trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Smart, (young), ambitious and clueless -- what to do to maximize goodness?
by Caesium — 2011-07-14T16:06:38.458Z

You're smart, want to help the world and are willing to work hard. You have no serious ties such as children or a marriage that would prevent you from making serious changes to your life, and you are willing to place others needs ahead of your own hedonistic desires. Given this, what should you do?

Should you aim to get involved personally with causes you feel passionately about? You can have greater control over your contribution if you do this, but can you achieve the most good in this way? Should you operate at a meta-level, such as by trying to convince other people to change their charitable giving, attempting to influence government policy, or by raising awareness of existential risks, or should you try and directly tackle the problems facing the world -- such as by donating money yourself, or by tackling open problems in friendly AI?

Once you've figured out what to do, you still have to find a way to support yourself, and fund any organizations or projects you wish to support. You could work for an existing organization active in the area that you are interested in - bearing in mind that ones contribution will only be the benefit of hiring you rather than the next-best guy. Or you could work in a completely unrelated job, and work part-time on the cause you are interested in; this is a route followed by many open source developers, e.g. the prolific Fabrice Bellard. Alternatively, you could aim to earn as much money as possible, and use this money to fund causes or projects you are interested in; this is the route followed by Jeff Hawkins, who founded Palm, Inc. in order to fund AI and neuroscience research, as well as notable philantropists such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

The problem is a simple one: how should one lead ones life in order to maximize the positive impact it has on others? There is an ample amount of data to draw from, such as charity rankings by GiveWell, salary data and personal experience. If rationality has any real-world benefits, then a discussion amongst rationalists should make it possible for substantially better decisions to be made than would otherwise be the case.

References

Existential Risk Reduction Careers Network

Thiel Fellows

Income and happiness (Wikipedia)

Cost effectiveness of aid (GiveWell)
Rationalist approach to developing Writing skills
by FiftyTwo — 2011-07-14T15:00:39.942Z

The ability to write efficiently and persuasively is important in many areas of life, and especially for spreading rationalist memes and hence raising the sanity waterline.

While there are a lot of very good and persuasive writers of both fiction and non-fiction on Less Wrong there seems to be relatively little advice on how to improve one's writing skills.

While there are a huge number of writing guides available, much like general self help they rarely reference studies on the effectiveness of the advice contained, and while some come from very successful authors, the problems of generalising from one example are well known.

Given this, would people be willing to supply rationalist supported strategies for improving writing skills?

Notes,

I've looked for previous posts on this subject, but if I have missed a previous good discussion please link to it and I will close this thread.

The most obvious piece of advice would be to engage in large amounts of writing practice, but hopefully you will be able to supply some more strategic advice than that.

Edit,

Consensus so far is that a high level of practice is very important, ideally paired with useful and continuous feedback. Otherwise a general agreement that the process is very idiosyncratic, with a few good suggestions for resources that have worked for individuals.

Ideally we'd be looking for advice that has helped a large majority of people to have tried it, if any such exists.

(Also added links)
Cognitive Load from simple computations
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-07-14T14:35:57.919Z

From Ken Burnside, a game designer

Counting is easier than addition.

Addition is easier than subtraction.

Subtraction can be done, but combining addition and subtraction into the same game mechanic will slow down play considerably. (“I have +2 for flanking, and -2 for lighting…”) is surprisingly fiddly in play.

BIG GAP HERE

Subtraction and addition in the same operation is easier than most forms of multiplication. For example, it’s better to express a critical hit as “+100% damage” rather than “x2″ damage. Not only does it avoid edge cases (where you have two critical hit multipliers that both apply) it’s faster at the gaming table because it’s addition.

Multiplication by 10, 5, 4 and 2 are light weight enough to be usable. If you’re using a multiplicative operator other than one of those four digits, you need to change something earlier in the process. When in doubt, make it addition.

BIGGER GAP HERE

Division is only tolerable when A) you’re dividing an integer and expect an integer outcome, or are rounding to an integer outcome, and B) the divisor is 2 or 10. I specifically built some parts of my games for modulus division to avoid these problem.

GINORMOUS GAP HERE

Square roots, cube roots and exponentiation are probably not game friendly to most people. When in doubt, transform your equations to use one of the first two items on this list.

My impression is that Ken's games are geeky, so it's reasonable to assume his players are more adept with arithmetic than most people. I'm posting this because it might be worth knowing for anyone who's trying to explain something that involves numbers.
Yet another cognitive biases book
by CronoDAS — 2011-07-14T08:03:13.602Z

I found this one because I'm on Sam Harris's email list.

Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives by Dean Buonomano

(Amazon.com link)

The preview didn't really give me all that good an impression... it mostly seemed to be stuff I already knew or sort-of knew. It feels easy to read; not dense like a textbook or GEB, but sort of information-light. Anyone else have any impressions?
Meetup : Bangalore: August Meetup
by subod_83 — 2011-07-14T05:59:21.985Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bangalore: August Meetup

WHEN:
21 August 2011 04:00:00PM (+0530)

WHERE:
Koshy's Parade Cafe, St Marks Rd, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

During our previous meetup we decided that the August meetup would be more structured and that the members attending would read one or more Sequences. For more details please join the facebook group "Less Wrong Bangalore".

Discussion article for the meetup : Bangalore: August Meetup
Stanford Prison Retrospective
by Prismattic — 2011-07-14T01:23:49.238Z

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I found this [retrospective](http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2011/julaug/features/spe.html) interesting. What really caught my eye is that, to some degree, it contradicts the main lesson of the experiment -- that context more than character determines behavior. If David Eschelman is accurately/truthfully recalling his role, then it seems like his individual character actually did play a role in how quickly things spiralled out of control (though the willingness of the other guards to go along with him supports the original conclusion).
"A good volunteer is hard to find"
by gwern — 2011-07-13T21:48:32.698Z

From the GiveWell blog, which is often interesting & applicable to our interests, comes a post on the quality of their volunteers:

"In our experience, valuable volunteers are rare. The people who email us about volunteer opportunities generally seem enthusiastic about GiveWell’s mission, and motivated by a shared belief in our goals to give up their free time to help us. Yet, the majority of these people never complete useful work for us.

We ask new volunteers to first complete a test assignment that takes about 2-4 hours. The assignment involves fixing the formatting of our list of sources on two practice pages and allows us to get a sense of their attention to detail and commitment to volunteer hours. Of the 34 people who emailed us expressing an interest in volunteering between September 2010 (when we started keeping track) and May 2011, only 7 have completed the test assignment and gone on to complete valuable work for us.

Of the 34, 10 never responded to my email outlining what GiveWell volunteers do and asking them if they’d like me to send the first assignment. 13 responded to this email and I sent them the first assignment, but they didn’t complete it. The final 4 completed the test assignment, but didn’t send back the next (real) assignment I sent.

It seems rather surprising that almost 80% of people who take the initiative to seek us out and ask for unpaid work fail to complete a single assignment. But maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. Writing an email is quick and exciting; spending a few hours fixing punctuation is not."

(The dropout rate is probably not due to the perceived low utility of the work - GiveWell seems to be up-front that the test assignment is a test.)

I draw a few lessons from this:

there is likely low-hanging fruit for volunteers in charities or communities in the area of sustained tedious tasks; collecting anecdotes, reports, links, that sort of thing come to mind as LW examples

additional incentives like jsalvatier's contests may be necessary to draw out community volunteer resources

tricking volunteers into work might be a fruitful approach - perhaps asking for explicit pointers to research or other help might not work, but presenting a half-complete version will elicit useful responses one can mine. (A more productive kind of trolling.)
Why is there variation in species?
by  — 2011-07-13T21:37:43.133Z

This may be a question trivial for you, but: Why is there variation inside a species? On some instances, you could argue that the Nash equilibrum is mixed (for example, different men prefer different physical appearances of women, so women of different appearance can coexist), but: What the hell is the evolutionary advantage in having zits?

Probably, it has something to do with genes of different types (all of whom have a good reason to stay in the gene pool by a mixed Nash equilibrium) mixing up and producing zits, but: Why should evolution, that managed to create eyes and brains, be unable to get something against this working if other members of the same species can perfectly manage to avoid them? Because such a gene can easily exist in individuals that don't have that particular problem (and I can't think of any adverse effects this would have), it should be able to spread even if not all members of the species have a particular problem. The disturbing thing is that I imagine a working fix without adverse effects to require only pulling some hormonal levers, not coming up with the complication that is needed to make a proto-eye better by a positive amount (so that the mutation can survive).
What are some inspiring biographies of people for us LessWrong types?
by InquilineKea — 2011-07-13T20:25:11.381Z

So like many LWers, I'm primarily interested in what Robin Hanson calls "foragers", as opposed to "farmers". By LW standards, even most Nobel laureates are "farmers".

However, there are some exceptions (and some farmers can be interesting, too).

