Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# [Link] Statistically, People Are Not Very Good At Making Voting Decisions

[Link.](http://www.businessinsider.com/voting-bias-study-2012-12#ixzz2Gd4D5LWj) Nothing surprising considering previous work on the subject, but a good reminder.

> A study by three scientists in the [American Political Science Review](http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPSR%2FPSR106_04%2FS0003055412000391a.pdf&code=6fc402e7f2db9e4f00828a47df480146) finds that voters are not competent at accurately evaluating incumbent performance and are easily swayed by rhetoric, unrelated circumstances and recent events.
> 
> Gregory Huber, Seth Hill, and Gabriel Lenz constructed a 32-round game where players received payments from a computer "allocator." The goal is to maximize the value of those payments.
> 
> Halfway through, at round sixteen, the player had to decide whether to get a new allocator or to stick with the old one.
> 
> The allocators pay out over a normal distribution based on a randomly selected mean. Getting a new allocator means that a new mean is selected. This was meant to simulate an election based on performance. 
> 
> The group ran three experiments where they changed some of the rules of the game in order to find out how voters could be manipulated or confused over performance. Essentially, how good were voters at accurately analyzing the performance of the "allocator?" 
> 
> *   The first experiment merely alerted the player at round twelve that they would have the chance to pick a new allocator at round sixteen. This "election in November" reminder made the player weight recent performance in rounds 12-16 over earlier performance in rounds 1-12.
> 
> *   The second experiment involved a lottery held at round eight or round sixteen. The payout was either -5000, 0, or 5000 tokens. The participant was told that the lottery was totally unrelated to the current allocator, but players still rewarded or punished their current allocator based on their lottery performance.
> 
> *   The third experiment primed the player with a question right before the election. The question took an adapted form of either Ronald Reagan's "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" or John F. Kennedy's "The question you have to decide on November 8 is, is it good enough? Are you satisfied?" 
> 
> The conclusion: 
> 
> Participants overweight recent performance when made aware of the choice to retain an incumbent closer to election rather than distant from it (experiment 1), allowed unrelated events that affected their welfare to influence evaluations of incumbents (experiment 2), and were influenced by rhetoric to focus less on cumulative incumbent performance (experiment 3).
> 
> If you were ever wondering why Congress [has a 95% incumbency](http://cstl-cla.semo.edu/Renka/ps103/Spring2010/congressional_incumbency.htm) rate despite [an approval rating in the high teens](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/congressional_job_approval-903.html), this study may be worth a read.
# [Link] On the Height of a Field

Mark Eichenlaub posted a great little [case-study about the difficulty of updating beliefs](http://arcsecond.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/an-empirical-investigation-into-runners-high/), even over trivial matters like the slope of a baseball field. The basic story of Bayes-updating assumes the likelihood of evidence in different states is obvious, but feedback between observations and judgments about likelihood quickly complicate the situation:

> The story of how belief is supposed to work is that for each bit of evidence, you consider its likelihood under all the various hypotheses, then multiplying these likelihoods, you find your final result, and it tells you exactly how confident you should be. If I can estimate how likely it is for Google Maps and my GPS to corroborate each other given that they are wrong, and how likely it is given that they are right, and then answer the same question for every other bit of evidence available to me, I don’t need to estimate my final beliefs – I calculate them. But even in this simple testbed of the matter of a sloped baseball field, I could feel my biases coming to bear on what evidence I considered, and how strong and relevant that evidence seemed to me.  The more I believed the baseball field was sloped, the more relevant (higher likelihood ratio) it seemed that there was that short steep hill on the side, and the less relevant that my intuition claimed the field was flat. The field even began looking more sloped to me as time went on, and I sometimes thought I could feel the slope as I ran, even though I never had before.
> 
> That’s what I was interested in here. I wanted to know more about the way my feelings and beliefs interacted with the evidence and with my methods of collecting it. It is common knowledge that people are likely to find what they’re looking for whatever the facts, but what does it feel like when you’re in the middle of doing this, and can recognizing that feeling lead you to stop?

**Edit:** Title changed from "An Empirical Evaluation into Runner's High," the original title of the article, to match the author's new title.
# PSA: Please list your references, don't just link them

In what [became 5th most-read new post on LessWrong in 2012,](/lw/g6q/2012_year_in_review/) Morendil [told us](/lw/9sv/diseased_disciplines_the_strange_case_of_the/?sort=new) about a study widely cited in its field... except that source cited, which isn't online and is really difficult to get, makes a different claim — and turns out to not even be the original research, but a PowerPoint presentation given ten years after the original study was published!

