Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# [Link] The Stanford Superman Experiment: Anchoring Empathy?

[Virtual superpowers encourage real-world empathy](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/virtual-reality-altruism-013013.html):

With a whoosh of air, the subjects left the ground – either controlling their flight by a series of arm motions, like Superman, or as a passenger in a helicopter. As they scoured the city, wall-mounted speakers gave the impression of wind whistling by; powerful speakers in the floor produced vibrations to simulate riding in a helicopter. The experiment was set so that two minutes into the simulation, no matter what mode of transport, the subject found the sick child.

After removing the virtual reality goggles, each person then sat with an experimenter to answer a few questions about the experience. This questionnaire, however, was a ruse: During the interview, the experimenter would "accidentally" knock over a cup filled with 15 pens. She would wait five seconds to see if the subject would help her pick them up, and then begin collecting the pens, one pen per second, to give the person another opportunity to come to her aid.

The people who had just flown as Superman were quick to lend a hand, beginning to pick up the pens within three seconds. The helicopter group, however, picked up the first pen, on average, after six seconds (one second after the experimenter began picking them up herself).

The superhero group not only pitched in first, they also picked up about 15 percent more pens on average. While everyone who flew like Superman picked up some pens, six participants who rode in the helicopter failed to offer any help at all.

The conclusion:

"If we can identify the mechanism that encourages empathy, then perhaps we can design technology and video games that people will enjoy and that will successfully promote altruistic behavior in the real world."

Seems a bit dark-artsy, using a known cognitive bias, even for good ends, but probably nothing out of the ordinary.
# [suggestion] New Meetup Tab

Hi everyone,

I am unsure if I am formatting this correctly or putting it in the appropriate location.

I think that having meetup notifications is a great idea. A new tab (I.e "main", "discussion" and "meetups") would  make it easier to find your own meetups, as well as create less clutter on the discussion page, leaving it for less administrative matters. What do you think about this?

Jeremy
# Offer: I'll match donations to the Against Malaria Foundation

Giving money to effective charities is one of the ways we can have the biggest positive impact in the world. If you've been thinking about giving to [GiveWell](http://www.givewell.org/)'s top-rated charity, the [Against Malaria Foundation](http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF), but haven't gotten around to it, perhaps this will help: make a donation of up to $2K and I will match it 100%. I'll match up to $20K this way.

(Any money left over at the end of the year will also go to the AMF. That makes this a [donor illusion](http://blog.givewell.org/2011/12/15/why-you-shouldnt-let-donation-matching-affect-your-giving/), in that you're not actually affecting the amount I give them this year.)

_I made the same offer [on my blog](http://www.jefftk.com/news/2013-02-04)_
# Official LW uncensored thread (on Reddit)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/17y819/lw\_uncensored\_thread/](http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/17y819/lw_uncensored_thread/)

This is meant as an open discussion thread someplace where I won't censor anything (and in fact can't censor anything, since I don't have mod permissions on this subreddit), in a location where comments aren't going to show up unsolicited in anyone's feed (which is why we're not doing this locally on LW).  If I'm wrong about this - i.e. if there's some reason that Reddit LW followers are going to see comments without choosing to click on the post - please let me know and I'll retract the thread and try to find some other forum.

I have been deleting a lot of comments from (self-confessed and publicly designated) trolls recently, most notably Dmytry aka private-messaging and Peterdjones, and I can understand that this disturbs some people.  I also know that having an uncensored thread somewhere else is probably not your ideal solution.  But I am doing my best to balance considerations, and I hope that having threads like these is, if not your perfect solution, then something that you at least regard as better than nothing.
# Link: blog on effective altruism

Over the last few months I've [started blogging](http://rationalaltruist.com/) about effective altruism more broadly, rather than [focusing on AI risk](http://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/). I'm still focusing on abstract considerations and methodological issues, but I hope it is of interest to others here. Going forward I intend to cross-post more often to LW, but I thought I would post the backlog here anyway. With luck, I'll also have the opportunity to post more than bi-weekly.

I welcome thoughts, criticisms, etc.
# MLP: The Next Level Of Your Studies

The first four chapters of my MLP fanfiction are now [online on fimfiction.net](https://www.fimfiction.net/story/82658/the-next-level-of-your-studies). Unlike [Friendship Is Optimal](/lw/efi/friendship_is_optimal_a_my_little_pony_fanfic/) ([fim link](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/Friendship-is-Optimal)), which focuses on how MLP might impact the trajectory of AI, or [Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me](/lw/e1g/a_rationalist_my_little_pony_fanfic/) ([fim link](https://www.fimfiction.net/story/33512/Myou%27ve-Gotta-be-Kidding-Me)), which focuses on how a rationalist might impact the trajectory of Equestria, I wanted to ask: what would the [MLP Way](/lw/bd/my_way/) look like? How would MLP impact rationality, and what would rationalist MLP look like?  
  
