trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Games Discussion
by RobinZ — 2016-10-07T01:08:31.652Z

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

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

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to talk about games and game-related topics.

Upcoming meetups:

Oct. 16: Fun & Games

Oct. 23: Communication

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Games Discussion
Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-10-07T00:30:40.101Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
09 October 2016 08:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg Room 456, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

Meeting is on 4th floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. Permit parking designations do not apply on weekends, so park pretty much wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
The University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is hiring!
by crmflynn — 2016-10-06T16:53:26.841Z

The University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is recruiting for an Academic Project Manager. This is an opportunity to play a shaping role as CSER builds on its first year's momentum towards becoming a permanent world-class research centre. We seek an ambitious candidate with initiative and a broad intellectual range for a postdoctoral role combining academic and project management responsibilities.

The Academic Project Manager will work with CSER's Executive Director and research team to co-ordinate and develop CSER's projects and overall profile, and to develop new research directions. The post-holder will also build and maintain collaborations with academic centres, industry leaders and policy makers in the UK and worldwide, and will act as an ambassador for the Centre’s research externally. Research topics will include AI safety, bio risk, extreme environmental risk, future technological advances, and cross-cutting work on governance, philosophy and foresight. Candidates will have a PhD in a relevant subject, or have equivalent experience in a relevant setting (e.g. policy, industry, think tank, NGO).

Application deadline: November 11th. http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/11684/
Logical inductor limits are dense under pointwise convergence
by SamEisenstat — 2016-10-06T08:07:53.000Z

Logical inductors [1] are very complex objects, and even their limits are hard to get a handle on. In this post, I investigate the topological properties of the set of all limits of logical inductors.

I’ll use the language of universal inductors [2], but everything I say will also hold for general logical inductors by conditioning. Also, the proofs can be made to apply directly to general logical inductors with relatively few changes.

Universal inductors are measures on Cantor space (i.e. the space 2ω of infinite bit-strings) at every finite time, as well as in the limit (this is a bit nicer than the analogous situation for general logical inductors, which are measures on the space of completions of a theory only in the limit). There are many topologies on spaces of measures, and we can ask about topological properties under any of these. Interestingly, the set of universal inductor limits is dense in the topology of weak convergence, but not in the topology of strong convergence (or, a fortiori, the total variation metric topology).

It’s not immediately clear how to interpret this - should we think of the space of measures as being full of universal inductor limits, or should we think of universal inductor limits as being relatively few, with big holes where none exist? A relatively close analogy is the relationship between computable sets (or limit computable sets for a closer analogy) and arbitrary subsets of N; any subset of N can be approximated pointwise by limit computable sets (indeed, even by finite sets), but may be impossible to approximate under the ℓ1 norm, i.e. the number of differing bits. Now, on with the proofs!

Theorem 1: The set of limits of universal inductors is dense in the topology of weak convergence on the space of measures Δ(2ω).

Proof outline: We need to find a limit of universal inductors in any neighborhood of any measure μ. That is, for any finite collection of continuous functions, we need a universal inductor that, in the limit, assigns expectations to each such function that is close to the expectation under μ.

We do this with a modification of the standard universal inductor construction (section 5 of [1]), adding one additional trader to TradingFirm. This trader can buy and sell shares in events in order to keep these expectations within certain bounds, in a way similar to the Occam traders in the proof of theorem 4.6.4 in [1]. H

...
Theory of an Immoral Sentiment
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-10-06T05:55:48.000Z

I.

Hey, did you hear the news about the descolada virus outbreak in Tajikistan?

“No,” you say, “is it bad?”

I confirm that it is bad indeed. 15,000 people have succumbed to the illness, many more cases unconfirmed, doctors are scrambling for a cure. Fortunately, the disease is localized and there’s practically no risk of anyone in this part of the world catching the virus.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” you sigh, “I wish we could do something for the poor souls.”

Your conversational duties fulfilled, you are now free to revert your attention to whatever you were doing before and not give another thought to the poor Tajiks. What was that virus called? You already forgot. It’s not that you’re indifferent to the Tajik plight, it’s just… it’s just that descolada in Tajikistan doesn’t really make a difference to you.

Now imagine instead that you get a call from your doctor: a test came back showing that your appendix is about to get inflamed, you’re scheduled for an appendectomy tomorrow afternoon. Someone’s going to cut open your abdomen with sharp instruments. You really shouldn’t worry though, it’s a routine procedure and most appendectomy patients are out of the hospital by the second day.

But you do worry, and probably have trouble sleeping tonight. It’s unlikely that you’ll be thinking of anything at all for the next day other than your imminent surgery.

II.

Adam Smith is most known for his Wealth of Nations being quoted out of context in 57% of dumb Facebook debates about economics. But that’s only half of his bibliography, Smith also wrote a remarkable book on virtue, wisdom and the life worth living in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. If you want the same ideas in modern English and with a snazzy cover, Russ Roberts of EconTalk fame covers TToMS in How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.

