Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Meta: How should LW account deletion work?

At 2011-04-08 LW user account deletion is broken. We (Trike) will fix it… but how should it work?

**Options:  **

1.  Easy complete deletion: At the click of a button you can remove your account, all of your posts, and all of your comments. It's just _that easy_ to scrub your activity from the site.
2.  Delete = Disable account: The account deletion process removes your ability to log in and your user page. Your posts and comments remain. (You get warned that you're about to lose the ability to change anything you've previously posted and that your username will continue to be associated with your previous account activity.) Actually deleting everything requires you to do it manually.

I favour 2 (Delete = Disable account). Poking a hole into all of the conversations you've been a part of should be hard - it reduces the quality of the site's archive.

I've made three comments below: "VOTE: Easy complete deletion", "VOTE: Delete = Disable account", and "VOTE: Karma balance". What do y'reckon?

  

(Detail - Under the Delete = Disable account option: Your username would continue to be unavailable to others. Your user account page would be replaced with a "User account deleted" page. Your old account activity would remain and link back to the "Account deleted" page.)
# What is wrong with "Traditional Rationality"?

In [several places in the sequences](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Traditional_rationality "LessWrong wiki"), Eliezer writes condescendingly about "Traditional Rationality".  The impression given is that Traditional Rationality was OK in its day, but that today we have better varieties of rationality available.

That is fine, except that it is unclear to me just what the traditional kind of rationality included, and it is also unclear just what it failed to include.  In [one essay](/lw/k1/no_one_can_exempt_you_from_rationalitys_laws/), Eliezer seems to be saying that Traditional Rationality was too concerned with process, whereas it should have been concerned with _winning_.  In other passages, it seems that the missing ingredient in the traditional version was Bayesianism (a la Jaynes).  Or sometimes, the missing ingredient seems to be an understanding of biases (a la Kahneman and Tversky).

In [this essay](/lw/iy/my_wild_and_reckless_youth/), Eliezer laments that being a traditional rationalist was not enough to keep him from devising a Mysterious Answer to a mysterious question.  That puzzles me because I would have thought that traditional ideas from Peirce, Popper, and Korzybski would have been sufficient to avoid that error.  So apparently I fail to understand either what a Mysterious Answer is or just how weak the traditional form of rationality actually is.

Can anyone help to clarify this?  By "Traditional Rationality", does Eliezer mean to designate a particular collection of ideas, or does he use it more loosely to indicate any thinking that is not quite up to his level?
# New FAI paper: 'Learning What to Value' by Daniel Dewey

[Daniel Dewey](http://www.danieldewey.net/), '[Learning What to Value](http://www.danieldewey.net/dewey-learning-what-to-value.pdf)'

_Abstract_: I.J. Good's theory of an "intelligence explosion" predicts that ultraintelligent agents will undergo a process of repeated self-improvement. In the wake of such an event, how well our values are fulfilled will depend on whether these ultraintelligent agents continue to act desirably and as intended. We examine several design approaches, based on AIXI, that could be used to create ultraintelligent agents. In each case, we analyze the design conditions required for a successful, well-behaved ultraintelligent agent to be created. Our main contribution is an examination of value-learners, agents that learn a utility function from experience. We conclude that the design conditions on value-learners are in some ways less demanding than those on other design approaches.
# Human errors, human values

### The trolley problem

In 2009, a pair of computer scientists published a paper enabling computers to [behave like humans on the trolley problem](http://www.livescience.com/5729-robots-ethical-decisions.html) (PDF [here](http://centria.fct.unl.pt/~lmp/publications/online-papers/epia07-morals.pdf)).  They developed a logic that a computer could use to justify not pushing one person onto the tracks in order to save five other people.  They described this feat as showing "how moral decisions can be drawn computationally by using prospective logic programs."

I would describe it as devoting a lot of time and effort to cripple a reasoning system by encoding human irrationality into its logic.

Which view is correct?

### Dust specks

Eliezer [argued](/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/) that we should prefer 1 person being tortured for 50 years over 3^^^3 people each once getting a barely-noticeable dust speck in their eyes.  Most people choose the many dust specks over the torture.  Some people argued that "human values" includes having a utility aggregation function that rounds tiny (absolute value) utilities to zero, thus giving the "dust specks" answer.  No, Eliezer said; this was an error in human reasoning.  Is it an error, or a value?

### Sex vs. punishment

In [Crime and punishment](/lw/4x9/crime_and_punishment/), I argued that people _want_ to punish criminals, even if there is a painless, less-costly way to prevent crime.  This means that people _value_ punishing criminals.  This value may have evolved to accomplish the social goal of reducing crime.  Most readers agreed that, since we can deduce this underlying reason, and accomplish it more effectively through reasoning, preferring to punish criminals is an error in judgement.