This has been over a year in the making, off and on, and I've received significant help in writing it. In particular, I'd like to thank the pre-readers and editors who have helped polish it, and everyone who's shown interest; that has been a great help in motivating me to work on this rather than other projects.

There's much more to come; I should be able to maintain at least a chapter a week for the medium term, and hope to post more frequently than that. If you're interested in pre-reading / editing chapters to come, let me know!
# [Link] False memories of fabricated political events

Another one for the memory-is-really-unreliable file. Some researchers at UC Irvine (one of them is Elizabeth Loftus, whose name I've seen attached to other fake-memory studies) asked about 5000 subjects about their recollection of four political events. One of the political events never actually happened. About half the subjects said they remembered the fake event. Subjects were more likely to pseudo-remember events congruent with their political preferences (e.g., Bush or Obama doing something embarrassing).

[Link to papers.ssrn.com](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2201941) (paper is freely downloadable).

The subjects were recruited from the readership of _Slate_, which unsurprisingly means they aren't a very representative sample of the US population (never mind the rest of the world). In particular, about 5% identified as conservative and about 60% as progressive.

Each real event was remembered by 90-98% of subjects. Self-identified conservatives remembered the real events a little less well. Self-identified progressives were much more likely to "remember" a fake event in which G W Bush took a vacation in Texas while Hurricane Katrina was devastating New Orleans. Self-identified conservatives were somewhat more likely to "remember" a fake event in which Barack Obama shook the hand of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

About half of the subjects who "remembered" fake events were unable to identify the fake event correctly when they were told that one of the events in the study was fake.
# Higher than the most high

In an earlier [post](/lw/giu/naturalism_versus_unbounded_or_unmaximisable/), I talked about how we could deal with variants of the Heaven and Hell problem - situations where you have an infinite number of options, and none of them is a maximum. The solution for a (deterministic) agent was to try and implement the strategy that would reach the highest possible number, without risking falling into an infinite loop.

Wei Dai [pointed](/lw/giu/naturalism_versus_unbounded_or_unmaximisable/8ew3) out that in the cases where the options are unbounded in utility (ie you can get arbitrarily high utility), then there are probabilistic strategies that give you infinite expected utility. I suggested you could still do better than this. This started a conversation about choosing between strategies with infinite expectation (would you prefer a strategy with infinite expectation, or the same plus an extra dollar?), which went off into some interesting directions as to what needed to be done when the strategies can't sensibly be compared with each other...

Interesting though that may be, it's also helpful to have simple cases where you don't need all these subtleties. So here is one:

Omega approaches you and Mrs X, asking you each to name an integer to him, privately. The person who names the highest integer gets 1 utility; the other gets nothing. In practical terms, Omega will reimburse you all utility lost during the decision process (so you can take as long as you want to decide). The first person to name a number gets 1 utility immediately; they may then lose that 1 depending on the eventual response of the other. Hence if one person responds and the other doesn't, they get the 1 utility and keep it. What should you do?

In this case, a strategy that gives you a number with infinite expectation isn't enough - you have to beat Mrs X, but you also have to eventually say something. Hence there is a duel of (likely probabilistic) strategies, implemented by bounded agents, with no maximum strategy, and each agent trying to compute the maximal strategy they can construct without falling into a loop.
# [LINK] "Scott and Scurvy": a reminder of the messiness of scientific progress

[http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott\_and\_scurvy.htm](http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm)

> Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician [James Lind](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lind) proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.
> 
> But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?

This article is a vivid illustration of just how nonlinear and _downright messy_ science actually is, and how little the superficial presentation of science as neat "progress" reflects the reality of the field.
# Rationalist Lent

As I understand it, [Lent](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent) is a holiday where we celebrate the scientific method by changing exactly one variable in our lives for 40 days. This seems like a convenient [Schelling point](/lw/dc7/nash_equilibria_and_schelling_points/) for rationalists to adopt, so:

What variable are you going to change for the next 40 days?

(I am really annoyed I didn't think of this yesterday.)
# What are your rules of thumb?

I'm not as smart as I like to think I am. Knowing that, I've gotten into a habit of trying to work out as many general principles as I can ahead of time, so that when I actually need to think of something, I've already done as much of the work as I can.

What are your most useful cached thoughts?

