trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Philosophical theory with an empirical prediction
by mgin — 2016-10-28T16:14:16.480Z

I have a philosophical theory which implies some things empirically about quantum physics, and I was wondering if anyone knowledgeable on the subject could give me some insight.

It goes something like this:

As an anathema to reductionists, quarks (and by "quarks" I just mean, whatever are the fundamental particles of the universe) are not governed by simple rules a la conway's game of life, but rather, like all of metaphysics goes into their behavior.

The reductionist basically reduces metaphysics to the simple rules that govern quarks. Fundamentally there is no other identity or causality, everything else is just emergent from that, anything we want to call "real" that we deal with in ordinary experience, does not have any metaphysical identity or causal efficacy of its own, it's just an illusion produced by tons of atoms bouncing around. If the universe is akin to conway's game of life, then I don't think the things we see around us are actually what we think they are. They don't have any real identity on a metaphysical level, but rather they are just patterns of particles in motion, governed by mathematically simple rules.

But suppose there actually is metaphysical identity and causal power in the things around us, well the place I can see for that, is that the unknown rules governing quarks, are not mathematically simple rules, but literally that's where all of metaphysics is contained, quarks entangle together according to high level concepts corresponding to the things we see around us, including a person's identity, and have not the mathematically simple causal powers like conway's game of life, but the causal powers of the identity of the high-level agent.

The empirical question is this: do we observe the fundamental particles of the universe behaving according mathematically simple rules, or do they seem to behave in complex/unpredictable ways depending on how they are entangled / what they are interacting with?

Adding an example to clarify:

The behavior of the quarks corresponds to the identity of the things we see around us. The things we see around us are constituted by quarks - but the question is, are these quarks behaving mindlessly as billiard balls, or is their behavior the result of complex rules corresponding to the identity of the thing they form?

In other words, suppose we're talking about a living ant, are the quarks which constitute...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-10-28T15:47:58.838Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on October 28th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Zürich social Rationality meetup: 29 October 2016 05:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Munich Meetup in October: 29 October 2016 04:00PM
Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources: 11 November 2016 05:15PM

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:

Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
Moscow: rational review, status quo bias, interpersonal closeness: 30 October 2016 02:00PM
NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox: 17 December 2016 06:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Board Games: 31 October 2016 06:15PM
Washington, D.C.: Halloween Party: 30 October 2016 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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 meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in orde...
Your Truth Is Not My Truth
by Bound_up — 2016-10-28T13:35:01.968Z

Can someone help me dissolve this, and give insight into how to proceed with someone who says this?

What are they saying, exactly? That the set of beliefs in their head that they use to make decisions is not the same set of beliefs that you use to make decisions?

Could I say something like "Yes, that's so, but how do you know that your truth matches what is in the real world? Is there some way to know that your truth isn't only true for you, and not actually true for everybody?"

I'm trying to get a feel for what they mean by "true" in this case, since it's obviously not "matching reality."
Meetup : Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources
by pepe_prime — 2016-10-28T11:41:49.046Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources

WHEN:
11 November 2016 04:15:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Lindstedtsvägen 3 room 1537, SE-114 28 Stockholm, Sverige

"Value of time" is often employed by utilitarians. It can be hard to determine one's value of time for a variety of reasons. This talk will be about different currencies of personal life like time, money, and pleasure; and how choices are implicit trades between them.
The talk will focus on when it's appropriate to treat these resources as liquid currencies and when it's not. After discussing the theory, and some examples, we'll practice. We'll individually come up with our own exchange rates for personal currencies, then fix one another's estimates in small groups.
I hope everyone walks away from this talk with a concrete number for their value of time.
The meetup is at a KTH academic building and the room is on the 5th floor, two stairs up. If you want to influence future meetup times, fill out this poll

Discussion article for the meetup : Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources
Year 1 Redux – Trump
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-10-27T21:58:51.000Z

Putanumonit’s birthday week continues, this is the second of my year 1 review posts.