Most people _want_ to have sex.  This value evolved to accomplish the goal of reproducing.  Since we can deduce this underlying reason, and accomplish it more efficiently than by going out to bars every evening for ten years, is this desire for sex an error in judgement that we should erase?

### The problem for Friendly AI

Until you come up with a procedure for determining, in general, when something is a value and when it is an error, there is no point in trying to design artificial intelligences that encode human "values".

(P.S. - I think that necessary, but not sufficient, preconditions for developing such a procedure, are to agree that only utilitarian ethics are valid, and to agree on an aggregation function.)
# Gamification and rationality training

Watch [this](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2985-Gamification) Extra Credits and take note especially of the end, where they're offering consultation to educators and doctors re making educational stuff and other useful stuff more like games. (Incidentally, the people that make Extra Credits all work in or have been around in the game industry)

I figured I'll email them and going to point them to LW, see if they're willing to give any insights re rationality training. Especially in light of the fact that the subject of games for teaching rationality has come here up before.

Hey, maybe we'll learn something about how to learn something about how to be Less Wrong.
# Reasons for SIAI to not publish in mainstream journals

Recently, I [gave](/lw/4r1/how_siai_could_publish_in_mainstream_cognitive/) some reasons for SIAI to begin publishing in mainstream journals, and outlined how it could be done.

I've recently been made aware of some pretty good reasons for SIAI to _not_ publish in mainstream journals, so here they are:

1.  Articles published to websites (e.g. [Yudkowsky's work](http://yudkowsky.net/), [Bostrom's pre-prints](http://www.nickbostrom.com/)) seem to have gotten more attention, and had more positive impact, than their in-journal counterparts.
2.  Articles in mainstream journals take a relatively large amount of time, money, and expertise to produce.
3.  Articles in mainstream journals must jump through lots of hoops - journals' aversion to novelty, reviewer bias, etc.
4.  It is easier to simply collaborate with (and greatly influence) established mainstream academics who have already jumped through mainstream academia's many hoops (as Carl Shulman has been doing, for example).

I still think there are strong reasons to publish articles in standard academic _form_ (for readability purposes), but I've recently updated hugely toward SIAI _not_ publishing in mainstream journals.
# Do meetups really have to go on the front page?

I've been browsing LessWrong less often as of late, and I believe that one of the reasons is because I don't want to get all excited all over a new insightful LW post, only to discover that it's a meetup in a city that I'm not even in.

And for newbies to the site in particular, they're not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it's a community just for meetups.

I'm sure meetup discussions can go somewhere prominent. Maybe a separate section can be devoted to them.
# How would you respond to the Philpapers "What are your Philosophical Positions" Survey?

The questions are at [http://philpapers.org/surveys/oquestions.html](http://philpapers.org/surveys/oquestions.html). The correlations can be intensely interesting to those who understand philosophical jargon (http://philpapers.org/surveys/linear_most.pl) - it doesn't take too long to look them up as you go - and I actually found it to be a fun way to learn new philosophy. I know that there was a LW thread about this several months ago, but it didn't have a section for people here to respond to the survey. I would be very interested to see how people here would respond.

I'll repost the questions here:

===

Original Survey Questions | PhilPapers Surveys

A priori knowledge: yes or no?

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

God: theism or atheism?

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?

Logic: classical or non-classical?

Mental content: internalism or externalism?

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

Proper names: Fregean or Millian?

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Time: A-theory or B-theory?

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch?

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

===

And... which of the following philosophers do you identify with?

The philosophers available to choose from for the "which philosophers do you identify with?" question were:

Anscombe

Aquinas

Aristotle

Augustine

Berkeley

Carnap

Davidson

Descartes

Frege

Hegel

Heidegger

Hobbes

Hume

Husserl

Kant

Kierkegaard

Leibniz

Lewis

Locke

Marx

Mill

Moore

Nietzsche

Plato

Quine

Rawls

Rousseau

Russell

Socrates

Spinoza

Wittgenstein
# It is OK to publicly make a mistake and change your mind

At a recent meetup, we tried having a structured discussion in which we would all choose to talk about a belief that influences our behavior, talk about something we protect, or talk about a mistake we once made and have corrected. And it seemed that people thought it would require exceptional bravery to choose to talk about one's mistake. Elsewhere on Less Wrong, people are concerned about retaining the ability to edit a comment expressing a position they later reconsider and think is wrong.

