trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Brussels February meetup: Words
by Roxolan — 2015-01-13T15:55:44.577Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels February meetup: Words

WHEN:
14 February 2015 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

This February, we will talk about the way we talk.

Yudkowsky has written quite a lot on that topic in the early days of LessWrong, collected into the sequence A human's guide to words (also available as a 5$ podcast). My personal favourite is the more practical Taboo Your Words. I have, on many occasions, attempted to resolve an apparent conflict by asking someone to replace a word with its definition and it never works because not enough people have read the damn article and the inferential distance is too damn big.

notices anger, snaps fingers

tugce also suggested the movie Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, an animated conversation between Michel Gondry and Noam Chomsky. I have to admit I know almost nothing of Chomsky. If anyone can recommend a good starting point, by next month I will feel very guilty about not having read it.

This meetup marks the third-year anniversary of LessWrong Brussels. There will be an item of soft sweet food made from a mixture of flour, fat, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients, baked and possibly iced or decorated.

We will meet at 1 pm at "La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form to share your contact information.

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group.

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on meetup.com

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels February meetup: Words
'Dumb' AI observes and manipulates controllers
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-01-13T13:35:19.718Z

The argument that AIs provided with a reward channel will observe their controllers and learn to manipulate them is a valid one. Unfortunately, it's often framed in a way that feels counterintuitive or extreme, especially to AI designers. It typically starts with the standard reinforcement learning scenario, then posits that the AI becomes superintelligent and either manipulates the controller with super-social powers, or breaks out and gains control of its reward channel, killing or threatening its controllers.

And that is a fair argument. But conceptually, it leaps from a standard reinforcement learning scenario, to a science-fiction-sounding scenario. It might help to have intermediate scenarios: to show that even lower intelligence AIs might start exhibiting the same sort of behaviour, long before it gets to superintelligence.

So consider the following scenario. Some complex, trainable AI is tasked with writing automated news stories for a student newspaper. It trawls the web and composes its stories, then gets reward and feedback from the editors. Assume there are two editors for this newspaper, and they work on alternate days. The two editors have somewhat different ideas as to what constitutes a good story, so their feedbacks are different. After a while, the AI finds that it gets higher reward by using a certain style on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and another style on Tuesday and Thursdays - this is a simple consequence of its reward mechanism.

But the rota isn't perfect. Sometime the Monday editor will edit a story so late on Monday that it's Tuesday, and sometimes the Tuesday editor will be up early and edit a story at the same time. This pattern is more common during the holidays, when the editors go to different time zones, often travel, and become more irregular in their editing.

So if the AI complex and skilled enough, then, simply through simple feedback, it will start building up a picture of its editors. It will figure out when they are likely to stick to a schedule, and when they will be more irregular. It will figure out the difference between holidays and non-holidays. Given time, it may be able to track the editors moods and it will certainly pick up on any major change in their lives - such as romantic relationships and breakups, which will radically change whether and how it should present stories with a romantic focus.

It will also...
Meetup : MelbLW: January Social Meetup
by MelbourneLW — 2015-01-13T09:38:26.332Z

Discussion article for the meetup : MelbLW: January Social Meetup

WHEN:
16 January 2015 06:30:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
The Bull & Bear Tavern, 347 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

January's social meetup is scheduled for this Friday (16th January) at 6:30pm as usual. This month, we will be returning to the Bull & Bear Tavern on Flinders Lane.

Our social meetups are relaxed, informal events where we chat and often play games. The start and finish times are very loose - people will be coming and going throughout the night, so don't worry if you are coming later or have to leave early.

Where? The Bull & Bear Tavern, 347 Flinders Lane, Melbourne (on Flinders Lane between Queen and Elizabeth)

When? From 6:30pm until late, Friday January 16th.

Contact? If you have any questions, just text or call Richard on 0421231789

Dinner? The Bull & Bear serve typical pub food until 9pm. Some of us will most likely go for our traditional post-meetup souvlakis at Stalactites, some time around 11-12.

Games? We will have our own section of the Bull & Bear with tables and chairs, and can bring board games to play. If you'd like to play something, bring it along and you should be able to rustle up a group easily.

To organise similar events, please send an email to melbournelw@gmail.com

Discussion article for the meetup : MelbLW: January Social Meetup
LW-ish meetup in Boulder, CO
by fowlertm — 2015-01-13T05:23:39.024Z

This Saturday I'm giving a presentation at the Boulder Future Salon, topic will be non-religious spirituality. The more LWians that can make it the better, because I'm really trying to get some community building done in the Boulder/Denver area. There's an insane amount of potential here.