The original, published in 1759, remarks on the fact that people are more preoccupied with the smallest inconvenience to themselves than with the greatest tragedies occurring half the world away:

If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems pl

...
Meetup : Moscow: rational review, bias busters, Kolmogorov and Jayes probability
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-10-05T19:32:22.651Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: rational review, bias busters, Kolmogorov and Jayes probability

WHEN:
09 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 09.10.2016 meetup.

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

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: rational review, bias busters, Kolmogorov and Jayes probability
Astrobiology III:  Why Earth?
by  — 2016-10-04T21:59:57.716Z

After many tribulations, my astrobiology bloggery is back up and running using Wordpress rather than Blogger because Blogger is completely unusable these days. I've taken the opportunity of the move to make better graphs for my old posts.

"The Solar System: Why Earth?"
https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/the-solar-system-why-earth/

Here, I try to look at our own solar system and what the presence of only ONE known biosphere, here on Earth, tells us about life and perhaps more importantly what it does not. In particular, I explore what aspects of Earth make it special and I make the distinction between a big biosphere here on Earth that has utterly rebuilt the geochemistry and a smaller biosphere living off smaller amounts of energy that we probably would never notice elsewhere in our own solar system given the evidence at hand.

Commentary appreciated.

Previous works:

Space and Time, Part I

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-i

Space and Time, Part II

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-ii
Astrobiology III:  Why Earth?
by  — 2016-10-04T21:44:29.430Z

After many tribulations, my astrobiology bloggery is back up and running using Wordpress rather than Blogger because Blogger is completely unusable these days. I've taken the opportunity of the move to make better graphs for my old posts.

"The Solar System: Why Earth?"
https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/the-solar-system-why-earth/

Here, I try to look at our own solar system and what the presence of only ONE known biosphere, here on Earth, tells us about life and perhaps more importantly what it does not. In particular, I explore what aspects of Earth make it special and I make the distinction between a big biosphere here on Earth that has utterly rebuilt the geochemistry and a smaller biosphere living off smaller amounts of energy that we probably would never notice elsewhere in our own solar system given the evidence at hand.

Commentary appreciated.

Previous works:

Space and Time, Part I

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-i

Space and Time, Part II

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-ii/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true
Open thread, Oct. 03 - Oct. 09, 2016
by MrMind — 2016-10-03T06:59:03.141Z

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.
Cryo with magnetics added
by morganism — 2016-10-01T22:27:05.573Z

This is great, by using small interlocking magnetic fields, you can keep the water in a higher vibrational state, allowing a "super-cooling" without getting crystallization and cell rupture

Subzero 12-hour Nonfreezing Cryopreservation of Porcine Heart in a Variable Magnetic Field

"invented a special refrigerator, termed as the Cells Alive System (CAS; ABI Co. Ltd., Chiba, Japan). Through the application of a combination of multiple weak energy sources, this refrigerator generates a special variable magnetic field that causes water molecules to oscillate, thus inhibiting crystallization during ice formation18 (Figure 1). Because the entire material is frozen without the movement of water molecules, cells can be maintained intact and free of membranous damage. This refrigerator has the ability to achieve a nonfreezing state even below the solidifying point."

http://mobile.journals.lww.com/transplantationdirect/_layouts/15/oaks.journals.mobile/articleviewer.aspx?year=2015&issue=10000&article=00005#ath
Fermi paradox of human past, and corresponding x-risks
by turchin — 2016-10-01T17:01:48.832Z

Based on known archaeological data, we are the first technological and symbol-using civilisation on Earth (but not the first tool-using species).
This leads to an analogy that fits Fermi’s paradox: Why are we the first civilisation on Earth? For example, flight was invented by evolution independently several times.
We could imagine that on our planet, many civilisations appeared and also became extinct, and based on mediocre principles, we should be somewhere in the middle. For example, if 10 civilisations appeared, we have only a 10 per cent chance of being the first one.

The fact that we are the first such civilisation has strong predictive power about our expected future: it lowers the probability that there will be any other civilisations on Earth, including non-humans or even a restarting of human civilisation from scratch. It is because, if there will be many civiizations, we should not find ourselves to be the first one (It is some form of Doomsday argument, the same logic is used in Bostrom's article “Adam and Eve”).

If we are the only civilisation to exist in the history of the Earth, then we will probably become extinct not in mild way, but rather in a way which will prevent any other civilisation from appearing. There is higher probability of future (man-made) catastrophes which will not only end human civilisation, but also prevent any existence of any other civilisations on Earth.

Such catastrophes would kill most multicellular life. Nuclear war or pandemic is not that type of a catastrophe. The catastrophe must be really huge: such as irreversible global warming, grey goo or black hole in a collider.