Fortunately, the _original_ study turns out to be freely available online, for all to read; Morendil's post has a [link](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HPJ/is_n2_v40/ai_7180006/pg_2/). The post also tells us the author and the year of publication. But that's all: Morendil didn't provide a list of references; he showed how the _presentation_ is usually cited, but didn't give a full citation for the original study.

The link is broken now. The Wayback machine doesn't have a copy. The address doesn't give hints about the study's title. I haven't been able to find anything on Google Scholar with author, year, and likely keywords.

I rest my case.
# Case Study: the Death Note Script and Bayes

["Who wrote the _Death Note_ script?"](http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20script)

> I give a history of the 2009 leaked script, discuss internal & external evidence for its authenticity including stylometrics; and then give a simple step-by-step Bayesian analysis of each point. We finish with high confidence in the script's authenticity, discussion of how this analysis was surprisingly enlightening, and what followup work the analysis suggests would be most valuable.

If you're already familiar this particular leaked 2009 live-action script, please write down your current best guess as to how likely it is to be authentic.

This is intended to be easy to understand and essentially beginner-level for Bayes's theorem and fermi estimates, like my other [_Death Note_ essay](/lw/5ld/death_note_anonymity_and_information_theory/) (information theory, crypto) or my [console insurance](/lw/4or/case_study_console_insurance/) page (efficient markets, positive psychology, expected value).

Be sure to check out the controversial twist ending!

(I'm sorry to post just a link, but I briefly thought about writing it and all the math in the LW edit box and decided that cutting my wrists sounded both quicker and more enjoyable. Unfortunately, there seems to be a math problem in the Google Chrome/Chromium browser where fractions simply don't render, [apparently](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606) [due](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430) to not enabling Webkit's MathML code; if fractions don't render for you, well, I know the math works well in my Iceweasel and it seems to work well in other Firefoxes.)
# How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking. I teach the third grade, and it is not immediately apparent how to apply this with my own class.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

*   Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
*   Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.
*   Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.
*   Attention spans in general are very short.
*   Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
*   Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

In the [sequences](/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/), it is suggested teachers should drill into students _words don't count, only anticipation-controllers_. How practical is this for an elementary school level? Also appreciated would be any ideas or experiences on how to do this, or how to combat the above problems. Hearing from other teachers would be excellent especially.
# Just One Sentence

So apparently Richard Feynman once said:

> If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

I could be missing something, but this strikes me as a terrible answer.

When was the atomic hypothesis confirmed?  If I recall correctly, it was only when chemists started noticing that the outputs of chemical reactions tended to factorize a certain way, which is to say that it took _millennia _after Democritus to get the point where the atomic hypothesis started making clearly relevant experimental predictions.

How about, "Stop trying to sound wise and come up with theories that make precise predictions about things you can measure in numbers."

I noticed this on [Marginal Revolution](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/01/if-we-could-preserve-only-one-sentence.html), so I shall also state my candidate for the one most important sentence about macroeconomics:  "You can't eat gold, so figure out how the heck money is relevant to making countries actually produce more or less food."  This is a pretty large advance on how kings used to think before economics.  I mean, Scott Sumner is usually pretty savvy (so is Richard Feynman btw) but his instruction to try to understand money is likely to fall on deaf ears, if it's just that one sentence.  Think about money?  Everyone wants more money!  Yay, money!  Let's build more gold mines!  And "In the short run, governments are not households"?  Really, Prof. Cowen, that's what you'd pass on to the next generation as they climb up from the radioactive soil?

\*Cough.\*  Okay, I'm done.  Does anyone want to take their own shot at doing better than Feynman did for their own discipline?
# [LINK] Why taking ideas seriously is probably a bad thing to do

Yvain's blog: [Epistemic learned helplessness](http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html).

A friend in business recently complained about his hiring pool, saying that he couldn't find people with the basic skill of _believing arguments_. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don't like it. He told me a good portion of the point of CfAR was to either find or create people who would believe something _after it had been proven to them_.  
  
And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn't until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went "Wait, no, that would be the worst idea ever."  
  