Anyways, which ones are your favorites? I'm starting to *really* like all the biographies of Watson and Crick (especially Olby's biography of Crick), since they were both iconoclastic foragers (Crick, in fact, seems uncannily similar to Feynman). Crick also has an autobiography but it isn't that insightful about his life.

And then there are the Feynman and Einstein biographies - Olby's biography of Feynman being the prototypical example. I'm checking out an Einstein biography right now - I'll see how that goes.

Among people who are especially underrated - I think Herbert Simon's autobiography (http://www.amazon.com/Models-My-Life-Herbert-Simon/dp/026269185X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1310586938&sr=8-3 ) might be particularly interesting. I just checked it out from the library.

Then there's Elizier Yudowsky's autobiography.
How much do you really love the internet?
by KatjaGrace — 2011-07-13T18:37:32.000Z

Would you give up the internet for a million dollars?

Many people say they would not. If you are one of them, and in a committed relationship, which of the following is true:

a) You would also not give up your partner for a million dollars

b) The internet is more valuable to you than your partner

The first one looks safer. But people change partners a lot, which suggests for many there is much less than a million dollars expected difference between one’s partner and the next best alternative, since the next best alternative frequently scales that gap and becomes the best. If every time a person changed partners the relative value of the new and old partners had changed by around two million dollars in the new partner’s favor, people should pretty soon stop expecting their current partner to be worth so much in the long run.

It’s easy to offer the internet endless love while nobody ever offers you much reward for giving it up. Relationships are an interesting ‘sacred value’ to compare because we really are frequently in a position to give one up permanently for some other benefit.
[Link] Computer improves its Civilization II gameplay by reading the manual
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-07-13T12:00:30.053Z

Press release

Computers are great at treating words as data: Word-processing programs let you rearrange and format text however you like, and search engines can quickly find a word anywhere on the Web. But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin?
One test might be whether the computer could analyze and follow a set of instructions for an unfamiliar task. And indeed, in the last few years, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have begun designing machine-learning systems that do exactly that, with surprisingly good results.
In 2009, at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), researchers in the lab of Regina Barzilay, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, took the best-paper award for a system that generated scripts for installing a piece of software on a Windows computer by reviewing instructions posted on Microsoft’s help site. At this year’s ACL meeting, Barzilay, her graduate student S. R. K. Branavan and David Silver of University College London applied a similar approach to a more complicated problem: learning to play “Civilization,” a computer game in which the player guides the development of a city into an empire across centuries of human history. When the researchers augmented a machine-learning system so that it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy, its rate of victory jumped from 46 percent to 79 percent.
Starting from scratch
“Games are used as a test bed for artificial-intelligence techniques simply because of their complexity,” says Branavan, who was first author on both ACL papers. “Every action that you take in the game doesn’t have a predetermined outcome, because the game or the opponent can randomly react to what you do. So you need a technique that can handle very complex scenarios that react in potentially random ways.”
Moreover, Barzilay says, game manuals have “very open text. They don’t tell you how to win. They just give you very general advice and suggestions, and you have to figure out a lot of other things on your own.” Relative to an application like the software-i

...
Do not ask what rationalists should do
by  — 2011-07-13T10:47:37.971Z

Recently there has been a couple of articles in the discussion page asking whether rationalists should do action A. Now such questions are not uninteresting, but by saying "rationalist" they are poorly phrased.

The rational decision at any time is the decision, given a human with a specific utility function B, and information C, should make to maximise B, given their knowledge (and knowledge about their knowledge) of C. It's not a decision a rationalist should make, it's a decision any human should make. If Omega popped into existence and carefully explained why action A is the best thing for this human to do given their function B, and their information C, then said human should agree.

The important question is not what a rationalist should do, but what your utility function and current information is. This is a more difficult question. Humans are often wrong about what they want in the long term, and it's questionable how much we should value happiness now over happiness in the future (in particular, I suspect current and future me might disagree on this point). Quantifying our current information is also rather hard- we are going to make bad probability estimates, if we can make them at all, which lead us into incorrect decisions just because we haven't considered the evidence carefully enough.

Why is this an important semantic difference? Well it's important for the cause of refining rationality that we don't get caught with associating the notion of rationality with certain goals. Some rationalists believe that they want to save the world, and the best way to do it is by creating friendly AI. This is because they have certain utility functions, and certain beliefs about the probabilities of the singularity. Not all rationalists have these utility functions. Some just want to have a happy home life, meet someone nice, and raise a family. These are different goals, and they can be helped by rationality, because rationality IS the art of winning. Being able to clearly state ones goals and work out the best way to acheieve them is useful pretty much no matter what those goals are. (pretty much to prevent silly examples here!)
Two barrels problem from the Intuitive Explanation (answered)
by MarkusRamikin — 2011-07-13T07:11:57.387Z

I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong here. EDIT: Yup, I'm allowing myself to be tricked.

