trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Ascended Economy?
by Scott Alexander — 2016-05-30T21:06:07.000Z

[Obviously speculative futurism is obviously speculative. Complex futurism may be impossible and I should feel bad for doing it anyway. This is “inspired by” Nick Land – I don’t want to credit him fully since I may be misinterpreting him, and I also don’t want to avoid crediting him at all, so call it “inspired”.]

I.

My review of Age of Em mentioned the idea of an “ascended economy”, one where economic activity drifted further and further from human control until finally there was no relation at all. Many people rightly questioned that idea, so let me try to expand on it further. What I said there, slightly edited for clarity:

Imagine a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars. The inventor of the batteries might be a scientist who really believes in the power of technology to improve the human race. The workers who help build the batteries might just be trying to earn money to support their families. The CEO might be running the business because he wants to buy a really big yacht. The shareholders might be holding the stock to help save for a comfortable retirement. And the whole thing is there to eventually, somewhere down the line, let a suburban mom buy a car to take her kid to soccer practice. Like most companies the battery-making company is primarily a profit-making operation, but the profit-making-ness draws on a lot of not-purely-economic actors and their not-purely-economic subgoals.

Now imagine the company fires the inventor and replaces him with a genetic algorithm that optimizes battery design. It fires all its employees and replaces them with robots. It fires the CEO and replaces him with a superintelligent business-running algorithm. All of these are good decisions, from a profitability perspective. We can absolutely imagine a profit-driven shareholder-value-maximizing company doing all these things. But it reduces the company’s non-masturbatory participation in an economy that points outside itself, limits it to just a tenuous connection with soccer moms and maybe some shareholders who want yachts of their own.

Now take it further. Imagine that instead of being owned by humans directly, it’s owned by an algorithm-controlled venture capital fund. And imagine there are no soccer moms anymore; the company makes batteries for the trucks that ship raw materials from place to plac

...
Meetup : June Rationality Dojo
by Chriswaterguy — 2016-05-30T05:24:09.721Z

Discussion article for the meetup : June Rationality Dojo

WHEN:
04 June 2016 03:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne Vic

[3:00pm arrival and 3:30pm start of scheduled activities.]

For our May Dojo we have a choice of discussion groups, consisting of:
- Imposter syndrome (facilitated by Eike)
- Ways that words can be wrong (facilitated by James)

... and possibly a third topic, depending on numbers and interest.

This is followed by "Debugging". Get help troubleshooting your goals, help someone else, or (if you prefer) work on something by yourself.

The Dojo will run until about 6pm, after which you are welcome to join us for dinner.

WHERE: Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane. Level 3 (Jenny Florence Room).
If you have any trouble finding the venue or getting in, text or call Chris on 0439 471 632. For the greatest convenience and most prompt service, please arrive before 3:30pm.

WHAT'S THIS ABOUT?: The Less Wrong Melbourne Rationality Dojos are self-improvement sessions for those committed to the art of rationality and personal growth. We welcome new members who are interested in exploring rationality. We're all "aspiring rationalists".

Dojos are currently being held on the first Saturday of each month, so you may wish to add that as a recurring event in your calendar.

Discussion article for the meetup : June Rationality Dojo
Open Thread May 30 - June 5, 2016
by Elo — 2016-05-30T04:51:47.829Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), 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 be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Cognitive Biases Affecting Self-Perception of Beauty
by Bound_up — 2016-05-29T18:32:29.383Z

I wrote an article for mass consumption on the biases which are at play in a hot-button social issue, namely, how people feel about their beauty.

skepticexaminer.com/2016/05/dont-think-youre-beautiful/

and

intentionalinsights.org/why-you-dont-think-youre-beautiful

It's supposed to be interesting to people who wouldn't normally care a whit for correcting their biases for the sake of epistemology.