A few of the rules-of-thumb I've already pre-cached include:

*   "Stay classy". Assume that whatever social interactions I have are going to come back to me in twenty years, so try not to make my future self too embarrassed; be as polite and respectful as feasible.
*   "The rule of threes: for anything important, try to have at least three sources, including at least one under your own control". Adapted from some wilderness survival books, it also applies to anything from home emergency kits to internet access to news sources.
*   "Assume I'm more likely than not going to get the worse side of the bargain." There are lots of people who are better than me at haggling, negotiating, and social sciences - in fact, I'm almost certainly somewhere down on the lower half of the bell-curve. So if it's possible to be taken advantage of in a deal, then I'm probably the one who's going to get taken advantage of.
*   "Assume I'm more likely than not going to get the worse side of the bargain." Applied to the field of ethics; if an ethical system says that it's moral to shoot someone for stealing an ice cream, then I assume that someone is going to mistake me for having stolen it and try to shoot me; or, if it's supposedly moral for a rich man to charge a thousand dollars for a bottle of water, I assume I'm going to be the one crawling in from the desert.
*   "It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." I'm quite willing to steal ideas, including this phrasing of enlightened self-interest by Thomas Jefferson. (But I don't want this to become just another quotes thread.)

That should be a reasonable but not overwhelming sample of the sorts of ideas I mean, and am hoping to evoke more of with this post.
# Cryo: Legal fees of $2500

I have just received a message from my lawyer, regarding the preparations of my cryo-based will, power of attorney, and related papers. The most significant quote reads as follows:  
  
  
Due to the complex nature of your wishes and the undeveloped area of the law surrounding cryogenics and the transportation of a human body out of the country, your file has required and will require further extensive time and research to prepare and draft the necessary documents to ensure that your wishes are correctly stated and that they will be carried out upon your death. As such, in order to complete any further work on your behalf we will require a retainer from you in the amount of $2,500.00. Please contact our office to arrange the payment of the retainer. This can be paid by cheque, cash, credit or debit. Upon receipt of this retainer we will proceed to draft the documents in a manner that best ensures that your wishes regarding cryogenics are carried out.  
  
This is somewhat more than I was hoping, and expecting, to pay. While I do have a line of credit which I can use to pay the immediate cost, I do not have sufficient income to pay off that cost any time soon, and I am thus debating whether or not to pay it.  
  
One option that occurs to me is that if my law-firm is able to nail down a set of documents to maximize the odds of a Canadian cryonicist's will being properly carried out, then that would be to the benefit of a number of cryonicists, here and otherwise; perhaps even enough so that it could be in the interests of cryonicists here to help cover the legal fees, instead of having to hire new lawyers to separately re-develop the same paperwork. (It would be reasonably trivial for me to provide proof of my lawyer's existence and the retainer request.)  
  
I'm also open to any other ideas that anyone here could suggest.
# "What-the-hell" Cognitive Failure Mode: a Separate Bias or a Combination of Other Biases?

The ["what-the-hell" effect](http://goo.gl/D8aBF), when you break a rule and then go on a rule-breaking rampage, like [binge eating after a single dietary transgression](http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/03/the-what-the-hell-effect.php), is a very common failure mode. It was recently mentioned in the Overcoming Bias blog comments on the [Which biases matter most? Let’s prioritise the worst!](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/02/which-biases-matter-most-lets-prioritise-the-worst.html) post. I have not been able to find an explicit discussion of this issue here, though there are quite a few comments on binge-<something>.

From the [Psyblog entry](http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/03/the-what-the-hell-effect.php) quoting [this paper](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666310004630):

Although everyone was given the same slice of pizza; when it was served up, for some participants it was made to look larger by comparison.

This made some people think they'd eaten more than they really had; although in reality they'd all eaten exactly the same amount. It's a clever manipulation and it means we can just see **the effect of _thinking_ you've eaten too much** rather than _actually_ having eaten too much.

When the cookies were weighed it turned out that **those who were on a diet and thought they'd blown their limit ate more of the cookies than those who weren't on a diet**. In fact over 50% more! \[Emphasis mine\]

Other examples include sliding back into one's old drinking/smoking/surfing habit. For example, that's how I stopped using Pomodoro.

My (title) question is, what's the mechanism of this cognitive failure and whether it can be reduced to a combination of existing biases/fallacies? If the latter is true, can addressing one of the components counteract the what-the-hell effect? If so, how would one go about testing it?

For completeness, the top hit from Google scholar to the "what-the-hell effect" query is chapter 5 of [Striving and Feeling: Interactions Among Goals, Affect, and Self-regulation, by Martin and Tesser](http://www.amazon.com/Striving-Feeling-Interactions-Affect-Self-regulation/dp/0805816291).

