trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Link: Collective Intelligence
by Randaly — 2011-01-05T08:15:23.203Z

Per this recent paper, individual IQ has no significant correlation with 'group IQ' (defined and measured as the groups ability to accomplish various tasks); group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction aren't either. The study identified two things that were positively correlated with group IQ: average social sensitivity and a low variance in the amount of time each person spent speaking. (It also found that having more women improved collective intelligence- because women have better social sensitivity.)

(The remaining stuff is idle speculation from me, not the paper. There's no experimental evidence whatsoever backing it up.)

One possible explanation of the contribution of social sensitivity towards collective intelligence is that it reduces conflicts between group members, allowing the group the remain at least somewhat dispassionate/rational about potential solutions instead of turning discussions about solutions into status pissing contests. This is supported by the fact that ego-based actions are well known to be extremely damaging to group outcomes in sports, and that in contexts (e.g. politics) where there are groups with pre-existing conflicts decision-making seems to be relatively poor despite (presumably) higher social sensitivity on the part of politicians. (This also provides an alternative explanation for the benefits of holding off on proposing solutions: while Eliezer focused, as he is wont to do, on the implications for individual rationality, Maier's edict presumably didn't stop people from thinking of potential solutions and privately settling on a preferred solution- but because they hadn't announced it publicly, they would be more willing to listen to others and change their mind.)

The contribution from variance presumably comes from the fact that if people are on average speaking roughly the same amount, then there are more ideas and perspectives being offered than if only a few people dominated the conversation.

I'd also be interested in seeing whether Collective Intelligence is correlated with individual rationality, given that there is little to no correlation between individual rationality and IQ.
The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship
by lukeprog — 2011-01-05T07:22:30.669Z

Eliezer Yudkowsky identifies scholarship as one of the Twelve Virtues of Rationality:

Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger... It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study...

I think he's right, and I think scholarship doesn't get enough praise - even on Less Wrong, where it is regularly encouraged.

First, consider the evangelical atheist community to which I belong. There is a tendency for lay atheists to write "refutations" of theism without first doing a modicum of research on the current state of the arguments. This can get atheists into trouble when they go toe-to-toe with a theist who did do his homework. I'll share two examples:

In a debate with theist Bill Craig, agnostic Bart Ehrman paraphrased David Hume's argument that we can't demonstrate the occurrence of a miracle in the past. Craig responded with a PowerPoint slide showing Bayes' Theorem, and explained that Ehrman was only considering prior probabilities, when of course he needed to consider the relevant conditional probabilities as well. Ehrman failed to respond to this, and looked as though he had never seen Bayes' Theorem before. Had Ehrman practiced the virtue of scholarship on this issue, he might have noticed that much of the scholarly work on Hume's argument in the past two decades has involved Bayes' Theorem. He might also have discovered that the correct response to Craig's use of Bayes' Theorem can be found in pages 298-341 of J.H. Sobel’s Logic and Theism.

In another debate with Bill Craig, atheist Christopher Hitchens gave this objection: "Who designed the Designer? Don’t you run the risk… of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?" But this is an elementary misunderstanding in philosophy of science. Why? Because every successful scientific explanation faces the exact same problem. It’s called the “why regress” because no matter what explanation is given of something, you can always still ask “Why?” Craig pointed this out and handily won that part of the debate. Had Hitchens had a pass

...
Techniques for probability estimates
by Scott Alexander — 2011-01-04T23:38:27.801Z

Utility maximization often requires determining a probability of a particular statement being true. But humans are not utility maximizers and often refuse to give precise numerical probabilities. Nevertheless, their actions reflect a "hidden" probability. For example, even someone who refused to give a precise probability for Barack Obama's re-election would probably jump at the chance to take a bet in which ey lost $5 if Obama wasn't re-elected but won $5 million if he was; such decisions demand that the decider covertly be working off of at least a vague probability.
When untrained people try to translate vague feelings like "It seems Obama will probably be re-elected" into a precise numerical probability, they commonly fall into certain traps and pitfalls that make their probability estimates inaccurate. Calling a probability estimate "inaccurate" causes philosophical problems, but these problems can be resolved by remembering that probability is "subjectively objective" - that although a mind "hosts" a probability estimate, that mind does not arbitrarily determine the estimate, but rather calculates it according to mathematical laws from available evidence. These calculations require too much computational power to use outside the simplest hypothetical examples, but they provide a standard by which to judge real probability estimates. They also suggest tests by which one can judge probabilities as well-calibrated or poorly-calibrated: for example, a person who constantly assigns 90% confidence to eir guesses but only guesses the right answer half the time is poorly calibrated. So calling a probability estimate "accurate" or "inaccurate" has a real philosophical grounding.
There exist several techniques that help people translate vague feelings of probability into more accurate numerical estimates. Most of them translate probabilities from forms without immediate consequences (which the brain supposedly processes for signaling purposes) to forms with immediate consequences (which the brain supposedly processes while focusing on those consequences).

