trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rationality Quotes July 2011
by Normal_Anomaly — 2011-07-03T06:41:13.989Z

Here's the new quotes thread.

Rules:

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Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Volunteers needed to work on LessWrong's public goods problem
by jsalvatier — 2011-07-03T01:08:08.380Z

I want to figure out how to solve LessWrong's public goods problem. There are lots of projects that lots of people are moderately interested in but not interested enough to do themselves. For example:

Further contributions to the Science of Winning at Life sequence: cognitive science of learning, cognitive science of memory, ergonomics, behavioral conditioning, fashion, productivity and no doubt many others

Explicit guides to applying LW material to your life, smaller sequences and exercises

Introductory material that gets people hooked, MoR is great, but surely there should be other avenues

User friendly guides to existing LW material

Meetup materials: exercises, slides, games, lectures etc.

Book reviews on important topics (this book needs critique summary/review)

The cognitive bias Wikipedia entries need serious cleanup

Developing exercises and tests that help understand or improve rationality (this website could use much better questions and interface)

Financial analyses, like BrandonReinhart's analysis of SIAI, of The Cryonics Institute and Alcor

Right now the only way those projects get done there's one person with enough intrinsic interest in the project that they do it mostly regardless of the benefits to others. We need ways to focus dispersed interest into intense interest in people willing and able to do particular projects (different ways that might be accomplished).

I think figuring out how to do that is probably best done by a small team, but I am not sure who else might be interested.

I need two other people enthusiastic about solving LessWrong's public goods problem to be part of that team. What would be involved? We'd meet to discuss what things are most likely to ameliorate the public goods problem and the best way to execute them, do research on what works elsewhere and experiment with ideas. For example, I've been slowly experimenting with contests in the hopes that money, prestige and competition will be good motivators. I would like to do more contests, but I could really use help coming up with good test contest ideas, coming up with a good contest formats, and judging contests.

Any volunteers?

Update: We've started a mailing list for this project.
Is it cool if I post responses/thoughts as I read through the sequences?
by MrHen — 2011-07-02T23:31:46.440Z

I have poked around here on and off but someone recently led me back to the site. After taking the long break, I am ready to jump back into the sequences but have a favor to ask. Is it okay if I post my thoughts on each as I read them in the comments for that post? I don't know what impact that would have on any feeds, threads or whatnot. Things have changed a lot since I was last active.

To be extremely clear, these aren't going to be inherently nice. They won't be inherent un-nice either but it helps me to process something by responding to it critically. This means challenging it; squeezing it; banging my head against it. I will get a lot of it wrong. My questions may not make sense. I could start mucking up the place with untrained thoughts.

So, being wary of fools, I give you a chance to just nip it all in the bud if you guys have moved on from the Old Posts. I left off somewhere around Fake Morality so... I still have a lot of work ahead of me. If it would help to post a few and then get feedback, that works too.
Not for the Sake of Selfishness Alone
by lukeprog — 2011-07-02T17:37:06.377Z

Related: Fake Selfishness, Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone, Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone), Value is Fragile, Fake Fake Utility Functions

No one deserves thanks from another about something he has done for him or goodness he has done. He is either willing to get a reward from God, therefore he wanted to serve himself. Or he wanted to get a reward from people, therefore he has done that to get profit for himself. Or to be mentioned and praised by people, therefore, it is also for himself. Or due to his mercy and tenderheartedness, so he has simply done that goodness to pacify these feelings and treat himself.

- Mohammed Ibn Al-Jahm Al-Barmaki

In a 1990 experiment, Jack Dovidio made subjects feel empathy for a young woman by asking subjects to imagine what she felt as she faced a particular problem.1 Half the subjects focused on one problem faced by the woman, while the other half focused on a different problem she faced. When given the opportunity to help the woman, subjects in the high empathy condition were more likely to help than subjects in the low empathy condition, and the increase was specific to the problem that had been used to evoke empathy.

What does this study say about altruism and selfishness?

Some people think that humans are purely selfish, that we act for selfish motives alone. They will re-interpret any counter-example you give ("But wouldn't you sacrifice your life to save the rest of the human species?") as being compatible with purely selfish motives.

Are they right? Do we act for selfish motives alone?

Let's examine the evidence.2

We begin with a rough sketch of human motivation. We have 'ultimate' desires: things we desire for their own sake. We also have 'instrumental' desires: things we desire because we belief they will satisfy our ultimate desires.