Smart students, stupid charts

I stand behind everything I wrote in I Smell a Chart, at least until someone shares it with FiveThirtyEight’s Leah Libresco who will politely explain why I’m an idiot. My post focused on the abuses of data and statistics in the article, but I neglected an important point: if your data shows that affirmative action doesn’t help Hispanic students at all, but you still claim that it does, you’re doing actual harm to Hispanic students.

Affirmative action by definition evaluates people based on factors other than academic qualification, so employers who only care about qualification will try to counteract the effect of affirmative action. Let’s say that a university will accept a person named Leigh if their SAT is above 600, but they’ll only take Li if he scores 650, while Luis needs a mere 550 score. When an employer receives job application from all three students, they can conclude that Li was likelier to have a higher SAT score than Luis, which will influence their hiring decision. Even if they don’t aim to discriminate, companies in a competitive market have a huge incentive to hire the most qualified people they can.

I don’t know how large this effect is, but it’s not zero. It also depends on the perception by employers of affirmative action, not the actual effect of AA. If some people face severely limited educational opportunities and AA helps them get to college, AA may well have a positive effect even when rational employer discrimination is accounted for. But if AA doesn’t help Hispanics get into college, and the perception of AA hurts them coming out of college, it causes them net harm. Articles that increase the perception of AA while doing nothing to actually make it more effective exacerbate the harm even further.

Trump in the cockpit, journalists in the seats: story of a plane crash

With all that said, the AA article is an outlier on FiveThirtyEight. On the whole, the site is consistently smart, informative, and more or less objective.

To wit, FiveThirtyEight is practically the only mainstream (i.e. left-leaning) outlet that I can stomach following election coverage on (right-wing sources are no better). A lot of mainstream media companies chose to self-immolate in a Trump...
Meetup : Moscow: rational review, status quo bias, interpersonal closeness
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-10-27T13:58:31.795Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: rational review, status quo bias, interpersonal closeness

WHEN:
30 October 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

Note: most our members join meetups via other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a short link to the hackpad document with the schedule here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

Pad with the details about 30.10.2016 meetup.

We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: rational review, status quo bias, interpersonal closeness
Counterfactual do-what-I-mean
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-10-27T13:54:29.879Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

The counterfactual approach to value learning could be used to possibly allow natural language goals for AIs.

The basic idea is that when the AI is given a natural language goal like "increase human happiness" or "implement CEV", it is not to figure out what these goals mean, but to follow what a pure learning algorithm would establish these goals as meaning.

This would be safer than a simple figure-out-the-utility-you're-currently-maximising approach. But it still doesn't solve a few drawbacks. Firstly, the learning algorithm has to be effective itself (in particular, modifying human understanding of the words should be ruled out, and the learning process must avoid concluding the simpler interpretations are always better). And secondly, humans' don't yet know what these words mean, outside our usual comfort zone, so the "learning" task also involves the AI extrapolating beyond what we know.
Counterfactual do-what-I-mean
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-10-27T13:53:47.000Z

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

The counterfactual approach could be used to possibly allow natural language goals for AIs.

The basic idea is that when the AI is given a natural language goal like "increase human happiness" or "implement CEV", it is not to figure out what these goals mean, but to follow what a pure learning algorithm would establish these goals as meaning.

This would be safer than a simple figure-out-the-utility-you're-currently-maximising approach. But it still doesn't solve a few drawbacks. Firstly, the learning algorithm has to be effective itself (in particular, modifying human understanding of the words should be ruled out, and the learning process must avoid concluding the simpler interpretations are always better). And secondly, humans' don't yet know what these words mean, outside our usual comfort zone, so the "learning" task also involves the AI extrapolating beyond what we know.
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games
by rocurley — 2016-10-27T02:56:19.883Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games

WHEN:
31 October 2016 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1769 15th St, San Francisco, CA

We’ll be meeting to play board (and other) games!

I have Dominion, Suburbia, and standard playing cards. Please feel free to bring other games you’d like to play.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games
Training Garrabrant inductors to predict counterfactuals
by TsviBT — 2016-10-27T02:41:49.000Z

author:

'Tsvi Benson-Tilsen'
title: Training Garrabrant inductors to predict counterfactuals
...

