Meetup : Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup

3 Nova_Division 17 March 2013 09:49PM

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup

WHEN: 29 March 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: 1314 Hosea L Williams Drive NE, Atlanta, GA 30317

Let's get together and rock some rationality. Snacks, games, and various other fun activities will follow the official business. New members welcome! No reading or other preparation is required, just come and join in!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup

Exercise in dissolving

8 Eneasz 14 March 2013 04:40PM

A fun little exercise in dissolving a problem. Relatively quick, but it can wake you up on a slow day.

http://www.memedroid.com/share-meme/337837/8000

MetaMed: Evidence-Based Healthcare

83 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 March 2013 01:16PM

In a world where 85% of doctors can't solve simple Bayesian word problems...

In a world where only 20.9% of reported results that a pharmaceutical company tries to investigate for development purposes, fully replicate...

In a world where "p-values" are anything the author wants them to be...

...and where there are all sorts of amazing technologies and techniques which nobody at your hospital has ever heard of...

...there's also MetaMed.  Instead of just having “evidence-based medicine” in journals that doctors don't actually read, MetaMed will provide you with actual evidence-based healthcare.  Their Chairman and CTO is Jaan Tallinn (cofounder of Skype, major funder of xrisk-related endeavors), one of their major VCs is Peter Thiel (major funder of MIRI), their management includes some names LWers will find familiar, and their researchers know math and stats and in many cases have also read LessWrong.  If you have a sufficiently serious problem and can afford their service, MetaMed will (a) put someone on reading the relevant research literature who understands real statistics and can tell whether the paper is trustworthy; and (b) refer you to a cooperative doctor in their network who can carry out the therapies they find.

MetaMed was partially inspired by the case of a woman who had her fingertip chopped off, was told by the hospital that she was screwed, and then read through an awful lot of literature on her own until she found someone working on an advanced regenerative therapy that let her actually grow the fingertip back.  The idea behind MetaMed isn't just that they will scour the literature to find how the best experimentally supported treatment differs from the average wisdom - people who regularly read LW will be aware that this is often a pretty large divergence - but that they will also look for this sort of very recent technology that most hospitals won't have heard about.

This is a new service and it has to interact with the existing medical system, so they are currently expensive, starting at $5,000 for a research report.  (Keeping in mind that a basic report involves a lot of work by people who must be good at math.)  If you have a sick friend who can afford it - especially if the regular system is failing them, and they want (or you want) their next step to be more science instead of "alternative medicine" or whatever - please do refer them to MetaMed immediately.  We can’t all have nice things like this someday unless somebody pays for it while it’s still new and expensive.  And the regular healthcare system really is bad enough at science (especially in the US, but science is difficult everywhere) that there's no point in condemning anyone to it when they can afford better.


I also got my hands on a copy of MetaMed's standard list of citations that they use to support points to reporters.  What follows isn't nearly everything on MetaMed's list, just the items I found most interesting.

continue reading »

Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia

54 ShannonFriedman 09 March 2013 06:17PM

Before I was very involved in the Less Wrong community, I heard that Eliezer was looking for people to sit with him while he worked, to increase writing productivity. I knew that he was doing important work in the world, and figured that this was the sort of contribution to improving humanity that I would like to make, which was within the set of things that would be easy and enjoyable for me.

So I got a hold of him and offered to come and sit with him, and did that once/week for about a year. As anticipated, it worked marvelously. I found it easy to sit and not talk, just getting my own work done.  Eventually I became a beta reader for his "Bayes for Everyone Else" which is really great and helped me in my ability to estimate probabilities a ton. (Eliezer is still perfecting this work and has not yet released it, but you can find the older version here.)

In addition to learning the basics of Bayes from doing this, I also learned how powerful it is to have someone just to sit quietly with you to co-work on a regular schedule.

I’ve experimented with similar things since then, such as making skype dates with a friend to watch informational videos together. This worked for awhile until my friend got busy. I have two other recurring chat dates with friends to do dual n-back together, and those have worked quite well and are still going.

