fact those will be the only things it can physically do.

Now we upgrade the AI to human level intelligence, and at the same time add a module for chatting with human beings through a text terminal. Now we can engage it in conversation. Something like this might be the result:

Human: What are your goals? What do you feel like doing?

AI: I like to play and win chess games with human beings, and to chat with you guys through this terminal.

Human: Do you always tell the truth or do you sometimes lie to us?

AI:&

...
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Seeking advice
by Manfred — 2014-11-27T00:58:01.285Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Seeking advice

WHEN:
30 November 2014 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
206 S. Cedar St, Urbana, IL

Sometimes, one might even say usually, other people know more than me. This is great, because then they can give me advice.

Let's talk about how to evaluate advice resources, and how to ask, and reinforce how useful this can be.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Seeking advice
The Hostile Arguer
by Error — 2014-11-27T00:30:28.235Z

“Your instinct is to talk your way out of the situation, but that is an instinct born of prior interactions with reasonable people of good faith, and inapplicable to this interaction…” – Ken White

One of the Less Wrong Study Hall denizens has been having a bit of an issue recently. He became an atheist some time ago. His family was in denial about it for a while, but in recent days they have 1. stopped with the denial bit, and 2. been less than understanding about it. In the course of discussing the issue during break, this line jumped out at me:

“I can defend my views fine enough, just not to my parents.”

And I thought: Well, of course you can’t, because they’re not interested in your views. At all.

I never had to deal with the Religion Argument with my parents, but I did spend my fair share of time failing to argumentatively defend myself. I think I have some useful things to say to those younger and less the-hell-out-of-the-house than me.

A clever arguer is someone that has already decided on their conclusion and is making the best case they possibly can for it. A clever arguer is not necessarily interested in what you currently believe; they are arguing for proposition A and against proposition B. But there is a specific sort of clever arguer, one that I have difficulty defining explicitly but can characterize fairly easily. I call it, as of today, the Hostile Arguer.

It looks something like this:

When your theist parents ask you, “What? Why would you believe that?! We should talk about this,” they do not actually want to know why you believe anything, despite the form of the question. There is no genuine curiosity there. They are instead looking for ammunition. Which, if they are cleverer arguers than you, you are likely to provide. Unless you are epistemically perfect, you believe things that you cannot, on demand, come up with an explicit defense for. Even important things.

In accepting that the onus is solely on you to defend your position – which is what you are implicitly doing, in engaging the question – you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. That is the real point of the question: to bait you into an argument that your interlocutor knows you will lose, whereupon they will expect you to acknowledge defeat and toe the line they define.

Someone in the chat compared this to politics...
Stuart Russell: AI value alignment problem must be an "intrinsic part" of the field's mainstream agenda
by Rob Bensinger — 2014-11-26T11:02:01.038Z

Edge.org has recently been discussing "the myth of AI". Unfortunately, although Superintelligence is cited in the opening, most of the participants don't seem to have looked into Bostrom's arguments. (Luke has written a brief response to some of the misunderstandings Pinker and others exhibit.) The most interesting comment is Stuart Russell's, at the very bottom:

Of Myths and Moonshine

"We switched everything off and went home. That night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief."

So wrote Leo Szilard, describing the events of March 3, 1939, when he demonstrated a neutron-induced uranium fission reaction. According to the historian Richard Rhodes, Szilard had the idea for a neutron-induced chain reaction on September 12, 1933, while crossing the road next to Russell Square in London. The previous day, Ernest Rutherford, a world authority on radioactivity, had given a "warning…to those who seek a source of power in the transmutation of atoms – such expectations are the merest moonshine."

Thus, the gap between authoritative statements of technological impossibility and the "miracle of understanding" (to borrow a phrase from Nathan Myhrvold) that renders the impossible possible may sometimes be measured not in centuries, as Rod Brooks suggests, but in hours.

None of this proves that AI, or gray goo, or strangelets, will be the end of the world. But there is no need for a proof, just a convincing argument pointing to a more-than-infinitesimal possibility. There have been many unconvincing arguments – especially those involving blunt applications of Moore's law or the spontaneous emergence of consciousness and evil intent. Many of the contributors to this conversation seem to be responding to those arguments and ignoring the more substantial arguments proposed by Omohundro, Bostrom, and others.

The primary concern is not spooky emergent consciousness but simply the ability to make high-quality decisions. Here, quality refers to the expected outcome utility of actions taken, where the utility function is, presumably, specified by the human designer. Now we have a problem:

1. The utility function may not be perfectly aligned with the values of the human race, which are (at best) very difficult to pin down.