I instrumentally desire to go to the kitchen because I ultimately desire to eat a brownie and I believe brownies are in the kitchen. But if I come to believe brownies are in the dining room and not the kitchen, I will instrumentally desire to walk to the dining room instead, to fulfill my ultimate desire to eat a brownie. Or perhaps my desire to eat a brownie is also an instrumental desire, and my ultimate desire is to taste something sweet, and I instrumentally desire to eat a brownie because I believe that eating a brownie will satisfy my desire to taste something sweet....
"The True Rejection Challenge" - Thread 2
by Armok_GoB — 2011-07-02T11:49:06.869Z

The old thread (found here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6dc/the_true_rejection_challenge/ ) was becoming very unwieldy and hard to check, so many people suggested we made a second one. I just realized that the only reason it didn't exist yet was bystander effect-like, so I desiced to just do this one.

From the original thread:

An exercise:

Name something that you do not do but should/wish you did/are told you ought, or that you do less than is normally recommended. (For instance, "exercise" or "eat vegetables".)

Make an exhaustive list of your sufficient conditions for avoiding this thing. (If you suspect that your list may be non-exhaustive, mention that in your comment.)

Precommit that: If someone comes up with a way to do the thing which doesn't have any of your listed problems, you will at least try it. It counts if you come up with this response yourself upon making your list.

(Based on: Is That Your True Rejection?)

Edit to add: Kindly stick to the spirit of the exercise; if you have no advice in line with the exercise, this is not the place to offer it. Do not drift into confrontational or abusive demands that people adjust their restrictions to suit your cached suggestion, and do not offer unsolicited other-optimizing.
People neglect small probability events
by XiXiDu — 2011-07-02T10:54:31.526Z

Over at overcomingbias Robin Hanson wrote:

On September 9, 1713, so the story goes, Nicholas Bernoulli proposed the following problem in the theory of games of chance, after 1768 known as the St Petersburg paradox …:

Peter tosses a coin and continues to do so until it should land heads when it comes to the ground. He agrees to give Paul one ducat if he gets heads on the very first throw, two ducats if he gets it on the second, four if on the third, eight if on the fourth, and so on, so that with each additional throw the number of ducats he must pay is doubled.

Nicholas Bernoulli … suggested that more than five tosses of heads are morally impossible [and so ignored]. This proposition is experimentally tested through the elicitation of subjects‘ willingness-to-pay for various truncated versions of the Petersburg gamble that differ in the maximum payoff. … All gambles that involved probability levels smaller than 1/16 and maximum payoffs greater than 16 Euro elicited the same distribution of valuations. … The payoffs were as described …. but in Euros rather than in ducats. … The more senior students seemed to have a higher willingness-to-pay. … Offers increase significantly with income. (more)

This isn’t plausibly explained by risk aversion, nor by a general neglect of possibilities with a <5% chance. I suspect this is more about analysis complexity, about limiting the number of possibilities we’ll consider at any one time. I also suspect this bodes ill for existential risk mitigation.

The title of the paper is 'Moral Impossibility in the Petersburg Paradox : A Literature Survey and Experimental Evidence' (PDF):

The Petersburg paradox has led to much thought for three centuries. This
paper describes the paradox, discusses its resolutions advanced in the
literature while alluding to the historical context, and presents experimental
data. In particular, Bernoulli’s search for the level of moral impossibility in
the Petersburg problem is stressed; beyond this level small probabilities are
considered too unlikely to be relevant for judgment and decision making. In
the experiment, the level of moral impossibility is elicited through variations
of the gamble-length in the Petersburg gamble. Bernoulli’s conjecture that
people neglect small probability events is suppo

...
Khan Academy: Introduction to programming and computer science
by XiXiDu — 2011-07-02T09:44:00.517Z

Khan Academy now also features a Computer Science category. There are not many lessons yet but about 3 new videos are being added each day. They are going to add CS exercises soon too.

If you don't want to wait for the exercises, there is always the incredible Project Euler that you can use to hone your math and programming skills.
[SEQ RERUN] The Proper Use of Doubt
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-07-01T23:54:19.634Z

Today's post, The Proper Use of Doubt, was originally published on 06 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Doubt is often regarded as virtuous for the wrong reason: because it is a sign of humility and recognition of your place in the hierarchy. But from a rationalist perspective, this is not why you should doubt. The doubt, rather, should exist to annihilate itself: to confirm the reason for doubting, or to show the doubt to be baseless. When you can no longer make progress in this respect, the doubt is no longer useful to you as a rationalist.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order, so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Focus Your Uncertainty, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[LINK] Charlie Stross: Federov's Rapture
by jfm — 2011-07-01T17:18:15.710Z

Federov's Rapture at Charlie's Diary

This is a follow-up to his article on Singularitarianism last week, which was also discussed here.