I don't think I'm overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average high school dropout. Like I mean that on almost any topic, given almost any position, I could totally demolish her and make her look like an idiot. Reduce her to some form of "Look, everything you say fits together and I can't explain why you're wrong, I just _know you are_!" Or, more plausibly, "Shut up I don't want to talk about this!"
# [Link] Your Elusive Future Self

A [current article in Science](http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/01/your-elusive-future-self.html) reports on [this study](http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/Quoidbach%20et%20al%202013.pdf) about how good people are at predicting what their future selves will be like. Not very good, apparently. Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, with other colleagues conducted several experiments online, in which 19,000 people were asked about such things as personality traits, preferences in music, etc., answering about the present, about themselves 10 years earlier, and about what they expected 10 years hence. More precisely, this not being a longitudinal study, people of any age X predicted less difference with their X+10 selves than people of age X+10 recollected of themselves at age X. The effect did not go away with increasing age: 58-year-olds still expected less change in the next 10 years than 68-year-olds reported in the last ten.

Gilbert and colleagues call this effect "the end of history illusion," because it suggests that people believe, consciously or not, that the present marks the point at which they've finally stopped changing.

"What these data suggest, and what scads of other data from our lab and others suggest, is that people really aren't very good at knowing who they're going to be and hence what they're going to want a decade from now," Gilbert says.

Someone suggests an alternative explanation:

Another possibility is that people "might well anticipate substantial change, yet not know how they would change, and thus, just predict the status quo"

An actionable moral:

"The single best way to make predictions about what you're going to want in the future isn't to imagine yourself in the future, … it's to look at other people who are in the very future you're imagining," \[Gilbert\] says.
# How to signal curiosity?

At LessWrong we encourage people to be [curious](/lw/4ku/use_curiosity/). Curiosity causes people to ask questions, but sometimes those questions get misinterpreted as social challenges or rhetorical techniques, or maybe just regular questions that you don't have a "[burning itch](/lw/jz/the_meditation_on_curiosity/)" to know the answers for (and hence maybe not particularly worth answering). I sometimes preface a question by "I'm curious," but of course anyone could say that so it's not a very effective way to distinguish oneself as being genuinely curious. Another thing I sometimes do is to try to answer the question myself and present one or more answers as my "guesses" and ask if one of them is correct, since someone who is genuinely curious is more likely put in such effort. But unfortunately sometimes that backfires when the person you're directing the question at interprets the guesses as a way to make them look bad, because for example you failed to hypothesize the actual answer and include it as one of the guesses, and all your guesses make them look worse than the actual answer.

I've noticed examples of this happening to others on LW (or at least possibly happening, since I can't be sure whether someone else really is curious) as well as to myself, and can only imagine that the problem is even worse elsewhere, where people may not give each other as much benefit of doubt as we do around here. So my question is, what can curious people do, to signal their genuine curiosity when asking questions? Has anyone thought about this question already, or perhaps can recognize some strategies they already employ and make them explicit for the rest of us?

**ETA:** Perhaps I should say a bit more about the kind of situation I have in mind. Often I'll see a statement from someone that either contradicts my existing beliefs about something or is on a topic that I'm pretty ignorant about, and it doesn't come with an argument or evidence to back it up. I'd think "I don't want to just take their word since they might be wrong, but there also seems a good chance that they know something that I don't in which case I'd really like to know what it is, so let's ask why they're saying what they're saying." And unfortunately this sometimes gets interpreted as "I'm pretty sure you're wrong, and I'm going to embarrass you by asking a question that I don't think you can answer."

**ETA2:** The reason I use "signal" in the title is that people who _do_ just want to embarrass the other person would want to have plausible deniability. If it was clear that's their intention and it turns out that the other person has a perfectly good answer, then they'll be the one embarrassed instead. So ideally the curious person should send a signal that can't be faked by someone who just wants to pretend to be curious.
#  Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

[Link](http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swartz.html)

[One of us](/user/aaronsw/overview/) is [no more](http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swartz.html).

> Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11.
> 
> The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded [_DemandProgress.org_](http://demandprogress.org/), a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”

He deserves a eulogy more eloquent than what I am capable of writing. [Here's](http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html) Cory Doctorow's, one of his long time friends.

It's a sad world in which you are [being arrested](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-charged-with-data-theft/) and grand jury'd for downloading scientific journals and papers with the intent to share them.
# Seeking examples of people smarter than me who got hung up

I'm looking for historical examples of scientists who were 

a) very intelligent and still

b) continued to put themselves behind a theory in their discipline long after it was rejected.  Maybe they got too attached to it, refused to be wrong, got emotional, but they somehow let their hangups get in the way.

  

Maybe I'm being too demanding, but if you can resist, give me fewer cranks, pseudoscience, and wierd sociopolitical commitments and more theories that were credible until they became incredible to all but their big fancy until-then-respected proponent.