My first reaction to all of this is that we need a group norm so that it doesn't require bravery to admit a mistake, or to leave a record of previously held positions. My second reaction is that we do in fact have such a norm. Comments expressing a change in position, that accept counter arguments and refutations, get up voted. Old comments reflecting the old wrong position are generally not down voted for being wrong. The problem is not how we treat people that make mistakes, but that people have inaccurate anticipations of how we will react.

So, to everyone who is worried about this, I want to say: It's OK. You can admit your mistakes. You can make a mistake and change your mind. We, the community, will applaud your growth, celebrate your new strength, and leave your mistake in the past where it belongs.
# Modeling sleep patterns

My sleep is unpredictable. Not in a technical sense, but a colloquial one. To be literal, I have no idea how to predict my sleep. I just as often sleep through the day as I do through the night. My sleep itself, as far as a sleep study can tell, is normal. I can vaguely say, 60% confidence, if I'm likely to fall asleep in a given 3-4 hour period, and occasionally I will be fairly sure, 80% confidence, 6-10 hours beforehand, of a 1-2 hour period. I can similarly predict the length of my sleep (which is relatively normal--generally distributed 7, 8, 9.5, 13 hours at .1, .4, .6, .9).

My sleep is seriously disturbed. Without understanding the process behind my sleep, without being able to predict it days beforehand and understand the variables behind it, I find it impossible to wake up at a consistent time every day (+/- 8 hours), despite years of trying, which makes it extremely hard to hold down a job, or do dozens of other normal things. There could be a profession that I could make my sleep work with, but I'm still searching for it.

So I ask you readers: Is there some sort of pattern detecting **thing,** whose name perhaps includes something like "markov" or "kolmogorov" or "bayesian", that could automatically take a time series data and predict the next values based on an unknown, complex model?

So, I could like enter the times I go to sleep and wake up, and when I have caffeine or I exercise, and maybe other things, and it would puzzle out how my sleep works and forecast my next few sleep cycles?

To have an accurate tool like that would transform my life.

"Hidden Markov models" comes to mind, but at first glance I don't see how a sleep model would count as a Markov process, given that you have to factor in sleep debt, time of day (because of sunlight), and perhaps other variables. But then I know nothing about HMMs.

Also, this is my first post. Is this the sort of thing that goes better in LessWrong or Less Wrong Discussion?
# Eight questions for computationalists

This post is a followup to "[We are not living in a simulation](/lw/57e/we_are_not_living_in_a_simulation/)" and intended to help me (and you) better understand the claims of those who took a computationalist position in that thread.  The questions below are aimed at you if you think the following statement both a) makes sense, and b) is true:

**"Consciousness is really just computation"**

I've made it no secret that I think this statement is hogwash, but I've done my best to make these questions as non-leading as possible: you should be able to answer them without having to dismantle them first. Of course, I could be wrong, and "the question is confused" is always a valid answer. So is "I don't know".

1.  As it is used in the sentence "consciousness is really just computation", is computation:  
    a) Something that an abstract machine does, as in "No oracle Turing machine can compute a decision to its own halting problem"?  
    b) Something that a concrete machine does, as in "My calculator computed 2+2"?  
    c) Or, is this distinction nonsensical or irrelevant?
2.  If you answered "a" or "c" to question 1: is there any particular model, or particular class of models, of computation, such as Turing machines, register machines, lambda calculus, etc., that needs to be used in order to explain what makes us conscious? Or, is any Turing-equivalent model equally valid?
3.  If you answered "b" or "c" to question 1: unpack what "the machine computed 2+2" means. What is that saying about the physical state of the machine before, during, and after the computation?
4.  Are you able to make any sense of the concept of "computing red"? If so, what does this mean?
5.  As far as consciousness goes, what matters in a computation: functions, or algorithms? That is, does any computation that give the same outputs for the same inputs feel the same from the inside (this is the "functions" answer), or do the intermediate steps matter (this is the "algorithms" answer)?
6.  Would an _axiomatization_ (as opposed to a complete exposition of the implications of these axioms) of a Theory of Everything that can explain consciousness include definitions of any computational devices, such as "and gate"?
7.  Would an axiomatization of a Theory of Everything that can explain consciousness mention qualia?
8.  Are all computations in some sense conscious, or only certain kinds?

