trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Efficient Food
by Fluttershy — 2015-04-06T05:20:11.307Z

Yudkowsky's 2014 April Fools Day's confession notes that food production could be more efficient:

Food in dath ilan was made by people who were very good at making a particular variety of food, and they’d pick a few dishes and make a huge amount of it on any given day. There’d be many places like that within 2 miles of you, and a small courier-carlike-thing would attach itself to another car and arrive with the food you liked within 2 minutes.

A quick Google search suggests that restaurants tend to spend around a third of their revenue on ingredients (more quick estimates of restaurant operational costs on page five of this slideshow). Of course, fast food and fast casual restaurants spend a higher percentage of revenue on ingredients than other types of restaurants, but spending 30-35% of revenue on ingredients seems standard. So, it should be possible to reduce the cost of food by producing food more efficiently, that is, by making huge batches of one or two types of food at a given restaurant.

I've only been able to find one example of an establishment that actually does this. Ugi's, an Argentinian pizza chain, sells 12-inch (?) cheese pizzas for about 4.91 USD in Buenos Aires. Ugi's has a couple of locations in the US, too-- this one in Boston sells 12-inch cheese pizzas for 6.55, but also sells items other than cheese pizzas. For comparison, a 12-inch cheese pizza from Domino's pizza costs around 11 USD to order via carryout in Boston.

I, for one, am fascinated by the idea of restaurants that only serve one item, and would definitely purchase food from such establishments if they were more common in the US.

Also relevant:

Automatic food preparation

Automation of fast food cashiers
In what language should we define the utility function of a friendly AI?
by Val — 2015-04-05T22:14:58.268Z

I've been following the "safe AI" debates for quite some time, and I would like to share some of the views and ideas I don't remember seeing to be mentioned yet.

There is a lot of focus on what kind of utility function should an AI have, and how to keep it adhering to that utility function. Let's assume we have an optimizer, which doesn't develop any "deliberately malicious" intents, and cannot change its own utility function, and it can have some hard-coded constraints it can not overwrite. (Maybe we should come up with a term for such an AI, it might prove useful in the study of safe AI where we can concentrate only on the utility function, and can assume the above conditions are true - for now on, let's just use the term "optimizer" in this article. Hm, maybe "honest optimizer"?). Even an AI with the above constraints can be dangerous, an interesting example can be found in the Friendship is Optimal stories.

The question I would like to rise is not what kind of utility function we should come up with, but in what kind of language do we define it.

More specifically how high-level should the language be? As low as a mathematical function working with quantized qualities based on what values humans consider important? A programming language? Or a complex, syntactic grammar like human languages, capable of expressing abstract concepts? Something which is a step above this?

Just quantizing some human values we find important, and assigning weights to them, can have many problems:

1. Overfitting.

A simplified example: imagine the desired behavior of the AI as a function. You come up with a lot of points on this function, and what the AI will do is to fit a function onto those points, hopefully ending up with a function very similar to the one you conceived. However, an optimizer can very quickly come up with a function which goes through all of your defined points and the function will not look anything like the one you imagined. I think many of us encountered this problem when we wanted to do a curve-fitting with a polynomial of too high degree.

I guess many of the safe AI problems can be conceptualized as an overfitting problem: the optimizer will exactly fulfill the requirements we programmed into it, but will arbitrarily choose the requirements we didn't specify.

2. Changing of human values.

Imagine that someone created an honest optimizer, though of...
Desire is the direction, rationality is the magnitude
by So8res — 2015-04-05T17:27:57.757Z

What follows is a series of four short essays that say explicitly some things that I would tell an intrigued proto-rationalist before pointing them towards Rationality: AI to Zombies (and, by extension, most of LessWrong). For most people here, these essays will be very old news, as they talk about the insights that come even before the sequences. However, I've noticed recently that a number of fledgling rationalists haven't actually been exposed to all of these ideas, and there is power in saying the obvious.

This essay is cross-posted on MindingOurWay.