  

To get you started: 

\* Fred Hoyle against the Big Bang

\* Lord Kelvin and Hoyle on microbes from spce

\* Tesla against relativity and other chunks of modern physics.

\* Heaviside against relativity

\* George Gaylord Simpson against plate tectonics

\* Newton on alchemy

  

More?

  

Posted on behalf of a friend. Thanks.
# Evolution, Sex, and Gender, Not to Mention Research

From [The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/opinion/sunday/darwin-was-wrong-about-dating.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=general&src=me):

> Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

So how sketchy is the research on human sexual behavior, anyway?
# Study on depression

I am currently running a study on depression, in collaboration with Shannon Friedman ([http://lesswrong.com/user/ShannonFriedman/overview/](/user/ShannonFriedman/overview/)). If you are interested in participating, the study involves filling out a survey and will take a few minutes of your time (half an hour would be very generous), most likely once a week for four weeks. Send me an email at mdixo100@uottawa.ca, and I can give you more details. 

Thank you!
# My simple hack for increased alertness and improved cognitive functioning: very bright light

This is a simple idea that I came up with by myself. I was looking for a means to enter high functioning lots-of-beta-waves modes without the use of chemical stimulants. What I found was that very bright light works really, really well.

I got the [brightest light bulbs I could get cheaply](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wolfram-Halogengl%C3%BChlampe.png). 105 watts of incandescents with halogen gas, billed as the equivalent of 130 watts of incandescent light. And I got an adaptor like [this](http://www.enjoyyourcamera.com/images/product_images/popup_images/31513650_0.jpg) that lets me screw four of those into the same socket in the ceiling. The result is about as painful to look at as the sun. It makes my (small) room brighter than a clear summer's day at my latitude and slightly brighter than a supermarket.

I guess it affects adenosine much like caffeine does because that's what it feels like. Yet unlike caffeine, it can be rapidly turned on and off, literally with the flip of a switch.

For waking up in the morning, I find bright light more effective than a 200mg caffeine tablet, although my caffeine tolerance is moderate for a scientist.

I have not compared the effects of very bright light to modafinil, which requires a prescription in my country.

When under this amount of light, I need to remind myself to go to bed, because I tire about three hours later than with common luminosity. Yet once I switch it off, I can usually sleep within a few minutes, as (I'm guessing) a flood of unblocked adenosine suddenly overwhelms me. I used to have those unproductive late hours where I was too awake to sleep but too tired to be smart. I don't have those anymore.

You've probably heard of [light therapy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy), which uses light to help manage seasonal affective disorder. I don't have that issue, but I definitely notice that the light does improve my mood. (Maybe that's simply because I like to function well.) I'm pretty sure the expensive "light therapy bulbs" you can get are scams, because the color of the light doesn't actually make a difference. The amount of light does.

One nice side benefit is that it keeps me awake while meditating, so I don't need the upright posture that usually does that job. Without the need for an upright posture, I can go beyond two hours straight, which helps enter more profoundly altered states.

After about 10 months of almost daily use of this lighting, I have not noticed any decrease in effectiveness. I do notice I find normally-lit rooms comparatively gloomy, and have an increasingly hard time understanding why people tolerate that. Supermarkets and offices are brightly lit to make the rats move faster - why don't we do that at our homes and while we're at it, amp it up even further? After all, our brains were made for the African savanna, which during the day is a lot brighter than most apartments today.

Since everyone can try this for a few bucks, I hope some of you will. If you do, please provide feedback on whether it works as well for you as it does for me. Any questions?
# Banish the Clippy-creating Bias Demon!

I [posted](http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2013/01/invoking-and-banishing-the-dread-demon-lead/) in Practical Ethics, arguing that if we mentally anthropomorphised certain risks, then we'd be more likely to give them the attention they [deserved](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate). Slaying the Cardiovascular Vampire, defeating the Parasitic Diseases Death Cult, and banishing the Demon of Infection... these stories give a mental picture of the actual good we're doing when combating these issues, and the bad we're doing by ignoring them. Imagine a politician proclaiming:

*   I will not let the Cardiovascular Vampire continue his unrelenting war upon the American people, slaying over a third of our citizens - the eldest, in their weakened state, among his most numerous victims. There is no negotiating with such a terrorist - I will direct the full resources of the state to crushing his campaign of destruction.