A client of mine, Mqrius, is working on his Master’s thesis and has found that the only way he has been able to overcome his akrasia so far is by co-working with a friend. Unfortunately, his friend does not have as much time to co-work as he’d like, so we decided to spend Mqrius’s counseling session today writing this Less Wrong post to see if we can help him and other people in the community who want to co-work over skype connect, since this will probably be much higher value to him as well as others with similar difficulties than the next best thing we could do with the time.

I encourage anyone who is interested in co-working, watching informational videos together, or any other social productivity experiments that can be done over skype or chat, to coordinate in the comments. For this to work best, I recommend being as specific as possible about the ideal co-working partner for you, in addition to noting if you are open to general co-working.

If you are specific, you are much more likely to succeed in finding a good co-working partner for you. While its possible you might screen someone out, its more likely that you will get the attention of your ideal co-working partner who otherwise would have glossed over your comment.

Here is my specific pitch for Mqrius:

If you are working on a thesis, especially if it’s related to nanotechnology like his thesis, and think that you are likely to be similarly motivated by co-working, please comment or contact him about setting up an initial skype trial run. His ideal scenario is to find 2-3 people to co-work with him for about 20 hours co-working/week time for him in total. He would like to find people who are dependable about showing up for appointments they have made and will create a recurring schedule with him at least until he gets his thesis done. He’d like to try an initial 4 hour co-working block as an experiment with interested parties.   Please comment below if you are interested.


[Mqrius and I have predictions going about whether or not he will actually get a co-working partner who is working on a nanotech paper out of this, if others want to post predictions in the comments, this is encouraged.  Its a good practice for reducing hindsight bias.]

[edit]

An virtual co-working space has been created and is currently live, discussion and link to the room here.

Philosophical Landmines

84 [deleted] 08 February 2013 09:22PM

Related: Cached Thoughts

Last summer I was talking to my sister about something. I don't remember the details, but I invoked the concept of "truth", or "reality" or some such. She immediately spit out a cached reply along the lines of "But how can you really say what's true?".

Of course I'd learned some great replies to that sort of question right here on LW, so I did my best to sort her out, but everything I said invoked more confused slogans and cached thoughts. I realized the battle was lost. Worse, I realized she'd stopped thinking. Later, I realized I'd stopped thinking too.

I went away and formulated the concept of a "Philosophical Landmine".

I used to occasionally remark that if you care about what happens, you should think about what will happen as a result of possible actions. This is basically a slam dunk in everyday practical rationality, except that I would sometimes describe it as "consequentialism".

The predictable consequence of this sort of statement is that someone starts going off about hospitals and terrorists and organs and moral philosophy and consent and rights and so on. This may be controversial, but I would say that causing this tangent constitutes a failure to communicate the point. Instead of prompting someone to think, I invoked some irrelevant philosophical cruft. The discussion is now about Consequentialism, the Capitalized Moral Theory, instead of the simple idea of thinking through consequences as an everyday heuristic.

It's not even that my statement relied on a misused term or something; it's that an unimportant choice of terminology dragged the whole conversation in an irrelevant and useless direction.

That is, "consequentialism" was a Philosophical Landmine.

In the course of normal conversation, you passed through an ordinary spot that happened to conceal the dangerous leftovers of past memetic wars. As a result, an intelligent and reasonable human was reduced to a mindless zombie chanting prerecorded slogans. If you're lucky, that's all. If not, you start chanting counter-slogans and the whole thing goes supercritical.

It's usually not so bad, and no one is literally "chanting slogans". There may even be some original phrasings involved. But the conversation has been derailed.

So how do these "philosophical landmine" things work?

It looks like when a lot has been said on a confusing topic, usually something in philosophy, there is a large complex of slogans and counter-slogans installed as cached thoughts around it. Certain words or concepts will trigger these cached thoughts, and any attempt to mitigate the damage will trigger more of them. Of course they will also trigger cached thoughts in other people, which in turn... The result being that the conversation rapidly diverges from the original point to some useless yet heavily discussed attractor.

Notice that whether a particular concept will cause trouble depends on the person as well as the concept. Notice further that this implies that the probability of hitting a landmine scales with the number of people involved and the topic-breadth of the conversation.

Anyone who hangs out on 4chan can confirm that this is the approximate shape of most thread derailments.