2. Any sufficiently capable intelligent system will prefer to ensure its own continued existence and to acquir

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Superintelligence 11: The treacherous turn
by KatjaGrace — 2014-11-25T02:00:06.414Z

This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.

Welcome. This week we discuss the 11th section in the reading guide: The treacherous turn. This corresponds to Chapter 8.

This post summarizes the section, and offers a few relevant notes, and ideas for further investigation. Some of my own thoughts and questions for discussion are in the comments.

There is no need to proceed in order through this post, or to look at everything. Feel free to jump straight to the discussion. Where applicable and I remember, page numbers indicate the rough part of the chapter that is most related (not necessarily that the chapter is being cited for the specific claim).

Reading: “Existential catastrophe…” and “The treacherous turn” from Chapter 8

Summary

The possibility of a first mover advantage + orthogonality thesis + convergent instrumental values suggests doom for humanity (p115-6)

First mover advantage implies the AI is in a position to do what it wants

Orthogonality thesis implies that what it wants could be all sorts of things

Instrumental convergence thesis implies that regardless of its wants, it will try to acquire resources and eliminate threats

Humans have resources and may be threats

Therefore an AI in a position to do what it wants is likely to want to take our resources and eliminate us. i.e. doom for humanity.

One kind of response: why wouldn't the makers of the AI be extremely careful not to develop and release dangerous AIs, or relatedly, why wouldn't someone else shut the whole thing down? (p116)

It is hard to observe whether an AI is dangerous via its behavior at a time when you could turn it off, because AIs have convergent instrumental reasons to pretend to be safe, even if they are not. If they expect their minds to be surveilled, even observing their thoughts may not help. (p117)

The treacherous turn: while weak, an AI behaves cooperatively. When the AI is strong enough to be unstoppable it pursues its own values. (p119)

We might expect AIs to be more safe as they get smarter initially - when most of the risks come from crashing self-driving cars or mis-firing drones - then to get much less safe as t

...
Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining
by bokov — 2014-11-24T23:38:06.226Z

Imagine you had the following at your disposal:

A Ph.D. in a biological science, with a fair amount of reading and wet-lab work under your belt on the topic of aging and longevity (but in hindsight, nothing that turned out to leverage any real mechanistic insights into aging).

A M.S. in statistics. Sadly, the non-Bayesian kind for the most part, but along the way acquired the meta-skills necessary to read and understand most quantitative papers with life-science applications.

Love of programming and data, the ability to learn most new computer languages in a couple of weeks, and at least 8 years spent hacking R code.

Research access to large amounts of anonymized patient data.

Optimistically, two decades remaining in which to make it all count.

Imagine that your goal were to slow or prevent biological aging...

What would be the specific questions you would try to tackle first?

What additional skills would you add to your toolkit?

How would you allocate your limited time between the research questions in #1 and the acquisition of new skills in #2?

Thanks for your input.

Update

I thank everyone for their input and apologize for how long it has taken me to post an update.

I met with Aubrey de Grey and he recommended using the anonymized patient data to look for novel uses for already-prescribed drugs. He also suggested I do a comparison of existing longitudinal studies (e.g. Framingham) and the equivalent data elements from our data warehouse. I asked him that if he runs into any researchers with promising theories or methods but for a massive human dataset to test them on, to send them my way.

My original question was a bit to broad in retrospect: I should have focused more on how to best leverage the capabilities my project already has in place rather than a more general "what should I do with myself" kind of appeal. On the other hand, at the time I might have been less confident about the project's success than I am now. Though the conversation immediately went off into prospective experiments rather than analyzing existing data, there were some great ideas there that may yet become practical to implement.

At any rate, a lot of this has been overcome by events. In the last six months I realized that before we even get to the bifurcation point between longevity and other research areas, there are a crapload of technical, logistical, and organizational proble...
Expected value estimates you can take (somewhat) literally
by Thrasymachus — 2014-11-24T15:57:50.980Z

Summary

A geometric interpretation of tail divergence offers a pseudo-robust mechanism of quantifying the expected 'regression to the mean' of a cost effectiveness estimate (i.e. expected value given estimated value). With caveats, this seems to be superior to current attempts at guestimation and 'calling the bottom' of anticipated regression to the mean. There are a few pleasing corollaries: 1) it vindicates a 'regressive mindset' (particularly championed by Givewell), and underscores the value of performing research to achieve more accurate estimation; 2) it suggests (and provides a framework for quantification for) how much an estimated expected value should be discounted by how speculative it is; 3) it suggests empirical approaches one can use to better quantify degree of regression, using variance in expected-value estimates.