ETA: By the way, I probably won't engage right away with individual commenters on this thread except to answer requests for clarification.  In a few days I'll write another post analyzing the points that are brought up.
# Hunger can make you stupid

When I originally wrote ["When to scream 'Error!'"](/r/discussion/lw/4le/when_to_scream_error/), I was mainly thinking of bad patterns of thought or bad problem-solving strategies as being the source of the error. Since then, I've come to realize that my own most common source of stupidity is because I've neglected some comfort. I may be hungry without consciously paying attention to it, dehydrated because I've been living on coffee for too long, or simply have a headache and need to take an Ibuprofen -- as a result, I don't think well, get irritated at the fact that I'm not thinking well, and generally begin a death spiral if I don't realize why.

In hindsight, it feels obvious that I should take care of the physiological needs that I can because they're likely preventing me from thinking straight. However, I've failed to do this on numerous occasions and so thought it worth mentioning.

In summary: Whenever you're [screaming "Error"](/r/discussion/lw/4le/when_to_scream_error/), I suggest you stop and figure out whether you're hungry, thirsty, tired, or hurting before trying to find a problem in your thinking itself, especially if you're not usually good at noticing such things.
# Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Podcast

Have you ever thought “I’d love to read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but I just don’t have the spare time. I wish it was available in audio format.” Fret no more! I present to you the HPMoR Podcast! First chapter out now, and another one added every Wednesday.  
[](http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/harry-potter-methods-rationality/id431784580)

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/harry-potter-methods-rationality/id431784580](http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/harry-potter-methods-rationality/id431784580)
# Might whole brain emulation require quantum-level emulation?

Most experts seem to think that [whole brain emulation](http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf) will not require emulation down to the quantum level, but perhaps at the level of atoms or even molecules, either of which is far more computationally tractable than quantum-level brain emulation. Those who think quantum-level emulation will be required for whole brain emulation are often considered to be cranks.

However, it is worth noting that a few biological processes - including photosynthesis - have [recently been found](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcXSpXyZVuY) \[excellent video lecture\] to depend on the particularities of quantum phenomena. This lends no support to Penrose's views on quantum phenomena and the brain, but it may not be so crankish after all to suppose that whole brain emulation may require emulation down to the quantum level.

Thoughts?

Links:

On photosynthesis, see [Fleming's papers](http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/grfgrp/publications/index.html) on the topic.

[Here](http://www.physics.uci.edu/~tritz/Publications/RITZ2004.pdf) is the quantum bird navigation paper.

[Here](http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061204/full/news061204-10.html) is some coverage on Turin's controversial theory of quantum smell.
# Link: Why and how to debate charitably

Even though this was written by a current Less Wrong poster (hi, pdf23ds!), I don't think it has been posted here: Why and how to debate charitably (pg. 2, comments). _(Edit: The original pdf23ds.net site has sadly been lost to entropy – Less Wrong poster MichaelBishop found [a repost on commonsenseatheism.com](http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=15703 "Why and How to Debate Charitably"). He also provides [this summary version](http://permut.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/why-and-how-to-debate-charitably/ "Why and How to Debate Charitably (summary)").)_

I was linked to this article from a webcomic forum which had a low-key flamewar smouldering in the "Serious Business" section. (I will not link to it here; if you can tell from the description which forum it is, I would thank you not to link it either.) Three things struck me about it:

1.  I have been operating under similar rules for years, with great success.
2.  The participants in the flamewar on the forum where it was posted were _not_ operating under these rules.
3.  Less Wrong posters generally _do_ operate under these rules, at least here.

The list of rules is on pg. 2 - a good example is the rule titled "You cannot read minds":

> As soon as you find someone espousing seemingly contradictory positions, you should immediately suspect yourself of being mistaken as to their intent. Even if it seems obvious to you that the person has a certain intent in their message, if you want to engage them, you must respond being open to the possibility that where you see contradictions (or, for that matter, insults), none were intended. While you keep in mind what the person’s contradictory position seems to be, raise your standards some, and ask questions so that the person must state the position more explicitly—this way, you can make sure whether they actually hold it. If you still have problems, keep raising your standards, and asking more specific questions, until the person starts making sense to you.
> 
> If part of their position is unclear or ambiguous to you, say that explicitly. Being willing to show uncertainty is an excellent way to defuse the person’s, and your own, defensiveness. It also helps them to more easily understand which aspects of their position they are not making clear enough.
> 
> The less their position makes sense to you, the more you should rely on interrogative phrase and the less on declarative. Questions defuse defensiveness and are much more pointed and communicative than statements, because they force you to think more about the person’s arguments, and to really articulate what it about their position you most need clarification on. They help to keep the discussion moving, and help you to stop arguing past each other. Phrase the questions sincerely, and use as much of the person’s own reasoning (putting in the best light) as you can. This requires that you have a pretty good grasp on what the person is arguing—try to understand their position as well as you can. If it’s simply not coherent enough, the case may be hopeless.
# Brief Query- An Idea

I had an idea- has it been done before, and if not shouldn't somebody try to do it? I live in Melbourne where LWers aren't organised, but perhaps the New York branch or some other group could try this? (IF it hasn't been done, that is- I haven't seen in mentioned, which is why I'm checking)

**Idea:**

-Recruit a non-rationalist scientist (or better group of scientists) either by persuading friends or perhaps getting some money together to pay somebody (or finding a helpful volenteer) or perhaps several.