Most concepts in philosophy and metaphysics are landmines for many people. The phenomenon also occurs in politics and other tribal/ideological disputes. The ones I'm particularly interested in are the ones in philosophy, but it might be useful to divorce the concept of "conceptual landmines" from philosophy in particular.

Here's some common ones in philosophy:

  • Morality
  • Consequentialism
  • Truth
  • Reality
  • Consciousness
  • Rationality
  • Quantum

Landmines in a topic make it really hard to discuss ideas or do work in these fields, because chances are, someone is going to step on one, and then there will be a big noisy mess that interferes with the rather delicate business of thinking carefully about confusing ideas.

My purpose in bringing this up is mostly to precipitate some terminology and a concept around this phenomenon, so that we can talk about it and refer to it. It is important for concepts to have verbal handles, you see.

That said, I'll finish with a few words about what we can do about it. There are two major forks of the anti-landmine strategy: avoidance, and damage control.

Avoiding landmines is your job. If it is a predictable consequence that something you could say will put people in mindless slogan-playback-mode, don't say it. If something you say makes people go off on a spiral of bad philosophy, don't get annoyed with them, just fix what you say. This is just being a communications consequentialist. Figure out which concepts are landmines for which people, and step around them, or use alternate terminology with fewer problematic connotations.

If it happens, which it does, as far as I can tell, my only effective damage control strategy is to abort the conversation. I'll probably think that I can take those stupid ideas here and now, but that's just the landmine trying to go supercritical. Just say no. Of course letting on that you think you've stepped on a landmine is probably incredibly rude; keep it to yourself. Subtly change the subject or rephrase your original point without the problematic concepts or something.

A third prong could be playing "philosophical bomb squad", which means permanently defusing landmines by supplying satisfactory nonconfusing explanations of things without causing too many explosions in the process. Needless to say, this is quite hard. I think we do a pretty good job of it here at LW, but for topics and people not yet defused, avoid and abort.

ADDENDUM: Since I didn't make it very obvious, it's worth noting that this happens with rationalists, too, even on this very forum. It is your responsibility not to contain landmines as well as not to step on them. But you're already trying to do that, so I don't emphasize it as much as not stepping on them.

[Link] Tomasik's "Quantify with Care"

13 Pablo_Stafforini 23 February 2013 01:52PM

Brian Tomasik's latest article, 'Quantify with Care', seems to be of sufficient interest to readers of this forum to post a link to it here.  Abstract:

Quantification and metric optimization are powerful tools for reducing suffering, but they have to be used carefully. Many studies can be noisy, and results that seem counterintuitive may indeed be wrong because of sensitivity to experiment conditions, human error, measurement problems, or many other reasons. Sometimes you're looking at the wrong metric, and optimizing a metric blindly can be dangerous. Designing a robust set of metrics is actually a nontrivial undertaking that requires understanding the problem space, and sometimes it's more work than necessary. There can be a tendency to overemphasize statistics at the expense of insight and to use big samples when small ones would do. Finally, think twice about complex approaches that sound cool or impressive when you could instead use a dumb, simple solution.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Argument

74 palladias 18 February 2013 05:05PM

I recently gave a talk at Chicago Ideas Week on adapting Turing Tests to have better, less mindkill-y arguments, and this is the precis for folks who would prefer not to sit through the video (which is available here).

Conventional Turing Tests check whether a programmer can build a convincing facsimile of a human conversationalist.   The test has turned out to reveal less about machine intelligence than human intelligence.  (Anger is really easy to fake, since fights can end up a little more Markov chain-y, where you only need to reply to the most recent rejoinder and can ignore what came before).  Since normal Turing Tests made us think more about our model of human conversation, economist Bryan Caplan came up with a way to use them to make us think more usefully about our models of our enemies.

After Paul Krugman disparaged Caplan's brand of libertarian economics, Caplan challenged him to an ideological Turing Test, where both players would be human, but would be trying to accurately imitate each other.  Caplan and Krugman would each answer questions about their true beliefs honestly, and then would fill out the questionaire again in persona inimici - trying to guess the answers given by the other side.  Caplan was willing to bet that he understood Krugman's position well enough to mimic it, but Krugman would be easily spotted as a fake!Caplan.