EDIT: personal anecdotes are encouraged, they may help construct a more complete picture.
# [Link] Tomasik's "Quantify with Care"

[Brian Tomasik](http://utilitarian-essays.com/)'s latest article, '[Quantify with Care](http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=849)', 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.
# Call for discussion: Signalling and/vs. accomplishment

It seems to me that when people discover signalling, they see it everywhere and write essays about how no human activity is aimed at its stated purpose.

However, stated purposes and other sorts of useful work get done anyway, and I'm sure there are constraints which mostly keep signalling under enough control that it's mostly not deadly. When I try to think about the subject, I don't get anywhere, possibly because the constraints on signalling are mostly tacit.

Any thoughts or resources on the subject?
# [Link] Colonisation of Venus

I was wondering what people thought of [this paper](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030022668_2003025525.pdf "this paper") by Geoffrey Landis on colonising Venus. In it he suggests that cloud-top Venus is one of the most benign environments in the Solar System. Temperature and gravity are similar to Earth, there's some radiation shielding and useful resources, and aerostats filled only with breathable air would float at that height. I'm no expert so can't speak to how accurate it is, but it's certainly very thought-provoking for such a short paper.
# Memory, nutrition, motivation, and genes

There are two confusing but potentially important papers in the Jan. 25 2013 _Science_ on long-term memory (LTM) formation in fruit flies:

Pierre-Yves Placais & Thomas Preat. To favor survival under food shortage, the brain disables costly memory. 339:440-441.

Yukinori Hirano et al. Fasting launches CRTC to facilitate long-term memory formation in Drosophila. 339:443-446.

These papers categorize long-term memory formation along three axes.

*   Aversive vs. appetitive:  Actions that the brain interprets as helping it avoid something, vs. actions that help it attain something.
*   Fasting-dependent (fLTM) vs. spaced training-dependent (spLTM):  fLTM is formed in a single learning episode, but only at the time that an organism first obtains food after a long fast. spLTM does not require fasting but requires repeated training.
*   LTM vs. ARM: Memories that require protein synthesis (LTM) vs. "anesthesia-resistent memory" (ARM), which does not.  (The papers don't explain what ARM might correspond to in humans.)

The relationship between these is unclear, particularly as each of these three axes is claimed at various times to determine whether memory can be learned in a single training cycle (appetitive, fLTM, and/or ARM) or not (aversive, spLTM, and/or LTM).  But these things appear to be likely, or at least to be reasonable hypotheses, if these pathways are conserved in humans:

*   How quickly you learn something depends on how much you've eaten recently.  You learn most quickly immediately after ending a long fast. Your brain thinks you just learned something that saved it from starvation. (But note that a 1-day fast for a fruit fly could be compared to a human fasting for months.)
*   How quickly you learn something depends on whether your brain thinks that this knowledge is to avoid something bad (slow learning) or to attain something good (fast learning).
*   Almost all of the mutations that extend lifespan in organisms from yeast to humans impact the FOXO3a vs. mTORc1 axis (to use the human analogs).  Expressing FOXO3a inhibits mTORc1 and extends lifespan in various ways; producing and assembling more mTORc1 inhibits FOXO3a and promotes protein synthesis, growth, reproduction, tissue repair, and immune response.  We already know that extending lifespan, in general, is antithetical to building muscle.  It may also be antithetical to forming long-term memories.  This makes sense.
*   Learning rate can be increased by expressing or inhibiting  proteins involved in these responses.  Hirano et al. focus on activating a cAMP-regulated transcriptional coactivator (CRTC) by dephosphorylating it in order to invoke fLTM.  They were able to do this and enable flies to learn quickly without fasting followed by feeding.

I'd really appreciate it if somebody would do a literature review and a comparison of the pathways involved to those in humans, and summarize their findings.
# [LINK] Westerners may be terrible experimental psychology subjects

[WEIRD](/lw/17x/beware_of_weird_psychological_samples/) may be weirder than you think. [We Aren't The World](http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/) writes of psychological experiments on non-Westerners that give vastly disparate results from results that have been assumed to be hardwired, and the implications of this:

Henrich used a “game”—along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma—to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery—the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring.  The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game.

...  
  
To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

...  
  
At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West.

**Edit:** The actual papers this article writes about are covered in [this post by Ciphergoth](/lw/17x/beware_of_weird_psychological_samples/) from a few years ago.
# Self-assessment in expert AI predictions

_This brief post is written on behalf of [Kaj Sotala](/user/Kaj_Sotala/overview/), due to deadline issues._

The results of our prior analysis suggested that there was [little difference between experts and non-experts](/lw/e36/ai_timeline_predictions_are_we_getting_better/) in terms of predictive accuracy. There were [suggestions](/lw/e36/ai_timeline_predictions_are_we_getting_better/77dv), though, that predictions published by self-selected experts would be different from those elicited from less selected groups, e.g. surveys at conferences.