A brief note on "rationality:"

It's a common trope that thinking can be divided up into "hot, emotional thinking" and "cold, rational thinking" (with Kirk and Spock being the stereotypical offenders, respectively). The tropes say that the hot decisions are often stupid (and inconsiderate of consequences), while the cold decisions are often smart (but made by the sort of disconnected nerd that wears a lab coat and makes wacky technology). Of course (the trope goes) there are Deep Human Truths available to the hot reasoners that the cold reasoners know not.

Many people, upon encountering one who says they study the art of human rationality, jump to the conclusion that these "rationalists" are people who reject the hot reasoning entirely, attempting to disconnect themselves from their emotions once and for all, in order to avoid the rash mistakes of "hot reasoning." Many think that these aspiring rationalists are attempting some sort of dark ritual to sacrifice emotion once and for all, while failing to notice that the emotions they wish to sacrifice are the very things which give them their humanity. "Love is hot and rash and irrational," they say, "but you sure wouldn't want to sacrifice it." Understandably, many people find the prospect of "becoming more rational" rather uncomfortable.

So heads up: this sort of emotional sacrifice has little to do with the word "rationality" as it is used in Rationality: AI to Zombies.

When Rationality: AI to Zombies talks about "rationality," it's not talking about the "cold" part of hot vs cold reasoning, it's talking about the reasoning part.

One way or another, we humans are reasoning creatures. Sometimes, when time pressure is bearing down on us, we make quick decisions and follow our split-second intuitions. Sometimes, when the stakes are incredibly high and...
A question on DAG interpretation
by  — 2015-04-05T16:40:18.803Z

(Sorry, I did not find an easy way to post this as a comment in Open Thread or a private message, so putting it here. When there are some definite responses I promise to delete it.)

I tried to make a DAG to represent a process of recognizing a season of the year from an old, damaged photo of a plant. The object was to see how 'Colour of the plant' becomes d-separated from 'Season of the year' and what variables screen 'colour' off.

Here's my attempt (first one ever, so there might be mistakes):

X is season, Y is colour on the photo, and Z is whatever can be used for analysis. U1 is error introduced when the photo was taken, and the two-sided arrow between it and 'Species' means that some plants can be grown indoors as well as outdoors and even though they are capable of photosynthesis they don't tell us useful things about what season it is.

Could you help me?
Meetup : Atlanta Meetup: Game Night
by alexdewey — 2015-04-04T18:04:48.658Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Meetup: Game Night

WHEN:
11 April 2015 02:05:44PM (-0400)

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

This meetup will probably be the last meetup hosted by Adele (user: Adele_L) and I, as we're moving at the end of the month, so we'll be playing games, having snacks, and socializing.
Feel free to bring along any games you'd like to play or snacks you'd like, though please refrain from bringing anything with wheat or gluten as I have celiac disease and there have been problems in the past with cross contamination. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Please park in a spot labeled visitor . There are cats at the location. Feel free to message me for directions or to ask any questions.
Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Meetup: Game Night
Why IQ shouldn't be considered an external factor
by estimator — 2015-04-04T17:58:46.348Z

This is a sort-of response to this post.

"Things under your control" (more generally, free will) is an ill-defined concept: you are an entity within physics; all of your actions and thoughts are fully determined by physical processes in your brain. Here, I will assume that "things under your control" are any things that are controlled by your brain, since it is a consistent definition, and it's what people usually mean when they talk about things under one's control.

So, you may be interested in the question: how much one's success depends on his thoughts and actions (i.e. things that are controlled by his brain) vs. how it depends on the circumstances/environment (i.e. things that aren't)? Another formulation: how you can change one's life outcomes if you could alter neural signals emitted by his brain?

We also could draw the borderline somewhere else; maybe add physical traits, like height or attractiveness to the "internal factors" category, or maybe assign some brain parts to the "external factors" category. The question whether your life success is mostly determined by "internal factors" or "external factors" would remain valid -- and we call it "internal vs. external locus of control" question.

But what happens when we assign IQ to the "external factors" category?

IQ test is an attempt to measure some value, which is supposed to be a measure of something like quality of one's thinking process. So, this value can be seen as a function IQ(brain), which maps brains to numbers. Your thoughts and actions don't depend on your IQ score; IQ score depends on your thoughts. That's how the causal arrows are arranged.