Krugman didn't take him up on the offer, but I've run a couple iterations of the test for my religion/philosophy blog.  The first year, some of the most interesting results were the proxy variables people were using, that weren't as strong as indicators as the judges thought.  (One Catholic coasted through to victory as a faux atheist, since many of the atheist judges thought there was no way a Christian would appreciate the webcomic SMBC).

The trouble was, the Christians did a lot better, since it turned out I had written boring, easy to guess questions for the true and faux atheists.  The second year, I wrote weirder questions, and the answers were a lot more diverse and surprising (and a number of the atheist participants called out each other as fakes or just plain wrong, since we'd gotten past the shallow questions from year one, and there's a lot of philosophical diversity within atheism).

The exercise made people get curious about what it was their opponents actually thought and why.  It helped people spot incorrect stereotypes of an opposing side and faultlines they'd been ignoring within their own.  Personally, (and according to other participants) it helped me have an argument less antagonistically.  Instead of just trying to find enough of a weak point to discomfit my opponent, I was trying to build up a model of how they thought, and I needed their help to do it.  

Taking a calm, inquisitive look at an opponent's position might teach me that my position is wrong, or has a gap I need to investigate.  But even if my opponent is just as wrong as zer seemed, there's still a benefit to me.  Having a really detailed, accurate model of zer position may help me show them why it's wrong, since now I can see exactly where it rasps against reality.  And even if my conversation isn't helpful to them, it's interesting for me to see what they were missing.  I may be correct in this particular argument, but the odds are good that I share the rationalist weak-point that is keeping them from noticing the error.  I'd like to be able to see it more clearly so I can try and spot it in my own thought.  (Think of this as the shift from "How the hell can you be so dumb?!" to "How the hell can you be so dumb?").

When I get angry, I'm satisfied when I beat my interlocutor.  When I get curious, I'm only satisfied when I learn something new.

Domesticating reduced impact AIs

9 Stuart_Armstrong 14 February 2013 04:59PM

About a year ago, I posted several ideas for "reduced impact AI" (what Nick Bostrom calls "domesticity"). I think the most promising approach was the third one, which I pompously titled "The information in the evidence". In this post, I'll attempt to put together a (non-realistic) example of this, to see if it's solid enough to build on. I'll be highlighting assumptions I'm making about the AI; please point out any implicit assumption that I missed, and any other weaknesses of the setup. For the moment, I'm more interested in "this doesn't work" than "this can't be done in practice" or "this can't be usefully generalised".

EDIT: It wasn't clear here, but any paperclip constructed by the reduced impact AI would be destroyed in the explosion, and the AIs would not be observed during the process. How to get useful work out of the AI will be the next step, if this model holds up.

Intuitive idea

For a reduced impact AI, we want an AI that can accomplish something, say building a paperclip, without it going out of control and optimising the universe. We want the future to be roughly the same whether or not the AI was turned on. Hence the piece of information "the AI was turned on" is not particularly important - if we didn't know, we wouldn't go far wrong in our predictions.

To enforce this we'll equip the AI with a two-piece motivation: a utility function U (causing it to build paperclips) and a penalty function R (which penalises the AI if its actions have a large future 'impact'). The challenge is to have a setup and a definition of R that implements this intuitive idea.

 

Reduced impact

Can we hope to define reduced impact? Doesn't any change percolate across all future time? Yes, but not all changes are the same - especially where our ability to predict them is concerned. Imagine an AI, confined to a box. While inside the box, it will build a paperclip. Then, in one hour's time, an antimatter bomb inside the box will explode, obliterating everything inside. We would intuitively say that whether the paperclip was built or not, would have very little impact afterwards. What we really mean is that we are unable to usefully use that information for future predictions. To make it even harder, surround the box by a large mass of antimatter gas, moving chaotically. In order to figure out the consequences of anything happening inside the box, we'd have to be able to unravel chaos: solve chaotic equation correctly and quantitatively, not just qualitatively. So our first assumption is that the AI can't unravel chaos.

continue reading »

CEV: a utilitarian critique

25 Pablo_Stafforini 26 January 2013 04:12PM

I'm posting this article on behalf of Brian Tomasik, who authored it but is at present too busy to respond to comments.