We have no real data to confirm this, but a single datapoint suggests the idea might be worth taking seriously. Michie[conducted](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v241/n5391/pdf/241507a0.pdf) an opinion poll of experts working in or around AI in 1973. The various experts predicted adult-level human AI in:

*   5 years: 0 experts
*   10 years: 1 expert
*   20 years: 16 experts
*   50 years: 20 experts
*   More than 50 years: 26 experts

On a quick visual inspection, these results look quite different from the distribution in the rest of the database giving a much more pessimistic prediction than the more self-selected experts:

![](http://images.lesswrong.com/t3_gta_0.png?v=73322cd8c76e8f78cede37457c2d3534)  

But that could be an artifact from the way that the graph on page 12 breaks the predictions down to 5 year intervals while Michie breaks them down into intervals of 10, 20, 50, and 50+ years. Yet there seems to remain a clear difference once we group the predictions in a similar way \[1\]:

![](http://images.lesswrong.com/t3_gta_1.png?v=1d152f6007c571bfc3ca8e12ecf453f3)

This provides some support for the argument that "the mainstream of expert opinion is reliably more pessimistic than the self-selected predictions that we keep hearing about".

\[1\] Assigning each prediction to the closest category, so predictions of <7½ get assigned to 5, 7½<=X<15 get assigned to 10, 15<=X<35 get assigned to 20, 35<=X<50 get assigned to 50, and 50< get assigned to over fifty.
# Need some psychology advice

I started going out with a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago.  Everything is great, except that whenever I've sent her a text message or email requesting something and haven't received a response yet, I experience significant dysphoric anxiety, fearing that her response will be not just "no" but "no and I don't want to date you any more".  This is due to brain chemistry or personal history, take your pick—either seems like a possible explanation to me.  But there's certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.

Does anyone have evidence-based advice, or pointers to same, on dealing with this kind of issue?  It is the only splotch on what have otherwise been the best two weeks of my life.
# Seize the Maximal Probability Moment

Try and remember 3 or 4 things that you think would be _effective hacks_ for your life but you have _not_ so far implemented. Really, find three. 

Probably that was not so hard.

Now think of at which moment in time did you have a maximal probability of having implemented such hacks. Sometimes you had no idea that was the moment. But sometimes you did, like when a friend tells you "I just read this great paper on how people report cartoons being funnier when their face is shaped in a more smiling fashion." and you thought "Great! I may one day implement the algorithm: if studying, force a smile".

You knew you didn't plan to read the article, you knew you trust that friend, and you knew you'd either forget it later, or in any case that _from that moment on, the likelihood of you implementing the algorithm would lower._

So my hack of the day is: If you feel you are likely at the maximal probability moment to start a new policy, start immediately.

My friend was telling me about how he went abroad to research: "...so at this place and people there used very strong lights as cognitive enhancement and yadda yadda yadda... (stopped listening for 40s) yadda yadda yadda.... and I wrote a paper on ..."  By that time my room had an extra 110W light working.   

Just now~0~ I thought: It was good I installed that light. Why didn't I do the same when I felt like finding a personalized shirt website where the front would be "I Don't want to talk about: \[list\]" and the back "Pick your topic: \[list\]" to once and for all stop the gossip and sports ice-breakers? 

I didn't seize the maximal probability moment. That's what happened.

Then I noticed that that~1~ was the maximal probability moment to install in my mind the maximal probability moment algorithm, I did,  and _that_~2~ was the maximal probability moment of writing this post.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have~3~ a shirt to buy.
# The VNM independence axiom ignores the value of information

_Followup to : [Is risk aversion really irrational?](/lw/9oj/is_risk_aversion_really_irrational/)_

After reading the [decision theory FAQ](/lw/gu1/decision_theory_faq) and re-reading [The Allais Paradox](/lw/my/the_allais_paradox/) I realized I still don't accept the VNM axioms, especially the independence one, and I started thinking about what my true rejection could be. And then I realized I already somewhat explained it here, in my [Is risk aversion really irrational?](/lw/9oj/is_risk_aversion_really_irrational/) article, but it didn't make it obvious in the article how it relates to VNM - it wasn't obvious to me at that time.

Here is the core idea: information has value. Uncertainty therefore has a cost. And that cost is not linear to uncertainty.

Let's take a first example: A is being offered a trip to Ecuador, B is being offered a great new laptop and C is being offered a trip to Iceland. My own preference is: A > B > C. I love Ecuador - it's a fantastic country. But I prefer a laptop over a trip to Iceland, because I'm not fond of cold weather (well, actually Iceland is pretty cool too, but let's assume for the sake of the article that A > B > C is my preference).

