trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Singularity Call For Papers
by CarlShulman — 2010-04-10T16:08:00.347Z

Amnon Eden has sent out this call for papers on technological singularity, which many Less Wrongers may be interested in. I presented at last year's conference, which was a good experience with many interesting people. Submitting good papers can help to legitimate and cultivate the field and thus reduce existential risk (although of course poor work could have the reverse effect). If you have an idea or a draft that you're not sure about, and would like to discuss it before submitting, I'd be happy to help if you contact me (carl DOT shulman AT gmail).

I am also told that the Singularity Institute may be able to provide travel funding for selected papers. Email annasalamon@intelligence.org for more information.

Track in:

8th European conference on Computing And Philosophy — ECAP 2010
Technische Universität München
4–6 October 2010

Important dates:

* Submission (extended abstracts): 7 May 2010
* ECAP Conference: 4–6 October 2010

Submission form

Theme

Historical analysis of a broad range of paradigm shifts in science, biology, history, technology, and in particular in computing technology, suggests an accelerating rate of evolution, however measured. John von Neumann projected that the consequence of this trend may be an “essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue”. This notion of singularity coincides in time and nature with Alan Turing (1950) and Stephen Hawking’s (1998) expectation of machines to exhibit intelligence on a par with to the average human no later than 2050. Irving John Good (1965) and Vernor Vinge (1993) expect the singularity to take the form of an ‘intelligence explosion’, a process in which intelligent machines design ever more intelligent machines. Transhumanists suggest a parallel or alternative, explosive process of improvements in human intelligence. And Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave (1980) forecasts “a collision point in human destiny” the scale of which, in the course of history, is on the par only with the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.

We invite submissions describing systematic attempts at understanding the likelihood and nature of these projections. In particular, we welcome papers critically analyzing the following issues from a philosophical, computationa...
Meetup after Humanity+ , London, Saturday 2010-04-24?
by Paul Crowley — 2010-04-10T12:54:01.601Z

Humanity+ UK 2010 is in central London (near Holborn) in a fortnight. Speakers include Anders Sandberg, Aubrey de Grey, and Nick Bostrom. Anyone else from Less Wrong going along? If so, shall we meet for a drink afterwards, perhaps in the Princess Louise around 17:20ish?

As always, if I know you here mail me on paul at ciphergoth and I'll give you my mobile number - thanks!

I'm also planning another London Less Wrong meetup on Sunday 2010-06-06 - details to come, suggestions for venue welcome.
The Last Number
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2010-04-10T12:09:34.649Z

"...90116633393348054920083..."

He paused for a moment, and licked his recently reconstructed lips. He was nearly there. After seventeen thousand subjective years of effort, he was, finally, just seconds away from the end. He slowed down as the finish line drew into sight, savouring and lengthening the moment where he stood there, just on the edge of enlightenment.

"...4...7...7...0...9...3..."

Those years had been long; longer, perhaps, in the effects they had upon him, than they could ever be in any objective or subjective reality. He had been human; he had been frozen, uploaded, simulated, gifted with robotic bodies inside three different levels of realities, been a conscript god, been split into seven pieces (six of which were subsequently reunited). He had been briefly a battle droid for the army of Orion, and had chanted his numbers even as he sent C-beams to glitter in the dark to scorch Formic worlds.

He had started his quest at the foot of a true Enlightened One, who had guided him and countless other disciples on the first step of the path. Quasi-enlightened ones had guided him further, as the other disciples fell to the wayside all around him, unable to keep their purpose focused. And now, he was on the edge of total Enlightenment. Apparently, there were some who went this far, and deliberately chose not to take the last step. But these were always friends of a friend of an acquaintance of a rumour. He hadn't believed they existed. And now that he had come this far, he knew these folk didn't exist. No-one could come this far, this long, and not finish it.

"...2"

There, he had done it. He had fully pronounced, defined and made his own, the last and greatest of all integers. The Last Number was far too large for standard decimal notation, of course; the first thousand years of effort, while there were still many other disciples around, filling the air with their cries and their joys, had been dedicated entirely to learning the mathematical notions and notations that were needed to correctly define it. But it seemed that for the last ten trillion digits of the Last Number, there was no shorter way of stating them than by listing them all. Entire books had been written about this fact, all untrue or uninteresting (but never both).

He willed a pair of lungs into existence, took a deep shuddering breath, and went on:

"... + 1 ..."

Had he been foolish enoug

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Swimming in Reasons
by steven0461 — 2010-04-10T01:24:27.787Z

To a rationalist, certain phrases smell bad. Rotten. A bit fishy. It's not that they're actively dangerous, or that they don't occur when all is well; but they're relatively prone to emerging from certain kinds of thought processes that have gone bad.