But it's possible to ask, what can we change if we can change brain, conditional on the fixed IQ score. But then the "free will" intuition collapses; it's hard to imagine what we could change if our thought processes were restricted in some weird way. And such question is hardly practical, in my opinion. It's true that one can measure his IQ, and that IQ rarely changes much, but still: if you consider IQ fixed and external factor out of your control, then you must consider your thought processes restricted to some set and therefore, not totally under your control.

Define "things under your control" as "things under your brain neural signals' control", and then we will have a consistent definition, and we will find ourselves in the common sense domain. Decla...
Futarchy and Unfriendly AI
by jefftk — 2015-04-03T21:45:41.157Z

We have a reasonably clear sense of what "good" is, but it's not perfect. Suffering is bad, pleasure is good, more people living enjoyable lives is good, yes, but tradeoffs are hard. How much worse is it to go blind than to lose your leg? [1] How do we compare the death of someone at eighty to the death of someone at twelve? If you wanted to build some automated system that would go from data about the world to a number representing how well it's doing, where you would prefer any world that scored higher to any world scoring lower, that would be very difficult.

Say, however, that you've built a metric that you think matches your values well and you put some powerful optimizer to work maximizing that metric. This optimizer might do many things you think are great, but it might be that the easiest ways to maximize the metric are the ones that pull it apart from your values. Perhaps after it's in place it turns out your metric included many things that only strongly correlated with what you cared about, where the correlation breaks down under maximization.

What confuses me is that the people who warn about this scenario with respect to AI are often the same people in favor of futarchy. They both involve trying to define your values and then setting an indifferent optimizer to work on them. If you think AI would be very dangerous but futarchy would be very good, why?

I also posted this on my blog.

[1] This is a question people working in public health try to answer with Disability Weights for DALYs.
Against the internal locus of control
by Thrasymachus — 2015-04-03T17:48:56.400Z

What do you think about these pairs of statements?

People's misfortunes result from the mistakes they make

Many of the unhappy things in people's lives are partly due to bad luck

In the long run, people get the respect they deserve in this world.

Unfortunately, an individual's worth often passes unrecognized no matter how hard he tries.

Becoming a success is a matter of hard work; luck has little or nothing to do with it.

Getting a good job mainly depends on being in the right place at the right time.

They have a similar theme: the first statement suggests that an outcome (misfortune, respect, or a good job) for a person are the result of their own action or volition. The second assigns the outcome to some external factor like bad luck.(1)

People who tend to think their own attitudes or efforts can control what happens to them are said to have an internal locus of control, those who don't, an external locus of control. (Call them 'internals' and 'externals' for short).

Internals seem to do better at life, pace obvious confounding: maybe instead of internals doing better by virtue of their internal locus of control, being successful inclines you to attribute success internal factors and so become more internal, and vice versa if you fail.(2) If you don't think the relationship is wholly confounded, then there is some prudential benefit for becoming more internal.

Yet internal versus external is not just a matter of taste, but a factual claim about the world. Do people, in general, get what their actions deserve, or is it generally thanks to matters outside their control?

Why the external view is right

Here are some reasons in favour of an external view:(3)

Global income inequality is marked (e.g. someone in the bottom 10% of the US population by income is still richer than two thirds of the population - more here). The main predictor of your income is country of birth, it is thought to explain around 60% of the variance: not only more important than any other factor, but more important than all other factors put together.

Of course, the 'remaining' 40% might not be solely internal factors either. Another external factor we could put in would be parental class. Include that, and the two factors explain 80% of variance in income.