Now, I will list possible explanations of the Fermi paradox of human past and corresponding x-risks implications:

1. We are the first civilisation on Earth, because we will prevent the existence of any future civilisations.

If our existence prevents other civilisations from appearing in the future, how could we do it? We will either become extinct in a very catastrophic way, killing all earthly life, or become a super-civilisation, which will prevent other species from becoming sapient. So, if we are really the first, then it means that "mild extinctions" are not typical for human style civilisations. Thus, pandemics, nuclear wars, devolutions and everything reversible are ruled out as main possible methods o...
October 2016 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2016-10-01T14:05:55.965Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. 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 post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-09-30T14:48:10.172Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 30th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Stockholm: When to stop making a decision: 07 October 2016 03:00PM

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:

Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
Melbourne: A Bayesian Guide on How to Read a Scientific Paper: 08 October 2016 03:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - October 2016: 02 October 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...
Risk Contracts: A Crackpot Idea to Save the World
by SquirrelInHell — 2016-09-30T14:36:27.232Z

Time start: 18:17:30

I

This idea is probably going to sound pretty crazy. As far as seemingly crazy ideas go, it's high up there. But I think it is interesting enough to at least amuse you for a moment, and upon consideration your impression might change. (Maybe.) And as a benefit, it offers some insight into AI problems if you are into that.

(This insight into AI may or may not be new. I am not an expert on AI theory, so I wouldn't know. It's elementary, so probably not new.)

So here it goes, in short form on which I will expand in a moment:

To manage global risks to humanity, they can be captured in "risk contracts", freely tradeable on the market. Risk contracts would serve the same role as CO2 emissions contracts, which can likewise be traded, and ensure that the global norm is not exceeded as long as everyone plays along with the rules.

So e.g. if I want to run a dangerous experiment that might destroy the world, it's totally OK as long as I can purchase enough of a risk budget. Pretty crazy, isn't it?

As an added bonus, a risk contract can take into account the risk of someone else breaking the terms of contract. When you trasfer your rights to global risk, the contract obliges you to diminish the amount you transfer by the uncertainty about the other party being able to fullfill all obligations that come with such a contract. Or if you have not enough risk budget for this, you cannot transfer to that person.

II

Let's go a little bit more into detail about a risk contract. Note that this is supposed to illustrate the idea, not be a final say on the shape and terms of such a contract.

Just to give you some idea, here are some example rules (with lots of room to specify them more clearly etc., it's really just so that you have a clearer idea of what I mean by a "risk contract"):

My initial risk budget is 5 * 10^-12 chance of destroying the world. I am going to track this budget and do everything in my power to make sure that it never goes below 0.

For every action (or set of correlated actions) I take, I will subtract the probability that those actions destroy the world from my budget (using simple subtraction unless correlation between actions is very high).

If I transfer my budget to an agent who is going to decide about its actions independently from me, I will first pay the cost from my budget for the probability that this agent might not keep the terms of t

...
Linkposts now live!
by Vaniver — 2016-09-28T15:13:19.542Z

You can now submit links to LW! As the rationality community has grown up, more and more content has moved off LW to other places, and so rather than trying to generate more content here we'll instead try to collect more content here. My hope is that Less Wrong becomes something like "the Rationalist RSS," where people can discover what's new and interesting without necessarily being plugged in to the various diaspora communities.

Some general norms, subject to change:

It's okay to link someone else's work, unless they specifically ask you not to. It's also okay to link your own work; if you want to get LW karma for things you make off-site, drop a link here as soon as you publish it.

It's okay to link old stuff, but let's try to keep it to less than 5 old posts a day. The first link that I made is to Yudkowsky's Guide to Writing Intelligent Characters.

It's okay to link to something that you think rationalists will be interested in, even if it's not directly related to rationality. If it's political, think long and hard before deciding to submit that link.

It's not okay to post duplicates.

As before, everything will go into discussion. Tag your links, please. As we see what sort of things people are linking, we'll figure out how we need to divide things up, be it separate subreddits or using tags to promote or demote the attention level of links and posts.

(Thanks to James Lamine for doing the coding, and to Trike (and myself) for supporting the work.)
A Child's Petrov Day Speech
by James_Miller — 2016-09-28T02:27:38.521Z

30 years ago, the Cold War was raging on. If you don’t know what that is, it was the period from 1947 to 1991 where both the U.S and Russia had large stockpiles of nuclear weapons and were threatening to use them on each other. The only thing that stopped them from doing so was the knowledge that the other side would have time to react. The U.S and Russia both had surveillance systems to know of the other country had a nuke in the air headed for them.

On this day, September 26, in 1983, a man named Stanislav Petrov was on duty in the Russian surveillance room when the computer notified him that satellites had detected five nuclear missile launches from the U.S. He was told to pass this information on to his superiors, who would then launch a counter-strike.

He refused to notify anyone of the incident, suspecting it was just an error in the computer system.

No nukes ever hit Russian soil. Later, it was found that the ‘nukes’ were just light bouncing off of clouds which confused the satellite. Petrov was right, and likely saved all of humanity by stopping the outbreak of nuclear war. However, almost no one has heard of him.

We celebrate men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who win wars. These were great men, but the greater men, the men like Petrov who stopped these wars from ever happening - no one has heard of these men.

Let it be known, that September 26 is Petrov Day, in honor of the acts of a great man who saved the world, and of who almost no one has heard the name of.

My 11-year-old son wrote and then read this speech to his six grade class.