One such phrase is for many reasons. For example, many reasons all saying you should eat some food, or vote for some candidate.

To see why, let's first recapitulate how rational updating works. Beliefs (in the sense of probabilities for propositions) ought to bob around in the stream of evidence as a random walk without trend. When, in contrast, you can see a belief try to swim somewhere, right under your nose, that's fishy. (Rotten fish don't really swim, so here the analogy breaks down. Sorry.) As a Less Wrong reader, you're smarter than a fish. If the fish is going where it's going in order to flee some past error, you can jump ahead of it. If the fish is itself in error, you can refuse to follow. The mathematical formulation of these claims is clearer than the ichthyological formulation, and can be found under conservation of expected evidence.

More generally, according to the law of iterated expectations, it's not just your probabilities that should be free of trends, but your expectation of any variable. Conservation of expected evidence is just the special case where a variable can be 1 (if some proposition is true) or 0 (if it's false); the expectation of such a variable is just the

probability that the proposition is true.

So let's look at the case where the variable you're estimating is an action's utility. We'll define a reason to take the action as any info that raises your expectation, and the strength of the

reason as the amount by which it does so. The strength of the next reason, conditional on all previous reasons, should be distributed with expectation zero.

Maybe the distribution of reasons is symmetrical: for example, if somehow you know all reasons are equally strong in absolute value, reasons for and against must be equally common, or they'd cause a predictable trend. Under this assumption, the number of reasons in favor will follow a binomial distribution with p=.5. Mostly, the values here will not be too extreme, especially for large numbers of reasons. When there are ten reasons in favor, there are usually at least a few again

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Boston area meetup April 18
by jimrandomh — 2010-04-09T23:53:29.675Z

I propose a Less Wrong meetup on Sunday, April 18, 4pm at the Clear Conscience Cafe at 581 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA, near the Central Square T station. Please comment if you plan to attend, or have questions or ideas. Time and place are flexible if anyone has a conflict.

There were two previous Less Wrong meetups in the Boston area, back in October and November, when there were visiting rationalists in the area, but I don't think we need that pretext; there are enough of us locals for a decent turnout. There seemed to be a consensus that we ought to have regular meetups, but no one declared a date and time. So, to prevent that from happening again: The third Sunday of every month, at the same time and location as the previous month unless otherwise specified.
Frequentist Magic vs. Bayesian Magic
by Wei Dai — 2010-04-08T20:34:44.866Z

[I posted this to open thread a few days ago for review. I've only made some minor editorial changes since then, so no need to read it again if you've already read the draft.]

This is a belated reply to cousin_it's 2009 post Bayesian Flame, which claimed that frequentists can give calibrated estimates for unknown parameters without using priors:

And here's an ultra-short example of what frequentists can do: estimate 100 independent unknown parameters from 100 different sample data sets and have 90 of the estimates turn out to be true to fact afterward. Like, fo'real. Always 90% in the long run, truly, irrevocably and forever.

And indeed they can. Here's the simplest example that I can think of that illustrates the spirit of frequentism:

Suppose there is a machine that produces biased coins. You don't know how the machine works, except that each coin it produces is either biased towards heads (in which case each toss of the coin will land heads with probability .9 and tails with probability .1) or towards tails (in which case each toss of the coin will land tails with probability .9 and heads with probability .1). For each coin, you get to observe one toss, and then have to state whether you think it's biased towards heads or tails, and what is the probability that's the right answer.

Let's say that you decide to follow this rule: after observing heads, always answer "the coin is biased towards heads with probability .9" and after observing tails, always answer "the coin is biased towards tails with probability .9". Do this for a while, and it will turn out that 90% of the time you are right about which way the coin is biased, no matter how the machine actually works. The machine might always produce coins biased towards heads, or always towards tails, or decide based on the digits of pi, and it wouldn't matter—you'll still be right 90% of the time. (To verify this, notice that in the long run you will answer "heads" for 90% of the coins actually biased towards heads, and "tails" for 90% of the coins actually biased towards tails.) No priors needed! Magic!

What is going on here? There are a couple of things we could say. One was mentioned by Eliezer in a comment:

It's not perfectly reliable. They assume they have perfect information about experimental setups and likelihood ratios. (Where does this perfect knowledge come from? Can Bayesians get their pri

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Ureshiku Naritai
by Alicorn — 2010-04-08T20:08:58.726Z

This is a supplement to the luminosity sequence. In this comment, I mentioned that I have raised my happiness set point (among other things), and this declaration was met with some interest. Some of the details are lost to memory, but below, I reconstruct for your analysis what I can of the process. It contains lots of gooey self-disclosure; skip if that's not your thing.

