betterthanwell

• betterthanwell 19 Jun 2012 17:10 UTC

  42 points

  on: Suggest al­ter­nate names for the “Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute”

  So I read this, and my brain started brainstorming. None of the names I came up with were particularly good. But I did happen to produce a short mnemonic for explaining the agenda and the research focus of the Singularity Institute.

  A one word acronym that unfolds into a one sentence elevator pitch:

  Crisis: Catastrophic Risks in Self Improving Software

  • “So, what do you do?”

  • “We do CRISIS research, that is, we work on figuring out and trying to manage the catastrophic risks that may be inherent to self improving software systems. Consider, for example...”

  Lots of fun ways to play around with this term, to make it memorable in conversations.

  It has some urgency to it, it’s fairly concrete, it’s memorable.
  It compactly combines goals of catastrophic risk reduction and self improving systems research.

  Bonus: You practically own this term already.

  An incognito Google search gives me no hits for “Catastrophic Risks In Self Improving Software”, when in quotes. Without quotes, top hits include the Singularity Institute, the Singularity Summit, intelligencexplosion.com. Nick Bostrom and the Oxford group is also in there. I don’t think he would mind too much.

• betterthanwell 14 Jun 2012 10:37 UTC

  30 points

  on: [Link] Can We Re­v­erse The Stan­ford Pri­son Ex­per­i­ment?

  From Dr. Zimbardo in his recent IAMA on Reddit:

  Mawkish asks:

  If you could conduct any human [sic]bahaviour experiment, without risk to those participating, what would it be? What is your hypothesis for how it would turn out?

  Zimbardo:

  The answer to this provocative question is given in the introduction to chp 16 in my Lucifer Effect book (2007) where I invited anyone to perform a Reverse Milgram experiment. Milgram was able to demonstrate the relative ease with which ordinary people, 1000 of them, could be systematically led to administer increasingly dangerous levels of shock to an innocent victim by means of gradually raising the shock level with each trial by only 15 volts, until by the end of 30 shocks the voltage was raised to a near lethal 450 volts. At least 2 of every 3 participants went all the way down that slippery slope.

  Now can we demonstrate the opposite, that ordinary people can be gradually led to engage in increasingly “good” socially redeeming deeds up to a point of engaging in extremely altruistic, heroic actions, which initially they assert they would never be willing to do?

  It would have to be well crafted with early assessments of the prosocial value of each target action on the way up the slippery slope of goodness. It might have to be individually tailored to the values and interests of the target person, thus for some giving one’s time is precious, for others it would be money, or working in undesirable conditions, or with an unattractive population of people, etc.

  It would be sad to conclude that it is easier to get ordinary people to do evil, than to do heroic actions, so I personally welcome someone to systematically take up my challenge, and I will serve as free consultant.

  If you are in experimental psychology, taking him up on this promise sounds like a good way to make your career.

  (And perhaps do some good along the way.)

  “What are the important problems in your field? Why aren’t you working on them?”

• betterthanwell 7 Nov 2011 6:10 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: ahartell’s comment on: Q&A with new Ex­ec­u­tive Direc­tor of Sin­gu­lar­ity Institute

  And how will your duties differ from those of the President.

Min­i­mum Vi­able Work­out Rou­tine is Danger­ously Misinformative

Cen­tre for the Study of Ex­is­ten­tial Risk (CSER) at Cam­bridge makes head­lines.

Less Wrong used to like Bit­coin be­fore it was cool. Time for a re­visit?

• betterthanwell 10 Jun 2012 18:49 UTC

  25 points

  on: What was your biggest re­cent sur­prise?

  A very salient moment of surprise was when I realized that my mental model of a simple three-quark proton was deeply (or simply) wrong:

  You may have heard that a proton is made from three quarks. Indeed here are several pages that say so. This is a lie — a white lie, but a big one. In fact there are zillions of gluons, antiquarks, and quarks in a proton. The standard shorthand, “the proton is made from two up quarks and one down quark”, is really a statement that the proton has two more up quarks than up antiquarks, and one more down quark than down antiquarks. To make the glib shorthand correct you need to add the phrase “plus zillions of gluons and zillions of quark-antiquark pairs.” Without this phrase, one’s view of the proton is so simplistic that it is not possible to understand the LHC at all.

  http://​​profmattstrassler.com/​​articles-and-posts/​​largehadroncolliderfaq/​​whats-a-proton-anyway/​​

  What still surprises me, whenever I think of it, is how we live in a such a big world, even on the smallest scales we are able to probe. And also that things like nuclei happen to be stable over long enough timescales for things like chemistry and life to occur.

