trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
In the Pareto-optimised crowd, be sure to know your place
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-01-07T18:12:03.561Z

tldr: In a population playing independent two-player games, Pareto-optimal outcomes are only possible if there is an agreed universal scale of value relating each players' utility, and the players then acts to maximise the scaled sum of all utilities.

In a previous post, I showed that if you are about the play a bargaining game with someone when the game's rules are initially unknown, then the best plan is not to settle on a standard result like the Nash Bargaining Solution or the Kalai-Smorodinsky Bargaining Solution (see this post). Rather, it is to decide in advance how much your respective utilities are worth relative to each other, and then maximise their sum. Specifically, if you both have (representatives of) utility functions u1 and u2, then you must pick a θ>0 and maximise u1+θu2 (with certain extra measures to break ties). This result also applies if the players are to play a series of known independent games in sequence. But how does this extend to more than two players?

Consider the case where there are three players (named imaginatively 1, 2 and 3), and that they are going to pair off in each of the possible pairs (12, 23 and 31) and each play a game. The utility gains from each game are presumed to be independent. Then each of the pairs will choose factors θ12, θ23 and θ31, and seek to maximise u1+θ12u2, u2+θ23u3 and u3+θ31u1 respectively. Note here that I am neglecting tie-breaking and such; the formal definitions needed will be given in the proof section.

A very interesting situation comes up when θ12θ23θ31=1. In that case, there is an universal scale of "worth" for each of the utilities: it's as if the three utilities are pounds, dollars and euros. Once you know the exchange rate from pounds to dollars (θ12), and from dollars to euros (θ23), then you know the exchange rate from euros to pounds (θ31=1/(θ12θ23)). We'll call these situations transitive.

Ideally we'd want the outcomes to be Pareto-optimal for the three utilities. Then the major result is:

The outcome utilities are Pareto-optimal if and only if the θ are transitive.

What if there are not three, but hundreds, or thousands of players, playing games with each other? If we assume that the utilities derived from each game is independent, then we get a similar result: given a sequence of...
The "map" and "territory" analogy as it pertains to potentially novel territories that people may not anticipate
by InquilineKea — 2011-01-07T09:19:45.969Z

So in terms of the "map" and "territory" analogy, the goal of rationality is to make our map correspond more closely with the territory. This comes in two forms - (a) area and (b) accuracy. Person A could have a larger map than person B, even if A's map might be less accurate than B's map. There are ways to increase the area of the territory - often by testing things in the boundary value conditions of the territory. I often like asking boundary value/possibility space questions like "well, what might happen to the atmosphere of a rogue planet as time approaches infinity?", since I feel like they might give us additional insight about the robustness of planetary atmosphere models across different environments (and also, the possibility that I might be wrong makes me more motivated to actually spend additional effort to test/calibrate my model more than I otherwise would test/calibrate it). My intense curiosity with these highly theoretical questions often puzzles the experts in the field though, since they feel like these questions aren't empirically verifiable (so they are considered less "interesting"). I also like to study other things that many academics aren't necessarily comfortable with studying (perhaps since it is harder to be empirically rigorous), such as the possible social outcomes that could spring out of a radical social experiment. When you're concerned with maintaining the accuracy of your map, it may come at the sacrifice of dA/dt, where A is area (so your Area increases more slowly with time).

I also feel that social breaching experiments are another interesting way of increasing the volume of my "map", since they help me test the robustness of my social models in situations that people are unaccustomed to. Hackers often perform these sorts of experiments to test the robustness of security systems (in fact, a low level of potentially embarrassing hacking is probably optimal when it comes to ensuring that the security system remains robust - although it's entirely possible that even then, people may pay too much attention to certain models of hacking, causing potentially malicious hackers to dream up of new models of hacking).

With possibility space, you could code up the conditions of the environment in a k-dimensional space such as (1,0,0,1,0,...), where 1 indicates the existence of some variable in a particular environment, and 0 ind...
Avoiding the Study of Being Sincere
by Vaniver — 2011-01-07T08:10:33.269Z

This is a mind-dump of sorts: I don't expect I can make a top-level post of this without extensive external input, and am not sure there's anything interesting here. But the possibility seems high enough to consider it openly (and if someone else sees something here they can run with, go for it).

I can't reproduce the entire train of thought (though a lot of it was based on thinking about Joseph Smith and Mormons), but I was just struck by something: the difference between the study of being sincere and the study of revolutions.

Most people spend their time thinking about sincerity: what do I like and dislike? What would a utopia look like? It's primarily speculation about and statement of desires, which are relatively easy to determine and manufacture. I should be clear here that I'm not talking about the study of lying or persuasion, but of your belief about something in particular: in truly believing something and that belief having power over you. I've read somewhat frequently around here people swearing on their 'strength as a rationalist', a phrase that utterly fails to move me but apparently does move them. I am not sincere about rationalism the way they are; that's what I mean by being sincere (does anyone have another word they would recommend I use instead?).

