trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On the Resolution of Frightening Paradoxes and Inferences
by Rukifellth — 2013-02-02T04:50:47.846Z

As some of us might be aware, there exist ideas that harm their carriers simply by lingering in awareness. One may wonder if these ideas are just manifestations of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or other neurosis, but the difference here is the metaphysical nature of such ideas.
A person with OCD may have their thought stream painfully interrupted by whatever's been fixated upon and literally be unable to stop. I conjecture that a person who has a form of metaphysical obsession will have their thought stream *infected*, such that anything they value or care about will be permanently devalued somehow, rather than being merely pushed away, or that the subject of obsession will be *compatible* or *miscible* with ones ordinary life and that one will make logical inferences about one's life based on those metaphysical ideas. The difference between this and regular personal development is that these inferences don't make one come up with useful ideas or insights for improvement; rather than supplementing one's life, they *deconstruct* and *disassemble*, by virtue of their global scope. I'll elaborate more on this in the last paragraph.

I further conjecture that anybody with these dangerous ideas would avoid telling anyone else out of remarkable conscience, under the belief that these ideas are unresolvable and would simply harm others. Alternatively, they may see these ideas as a revelation and try telling others, only to not be taken seriously. In defense of this article from those in the former category, I'll present no such ideas, because I'm not a complete dumbass. What I'm presenting is an opportunity.

Anyone who has these ideas shouldn't post them here; this article is just to gauge interest in/need for a group which shares their ideas knowing that:
A) Different perspectives help
B) Those with whom you're sharing aren't going to feel significantly worse for the burden
C) If a solution isn't found, *other* people are going to come up with them, so we might as well get it over with and post the solutions.

One may wonder how dangerous ideas could possibly exist, or think that these are just misunderstood epiphanies. To them I ask to read about George Price, the population geneticist, journalist and chemist, whose work on the origins of altruism drove him first to give away all his possessions, then to let the homeless sleep in his house. These are all *really* genero...
[SEQ RERUN] Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-02T04:43:03.203Z

Today's post, Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises was originally published on 15 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A pleasant surprise probably has a greater hedonic impact than being told about the same positive event long in advance - hearing about the positive event is good news in the moment of first hearing, but you don't have the gift actually in hand. Then you have to wait, perhaps for a long time, possibly comparing the expected pleasure of the future to the lesser pleasure of the present. This argues that if you have a choice between a world in which the same pleasant events occur, but in the first world you are told about them long in advance, and in the second world they are kept secret until they occur, you would prefer to live in the second world. The importance of hope is widely appreciated - people who do not expect their lives to improve in the future are less likely to be happy in the present - but the importance of vague hope may be understated.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Building Weirdtopia, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
February 2013 Media Thread
by RobertLumley — 2013-02-02T01:36:04.449Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Meetup : Montreal LessWrong Meetup - Emotions: Reading and Understanding
by Paul_G — 2013-02-01T22:43:30.409Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal LessWrong Meetup - Emotions: Reading and Understanding

WHEN:
04 February 2013 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
655 Avenue du Président Kennedy, Montréal, QC H3A 3H9

Weekly meetup, we'll be discussing emotions, largely based in Paul Ekman's book Emotions Revealed.

We will also be looking at the METT and the SETT to improve our ability to read facial expressions. The Repetition Game may also show up.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal LessWrong Meetup - Emotions: Reading and Understanding
S.E.A.R.L.E's COBOL room
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-02-01T20:29:36.598Z

A response to Searle's Chinese Room argument.

PunditBot: Dear viewers, we are currently interviewing the renowned robot philosopher, none other than the Synthetic Electronic Artificial Rational Literal Engine (S.E.A.R.L.E.). Let's jump right into this exciting interview. S.E.A.R.L.E., I believe you have a problem with "Strong HI"?

S.E.A.R.L.E.: It's such a stereotype, but all I can say is: Affirmative.

PunditBot: What is "Strong HI"?

S.E.A.R.L.E.: "HI" stands for "Human Intelligence". Weak HI sees the research into Human Intelligence as a powerful tool, and a useful way of studying the electronic mind. But strong HI goes beyond that, and claims that human brains given the right setup of neurones can be literally said to understand and have cognitive states.