Prepare for Revelation

What would you expect if you believed the answer to your question were about to be revealed to you?
In Belief in Belief, a man acts as if there is a dragon in his garage, but every time his neighbor comes up with an idea to test it, he has a reason why the test wouldn't work. If he imagined Om...
Less Wrong policy questions
by diegocaleiro — 2011-01-04T20:27:49.228Z

I have a few questions, mostly on which kinds of content can or cannot be posted to Less Wrong.

1) Suppose I'd like everyone to comment on this paper, is it okay to just link to it, give an oppinion, and ask for others?

2) What if the paper had been written by me?

3) What if it was a blog post from another blog?

4) Videos and images are allowed?

5) Should all Meta-level discussion be posted under the "Discussion" or are there kinds of Meta welcome in the Main Posts?

6) Is there any sequence of posts from the post-Yudkowsky era that have been collected into a Cohesive Extrapoleted Less-Wrongness so that people who just finished the sequences can go right to them? Why not?
Applied Optimal Philanthropy: How to Donate $100 to SIAI for Free
by Louie — 2011-01-04T06:14:31.288Z

If I gave you $50 you hadn't planned on receiving, would you consider giving it to charity?

Here's your chance to find out.

Just in time for the Tallin-Evans matching fundraiser, ING Direct has started offering a free $50 cash sign-up bonus. I've personally used ING for 10 years and referred over 20 people to similar promotions of theirs in the past so I can confirm that this is legit.1

It's a simple, effective way to get started as an optimal philanthropist for free:

Get $50 for free

Donate $50 --> turns into $100

Profit!2

Full disclosure: I was an SIAI Visiting Fellow in 2010. I've also used ING Direct as a customer the past 10 years, but otherwise have no financial interest in them.

[1] This isn't one of those bogus "intro" deals where you have to make sure you cancel the service later on or risk getting charged fees. ING has no fees, no minimum balance requirements, no sleazy marketing emails, and consistently good savings rates. If you want to use them for their good service after signing up, great, if not, no worries. All you have to do to qualify for the $50 is make 3 small purchases you were planning to make anyway with their new debit card. I know it's a trivial inconvenience, but I think it's worth it to be able to donate up to $100 to charity without actually spending any money.

[2] Profit denominated in warm fuzzies, karma, and post-Singularity catgirls.
Goals vs. Rewards
by icebrand — 2011-01-04T01:43:52.981Z

Related: Terminal Values and Instrumental Values, Applying behavioral psychology on myself

Recently I asked myself, what do I want? My immediate response was that I wanted to be less stressed, particularly for financial reasons. So I started to affirm to myself that my goal was to become wealthy, and also to become less stressed. But then in a fit of cognitive dissonance, I realized that both money and relaxation are most easily considered in terms of being rewards, not goals. I was oddly surprised by the fact that there is a distinction between the two concepts to begin with.

It later occurred to me to wonder if some things work better when framed as goals and not as rewards. Freedom, long life, good relationships, and productivity seemed some likely candidates. I can't quite see them as rewards because a) I feel everyone innately deserves and should have them (even though they might have to work for them), and b) they don't quite give the kind of fuzzies that motivate immediate action.

These two kinds of positive motivation seem to work in psychologically dissimilar ways. Money for example is more like chocolate, something one has immediate instinctive motive to obtain and consume. Freedom of speech is more along the lines of having enough air to breathe. A person needs and perhaps inherently deserves to have at least a little bit of it all the time, and as a general rule will have a constant background motive to ensure that it stays available. It's a longer-term form of motivation.