-Have THEM come up with a series of tests to test rationalists relative to a control group.

If 'sucessful' (in the sense of a significant difference between rationalists and non-rationalists, the result we on LW would presumably predict), it would provide enough evidence to justify a formal test (there would likely be a few weaknesses, such as recruiting friends of rationalists), which could then (again, assuming such a result) persuade scientists to become rationalists (benefits should be obvious on a bit of thought) and generate publicity. If a 'failure' or indecisive, it justifies a serious reevaluation of site methodology.
# "High Value" Karma vs "Regular" (i.e. Quirrell Points)

I consider this a low value post, because it muses about a particular idea without actually doing hard work to get it done. (I do not have the knowledge or resources to do so, or even know if it's possible to implement this idea on Less Wrong. I'm not even sure if it would be worth the effort)

There are posts that I upvote because I thought they were funny, mildly informative or well reasoned. Sometimes I upvote a simple (easy to produce) link to a good article. Sometimes I admit I upvote them simply because I agree with them (I generally don't upvote things I agree with if they use bad reasoning, but I am less likely to upvote something I DON'T agree with unless it is extremely well thought out, to the point that I actually updated my beliefs because of it.) I don't apologize for that - it's a natural outgrowth of the Karma system. It costs me nothing to give Karma to whatever I like and there is no means to enforce any particular usage of Karma.

But there are things I upvote because they were actually important and good and required hard work to put together. And I feel a little bit sad that the most I can reward those things is with a "click" that is exactly as valuable as the click I give people who said something mildly funny.

High value posts tend to acquire a lot of Karma because a lot of people feel motivated to click. But I think there is a qualitative difference between a guy who makes one amazing post that gathers 80 Karma and a guy who makes 80 posts that are kinda neat. I think it would interesting, fun, and potentially valuable to distinguish between those kinds of people.

So what if we had regular Karma, and then we had some kind of Superkarma. (Perhaps a good name would be "Status"). Status points would be genuinely rare - when you give one, you are not allowed to give another one for at least 24 hours. You can still give them to a funny joke or viewpoint that aligns with your tribe, but I think assigning them rarity would encourage people to reward genuinely important things. (I'm not sure 24 hours is the ideal waiting period, it just sounded nice).

I'm actually kinda amazed by how much I care about Karma. I get a "sweet, level up!" message in my head every time I see that I've passed another 100 points. But most of my Karma is from random comments. The two fastest upvoted posts I made were links to an article about the Singularity and a webcomic, neither of which required much effort on my part. The fact that my more serious posts are judged by the same metric is (slightly) demotivating.
# Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences): Exercises

_The following is a series of exercises designed to test one's understanding of "[Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)](/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/)", a post in the [Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysterious_Questions) sequence by Eliezer Yudkowsky._

**A.** Examine the following list of statements. For each statement, ask: What observations would you expect to make if this statement were true that you would not expect to make if this statement were false, or vice-versa? If no such observations exist, indicate that this is so.

1.  Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota.
2.  The universe does not exist; all existence is imaginary.
3.  The earth is flat.
4.  The comic book _Queen & Country_ is based on the British ITV series _The Sandbaggers_.
5.  _Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ by Douglas Hofstadter is a good book.
6.  "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (a.k.a. "Twas the Night Before Christmas") was written by Clement Clarke Moore.
7.  Herbert Hoover was left-handed.

**B.** In the Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip song "[Thou Shalt Always Kill](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoN6XfyQsr4)", one of the injunctions given to the listener is, "Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were." After this statement comes a list of such bands, beginning, "The Beatles: Were just a band. Led Zeppelin: Just a band. The Beach Boys: Just a band." Consider just this first statement, that the Beatles were just a band. What does it imply in terms of anticipated experiences?

The author's remarks on the solutions to these questions appear in [this comment](/r/discussion/lw/53b/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated/3yba).
# Sequence Exercise: "Extensions and Intensions" from "A Human's Guide to Words"

Exercise for “[Extensions and Intensions](/lw/nh/extensions_and_intensions)”

Give an intensional definition for each of the following words:

1.  Shoe
2.  Hope
3.  Wire
4.  Green
5.  Politician
6.  Apple

Now rank them from easiest to define to hardest.