But now, I'm offered D = (50% chance of A, 50% chance of B) or E = (50% chance of A, 50% chance of C). The VNM independence principle says I should prefer D > E. But doing so, it forgets the cost of information/uncertainty. By choosing E, I'm sure I'll be offered a trip - I don't know where, but I know I'll be offered a trip, not a laptop. By choosing D, I'm no idea on the nature of the present. I've much less information on my future - and that lack of information has a cost. If I know I'll be offered a trip, I can already ask for days off at work, I can go buy a backpack, I can start doing the paperwork to get my passport. And if I know I won't be offered a laptop, I may decide to buy one, maybe not as great as one I would have been offered, but I can still buy one. But if I chose D, I've much less information about my future, and I can't optimize it as much.

The same goes for the Allais paradox: having certitude of receiving a significant amount of money ($24 000) has a value, which is present in choice 1A, but not in all others (1B, 2A, 2B).

And I don't see why a "rational agent" should neglect the value of this information, as the VNM axioms imply. Any thought about that?
# Meta Decision Theory and Newcomb's Problem

Hi all,

As part of my PhD I've written a paper developing a new approach to decision theory that I call Meta Decision Theory. The idea is that decision theory should take into account decision-theoretic uncertainty as well as empirical uncertainty, and that, once we acknowledge this, we can explain some puzzles to do with Newcomb problems, and can come up with new arguments to adjudicate the causal vs evidential debate. Nozick raised this idea of taking decision-theoretic uncertainty into account, but he did not defend the idea at length, and did not discuss implications of the idea.

I'm not yet happy to post this paper publicly, so I'll just write a short abstract of the paper below. However, I would appreciate written comments on the paper. If you'd like to read it and/or comment on it, please e-mail me at will dot crouch at 80000hours.org. And, of course, comments in the thread on the idea sketched below are also welcome.

**Abstract**

First, I show that our judgments concerning Newcomb problems are _stakes-sensitive._ By altering the relative amounts of value in  the transparent box and the opaque box, one can construct situations in which one should clearly one-box, and one can construct situations in which one should clearly two-box. A plausible explanation of this phenomenon is that our intuitive judgments are sensitive to decision-theoretic uncertainty as well as empirical uncertainty: if the stakes are very high for evidential decision theory (EDT) but not for Causal Decision theory (CDT) then we go with EDT's recommendation, and vice-versa for CDT over EDT.

Second, I show that, if we 'go meta' and take decision-theoretic uncertainty into account, we can get the right answer in both the Smoking Lesion case and the Psychopath Button case.

Third, I distinguish Causal MDT (CMDT) and Evidential MDT (EMDT). I look at what I consider to be the two strongest arguments in favour of EDT, and show that these arguments do not work at the meta level. First, I consider the argument that EDT gets the right answer in certain cases. In response to this, I show that one only needs to have small credence in EDT in order to get the right answer in such cases. The second is the "Why Ain'cha Rich?" argument. In response to this, I give a case where EMDT recommends two-boxing, even though two-boxing has a lower average return than one-boxing.

Fourth, I respond to objections. First, I consider and reject alternative explanations of the stakes-sensitivity of our judgments about particular cases, including Nozick's explanation. Second, I consider the worry that 'going meta' leads one into a vicious regress. I accept that there is a regress, but argue that the regress is non-vicious.

In an appendix, I give an axiomatisation of CMDT.
# Caelum est Conterrens: I frankly don't see how this is a horror story

So Eliezer said in his March 1st [HPMOR progress report](http://hpmor.com/notes/progress-13-03-01/):

> I recommend the recursive fanfic “[Friendship is Optimal: Caelum est Conterrens](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-caelum-est-conterrens)” (Heaven Is Terrifying).  This is the first and only effective horror novel I have ever read, since unlike Lovecraft, it contains things I actually find scary.

So I read that and it was certainly very much worth reading - thanks for the recommendation! Obviously, the following contains spoilers.

I'm confused about how the story is supposed to be "terrifying". I rarely find any fiction scary, but I suspect that this is about something else: I didn't think [Failed Utopia #4-2](/lw/xu/failed_utopia_42/) was "failed" either and in Three Worlds Collide, I thought the choice of the "Normal" ending made a lot more sense than choosing the "True" ending. The Optimalverse seems to me a fantastically fortunate universe, pretty much the best universe mammals could ever hope to end up in, and I honestly don't see how it is a horror novel, at all.