Even conditional on being born in the right country (and to the right class), success may still not be a matter of personal voliti

...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-04-03T16:52:14.678Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on March 27th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

[Edinburgh] LessWrong Scotland: 12 April 2015 02:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
LessWrong-like Meetup Hamburg: 27 March 2015 07:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Small concrete actions you could take: 29 March 2015 01:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks: 30 March 2015 06:15PM

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

Austin, TX - Caffe Medici: 28 March 2015 12:22PM
Boston: Unconference: 05 April 2015 03:30AM
London Newcomers-Are-Especially-Welcome Meetup, March 29th: 29 March 2015 01:00PM
Moscow meetup: communication practice and three short talks: 29 March 2015 02:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Skill Training Part 2: 12 April 2015 05:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 09 May 2015 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Singing: 29 March 2015 03:00AM
West LA—R:AZ Part B, Fake Beliefs: 01 April 2015 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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 is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetu...
Meetup : West LA—R:AZ Part C, Noticing Confusion
by OpenThreadGuy — 2015-04-03T07:51:19.756Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—R:AZ Part C, Noticing Confusion

WHEN:
08 April 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will probably be in the back room.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: We will be discussing Part C of Rationality: From AI to Zombies. You are welcome to join us even if you have not done the reading. However, the reading is very good, and it is free, and you should read it. We will be discussing roughly one part per week for a total of 26 weeks.

Recommended Reading:

Part C, Noticing Confusion (pages 79-114), Kindle locations 1647-2137)

Kim Øyhus's proof that absence of evidence is evidence of absence

Privileging the Hypothesis

Uncertainty and Confidence

Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument

That Tiny Note of Discord

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required, nor is the reading required, only strongly recommended.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—R:AZ Part C, Noticing Confusion
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2015-04-03T04:54:16.091Z

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

WHEN:
05 April 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

Note: Feel free to send an email to the Google Group - lesswrong-dc - if you have a game you wish to recruit people to play in advance. This is especially useful for games that take 3+ hours, as you would want to start playing by 3:30 to be sure of finishing by 7:00.

Note Also: At the DC-area party celebrating the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, there were a number of people who expressed interest in the Less Wrong DC group. As we mentioned last week: glad to have you! We will aim to make ourselves available to answer questions about the group if you have any.

There is no WMATA major track work scheduled; minor track work is also on hold for the end of the Cherry Blossom festival. The Verizon Center calendar for April 5 has no events scheduled.

Upcoming meetups:

Apr. 12: Cherry Blossoms (take a walk and look at the cherry blossoms)

Apr. 19: "The Sword of Good" (talk about a LessWrongian short story)

Apr. 26: Fun & Games (bring games, play games, converse, socialize, or any combination thereof)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
LW's take on nutrition?
by michael_b — 2015-04-03T00:33:37.688Z

There's a book called The China Study. It's written by the "Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, and his son Thomas M. Campbell II, a physician". Based on what I know about the words "professor" and "emeritus" and "cornell", I assume this is written by an authority in the field of nutrition.

When it was published in 2005 it recommended clearly crazy stuff: by minimizing or eliminating the consumption of animal based foods as well as refined/processed foods (e.g. adopt a "whole food plant-based diet"), you could greatly reduce your risk of diseases of affluence like heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, etc. The book follows his 60+ year career through cancer experiments on animals, conducting a pretty large epidemiological study (the China-Cornell-Oxford study), and then discusses some important clinical trials that support his recommendations. He also surveys some nutrition literature that corroborates his research.

Some other experts vocally support him; further, his recommendations don't seem to be a radical departure from either public health recommendations or prior research in the field. The FDA MyPlate, and also the UK's health initiatives ("5 fruits/vegetables a day"), as well as the Harvard School of Public Health's recommendations and others all seem to be moving in his general direction, although seemingly filtered by politics (e.g. telling Americans to stop eating meat entirely seems like political suicide, so baby steps in the direction seem more expedient; but I'm conjecturing this).

The book is widely dismissed as vegan propaganda, but the author says he's not advocating a vegan diet and in fact criticizes vegan diets as only minimally healthier than the "standard American diet". He also conducted experiments which subjected animals to carcinogens, which is not a very vegan thing to do. He does not admit to being vegan. He even observes that the evidence says restricting animal based calories to under 10% of total calories offers almost all of the health benefits as restricting them to 0%, but says as a practical matter this is much harder to stick to (e.g. you may only eat a 3mm slice of chocolate cake is much harder than simply saying no to chocolate cake). He also admits he had a bias when he entered the field of nutrition, but a bias in favor of atte...