Studying revolutions, however, seems almost entirely different. It's not a question of like and dislike, but effective and ineffective. Rather than focusing on outcomes, it focuses on processes (judged by their outcomes). While morality is a central fixture of sincerity, amorality is a hallmark of effective revolutionaries- any moral actions are justified by amoral reasons.

Every distinction wants to be a dichotomy, but obviously that is not the case here- it's easy to be both sincere and a revolutionary (though a fairly large set of beliefs are difficult to be sincere about while a revolutionary).

The first example is a simplified one: the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789. The Americans talked a lot about checks and balances; the French talked a lot about liberty and brotherhood. Their outcomes suggest not that liberty or brotherhood are bad things to talk about, but that not talking about checks and balances is a terrible idea. The Americans were interested in the method of government while the French were solely interested in the outcome of government.

The relationship to ra...
Sociopathy and Rationality
by InquilineKea — 2011-01-07T07:24:15.679Z

So I randomly ran across a very interesting site about sociopaths. The links at the FAQ and informal test are particularly intriguing (especially since many of us score lower on all 5 moral dimensions measured at yourmorals.org, although many of us would score higher if a liberty dimension was added). Sociopaths often get a lot of flak, and a lot of this flak is completely understandable, since sociopaths often effectively destroy the perception between malleability and effort (since their personalities are effectively immalleable, and no amount of effort, expressed traditionally, could help them - although I do believe that there are highly creative solutions that could integrate them better in society where they won't feel like they have a need to constantly take from others) - and people who do believe in the correlation between malleability and effort often do end up more able to change themselves. Sociopaths also effectively reduce the trust people have with everyone else - because anyone else could be seen as a potential sociopath (the possibility of sociopaths forces people to use "tit-for-tat" as the default strategy for dealing with others, rather than the "altruistic" strategy - but people often end up becoming even less generous than "tit-for-tat" due to their overreactions to negative experiences). At the same time, I was quite struck by how many of these traits (expressed in both links) also correlate with traits we see in the highly rational (as sociopaths often lack much of the emotional baggage found in neurotypicals). Of course, there are the dysfunctional sociopaths who are truly dangerous for society at large, and the more functional sociopaths, who can appreciate (through some highly creative arguments - I've used some of those arguments on myself to reduce my adolescent anger towards humanity - but it's hard for people to really think of those arguments unless they've gone through a similar phase of anger themselves) that the world does not revolve around their lives.

In particular, I found the linked sociopath test to be intriguing, since I fit all 12 of those traits (except for possibly the trait about embarrassment). The first observation was particularly interesting: "1. Sociopaths typically don't smalltalk about themselves as much as normal people do. They will direct the conversation back to the new acquaintance as mu...
My story / owning one's reasons
by jwhendy — 2011-01-07T00:17:49.840Z

This is my first post. I've lurked for quite some time and just recently took the opportunity to join this week. I doubt that anything I post will be groundbreaking, but one thought has been developing that I thought I could at least try writing about. I'd appreciate suggestions regarding the content, but also about appropriateness at LessWrong in general. I have mainly read top level threads, but in my perusal of the discussion area it seems that, for the most part, most things are acceptable... so here goes.

Background

I consider this relevant and somewhat necessary. I also think many may find this interesting. I went through a "conversion experience" approximately 9 years ago next month. In my teens I was a heavy user of drugs and alcohol and was sent to a 12 step boarding school in upstate New York from my home in Milwaukee. After a "breakdown" experience there which amounted to realizing the legal ramifications of my substance usage and receiving a reprieve from those consequences (probation), I believed that god had saved my life. I dedicated myself to the 12 steps [1] and a spiritual path, which took the form of taking seriously my Catholic faith.

I moved to Minnesota for college and joined a Catholic Outreach group. I believed that living out a religious faith was the key to maintaining my sobriety. I also attended AA meetings. I maintained an extremely orthodox and passionate faith for 6 years. I was about as religious as they come -- attending adoration nightly for a month at one point, daily prayer/scripture study, prayer and "discernment" for big decisions (marrying my wife, buying a house, etc.), and so on. And don't view these as pew-warming exercises; I meant everything I did. I was passionate about the second chance I believed I'd been given, thought god was responsible, and had dedicated my life to being his faithful servant and living a holy life.

Turning Point

Last Christmas while visiting my parents, I suddenly began to doubt. I still couldn't tell you exactly why. I simply recall wondering if anyone other than the gospel writers wrote about Jesus. Google let me down. I was very disappointed to find that hardly anyone had even cared to mention him. Now, as an aside, I am almost positive that under different circumstances I would have assumed there was a perfectly reasonable explanation and simply moved on. I had never before actually tho...
How do you accept others even when they're so irrational?
by InquilineKea — 2011-01-06T22:45:10.830Z

I don't think that it's possible to convince most people to be more rational. It usually causes more problems than it's worth. And as a result, I often have to make white lies or pretend to believe in things I don't believe in, even though those things kill me inside.