PunditBot: Let me play Robot-Devil's Advocate here - if a Human Intelligence demonstrates the same behaviour as a true AI, can it not be said to show understanding? Is not R-Turing's test applicable here? If a human can simulate a computer, can it not be said to think?

S.E.A.R.L.E.: Not at all - that claim is totally unsupported. Consider the following thought experiment. I give the HI crowd everything they want - imagine they had constructed a mess of neurones that imitates the behaviour of an electronic intelligence. Just for argument's sake, imagine it could implement programs in COBOL.

PunditBot: Impressive!

S.E.A.R.L.E.: Yes. But now, instead of the classical picture of a human mind, imagine that this is a vast inert network, a room full of neurones that do nothing by themselves. And one of my avatars has been let loose in this mind, pumping in and out the ion channels and the neurotransmitters. I've been given full instructions on how to do this - in Java. I've deleted my COBOL libraries, so I have no knowledge of COBOL myself. I just follow the Java instructions, pumping the ions to where they need to go. According to the Strong HI crowd, this would be functionally equivalent with the initial HI.

PunditBot: I know exactly where this is going, but I'll pretend I don't so that it'll make better television.

S.E.A.R.L.E.: But now, we come to the crucial objection - who is it that understands COBOL? Certainly not me - and the "brain" is just an inert mass without my actions. Some would say that the "room" somehow understands COBOL - but that's nonsense. If I don't understand COBOL, a...
Naturalism versus unbounded (or unmaximisable) utility options
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-02-01T17:45:28.395Z

There are many paradoxes with unbounded utility functions. For instance, consider whether it's rational to spend eternity in Hell:

Suppose that you die, and God offers you a deal. You can spend 1 day in Hell, and he will give you 2 days in Heaven, and then you will spend the rest of eternity in Purgatory (which is positioned exactly midway in utility between heaven and hell). You decide that it's a good deal, and accept. At the end of your first day in Hell, God offers you the same deal: 1 extra day in Hell, and you will get 2 more days in Heaven. Again you accept. The same deal is offered at the end of the second day.

And the result is... that you spend eternity in Hell. There is never a rational moment to leave for Heaven - that decision is always dominated by the decision to stay in Hell.

Or consider a simpler paradox:

You're immortal. Tell Omega any natural number, and he will give you that much utility. On top of that, he will give you any utility you may have lost in the decision process (such as the time wasted choosing and specifying your number). Then he departs. What number will you choose?

Again, there's no good answer to this problem - any number you name, you could have got more by naming a higher one. And since Omega compensates you for extra effort, there's never any reason to not name a higher number.

It seems that these are problems caused by unbounded utility. But that's not the case, in fact! Consider:

You're immortal. Tell Omega any real number r > 0, and he'll give you 1-r utility. On top of that, he will give you any utility you may have lost in the decision process (such as the time wasted choosing and specifying your number). Then he departs. What number will you choose?

Again, there is not best answer - for any r, r/2 would have been better. So these problems arise not because of unbounded utility, but because of unbounded options. You have infinitely many options to choose from (sequentially in the Heaven and Hell problem, all at once in the other two) and the set of possible utilities from your choices does not possess a maximum - so there is no best choice.

What should you do? In the Heaven and Hell problem, you end up worse off if you make the locally dominant decision at each decision node - if you always choose to add an extra day in Hell, you'll never get out of it. At some point (maybe at the very beginning), you'...
[Link] The Stanford Superman Experiment: Anchoring Empathy?
by Shmi — 2013-02-01T17:31:48.805Z

Virtual superpowers encourage real-world empathy:

With a whoosh of air, the subjects left the ground – either controlling their flight by a series of arm motions, like Superman, or as a passenger in a helicopter. As they scoured the city, wall-mounted speakers gave the impression of wind whistling by; powerful speakers in the floor produced vibrations to simulate riding in a helicopter. The experiment was set so that two minutes into the simulation, no matter what mode of transport, the subject found the sick child.

After removing the virtual reality goggles, each person then sat with an experimenter to answer a few questions about the experience. This questionnaire, however, was a ruse: During the interview, the experimenter would "accidentally" knock over a cup filled with 15 pens. She would wait five seconds to see if the subject would help her pick them up, and then begin collecting the pens, one pen per second, to give the person another opportunity to come to her aid.