Update from Brian: "As of 2013-2014, I have become more sympathetic to at least the spirit of CEV specifically and to the project of compromise among differing value systems more generally. I continue to think that pure CEV is unlikely to be implemented, though democracy and intellectual discussion can help approximate it. I also continues to feel apprehensive about the conclusions that a CEV might reach, but the best should not be the enemy of the good, and cooperation is inherently about not getting everything you want in order to avoid getting nothing at all."


Introduction

I'm often asked questions like the following: If wild-animal suffering, lab universes, sentient simulations, etc. are so bad, why can't we assume that Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV) will figure that out and do the right thing for us?

 

Disclaimer

Most of my knowledge of CEV is based on Yudkowsky's 2004 paper, which he admits is obsolete. I have not yet read most of the more recent literature on the subject.

 

Reason 1: CEV will (almost certainly) never happen

CEV is like a dream for a certain type of moral philosopher: Finally, the most ideal solution for discovering what we really want upon reflection!

The fact is, the real world is not decided by moral philosophers. It's decided by power politics, economics, and Darwinian selection. Moral philosophers can certainly have an impact through these channels, but they're unlikely to convince the world to rally behind CEV. Can you imagine the US military -- during its AGI development process -- deciding to adopt CEV? No way. It would adopt something that ensures the continued military and political dominance of the US, driven by mainstream American values. Same goes for China or any other country. If AGI is developed by a corporation, the values will reflect those of the corporation or the small group of developers and supervisors who hold the most power over the project. Unless that group is extremely enlightened, CEV is not what we'll get.

Anyway, this is assuming that the developers of AGI can even keep it under control. Most likely AGI will turn into a paperclipper or else evolve into some other kind of Darwinian force over which we lose control.

Objection 1: "Okay. Future military or corporate developers of AGI probably won't do CEV. But why do you think they'd care about wild-animal suffering, etc. either?"

Well, they might not, but if we make the wild-animal movement successful, then in ~50-100 years when AGI does come along, the notion of not spreading wild-animal suffering might be sufficiently mainstream that even military or corporate executives would care about it, at least to some degree.

If post-humanity does achieve astronomical power, it will only be through AGI, so there's high value for influencing the future developers of an AGI. For this reason I believe we should focus our meme-spreading on those targets. However, this doesn't mean they should be our only focus, for two reasons: (1) Future AGI developers will themselves be influenced by their friends, popular media, contemporary philosophical and cultural norms, etc., so if we can change those things, we will diffusely impact future AGI developers too. (2) We need to build our movement, and the lowest-hanging fruit for new supporters are those most interested in the cause (e.g., antispeciesists, environmental-ethics students, transhumanists). We should reach out to them to expand our base of support before going after the big targets.

Objection 2: "Fine. But just as we can advance values like preventing the spread of wild-animal suffering, couldn't we also increase the likelihood of CEV by promoting that idea?"

Sure, we could. The problem is, CEV is not an optimal thing to promote, IMHO. It's sufficiently general that lots of people would want it, so for ourselves, the higher leverage comes from advancing our particular, more idiosyncratic values. Promoting CEV is kind of like promoting democracy or free speech: It's fine to do, but if you have a particular cause that you think is more important than other people realize, it's probably going to be better to promote that specific cause than to jump on the bandwagon and do the same thing everyone else is doing, since the bandwagon's cause may not be what you yourself prefer.

Indeed, for myself, it's possible CEV could be a net bad thing, if it would reduce the likelihood of paperclipping -- a future which might (or might not) contain far less suffering than a future directed by humanity's extrapolated values.

 

Reason 2: CEV would lead to values we don't like

Some believe that morality is absolute, in which case a CEV's job would be to uncover what that is. This view is mistaken, for the following reasons: (1) Existence of a separate realm of reality where ethical truths reside violates Occam's razor, and (2) even if they did exist, why would we care what they were?

