Link: Re-reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow
"A bit over four years ago I wrote a glowing review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I described it as a “magnificent book” and “one of the best books I have read”. I praised the way Kahneman threaded his story around the System 1 / System 2 dichotomy, and the coherence provided by prospect theory.
What a difference four years makes. I will still describe Thinking, Fast and Slow as an excellent book – possibly the best behavioural science book available. But during that time a combination of my learning path and additional research in the behavioural sciences has led me to see Thinking, Fast and Slow as a book with many flaws."
Continued here: https://jasoncollins.org/2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/
[LINK] The Top A.I. Breakthroughs of 2015
A great overview article on AI breakthroughs by Richard Mallah from FLI, linking to many excellent recent papers worth reading.
Progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning has been impressive this year. Those in the field acknowledge progress is accelerating year by year, though it is still a manageable pace for us. The vast majority of work in the field these days actually builds on previous work done by other teams earlier the same year, in contrast to most other fields where references span decades.
Creating a summary of a wide range of developments in this field will almost invariably lead to descriptions that sound heavily anthropomorphic, and this summary does indeed. Such metaphors, however, are only convenient shorthands for talking about these functionalities. It's important to remember that even though many of these capabilities sound very thought-like, they're usually not very similar to how human cognition works. The systems are all of course functional and mechanistic, and, though increasingly less so, each are still quite narrow in what they do. Be warned though: in reading this article, these functionalities may seem to go from fanciful to prosaic.
The biggest developments of 2015 fall into five categories of intelligence: abstracting across environments, intuitive concept understanding, creative abstract thought, dreaming up visions, and dexterous fine motor skills. I'll highlight a small number of important threads within each that have brought the field forward this year.
Why CFAR's Mission?
Related to:
---
Q: Why not focus exclusively on spreading altruism? Or else on "raising awareness" for some particular known cause?
Briefly put: because historical roads to hell have been powered in part by good intentions; because the contemporary world seems bottlenecked by its ability to figure out what to do and how to do it (i.e. by ideas/creativity/capacity) more than by folks' willingness to sacrifice; and because rationality skill and epistemic hygiene seem like skills that may distinguish actually useful ideas from ineffective or harmful ones in a way that "good intentions" cannot.
Q: Even given the above -- why focus extra on sanity, or true beliefs? Why not focus instead on, say, competence/usefulness as the key determinant of how much do-gooding impact a motivated person can have? (Also, have you ever met a Less Wronger? I hear they are annoying and have lots of problems with “akrasia”, even while priding themselves on their high “epistemic” skills; and I know lots of people who seem “less rational” than Less Wrongers on some axes who would nevertheless be more useful in many jobs; is this “epistemic rationality” thingy actually the thing we need for this world-impact thingy?...)
This is an interesting one, IMO.
Basically, it seems to me that epistemic rationality, and skills for forming accurate explicit world-models, become more useful the more ambitious and confusing a problem one is tackling.
For example:
Announcing the Signal Data Science Intensive Training Program
Note: We now have a website with up to date information here: http://signaldatascience.com/.
(This post is coauthored with Robert Cordwell.)
We’re writing to announce the inaugural run of Signal Data Science’s intensive training program.
The program will train students in the core skills needed to work as a professional data scientist:
- Scraping and cleaning data
- Exploring and analyzing data using statistics
- Presenting findings
- Interviewing
By the end of the course, you’ll will be able to start with raw data and produce analyses like the one in Bayesian Adjustment of Yelp Ratings. More to the point, you’ll understand why Jonah structured the analysis the way he did and be able to do the same yourself.
You’ll also be able to produce cool visualizations like this automatic grouping of Slate Star Codex posts by topic, as shown below.
Why data science?
Making inferences from data is fundamental to understanding the world, and there’s a growing unmet need in industry for people with the relevant skills. With good instruction and peer group, smart, motivated people can quickly develop enough proficiency to get jobs in the tech sector (starting compensation ~$115k in the San Francisco Bay Area).
Why us?
The Program
We offer inquiry-based learning (no boring lecturers or unmotivating problem sets!) and an unusually intellectually curious peer group. Far from what’s typical of college classes, our model has more in common with the Math Olympiad Summer Program, where daily lectures are interspersed with on-the-spot problems and followed by long-form problems designed to build on the lesson.
Robert Cordwell is an IMO gold medalist and educational startup veteran who’s working a Facebook data science job despite his limited, self-taught experience. He’s going to be teaching math problem solving, overall presentation skills, and how to break interviews.
Jonah Sinick is a data scientist with 13 years of experience making advanced math accessible to beginners, a PhD in math from University of Illinois, and an extensive body of published work. He’ll be teaching a comprehensive technical curriculum.
Who is this for?