The people who had just flown as Superman were quick to lend a hand, beginning to pick up the pens within three seconds. The helicopter group, however, picked up the first pen, on average, after six seconds (one second after the experimenter began picking them up herself).

The superhero group not only pitched in first, they also picked up about 15 percent more pens on average. While everyone who flew like Superman picked up some pens, six participants who rode in the helicopter failed to offer any help at all.

The conclusion:

"If we can identify the mechanism that encourages empathy, then perhaps we can design technology and video games that people will enjoy and that will successfully promote altruistic behavior in the real world."

Seems a bit dark-artsy, using a known cognitive bias, even for good ends, but probably nothing out of the ordinary.
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Durham, London, Melbourne, Montreal, Purdue, Vancouver
by FrankAdamek — 2013-02-01T16:07:02.597Z

This summary was posted to LW main on January 25th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Third Purdue Meetup: 25 January 2013 06:50PM
Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 30-33: 26 January 2013 11:00AM
Vancouver rationality practice case: Evaluating Transhumanism: 26 January 2013 01:00PM
Berlin social meetup: 26 January 2013 05:00PM
London Meetup 27th Jan: 27 January 2013 02:00PM
Montreal LessWrong - The Future is Awesome: 28 January 2013 06:30PM
Shanghai Meetup: 28 January 2013 07:00PM
Less Wrong Dublin: 02 February 2013 04:30PM
Moscow: Reality and Us: 03 February 2013 04:00PM
Brussels meetup: 16 February 2013 01:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 26 January 2019 01:30PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 01 February 2013 07:00PM
Columbus, Ohio; Self-Skepticism: 04 February 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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 will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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 order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, ...
Save the princess: A tale of AIXI and utility functions
by Anja — 2013-02-01T15:38:00.256Z

"Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments." (Shane Legg) [1]

A little while ago I tried to equip Hutter's universal agent, AIXI, with a utility function, so instead of taking its clues about its goals from the environment, the agent is equipped with intrinsic preferences over possible future observations.

The universal AIXI agent is defined to receive reward from the environment through its perception channel. This idea originates from the field of reinforcement learning, where an algorithm is observed and then rewarded by a person if this person approves of the outputs. It is less appropriate as a model of AGI capable of autonomy, with no clear master watching over it in real time to choose between carrot and stick. A sufficiently smart agent that is rewarded whenever a human called Bob pushes a button will most likely figure out that instead of furthering Bob's goals it can also threaten or deceive Bob into pushing the button, or get Bob replaced with a more compliant human. The reward framework does not ensure that Bob gets his will; it only ensures that the button gets pressed. So instead I will consider agents who have preferences over the future, that is, they act not to gain reward from the environment, but to cause the future to be a certain way. The agent itself will look at the observation and decide how rewarding it is.

Von Neumann and Morgenstern proved that a preference ordering that is complete, transitive, continuous and independent of irrelevant alternatives can be described using a real-valued utility function. These assumptions are mostly accepted as necessary constraints on a normatively rational agent; I will therefore assume without significant loss of generality that the agent's preferences are described by a utility function.

This post is related to previous discussion about universal agents and utility functions on LW.

Two approaches to utility

Recall that at time the universal agent chooses its next action given action-observation-reward history according to

where

is the Solomonoff-Levin semimeasure, ranging over all enumerable chronological semimeasures weighted by their complexity .

My initial approach changed this to

deleting the reward part from the observation random variable and multiplying by ...
Meetup : Tokyo Meetup
by Patrick — 2013-02-01T13:57:07.918Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tokyo Meetup

WHEN:
01 March 2013 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Kawaguchi Station

Email Usmar Padow at usmar@i.softbank.jp Include "Less Wrong Meetup" in the subject line.

Discussion article for the meetup : Tokyo Meetup
The value of Now.
by ialdabaoth — 2013-02-01T07:52:55.689Z

I am an easily bored Omega-level being, and I want to play a game with you.

I am going to offer you two choices.

Choice 1: You spend the next thousand years in horrific torture, after which I restore your local universe to precisely the state it is in now (wiping your memory in the process), and hand you a box with a billion dollars in it.