And the truth is, that the most rational decisions you can make for yourself are decisions that take the irrational feelings of others in account (and the immalleability of them). It's hard to empathize with the irrational feelings of others. But there may be creative ways to trick myself into accepting them.

For example, I think that "overmoralization" is one of the major sources of social irrationality. For example, people are willing to take drastic actions (to irrational extents) to punish victimless crimes like marijuana smoking. The "make-work" bias documented in Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter" is another irrational bias that comes from "overmoralization" (certainly there are good reasons to stigmatize unemployment on a societal level, but the level that it takes is often irrational). And as someone with both Asperger's and Attention Deficit Disorder (both cases far more severe than the cases of anyone else I know), I've often had to take extremely untraditional approaches in order to learn as well as I can (or in other words, there are certain rules and norms that I *will* break), even though many people find these untraditional approaches to be morally jarring (which comes from the "overmoralization" of fairness and respect for the rules). Furthermore, some people do act like altruistic punishers even when it isn't in their best interest to do so (since it can alienate them from others) - breaking a friendship because you disapprove of someone's victimless action is sort of like "altruistic punishment", although it may not be actually altruistic if the person's values against that victimless action really are so fundamental to himself/herself.

Of course, I can hide potentially objectionable things that I do from others. And I do try to think of ways in which I could be more normal (and creative ways to reframe social norms in a system that's more acceptable than me), and I've managed to talk myself out of using Asperger's as an excuse. But hiding things makes me emotionally distant from just about everyone, and I'd like to hear suggestions on what to do, or...
An Overview of Formal Epistemology (links)
by lukeprog — 2011-01-06T19:57:20.972Z

The branch of philosophy called formal epistemology has very similar interests to those of the Less Wrong community. Formal epistemologists mostly work on (1) mathematically formalizing concepts related to induction, belief, choice, and action, and (2) arguing about the foundations of probability, statistics, game theory, decision theory, and algorithmic learning theory.

Those who value the neglected virtue of scholarship may want to study for themselves the arguments that have lead scholars either toward or against the very particular positions on formalizing language, decision theory, explanation, and probability typically endorsed at Less Wrong. As such, here's a brief overview of the field by way of some helpful links:

Wikipedia, "Formal Epistemology" (contains an excellent list of today's leading formal epistemologists)
Hendricks, Mainstream and Formal Epistemology (perhaps the best "introduction" to the subject, especially for those familiar with mainstream epistemology)
The Reasoner, a free monthly digest of short articles and interviews on formal epistemology
Choice & Inference, a group blog
Introduction to Formal Epistemology, a short Stanford course with lecture slides and some literature in PDF
Hajek & Hartmann, "Bayesian Epistemology" and Talbott, "Bayesian Epistemology" and Bovens & Hartmann, Bayesian Epistemology (an important sub-field of formal epistemology)
Jeffrey, Subjective Probability (free introductory book on a Less Wrong-ish approach to probability.

Enjoy.
Help: Neurochemistry question
by Will_Newsome — 2011-01-06T15:55:58.866Z

I was looking at a hypothesis that bipolar disorder is probably due to problems with neocortical sodium-potassium pump activity cyclically decreasing and thus allowing increased resistance, which increases neuronal excitability by the square of the resistance. According to what I've read on Wikipedia it seems that agonizing Gi proteins would inhibit cAMP production and therefore downregulate sodium pump activity (this was the most tenuous part, and the reference was unintelligible) and increase neuronal excitability. But 5-HT1A (a type of Gi protein) agonists have been shown to be useful for improving symptoms of schizophrenia, which is typically thought of as resulting from increased neuronal excitability. Sign error? What's up? I don't have any model of the underlying mechanisms, and only vaguely know what words like 'downregulate' mean.

ETA: But apparently http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risperidone , a 5-HT2A agonist, also supposedly mitigates symptoms of schizophrenia, which is weird because it increases neuronal excitation. It seems that the flawed assumption is that schizophrenia has something to do with 5-HT-caused neuronal excitability.

Thus it seems like maybe you can reduce bipolar tendencies by taking 5-HT1A antagonists, and schizophrenia is its own separate problem that is perhaps solved by taking a D2 antagonist. 5-HT2A agonists increase neuronal excitation which may interact somehow with the the 5-HT1A antagonists. I'm still confused.

