trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Messy Science
by  — 2010-09-30T06:08:55.684Z

Sometimes it's obvious who the good scientists are. They're the ones who have the Nobel Prize, or the Fields Medal. They're the ones with named professorships. But sometimes it's not obvious -- at least, not obvious to me.

In young, interdisciplinary fields (I'm most familiar with certain parts of applied math) there are truly different approaches. So trying to decide between approaches is at least partly tied to whether you think something is, say, really a biology problem, a computer science problem, or a mathematics problem. (And that's influenced by your educational background.) There are issues of taste: some people prefer general, elegant solutions, while some people think it's more useful to have a precise model geared to a specific problem. There are issues of goals: do we want to build a tool that can be brought to market, do we want to prove a theorem, or do we want to model what a biological brain does? And there's always tension between making assumptions about the data that allow you to do prettier math, versus permitting more "nastiness" and obtaining more modest results.

There's a lot of debate, and it's hard for a novice to make comparisons; usually the only thing we can do is grab the coattails of someone who has proven expertise in an older, more traditional field. That's useful for becoming a scientist, but the downside is that you don't necessarily get a complete picture (as I get my education in math, I'm going to be more inclined to believe that the electrical engineers are doing it all wrong, even though the driving *reason* for that belief is that I didn't want to be an electrical engineer when I was 18.)

I'm hankering for some kind of meta-science that tells you how to judge between different avenues of research when they're actually different. (It's much easier to say "Lab A used sounder methodology than Lab B," or "Proof A is more general and provides a stronger result than Proof B.") Maybe it's silly on my part -- maybe it's asking to compare the incomparable. But it strikes me as relevant to the LW community -- especially when I see comments to the effect that such-and-such approach to AI is a dead end, not going to succeed, written as though the reason why should be obvious. I don't know about AI, but it does seem that correctly predicting which re...
Human inability to assign numerical probabilities
by AlexMennen — 2010-09-30T04:42:26.633Z

Whenever we talk about the probability of an event that we do not have perfect information about, we generally use qualitative descriptions (e.g. possible but improbable). When we do use numbers, we usually just stick to a probability range (e.g. 1/4 to 1/3). A Bayesian should be able to assign a probability estimate to any well-defined hypothesis. For a human, trying to assign a numerical probability estimate is uncomfortable and seems arbitrary. Even when we can give a probability range, we resist averaging the probabilities we expect. For instance, I'd say that Republicans are more likely than not to take over the House, but the Democrats still have a chance. After pressing myself, I managed to say that the probability of the Democratic party keeping control of the House next election is somewhere between 25% and 40%. Condensing this to 32.5% just feels wrong and arbitrary. Why is this? I have thought of three possible reasons, which I listed in order of likeliness:

Maybe our brains are just built like frequentists. If we innately think of probability of probabilities of being properties of hypotheses, it makes sense that we would not give an exact probability. If this is correct, it would mean that the tendency to think in frequentist terms is too entrenched to be easily untrained, as I try to think like a Bayesian, and yet still suffer from this effect, and I suspect the same is true of most of you.

Maybe since our ancestors never needed to express numerical probabilities, our brains never developed the ability to. Even if we have data spaces in our brains to represent probabilities of hypotheses, it could be buried in the decision-making portion of our brains, and the signal could get garbled when we try to pull it out in verbal form. However, we also get uncomfortable when forced to make important decisions on limited information, which would be evidence against this.

Maybe there is selection pressure against giving specific answers because it makes it harder to inflate your accuracy after the fact, resulting in lower status. This seems highly unlikely, but since I thought of it, I felt compelled to write it anyway.

As there are people on this forum who actually know a thing or two about cognitive science, I expect I'll get some useful responses. Discuss.

Edit: I did not mean to imply that it is wise for humans to give a precise probability estimate, only ...
Request for rough draft review: Navigating Identityspace
by Will_Newsome — 2010-09-29T17:51:18.184Z

Ignore this. After getting some much needed sleep I decided that the first half of this post, though necessary if I am to write the second half, isn't justified in being so complicated unless I actually use the added complications in solving the problems posed. First, I will use empiricism to see if this model is helpful in finding and verifying methods of attack on the problem of crafting a rationalist identity. If so, I will go back and try to simplify what I have here and make sure all parts are necessary to understand the solutions found.

Related to: Cached Selves, Cached Thoughts, A Rational Identity

Thesis: Harnessing the large pressures on thoughts and actions generated by innate drives for signaling, identity negotation, and identity formation by consciously aiming for instrumentally optimal attractors in identityspace should allow for structured self-improvement and a natural defense against goal distortion. First, though, we must see the true scope of the problem, and then find methods of attack.