His own introduction:

Last week I did a brief hit and run on the concept of the Singularity. Today I'd like to raise awareness of one of the taproots of Extropian thought — specifically, the origins of modern singularitarian thinking in the writings of the 19th century Russian Orthodox teacher and librarian, Nikolai Fyodorov (or Federov).

I'm not sure if the point is really anything more than guilt-by-association, because he doesn't really make a complete argument for anything in particular.
Reasons for being rational
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-07-01T15:28:08.165Z

When I found Less Wrong and started reading, when I made my first post, when I went to my first meetup….

It was a little like coming home.

And mostly it wasn’t. Mostly I felt a lot more out of place than I have in, say, church youth groups. It was hard to pinpoint the difference, but as far as I can tell, it comes down to this: a significant proportion of the LW posters are contrarians in some sense. And I’m a conformist, even if I would prefer not to be, even if that’s a part of my personality that I’m working hard to change. I’m much more comfortable as a follower than as a leader. I like pre-existing tradition, the reassuring structure of it. I like situations that allow me to be helpful and generous and hardworking, so that I can feel like a good person. Emotionally, I don’t like disagreeing with others, and the last thing I have to work hard to do is tolerate others' tolerance.

And, as evidenced by the fact that I attend church youth groups, I don’t have the strong allergy that many of the community seem to have against religion. This is possibly because I have easily triggered mystical experiences when, for example, I sing in a group, especially when we are singing traditional ‘sacred’ music. In a previous century, I would probably have been an extremely happy nun.

Someone once expressed surprise that I was able to become a rationalist in spite of this neurological quirk. I’ve asked myself this a few times. My answer is that I don’t think I deserve the credit. If anything, I ended up on the circuitous path towards reading LessWrong because I love science, and I love science because, as a child, reading about something as beautiful as general relativity gave me the same kind of euphoric experience as singing about Jesus does now. My inability to actual believe in any religion comes from a time before I was making my own decisions about that kind of thing.

I was raised by atheist parents, not anti-theist so much as indifferent. We attended a Unitarian Universalist church for a while, which meant I was learning about Jesus and Buddha and Native American spirituality all mixed together, all the memes watered down to the point that they lost their power. I was fourteen when I really encountered Christianity, still in the mild form of the Anglican Church of Canada. I was eighteen ...
Meta: "Less Wrong" connotations?
by Will_Newsome — 2011-07-01T06:57:41.155Z

I've always interpreted this site's title, "Less Wrong" (link is to description of origin of phrase), to name a goal that its members strive towards. After factoring in the slightly self-deprecating or human-deprecating connotations the title's message sorta feels like "We know it's impossible to become completely right, but we should at least aim to be less wrong". But earlier today I realized that it could also be interpreted as an implicit comparison of social groups: "We are less wrong than others.".1&2 Does anyone know if there's a sizable minority of people who interpret "Less Wrong" to be primarily a boastful comparison of social groups? Edit: To make it clearer, I'm worried about potential negative effects via the social psychology of credibility and people maneuvering to uncharitably resolve unintended ambiguities to make contemptible caricatures of complex social groups whose perceived-members can thenceforth be disregarded. An example is how someone might be a lot more suspicious of an intellectual if that intellectual had been seen as somehow in league with those heartless Rand-worshipping Objectivists.

1 I'm not sure if this connotation was intended but I suspect that if it was it was meant as a secondary and subtle message, and I suspect that if people were trying to sneak in secondary or subtle messages they would have been smart enough to realize that putting two negative-affect words next to each other to make a title isn't a good idea. But perhaps I underestimate the ratio of intellectualish cleverness to practical wisdom among those who named Less Wrong "Less Wrong".

2 This kinda worried me because of all those somewhat-misguided3 comment replies that start off with "For a site titled 'Less Wrong', you guys sure are wrong about [probably controversial topic].", where it's unclear what they think "Less Wrong" is supposed to mean.

3 Here's one good exception to the general awfulness of this meme.
Those who can't admit they're wrong
by Zed — 2011-07-01T05:09:50.738Z

The sequences cover the virtue of admitting you've made a mistake. We all make mistakes and when we do we ought to say oops and move on. I was taught this at an early age and I grew up in an environment where admitting error had no social stigma and where correcting somebody (even in public) was commended. Good times were had by all.

Needless to say, I eventually came into contact with the real world and I had to change my behavior. For instance, correcting somebody's pronunciation used to result in immediate repetition of the correct pronunciation followed by "thanks" and the discussion would continue without interruption. Or just a simple nod to acknowledge the correction. In the adult world a correction results in an annoyed look or a glare instead.