I've finally sat down to reading http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes carefully, and I solved all story problems so far with no trouble. However, now I'm at this one:

Q. Suppose that there are two barrels, each containing a number of plastic eggs. In both barrels, some eggs are painted blue and the rest are painted red. In the first barrel, 90% of the eggs contain pearls and 20% of the pearl eggs are painted blue. In the second barrel, 45% of the eggs contain pearls and 60% of the empty eggs are painted red. Would you rather have a blue pearl egg from the first or second barrel?
A. Actually, it doesn't matter which barrel you choose! Can you see why?

This doesn't look right to me.

In the first barrel, we have 18% blue eggs that contain pearls, and an unknown number of blue eggs that do not contain pearls, anywhere between 10% (worst case) and 0%. Depending on that, the proportion of blue eggs with pearls among all blue eggs can only be between 18/(18+10) = 64ish% in the worst case, to 100% in the best.

In the second barrel, we don't know how many pearls eggs are blue. We do know there are 45% eggs with pearls altogether, therefore 55% without pearls, and out of the latter 60% are red therefore 40% are blue. That means we have 40%*55% = 22% empty blue eggs. Pearl blue eggs are anywhere between 0 and 45%, so from 0% to 45/(45+22) = 67ish%.

Were we just supposed to conclude that there isn't enough information to answer that problem? But I'd say "anywhere between 64% and 100%" is a better shot than "anywhere between 0% and 67%". If I actually had to choose, and there were valuable pearls at stake, I'd choose the first barrel. Am I making some sort of a mistake?
Some Thoughts on Singularity Strategies
by Wei Dai — 2011-07-13T02:41:16.696Z

Followup to: Outline of possible Singularity scenarios (that are not completely disastrous)

Given that the Singularity and being strategic are popular topics around here, it's surprising there hasn't been more discussion on how to answer the question "In what direction should we nudge the future, to maximize the chances and impact of a positive Singularity?" ("We" meaning the SIAI/FHI/LW/Singularitarian community.)

(Is this an appropriate way to frame the question? It's how I would instinctively frame the question, but perhaps we ought to discussed alternatives first. For example, one might be "What quest should we embark upon to save the world?", which seems to be the frame that Eliezer instinctively prefers. But I worry that thinking in terms of "quest" favors the part of the brain that is built mainly for signaling instead of planning. Another alternative would be "What strategy maximizes expect utility?" but that seems too technical for human minds to grasp on an intuitive level, and we don't have the tools to answer the question formally.)

Let's start by assuming that humanity will want to build at least one Friendly superintelligence sooner or later, either from scratch, or by improving human minds, because without such an entity, it's likely that eventually either a superintelligent, non-Friendly entity will arise, or civilization will collapse. The current state of affairs, in which there is no intelligence greater than baseline-human level, seems unlikely to be stable over the billions of years of the universe's remaining life. (Nor does that seem particularly desirable even if it is possible.)

Whether to push for (or personally head towards) de novo AI directly, or IA/uploading first, depends heavily on the expected (or more generally, subjective probability distribution of) difficulty of building a Friendly AI from scratch, which in turn involves a great deal of logical and philosophical uncertainty. (For example, if it's known that it actually takes a minimum of 10 people with IQ 200 to build a Friendly AI, then there is clearly little point in pushing for de novo AI first.)

Besides the expected difficulty of building FAI from scratch, another factor that weighs heavily in the decision is the risk of accidentally building an unFriendly AI (or contributing to others building UFAIs) while trying to build FAI. Taking this into account also involves lots ...
Meetup : DC Weekly Meetup is Back!
by Benquo — 2011-07-13T00:26:22.019Z

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Weekly Meetup Resumes

WHEN: 17 July 2011 01:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: Washington, DC

Agenda is fairly light this time, mostly we'll just hang out:

Follow-Ups to New York Joint Meet-Up

Plan future activities

Meetup is at a private residence. Contact Benquo for venue details.

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Weekly Meetup Resumes
Meetup : Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays meetup
by jimrandomh — 2011-07-12T23:33:01.304Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays meetup

WHEN:
17 July 2011 06:47:45PM (-0400)

WHERE:
290 Main St # 6, Cambridge, MA

It's the third Sunday of the month, so we'll be meeting at Cosi near Kendall Square in Cambridge.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays meetup