Describe how you would give an extensional definition of the same words:

1.  Shoe
2.  Hope
3.  Wire
4.  Green
5.  Politician
6.  Apple

Again, rank them from easiest to hardest.

Are the two lists the same? If not, what tends to make something easier to define intensionally than extensionally and vice versa?

* * *

You can share your answers in the comments. I'm interested in seeing how similarly people think of these things. Please make suggestions as to how this could be improved or augmented and what to do the same/differently in future exercises. My current plan is to do more from the sequence "A Human's Guide to Words." This post will be edited in response to suggestions.
# Insufficiently Awesome

Apologies for the wasted time spent reading and replying to this post.  Please disregard it.

I've been feeling non-awesome for a long time.  I don't know if anyone else here feels the same way, but I'm going to assume that at least a few people do.  I want to correct this horrible deficiency.

We already have the LW meetups in a lot of places, monthly in some places and weekly in others.  I've gone to a few, and they're interesting and I get to meet a lot of very smart people (and get intimidated by them)... but mostly all we've done is talk and sometimes go and eat at a restaurant.  I want more than this!

We already talk, we need an action-based meetup.  I want to propose another kind of meetup, the Insufficiently Awesome meetup.  It should aim to make us good at baseline things like fitness, social skills, strategy, and reflexes, and to make us very good at specialized awesome things like master-level chess/go/shogi, public speaking, various sports, dancing, making music, making art.

I think this meetup should be daily, though not everyone would want to go every day.  Nonetheless, we should have _something_ happening every day that we're not spending talking.  The goal shouldn't be just to be fit in different situations, but to instead become _totally awesome_.

Is there anyone else that feels the same?  If so, what things do you think we need to learn for the baseline, and what things should we get very good at?
# Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions 

In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a [professional designer](http://www.jimmygleeson.com/) to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.

How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?

The rules for this thread are:

*   One suggestion per comment.
*   Upvote all comments you’d like to see implemented.

**BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET**: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas _before_ reading others’ suggestions. Less [contamination](/lw/k3/priming_and_contamination/ ) = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!

Thanks for your help!
# Things That Shouldn't Need Pointing Out

Today I learned that you can toast marshmallows in the oven.

By "learned", I mean "I read a recipe which included as a step toasting marshmallows in the oven".  I didn't have to try it out to realize that this would _obviously work_.  It was plain as soon as I heard the idea.  And it shouldn't have needed pointing out.  I know how ovens work.  I am familiar with the marshmallow species of food.  I _love_ roasted marshmallows while hating them in most other forms and often occurrently lament the difficulty of arranging open flames over which one may safely toast them.  I routinely try new things in the kitchen to get results I want.

And yet I read it, and was surprised.  And so were the people I reported this finding to.  It needed pointing out.

What other facts need pointing out, although they are plain on inspection?  What is the pattern behind these facts and a good way to find more?
# How can I make money?

Hey everyone,

I'd like too see if I can utilize the rational powers of Less Wrong

Currently I work full time. Am well paid for my age. Have approximately $20,000 AU in savings.

My spouse is in uni. Will finish this year and begin working next year. But currently I am supporting our household.

I have recently concluded that $20k is too much to be sitting idle, and the rational thing to do would be to find a way of putting those savings to work in some fashion. But how?

What would be the best way of utilizing these finances in terms of self-development and/or monetary return?

A few things to consider:

a) My skillset at the moment is limited, but I am eager to learn anything.

b) I only desire money in that it enables me to carry out many plans that would be difficult otherwise.

c) Relationships are far more important to me than money, however money is still pretty high up there.

I come to Less Wrong because it is the only community whose advice I would trust. The rest of the internet as many scammers, most friends and family feel threatened by the idea of investment/new things etc. Also they just aren't as rational as Less Wrong.

I would be so appreciative of any advice given.

Also anyone in the same boat?
# The Black Team - A Parable of Group Effectiveness

> Management noticed that certain software testers were 10 to 20 percent better at finding defects than their peers. By putting these people on the same team, they reasoned, they could form a group that would be 10 or 20 percent more effective and then put the team to work testing the most critical system components.
> 
> It didn't turn out that way.
> 
> The individuals who made up the team were not exceptionally intelligent or talented, but they all enjoyed testing software and were better than average at it. When these like minded individuals were assembled, they they spent their working hours, lunches and sometimes free time collaborating on how to better find software defects.
> 
> Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves "The Black Team."