An amusing thing to contemplate - except, of course, if there were a real Cardiovascular Vampire, politicians and pundits would be falling over themselves with those kinds of announcements.

The field of AI is already over-saturated with anthropomorphisation, so we definitely shouldn't be imagining Clippy as some human-like entity that we can heroically combat, with all the rules of narrative applying. Still it can't hurt to dream up a hideous Bias Demon in its mishaped (though superficially plausible) lair, cackling in glee as someone foolishly attempts to implement an AI design without the proper safety precautions, smiling serenely as prominent futurist dismiss the risk... and dissolving, hit by the holy water of increased rationality and proper AI research. Those images might help us make the right emotional connection to what we're achieving here.
# Michael Vassar's Edge contribution: summary

Michael Vassar has written a [provocative response](http://edge.org/response-detail/23876) to this year's [Edge question](http://edge.org/annual-question/q2013): "What \*should\* we be worried about?". But, I'm confused about his post. My attempt to summarize his point of view follows:

1\. People have physiological needs (food, shelter, safety etc.) and social needs (esteem, love, respect etc.).

2\. People have mental programs to try to achieve both needs. 

3\. Modern society has been exceptional at fulfilling people's physiological needs but not very good at fulfilling their social needs.

4\. Thus, mental programs that were meant to achieve physiological needs do not develop very well relative to mental programs meant to achieve social needs .

5\. Mental programs for achieving physiological needs are more precise and hence harder to hack. Mental programs for social needs are fuzzy and vague and thus more easily hackable. 

6\. Thus, and because of (4), people are more hackable. 

7\. This manifests operationally as a few powerful people (the rich, the politicians etc.) hacking the majority into submitting to their will. 

8\. But even the powerful do not have significantly better mechanisms for precise thought. It is just that their social weirdness (need for power, lack of empathy etc.) allowed them to be the hacker instead of the hacked.

9\. Thus for most of our useful innovations, we are forced to rely on the rare people who are capable of precise abstract thought because they worry less about their social needs. 

So, I guess Vassar's point is that this pattern is what we should worry about as it systematically suppresses useful innovators.  

Would agree about my reading of his short essay? 

How solid do you think his argument is?
# Long-chain correlation: lead paint and crime

A friend has been asking my views on the likelihood that there's anything to a correlation between changing levels of lead in paint (and automotive exhaust) and the levels of crime. He quoted from a Reason Blog:

> So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a [2000 paper](http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/Nevin_2000_Env_Res_Author_Manuscript.pdf) (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

I responded with the following:

> Sounds like a stretch to me. I'd want to hear that they didn't test more than 5 other hypothesis before coming to that conclusion, or the p value was far better than .05. I kind of doubt that either is the case. 

He's apparently continued to pursue the question, and just forwarded these remarks from Steven Pinker that I thought were very illuminating, and probably deserve a place in this community's toolkit for skeptics. Pinker's main point is that the association between Lead and crime is a long tenuous chain of suppositions, and several of the intermediate points should be far easier to measure. Finding correlations at this distance is not very informative.

[http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker\_comments\_on\_lead\_removal\_and\_declining_crime.pdf](http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime.pdf)

Does the phrase "long-chain correlation" stick in your head and make it easier to dismiss this kind of argument?
# Update on Kim Suozzi (cancer patient in want of cryonics)

Kim Suozzi was a neuroscience student with brain cancer who wanted to be cryonically preserved but lacked the funds. She appealed to reddit and a foundation was set up, called the Society for Venturism.  Enough money was raised, and when she died on the January 17th, she was preserved by Alcor.    
  
I wasn't sure if I should post about this, but I was glad to see that enough money was raised and it was discussed on LessWrong [here](/lw/e9k/update_society_of_venturism_is_spearheading_kim/), [here](/lw/e8h/cryonics_donation_fund_for_kim_suozzi_established/ "here"), and [here](/lw/e5d/link_reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_im_dying_young/ "here").

[Source](http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/21/3900442/reddit-post-leads-to-funding-for-cryonic-freezing-of-student)

Edit:  [It looks like](http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/10/03/alcor-2012-strategy-meeting-kim-suozzis-cryonic-suspension-funded-and-more/) Alcor actually worked with her to lower the costs, and waived some of the fees.