Details.
Superintelligence 18: Life in an algorithmic economy
by KatjaGrace — 2015-01-13T02:00:11.506Z

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 eighteenth section in the reading guide: Life in an algorithmic economy. This corresponds to the middle of Chapter 11.

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: “Life in an algorithmic economy” from Chapter 11

Summary

In a multipolar scenario, biological humans might lead poor and meager lives. (p166-7)

The AIs might be worthy of moral consideration, and if so their wellbeing might be more important than that of the relatively few humans. (p167)

AI minds might be much like slaves, even if they are not literally. They may be selected for liking this. (p167)

Because brain emulations would be very cheap to copy, it will often be convenient to make a copy and then later turn it off (in a sense killing a person). (p168)

There are various other reasons that very short lives might be optimal for some applications. (p168-9)

It isn't obvious whether brain emulations would be happy working all of the time. Some relevant considerations are current human emotions in general and regarding work, probable selection for pro-work individuals, evolutionary adaptiveness of happiness in the past and future -- e.g. does happiness help you work harder?--and absence of present sources of unhappiness such as injury. (p169-171)

In the long run, artificial minds may not even be conscious, or have valuable experiences, if these are not the most effective ways for them to earn wages. If such minds replace humans, Earth might have an advanced civilization with nobody there to benefit. (p172-3)

In the long run, artificial minds may outsource many parts of their thinking, thus becoming decreasingly differentiated as individuals. (p1

...
How subjective is attractiveness?
by JonahS — 2015-01-13T00:04:00.237Z

Consider the two statements:

There is a universal standard for beauty.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Most people would agree that there's some truth to each of these statements. At Thing of Things Ozy wrote:

As for the beauty thing… well, yeah, everyone’s beautiful in the sense that everyone is sexually attractive to someone, and that human bodies in general are pretty cool-looking. But conventional attractiveness is still a thing. While I’m fairly conventionally attractive (thin, white, clear skin, symmetrical features), I doubt hairy legs, bound chests, and haircuts that make one look like a teenage boy are going to be all the rage at Cosmo any time soon.

This post explores the question of the extent to which each of the two statements is true, using data from a study of speed dating events conducted by Raymond Fisman and Sheena Iyengar.

The basic facts that I describe here are:

Attractiveness as defined by group consensus can be modeled well using a normal distribution.

The group consensus on somebody's attractiveness accounted for roughly 60% of the variance in people's perceptions of the person's relative attractiveness.

The distribution of people's perceptions of the relative attractiveness of a fixed person can be modeled well using a normal distribution. Moreover, the standard deviations of these distributions tend to be quite close to one another (across different people), so that it's often possible to approximate the entire distribution of perceptions of somebody's relative attractiveness using only the mean of the distribution, which is just the group consensus on the person's attractiveness.

There's much more to say about how to interpret the group consensus and its implications, which I'll go into in a later post.

Each event involved ~15 men and ~15 women, and everybody of a given gender went on speed dates with everyone of opposite gender. Each participant on each date rated his or her partner on a number of dimensions, including attractiveness, on a scale from 1 to 10. For the purpose of this post, I focused on how attractive raters found a ratee relative to other ratees. For this reason, I scaled each rater's ratings so that the averages are the same for all raters of a given gender.

Gender differences

One sees essentially the same phenomena when t...
Ethical Diets
by pcm — 2015-01-12T23:38:33.864Z

[Cross-posted from my blog.]

I've seen some discussion of whether effective altruists have an obligation to be vegan or vegetarian.

The carnivores appear to underestimate the long-term effects of their actions. I see a nontrivial chance that we're headed toward a society in which humans are less powerful than some other group of agents. This could result from slow AGI takeoff producing a heterogeneous society of superhuman agents. Or there could be a long period in which the world is dominated by ems before de novo AGI becomes possible. Establishing ethical (and maybe legal) rules that protect less powerful agents may influence how AGIs treat humans or how high-speed ems treat low-speed ems and biological humans [0]. A one in a billion chance that I can alter this would be worth some of my attention. There are probably other similar ways that an expanding circle of ethical concern can benefit future people.

I see very real costs to adopting an ethical diet, but it seems implausible that EAs are merely choosing alternate ways of being altruistic. How much does it cost MealSquares customers to occasionally bemoan MealSquares use of products from apparently factory-farmed animals? Instead, it seems like EAs have some tendency to actively raise the status of MealSquares [1].

I don't find it useful to compare a more ethical diet to GiveWell donations for my personal choices, because I expect my costs to be mostly inconveniences, and the marginal value of my time seems small [2], with little fungibility between them.