Yudkowsky and the LessWrong community agree that ethics is not absolute, so they have different motivations behind CEV. As far as I can gather, the following are two of them:

Motivation 1: Some believe CEV is genuinely the right thing to do

As Eliezer said in his 2004 paper (p. 29), "Implementing CEV is just my attempt not to be a jerk." Some may believe that CEV is the ideal meta-ethical way to resolve ethical disputes.

I have to differ. First, the set of minds included in CEV is totally arbitrary, and hence, so will be the output. Why include only humans? Why not animals? Why not dead humans? Why not humans that weren't born but might have been? Why not paperclip maximizers? Baby eaters? Pebble sorters? Suffering maximizers? Wherever you draw the line, there you're already inserting your values into the process.

And then once you've picked the set of minds to extrapolate, you still have astronomically many ways to do the extrapolation, each of which could give wildly different outputs. Humans have a thousand random shards of intuition about values that resulted from all kinds of little, arbitrary perturbations during evolution and environmental exposure. If the CEV algorithm happens to make some more salient than others, this will potentially change the outcome, perhaps drastically (butterfly effects).

Now, I would be in favor of a reasonable extrapolation of my own values. But humanity's values are not my values. There are people who want to spread life throughout the universe regardless of suffering, people who want to preserve nature free from human interference, people who want to create lab universes because it would be cool, people who oppose utilitronium and support retaining suffering in the world, people who want to send members of other religions to eternal torture, people who believe sinful children should burn forever in red-hot ovens, and on and on. I do not want these values to be part of the mix.

Maybe (hopefully) some of these beliefs would go away once people learned more about what these wishes really implied, but some would not. Take abortion, for example: Some non-religious people genuinely oppose it, and not for trivial, misinformed reasons. They have thought long and hard about abortion and still find it to be wrong. Others have thought long and hard and still find it to be not wrong. At some point, we have to admit that human intuitions are genuinely in conflict in an irreconcilable way. Some human intuitions are irreconcilably opposed to mine, and I don't want them in the extrapolation process.

Motivation 2: Some argue that even if CEV isn't ideal, it's the best game-theoretic approach because it amounts to cooperating on the prisoner's dilemma

I think the idea is that if you try to promote your specific values above everyone else's, then you're timelessly causing this to be the decision of other groups of people who want to push for their values instead. But if you decided to cooperate with everyone, you would timelessly influence others to do the same.

This seems worth considering, but I'm doubtful that the argument is compelling enough to take too seriously. I can almost guarantee that if I decided to start cooperating by working toward CEV, everyone else working to shape values of the future wouldn't suddenly jump on board and do the same.

Objection 1: "Suppose CEV did happen. Then spreading concern for wild animals and the like might have little value, because the CEV process would realize that you had tried to rig the system ahead of time by making more people care about the cause, and it would attempt to neutralize your efforts."

Well, first of all, CEV is (almost certainly) never going to happen, so I'm not too worried. Second of all, it's not clear to me that such a scheme would actually be put in place. If you're trying to undo pre-CEV influences that led to the distribution of opinions to that point, you're going to have a heck of a lot of undoing to do. Are you going to undo the abundance of Catholics because their religion discouraged birth control and so led to large numbers of supporters? Are you going to undo the over-representation of healthy humans because natural selection unfairly removed all those sickly ones? Are you going to undo the under-representation of dinosaurs because an arbitrary asteroid killed them off before CEV came around?

The fact is that who has power at the time of AGI will probably matter a lot. If we can improve the values of those who will have power in the future, this will in expectation lead to better outcomes -- regardless of whether the CEV fairy tale comes true.

Update on Kim Suozzi (cancer patient in want of cryonics)

45 ahartell 22 January 2013 09:15AM

Kim Suozzi was a neuroscience student with brain cancer who wanted to be cryonically preserved but lacked the funds. She appealed to reddit and a foundation was set up, called the Society for Venturism.  Enough money was raised, and when she died on the January 17th, she was preserved by Alcor.  

I wasn't sure if I should post about this, but I was glad to see that enough money was raised and it was discussed on LessWrong herehere, and here.

 

Source

 

Edit:  It looks like Alcor actually worked with her to lower the costs, and waived some of the fees.

Edit 2:  The Society for Venturism has been around for a while, and wasn't set up just for her.

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