Edit 2:  The [Society for Venturism](/r/discussion/lw/gfb/update_on_kim_suozzi_cancer_patient_in_want_of/8bvv) has been around for a while, and wasn't set up just for her.
# AidGrade - GiveWell finally has some competition

AidGrade is a new charity evaluator that looks to be comparable to GiveWell. Their primary difference is that they \*only\* focus on how charities compare along particular measured outcomes (such as school attendance, birthrate, chance of opening a business, malaria), without making any effort to compare between types of charities. (This includes interesting results like "Conditional Cash Transfers and Deworming are better at improving attendance rates than scholarships")

GiveWell also does this, but designs their site to direct people towards their top charities. This is better for people with don't have the time to do the (fairly complex) work of comparing charities across domains, but AidGrade aims to be better for people that just want the raw data and the ability to form their own conclusions.

I haven't looked it enough to compare the quality of the two organizations' work, but I'm glad we finally have another organization, to encourage some competition and dialog about different approaches.

This is a fun page to play around with to get a feel for what they do:  
[http://www.aidgrade.org/compare-programs-by-outcome](http://www.aidgrade.org/compare-programs-by-outcome)

And this is a blog post outlining their differences with GiveWell:  
[http://www.aidgrade.org/uncategorized/some-friendly-concerns-with-givewell](http://www.aidgrade.org/uncategorized/some-friendly-concerns-with-givewell)
# AI box: AI has one shot at avoiding destruction - what might it say?

Eliezer [proposed in a comment:](/r/discussion/lw/gej/i_attempted_the_ai_box_experiment_and_lost/8bje)

>More difficult version of AI-Box Experiment: Instead of having up to 2 hours, you can lose at any time if the other player types AI DESTROYED. The Gatekeeper player has told their friends that they will type this as soon as the Experiment starts. You can type up to one sentence in your IRC queue and hit return immediately, the other player cannot type anything before the game starts (so you can show at least one sentence up to IRC character limits before they can type AI DESTROYED). Do you think you can win?

This spawned a flurry of ideas on what the AI might say. I think there's a lot more ideas to be mined in that line of thought, and the discussion merits its own thread.

So, give your suggestion - what might an AI might say to save or free itself?

([The AI-box experiment is explained here](http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox))

EDIT: one caveat to the discussion: it should go without saying, but you probably shouldn't come out of this thinking, "Well, if we can just avoid X, Y, and Z, we're golden!" This should hopefully be a fun way to get us thinking about the broader issue of superinteligent AI in general. (Credit goes to Elizer, RichardKennaway, and others for the caveat)
# Want to help me test my Anki deck creation skills?

I'm interested in trying to make better Anki decks for the LessWrong community, but I want to see how well I can actually do this first. There's a lot of knowledge out there about how to format and create decks, but it's still a decent amount of work, and there are lots of people who would benefit from Anki decks, but who wouldn't make them themselves.

In order to test my deck-creation skills, I'd be willing to do a summary + deck of a chapter or two of a book, then release them to the community for feedback.

I have two questions:

*   Who's interested in/willing to evaluate the decks? If there are enough volunteers, I'd also be willing to try different deck-making approaches.
*   What book/chapters would people like to see covered? I'm currently thinking of trying to do Eat That Frog or some similar book with a lot of recommendations and useful details. I don't really think that a math-heavy book would be well-suited to this, at least now.

These links are fairly useful/relevant.

[http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)  
[http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm](http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm)

As a side note: I still do intend to do this, but have been fairly busy with the start of this semester. If there's no progress by March 1st, then you should consider this to be on indefinite pause.
# LW anchoring experiment: maybe

> I do an informal experiment testing whether LessWrong karma scores are susceptible to a form of anchoring based on the first comment posted; a medium-large effect size is found although the data does not fit the assumed normal distribution & the more sophisticated analysis is equivocal, so there may or may not be an anchoring effect.

Full writeup on [gwern.net](http://www.gwern.net/) at [http://www.gwern.net/Anchoring](http://www.gwern.net/Anchoring " LW anchoring experiment")
# In the beginning, Dartmouth created the AI and the hype

I've just been through the proposal for the Dartmouth AI conference of 1956, and it's a surprising read. All I really knew about it was its absurd optimism, as typified by the quote:

An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

But then I read the rest of the document, and was... impressed. Go ahead and [read it](http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html), and give me your thoughts. Given what was known in 1955, they were grappling with the right issues, and seemed to be making progress in the right directions and have plans and models for how to progress further. Seeing the phenomenally smart people who were behind this (McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, Shannon), and given the impressive progress that computers had been making in what seemed very hard areas of cognition (remember that this was before we discovered [Moravec's paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox))... I have to say that had I read this back in 1955, I think the rational belief would have been "AI is probably imminent". Some overconfidence, no doubt, but no good reason to expect these prominent thinkers to be so spectacularly wrong on something they were experts in.
# Best of Rationality Quotes, 2012 Edition

I finished creating the 2012 edition of the Best of Rationality Quotes collection. ([Here is last year's](/lw/3cn/best_of_rationality_quotes_20092010/).)