I'm reluctant to adopt a vegan diet due to the difficulty of evaluating the health effects and due to the difficulty of evaluating whether it would mean fewer animals living lives that they'd prefer to nonexistence.

But there's little dispute that most factory-farmed animals are much less happy than pasture-raised animals. And everything I know about the nutritional differences suggests that avoiding factory-farmed animals improves my health [3].

I plan not to worry about factory-farmed invertebrates for now (shrimp, oysters, insects), partly because some of the harmful factory-farm practices such as confining animals to cages not much bigger than the animals in question aren't likely with animals that small.

So my diet will consist of vegan food plus shellfish, insects, wild-caught fish, pasture-raised birds/mammals (and their eggs/whey/butter). I will assum...
What topics are appropriate for LessWrong?
by tog — 2015-01-12T18:58:16.791Z

For example, what would be inappropriately off topic to post to LessWrong discussion about?

I couldn't find an answer in the FAQ. (Perhaps it'd be worth adding one.) The closest I could find was this:

What is Less Wrong?

Less Wrong is an online community for discussion of rationality. Topics of interest include decision theory, philosophy, self-improvement, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, game theory, metamathematics, logic, evolutionary psychology, economics, and the far future.

However "rationality" can be interpreted broadly enough that rational discussion of anything would count, and my experience reading LW is compatible with this interpretation being applied by posters. Indeed my experience seems to suggest that practically everything is on topic; political discussion of certain sorts is frowned upon, but not due to being off topic. People often post about things far removed from the topics of interest. And some of these topics are very broad: it seems that a lot of material about self-improvement is acceptable, for instance.
Misapplied economics and overwrought estimates
by Timothy Telleen-Lawton — 2015-01-12T17:10:50.617Z

I believe that a small piece of rationalist community doctrine is incorrect, and I'd like your help correcting it (or me). Arguing the point by intuition has largely failed, so here I make the case by leaning heavily on the authority of conventional economic wisdom.

The question:

How does an industry's total output respond to decreases in a consumer's purchases; does it shrink by a similar amount, a lesser amount, or not at all?

(Short-run) Answers from the rationalist community:

The consensus answer in the few cases I've seen cited in the broader LW community appears to be that production is reduced by an amount that's smaller than the original decrease in consumption.

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE):

Fewer people in the market for meat leads to a drop in prices, which causes some other people to buy more meat. The drop in prices does also reduce the amount of meat produced and ultimately consumed, but not by as much as was consumed by people who have left the market.

Peter Hurford:

As is commonly known by economists, when you choose to not buy a product, you lower the demand ever so slightly, which lowers the price ever so slightly, which turns out to re-increase the demand ever so slightly. Therefore, forgoing one pound of meat means that less than one pound of meat actually gets prevented from being factory farmed.

Compassion, by the Pound:

The key points to note are that a permanent decision to reduce meat consumption (1) does ultimately reduce the number of animals on the farm and the amount of meat produced (2), but it has less than a 1-to-1 effect on the amount of meat produced.

These answers are all correct in the short-run (ie, when the “supply curve” doesn’t have time to shift). If there is less demand for a product, the price will fall, and some other consumers will consume more because of the better deal. One intuitive justification for this is that when producers don’t have time to fully react to a change in demand, the total amount of production and consumption is somewhat ‘anchored’ to prior expectations of demand, so any change in demand will have less than a 1:1 effect on production.

For example, a chicken producer who begins to have negative profits due to the drop in price isn't going to immediately yank their chickens from the shelves; they will sell what ...
Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-01-12T00:39:20.888Z

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

Previous Open Thread

Next Open Thread

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.
Research Priorities for Artificial Intelligence: An Open Letter
by jimrandomh — 2015-01-11T19:52:19.313Z

The Future of Life Institute has published their document Research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence and written an open letter for people to sign indicating their support.

Success in the quest for artificial intelligence has the potential to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity, and it is therefore worthwhile to research how to maximize these benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. This document gives numerous examples (which should by no means be construed as an exhaustive list) of such worthwhile research aimed at ensuring that AI remains robust and beneficial.
Who are your favorite "hidden rationalists"?
by aarongertler — 2015-01-11T06:26:58.471Z

Quick summary: "Hidden rationalists" are what I call authors who espouse rationalist principles, and probably think of themselves as rational people, but don't always write on "traditional" Less Wrong-ish topics and probably haven't heard of Less Wrong.