From [The Black Team](http://www.t3.org/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html). (Hat tip to Adam "ata" Atlas and Mike Blume.)
# Leaving a line of retreat for theists

Eliezer recommends that we leave a [line of retreat](/lw/o4/leave_a_line_of_retreat/) when discussing controversial topics, since this prevents scary propositions from clouding our judgment. However, I've noticed recently that there are some topics that are just _too_ scary for people to think about, the existence of God being a primary example. Simply put, people don't want to admit that the universe is [beyond the reach of a caring God](/lw/uk/beyond_the_reach_of_god/), no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. People especially don't want to hear that they will one day cease to exist, never to be reincarnated or continued in an afterlife. I've found this to be a major stumbling block when having discussions with theists or agnostics--though the people I've talked to are willing to accept that [nonbelievers can lead very moral lives](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_gates#Philanthropy), the thought that "it's just us" is the stopsign that prevents the discussion from moving further. Naturally I've explained that it's important to [only believe things that are true](/), but for some people this meme just can't overcome the scariness of a naturalistic universe.

Have any LessWrongians managed to overcome this obstacle? If so, how? We can generalize this problem somewhat: are there effective techniques for getting people to clearly evaluate the probability of scary or depressing propositions? Explanations with the smallest amount of [inferential distance](/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/) are preferred--while something like cryonics does answer most of the theistic objections raised above, it's a huge distance away from most people's belief systems. (That said, it's quite possible that the answer to my question might be "No, there are no effective techniques that have short inferential distances," and in the spirit of this post I'm willing to accept that.) I'd also be interested in hearing anecdotes about similar situations if anyone has any.
# Are Girl Scout Cookies Deliciously Evil? A Case Study in Evaluating Charities by Yourself

I recently finished up an [essay examining the Girl Scouts, their cookies, and their finances](http://www.gwern.net/Girl%20Scouts%20and%20good%20governance) with reference to whether they are inefficient or corrupt.

What is the relevance to LW? (The essay is aimed at a general audience & assumes no knowledge of LW material, though it links heavily to LW in justifying why one should make predictions - such as about Girl Scout finances - before looking at data.)

Well, on occasion, people ask questions about SIAI that they could have answered by themselves, such as by looking through SIAI financial filings. This kind of annoys me. This essay serves as a demonstration how one could investigate a charity on one's own, without simply trusting GiveWell's recommendations (good though they surely are).

Reading SIAI's filings may be a future essay; until then, it is left as an exercise for the reader... (EDIT: One such reading is [BrandonReinhart](/user/BrandonReinhart/)'s extremely thorough [SIAI Fundraising](/lw/5il/siai_an_examination/) Article; highly recommended.)
# Attempts to work around Goedel's theorem by using randomness

You can't make PA complete by adding new axioms with a deterministic algorithm. But what if you used a randomized algorithm? Richard Lipton wrote a [post](http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/random-axioms-and-gdel-incompleteness/) about this idea: generate a random bitstring S, then add to PA the axiom that the K-complexity of S is high enough. That is probabilistically very likely to be true, but is always unprovable in PA for long enough S. Clearly this gives you a stronger theory, but how much stronger? In particular, is there any hope at all that you can approach completeness in some suitable probabilistic sense?

Nah, don't get your hopes up. In the comments to Lipton's post, Alexander Shen (amusingly, one of my former schoolteachers) and Harvey Friedman show that most true statements remain unreachable by this procedure. Leonid Levin proved a [weaker but more general result](http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CC/0203029), roughly saying that randomized algorithms cannot complete PA with positive probability.

So the idea doesn't seem to work. But it was a very nice try.
# Consequentialism FAQ

There are a lot of explanations of consequentialism and utilitarianism out there, but not a lot of persuasive essays trying to convert people. I would like to fill that gap with a pro-consequentialist FAQ. The target audience is people who are intelligent but may not have a strong philosophy background or have thought about this matter too much before (ie it's not intended to solve every single problem or be up to the usual standards of discussion on LW).

I have a draft up at [http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html](http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html) (yes, I have since realized the background is horrible, and changing it is on my list of things to do). Feedback would be appreciated, _especially_ from non-consequentialists and non-philosophers since they're the target audience.
# Nonmagical Powers

A couple of years ago my workplace was running one of those guess-the-number-of-jellybeans-in-the-jar competitions. I don't even like jellybeans all that much, but nonetheless, I held aloft my nonmagic calculator and said "by the power of Galton!" Taking the mean of all the previous guesses, I put that down as my answer. I was out by one bean, and won the jar. I don't think my colleagues have ever been so interested in statistics as they were that afternoon, and I doubt they ever will be again.