[**Best of Rationality Quotes 2012**](http://people.mokk.bme.hu/~daniel/rationality_quotes_2012/rq_only2012.html) (500kB page, 434 quotes)  
and [**Best of Rationality Quotes 2009-2012**](http://people.mokk.bme.hu/~daniel/rationality_quotes_2012/rq.html) (1200kB page, 1140 quotes)

The page was built by a short script ([source code here](http://people.mokk.bme.hu/~daniel/rationality_quotes_2012/)) from all the LW Rationality Quotes threads so far. (We had such a thread each month since April 2009.) The script collects all comments with karma score 10 or more, and sorts them by score. Replies are not collected, only top-level comments.

As is now usual, I provide various statistics and top-lists based on the data. (Source code for these is also at the above link, see the README.) I added these as comments to the post:

*   [Top quote contributors by total karma score collected](/lw/ggp/best_of_rationality_quotes_2012_edition/8cgh)
*   [Top quote contributors by karma score collected in 2012](/lw/ggp/best_of_rationality_quotes_2012_edition/8cgj)
*   [Top quote contributors by statistical significance level](/lw/ggp/best_of_rationality_quotes_2012_edition/8cgk) (See [this comment](/lw/3cn/best_of_rationality_quotes_20092010/37ej) for a description of this metric.)
*   [Top original authors by number of quotes](/lw/ggp/best_of_rationality_quotes_2012_edition/8cgl)
*   [Top original authors by total karma score collected](/lw/ggp/best_of_rationality_quotes_2012_edition/8cgm)
# Meetup : Love and Sex in Salt Lake City

Discussion article for the meetup : [Love and Sex in Salt Lake City](/meetups/ij)
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**WHEN:** 16 February 2013 01:00:00PM (-0700)  

**WHERE:** 1558 Palo Verde Way QE#12, cottonwood heights, ut 84121

It's February, the arbitrarily themed month of love and sex! Naturally, we're having a themed discussion to reflect this fact. We're also departing from the usual schedule and doing it on a Sunday so we can finally meet the mysterious can't-come-on-saturday crowd! Any snacks you might want to bring would be dully appreciated.

Discussion article for the meetup : [Love and Sex in Salt Lake City](/meetups/ij)
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# [LINK] NYT Article about Existential Risk from AI

[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/cambridge-cabs-and-copenhagen-my-route-to-existential-risk/](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/cambridge-cabs-and-copenhagen-my-route-to-existential-risk/)

Author: Huw Price (Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge)

The article is mainly about the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author's speculation about AI (and his association with Jaan Tallinn).  Nothing made me really stand up and think "This is something I've never heard on Less Wrong", but it is interesting to see Existential risk and AI getting more mainstream attention, and the author reproduces tabooing in his willful avoidance of attempting to define the term "intelligence".

The comments all miss the point or reproduce cached thoughts with frustrating predictability.  I think I find them to be so frustrating because these do not seem to be unintelligent people (by the standards of the internet at least; their comments have good grammar and vocabulary), but they are not really processing.
# Isolated AI with no chat whatsoever

Suppose you make a super-intelligent AI and run it on a computer. The computer has NO conventional means of output (no connections to other computers, no screen, etc). Might it still be able to get out / cause harm? I'll post my ideas, and you post yours in the comments.

(This may have been discussed before, but I could not find a dedicated topic)

My ideas:  
-manipulate current through its hardware, or better yet, through the power cable (a ready-made antenna) to create electromagnetic waves to access some wireless-equipped device. (I'm no physicist so I don't know if certain frequencies would be hard to do)  
-manipulate usage of its hardware (which likely makes small amounts of noise naturally) to approximate human speech, allowing it to communicate with its captors. (This seems even harder than the 1-line AI box scenario)  
-manipulate usage of its hardware to create sound or noise to mess with human emotion. (To my understanding tones may affect emotion, but not in any way easily predictable)  
-also, manipulating its power use will cause changes in the power company's database. There doesn't seem to be an obvious exploit there, but it IS external communication, for what it's worth.