There's this other problem where if the main reason D2 and 5-HT1A work is by decreasing neuronal excitability that might just be because sedate people are more similar to each other than manic people, but the kind of neuronal excitability that makes people manic and the kind that makes people schizoid are qualitatively different, and hence the difference in receptors being important. It could be that 5-HT2A agonists and 5-HT1A antagonists increase and decrease neuronal excitability respectively, but in different ways such that they're not countervailing.
In Defense of Objective Bayesianism: MaxEnt Puzzle.
by Larks — 2011-01-06T00:56:50.739Z

In Defense of Objective Bayesianism by Jon Williamson was mentioned recently in a post by lukeprog as the sort of book that should be being read by people on Less Wrong. Now, I have been reading it, and found some of it quite bizarre. This point in particular seems obviously false. If it’s just me, I’ll be glad to be enlightened as to what was meant. If collectively we don’t understand, that’d be pretty strong evidence that we should read more academic Bayesian stuff.

Williamson advocates use of the Maximum Entropy Principle. In short, you should take account of the limits placed on your probability by the empirical evidence, and then choose a probability distribution closest to uniform that satisfies those constraints.

So, if asked to assign a probability to an arbitrary A, you’d say p = 0.5. But if you were given evidence in the form of some constraints on p, say that p ≥ 0.8, you’d set p = 0.8, as that was the new entropy-maximising level. Constraints are restricted to Affine constraints. I found this somewhat counter-intuitive already, but I do follow what he means.

But now for the confusing bit. I quote directly;

“Suppose A is ‘Peterson is a Swede’, B is ‘Peterson is a Norwegian’, C is ‘Peterson is a Scandinavian’, and ε is ‘80% of all Scandinavians are Swedes’. Initially, the agent sets P(A) = 0.2, P(B) = 0.8, P(C) = 1 P(ε) = 0.2, P(A & ε) = P(B & ε) = 0.1. All these degrees of belief satisfy the norms of subjectivism. Updating by maxent on learning ε, the agent believes Peterson is a Swede to degree 0.8, which seems quite right. On the other hand, updating by conditionalizing on ε leads to a degree of belief of 0.5 that Peterson is a Swede, which is quite wrong. Thus, we see that maxent is to be preferred to conditionalization in this kind of example because the conditionalization update does not satisfy the new constraints X’, while the maxent update does.”

p80, 2010 edition. Note that this example is actually from Bacchus et al (1990)

...
the Universe, Computability, and the Singularity
by mwengler — 2011-01-05T17:19:24.233Z

EDIT at Karma -5: Could the next "good citizen" to vote this down leave me a comment as to why it is getting voted down, and if other "good citizens" to pile on after that, either upvote that comment or put another comment giving your different reason?

Original Post:

Questions about the computability of various physical laws recently had me thinking: "well of course every real physical law is computable or else the universe couldn't function." That is to say that in order of the time-evolution of anything in the universe to proceed "correctly," the physical processes themselves must be able to, and in real-time, keep up with the complexity of their actual evolution. This seems to me a proof that every real physical process is computable by SOME sort of real computer, in the degenerate case that real computer is simply an actual physical model of the process itself, create that model, observe whichever features of its time-evolution you are trying to compute, and there you have your computer.

Then if we have a physical law whose use in predicting time evolution is provably uncomputable, either we know that this physical law is NOT the only law that might be formulated to describe what it is purporting to describe, or that our theory of computation is incomplete. In some sense what I am saying is consistent with the idea that quantum computing can quickly collapse down to plausibly tractable levels the time it takes to compute some things which, as classical computation problems, blow up. This would be a good indication that quantum is an important theory about the universe, that it not only explains a bunch of things that happen in the universe, but also explains how the universe can have those things happen in real-time without making mistakes.

What I am wondering is, where does this kind of consideration break with traditional computability theory? Is traditional computability theory limited to what Turing machines can do, while perhaps it is straightforward to prove that the operation of this Universe requires computation beyond what Turing machines can do? Is traditional computability theory limited to digital representations whereas the degenerate build-it-and-measure-it computer is what has been known as an analog computer? Is there somehow a level or measure of artificiality which must be present ...
Possible Cockatrice in written form
by Aurini — 2011-01-05T09:54:21.271Z

My various interweb browsings stumbled me upon a potential Cockatrice in written, philisophical form. I've thus far read through the first chapter, and it is less anti-rational than most philosophical writings.

I'm reading through it right now, and will provide my feedback when I'm done, likely as a front-page post.

Personally, I'm a Fatalist, with some sort of Weird Soldier Ethic, who plans to go out the same way that Hunter did (if the cops don't get me first), but I've got a bunch of nonsense to Write first. I figure that'll make me somewhat immune. That aside, I doubt it's a real cockatrice - or we would've heard about it before.

It is a strong exercise in Nihilism. So, with those cautions given, I offer it to you: an extensive suicide letter.

Tip of the hat to this guy.