EDIT: Text included below

Long-time friends Amy, Bailey, and Casey are having their weekly lunch together when Amy says “I don’t think I’m very beautiful.”
Have you ever seen something like this? Regardless, before moving on, try to guess what will happen next. What kind of future would you predict?
I’ve often seen such a scene. My experience would lead me to predict...
“Of course you’re beautiful!” they reassure her. Granted, people sometimes say that just to be nice, but I’ll be talking about those times when they are sincere.
How can Bailey and Casey see Amy as beautiful when Amy doesn’t? Some great insight into beauty, perhaps?
Not at all! Consider what typically happens next.
“I only wish I was as beautiful as you, Amy,” Bailey reassures her.
The usual continuation of the scene reveals that Bailey is just as self-conscious as Amy is, and Casey’s probably the same. All people have this natural tendency, to judge their own appearance more harshly than they do others’.
So what’s going on?
If you were present, I’d ask you to guess what causes us to judge ourselves this way. Indeed, I have so asked from time to time, and found most people blame the same thing.
Think about it; what does everybody blame when people are self-conscious about their beauty?
We blame…
The media! The blasted media and the narrow standard of beauty it imposes.
There are two effects; the media is responsible for only one, and not the one we’re talking about.
Research suggests that the media negatively affects how we judge both ourselves and others. We tend to focus on how it affects our perception of ourselves, but the media affects how we judge others, too. More to the point, that’s not the effect we were talking about!
We were talking about a separate effect, where people tend to judge themselves one way and ever...
When considering incentives, consider the incentives of all parties
by casebash — 2016-05-29T13:47:40.571Z

Once upon a time the countries of Alpago and Byzantine had a war. Alpago was mostly undamaged during this war. Byzantine was severely damaged by this war, although they have caught up in some metrics such as education, their economy is still somewhat weaker. Alpago was the clear aggressor, and now, fifty years later, everyone who is reasonable now acknowledges that Alpago was in the wrong.

There is a major debate within the countries about how to respond to the past. Many Byzantians argue that the views of the Alpagoans are irrelevant. The Alpagoans are "unbombed", this provides them with many systematic advantage over the Byzantians such as career opportunities, indeed most of the top companies in Byzantian still have Alpagoan CEOs since many of the senior management were hired before Byzantian had built anywhere near the number of colleges in Alpago.

Many Byzantians argue that the views of the unbombed deserve very little consideration. Of course the unbombed will want to preserve their advantages. How can the Byzantians ever have their voices heard when unbombed members of parliament are giving their opinions in the Alpago parliament on how much compensation is appropriate? Surely if Alpago was truly sorry, they would accept the demands of the Byzantian government without question.

The Byzantians are undoubtedly correct in their assumption that the Alpagoans have a very strong incentive to underestimate what is owed. They are also correct when they say that the Alpagoans are in a position of power that makes it very easy for them to ignore the issue of compensation, after all, it does not affect them very much if their government decides to pay compensation to the Byzantians, instead of the alternate plan of wasting it on a fleet of nuclear submarines. However, in other areas, the Alpagoans no longer have a power advantage. Many Alpagoan politicians used to say that the war was justified, if a politician said that these days, even the conservative party would demand that they resign because no reasonable person could come to such a conclusion.

In contrast, some of the more extreme Byzantians regularly declare the burning of their capital as a intentional war crime, while the evidence quite clearly shows that the Alpagoans had not targeted their civilian population, only their military base which had inadvertently led to the fire when it was de...
Meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
by AnnaLeptikon — 2016-05-29T11:39:28.086Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna

WHEN:
18 June 2016 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Kaisermühlenstraße 24

Agenda
15:00 - 15:30 arrival and social time
15:30 official start with an introduction round 16:00 defining the topic(s) of the day (might be one big presentation or open microphone which means everyone can offer short talks or topics for discussion)
at around 18:00 leaving for dinner and beforehand cleaning up together
19:00 Dinner
Follow Links for directions:
https://www.facebook.com/events/447851665414100/permalink/455616414637625/
Topics proposed so far:
Konstantin Orshulevich - Game Theory
Event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/636719113161659/
(look here for updated information!)