So, apparently there's something I'm not getting. Something that makes an individual's hard-to-define "free choice" more valuable than her much-easier-to-define happiness. Something like a paranoid schizophrenic's right not to be treated,

So I'd like the dumb version please. What's terrifying about the Optimalverse?
# Getting myself to eat vegetables

[![](http://www.jefftk.com/veggies_on_top-small.jpg)](http://www.jefftk.com/veggies_on_top.jpg)

I have a strategy for getting myself to eat vegetables. I've been using it for about six months now, and it works well:

*   Put the food I want to eat on my plate.
*   Put raw vegetables on top.
*   Eat through vegetables to get to the food I want.

Side effect: people who see my plate think I'm a very healthy eater. But sometimes they ask my "why is your salad steaming?"

_I also posted this [on my blog](http://www.jefftk.com/news/2013-03-06)_
# Boring Advice Repository

This is an extension of a comment I made that I can't find and also a request for examples. It seems plausible that, when giving advice, many people optimize for deepness or punchiness of the advice rather than for actual practical value. There may be good reasons to do this - e.g. advice that sounds deep or punchy might be more likely to be listened to - but as a corollary, there could be valuable advice that people generally don't give because it doesn't sound deep or punchy. Let's call this **boring advice**. 

An example that's been discussed on LW several times is "make [checklists](/lw/8vm/the_rationalists_checklist/)." Checklists are [great](/lw/cnr/share_your_checklists/). We should [totally make checklists](/lw/fc3/checklist_of_rationality_habits/). But "make checklists" is not a deep or punchy thing to say. Other examples include "google things" and "exercise." 

I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of boring advice. If you can, provide evidence and/or a plausible argument that your boring advice actually is useful, but I would prefer that you err on the side of boring but not necessarily useful in the name of more thoroughly searching a plausibly under-searched part of advicespace. 

Upvotes on advice posted in this thread should be based on your estimate of the usefulness of the advice; in particular, please do not vote up advice just because it sounds deep or punchy.
# A problem with "playing chicken with the universe" as an approach to UDT

Let's consider the agent given in [A model of UDT with a halting oracle](/r/discussion/lw/8wc/a_model_of_udt_with_a_halting_oracle/). One will notice that that agent is not quite well defined because it doesn't tell us in what order we are supposed to consider actions in step 1. But surely that doesn't matter, right? Wrong.

Let's consider the prisoner dilemma with payment matrix given by

|     | 1: C | 1: D |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 2: C | (3, 3) | (5, 0) |
| 2: D | (0, 5) | (2, 2) |

and consider agent A which consider whether there is a proof that A()≠D before considering whether there is a proof that A()≠C and agent A' which do things in the opposite order. If A or A' is pitted against itself everything is well and mutual cooperation is the result of the game but what if A is pitted against A'? Then A break down and cry.

Let's call the utility functions of A U and the utility function of A' U' and consider a model of PA in which PA is inconsistent (such a model must exist if PA is consistent). In such a model we will have A()=D and A'()=C and so U()=5 and U'()=0. That means that A will not be able to prove that A()=D => U()=u for any u different from 5 and so either A will defect and A' will cooperate or A will break down and cry, but A' will not cooperate because it cannot prove A'()=C => U()=u' for any u' except possibly 0, so A will break down and cry. QED

More generally if M is a model of PA in which PA is inconsistent, an agent defined in this way will never be able to prove that A()=a => U()=u (where a is the first action considered in step 1) except possibly for u=u~0~ where u~0~ is the value of U() in M. That seems to create a huge problem for that approach to UDT.
# You only need faith in two things

You only need faith in two things:  That "induction works" has a non-super-exponentially-tiny prior probability, and that some single large ordinal is well-ordered.  Anything else worth believing in is a deductive consequence of one or both.

(Because being exposed to ordered sensory data will rapidly promote the hypothesis that induction works, even if you started by assigning it very tiny prior probability, so long as that prior probability is not super-exponentially tiny.  Then induction on sensory data gives you all empirical facts worth believing in.  Believing that a mathematical system has a model usually corresponds to believing that a certain computable ordinal is well-ordered (the proof-theoretic ordinal of that system), and large ordinals imply the well-orderedness of all smaller ordinals.  So if you assign non-tiny prior probability to the idea that induction might work, and you believe in the well-orderedness of a single sufficiently large computable ordinal, all of empirical science, and all of the math you will actually believe in, will follow without any further need for faith.)

(The reason why you need faith for the first case is that although the fact that induction works can be readily observed, there is also some anti-inductive prior which says, 'Well, but since induction has worked all those previous times, it'll probably fail next time!' and 'Anti-induction is bound to work next time, since it's never worked before!'  Since anti-induction objectively gets a far lower Bayes-score on any ordered sequence and is then demoted by the logical operation of Bayesian updating, to favor induction over anti-induction it is not necessary to start out believing that induction works better than anti-induction, it is only necessary \*not\* to start out by being \*perfectly\* confident that induction won't work.)