The ideas in this post are due to Scott, me, and possibly others. Thanks
to Nisan Stiennon for working through the details of an earlier version
of this post with me.

Github pdf:
https://github.com/tsvibt/public-pdfs/blob/master/decision-theory/training-counterfactuals/main.pdf

We will use the notation and definitions given in
https://github.com/tsvibt/public-pdfs/blob/master/decision-theory/notation/main.pdf.
Let ¯¯¯P be a universal Garrabrant inductor and
let
¯¯¯¯U:N+→Expr(2ω→R)
be a sequence of utility function machines. We will define an agent
schema (AUnn).

We give a schema where each agent selects a single action with no
observations. Roughly, AUnn learns how to get what it wants
by computing what the AUii with i<n did, and also what
various traders predicted would happen, given each action that the
AUii could have taken. The traders are rewarded for
predicting what (counterfactually) would be the case in terms of
bitstrings, and then their predictions are used to evaluate expected
utilities of actions currently under consideration. This requires
modifying our UGI and the traders involved to take a possible action as
input, so that we get a prediction (a “counterfactual distribution over
worlds”) for each action.

More precisely, define AUnn:= let ^Pn:=Counterfactuals(n)returnargmaxa∈Act^En[a](Un)

where ^En[a](Un):=∑σ∈2n^Pn[a](σ)⋅Un(σ).
Here ^Pn is a dictionary of belief states, one for
each action, defined by the function
Counterfactuals:N+→(Act→Δ(2ω))
using recursion as follows:

<span>input:</span> n∈N+

<span>output:</span> A dictionary of belief states
P:Act→Δ(2ω)

<span>initialize: </span>histn−1← array
of belief states of length n−1

<span>for</span> i≤n−1:

^Pi←Counterfactuals(i)

ai←argmaxa∈Act∑σ∈2i^Pi[a](σ)⋅Ui(σ)

histn−1[i]←^Pi[ai]

<span>for </span> (a:Act):

P[a]←MarketMaker(histn−1,TradingFirm′(a,a≤n−1,histn−1))

<span>return </span> P

Here, we use a modified form of traders and of the
TradingFirm′ function from the LIA algorithm given in the
logical induction paper. In detail, let traders have the type
N+×Act→trading strategy.
On day n, traders are passed a possible action a∈Act, which we interpret as “an action that AUnn
might take”. Then each trader returns a trading strategy, and

...
Desiderata for decision theory
by TsviBT — 2016-10-27T02:10:48.000Z

author:

'Tsvi Benson-Tilsen'
title: 'Desiderata for a mathematical theory of decision-making'
...

What decision theory is for

Desiderata for decision theory

Optimal bounded reasoning

Philosophically sound
reasoning

Optimal decision-making

Philosophically sound
decision-making

This is a collection of my current hypotheses about what decision theory
is for and what would constitute progress in decision theory.

***

There are not many nonlocal dependencies, so feel free to skip around
liberally. I’ve chosen not to track sources, both for my own convenience
and also because I may have put my own spin on the ideas; but it is safe
to assume that the ideas and my apprehension of them are due almost
entirely to conversations with and writings by other reasearchers. This
should be considered a draft, so comments are particularly welcome.

Github pdf:
https://github.com/tsvibt/public-pdfs/blob/master/decision-theory/desiderata/main.pdf

What decision theory is for

Decision theory is for

directing a consequentialist reasoning process to reason about how
to achieve particular goals; and

directing autonomous agents to reliably achieve particular goals.

“Directing a reasoning process” is not restricted to decision-making
systems. Broadly, if we are getting useful work out of an AI, it’s
because the AI is doing computations that produce logical information
about how we can achieve our goals. So we must have somehow pointed the
consequentialist-reasoning part of the AI towards our goals. The
questions of decision theory in this context are then: How do you
specify logical or environmental goals? How do you direct a
consequentialist reasoner to produce the relevant logical information?
How do you make a consequentialist reasoner that does this efficiently?