Part One: Conceptualizing the Problem Domain

I: It Begins

Life is an odd, long journey. The difference between a young girl and the wizened professor she becomes is quite profound. One of those crazy things in life that seems so natural. The child surely has a very different set of aspirations than the professor. They look different. They have entirely different thoughts. They share the same genes, but the two are still way more different than the average pair of identical twins. The professor has very dull memories of the child, but that's a pretty weak link, and it only goes one way. They have different senses of self, different beliefs, different affiliations, different relationships, different goals. Different identities. Is the professor what the child would have wished to become, if the child had known more and thought faster, had become wiser and more enlightened by some magical process? It's hard to say; it's hard to say how well the child's theoretically reflectively endorsed goals were fulfilled, how many utilons were attained by that standard.

There is a long, long journey between the child and the professor, and the journey is frought with potential for both growth and goal distortion. Talk of genetic predispositions all you want, but Orwell wasn't that far off in claiming that man is infinitely malleable. That list of human universa...
Experts vs. parents
by PhilGoetz — 2010-09-29T16:48:55.781Z

I'm reviewing the literature on the link between food dyes and hyperactivity. Studies evaluate hyperactivity largely by observations made by teachers, psychologists, and/or parents. Observations by trained professionals using defined scales are sometimes considered superior to observations by parents. However, a meta-analysis of 15 studies (Schab+Trinh 2004, "Do artificial food colors promote hyperactivity in children with hyperactive syndromes?", Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 25(6): 423-434), found that:

While health professionals' ratings (ES = 0.107) and teachers' ratings (ES = 0.0810) are not statistically significant, parents' ratings are (ES = 0.441).

("Effect strength" = standard mean difference = average of (active - placebo) / standard deviation (pooled active and placebo). Thanks to Unnamed for reminding me.)

This isn't saying that parents reported more hyperactivity than professionals. It's saying that, across 15 double-blind placebo experiments, the behavior observed by parents had a strong correlation with whether the child received the test substance or the placebo, over four times as strong as that measured by professionals. Conclusion: Observation by parents is much more reliable than observation by trained professionals.

Schab & Trinh offered several reasons why this might be: Administration of test substance might be timed so behavior changes occur primarily at home; parents observe insomnia while teachers observe attention; parents may detect behaviors that are not listed in the DSM for ADHD; and one more - parents may be "particularly attuned to the idiosyncrasies of their own children". Gee, do you think?

Every parent is an expert on their child's behavior. Just not an accredited expert.

Disclaimer: At least one study has found the opposite result (Schachter et al. 2001, "How efficacious and safe is short-acting methylphenidate for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder in children and adolescents?", Can. Med. Assoc. J. 2001, 165:1475-1488). I haven't read it and don't know how strong the effect was.
Brain storm: What is the theory behind a good political mechanism?
by  — 2010-09-29T16:22:14.736Z

Patrissimo argue that we should try to design good mechanisms for governance rather than try and use the current broken mechanisms.

I agree, however we don't have a theoretical framework that we can use to evaluate different systems that are proposed. Ideally we would be able to crunch some numbers and show that a Futarchy responds to the desires/needs of the populace better than "voting for politicians who then make decisions" or anything else we come up with.

So we need to be able to do things like quantifying how well the system responds to the people. Pretending that humans are agents which have a utility function would seem like an obvious simplification to make in the model. We also need to formalise "being in charge".

I tend to formalise who has authority in a system as a number of pairings of people and posts. Posts might be the seat in the senate or the presidency, although we will want to expand this notion of post to look at all bureacracy and how they are filled.

One way a proposed mechanism would work would be through controlling the pairings. Futarchy suggests that we might look at other ways to make the mechanism work. This would be quite hard to model, we would have to model the incentives of the people making the prosperity indexes and the incentives of the market participants.

So we want a system that selects the people/post pairing that maximises the groups utility function, while assuming that the people in control of the post will maximise their utility and everyone else will try to (ab)use the mechanism to maximise their own utility.

Does this seem like the right track?
Hypothetical - Moon Station Government
by nick012000 — 2010-09-29T15:57:33.884Z

You are now in control of a habitat on the moon. It has no ties to any government; its creation was funded by a wealthy philanthropist who just wants people to emigrate from Earth. The cost of doing so is within the reach of a middle-class family if they sell their home; you can therefore expect a decent number of immigrants.

What sort of government do you establish? How do you go about ruling so that your new settlement on the moon will survive and thrive?
Permission for mind uploading via online files
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-09-29T08:23:13.232Z

Giulio Prisco made a blog post giving permission to use the data in his Gmail account to reconstruct an uploaded copy of him.