• betterthanwell 20 Jun 2012 15:07 UTC

  24 points

  on: Less Wrong used to like Bit­coin be­fore it was cool. Time for a re­visit?

  Clippy noticed that Bitcoin seems to make it easier for software agents to earn money, convince humans to do jobs for them, and optimize the universe in a paper-clip friendly direction.

  If Clippy is right, is it a problem?

  Singularity Institute visiting fellow Thomas McCabe is running GetBitcoin, a notable money handling service.

  Does he have any insights to share?

  Gwern wrote an article arguing that Bitcoin is an ugly protocol: Bitcoin is Worse is Better

  What does gwern think today?

  How should one extend or rework the protocol to make Bitcoin, or a successor more appealing?

  Wei Dai is quoted in the original whitepaper. He writes:

  If you read the Wikipedia article, you should know that I didn’t create Bitcoin but only described a similar idea more than a decade ago. And my understanding is that the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, didn’t even read my article before reinventing the idea himself. He learned about it afterward and credited me in his paper. So my connection with the project is quite limited.

  What does he think of of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general? (Still mining?)

  Scott Aaronson recently published a technical paper on quantum money, unrelated to Bitcoin. Would implementing this scheme require keeping qubits stable for an indefinite timespan, for the money not to go poof?

[link] Faster than light neu­trinos due to loose fiber op­tic ca­ble.

June 2012: 0/​33 Tur­ing Award win­ners pre­dict com­put­ers beat­ing hu­mans at go within next 10 years.

• betterthanwell 23 Feb 2012 14:43 UTC

  17 points

  on: [link] Faster than light neu­trinos due to loose fiber op­tic ca­ble.

  Update: It seems OPERA has made an official statement.

  The OPERA Collaboration (...) has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result. The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the events time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock.

  These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012.

  Source: Nature

• betterthanwell 7 Sep 2009 20:52 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: JulianMorrison’s comment on: The Sword of Good

  What misdeeds are we shrugging off because they’re normal?

  Eating mammals. More generally; non-vegetarianism.

• betterthanwell 20 Dec 2012 14:16 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Notes on Psychopathy

  Maybe they need better treatments. Has anyone asked psychopaths—“How would you convince a psychopath like you to stop doing X?” Has anyone let psychopaths try? Aren’t they the master manipulators? They even have a readily available model of a psychopath to test out the theory on. How convenient! Sufficiently motivating a psychopath with rewards for changing the mind of another psychopath might be an effective treatment for the first psychopath. Did they try that treatment?

  Something like it was tried in Canada, in the sixties, with LSD, in a four year experiment where a group of 30 psychopaths were, at least apparently, temporarily reformed through unconventional means.

  This strange and unique program was obliquely referenced in the top post:

  ...operated for over a decade in a maximum security psychiatric hospital and drew worldwide attention for its novelty. The program was described at length by Barker and colleagues…The results of a follow-up conducted an average of 10.5 years after completion of treatment showed that, compared to no program (in most cases, untreated offenders went to prison), treatment was associated with lower violent recidivism for non-psychopaths but higher violent recidivism for psychopaths.

  The Insane Criminal as Therapist
  E.T. Barker, M. H. Mason, The Canadian Journal of Corrections, Oct. 1968.

  Here’s an account from a recent pop-psychology book, The Psychopath Test:

  In the late 1960s, a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the answer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeutic communities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim. Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in a circle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears. Barker worked at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Although the inmates were undoubtedly insane, they seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Barker deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a facade of normality. If the madness could only, somehow, be brought to the surface, maybe it would work itself through and they could be reborn as empathetic human beings.

  And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led them into what he named the “total encounter capsule”, a small room painted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

  Barker’s sessions lasted for epic 11-day stretches. There were no distractions – no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least 100 hours every week) of their feelings. Much like Bindrim’s sessions, the psychopaths were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for each other, even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, “in a state of arousal while doing so”.

  ...

  Barker watched it all from behind a one-way mirror and his early reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the capsule was tense. Psychopaths would stare angrily at each other. Days would go by when nobody would exchange a word. But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen.

  The transformation was captured in an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the capsule.

  We see Barker in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they’ve completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished.