If you:
- Are interested in data science
- Passionate about learning new things
- Would benefit from a social environment with others working toward the same goal
- Have the programming skills to solve simple algorithms problems
- Plan on applying for data science jobs after the program
our program will be a good fit for you.
Where / When
The first cohort will run in Berkeley for 6 weeks, from Feburary 1st – March 18th. This will be a compressed version of the standard course that we’ll be offering in the future, and is targeted at students who have a high degree of comfort with math.
In the future we’ll be offering longer courses that cover the mathematical / statistical material at a gentler pace.
Cost
For students in our first 6 week cohort, we offer two options:
- Payment of $8,000 at the start of the program.
- A “pay later” model where students pay 8% of their first year’s salary (pretax, spaced over 6 months), contingent on getting a data science job.
This is roughly 50% of the standard price for coding /data science bootcamps.
Next steps
If you’re interested in exploring participating in our first cohort, or keeping posted, please be in touch with us at signaldatascience@gmail.com.
MIRI's 2015 Winter Fundraiser!
MIRI's Winter Fundraising Drive has begun! Our current progress, updated live:
Like our last fundraiser, this will be a non-matching fundraiser with multiple funding targets our donors can choose between to help shape MIRI’s trajectory. The drive will run until December 31st, and will help support MIRI's research efforts aimed at ensuring that smarter-than-human AI systems have a positive impact.
[Link] Introducing OpenAI
From their site:
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
The money quote is at the end, literally—$1B in committed funding from some of the usual suspects.
New Leverhulme Centre on the Future of AI (developed at CSER with spokes led by Bostrom, Russell, Shanahan)
[Cross-posted at EA forum]
Hot on the heels of 80K's excellent AI risk research career profile (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/artificial-intelligence-risk-research/), we're delighted to announce the funding of a new international Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, to be led by Cambridge, with spokes at Oxford (Nick Bostrom), Imperial (Murray Shanahan), and Berkeley (Stuart Russell). The Centre proposal was developed by us at CSER, but will be a stand-alone centre, albeit collaborating extensively at CSER.
Building on the by-now-familiar "Puerto Rico Agenda", it will have the long-term safe and beneficial development of AI at its core, but with a slightly broader remit than CSER's focus on catastrophic AI risk and superintelligence. For example, it will consider some near-term challenges such as lethal autonomous weapons, and as well as some of the longer-term philosophical and practical issues surrounding the opportunities and challenges we expect to face, should greater-than-human-level intelligence be developed later this century.
It builds on the pioneering work of FHI, FLI and others, and the generous support of Elon Musk in massively boosting this field with his (separate) $10M grants programme in January of this year. One of the most important things this Centre will achieve is in taking a big step towards making this global area of research a long-term one in which the best talents can be expected to have lasting careers - the Centre is funded for a full 10 years, and we will aim to build longer-lasting funding on top of this.
In practical terms, it means that ~10 new postdoc positions at a minimum will be opening up in this space (we're currently pursuing matched funding opportunities) across academic disciplines and locations (Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, Imperial and elsewhere). Our first priority will be to identify and hire a world-class Executive Director, who would start in October. This will be a very influential position over the coming years. Research positions will most likely begin in April 2017.
In between now and then, FHI is hiring for AI safety researchers, and CSER will be hiring for an AI policy postdoc in the spring. I'll have limited time to post in between now and the Christmas break (I'll be away at NIPS and then occupied with funder deadlines and CSER recruitment), but will be happy to post more over the Christmas break if desired.
Thank you so much as always to the Lesswrong and Effective Altruism community for their support of existential risk/far future work, both financially and intellectually - it has made a huge difference over the last couple of years. Thanks in particular to MIRI and FHI's researchers, who I received a lot of guidance from in my part of co-developing this proposal.
Seán (Executive Director, CSER)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/uoc-cul120215.php
Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological 'hardware' -- it happens inside our skulls. Technology and science are now converging on a possible future where similar intelligence can be created in computers.
While it is hard to predict when this will happen, some researchers suggest that human-level AI will be created within this century. Freed of biological constraints, such machines might become much more intelligent than humans. What would this mean for us? Stuart Russell, a world-leading AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and collaborator on the project, suggests that this would be "the biggest event in human history". Professor Stephen Hawking agrees, saying that "when it eventually does occur, it's likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there's huge value in getting it right."
Now, thanks to an unprecedented £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust, the University of Cambridge is to establish a new interdisciplinary research centre, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, to explore the opportunities and challenges of this potentially epoch-making technological development, both short and long term.
The Centre brings together computer scientists, philosophers, social scientists and others to examine the technical, practical and philosophical questions artificial intelligence raises for humanity in the coming century.
Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Director of the Centre, said: "Machine intelligence will be one of the defining themes of our century, and the challenges of ensuring that we make good use of its opportunities are ones we all face together. At present, however, we have barely begun to consider its ramifications, good or bad".