A reward seems to be something where you receive immediate fuzzies when you achieve it. Getting paid, getting a pat on the back, getting your posts and comments upvoted... Things where you might consider them more or less optional in the grander scheme of things, yet they tend to trigger an immediate sense of positive anticipation before the event which is reinforced by a sense of satisfaction after. Actually writing a good post or comment, actually doing a good job, being a good spouse or friend -- these are surely related, but are goals in and of themselves. The mental picture for a goal is one of achieving, as opposed to receiving.

One thing that seems likely to me is that the presence of shared goals (and the communication thereof) tends to a good way to generate long term social bonds. Rewards seem to be more of a good way to deliberately steer behavior in more specific ...
Zendo-like Induction Game for Playing Online
by Normal_Anomaly — 2011-01-03T17:16:06.414Z

I recently encountered the inductive logic game Zendo 1, and it looks like a great game for aspiring rationalists. I’d like to play a game like it among the people on this forum. However, Zendo is very visual, with an emphasis on color and position of pieces, so it would be difficult to play over the Internet. So I’ve adapted the concept and rules of Zendo to a format that can be played in an LW thread.

The basic premise of Zendo is that of trying to figure out a rule by observing which entities do or do not comply with it. One player, the “Master,” devises a rule and presents one structure that does and one that does not comply. In the online version, these are strings of 1-digit numbers. For instance, the rule might be “at least 2 of the digits are odd.” Then “2 5 1 0 ” would satisfy the rule, and “8 3 2” would not. The rule can be any level of complexity and may concern anything about the numbers, like “The string must contain at least 4 digits” or “The sum of the first two digits must be greater than the sum of the last two” or whatever. It may not concern anything other than the string, such as the timestamp of the post.

Players take turns by proposing a string in reply to the comment with the first two strings, and saying either “Master” or “Mondo”. If the player says “Master,” the Master will reply to the comment containing the string and say “yes” if it complies with the rule and “no” if it does not. If the player says “Mondo,” all players have some amount of time to post a reply guessing whether or not the string will meet the rule before the Master judges it. Currently this time is 8 hours so everyone will have time to see it, but if this seems too long it can be shortened. Traditionally this is done by concealing a colored stone in one’s hand with nobody seeing anybody else’s guess until time is up, so if you want post your guess in rot13 surrounded by gobbledygook (e.g. fyqxwsfyxqwstfyxlrffyqxwsyfqxwtsfy). Please don’t read other people’s rot13. At the end of the time period, the Master will judge the string and give everyone who guessed correctly a guessing point.

At the end of your turn, after your string has been judged, you may spend one guessin...
Asking Precise Questions
by paulfchristiano — 2011-01-03T08:48:45.020Z

Isaac Asimov once described a future in which all technical thought was automated, and the role of humans was reduced to finding appropriate questions to pose to thinking machines. I wouldn't suggest planning for this eventuality, but it struck me as an interesting situation. What would we do, if we could get the answer to any question we could formulate precisely? (In the story, questions didn't need to be formulated precisely, but nevermind.) For concreteness, suppose that we have a box as smart as a million Einsteins, cooperating effectively for a century every time we ask a question, but which is capable only of solving precisely specified problems.

You can't say "analyze the result of this experiment." You can say, "find me the setting for these 10 parameters which best explains this data" or "write me a short program which predicts this data." You can't say "find me a program that plays Go well." You can say, "find me a program that beats this particular Go ai, even with a 9 stone handicap." Etc. More formally, lets say you can specify any scoring program and ask the box to find an input that scores as well as it can.

What would you do, if you got exactly one question? I don't think humanity is posed to get any earth-shattering insights. I don't think we could find a theory of everything, or a friendly AI, or any sort of AI at all, or a solution to any real problem facing us, using just one question. But maybe that is just a failure of my creativity.

What would you plan to do, if you had unlimited access? An AGI or brain emulation arguably implicitly converts our vague real world objectives into a precise form. Are there other ways to bridge the gap between what humans can formally describe and what humans want? Can you bootstrap your way there starting from current understanding? What is any reasonable first step?
Rationality Quotes: January 2011
by wedrifid — 2011-01-03T05:24:50.403Z

Post quotes.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts from LW. (If you want to exclude OB too create your own quotes thread! OB is entertaining and insightful and all but it is no rationality blog!)