To whom it may concern:
I am writing this in 2010. My Gmail account has more than 5GB of data, which contain some information about me and also some information about the persons I have exchanged email with, including some personal and private information.
I am assuming that in 2060 (50 years from now), my Gmail account will have hundreds or thousands of TB of data, which will contain a lot of information about me and the persons I exchanged email with, including a lot of personal and private information. I am also assuming that, in 2060:
1) The data in the accounts of all Gmail users since 2004 is available.
2) AI-based mindware technology able to reconstruct individual mindfiles by analyzing the information in their aggregate Gmail accounts and other available information, with sufficient accuracy for mind uploading via detailed personality reconstruction, is available.
3) The technology to crack Gmail passwords is available, but illegal without the consent of the account owners (or their heirs).
4) Many of today's Gmail users, including myself, are already dead and cannot give permission to use the data in their accounts.
If all assumptions above are correct, I hereby give permission to Google and/or other parties to read all data in my Gmail account and use them together with other available information to reconstruct my mindfile with sufficient accuracy for mind uploading via detailed personality reconstruction, and express my wish that they do so.
Signed by Giulio Prisco on September 28, 2010, and witnessed by readers.
NOTE: The accuracy of the process outlined above increases with the number of persons who give their permission to do the same. You can give your permission in comments, Twitter or other public spaces.

Ben Goertzel copied the post and gave the same permission on his own blog. I made some substantial changes, such as adding a caveat to exclude the possibility of torture worlds (unlikely I know, but can't hurt), and likewise gave permission in my blog. Anders Sandberg comments on the thing.
Nootropics and Cognitive-enhancement Discussion Area
by knb — 2010-09-29T05:29:47.679Z

Many people on LW have expressed interest in nootropics and cognitive enhancement. However, since people are presumably interested in the long-term efficacy, side effects and withdrawal symptoms of using various supplements, open-threads (which quickly become hard to navigate and only last a couple weeks anyway) are a sub-optimal place to discuss the topic.

So I thought I would create a permanent area for people who want to discuss the topic long-term.

Here are some "quick links" courtesy of gwern:

http://www.erowid.org/

http://www.imminst.org/forum/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/

http://www.bluelight.ru/

And Wikipedia's main page on the topic.
The Direct Democracy Experiment
by Servant — 2010-09-29T04:36:22.151Z

>"The heart of the problem is not how we vote for officials - it's that we vote for officials, instead of getting to vote on issues.

>Americans are proud of being "governed by the people", yet a citizen has no effective way to have any influence on any particular issue! If it's very important to me to promote gay rights or environmental responsibility, I'm supposed to vote for a Democrat? How effective is that?

>We need to ditch representative democracy if we want democracy. (The next question is whether we want democracy.)"---PhilGoetz

The main problem with direct democracy is that we are reliant on "the people", who may be ill-informed and not make correct choices on issue questions. With a representative democracy, you may have intelligent and rational actors who would make better policy choices. PhilGoetz may disagree though, and believe that it is important to enfranschie "the people" in policymaking...

Rather than rely on philosophical discussion based on values, I propose an experiment to find out if PhilGoetz' Direct Democracy works.

I start up a simulation (which I will not name so that you don't play the simulation ahead of time). I will give you Policy Questions based on the simulation, where you will simply vote Yes or No. Majority rules. (To make it more interesting, I'll have each vote represent a random "interest group", with control over entire voting blocs.) Anybody can change their vote at any time. If people don't have the time to vote, then can develop a "profile" which would allow them to vote in proxy. Voting will end after a specific period of time, or the moment the vote crosses over the majority threshold, and stays over for a required period of time.

The simulation will end in a war against an NPC country. If you "win" this war, you win the simulation, the Direct Democracy works, and then future experiments could lead to people comparing the effectiveness of different types of "democracy" in creating good policy. If you "lose" the war, the government is destroyed, and you lose the simulation. Direct Democracy may has some problems and need to be modified or abanonded.

I will limit the amount of information I will give you. I'll only give enough information so you understand how the simulation works, but no more. It's up to you to decide what is the best thing to do.
Counterfactual mugging: alien abduction edition
by Emile — 2010-09-28T21:25:41.142Z

Omega kidnapps you and an alien from FarFarAway Prime, and gives you the choice: either the alien dies and you go home with your memory wiped, or you lose an arm, and you both go home with your memories wiped. Nobody gets to remember this. Oh and Omega flipped a coin to see who got to choose. What is your choice?

As usual, Omega is perfectly reliable, isn't hiding anything, and goes away afterwards. You also have no idea what the alien's values are, where it lives, what it would choose, nor what is the purpose of that organ that pulsates green light.