The Centre is a response to the Leverhulme Trust's call for "bold, disruptive thinking, capable of creating a step-change in our understanding". The Trust awarded the grant to Cambridge for a proposal developed with the Executive Director of the University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. CSER investigates emerging risks to humanity's future including climate change, disease, warfare and technological revolutions.
Dr Ó hÉigeartaigh said: "The Centre is intended to build on CSER's pioneering work on the risks posed by high-level AI and place those concerns in a broader context, looking at themes such as different kinds of intelligence, responsible development of technology and issues surrounding autonomous weapons and drones."
The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence spans institutions, as well as disciplines. It is a collaboration led by the University of Cambridge with links to the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. It is supported by Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). As Professor Price put it, "a proposal this ambitious, combining some of the best minds across four universities and many disciplines, could not have been achieved without CRASSH's vision and expertise."
Zoubin Ghahramani, Deputy Director, Professor of Information Engineering and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, said: "The field of machine learning continues to advance at a tremendous pace, and machines can now achieve near-human abilities at many cognitive tasks -- from recognising images to translating between languages and driving cars. We need to understand where this is all leading, and ensure that research in machine intelligence continues to benefit humanity. The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence will bring together researchers from a number of disciplines, from philosophers to social scientists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists, to help guide the future of this technology and study its implications."
The Centre aims to lead the global conversation about the opportunities and challenges to humanity that lie ahead in the future of AI. Professor Price said: "With far-sighted alumni such as Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and Margaret Boden, Cambridge has an enviable record of leadership in this field, and I am delighted that it will be home to the new Leverhulme Centre.
Aumann Agreement Game
I've written up a rationality game which we played several times at our local LW chapter and had a lot of fun with. The idea is to put Aumann's agreement theorem into practice as a multi-player calibration game, in which players react to the probabilities which other players give (each holding some privileged evidence). If you get very involved, this implies reasoning not only about how well your friends are calibrated, but also how much your friends trust each other's calibration, and how much they trust each other's trust in each other.
You'll need a set of trivia questions to play. We used these.
The write-up includes a helpful scoring table which we have not play-tested yet. We did a plain Bayes loss rather than an adjusted Bayes loss when we played, and calculated things on our phone calculators. This version should feel a lot better, because the numbers are easier to interpret and you get your score right away rather than calculating at the end.
Future of Life Institute is hiring
I am a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute based in Boston, and we are looking to fill two job openings that some LessWrongers might be interested in. We are a mostly volunteer-run organization working to reduce catastrophic and existential risks, and increase the chances of a positive future for humanity. Please consider applying and pass this posting along to anyone you think would be a good fit!
PROJECT COORDINATOR
Technology has given life the opportunity to flourish like never before - or to self-destruct. The Future of Life Institute is a rapidly growing non-profit organization striving for the former outcome. We are fortunate to be supported by an inspiring group of people, including Elon Musk, Jaan Tallinn and Stephen Hawking, and you may have heard of our recent efforts to keep artificial intelligence beneficial.
You are idealistic, hard-working and well-organized, and want to help our core team carry out a broad range of projects, from organizing events to coordinating media outreach. Living in the greater Boston area is a major advantage, but not an absolute requirement.
If you are excited about this opportunity, then please send an email to jobs@futureoflife.org with your cv and a brief statement of why you want to work with us. The title of your email must be 'Project coordinator'.
NEWS WEBSITE EDITOR
There is currently huge public interest in the question of how upcoming technology (especially artificial intelligence) may transform our world, and what should be done to seize opportunities and reduce risks.
You are idealistic and ambitious, and want to lead our effort to transform our fledgling news site into the number one destination for anyone seeking up-to-date and in-depth information on this topic, and anybody eager to join what is emerging as one of the most important conversations of our time.
You love writing and have the know-how and drive needed to grow and promote a website. You are self-motivated and enjoy working independently rather than being closely mentored. You are passionate about this topic, and look forward to the opportunity to engage with our second-to-none global network of experts and use it to generate ideas and add value to the site. You look forward to developing and executing your vision for the website using the resources at your disposal, which include both access to experts and funds for commissioning articles, improving the website user interface, etc. You look forward to making use of these resources and making things happen rather than waiting for others to take the initiative.
If you are excited about this opportunity, then please send an email to jobs@futureoflife.org with your cv and answers to these questions:
- Briefly, what is your vision for our site? How would you improve it?
- What other site(s) (please provide URLs) have attributes that you'd like to emulate?
- How would you generate the required content?
- How would you increase traffic to the site, and what do you view as realistic traffic goals for January 2016 and January 2017?
- What budget do you need to succeed, not including your own salary?
- What past experience do you have with writing and/or website management? Please include a selection of URLs that showcase your work.
The title of your application email must be 'Editor'. You can live anywhere in the world. A science background is a major advantage, but not a strict requirement.
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