(The reason why you need faith for the second case is that although more powerful proof systems - those with larger proof-theoretic ordinals - can prove the consistency of weaker proof systems, or equivalently prove the well-ordering of smaller ordinals, there's no known perfect system for telling which mathematical systems are consistent just as (equivalently!) there's no way of solving the halting problem.  So when you reach the strongest math system you can be convinced of and further assumptions seem dangerously fragile, there's some large ordinal that represents all the math you believe in.  If this doesn't seem to you like faith, try looking up a Buchholz hydra and then believing that it can always be killed.)

(Work is ongoing on eliminating the requirement for faith in these two remaining propositions.  For example, we might be able to describe our increasing confidence in ZFC in terms of logical uncertainty and an inductive prior which is updated as ZFC passes various tests that it would have a substantial subjective probability of failing, even given all other tests it has passed so far, if ZFC were inconsistent.)

(No, this is \*not\* the "tu quoque!" moral equivalent of starting out by assigning probability 1 that Christ died for your sins.)
# [LINK] Intrade Shuts Down

Intrade, the prediction market website, has shutdown.  According to [their website](http://www.intrade.com/v4/home/):

With sincere regret we must inform you that due to circumstances recently discovered we must immediately cease trading activity on [www.intrade.com](http://www.intrade.com/).

These circumstances require immediate further investigation, and may include financial irregularities which in accordance with Irish law oblige the directors to take the following actions:

*   Cease exchange trading on the website immediately.
*   Settle all open positions and calculate the settled account value of all Member accounts immediately.
*   Cease all banking transactions for all existing Company accounts immediately.

During the upcoming weeks, we will investigate these circumstances further and determine the necessary course of action.

Here's a link to an article on the slashdot website with more information about it:

[http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/intrade-shuts-down-under-murky-circumstances/](http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/intrade-shuts-down-under-murky-circumstances/)

Has anyone looked into the feasibility of creating an open source version of something similar, using a distributed application and a microcurrency (such as bitcoin), that couldn't be shutdown?
# Programming the LW Study Hall

**We've had considerable interest and uptake on the [Less Wrong Study Hall](/lw/gwo/coworking_collaboration_to_combat_akrasia/), especially with informal timed Pomodoro sessions for everyone to synchronize on.  Working together with a number of other visible faces, and your own face visible to them, does seem effective.  Keeping the social chat to the 5 off minutes prevents this from turning into just another chatroom.  
  
We've been using this [Tinychat room](http://tinychat.com/lesswrong), and implementing everything Pomodoro-related with manual typing.  Is there anyone out there who's interested in taking this to the next level with some custom code, possibly via the Google Hangouts API (Javascript), so we can have the following nice features?  
**

*****   Synchronized, software-implemented Pomodoros for everyone.
    *   Maybe one chat room with 20/5 and one with 45/5.
    *   Actual enforcement of the "no chatting unless the Pomodoro is on" and/or muted microphones.
*   Chat rooms with an N-person limit (several people report being more productive in smaller groups, so we're not sure if N should be 5 or 10) and new chat rooms being spawned as earlier ones get full.
*   Moderatability (we've already had one troll).  One person suggested the ability to +1/-1 one person per day, with a kick at -5.  (Eliezer remarks that he expects this to be completely ineffective and that you need actual mods, maybe a group of trusted users.)
    *   We only wish and dream that we could integrate with LW logins, but this would require LW development resources that apparently don't exist.  Maybe with enough grotesque hackery we could have a page somewhere that you comment to confirm you're a Study Hall user, and the system could look up your karma from there to decide if you can cast +1/-1 user votes.
*   A custom page layout (which you don't get if you use Tinychat!) which has the watching participants lined up vertically on the left, so we can work on something while still easily seeing our friends.
    *   A small line underneath everyone's image saying what they're currently working on.
*   Maybe a common room where people can initially talk about what they intend to work on.  (Eliezer says:  This needs either strong group norms or built-in limits on talk time to avoid becoming a social chat timesink.)
*   The ability to branch off small sub-chat rooms (maybe with limit 2 or 3) in case somebody wants to talk (about work!)
*   A welcome page ([mockup](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EjmaQ4SY1aXfbRfSxmiztwEZaabL0lSyNRAJdwh4GdM/edit?usp=sharing)) where people see the group norms the first time they visit the Study Hall that serves as a portal.****

**This doesn't "seem" very complicated from a programming perspective (yes, we all know about things that don't seem complicated). The Google Hangouts API (possibly OpenMeetings) seems like it should provide almost all of the basics already.  But unless some particular programmer steps up to do it, it won't get done. If interested, comment below or email shannon.friedman@positivevector.com, and please mention your relevant Javascript experience.**