Eliezer commented on FB about a post Announcing GoodAI (by Marek Rosa GoodAIs CEO). I think this deserves some discussion as it has a quite effective approach to harness the crowd to improve the AI:

As part of GoodAI’s development, our team created a visual tool called Brain Simulator where users can design their own artificial brain architectures. We released Brain Simulator to the public today for free under and open-source, non-commercial license– anyone who’s interested can access Brain Simulator and start building their own artificial brain. [...]

By integrating Brain Simulator into Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers [a game], players will have the option to design their own AI brains for the games and implement it, for example, as a peasant character. Players will also be able to share these brains with each other or take an AI brain designed by us and train it to do things they want it to do (work, obey its master, and so on). The game AIs will learn from the player who trains them (by receiving reward/punishment signals; or by imitating player's behavior), and will have the ability to compete with each other. The AI will be also able to learn by imitating other AIs.

This integration will make playing Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers more fun, and at the same time our AI technology will gain access to millions of new teachers and a new environment. This integration into our games will be done by GoodAI developers. We are giving AI to players, and we are bringing players to our AI researchers.

This is the public group rationality diary for July 12th - August 1st, 2015. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

• Established a useful new habit

• Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

• Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

• Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

• Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

• Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

• Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

• Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Archive of previous rationality diaries

Note to future posters: no one is in charge of posting these threads. If it's time for a new thread, and you want a new thread, just create it. It should run for about two weeks, finish on a Saturday, and have the 'group_rationality_diary' tag.

After a hiatus of about a year the LessWrong Hamburg Meetup had a very strong revival! Infused by motivation from the Berlin Weekend I tried a reachout to collegues and via meetup.com and an amazing 24 people gathered on July, 17th in a location kindly provided by my employer.

Because the number of participants quickly exceeded my expectations I had to scramble to put something together for a larger group. For this I had tactical aid from blob and practical support from colleagues putting everything together from name tags to getting food and drinks and chairs.

We had an easy start with getting to know each other with Fela's Ice-Breaking Game.

The main topics covered were:

• An introduction into the topics, goals and methods or LessWrong illustrated with The Parable of the Dagger by pinkgothic. This was followed up by many smaller talks about how to apply rationality.
• A presentation and moderated discussion about effective altruism by ImmaSix.
• Moderated discussion about methods of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• I answered many questions regarding biases and fallacies and we used the game cards I had prepared early multiple times. These attracted some interest and can be found here (Dropbox).

Beside the main topics there was a good athmosphere with many people having smaller discussions.

The event ended with a short wrap-up based on Irinas Sustainable Change talk from the Berlin event which did prompt some people to take action based on what they heard.

What I learned from the event:

• I still tend to do overplanning. Maybe having a plan for eventualities isn't bad but the agenda doesn't need to be as highly structured as I did. It could cause expectations that can't be met. 
• Apparently I appeared stressed but I didn't feel that way myself. Probably from hurrying around. I wonder wheather that has a negative effect on other people and how I can avoid that. Esp. as I'm not feeling stressed myself. 
• A standard-issue meeting room for 12 people can comfortably host 24 people if tables and furniture are rearranged and comfy beanbags etc. are added.
• Whe number of people showing up can vary unpredictably. This may depend on weather or how the event is communicated and unknown factors.
• Visualize the concrete effects of your charity. This can give you a specific intuition you can use to decide whether it's worth it. Imma's example was thinking about how your donated AMF bednets hang over children and protect from mosquitoes.

There will definitely be a follow-up meeting of a comparable size in a few month (no date yet). And maybe smaller get-together will be organized inbetween.

Follow-up to: Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

See also: Fully General Counterargument (LW Wiki)

A fully general counterargument [FGCA] is an argument which can be used to discount any conclusion the arguer does not like.

With the caveat that the arguer doesn't need to be aware that this is the case. But if (s)he is not aware of that, this seems like the other biases we are prone to. The question is: Is there a tendency or risk to accidentally form FGCAs? Do we fall easily into this mind-trap? 

This post tries to (non-exhaustively) list some FGCAs as well as possible countermeasures.

On the Stupid Questions Thread I asked

I need some list of biases for a game of Biased Pandemic for our Meet-Up. Do suitably prepared/formatted lists exist somewhere?

But none came forward.

Therefore I created a simple deck based on Wikipedia entries. I selected those that can be presumably be used easily in a game, summarized the description and added an illustrative quote.

The deck can be found in Dropbox here (PDF and ODT).

I'd be happy for corrections and further suggestions.

ADDED: We used these cards during the LW Hamburg Meetup. They attracted significant interest and even though we did use them during a board game we drew them and tried to act them out during a discussion round (which didn't work out that well but stimulated discussion nonetheless).

This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

1. Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
2. Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
3. Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose. 

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

• Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
• Copy the rules.
• Add the tag "crazy_idea".
• Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
• Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Hamburg

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Hamburg

Self-Representation in Girard’s System U, by Matt Brown and Jens Palsberg:

In 1991, Pfenning and Lee studied whether System F could support a typed self-interpreter. They concluded that typed self-representation for System F “seems to be impossible”, but were able to represent System F in Fω. Further, they found that the representation of Fω requires kind polymorphism, which is outside Fω. In 2009, Rendel, Ostermann and Hofer conjectured that the representation of kind-polymorphic terms would require another, higher form of polymorphism. Is this a case of infinite regress?

We show that it is not and present a typed self-representation for Girard’s System U, the first for a λ-calculus with decidable type checking. System U extends System Fω with kind polymorphic terms and types. We show that kind polymorphic types (i.e. types that depend on kinds) are sufficient to “tie the knot” – they enable representations of kind polymorphic terms without introducing another form of polymorphism. Our self-representation supports operations that iterate over a term, each of which can be applied to a representation of itself. We present three typed self-applicable operations: a self-interpreter that recovers a term from its representation, a predicate that tests the intensional structure of a term, and a typed continuation-passing-style (CPS) transformation – the first typed self-applicable CPS transformation. Our techniques could have applications from verifiably type-preserving metaprograms, to growable typed languages, to more efficient self-interpreters.

On Scott Adams' Blog: Robots Program People:

It won’t be long before all new drugs are discovered by robots. This start-up is an example of that trend.

And it won’t be long before IBM’s Watson can diagnose and prescribe treatments better than any human doctor.

Put those two trends together and robots will be programming humans with drugs. Drugs are the user interface to our moistware.

[...]

Someday, for sure, machines will be programming humans. And that day will probably be in your lifetime. But don’t be afraid because the robots will someday have a drug that will make you feel totally okay with being their pet.

The European Community Weekend in Berlin is over and was plain awesome.

This is no complete report of the event but a place where you can e.g. comment on the event, link to photos or what else you want to share.

I'm not the organizer of the Meetup but I have been there and for me it was the most grand experience since last years European Community Weekend. Meeting so many energetic, compassionate and in general awesome people - some from last year or many new. Great presentations and workshops. And such a positive and open athmosphere.

Cheers to all participants!

See also the Facebook Group for the Community Event.