Let's hear your thoughts! Lastly, as in similar discussions, you probably shouldn't come out of this thinking, "Well, if we can just avoid X, Y, and Z, we're golden!" There are plenty of unknown unknowns here.
# [minor] Separate Upvotes and Downvotes Implimented

It seems that if you look at the column on the right of the page, you can see upvotes and downvotes separately for recent posts. The same \[n, m\] format is displayed for recent comments, but it doesn't seem to actually sync with the score displaying on the comment. This feature only seems available on the sidebar: looking at the actual comment or post doesn't give you this information.

Thanks, whoever did this!
# Second major sequence now available in audio format

The sequence "[A Human's Guide to Words](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words)" is now available as a [professionally read podcast](http://castify.co/channels/16-less-wrong-a-human-s-guide-to-words).

We have started working on the large "[Reductionism](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Reductionism_%28sequence%29)" sequence which includes both the "[Joy in the Merely Real](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Joy_in_the_Merely_Real)" and the "[Zombies](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Zombies_(sequence))" sub-sequences.  They should be available in a couple of weeks.
# Singularity Institute is now Machine Intelligence Research Institute

[http://singularity.org/blog/2013/01/30/we-are-now-the-machine-intelligence-research-institute-miri/](http://intelligence.org/blog/2013/01/30/we-are-now-the-machine-intelligence-research-institute-miri/)

As [Risto Saarelma](/user/Risto_Saarelma/) pointed out on IRC, "Volcano Lair Doom Institute" would have been cooler, but this is pretty good too. As the word "Singularity" has pretty much [lost its meaning](http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2007/07/the-word-singularity-has-lost-all-meaning/), it's better to have a name that doesn't give a new person all kinds of weird initial associations as their first impression. And "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" is appropriately descriptive while still being general enough.
# [LINK] The Cryopreservation of Kim Suozzi

[http://www.alcor.org/blog/?p=2716](http://www.alcor.org/blog/?p=2716)

> With the inevitable end in sight – and with the cancer continuing to spread throughout her brain – Kim made the brave choice to refuse food and fluids. Even so, it took around 11 days before her body stopped functioning. Around 6:00 am on Thursday January 17, 2013, Alcor was alerted that Kim had stopped breathing. Because Kim’s steadfast boyfriend and family had located Kim just a few minutes away from Alcor, Medical Response Director Aaron Drake arrived almost immediately, followed minutes later by Max More, then two well-trained Alcor volunteers. As soon as a hospice nurse had pronounced clinical death, we began our standard procedures. Stabilization, transport, surgery, and perfusion all went smoothly. A full case report will be forthcoming.

Previously on LW: [Aug 18](/lw/e5d/link_reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_im_dying_young/), [Aug 25](/lw/e8h/cryonics_donation_fund_for_kim_suozzi_established/), [Aug 27](/lw/e9k/update_society_of_venturism_is_spearheading_kim/), [Jan 22](/r/discussion/lw/gfb/update_on_kim_suozzi_cancer_patient_in_want_of/).
# The value of Now.

I am an easily bored Omega-level being, and I want to play a game with you.

I am going to offer you two choices. 

Choice 1: You spend the next thousand years in horrific torture, after which I restore your local universe to precisely the state it is in now (wiping your memory in the process), and hand you a box with a billion dollars in it.

Choice two: You spend the next thousand years in exquisite bliss, after which I restore your local universe to precisely the state it is in now (wiping your memory in the process), and hand you a box with an angry hornet's nest in it.

Which do you choose?

Now, you blink. I smile and inform you that you made your choice, and hand you your box. Which choice do you hope you made?

You object? Fine. Let's play another game.

I am going to offer you two choices.

Choice 1: I create a perfect simulation of you, and run it through a thousand simulated years of horrific torture (which will take my hypercomputer all of a billionth of a second to run), after which I delete the simulation and hand you a box with a billion dollars in it.

Choice 2: I create a perfect simulation of you, and run it through a thousand simulated years of exquisite bliss (which will take my hypercomputer all of a billionth of a second to run), after which I delete the simulation and hand you a box with an angry hornet's nest in it.

Which do you choose?

Now, I smile and inform you that I already made a perfect simulation of you and asked it that question. Which choice do you hope it made?

Let's expand on that. What if instead of creating one perfect simulation of you, I create 2^^^^3 perfect simulations of you? Which do you choose now?

What if instead of a thousand simulated years, I let the boxes run for 2^^^^3 simulated years each? Which do you choose now?

I have the box right here. Which do you hope you chose?