  Several of the 30 participants of the experiment went on to commit violent homicides some years after release.

  An internal memo from the experiment: “LSD in a Coercive Milieu Therapy Program” (E.T Barker)

  Intriguing.

• betterthanwell 2 Nov 2011 15:15 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: AGI Quotes

  It is seemingly easy to get stuck in arguments over whether or not machines can “actually” think.
  It is sufficient to assess the effects or outcomes of the phenomenon in question.

  By sidestepping the question of what, exactly, it means to “think”,
  we can avoid arguing over definitions, yet lose nothing of our ability to model the world.

  Does a submarine swim? The purpose of swimming is to propel oneself through the water. A nuclear powered submarine can propel itself through the oceans at full speed for months at a time. It achieves the purpose of swimming, and does so rather better than a fish, or a human.

  If the purpose of thinking is isomorphic to:

  Model the world in order to formulate plans for executing actions which implement goals.

  Then, if a machine can achieve the above we can say it achieves the purpose of thinking,
  akin to how a submarine successfully achieves the purpose of swimming.

  Discussion of whether the machine really thinks is now superfluous.

• betterthanwell 5 Apr 2015 20:49 UTC

  12 points

  on: How has less­wrong changed your life?

  I discovered the idea of Bitcoin early, made a life-changing amount of money.

• betterthanwell 2 Dec 2013 22:28 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: De­cem­ber 2013 Me­dia Thread

  Gwern Branwen plays a notable part in this recent story about the demise of one ill-fated black market:

  http://​​motherboard.vice.com/​​blog/​​did-one-of-the-silk-roads-successors-just-commit-the-perfect-bitcoin-scam

• betterthanwell 27 Nov 2012 11:30 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Cen­tre for the Study of Ex­is­ten­tial Risk (CSER) at Cam­bridge makes head­lines.

  Yudkowsky seemed to me simplistic in his understanding of moral norms. “You would not kill a baby,” he said to me, implying that was one norm that could easily be programmed into a machine.
  “Some people do,” I pointed out, but he didn’t see the full significance. SS officers killed babies routinely because of an adjustment in the society from which they sprang in the form of Nazism. Machines would be much more radically adjusted away from human social norms, however we programmed them.

  Wow. This particular mistake seems to be an unlikely and even difficult mistake to make in good faith,
  as opposed to, for example, by outright dishonesty.

  Update: I told Appleyard of his mistake, and he simply denied that his article has made a mistake on this matter.

  Never mind, it seems they don’t even try to be honest.

• betterthanwell 25 Nov 2012 13:38 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Kyre’s comment on: Musk, Mars and x-risk

  Which catastrophic risks does a mars colony mitigate? … Climate change : yes

  If a Mars colony mitigates catastrophic risk (extinction risk?) from climate change,
  then climate change is not an existential risk to human civilization on earth.

  If humans can thrive on Mars, Earth based humanity will be able to cope with any climate change less drastic than transforming the climate of Earth to something as hostile as the current climate of Mars.

• betterthanwell 12 Jan 2013 19:29 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

  EDIT: OTOH, there’s this… What person makes a will at 26?

  It seems he published “If i get hit by a truck” in 2002, at age 16. Sad. Also, perhaps, awe-inspiring. Eliminating the problem of one’s bus-factor would ordinarily be admirable… if you do it for the contingency where you simply get hit by a bus. I want, but can’t, quite make myself believe that he didn’t write this, at that time, in anticipation of an end like this. In that case; not awe-inspiring, only sad.

• betterthanwell 8 Dec 2011 10:54 UTC

  11 points

  on: [Link] A Short Film based on Eliezer Yud­kowsky’s AI Box experiment

  The narrator sounds Russian. Is the text-to-speech synthesized robot voice speaking Finnish?

  I note that “Sinopsis” is spelled “Synopsis” in English.

  EY’s quoted in the trailer too. I guess this is a good thing. No such thing as bad publicity.

  But there is such a thing as having people misunderstand AI-Risk to be about scary robot soldiers with cameras for heads, wielding plain old guns, because it lends itself to powerful images. Superintelligence is not a salient threat to the human mind, because we do not know it. Humans have no experience with something perhaps very powerful yet perhaps invisible, that is simply going to disassemble the biosphere and put it to better use according to it’s own criterion, and not at all fight us in a war with soldiers and guns first or whatever.

  That said, the VFX look great. Which is presumably what this film is about.