There may be more specific problems relating to agent-like systems in
particular. For example, systems that make decisions may exhibit reward
hacking, instability under self-modification, averting instrumental
incentives, severe suboptimality due to things like spurious
counterfactuals, and other more exotic failure modes such as Pascal’s
mugging. A good theory of decision-making might also enlighten us about
other research paths such as low impact, mild optimization, and so on.

I think it’s plausible that it’s simply not necessary to have a deeper
theoretical understanding of decision-making in order to design AI

...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Halloween Party
by RobinZ — 2016-10-26T21:37:01.292Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Halloween Party

WHEN:
30 October 2016 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Mosaic at Metro Apartments

We will be meeting at the residence of one of the meetup regulars for a Halloween party. The host promises "[f]ood, friends, fun, and possibly, the gory ritualistic sacrifice of a giant squash. Potluckery encouraged." If you are planning to attend, please email Richard Bruns (richardbruns[at]gmail.com) so he can add you to the Facebook event.

Directions:

Take the metro to the Prince Georges Plaza metro stop, or park in the metro garage there.

As you come up the metro escalators, you will be facing a traffic circle, and Belcrest Road. Go around the circle, continue, and take a right on the next street (Belcrest Road); the building entrance will be on your right. Call or email Richard Bruns (richardbruns[at]gmail.com) so he can let you in or send someone to do so, or tailgate behind someone else.

Upcoming meetups:

Nov. 6: Fun & Games

Nov. 13: Gardening

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Halloween Party
Year 1 Redux – Serena and Ivan
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-10-26T01:30:11.000Z

I blog whenever I’m excited by an idea, when I just read or though of something cool and I simply can’t keep it to myself. The ideas I’m excited by are new and a little precarious. Often, they’re gratuitously contrarian (*cough* burn the FDA *cough*).

These ideas are bit raw. Not fully baked, but not quite half-baked either. Maybe three quarter baked: arguments that are 75% correct, or models that are 75% complete, or advice that three out of four readers need to hear. I don’t always have the time or the patience to fully bake them on a 3-a-month schedule, but I have a bit of time now to retrospect. To wrap up the year, I’m publishing a series of short posts covering that missing 25% for some of my top articles from year 1. I have about 4-5 planned, and I’ll publish a new one every day or two to celebrate Putanumonit’s birthday week.

Tails of Great Soccer Players is the one that started it all. It did two wonderful things for my blog. It brought in readers who like scientific inquiry and numbers. More importantly, it scared away readers who like political correctness and were mortified by the idea that you can compare nationalities on innate ability, and declare that some people are better than others. Maybe it’s safe for a Jew to write about naitonal difference in athletic ability, ’cause we ain’t got none. Now I’m going to stick my neck out even further and be a man who writes about gender differences, because there’s a really important question we need to answer.

Can Serena Williams beat the man ranked 351st in world in tennis?

Professional tennis coaches talk about variations in wrist tendon strength or topspin RPM between men and women. These are all important topics that I know very little about. All I know are bell curves, you can scroll down in the original post for a refresher of the math.

It’s hard to estimate the number of tennis players in the world, with guesses ranging from 75 million to 1.2 billion. According to a survey, 18 million Americans played tennis in the past year and Americans make up 6% of ranked tennis pros, putting the global number of players at 300 million. Also, 65% of the world’s 13,000 professional players are men. Conservatively, let’s assume that there are 100 million people playing tennis somewhat seriously, 60 million men and 40 m...
Trying to find a short story
by mgin — 2016-10-25T02:27:42.156Z

It's a story about a boy who is into science and transhumanism, and a girl he told about all these crazy things that were going to happen. He dies and all of the things he said started to happen. She ended up floating around Saturn remembering him.

Either he or she was in the wheelchair. He was dying and he was disappointed he was dying because of all the cool stuff that was going to happen that she was going to be around for, and some of it had to do with whatever problem she had that was going to get fixed.

Please help me find this story if you can.
Open thread, Oct. 24 - Oct. 30, 2016
by MrMind — 2016-10-24T06:54:52.132Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, 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 start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.