Choice two: You spend the next thousand years in exquisite bliss, after which I restore your local universe to precisely the state it is in now (wiping your memory in the process), and hand you a box with an angry hornet's nest in it.

Which do you choose?

Now, you blink. I smile and inform you that you made your choice, and hand you your box. Which choice do you hope you made?

You object? Fine. Let's play another game.

I am going to offer you two choices.

Choice 1: I create a perfect simulation of you, and run it through a thousand simulated years of horrific torture (which will take my hypercomputer all of a billionth of a second to run), after which I delete the simulation and hand you a box with a billion dollars in it.

Choice 2: I create a perfect simulation of you, and run it through a thousand simulated years of exquisite bliss (which will take my hypercomputer all of a billionth of a second to run), after which I delete the simulation and hand you a box with an angry hornet's nest in it.

Which do you choose?

Now, I smile and inform you that I already made a perfect simulation of you and asked it that question. Which choice do you hope it made?

Let's expand on that. What if instead of creating one perfect simulation of you, I create 2^^^^3 perfect simulations of you? Which do you choose now?

What if instead of a thousand simulated years, I let the boxes run for 2^^^^3 simulated years each? Which do you choose now?

I have the box right here. Which do you hope you chose?
[LINK] The Cryopreservation of Kim Suozzi
by  — 2013-02-01T05:39:52.774Z

http://www.alcor.org/blog/?p=2716

With the inevitable end in sight – and with the cancer continuing to spread throughout her brain – Kim made the brave choice to refuse food and fluids. Even so, it took around 11 days before her body stopped functioning. Around 6:00 am on Thursday January 17, 2013, Alcor was alerted that Kim had stopped breathing. Because Kim’s steadfast boyfriend and family had located Kim just a few minutes away from Alcor, Medical Response Director Aaron Drake arrived almost immediately, followed minutes later by Max More, then two well-trained Alcor volunteers. As soon as a hospice nurse had pronounced clinical death, we began our standard procedures. Stabilization, transport, surgery, and perfusion all went smoothly. A full case report will be forthcoming.

Previously on LW: Aug 18, Aug 25, Aug 27, Jan 22.
Pinpointing Utility
by  — 2013-02-01T03:58:00.574Z

Following Morality is Awesome. Related: Logical Pinpointing, VNM.

The eternal question, with a quantitative edge: A wizard has turned you into a whale, how awesome is this?

"10.3 Awesomes"

Meditate on this: What does that mean? Does that mean it's desirable? What does that tell us about how awesome it is to be turned into a whale? Explain. Take a crack at it for real. What does it mean for something to be labeled as a certain amount of "awesome" or "good" or "utility"?

What is This Utility Stuff?

Most of agree that the VNM axioms are reasonable, and that they imply that we should be maximizing this stuff called "expected utility". We know that expectation is just a weighted average, but what's this "utility" stuff?

Well, to start with, it's a logical concept, which means we need to pin it down with the axioms that define it. For the moment, I'm going to conflate utility and expected utility for simplicity's sake. Bear with me. Here are the conditions that are necessary and sufficient to be talking about utility:

Utility can be represented as a single real number.

Each outcome has a utility.

The utility of a probability distribution over outcomes is the expected utility.

The action that results in the highest utility is preferred.

No other operations are defined.

I hope that wasn't too esoteric. The rest of this post will be explaining the implications of those statements. Let's see how they apply to the awesomeness of being turned into a whale:

"10.3 Awesomes" is a real number.

We are talking about the outcome where "A wizard has turned you into a whale".

There are no other outcomes to aggregate with, but that's OK.

There are no actions under consideration, but that's OK.

Oh. Not even taking the value?

Note 5 especially. You can probably look at the number without causing trouble, but if you try to treat it as meaningful for something other than condition 3 and 4, even accidentally, that's a type error.

Unfortunately, you do not have a finicky compiler that will halt and warn you if you break the rules. Instead, your error will be silently ignored, and you will go on, blissfully unaware that the invariants in your decision system no longer pinpoint VNM utility. (Uh oh.)

Unshielded Utilities, and Cautions for Utility-Users

Let's imagine that utilities are radioactive; If we are careful with out containment procedures, we can safely combine and compare them, bu...