I'm going to admit something a bit silly and embarrassing now: that made me feel like a wizard. Not because of the scope of what I'd done, since it was an utterly trivial piece of arithmetic, but because of the reaction it got. I had drawn on arcane lore unknown to my colleagues, and used it to exercise power over the world.

Personally, I think something like solid state semiconductor technology is about as impressive a real-world miracle as one could ever want by way of demonstrating the whole Science Works/Rationality Is Systematised Winning/Maths Has Manifold Real-World Applications thing, but for most people it will never have the impact of intentionally winning a jar full of jellybeans.

So I ask you, LW-readership: what other impressive nonmagical powers do we have, that we can casually demonstrate to everyday people in everyday circumstances?
# Explanation found for the Pioneer anomaly 

[Paper here](http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.5222). [Lay summary here](http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26589/). Some bits from the latter:

> The problem is this. The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were launched towards Jupiter and Saturn in the early 1970s. After their respective flybys, they continued on escape trajectories out of the Solar System, both decelerating under the force of the Sun's gravity. But careful measuremenrs show that the spacecraft are slowing faster than they ought to, as if being pulled by an extra unseen force towards the Sun.

> Spacecraft engineers' first thought was that heat emitted by the spacecraft could cause exactly this kind of deceleration. But when they examined the way heat was produced on the craft, by on board plutonium, and how this must have been emitted, they were unable to make the numbers add up.

> Now Frederico Francisco at the Instituto de Plasmas e Fusao Nuclear in Lisbon Portugal, and a few pals, say they've worked out where the thermal calculations went wrong.
# What are the leftover questions of metaethics?

lukeprog gave a list of metaethics questions [here](/lw/5eh/what_is_metaethics/):

> What does moral language mean? Do moral facts exist? If so, what are they like, and are they reducible to natural facts? How can we know whether moral judgments are true or false? Is there a connection between making a moral judgment and being motivated to abide by it? Are moral judgments objective or subjective, relative or absolute? Does it make sense to talk about moral progress?

Most of these questions make no sense to me. I imagine that the moral intuitions in my brain come from a special black box within it, a "morality core" whose outputs I cannot easily change. (Explaining how my "morality core" ended up a certain way is a task for evo psych, not philosophy.) Or I can be more enlightened and adopt Nesov's idea that the "morality core" doesn't exist as a unified device, only as an umbrella name for all the diverse "reasons for action" that my brain can fire. Either perspective can be implemented as a computer program pretty easily, so I don't feel there's any philosophical mystery left over. All we have is factual questions about how people's "morality cores" vary in time and from person to person, how compelling their voices are, finding patterns in their outputs, etc. Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?
# An inflection point for probability estimates of the AI takeoff?

Suppose that your current  estimate for possibility of an AI takeoff coming in the next 10 years is some probability x.  As technology is constantly becoming more sophisticated, presumably your probability estimate 10 years from now will be some y > x.  And 10 years after that, it will be z > y.  My question is, does there come a point in the future where, assuming that an AI takeoff has not yet happened _in spite of_ much advanced technology, you begin to revise your estimate _downward_ with each passing year?  If so, how many decades (centuries) from now would you expect the inflection point in your estimate?
# META: application for adminship on the wiki

So, as people have probably noticed, there's fairly regular vandalism on the LW wiki which has been taking a while to address and which regular users have been trying to cope with by moving and blanking pages. This is a little silly - it doesn't resolve the problem and just generates more noise in the RSS feed for Recent Changes (to which I've long subscribed).

We need more administrators.

I suggest [myself](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/User:Gwern). I'm a longtime LWer with high karma, so I can't be _too_ crazy. More to the point, I currently [handle vandalism](http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=&user=Gwern&page=&pattern=&limit=500&offset=0) as an administrator on the [Haskell wiki](http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell) and have done so ~July 2010; I was formerly an administrator on the English Wikipedia (where I have been a [contributor](http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume) since ~2005); nor have I abused access that has been given to me elsewhere (eg. my shell account on http://community.haskell.org, the commit bit on the [PredictionBook.com](http://predictionbook.com/) repo, etc.). In general, I think of myself as a wiki-savvy and trustworthy guy.

Administrators are created by bureaucrats; there are currently [3](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&group=bureaucrat). Rather than simply message Yudkowsky or Matt of Trike, I thought I'd make my request public along the line of Wikipedia's [Requests for Adminship](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship).

If people object, please leave comments; if there are any other users who would like to be admins ([David Gerard](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/User:David_Gerard) comes to mind as someone I know from Wikipedia and would trust as a LW wiki admin), likewise.