I've noticed that a lot of my rationalist friends seem to read the same ten blogs, and while it's great to have a core set of favorite authors, it's also nice to stretch out a bit and see how everyday rationalists are doing cool stuff in their own fields of expertise. I've found many people who push my rationalist buttons in fields of interest to me (journalism, fitness, etc.), and I'm sure other LWers have their own people in their own fields.

So I'm setting up this post as a place to link to/summarize the work of your favorite hidden rationalists. Be liberal with your suggestions!

Another way to phrase this: Who are the people/sources who give you the same feelings you get when you read your favorite LW posts, but who many of us probably haven't heard of?

Here's my list, to kick things off:

Peter Sandman, professional risk communication consultant. Often writes alongside Jody Lanard. Specialties: Effective communication, dealing with irrational people in a kind and efficient way, carefully weighing risks and benefits. My favorite recent post of his deals with empathy for Ebola victims and is a major, Slate Star Codex-esque tour de force. His "guestbook comments" page is better than his collection of web articles, but both are quite good.

Doug McGuff, MD, fitness guru and author of the exercise book with the highest citation-to-page ratio of any I've seen. His big thing is "superslow training", where you perform short and extremely intense workouts (video here). I've been moving in this direction for about 18 months now, and I've been able to cut my workout time approximately in half without losing strength. May not work for everyone, but reminds me of Leverage Research's sleep experiments; if it happens to work for you, you gain a heck of a lot of time. I also love the way he emphasizes the utility of strength training for all ages/genders -- very different from what you'd see on a lot of weightlifting sites.

Philosophers' Mail. A website maintained by applied philosophers at the School of Life, which reminds me of a hippy-dippy European version of CFAR (in a good way). Not much science, but a

...
How Islamic terrorists reduced terrorism in the US
by PhilGoetz — 2015-01-11T05:19:17.376Z

Yesterday I was using the Global Terrorism Database to check some suprisingly low figures on what percentage of terrorist acts are committed by Muslims. (Short answer: Worldwide since 2000, about 80%, rather than 0.4 - 6% as given in various sources.) But I found some odd patterns in the data for the United States. Look at this chart of terrorist acts in the US which meet GTD criteria I-III and are listed as "unambiguous":

There were over 200 bombings in the US in 1970 alone, by all sorts of political groups (the Puerto Rican Liberation Front, the Jewish Defense League, the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, anti-Castro groups, white supremacists, etc., etc.) There was essentially no religious terrorism; that came in the 80s and 90s. But let's zoom in on 1978 onward, after the crazy period we inaccurately call "the sixties". First, a count of Islamic terrorist acts worldwide:

This is incomplete, because the database contains over 400 Islamic terrorist groups, but only let me select 300 groups at a time. (Al Qaeda is one of the groups not included here.) Also, this doesn't list any acts committed without direct supervision from a recognized terrorist group, nor acts whose perpetrators were not identified (about 77% of the database, estimated from a sample of 100, with the vast majority of those unknowns in Muslim countries). But we can see there's an increase after 2000.

Now let's look at terrorist acts of all kinds in the US:

We see a dramatic drop in terrorist acts in the US after 2000. Sampling them, I found that except for less than a handful of white supremacists, there are only 3 types of terrorists still active in the US: Nutcases, animal liberation activists, and Muslims. If we exclude cases of property damage (which has never terrified me), it's basically just nutcases and Muslims.

Going by body count, it may still be an increase, because even if you exclude 9/11, just a handful of Muslim attacks still accounted for 50% of US fatalities in terrorist attacks from 2000 through 2013. But counting incidents, by 2005 there were about 1/3 as many per year as just before 2000. From 2000 to 2013 there were only 6 violent terrorist attacks in the US by non-Islamic terrorist groups that were not directed solely at property damage, resulting in 2 fatalities over those 14 years. Violent non-Islamic organized terrorism in the US has been effectively elimin

...
Meetup : Atlanta January Meetup: Boring Advice & Stupid Questions
by alexdewey — 2015-01-10T20:04:48.129Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta January Meetup: Boring Advice & Stupid Questions

WHEN:
17 January 2015 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Norgate Manor, 2388 Lawrenceville Highway Unit L, Decatur, GA 30033

This meetup we'll be talking about the Boring Advice Repository and giving our own suggestions and input. We'll also be asking any "stupid" questions we have that seem obvious or silly. If you'd like, take a look at these posts in advance for an idea of what we'll be discussing:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lih/2015_repository_reruns_boring_advice_repository/
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lgn/stupid_questions_january_2015/

Please park in a spot labeled visitor, because parking in a numbered spot can get your car towed. There are cats at the location.
As usual, there will be snacks, games, and good conversation. Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta January Meetup: Boring Advice & Stupid Questions