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Externally Oriented, Love, Sensational. Which Rationality will LW be about?
by diegocaleiro — 2011-01-02T22:22:41.028Z

Short Version: Less Wrong has been trying to address rationality in all domains. This may prove too wide a scope. As it has been suggested, effectiveness changes should come soon. Those who just read the sequences need more a focused walkthrough. A proposed path is tightening the scope within rationality to Externally Oriented, Tech-friendly, H+(Transhuman) posts. Once the sanity waterline within is raised only the highest peaks remain above water, thus what remains must be more focused. How to do this is discussed.

I'm testing this quote from Less Wrong's Best Of to introduce my post:

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. -- Dorothy L. Sayers

Garrett Lisi has advanced, in the last minutes of this video, the suggestion that life should equally divided between Physics, Love, and Surfing.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, here, advanced that we buy fuzzies and utilons separately.

Patrissimo, in a very controversial post said that: As Merlin Mann says: "Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging". Well, reading a blog to overcome akrasia IS joining a Facebook group about creative productivity. " [...] " I believe that most people, particularly smart ones, do way too much thinking & talking and way too little action (me included), because that is what's easy for them."[...] "To aid growth at rationality, Less Wrong would have to become a skill practice community, more like martial arts, PUA, and physical fitness, with an explicit focus of helping people grow in their ability to set and achieve goals, combining local chapters with global coordination, infrastructure, and knowledge accumulation. Most discussion should be among people working on a specific skill at a similar level about what is or isn't working for them as they attempt to progress, rather than obscure theories about the inner workings of the human mind."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

So I decided to invest my few karma points in advancing an unreasonable suggestion, as a followup to Patrissimo's post.

First let me abstr...
Externally Oriented, Love, Sensational. Which Rationality will LW be about?
by diegocaleiro — 2011-01-02T22:18:39.293Z

Short Version: Less Wrong has been trying to address rationality in all domains. This may prove too wide a scope. As it has been suggested, effectiveness changes should come soon. Those who just read the sequences need more a focused walkthrough. A proposed path is tightening the scope within rationality to Externally Oriented, Tech-friendly, H+(Transhuman) posts. Once the sanity waterline within is raised only the highest peaks remain above water, thus what remains must be more focused. How to do this is discussed.

I'm testing this quote from Less Wrong's Best Of to introduce my post:

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. -- Dorothy L. Sayers

Garrett Lisi has advanced, in the last minutes of this video, the suggestion that life should equally divided between Physics, Love, and Surfing.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, here, advanced that we buy fuzzies and utilons separately.

Patrissimo, in a very controversial post said that: As Merlin Mann says: "Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging". Well, reading a blog to overcome akrasia IS joining a Facebook group about creative productivity. " [...] " I believe that most people, particularly smart ones, do way too much thinking & talking and way too little action (me included), because that is what's easy for them."[...] "To aid growth at rationality, Less Wrong would have to become a skill practice community, more like martial arts, PUA, and physical fitness, with an explicit focus of helping people grow in their ability to set and achieve goals, combining local chapters with global coordination, infrastructure, and knowledge accumulation. Most discussion should be among people working on a specific skill at a similar level about what is or isn't working for them as they attempt to progress, rather than obscure theories about the inner workings of the human mind."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

So I decided to invest my few karma points in advancing an unreasonable suggestion, as a followup to Patrissimo's post.

First let me...
In Russian we have the word 'Mirozdanie', which means all that exists
by kononov — 2011-01-02T20:28:43.307Z

In Russian we have the word 'Mirozdanie', which means all that exists, no matter do we know anything about it or not. The sense of this word includes you and me and every man, and every star, and every planet and all universes and all space (super) civilizations, if exist, and this world and any other worlds, if exist, and so on. Is any English word with the same sense? Or in other words, how correctly and adequately translate the Russian word 'Mirozdanie' in English? I have my web project (in Russian) “Dossier on Mirozdanie” ( http://www.mirozdanie.narod.ru ) To tell about it in English sometimes I use the word, that Google and other dictionaries recomend - 'Creation' (Creation Dossier), sometimes, when I am afraid of being accused of creationism, I use the word «Multiverse» (Multiverse Dossier), but I think, every of this words has a great shortage in the context - both of them are based on hypothetical conceptions.