So it turns out that some people, highly intelligent and intellectual people, seem to be completely unable to admit error. Even when it concerns a trivial mistake, such as getting a factoid wrong, the best response I can hope for is a grunt of acknowledgement. I'm not talking about uneducated or intellectually insecure people here.

Okay, so a lot of adults don't appreciate being corrected. Duly noted. I could move on, but the virtues of scholarship and curiosity compel me to find out why. Predictably Irrational (Ariely) and Influence (Cialdini) don't have the answers. My non-scientific experiments indicate that prefacing a statement with "That's wrong because..." doesn't work. It seems to make people extra defensive. Standard strategies of persuasion do work, of course. Rephrasing the correction as a question? Works. Saying "Hmm" and pausing before you correct? Works. Making a suggestion that indirectly points out the mistake? Yep, works. These are all standard strategies of persuasion and they can be used to work around the issue but they don't explain why it is that some people have such an aversion to being corrected in the first place.

So where does the aversion come from?

In a group context signaling could explain it: when you correct somebody you draw attention to a mistake and this could lead to (perceived) loss of status. I don't think this is the real cause because people seem equally annoyed when corrected in a private conversation where there is nobody to signal towards. In cases where signaling takes a dominant role (e.g. when a bunch of guys are talking and a woman joins i...
Introducing… The Less Wrong Forum!
by Normal_Anomaly — 2011-07-01T01:46:10.213Z

A while ago, some posters mentioned that it would be good if LW had a forum. Earlier this week I was planning a role-playing game with some other users and decided that a forum would be a good place for us and other groups to play online. And the Less Wrong Forum was born.

Currently, the forum has three boards: Gaming, Less Wrong/SIAI Related Topics, and General/Meta. The Gaming board is for RPGs, Diplomacy, Zendo, or any other games rationalists might enjoy playing together. The LW/SIAI board is for discussing any of the topics we normally discuss on Less Wrong. The General/Meta board is for random topics and discussions of the LW site or the forum itself.

EDIT: Looks like a supermajority of commenters don't want the LW board to exist because it would be redundant with the discussion section. I'll leave it up for a bit longer, and take it down if nobody says they support it.

I encourage everyone to check out the forum and help make it a fun and useful part of the online rationalist community. Please make suggestions in the comments (or on the forum itself!) about how it can be improved.

EDIT: Due to problems with trolls, registration now requires an invite. If you want an account, say so in the comments and I or the other admin (Armok_GoB) will get you one.
Algorithm detects multiple authors in of the Old Testament [link]
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-06-30T19:16:59.107Z

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/israeli-software-aims-to-shed-light-on-the-bible-1.370343

The more interesting aspect of the story is that the algorithm was originally developed by an (rather impressive IMO) orthodox jewish CS researcher - http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/Publications.html. See his group's comment towards the end of the article. Some lessons about compartmentalization there (which is a reason I chose to beat the dead horse once again)
I'm becoming intolerant. Help.
by loup-vaillant — 2011-06-30T15:30:47.970Z

Basically, I cannot stand people who will not bow to the Truth.

I always had this trait, but I noticed lately that it is becoming worse, and has consequences. Ironically, the main trigger seems to be the sequences. They gave me a confidence that sometimes frightens me. There are multiple manifestations:

Before, I had no problem whatsoever with believers of various religions (as long as they don't do bad things). I was still acting like an agnostic at that time. Now I tend to think less of them.

Before, I tolerated disagreement about some subjects, like the supernatural. Now I loath any form of epistemic relativism.

I now tend regard anyone who isn't Bayesian as either uneducated or moronic. Same thing about materialist reductionism, only with a slightly lower confidence. (And my inability to convince people of the validity of Occam's Razor doesn't help.)

I sound more and more arrogant, and possibly full of myself.

My urge to rewire the brain of anyone who won't listen grows stronger.

The closest semi-famous embodiment of this character trait I can think of is Xah Lee. I like much of his writing, but he can be very blunt, sometimes to the point of insult.

Needless to say, I do not endorse all these changes. The problem is, while I know I should calm down, I just can't lose when I'm confident truth is on my side. I'm not even sure I should. (Note however that I'm rather good at losing to evidence.)

So, what do you think? What should I do? Thanks.
Meetup : Edinburgh Tiny Meetup Reminder
by sark — 2011-06-30T10:58:30.860Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Edinburgh Tiny Meetup Reminder

WHEN:
02 July 2011 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Delhi Cafe, Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Same place. Same time.

Discussion article for the meetup : Edinburgh Tiny Meetup Reminder