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
Book Review: Age of Em
by Scott Alexander — 2016-05-28T20:42:17.000Z

[Note: I really liked this book and if I criticize it that’s not meant as an attack but just as what I do with interesting ideas. Note that Robin has offered to debate me about some of this and I’ve said no – mostly because I hate real-time debates and have bad computer hardware – but you may still want to take this into account when considering our relative positions. Mild content warning for murder, rape, and existential horror. Errors in Part III are probably my own, not the book’s.]

I.

There are some people who are destined to become adjectives. Pick up a David Hume book you’ve never read before and it’s easy to recognize the ideas and style as Humean. Everything Tolkien wrote is Tolkienesque in a non-tautological sense. This isn’t meant to denounce either writer as boring. Quite the opposite. They produced a range of brilliant and diverse ideas. But there was a hard-to-define and very consistent ethos at the foundation of both. Both authors were very much like themselves.

Robin Hanson is more like himself than anybody else I know. He’s obviously brilliant – a PhD in economics, a masters in physics, work for DARPA, Lockheed, NASA, George Mason, and the Future of Humanity Institute. But his greatest aptitude is in being really, really Hansonian. Bryan Caplan describes it as well as anybody:

When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘Eh, maybe.’ Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘No way! Impossible!’ Then I think about it for years.

This is my experience too. I think I said my first “No way! Impossible!” sometime around 2008 after reading his blog Overcoming Bias. Since then he’s influenced my thinking more than almost anyone else I’ve ever read. When I heard he was writing a book, I was – well, I couldn’t even imagine a book by Robin Hanson. When you read a thousand word blog post by Robin Hanson, you have to sit down and think about it and wait for it to digest and try not to lose too much sleep worrying about it. A whole book would be something.

I have now read Age Of Em (website)and it is indeed something. Even the cover gives you a weird sense of sublimity mixed with unease:

And in this case, judging a book by its cover is enti...
How my something to protect just coalesced into being
by  — 2016-05-28T18:21:47.609Z

Tl;dr Different people will probably have different answers to the question of how to find the goal & nurture the 'something to protect' feeling, but mine is: your specific working experience is already doing it for you.

What values do other people expect of you?

I think that for many people, their jobs are the most meaningful ways of changing the world (including being a housewife). When you just enter a profession and start sharing your space and time with people who have been in it for a while, you let them shape you, for better or for worse. If the overwhelming majority of bankers are not EA (from the beneficiaries' point of view), it will be hard to be an EA banker. If the overwhelming majority of teachers view the lessons as basically slam dunks (from the students' point of view), it will be hard to be a teacher who revisits past insights with any purpose other than cramming.

So basically, if I want Something to protect, I find a compatible job, observe the people, like something good and hate something bad, and then try to give others like me the chance to do more of the first and less of the second.

I am generalizing from one example... or two...

I've been in a PhD program. I liked being expected to think, being given free advice about some of the possible failures, knowing other people who don't consider solo expeditions too dangerous. I hated being expected to fail, being denied changing my research topic, spending half a day home with a cranky kid and then running to meet someone who wasn't going to show up.

Then I became a lab technician & botany teacher in an out-of-school educational facility. I liked being able to show up later on some days, being treated kindly by a dozen unfamiliar people (even if they speak at classroom volume level), being someone who steps in for a chemistry instructor, finds umbrellas, and gives out books from her own library. I hated the condescending treatment of my subject by other teachers, sudden appointments, keys going missing, questions being recycled in highschool contests, and the feeling of intrusion upon others' well-structured lessons when I just had to add something (everyone took it in stride).

(...I am going to leave the job, because it doesn't pay well enough & I do want to see my kid on weekdays. It let me to identify my StP, though - a vision of what I want from botany education.)

Background a...
Anti-reductionism as complementary, rather than contradictory
by ImNotAsSmartAsIThinK — 2016-05-27T23:17:43.092Z

Epistemic Status: confused & unlikely

Author's note: the central claim of this article I now believe is confused, and mostly inaccurate. More precisely (in response to a comment by ChristianKl)

>Whose idea of reductionism are you criticising? I think your post could get more useful by being more clear about the idea you want to challenge.