In summary: I decided that I had to and wanted to become happier; I re-labeled my moods and approached their management accordingly; and I consistently treated my mood maintenance and its support behaviors (including discovering new techniques) as immensely important. The steps in more detail:

1. I came to understand the necessity of becoming happier. Being unhappy was not just unpleasant. It was dangerous: I had a history of suicidal ideation. This hadn't resulted in actual attempts at killing myself, largely because I attached hopes for improvement to concrete external milestones (various academic progressions) and therefore imagined myself a magical healing when I got the next diploma (the next one, the next one.) Once I noticed I was doing that, it was unsustainable. If I wanted to live, I had to find a safe emotional place on which to stand. It had to be my top priority. This required several sub-projects:

I had to eliminate the baggage that told me it was appropriate or accurate to feel bad most of the time. I endorse my ability to react emotionally to my environment; but this should be acute, not chronic. Reacting emotionally is about feeling worse when things get worse, not feeling bad when things are bad for months or years on end. (Especially not when feeling bad reduces the ability to make things less bad.) Further, having a lower set point did not affect my emotional range except to shrink it; it reduced the possible impact of real grief, and wasn't compatible with the "react emotionally" plan. The low set point also compromised my ability to react emotionally to positive input, because it was attached to a systematic discounting of such positivity.

I had to eliminate the baggage that told me it was not possible to cognitively change my mood. Moods correspond to thoughts, and while it can be hard to avoid thinking about things, I can decide to think about whatever I want.&n

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Pain and gain motivation
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-04-07T18:48:17.624Z

Note: this post is basically just summarizing some of PJ Eby's freely available writings on the topic of pain/gain motivation and presenting them in a form that's easier for the LW crowd to digest. I claim no credit for the ideas presented here, other than the credit for summarizing them.

EDIT: Note also Eby's comments and corrections to my summary at this comment.

Eby proposes that we have two different forms of motivation: positive ("gain") motivation, which drives us to do things, and negative ("pain") motivation, which drives us to avoid things. Negative motivation is a major source of akrasia and is mostly harmful for getting anything done. However, sufficiently large amounts of negative motivation can momentarily push us to do things, which frequently causes people to confuse the two.
To understand the function of negative motivation, first consider the example of having climbed to a tree to avoid a predator. There's not much you can do other than wait and hope the predator goes away, and if you move around, you risk falling out of the tree. So your brain gets flooded with signals that suppress activity and tell it to keep your body still. It is only if the predator ends up climbing up the tree that the danger becomes so acute that you're instead pushed to flee.
What does this have to do with modern-day akrasia? Back in the tribal environment, elicting the disfavor of the tribe could be a death sentence. Be cast out by the tribe, and you likely wouldn't live for long. One way to elict disfavor is to be unmasked as incompetent in some important matter, and a way to avoid such an unmasking is to simply avoid doing anything where to consequences of failure would be severe.
You might see why this would cause problems. Sometimes, when the pain level of not having done a task grows too high - like just before a deadline - it'll push you to do it. But this fools people into thinking that negative consequences alone will be a motivator, so they try to psyche themselves up by thinking about how bad it would be to fail. In truth, this is only making things worse, as an increased chance of failure will increase the negative motivation that's going on.
Negative motivation is also a reason why we might discover a productivity or self-help technique, find it useful, and then after a few successful tries stop using it - seemingly for no reason. Eby uses the terms "naturall...
Single Point of Moral Failure
by Alexandros — 2010-04-06T22:44:51.369Z

I have been recently entertaining myself with a 3-day non-stop binge of Theist vs. Atheist debates, On the atheist side: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Denett, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers. On the theist corner: Dinesh D'Souza, William Lane Craig, Alistair McGrath, Tim Keller, and (unfortunately) Nassim Nicholas Taleb. One of the interesting points that comes up, often by Hitchens, is what I call the "Bodycount Argument". The atheist will claim: "Look at all the deaths caused by religion: Crusades, Inquisition, Islamic fundamentalism, Japanese militarism, Conquests of the New World" and the list goes on and on. Then the Theist will claim: "Well, look at the Nazis, the Fascists, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge...". the Atheist then tries to reverse some of that, e.g. the Fascists were the catholic right wing, the SS were mostly confessing Catholics and Hitler had churches pray for him on his birthday, and, most tenuously, that the Soviets had the support of the orthodox church and used the pre-existing structures set up by the Czar to establish their power.
Some of that retort is convincing, some is not so much. You cannot really blame Soviet, Cambodian and Chinese massacres solely on religion. While they do at least manage to bring it to a tie, I suspect that the atheists follow this argument up suboptimally. My instinctive reaction would be "ok, so you proved that except for religion, communism leads to mass slaughter too. I have no problem doing away with both". But the Theists have a stronger form of their argument in which they claim that the crimes of communism are -because- of atheism, so a simple one-line retort won't work in all cases. We need to lay a deeper foundation for that claim to be convincing.
Enter single points of failure. The rudimentary definition, usually given in terms of computer networks, is that a single point of failure is that component which takes down the entire system when it fails. While the term has originated in computer science as far as I can tell, it can be applied to human networks as well. The strategy of Alexander the Great, at the battle of Issus, was instead of trying to defeat the entire, vastly ournumbering, Persian army in combat, to attack the Persian king Darius directly. When he was able to make him flee, the entire Persian army fell into disarray, with one side executing an orderly retreat, but the left f...
Lampshading
by Alicorn — 2010-04-06T20:03:25.800Z

Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: City of Lights
You can use luminosity to help you effectively change yourself into someone you'd more like to be. Accomplish this by fixing your self-tests so they get good results.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the seventh story from Seven Shiny Stories.
When you have coherent models of yourself, it only makes good empirical sense to put them to the test.
Thing is, when you run a test on yourself, you know what test you're running, and what data would support which hypothesis. All that and you're the subject generating the data, too. It's kind of hard to have good scientific controls around this sort of experiment.
Luckily, it turns out that for this purpose they're unnecessary! Remember, you're not just trying to determine what's going on in a static part of yourself. You're also evaluating and changing the things you repudiate when you can. You don't just have the chance to let knowledge of your self-observation nudge your behavior - you can outright rig your tests.
Suppose that your model of yourself predicts that you will do something you don't think you should do - for instance, suppose it predicts that you will yell at your cousin the next time she drops by and tracks mud on your carpet, or something, and you think you ought not to yell. Well, you can falsify that model which says you'll yell by not yelling: clearly, if you do not yell at her, then you cannot be accurately described by any model that predicts that you'll yell. By refraining from yelling you push the nearest accurate model towards something like "may yell if not careful to think before speaking" or "used to yell, but has since grown past that". And if you'd rather be accurately described by one of those models than by the "yells" model... you can not yell.
(Note, of course, that falsifying the model "yells" by silently picking up your cousin and defenestrating her is not an improvement. You want to replace the disliked model with a more likable one. If it turns out that you cannot do that - if controlling your scream means that you itch so badly to fling your cousin out a window that you're likely to actually do it - then you should postpone your model falsification until a later time.)
Now, of course figuring out how to ...
Anthropic answers to logical uncertainties?
by Roko — 2010-04-06T17:51:49.486Z

Suppose that if the Riemann Hypothesis were true, then some complicated but relatively well-accepted corollary involving geometric superstring theory and cosmology means that the universe would contain 10^500 times more observers. Suppose furthermore that the corollary argument ( RH ==> x10^500 observers) is accepted to be true with a very high probability (say, 99.9%).

A presumptuous philosopher now has a "proof" of the Riemann Hypothesis. Just use the self-indication assumption: reason as if you are an observer chosen at random from the set of all possible observers (in your reference class). Since almost all possible observers arise in "possible worlds" where RH is true, you are almost certainly one of these.

Do we believe this argument?

One argument against it is that, if RH is false, then the "possible worlds" where it is true are not possible. They're not just not actual, they are as ridiculous as worlds where 1+1=3.

Furthermore, the justification for reasoning anthropically is that the set Ω of observers in your reference class maximizes its combined winnings on bets if all members of Ω reason anthropically; otherwise, they act as a "collective sucker". Unless you have reason to believe you are a "special" member of Ω, you should assume that your best move is to reason as if you are a generic member of Ω, i.e. anthropically. When most of the members of Ω arise from merely non-actual possible worlds, this reasoning is defensible. When most of the members of Ω arise from non-actual impossible worlds, something seems to have gone wrong. Observers who would only exist in logically impossible worlds can't make bets, so the "collective sucker" arguments don't really work.

If you think that the above argument in favor of RH is a little bit fishy, then you might want to ponder Katja's ingenious SIA great filter argument. Most plausible explanations for a future great filter are logical facts, not empirical ones. The difficulty of surviving a transition through technological singularities, if it convergently causes non-colonization, is some logical fact, derivable by a sufficiently powerful mind. A tendency for advanced civilizations to "realize" that expansionism is pointless is a logical fact. I would argue that anthropic considerations should not move us on such logical facts.

Therefore, if you still buy Katja's argument, an...