(This is my (incorrect) interpretation of counterfactual mugging, which we were discussing on the #lesswrong channel; Boxo pointed out that it's Prisonner's Dilemma where a random player is forced to cooperate, and isn't that similar to counterfactual mugging.)
Why learning programming is a great idea even if you'd never want to code for a living
by Morendil — 2010-09-28T16:51:04.145Z

Here is the short version:

Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking -- Bill Venables

It's short, apt, and to the point. It does have a significant flaw: it uses a term I've come to hate, "bug". I don't know if Grace Murray Hopper is to blame for this term and the associated image of an insect creeping into a hapless programmer's hardware, but I suspect this one word may be responsible in some part for the sad state of the programming profession.

You see, a lot gets written about bugs, debugging, testing, and so on. A lot of that writing only serves to obscure one plain fact, which if I were slightly more pretentious I'd call one of the fundamental laws of software:

Every "bug" or defect in software is the result of a mismatch between a person's assumptions, beliefs or mental model of something (a.k.a. "the map"), and the reality of the corresponding situation (a.k.a. "the territory").

The software industry is currently held back by a conception of programming-as-manual-labor, consisting of semi-mechanically turning a specification document into executable code. In that interpretation "bugs" or "gremlins" are the equivalent of machine failures: something unavoidable, to be controlled by rigorous statistical controls, replacement of faulty equipment (programmers), and the like.

A better description would be much closer to "the art of improving your understanding of some business domain by expressing the details of that domain in a formal notation". The resulting program isn't quite a by-product of that activity - it's important, though not nearly as important as distilling the domain understanding.

You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. -- Alan Perlis

So, learning how to program is one way of learning how to think better. But wait; there's more.

An art with a history

It's easy, if your conception of programming is "something people do to earn a few bucks on freelance exchange sites by coding up Web sites", to think of programming as an area where only the past five years or so are of any interest. Get up to speed on the latest technology, and you're good to go.

In fact programming is a discipline with a rich and interesting history1. There is a beauty in the concrete expression of algorithmic ideas in

...
Test to experiment with the Discussion section
by jimrandomh — 2010-09-28T14:34:16.039Z

This isn't a real article, it's just a test that I'm using to see what the Discussion section can and can't do. In particular, I want to see whether it's possible to move an article from the Discussion section to a Less Wrong top-level post (or vise-versa); if so, that would be a good strategy for drafts that need feedback before they're ready for the front page, but which are likely to generate topical discussions that should be preserved.
New Discussion section on LessWrong!
by Emile — 2010-09-28T13:08:26.251Z

There is a new discussion section on LessWrong.

According to the (updated) About page:

The Less Wrong discussion area is for topics not yet ready or not suitable for normal top level posts. To post a new discussion, select "Post to: Less Wrong Discussion" from the Create new article page. Comment on discussion posts as you would elsewhere on the site.

Votes on posts are worth ±10 points on the main site and ±1 point in the discussion area. [...] anyone can post to the discussion area.

(There is a link at the top right, under the banner)
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
by Kevin — 2010-09-28T12:12:44.009Z

The other most famous zen koan, has a distinct and correct answer that is not mu. In the same way that the answer to "what is the sound of two hands clapping?" is to perform an action, the answer to this koan is an action. While there is an endless amount of deconstruction that you can do once you have the answer, the correct answer itself is not deconstruction, but a simple answer.

I'm surprised at how rare knowledge of the answer of this koan is when it's easy to find the answer by Googling "what is the sound of one hand clapping?". I wonder why the answer to the mu koan seems to be so much more widespread than the answer to this koan, when the one hand clapping koan is even more popular in the West than the mu koan. Please don't post answers that come from Google in this thread without spoiler warnings.
Nothing wastes resources like saving them
by KatjaGrace — 2010-09-28T07:03:52.000Z

Imagine you find yourself in possession of a diamond mine. However you don’t like diamonds very much; you think they are vastly overvalued compared to important resources such as soil. You are horrified that people waste good soil in their front gardens where they are growing nothing of much use, and think it would be better if they decorated with a big pile of this useless carbon crystal. What do you do?

a) Cover your own lawn with diamonds

b) Donate as many diamonds as you can for free to anyone who might use them to decorate where they would use soil

c) Sell the diamonds. Buy something you do value.

d) Something else

Environmentalism often takes the form of the conviction that human labor should take the place of other resource use. Bikes should be ridden instead of cars, repair is superior to replacement, washing and sorting recycling is better than using up tip space, and so on. This is usually called ‘saving resources’ not ‘using up more valuable resources’. One might argue that while human labor is usually relatively expensive (you can generally make much more selling five minutes of time than a liter of tip space and a couple of cans worth of clean used steel), environmentalists often consider the other resources to be truly more valuable, often because they are non-renewable and need to be shared between everyone in the future too. Even so, since when is it sensible to treat your overvalued resources as if they were worthless? How will resources come to be used more efficiently if those who care about the issue destroy their own potential by donating their most valuable assets to the world at large in the form of the very things which the world supposedly blithely squanders?