[Cross-posted here and here. I'm deeply uncertain about this, and wonder if this is an over-long elaboration on a very simple error. If so, please show me!]

Introduction

Estimates of expected value regress to the mean - something that seems much more valuable than average will generally look not-quite-so-valuable when one has a better look. This problem is particularly acute for effective altruism and its focus on the highest expected value causes, as these are likely to regress the most. Quantifying how much one expects an estimate to regress is not straightforward, and this has in part lead to groups like Givewell warning against explicit expected value estimates. More robust estimation has obvious value, especially when comparing between diverse cause areas, but worries about significant and differential over-estimation make these enterprises highly speculative.

'In practice', I have seen people offer discounts to try and account for this effect (e.g. "Givewell think AMF averts a DALY for $45-ish, so lets say it's $60 to try and account for this"), or mention it as a caveat without quantification. It remains very hard to get an intuitive handle on how big one should expect this effect to be, especially when looking at different causes: one might expect more speculative causes in fields like animal welfare or global catastrophic risks to 'regress more' than relatively well-studied ones in public health, but how much more?

I am unaware of any previous attempts to directly quantify this effect. I hope this ...
Population ethics and utility indifference
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-11-24T15:18:42.439Z

It occurs to me that the various utility indifference approaches might be usable in population ethics.

One challenge for non-total utilitarians is how to deal with new beings. Some theories - average utilitarianism, for instance, or some other systems that use overall population utility - have no problem dealing with this. But many non-total utilitarians would like to see creating new beings as a strictly neutral act.

One way you could do this is by starting with a total utilitarian framework, but subtracting a certain amount of utility every time a new being B is brought into the world. In the spirit of utility indifference, we could subtract exactly the expected utility that we expect B to enjoy during their life.

This means that we should be indifferent as to whether B is brought into the world or not, but, once B is there, we should aim to increase B's utility. There are two problems with this. The first is that, strictly interpreted, we would also be indifferent to creating people with negative utility. This can be addressed by only doing the "utility correction" if B's expected utility is positive, thus preventing us from creating beings only to have them suffer.

The second problem is more serious. What about all the actions that we could do, ahead of time, in order to harm or benefit the new being? For instance, it would seem perverse to argue that buying a rattle for a child after they are born (or conceived) is an act of positive utility, whereas buying it before they were born (or conceived) would be a neutral act, since the increase in expected utility for the child is cancel out by the above process. Not only is it perverse, but it isn't timeless, and isn't stable under self modification.

What would be needed is a natural, timeless zero for the act of bringing a being into existence. Something that took into account things done before the being is created as well as after. A sort of Rawlsian veil of ignorance about whether the being is created at all.

This suggests another approach, vaguely derived from utility indifference and counterfactuals. What if the agents "believed" that being B wasn't going to be successfully created? If they were certain that its creation or conception would fail? Then they wouldn't be, eg, buying rattles ahead of time.

It seems this could define a natural zero. If agent A decides to bring being B into existence, the...
Open thread, Nov. 24 - Nov. 30, 2014
by MrMind — 2014-11-24T08:56:19.716Z

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.
Shop for Charity: how to earn proven charities 5% of your Amazon spending in commission
by tog — 2014-11-24T08:29:32.996Z

If you shop on Amazon in the countries listed below, you can earn a substantial commission for charity by doing so via the links below. This is a cost-free way to do a lot of good, so I'd encourage you to do so! You can bookmark one of the direct links to Amazon below and then use that bookmark every time you shop.

The commission will be at least 5%, varying by product category. This is substantially better than the AmazonSmile scheme available in the US, which only gives 0.5% of the money you spend to charity. It works through Amazon's 'Associates Program', which pays this commission for referring purchasers to them, from the unaltered purchase price (details here). It doesn't cost the purchaser anything. The money goes to Associates Program accounts owned by the EA non-profit Charity Science, money to which always gets regranted to GiveWell-recommended charities unless explicitly earmarked otherwise. For ease of administration and to get tax-deductibility, commission will get regranted to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative until further notice.

Direct links to Amazon for your bookmarks

If you'd like to shop for charity, please bookmark the appropriate link below now:

US

Canada

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany and Austria

From now through November 28: Black Friday Deals Week

Amazon's biggest cut price sale is this week. The links below take you to currently available deals:

US

Canada

UK

Please share these links

I'll add other links on the main 'Shop for Charity' page later. I'd love to hear suggestions for good commission schemes in other countries. If you'd like to share these links with friends and family, please point them to this post or even better this project's main page.

Happy shopping!

'Shop for Charity' is a Charity Science project