I think this is closest I get to having a "Definiton 3.4.1" in my post

"...the other reductionism I mentioned, the 'big thing = small thing + small thing' one..."

Essentially, the claim is that to accurately explain reality, non-reductionist explanations aren't always *wrong*.

The confusion, however, that I realized elsewhere in the thread, is that I conflate 'historical explanation' with 'predictive explanation'. Good predictive explanation will almost always be reductionist, because, as it says on the tin, big are made of smaller things. Good historical explanations, though, will be contra-reductionist, they'll explain phenomena in terms of its relation to the environment. Consider evolution; the genes seem to be explained non-reductionistically because their presence or absence is determined by its effect on the environment i.e. whether its fit, so the explanation for how it got there necessarily includes complex things because they cause it.

>Apart from that I don't know what you mean with theory in "Reductionism is a philosophy, not a theory." As a result on using a bunch of terms where I don't know exactly what you mean it's hard to follow your argument.

Artifact of confusion; if contra-reductionism is a valid platform for explanation, then the value of reductionism isn't constative -- that is, it isn't about whether it's true or false, but something at the meta-level, rather than the object level. The antecedent is no longer believed, so now I do not believe the consequent.

The conceit I had by calling it a philosophy, or more accurately, a perspective, is essentially that you have a dataset, then you can apply a 'reductionist' filter on it to get reductionist explanations and a 'contra-reductionist' filter to get contra explanations. This was a confusion; and only seemed reasonable because I I was treating the two type of explanation -- historical and predictive -- as somehow equivalent, which I now know to be mistaken.

Reductionism is usually thought of as the assertion...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-05-27T15:39:34.956Z

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

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
[Munich] Less Wrong, More Summer, Munich Picnic: 04 June 2016 01:00PM

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:

Sydney Rationality Dojo - June: 05 June 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - July: 03 July 2016 04:00PM

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, 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 order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), Singapore, St. Louis, Vancouver, Warsaw, Waterloo.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any f...
LINK: Performing a Failure Autopsy
by fowlertm — 2016-05-27T14:21:27.343Z

In which I discuss the beginnings of a technique for learning from certain kinds of failures more effectively:

"What follows is an edited version of an exercise I performed about a month ago following an embarrassing error cascade. I call it a ‘failure autopsy’, and on one level it’s basically the same thing as an NFL player taping his games and analyzing them later, looking for places to improve.

But the aspiring rationalist wishing to do the something similar faces a more difficult problem, for a couple of reasons:

First, the movements of a mind can’t be seen in the same way the movements of a body can, meaning a different approach must be taken when doing granular analysis of mistaken cognition.

Second, learning to control the mind is simply much harder than learning to control the body.

And third, to my knowledge, nobody has really even tried to develop a framework for doing with rationality what an NFL player does with football, so someone like me has to pretty much invent the technique from scratch on the fly.

I took a stab at doing that, and I think the result provides some tantalizing hints at what a more mature, more powerful versions of this technique might look like. Further, I think it illustrates the need for what I’ve been calling a “Dictionary of Internal Events”, or a better vocabulary for describing what happens between your ears."
LINK: Quora brainstorms strategies for containing AI risk
by Mass_Driver — 2016-05-26T16:32:02.304Z

In case you haven't seen it yet, Quora hosted an interesting discussion of different strategies for containing / mitigating AI risk, boosted by a $500 prize for the best answer. It attracted sci-fi author David Brin, U. Michigan professor Igor Markov, and several people with PhDs in machine learning, neuroscience, or artificial intelligence. Most people from LessWrong will disagree with most of the answers, but I think the article is useful as a quick overview of the variety of opinions that ordinary smart people have about AI risk.

https://www.quora.com/What-constraints-to-AI-and-machine-learning-algorithms-are-needed-to-prevent-AI-from-becoming-a-dystopian-threat-to-humanity